If you’re Downtown and looking for lunch — but can’t decide what you’d like to eat — beginning Thursday there will be new and varied options.
It’s so varied, the menu will change every day.
The Court: An Urban Food Park will be open for lunch Monday-Friday and will feature a rotating selection of some of Northeast Florida’s most popular food trucks, along with shaded seating and new landscaping.
The pop-up lunch destination will be set up along Hogan Street on the wide sidewalk at the entrance to the SunTrust Tower parking garage between Bay Street and Independent Drive.
“It’s a section of Downtown that a lot of people interact with,” said Mike Field, a longtime Downtown and food truck advocate.
He and Jack Shad, principal of Windmill Consulting LLC, developed the concept.
“Mike and I have been talking about doing this for a while,” said Shad. “This place seems perfect because it’s a little underutilized.”
The site is in the center of Downtown’s Northbank Class A office space, within a few blocks of Bank of America Tower, EverBank Center, Wells Fargo Center and the BB&T building, in addition to SunTrust.
It’s about four blocks from City Hall and the U.S. Courthouse at Hemming Park.
“There are thousands of people who work Downtown who can walk to the food court,” Shad said. “It’s an urban ‘meet and eat.’”
The food court will debut at 11 a.m. Thursday with Butt Hutt Smokehouse, Chew Chew and Muzzi’s Madhouse food trucks and Guanabanas ice pops and smoothies.
Field, who founded the Jax Truckies food truck movement in 2012, said more than 20 of the about 100 food trucks that operate in Northeast Florida have signed up to be part of the rotation.
“Our plan is to have a constant variety of food trucks. We want it to be a place where everybody can find something they want to eat,” he said.
It will open with weekday lunch from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-9 p.m. during First Wednesday Art Walk, but plans are in place to eventually expand the schedule, Field said.
“We want to have activity there seven days a week, so we’ll be phasing in weekend hours. We want to make sure we’ve got lunch right first,” he said.
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