Dreams on Wheels

We’ve had food trucks in the Twin Cities for more than a decade now. But have we ever grappled with what they really are and what they really do?

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Pani puri are golden globes smaller than an egg and no thicker or stronger than a wisp, just a millimeter thick, just a hollow sphere, the top snipped off so you can fill them with edible charms—but they can be a confounding thing to an American. The ones at new Muddy Tiger in Edina are some of the best in town, and worth building a day around. Order some, and chef Jyotiee Kistner hands you your own individual tray of pani puri poofs with a side of blended fresh and crunchy bits, like a mung bean sprout salad, and comforting bits, including yellow split peas. The order comes with two small carafes of what Kistner calls “waters,” one sweet and bright with tamarind, the other green and vibrant with cilantro and mint, as well as other spices. You pour the two waters into a filled sphere and now have about five seconds to get the whole thing into your mouth before the shell begins to leak or lapse to watery destruction in your hand or on your shirt.

“When I first took my husband, Andy, to India, pani puri were a shock to him,” explains Kistner. “You have to eat them so quickly. He was like, ‘First of all, how do you know every street food vendor in Pune? Second, how does anyone eat five at a time?’ He was practically choking to eat them so quickly. I said, ‘It’s simple; you just have to eat and drink at the same time.’ He said, ‘Oh my God! Americans don’t know how to do that!’” So that’s why she serves her pani puri with the waters in carafes—to give you a chance. But otherwise, she says, “it’s exactly my father’s recipe. In the winter, I use good summer mint that I flash freeze.” 

Fill all your golden poofs with the waters at once if you have the skills of an Indian-street-food lifer. But if not, it’s just as thrilling to go one by one. As soon as you pop a pani puri from Muddy Tiger into your mouth, you get a wash of flavor and texture that feels physically transformative: First, your whole consciousness rushes to your mouth because you’re doing something difficult that requires concentration, like balancing an egg on a spoon. Then comes the pop as the shell bursts and the sweet, cooling liquid rushes through you. And finally, you get all the yummy crunchy bits to chew on. Riveting! What is life but moments we often miss for not paying attention? With a pani puri, you pay attention. 

Muddy Tiger opened a brick-and-mortar restaurant this past winter in Edina, in an unlikely office-building corner off Highway 100. You’ll know it from a distance mainly because of the Muddy Tiger truck, where it all began, parked outside. In talking to Kistner, I was surprised to learn that these lively little edible magic tricks are the lifelong dream and passion of an important software executive. Jyotiee Kistner grew up in Pune, India, her daily delight trailing after her dad, a caterer and produce distributor, as he made the rounds to all the street vendors, delivering fruits and vegetables and sampling the wares. Kistner’s parents raised her to punch back when little neighbor boys started fights, to speak up, to nurture her artistic side, and to stay out of the kitchen, because it would interfere with life’s more important fights. That’s how she ended up here, in UX design with a specialty in hotel back-end software, and became so lonely that she started a vegetarian cooking club for coworkers. She also got a puppy, and it led her to Andy Kistner, who helped her train the dog. Jyotiee and Andy fell in love and married. Then, one fateful day, she recalls, “Andy told me, ‘When you talk about your job, your promotions, all that, you are never as happy as when you are cooking and talking about cooking.’ I instantly saw that was the missing link in my whole life.” 

She decided to try selling her own Indian food at local farmers’ markets, starting with dishes like pav bhaji, a sort of Indian version of sloppy joes, with water buffalo milk butter–seared sweet buns holding a potato-and-veg saucy filling. “That’s where I met Carrie and Lisa, and my whole life changed,” concludes Kistner. 

Carrie and Lisa? The second I hear those two names, the Muddy Tiger story suddenly rewrites itself in my mind. In the Twin Cities food world, Carrie Summer and Lisa Carlson don’t need last names. They are the partner chefs behind Chef Shack, the very first legal, next-wave, chef-driven food truck in the Twin Cities. Before that, Carlson was the white-tablecloth chef at big prestige spots like New York City’s Lespinasse and Summer was the front-of-house superstar of New York City–famous restaurants like JoJo. In 2010, the duo led the charge to bring the next generation of scratch-cooking food trucks to the streets, legally, in the Twin Cities, and today, we all owe a debt to the legal and PR work done by Chef Shack in those early years. (There were always trucks selling bags of potato chips, ice cream, and pre-cooked foods like hot dogs in parking lots in the Twin Cities, but the post-2010 trucks used raw foods and fresh vegetables and parked on the streets, so a whole updated world of fire-safety, food-safety, mobile-workplace-safety, and street regulations had to be invented.) 

Kistner begins to unpack her story with a smile—she tells me how she worked inside the Chef Shack truck for fun; how Summer and Carlson guided her every step of the way; how she became a featured chef; and how Summer and Carlson helped her find a truck and a commercial kitchen to sell her craveable Marathi street foods, like the layered dessert parfait falooda, sort of like a Dairy Queen parfait but in a different language. All of this created enough momentum on four wheels to give birth to this tiny restaurant that serves the signature foods of the west coast of India, where longtime trade with Europe brought in a fondness for bread and helped build big cities like Mumbai and Pune. 

As she tells me her story, a new confounding question about paying attention bubbles up in my mind: A life changed by a food truck, by other food truckers—what are food trucks today, in our Twin Cities food culture, in the year 2023? There is no arguing that the Twin Cities have been physically and culturally transformed by various entrepreneurial and artistic efforts launched, initially, by truck.  

Roll call! Smack Shack, truck pioneer, now lobster palace in both the North Loop and Bloomington. World Street Kitchen and Milkjam, truck pioneer, Palestinian soul with Michelin-star quality tied to a 21st-century hip-hop sensibility by chef Sameh Wadi. Hai Hai and Hola Arepa, food truck pioneers and the playground of James Beard Award nominee and local genius Christina Nguyen. Billy Sushi, the see-and-be-seen sushi palace by former sushi truck—remember when that seemed like a weird idea?—owner Billy Tserenbat. It’s impossible to envision current Twin Cities food life without the restaurants that started as food trucks and trailers: Minnesota Nice Cream, Red Wagon Pizza, Vellee Deli, Potter’s Pasties, Foxy Falafel, Animales Barbeque. Also: Remember those years when our leading Hmong chef, another multiple-Beard nominee, Yia Vang, cooked in a trailer outside Sociable Cider Werks? 

Speaking of Sociable, let’s mentally gather together all our local cidery and brewery taprooms. Would we have the brewery culture we have without our food trucks? Think about how many times you’ve texted your friends something like, “Let’s meet at Bang Brewing at 4, then we’ll have dinner from…[and then you pause to check the food truck calendar before circling back to say]…Pastel Pizza! Yeah, their Instagram looks amazing!” I’d argue: No, we would not have the taproom culture we have without food trucks. Food trucks are what have made breweries a night out and not just a grab-and-go place for beer connoisseurs.  

On top of this: How many of our restaurants survived the pandemic because of their sidekick food trucks? Parlour, Brasa, Market BBQ, Red’s Savoy—there were pandemic years where restaurant staffs shrank to a manager and an owner on a truck, working to offset brick-and-mortar rent payments for a space they couldn’t use. Back in 2010, I remember the big arguments about whether we should allow food trucks. The central question was: Would they harm skyway restaurants? I don’t recall anyone asking, “What if there’s an airborne global pandemic, and everything we take for granted is like a deck of cards flung into the sky and no one knows how it lands?” Food trucks ended up getting us through. Finally: How do our next-generation cooks and entrepreneurs enter food culture now that the local Le Cordon Bleu and Art Institutes International cooking schools have closed, and Saint Paul College is the main culinary program left standing? 

I call up Carrie Summer, who’s getting ready for her food truck’s only regular summer gig, Saturday mornings at the Mill City Farmers Market. Right now, they have a longtime employee who gets the truck to Mill City at dawn and starts setup, then Carlson, the chef, rolls in at 7 am and cooks glories like spring rolls threaded with local ramps, gluten-free donuts, and lamb tamales. Then, around 1 pm, Carlson leaves the truck for the employee to break down and clean while she hightails it back to Bay City, Wisconsin, where she and Summer run their wonderful land-based restaurant with a dinner service that begins at 5 pm.   

When I mention Kistner, Summer says, “Oh, yes,” surprised I didn’t know that mentoring entrepreneurs is an unseen part of what they do. “We’re always trying to push the culinary community forward however we can. We’ve made so many mistakes; we want to help anyone know what we know. First step: Put all liquids on the floor before you hit the gas. We draw the line at opening up our books, but short of that, we have meetings and give all the love and help we can.” Past recipients of Chef Shack mentoring include the Wadi brothers when they were opening the WSK food truck, Foxy Falafel, the Ethiopian truck Brava on Wheels, Icy Icy Baby, ParraLily, Café Racer, Gastrotruck, and many, many others. (When New York City Michelin-starred chef Daniel Humm wanted to open a food truck, he also called Summer and Carlson!) As my mind reels with the millions of meals and hundreds of families those trucks and brick-and-mortar spots have collectively supported, my sense that I haven’t fully understood how important food trucks are grows and grows.

I think back to the Muddy Tiger timeline: Kistner’s first day helping Summer and Carlson on their Chef Shack truck? 2018. Her first day setting pani puri on a tray for a customer from her brick-and-mortar kitchen at a Muddy Tiger table? 2023. Five years from baby step to restaurateur. That’s, what, the equivalent of making it most of the way through medical school? When I was younger, eight years for medical school seemed insane, a lifetime. Now that I’m older, I realize every career I know of requires eight years of low- or no-paid scramble and hustle before you really get to what you look back on as your starting place. It’s a lot to imagine throwing eight years of your life onto the poker table to get into the game. Is five years on a food truck what we, the Twin Cities, are using to replace our now-vanished culinary schools? 

To find out if this hunch is crazy, I call up a chef the magazine has been watching for a while, Jason Sawicki. Before starting his food truck Fare Game, Sawicki had been steadily rising as a chef in the Twin Cities, cooking at Lyn 65, Restaurant Alma, and Popol Vuh and heading out into the streets on the wheels of the fried-chicken-only Lyn 65 spin-off, Wyn 65. (Remember Wyn 65? A colorfully painted, very creaky Winnebago with only two fryers, no other cooking surface, and so little headroom the cooks could only cook while bending forward.) In the fall of 2019, Sawicki bought a building in Northeast to turn into his restaurant. He parked a trailer out front and started building an audience. Everyone was raving about his homemade pączki; his handmade buttermilk-brined chicken tenders; his sous-vide cheffy bologna, griddle-seared for sandwiches. But in March of 2020, his bank said, You know, let’s take a beat and figure out what’s going on with this pandemic. So Sawicki headed out to the streets again, cooking on wheels. 

He has been working his food truck ever since, playing the same game of Chutes and Ladders so many of us are, trying to get back to where he was before all plans needed to be remade. “What is a food truck, really?” I ask Sawicki. He laughs. “The modern food truck scene—when it happened here, I watched it from inside restaurants, and it seemed like, as a hospitality worker, it was the first and most accessible step you could take on your own,” he recalls. “You’re trying to build some stability in your life; you’re trying to build some financial stability. Working in someone else’s restaurants, there’s so little security with all of these factors outside of your control. So, the food truck itself, it’s an asset. I mean, maybe it’s a fool’s dream, but I thought, It’s a step you can take that’s at least somewhat something you can control.” 

And what is a food truck to Sawicki now—after a couple years hunching over a fryer in a janky Winnebago and a couple years navigating a pandemic with a beautiful truck with a whole flight of branding and a loyal customer base? It’s like running 1,000 war games, but for a food business, he explains. 

“You get put in new situations every day,” he says. Something with the weather. Something breaks. Some order doesn’t come in. Some employee or customer is a pain or amazing. “How do you really learn stuff?” asks Sawicki. “New situation, new problem, figure out how to fix it, learn from your mistakes. It’s a difficult path, but it can be incredibly rewarding and satisfactory because you see yourself getting better and responding perfectly to situations that years ago you couldn’t even imagine. I have grown so much as a person since 2014; I feel like I can come up with 50 solutions to every problem, and I just have confidence I don’t know I could have come up with any other way.” Even though the past couple years have been grueling, Sawicki tells me—watching the now-proven truck-to-success pipeline, watching fellow talents like Jon Wipfli of Animales also have to bob and weave—he’s more sure than ever that his truck will get him to where he wants to go. 

For the summer of 2023, Fare Game is “in residency” outside Minneapolis’s distillery cocktail room, Tattersall. A residency! A resident! I head over, taking note for the first time of how like the final stage of medical school that well-used food truck term is. There are some parallels. A big draw like Tattersall can’t have an amateurish, fledgling food truck. It needs a mature culinary presence who’s going to deliver the competence of a restaurant, but on wheels. 

I visit on the day of a big festival in late spring, and Fare Game is serving tacos and burgers to a jam-packed Tattersall crowd, both indoors and spilling out onto the sunny patio. I get a spectacular burger, sizzled with char, perfectly balanced with gooey cheese and a mild and mellow bun, salted expertly. “Is that good? That looks good,” asks a blonde, leaning in from the next table. I affirm that it is, and she asks me to hold her chair as she hops up to order her own. The crowd is a very Northeast one, comparing new tattoos, admiring fun new bandanas on the same old good dogs. They seem reasonably oblivious that anything unusual is going on out on this patio, because Jason Sawicki is essentially hidden in his truck, and there’s actually nothing unusual in the Twin Cities about a rising star of a chef laboring in a parking lot truck. Also, a cheeseburger is the least confounding of all American objects: It’s not just understood; it’s as expected as sunshine in July. 

Still, like Jyotiee Kistner’s pani puri, this Fare Game cheeseburger has a story. It is both a flower that emerges from the tree of a chef’s whole life and something you happily gobble up as you rush through your own busy existence, without thinking too much about how this delicious object borne on wheels wheeled its way to you. Muddy Tiger, 7015 Amundson Ave., Edina,  952-600-7009, muddytiger.com; Fare Game, 2900 NE Johnson St., Mpls., faregamene.com