Food Truck Festival Done Right

Trek Food Festival

We were lucky enough to be in town during a regional traveling food truck festival.  Coming from a city, even a neighborhood that hosts weekly food truck nights, we were quite excited to see how a Dutch event would compare.

We headed down by bus after Pearce got off school at 5 pm, which is late by our standards, but they Dutch were just arriving. The event took place in Stads Park which is a beautiful city park. It abuts the old city walls.

The historic town area adjacent to the festival served as the anachronistic backdrop.

When this is the background view of your festival, you have already won.

It was by far and definitively the coolest food truck festival I have ever seen.  All around the park they set up wooden floors with intimate vignettes, with big comfy chairs, and small tables for socializing.   There was a subtle, charming french circus theme, with a ring master who went around announcing a small art house theater and other nods including a strong man contest where you hit the hammer to make the dial go up to the bell. Our pictures really don't do it justice...

On the way in, we hurriedly ordered some steak fries topped with a giant slab of mayonnaise to quiet our Hangry Hendryx and also bought some charcuterie from a CHACUTERIE FOOD TRUCK! I have died and gone to heaven! We scored a wooden picnic table strategically located next to a small playground and I started shoveling fries and sausages into Hendryx's face while Pearce and Lucille went on a broader scouting mission.

Meat and Potatoes is a complete meal right? (Pearce - yes, especially when you add Mayo, the lost food group)

He returned a bit later with a duck and goat cheese burger and a bottle of wine. Interestingly, at these types of events, you pay for a plastic cup, in this case a wine glass that you use an then turn in if you switch style of drinks. I have been so impressed with how eco-conscious the dutch are, everywhere you go you see how they incorporate environmentalism into their daily lives. Examples include, stores don't give you bags, people use real plates when we would use disposable, the way they package things in stores in minimalist, and of course, they have created cities that promote people biking everywhere. I am sure there is a whole lot more examples.

A burger with duck scratching's and fried goat cheese. Here they don't call it hipster, they call it European.

After we got the kiddos fed, they played on the playground with their new dutch friends while we drank our bottle of wine and ate our decadent food. It was a perfect evening.  Here are Pearce's impressions:

The Europeans, in this case the Dutch, have taken our Food Truck novelty and made it look savagely primitive. I sit here in a setting that had to be made up in the fever dream of a magic surrealist writing about pastoral perfection.  We sit in one of several clearings surrounded by "food trucks" which is a wholly inadequate label.  One is a vintage but pristine Ford truck with Coca-Cola printed on the side.  They are vehicular works of art.  Between the trucks and just above trees in our alcove, the surrounds of a modern hipster festival is juxtaposed with a horizon dominated by an anachronistic and quite literal medieval tower and wall behind a small pond.

We are sitting at picnic table shared with local Dutch, animatedly talking with sometimes impossible syllables.  There are slightly modified remixes of legendary 70's rock anthems, mutated to slower melodies that are recognizable in that far off distracted way.  They are seeping from a sound system controlled by a retrofitted Volkswagen caravan occupied by what I assume is the Dutch version of a hippie in his moonlight years.  He is selling vinyl in this ersatz music store on wheels and based on his music selection of deep cuts now seamlessly transitioning to blues and simple gut instinct, I have faith that if I were to engage him he could lecture me on any musical topic while I sat in his car-side patio bean bag chairs.  

As look around in a rare respite, with the children playing on the playground so well placed beside the wine bar, I see that everyone is dressed impeccably, in that annoying fabulous without trying way.  I scan the crowd for a single slob in any ill fitting t-shirt, hopefully with some tacky brand, and come up empty.  I check myself with my REI outdoor, hiking, ALL-weather, ALL-purpose efficient, travel gear and realize I am the worst dressed person there.  Fortunately a mixture of wine and sheer post-card ambiance allows me to ignore this, not entirely surprising, realization.

The people are chatting vigorously, but without rancor.  There is no shouting, just the ebb and flow of good conversation that should accompany good food and drink.  There are occasional faint whiffs of smoke in the air, which I know I am not supposed to like but secretly do as long as I am outside and not the one smoking.  Wine is being sold and drunk by the bottle, with sharing of course.  As the long day very slowing turns orange, colored lights that have been strung up from several surrounding trees to several more central poles turn on.  The air is just the right amount of cool from a exquisitely timed, mercifully short rain to cut the heat of the day while not making everything wet.

They make this moment in time look effortless, common place and expected.  This would be a extraordinary evening back home, the kind of Feng Shui in life you work tirelessly to engineer.  Here though, its just Thursday.

We join in the revelry as if we belong.  We eat and drink and make merry.  Strangers in a wonderfully strange land.  

- Pearce, a wannabe European, on a perfect evening in Maastricht



Check it out here: http://www.festival-trek.nl/