VendrTV Hits The Streets For Tasty Treats

As our increasingly global society slowly but surely franchises the entire world, it becomes harder and harder to find flavors authentic to their regions. Turns out the best place to find them is on the streets.

VendrTV, launched last month on Blip.tv, is a food show with a very specific focus: In each episode, host/creator Dan Delaney looks at the world of mobile eating, specifically food served from carts and trucks. And by spotlighting the incredibly diverse world of streetside vendors, Delaney and his team have a unique opportunity to showcase one of the few remaining sectors where homogeny is relatively nonexistent. Because as documented by the show, there’s an incredible variety of food out there.

While Delaney’s opening promise of world travel has extended only to the outer boroughs of New York and Pennsylvania, the episodes released still represent a high amount of diversity. Delaney has interviewed the owner/baker of the Treats Truck, profiled the turf war brewing between halal guys, and gone on a cart crawl through Queens.

As a first-time host, Delaney brings a lot of enthusiasm (if not a lot of expert knowledge) to the subject. While he doesn’t have any formal culinary education, he does have a passion for entrepreneurship, and considers vendors like these an excellent representation of small businesses. Whether he has culinary daredevil Anthony Bourdain’s fearless approach to eating has been so far untested, but he’s used the show’s format to focus on world cuisine (five episodes in, there has yet to even be a mention of hot dogs). And the production values are top-notch, too, especially given the technical limitations of shooting on the streets.

There’s an instinct that kicks in when reviewing shows like this that prompts to compare it with other shows you might find on the Food Network or other cable networks. But that does VendrTV a great disservice. After all, do you really want to watch a show about food that takes longer to watch than the food in question does to eat? The only tragedy of its web-based existence is that it might not actually have the budget to truly travel the world — not without some sweet sponsorship deals — which means that the wonders of Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, London’s Bowery Market, and the Los Angeles taco truck may remain unexplored.

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