Streetza Pizza: Meals on wheels
The new Milwaukee food cart is already drawing national raves
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In just a few short months, Milwaukee mobile eatery Streetza Pizza has earned praise from local and national media, including Top 10 food-truck awards from GQ and Jalopnik.com, and a mention on ESPN. The food truck, run by Scott Baitinger and Steve Mai, travels the city with an ever-changing lineup of both ordinary and gourmet slices, serving them up to concert-goers and Saturday-night drunks alike. Baitinger mans the front, and is the one you’ll likely see when you stop for a bite, while Mai—former manager of Riverfront Pizzeria Bar And Grill and Ricardo's Pizza—keeps the pies coming in the back of the truck. The A.V. Club recently caught up with Baitinger to talk about GQ, Twitter, and whether drunk people appreciate corn on pizza.
The A.V. Club: Let’s talk about that GQ article. Did you know that you might be named one of the top 10 food trucks in the country?
Scott Baitinger: We knew that something was going to happen. I got a random call from an editor at GQ, and he’s like, “Well, I’d really like to try your pizza, but unfortunately Conde Nast budgets aren’t what they used to be, so they can’t fly me to Milwaukee to test a piece.” So, we actually baked pizzas and packed them in dry ice, sent along some Italian slate to finish the pizzas off on. He baked it, and absolutely loved it, and called the next day raving about it. From a guy who was born and bred in New York, that was a pretty high compliment, because I know they are pizza snobs in New York.
AVC: You use a lot of local ingredients. Do you hit the farmers' markets every day?
SB: Every day that we operate. We also go to Restaurant Depot, which is kind of like a farmers' market, except for restaurants. It depends on the season. I like going to the Milwaukee Public Market, and finding fresh vegetables and things.
AVC: What are you going to do in winter?
SB: Well, use not necessarily local foods, unfortunately. We’re talking to A.J. Bombers at the moment about possibly living permanently in their parking lot for the winter. There’s been some Twittering back and forth, and they invited us to be a part of their parking lot, to do kind of a fresco restaurant throughout the winter. Our plan is to operate normally, as we have been, up until the point where you have to climb over a snow bank in order to get food. Which in Wisconsin could be next week.
AVC: How important is Twitter for you? Do you get a lot of your customers that way?
SB: We get a lot of our evangelists that way. Not necessarily all of our customers, because I think that Twitter users, or the active Twitter users in Milwaukee, skew a little bit older than our target audience. I’m very interested to see what’s going to happen now that school is back in session. From what I’ve seen, the college population in Milwaukee has not embraced Twitter as actively as the coasts have, but I’m guessing that might change this semester.
AVC: It seems like on the coasts, Twitter and food trucks really go hand in hand.
SB: It does. The big one is Kogi Barbecue. But there are a lot of people on Twitter in L.A.—Kogi has 43,000 followers. It’s good; it’s not ridiculous—I think Oprah has 2 million or something like that. My guess is that a lot of their followers are customers, based on the lines that I’ve seen. It’s crazy. That has almost become more an event. I don’t think it would matter if they served anything out of their truck. It just became kind of a Where’s Waldo thing, sort of a game, almost. They’d say, “We’re going to be at the corner of Melrose and something,” and 3,000 people would be waiting. Milwaukee is not that way.
AVC: Are Water Street drunks really able to appreciate your fancy-pants pizza?
SB: I would say no, usually not. We do that more for ourselves because we’re foodies by nature. Some do. The ones who are still sober. But for the most part, no. Definitely our most popular slice is still pepperoni. Like, last weekend I did a Romanian pizza based on my trip there, and it had fresh, cut from the cob corn—Sendik’s had special-ordered some in—but the crowd did not appreciate that one at all. But the neat thing is that the people at Chill On The Hill do. That’s a much more gourmet crowd. It really depends on where we are.
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