Food fight between restaurants and trucks heats up outside Amazon

Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood is about to welcome a new food truck park featuring a rotating lineup of vendors.

“Ballard Bite” should solve a main issue faced by food trucks in South Lake Union: It will include seating, beers by the can and on tap, plus bathrooms for patrons.

But not everybody is happy about the success of these meals on wheels.

Nollie’s Cafe owner Dan Munro has seen his South Lake Union neighborhood change dramatically since the family business opened in 1973.

Read more: 10 favorite food trucks in Seattle

His lunch spot is within blocks of new buildings filled with Amazon employees, but that extra demand for sandwiches and soup hasn’t materialized. He says the problem started when the Seattle City Council gave the green light to mobile food vending on public streets in 2011.

“I see that as a breach of the social contract,” says Munro. “I mean, we are brick and mortar. We pay for the roads and sidewalks with our taxes. When the food trucks come in, I end up cutting my staff and hours by 30 percent.”

Munro pointed me west on Harrison Street to the neighboring Taco Del Mar. He says they’ve been around since the 1990s.

“They’ve been here through all this stuff and paid their taxes and then the city comes along, after we’ve survived all this, and put in two taco trucks between the Amazon campus and Taco Del Mar,” says Munro.

He says food trucks lining up to serve hungry tech workers have cut off foot traffic to his restaurant and now the lunch hour is his slowest.

Trucks have become a popular way for entrepreneurs to get into the culinary scene. SeattleFoodTruck.com lists about 170 mobile food vendors — 50 that started rolling in 2014 — although there were also a number of closures.

A little over two years ago, Bo Saxbe left a research job at AmGen and he and his brother, Tom, customized their sandwich-mobile.

Though they don’t pay rent and getting started is cheaper, Saxbe says mobile vendors do have to navigate a tangle of state and local regulations that make it difficult to do business.

“We are actually required to have equipment in the truck by the Labor and Industries Department that we are prohibited from using by the Department of Health.”

Saxbe adds that on top of city regulations on truck locations, they can’t be within 50 feet of an existing food business and there can’t be more than two trucks on one side of the street. There are also food safety requirements that most dishes must be pre-cooked in a central, Department of Health-inspected commissary kitchen.

Saxbe admits there should be some form of limits on the number of food trucks allowed in Seattle, similar to the way taxi licenses are capped. But he believes a rising tide of interested diners lifts all grilled-cheese boats.

“The competition between trucks and brick and mortar is a healthy one,” says Saxbe. “While there might be some head to head, everyone benefits when a scene like South Lake Union is energized with a lot of food options.”