The enduring, confusing, and always delicious Octopus Cart is still puffing along after 34 years

There is no octopus on the menu of the Octopus Cart, and only partly because there’s no menu. You get whatever Konstadinos “Gus” Christis is cooking that day. Lately, that has meant a massive pile of garlicky grilled chicken and peppers over fresh noodles, along with falafel and a fruit course, too.

The name — a tribute to Christis’ childhood in Greece and long-ago history as a taverna owner on South Street — is just one of many curious things about this legendary food cart, now in its 34th year at 20th and Market. Its quilted steel box festooned with colorful peppers and decorative copper pots has been puffing fragrant smoke from its charcoal-fired grill for so long that its tenure at this intersection predates several of the buildings that surround it.

Another, more pressing question presents itself to potential diners: How long will the wait be today? It can easily range from 30 minutes to an hour.

“I cook everything fresh here, so if you don’t have an hour, don’t waste your time,” says Gus, 64, who also sometimes goes by “Kostas.”“Quality food takes a long time!”

Center City is full of food carts, but the Octopus Cart is one of a kind. That begins with the unique fuel source of charcoal for its live fire (as opposed to the usual gas-fired griddle), which sends seductive plumes of smoke swirling around the entire intersection. Its character continues at the cart’s window, where, aside from the rotating produce displays, dangling cookware decorations, occasional floral arrangements, and an energetic soundtrack (typically jazz or classic Greek tunes), the animated Gus is always a draw — especially for regulars like Chris Cahill.

“He was almost offensive when I first met him, telling me, ‘You don’t know quality! You don’t know quality!’ But then I ate his food and it changed my life,” said Cahill, 52, a former trainer who now owns Barbershop Denim and has eaten from the Octopus Cart almost three times a week for the past 20 years. “His food is medicinal. When I go to the gym, my workouts and lifting are better. And I can’t cut hair without it. It’s my work food.”

At first glance, one of these takeout meals is chaos in a clam-shell: char-kissed chicken breasts tinged red with paprika and saffron that, on my most recent visit, came tangled with house-extruded turmeric spaghetti in a golden garlic sauce. And that was just the base. Add a handful of crispy, verdant falafel (my vote for Philly’s best), apple-cabbage slaw, perfectly blanched asparagus and yes, a handful of fruit — ripe cherries on my late summer visit, but sometimes plump grapes or sweet in-season blueberries. It looked like appetizer, entree, and dessert all piled into one big mess. But I followed Cahill’s suggestion, setting aside the fruit for a palate-cleansing finish, and found it to be one of the most flavorful — and satisfying — food cart lunches I’ve had in recent memory.

It costs $20, the result of a recent price hike that sparked a long Reddit thread that alternated between “still worth it” defenders and those outraged over everything from the existence of fruit to Gus’ occasionally cantankerous attitude and the fact that he doesn’t sell drinks or provide cutlery. (“Almost certain that Starbucks [next door] hides their forks now,” said one commenter).

The complaints are no doubt triggered by the ubiquity of halal carts that serve $7 rice platters — but those are topped with much smaller portions of a vaguely similar but far less flavorful chicken. I’ve eaten and appreciated plenty of those halal cart lunches over the years, but the comparison isn’t even close. Gus’ servings are enormous: A recent order with all the fixings weighed in at more than 2½ pounds on a digital scale; fully 1 pound of that was chicken. That’s at least two meals for the price of one.

More importantly, the quality is vastly superior. Aside from the quality and flavor of the chicken, which he buys fresh every day with enough for 30 or so customers, Gus insists on using good Greek olive oil (”no cheap-cheap!”), Hawaiian and French sea salts, and fresh garlic he spends nearly an hour peeling every day. That detail is important when there’s quite possibly nearly a head of garlic in every serving. Gus is also the only food cart operator I’ve encountered who extrudes fresh pasta from an Arcobaleno machine at his commissary and infuses the noodles with the occasional organic ginger, saffron, turmeric, or truffles.

“If you want to make nice (clothing), you buy high-end wool,” says Gus. “So if you don’t have good ingredients, how are you going to make good food?”

Gus has been a stickler for quality ever since he opened Greek Village Taverna at 646 South Street in 1992, where they were known for daily fresh fish and quails cooked on a wood-fired grill. But staffing gave him headaches, prompting him to leave the restaurant after a couple years.

“If the waitress didn’t show up I was in trouble. If the other cook didn’t show up, I was in trouble, too,” he said. “A truck I can do myself. I don’t need nobody. So I stuck with the truck.”

The itch for a standalone restaurant has never quite gone away, and Gus continues to mention plans for a new project in a restaurant space on 11th Street just north of Spring Garden Street. But after more than three decades of success inside that hot steel box on the sidewalk at 20th and Market, he vows, “the truck is never going to stop.” If he’s not there on an expected weekday, he says he either has a doctor’s appointment or the cart is being repaired. But those occurrences are rare, he says. “I’m there every day, through rain and thunderstorms, a million degrees hot or, or zero degrees with snow. I’m there.“

“I take it seriously because I do it for my health, not for the money,” says Gus, who notes that the physicality of towing, prepping, and cleaning his cart each day has contributed toward keeping him fit.

The recent price hike, he says, was necessary to remain sustainable in this era of rapidly rising food and fuel costs, commissary fees and more lunch competition than ever. Regulars like Cahill insist it was overdue.

“Guess who got him to go to $20? Yours truly,” says Cahill. “If you go to any ratchety pizzeria and order a chicken Caesar salad it costs $17, comes with cheap garlic dressing and it’s horrible. Gus was practically giving his food away. What he gives you for $20 now is bananas. This way, he’ll also weed out the nickel-and-dimers, and the people who appreciate him will still be in line — and everything will move quicker, too.”

Southeast corner of 20th and Market Streets, most weekdays noon-2:30 p.m. (or until sold out)

No phone. No website. No Instagram. No modifications. No delivery. No cutlery, beverages or straws.

Chicken and falafel platters, $20. Cash only.