A new food truck festival is bringing a little bit of everything to a Washington parking lot once a month, all through the summer.
The Spring Food Truck Festival attracts around a dozen trucks to the Connect Center the third Monday of every month. But it started small for organizer Marci Ullom.
Ullom organizes car shows and cruise-ins in Washington, and wanted a food truck for one of them. She contacted Jake Tharp of Big Papa Jake's food truck, and he pitched a separate food-focused event at the Connect Center. The seed sprouted from there.
“I thought, ‘well, we’re going to do this just one time,’” said Ullom. “Well, it ended up raining and we had a lot of people show up. We had six trucks come in, they all sold out. And then everybody was like, ‘can you do this again?’”
Tharp remembers as many as 500 to 600 people showing up on that rainy April day.
As Tharp tells it, he left corporate America at age 43 to pursue his food truck dream. He went from basic burgers, to loaded tater tot bowls, to including healthier options.
“Like rice bowls and salads with a lot of the same flavor profiles that I do on the loaded tots,” he said. “And it turned out really, really good and it’s been successful this year. So it’s evolved immensely.”
Tharp says it's important his truck offers something unique. That's an ethos that carries through to the festival itself.
Though Ullom says the monthly festival has grown from six trucks to almost twenty, no two trucks offer the same fare.
“We’ll have only one pizza truck, one barbecue truck,” she said. “And then we’ve also added vendors. Who come in and they sell crafts or different, different types of things that they, you know, they’re businesses.”
Most recently, the festival added a truck serving tea and another serving energy drinks.
The geographic range of the festival is growing too. Ullom says the event has drawn food truck operators from Lincoln, Springfield and Bloomington. She wasn't expecting the continued growth when she started in April.
“The response was just so amazing,” Ullom said. “It’s a Monday night, nobody wants to cook. Everybody says, you know, ‘keep it up, keep it up,’ so that’s where we go. We’re planning right now, if the weather is good, to go into December.”
Efforts to attract local food in the region have not necessarily been as successful. Downtown Peoria, for example, never recovered a thriving food cart scene that disappeared during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ullom points to the location as a major reason for the event's success, making the event attractive to not just the crowds, but the food businesses as well.
“We have a big parking lot with lots of parking. It’s just a really nice area,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about cars, you know, on the street, if you’re setting up on the street. You’re in a parking lot. We make it a u-shape. So we close it off inside, so once you’re inside that u, you don’t have to worry about cars.”
Tharp thinks the variety of food at the festival is a defining factor that continues to draw in the customers.
“You can walk up to one truck and get a nice dish of comfort food and if somebody in your family doesn’t want to do comfort food, they can walk up to the next truck and get a hot dog. Or they can walk down and get a loaded bowl from me. Or they can walk and get a beautiful quesadilla from another truck,” he said.
Tharp sees the festival as a great opportunity to support other small businesses' like his. But, perhaps more importantly, the self-described "foodie" just loves making and sharing something new.
“It’s not so much about being out there trying to make huge profits and build a big brand or build a big business and be the next McDonald’s or something,” he said. “I’m out there just kind of really enjoying sharing my creations with everybody and seeing them be happy with it.”
For Ullom, she was already working hard to bring together a smaller portion of the community through car shows and cruise-ins. So, the food truck festival feels like a very natural extension.
“It just makes me happy to watch people come with their families and enjoy being out on a Monday night. Just everybody sitting down and having a nice meal,” she said.
The next installment of Washington's Spring Food Truck Festival is scheduled for Monday, Aug. 19 in the parking lot of the Connect Center.
