Truck Yard fuels the Lower Greenville renaissance with cheesesteaks, hipsters and food trucks
SAY CHEEZ | The Philly cheesesteak, along with a smart cocktail menu, are the only foodstuffs made by Jason Boso’s Truck Yard team — the rest comes from a rotating slate of food trucks.
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor
The neighborhood called Lower Greenville Avenue has been a social center of Dallas for 40 years, ever since The Grape opened. In the mid-1990s, things were booming there, with countless restaurants, venues and bars, and more activity on the weekends than an anthill at a sugar festival.
Then things started to slow. The Whole Foods closed down, and its neighboring store, Blockbuster Video (remember them?) became a relic, a sad reminder of what had been. The Arcadia burned down, and a classic hall for live music faded into legend. A few years later, the restaurants on the block where Terilli’s has been a staple also succumbed to fire.
Sure, there was still The Grape, the Blue Goose and the St. Patty’s Parade, but the buzz was stifled into a hum.
Until last year.
The Wal-Mart market replaced Whole Foods and an abandoned strip mall took on new life. Across the street, it got competition from the first central Dallas location of Trader Joe’s. Then foodie destinations and cocktail lounges began popping up: Mudsmith’s. Dude, Sweet Chocolates. Nora. HG SPLY Co.
Among the clatter, Truck Yard has held its own, offering Dallasites something they could only have dreamed of just three years ago: A clearinghouse of food truck cuisine.
Food trucks only recently came into their own here, and Jason Boso, the man who conceived of Truck Yard, found a way to capitalize on that obsession. Boso was accustomed to turning lemons into lemon meringue pie. With his Cordon Bleu training and guerrilla instincts, he pioneered Deep Ellum when it had fallen into disrepute with his Twisted Root Burger Co. (now a growing brand), and gives Truck Yard its distinction style: rustic (like The Rustic!), outdoory (like the Katy Trail Ice House), hipster-friendly but also subtly sophisticated.
He hired talented mixologists to design the cocktail menu, schedules different food trucks (during a recent visit, Easy Sliders among them) and provides an infrastructure around which the tattooed and the tutu’d can brush elbows in peace. Aside from the drinks and desserts, Boso leaves the culinary offerings up to his parked invitees, with one exception: The Philly cheesesteak (about 10 bucks), over which he exercises sole authority.
It’s a canny choice for a signature dish, one not widely available in Dallas but iconic in its own right, with Boso’s own touches, including a selection of cheeses (including Cheez Whiz), jalapenos and the traditional grilled onions, all mixed up right in front of you and griddled with the bun catching the steak like a doughy net. It’s self-service, with fountain drinks and proprietary sauces available and, predictably, satisfying like only a messy meat sandwich can be.
It’s the vibe, though, that registers at Truck Yard, one that asks you to drop your pretense but acknowledges you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t attuned to the hipster appeal that Lower Greenville has once again engendered. No reason to forget that “working class” still has the word “class” in it.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 2, 2014.