A heaping helping of news & reviews from DFW’s dining scene.
Moments ago, the Fort Worth Food Park, that haven for food-truck foodies, announced on its Facebook page that it will open Dec. 2. The park will be at 2509 Weisenberger St., a couple of blocks south of White Settlement Road and just north of the Seventh Street Target.
Charter trucks include Good Karma Kitchen, YES! Taco, Nammi Truck, Lee's Grilled Cheese, cupcake-mobile Red Jett Sweets, and a Jake's Hamburgers truck.
Grand opening is 6 to 10 p.m. Dec. 2. For more info, go here.
The food truck park will be open Thursday-Sunday for dinner. It'll be open for lunch Friday through Sunday. It may eventually expand to a full-week schedule.
UPDATE: Just got off the phone with Chris Kruger, owner/founder of Fort Worth Food Park. Began the discussion by bringing up the eclectic selection of trucks, which range from the vegan/vegetarian Good Karma to a burger truck, with grilled cheese, Vietnamese, tacos and cupcakes in between.
"That's basically what we were going for," Kruger says. "We wanted a wide variety to please the whole family or the group of friends or whatever. Whoever's coming to the park. We'd like to provide for everybody, and we've got enough space for six trucks, where we can reach people with different tastes."
Kruger says the park probably won't have room for more trucks, but trucks will rotate in and out of the park, which at the beginning will be open Thursday-Sunday for dinner and Friday-Sunday for lunch, with hopes of expanding to daily service in the future. Most of these trucks are known for being mobile, so they'll still be hitting other locations and doing special events when they're not in the park. Good Karma will be there daily, Kruger says, but he'll keep other trucks rotating to keep the park fresh.
"We're definitely tight where we are on our lot," Kruger says. "We're definitely going into this designing it as if this is the space we have to work with and going from there. I think it works well; we've got enough space for the trucks, a seating area for people, a nice deck space where we'll have some live music and do some outdoor movie nights, and we'll have some space left over, hopefully, for a sandbox or play area for kids. We're squeezing every inch we can out of the space."
This reminds me of the South Austin Trailer Park & Eatery, which Kruger says is one of the inspirations for the Fort Worth Food Park.
"That is one of the closest things I've seen to what I envisioned for our park," Kruger says. "I love Austin, I love the food-truck scene there, but a lot of what you have there is really just four trucks setting up in a parking lot with a couple of tables. The [South Austin Trailer Park] was a little more designed toward creating an atmosphere where people can sit down and eat and relax. We're taking that and going one step further in thinking about how people can enjoy eating within that space and having some entertainment provided on an ongoing basis."
I asked Kruger if he was worried about the capricious nature of Texas weather, where Dec. 2 could mean an 80-degree day or could mean an ice storm. And let's not even go into last summer ... well, actually, Kruger did.
"On the summer side of things, when it's more warm, the site's going to be especially attractive to customers, because it's such a shaded spot," he says. "We picked this property because it's got almost a 100 percent canopy of trees. So even when I was looking at this property in August and late July, when we had the worst heat wave ever, it was still reasonable on the property, because it's between two buildings and that creates a nice almost wind tunnel, and you've got shade and we'll have misters out there to cool it off. And in the winter ... it's not often that [the cold] stays for too long, but we'll have heaters out there to make it more comfortable."
