Chinese Food Trucks Carve A Niche Near Campuses

Chinese Food Trucks Carve A Niche Near Campuses - Menuism Dining Blog, July 24, 2017 

As we have mentioned on a number of occasions, Mainland Chinese students studying at American universities have created a demand for authentic Chinese regional food that has resulted in countless campus towns and cities across the country getting their first taste ever of authentic Chinese food.  But these Mainland Chinese students are not getting their homeland food fix solely through restaurants opening up near their local campuses.  Rather, other interesting options are available for these students longing for a taste of home.

Despite the nationwide proliferation of authentic Chinese food near college campuses, I found to my surprise there was very little in the way of authentic Chinese food near the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.   USC’s 5,000 Mainland Chinese students had to eat somewhere, and it’s hard to believe that USC’s Mainlanders would somehow be the only group of their compatriots in the US not to be subject to the “Chinese stomach.”   

In trying to solve the USC puzzle, vague information appeared referring to a group of Chinese food trucks which camped near USC’s international student housing.  When I drove there I did see one Chinese food truck called Tasty Wok Express, but the other three trucks there were taco trucks with names like Guadalajara Tacos and Fluffy Tacos.  While finding that one truck was encouraging, it could hardly service 5,000 Mainland Chinese students. 

But finally I got the lead I was looking for.  A food writer living near campus said that despite the names of the trucks parked there, all four of them were actually trucks selling Mainland Chinese food.  Returning on foot I found this was the case.  The trucks were all marked with Chinese lettering and posted pictures of dozens of Mainland Chinese dishes that they served.  That added up to about 200 Mainland Chinese dishes between the four trucks, enough to keep a good portion of USC’s Mainland students very happy.  And who cares if the trucks said “tacos”, given that at least at one of the trucks I visited, neither truck employee understood English and one of the customers had to translate my order to them for me.

 

 

As it turns out, Chinese food trucks have carved a niche for themselves in university settings, particularly in urban campuses in large cities where opening a sit down restaurant for the benefit of Chinese students might be problematic due to high operational costs.  This is certainly the case with USC in Los Angeles, so it’s not surprising to see the same routine nearby Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  At Columbia, the phenomenon has taken on a slightly different personality, as the full sized food trucks seen at USC have mostly been replaced by the smaller carts typically found on the street corners in midtown Manhattan, leading to more limited menus. 

Perhaps the star of the show at Columbia with the longest lines is Uncle Luoyang.  The Uncle Luoyang truck features Shaanxi and Henan style food, with their liang pi cold noodles and pork burgers among their most popular items.  Also popular are their $7, three item rice combos, perfect for starving Mainland Chinese students.  The Uncle Luoyang truck was featured in a student film, which you can see on YouTube. 

 

 

Uncle Luoyang now also has a sit down location on Amsterdam St., though it has to humor the locals with sushi and Americanized Chinese dishes, too.  There are a number of other Chinese food carts around Columbia.  The Healthy Food cart also features $4 and $7 rice combos with a rotating daily menu of 15 entrees.  Two other Chinese carts by Columbia don’t even have English names, and also serve Mainlander type Chinese food.  All of these Chinese carts are based out of Flushing, so it’s a long trek for the operators in addition to the nine hour days spent on campus.

But the city with the greatest number of college campus Chinese food trucks is not Los Angeles or New York.  Rather it’s Philadelphia, with multiple trucks on various campuses.  The largest congregation is by the University of Pennsylvania campus, where there are seven Chinese food trucks, plus a number of other Asian food trucks, found along Spruce St. and Walnut St.  There are additional Chinese food trucks parked at the nearby campus of Drexel University.   And Temple University also has its share of Chinese food trucks.  However, unlike the trucks near USC and Columbia, Philadelphia’s campus food trucks tend largely to Americanized Chinese fare, rather than Mainlander food.  This likely reflects that campus food trucks are a longtime staple in Philadelphia, with probably 70 trucks of different stripes in the University City area alone, and aimed at the student population in general.

Food trucks aren’t as big of a thing in Chicago, but near the University of Chicago, trucks do line up on Ellis St. between 57^th and 59^th Streets.  Regular participants in that scene are the Yum Dum dumpling truck and BAO Mobile.   And in the Boston area, the Savory Food Truck has turned Chinese campus food truck dining into a cottage industry with trucks permanently parked by Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, MIT, and Northeastern University.

Food trucks are not the only nontraditional option used by mainland Chinese college students to get their provincial style Chinese food in their campus digs.  The most interesting option is the use of delivery services like To Go 626, to have food ferried from the San Gabriel Valley to campus.  Dozens of top Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, such as Chengdu Taste, Szechuan Impression, SinBaLa, Xi'An Tasty, Class 302, Gui Lin Noodle, Din Tai Fung, Shaanxi Gourmet, 101 Noodle Express, Savoy, and Beijing Pie House, have aligned themselves with delivery services.  

 

And while the delivery services derive most of their business from local residents, they'll deliver almost anywhere if you pay them the approximately $1 a mile delivery charge.   Consequently, the San Gabriel Valley Chinese food delivery businesses do a thriving business delivering food to Mainland students 45 miles away at UC Irvine, as well as other campuses including USC.  While a food delivery charge of $45 may seem incomprehensible to you or me, it’s a pittance to the rich mainland Chinese students we have talked about in the past.  Now you still might wonder why would a UC Irvine student pay $45 to have authentic Chinese food delivered from the San Gabriel Valley, when Irvine itself has dozens of authentic Chinese restaurants, all within convenient driving distance in your Maserati or Lamborghini.  The answer lies in the fact that Irvine's Chinese restaurants skew toward their local residents, meaning Cantonese, Taiwanese and Shanghainese style food. Irvine has only a small (though growing) number of Mainland style Chinese restaurants, so if you really want the food of your home province and have money to burn, delivery from the San Gabriel Valley is the only way to go.