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Food Truck "Mania" in Harrisonburg

The first Harrisonburg food truck registered in 2006. Now, nine years later, 22 food trucks - ranging in product from grilled cheese to Mexican to lobster rolls to barbecue - operate in the city. WMRA’s Kara Lofton reports.

In Harrisonburg, food trucks operate somewhat differently than the ones found in bigger cities such as Washington or Richmond. Belen Martinez, owner of the truck Belen’s Thrill of the Grill, explains.

BELEN MARTINEZ: The whole thing about food trucks is that you move place to place and you have a good following, but Harrisonburg is a city, but it’s [also] a small town so you don’t have enough people where you can just set up somewhere and then people will see your truck and come to it, there’s not that much foot traffic in the city.

So, many Harrisonburg food trucks, such as the one owned by Martinez, operate in semi-permanent food truck “parks” (which are usually privately rented out parking lots) where they stay, working sometimes side by side with a number of other food trucks, unless they have reason to leave for an event.

For Martinez, the downtown food truck park he uses as a “home base” allows him to operate a truck in a city with low foot traffic. Kathleen Mania-Casey of Grilled Cheese Mania, agrees.

KATHLEEN MANIA-CASEY: I don’t want to be on the road. I want to be very branded; we are very branded. This is where we are, this is when we are here and this is what we sell.

Over the last three years Grilled Cheese Mania has expanded from one food truck to two, one downtown and one near Hillandale Park. Even when she goes to festivals and events, she doesn’t take the trucks, but rather serves food from grills under a tent canopy.  But for Stacy Turner, Director of Planning and Community Development for the city, the recent development of the parks, and the quickly changing nature of food trucks from moving venders to semi-permanent restaurant-like businesses, produces a number of questions about compliance, regulation and equity for the city to grapple with.

STACY TURNER: We don’t want to come up with a bunch of regulations that are difficult for the venders to meet, we want to be sure that we are looking at the implications to adjacent residential areas, we are looking at the implications to the public streets, to discharges into our sewer system or back flows into the water system, so you know we’ve got these types of things we are concerned about, but at the same time we would like to come up with something that does not make it excessively difficult for them to be able to operate. It’s kind of a fine line.

For entrepreneurs such as Martinez, the lack of regulations that brick and mortar restaurants have to deal with, is part of the appeal of the trucks to begin with.

MARTINEZ: [With] a restaurant you have a big startup budget and then to maintain your operations the overhead is triple what you would get in a food truck.

He said he eventually hopes to open a restaurant, but the truck allows him to start with a smaller budget and work out the kinks before investing heavily in a building.

The food truck park near Hillandale now boasts four trucks. But for the first year it existed, Grilled Cheese Mania was the only truck there.

MANIA-CASEY: And then other trucks started coming and people were saying “you don’t like the competition, what do you think about having competition?” And I don’t think it is competition. It is and it isn’t. The more people who come for them see us too. And I can’t feed all of Harrisonburg so if I could feed all of Harrisonburg then I would say yeah they’re competition, but there’s enough for everybody. And it keeps everybody on top of their game too. I think the more people that are around, the better everyone’s food will be.

Kara Lofton is a photojournalist based in Harrisonburg, VA. She is a 2014 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University and has been published by EMU, Sojourners Magazine, and The Mennonite. Her reporting for WMRA is her radio debut.