The Rotisserie King of San Francisco | Street Food Icons #Streetfood

I am very proud of the way we cook the product, the way we breed the product. I think this is a very almost forgotten art. I'm actually blown away how good the food can come out cooked on the street. No charge for him please. My name is Thomas Odermatt. I am the owner of Roli Roti, a mobile rotisserie business headquartered in San Francisco, the Bay Area. Are those people taking care or what are you waiting for? Sandwiches. Oh okay, let's push, push, push. Let's get it done. I started Roli Roti in 2002 out of one single food truck. Yes, a food truck. I'm known for three things. I started with the rotisserie chicken. What I really wanted when I founded Roli Roti is to provide a rotisserie chicken that is as good if not better than a restaurant. For me, I want to serve something that's hot, fresh, off the grill. Then the potatoes came. The potatoes are my signature dish. And then the last that I'm very well known for is actually the porchetta. The porchetta is basically an Italian street food. The philosophy of Roli is to source really impeccably good raw materials. Rotisserie cooking, you cannot rush it. You just cannot rush the protein. You have to be very patient. We're running the oven at about 425 to 460 degrees Fahrenheit. Back home, we didn't really use a lot of potato underneath the porchetta, but then my wife, Yumi, was saying, hey, why don't you put some potato under? We start with the fingerling, and it's a hard-cooking potato. So the potato doesn't mash out. It stays intact, but it has the ability to soak up many, many flavors. So we cook them with the drippings, almost indirect frying. It really creates a really nice product. A typical day starts, basically, the chicken gets loaded in the morning to the food truck, and we start roasting outside in the parking. Then when the truck is loaded, finished, and situated, we move to the farmer's market. We sell throughout the day, and hopefully we go for sellout. Thank you! We're at the ferry building that is Pier 1 in San Francisco. Push, push, push. I come to this farmer's market 18 years. We know Thomas because when he started his business here initially, which is probably more than 15 years ago, we also started coming to the Saturday market. He does a phenomenal job in terms of roasting the chicken, and so every Saturday, literally since 15 years ago, we come to Thomas' business and buy roasted chicken. You're here every week. How's it going? I forgot to actually mention where that funky accent might come from. Can you give me a sandwich and then take care? You possibly would say, well, he has an accent of an Italian. No, not really. An accent of a German? Not really. Actually, that is a Swiss accent. I'm from Switzerland. I grew up in a butcher shop right on the foothills of the Alps. My father is a master butcher, so I really was early on exposed to some butcher's technique. I was interested in becoming my own entrepreneur. I wanted to have my destiny by owning a company. I came then to the United States, to UC Berkeley, where I studied marketing and management. And at that moment, I kind of didn't think that actually, I would be probably staying here. I just wanted to really write a business plan that has a little bit more what I call it nowadays, meat on the bone, something that's really real. I presented that to a professor, and I still remember the sentence he said, I hope you're going to stay. This works. Everything was risk, but I was not afraid of taking the risk because I know that with hard work, I can possibly make it, not to a big company, but something that I can enjoy and maybe live on. I know Roli Roti because I come to the ferry building quite a bit, and this is by far the most popular stand. There's always a ginormous line. Every single weekend, I'm here in line waiting to get this porchetta sandwich just because the food tastes amazing. There's no ambiance, right? It's just a food truck. It's really clear that the founder really cares about his craft. Food trucks in 2000, they were called roach coaches. I felt like what's very, very important is that I present myself as a chef. So I thought to wear a white chef shirt and just be pristine, and that alone was the icebreaker. So now they know they're buying it from a chef. They're buying it from a person who knows a little thing or two about cooking. I jump on the line. Yes, chef. No, no, don't call me chef. My family is in the meat business. We know how to make porchetta. Today, we are making a porchetta. That's our signature dish. It's a pork middle. There is the belly on it, and there's the loin. This is my spice rub. I made that yesterday in the kitchen. So it's rosemary, fennel, pinot grigio, salt, lemon juice, lemon zest, pepper, and it becomes this really aromatic herb. What makes a very good porchetta is obviously starting with a really good pork. I use heritage pork, so I like to have the fat and the meat balanced. The loin is the leaner part, and the belly is a little bit more on the fat. So I'm going to make a porchetta now. I want to use one string from the front to the back, and I never cut it so that I have the same tension from the front to the bottom. This is pretty tough work. This is about 26, 28 pounds. It's a good exercise. I want to show you what a real porchetta inside should look like when it's tied up. Every piece is nicely arranged, so there's no gap and evenly distributed seasoning. To make a really good porchetta, there is a little bit of a trick. This is a beautiful ciabatta bread, locally sourced from Acme Bread. It is a little bit more sweet. It's soft inside and has a good chew. So we take the sauce, the chews from the porchetta, so it's nicely, beautifully coated, and I cut the porchetta. The key is the thinner, the better, so you bring much more flavor into the porchetta. So I take two loins, put them on, a little bit of the belly in the middle, and then the crispy skin. Just go right over it. So I take onion marmalade. This is onion that has been cooked for 72 hours. Very slow, no oil, no fat, nothing. Just simple onion. So make sure it's nicely coated. Then a little bit of a wild arugula, some salt. All right, that's about as good as it gets. Three weeks into the business, I was invited to a farmer's market. I was loading the truck at night, and the next morning, the truck was gone. So somebody was stealing their truck. I had a big chicken on the roof of the truck. It was maybe five feet long and maybe four feet wide. So it was really noticeable. I was contacting a friend of mine and said, look, I guess I'm out of business. And he said, let's call the media. 24 hours later, I got a phone call from a police officer. I found your truck. So I went there, got the truck. Well, sure, the truck was almost gutted out. They took the engine and everything. So we rigged the truck out, put it on a flatbed, washed it out. I had an event that I committed to. So we pulled the truck down to Santana Row for the grand opening. And on the way down, people on the highway, they were slowing down and honking and yeah, yeah, yeah. So the food truck, that rolly truck became kind of known. We pulled the truck down there and we sold out in two hours. Would I have made it without that? I'm sure I would have. It gave me a boost for the business. But I don't want anybody to go through something like that. So the truck will stay. Hi, are you the founder? I am. Thank you. I needed to really look hard at the rolly rolly business. And when I did that, I really said to myself, let's go back to the roots. The cooking food, making products. We know chicken, we know potatoes, we know porchetta. Yeah, if you want to write down your email, we're not going to sell your email address, but I'll make sure you get some phone browse. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. The farmer's market and the food truck will not go away. That's our, that's our livelihood. That's our basis. I am really proud of that. I want to stick with that. What we're really looking for is the ideal caramelization. We achieve that with slowly, slowly, slowly cooking. We have patience about the food. We let it go. We don't rush.