We love Ethnic foods and Houston, TX has a lot of it - from a hole in the wall places to high end restaurants.
Amongst Ethnic foods, Kolaches (originally from Czech region) are our favorite weekend breakfast.
New Braunfels, near San Antonio also has a lot of ethnic German foods. We enjoy the Wurstfest annual festival in New Braunfels.
Jumping off from this, the whole “fancy food truck” trend in the US started during the 2008 recession. A lot of aspiring chefs weren’t able to get loans to start real restaurants in those days, but discovered that it’s much cheaper to buy a food truck.
I’ve been going outa my way to support food trucks during the pandemic. Surprisingly, the owners I’ve become friends with are doing very well.
And all the car exhaust that’s settled down on it like in Bangkok, where the Skytrain rails above tend to hold it all in. I quit Bangkok street food years ago. Once in the wee hours I saw one stand where the cook stepped over behind a Skytrain stairway to take a massive leak, then went back to cooking. There was no place to wash his hands.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. The places I’ve seen fail are all sit down restaurants particularly dependent on a significant breakfast and/or dinner trade and have a serious lease to answer to. Meanwhile take-out oriented places like taquerias that have always had minimal seating are doing brisk business with lines out the door. A food truck is going to be even better positioned presuming you own it outright.
AIUI, the “cultural appropriation” issue here is typically with trendy restaurants started up by white people to piggyback on popular ethnic food trends, copying dishes (and sometimes even ripping off recipes) from local ethnic restaurants that are actually run by people of that ethnicity.
Sure, everybody is legally allowed to serve whatever type of food they want in their own restaurant. But, just as with high-end clothing and jewelry designers who copy garment and design features from indigenous/minority traditional garb, there’s a bit of frustration along the lines of “you’re just taking advantage of the popularity of our culture and art to imitate parts of it to make your overpriced characterless merchandise seem ‘exotic’ and ‘authentic’.”
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Agree with you and want to also point out that this is not just done by white people. I have seen this done with Indian food, Indian meditation, Yoga, Music , clothing, home decorations, …
It used to bug me a lot in my younger years, but it doesn’t anymore. I think this is way things have evolved over history.
I read a post where it was said (with citations) that the food of the European kings were like the worst (most spiciest) Indian buffet restaurants 
and they tried outdoing each other with more spices. (back in the day when spices were first introduced to Europeans).