It’s a mad dash – well, a short one – inside the Bistro Box’s 20-foot gourmet food truck near Boeing’s office buildings on Park Avenue North.
Within about 35 minutes, owner Barbara Pagarigan and her two line chefs will have taken and filled 28 orders for everything from sliders to a Turkey Bacon Ranch Panini to a Bistro Margherita Pizzetta.
And that’s a relatively slow lunch hour.
Pagarigan and her husband Floyd started Bistro Box in October on Main Avenue, not far from Renton City Hall. They built up a fan base, including denizens from City Hall.
But a month later the Pagarigans moved to Park Avenue near North Sixth Street, which offered a better space, including for the truck and the mobile kitchen on wheels that it pulls, and better foot traffic.
Right after the move they were “blessed” with an influx of Boeing employees from the surrounding office buildings, Pagarigan said. Boeing workers make up between 80 and 85 percent of their business, she said, but more people are queuing up under their canopy every day.
What they find is what Pagarigan calls a European-style bistro.
“We are kind of eclectic,” she said. Updates and daily specials are posted on the Bistro Box Facebook page.
The sliders come as coconut chicken or Kobe beef, with a delicious sauce and Hawaiian brioche buns. There are soups and salads and seasonal specials.
Bistro Box offers catering platters and lunch boxes. They’re one of the caterers for the Seattle International Film Festival Gala in May to kick off the six-day run of SIFF’s Renton venue.
Mike Langholz, who works nearby, says he has tried almost every dish at the Bistro Box. Those fries “are simply delicious.”
It’s certainly not cafeteria food; everything is prepared fresh, which Langholz says makes all the difference.
“It’s a short-order dining experience,” he said.
Alex Pietsch, the administrator for city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, is also an occasional diner there.
“Mobile food vendors are sweeping the nation,” said Pietsch said, spreading from Los Angeles to Portland and Seattle.
“Given the large number of great restaurants in Renton and the appreciation our residents and employees of our companies have demonstrated for high quality, creative food, I think it is only fitting that Renton has its own gourmet food trucks,” he said.
Besides Bistro Box, he said, there’s Lumpia World, which is based in Renton and locates at Southwest 16th Street and Lind Avenue on Wednesdays.
While Barbara’s friendly face greets diners at the order window, the fast and furious action takes place just inches behind her.
The line chefs, Silvia Vides and Mark French, work either side of the narrow aisle, cooking, assembling and then handing out lunch through a side window.
Vides started as an extern from The Cordon Bleu School of Culinary Arts in Tukwila and now is on the payroll. French worked in the catering business and has been a restaurant consultant.
It’s chaotic inside the trailer, but organized, and based on the reviews, the end result keeps people coming back.
Floyd works in the back, but isn’t in the background, cleaning dishes and fixing things.
He’s called the “Bistro Box engineer.”
The Pagarigans are required to move the food truck every day. Now, it’s powered by a generator, but a power source is on the way. They want to add hours to offer a breakfast and are looking for a spot to set up for the weekends. Customers are also clamoring for dinnertime hours.
Barbara Pagarigan worked as a deli specialist at Safeway until she was laid off. But she wanted to stay in the food industry. She had heard of food trucks, started in Los Angeles, and her family and friends liked her food.
“I took the leap,” she said.
Bistro Box
Where: 618 Park Ave. N., Renton
Hours: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday through Friday
Online: twitter.com/@bistrobox, facebook.com/bistrobox
Contact: freshplate@gmail.com, 206-406-6202
