NEWBURYPORT, MA — A taste of the Southwest has been popping up in Newburyport and is causing quite a stir.

Metzy’s Taqueria is the first gourmet food truck in Newburyport and it has been drawing about 75 to 100 customers a day at the Plum Island airport and the Lord Timothy Dexter Industrial Green since it started rolling last Saturday.

“I’ve always been interested in food,” owner Erik Metzdorf said. “Last year I was deciding that I needed to make a change and trying to figure out the business I was going to go in. Having been a small business owner for the past several years, my resume looked funny. None of the stuff had been my passion. This is something that I wanted to do for a long time.”

A Plum Island resident, Metzdorf has worked in the importing and sporting goods businesses, as well as in the restaurant world. Although he enjoyed his past work, Metzdorf felt it didn’t fill a deeper need. When a good friend came home from San Diego lamenting the lack of good food trucks on the North Shore last year, it rang a bell Metzdorf had never thought about before.

“I love what I am doing right now and I didn’t love what I was doing before,” Metzdorf said. “That’s a big difference in life. People are noticing it and I think they are feeling it.”

Over the winter, Metzdorf began researching what kind of ambulatory cuisine the area would support, taking surveys and traffic counts at the industrial park as well as the Route 1 traffic circle. Metzdorf entertained many different ideas on what to serve, but Tex Mex was the answer. He and his wife Kelly began the process of getting their permits together from the city, eventually rolling the truck for the first time at the Lucky Duck Derby last weekend.

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