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His food truck effort is strictly extracurricular, he says by email. He’s “just someone who works at 125 Sussex, heard people complain about the lack of food options once too often and decided to do something about it.” He refuses an interview on company time.

But the way the councillor for the area, Mathieu Fleury, tells it, Buchan had a simple idea: get a rotation of trucks, like Ad Mare and Dosa and Sula Wok, to set up nearby and purvey their high-end street food.

Turns out this wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

Global Affairs is on the official ceremonial boulevard between Rideau Hall and Parliament, but it’s snarled in bridge approaches and traffic circles that isolate it as thoroughly as if it were in a highway cloverleaf. According to Fleury, the city looked for a place to put a food truck spot and found none on the roads. What it did find is a city basketball court, tucked into a sliver of parkland between a roundabout and the Rideau River, with its own tiny parking lot that isn’t used much during the day. What about there?

Fleury says they took the idea to Dan Chenier, the city’s general manager for parks.

“Dan at first wasn’t super-open. At first he was, like, ‘We’ve never done something like this, I don’t know’,” Fleury says. But after some persuading, everyone agreed to try it.

The first food truck produced more demand than even the most frenetic chef could serve.

The response on Day 1 a couple of weeks ago was overwhelming. Crazy lineups. More demand than even the most frenetic food truck chef could serve. Since then business has been up and down but good enough that in the second week, Buchan invited a second truck, plus on some days a dessert cart — Stella Luna gelato, Mr. Churritos. The weekly roster goes up on a tiny but popular website, including in a printable form suitable for office bulletin boards. “Variety is the spice of lunch,” it says.