By Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon
CJ Travel Editor
Typical food truck fare might include French fries, sandwiches, cupcakes and burgers. But Hungry’s, in Anguilla’s capital, The Valley, is no typical food truck.
Irad Gumbs’ painted green 1984 Grumman, parked next to the Valley Bistro, serves up local eats such as bull foot, conch and goat soup to hungry Anguillians seven days a week, and the bestselling things on the menu – shrimp quesadillas and salmon pasta – are hardly the sort of items you’d expect from a Caribbean food truck.
Gumbs previously enjoyed a long career in some of the island’s finest resorts and ran his own restaurants.
“Originally I was only going to make this a soup-only truck. But pastas and quesadillas are fast and easy to prepare, so I thought, why not? I use the same high-quality ingredients as all the resorts, and this is the only food truck on island where you can get lobster. My mission is to bring good food to the people, and to show that you don’t have to go to a hotel to eat well.”
Sure enough, business was brisk on the day I stopped by, with a long line of locals at the window collecting their lunch. And my lobster-and-corn soup was as good as any soup I’ve ever been served in a fancy hotel dining room: piping hot, flavorful, and hearty with large chunks of lobster and vegetables. A taste of my companion’s fish pasta proved equally delicious, the fresh white fish bathed in a creamy Alfredo-esque sauce and the pasta perfectly al dente.
“I originally wanted to be a pilot,” Gumbs says with a shrug when I ask him how he got into the food business. “But somehow I got into restaurants and resorts and just stayed.”
Two decades, three restaurants, several resorts, and one food truck later, aviation’s loss is hungry Anguillians’ gain.
Hungry’s Good Food is open seven days a week, from noon to 10pm.