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11/13/2017 Are Food Trucks Good or Bad for the Twin Cities? | streets.mn https://streets.mn/2012/07/09/are-food-trucks-good-or-bad-for-the-twin-cities/4/14 People lining up for tater tots as if they’re the last thing on Earth. First, food trucks redress Minneapolis and St Paul’s long-standing downtown vs. neighborhood imbalance. I always feel bad for anyone attending a conference in Minneapolis and staying in a downtown hotel. Why? Because very few of the Twin Cities places I love can be found there. Compared to all the wonderful little neighborhood corners, both downtowns are giant wastelands where interesting ideas go to die. (Quick, name your top 10 bars and restaurants in the Twin Cities? How many of them are downtown?) And apart from bit around Washington Avenue or near Cedar and Riverside, the entire U of MN campus is a chained-up Sahara. Tens of thousands of hungry people are trapped there every day forced to subsist on re-heated Poppa Johns and subjected to the faux-kitcsh wall hangings at Potbelly. They subsist almost entirely on tasteless crap from a SYSCO warehouse. For any Twin Cities visitor, in order to discover anything really amazing, you must escape the the corporate core, flee downtown, and abandon campus. Or, thanks to the magic of petroleum powered food trucks, you can have the neighborhoods come to you! A good example is the Anchor Fish and Chips, which is a delicious chippie on 13 avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s great food that makes people in Northeast Minneapolis happy and fat, but nobody working downtown is going to take the time (or go get their cars, un- and re-park them) to visit Northeast for lunch. So why not have 13 Avenue come to them? It sure beats the Nicollet Mall Panera. The same holds for the Barrio truck or the 128 Café or the Ngon Bistro. In a way, these trucks are bringing the neighborhoods of the Twin Cities into downtown. They’re mobile billboards for the diversity of restaurants that make the Twin Cities great. Food trucks improve our mediocre skyway- laden anti-places by injecting them with old streetcar shopcorners. Second, food trucks are new business incubators. The reason why food trucks are so immensely popular with Twin Cities’ entrepreneurs is that they require vastly less overhead. Instead of taking out huge loans to lease and fix-up a business that will be tied down to one location location location, you can invest less money into a food truck, buy some paint, and come up with a nifty low-cost internet marketing campaign. Voilà! You have a new restaurant concept. Good luck to you. Food trucks are almost like a giant marketplace of embryonic restaurants, little incubators of future shops. Look at the diversity of trucks. Any one of them may become wildly popular and evolve into an actual bricks-and-mortar establishment. For example, the Smack Shack should be opening up their restaurant on Washington Avenue anytime now. Food trucks aren’t just competing with actual café buildings, they’re evolving into them. They’re like mini-restaurants, starter cafés, chrysalis bistros. th th