Tag Archives: food truck

Girdwood Izakaya (Girdwood, AK)

For most of our stay in Alaska, we were staying at an AirBnB condo in Girdwood, Alaska, a small resort town located in a valley east of Anchorage along the Turnagain Arm. Girdwood is primarily known for the Alyeska Ski Resort that actually constitutes the majority of the town. Aside from the resort itself, Girdwood is actually a pretty small town, but it has a handful of restaurants, a few smaller stores, and a brewery: Girdwood Brewing. Girdwood Brewing is just a small craft brewery without its own food service (unfortunately, that means that the brewery itself has to close at 8pm due to liquor laws, which in July in Alaska is ridiculously early). Instead, Girdwood has a rotating selection of local food trucks set up shop in their parking lot. During our visit, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, the rotating food truck was Girdwood Izakaya.

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German Food Truck (Portobello Road, London, UK)

Despite “eating” being one of the more substantial goals of our annual “Death March” tradition, there aren’t a lot of reviews from the walk along the way, mostly since Death March dining is primarily a matter of “grazing” as we hit various markets, train stations, and other light dining opportunities. However, we did find a few interesting and notable places along the way. The first of these was at London’s Portobello Road market. Portobello Road has long been known for its antique stores and Saturday morning market where people set up shop at various stalls hawking their antiques. But in recent years, it has increasingly become a street food market, with both a few vendors intermixed among the antiques, and a larger dedicate food market along Cambridge Gardens right after Portobello road passes under the A40, and a few of the vendors throughout Portobello Street are actually quite good and notable. One of these that caught our attention was a truck simply named “German Food”.

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PA & Gargantua Grilled Cheese (Montreal, QC)

(Closed) After a few years resisting, in recent years Montreal has finally started to embrace the food truck, offering up a permitting system for up to 50 trucks each season (running from Spring to Fall) at 38 designated locations around the city, as well as special events. As a result, the restaurateurs of Montreal have responded, and there’s now no shortage of food trucks, ranging from those run by established restaurants to those opened by new chefs. Last summer’s trip to the Mondiale de la Biere festival in Montreal (yeah, last June… I’m still behind in my writeups) allowed us to sample a good cross-section of some of the city’s food trucks. One of our clear favorites was PA & Garguantua, serving up grilled cheese.

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Camion Bar Broderie (Palmiste Rouge, Réunion , France)

Sometimes, getting there is half the fun. Our next destination in Réunion, Cilaos, involved one of the most interesting and challenging drives I’ve ever done. On an island already infamous for it’s many steep and winding roads, the N5, leading from Ilet Palmistes to Cilaos in the Cirque de Cilaos, is the granddaddy of them all. The road is only approximately 20 km long, but that 20 km of driving involves over 2000 m of elevation gain and loss, over 600 turns (most of them in the 400+ switchbacks), two one-lane tunnels, several one-lane segments, dozens of blind corners, narrow shoulders, and other driving challenges. The road is so twisty that in a few places it even loops back over itself! It truly is one of the most challenging, and most impressive, drives I’ve ever done (especially at night!). And after our first drive up the N5, we emerged from the Peter Both Tunnel to find a small parking area, and, a “Camion Bar”. In the pantheon on Réunionnaise restaurants, if there’s anything that comes in a close second in popularity to the ubiquitous “le Snack Bar”, it would be “Le Camion Bar”. Basically, a food truck. And seeing the “Camion Bar Broderie” was certainly a welcome sight, and a chance to put the twists, turns, and tunnels of the drive behind me as we stopped, enjoyed the view, and had some sandwiches.

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The Hindquarter (Burlington, VT)

I always enjoy a good hot dog truck, especially ones that can really have fun with the concept. For example, about 6 months ago I really got to enjoy Asia Dog, a funky Asian-inspired hot dog vendor in New York City. So when wandering through Eat X NE in Burlington, one food truck caught my eye, The Hindquarter. The Hindquarter drives around Burlington’s South End in a converted Rescue Squad red truck, serving up a variety of sandwiches, soul food, and sausages to hungry eaters. For Eat X NE, they had a nice broad menu, focusing on fried whole belly clams (clam strips are the work of the devil!), their take on a Banh Mi, a smoked chicken sandwich, and a chile relleno. But one item in particular attracted my attention: the simply named Jumbo Hot Dog.

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Lazy Farmer (Burlington, VT)

It’s been a crazy-busy year, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been eating, just behind in our writing. Back in September, we decided to take a weekend to ourselves and head up to one of our favorite cities, Burlington, VT, for a relaxing day of hanging around. After doing some light shopping, we headed down to the South end of town to pay another visit to Switchback Brewery. While there, we noticed that a rather lot of people were in the area, all headed for a local food festival, Eat X NE, focusing on local farm-to-food options (as well as their partner event, BrewHaHa, a modest beer festival focusing on local beers). We decided to check it out, and were very pleasantly surprised: the fairly lousy weather had finally broken giving some nice, clear weather, and we got to sample a handful of new beers, and check out some of Burlington’s food trucks. One of these were a modest little trailer called Lazy Farmer.

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Loncheria Rubi (Grand Junction, CO)

The whole purpose of our trip to Colorado was going to a wedding of two of our friends. However, they aren’t exactly traditionalists, so one of the activities planned for their informal wedding was a hike up nearby Mount Garfield. Well, it’s a short hike (~2 miles), but it’s also a steep one (~2000 feet), with most of the elevation gain in the first third of the trail. I enjoyed both the hike and the view from the top, but by the time we got back to Grand Junction to get ready for the wedding, I needed a bit of a snack. Cruising through the west side of Grand Junction, we happened across two places: a Sonic (I don’t really care for their food, but I love their cherry limeade), and in a little parking area right next door, Loncheria Rubi, a taco truck.

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Crêpes Parfait (Washington, DC)

Since I end up going to the DC area at least twice every year (usually for work), I’ve been able to see a lot of minor changes as they happen on the food scene. One of the bigger changes is that the area is finally starting to embrace the food truck. A few years ago, there were surprisingly few modern food trucks, with the mobile food scene in DC still dominated by hot dog vendors and the people selling random snack food on the Mall. Indeed, it was just 2011 when one had to go to odd neighborhoods to find a place like El Chilango (who have since spun off a brick and mortar joint in the District, as is often the case with the better food trucks). In any case, there are now food trucks aplenty: 12th Street and 14th Street on the Mall are repleat with them, and the central business areas in downtown and Arlington now sport plenty of food truck options, as do most of the major tourist areas. Indeed, Connecticut Ave on the west end of the National Zoo has quite a selection, and, as we discovered this trip, some of them, like Crêpes Parfait, are actually quite good.

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Pascalino’s (Brussels, Belgium)

Okay, I’m going to start out by saying that this review is of a place that’s not particularly offbeat or unique. You see, pretty much any place you go in Belgium, you can count on three things being widely available: beer, frites, and Gaufres de Liege, aka the Belgian Waffle. Doing a simple walking tour of Brussels, I passed approximately two dozen storefronts, carts, and food trucks selling freshly made Gaufres de Liege, and by the time we got to Square de Meeûs, the nice aromas of freshly-baked waffles had finally defeated me, and I had to stop at Pascalino’s Glaces et Gaufres for a waffle.

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Beansie’s Bus (Burlington, VT)

As those that have been to this site a lot have noticed, I have a weakness for hot dogs. Indeed, a coworker claiming that “hot dogs are just hot dogs” was one of my inspirations for starting this blog, since there are really quite a few varieties of hot dogs in existence (indeed, I’ve got as far as the Iceland Pylsur in my reviews). One of the more intriguing things I like is when essentially the same concept, like the “Chili dog”, gets some regional variations. When I was growing up (in the Southwest), a chili dog was simply a “chili dog” (albeit with the caveat that the sort of chili that makes a good condiment isn’t the same sort that tastes good in a bowl). The “Coney Island” dog is a variant of this with “Coney sauce”, a meaty, near-chili spicy meat sauce, and can be spotted by that name ranging from Michigan all the way over to Massachusetts. However, nearly the exact same dog as a “Coney Dog”, with a slightly drier and less spicy sauce, goes by the name “Texas Hot” or a “Michigan” (likely in homage to the Coney Island variety primarily coming from Michigan) in Upstate New York and Vermont (and as far north as northern Quebec, my friend Ben has a great story about buying a “Michigan” hot dog at a food cart at a Hydro Quebec station in far, far, northern Quebec). And a particularly good example of the “Michigan” hot dog can be found at Beansie’s Bus in Burlington, VT.

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