At the very center of San Francisco International Airport, far from the soft carpets, stainless steel and right angles, which guide the world's traveling classes to their destination, there is a concrete pit teeming with taxi drivers, ready to serve.
Like the fares they shuttle hither and thither, these cabbies are the world. And they speak it all -- Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, English -- as they wait. To kill the time, they play cards on trunks, pop hoods, check engines, punch shoulders, whisper gossip, scream insults. All that activity is fueled by food and as long as anyone can remember, that fuel has been provided by a catering truck -- or, in the parlance of our times, a "roach coach."
For taxi drivers in the airport, it is also the only game in town. "Yeah I frequent it, but I've got no choice," said Rick Arena, a veteran cabbie with three decades at the airport. The coffee, he says, is "terrible;" the food, he says, is "awful." And the ambiance of the "dark old, dingy old" garage where the truck sets up everyday leads him to the following conclusion: "You might as well be eating in a graveyard."
I'm not trying to put it down," Arena said. "But I'm Italian, man, I eat. And anytime you eat off that truck, man -- it's not like mama." Corn dogs. Hot dogs. Hamburgers. Sandwiches. Egg sandwiches. Meat on a stick.
In an airport renowned for 38 eateries -- featuring options that run from brick oven pizza to oystersto sushi -- many of the resident cabbies feel the taxi pit's catering truck lacks a certain Je ne sais quoi. But this week the taxi pit's culinary future seemed poised to change. The airport's Revenue Development and Management department formally launched a bidding period for new catering options with an informational meeting. Sadly, neither of the four people in attendance -- three representatives from the airport and one reporter -- submitted a bid.
Actually, said SFO Principal Property Manager Vicente Bartolome, interest in running a catering truck for the thousands of taxi drivers that pass in and out of the airport has steadily waned. Three years ago, during the last bidding period, only two interested parties bothered to submit a proposal. S & T Catering -- a Vietnamese husband-and-wife outfit from Hayward -- won out. They are now the target of the scant praise and notoriously emphatic opinionating of hundreds of cabbies.
And not even the harshest truck critics among the cabbies had a bad word to say about the couple. The prevailing sentiment? "They work hard for their dollar." The catering truck has even developed a following, drawing cabbies and employees from inside the airport alike. Calvin McCoy, 47, and Hamilton Woods, 46 -- employees at Prospect Airport Services -- come here every day for their morning break.
"Before, I was wasting all my money upstairs," said McCoy, "and I was like, 'Dang, it's gotta be better than this.'" Lo and behold, it was. McCoy remembers his first trip down here like it was yesterday -- the off-white truck outfitted with grill, deep fryer, steamer oven, fridge and freezer; the dizzying array of packaged goods: Asian Cup-O'-Noodle soups, Cornflakes, saltine crackers, Ritz crackers, shrimp crackers, hard-boiled eggs, donuts, sticks of gum.
"I was like, Whoa, I ain't goin' nowhere else," said McCoy. His friend Woods, lounging in front of a TV propped on an aging cardboard box, echoed the sentiment.
"You can't get this upstairs," said Woods, waving a bacon-egg-cheese sandwich and a chocolate glazed donut in one hand. "I feel kind of privileged to know about this place." Mario Dela'O, who works for Regents Cab Company, feels less privileged to be eating at the truck. When asked his opinion of the fried chicken, Dela'O studied the golden-brown nub of poultry in his hand before issuing an assessment: "Dry on the inside, too much bone and too much grease."
And the rest of the food? "The sandwiches," said Dela'O, "they're wet and soggy. The Cracker Jacks, half the time are stale ... also, the rice stinks like rat poison."
One day I ate a bagel with a little bit of cream cheese," said George Popadopuluto, an old-time driver with 30 years at SFO under his belt. "I had diarrhea the next day."
What would be nice, he said, would be "a little souvlaki to make a giro or something." With his desire for ethnic cuisine, Popadopuluto is not alone. The Ethiopian drivers said that a little lentils would go a long way. Some of the Indians said that dahl and curry would be a plus. Members of the Russian delegation expressed a not-unserious desire to see caviar and vodka, and Joao Gravo, a 62-year old driver from Brazil, waxed poetic over "a good soup, man with vegetable, lentil, a little chicken -- oh my God!"
Marwan Rashid, a driver from the Middle East, expressed neither craving for hummus nor baba ghanoush, falafel nor shawarma. Instead, he issued an appeal to reason. "I don't care what kind of food," he said. "The only thing that I care is that it's healthy food."
Although Eirin Hilton, a registered dietitian for Kaiser Permanente in South San Francisco, admitted that she had never considered what taxi drivers were eating at the airport, she favored Rashid's common-sense approach. "This vendor at the mobile unit has such a great opportunity," said Hilton. "He could do a paradigm shift on his image and make (the food) really like a healthy, clean choice."
Sure, said Hilton, a parking garage lacks "the kind of ambience really conducive ... to eating and digesting," but a change in food could make a big difference to ward away the "obesity, cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular-type problems" associated with junk food. Wong, the truck's co-owner, claimed that he has done what he can to improve the food's health factor. According to some of the more sympathetic cabbies, the truck's fare has actually improved under Wong's stewardship -- benefiting from the addition of Vietnamese specials and a supply of Asian rice-meat-and-vegetable dishes, prepared on-site and plastic-wrapped on a bed of Styrofoam.
Only business, said Wong, is not what he thought it would be at the Bay Area's most-trafficked airport. Although airport records indicate that the truck pulled in some $700,000 last year, Wong claims that expenses cut down his net profit to a paltry $10,000-to-15,000 a year. In fact, said Wong, who pays close to 10,000 a month for his space at the airport, he may not bid to renew his lease. Could the taxi pit be left without a catering truck?
"We'll always have a catering truck down there," said Bartolome of SFO, adding that the terms of the lease could be adjusted if necessary and the contract put out to re-bid. As is always the case, he added, the quality of the food would not enter into consideration during the bidding process. The primary determinant, he said, would be the size of the bid. As for Arena, the Italian cabbie driver, news that money sets the table was neither surprising nor encouraging.
"Of course, they just want the highest bidder," he shouted. Then, he pled his case.
"Treat us like human beings, not fish," he said. "We are bottom feeders, we are the sturgeons of society. What do I want? I want a goddamn restaurant. I want a steak, I want some pasta, a little bread. Throw us a bone once in a while. Throw us some shrimp." Throw us," he said, "something good."
Staff writer Michael Manekin can be reached at (650) 348-4331 or by e-mail at [email protected] .
