Roland Robles loves food and people equally.  Like other creative types with an itch for social interaction, he used to have to seek out extracurricular experiences to balance the isolation of his chosen art; the time he spent in the back kitchens of San Francisco restaurants didn’t wholly satisfy him.  Luckily, the gregarious and fast-talking owner of the Bay Area’s Fiveten Burger food truck has found the best of both worlds in a tiny kitchen on wheels. Today, he gets to spend his time feeding and chatting with everyone from the suits to the skaters, and he couldn’t be happier.  On August 1, Fiveten Burger turns one year old.

Robles took a break from his crazy-busy day to give me the what’s what of his food truck world.  After a few minutes with him, I was not surprised to discover that he befriended his business partner over a hamburger.  

 

Please start by telling me a little bit about your background.

I came up in the kitchens here in San Francisco.  My last kitchen was a place called Bar Johnny, and the owner there asked me specifically to write a hamburger as the main dish on his menu.  The restaurant was changing over from what it had been to what it became, so I had about six months to work out recipes and things like that.  I spent a bunch of time dealing with a friend of mine from a wheat company to get wheat ground and textured the way I wanted it, and I made a bun recipe that I spent a lot of time trying to get right.  So I got it together in time to open the restaurant, and it did pretty well.  When I finally decided to do my own thing after the owner sold the place, I took a little time off and started to work on the truck.  It just made sense to open a truck selling a hamburger.

 

 

So, why a truck?  Why not another restaurant?

Honestly, since before trucks became a craze, I’ve always wanted a truck because I like independent cooking.  I’m that sort of person in general. I like to do things for myself. The truck style is all about that.  That’s what you do in the truck.  You have a kind of self-contained environment.  It’s your own space.  You have your own fuel supplies and your own generator.  You don’t plug in or pay anybody.  You just run your own. 

 

Alright, and what is this about you befriending your business partner over a hamburger?

Andrew used to come to the restaurant when I worked at Bar Johnny.  He’d come in and order my hamburger all the time, but he could never get through on the phone to order one to go.  He complained to me about it, and I told him, ‘Here’s my phone number. Give me a call.’  We became friends from that. He’d called me to get his burger made.  Then after the restaurant closed, we went out to have a beer and talk about the truck.  He was into it.  And here we are now.

 

What, besides the independence, would you say is the best perk to running a food truck?

The best perk to having my truck is that as an executive chef, I spent all my time behind the door, and now, I’m the face in the window.  I’m not represented by a server or by the owner of the restaurant.  It’s my food.  I wrote the recipe.  I cook it. And I love meeting people face to face, shaking their hands, and watching them eat.  Watching people stand outside my window is just the best thing.  I’ve seen a lot of really unabashed eaters.  They just forget about their neatness and their suits, they put the tie over their shoulders and they just get down.  People like hamburgers anyway, and when you make a good one, they can really get into it.  That aspect is super rewarding.

 

And the biggest challenge?

Space!  We’re a bit unusual compared to other trucks.  We don’t have a prep kitchen.  We don’t store stuff anywhere else.  Everything we serve, we make it, prep it, cut it, whatever, inside the truck.  Our menu is usually about five items at a time (we rotate, so it’s not always the same), but everything is prepped and kept in the truck.  So we tend to sell out because we can only pack so much stuff into the truck a day.  In order to serve tomorrow, I have to go shop again.  We do have some things made.  We have a bakery that makes our buns for us, and the meat company delivers to an address I have, but I rent a little tiny piece of a refrigerator, which is just big enough for the box I get once a day. The good thing about it is that we don’t have anything old because we can’t.  Everything is super fresh.

Which, in your opinion, is the best burger on your menu?  And which is the most popular?

That’s easy.  We don’t do any funky toppings or do anything crazy on our burgers.  We don’t make donut burgers, and we don’t have carmelized celery at all.  We make straight up hamburgers.  My business partner and I pretty much agree that the best way to eat our hamburger is medium rare (I like mine medium, but he likes it medium rare.), with a piece of American cheese, a little bit of mayonnaise, and a couple of pickles. That’s it. That way, it tastes the most like a burger.  You taste the beef. 

The most popular version of our burger is with cheddar cheese, which I don’t really like at all, and all of the toppings that we offer, so lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pickles, ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard.   And I would say that burger with bacon is probably the most popular.

Do you have a favorite stop on your route?

I like them all, and I don’t want to pick one over the other because I like everybody. Everyone’s cool with me.  I can tell you our busiest stop, though.  We work with this organization called Off the Grid.  The director is Matt Cohen. He arranges the permits in a certain area, and then he collects a bunch of trucks that are on his roster.  He invites you to a certain place, and you show up at a given time and sell food for so many hours. We do one here in Berkeley.  It just started this summer, and I would say at this point, it’s probably our busiest stop.  We’re supposed to be there for four hours, and we haven’t made four hours in four trips yet. 

And as a personal favorite, I would have to say Thursday nights here in Oakland at a bar called Penelope.  I don’t have to get into my truck.  I have a crew that can work without my help.  I really like that because there’s beer, and I don’t have to work. 

 

All photos courtesy of FiveTenBurger.