Kevin Roden – 01.25.11

Denton’s two universities have a long history of providing examples of beauty and innovation for the benefit of the entire city.  Both UNT and TWU have provided not just space for intellectual reflection, but a concrete environment within which we can all reflect upon the meaning of place.  There we find the town’s highest standards of architecture, landscape, public art, walkability, and a sense of community. It makes sense, therefore, that UNT would be the city’s leader in mobile food carts.

More than just places to buy food, these carts bring forth both culture and an opportunity for interaction to the very place where most meaningful human connections occur: on the public sidewalk. Several years ago, the first hot dog cart arrived on campus to the delight of students, faculty, and staff.  A version of that original stand remains in the form of “The Texas Pitstops,” where you can get a hot dog, braut, or sausage link with all the fixings you would expect from such a cart.  The scent of seasoned grilled onions and sauerkraut hit you as soon as you walk out the door of the Language Building, drawing you toward their location just South of the GAB.  This semester saw a new, more ambitious, and less traditional attempt at the food cart with the advent of Khush Roti, a stand complete with nine options of grilled sandwiches.  And those are just the officially sanctioned carts…

The Angry Friar, a 1961 English double-decker Routemaster, is the mobile home of an authentic fair of fried fish and chips.  On Monday through Saturday evenings from 5 to 10pm, you can find them tucked in beside Curry Hall at the UNT campus (right across the street from the Fry Street pubs).  But you will not find them in more logical and heavily foot-trafficked areas such as the downtown square.  Why? As a state institution, UNT is exempt from the city’s bureaucratic obstacles that prevent downtown Denton from fostering an emerging food cart culture of its own.  In short, the Friar bus is prevented from setting up shop on a regular basis in other areas of town and finds helpful refuge on the premises of UNT.

The City of Denton’s Consumer Health department oversees the regulations, permits, and inspections of Denton’s food service industry.  On their website, this information sheet is provided outlining some of the regulations relating to mobile food carts.  Among other things, the prohibition against home food preparation and home storage of food and carts effectively requires a food cart operator to also operate a full-service restaurant.  What this sheet does not address is where carts can set-up and for how long.  An October Denton Record-Chronicle article even went so far as to state that “the city’s health code doesn’t allow for them.”  An earlier THINKDENTON article alluded to another emerging outdoor taco stand phenomena occurring on weekend nights along McKinney Street, but those are linked to and physically exist on the premises of their respective parent restaurants.

As it stands today, the city ordinances make it easier to come into town and erect obnoxious and unhealthy gas drills across from a city park then it is to run a gyro stand on the Courthouse lawn.  It is easier for an out-of-town developer to come into town and arbitrarily tear down a row of 1920s era buildings with deep and lasting culture significance than it is for a local chef to try out his urban mexican cuisine from the back of his truck on our downtown square.  This seems silly.  As the city has its sights on creating a first-class new urban downtown, they would do well to re-examine embarrassingly outdated codes that prevent something that makes so much sense – and at no cost to the citizen, other than the 99 cents they would spend on a delicious Taco al Pastor.

The recent focus on our downtown area is encouraging, but the renewed interest in development will inevitably drive up leasing rates as property values increase.  That is good news from the point of view of commerce and tax revenue for the city.  It also creates the (hopefully) unintended consequence of pricing less-well-funded locally-owned, funky start-ups out of the downtown market.  Opening up the market for mobile food carts, in addition to creating a quick and certainly ever-changing landscape of culinary options by which to draw more downtown visitors, will provide the much needed space for creative entrepreneurs to try new things with a much lower ceiling of risk.

Such a policy might also be a step toward an atmosphere of civic wholeness to the core of the city.  It remains an unfortunate fact that the demographics visiting our town square are much paler than the true colors of our culturally-rich town.  Why not go out of our way to invite our Southeast Denton neighbors, where there already exists a well-established and growing food culture, to the city’s main dining table by encouraging some of the Taquerias and BBQ vendors to create satellite food carts on the square?  As the upcoming train shifts our eyes to the East of the square and provides a new corridor to “the other side of the tracks,” why not find a way to encourage a seamless connection to this under-utilized cultural asset?

City leaders: this is an easy one.

For more info on UNT’s food carts, check out NT Daily’s Shannon Moffatt’s January 25 story on the subject.