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There are four hundred and twenty nine food stalls, carts, and trucks officially listed as actively serving the metropolitan area of Splatsville, at least according to the online vendor registry that is only occasionally updated by a very neurotic employee up in City Hall. These all tend to be very small businesses that operate on a month-to-month basis, working to balance the costs of running one’s own culinary business with the shifting amounts of cash brought in by the city’s many mouths to feed. They serve all sorts of locations at all sorts of times, each one trying to find its niche within this example of urban sprawl’s complicated ecosystem of burgeoning franchised chains, well-established indie joints, and the occasional inane pop-up restaurants gunning to use ideas nobody else wanted to..
Some manage to dig themselves in and ride out the chaotic waves of trends that affect the local population, becoming downright comparable to true brick and mortar restaurants in both renown and income. Others turn out to be miserable failures brought about by someone misjudging what kind of stunning new combination of tastes would take the city by storm, or by the establishment merely falling victim to a shriveling customer base. But in between the tales of great successes and abysmal screw-ups lies a broader array of businesses that manage to be nothing special. They shoot for merely making the grade, pushing the threat of rental fees back with one hand and propelling the dream of success forward with the other, week by week.
To a few, this may sound like absolute mediocrity. Maybe even some kind of street food-tinged limbo, if one were feeling slightly poetic in their derision. The people of all kinds that populate this slice of Splatsville’s culinary scene see it in a much more complicated way. Some do it for the love of the art, some just want to keep their lives afloat, and a scant few genuinely find an odd sense of pride in their meager position. They’re setting the absolute baseline than the vast majority of Splatsville residents will deal with: food of worse quality is going to be probably trashed, and dishes of a better quality will be usually out of the common individual’s price range. The statistical truth of this is entirely up in the air, but it certainly must serve as a comforting concept to some more philosophical individuals of the trade. When a person’s job security relies on the oft-fickle tastes of the wider masses, they tend to find solace in whatever strange way they can get it.
On a related note, Splatsville is known to many of those outside the region as the “city of chaos” and the local government has a slight reputation of being “hands-off” in a handful of circumstances. This viewpoint has been propagated by certain tabloids and other low brow media companies when they’ve suffered dry spells of eye-catching content in the past and needed something to bump up impressions. The area is not an anarchic free-for-all of nutjobs and survivalists, it is a metropolitan city governed by a genuinely working central authority. Just like any other city-state, the government keeps things running and regulated enough to avoid catching flak from the population or any other special interest groups. One of the many regulated areas of life involves the proliferation of street food vendors throughout the denser central sections, ensuring they both are health code compliant and actually operating in the streets.
Why the specificity? In the past, a handful of restaurants run by unscrupulous owners realized that the licenses offered to street vendors were much cheaper when it came to regular fees than those they currently had. This led to an effort to falsely re-brand into the food truck business by multiple big name restaurants, a flimsy attempt that was (despite some legal bellyaching) quelled quite quickly. In order to prevent another bout of viciously annoying scheming, oddly specific regulations were put in place to police the exact definitions of what a food stall, cart, or truck actually is. A shamelessly rushed and slapdash solution, but one that worked well enough.
If someone wants to acquire this specific license, their business is required to fall into one of the three specific categories of street food vendor set up by the city or else they will be met with flat-out denial. Those categories are: Food stalls, carts, and trucks. Food stalls are semi-permanent setups that have their own sets of seats for customers to use. Food carts are used by a singular operator, present both when it comes to operating the culinary equipment and moving the cart around (usually on foot) to another spot. Food trucks are vehicle-bound kitchens, operating specifically on the street and not the sidewalk for reasons involving parking laws. It is openly noted by some city hall employees that these specific categories are quite oddly stringent, but they clearly did not unintentionally smother the nascent street vendor community after their institution.
All currently operating street related food enterprises in Splatsville have passed these qualifications and been slotted into one of the three categories. Except one single anomaly, which ends up not being legally counted alongside its four hundred and twenty nine nominal fellows. It is neither a food stall, cart, or truck. It is in fact a food stall, cart, and truck all at the exact same time. The establishment had the owned seating arrangement of a stall by way of numerous steel chairs and two fold out tables, not solely relying on provided public seating. It also had only a single operator running it and moving it, especially notable when the engine temporarily stalled out midway through the half-hour long inspection and had to be hurriedly push-started. And finally, if the mention of an engine wasn’t enough to clue someone in, the entire mess was run out of a roughly modified Kei truck’s back bed. Astoundingly, despite being (non-maliciously) discompliant with any and all of the categories it should have slotted cleanly into, the business was allowed to pass on into a singular easily overlooked category of its own: Stall-cart-truck.
The slightly odd looking man who owned the truck should have been dismissed outright by the inspector, for how categorically discompliant the truck was. He should have been informed dryly to return at a later date with another appointment and a much more compliant vehicle. None of that happened, however, as the inspector simply placed her signature on the approval form and handed it over without a word. Despite being officially a street vendor license inspector, the bone-tired woman still had to deal beforehand with her actual day job at the main office of the Splatsville DMV, an exhausting prospect that brought forward many annoyed and outraged individuals. This sad eyed man counting as her final inspection for the night was the only person she talked to that hadn’t sought to make her job harder, of all the people she met that day. The forms he brought with him were legible enough, no demands were made for her to hurry up mid-inspection, and the man was quite polite despite his awkward accent occasionally flaring up when asked to explain the reasoning for his truck’s mildly dilapidated state.
The most basic amount of neutral kindness someone could dredge up had been shown to the inspector at the end of a very long day, and she decided to simply allow the approval of the stall-cart-truck. A mild bright spot in the long line of tedious encounters, one that he probably wasn’t even aware of causing. Plus, beyond all that emotional stuff, it couldn’t be more blatant that this was just some poor sap trying his best to start a business. He did not have the at-ease face of some slick liar convinced they snuck something by, not by a long shot. The license handed over to him was certainly going to be used for its intended purpose, to allow a fledgling street business to even vaguely compete with its brick and mortar rivals. All of that was good enough to get the inspector’s okay.
And with the inspector’s approval and over-laminated license to identify the establishment as legally running acquired, the legal side of things was entirely handled. All the hairy man had to handle at this point was simple stuff, really. Drawing up a menu of standard street food fare, stocking the truck with the ingredients required, and staking out some spots to set up at. Nothing impossible and insurmountable, especially when compared to the dodged obstacle of being outright denied a license by the legal authorities. Just a series of things to be chipped away at over the next handful of weeks, and then? It should be smooth sailing from there on out, for sure. What kind of ace up his sleeve would have some outwardly unsteady fellow feeling that an admittedly risky venture like a food truck will work out?
Because, at the end of the day, staying afloat in the street-food game is all about differentiating one’s establishment from the competition. Anything goes to stay ahead of the constantly shifting pack of businesses, while avoiding getting tied up with temporary trends that could very well pull the rug out from under a business when all is said and done. And what better way to differentiate and stand out, than to have a place pop up run by someone of a species that most mollusks and seafolk had consigned to the history books forever up until recently? With food that arguably could be claimed to be the closest anyone’s ever managed to match recovered recipes dating back to the pre-Mollusk Era species of humanity? That might just be the thing to keep a business going if things go wrong.