Midtown Lunch

Remember how excited I was to find real jerk chicken, stewed oxtails, and goat stew on the Kassava Truck back in April?  Well, apparently Los Angeles wasn’t as excited because the trucks are now gone, pulled off the street months ago.  Kassava the restaurant is still open over in Beverly Hills (8600 W. 3rd Street) but the trucks just weren’t making enough money to be worthwhile.   But that’s not the end of the story… last month the guy who ran the Kassava Trucks decided to strike out on his own, opening the Tropical Food Truck and parking it near 5858 Wilshire Blvd.  He’s also added some Haitian specialties to the menu, and claims that his mom is the chef of Kassava (and helps him cook the food) so the Jamaican stuff should be exactly the same as the original Kassava truck.

Clearly somebody was going to need to test this out.

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There is not much I can say about the infamous Chef Ludo that you couldn’t read in the L.A. Times or the New York Times or the L.A. Weekly, or in the millions of blog posts that have been written about him. But I will say this- the prospect of an under $10 Ludo lunch is especially exciting to me. When he introduced his ham and cheese sandwich at Gram & Papa’s downtown I got a little giddy…  but ham and cheese is child’s play compared to fried chicken. So once it was announced that Ludo would be taking his famous fried chicken to the streets permanently, the official stalking began.

There have been sporadic sightings over the past few months (like the one a few weeks ago at the Tuesday only LAX food truck lot) but lately it feels like they’re finally gearing up for an official launch.  They’ve even posted a schedule to their Facebook page and a menu to their MobiMunch page, so when I saw they were going to be parked on the westside for lunch yesterday I had to go check it out. (Fat man likey fried chicken.)

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The brand new “Shrimp Pimp” truck showed up in Westwood on Tuesday (Glendon & Wilshire) and Lunch’er Sarah, who tried the shrimp po’boy, sent this photo and report to let us know how good it was.

“Not a traditional po-boy because it had no pickles and a spicy remolaude instead of mayo and also mesculen instead of iceberg – but the shrimp were huge and delicious. They also offered cevice and handmade French fries which were also delicious.”

New truck + the name “Shrimp Pimp” = automatic eye roll (I’ll refer you to the first paragraph of yesterday’s post.) On the other hand, I do like the sound of shrimp and chips. Supposedly the truck will be parked in front of Hulu today (on Olympic just West of Bundy) and according to Sarah they’ll be trying to park in Westwood every Monday. You can track them (naturally) on Twitter. Got a lunch you want to share? Email it to me at zach@midtownlunch.com

Oh food trucks… you are everything I love and hate about lunchtime in Los Angeles.  I love you, because you bring fun and interesting food to my neighborhood every day, saving me from another visit to [insert boring fast food chain near you office here].  You get me outside, and interacting with people on the street.  You make my lame co-workers willing to eat a less than healthy lunch they would otherwise balk at (“Korean buffet?  Meh… Kogi is outside?  Let’s do it!”)   But there are a lot of you. And not all of you are good.  And sometimes you are hard to find.  And you have made me hate the words “fusion tacos” and “seasoned fries”.  And most of you take too long.  (Isn’t street food supposed to be fast?)  And some of your concepts are ridiculous, and not well thought out.  And if it wasn’t for you I could probably get away with pretending Twitter doesn’t exist.  Did I mention there are too many of you?

Clearly my relationship with food trucks is complicated, but my fat stomach was still pretty excited to move to L.A. and be unleashed into the wild street food scene.  When I first got here, Kogi was already on my radar (I don’t live under a rock), but beyond that I didn’t quite know where to start.  Thankfully (?) a few names kept popping up over and over again.  Grilled Cheese Truck (how could that be bad?), Cool Haus (I like ice cream sandwiches!), India Jones, Komodo… and of course, The Buttermilk Truck, which for some reason I kind of brushed off.  (Here’s where I admit I’m an idiot.)  For some reason the whole “buttermilk” thing didn’t register with me.  Buttermilk pancakes?  Buttermilk biscuits?  It didn’t click (I think I thought it was dessert or something?) until I heard the words fried chicken and waffles.

I want to go to there.

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I have a confession to make.  When I first moved here from New York back in February I was completely overwhelmed by the street food scene here.  NYC has its fair share of new school trucks, and Midtown Lunch has enthusiastically covered them since their numbers began to explode back in 2007.  But what’s going on in Midtown is nothing compared to the scene here in Los Angeles.  As everybody knows, it’s far from easy to vend here… but if you can believe it, it’s even harder in New York.  Licenses are hard to come by, and permits are capped, so the waiting list to legally open a food truck in any of the five boroughs is a mile long. Don’t believe me?  Kogi, arguably the most successful street vending operation to date, looked into opening in NYC and decided it was too difficult.  Here, parking might be tough in some high density areas, but renting a truck is super easy (there is no Road Stoves equivalent in NYC) and there are no caps placed on permits so there is no limit to the number of new trucks that can (and have) hit the streets here in L.A.

The Flying Pig Truck, which will be one year old in October, is one of those trucks that I would have been super excited about had it opened in Midtown.  Or if I had been living in L.A. when it first hit the streets.  On one hand the choice between pork and anything else is no choice at all for this (lower case) jew.  On the other hand, Asian tacos and Asian sliders are not as exactly the ground breaking menu item they once were here in SoCal.   And then I read this blog post a few weeks ago, saying their pork buns were “ripped from the Momofuku playbook”.

Well, that’s all I needed to hear.

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The New York based Schnitzel & Things Truck has become so popular since their launch last year that it didn’t surprise me at all to read this morning on Grub Street that a new Schnitzel Wagon has launched here in L.A. What did surprise me was how much the wagon looks like another New York City truck… The Street Sweets Truck!  I mean, seriously? Burger Kitchen ripping off Umami is a bit of a stretch… this?  Not so much.  Super curious to find out if the guys behind this truck are from NYC?  Or whether or not they even know the folks behind the Schnitzel & Things Truck or the Street Sweets Truck.  Laughably hilarious trademark infringement aside, I am excited to be able to get some schnitzel from a truck here in L.A.  (I was a huge fan of Schnitzel & Things.)    You can follow them on Twitter here.

UPDATE: Apparently the Street Sweets Truck has taken notice…

There were quite a few standouts at the LA Food Fest tasting event last weekend at the Rose Bowl, but none stood out more to me than the pork belly adobo served up by the Manila Machine, a Filipino food truck that hit the streets of L.A. back in June. Run by two popular food bloggers (not a joke), the truck launched with a ton of great press (mostly by bloggers, natch) but I couldn’t help but be a little skeptical. Nobody gets more excited about street food than me, and I’ve been covering the ascent of the “hipster truck” for over 4 years now.  But I’ve also been burned by one too many mediocre new school food trucks, and have gradually gone from feeling like “anything new with four wheels is worth getting excited about!” to “I’m going to wait until I hear something really good from somebody who isn’t friends with the owner of the food truck, or getting free food” before I dig in.

A single bite of pork belly adobo with pineapple changed all of that, so on Friday I found myself on Olympic btw. Bundy and Centinela- ordering practically the Manila Machine’s entire menu.

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