Uptown: You get to travel all over the country in your role as Chef on Assignment for Johnson & Wales. What are you seeing in the way of food trends that may be coming our way?
PR: Different regions of the country tend to pick up on various trends at their own pace and with their own regional spin, such as we saw with the organic and the farm-to-table trends a few years ago. The trends tend to start on the West Coast, then slingshot to big cities like New York and Chicago, and then radiate their way out to other cities where chefs or savvy food businesses make them their own. In the south, Birmingham (Ala.) has recently been very influential, as well as Charleston and also Chapel Hill. Charlotte has also gotten on board, albeit later than the leading food towns, with its growing participation in the Slow Food Movement as well as the growth of local farmers markets and food growers. But we’re in danger of missing what promises to be the next big trend, perhaps one of the most exciting developments in years. I’m talking about the food cart phenomenon.

Uptown: What on earth is the food cart phenomenon? Are you talking about taco trucks?
PR: Taco trucks are a tiny tip of the iceberg. I’m really talking about mobile food trucks inside of retro-fitted carts, complete with cooking gear, grills, ovens and the like. These are movable feasts capable of turning out a limited menu, but they do it extremely well. Let me give you some perspective. In Portland, Oregon, which is probably the epicenter of the food cart scene in the U.S., there are over 250 food carts, featuring every sort of food imaginable. Wood-fired pizza trucks, Korean fusion taco trucks (imagine a carne asada taco garnished with kim chee – it’s fantastic!), French fried potato trucks that also serve poutine (the national potato dish of Canada – crispy, twice-fried potatoes covered with fresh cheese curds and brown gravy. Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Yes, it’s a gut bomb but it sure tastes good!), health food cart, wild and crazy food carts, dessert trucks, smoothie carts, Cuban sandwich carts, crepe trucks, and on and on. Portland has even designated empty parking lots, licensing some of these food cart operators to permanently park there. In other words, they’ve created a number of “food cart courts,” which become instant festivals for anyone looking for fun and fellow food freaks. During business hours you see a lot of businessmen eating at the carts – it’s the new power lunch forum.

Uptown: Sounds like fun – when are we going to see those here?
PR: Well, currently we have one food cart here that could be competitive in Portland. That’s the Harvest Moon Grille, which could hold its own anywhere, especially with their amazing pork and grits <editor’s note: see page __ in this issue for a story about this cart>.  The problem is that the folks who issue permits are worried about crime and, probably, also about the unfair competitive advantage that low-overhead carts present to what we call brick and mortar restaurants. It’s a delicate balance to make something like a food cart scene work. There were probably a few negative incidents around some of the taco trucks awhile back and that kind of soured the authorities on the idea of food carts in general. But the other side of the coin is that these food carts are fabulous entrepreneur laboratories, maybe the first step to a later incarnation as a true brick and mortar restaurant. This is what happened in Portland, as the food carts there have become part of the cultural identity for the city, highlighting the creativity and diversity of the area. There’s so much excitement and buzz about the carts there that some of the trucks move to different locations every night and Twitter to their followers, who show up en masse, like a spontaneous rave or happening. We have nothing like that here yet.

Uptown: Do you see something like that ever happening here?
PR: I’m not sure. In my six years living in Charlotte I’ve seen a growing interest in food and such, but we’re also somewhat conservative and don’t really like to take too many out-of-the-box chances. But I could see it happening in areas of town like NoDa and, if we get the Center City year-round farmers market we’ve been hearing about, it could be an ideal location for something like a food cart court. Once the city makes it easier for the start-up cart operations to do business we could see all that latent creativity come to fruition.

Uptown: Yes, but do you think it will really happen?
PR: Let me put it this way: If we don’t do it first, Atlanta probably will and then we’ll just be playing catch-up, still waiting for the next wave. I’m convinced that this is the biggest wave, the one we’ve been waiting for. It’s already happening in L.A., Chicago and New York City. In fact, some of the brick and mortar restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are now reverse engineering it – they’re sending out their own food carts to capitalize on the interest and also to allow them to make some fun foods that they don’t do in their restaurants. I hope we catch this wave soon so I don’t have to go to Atlanta or one of those other cities for my kim chee taco. I’m telling you, though, it’s worth the drive.

Gallis’ passion for exploring history, his ability to see beyond boundaries and identify spacial relationships has made him an expert in his field. He has helped shape the vision for U.S. transportation in the 21st century. His uptown Charlotte firm paved the way for how people commute from New York to Orlando, Fla., to Detroit and Memphis, Tenn., which also has a new economic development strategy thanks to him.

But he is also a writer, working on a book about friends who went to Vietnam and returned very different people. He is a historian, able to quote Bible verses and war battles.  And he is passionate about the environment and the impact of global warming.

“It’s apparent to all of us we have a daunting challenge ahead of us,” he says.

Gallis, 66, was born in San Francisco to a Chinese-born Russian father who operated a general goods and timber company that expanded to Oregon.  When the company collapsed during the Great Depression, Gallis’ father moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Oregon. His mother was Swedish. Her family operated timber companies as well. The two had met at International House at the University of California at Berkley and married a short time later.

Gallis, who crewed on a rowing team when he was young, also developed an appreciation for history and art, courtesy of his parents who had their own Chinese art collection. He bought his first piece – a pair of African figurines – from an L.A. art dealer he discovered while buying supplies for a freshman architecture project at a lumberyard next door.

“The importance of collecting art from different parts of the world to me is that it was created as a result of different kinds of ideas,” Gallis says.

Today his first floor office in the Boxer Building uptown resembles a gallery, with hundreds of pieces of Tribal and African art displayed on shelves and whitewashed walls. Feathered masks with shells, carved wooden shapes and masks with cutout eyes fill the library.  But the collection doesn’t stop there. Metal statues tucked between floor plants fill the hallways and decorate desks along with a chair hand carved from a single tree. One of Gallis’ favorite pieces of art is a colorful painting of Chinese letters that hangs in the conference room.

“If you only stick to your own culture, you never expand your mind,” he says. “By collecting different art you get a better understanding of your own history and a deeper appreciation for your perceptions and values.”

Gallis studied art history and earned his architecture degree from the University of California at Berkley and a master’s in architecture and planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to teach at the University of Miami and came here in the early 1970s when a college friend asked him to teach at the newly formed college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He was an associate professor there for 20 years before starting his own company, which he called Noah Studios – a name he chose after reading the Bible and recalling Jesus’ first prophet, Noah.

“That little company was our arc,” he recalls. “Noah put trust in God to guide the arc and we left it up to God to get our little company off the ground.”
Decades later, Gallis has been recognized nationally for motivating governments to integrate regional, national and global strategies. His firm’s latest study – the first of its kind – provides insight into coping with nature’s evolution and how man-made systems can evolve efficiently so the two can co-exist.

The framework for his most recent study and those before it stem from lessons learned while watching Charlotte transform from a tiny city into the country’s 21st largest.
Gallis began studying Charlotte in depth in the mid-1980s.  It was transforming quickly from a city to a metropolitan area and people were confused over how to deal with planning as political coalitions emerged and development patterns changed.

“When I arrived here, Charlotte was just a small city with a lot of country roads around it,” Gallis says. “In the course of the next three decades it transformed into a major metro area – it was a great urban learning laboratory.”

His staff crafted a development plan for Rock Hill, S.C. And it was during that research when growth patterns began to emerge.

Using a pen on old hand drawings, Gallis circles little yellow blobs on a map that represents Gastonia, Concord and others. They were getting bigger. And a grid of highways and superhighways was beginning to develop, he says.

The cities were not just growing but they were merging as one big unit or urban network, and the future of any city is related to where it sits inside the network.
This would require new theories and approaches, Gallis says.

A decade later city leaders formed committees to study growth in the region. Rather than build more highways, the Gallis research suggested Charlotte choose building a transportation system along its centers and corridors, which became the transit lines the city has today.

“The key to the future was understanding how these urban networks grew and changed and then how we could affect their future through different policies, regulations and investments,” Gallis says.

He retired from teaching in 1997 to work full time at the newly formed Michael Gallis & Associates, which suddenly began getting nationwide attention for its innovative and efficient strategies.

The firm began studying connections between Connecticut, New York and Boston and discovered relationships between politics, urban economics and geography.  Soon, Gallis and his staff were traveling the country compiling research on numerous regions.

Through this work the firm developed what Gallis calls a systems approach to networks such as transportation, tourism and the environment. The concept is similar to the systems within the human body, each with a purpose and function.

It was through this lens that Gallis and his people determined that the environment was so unique that it should be treated separately.

“We discovered that we knew less about the environment than we did about any other system,” Gallis says. “And it occurred to me that we needed to study the interaction of (the environment and manmade systems), which had never been done before.”

What had been done before simply was man’s impact on the environment such as air pollution and water runoff. But no one had studied how people were building urban ecosystems, Gallis says.

Wearing a crisp white button-down and gray paisley tie, Gallis pops up out of his chair to fetch a book to illustrate his point. He glances pensively through his collection of topics from painting to ocean liners and railroads.  At 6-foot-4, he towers over some of the highest shelves, which include the 1929 plans for New York City, a collection of 19th century atlases and the book that created the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the mash of books, Gallis can’t find what he’s after, but it’s hardly needed. He recalls most of the details he’d hoped and explains how his firm began researching the way cities were growing compared to the patterns of nature. First his staff looked at the Southeast, from Birmingham, Ala., to southern Virginia as well as Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., Charlotte, Raleigh and the Tennessee Valley. On a global scale, Gallis & Associates took the research to another level looking at the relationship between natural and human systems.
“You could see where – as we built human networks such as roads and buildings – we never built either to fit the natural system. We took the environment for granted,” Gallis says. “It is only now we are able to fully appreciate our relationship with nature.”

Currently nature and man-made systems are in conflict with each other, he says.

“We have to move toward co-evolving.”

By identifying effects of growth on the environment such as erosion, depletion, extinction and pollution, Gallis & Associates has identified strategies for action to include new policies, incentives and regulatory procedures up to the federal level.

“The bottom line is we have to rethink the way we manage the growth of our cities,” Gallis says. “We have two systems in conflict and we are facing problems people haven’t grasped.”
Based on its global research and findings, Gallis & Associates is one of several organizations working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study the physical, socioeconomic and ecosystem impact of significant changes in sea levels along the Eastern seaboard.

“We are looking at some of the potentials of dramatic changes that people think will happen in small increments but could be of significant size,” Gallis says. “If we don’t try to understand them we won’t be prepared for them.”

~ Victoria Cherrie