As we reported here, the most recent First Friday event along Venice's Abbot Kinney Boulevard was complicated by the ongoing lack of consensus (that's putting it mildly) between the food trucks, the Venice merchants, the Abbot Kinney Merchants Committee (AKMC), and the SoCal Mobile Food Vendors Association (SCMFVA). Informer reporter Simone Wilson, who attended the event, writes that only 7 food trucks actually showed up, in addition to one other that parked along a side street and the usual trucks that customarily park in the Brig parking lot. (Read her story.) If you're tracking this sort of thing, there were: Tornado Potato, Chili Wagon, Vesuvio, Street Kitchen, Barbie's Q, The Flying Pig and Lardon.

That's a lot less than the 40 or 50 food trucks that were parking there last year, which numbers were the catalyst for the current messy situation. Maybe the relative paucity of trucks was due to the confusion of whether there would again be a parking ban (there was one last month), or because of the mixed signals the truck owners were getting from, well, everybody. And maybe the noticeably smaller number of people attending the event was due to the recent lack of food trucks — or something else. Weather. The Lakers game. Or maybe everybody just decided to stay home and watch television, something Matt Geller of the SCMFVA said he'd probably prefer to do these days. So, should First Fridays include food trucks or not? Somebody should probably decide once and for all.

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