BOULDER — On Friday afternoon, dozens of hungry office workers at 55th Street and Flatiron Parkway took a break from their computers and phone calls, and strolled outside to the parking lot.
Their mid-day destination: a rumbling pink truck in which Rayme Rossello was cooking up tacos, gorditas and Mexican hot chocolate.
“It’s like something you would get from a restaurant,” said Alison Dillman, a Lyons resident who works in one of the nearby office buildings and stopped for lunch.
Dillman is a regular at the Comida truck, which Rossello spent $100,000 to convert from a DHL delivery van. Rossello is among a growing number of chefs turning to upscale mobile-food vending, which is a growing national trend.
But in the city of Boulder, selling food from a vehicle is illegal. For now, the handful of food trucks that have sprung up around the city in recent months are allowed to sell their food as “caterers” on private property.
Boulder officials, who want the city to be more inviting to such vendors, are crafting a plan to allow the trucks to sell food in a variety of public and private places.
“Boulder is known as a restaurant and entertainment district, and we really want to try and support that and make it easier for people to do business,” said Molly Winter, director of Boulder’s Downtown and University Hill Management Division.
Winter said Boulder is behind the ball when it comes to encouraging food trucks. Places like Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., she said, are popular destinations for followers of gourmet food trucks.
“It is a national trend,” she said.
Winter is drafting changes to the city code that would allow food trucks to operate legally. Winter said she’s working to address concerns among some brick-and- mortar restaurants about keeping trucks separated from their customer base.
But Winter said she’s confident the city will reach a “win-win” ordinance, which is scheduled to have public input during meetings with the Boulder Planning Board in March and with the City Council in May.
Rossello, who uses Facebook and Twitter to tell her followers where she’ll be on any given lunch hour, has worked to get the city to recognize the growing industry.
Within a couple weeks of her May debut last year, Rossello and her two employees were approached by police as they served food on Pearl Street, west of the pedestrian mall, and told that they were in violation of the city’s vending regulations.
