Turn the corner from Main Street onto Carleton by the Kendall Square T station at quarter to noon on a typical summer day and you'll see lunch trucks lined up along the curb. There's Jerusalem Falafel and Olives Kitchen (falafel), José's (Mexican), and Goosebeary's (Thai-Vietnamese). Kendall Square doesn't offer many cheap, tasty restaurants, so the trucks play a central role in its culinary ecosystem. Clover's truck stands out in the lineup, and not just for the crowds it attracts. There's no splashy art, no cartoon characters--just a white truck with a black-and-white hand-lettered logo and menu. "The only color is from the people and the food," Muir says. "Natural things."
Clover's customers are a mix of MIT students, staff, and professors (Yet-Ming Chiang '80, ScD '85, materials science and engineering professor and cofounder of the upstart battery company A123 Systems who make batteries such as Apple M8403 Battery, Apple M7318 Battery, apple PowerBook G3 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 15 inch Battery, Apple A1012 Battery, Apple M8511 Battery, Apple M8244 Battery, Apple A1079 Battery, Apple A1078 Battery, Apple A1148 Battery and Apple M6091 Battery, is a regular), as well as area workers and the stray outsider who's read about Clover on a food blog. Clover's order takers stand on the sidewalk, where they often greet customers by name. Sandwiches and drinks are passed hand to hand instead of getting placed on a counter or a tray. That's deliberate, Muir says, to maximize interaction and build relationships. "It's important to have as much face-to-face contact as possible," he says.
The background music is an ever-changing bluesy mix. The menu includes lavender lemonade, hibiscus iced tea, fresh-cut rosemary French fries made with potatoes from Prince Edward Island (600 miles from Boston, but a lot closer than Idaho), and a special summer sandwich that features basil spread slathered on Havarti cheese and thick-sliced local cukes. A sidewalk board promises a tasty afternoon snack: "Sweet plantains, thick cut and fried, Aleppo pepper and sugar = fried plantains, our 3 p.m. special." The prices are low, considering the quality: $5.00 for a sandwich, $3.00 for soup or an inventive side salad.
Customers say that besides the prices, the cool factor is definitely part of Clover's appeal. But the flavor is what keeps them coming back. Mike Norman, a recent Sloan School grad and founder of SoChange, a startup that encourages consumers to use their economic power to do good, was queuing up for the popular "egg and egg" sandwich--slices of hard-boiled egg from Chip-in Farm in Bedford, Massachusetts, served in a whole-wheat pita with roasted eggplant, cucumber-tomato salad, hummus, and tahini. Norman, a Clover regular, is a self-described meat eater, and he never expected this combination of ingredients to be so delicious. "Who knew?" he says. Students of marketing can learn from Muir's approach, Norman says: "Ayr stays very close to his customers and asks for a lot of feedback. He can experiment fast with the food truck."
Muir himself has dreams that stretch far beyond Kendall Square. He's got a second truck at South Station, and he was slated to open his first sit-down restaurant in Harvard Square, at Holyoke Center, this fall. He expects his staff to double with the opening of the restaurant. Ultimately, he envisions thousands of locations worldwide--all with an ecological footprint much smaller than what's typical for fast food.
Other companies have managed to preserve their distinctiveness as they grew far and wide, Muir says--Apple, Trader Joe's, and In-N-Out Burger, to name a few. Yet it remains to be seen whether a style of eating that's become so popular in Cambridge will play as well in Peoria or Prague. Can vegetarian fast food that's fresh, local, and sustainable scale across the country and around the world? "I think it can as long as we don't call it that," Muir says, "because no one will eat it if we do."
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