BUSINESS: Yeastie Boys food truck draws ire of downtown Manhattan Beach businesses 

by Mark McDermott

Yeastie Boys, among the most popular food trucks in all of Los Angeles, arrived in downtown Manhattan Beach on June 27 and immediately attracted the kind of fervor they’ve been known for wherever they go. They parked in the heart of downtown and drew long lines for their hand-crafted bagels. 

The Yeastie Boys were a hit, and have been ever since. But among downtown businesses, including restaurants who pay some of the most expensive per square foot costs in the nation for their brick and mortar establishments? Not so much. 

Kelly Stroman, the executive director for the Downtown Business and Professional Association, told the City Council last week that she has been inundated with calls and emails from businesses outraged by the appearance of Yeastie Boys. 

“Food Trucks present unfair competition to the locally owned, year-round restaurants, boutiques and cafes that are the foundation of downtown Manhattan Beach and are the very heart and soul of the city,” Stroman said. “These brick and mortar businesses make long term commitments and investments in our community, paying rent, elevated parking permit fees, trash fees, signage fees, fees…fees, fee fees. They hire locally, they contribute locally. They pay taxes and take great pride in maintaining storefronts that support a walkable and vibrant environment. In contrast, food trucks often operate with lower overhead, minimal community ties and little accountability, yet draw from the very same customer base that your beloved businesses do.” 

Stroman also said that Yeastie Boys are violating municipal code, which specifically states food trucks must comply with all parking and vehicle code provisions for the location at which they are parked. The Beastie Boys truck is oversized, thus the owners are ticketed multiple times per day, which they accept simply as a cost of doing business. 

Matt Romanodes, representing Yeastie Boys, told the council that said that the fines they pay are a contribution to the City. 

“I think we paid $1,259 over 12 days, which is about $104 per day, which, if you actually take the prorated per square foot amount, we actually pay what would be the market rent or more in square footage,” Romanodes said. “That actually goes directly to the City, not to a landlord, who then pays a 1.3 percent flow-through to the City. So on the financial side, there’s some merit to having our business operate, especially in the current environment.” 

Romanodes larger argument was that nearly everybody Yeastie Boys has encountered in the city has loved them. He said that even Stroman had been helpful with ideas about where to locate, and other than a few “rogue citizens who have contributed to a difficult parking situation” by blocking up parking spots, Yeastie Boys has been embraced in Manhattan Beach. 

“We want to thank the overall community for the hundreds, if not 1000s of positive engagements we’ve had so far,” Romanodes said. “Lots of sentimental notes, social media engagements. [We] have also appreciated the communication and willingness to engage, especially from [MBPD] Chief Johnson and Ms. Stroman, who made some great recommendations to us over the last couple of weeks on how to address some of these issues, to make sure that we could be contributing to the prestige of this community…..We tried to approach this situation with lots of thoughtfulness and kindness and polish, and despite being a food truck business, we do have a larger operation or widely known in LA and really do our best to be respectful of all the communities that we’re in. It sometimes is suggested that there’s not overhead within the food truck business. I want to let you know that there is a significant overhead and that we reinvest a very, very significant part of our profitability, just in that infrastructure to make sure that we can remain at the utmost standards of every community.” 

A viral TikTok video taken shortly after Yeastie Boys arrived — they offered free bagels their first day — shows a line stretching all along the 300 and 400 blocks of Manhattan Beach Boulevard and around the corner. An announcement of their imminent arrival to Manhattan Beach that Yeastie Boys made on their Instagram page in June showed overhead drone footage of the truck parked downtown received over 800 likes. “Yes!!!!!” one person commented on the post.  “We need our bagels! Severely lacking in the South Bay!” 

Yeastie Boys has been in operation since 2014. It was founded by Evan Fox, a former musician who grew up eating bagels in Arizona but finally had his first New York City bagel while touring with a band, and finally understood why New York bagels are so revered. He’d worked in restaurants from his teenage years to support his musical career. Once the food truck craze hit LA, Fox realized there was a market niche that nobody was addressing. Initially Yeastie Boys — named after the Beastie Boys band — mainly worked at music events. Now the company has nine trucks, one each assigned to different parts of LA, including DTLA, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Studio City, Highland Park, Venice, Brentwood,  and now Manhattan Beach. 

Fox said the Yeastie Boys’ success is due to both quality and inventiveness. 

“For the most part, the menu is pretty much what I think people like,” Fox told the Jewish Journal. “My whole thing for Yeastie Boys is, ‘How can I make something that people want to eat daily, that’s a quick bagel, that’s a classic that you’d get in a bodega in New York. … How can I take the old classics and make them more refined [and] more current?’”

Their menu includes traditional bagels with lox or schmeer, but also several maximalist bagels, such as “The Birdman,” which, according to their menu, features “smoked turkey, bacon, house-made scallion schmear, tomato, and sprouts on a hand-rolled everything bagel.” Another popular bagel is the “Cheddy Wap,” with bacon, a fried egg, and melted sharp cheddar cheese. Yeastie Boys bagels cost from $6 to $13. 

Fox credits Yeastie Boys success, however, to their hand-rolled bagels, which require a multiple day preparation process. 

“A lot of that flavor develops in the dough and leaving it in the walk-in cooler overnight [or] a couple days and boiling the bagel properly [makes a difference] … and you gotta really massage the dough,” Fox told the Jewish Journal. “It’s a multiple-day process, so when you get a bagel that tastes off or just okay, you’re probably getting a bagel that was mixed and boiled and baked all in one day; you’re missing flavor, you’re missing texture, and so on.”

Mike Zislis, the owner of multiple downtown restaurants, said that there are areas where food trucks would be appropriate in Manhattan Beach, but not downtown, and not intentionally breaking laws. He told Council it is fundamentally unfair to have a truck taking business from local establishments. 

“They pay a whopping $300 business license fee,” Zislis said. “Okay, so if you’re a plumber and you do business in this town, you pay $300.  If you’re a contractor and you do business ,just work in somebody’s house, you pay a $300 fee. I just want to let you know that the sales tax that they generate does not stay in Manhattan Beach. It all goes to where their home office is, wherever their mailing address is. The other thing is, they do violate the parking with an oversized vehicle, and they get three tickets a day. If I got three violations a day in my restaurant, you would yellow tag me, red tag me, just shut me down. So I would just presume that we should just pull [Yeastie Boys’] business license, because they violate every day.” 

“But if you are under pressure from Sacramento to have food trucks, there’s some great places in Manhattan Beach,” Zislis said. “You should have Polliwog Park, Bruce’s Beach. You can have some type of a lottery system where you have two or three spots and people sign up. But the idea of somebody setting up a business on our streets is just not right.” 

Romanodes said Yeastie Boys want to fit into Manhattan Beach and are listening to all suggestions. 

“We want to keep an open dialogue, where we would be more than happy to have an open forum and talk to everybody about how we can participate in this community,” he said. “We’ve tried our best to be kind and lead with kindness….We’ve approached it by communicating openly, trying to get out ahead of everything, and really being thoughtful and with open ears.” ER