New York a la Cart by Siobhan Wallace

Author:Siobhan Wallace [Penfold, Alexandra and Wallace, Siobhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762448241
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2013-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

COOLHAUS

Of all the new-wave food trucks roaming the streets of New York, Coolhaus, an inventive ice cream sandwich truck, is one of the few with roots outside the city. The brainchild of architect Natasha Case and real estate developer Freya Estreller, Coolhaus combines two of their great passions. “Our actual company name is farchitecture: food plus architecture,” says Natasha. Architecture lovers can geek out at the triple entendre in Cool-haus—it’s a play on the Bauhaus modern design movement; Remment Koolhaas, an influential Dutch architect and theorist; and the actual product. You pick out the cookies (“floor” and “roof ”) and choose your own ice cream “walls” for a made-to-order ice cream sandwiches.

The concept first came to Natasha her senior year at Berkeley. Her senior project was about extruding land and using the striations of land as different floors. “My professor’s criticism was that my building looked like a layer cake, and I remember being like, he’s saying that like it’s such a bad thing. What’s wrong with layer cakes? Layer cakes are awesome.” For the next round of the model, she actually baked it as a layer cake. “I could sort of see my peers, they were just paying attention in a different way—when food is involved it brings people together.” Natasha began to look for ways to incorporate food into architecture, and she nurtured the idea through grad school, trying to figure out how she could make it into a viable career. It wasn’t until she started working at Walt Disney in hotel and master planning, her first job out of school, that she began laying the foundation for Coolhaus. “I was baking cookies and making ice cream and naming the combinations after architects for friends at work. It was a total hobby thing just to lighten everyone up, and I met Freya around that time.” At Disney they had an annual craft fair where employees could bring their homemade products to Disney and sell them. Freya helped Natasha prepare to sell her ice-cream sandwiches. “People liked the architecture niche of it and the product itself—people were reacting in an obsessed way that made you think, maybe there is something in this project that is worth exploring more.”

At that point, Natasha was “more of the creative ideas person,” while Freya had all the business background as a real estate developer. “We had the common interests of design and architecture and food, but she was able to take what I really thought of as an art project and make it a business,” Natasha says. With the recession setting in late 2008, a brick-and-mortar shop wasn’t an option. They went on Craigslist and found a postal truck that was so beat up that they had to have it towed to L.A. With no formal cooking background, the roommates started perfecting the recipes in their apartment kitchen through a process of trial and error. “Actually I think baking is a lot more difficult than ice cream,” says Natasha. “If you have a decent machine and you kind of get food, you can get pretty good at it, actually.

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