The ThunderBlogs

Derek and Michael Ip spent their Monday baking ice cream-filled croissants out of a bright yellow school bus.

The entrepreneurial brothers, 22 and 20, respectively, are part of a new street food pilot program that runs until April 2011 and is intended to cook up some international alternatives to Vancouver’s much-maligned street menu of hotdogs and chestnuts.

The Ips, in business since mid August, offer fresh-baked goods with an original twist. Be it ice cream, s’mores or mac ‘n cheese, the filling packed into their flaky treats is like nothing the city’s streets have played host to before.

The many influences on PanDa Fresh Bakery—a nod to Derek’s nickname and a pun on both the Japanese and French words for bread—draw at their root on the cuisine of those two nations.

“I was in Harajuku last year,” said Derek, “and there was a little stall in the street that sells Parisian-style croissants. They put the croissant inside a waffle cone, and they put soft-serve on top. So it’s kind of a play on that idea.”

The school bus, located near the corner of Drake Street and Pacific Boulevard, was Derek’s concept. He spent several months with a friend converting it into a workable kitchen, which now wafted out a scent of sugary oven dough and shaved chocolate.

Derek and Michael, like several vendors involved in the process, had mixed feelings about the pilot program and the lead-up to its launch.

“There was a little complication,” Derek said. “During the application they changed the location. We were going to be in front of Granville Station, which would have been great. Then a week into it they changed it without informing us.”

The city removed the Granville location as an option for “motor vehicle” vendors, as opposed to basic cart vendors. There are five of the former, including the PanDa Fresh Bakery, parked around the city for the duration of the pilot program.

Complaints directed against both the timing of the program’s unveiling—only one vendor was up and running by the start date, July 31—and the applicant selection process, which was lottery-based and did not try to distinguish well-prepared entrepreneurs from blithe amateurs, remain fresh in the minds of many Vancouverites.

Far from the other downtown carts and trucks, the PanDa Fresh school bus bookends a long stretch of parked cars on Pacific. Sandwiched between Yaletown’s glass-panelled condo towers and the green plane of David Lam Park, the two young vendors can enjoy a nice view, if not a brisk pace of weekday business.

Beyond, the prows of white-hulled yachts and red-bottomed water taxis point to an unexploited market. Meals on waves, anyone?