Category: Food

Food Truck Friday brings eats to Arms Park in Manchester

Every Friday throughout the summer, there will be food trucks in Arms Park (10 Arms St., Manchester) between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. They set up at the far western end of the parking lot adjacent to Cotton Restaurant and the University of New Hampshire’s Manchester campus, overlooking the Merrimack River. (Arms Park is the riverside park with the brightly painted stairs leading down to the river.)

Food Truck Friday is the brainchild of Stark Brewing Co.’s Peter Telge. Stark Brewing, based in Manchester, recently completed a mobile kitchen in a food truck. Telge said he was inspired by what happened at the Tideline Restaurant in Durham, which allowed a pair of food trucks to use its parking lot on weekends.

“They started with two trucks just on the weekends,” Telge said, “and now it’s up to six trucks, Monday through Friday. It’s become a destination.”

Telge saw the same potential near his restaurant, in Arms Park. It is not as well-known as many of Manchester’s other parks, but customers frequently asked him, “Has this always been here? Why don’t people know about it?” Telge partnered with City of Manchester Parks and Recreation department to bring the project together.

“Because we’re working with the City,” Telge said, “we’ve been able to save money on fees and permits.” It also made it easier to expedite the paperwork.

Tim Cunningham is in charge of social media for Food Truck Friday. Like everyone involved in the project, he is confident that it will become extremely successful, once enough people know about it.

“Pretty much we’re just blasting out [social media posts] every week,” he said. “Every week we’re trying to post about it, get people out there, because Fridays, especially in the summertime down there, are beautiful down by Arms Park. There’s so many people in the millyard that will think Friday would be a great day for them to maybe not bring a lunch that day and go down to the park and support some local food vendors”

John Worthen is one of those vendors. He is the owner and operator of Purple Snack Shack (text: 818-9796, facebook.com/purplesnackshack), a mobile snack shack that is indeed painted purple. He sells mostly pre-packaged food and drinks.

“I have pre-packaged everything,” Worthen said. “… novelty ice cream bars, soda, Gatorade, candy bars, potato chips, things like that.” He’s waiting for more customers to learn about Food Truck Friday. The main problem he sees is the lack of foot traffic.

“There’s not a lot of people walking here right now,” Worthen observed. “There’s a few that come by, you know, but it just doesn’t have the viewing. [The hot dog stand] up on Commercial Street — they set up up there, and they’ve got a whole ton of people. If it was busy here, it’d be great, but we’re not too busy yet.”

Joe Savitch is the owner of the Creative Kones food truck. This summer he is working with his daughter Isla. “I’m the Kid,” she said.

“Of Joe,” she clarified.

Creative Kones specializes in food in cones, but not just ice cream.

“We center around all kinds of things in cones,” Savitch said, “from snow cones to waffle cones where we put fun things like chicken and waffles. We have taco cones, which we did this year at the taco tour, and we also do a handheld Japanese-style crepe cone. We leverage creativity as much as we leverage the cones to have some fun with our food.”

“Hopefully all the businesses here, with the hotel and the mill buildings and stuff, word will get out that there’s something new for lunch.”

Food Truck Friday
Arms Park, Manchester
See the Stark Brewing Co. Facebook page for updates on Fridays about who is attending that week’s events.

Sourcing from their farm and nearby at Eden’s Table Farm Store

Given how difficult it can be to find a spicy, flavorful chile in New Hampshire, is it possible to grow one here?

“We’ve had two hot peppers that I just love!” said Addie Leader-Zavos, co-owner of Eden’s Table Farm in Dunbarton. “I was shocked by how good a pepper year we had last year. We’re trialing a bunch of different paprika types this year.” The Czech Black, for instance.

Her husband, Michael Williams, agreed.

“These [the Czech Blacks] will fake you out,” he said. “They smell like mango fruit leather, but they are serious. These are a little milder than a serrano when they’re green, but then they blow way past it when they’re ripe. They go from 5,000 Scoville units [a system for rating the heat of chiles] when they’re green to 17 [thousand] to 30,000 when they’re ripe. They’re no joke.”

This is the first full season that Eden’s Table Farm has been in business. The wife-and-husband team have been building a new farm more or less from scratch.

“We are a diversified market farm,” Williams said. “We grow vegetables. We have 65 mature blueberry bushes that we inherited. We also have a rhubarb patch that we inherited from the previous owners. There are a lot of volunteer raspberry, black raspberry and blackberry bushes; we’re going to mark the ones that taste best and take cuttings and propagate for next year.”

And, of course, the chiles.

The Williamses grow many different fruits, vegetables and herbs that they sell through their farm store, but the peppers are a good illustration of the amount of thought that is put into growing them. Leader-Zavos spent months researching varieties of chiles that would do well in New Hampshire’s climate. Eventually she discovered multiple varieties from Eastern Europe, from countries with similar climates. After that, the new farmers selected the varieties with the shortest growing season to try on the Farm.

“It was really important to us to have the shortest days-to-maturity,” Leader-Zavos said. “We wanted to be able to grow varieties that will work for us when our growing season is so short.”

Growing seasons, soil acidity, and hours of sunlight are some of the factors that Williams and Leader-Zavos have been working hard to get a handle on. Since moving from Virginia, where Leader-Zavos worked as a pastry chef and Williams was a sommelier and wine marketer, the couple have tackled the steep learning curve of starting a farm and a business with enthusiasm. “Addie’s superpower is research,” Williams said. “She can find the answer to anything.”

Which is how the two ended up buying a farm in Dunbarton. They had decided to start a small farm together.

“We cast a pretty wide net when we were looking for farm properties,” Williams said, “and at one point the price on this property dropped and it showed up in our searches. [We asked ourselves] ‘Should we go to New Hampshire to look at this property?’” They visited the farm that November, and owned it by the end of January.

In addition to actually growing things, the couple’s main focus is on their farm store, which sells their own produce and baked goods, as well as other locally produced meats, dairy, wild foods and artisanal products.

“We are very locally focused in terms of sourcing,” Williams said. “Everything in here, with the exception of a very short list of items, is from New Hampshire, and the things that aren’t from New Hampshire are from Maine, and they’re all artisanal products.”

He pointed to several varieties of dried beans as an example. “These are Baer’s Best Beans,” he said. “One of the things I like to do with new suppliers is I will go to them to pick up my first order, because I want to see what they are doing and how they’re doing it. I walked in [to Baer’s] and somebody was hand-sorting beans. So I was very happy. I was like, ‘OK, these are my people.’ This is the level of detail and attention that I like.”

Not to mention that the beans will go really well with the chiles.

Eden’s Table Farm Store
240 Stark Highway N., Dunbarton Center, 774-1811
Open Thursdays and Fridays 3 to 7 p.m., Saturdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.