When I came on board full-time at Xpress, I hoped my new position would enable me to shed a new and different light on Asheville's amazing food scene, something that's near and dear to my heart (obviously).
With this article about street food and one local woman's efforts to follow through on a simple dream — her own food truck — I hoped to help get people talking about some of the unexamined rules preventing certain types of street food in Asheville.
And people are still talking. The Asheville Downtown Association, Asheville Independent Restaurant Association and Downtown Commission have all brought the issue to the table, and we could see street food in Asheville during the coming year. — Mackensy Lunsford, food and features coordinator
“Food trucks are taking it to the streets everywhere. They're all over cities like Austin and local-foods mecca Portland, Ore. — a city with sensibilities much like our own. Hungry diners can choose from a veritable stable of mobile vendors that offer everything from authentic asada tacos to Vietnamese Pho. The trucks are cheap to keep, for the most part, and the street-food purveyors pass on the savings with their oftentimes exotic offerings.
It's inevitable in a food town like Asheville that mobile food vendors would motor onto the scene. We have a wealth of talented cooks trying to make a living, while everyone else is trying not to spend too much of their own cash. But slow your roll — a number of laws currently discourage the moveable feast.
‘Philosophically, we just aren't ready for it,’ says City Planner Shannon Tuch. Simply put, food trucks are not allowed in downtown Asheville under city ordinance — at least not yet. There are standards already put in place allowing, yet limiting, the number of push-carts in the city — the hot dog and burrito vendors that you already see. No laws exist to regulate the existence of food trucks; until now, there simply hasn't been enough interest.”
To view the full story, visit http://avl.mx/27
I hope this works, but all too often city planners side with brick-and-mortar restaurants whose owners have much higher overhead.
Where I live now we had a guy with a spotless food truck. He sold Caribbean/Jamaican food at worksites, etc. At the time there were very few ordinances dealing with such because before this time no one had done it. Within weeks the city had passed a whole slew of ordinances all but banning food trucks. The operator was forced to relocate to a storefront in a bad neighborhood which was all he could afford. Within a few months he went belly up. Shame.