After months of serving from 12th & F St NW, Andy Kim’s Yellow Vendor food truck, offering Korean BBQ, will be serving from 19th & Pennsylvania Ave NW today.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how DCRA & MPD have hired multiple officers to dedicate to enforcing DC food truck laws & regulations.  Almost every other day, I see a tweet about a food truck being late to lunch because they were just pulled over on the street to have their permit checked.  The latest incident occurred just yesterday when DC Empanadas was stopped and released while en-route to their lunch spot.  It takes a lot of time and effort to construct a food truck that is compliant with food safety code and then requires additional effort to acquire all of the inspection certificates.  One could reason that the seemingly extreme checking of permits and food truck regulations enforcement is here to protect those DC Chefs who have gone through all of the trouble to get the correct permits.

But, it is also bittersweet to see the enforcement activity actually working when an out of town marketing campaign wants to serve free coffee out of a truck.  As in the case of the SeamlessWeb Free Coffee Days marketing campaign, where passerbys were able to grab a free cup of coffee and a discount coupon to use with their online food delivery service, MPD asked the truck to pack things up and also fined the truck for not having a valid permit.

Just another day of drama on the DC food truck scene! 🙂

As reported by Bitches Who Brunch, DC food trucks are celebrating DC Meat Free Week by offering $1 off their veggie offerings today.  Participating food trucks include Eat Wonky, Sweetflow Mobile, Dangerously Delicious Pies, Fojol Brothers, PORC Mobile, DC Slices and El Floridano.

The full list of trucks + info is listed on the DC Vegan website.

Great news coffee lovers! Online food ordering service SeamlessWeb is giving out more than 10,000 cups of free coffee all over Washington DC this week from their food truck! Follow along at Free Coffee Days DC or right here at Food Truck Fiesta so you can find out where to grab your free cup each day.

Need more? Take a photo with your cup and tweet it @SeamlessWeb and you could win $100 in free food!

NOTE: The SeamlessWeb coffee truck will be on the Food Truck Fiesta map and found tomorrow at Metro Center and Gallery Place!

One of the best kept secrets of the DC food truck scene is just how well organized the food truck owners are in everything they do.  I’ve been following their tweets for many months and I can tell you that I witnessed this extreme organization in just a matter of days.

To the outsider, you observe many individually branded food trucks with varying cuisine that seem to roam about the District and Arlington in search of hungry customers.  Then, all of a sudden you wake up on a Saturday and find that no less than 7 food trucks had been summoned to the GWU campus to serve food at the RootsCamp conference.  A few Mondays later, you find an impromptu food truck fiesta at Franklin Square hosting almost the entire inventory of DC food trucks, as if some giant multinational company CEO ordered that it be done.

This extreme organization of DC food trucks is not directed by any single person or by some ambiguous parent company.  DC Food Trucks have self-organized for several reasons: Survival, Friendship and Business.  I haven’t interviewed trucks for this particular story, but 80% of this info can be gleaned from reading pages and pages of tweets.  For example, on December 18th, El Floridano tweets “Huge Massive shout out to Tom @DCSlices for the propane hook up!!”  Simultaneously, every DC food truck tweets the following on December 7th: “URGENT: Tell the City Council to stand up to these special interests by emailing your council member now – www.SaveDCFoodTrucks.org“.

How well organized are DC food trucks now? Well, I happen to know that DC food trucks have in-person owner/operator meetings as frequently as on a weekly basis.  And, as of late last week, it isn’t such a big secret anymore because the DC Mobile Food Vendors Association has officially formed. According to Matt Geller CEO – SoCal Mobile Food Vendors’ Association, who was flown in to DC to consult the DCMFVA, the newly elected board of the DC Mobile Food Vendors Association includes Kristi Whitfield (executive director) of Curbside Cupcakes, Justin Vitarello (assistant director) of Fojol Bros and Mike Lenard (assistant director) of TaKorean.

The restaurant associations have had a huge head start in lobbying against food trucks, attacking them through proposed District of Columbia DCRA regulations.  So, while the DC food truck industry seems to be thriving right now, its existence is still not guaranteed.

The (yet to be built) DCMFVA website is located here and their twitter handle is @DCMFVA.  Yes, @foodtruckfiesta is the first one to follow @DCMFVA 🙂

Austin Grill just contacted me to let everyone know that they are launching a DC food truck, expected to start serving by March 1, 2011! Austin Grill joins the handful of brick and mortar restaurants that are announcing plans to open up a food truck, with District of Pi being the most recent. Dangerously Delicious Pies and Sweetgreen’s Sweetflow Mobile are examples of trucks that have already launched, and District Taco went in the other direction by creating a brick and mortar restaurant out of their food truck business.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Austin Grill, it is a 6 restaurant Tex-Mex chain that is based in the Washington, DC area. The DC restaurant is located in Penn Quarter at 750 E St NW.

Edit: Thanks Britt for the corrections!

Well, shame on me for not reporting this on Feb 1st.. But, scanning the tweets last week, it looks like the word has gotten out, so it’s open season! Rolling Wit Burgers will serve gourmet burgers with fries and the owner expects to start serving during the first 2 weeks of April 2011.

The truck is named Rolling Wit Burgers and will serve burgers and fries.  The twitter handle is @Rollingwburgers.  Check out the profile page for future updates!

From the makers of Sauca, MEATHEAD Mobile Eatery offers a menu of 4 steak, pork and chicken sandwiches. There will be a soft opening on Farragut Friday tomorrow (2/4)! Here’s MEATHEAD page with all of the info + MENU.

I just got in touch with the owner of a new DC food truck named The Rolling Ficelle. This food truck serves excellent sandwiches on fresh Lyon Bakery bread. More details are coming soon! Check out the Rolling Ficelle profile page for further details.

BTW – Ficelle is a type of French bread that is a little narrower than the typical French bread.

I just wanted to quickly note that those looking for a DC food truck dinner tonight are in luck!  Outside the Ritz at 23rd & M St NW, five food trucks will be serving food to benefit the Washington Humane Society (@Wash_Humane)!  Trucks serving are: @LobstertruckDC @CapMacDC @DCEmpanadas @dcslices @Saborastreet