April 29--It's 3 a.m. on a Sunday in Logan Square and a young woman is eating a chicken kebab salad. She's riding piggyback on her boyfriend.
"That's good!" she shouts. "That's f---- good!"
On Saturdays, from midnight to 3 a.m., the view from the serving window of the DonerMen food truck is of hungry and happy customers entering and exiting the Slippery Slope and other nearby bars on Milwaukee Avenue.
Enjoying that view, former bandmates and DonerMen owners Shawn Podgurski and Phil Naumann found a life beyond the musician's routine of late nights and bars: more late nights and bars.
"No other trucks are going out late night at this point, unless it's an event. The key to food trucks is, you got to get that foot traffic," Podgurski says. "It's a big hit with the drunk folks."
Podgurski and Naumann made several research trips to Europe before they settled on the recipes for their version of the Turkish-inspired, German-perfected, street fare of currywursts and chicken kebabs.
They still depend on catering and lunch crowds, lining up on certain weekdays behind other trucks at places like Ellis Avenue at University of Chicago, one of a few easy-parking zones in the city where a lunch business is concentrated.
But the late-night shift is where their heart is.
"It's real 'food truck,'" Podgurski says. "The lunches are kind of like, dry, in comparison."
Naumann agrees. "I'm glad to see it actually work, the plan that we had," he says.
"The plan was to serve drunk people food, like they serve drunk people food in Berlin. And that's the coolest part about the late night. So many things on a food truck ... it never works out the way you think it will. And to have like, one thing work out the way we thought it would, it's kind of nice!"
Watch the video (under "Related") to see more of the Donermen.
