Mitote Food Park

How a One-of-a-Kind Mexican Food Truck Park Mitote Opened in a South Bay Parking Lot in Santa Clara | Eater SF

"On Roseland's main drag, a vast parking lot that once held a Dollar Tree and later a flea market-style Mercadito — and that still contains a corner devotional to Andy Lopez — has been transformed into Mitote Food Park, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in June. The park is a family-focused, fiesta-driven collection of seven rotating, family-run food trucks representing Mexican cuisines from Jalisco to the Yucatán, and it hosts live bands, family festivals and events like the Roseland Rumble outdoor boxing match (the word “mitote” broadly refers to a fiesta in Nahuatl). Restaurateur Octavio Diaz acts as a small-business incubator who selected the trucks and helps launch them into permanent spaces (you can usually catch him slinging cocktails on weekends). The trucks ring a huge 80-by-40-foot tent strung with warm white lights and filled with picnic tables, round tops and a standing bar; additional tables built around trees sit outside near a shipping-container-turned-bar (one of the few places in the neighborhood that serves hard alcohol) whose bright blue interior is covered in a blown-up photograph of a muralist's jeans printed on vinyl. Bartender Estrella Flores mixes mezcal- and tequila-based cocktails; my favorite, La Coqueta, tempers tequila with hibiscus-strawberry syrup and blood orange liqueur, while the Una Mas y Nos Vamos pairs tequila with tamarind and ancho chile liqueur, and La Charla blends smoky mezcal with pineapple, cucumber and habanero. Visual and community-minded design by longtime residents and artists (including Todd Barricklow and Gregory Pagel, and muralists Joshua Lawyer and MJ Lindo-Lawyer) — from hand-cut stencils of corn, scorpions and agave to a large west-end mural of an indigenous woman battling a masked wrestler on a bright pink background — reinforces the park’s underdog, homegrown-business ethos." - Eater