Culinary Types: The Crepe Truck

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Like the Robin of Spring, Street Dining Returns to NYC

There is a feeling in the air – a certain crispness, or vitality. A sense of new life.

It is like witnessing the first signs of Spring. You’re walking along 50^th Street, and a bright robin redbreast flies across your path. You turn, and you can’t help but notice a bright magenta vehicle at the curb, a whimsical illustration depicting the Eiffel Tower, and the savory scent of crepes wafting from the window.

Yes, it is Spring, and the food trucks have returned to Manhattan! The annual ritual of street dining has begun anew.

My jaw drops. I had thought the food trucks were banished from Midtown forever, due to an arcane law enforced by a peevish and dyspeptic judge, but here I am staring at a line of colorful vehicles, and my nose is immediately drawn to The Crepes Truck.

I quickly whip out my iPhone and put out an APB for my pal Marie Antoinette. Alas, she is MIA. A French epitaph escapes my lips. Most of the time, Marie Antoinette is MIA. I mean, what’s the point of having a cool French nickname, if you can’t even be available when the Crepes Truck is in town?

I step up to the window and order “A Frenchman” -- two savory crepes filled with Swiss cheese, goat cheese, tomatoes and shallots. I can see the man in the window cooking two lacy-thin crepes on two giant flat steaming skillets.

As the crepes cook, I consider the menu. There’s also a selection of sweet crepes, and the Butter, Lemon and Sugar sweet crepe sounds mighty tasty. I do what Zany would have done. I order that too, because skipping dessert is just foolhardy.

Just for fun, I ping Zany, who is probably having lunch at her desk in her drab office in Chicago. I send her a photo of The Frenchman.

“You’re killing me today … you know that?” she writes. “I’m wasting away on a Spring salad over here. It’s just not fair.”

I, however, am in my own little Parisian paradise. The Frenchman is indeed superior to a humdrum salad. The hot, gooey cheese is wrapped in fragrant, nutty buckwheat crepes.