THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510110089
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
IT GOES WHERE no sandwich has gone before.
The Munch Mobile rumbles down roads that aren't roads, streets that have no names, neighborhoods where nobody lives.
``Munch 1,'' says the license plate. It's a meal on wheels. A moveable feast for hungry crews that lay pipe, put down asphalt, frame houses. Wherever construction crews are, that's where the Munch Mobile goes.
``Toooot, toot, toooot'' goes the horn, and shirtless, booted guys pour out of trucks and half-built houses. Savory smells - hot chili, fried eggs, warm bread - waft out into their faces as they line up. This is not a bean sprout crowd. They want hearty food and lots of it.
Inside the rolling kitchen, a team of two - mother and daughter - dishes up breakfast, lunch, snacks, whatever the workers want from about 9:30 in the morning to a little after noon. Because her feet will reach the pedals, Sharon Johnson is the driver, and her mom, Della Mellies, is cook.
They've got hamburgers, Polish or Italian sausage, hot dogs any way you want including kosher, ham-egg-and-cheese, bacon-egg-and-cheese, steak-and-cheese.
``Meatballs? Got any meatballs?'' asks John Tubbs. The 19-year-old peers into the window through his Oakley Blades like he's trying to lay claim to stray meatballs rolling around inside the tiny sardine can of a kitchen. The walls and ceiling are quilted in shiny aluminum. Racks hold buns, chips and bread. A board tacked to the outside of the white truck lists the day's choices.
``Mmm, good,'' says the house framer from North Carolina when Mellies tells him yes. A cheer goes up behind Tubbs when the other guys hear her answer. He adjusts his headgear, the sleeve of a T-shirt cut off to fit around his head like a sweatband. ``I'll get one at lunch,'' he says. ``Make sure you have some of that sauce left over.''
Mention of ``that sauce'' makes Mellies smile.
``My meatballs are two inches across,'' she says. ``An Italian woman gave us this recipe 40 years ago.'' She slams the lid back down on the thick, red, fragrant liquid bubbling inside a pot.
They're at Courthouse Estates, a residential neighborhood under construction off Landstown Road in Virginia Beach. Some streets are paved. Some aren't. Bare fields dotted with hillocks of soil mark where the rest of the neighborhood will be. A construction truck barrels across the no-man's-land toward the women. A worker jumps out, a scribbled list in hand.
Betty Ginn, a laborer for Chesapeake Bay Contractors Inc., has the breakfast orders for the guys on her crew.
``We're getting ready to lay pipe over on the other side - that's why you couldn't find us,'' she tells Johnson.
Thirty years ago, Mellies drove a kitchen on wheels through the Princess Anne Plaza area of the city when it was being built. Mellies left the business and waitressed in a regular restaurant. But four years ago, the temptation to cook on the road came back.
She and her daughter bought this truck and Mellies jumped back behind the stove. They go out in the mornings, before Johnson starts her bookkeeping job after lunch.
Mellies is 60-something now. Too young to retire, she says.
``My husband keeps after me to quit, but I can't stand staying home,'' she says.
While her daughter drives and watches for hungry men, she steps up and down the narrow aisle in navy blue sneakers, keeping hot things hot, cold things cold.
They both know most of the construction workers by name, let them buy on credit, and can even tell what they'll want to eat.
``She'll see one coming and she'll say to me, he wants a Pepsi,'' says Mellies.
The crew from North Carolina is predictable.
``They almost all order the same thing every day, except Frank - he changes on us,'' teases Johnson.
Today Frank Almer, a carpenter, gets a steak-and-cheese (no cheese) and orders a plain hot dog for Tootie, a spotted mongrel that rides to work with him. Had he been in the mood for one, Tootie could've had a dog biscuit. Mellies and Johnson keep a box up on a shelf above the soft drink cooler.
One guy, young enough to be Johnson's son and Mellies' grandson, trots up to the window. ``Hey, girls,'' he hollers. ``I need a pack of Marlboros.'' He passes his money through the window and tells them to keep the change. It goes into a slotted jar destined for the slots on their next trip to Atlantic City.
``Mad money,'' Johnson says, laughing.
One after the other, she scribbles orders on a piece of paper, while her mother dishes up the food. Squirting spirals of mustard and ketchup on buns with one hand, Mellies grills marinated chicken strips and green peppers with the other.
The chicken has a following, too. Toward 11 a.m. three framers line up outside the truck on another street full of half-finished houses.
``We get the same feeling every day - I know she's going to be here,'' says John Buddles, happily waiting for chicken strips he can already smell. ``Sometimes this is the only place we eat all week long.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JIM WALKER/Staff
Della Mellies, left, is the cook and her daughter, Sharon Johnson,
is the driver of the Munch Mobile. They supply hungry workers with
hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage, eggs, meatballs and more.
by CNB