500 words on mobile food

My first job out of college was at a Hollywood studio at the height of the Internet-boom. We typically spent just a couple of hours a day doing the work of the studio and the rest of the time cavorting around the office looking for ways to pass the time until 6:00 PM and freedom. It’s amazing what you can do with hours to spend and a high-speed Internet connection. Corporate servers would become filled with Napster downloads. We’d order the newest Madonna album for free delivery from Kozmo.com.

Oh Kozmo, how I miss you. Los Angeles has long featured shopping on demand. In college, it was Pink Dot who could deliver Twinkies, ice cream, toilet paper, beer, and cigarettes in the middle of the night. Despite our “car culture”, people in Los Angeles apparently like having their shopping come to them.

My senior year of college, I lived in a lower-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood where the neighbors were years ahead of the curve. At various times during the day, large white trucks would pull up and play tunes through their horns and folks would scamper out of their houses to buy produce, tacos, meats, juices, burritos, and more. Ten years later, I imagine it’s harder to get your hands on one of those catering or delivery trucks with the recent rise in gourmet, or at least kitschy and divine, “taco trucks.”

I think it started with the Kogi BBQ taco truck. I’m not a 100% sure because there is a bar near me that serves Kogi tacos so I haven’t been a big stalker of the trend. Not until the debut of the Grilled Cheese Truck last month. Like most of these trucks, the Grilled Cheese Truck had its coming out party at the Brig in Venice, the natural stomping ground for trend-setting mobile-food-eating hipsters. Diverging from spectacular fusion of one nation’s food with tacos (Koji Tacos = Korean seasoned meats), the Grilled Cheese Truck features heavenly-inspired concoctions but strays from the mobile-dining pack by allowing a lot of personalization. The Grilled Cheese Truck is my idea of the perfect companion: comforting, indulgent, and only around once a week.

The competition among the trucks is tough. This phenomenon, where Twitter is used to announce the daily locations, clogs up my personal account daily. I’m following Koji BBQ, Flying Pig, India Jones, Buttermilk Truck, Grilled Cheese Truck, Get Shaved, Baby’s, The Gastro Bus, Dosa Truck, South Philly Express, Cool Haus, LA FuXion, Let’s Be Frank, and the newest addition, Frysmith. Once we check the twittervese to find them, we scramble through the city to get our fix from the truck.

And then we stand in line. Usually a very long line. It’s said that nobody walks in LA, but we’ll stand in line for two hours for a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s not quite the same as La Cucaracha bellowing from a beat-up catering truck’s horn and the whole neighborhood running out to be fed, but it sure is close.