This opinion piece by Scott Bolejack of the Garner-Clayton Record also gets the Raleigh food truck fight right.
And it’s not as though food trucks have a guaranteed advantage over brick-and-mortar restaurants. Most obvious, few people stand in the rain, sleet, snow, cold or heat to buy lunch on a paper plate, even a good, cheap lunch. Raleigh, by the way, has about 110 days of rain a year. That number doesn’t matter as much to a restaurant with a roof over its head. Neither does the temperature, be it 100 or 30 degrees.
In this economy, new entrepreneurs are seeking low-cost entries into growing marketplaces. What’s surprising is that some local governments are working overtime to bar that entry.
Carolina Journal’s Sara Burrows provides more details about Raleigh city council’s response to the political pressure from brick-and-mortar restaurants in this article.
Belmo, a Panamanian, is a first generation American. Her husband is German and grew up eating his grandmother’s German pretzels. Pretzels are their passion. Belmo thought, in America, she would have the opportunity to make a profit off of her passion, but it’s harder than she expected.
“All we want to do is serve pretzels,” she said. “We want to serve people. But we’re coming up against all of this bureaucracy, all of these restaurants that don’t understand what the American model of free enterprise is.”
Belmo and her husband have done some traveling, noting that in much of the rest of the world “street food” is plentiful. She talked about how world-class chefs, like Anthony Bourdain, are “not above” eating street food. In many places, street food is considered a delicacy.
But in Raleigh, the owners of brick and mortar restaurants “have taken this kind of elitist attitude, saying because you’re in a food truck that your food may not be as good, or that you’re going to de-class or degrade the city,” Belmo said.
“I think they’re just afraid, and I can understand that, but it’s called competition,” she said. “Get a better product.”
