“We just put the truck out there and it took off.” Gaelle Cerf co-owner of Grumman 78, a popular taco truck

MONTREAL—It has taken more than 65 years and a popular gastronomic uprising, but Montreal’s foodies are finally catching up to one of the most popular trends to hit North American cuisine.

Street-corner merchants of french fries, hot dogs and even the simple ice cream cone have been outlawed in Quebec’s largest city since 1947 — ostensibly due to anxieties over public health and cleanliness.

So Montrealers, who take pride in being ahead of the trend, had to watch from afar as gourmands in New York, Vancouver, Portland and Los Angeles sampled cutting-edge cuisine out of tricked-out delivery trucks parked curbside.

That changes this summer, in part because of the brash owners of a glowing green taco truck intent on showing what the city has been missing.

The city of Toronto, meanwhile, is serving as a lesson in what regulators must not do — thanks to “A la Cart,” its short-lived street-food experiment in 2009, which was deemed a failure.

Veronique Fournier, a city councillor and member of the all-party committee that gave the green light to an estimated three-dozen mobile restaurants, believes the key to success is a slow start.

“We have to give it time to be able to make adjustments if there are problems,” she says.

“As for Toronto, we discovered that the business plan was much too difficult for an entrepreneur. There were too many obligations, rules and ways of doing things.”

So the street-food revolution will start slowly, which is just fine with Gaelle Cerf, co-owner of Grumman ’78, a popular taco joint tucked in an up-and-coming neighbourhood in the city’s southwest corner.

Every restaurant owner takes a risk when going into business. But the creation story behind Grumman ’78 has the makings of legend now that the city has decided to amend its long-standing bylaws.

Two cooks, Marc-André Leclerc and Hilary McGown, took a trip to Mexico in 2010 and fell in love with the roadside taco stands. Determined to bring the discovery to their fellow Montrealers, they recruited Cerf, a veteran restaurant manager, and opened for business. The decision to name the enterprise after the make and year of the refurbished delivery truck used to prepare and serve the food should have been enough warning of the trio’s ambition to take the city’s hungry pedestrians by storm.

When the wheels got moving in 2011, the entrepreneurs had the road to themselves. Barred from public squares, university campuses and parklands, the truck went to every event, festival and private function that called.

“We just put the truck out there and it took off,” Cerf said. “There was some good timing involved, but there was no strategy, plan, marketing, pressure or lobbying — nothing like that. We just brought the truck out to every possible event to get lots of exposure.”

Interest built through word of mouth, aided by popular food-culture columnist Marie-Claude Lortie, who launched a campaign to have in Montreal what has become a staple of most North American cities. Competitors started to take notice, too.

By the start of last summer, there were eight food trucks working the city’s event and festival circuit. The little-used Olympic Stadium in Montreal’s east end — eager to give people a reason to visit — invited the food truckers to sell their high-quality street meat on the first Friday of every month. Then the world-renowned Just For Laughs festival asked the group to serve the hungry masses in July, giving street-foodies another reminder of what they were missing.

Municipal politicians, who had at several intervals over the last six decades considered and rejected changing the city’s street-food fatwa, could no longer ignore the cresting popular support.

“Maybe at a certain time they had good reason, but in the last few years I think there were competing interests who didn’t want to see the city move forward with it,” Fournier said. “But I think the population wants it and it’s only normal that politicians give it to them.”

When a commission was launched last fall to conduct public hearings, there were a dozen trucks in operation. With the go-ahead for a pilot project that is aiming to have new municipal rules in place by 2015, Cerf said she expects at least 27 operators on the festival circuit this summer.

Top of mind for politicians, city bureaucrats and entrepreneurs alike is to avoid the potholes that sunk Toronto’s program shortly after it got off the ground.

Envisaged as a way to showcase the city’s culinary diversity, it effectively handcuffed inexperienced vendors. Sellers were forced to purchase identical carts that were clunky and costly — up to $30,000 for a cooking kiosk that was prone to break-down and took hours to set up and remove each day. Menus and locations were vetted by ill-equipped public health authorities who had no experience supporting a business start-up program.

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The program was finally shut down after an independent report noted how it had gone off the rails and bankrupted the vendors. If Toronto wanted a more diverse selection of street food, the report’s authors noted, it should have cleared the red tape and made room for some entrepreneurial spirit.

“New York run by the Swiss may be an acceptable model for public transit, but it is inappropriate for street food,” it added.

In Montreal, there are still many questions to be answered: How many licenses should be issued and at what price? How far can a truck operate from a fixed-address restaurant? How many hours a day can a truck operate from a single location? How to deal with the garbage, wastewater and recycling in a way that won’t attract pigeons, squirrels and rats? And how to quell the fears of the traditional restaurateur while ensuring larger franchises don’t try to muscle in on the mobile market?

All pressing questions that will have their response — just as soon as Montreal’s burgeoning band of trucker-cooks stop celebrating their victory.

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