Food truckin’

To the untrained eye, the rusty old junkyard on Spear across the street from the new Trader Joe’s looked like, well, a junkyard. But to Jason Boso, the brain behind Twisted Root Burger Co., it looked like “a fantastic opportunity on a fantastic piece of land.”

“While other people saw it as a junkyard, I saw it as a gold mine,” Boso explains. “It was a completely tree-covered, 9,000-square-foot backyard. I just thought, man, I want to drink some beer back here.”

And thus began the business venture that has produced one of the coolest ideas to hit the pavement in East Dallas the Truck Yard.

The Truck Yard opened in September, and if you haven’t been by, it’s a food truck park that features a rotating ensemble of food trucks. Not to mention, there are about a gazillion ways to buy a beer there.

There’s a full bar in what was once a mechanic’s shop, a canned-beer bar in an Airstream trailer, and a treehouse bar in the ancient pecan tree.

Yes, a bar 14 feet up in a tree I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Boso says with a chuckle. “We got [the treehouse bar] all stamped and approved by the city. We had to follow all the regulations and get it professionally engineered, but we did all that. It was quite a feat, but we made it happen.”

The Truck Yard fits three food trucks at a time. The trucks, which are from all around the Dallas-Fort Worth area, rotate each day, although there is some consistency — meaning some trucks, such as Easy Slider or Cajun Tailgaters, are always there on certain days of the week. Philly cheesesteaks also are served out of the permanent building.

“We close at 12, so we’re not a latenight party place,” Boso says. “We’re more the ‘come for dinner, enjoy a live band’ kind of eat-and-drinking environment. A casual, gather-with-friends kind of place.”

—Brittany Nunn

Co-op coop

When Greg and Jill Gordon moved to Lakewood from Forest Hills, they weren’t too chicken to bring along their small urban chicken farm, but they hoped it wouldn’t ruffle the feathers of their next-door neighbors, Kathy and Don Carroll.

On the contrary, the Carrolls were thrilled about the neighborhood addition.

“My daughter had been begging me for chickens for years,” Kathy explains.

“They [the Gordons] hadn’t been here long, maybe only a couple weeks, when

Greg walks over and goes, ‘So, we’ve got these chickens, and we really think the best place for the coop is between our two houses, but that’s kind of on your property line, so we don’t have to put it there, but we think it’d be better if we did. So how do you feel about that?’

“I said, ‘I’m totally fine with that if we can put a couple of chickens in there and you’ll teach me what I’m doing.’ And thus, the great chicken co-op was born,” Kathy says, laughing.

It’s not hard to raise chickens, Greg says.

“The hardest part is that everything wants to kill a chicken and chickens are very delicate,” he says. “So as long as you keep them safe and keep them fed and watered, they really take care of themselves.”

For safety’s sake, Greg, who works as a contractor, designed and worked with a friend to build a super-secure, metal chicken fortress he calls the “Coop Deville.” The structure can be seen from the sidewalk, which is why we found out about it. Nearby neighbors who walk by the Gordons’ house regularly, particularly with dogs, couldn’t miss it.

Kathy says having the chickens has been a great learning opportunity for their combined brood of five kiddos (not including the Gordons’ new set of twins). It’s given the parents an opportunity to chat with their kids about everything from the birds and the bees to the circle of life to the origin of classic phrases like “pecking order,” or “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“There are all these old terms that we use,” Greg says, “from back when raising chickens used to be a way of life.”

—Brittany Nunn