What do these two slightly crazy guys who call themselves the Two Pitas believe in when it comes to their food? What are you getting when you eat at the Pod?

It’s Simple. It’s Delicious. It’s Simplelicious. Add in some creativity, passion, love of good food and there you have it.

What we do is make everything fresh. So how does this work out in practice?

We do not use frozen or processed foods. All of our menu items are made using our own recipes, and are made from scratch using premium ingredients. Where we can we use organic ingredients such as organic fair trade sugar from Costco, or organic vegetable base for stock. Our chicken is all-natural and free-range, sourced locally from Goffle Farms in Wychoff, NJ. We grind the boneless Halal leg of Australian lamb for our kefta kebabs ourselves. The falafel we make using the proper techniques of grinding reconstituted dried chick peas with a food grinder, twice, and using no fillers – just fresh herbs, fresh onions and garlic, and spices that we toast and grind. That’s right, we buy cumin and coriander whole, toast ‘em and grind ‘em. We source Yukon Gold Potatoes and cut them ourselves, soak ‘em and then fry them twice. It all turns out fresh, tasty and full of flavor. The right way. We pickle Zucchini, we chutney Jalapenos, we curry Carrots and we mint up Beets that we prep from scratch for all our toppings.

All of our ground meat specials we grind fresh at the PodBase. We are considering working with some butchers if they are able to provide us with fresh ground meat made to our specifications and blend of cuts.   We are food elitists on some level, but reasonable ones. Reasonable is a subjective term of course.

You will often see us on the pod with our trusty Robot-Coup Food Processor making our Israeli Salad, which we make every day either on the truck or at our commissary. In between lunch and dinner service you can find us whipping up some fresh cous-cous salad or orzo or quinoa, or inventing our own interpretation of tabouli aka the Two Pitas Crazy Cracked Wheat Salad. A lot of cooking goes on in that green truck of ours. And a lot of running around and bumping into each other cooking stuff fresh to order, zesting some lemons on the fly when an order of Pod Frites comes in (well when we forgot to zest them just before service started). We are two fast-moving pitas, covered in lemon zest dust.

All the time we are dreaming up funky fresh ways of integrating flavors from around the world to serve from the Pod, like our Mediterranean Inspired Banh-Mi, our Cuban in a Pita, Thanksgiving in a Pita, Pork Kefta BLT, Ancho Chile Braised Chicken Thighs, or our Mediterranean Wings ‘n Frites for example.  It all comes from a love of good eats and trying out new flavors.

And that folks, is how the Two Pitas roll. We always appreciate feedback and suggestions. Heck just even drop us a line if you have some food idea that you think works stuffed in one of our fluffy pitas. We love to talk food, and some of the most rewarding experiences have been foodie conversations with our customers.

See you soon at the Pod!

So what drove this enterprise? Pretty much a passion for good eats and the falafel sandwich itself. Having first being introduced to falafel at Mamoun’s in Greenwich Village, we both fell in love with that Middle Eastern street food. A falafel at Mamoun’s was then $2, but then add in the $6 toll and that meal just got a lot more pricey. But yet we would drive in just to eat a falafel. Obviously we have excellent cost-saving business savvy. But it was that good. A perfect blend of cumin, coriander and fresh green herbs with the tang of tahini sauce just made a perfect little meal in a pita. We just wanted to perfect it and make it our own. Our taste buds for falafel grew as we sampled more and more varieties of it, learning all that time about the flavors that made it work.

After talking about it casually for a couple of years, the dream became a hectic rush to reality as life circumstances made it possible for both of us – and we ran a mad dash from concept to launch in a short few months. Athos was in New Jersey looking for work having been laid off earlier in the year. Scot was in California as an executive chef parlaying his passion for food into the smiles of customers – but he was moving back to Jersey to marry the woman of his dreams. So the opportunity came about to follow through on the business now that we were back in the same geographic location.

Recipes were discussed over the phone, hours each day. We made Sprint and T-Mobile happy. Concepts were tossed about. Business names were pondered over. Logistics were dissected. Menu items were debated. By the time Scot landed back in Jersey in late July 2010, the Two Pitas hit the ground running with pitas and chef knives in hand. Cooking equipment was delivered. Two Pitas in a Pod were incorporated, a food truck was ordered and design work was initiated. Recipes were tested; the falafel took dozens of iterations for example. To that we added some of our other favorite Mediterranean street-food flavors, mastered our favorite kind of french fry known as the frite (Belgian-style), and then finalized the menu. In what was essentially a month the entire operation was conceptualized and created.

The Pod was born, the Two Pitas had a vehicle for their culinary dreams, and entrepreneurship was validated. While it would take a large corporate entity ages to simply add one new food item to a menu, the Two Pitas put together an entire menu together from the heart and made it a reality in a very short time. This is the beauty of the mom & pop food truck craze that has driven all over the nation – truly inspired food from idea to plate in an unfiltered and minimally processed process.

In our first few months on the road we have met a lot of interesting folks in our current market of Hoboken, NJ. From foodies to the casual passerby, being on the truck as owners talking directly to each and every customer has been an amazing experience. We already have a friendly homemade kim-chi challenge pending with one of our regulars, and that is a big part of the reward of everything we do.

Stay tuned for updates on what we are doing on the pod – from our ingredients to our playful specials and just general banter on what it takes to make a food truck run on a day to day basis.