In the course of a May 2015 food festival, food trucks run by top chefs were supposed to roam Tel Aviv, stop at various locations and sell their fare to passersby. While food trucks are common in large cities all over the world, here in Israel they're still a rarity. That’s how it is when a culinary trend that has captivated the world skips Israel.

Ultimately, the chefs did not cook and the trucks did not roam. The project was postponed. It's not that local chefs were uninterested — on the contrary. Sarit Shalev, one of the festival’s organizers, told Al-Monitor, “The chefs’ responses were amazing. Everyone thought it’s an awesome idea and wanted to participate. Haim Cohen, the [renowned Israeli] chef, was supposed to take the lead.” 

Indeed, the organizers expected guests to run to these trucks like they hadn’t eaten in weeks. But it seems there were no suitable trucks in Israel to be rented for the event. The cost of renovating and retrofitting trucks for the festival wasn’t worth it to the producers for a one-time event. 

Shalev hopes that the project will be realized sometime in the future. She notes that when the initiative came up, she hoped that the food trucks would continue operating after the festival. But that's impossible in Tel Aviv because of a strange municipal bylaw that prohibits the operation of food trucks. Despite the legal prohibition, the Tel Aviv municipality in fact supported the festival. The director of the city’s events department, Shevi Mizrahi, was even quoted in a press release put out by the city leading up to the festival as saying, “The city is happy to bring an interesting and innovative culinary festival that will present the terrific culinary qualities of the city in an accessible and experiential format.”