My Apologies to Joni Mitchell

I was planning to regale you with more hijinx in the truck but I need to put that on hold for a bit. It can’t be all fun and games all the time, can it?

We’ve had a fairly charmed beginning, as some of you know. We found this one-of-a-kind truck that has a nicer kitchen than the one in my house. We bought it from a guy who is letting us pay him off, over time, with no interest. Our truck renovation was on-time and pretty much flawless. We had the wood lovingly restored by a friend who made our truck absolutely gorgeous (contact us if you want his info – he’s a woodworking genius). An endlessly talented friend designed our first and second logo, photographed all of our food and is creating our website. The owner of our kitchen space is totally fired up about our business, is putting in a designated electrical outlet for our truck and has basically adopted us. The biggest frustration we had was having to wait one week to hear back from the local police station to get our final inspection. We’ve had a lot of wind in our sails.

Well today, we found ourselves windbound. This shouldn’t be a surprise. When I set this blog up, I chose “frustrations” as one of our categories. With the exception of that little problem with our name, I’ve not had to use the “f” tag. Until now. We had this plan to get our feet wet in Emeryville and vend there a few times a week through September. Didn’t seem like a bad plan at the time. Well, have you been to Emeryville lately? There are lots of trucks! And there are limited places to park. Between keeping the legal distance from the bricks and mortar restaurants, respecting the existing truck “schedule,” and avoiding the Thursday Farm Market altogether, there’s not that many options left. Sure, we could ignore the ordinance and pull up across the street from, say, a cafe that sell sandwiches. But we don’t want to engender bad feelings from the business community that already feels under siege. We could cop a “hey we parked in this spot before you arrived so now you have to find some other place” attitude. But having a food truck is already hard – why make it more difficult by having the other truck owners hate us from Day 1? We could park by the Farm Market and benefit from (or poach, depending on who you ask) their customer base. But most of the food vendors are local restaurants and, well, they’re the ones who call the police when they think you’ve parked too close to their establishment. Throw into this mix all of the friggin’ red you-can’t-park-here zones and well…We spent all of yesterday trying to secure a place to park on Friday after we realized that Thursday just wasn’t going to happen.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Sigh.

What I really want is to park somewhere over near Watergate Towers. Have you been over there? It’s like a food wasteland. There’s a chain restaurant that I won’t impugn but I would cross the highway rather than eat there. And there’s a deli and a market. For this huge office complex. If we could just get invited to park over there once a week, we’d be over the moon.

In fact, we would like to find a bunch of private properties where we can park our groovy blue truck.

So, friends, do you know anyone at a local company with a PARKING LOT that might like to give their employees access to our ridiculously delicious sandwiches? Any contacts you have would save us some steps, giving us more time in the kitchen. We’d happily entertain any location. You can either post below or e-mail us at info@ebbettsgoodtogo.com

We’ll name a sandwich after anyone whose lead helps us find a successful new location.