By Parker McKenzie
When not in action at a festival, event or market, the Dolly Bus rests easy in Tecoma in the Dandenong Ranges. The 1994 Mercedes Benz bus, built somewhere in Brazil, is a 100 per cent vegan food truck created by Steve and Lisa Brand.
Chef and musician Alex Cann bought the Dolly Bus from the couple around six years ago and said it was an excellent opportunity to combine two of his passions by serving food at festivals.
“I started working in kitchens when I was younger and I kind of found classical cheffing to be quite boring, to be honest,” he said.
“I know the Dolly Bus because I’ve been a vegan chef for 12 years and I realised they’re quite quirky and they’d been around six or seven years before I decided to buy it,
“I decided doing festivals and food – my two loves, cooking and music – why not combine them and some money on the side.”
The bus serves a range of different of vegan options on the go, including burgers, hotdogs, dahl and zucchini noodles.
Mr Cann said a usual day at a festival means getting up at six of seven in the morning.
“At a big festival I’ll have seven staff or so, we can have five people inside the bus cooking and serving meals,” he said.
“I’ll have a couple people out the back doing prep, basically we don’t sleep very much at festivals.”
He said despite the lack of sleep, everyone has plenty of fun at multiday festivals.
“It’s just great to be at the festivals and the spirit they provide, I love being there,” Mr Cann said.
“”You finish your end of the day and you get to hang out with interesting people who have interesting stories, it’s a lot of fun actually.”
Mr Cann does the mechanical work on the bus himself, which has improved its top speed since he bought it.
“I generally have three toolkits in here, so when I’m on the side of the road I can fix it if I need too,” he said.
“The previous owners were old-school, very casual hippie kind of vibe. Over the six years they owned it, they didn’t spend much money on actually on repairs,
“I bought a bus that was only going 15 kilometres up a hill with a top speed of 75, after me and brothers fixing a lot of the issues it now goes 95km an hour and goes up hills instead of backwards down them.”
Alex Cann and the Dolly Bus can be found across a number of festival during the summer, including Unify, Ultra Music Festival, the Herb and Chili festival.
After the festival season is over, Mr Cann said he will likely be found relaxing on a beach.
“Wouldn’t that be nice, even if the weather is bad?” he said.
