Frenchman hits the road with ‘world’s first’ food truck selling snails

Slow food has just taken on a whole new meaning

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, a Frenchman with a beret has opened a food truck selling cooked snails.

Yep, Denis Petit has been cruising the streets of Burgundy for the last six months selling snails cooked in every way you can imagine. And he’s soon to come to Paris.

He thinks his snail food truck might be the first of his kind in the world – or at least it’s definitely the first one run by a French snail farmer (or a héliciculteur).

“The customers love it, they’re getting to talk to someone who truly knows the product. And what’s a more symbolic dish in France than snails?” Petit tells The Earful Tower.

His truck is called L’escargot Roulant (or “The Rolling Snail”) – and marks a change in life for Mr Petit, who usually sells off his annual harvest of 200,000 snails.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I usually do it for restaurants, but I decided I’d like to actually work with people,” he says.

While his speciality is skewered snails with bacon, he says he can cook the shelled gastropods in a number of different ways with side dishes, lashings of garlic, shallots, and butter of course.

“It’s all a bit of fun and the locals love it – and so do the tourists,” he says.

If you’re in Burgundy and want to grab a snail to go, follow L’Escargot Roulant on Facebook here to find out where they are.

Or just wait until September and October when Mr Petit will be bringing his food truck to a number of different spots around Paris.

More from The Earful Tower: 

If you liked this story, check out our Food and Drink section here. Why not start with chef David Lebovitz on our podcast giving us the ultimate A to Z of French food. And yes, E was for escargot…