There was a sense of life coming back to normal, as the crowds stood in line, ordered food and then headed off to a table and chair to eat at Larkinville Tuesday evening. Heat, humidity and Food Truck Tuesday were back for the summer. Even with occasional bursts of pouring rain, no one appeared to leave, just shift to under cover.
Food Truck Tuesday has become a tradition: coming to Larkin Square, checking out the variety of food trucks there that week, then noshing to one's delight. But it had to be canceled last summer, due to COVID-19.
Norman from Cheektowaga is a regular.
"It's a little smaller than in past years, but they're still building it. This is the first one," he said. "And usually, they have trucks over across the street also, off Seneca Street. I'm looking forward to big things. I come down here as often as I can."
There clearly were people experimenting and sampling what was available.
"Larkin Square, people taste a lot of things," said Jonathan Hardy, Truck 5 captain for Lloyd Taco. "We sell a lot of tacos. Our tacos. One's just a sample. Two or three are a good meal. But we also have our regulars who come back every year for a chicken burrito, sometimes multiple times a summer, sometimes multiple times a week and I've seen some of those guys already."
BJ was running the Dirty Bird food truck.
"We have the Dirty Bird, the original chicken waffles, chicken on a stick," he said. "We have the Boss chicken sandwich. We have pizza logs. We have shrimp in a basket. We have mozzarella sticks and chicken wings."
Joel Schreck from Share Kitchen and Bar Room in Williamsville said a return to a normal summer will be good for business.
"Our food truck, as soon as they opened things up, our phone rang off the hook for our food truck for events," Schreck said. "So we've basically been booked and we are booked most of the summer."
For the sponsors of the neighborhood, the food trucks are a goodie for the workers who may just be leaving work.
"This has always been a destination event of people literally coming from up to an hour away," said Lesley Zemsky, vice president of Larkin Development Group. "People who work in our building and now there are more residents living down in Larkinville and then we're just a mile from downtown, so people working down at Seneca One, all kinds of different places. People come from all over for this."
A variety of customers were certainly proving this, as they nibbled their way through the food trucks, spaced out around the property, offering everything from Asian fusion to desserts.
