Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

51. The Food Shark

✥ 51 ✥ The Food Shark Tw en t y-f iv e years ag o the Irish novelist Roddy Doyle published a hilarious book called The Van about the misadventures of three working-class Dubliners who purchase an old van and try to sell fish and chips from it. In Doyle’s novel, everything goes wrong that possibly can, and the entrepreneurs end up driving the van into the Irish Sea and leaving it there. I doubt if this will be the fate of Marfa’s food van, the Food Shark. I spent an afternoon not long ago talking with the Food Shark’s proprietors, Adam Bork and Krista Steinhauer, and they seem far more competent than Doyle’s characters, who are lovable but seldom sober. Another major difference is that Doyle’s trio started their mobile food business out of economic necessity, while Bork and Steinhauer started theirs because they bought a van and then had to figure out what to do with it. The van is not exactly a thing of beauty or an example of classic automobile design. It consists of a bulky aluminum body built thirty or so years ago onto a 1974 Ford truck chassis by a now defunct outfit in San Angelo called Ford Brothers. Internal evidence shows that it was once a Rainbow Bread delivery truck, but when Bork and Steinhauer spotted it sitting behind a short-lived barbecue joint in Marfa last year it had been converted into a food service vehicle. “It had a lot of personality,” Steinhauer told me, “a kind of cute grill and face.” They decided that they couldn’t live without it, and with the help of their friend Ginger Griffice they bought it (Griffice, who sometimes helps out with lunch at the Food Shark, describes herself as a “plankholder” in the enter200 ✥ prise, which must be something more substantial than a stakeholder ). When they bought the van in February 2006, neither Bork nor Steinhauer, who came to Marfa from Austin in 2004 to help open the Thunderbird Motel, had any previous experience in the foodpreparation business, although Bork was once a waiter and busboy in an Austin restaurant and Steinhauer had put in a brief stint as a cheese and chocolate buyer for a specialty food store in San Francisco. In fact, Bork was a well-known musician in Austin, playing the electric guitar in venues like Antone’s and the Continental Club under the name Earth Pig (he will be putting out an album soon, recorded at the Gory Smelley studio in Marfa). Steinhauer, however, lived in Florence, Italy, for four years and traveled a good deal in the Eastern Mediterranean, where she acquired a taste for what she describes as “Middle Eastern street food.” Not only that, her father had once been in the food van business, and when she told him about the new vehicle he started sending her drawings showing how to install kitchen equipment in it (actually, when she first sent him a picture of the van, his response was, “Maybe you should have sent me a photo before you bought it,” but then the drawings started arriving). “Things just jelled,” Bork says. “It was just crazy enough to work.” They started serving lunch from the van in October 2006. Steinhauer is in charge of the menus, which have a core of Middle Eastern falafel and hummus supplemented with daily specials that tend toward dishes that Steinhauer describes as “more instantly recognizable,” such as barbecue sandwiches and tacos. She prepares most of the food, while Bork is in charge of mixing the hummus and taking care of the cold drinks. Their day starts about 7:00 a.m., when Steinhauer starts making the day’s supply of falafel in her catering kitchen and transferring it to the van for final assembly . Falafel, she explained, is a mixture of ground garbanzo beans, cilantro, Italian parsley, fresh mint, garlic, and onions, “plus a cou- ✥ 201 ple of little secrets.” The van is equipped with an icebox, a hot plate, and a deep fryer, and the falafel balls that are the Food Shark’s staple are formed from Steinhauer’s premixed supply and fried when the customer orders them. Hummus is also based on garbanzo beans, cooked and mixed with lemon juice and olive oil—“We go through buckets of olive oil,” Steinhauer said. Bork and Steinhauer obtain their ingredients from a variety...