I just wanted to send a shout out to all of the FTF fans out there, especially the food truck owners and all of those who have emailed in to report website issues and suggest enhancements – THANK YOU!

Food Truck Fiesta just logged its 25,000th page load and 15,000th visitor since opening up to the web 1 month ago. I’m looking forward to growing as more food trucks get licensed in DC/MD/VA!

Also, not to dump too much on the adsense ads, but I’m not a huge fan of seeing “chevy truck” ads on this food related site. To that end, if anyone is interested in directly advertising with FTF, please get in touch by clicking the envelope icon on the top right of the site. Thanks!

After a few false starts, we can confidently say that the first lobster food truck will debut today!  Look for it at 11am in the Farragut Square area.  Exact location will be shown on the Food Truck Fiesta map! Here is the relevant tweet:

Official word from the Lobster Truck King Kahuna – All Systems Go -they will be at Farragut Square around 11am & will tweet exact location!

Update: It’s here and it’s good! Pics:

As tweeted today by El Floridano, some businesses and Business Improvement Districts (BID) are trying to modify DCRA regulations to limit or stop food trucks from vending in DC. A website, called yesontitle24.com, was setup with a sample form letter that you can send to a DCRA contact. This is a quick copy & paste job, people! Help protect the food truck industry!

Sweetflow Mobile is starting a new thing: giving away free Sweetflow on Saturdays – yes!  Check out current locations on the FTF food truck tracker!

After a successful private launch Thursday night, the Red Hook Lobster Pound food truck was hoping to make its first public serving today (Friday). But, due to rainy weather and, well, Friday the 13th, LobsterTruckDC announced that it will launch on Monday! Here is a copy of the tweet:

So, we’re not as weatherproof as our favorite hard-shelled friends and Friday the13th demons struck our truck. So sorry. Hope to roll Mon.

Stand down! Stand down! Ok, the Empanada Truck is still with us, they just changed their twitter handle to DCEmpanadas.  But, it looks like they changed their twitter handle back to EmpanadaTruckDC amidst all of the confusion.  I swear I did a twitter search for empanadas before creating that last blog post, but didn’t find anything.  Oh well.  But, the great news is that we should be seeing a new food truck!

The DC Empanadas folks were kind enough to get in touch with me to divulge the following info about their new truck:

We are hoping to hit the streets this fall & will be offering a variety of unique empanadas including:

Thai
Steak + Cheese
Mac + Cheese
Pulled Pork
BBQ Chicken
Traditional beef
Chicken pot pie
Caramel Apple
Chocolate

Right now we are waiting for our truck to be finished and are still playing with the menu!  We are truly excited to hit the DC streets!!

I received some @’s on Twitter announcing an up and coming DC food truck called EmpanadaTruckDC (thanks everyone!!)  But, as I was going to add it to the sidebar, I noticed that the Twitter account has been deleted.  What the hizzle?

Here is the relevant tweet. Click on the URL for more details!  It’ll be 12 noon – 5pm at two locations downtown (25th & Penn and 5th & K NW)

Pumped for tomorrow bc it’s saturday & we’re handing out free sweetflow! http://ow.ly/2lFHa

As you already know, Food Truck Fiesta tracks locations of DC food trucks by listening for daily tweets with location updates.  Every once in a while, food trucks like to announce their planned schedule for the next day or even the whole week.  We publish that info on the side of the map for everyone to read, but does that mean that they will actually be at the planned location when that day arrives?

Past experience shows that unexpected issues arise quite frequently: sold out of food, a power outage prevents the truck from being supplied, last minute private event or catering gig, thunderstorms, streets blocked off or even a food truck operator just being spontaneous.  For this reason, Food Truck Fiesta believes in only displaying a food truck’s location if it just tweeted that it is currently at that location.

We’ve noticed that Yellow Vendor has recently tweeted that they’ll be at one location all week for lunch.  For the past two days, they have indeed been at that one location.  But, we still believe that unless the truck tweets when they arrive on location, we cannot be 100% sure that they are at the planned location.  Plus, it also helps let fans know when they get there!

If food trucks don’t tweet their locations upon arrival and instead just tweets a static location at the beginning of the week, doesn’t that make them more of an old school food cart?

A new Korean BBQ truck has been announced on Friday that they have been approved by DCRA and the fire marshal and are ready to start serving!  It is called Takorean.  Here is their tweet from July 29:

DC Health Dept. inspection…Passed. DCRA Street Vendors License…..Approved! We are now officially licensed to… http://fb.me/DkrDrOCa

Their Facebook page has more info.  FTF will start tracking as soon Takorean hits the streets of DC!