2011: The year street food broke in Seattle. It’s the year some of the first wave of Seattle food trucks opened fixed-location restaurants. It’s the year we should soon have a new ordinance in place to create food truck zones on the Hill and across the city. It’s the year “street food” joined “organic” and “local” as a valuable marketing “keyword.” Here’s an update on some “street food” activity on the Hill this weekend involving a fleet of four food trucks plus information about a handy new Web site for mobile food fans.

Saturday, Hugo House and Elliott Bay Book Company celebrate 2011’s street food explosion with a gathering of four of the city’s mobile chow providers and an appearance by an author who has documented the way the social network likes to eat out in Food Truck: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels. Here are details on the food truck party which runs noon to 2 PM Saturday:

Are you hungry today? Food trucks and street food—timeless fixtures of both urban and rural enclaves around the world—have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in Seattle and elsewhere in the U.S. Now word of their whereabouts gets around by word of mouth but also by Twitter, and other social media. Today is an opportunity to meet and hear Heather Shouse—Food & Wine reporter, Time Out Chicago correspondent, and author of the new book, Food Trucks; Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels (10 Speed Press). Three local trucks featured in the book—Maximus Minimus, Skillet, and Hallava Faladel, and one other, StreetTreats, will be on hand in the Hugo House parking lot to weigh in on the story—and give those attending some tasty opportunities for lunch or snack fare. Richard Hugo House is around the corner from Elliott Bay at 1634 Eleventh Avenue (just north of Pine Street). Please join us.

Looking for more to do this weekend? Check out our latest On the List for info on an indoor market, Shakespeare recitals, a City Council member’s visit and more.

Meanwhile, we thought this image posted by @lookatlao of a “coming soon” sign hung at  Eric Banh’s coming-soon, 12th Ave noodle shop Ba Bar captured the Hill’s foodie zeitgeist:

Back to the mobile food end of things, we got a a note from the folks behind a relatively new Seattle Web site tracking the city’s food truck phenomenon. Welcome For Truck’s Sake http://www.fortruckssake.com/ to the fun:

 I’m writing to let you know that some friends and I have started a blog (hurray!) called For Truck’s Sake, all about Seattle’s Food Trucks. This just grew out of a group of us going to food trucks a lot and deciding that it would be nice if there were a resource available to spread the word on what’s good to eat, where you can take your lunch to eat outside on a nice day, and where the trucks can be found. We also want there to be more trucks in general, so hopefully getting people excited for the trucks and adding to the whole culture of it will help to make that happen. It’s been slow over the winter, but things are ramping up now, and we hope to have reviews up on a pretty regular basis. (We already have several up.) 

Liss says you should make sure to check out the Locator. “The Truck Locator is up-to-date and pretty rad, and there’s a Lo-Fi option too,” she writes. “You can search by neighborhood in the Locator, too, to keep things CapHill focused. ;-) We’re just doing it all for fun because we like biking to the trucks on our lunch break.”