Offbeat Eats

Still no rest for the weary. After getting back from my Dayton Trip (which was right on the heels of my Chicago trip), it was time to repack the suitcase, grab my appetite and a fresh CF card, and head off to Austin. In what’s becoming an annual tradition, several of us from TivoCommunity.com descended on the Austin area for several days dedicated to eating, both BBQ and Food Trucks (of which the greater Austin area has plenty of both). Carol and I arrived a day before most of the attendees, which gave us an opportunity to start sampling food trucks a bit early. From the airport, we headed to South 1st Street in the SoCo (“South Congress”) and decided to indulge in Torchy’s Tacos.

After a morning spent looking at the most excellent native art collections at the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix, as well as having a quick trip over to Wes Bolin Plaza to look at the various memorials, we decided that we needed a quick lunch. Luckily, Phoenix has the same, healthy taco truck economy that I’ve come to expect from any major Southwestern city. Easy to miss the place, since you can’t directly see the truck from the street without eagle eyes, since they’ve ensconced it in several blue tarps to make a seating area of a few rickety tables and chairs (as well as a place to get out of the sun). The truck itself makes one wall of the dining area, so you wander up to the window and place your order, and then hang out and relax as they assemble it…

(Closed) After a second day of driving about the Austin area sampling barbecue, and then washing down that barbecue with more Blizzards from the Lockhart, TX Dairy Queen, we again decided that, after a modest afternoon siesta, it was time to go seek out more food carts in Austin. After checking out the nice map of Austin food carts, we decided to check out some of the trailers along South Congress. So we piled into the cars and headed out. Alas, while we saw our desired street carts, the traffic was intractable due to the LoneStar Roundup Car and Custom show. So we ended up heading over the river, and then east of I-35, eventually finding what’s known as the “Eastside Drive-In” court of food carts, with eight or nine trailers all clustered around a central courtyard of tables…

While the primary reason we came to Austin was the wide variety of excellent barbecue joints, it’s important to note that Austin has a very healthy and vibrant non-barbecue food scene as well. In particular, Austin is ahead of the curve with the current food cart trend, with all sorts of energetic chefs piling cooking equipment and refrigerators into all sorts of food carts, converted airstream trailers, vans, and the like. They are pretty much everywhere in central Austin now, it seems that a large fraction of vacant lots, parking lots, sidewalks, and curbsides now host food carts. Heck, most of them now feature groups of carts. Pretty much every fare that can be sold from a truck is sold from a truck, from burgers, to organic meat, to vegan wraps, to chicken n’ waffles, to tacos (where the whole food cart craze really took hold), to, well, just about anything…