There are a dozen or more sites tracking where the new gourmet food trucks at any given time. People follow the trucks on Twitter and retweet compulsively when one they like has shown up nearby.
I prefer a more aleatory approach: I go to the Bruery and see what's there. They've been inviting the more popular food trucks to park outside the door of the tasting room at the weekend, and more and more are responding. Food from trucks, incidentally, tastes better with beer. It's just one of those inescapable facts of life.
Yesterday's visitor to Greater Southwestern Placentia was the Louks To Go truck, a Greek truck whose name is a play on two Greek comestibles: loukaniko (sausage) and loukoumades (fritters).
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As I was with a group of friends, I ordered a lot of food: a beef
gyros sandwich (which was repeated back to me as “ghee-rose”, argh!),
an order of feta fries and an order of honey louks (i.e., loukoumades).
Later, another of our party ordered tzatziki fries. The Louks folks get kudos for having good-looking salads on their menu, too; too often food trucks concentrate on meat and carbohydrates.
The beef
gyros was tasty, cut reasonably thickly (but not as thickly as the
late-and-lamented Greek Garden Grill) and well-dressed with tomatoes,
onion and tzatziki, but one quibble is the presence of French fries on
the sandwich. Though common in Greece and the various Greek expatriate communities, they're just unnecessary.
The feta fries were
excellent: the feta had been loaded on thin-cut fries as soon as they
came out of the fryer, so that the crumbles melted into an
astonishingly creamy blanket of curds. If I hadn't known they were
feta, I would have thought they were some kind of fresh cheese such as
ricotta. The fries were unsalted, which is fine, since feta is very
salty.
The same fries topped with a pool of tzatziki (yoghurt with cucumbers and garlic) were not as good. The tzatziki was too cold, and it cooled the fries too quickly. Whether due to the recipe or the fries, the tzatziki itself was flavorless: no discernible cucumber or garlic flavor.
The honey loukoumades were the first thing to go from the table barrel around which we were gathered: a huge
plastic clamshell of what can only be described as Greek funnel cake:
crispy, crunchy fried dough covered in honey. These were very good, very sticky-sweet, very rustic with cakes of various sizes.
There were some problems: the food got cold very, very quickly and was unappealing after it cooled down (particularly the fries). I'm not sure how a food truck would rectify that problem, but it's one shared by many trucks.
We were given a fork, which helped to eat the fries, but when I asked for a plastic knife to cut the sandwich so the seven of us could each try a bit, they said they didn't carry such things. It's not too much to ask to have forks, knives and spoons, is it?
The
value, however, was excellent, and that is what would keep me coming
back. The portions were quite large and the prices low. You can't buy a
gyros sandwich for $5 in bricks-and-mortar stores anymore. Fries were $3–outstanding for the amount of food you get, especially for the feta fries–and the loukoumades were $4.
I'm a sucker for Greek food of any provenance, so I consider this a happy addition to the OC food truck scene. A few minor tweaks and it will be even better.
The Louks To Go truck is normally in Orange County during the dinner hours, with late hours (until 2 a.m.) on the weekends. Follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/loukstogo or see their website. Unlike most trucks, they accept plastic.
