I think that the food trucks are also viewed as "undercutting" the restaurants (at least of the lunch crowd, as they sell the same things that people would go to restaurants for (i.e. burgers and sandwiches), even though the food truck items can be about $10 (i.e food fair pricing).
In Asia, are the prices more comparable between bricks and mortar restaurants and food carts (or do they differentiate themselves in the marketplace)? Maybe the City created part of the problem with requirements for "high end" food trucks?
Here's an odd article from the Globe - one of the "big" food trends for 2014 is supposedly to bring up the cost of "ethnic" food to the cost of food at western restaurants (which may wrongly assume that cheap food is poor quality):
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...228061/?page=4