A yurt for all seasons: BBQ stand keeps cooking in bad weather

Executive Chef Tom Colbert, 53, started working for the company about five months back, just as summer was segueing into fall. “The first two months were nice,” he said.

“I was never really an outdoor person, never liked a cold winter, but it’s amazing how quickly your body learns to adapt to it,” Colbert said. “It doesn’t really bother me much anymore. Toes, every once in a while.”

Many who work or live nearby appreciate their hardiness.

Bob Fasanella, who works just across the street, said he comes by the kiosk frequently and called Cornelia and Colbert “troupers” for continuing to serve even in brutal January weather.

“It’s great, it’s a great convenience,” he said. “It’s hard to find good barbecue that’s so local in this area.”

Chris Dulmaine, who lives and works in the North End, was running some errands Tuesday afternoon and went out of his way to stop by Silk Road. “Anytime you can get meat on a stick is pretty good.”

Asked whether he was surprised to see the stand out in all kinds of weather, Dulmaine replied, “I would have been disappointed if I turned the corner and didn’t see them down here, because I kind of made this part of my route.”

Colbert said that kind of customer loyalty compensates for the extra effort. He saw it during the heavy snow the previous Friday, when a network of their regulars encouraged co-workers to go out and visit the kiosk in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, its home on Wednesdays and Fridays during the winter. That turned out to be their busiest day of the year.

“If you give them what they want and build community relations, they give back as much as we give to them,” Colbert said.

The menu at the small food stand contains a limited number of items but considerable variety, ranging from the familiar hot dog to Jamaican jerk chicken and Uzbek lamb skewers. The most popular item is the humble, American pulled-pork sandwich, Cornelia said, but from there customers often branch out into the more exotic flavors.

The name for the venture came out of research Cornelia and his partners did on open-air markets and food stands throughout history. They were particularly taken with those that sprang up around the Silk Road, which connected Asia to Europe from ancient times until the Middle Ages.

This system of trading routes was the world’s first trans-continental commerce network and an important venue for the spread of ideas and technology.

“It was not only a trading system, but it was an idea ecosystem. Essentially, it was the Internet of its day,” Cornelia said. “It was impossible to stop people from commingling in these dusty little towns.''

Cornelia and his partners embraced the idea of an outdoor gathering place that would be a space for food and for building community in the real world, in real time, face-to-face. It presented them with an opportunity to create a conversation both between the company and its customers and among those customers as they stop by the kiosk and, in warmer weather, pick a spot nearby to enjoy their sandwich or kebab.

In keeping with the types of food stands that inspired them, Silk Road operates out of a mobile, hexagonal kiosk designed to resemble a yurt, a kind of portable wood-framed structure used by nomads in Central Asia. Colbert cooks the skewers on a mangal, a Turkish-style barbecue basin that roasts the meat directly over the coals, and they offer free cups of hot tea, a touch of hospitality intended to help start conversations.

The company has mutually reinforcing goals of connecting people, enlivening public spaces and creating opportunities for itself and others to build profitable businesses. “We believe it brings social value to the community and it also brings commercial value to the people that own the land,” he said.

So they couldn’t say no when representatives from the Greenway Conservancy approached Silk Road last year and asked them to be part of their efforts to bring outdoor food vendors to the Greenway to encourage workers and residents downtown to make more use of the space. From July to November, they were at the Greenway five days a week.

Currently, they split the week between the spot near Rowes Wharf and their other home in Kendall Square, but since they first set up their yurt in January 2009, they’ve tried out other spots in Cambridge, Needham and Weston, and they plan to expand in the coming months.

“We’ve been learning as an organization what makes sense, and in order to do that, we needed to experiment with different locales, different demographics, different time slots,” Cornelia said. “We’re now coming to understand what our value is to a community, what our value is to landowners and what that dialogue is between the public, the landowner and the proprietors for open-air markets.”

Email Jeremy C. Fox at jeremycfox@gmail.com.

(Jeremy C. Fox / Boston.com)

Silk Road Executive Chef Tom Colbert roasted a lamb skewer on the mangal, a Turkish-style barbecue basin that doesn’t use a grill.