Foodies brave long lines for 2nd year at SC food truck festival

The blue-stained lips gave him away when 12-year-old Elijah Crawford stepped up to the Palmetto Polar Snow truck window for his second shaved ice cup of the afternoon.

Another blue raspberry it was for Elijah, this time with a side of cherry flavoring, too.

That he would come back for seconds shows “that’s how good it was,” Elijah said.

Elijah was one of thousands of foodies who braved long lines and Columbia heat Saturday for the S.C. Food Truck and Craft Beer Festival at the State Fairgrounds.

The Crawford family didn’t even make it in to last year’s food truck festival at the S.C. State Farmers Market, when a crowd three times as large as organizers planned for showed up. Traffic snarled nastily, and many vendors ran out of food.

This year’s event seemed to have solved the traffic problem with the new venue. But long lines couldn’t be helped at the nearly 40 food trucks parked around the fairgrounds’ midway.

Some 5,000 tickets to the festival were pre-sold, and thousands more would be bought at the gates, said Janet Prensky of Food Truck Festivals of America, which presented the event using trucks from across South Carolina.

“I think people are curious about food trucks and always so amazingly surprised by the quality of the food that they have,” Prensky said. “In the old days, the old food truck might have a wrapped sandwich. Now, we have gourmet food, custom-made. These are chefs, not cooks.”

The long lines were worth it for many customers, who craved a taste of a variety of foodie delights – from lobster macaroni and cheese to turkey wings to funnel cakes to barbecue sliders.

Christianna Harmon said she’d be willing to wait as long as an hour and a half or two hours to finally try 2 Fat 2 Fly’s famous stuffed chicken wings. She and her friends Fionde Dreher and Asia Reed had been waiting for about 30 minutes in a line that easily stretched more than 100 customers deep only shortly after the festival gates opened.

“I’ve always wanted to try them,” Harmon said. She saw comedian Steve Harvey rave about them once – “Steve Harvey is my inspiration” for trying 2 Fat 2 Fly, she said.

Friends Janet and Keith Costley and Tracy and Wayne Auld saw people running to get in the 2 Fat line just after the festival opened, they said. They’d rather stop by 2 Fat’s stationary restaurant on Bluff Road another time than wait in Saturday’s crowd.

After arriving early with VIP tickets to the festival, which meant they were treated to free doughnuts at the gate and free water throughout the day, the Aulds and Costleys propped themselves up in lawn chairs early in the afternoon to people watch and digest their earlier meals.

Bratwurst, turkey wings, Mongolian food, fried okra – “Oh, that fried okra was awesome,” Janet Costley said.

The Costleys made it into last year’s festival early enough to miss the crowds. The Aulds, though, came later and weren’t so lucky. Only two trucks hadn’t run out of food by the time they made it, “so we left and went to a restaurant and got food,” Tracy Auld said.

“We kind of chalked it up to it was the first time it had ever gone on, nobody knew what to expect,” Janet Costley said.

Both couples made another, earlier, go of it this year for the fun of being able to sample so many different foods from vendors they don’t normally have access to, they said.

With so many options, the Costleys and Aulds took time to work up another appetite and calculate their next food moves. But it was easy for some festivalgoers to have eyes bigger than their stomachs.

“I don’t know why I thought I was going to eat a lot of meals,” said Lynn Nassivera, as she and her husband, Larry, finished up a pair of lobster rolls from the Lowcountry Lobster truck. “I’m already full.”

This story was originally published April 30, 2016 at 6:20 PM with the headline "Foodies brave long lines for 2nd year at SC food truck festival."