NEW YORK—Office workers streamed into a Long Island City parking lot to grab lunch from a collection of food trucks before noon on Tuesday.
“This is great!” exclaimed a New York City Department of Health (NYCDH) employee who saw the trucks while walking by. “Dumplings, apple pie, cupcakes, and Indian food, what more could you want?”
The Desi Food Truck, stocked with Indian favorites like lentils, rice, and chicken curry; Eddie’s Pizza, serving freshly baked pizza; and Cupcakestop, billed as “NYC’s first mobile gourmet cupcake shoppe;” and Rickshaw Dumpling featuring flavorful dumplings like the Chocolate Shanghai Soup Dumpling, were the four vendors in the lot.
The city’s first food truck court located on privately owned land, which opened several days ago, will typically have three trucks on-site with a regular rotation of the New York City Food Truck Association’s (NYCFTA) 40 trucks between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays.
”We have this lot where we’ve been parking cars and we thought this would be a pretty good place for them,” said Justin Elghanayan, vice president of Rockrose Development Corp., which owns the lot. “This is bringing life to the neighborhood. … [The food] is really delicious. I think what happens with these food trucks is they specialize in one thing, so they do it better ... though they have certain limited constraints because of the truck, they just get really good at that thing.”
There may be trucks at the parking lot on the weekends, and for special events. If the location proves popular, over 10 new trucks could be added.
Food trucks are a growing social phenomenon that provide a lower-costing, flexible, and quick alternative to the conventional sit-down lunch in restaurants. This new lot could be the beginning of a trend; food trucks giving up some of their mobility in return for the safety of being off the street.
The restaurants near the parking lot are “kind of expensive,” said Magda, another NYCDH employee. “They’re crowded, because there are a lot of people in the area who need to eat lunch.”
There are two Citicorp buildings in the area, as well as a number of residential properties. Jet Blue and the new law school of the City University of New York are scheduled to open buildings nearby early next year.
Food trucks have been struggling to find their place in NYC. The NYPD recently began enforcing a long-forgotten law from 1965 that prohibits vehicles from using metered parking spaces to sell merchandise, and a May 24 New York State Supreme Court ruling that food should be considered merchandise and, thus, subject to the law, has made things more difficult for the mobile vendors.
David Weber, president of the NYCFTA and owner of the Rickshaw Dumpling truck, disagreed with the ruling in an earlier interview with The Epoch Times. He said that food cannot be considered merchandise because it is prepared on the spot and that the prepared dish of food is not something that can be both bought and sold.
“This is great!” exclaimed a New York City Department of Health (NYCDH) employee who saw the trucks while walking by. “Dumplings, apple pie, cupcakes, and Indian food, what more could you want?”
The Desi Food Truck, stocked with Indian favorites like lentils, rice, and chicken curry; Eddie’s Pizza, serving freshly baked pizza; and Cupcakestop, billed as “NYC’s first mobile gourmet cupcake shoppe;” and Rickshaw Dumpling featuring flavorful dumplings like the Chocolate Shanghai Soup Dumpling, were the four vendors in the lot.
The city’s first food truck court located on privately owned land, which opened several days ago, will typically have three trucks on-site with a regular rotation of the New York City Food Truck Association’s (NYCFTA) 40 trucks between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays.
”We have this lot where we’ve been parking cars and we thought this would be a pretty good place for them,” said Justin Elghanayan, vice president of Rockrose Development Corp., which owns the lot. “This is bringing life to the neighborhood. … [The food] is really delicious. I think what happens with these food trucks is they specialize in one thing, so they do it better ... though they have certain limited constraints because of the truck, they just get really good at that thing.”
There may be trucks at the parking lot on the weekends, and for special events. If the location proves popular, over 10 new trucks could be added.
Food trucks are a growing social phenomenon that provide a lower-costing, flexible, and quick alternative to the conventional sit-down lunch in restaurants. This new lot could be the beginning of a trend; food trucks giving up some of their mobility in return for the safety of being off the street.
The restaurants near the parking lot are “kind of expensive,” said Magda, another NYCDH employee. “They’re crowded, because there are a lot of people in the area who need to eat lunch.”
There are two Citicorp buildings in the area, as well as a number of residential properties. Jet Blue and the new law school of the City University of New York are scheduled to open buildings nearby early next year.
Food trucks have been struggling to find their place in NYC. The NYPD recently began enforcing a long-forgotten law from 1965 that prohibits vehicles from using metered parking spaces to sell merchandise, and a May 24 New York State Supreme Court ruling that food should be considered merchandise and, thus, subject to the law, has made things more difficult for the mobile vendors.
David Weber, president of the NYCFTA and owner of the Rickshaw Dumpling truck, disagreed with the ruling in an earlier interview with The Epoch Times. He said that food cannot be considered merchandise because it is prepared on the spot and that the prepared dish of food is not something that can be both bought and sold.
Weber has been negotiating with city officials to establish a compromise for the future of food trucks in the city. “It’s extremely complicated,” he said. “You have so many stakeholders: the truck owners, restaurant owners, New Yorkers who enjoy the food trucks, [and] city planners. … There’s so much history. These vending rules have been on the books for 150 years, and they’re slowly changing.”
The trucks are allowed to be parked at meters for three hours without feeding the meter, while NYPD parking enforcement routinely hand out tickets to some who are within the allotted time frame, according to the vendors.
“The Board of Health gives you a book that tells you where you can park,” said Rob F., a manager at Eddie’s Pizza. “We follow the Board of Health book, but now the city is telling us we can’t park there, it’s like a Catch-22 [and] you can’t win.”
Tickets run from $65–$115, according to Grant Di Mille, co-owner of Sweetery. Rob said they vary from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on what the police decide to write the citation for.
“Anything they want,” said Rob when asked what they cite for, “They can say the guy didn’t have a hairnet on or gloves on, or the building complained that their generator is too loud.”
A fine of $1,000 is due for not having running water on the truck, while a $300 fine is leveled for an employee not wearing a hairnet, according to the recorded testimony of Derek Kay, owner of Eddie’s Pizza, at a City Council hearing on June 16.
The hearing was about Intro 272, an amendment to the Administration Code of NYC that would revoke food vendor permits for parking violations, specifically feeding the meter and idling for more than three minutes. There hasn’t been any activity on the amendment since the hearing, at which 10 mobile truck vendors appeared, including Di Mille.
A Crain’s New York Business poll from June had 63 percent of the votes against food truck vendors losing their license because of parking violations.
There are 3,100 permits circulating for trucks and carts in NYC and another 1,000 seasonal permits. Others are placed on a waiting list and get licenses that expire. The number of food trucks may be around 10,000 and the lack of permits has created a black market, which illegally transfers ownership of existing permits, according to a fall 2010 Food Trucks Report by Boston Councilors Michael P. Ross and Salvatore LaMattina.
Sweetery has over 9,000 followers on Twitter, and has established a brand, thanks to the extensive marketing and advertising experience of Di Mille and his wife and co-owner Samira Mahboubian.
“Moving around is part of what we do, our business is very, very different than all these other trucks,” said Di Mille in a telephone interview. When, on occasion, they’re asked to move by the police, they Tweet their new location, and the customers know where to find them.
“We understand [the situation], we don’t agree with it, we’re hoping somehow or another change is enacted, and there’s some sort of compromise,” said Di Mille.
The New York City Department of Health didn’t return a request for comments, nor did the NYPD.
The trucks are allowed to be parked at meters for three hours without feeding the meter, while NYPD parking enforcement routinely hand out tickets to some who are within the allotted time frame, according to the vendors.
“The Board of Health gives you a book that tells you where you can park,” said Rob F., a manager at Eddie’s Pizza. “We follow the Board of Health book, but now the city is telling us we can’t park there, it’s like a Catch-22 [and] you can’t win.”
Tickets run from $65–$115, according to Grant Di Mille, co-owner of Sweetery. Rob said they vary from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on what the police decide to write the citation for.
“Anything they want,” said Rob when asked what they cite for, “They can say the guy didn’t have a hairnet on or gloves on, or the building complained that their generator is too loud.”
A fine of $1,000 is due for not having running water on the truck, while a $300 fine is leveled for an employee not wearing a hairnet, according to the recorded testimony of Derek Kay, owner of Eddie’s Pizza, at a City Council hearing on June 16.
The hearing was about Intro 272, an amendment to the Administration Code of NYC that would revoke food vendor permits for parking violations, specifically feeding the meter and idling for more than three minutes. There hasn’t been any activity on the amendment since the hearing, at which 10 mobile truck vendors appeared, including Di Mille.
A Crain’s New York Business poll from June had 63 percent of the votes against food truck vendors losing their license because of parking violations.
There are 3,100 permits circulating for trucks and carts in NYC and another 1,000 seasonal permits. Others are placed on a waiting list and get licenses that expire. The number of food trucks may be around 10,000 and the lack of permits has created a black market, which illegally transfers ownership of existing permits, according to a fall 2010 Food Trucks Report by Boston Councilors Michael P. Ross and Salvatore LaMattina.
Sweetery has over 9,000 followers on Twitter, and has established a brand, thanks to the extensive marketing and advertising experience of Di Mille and his wife and co-owner Samira Mahboubian.
“Moving around is part of what we do, our business is very, very different than all these other trucks,” said Di Mille in a telephone interview. When, on occasion, they’re asked to move by the police, they Tweet their new location, and the customers know where to find them.
“We understand [the situation], we don’t agree with it, we’re hoping somehow or another change is enacted, and there’s some sort of compromise,” said Di Mille.
The New York City Department of Health didn’t return a request for comments, nor did the NYPD.
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