Have you ever eaten from a food truck? These mobile restaurants are affording culinary entrepreneurs a new way to get established in the competitive restaurant business.

Food trucks are taking over a lot of metro areas across the country. However, the response from local governments has been varied because they're direct competition for established restaurants that really add life to a neighborhood and attract clientele.

Today's mobile restaurants serving meals on wheels aren't exactly your daddy's food trucks. In many metro areas, they provide specialty food that flirts with the gourmet. Food trucks can expose people to cuisine they might not be able to get otherwise.

Traditional restaurateurs are angry about the food trucks, seeing them as just one more body blow to the restaurant business. After all, truck operators have few of the expenses involved with running a traditional restaurant that they have.

But some cities like Portland have been really big on food trucks. They even take public areas and make them available for the trucks.

I read a completely new angle to this story that I hadn't thought about in The San Francisco Chronicle. As some truck operators become more successful, they then open traditional locations. In fact, the goal of many operators is to get established enough to open a brick-and-mortar eatery.

Meanwhile, in another trend, I read about pop-up restaurants that open in unused space for as short as a month, a week, or in the most extreme cases, one night only!

This can be a great way to establish a new concept if you're a restaurant entrepreneur. The Orlando Sentinel  reports people are selling tickets for mystery food nights at these pop-up restaurants. There's no menu, you just eat what's being prepared by the chef. People are buying tickets and going to have an unusual dining experience.

Sounds like something ScoutMob.com would want to get into this!