By Robert Duffer, Chicago Tribune

The English are not known for their food,  and food trucks are not known for being green. Bridgeport Pasty Co. is setting out to change that.

Since August of 2011, Carrie and Jay Sebastian have been baking pasties and selling them about town in their diminutive electric food truck. It’s less a truck than a wagon, and to be clear a pasty is pronounced PASS-tee. It is a handheld pie, a dough pocket filled with meat or veggies like an empanada, calzone or pierogi.

“Every culture has a version of a pasty,” Sebastian says. And it should not be confused with a pasty (PAY-stee), the decoration  favored by strippers.

“If I sold pay-stees, my job might be a whole lot more interesting,” says John Shotwell, who manages the food truck for the Sebastians.

Patsy the Pastymobile is a GEM all-electric vehicle manufactured in Iowa by Polaris. At 6 feet high by 6 feet wide by 12 feet long, it is bigger than a golf cart and smaller than most road vehicles, except for those you might see zipping around airports or retirement communities.

The gel batteries will run for about 25 miles when the truck is loaded. That range is perfect for mobile vending in Chicago, especially Patsy’s popular vending spot at the University of Chicago. The truck is classified as a low-speed vehicle, topping out at 26 mph.

Chicago drivers are not known for their patience. “I’m a cyclist, so people honking at me does not faze me in the slightest,” Shotwell says.

The Sebastians are cyclists as well, active in the bicycle booster group Critical Mass, and they are committed to the bicycle as their preferred mode of transportation. It was a fateful bike ride in London at Christmas time that turned the Sebastians onto the pasty.

“We saw it as the perfect street food, a grab-and-go food,” says Sebastian. That was the case historically as well, where the pasty was popular with coal miners because it could stay warm and stick to their ribs. The crusts acted as a handle for their arsenic-laced fingers.

The pasty migrated with miners to the Midwest, where Sebastian notes a weird little pocket of pasty shops in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

That’s why Bridgeport Pasty’s flagship pasty of beer-marinated beef, onion, potato and rutabaga is dubbed the Yooper. Chef Carrie Sebastian, who grew up with pasties during her summers in Ireland, has developed seven pasties, from the classic Yooper to the Oinkle.  

The Oinkle combines pork, apple and onion with chucks of potato and a light, distinctive smattering of sage. Enveloping it is a flaky dough that tastes like the product of a buttermilk biscuit mating with a pie crust. There should be no discarding these crusts.  Not only does it stick to your ribs, it sticks to your taste buds. I would eat another if I hadn’t been filled from the first.

The most popular one is the veggie, made with spinach and mushroom, and the ginger chicken, which is popular with the five Sebastian grandchildren. Pasty popularity has led the Sebastians to build a brick-and-mortar bakery at 3142 S. Morgan, where 40 solar panels will charge Patsy.

Sebastian is hopeful the bakery will open for walk-in traffic this summer, but he’s been stymied by Chicago food law before. In fact, he originally had proposed to be a food vendor on a tricycle with a propane stove. 

“The city wouldn’t go for it,” says the 60 year old, who works in administration at a large downtown law firm. He expects Patsy the Pastymobile to be part of his retirement plan, making road trips via trailer to Florida or Austin during the winter months.

For now, Sebastian hopes improvements can be made to lessen the carbon footprint of the fuel consumed in making their product and their truck, which includes a super-efficient 1 gallon gas heater to keep the pasties at the city-mandated temperature. A gallon is enough for about two lunch shifts.

“My hope is that some 12-year-old kid sees this and asks how can I make it better?” Sebastian says. “You can’t put a price tag on the inspiration this can create in the younger generation.”

It inspires passersby as well. Shotwell notes that the curiously cute truck lures people to the pasty. Its podlike cab, diminutive wheelbase and plastic body all attract attention among the big rigs of the burgeoning Chicago food-truck scene.

“I feel like a bug sometimes,” Shotwell says, who takes it slow and trusts in the kindness of other drivers.

On the street, it looks like the traditional food trucks are about to eat Patsy. But bigger food trucks do not bully Patsy, or Shotwell. “They’re envious of my ability to park.”