Food Trucks Return to Main Street Santa Monica After Long Hiatus
Customers at the food trucks outside the California Heritage Museum on Main Street, Santa Monica, Calif., on Tuesday, August 25, 2020. The food trucks were last here in March, and because of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions on public gatherings could not return until this evening. (Marco Pallotti/The Corsair)
Main Street Santa Monica is a popular attraction for Santa Monica College (SMC) students. The two-mile stretch offers students dozens of places to eat, drink, hang out, and have fun with friends. The California Heritage Museum (CHM) on Main Street, near Ocean Park, began a Tuesday evening tradition curating colorful food trucks in their parking lot.
This tradition came to an abrupt stop in March 2020, with the lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. City Hall banned food trucks and restricted most food and drink commerce along Main Street as a public safety measure to stop the spread of the killer virus.
Once exiled from Main Street, the food trucks are now slowly returning. The food trucks are mandated to follow health measures such as requiring social distancing, only serving people with masks, and providing hand sanitizer.
The food trucks provide the community a variety of take-out food. The specialty cuisine the trucks offer are New England lobster rolls, Cuban plantains, California tacos, Japanese sushi, and Korean kimchi. On summer evenings, patrons bring their goodies from the food trucks and dine picnic style on the green lawn by the CHM. Patio seating is available at the adjacent Victorian for gracious noshing. The Tuesday Evening food truck event takes place between 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. A portion of food truck sales are contributed to the Museum fundraising effort that serves the community as a non-profit culture center.
Food trucks are a staple in the Los Angeles lunchtime culture with its origins as mobile taco stands and hot grilled food dispensaries. They serve breakfast and lunch on many construction sites and factory workshop street venues. The food quality and kitchen standards often earned them the wisecrack term “roach coaches.”
Around 2008 this all changed. Food trucks became a pop-up food event that catered to tech-savvy workers around the exploding digital venues. Exotic and hip fusion cuisines are introduced. Fresh food fare represents the diversity of the Asian, Caribbean, African-American, and Latinx cultures in Los Angeles, along with the basic American grub like bacon and eggs or burgers. The truck exterior is often colorful advertising art reflecting the food's national origin or mouth-watering cuisine. A fun, circus-like atmosphere is created when the food trucks arrive en masse. On the one block of Pennsylvania Street by SMCs Center for Media Design displayed this food truck carnival of flavors prior to the Corona campus shut down.
