A moment with ... Joe Jeannot, hot dog vendor

Joe Jeannot runs two vending carts, called Hot Dog Joe's, outside Safeco Field. The

36-year-old has sold hot dogs there since the baseball stadium opened four years ago.

He also operates a Belltown hot dog cart on Friday and Saturday nights.

On preparing for the home opener: We prepped up our food like onions and vegetables.

Today we had all our orders come in with the bread and the hot dogs. We get all our steamers.

We do a lot of cleaning. We get our peanuts delivered. I mean everything that goes on today all came today.... We started at 6:30 this morning.

On how many hot dogs are sold: That's a question I get from a lot of people. My answer I give to everyone is we sell a lot.

On the most popular condiments: Onions. Onions and ketchup. Everybody has to have their onions and ketchup, but the sleeper is probably cream cheese. That seems to be the new hot topping. Everybody wants cream cheese.

On catching a game: I take my staff with me. We'll hit like three or four games a year. I buy them a whole bunch of tickets. We sit in the bleachers, have a couple sodas, eat bad food and have a good time.

On season predictions: I think we're gonna finish first or second in the West. As long as we can avoid injury, I think we could be OK. We got a tough schedule.... First or second. I'm not going to say third. Don't believe in it.

On vending: I think that there should be more food vending going on in Seattle because it's good for small business. It's good for people who want to get in small business and try it out. I've learned a lot. I'm still learning. So I think that the city should allow more vending to go on through the city instead of just at events. And at the same time I think that someday down the road I think that you'll see vending as big as it is back East.

On business: My biggest day normally is when the Yankees come to town.... People from the East Coast come out in droves and they eat their hot dogs. It's like the biggest day. When the Yankees are in town it's big. Bigger than opening day.

Hungry customers flock to truck offering Asian lunch specialties

BY BARBARA PALMER

One day in late November, Marcela Muniz, associate director of undergraduate admission, stood at the head of a 46-person line snaking in front of two red-and-white lunch trucks parked on Santa Teresa Street. "My co-workers told me it was very good," said Muniz, lifting an egg roll from a stainless steel buffet bolted to the side of a truck.

Graduate students Hee Cheul Choi and Moonsub Shim were well behind Muniz in line -- but they weren't complaining about the wait. In fact, the long line of lunch customers, along with the price ($4.50 for all you can eat) and a food selection that included red snapper, chicken with Thai peanut sauce, Thai green curry, Vindaloo curry and seven more dishes, convinced them to give the trucks a try. They'd come back every single day for three straight weeks, Choi said.

The trucks temporarily have vanished this month -- victims of their own swift popularity. "The support we received at Stanford grew faster than we anticipated," said Chon Vo, a partner in NetAppetit Inc. of Santa Clara, which operates the trucks. "We are currently scrambling to renovate our mobile kitchen to provide quicker service."

When NetAppetit returns -- and it will return, Vo promises -- it will be with a new truck modeled after a mobile kitchen that's been successfully serving MIT students hot lunches for the last decade. (At MIT, the lunch line can stretch to 70 or 80 people, Vo said.)

Vo, who originally is from Vietnam, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied biochemistry and electrical engineering. He brought the idea for the food truck with him to Silicon Valley from MIT, he said.

He and fellow international students at MIT hadn't intended to go into the food business, he said, "but a bunch of us really missed international food." In Boston, Vo and his friends were tutors for the children of refugees and noted that many of their parents were unemployed because of language barriers, Vo said. Starting an international food business would give the students a chance to eat the food they missed and provide income for people, he said.

The food business, which students had envisioned as a "bake sale type of thing" with revenue of maybe $200 to $300 a day, soon was making $5,000 to $6,000 daily, Vo said. The business grew into the Poppa and Goose restaurant in Cambridge, which still operates a food truck at MIT called Gooseberry's. (It was at Poppa and Goose that the food earned kudos from Cambridge resident Julia Child; a plug from Child is painted on the side of the truck.)

Vo and fellow MIT graduates actually came to Silicon Valley to start an online grocery store -- which Vo points out folded six months before Webvan started. "In a short time, we knew there wouldn't be any money in it."

He and his partners were struck by how much more profit margin there is in prepared food than in groceries, he said. NetAppetit operates four trucks, pulling into parking lots at high-tech companies including Cisco, Oracle and Nortel.

Vo keeps a day job at Cisco and manages the trucks part time. "You can't make a living out of it, but it's fun," he said. And as it did in Massachusetts, the company provides needed jobs and good international food.

At MIT after 10 years, the food truck operators and their customers coalesced into a community, an experience Vo hopes will be repeated at Stanford. Already there's been a lot of input from students, Vo said. "This is the best community we've served."

When the trucks come back, they won't be loaded down with the eye-popping buffet NetAppetit first brought on campus, Vo said. Most likely, diners will choose three entree items from a list of 10, Vo said. The line will move faster and the food won't be exposed to the elements, he added.

The trucks will reopen with menu items and recipes that have stood the test of time, although the company does like to continue to test new dishes, Vo said. And Vo offers a powerful incentive to offer NetAppetit's cooks new ideas: "If you contribute a recipe we use, you get free lunch for a semester."