CHICAGO, IL – More than six months after the Chicago City Council legalized cooking onboard food trucks, the city on Thursday issued its first license for it to Dan Salls, owner of The Salsa Truck.

salsa truck chicagoAn ecstatic Salls said that he passed his health and fire inspection on Wednesday and finished his paperwork on Thursday afternoon. By Tuesday, he hopes to be searing meat, grilling quesadillas and warming tortillas on board his truck to serve with his salsas to hungry Chicagoans.

Salls, a former financial adviser who quit his job to go into the salsa business, said he will likely serve his first hot meal at the 600 W. Chicago Ave. food-truck stand Tuesday. He has publicly invited Mayor Rahm Emanuel to be his first customer.

“I think it would be a great press opportunity for him to finally get the monkey off of everyone’s back,” Salls said of the long contentious process that has finally led to the first cooking license called an MFP (for mobile food preparer).

For more than two years, food-truck activists had been lobbying the city to allow onboard cooking, as opposed to restricting food offerings to those that had been pre-cooked and packaged. Proposals were stalled for more than a year at the committee level until Emanuel presented his own version of a modified ordinance last summer, which passed in late July.

Find the entire article by Monica Eng at The Chicago Tribune <here>