UPPER WEST SIDE — A pizza cart that was in the running for a coveted Vendy Award is planting itself in an Upper West Side park.
Eddie's Pizza, a finalist for rookie of the year at the 2011 Vendys mobile food contest, recently won a five-year Parks Department contract to operate a cart seven days a week at Richard Tucker Square, the small park on West 66th Street and Broadway.
Depending on the weather and customer demand, the cart will be open from roughly 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and could eventually serve breakfast, lunch and dinner, said owner Derek Kaye.
Eddie's Pizza, which started out as a Long Island restaurant whose thin crust pies were once featured on the HBO show "Entourage," has won many fans since it rolled into the roving food business in 2010.
Eddie's operates a truck that roams the city and a stationary cart in TriBeCa on Duane and Greenwich streets. The Eddie's location in Richard Tucker Park will be a stationary cart, not a full-scale truck.
The pizza truck has been visiting the Upper West Side for the to serve dinner on Wednesday nights. The response was so positive that Kaye decided to compete for the Parks Department contract.
"We thought it would be a great location, especially because there's a need for a quicker affordable bite to eat for people seeing shows at Lincoln Center," Kaye said. The cart could also find a following among fashion-hungry shoppers, because it's right across the street from the new Century 21 store.
Kaye said the permanent, city-sanctioned spot will allow Eddie's to build a customer base without having to worry about breaking the law, an issue that more mobile food vendors are confronting as police crack down on the trucks.
Richard Tucker Park is just two blocks from where residents on West 68th Street and Broadway have complained passionately about a food truck parked on their corner. The trucks have generated so many gripes that Upper West Side City Councilwoman Gale Brewer recently suggested using GPS to track the vendors' locations.
Eddie's Pizza is trying to avoid neighborhood conflicts by reaching out to local groups such as the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District, which hosts a free concert series in the park, Kaye said.
The pizza vendor will also be working with the Tucker Square Greenmarket farmers market, which operates every Thursday at the park. Eddie's is hoping to create special dishes using fresh farmer's market ingredients, Kaye said.
Eddie's Pizza is known for its "bar pie," a 10-inch thin-crust pie designed to be small enough to leave room in your stomach for a beer.
The personal-sized pizza weighs in at a mere 270 calories for the plain cheese version, which costs $7.50 for regular crust or $8.00 for the whole wheat variety. The dish can be customized with 20 different fresh toppings. Eddie's Pizza also serves Italian heroes, antipasto salads, cannoli and tomato basil soup.
"We want to become another neighborhood pizzeria," Kaye said. "We want it to become a place that people can count on to come to."
