Lunch Wars : Al Zennedjian Got the Cold Shoulder in ’77 but Now He’s King of the Hot-Truck Trade

Thick waves of silver hair cascade back from Al Zennedjian’s forehead. Blue curlicues above his left breast pocket spell out “Big Al.” On his wrist is a wide gold watch. On his lips are a smoldering cigarette and a satisfied smile.

Outside, there are 51 gleaming hot-lunch trucks--with 51 grills and 51 steam tables and 51 deep fryers. There’s a sprawling commissary, a supermarket stocked for catering trucks--giant tubs of catsup, fresh vegetables, pouches of Lucky Charms.

But the grandest symbol of Zennedjian’s success is a few miles away. It’s buried in the ground in the yard of his El Cajon home. There, Zennedjian has dug a whimsical monument to his good fortune: A swimming pool in the shape of a lunch truck.

“I figure one thing,” said Zennedjian, patriarch of the Cajon Valley Catering empire in Santee. “It doesn’t matter when, how, why--people have to eat. It’s a good business to be in. When you’re hungry, you got to eat.”

Al Zennedjian is the hot-truck king of San Diego County, the crown prince of “mobile industrial catering.” He has spent nine years in a land dominated by cold trucks, fighting for a piece of the action. Now he’s redefining working people’s lunch.

The battle has been a bitter and Byzantine one, waged in courthouses and construction sites countywide. It has been a fight in which contestants say things like “When I get through with you . . . “ and “Over my dead body . . . “ Then they take each other to lunch.

Earlier this year, Zennedjian penetrated the last frontier: San Diego finally licensed hot trucks in the cold-truck barons’ stronghold, the city. To compete, the cold-truck companies now are buying hot trucks--an expenditure of time and resources they had resisted for years.

On the streets, Cajon Valley and Moody’s Lunch and Fiesta Catering drivers vie for lucrative routes in a war of French fries and double cheeseburgers and extended credit. Threats are exchanged, drivers say, but no violence--just one set of a competitor’s ignition keys tossed into a dumpster at a strategic moment.

“Right now, anyone with a hot truck is looking for places with a whole lot of cold trucks so they can go in and invade and take the cold trucks’ business,” said Bob McGan, an independent who operates his “Mr. Food” truck out of Zennedjian’s commissary. “ . . . There is no faster fast-food service than hot trucks. We deliver right to your door, good food!”

One morning recently, McGan pulled up his truck outside the fence of a Navy facility in National City, sounded his air horn and flipped open the windows of his restaurant-on-wheels. As workers wandered up on their morning break, an identical hot truck from Moody’s Lunch rolled up, air horn squealing, inside the fence.

The stop had been Moody territory for years, McGan told a ride-along. A woman had serviced it for a decade with a cold truck, then turned it over to her daughter. Later, McGan showed up with a hot truck and moved inside the fence too. When it became too crowded, he had to move outside, and the Moody’s team had switched from cold to hot.

“I assume that Moody’s and Fiesta will catch up with us,” McGan mused, eyeing the clientele at the competing truck. “Because there’s no difference in the trucks; it’s the cook and the driver. The number one thing in this business is good food.”

The food-truck fracas commenced in 1977, when Zennedjian sold his Orange County hot-food operation and headed south into virgin territory. Hot trucks had roamed Los Angeles and Orange counties for years. But San Diego County remained off limits.

The result of that--or, some say, the cause of that--was that a small coterie of cold-truck caterers controlled “industrial catering” in the county. County health regulations forbade rolling hot-food restaurants, and the regulations had gone unchallenged.

The argument against hot trucks was that they were unsafe: Hot grease might fly up out of the fryers, food might rot in the sun, critics claimed. Cold-truck advocates gave grim forecasts of fires breaking out and cooks being unable to escape.

But Zennedjian was not inclined to avoid a fight. An Armenian born in Athens, he had been put in a German prison camp at age 11. He spent four years in hard labor, working in shoe factories. Released in 1945, he and his family emigrated to the United States.

In Detroit, Zennedjian went to work in machine shops. Later, he learned to cook in an officer’s mess during the Korean War. So when Armenian-American soccer fans in California flew him out for an exhibition game, he stayed and started a lunch business.

“All my life, since 19, 20 years, it’s all I have known, all I have done,” Zennedjian said recently, ensconced in his air-conditioned office in sweltering Santee. “Without any education in the United States, what else you do? What else you know?”

Starting with a single ’51 Dodge with a homemade one-square-foot grill, Zennedjian and his wife became caterers to a score of Los Angeles-area colleges. Later, they returned to Detroit briefly, then went back to California, working in Los Angeles and finally in Orange County.

But Orange County was dominated by Orange County Food Services, which Zennedjian says had over 100 trucks to his three. In 1977, he sold his trucks to his competitor and moved south to take on the cold-truck companies.

“I’ve never been in the cold-truck business. I don’t believe in it,” Zennedjian said. “One, cold trucks do not serve hot food. Two, some of the sandwiches are five days old. And . . . something I’m not going to eat I’m not going to sell to customers.”

As Zennedjian tells it, he ran into opposition in San Diego County immediately--as soon as he applied to the county Department of Health Services for a license. As he recalls it, the sanitarian informed him there would be hot trucks “over my dead body.”

“ ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be someone important to sit behind that desk and tell me what I can do,’ ” Zennedjian says he told the man. “ ‘I don’t know who you are, but I will fight you all the way down the line and beat you!’ ”

He says he sent his hot trucks out as cold trucks--an expensive arrangement as an interim measure. Immediately, Moody’s and Fiesta filed suit in Superior Court, charging unfair trade practices and seeking to shut Zennedjian down.

According to voluminous case files buried in the bowels of the courthouse downtown, the firms accused Zennedjian of enticing away their customers by giving out free food. They accused his drivers of using their trucks’ grills, in violation of county rules.

Zennedjian countered that there was nothing unfair about a one-time free sample--a position ultimately upheld by the judge. His lawyer accused Moody’s and Fiesta of filing a spurious lawsuit to protect their monopoly and avoid competition.

In October, 1978, the county Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to allow hot trucks in the county, bolstered by a decision from the county health department that they could be operated safely. But the ordinance applied only in the unincorporated areas. Zennedjian would have to take his case from city to city. Each time, the opposing camp would be there.

Meanwhile, the cold-truck companies had sued the county, saying the new ordinance was unconstitutional. Then they raised another objection to Zennedjian’s operation, contending his hot trucks violated state regulations governing mobile homes and “coaches” under lease.

This time, a judge ruled in their favor. So Zennedjian says he travelled to Sacramento to meet with the Department of Housing and Community Development. Then, he says, he spent $3,900 per truck on retooling with the required electricity and plumbing.

More court claims and counterclaims followed.

By 1981, Zennedjian said, the battle had broken him. He declared bankruptcy and was placed under federal protection. His trucks had been repossessed when he couldn’t make the payments. “I sold my $18,000 ice machine for $2,000 to pay my attorney,” he recalled grimly.

“By that time, we had lost everything,” he said. “I didn’t have a dollar to buy milk for my grandchildren. My wife says, ‘Honey, let’s go back to L.A.’ I say, ‘No, I lost my money in this county. I’m going to make it back here.’ ”

Zennedjian said he settled his differences with Moody’s and Fiesta in 1982. “They gave us a little bit of money to get going,” he said simply. In return, Zennedjian said, he agreed not to steal customers from Fiesta unless the customers specifically requested his services.

“Me and (Fiesta president) Ron McAtee talk to each other two or three times a day,” Zennedjian said. “I consider that man a beautiful person. And Moody’s, I don’t care one way or another. I figure this way: There’s plenty in San Diego, we can all make a living. Why kill each other?”

(Officials of Moody’s and Fiesta declined repeated requests for interviews. One receptionist running interference for her bosses explained that they believed it would put them in a sticky position.)

Zennedjian started again with a single truck leased from a friend in Los Angeles. It was named Eddie’s Lunch after one of his sons (who have since taken over the business). He went from city to city, arguing for the licensing of hot trucks. One by one, they began to fall.

Then in late 1985, McGan and several others sued National City after it licensed them and then revoked the licenses, saying there had been a mistake. A judge forced the city to reinstate the licenses, and McGan now spends his mornings feeding workers in and around Mile Of Cars.

Hot-truck drivers like to tell war stories, tales from the mobile industrial catering front. Like the time El Cajon was celebrating its 70th birthday and invited fast-food franchises to sell burgers at 1912 prices. They declined, but Zennedjian volunteered.

“Now what do you think we served--two trucks in four hours?” he asked a visitor. “Five thousand four hundred hamburgers we sold! The McDonalds people looked at it and said, ‘If we didn’t see it, we wouldn’t believe it.’ We made $42 profit.”

A few tips Al Zennedjian has acquired over the years:

- “When a guy’s got a $1.50, he’s only going to buy a hamburger. But when you give credit, he’s going to spend $3.”

- “Keep your grill on. If a last customer is out there, it’s another $2 in your pocket. If one burger is left on there, don’t shut the grill off and go home and throw it away. Find another gas station and sell that burger.”

- “You got to be good at public relations . . . When I first started with my wife, I used to have goofballs come talk to me. He smiles, I smile with him. He cries, I cry with him. He says, ‘Isn’t that right?’ I say, ‘That’s right.’ But most of the time I don’t know what he’s saying.”

Cajon Valley Catering now operates 35 trucks. Another 16 independents rent space at the complex and use the commissary. Zennedjian’s son Armen figures the 51 trucks service a total of 1,240 accounts daily, all in the southern parts of the county.

On the walls in the office hang photographs of Zennedjian’s racehorses in the winners’ circle in Del Mar. On one table there is a signed glossy of Rep. Jim Bates and a photograph of Los Angeles Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley.

But Al Zennedjian has hardly forgotten his roots:

“I eat off the trucks, baby. Every day.”