Some restaurants aren’t allowed to open. Others can only have one-quarter of the customers. Others serve downtown areas that are empty.
The only thing to do sometimes is give up your lease and take the show on the road.
Sure enough, food trucks (once reviled by city councils and brick-and-mortar restaurants) are becoming a bigger thing in more places in our COVID-plagued land, and we can expect this change to persist when things generally return to normal.
Cities and towns with strict limits on food trucks have loosened up in the past year. Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for instance, passed a new ordinance in January that would basically legalize food trucks. In St. Cloud, Florida, the local government is considering loosening regulations aimed at protecting restaurants from food truck competition.
Food trucks are also finding more and more places to park.
Downtown Bellevue, Washington, in February began hosting food-truck days every Tuesday and Thursday.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a gourmet food store named York set up “York Yard,” inviting food trucks to park outside and sell their wares.
One small business in Sioux City, Iowa, is providing a parking lot for food trucks, complete with an electric hookup, and calling it Yummi Blox. A similar privately owned food truck park opened in Florence, South Carolina, this year. On the banks of Jeffries Creek, a tributary of the Great Pee Dee River, the food truck lot is called “Eats on the Creek.”
Winter has proven a problem in colder climes, and so, operators have had to get creative. Nicole Ortiz found that she couldn’t operate in winter months, saying that “it’s hard to clean the truck and the pipes freeze and things like that, so we decided to just close.” So, she began delivering the meals she cooked to customers at home.
Not everyone is in the food truck business for a profit, though. Chicago chefs Robert Magiet and Jason Vincent set up a free food truck to give homeless residents a hot meal at Thanksgiving. Now, they’ve made it permanent. “The meals consist of pancakes, homemade tater tots, sausage, and eggs, and for lunch, we’re doing burgers with a side of macaroni and cheese,” according to WGN.
