Coming soon to a parking spot near you: burgers and milkshakes from Z-Burger, the quirky, D.C.-based burger joint.
Z-Burger’s Peter Tabibian plans to launch the food truck in January, serving lunch in D.C. or Montgomery County and then targeting areas with active nightlife in the evenings, he said in a phone interview.
The truck will serve Z-Burger’s burgers, including turkey and vegetarian, with all the fixings, as well as hot dogs, potato chips and 14 different hand-spun milkshakes. One thing that will be missing? The fries. It’s just too messy to be carting around all that fryer oil, Tabibian said.
Tabibian has invested upward of $60,000 in the truck, which he bought from a firm in New Jersey and then outfitted with local vendors. The truck’s exterior features a bright red motif with Z-Burger’s logo and words that Tabibian hopes will make people hungry: “handcrafted,” “sizzling” and “never frozen.”
Tabibian plans to enter the food truck lottery for space at some of the more highly trafficked food truck zones, though he’s also working to get certifications in Montgomery County. Northern Virginia isn’t yet in the plans, though it could be down the road, when he hopes to have a whole fleet of food trucks.
Tabibian, who opened the first Z-Burger in 2008 in Tenleytown, is in the process of suing his business partners over ownership and trademark infringement, as we reported earlier this month. His partners, Mohammad and Ebrahim Esfahani, have counter-sued him, claiming he was never an owner of the burger chain.
Tabibian doesn’t expect that case to affect the operations of the truck, though he also is optimistic about the case’s outcome.
“My lawyers are very confident that I’m going to win my case,” said Tabibian.
