When I was 5 or 6, there was a Peach man who parked in the parking lot of Randall’s, a grocery store in Austin. He would drive in, probably from Fredricksburg, during peach season and sell peaches to everyone.
I had completely forgotten about this until I was reading Re-thinking A Lot, the first-ever urban planning book about the role of parking lots. Eran is a customer and head of urban studies at MIT. We invited him to be a panelist at the Food Truck 101 Conference we’re helping organize, so I went and bought his book from the MIT Press Bookstore.
I’m always happy whenever I see a little kiosk or truck in a parking lot. I always have to stop. When my friends road-tripped to Maine, I made everyone go to the lobster-roll shack in the parking lot of this outerwear store. I read Ayr’s post about an ATM restaurant before I ever started working at Clover.
Do you love parking lots, food trucks, or just want to learn about the direction of street food in our cities? There are still a few tickets left for Thursday’s Food Truck 101 conference. Signups end tonight at midnight. We’re featuring top food truck operators (Roxy’s, Bon Me, Mei Mei), Edith Murnane (City of Boston Food czar), Christine Liu (one of the first writers to identify the food truck trend in Boston), Merry White (food anthropologist), and Zenovia Toloudi, an architect who thinks about food and public spaces.
