DEAN Interview: Nate Adams

DEAN INTERVIEW: NATE ADAMS OF CHIRBA CHIRBA FOOD TRUCK

To Duke students, Chirba Chirba's bright yellow truck is a familiar sight. For some students, the truck - which dishes out creative takes on Taiwanese street food - is a taste of home. For others, it's a delicious introduction to Asian cuisine and a welcome addition to Durham's vibrant food community. The Duke East Asia Nexus' Emily Feng sat down with Chirba's co-founder and operator Nate Adams to understand what it's like to run the award-winning food truck.

Emily: You can start and talk about yourself, if you like doing that.

Nate: [Laughs] I guess. I guess I’ll just introduce myself, and you can tell me what you’re looking for specifically. My name is Nate Adams. I am cofounder, owner, and operator of Chirba Chirba Dumpling. “Chirba chirba” means “eat, eat” in Mandarin Chinese, like “吃儿吧, 吃儿吧.” We are coming up on our third year of being in business in North Carolina. We started...well I’ll get into how I started later. I am ethnically Caucasian - white, and a lot of people wonder why I own a Chinese dumpling truck. I actually get that a lot at first. But the reason that I love dumplings so much was growing up that was my favorite food in Taiwan even now, still. It’s still kind of my comfort food: my macaroni and cheese.

I was [in Taiwan] from the age of four. My parents are medical missionaries. I actually, although I don’t identify as religious, my parents and on one side of my family have a legacy of Protestant Presbyterian missionaries going back five or six generations. My mom was born in Korea. Her mother was born in China. And her father was also born in Korea, and I think there’s one more generation. There’s like five generations of doctors, pastors, sand specifically medical missionaries. So my granddad was a surgeon. He was in the Korean War. He helped start a training hospital over there that trained nurses. It’s interesting because through that legacy, my parents decided when I was about four years old to sell the house and the boat and the two cars and keep the two kids. I guess my dad had had this kind of desire to go to places in need of doctors, specifically. He was a family practice, so I guess it was a logical step. They knew they were going go Asia; they didn’t exactly know where. They wound up in Taiwan. So from ages four to eighteen I lived in Taiwan except for two furloughs: third grade and eighth grade, when my family came back to visit the grandparents, and you know. So yeah, I went to an American school there for high school, and the rest of the time I went to Chinese school part of the time. The rest of the time I was home-schooled. My mom was a teacher.

So anyways, the homesickness expressed itself, because I, you know, was hiding my background and trying to fit in so hard and homesickness expressed itself in food. Like I missed food and specifically Taiwanese. Taiwanese street food is kind of like New Orleans in the US. You have a mixture of several different types of cuisine in New Orleans. You have French; you have Latino; you have the Caribbean, and every thing else. And Taiwanese was kind of like that, with Thai, Japanese, Korean - all of those foods. The Taiwanese put their own spin on int and sell it on the side of the road for very cheap. And that was all hours, 24/7. You always had access to it. So in that vacuum of not having that and not having the feeling of that, I was missed spending that time with friends. I found other friends with experiences like that. They were ABCs or they were transfers students from CHina or Taiwan, and we would get together and recreate them. This was in college. And of course, like after late night drinking, we figure out if I fry my dumplings that I had frozen that everybody wanted to come back to my house and eat after drinking all night. Like guo tie (锅贴，pot stickers), are you kidding me? I would whip up some spicy sauce...

E: Best munchies ever.

N: [Laughs] Best munchies ever, I agree. So it we started out as a way that I bonded with people in the States and kind of recreated something that made me feel safe and happy. I stumbled across this massive hole in this area, which was basically Chinese street food and Taiwanese food. Dumplings, buns, dan bing, you name it: there’s still so many things you can’t find here. Anyway, my friends got together a few years after we had graduated. We had been in our respective fields. That’s another story about how we got started. We wrote a business plan, cracked open our piggy banks, and started Chirba.

E: Why the idea of a food truck?

N: Definitely just the finances. The risk. The food ruck is just so much less start up than a restaurant. You know, we got a marketing budget of zero. We barely scraped together enough for the down payment on the truck and then had to start making money to make the first payment type thing. There are two aways about it: you can get the loan and the funding and drop a million dollars on the space and spend the next thirty years paying it off, or we could do it this way. As soon as we could afford to get stickers, we got stickers. As soon as we could afford to get a menu board, we got a menu board. It was really...exciting. I mean I need a little stress and excitement in my life, and it’s a fine line. That’s like an elevator speech of the Chirba story. From Nate’s perspective

E: What do you want to do next?

N: Definitely a single food truck is not the most sustainable thing. You know, unless I were to work it every single day for the rest of my life, I would be probably be okay. But I’m interested in pushing things. A little ambitious, I guess, and I want to see how far it goes. I’m looking to expand a little bit, but also keep the quality as best as I possibly can while trying to train people who have never eaten a dumpling before, much less cooked one.

E: Did you find it hard to sell the idea at first - of selling street food, which is supposed to be quick and inexpensive?

N: I would call ourselves expensive. Even eating in China or Taiwan, you get platefuls for five dollars or less. That was a huge concern when we were were first putting together our pricing. We didn’t know what was going to happen. But because we knew we were niche and no one else was doing it, it gave us a little bit of confidence to price it what we thought we should price it. I have to take myself back to where we were at that moment. I remember the debate we had. We didn’t know if it was going to hold up. We knew the dumpling places that had popped up and weren’t here anymore. We didn’t know if it would fly or not. We didn’t know even just the idea of sauces. Like the giant internal debate about whether to go Americanized sauces or completely authentic sauces.

E: And the decision?

N: Both. And we were overjoyed that first of all we were first going to be embraced with open arms. The popularity right off the bat let us know that we were in big trouble, because we had to scale, and we had to scale quickly. I think it’s a good problem to have. Two, the two authentic sauces - the Sichuan la jiang (辣酱，spicy sauce) and the cu (醋), the vinegar, really are the most popular.

E: Why street food? How would you characterize Taiwanese cuisine?

N: We would go and eat at restaurants here and the dumplings I would usually eat in the restaurant or get them in a to-go box and take home and eat. I guess I just...maybe it’s because I didn’t have it when I came back to the States. But the accessibility of privately owned little carts and stands that this same guy’s been doing for 30 years and the speed...and as a child watching that you become transfixed. It almost hypnotized. Like, humans are empathetic, so if we watch someone doing something, rolling cigars, or even if you’ve watched a lot of people making dumplings. I see that in the kitchen all that time. People just come by, and they just watch. It’s almost like a form of relaxation and you empathize with that. It’s like going into your right brain or something. So to see somebody doing that and doing that on the side of the street on their little cart which they can afford; I don’t know, something about that...

E: Is there something romantic about it?

N: Yeah, it’s always there. I think it’s a big part of culture. I think it’s a necessary part of the food chain, if you think about ecology of restaurants or places to eat. Yes, everything has its spot, and let’s say you want something quick. I didn’t see that same attention in the States. I thought you could taste it, too. I’m sure. I know you can taste it. Why street food? I guess existentially, I like to move around. The idea of a restaurant that could move around in my experience has been...I’ve hit so many different festivals, so many different events, fundraisers, schools, everything. Parties, private parties, from the most expensive homes to the most vacant lots in the past three years. I’ve never would have been to those places or experienced those things if I had stayed in my one little restaurant and gone to work everyday. It turned out I was good at it, and I liked it: the challenges of moving a kitchen from location to location. Because it fed me, it was exciting.

E: What’s your favorite street food?

N: Besides dumplings, the one that I’m really craving right now, and the one I would love to try next, is a dan bing (蛋饼). So it’s almost like a crepe, like with egg batter with chives in it that you put it on the flat grill and then loosen it up once and then strips of Chinese bacon, which is not smoked but sweet. And then a really thick soy sauce, and you wrap it up like a burrito and chop it. In Taiwan they call it dan bing. But I’ve heard it called jian bing (煎饼) also. I think that’s more of what it is. They have these little breakfast shops that have become almost like a fast food in its own right, and I’ve been to China, and it’s not the same there. It’s a distinctly Taiwanese thing. But you have also your kind of colder or hot dou jiang (豆浆，soy milk), and then your fried you tiao (油条, breakfast crullers). Dip those in, and go at it. There’s no Chinese breakfast here, man, none. They have some dim sum places, and they’re good. But Chinese breakfast is another thing I probably would only try that in Durham once a week, like Saturday morning brunch or something like that. But if it caught on...my crew really really wants to try it. I have two chefs on staff right now who can’t wait.

E: Selfishly, I hope you do it.

N: [Laughs] Yeah, I’ll let you know. Actually, what I really, really would like to do is take my crew - my two managers, my two chefs - and take them back to Taiwan with me and do an eating tour and hit maybe Hong Kong and maybe Shanghai.

E: For research, right?

N: [Laughs] Write it off, total expense right? Yeah, the first year that I come up with five grand profit, I’m spending it all! We’re going to Taiwan, baby.

Emily Feng is a senior at Duke University. She is president of the Duke East Asia Nexus.