On June 12 and 13, Visit Topeka Inc. will host the first ever Capital City Food Truck Festival.  The event will be from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday night and from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday.  In addition to the food, Manhattan-based country band, Lucas Maddy and the Jagged Edge will play three concerts at the Gage Park Amphitheater, and on Saturday the Gage Park mini-train and carousel and the Topeka Zoo will be open until 8 p.m.

     “My goal for the event is for Topekans to have something to do and to say that they had a great time at this event trying food…that they came with their family, their friends, and they just had a good time,” said Rosa Cavazos, the tourism development manager at Visit Topeka Inc.

     There will be at least eight food trucks at the event, including Hawaiian food, Mexican food, barbeque, and cupcakes and coffee.  Some of the vendors will be Noble House, Taqueira Mexican Lindo, CoffeeCakeKC, HHB BBQ, Ice & Olives and X-Marks the Spot.  The food trucks will be located on S.W. Zoo Parkway.

     “I was trying to get different types of food, and so I did a lot of researching to find food trucks of all different types of food to try to bring to the event,” Cavazos said.  “This way it’d get people a variety of choices and something that they might not have had before or might not have known about.  I thought that this would just get people a variety of different types of food to bring to the festival.”

     The idea for the event came when Cavazos and her co-workers at Visit Topeka Inc. noticed that this type of event was happening at other cities and that Topekans were interested in attending a similar event.

     “I thought it would be a great event for the city and we, Visit Topeka, really want to focus on not only visitors and tourists coming to the city, but we also want to focus on the citizens in our city,” Cavazos said.  “We want to see what it is that our people here want to see happening here, and the more excited that they talk about it to their friends and other visitors, then hopefully more people will in turn want to come and check out our city as well.”

     The event will be spread out over two days to give people two opportunities to attend the event as well as potentially provide two different atmospheres.

     “We thought that it would be something great to do on a Friday evening,” Cavazos said.  “We wanted people to come after work with their friends, grab some food, listen to some music.  Then on Saturday, [we] combined it with the park area thinking that maybe more families would come out…and enjoy the train, the carousel and the zoo and maybe go to the Discovery Center and then come back and hear the concert and try some more food later.  So we just decided that it would be a good event for an evening event and then for one for Saturday during the day to hit families as well.”

    Cavazos says that this event will be an annual thing, and that she’s looking at expanding the event to either twice a year or adding more food trucks to it.  The event is also being put on with the help of Shawnee County Parks and Recreation and Country Legends 106.9. 

    It is also being supported by the Topeka Zoo and Seveneightfive Magazine.  For more information, please either email Rosa Cavazos at [email protected] or check out Visit Topeka’s Facebook page.