GOT THE MIDNIGHT MUNCHIES?

If you’re driving around in the wee hours, the munchies strike, and your fevered mind can’t abide the thought of fluorescent diner lights, what can you do? If school’s in session, you can head to one of the food trucks – the Hot Truck or Louie’s Lunch parked near Cornell’s dormitories, place your order, then drive it home for peaceful, private consumption. Students stop by the trucks on study breaks, on late-night dates, returning from the library, or any time hunger pangs strike. But the pleasures of stand-up al fresco dining aren’t limited to students. Staffers, passers-by, townies and out-of-townies of every stripe follow their noses to the places whose sometimes-long lines have become campus traditions. You’ll find more than a cure for your hunger; in any weather, it’s a scene, with hungry folks clad in anything from formal wear to pajamas, from parkas to bikinis, waiting to fill at least one type of late-night emptiness.

You’ll find the famous Hot Truck parked just below the west campus dorms along Stewart Avenue, where the cognoscenti line up to order such treats as Suis, PMPs, MBCs, Shaggy – Hot and Heavies, and Guinea Pigs. Or try a HaHa, HeHe, or HoHo. With a brief visit to the Hot Truck’s Web site [http://people.cornell.edu/pages/smo9/hottruck], you, too, can become a cognoscentum in a matter of moments. Owner Albert Smith, a Cornell grad with a degree in agricultural economics, and proprietor of Ithaca’s Short Stop Deli, acquired the Hot Truck in the summer of 2000 when Bob and Sharon Petrillose, who had run it since 1960, retired. It had originally been the brainstorm of Petrillose’s father, John Petrillose, who’s landmark Collegetown bar, Johnny’s Big Red, closed at night, when all good bars close; but he knew there were still hungers out there to be addressed. 

Originally the truck served burgers, dogs, and pizza, but when the younger Petrillose realized that pizzas sold by the slice grew less appetizing as the evening wore on, he hit on the idea of slicing open loaves of French bread, loading them up with pizza ingredients, and popping them into the oven on demand. Voila! The PMP, or “poor man’s pizza” was born, soon to be poached (figuratively) by the folks from Stouffers for their frozen French bread pizzas. The Hot Truck menu evolved over the course of 40 years, and it continues to evolve today. Its menu credits sandwich inventors, the most recent additions being the Big Willie, created by Will Devine ’03, and the Super Slacker, co-authored by Brian Frankel and David MacLeon ’04. As an evening draws to a close, the red sauce and the acronyms begin to fly, along with orders for WGCs (wet garlic with cheese), MBCs (meatballs and mozzarella cheese), RBCs (roast beef with cheese), Ra-Ra’s (an RBC with pepperoni), Re-re’s (with sausage), and Ro-Ro’s (with mushrooms). Ravaging appetites might opt for the Little Sicilian, its French bread piled high with meatballs, sausage, cheese, and sauce, and topped with potato chips, or the ever popular Triple Suicide, or T-Sui, pronounced Tee Sooey, its garlic-doused bread loaded up with tomato sauce, mushrooms, sausage, pepperoni, mozzarella, and a trio of homemade meatballs. Why “suicide?” We’ve heard it posited that the darned things have so much garlic, they’re a surefire recipe for social suicide, not to mention indigestion and peculiar dreams. But delicious they are, and a personal favorite of this writer. 

Albert Smith’s son, Mike, runs the truck, parked on Stewart Avenue’s 600-block from 10p.m. to 2a.m. during the week and from 11p.m. to 3a.m. and later on weekends. But that’s only half the business. The Smith’s own the Shortstop Deli on Seneca Street, and serve a partial Hot Truck menu there during the day, and the truck can meander about town, catering to teary-or-bleary-eyed alumni on Cornell’s Arts Quad during reunion weekends, where, according to Albert Smith, “Doctors, and lawyers, and educators from 25 to 85 wait in line, some for as long as 45 minutes,” to fill up on subs and relive Hot Truck memories, some recalling having met their spouses for the first time on a Hot Truck line. 

The truck also serves fraternities and sororities on their chefs’ nights off, and is available for parties and celebrations, which is how the business recently achieved national fame. Last year food writers Jane and Michael Stern, who write a much-beloved, down-to-earth “road food” column for Gourmet Magazine, have published a small library of food books, and have an NPR program on – what else? -- food, discovered the Hot Truck at a wedding they attended in Ithaca, where it showed up outside La Tourelle to provide after-hours subs for the entire wedding party and their guests. The Sterns loved it, and the rest is history. A segment on the truck has been aired on their radio show and they’ve asked us to look for an article on the Hot Truck in Gourmet this fall. But even without the formal publicity, thousands of Cornellians and former Ithacans carry late-night Hot Truck memories with them all over the world.

A campus food truck with an even longer history is Louie’s Lunch, whose provenance dates back to sometime between 1916 and the early 1920s, when Louie Zounakos established his stand on Cornell’s North Campus. Louie, who was born in Sparta, Greece in 1885, originally emigrated to Brooklyn where, according to the Louie’s Lunch Web page [www.louieslunch.com], he made a living selling his mama’s bathtub gin during Prohibition. He eventually moved to Ithaca and is rumored to have begun his business peddling snacks at fraternities from a pushcart, eventually graduating to an old Ford truck and his spot in front of Risley.

Zounakos, who was known for his generosity to starving students, retired in 1955, selling the business to Arthur and Thelma Machen, whose family ran it until 1997, when current owner Ron Beck took it on. In this writer’s day, in the early 60’s (yes, yes, I know, if you were there, you can’t remember them, but I do remember them) we called the truck Louie’s Lunch and Country Club, and its dogs and burgers held us through those winter nights when we could steal out of the dorms after curfew past our eagle-eyed housemothers. But this is another, and a better, day, and students can now call in orders from their cell phones (257-4649 is the number) on their walks back from the library, and find their Buffalo chicken wing wrap or Tully burger hot and waiting for them when they arrive. Cornell staff members take advantage of the phone service as well to order quick lunches to go.

But on weekend nights the cooks are too frantic to take phone orders, and folks gather at the truck to give their orders and bask in the mobile kitchen’s friendly light and warm, foody fragrance. Beck came to the food truck business in 1991, in his days as a welder. He welded up his own rig and used it “to chase construction projects and do weekend jobs at auctions, horse shows, rabbit shows, fundraisers, and all kinds of parties,” he explains. “We’d cater backyard barbecues and company picnics.” When the owners were ready to sell Louie’s, he was ready to buy it. It’s hard work seven days a week for him, but with help from students, many of whom live in Risley, he seems to enjoy it and them, and is grateful that on a busy night students are willing to wait as long as half an hour for an order of Louie’s most popular side dish, Cajun fries. “People tell us we have the best fries anywhere,” Beck says. Other favorites are their chicken parm, Buffalo chicken wing, and Philly cheese steak subs, but variety is the watchword here, and there are chicken Caesar wraps, monster pizza subs with their six toppings, and a selection of breakfast sandwiches. For the indigent, grilled cheese sandwiches, egg and cheese sandwiches, burgers (ham- or veggie-) and dogs with a variety of toppings are among the items selling for two dollars or less, and there’s an entire page of vegetarian items on the Louie’s Lunch menu.

The truck itself is a rugged 1965 rescue vehicle with plenty of little compartments, high ceilings, and ceiling fans, with only 16,000 original miles on the engine. While it spends most of its life parked at its own NYSEG utility pole on the corner of Thurston and Wait Avenues, Beck generally drives it home over winter break to repair it, and to take a well-deserved rest himself. The hours are long (weekdays from 11a.m. to 3a.m., Saturdays from noon to 3a.m., and Sundays from 6p.m. to midnight), but the rewards are many, and Beck realizes he is making his place in history. Waiting at Louie’s is “a social event with some lifelong friendships being formed.”