Food Truck Rodeo in Memphis

First, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!  Happy Mother’s Day to my mom who is awesome and all the other amazing moms out there. I hope the day is amazing and you are celebrated and cherished.

Second, let me tell you about the food truck rodeo that happened in Memphis on Thursday. Sure this blog post is a little late but I’ve been busy!

The new Memphis Food Truck Alliance was created recently to unite the various food truck operators to help support and market the members. Memphis is new to food trucks and only last year started allowing them to operate. I think right now there are around 50 or so in operation and I’ve seen maybe a dozen of them, most at the Food Truck Rodeo on Thursday.

By the time thursday rolled around I couldn’t contain my excitement!It started at 11 a.m. and we left around 11:45 to walk the couple blocks to Court Square where the food truck rodeo was happening.

When we got there things were in full swing and several trucks had rather long lines. It seemed that Revival Southern Food and Fuel Cafe were very popular and had the longest lines.

After checking out several of the menus at various food trucks I decided to get in line at Fuel Cafe’s food truck. They had bison tacos that sounded interesting!

Unfortunately everyone else had the same idea that I did. The line was very long so it crawled along slowly. Lucky for us it was a beautiful day.

Then, five people before I got to order they ran out of bison. After waiting twenty minutes (or more?) in line I had to switch my order to chicken tacos. They erased it right off the menu when I got close. It was a bit disappointing but I was also excited they were getting so much business.

When I finally got my chicken tacos, about half an hour after ordering them, but luckily they made up for the wait.

I love a good taco! The chicken was well flavored and taco worked perfectly as a whole with the veggies and warm corn tortillas. I was very happy to see the cilantro on top too! I added a bit of hot sauce and it was perfect!

After eating my tacos I went to get frozen yogurt from YoLo… except they weren’t taking credit cards. Yuck.

Overall the food truck rodeo was a bit disappointing. A few people on Twitter complained about waiting 1.5 hours for food and my coworker gave up after waiting and went to a local restaurant. I’ll give them a pass though because it was the first one and it’s hard to predict how big the crowd will be the first time you hold an event like that. Hopefully next time will be better.

I’d love for them to do it once a week downtown, maybe on Thursdays. I think it would be nice to have a revolving group featuring different food trucks every week.

The Memphis Food Truckers website will eventually include event listings where food trucks will be and a map tool showing exactly where food trucks are operating that day. As a food truck lover I’ve extremely excited about that!

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Biking In Memphis

Biking in New Zealand is pretty easy. Where we live the roads either have bike lanes or are wide enough to accommodate both bikes and cars. I can do pretty much all my errands by bike without a problem so I rarely take the car.

However, I’m a bit nervous about biking while I’m living in Memphis.  In years past it has been known as a very unfriendly city to cyclists and I’ve heard some horror stories from friends who did try biking to work. Personally I never tried biking to work either since I usually lived 20-30 minutes away by car and bikes don’t mix with interstates.

Now though I’m living closer to my work place and biking to and from work is actually possible! I’m super excited about that. And since I’ve biked a bit in Downtown already I feel more confident about my ability to actually do this.

Plus since the last time I was in Memphis they have created MILES of new bike lanes! The street I’m on and both of the streets nearby leading downtown have new bike lanes. It’s pretty awesome!

For a little extra reassurance I’ve been researching routes and other cycling stuff in Memphis. I’ve found some great things about Memphis and biking in my search:

Memphis is one of six cities that have been chosen to get fast track protected bicycle lanes from Bikes Belong Foundation. The Green Lane Project is a cool effort working with six US cities including Memphis to help build world-class cycling networks on city streets in the next two years. This is huge for Memphis and makes me really happy!Annual Bike to Work Day is on May 18th, which I can actually participate in! I remember this from last year and was so bummed that I lived too far away to ride there safely, so I’m super excited this year! You have to register this year though but that is easily done here.Some cool Memphis bicycle related sites: Greater Memphis Greenline (multi use trails throughout the city which are really nice), Biking in Memphis, Bike Walk Tennessee, Livable Memphis, Fix Memphis., Memphis Bike Polo (I’d be scared to play but it looks cool).City of Memphis Bike Route Tours and a map of proposed/future bike lanes in Memphis: Memphis Bike Lanes. Bike Lanes proposed by Mayor AC Wharton to be completed by 2013.And what I was really looking for: Map of Bike-Friendly Streets in Memphis!! I’m using this to plan potential routes to work. Thanks to this map I confirmed what I thought would be a good route to take and will check it out for real once I get into the city. Looks like it will work perfectly!I just found Kyle Wagenschutz’s website/blog Bike Ped Memphis this week. Kyle is the city’s Bicycle/Pedestrian Coordinator and he has done great things for biking in Memphis over the last couple of years and I’m excited to follow his blog on the topic.

I think Memphis could be a great city for cycling and it’s nice to see changes being made to move in that direction. Memphis gets a bad rap all the time from almost everyone but I love it here and always will. I guess I like an underdog with character. It makes me happy to see good things happening in the city, especially regarding one of my other loves – biking!

I’ll be writing a lot more about biking in Memphis once I actually pick up a bike and start doing it. For now I’m waiting on my bike I’m borrowing from my boss (should get it this weekend). I’m super excited to get it and get out there and test out all those new bike lanes! Wish me luck!

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