| CITY OF ATE | t Dish Chef Ross Marquette started Smoke and Bone BBQ in a trailer after losing his job in the pandemic. C 16 16 After sputtering for years, Dallas gets in gear for better, fairer rules for food trucks. By Lauren Drewes Daniels Their choice paid off. Two years in, he’s Let’s Roll hef Ross Marquette and his wife, Katherine, were expecting their first child when they both lost their jobs in 2020. The pandemic dealt a knock-out punch to many in the restaurant industry, and they tumbled with it. “We have to do this smart,” Ross said of their next steps in those early days of unem- ployment. The Marquettes liked the food industry. They’d both made careers in it. They dreamed of starting their own business but were wary of taking on debt in an unpredict- able time, so they researched their options. “We wanted to start operating with as lit- tle overhead as possible to see if the business had legs,” he said. Ross is a trained chef with a resume that includes work at The Heritage Table in Frisco, and he has served as a restaurant consultant. “I’m very aware of how chal- lenging the margins are in the restaurant business,” he said. He wanted to try a barbecue business and looked into a food truck; used trucks cost around $50,000 to $100,000 but come with the risk of needing costly repairs. A newer food truck with customizations can be as much as $175,000. That’s why the couple settled on a much more affordable trailer that had a smoker with a canopy. It was a portion of the cost of a food truck but would get the job done. He and his wife could test his concept, Smoke and Bone BBQ, without going six digits into debt. booking events, taking catering jobs and feeding hungry drinkers at breweries around North Texas in cities like Garland and Fort Worth. But you won’t find Smoke and Bone BBQ in Dallas, at least for now. While mobile food operations in cities like Austin have flourished, Dallas entrepreneurs face regulations that are prohibitive to small business startups. For example, Dallas allows food trucks but not the more affordable trail- ers, the difference being that a food truck is “motorized” and a trailer is towed. The Mar- quettes haul their trailer to events and pull meat off the smoker and serve it to tables un- der a pop-up tent. To do that in Dallas, they’d need a city-issued event permit that would cost them more than $250 per day. Ross said he’d never go to an event that put him that deeply in the hole from the outset. We reached out to a handful of people with the city for an explanation of why trailers are treated differently but never got an answer. We asked a longtime food truck vendor the same question. They said they too have asked, and the city couldn’t answer. Some trailers are built with the same fea- tures of a food truck. For his 225 BBQ, owner René Ramirez has a fully enclosed trailer that is usually parked outside Division Brewing in Arlington, where he’s estab- lished a customer base. He serves tacos, que- sadillas, soups, birria and sometimes burgers, all of which are stuffed with brisket. Last year he made Texas Monthly’s >> p18 Nathan Hunsinger MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 APRIL 7–13, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
