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Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > october 16 > 2012
ing equipment. Billow argued that trucks can provide additional tax revenue for the city, can employ from 40 to 60 people, and offers an opportunity to brighten blighted areas, or areas with little to no nightlife options — new laws could allow mobile vendors in areas where they’re currently prohibited but needed. “Food trucks will show parts of city areas without significant … entertainment or restaurants that they’re viable,” Head said. Vendors can expect to pay $305.25 for the initial vending permits, but not vendors selling ice cream, nuts, hot tamales and pies — the standard “truck” fare in current city code, obviously not in tune with the gourmet burgers, tacos, grilled cheese sandwiches and other dishes served from today’s food trucks. For those smaller sales like peanuts, vendors pay between $25 and $50 for a permit. “We need to come up with a more rational set of fees,” Head said. That night, as La Cocinita served up spicy sliders to people gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Friday Night Fights boxing gym, Billow pronounced herself pleased with the council’s reaction. “I’m really optimistic,” she said. “People brought up a couple of good points about trash and public health. We’re all about no littering around our trucks, and food trucks are subject to the same health codes as restaurants.”
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As in the French Quarter, food trucks also are banned in the Central Business District. Councilmembers said they’d like to have more options near City Hall, or in
nearby Lafayette Square, for a potential regular food truck rally. (In many cities, food trucks cluster in “pods” in downtown areas so they can serve lunch to office workers.) As the city revises drafts of its comprehensive zoning ordinance (CZO), Head said city planners need to incorporate food trucks. “The concept of having permanent mobile vendors is one we have to incorporate into the upcoming CZO discussions … so the same prohibitions don’t come into play,” Head said. “How do we work with this 600 feet ordinance, which will be changed, and how do you make the two work together?” In drafting the new rules, Head’s office is looking to cities like Los Angeles, which has no restrictions on mobile vending laws, and Chicago, which recently reformed its vending laws without community input and suffered serious backlash as a result. Danielle Viguerie, Head’s chief of staff, said the new ordinance will likely fall somewhere near the former, though tailored to the city in a way that will be “unique to New Orleans. … We’ll approach this looking at other cities while thinking what’s best in New Orleans.” Restaurants also are getting in the truck game: Dat Dog, Sucre and Drago’s have mobile trucks, and Martinique Bistro is waiting for a permit to operate a truck in New Orleans. Uptown restaurant Boucherie opened its full-time restaurant after the success of its truck Que Crawl. Though the coalition has support from big-name restaurants like Brigtsen’s,
Galatoire’s and Emeril’s, vendors and the city are looking to the Louisiana Restaurant Association (LRA) to also join the discussion in drafting the new laws. “The Louisiana Restaurant Association does not currently have a position on food trucks or mobile vendors,” LRA vice president of communications Wendy Waren wrote in an email to Gambit. “The LRA is a statewide trade association, therefore we are looking at this issue as a whole, not market by market.” (In contrast to New Orleans, Baton Rouge has a well-established food truck scene. In January, when the Travel Channel’s foodie host Andrew Zimmern visited Louisiana, he hung out at Baton Rouge’s Wednesday Food Truck Wroundup.) “This is a group of people who are young entrepreneurs — the threshold to get into business is pretty low. It’s not a big capital outlay. It’s the kind of business that can be open to all kinds of people,” Head told Gambit. “It supports a sense of community without startup costs that are so challenging for many restaurants.” (Food truck vendors can expect to pay $40,000 to $50,000 for startup costs, as opposed to a few hundred thousand dollars for a brickand-mortar space.) It was that low buy-in that enticed husband and wife Jarett and Rachel Eymard to buy an old bread truck and turn it into the Rue Chow food truck. Rachel had been a sous chef at Lilette, while Jarett was a butcher at the Besh Steakhouse inside Harrah’s New Orleans. Their eclectic approach results in global fusion ideas like a Korean bar-
becue chicken pita sandwich, satsuma meringue pie and pumpkin cake with maple frosting. Are the Eymards hopeful that the city council may finally break through the logjam of archaic vending laws? “Without a doubt,” Rachel says. Of course, the beneficiaries of all this will be food lovers, particularly those who enjoy drinking at bars and would appreciate a mobile food option parked outside. The food truck Taceaux Loceaux, for instance, is a familiar sight outside clubs like Dos Jefes Uptown Cigar Bar and 45 Tchoup. And the New Orleans food truck scene also brings a new audience to the city’s real mobile food pioneers: the vendors who have sold food for years at the city’s second lines, people such as “Ms. Linda, the YaKa-Mein Lady” and Darren West, who sells barbecue under the name “Bittles With the Vittles.” Many of these trucks showed up on Oretha Castle Haley Oct. 11 for a special Thursday night “Central City Food Truck Fest,” organized by Head and the Good Work Network. The Tuesday before, grilled cheese vendor King was hanging out at the regular Tuesday night roundup with his French bulldog Bootz. His truck had mechanical problems, so he wasn’t selling his signature sandwiches. But King, who had been a lawyer in Washington D.C. before moving to New Orleans, said that whatever challenges food truck vending presented, it was still preferable to working in a courtroom. “It’s hard, and it’s a fight,” King said. “But it’s never as bad as that.”
Prison, U.S. District Court Judge Lance Africk has ordered a draft of a preliminary consent decree due by Monday, Oct. 15, according to court documents. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed the suit in April on behalf of all Orleans Parish Prison inmates. Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) joined as a plaintiff. More recently, the court granted a request from Gusman that the City of New Orleans — which controls the sheriff’s budget — be named as a third-party defendant. The federal government has been negotiating an agreement with the sheriff’s office for more than a year, following an investigation that began in 2008. In 2009, DOJ released a findings letter describing brutal guard-on-inmate violence, staffing shortages leading to frequent inmate-on-inmate violence, and woefully inadequate access to health care. DOJ released another letter this
year saying that OPSO had made little progress in remedying the problems. — CHARLES MALDONADO
scuttlebutt Quotes of the week NFL DisappoiNtmeNt eDitioN “I am surprised and disappointed by the fact that you, a former defensive captain and a passionate advocate for player safety, ignored such a program and permitted it to continue.” — NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, in a letter addressed to former New Orleans Saint and current Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita. Goodell also wrote public letters last week to players Jonathan Vilma, Anthony Hargrove and Will Smith reaffirming the suspensions and discipline imposed upon them for their alleged roles in the Saints bounty scandal. “For me, the issue of player health and safety is personal. For the league and the Commissioner, it’s about perception and liability. The Commissioner says he is disappointed in me. The truth is,
I’m disappointed in him.” — Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita, in his own open letter. “It seems like so much of his suspensions have been based upon speculation and rhetoric and maybe the testimony of some pretty unreliable sources. So that’s the unfortunate thing — it seems like his decision changes quite a bit and at least the reasoning behind what his decision is. So that is the disappointing part of it for all of us.” — Saints quarterback Drew Brees on WWL-AM on Oct. 11.
OPP and the feds DoJ says GusmaN has maDe Few improvemeNts at opp In a move to resolve a federal classaction lawsuit against the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office (OPSO) and Sheriff Marlin Gusman over allegedly inhumane living conditions at Orleans Parish
cAbl news Former Govs Discuss the state oF the state The Council for A Better Louisiana (CABL), a nonpartisan public policy group, will mark its 50th anniversary with a panel discussion by Louisiana’s four former governors covering more than 30 years of state politics. The event will begin at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 at the Hilton Capitol Center in Baton Rouge. Former Govs. Edwin Edwards, Buddy Roemer, Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco will be on the same stage for the first time “to share their thoughts and insights on where Louisiana stands, where it’s come from and where we’re going in the second decade of the 21st century,” according to a