Jason Boso: Jun Ma

Jason Boso: Jun Ma

The Truck Yard is open for business in East Dallas.

To the untrained eye, the rusty old junkyard on Spear across the street from the new Trader Joe’s looked like, well, a junkyard. But to Jason Boso, the brain behind Twisted Root Burger Co., it looked like “a fantastic opportunity on a fantastic piece of land.”

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“While other people saw it as a junkyard, I saw it as a gold mine,” Boso explains. “It was a completely tree-covered, 9,000-square-foot backyard. I just thought, man, I want to drink some beer back here.”

And thus began the business venture that has produced one of the coolest ideas to hit the pavement in East Dallas — the Truck Yard.

“While other people saw it as a junkyard, I saw it as a gold mine.”

The Truck Yard opened in September, and if you haven’t been by, it’s a food truck park that features a rotating ensemble of food trucks. Not to mention, there are about a gazillion ways to buy a beer there.

There’s a full bar in what was once a mechanic’s shop, a canned-beer bar in an Airstream trailer, and a treehouse bar in the ancient pecan tree.

Yes, a bar 14 feet up in a tree … I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Boso says with a chuckle. “We got [the treehouse bar] all stamped and approved by the city. We had to follow all the regulations and get it professionally engineered, but we did all that. It was quite a feat, but we made it happen.”

The Truck Yard fits three food trucks at a time. The trucks, which are from all around the Dallas-Fort Worth area, rotate each day, although there is some consistency — meaning some trucks, such as Easy Slider or Cajun Tailgaters, are always there on certain days of the week. Philly cheesesteaks also are served out of the permanent building.

“We close at 12, so we’re not a late-night party place,” Boso says. “We’re more the ‘come for dinner, enjoy a live band’ kind of eat-and-drinking environment. A casual, gather-with-friends kind of place.”

The Truck Yard is at 5624 Sears St.