By Jessica Geller, Sara Al Mheiri, and Ashley Young
The first bite at a restaurant is so much more than a mouthful of ingredients. It’s the culmination of starting a food truck, and expanding into five trucks and six restaurants. It’s the reward after angling the food just right to take the Instagram-worthy picture. It’s the combination of eastern and western cuisines to provide a common dish with unique flavors.
We sought out to tell the story of food through different lenses.
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Truck to wheels
Chicken and Rice Guys started as one food truck in 2012. Today, there are five food trucks and two restaurants in the Boston area. The trucks and restaurants serve the same food, but the mindset of running and working the locations is very different. We went inside the truck and the Medford restaurant to gain a firsthand look at the “poultry in motion.”
Chicken and Rice Guys is not the only business in Boston that started as a food truck and then added restaurant locations. Bon Me, which serves Vietnamese cuisine, has grown from one food truck in 2011, to five trucks and six restaurants today. Danielle Christensen and Anna Hoang spoke to us about working on a food truck.
Mixing flavors
There is no shortage of American, Asian, and Mexican food in Boston. But what about Mexican-Korean or Japanese-American-Italian? Koy and Hojoko are cooking up unique dishes such as carnitas dumplings, kimchi fried rice, and cheeseburgers with dashi pickles (Japanese-flavored pickles). We spoke with the chefs and managers to understand how these flavor combinations come together.
Memorable restaurants have more than just great food. Hojoko brings a Japanese tradition of hand washing right to its guests. Ashley Cerny, brand ambassador at Hojoko, walks us through the steps of their unique method.
Playing with food – Instagram approved
Picking an item off the menu isn’t so simple when you have thousands of Instagram followers awaiting your next post. Presentation can even be more important than taste. We went behind-the-scenes with @twohungrybostonians (three Wellesley College women actually run the account) to see what it’s really like to run a food account on Instagram.
Tiffany Lopinsky of @BostonFoodies has more than 60,000 Instagram followers. She reveals the process of perfecting the food picture with cropping, filters, and captions to attract the most likes possible.
NU Storytellers 