Street vendors must follow the same rules as restaurants

I am a restaurant owner and I also happen to love street food.

Some of the best food in America comes from taco stands, food carts, trucks and tiny independent operators. I started my restaurant venture with a single food truck in 2011 and have since opened dozens of restaurants.

I want entrepreneurs to succeed, whether they’re starting with a folding table and a grill or signing a lease on a 4,000-square-foot restaurant.

But Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ decision directing LAPD to stop issuing criminal citations to street vendors highlights a much bigger problem with how California treats small businesses.

California leaders always present two sets of rules for two different groups of people, depending on whose vote they want.

If you open a restaurant, you enter a regulatory obstacle course before serving your first customer.

Then you pay for rent, insurance, business license fees and health permits. Your kitchen must meet building, fire and health codes. You need approved refrigeration, handwashing facilities, plumbing, grease disposal, restrooms and food-storage systems. Then layer in workers’ compensation, payroll taxes and minimum wages. Now add the inspections, the frivolous violations that force new inspections and the inevitable delays because of the bureaucracy.

If you don’t follow those rules, the government doesn’t generally shrug and say you’re simply trying to make a living. They cite you, fine you and try and shut you down. That’s what makes this debate so frustrating for restaurant owners.

The issue isn’t whether street vendors work hard or whether street vending is “part of LA culture” — the question is much simpler: Why should two people selling prepared food to the same customer operate under radically different expectations?

Food safety doesn’t change because someone is cooking outdoors or cooking in a home kitchen.

Chicken still needs proper temperature control, and raw meat still needs to be separated from ready-to-eat food.

Employees still need somewhere to wash their hands.

These aren’t arbitrary rules invented by restaurant owners to keep competitors away. They’re rules government tells us are necessary to protect the public. If that’s true, they should apply consistently and if they’re not necessary, then get rid of them for everyone!

But that’s the conversation California politicians rarely want to have. Because that would mean they would lose fees, possibly cut government jobs and admit they engaged in gratuitous work for decades.

Instead of asking why it has become so expensive and complicated for a small entrepreneur to operate legally, government increasingly creates exceptions around the regulatory system it built, in almost every industry.

This is the typical backward California approach. The goal should be to bring entrepreneurs into the legal economy, not make legality optional.

So here’s the solution — make permits inexpensive.

Create a simple pathway for street vendors to comply with health standards.

Help entrepreneurs transition from carts to food trucks and, if they choose, eventually into storefronts.

Eliminate regulations that don’t meaningfully improve public safety for all businesses.

Most importantly, absolutely don’t allow an unpermitted vendor to set up directly in front of a restaurant that is paying thousands of dollars every month for the privilege of operating at that location.

Restaurant margins are already brutally thin. Every single cost in California has exploded and every additional regulation costs an obscene amount of money.

You can’t impose those costs on one business and then allow a competing business to avoid them in the name of entrepreneurship. This isn’t compassion or “business-friendly” policy; we all know it’s just pandering. Street vendors aren’t the enemy of restaurants. Bad public policy and inept politicians are.

I want the person selling tacos on the sidewalk to have an opportunity to build a successful business.

I also want the family that emptied its savings account to open the restaurant behind that taco stand to survive.

Los Angeles can support street vendors while maintaining basic standards of food safety, fairness and accountability. And if city leaders truly believe the current regulatory burden makes it impossible for small food businesses to survive, I agree with them.

So let’s reduce that burden for everybody.

Andrew Gruel is a chef, television host and member of the Huntington Beach City Council.

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