Mobile eats have segued from trucks to bicycles: Three new food ventures are pedaling their way through the Triangle to offer customers yet another way to get their buzz.
Berenbaum’s bakery (berenbaums.blogspot.com) launched their bread bike delivery service in April for select Durham neighborhoods and monthly CSB (Community Supported Bread) subscribers.
Downtown Raleigh folks can take advantage of a mobile happy hour with free bike delivery from The Wine Feed (thewinefeed.com). If you’re within a two-mile radius of their Glenwood South office, the online wine retailer will deliver Monday–Friday 2–4 p.m. or 6–7:30 p.m. and Saturday 3–5 p.m. Orders must be placed online at least 30 minutes in advance. You can also pick up your libations at their office in the Carter Building at 18-B Glenwood Ave.
By the end of summer, folks can catch a shot or two of caffeine from an espresso peddler in Durham. bikeCOFFEE (bikecoffee.net) is the brainchild of fun-loving husband/ wife team Leon Grodski de Barrera and Areli Barrera de Grodski. Leon owned a coffee shop in western North Carolina for seven years, where he met Areli, and the two recently settled in Durham to launch a few community-focused food ventures.
After test-driving industrial tricycles-turned-food carts from Worksman Cycles in Queens, N.Y., they expect their selection to arrive this week; they’ll have it customized by local Seven Stars Cycles. The cart attached to the back wheels is where all the necessary equipment goes, including fresh water, wastewater and propane tanks. Leon said the restsugar, cups, etc.will be “hanging off the sides.” The cart will operate like a food truck, with daytime and late-night locations announced on Twitter throughout the day.
Leon’s goal is to pull the perfect shot of espresso, something he speaks about as both a science and an art.
“It’s almost like perfume,” he says. “A really great perfume won’t hit you all at the same time. It will have a certain sweetness, a certain weight. When you extract the shot, it comes out in the way that it kind of looks like honey and it extracts in the way that comes out sweet, as opposed to a bitterness. And [you must] texturize milk to make a beautiful, velvety sheen. If it looks beautiful like that, it tastes better. Lactose comes out in the milk and makes it sweeter. Fluctuations in the weather, you have to pay attention to that, to change the grind size. That sounds really hoity-toity, but you’re combining great coffee with how you’ve pulled, and it stands out.”
Having roasted coffee as a shop owner, Leon was even more inspired to craft the perfect shot after he and Areli traveled to Italy.
“Have you ever had an espresso in [an Italian] train station? It’s incredible. When you talk about Europe, a lot of it sounds really cliché. The truth is, when you go to Italy and go to the train station and ask for a coffee, you’ll find this lady who doesn’t look like the most sophisticated espresso maker, and she’ll pull you the best shot of your life without even thinking about it.”
bikeCOFFEE artisan espresso shots will be created using local coffee, Leon says, including Joe Van Gogh, Counter Culture, Carrboro Coffee Roasters and Larry’s Beans.
