Drive south on Highway 101 through Lincoln City's Taft district on a Thursday evening and you'll find the gate at 5040 SE Highway 101 propped open, the parking lot across the street at 9 SE Inlet Ave filling with cars and the odd RV, and a dozen ordering windows lit up under string lights. This is The Pines Dine, the food truck pod that turned a half-acre lot with a complicated history into the closest thing Taft has to a town square. Most regulars know the menu rotation by heart. Fewer know that for nearly the entire 2026 tourist season, one of those truck bays sat empty, advertised for lease through the busiest months the pod sees all year.
That gap closed this fall. And the calendar that filled in around it, a hospital fundraiser, a debut trivia night, a Halloween party with a named host, tells you more about what this lot actually does for the neighborhood than any description of the food ever could.
A Lot That Keeps Refusing to Stay Empty
The ground under The Pines Dine has never had an easy history. Back in 1927, a hotelier named Fred Watson built the original Pines Hotel and Restaurant on this spot, a destination resort with a full ballroom, a restaurant, and a card room where locals gathered for decades. It was, by all local accounts, the place to be in the area through the 1960s. Then it burned down, and the lot sat empty for years, a gap in the middle of a neighborhood that had once organized its social life around it.
Ross and Rachelle Rehberg, local developers who had already reshaped a mixed-use property across the street back in 2014, bought the empty parcel in November 2019 with food trucks in mind. Lincoln City had just cleared the way. In February 2020, the city council unanimously approved two ordinances permitting food carts within city limits, and the Rehbergs decided to build something bigger than a single cart. Then COVID hit, and before ground was even broken, the Echo Mountain Fire tore through the area. The couple paused construction and used the property to house wildfire survivors while they got back on their feet, a detail Rachelle later described as meaningful precisely because of what had happened to this same ground once before. Everything on this property had already burned to the ground once. Using it to shelter people who had just lost everything to fire again wasn't lost on her.
Construction finally broke ground in June 2021. Four trucks opened first: Stoopid Veganz, Bobablastic, Gyropoulos, and La WaWa, serving to-go only while the Rehbergs built out utility pedestals, a 3,750-square-foot dining hall, and seating for 140 people. The Rehbergs were targeting a full grand opening, including a private upstairs event space called Utopia, for early 2022.
Twelve Bays, One Holdout
Since then, the roster has turned over more than once. Early names like Stoopid Veganz and Fish On A Stick, part of that original to-go lineup, are no longer on the current truck list. Others have stuck. Bobablastic, founded in 2016 as one of the earliest bubble tea trucks in the region, is still pouring. Sha Sha's Poke has been building bowls here since February 2023. Rook & Larder, Taqueria 101, Momo on the Wheels, and Sushi 101, run by a sushi chef with fifteen years of experience who previously owned a restaurant in Atlanta, round out a lineup that now also includes Lei Aloha Hawaiian BBQ, opened by chef Josh Anderson and his wife Cassie, who bring more than twenty years of Pacific Northwest cooking and Josh's own Hawaiian-Portuguese family roots to a menu of Hawaiian-style plates with Northwest ingredients.
What's notable is that even with that much stability, one bay sat open through the entire high season. The pod's own leasing listing for Space 4 ran from May 1 through September 30, 2026, spanning exactly the stretch when Taft sees its heaviest foot traffic. It's the kind of vacancy you'd expect a business to fill fast during peak months, and instead it held through the whole summer. This fall, Gyropoulos, already a familiar name in the pod's early years and currently running a truck at The Yard & Beehive Station in Salem, is expanding its footprint here to close that gap. Twelve bays, finally full again, right as the calendar around them gets busier.
What's Actually on the Fall Calendar
The programming that's landed this season goes well past food. Pulled straight from the venue's own fall lineup:
- Backyard Field Day, held September 5 and 6, brought family-friendly games and activities to the lot over the Labor Day weekend.
- The Tickled Pink Party, a ticketed fundraiser on September 26, closes the indoor bar early at 3 p.m. so the space can host a benefit for the North Lincoln Hospital Foundation, with proceeds going toward a new ultrasound machine for early cancer detection. Food trucks stay open on their normal schedule, and outdoor beverage service and seating continue after the bar closure.
- Trivia Night and Music Bingo are both debuting this fall, with exact dates still to be announced.
- A separate fundraiser supports the Taft Seniors' Drug and Alcohol Free Grad Night, aimed at giving graduating seniors a substance-free celebration.
- Family Karaoke Night is also debuting, alongside an open house for the Utopia event space that will include a wine tasting with Wine By Joe and a private tour of the upstairs room.
- The season closes out with a Halloween Extravaganza on Saturday, October 31, hosted by Sweeney Gray, before the pod closes for Thanksgiving and Christmas and reopens for a Pines Square All Ages New Year's Eve Party.
That's not a slow fall. It's a lot doing double duty as a dining destination and a fundraising venue in the same six weeks.
The Point of All This Isn't the Food
Ross Rehberg has said plainly that he thinks people misjudge Lincoln City by treating it as only a tourist stopover. His point, made in a local interview, was that the community underneath the tourism runs deeper than that, full of people who genuinely look out for each other. The fall calendar at The Pines Dine is the clearest evidence for that claim you'll find in Taft this season. This is the same half-acre that hosted card games in the 1920s, sat empty after a fire took the original building, sheltered families displaced by another fire, and is now hosting a ticketed night to help fund cancer screening equipment at the local hospital and a sober celebration for graduating seniors. The food trucks are the draw. The reason the lot keeps filling back in, every time something empties it out, is the town that keeps showing up to use it.
If you're already living in Taft, you've probably eaten here more times than you can count. If you're new to the neighborhood, or thinking about what makes a place like this one tick, this fall's calendar is a good place to start paying attention.
Joni Jackson has spent more than three decades getting to know the towns along this stretch of coast, not just the listings in them. If you're curious about life in Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, or any of the communities she works in, or you'd like a local's read on what a neighborhood is actually like day to day, Let's Connect.
