• Melissa Pasanen ©️ Seven Days
• Fork in the Road food truck

"Ask us what's local," instructed a sign on the brightly painted food truck set up in the Champlain Elementary School parking lot around noon on a recent Thursday.

Inside the Fork in the Road truck, a trio of teenagers was capably managing orders for the steady stream of customers pulling in off Pine Street. They juggled golden, herb-speckled fries ($5); kale Caesars ($5) tossed with fresh radishes and crunchy croutons; crispy chicken sandwiches ($10) piled high with vibrant red cabbage slaw; and black bean burgers ($10) garnished with tzatziki yogurt sauce, pesto and pickled onions.

Zoby Miller, 15, took orders at the window with a smile while Josue Correa, 18, and Thomas Newcomb, 16, worked the expediting and grill stations, respectively. All Burlington High School students, they represent half of the food truck's youth crew.

• Melissa Pasanen ©️ Seven Days
• Josue Correa

The Burlington School Food Project, which operates the district's nutrition services and farm-to-school education efforts, has run the paid food-truck employment and training program since 2013. After a two-year pandemic break, the seasonal truck is back on the road serving lunch in the Champlain parking lot on Thursdays and Fridays, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., through the end of August.

When a customer asked, "What's local?" as prompted, Miller considered for a moment and replied that the lettuce on the burgers and the kale in the salad came from Burlington school gardens.

The students' workweek includes prep days in the district's main kitchen and time tending six school gardens around the city, where some ingredients are grown.

Kale and lettuce were just the start, it turned out. The cucumber in the tzatziki sauce, the garlic scapes and basil in the pesto, the herbs on the fries, and the radishes in the salad also came from the gardens, said Jen Trapani, Burlington School Food Project's food science coordinator. She and supervising chef Drew Adamczyk work closely with the teens.

The Fork in the Road menu is uniformly delicious and fairly priced, especially given the local bona fides of many of the ingredients. The beef and cheddar are also local, and August brings more garden produce. Insider tip from Adamczyk: Get the kale salad topped with the housemade bean burger for $12, a perfect Dining on a Dime secret menu item.

Correa's favorite is the fried chicken sandwich, with its touch of sweetness from the peach barbecue sauce. Miller elaborated enthusiastically on the multistep chicken-prepping process, involving both pickle brine and buttermilk, that yields juicy, thoroughly seasoned meat.

• Melissa Pasanen ©️ Seven Days
• Fried chicken sandwich

Flattening the smash burgers to crisp them on the grill "makes them taste better," Newcomb said, adding, "I like that I get to cook burgers. They're my specialty."

"I like that I get to talk to people and stuff," Correa said. "It's good for my social life."

"It gives me good job experience," Miller said of the food truck opportunity.

Customer Nate Root was waiting for a smash burger ($10) and salt-and-vinegar fries ($5). Now a middle school teacher, the Burlington resident used to work in the restaurant industry, including managing the Skinny Pancake food truck. "I know that it's a lot of hard work," Root said.

Root appreciates the fact that the Fork in the Road program gives young people the opportunity to build social skills and learn to multitask and think on their feet, he said. "You can see they are really engaged," he observed. "We need more awesome programs like this."

His burger and fries were great, too, he said: "hot and delicious, well cooked, with great flavor in the special sauce. Two thumbs up."

When asked which ingredients might make that sauce so good, Correa responded shrewdly: "It's a secret. If it's secret, it gets more traction."

Dining on a Dime is a series featuring well-made, filling bites (something substantial enough to qualify as a small meal or better) for $12 or less. Know of a tasty dish we should feature? Drop us a line: [email protected].