Photo by T.D. Ford (Grundlepuck)

As the D.C. Council deliberates on the fate of the city’s food trucks, one mobile eatery has expanded into the brick-and-mortar restaurant scene. The team behind Purveyors of Rolling Cuisine, better known as PORC, officially announced Tuesday that they are opening a neighborhood bar and restaurant in Columbia Heights.

“It shows that we’re not just guys [serving] meals in a truck,” said Josh Saltzman, one of the founders of PORC. “We want to be restauranteurs, too.”

Saltzman and co-founder Trent Allen have always wanted to open a restaurant when they decided to become food entrepreneurs in college. But after graduation, the two University of Michigan alums couldn’t get financing for their idea so going toward the mobile food vending route was a more economical alternative.

According to Saltzman, PORC was born on December 2009, but it didn’t officially hit the streets until a year later. Back in July 2010, DCist reported that PORC used Kickstarter, a fundraising website for startup businesses. Saltzman and Allen didn’t reach their funding goal, but the attempt gave PORC more attention. They officially opened for business a few months later.

“It took a year to get the truck started and now a year to get this place,” said Saltzman.

PORC’s upcoming sit-down eatery will be located at 3412 11th St. NW, a space that formerly housed Latin dining establishment Acuario. Saltzman chose Columbia Heights because it’s home turf for him and his team, including his two new business partners. The announcement joked that the opening will be “spring and fall 2016,” but if all goes well according to plan, a rep for PORC confirmed in an e-mail that “it will be late spring or early summer.”

The PORC mobile will continue its daily operations, serving its popular dishes such as the pastrami and pulled-pork sandwich. The truck will also continue to run even after the opening of the brick-and-mortar business. Saltzman said the restaurant will allow his team to “strengthen its operations in the streets,” as well as “expand what we do in the truck.”