How we got our Vanstaurant

 

How we got our Vanstaurant

This is one of the first chapters in our Tigellae story and begins back when Giordano and I were still discussing ideas for a new Italian food business. We knew that the UK had some idea of just how delicious Italian food was, but we wanted to move the general image of Italian food away from pasta and pizza and onto something new and exciting. We knew from travelling around the country that there were many delicious dishes, some very specific to certain regions, that this country had never experienced, and we thought it was time for all this amazing food to be discovered.

The question was, how were we going to do it? With a restaurant? Did we go for a small takeaway business?

Then we hit upon an idea. A tigella – the inspiration for our name – is a round, flat bread, a perfect little alternative to a sandwich and ideal as street food. The more we looked at it, going mobile seemed like the best way to put our favourite food on the map. We could get ourselves a van and take our beautiful bread and sauces anywhere we wanted!

Once we’d started our research into getting a mobile kitchen, it didn’t take us long before we found the right company to make the unit for us.

Wilkinson Mobile Catering Systems gave us some excellent advice on mobile catering and put together a plan with us, so we could tell them exactly what we wanted the unit to look like. They sourced and installed some great, restaurant-standard equipment – like our heat lamp – in our mobile kitchen. The whole thing took about two months to build – which gave us plenty of time to invest in lots of gorgeous, shiny kitchen equipment – then one day in summer 2012 there it was….our Vanstaurant!

The name ‘Vanstaurant’ comes from a good friend in Italy, who referred to our shiny new vehicle as a ‘furgorante’ – somewhere between a ‘furgone’ (‘van’ in Italian) and a ‘ristorante’ (restaurant) – which is how we got to ‘Vanstaurant’ in English. It feels a little odd now to look at it in its new and shiny, pre-branded state, before we started cooking on it!

We also got to have a lovely little adventure getting up to Lancashire (in the rain of course!) to pick up the Vanstaurant. Here is Giordano driving the van back from Darwen with a little smile on his face:

I will do a few more posts about the Vanstaurant in the very near future, including its very first street food event, and a little more about how we made it our own.

Ciao for now!

Laura