Listen: I have no problem with food trucks. I have been eating food off trucks and street carts since I was young enough to wear saddle shoes and short pants. It’s even accurate to say that I love food trucks — and not just for the food, which often ventures into the type of culinary topography I love to explore and is almost always affordable, but also for the concept, which allows operators to take their restaurants to where the hungry people are.
I visit my neighborhood taco truck as often as circumstances allow. And I will throw out a standing offer to any food truck in Greensboro: Come park in the Nussbaum Center parking lot on Tuesdays while we are on deadline and it should be worth your while.
But don’t ask me to go to a food-truck rodeo. Just don’t.
Because the food-truck rodeo as it’s practiced here in the Triad is perhaps the worst setting to enjoy the wonderful bounty available from the windows of our corps of mobile chefs.
You know why: The crowds, which force wait times for food that rivals even the least organized of brick-and-mortar restaurants. The menus, which for large festivals lean towards more pedestrian items that can be bought, stored and assembled on the fly. The people, who sometimes act as if they’ve never seen a goddamn crepe before.
So I will pass on your food-truck rodeo, thank you. Unless, that is, the trucks themselves compete against each other in some sort of, you know, rodeo. Until then, I’ll be at the taco truck in my neighborhood.
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I think the problem is that in a smaller city like Greensboro, food trucks are far and few between, especially downtown (an attempt was made though back in 2012 for a food truck presence downtown). It doesn’t help that food truck festivals are only held downtown 2x a year, and people literally go crazy when they find out that the food trucks are coming to town! Haha. Yes, unfortunately for some folks, crepes can be quite exotic. If we just had a larger downtown like in Raleigh, where food trucks and food truck festivals are more common, maybe chaos would not ensue.