Meet San Diego's food trucks

Devilicious, @Deviliciousfood

Food truck fare: Comfort food with a twist

When: Lunch five days a week, plus special events. Dinner five nights a week by end of October.


Dining details: Dyann Manning’s foray into curbside cookery started one day last August when she and a girlfriend decided they’d tired of their jobs and wanted to try something different. Five months and $100,000 later, Manning and her friend (no longer her business partner) launched Devilicious, which turns out comfort food with a twist. (Think butter-poached lobster grilled cheese and truffled Parmesan fries).

“I had a finite amount of money to invest — not enough for a restaurant but enough for a food truck,” said Manning, who formerly was in the business of selling food to restaurants. “We can get on the truck and go anywhere we want and sell food. If a location is slow, we can just move to another location. At a restaurant you’re stuck there every day.”

Devilicious, which launched in January, was generating so much business that Manning purchased a second truck this year from another operator and continued selling the business’ Korean-Mexican fusion fare until last month when she converted it to Devilicious Squared. Together, the two trucks serve 80 to 120 people a day, she said.

“There are definitely concerns, the biggest being that the areas we go to get saturated, but the strong will survive,” Manning said. “So we’re constantly looking for new locations, and the second we see the business drop, we’ll market that new location.”

Mangia Mangia Mobile, @mangiatruck

Food truck fare: Classic Italian entrees and homemade pastas

When: Lunch five days a week, plus catering and special events


Dining details: A lifelong waiter in Italian restaurants, Marko Pavlinovic, like most food truck operators, was an aspiring restaurateur, but lacked the funds to open a brick-and-mortar establishment. The next best option, he said, was a food truck, which he leases for about $2,200 a month. Complete with a steam table, cold table, grill, fryer and refrigeration, Mangia Mangia opened six months ago and is still struggling to turn a profit.

Italian-born Pavlinovic, who invested $15,000 to customize his truck and outfit it with kitchen equipment, augments his daily lunch trade with special food truck gatherings, a weekly five-course dinner and catering, which he says is the most lucrative part of his business. He makes his pastas from scratch and boasts that he alone is turning out traditional Italian fare like spaghetti and meatballs, gnocchi and chicken parmigiana, which he begins preparing at 5 a.m. each weekday.

“It’s a very, very hard job and right now, I’m making just enough to get by, but I see a profit in the future,” said Pavlinovic, 36, whose truck will make an appearance on the Cooking Channel’s EatStreet show on Oct. 11. “San Diego is not a food traffic kind of city, like in Los Angeles where there are lots of people out walking. You have to find places where you’ll be busy. We target big buildings with tons of people who are hungry.”


