Local businesses declare war on the food trucks

Karma is a bitch and the businesses who called the police today to report the Ms. Cheezious food truck will find that out. Yup, that's what happened, local businesses called the police to report the food truck's presence. As usual, on Fridays, there is a food truck parked on Florida Avenue behind Mayfair. Crispin-Porter, the ad agency, arranged it as a diversion for employees who wanted something different for lunch.

But trying to put an end to a good thing, a couple of local businesses decided it was a good idea to report the truck to the police. The police showed up and explained the situation to the truck owner, Crispin-Porter and Mayfair and just like that they came up with a solution -- park the truck inside the loading dock, so that the truck would be on private property. After all, the truck was parked at street meters, which is not allowed. So moving to private property is the answer. They promised to get a permit for next week. The original plan weeks ago was to park the trucks on the Mayfair Promenade, but it turned out that the trucks may be too large for that, so even at the very beginning, keeping it all legal was the plan.


Anyway, the truck moved around the corner and the public lined up (mostly Crispin-Porter and Sony employees), just like they do every week to enjoy grilled cheese sandwiches. Something as simple as grilled cheese makes people happy.

Now you know I am always on the businesses side when it comes to everything, but in this instance, I do think that the businesses may have started a war and not so much with the food trucks, but with the very people who they hope to lure to their establishments. I heard so much grumbling from the food line, all negative toward the local food places.

Many told me that they would not be eating in any of the local places for lunch today anyway, or most days for that matter, they just don't. Many said they felt that the people who reported the truck and tried to start trouble are only going to see it backfire on themselves.

I for one am going to boycott all Grove food establishments this weekend. I have a few friends in from out of town and we usually always eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Grove, but not this weekend. That's my little protest for what I see as spitefulness. I know the places that reported the trucks to the police and to be honest, they sit empty at lunch time and this crowd was not going to magically appear out of the blue today to eat there. So all they did was spread ill will, which reflects on all of Coconut Grove.

It's things like this that hurt the Grove. Rather than be on the cutting edge and being part of the 21st Century, merchants are happy to be the last to jump on this food truck bandwagon and we are being left in the dark by doing this. The Grove slowly is slipping off the map because we have nothing of interest to put us on the map anymore, not even simple food trucks that are a big draw.

More next week on this.

Tonight on CSI: New York the story revolves around food trucks that are being blown up in NYC. Let's hope it never gets to that point here. Here's a food for thought preview.