The Gypsy Queen Cafe, Baltimore's newest gourmet food truck, first opened its sliding glass window for business in a bitter season. The converted DSL delivery truck officially became a mobile restaurant on New Year's Eve, and has since trundled over icy patches and maneuvered around snow drifts six days a week to bring crab rolls, sliders with bacon relish, and waffle cones filled with mac 'n' cheese to those intrepid enough to venture outside.

"I had to boil water yesterday and stick my hands in it because I was freezing," co-owner Annemarie Langton told a reporter one bracing day in January, early in the endeavor. "We are two crazy chefs, so the best time to start [a food truck business] is when you think it's the worst time." The truck was parked downtown on Commerce Street that day, and Langton and co-owner Tom Looney were preparing for the lunch crowd: shaping hamburger meat into patties, frying massive piles of onions, chopping slaw for tacos. Meanwhile, over the constant hum of the truck's generator, they sang silly songs, talked about boys, and taunted each other. "Careful not to chop your double chin over there!" Looney called to Langton, who was dicing onions at the other end of the narrow kitchen, about four feet away. Langton brandished her knife and laughed.

Langton and Looney have been trading friendly barbs for years, though the truck is a new venture. Looney and his partner Ed Scherer owned Helen's Garden, a beloved Canton restaurant where, for the last decade, Langton was the chef. When the restaurant closed last summer--for personal reasons, Looney says--the trio decided to scale down to a food truck. Scherer does the paperwork while Looney and Langton man the truck. As for the name, "I'm a gypsy and he's a queen!" laughed Langton, pointing at Looney.

The food truck concept is, of course, not a new one in Baltimore. An Andy Nelson's Barbeque truck first rolled down the street decades ago, and an unknown number of "taco trucks" ply the streets of Highlandtown and Fells Point. Tacos Jalisco, a large family-operated truck, has been serving up tacos de lengua on lower Broadway for a decade. But the new generation of gourmet trucks that has recently taken the country by storm is different: For one, they tend to be dependent on social media, alerting fans to their location via Twitter and Facebook. And they've been given a boost in the form of TV shows such as The Food Network's The Great Food Truck Race, which pits food trucks against one another in "a coast to coast culinary battle." (The local Kooper's Chowhound Burger Wagon was an unsuccessful nominee for the show, but Iced Gems, a local cupcake truck, was recently featured on MSN's Appetite for Life with Andrew Zimmern.)

Gourmet food trucks are so trendy in other cities that the variations have become truly baroque. In places such as New York, Austin, Portland, and San Diego, there are trucks that serve sushi, organic espresso, fine French cuisine, cardamom and gianduja ice creams, even schnitzel. Turf wars over parking spots are not uncommon, and in some cities so-called "bricks and mortar" establishments are beginning to feel threatened. In Washington, D.C., for instance, several restaurant associations and business improvement districts recently led a push to impose tougher restrictions on food trucks.

So far, Baltimore doesn't contain a large enough fleet to have such problems. But the city may be catching up. At least four new food trucks hit the streets in the past year. The city's database for mobile vendors does not track historical data, according to Brian Schleter, a spokesperson for the Health Department, so it is impossible to say whether this represents a measurable trend. (As of mid-February, the city had 62 food-vending motor vehicles registered. That category includes ice cream trucks, produce trucks, and trucks that sell pre-packaged chips and candy.) But anecdotal evidence--and active Twitter feeds--suggests that food trucks are finally trending in Baltimore.

The idea of starting a food truck first occurred to Tom Looney a decade ago. "My mother lived in Portland and there are a ton of food trucks there," he says. "And once I saw my first food truck--it was an Airstream, it was super cute--I was like 'Oooh.'" The time finally seemed right with the closing of Helen's Garden, and since the early frigid days, business has picked up for the Gypsy Queen, he says. On good days, they serve lunch to 75 to 100 people. (The truck currently runs a weekly circuit between the University of Maryland, Harbor East, Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Inner Harbor, and Canton.) Looney and company have big dreams: Some day they'd like to have a small fleet of trucks, perhaps a franchise. In the meantime, they are enjoying what they say is a stress-free work life compared to running a restaurant.

"We don't have to deal with employees," Looney says. "You know, 'My cat died and I can't come to work for a week.'" Langton is equally delighted with the setup. "We're the front of the house, the back of the house, the dish room, the whole thing," she says. "Everybody can go home. We got it!"

But several of the city's new food truck operators say they launched their business for quite the opposite reason: in the hopes of one day parlaying it into a restaurant. "The original plan was a restaurant," Missy Coatrieux of Creperie Breizh, which launched last November, says. "It just financially made sense to do this first." Coatrieux's husband Eric, who attended cooking school in France, whips up savory classics such as saut?ed mushrooms and Gruy?re, as well as sweet crepes, including the famous Suzette. The creperie actually operates out of a trailer rather than a truck, because, Missy Coatrieux says, it was significantly cheaper.

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