Chef taking soup to the street

In New York, the Treats Trucks troll and Tweet, selling Mexican chocolate brownies and pecan butterscotch bars right on the street.

In Portland, Ore., the mobile Spudnik hawks all things potato, including the gravy and cheese-curd covered dish known as poutine.

And in Omaha, well, there's not a whole lot of gourmet food on wheels.

But that may be changing.

A Nebraska native with classic French training and a decade of New York cooking and catering experience is working to launch what appears to be the Omaha area's first year-round gourmet food truck, a mobile soup station called Soup Revolution.

Sara DeMars Cerasoli is still working through the steps required for a health inspector's approval and a city peddler's permit. And she said her souped-up soup van likely won't be ready to hit the streets until late April.

But since the quiet February launch of her www.soup-revolution.com Web site, she has been bombarded with inquiries from would-be diners.

She's energized by that response and hopeful that Soup Revolution could pave the way for more gourmet food trucks in the area. “I think Omaha is just as ready for all these things as other cities,” she said.

While ice cream vans with tinkly music rumble routinely through local neighborhoods and Mexican popsicle carts and taco trucks have long trolled south Omaha, the metro area has yet to see the gourmet food truck explosion witnessed elsewhere in the past three years.

In New York and Los Angeles, food trucks with classically trained chefs at the wheel sell everything from Belgian waffles, Korean barbecue and spicy tuna sushi rolls to crème brulée and gourmet cupcakes. Such trucks also have found followings in smaller cities such as Austin, Texas, and Portland.

Diners' appetites for convenient fare with sophisticated flavors — and chefs' desires for a low-overhead way to deliver it during a recession — appear to have helped fuel the trend. Creative uses of Twitter, which make the trucks easier to find, also haven't hurt.

DeMars Cerasoli said she chose the soup truck route because she thinks of soup as “the perfect food” and likes the idea of interacting directly with the folks she's cooking for: “It's just a really exciting, creative way of going about feeding people.”

The 38-year-old Hastings, Neb., native is no stranger to professional kitchens. After studying literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the early 1990s, she found her passion working as a line chef in Colorado. She went on to attend the French Culinary Institute in New York, training with such esteemed master chefs as Jacques Pépin and André Soltner, and graduating with a culinary arts diploma in 1997.

In the decade that followed, she worked as a personal chef, a restaurant sous chef and the executive chef at two New York catering firms. She moved back to Nebraska with her husband, Anthony, in 2007.

Pending the approval of the required license and permit, she plans to make her soups at a commercial kitchen downtown, load them into a custom van fitted with steam tables and sell them to customers at construction sites, high-rises and other designated spots in Omaha and Council Bluffs from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. weekdays.

She said the route will be variable and determined largely by request. Customers can e-mail or Tweet to request visits at their workplaces and grant permission to park on private lots or drives. She said the Web site and her Twitter feed will track the truck and explain the day's offerings: “I can get on my phone when I pull up at my location and say (via Twitter), ‘Hey, I'm right in front of First National, and I have this butternut squash soup that rocks.'”

DeMars Cerasoli plans a limited from-scratch menu: four soups by the bowl or the gallon, a biscuit and a brownie — plus fresh salads in summer — each day. Her site hints at a repertoire of more than 100 soups, among them French onion, Tuscan white bean and kale, chicken and lime tortilla, and Red Bliss potato and sweet corn.

Why the gourmet mobile food trend hasn't caught on yet here isn't entirely clear.

Jere Ferrazzo, the Douglas County Health Department's food and drink supervisor, said the county issues roughly two dozen mobile food service licenses a year, many of them seasonal. Ferrazzo said he's not aware of other local gourmet vending vans like the one DeMars Cerasoli plans.

“Omaha is not like what I've heard about Phoenix and Seattle and Denver, where they have a lot of street vendors,” Ferrazzo said. “My theory is No. 1, it's because we have so many restaurants already, and No. 2, it's the weather. You don't want to buy your lunch when it's a blizzard outside.”

Mobile food trucks elsewhere have not been without controversy, especially in areas where older forms of street food are well-established. The New York Times wrote last year about turf battles between New York's gourmet trucks and the more traditional street vendors — the hot dog and kebab carts they sometimes park in front of — as well as the concerns of their brick-and-mortar restaurant competition. And the new growth has prompted some cities to review and tighten their mobile food regulations, sometimes to the detriment of longer-lived taco trucks.

DeMars Cerasoli said she's working through the necessary approvals and striving diligently to make sure her van will be approachable, legal and welcome wherever it stops.

“My van is brand new, so that I'm more welcome in public places. I'm working with the health department and the city of Omaha,” she said. “... It's a very serious, professionally done, seriously considered venture.”

Contact the writer:

444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com

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