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Food trucks are white hot in Austin – and the story’s similar across the country.
Mobile restaurants feed a trend of quickly-served, affordably-priced gourmet food – perfect whether you’re at the bar, or barely have time to leave your office for lunch.
But for those in the traditional world of street vending – old school hot dog carts parked on street corners – this new wave of mobile food vendors is a major disruption.
Premiering this year at the Austin Film Festival, "Dog Days" is a documentary focused on the world of hot dog vendors in Washington D.C. "Food trucks, street vendors, hot dog vendors, all of them – they're so symbolic of the American dream,” says "Dog Days" filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson. “There's nothing more pure than a sole entrepreneur who saved money and started they're business right on the streets.”
Hinson and co-director/co-producer Kasey Kirby spent four years following Siyone, a struggling street vendor, and Coite Manuel, a former industrial engineer who, without any food experience, started a business called Food Chain that supply carts with gourmet options other than hot dogs.
"Since food trucks are largely popular, we almost had to pull ourselves back from that easy avenue to go down,” Kirby says. “We felt the need to tell the story behind hot dog vendors because we never saw anything about it.”
"Dog Days" has its last Austin Film Festival screening tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Hideout Theatre.
