If street food is the rage in other parts of the world, Dunedin seems to be catching on relatively slowly. But it is catching on. Debbie Porteous finds out you might have to try a little harder to find it than simply walking down any CBD street, but these days you can locate delicious, exciting and cheap feed somewhere in the city at some part of the day, most days of the week, without having to bother with the trappings of a cafe or a restaurant dining room.
While the number of mobile traders selling food in Dunedin has increased 273% in the past five years, that still only brings it to 56 in total. About half of these, too, are technically stalls, registered as ''mobile'' so their owners can work different markets and events.
The council has 29 registered food trucks, caravans or vans on its books. Among them are eight coffee vans. And those that do trade in food experience relative popularity.
Around the city people have their favourite coffee carts, people know what day the Dunedin Cupcake Company caravan ''Eloise'' or Tex Otago trailer will be parked at the Museum Reserve.
Fans check the internet to find out where the Seabirds food truck, the Pineapple Bakery, or Churros Ole will be setting up next, or book in a coffee delivery.
Many return to their favourites time and again at the Otago Farmers' Market on Saturday, where long-standing popular traders like The Joyful Vegan, which has its own chairs and tables set up behind its quirky caravan, base themselves, or the Stadium Market on Sunday.
The Otago Farmers' Market has its own mobile kitchen, which also makes appearances at various events, teaching people how to cook with produce from the market.
The presence of food trucks, trailers and caravans adds a certain vitality to the city, and, clearly, provides something people want.
But it is hard work and rules restricting traders from selling foods within 300m of other food outlets or in parks and reserves without permits mean traders have work extra hard, and sometimes flout rules, to make a living.
One of the more exciting new entrants to the local scene are Kim and Matt Morgan, who arrived in Dunedin from Denver, Colorado, two years ago, and have for five months been serving up their Mexican-style food from their Tex Otago food truck.
They seem passionate about all they do, not least food, and about mobile trading.
''You can brighten up someone's whole week in that three minutes they're at your truck,'' Mrs Morgan said.
With a background in theatre and academia, the Morgans are colourful, friendly, well-spoken and well-researched.
They have been instrumental in setting up an informal union of Dunedin mobile traders, using the momentum around the Dunedin City Council's recent review of the bylaw governing mobile trading.
The council has welcomed the group approach to dealing with staff and elected members to get views and information across, and is, as a result of the feedback from traders, revisiting its proposed mobile trading bylaw again, after investigating how it can make access to more sites for traders possible, without compromising its other needs.
Mobile trading is something that has taken off phenomenally around the globe, Mrs Morgan says.
In Denver, where the Morgans have come from, street food has become so popular there are food truck parks and regular food truck ''rodeos''. They would like to see that happening in Dunedin, too.
Mrs Morgan puts the rise in the popularity of street food in the past few years down to its convenience, variety and price.
In a recession, street food makes financial sense, Matt Morgan says.
''When the recession hit, people still wanted a good meal, but they weren't going to pay $50 at a sit-down restaurant, so it opened up a window for new cuisine and new methods for delivery that's just taking off.
''People will come up [to the caravan] and get a taco, where they'd never go into a restaurant and get a taco, because that's a commitment, but $5 is enough to try something and then something else.''
The Morgans think their popularity is, in part, because they have a product nobody else has, plus they make everything they sell themselves.
''The idea you can get exactly what you want made fresh - I think people are looking for good quality food, but not necessarily to sit down formally to eat it.''
The interest in street food in some cases grew out of the farmers' market, where some stall holders are going mobile.
Chris Webber, of Dunedin Poultry Processors, has had a stall at the Otago Farmers' Market for years and more recently at the Sunday Market at the stadium. He is now building his own high-spec kitchen caravan, to make it easier to take his product to more events.
Fixed businesses, such as Fish Hook fish and chip shop, Deep Creek Deli and Mamma Mia pizzas have also added mobile options to their sales toolbox, and Huntsman restaurant owner Peter Barron is keen to open a mobile trailer outside his George St restaurant to serve the hungry late at night.
At a recent hearing on the bylaw review, much was made of whether mobile traders desired to one day move into bricks-and-mortar establishments, but Dunedin's mobile traders by and large said they liked their business for its
mobility.
The operator of the Jump'n Java coffee van, Graham Scott, says he would ''never'' contemplate starting a fixed business.
''I like to be able to go and find customers, rather than relying on them coming to me.''
Bricks and mortar were too expensive to rent, anyway.
''This [mobile trading] is the way retail's going.''
Fellow coffee truck operator Phil Lyons, of Coffee Pirates, said he would take up a permanent spot, but only for the right location.
About eight or nine food trailers or caravans pull up at the Stadium Market every Sunday to sell their food.
The latest addition, the Seabird Food Truck (actually a caravan), was the idea of Anna Donnelly and Sophie Gregg. They wanted to start a cafe, but found it would be significantly expensive. A caravan was more affordable, especially when Miss Donnelly's father did the building.
Matt Morgan built his own trailer, too.
Matthew Collier and Irene Fuertes, of Churros Ole, are investing $50,000 in a commercial standard mobile kitchen, so they can work events across the region. Local company Dunedin Motor Homes is building that trailer and it is not the first food truck business owner Bryan Rusbatch has had. He has been fitting out coffee vans around the city for about eight years, and this year [2013] built a fully kitted-out commercial standard mobile kitchen, for an Auckland company selling chicken goods.
''It's good business.''
They were a couple of Denver theatre types - actor and academic - who wanted to do something different with their lives.
So they packed up their dogs, moved to Dunedin and started selling Mexican food from a caravan.
Matt Morgan, who started out as a child actor and worked in professional theatre for 37 years, loved to cook and yearned to feed people. His wife Kim was a tenured professor of theatre for 15 years.
The couple had been working 80 to 100-hour weeks in a country that was starting to freak them out politically and socially.
They wanted to start a family, but knew they did not have the time or the desire to do that in the United States, so they decided to change everything about their lives. Upon arriving in New Zealand to get married in 2010, they knew it was where they wanted to be, and when Mr Morgan saw the potato cart in Christchurch's Cathedral Square he fell in love with it.
When they came to live in Dunedin a few years later they saw few mobile traders, almost no Mexican food on offer and a big student customer base and the answer to the question of what to do for a living seemed obvious.
Mr Morgan set about building a caravan and their mobile food business, Tex Otago, was born.
It has become so popular in its first five months they cannot keep up with demand, Mrs Morgan says. Their success, she believes, is down to offering reasonably priced, fresh, home-made and different food.
Part of a burgeoning street food scene in the city, they are enjoying seeing the number of food trucks increase and are also enjoying being a part of the efforts to review the somewhat restrictive city regulations around the industry.
The timing, like everything else Mrs Morgan notes, has been ''very fortuitous'' for the couple, who are also now expecting their first child.
It had been particularly enjoyable to be part of the review process - being able to see proposed changes to rules, submit on them and speak to them was something that did not often happen in the United States.
''To see participatory government in action here is another wonderful affirmation of where we've chosen to set up our lives.''
They were getting requests every day to cater functions or attend events, confirming the demand for street food in Dunedin.
''There's definitely a desire for it, if we are given the mechanism to support it.''
Wanaka 21-year-old Anna Donnelly wanted to open a cafe and gallery, but, after scouting for a location and investigating the costs involved, it became clear that was going to be difficult.
So she started talking with her friend, Sophie Gregg (also 21), and after talking with friends and assessing the general interest they landed on the idea of a food cart.
People had said it was a great idea, and they met plenty who said they would be interested in buying fresh hot food from a food trailer.
They had both studied in Dunedin - Miss Donnelly vet nursing and tourism (she had since worked in hospitality), and Miss Gregg has just completed a degree in media studies - so the city seemed to them like a great place to do it, especially with its bigger customer base.
''It was also way cheaper than a cafe,'' Miss Donnelly said.
Miss Donnelly and her father, David Donnelly, bought a trailer in April. Mr Donnelly built the body and all the necessities to make and sell food, and the Seabirds food trailer was born.
The girls started selling their burgers with a healthy twist, American hotdogs and coffees in November.
They started out with a bang, pulling up at John Wilson Ocean Dr from Thursday through Saturday, and were doing well.
Then the Dunedin City Council reminded them they could not trade on a reserve. They had to move on. The customers urged them to move to Macandrew Bay, where the resident coffee cart used to stop, but they received a visit from the council on the first day of trading, moving them from there, too.
Miss Donnelly said she and Miss Gregg had intended to both work full-time on the trailer, but she was now thinking about finding a part-time job, which was a little disappointing when the business clearly had so much potential. They were starting to cater for private functions, and would work the trailer in Wanaka during summer, but were otherwise limited in Dunedin.
''We'll still go the the [Sunday Market] but I think we'll just do events now.''
Numia Fereti's food trailer was born from adversity.
Mr Fereti (40), who had worked in tourism and hospitality in Samoa and Fiji, moved to Dunedin 10 years ago with his Dunedin-born Samoan wife Nela.
He worked front-of-house at Corstorphine House in Caversham before starting his own food business in the mid 2000s using a Samoan bread recipe of his mother-in-law's as his specialty product.
Where others put banana or apple into their bread, he chose pineapple, and the Pineapple Bakery was born. It was also a bit of a marketing ploy.
''If you say island food, or Samoan food that will limit people, but if you say pineapple that makes it more accessible.''
Based in South Dunedin, he made bread, pies and steak sandwiches mainly to order and for delivery to businesses.
Most of his customers were from companies like Fisher and Paykel and Sealord. After they went, so too did his little business.
For a year he kept getting asked what happened to the bakery.
He thought about his options and then last year his father-in-law lost his job at Hillside Workshops.
He invested some of his redundancy money into building Mr Fereti's trailer and in January this year a new Pineapple Bakery was born, this one on wheels.
''The story of this trailer, it's a story of how people lost so much and are trying to come through that and how they take another step forward, rather than backwards.''
The trailer will now be familiar to many, seen at events and markets around Dunedin, moving around where the city's strict bylaws on mobile trading allow.
Mr Fereti has been vocal in his opposition to the bylaw which at present does not allow mobile traders to be stationed within 300m of a food outlet, or stay in one place for more than two hours.
''That's not good business.''
The food truck specialises in Pacific specialties, pineapple bread, pork buns, pineapple pie and steak sandwiches, items that took him three years to perfect, and those items have become the most popular with the client base, which he says has slowly increased to about 400 regulars.
''We can really see that this thing is working better than a shop, because you can't take a shop to people.''
It is not an easy living, and his wife is the main bread-winner for the couple and their four children.
Most of the money earned from the food truck at this stage is still going back into the business, mainly refining the custom-built trailer, which Mr Fereti, who calls himself a product developer who also designs bain maries and pie warmers, hopes to one-day sell, after the business supports itself and has a regular clientele.
