Food Trucks

Someone Actually Gets a Mobile Food Preparer License

Photo: courtesy The Salsa Truck

A couple of weeks ago there was reporting, primarily from the Trib’s Monica Eng, that while the city had come up with new regulations for food trucks, nobody had actually successfully negotiated all the hoops and been granted a mobile food preparer license, the magic golden ticket that would allow you to take a hot dog and put it in a bun in a food truck, as we hear tell happens in other cities regularly, without fatalities or forcing upscale steakhouses out of business. It was starting to look like what one hand of the city granted in law, the other was preventing from actually happening in reality. Now the Tribune reports that the city’s first mobile food preparer license has been granted to The Salsa Truck’s owner Dan Salls, who hopes to be on the road, searing meat and grilling quesadillas, by Tuesday. It is a fair question if allowing Salls’ truck its license is merely to quiet critics; we’re interested now in who will be the second, the tenth, and the fiftieth, and how long it will take to have them. But Salls has advice for aspiring truckers, which is mainly, go slow with what equipment and cooking methods you can actually get approved:

“Tone everything down. Don’t go overboard right away and do what you can get away with.”

Innovation is still being driven… like a Sunday driver… by regulatory bureaucracy on food trucks, it seems. [Tribune]

Someone Actually Gets a Mobile Food Preparer License