Restaurants and food trucks here answer to the city-county Health District

The grade card taped near the door of a Corpus Christi taqueria comes from the same office that signs off on a downtown brewpub kitchen and a fair-week funnel-cake trailer: the Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District, out at 1702 Horne Road. If you sell or serve food to the public, you carry an annual permit and you get inspected. That covers brick-and-mortar restaurants, mobile vendors, temporary event setups, and the grocery and roadside operations in between.

Inspectors score off a demerit system tied to the Texas Food Establishment Rules (TFER, the state's adaptation of the FDA Model Food Code), so what shows up on the card is how many demerits a kitchen piles up on cold-holding, handwashing, and the rest. A food truck runs its own application track separate from a fixed restaurant, and temporary-event vendors file a shorter form covering only the days they're open. The District posts mobile-vendor and temporary-event guideline sheets in English and Spanish if you want to see what an inspector will be looking for.

Lease, trailer, and festival-booth plans all hinge on which of those tracks you're really on, and the food permit usually isn't the only one in play, since city zoning, fire, and county rules tend to overlap on the same kitchen. The District's food-permitting line is (361) 826-7222 (the main Horne Road number is (361) 826-7200), and a five-minute call there sorts out which application fits before you've sunk money into a build-out the inspection won't pass.