Photo by Amber Wilkie

D.C. legislators will soon vote on new regulations on the city’s growing fleet of food trucks, and starting today they’ll get a close-up look—and taste—of some of those mobile vendors.

Yesterday the D.C. Council’s secretary announced that two food trucks—one savory, one sweet—will park on the 14th Street side of the Wilson Building, the seat of the city’s government, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for the next three weeks. For today’s inaugural “Food Truck Day,” the Red Hook Lobster Pound and That Cheesecake Truck will be on hand from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and on subsequent days and weeks a similar combination of sweet and savory food trucks will sell lunch to staffers, legislators and passersby.

The initiative couldn’t come at a better time for the burgeoning food truck industry—the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs recently rolled out a new set of proposed rules and regulations that would apply to mobile vendors, and the D.C. Food Truck Association has already come out and called them overly restrictive. (In early October, food trucks started paying the usual 10 percent sales tax.) Still, both food truck owners and the council’s secretary call the timing coincidental, and say that the purpose is merely to offer hungry government workers a convenient lunchtime option.

The council won’t be the first D.C. agency to invite the food trucks to set up shop—in August, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library hosted food trucks every Wednesday as a means to attract residents and visitors to the city’s central library.