After my friends and I saw the ridiculously long line at the Kogi stop in Costa Mesa this past Saturday, we turned around and left to have some Taco Mesa. But I got to thinking, what other foods might do well in Orange County via lonchera (other than tacos, which are already a staple)? A quick internet search yielded these five, which has not yet roamed Orange County streets, and probably never will.
1. What the Pho Truck – Being so close to Little Saigon we probably don't need this, but just think: you come out of office, a lunch truck outside is serving bowls of hot steaming pho! But there's word this San Francisco truck — called What the Pho? — is not for real. Noted Bay Area Chowhound Melanie Wong suspects that it might just be a hoax. She may be right: their Twitter (twitter.com/WhatThePho) has been silent since July and it doesn't sound like anyone's actually seen them on the street.
2. Nom Nom Banh Mi Truck – Just like pho, we're blessed with an array of banh mi shops in Little Saigon, all of whom compete with each other to keep prices low and quality optimal. So the Nom Nom truck might not fare well here unless they're ready to get into a price war. But if it Twittered (twitter.com/nomnomtruck) that it's going to park in front of my building, I would rejoice and throw away the Quiznos.
3. Rickshaw Dumpling Truck – This New York truck is an offshoot of none other than Chef Anita Lo's restaurant called Rickshaw. Anita Lo, of course, was recently on Top Chef Masters. Fat chance it'll ever make it to the West Coast, let alone Orange County. They, of course, also Twitter at twitter.com/rickshawtrucK
4. Fishlips Sushi Truck – If you can have ice cream trucks, you can have sushi trucks. I figure: what's fresher than a truck that presumably just got back from a trip to the seafood supplier, holding everything fully refrigerated until you take a bite. The Fishlips truck operates in L.A. and it's Twitter is twitter.com/Fishlips_Sushi
5. Disneyland Corn Dog Truck – Lest we forget, Disneyland's only affordable edible food is served out of a truck at the end of Main Street. The truck's an antique, so it's probably not street legal, but it does run (if I am not mistaken) since it put-puts under its own power to go back to its staging area at night. They don't Twitter. But did you really expect it to?
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.