Bent over a sizzling griddle set up on a downtown Denver corner, Mike Winston and Elliot Jones assembled a dish whose ingredients sounded more at home on a menu at the nearby Ritz-Carlton: roast lamb, tzatziki sauce, napa cabbage, guajillo-mint foam and naan, a classic bread of India.
But this was a $7 gyro off a steel cart towed in an hour earlier by a pickup truck. Street food — albeit a savvy, sophisticated version created by two guys who conjured the idea between their shifts cooking at white-tablecloth restaurants from Vail to Massachusetts.
"This was kind of a pipe dream," Winston said as spiffily dressed customers came and went. "We'd always talked about the idea of street food made from scratch with high-quality ingredients."
So in October, with a mobile kitchen boasting a steam table and flat-top grill, plus a 90-gallon Coleman cooler for food buckets and sauces, Jones and Winston launched The Gastro Cart at 18th and Curtis streets.
They are part of a new generation of lunchtime line cooks, many with fine-dining roots, changing the way Denverites view street food.
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Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post
