Food Hawker Convoy

Restaurants are more complicated than we think

Street food is a major part of the Bangkok experience.  Almost everyone eats on the streets with delicacies served from hawker carts, sidewalk restaurants and from pole hawkers.  Every so often, one sees an interesting logistics exercise underway that allows all this food dispensing to work smoothly.  

Today’s example is of a food hawker I saw on my lane.  She was pushing her food cart up the lane to her space on an up coming street where dozens of food hawkers congregate for the lunchtime crowd.  I have talked about this street many times, for example in this entry from June 2015.

What was interesting about this particular food vendor was that this wasn’t a single cart business.  As you’ll see in third slide above, this food service actually was a convoy operation with some ladies following with a bucket of ice and some additional supplies.  It would have been too much for the lady with the main cooking cart to also carry this extra stuff.  She seemed to be struggling as it was, so a second vehicle was necessary to support her efforts.

These food carts essentially offer full take out restaurant services.  The food is stored, cooked and served on the spot.  It is fresh and tastes great.  And like every restaurant operation, there is a logistical side to the business that many of us don’t see.  However, in this case, to make whatever the lady with the cart was serving work, she needed another backup vehicle with ice and maybe raw ingredients to help her out.

While I didn’t have the time to follow her and her team, I at least had a chance to get a sense of the complexity of running a mobile food business.