Hundreds flock to grand opening of Kansas City’s first food truck hub
Kansas City’s first food truck hub got off to a popular start Sunday as hundreds of people flocked to a former used car lot on Southwest Boulevard for the grand opening.
“The grand opening was incredible,” said Michael Foust, chef and owner of the Little Piggy food truck hub. “We had about 1,000 people come down.”
Social media, Foust said, is more powerful than he thought. Foust started Little Piggy, which is at 3014 Southwest Blvd., to draw Kansas City’s food trucks to one spot.
“We have a great food truck culture, but it just didn’t seem like there was a consistency of where they were every day,” Foust said. “So we wanted to kinda give a place for people to come down and see the best food trucks or the food trucks they like on a daily basis.”
Little Piggy will have a few trucks that will rotate in and out, but it will also have trucks that are there on a permanent basis, including Wilma’s, El Tenedor, Fungal Fusion, Pie Hole and Foust’s truck, the Red Wattle.
Foust, who is the chef-owner of the Farmhouse, a farm-to-table restaurant in the River Market, decided to jump into the food truck business after he found a 1953 all-aluminum Spartan Aircraft Trailercoach parked in a farm field in Rantoul, Kan.
Some people, Foust said, have accused him of going backward. Usually, chefs go from food trucks to a restaurant. He instead is going from a restaurant to a food truck.
“Honestly, Ethel — which is now Red Wattle — she’s the one who did this to me,” Foust said. “We found her in a field and thought that we needed to give life to this wonderful RV that had this 1950s kind of art deco look.”
He also didn’t want to open another restaurant.
Little Piggy will open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturdays.
“We are going to close down on Sundays,” Foust said. “I got to be with my wife one day a week.”
Robert A. Cronkleton: 816-234-4261, @cronkb
This story was originally published May 1, 2016 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Hundreds flock to grand opening of Kansas City’s first food truck hub."