Street Eats Columbus

Not all Mobile Food kitchens roll away in the winter, but most do. This spring, most of the carts, trucks and trailers from last year are back. We have also heard of many new vendors soon to swim into the ever growing pond of mobile food. For readers that think this is a fad or passing fancy, think again and eat some more. Mobile food is here is stay in Columbus and the nation.

The National Restaurant Association show in the Chicago is the largest food vendor event in the world. This year, mobile food is there in a big way. Several books have just come off the presses including Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels. The Great Food Truck Race was a smash hit on TV. Locally mobile food vendors have just formed COMFVA: The Central Ohio Mobile Food Vendors Association. Street meat is a serious business and it is growing.

The Street Eats team is a serious collective of a cadre of culinary adventurers that take food and food writing seriously. We all have some connection to the culinary trades and one of us recently graduated from Hot Dog University (a course in all things hot dog cart). Columbus has long been a test bed and launching ground for new food concepts. In the case of the Midwest and most of the country, for the genre of mobile kitchens, our city is ahead of the curve. This should be a great year for mobile food so join us in our adventures in eating and help us support small business at it’s best.

The best place to start to try out a cart? Expect some Mobile Food festivals this summer. The Wexner Center will host a food cart weekly at their Market at 15th & High on Thursdays starting in a few weeks. In addition to new trucks and updated hours with locations for veteran street vendors we will let you know about events as they are scheduled. Don’t forget our Taco Truck Community, the largest in the Midwest, when you want dine al fresco.

If you care to be a savvy street eater, you can pick up a Small Business Beanstalk card for savings at some mobile vendors. (See the current examples here).

What a great event! The weather couldn’t have been better, and the turnout was phenomenal. We were going to write up a quick recap, but after seeing this excellent video by Mike Beaumont, we realized that it says everything we’d want to say about the event much better than we could with mere words.

If you’d like to see the video in high resolution (and I’d like to suggest that you really should), there’s a 720p versions here. Don’t forget to hit the ‘full screen’ button on the bottom right.

Welcome to the latest project from the team who brought you Taco Trucks Columbus and Alt Eats Columbus.

Columbus’ street food scene is growing, not just in numbers of vendors but also in variety. We now have mobile vendors offering cupcakes, Japanese crepes and pork belly quesadillas.

These vendors deserve their own website, and a guide to help people find great eats on our city streets.

We will be adding information to this site soon, but in the mean time here’s a previous post on Columbus’ mobile food mania and the Dispatch’s coverage on street food.