THE WASHINGTON POST.
FRIDAy, MARCH 27, 2020EZ10
From the Cover
BY TIM CARMANI
n the blink of an eye, it seems,
we have gone from feast to
famine. We’ve gone from the
freedom of feasting on al-
most any cuisine on earth, in our
own backyards, to the famine of
our daily lives during the corona-
virus outbreak. our favorite res-
taurants are closed or available
only for takeout. our grocery
stores look like they were looted.
our pantries are stocked with a
kind of survivalist fare that we
would have snubbed a month ago.
“We’ve gone from a very luxuri-
ous society to the essentials in,
like, a week,” chef and restaura-
teur edward Lee told me recently.
“It just makes me fearful of what
happens in another week or in
another two weeks.”
We don’t know what life will
look like in another week or two
— who among us predicted this
current mess? — but for now, we
still have food trucks. Remember
them? A decade ago, they were
the darlings of Washington. For
operators, they lowered the barri-
er to entry to the restaurant
world. For customers, they pro-vided a craft-focused, multicul-
tural alternative to the chains and
sandwich shops that, for years,
had a monopoly on the down-
town office lunch.
But the food truck life is brutal,
filled with long hours and wildly
fluctuating sales that are more
dependent on fair weather than
Major League Baseball. The years
have taken their toll on the food
truck community; many good
ones have died, but many also
remain, even as this virus increas-
ingly captures our breath and
holds us hostage in our homes. so
far, food trucks can still operate
on the streets, no doubt because
they inherently require us to eat
elsewhere. social distancing is
basically built into their business
plans.
With that said, I still have
serious misgivings suggesting
that you should visit a food truck.
This may be the ethical question
of the coronavirus era for places
still selling food and the writers/
Yelpers/PR professionals/influ-
encers who recommend them:
Are we putting people at r isk? not
just customers, who must keep
their distance at all times fromothers, but also employees, who
might take public transportation
to work and then toil side by side
with fellow workers, potentially
exposing themselves to the virus
anywhere along the way.
Ye t, as chef José Andrés, who
has dealt with more crises than
99 percent of us, said recently,
“People have to eat.” To which I
would add: People have to work
and survive, too, and not every-
one has a job where they can work
from home. By now, we all know
to follow the recommended pro-
tocols: regular hand-washing for
20 seconds, maintaining a six-
foot barrier between you and oth-
ers and staying home if you are
sick. Please keep these rules top-
most in your mind as you consid-
er visiting the following trucks,
each of which looks to be follow-
ing best sanitation practices on
their side of the counter. (Check
out each truck’s Twitter account
for locations.)
cracked Eggery, @crackede-
ggery
started by three veterans of the
Georgetown events company,
Cracked eggery first hit the
see cAsuAl on 11Still on the streets offering great food
As our meal options shrink,
we still have good food trucksPHOTOS BY DEB LINDSEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: The cracked Eggery food truck p arked in the
cleveland Park area of Washington. ABOVE: The truck
serves an Inigo Montoya sandwich, a rich chorizo-and-fried
egg combo cut, at least in theory, by a lemon aioli, which
does everything in its power to convince us the sandwich is
lighter than it actually is.