What was the Street Eats Food Truck Festival?
In January 2012 the Valley’s food truck boom was a year old, and Phoenix New Times decided it deserved a parking lot. The lot it picked was the center-field one at Salt River Fields, the year-old spring-training park on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community across Pima Road from Scottsdale. On Saturday, January 14, 2012, about two dozen local trucks parked in a ring, Tyler Florence of Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race hosted, admission was $10, and food was bought with $2 vouchers. Anyone who bought spring training tickets that morning, when they went on sale, got in free.
That was the Street Eats Food Truck Festival. Within a few years it was two days, 11 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m., with 55 to 70 trucks, two music stages, cooking demonstrations, lawn games, a vendor marketplace, a kids’ zone and the eating contests (watermelon, donuts, pie, Jell-O) that gave the local news its B-roll. Every truck sold its full menu and a $2 sample, which turned a weekend into a tasting tour. Admission settled at $12 online or $15 at the gate, children 12 and under free, with a $75 VIP lounge for people who wanted drinks and a private restroom.
It ran every winter from 2012 through 2020, skipped 2021 for the pandemic, returned February 5–6, 2022, and ran again January 28–29, 2023. That is the last edition we can document. The festival’s website and social pages posted no dates for 2024, 2025 or 2026; a follower asked the Facebook page in 2024 whether there would be another, and we found no answer. We list it as past, and we would be glad to be wrong.
What it was like, and what replaced it
The format. Gates at 11. The trucks ringed the outfield lawn and the lots: Sonoran tacos, barbecue, burgers, Asian fusion, shave ice and mini donuts. The right play was the $2 sample at eight trucks before committing to a full plate at one, which is also how the Arizona Taco Festival works at the same venue. Two stages ran local bands, a demo tent had truck chefs cooking, and the eating contests ran both afternoons.
Getting there. Salt River Fields is off the Loop 101 at Indian Bend Road, five minutes from Scottsdale Road. Parking in the ballpark lots was free, and still is for the venue’s other festivals. From Old Town: Scottsdale Road or Hayden north to Indian Bend, east across Pima. Early February is 70 degrees and sunny, which is why every one of these events books that outfield.
The venue now. The ballpark’s festival calendar is the real successor. The Arizona Taco Festival in mid-October is the direct descendant: dozens of taco makers, tasting-size pricing, a tequila expo and the Chihuahua races. Uncorked puts a hundred wines on the same lawn on a Saturday in April and again in October. The Spooktacular Hot Air Balloon Festival inflates twenty-odd balloons over the outfield on three late-October nights, with its own truck row. And from mid-February the Diamondbacks and Rockies take the field for six weeks of Cactus League baseball, the reason the place exists.
Trucks without a festival. The Old Town Farmers Market on Saturday mornings has a reliable truck or two, and Kierland Commons and Scottsdale Quarter run evening lineups in season. None of it is seventy trucks in a ring; that Valley moment, when a truck was a novelty worth a $12 ticket, has passed.
Why a newspaper threw a truck party on tribal land
Street Eats was a product of two things arriving at once. The first was the food truck wave, which reached Phoenix in 2011 with a cluster of trucks working downtown lunch hours and First Fridays. The second was Salt River Fields, opened in 2011 by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community as the first big-league spring-training complex built on tribal land, with an outfield lawn and acres of parking that sat empty eleven months a year. The Community wanted year-round events; New Times wanted a signature food event. The Taco Festival, which had started in 2010 in Scottsdale, would move to the same grounds later in the decade for the same reasons.
The partnership shows in the first-day deal: buy spring-training tickets, get into the truck festival free. Street Eats was a baseball promotion as much as a food event, and that is why it always sat in the last weekend of January or the first of February, two weeks before pitchers and catchers reported. For a decade it worked. The fifth annual in January 2016 was a full two-day weekend; the sixth in 2017 claimed about 70 trucks and two stages; 2018 drew more than 60 trucks at $12 a head. The 2020 edition, February 8–9, sold early-bird adult tickets for $8 and was one of the last big crowds in the Valley before the shutdown.
The pandemic broke the rhythm: 2021 was cancelled, the 2022 return on February 5–6 had 55-plus trucks, the January 2023 edition followed, and then nothing. We have not found an announcement that the festival ended, a reason, or a new owner, and we would rather say that than guess; the Thunderbird Balloon Classic page in our lost events note had the same problem. What we can say is that the format it pioneered here, tasting-size pricing across dozens of vendors on the Salt River Fields lawn, is alive and well in October under a different name.
The Scottsdale angle
The festival’s address said Scottsdale and its crowd came largely from Scottsdale, but it happened on the Salt River Community’s land, in the Talking Stick corridor the Community built around the casino, the resort and the ballpark. That corridor is now the Valley’s most consistent festival ground, and Street Eats was one of the first events to prove the outfield could hold a crowd that was not there for baseball. Gone, but it left the template.