Midtown Lunch

ML has always been a huge fan and supporter of food trucks, but we’ve also been realistic about how hard it is for trucks to make money exclusively selling food on the street (despite what countless “trend” pieces would have you believe.)  So it was no surprise to read on Squid Ink that a number of trucks have already shut down or reverted exclusively to catering gigs. (Even a truck like Marked 5, which had almost 4000 twitter followers and was featured on VendrTV, decided it wasn’t worth it financially to keep roaming around the streets.)  The good news is, a new tool is launching that could help… meet Road Stoves GPS, the first iPhone app dedicated to mapping food trucks based on GPS instead of twitter.  Great news if they can get all the trucks to participate, although we still think there is no online substitute for a consistent schedule of parking spots.  [via Squid Ink]

Related:
Opening a Street Truck is Just as Risky as Opening a Restaurant (Despite What the Local News Says)
News Flash: New Street Vendors Are Finding It Difficult to Make Money
How Twitter Actually Hurts Street Vendors

Thanks to the anonymous Midtown Lunch’er who forwarded along this email from the building that houses MTV, a popular lunchtime destination for a number of food trucks.

Hello All-

Due to an incident that occurred today, we will no longer host food trucks in the loading alley for lunch.
Thank you.

[Name Redacted]

Assistant Property Manager
Worthe Real Estate Group

They’re not talking about the food truck strip on Pennsylvania between 26th and Stewart are they!?! Thankfully not…

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Anybody who has ever moved from one great food city to another must know what I’m going through. When I moved from L.A. to New York 5 years ago, one of the first things I tried to do was find a replacement burrito for all the great ones I had left behind. (I failed.) And now that I’ve moved back, so much of my first few months of eating have been dedicated to finding replacement lunches for all my NYC favorites.  Thai food? That was easy. Pizza? Good enough. Ramen? Done and done.  The India Jones truck wasn’t quite the Kati Roll/Biriyani cart replacement I had hoped for, but their butter chicken more than made up for it.  But what about the Jamaican Dutchy?!  Where am I going to get my stew peas?  Hello Reggae Chicken Truck.

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I’ve been craving a burger since the day I got here (this city has some good burgers) and I thought long and hard about what I wanted my first burger in L.A. to be. Would I go old school at the Apple Pan, or new school at the Oinkster.  Would I splurge on Umami Burger, or go cheap at Capitol Burgers. And then of course there’s In N Out Burger, but I ruled that one out pretty quickly.  If an In N Out opened up in Manhattan it would be the greatest, most exciting day in Midtown Lunch’ing history… but here in L.A., a new In N Out Burger is like a new Starbucks (and therefore not a Midtown Lunch.)

It was a tough choice, and in the end I went for… none of the above!  I know it’s terrible, but if there’s one thing I like more than burgers it’s food trucks… so when I randomly found myself outside of Baby’s Badass Burgers the other day, I couldn’t resist trying it out.

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I love street food and covered it with Rain Man like precision in NYC, but at this point I feel like there is little left that would surprises me in the new school food truck scene.  Grilled cheese?  Sure.  Peruvian food?  Why not.  Asian food in taco form from a truck whose name rhymes with “kogi”? Uh… yeah.  In other words, just when I thought I couldn’t get excited anymore, a new truck goes and gets me all super giddy. Dim sum… my all time favorite food…  from a truck? Here we go.

For a white guy I consider myself fairly well versed in the ways of dim sum.  I don’t know the Chinese name for anything (besides shu mai and har gow), and still resort to pointing… but I have a pretty general idea what most things are (based on experience, shape, color, etc.)  I like the giant places, where pandemonium rules and you might have to stalk items across long distances (like a hunter with a punch card in place of a spear.)   I like carts, and lots of them (dim sum that you have to order off a menu is not real dim sum imo.)  And to the delight of most dim sum cart pushers, this short fat Jewish guy loves chicken feet.  I also know that in New York, if you want good dim sum you go to Brooklyn (or maybe even Flushing… but never Manhattan.)  And in L.A. dim sum fans all head east to the (at this point incredibly well known) San Gabriel Valley.

In other words, if you want awesome “dim sum” you’re clearly not going to get it from a truck parked in Santa Monica!  And yet there I was yesterday, “punch card” in hand,  as excited as I possibly could be to try the brand new “Dim Sum Truck”.  And you know why?  Because we don’t work in Monterrey Park.

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Midtown Lunch: LA has been up and running for 2 weeks now, and not a single post about street food? Embarrassing… so on Friday I set to rectify the situation by heading to the new Downtown food truck food court on S Alameda and Traction run by the SoCal MFVA. I was excited to try India Jones, which had been recommended by Lunch’er Damara during my last week of lunching in NYC. I’m a huge fan of the kati roll (an Indian burrito/soft taco of sorts popular on the streets of Kolkata), and was worried that moving to L.A. would end my affair with the Indian street snack I had come to know and love.

Is there anything this city doesn’t have!?

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