(Food) Truckin’ to Mebane

Small businesses helping small businesses….and helping Elon students eat delicious food. 

While we all love Elon’s campus, we can also all agree that the bricks and the oak trees can get a little repetitive after a while. Students here love getting off campus every so often to see all that North Carolina has to offer. One of those escapes can be spent in the little town of Mebane, which is no longer than a thirty-minute drive from campus.

“It’s a lot more charming and quaint than I expected,” said Emma Kopkowski, a first-year at Elon. “It’s a really good place for college students to spend the day shopping, taking pictures and eating.”

Mebane has a great downtown painted with murals and filled with coffee shops and restaurants. One thing special to Mebane, however, is the town’s Food Truck Saturdays.

Every weekend there is featured food truck parked on Clay Street right in front of Reed’s Coffee and Art and Mebane Merchants. The chosen truck is open from 11am to 4pm.

“Bringing in food trucks is a great idea for helping promote small businesses throughout the county,” said Kopkowski. This past weekend, the featured truck was Flirting with Fire, a Durham-based restaurant that specializes in gourmet wood-fired pizza. “The pizza was delicious,” said Kopkowski.

Every week, Mebane Merchants, one of the local antique shops, brings in a new food truck. From dumplings to pizza, there’s something for everyone to enjoy and the whole idea brings together the community.

“I loved seeing the people who came to try the pizza,” said Kirsten Chase, another Elon student who spent the day eating and shopping in Mebane. “It’s great to see small businesses helping each other out and it just makes me want to visit Mebane more often.”

This weekly event has been in effect for the past few months, but students at Elon are only just hearing about it.

“With more advertisement and word-of-mouth, I think this can become a really popular event for more than just the people of Mebane,” said Chase.

“I’m hoping they get enough people where they can actually bring in multiple trucks at once,” Kopkowski agreed.   

As Chase said, with enough word-of-mouth and advertising, hopefully Food Truck Saturdays can grow into something bigger. While we have great restaurants in and around the Burlington area, it’s nice to get a little further away where we can spend time with friends. You can never go wrong with a day spent shopping and eating street food with your people.