Gourmet food trucks the words to me invoke thoughts of a culinary adventure. You may have seen them on TV, or while driving on the highway, or even several of them parked along the side of a street in a straight line selling their food to hungry people. They come in a wide variety of designs, and styles. They serve a wide variety of food taking simple foods like hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, and ice cream and giving them gourmet twists.
Every Wednesday from 5:30-9:00pm a group of food trucks park in the Irvine bowling lanes/boomers parking lot and set up shop. Last Wednesday I went over and checked it out. Getting there was half the fun as I boarded a campus shuttle from my apartment at the Camino Del Sol complex to the University center, and from the University Center I ran to the Bowling lane. The food trucks present vary from week to week this time the trucks present included a barbecue truck, and Argentine cuisine truck, a gourmet slider truck, and even a gourmet ice cream sandwich truck. Due to the limited amounts of money I had at the time I chose to go to only 2 of the trucks. I went to the Argentine food truck and got an argentine sausage sandwich, then I went to the Ice cream sandwich truck and got a sandwich with a brownie on the bottom, and red velvet on the top with the ice cream flavors being white chocolate, and vanilla bean.
Considering the fact that the ice cream would melt I ate the ice cream first. The brownie matched my standards it was soft and chewy, and had a smooth texture on the inside with a crunchy crust, the red velvet cookie tasted similar to the brownie except it had red food coloring. The ice cream was sweet, and creamy, though I couldn’t really tell the difference between the two flavors in terms of taste, in appearance I could since the vanilla bean had the specks of vanilla in it.
Next I tried the sandwich and the fries that came with it. The sausage sandwich was good the bread they used which I assumed was an Argentine bread was like a French roll, and it complemented the texture of the sausage. They used a chimichurri sauce which is an Argentine vegetable sauce which oil, the oil soaked into the bread which made it similar to garlic bread which also helped improve the flavor of the sandwich. The fries were also very good they were garlic fries seasoned with a little cilantro, and they maintained their crisp even a half hour after I ordered them. The ability for a French fry to maintain its crisp is one of the standards I use next to the overall taste, and flavor to determine what makes a good fry.
The next day there was another food truck event. This time it was at the UCI campus only a three minute walk away from my apartment. There were only two food trucks present for this event, The Kogi Korean barbeque truck and the Ice cream sandwich truck I encountered the day before at the bowling lane. Since I already investigated the ice cream sandwich truck I ordered from the Kogi truck. The truck features a fusion of Korean, and Mexican cuisines. Kogi has a very interesting history as its famous both for their combination of Korean with Mexican food and also for their reliance on Internet technology, especially Twitter and Youtube, to spread information about their offerings and locations. Its owner/founder, Mark Manguera, a Filipino-American, married into a Korean family and was inspired to combine Mexican and Korean food as a result.[2] The food truck has won much recognition, including a Bon Appétit Award in 2009 and "Best New Chef" for Roy Choi by Food & Wine in 2010, the first for a food truck. It was also recognized as one of the Top 5 Food Trucks in the U.S. by gayot.com. When the truck was first created Kogi wasn’t doing very well, it wasn’t until they began to use Facebook, and Twitter that they saw success, and now many gourmet food trucks use Twitter, and Facebook to post their locations. In recent years gourmet food trucks have increased in popularity thanks to such reality shows as The Great Food Truck Race which aired last year, and now more and more chefs fresh out of culinary school start out with food trucks to get their name out there.
After looking through their menu I chose to order the calamari tacos since I’m a fan of fried calamari, and it sounded like a great combination. When I got my food I inspected it to see how it looked, it looked very good a pile of fried calamari lay on a small, soft tortilla with a red chili sauce on top, my first instinct was to smell it, my nose was treated to the wonderful smell of the cilantro, lime, and various herbs, and spices in the chili sauce on top. When I bit into it the taco was pleasantly crisp, the sauce was flavorful, and the calamari was seasoned, and fried to perfection. The calamari was pleasantly spicy the taste indicated it was marinated with a spicy Korean sauce.
Next we’re going to talk a little about the ice cream sundae. For those of you that were on google sometime between Sunday 4/3, to Monday 4/4 would have seen the google logo replaced with an image of an ice cream sundae shaped like google. The origin of the ice cream sundae is a story that is clouded in mystery.
While Ithaca is widely accepted as the birthplace of the Sundae, a few would disagree. Two Rivers, Wisconsin, cites Edward C. Berners, owner of a local ice cream parlor, as originator of the Sundae, and the nearby town of Manitowoc claims George Giffey as their own local hero. Hometown legend in Buffalo, New York, traces back to Stoddard Brothers, the first drugstore to install a soda fountain in Buffalo, selling ice cream sodas for a nickel -- that is, until the day the store ran out of soda water. Uncle Charley Stoddard needed to dream up a new dish in a hurry, so he instructed his clerks to serve ice cream drenched with fruit syrup. Norfolk, Virginia, holds dear to its own unverifiable claim. A city ordinance not only prohibited the consumption of alcohol, but legislated against the growing "Sunday Soda Menace." To circumvent the blue law, it is purported that a local fountain owner added a few berries, fruit syrup and ice cream to an ice cream soda glass, but held off on the fizzy water. The merchant would not be denied. With a snip of legal subterfuge, his “dry” soda became a Sundae. The story in Plainfield, Illinois, is that a druggist by the name of Sonntag dressed dishes of ice cream with syrup, and since "Sonntag" translates to "Sunday" in German, he should get the credit.
The most commonly accepted story takes place in 1892. Ithaca, New York, was dotted with local drug stores, where many a nickel was spent for a dish of ice cream. After Sunday services at the Unitarian Church, Reverend John M. Scott visited the Platt & Colt Pharmacy in downtown Ithaca, New York, for his usual dish of vanilla ice cream -- but on one fateful day, history was altered forever. That day, instead of plain vanilla for the Reverend, Chester Platt dipped his scoop of ice cream into a champagne saucer, poured cherry syrup over the top, and dressed it with a candied cherry. As the two men pondered over what to call the delightful new concoction, Scott proposed that it be named after the day on which it was invented: Cherry Sunday!
Stories have been told many times, in many places, and with varying degrees of believability. A few of the places continue spinning their tales today, and the Sundae flapdoodle may never be settled. What is known for sure is that Ithaca, New York, has the earliest documentation to substantiate its claim as the birthplace of the great American dessert -- an advertisement placed by Chester Platt in the Ithaca Daily Journal on April 5, 1892.
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