A while back, Candy had this wine at an Italian restaurant in Fort Worth. It was Lacryma de Christi del Vesuvio – which translates as “Tear of Christ.” It’s a type of wine produced on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. We had been looking for the stuff all over the Metroplex and nobody had it. They all said the same thing though, “have you looked at Jimmy’s? If anybody has it, they will.” I looked up Jimmy’s Food Store and found it was on the corner of Fitzhugh and Bryan in East Dallas. Today we had some time and drove down there.
I’m familiar with that area. For years I went through there twice a day on my way to work downtown – either driving or on a bus. It was always a poor area, pretty lively, but not the place you wanted to wander around after dark. Lately, though, a lot of the run down old apartments and crude homes have been torn down and the area is primed for redevelopment and gentrification.
Meat Case - Italian Sausage and more
Do you like Nutella? - here's an eleven pound jar for seventy dollars.
Jimmy’s Food Store is a fantastic place. It’s the motherlode of specialty Italian food and wine. I heard the owner talking – he’s been in the same location for forty-two years. The neighborhood has been through some serious changes over that time, but his store has stayed the same. It was crowded with people buying Italian groceries – about a quarter of them speaking Italian.
The store isn’t very big, but holds a lot of goodness, crammed in as tight as can be. The biggest area is dedicated to wine, a huge selection of Italian wines, arranged by region and type. You can learn a lot about wine simply walking the aisles and reading the little articles they have taped to each variety.
Sure enough, they had a couple Lachryma Christi whites (the one red they carry was sold out). There was a Mastroberardino and a Vini Nobilis. We bought one of each and a couple other bottles of wine. We picked up some pasta (Pastosa – imported from Brooklyn!) some cheese and a couple of sauces to go with the pasta.
A couple of Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio
This is the kind of place you don’t want to go when you are hungry. You will buy too much stuff. In addition to the wine and groceries, back next to the meat counter, is a little place where you can order sandwiches. We bought a Cuban and a Muffaletta, some drinks, and took them out to a little table out by the street. The day had started out crisp, but the Texas sun was warming everything up quickly.
Mufalletta - big enough for about three meals
Cuban Sandwich
Seating out on the street.
It was really nice sitting out there on the street eating sandwiches and enjoying the day. There was even live music – a partly blind man, Vincent Van Buren, playing harmonica and singing the blues (and a lot of old Beatles tunes).
I surfed through Twitter and Facebook, looking for stuff to do today, and found a Food Truck I had never tried before, Gennarino’s set up on the Siegel’s Parking lot down on Upper Greenville, just north of Lover’s.
Gennarino’s is a Friggitoria, which is Italian for a place that sells fried foods. In this case, it’s a truck that mostly sells things made out of fried pizza dough. Their menu specializes in Neapolitan street food.
It is a large and unique menu. There is a poster with photographs of:
Zeppoline Salate – Neapolitan fried dough bites
Panzarotti – Potato croquettes
Zeppolone – A panzarotto inside of a giant zeppola
Arancino Rosso – Traditional tomato risotto ball made with yummy Bolognese sauce
Arancino Giallo – Saffron risotto ball
Polentine – Fried polenta triangles
Timballo Rosso – Handheld spaghetti and meatballs
Timballo Bianco – Handheld fettuccine Alfredo
Pizza Fritta – Fried dough topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese
There was no way I was going to be able to make up my mind. There were a few folks standing around a tall table eating and I asked, “What’s good today?”
One woman (I think it was Raffealel’s wife – one of the owners) pointed out the specials, so I ordered a Calzone, something I was familiar with. I was able to chat with Raffealel for a bit about the food truck business and how they started (three brothers and Raffealel’s wife) and where he liked to set up. This truck runs out of Irving, which is why I hadn’t seen them before. He said he was doing mostly lunch business outside of office buildings in Los Colinas. He was very friendly and I really enjoyed talking to him, so when you visit his truck, be sure and say hello.
They had a couple of tall stand-up tables set up outside the truck which was nice – it’s always frustrating when you get your food and don’t have a place to eat it. My calzone was great. The fried dough was very crisp and light and not too greasy at all. It was a delicious treat, not like eating a football, which a lot of calzone’s feel like.
I wish Gennarino’s ran in Dallas more often. I’d like a chance to work my way through their extensive selection – that fried spaghetti and meatballs looks good, so does the pizza, and I’d like to bite into that Zeppolone (I always like something inside something else).
I live in Richardson, Texas – a first-ring suburb of the enormous Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. For the last year or so, I have been enjoying tracking down the various Gourmet Food Trucks that wander the highways and byways. I have been finding them at various locations – mostly in the Dallas Arts District – but have yet to have one show up in my own hometown.
The one struggle for the Food Trucks all over the country is finding locations to park. The owners of brick and mortar restaurants traditionally have a lot of political clout and are always working to enact harassing regulations designed to eliminate the portable competition. I have plenty of sympathy for restaurant owners – that has to be one of the hardest ways to make a living – but I think they are mistaken. The food trucks are mostly a quality replacement for fast food plus they get people used to eating out more. I don’t think the food trucks are a serious threat to quality restaurants.
So I was excited when I left work and checked my social media and found out that the Nammi Food Truck (one of my favorites – First Visit – Second Visit) was going to be setting up for dinner in Richardson. They were going to be at the RunOn! store at Campbell and Coit – not very close to my house – but I wanted to support a truck coming out to my town. The Nammi Truck serves Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwiches, rice bowls, and fusion tacos. I drove home, checked with Candy and decided what to get, and then drove out to RunOn!.
That store brings back a lot of memories. When Lee was younger we used to drive him out there for running lessons. I used to kid him about “lessons” – I’d say, “Left, Right, Left, Right… how hard can it be?” It worked though – the direction and practice Lee received helped him become a good and enthusiastic long-distance runner.
While he would run I would hang out at the Starbucks or wander around the shopping center. There is a lot of interesting stuff around that intersection.
Tonight there was a recreational run going on with a nice little crowd of runners outside the store, stretching, talking, hanging out, and getting ready to head out together. Saucony was there with a truck loaning out test shoes (WTF?) and promoting their products. They had an Xbox Kinect hooked up on the back of their truck and the runners would take turn playing track and field games – running in place, jumping, and throwing a virtual javelin. It looked like a lot of fun… I’m an old fart and had never seen the Xbox Kinect working before.
There was a continuous short line at the Nammi Food Truck. I waited my turn and ordered a BBQ Pork Banh Mi sandwich (these are big sandwiches and Candy and I would share it) plus a lemongrass chicken taco and a beef taco. It didn’t take long and I took the stuff home for dinner.
As always, it was good.
Nammi tacos. They taste better than they look in this picture.
I love the Saigon Market near my house, but I have been hearing the virtues of an even larger Asian Market called Super H Mart. It’s in north Carrollton, which is on the other side of the Metroplex from my humble home, but my car gets good mileage and I had some time today, so off I went.
It looks like a Kmart
Super H Mart is a chain, which started on the East Coast. It’s a huge place, with a massive grocery store surrounded by little stores and a long corridor of a food court. The biggest draw is the produce department with an endless assortment of fruits and vegetables… from normal looking peppers to the strangest looking spiky fruits from the far corners of the globe.
The place was packed with shoppers, noisy and active. It’s not very well organized, so you get to walk around a lot looking for stuff. It’s really clean though, and it’s an odd contrast, with the exotic selection presented like a typical American Megamart.
A great selection of Ramune
Of course, like any good Asian market, the seafood section is a treat. The back wall is full of tanks with every sea creature you can imagine. What isn’t swimming around is lined up on rows of aisles of ice. I wandered around looking at the stuff, watching some woman probing a case of blue crabs, watching them jump around, trying to decide if they were active enough.
Are your Abalone fresh?
Fan mail from some flounder?
Saigon Market in my neighborhood specializes in Vietnamese Fare, of course. Super H Mart specializes in Korean Food. I have never seen so much Kimchi in my life. Glass jars, plastic tubs, and big bags of a bewildering array of different kinds of fermented goodness – whole head cabbage, napa cabbage, radish, and many more that I didn’t really understand.
There is a large section of teas and herbal remedies. Including this one, "Super Colon Sweeper." You have to admire a product with a drawing of the human lower digestive system on the label.
On Sunday we met some friends for a late lunch and to exchange holiday gifts. They live on the opposite side of the Metroplex, so Candy chose a casual restaurant about halfway in between.
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
—-Peter De Vries
Today, Candy took Nick out for his birthday dinner, a day late. Lee didn’t want to go and headed over to a friend’s house, Nicholas (of course) didn’t mind.
Candy called me at work when they left home and I drove to meet them. The place isn’t far from my work. It is Nicholas’ favorite restaurant.
It is called Babe’s Chicken Dinner House. It could be a joke, a satire on everything Texan – except it is serious.
The place is located in a run-down strip center in northern Garland. It shares the NorthStar Center with the Mu Do Martial Arts Academy, the Celebration Bible Church, Second Look Beauty Supply, the Begin Again Thrift Store, a handful of vacant storefronts, and three different burger joints.
I arrived before Nick and Candy so I sat awhile outside, enjoying the sultry evening with the day’s heat reradiating off the partially melted asphalt in the parking lot. They have a row of chairs out front, some made from old steel tractor seats crudely welded to triangles of rebar. A cable runs through them all to discourage theft. A surprisingly powerful outdoor speaker blared out Elvis (Kentucky Rain) and Willie Nelson (an odd version of Deep in the Heart of Texas).
I didn’t have to wait long before Candy and Nick arrived and we went in and ordered. The menu is simple: Fried Chicken, Chicken Fried Steak, Pork Ribs, Pot Roast, Fried Catfish. You get a huge serving of meat and unlimited sides. They keep bringing and bringing, tray after tray. Massive bowls of mashed potatoes, biscuits, heavy cream gravy, creamed corn, stewed tomatoes and okra, green beans, that sort of thing.
“Want anything else with that honey?” our waitress asked, “Tabasco, A-1, Jalepenos?”
“I’ll have a few Jalepenos,” I replied.
The waitresses are young voluptuous local girls in impossibly tight jeans or older battleaxes that look like they’ve been rode hard and put up wet too many times. They all have that tough down-home serious look about them. So do the customers. All stiff, proper, not-too-well-off folk. Mostly families. Everybody looks hungry. One large table was full of burly firefighters, all in blue shirts and burr haircuts. A huge ladder truck and ambulance were parked outside.
The decor is beyond tacky. Lots of wood, mostly concealed with country style bric-a-brac. Hand painted signs everywhere with earthy wit – “Life is too short to drink cheap beer,” “Never squat with your spurs on,” “Work is for people who don’t know how to fish,” “Speak your mind but ride a fast horse,” “Don’t steal the government doesn’t like competition.”
Even more bizarre signs adorn various dead animals stuck on the wall here and there. A stuffed Raccoon is inexplicably labeled, “Just say NO to raccoon.” An armadillo is spray painted gold and boasts, “Roadkill Only.” A swordfish has been painted black and white, spotted like a cow, mounted above a piece of plywood that says, “No sushi.” I guess all this is supposed to improve the appetite.
Nick loves the place. He had the child’s plate – only a chicken leg. He ate the side dishes like a lumberjack, though. Mostly the creamed corn and the biscuits.
In the center of the restaurant is a massive display case filled with huge pies. Lemon, chocolate, coconut cream. The meringue flows across the top like a toasted ocean – tan peaks flicking pointed into the valley far below. I was so stuffed I couldn’t even look at them.
Now I feel sick. There is no way I can go into that place and not eat too much. No way.
Near the exit a small plastic pet carrier sits on a pedestal. “Babe’s Groundhog,” is spray painted on it, along with warning not to feed the groundhog, to keep your fingers away, that sort of thing. On the way out I couldn’t help but look inside. Nestled in a nice little bed of hay is a tube of Owen’s Sausage. Ground-Hog… Get it?
Many things have changed greatly in the almost-a-dozen years since I wrote that. Many things have changed greatly. Babe’s Chicken Dinner House is not one of them. Only a few details around the edges – the crowd is now much more diverse – the Metroplex is more of a worldly Cosmopolitan place now. The menu has added smoked chicken, so it is a little bit healthier.
The restaurant in Carrollton is a bit more upscale than the one in Garland – it’s an interesting architectural hodgepodge built from an old lumber yard and chicken coop with a nice patio that holds a giant firepit sort of place to sit around, watch some wood burn, and choke on the smoke. It is trimmed out in raw cedar posts – which are beautiful and unique. The humor is as tacky, though – on the ceiling over our table was painted a huge blue oval, with duck feet, bottoms, and a few duck heads poking down through the blue. The idea was that we were sitting under a pond and these ducks were swimming around on top of the ceiling, peering down through the water at us. I guess….
One interesting thing about that old journal entry was that it would always get a huge number of search engine hits. I had a good stats server then and I discovered that those searches were all coming from Norman, Oklahoma. Apparently Oklahoma University students loved to eat at Babe’s when they came to the Big D for the Texas-OU game. I guess….
So I had the smoked chicken, but ate too many mashed potatoes – so I ate ’til I was sick. We all sat around the fire pit and talked, until my winter cold congestion revolted against the woodsmoke and I had to beat a hasty retreat into the fresh air so I could breathe.
So I wave goodbye to Babe’s Chicken Dinner House for another year. I feel sure it will be back again next year… as delicious and tacky as ever.
The odd fire pit outside at Babe's Chicken Dinner House in Carrollton, Texas.
There are certain things you have to eat on holidays. For Christmas, of course, you have to eat Pho.
And on New Year’s morning, you have to eat black eyed peas. Some folks say you only need to eat one pea if you want good luck the following year. Other’s say you have to eat three hundred and sixty-five peas to get the same benefit (I wonder about leap year). Still others say you have to eat those black eyed peas while listening to the Black Eyed Peas… but I don’t know about that.
Then there are tamales. Christmas Eve is a good time for tamales… but my opinion is they should be eaten as often as possible… or at least convenient.
Tamales come in many different shapes, and delivery methods. The first type of tamale I ever ate was given to me as a small child – the infamous Tamale in a Can. I learned they can be heated in boiling water, bobbing around in the bubbles before the top is even sliced off (preferably with a P-38).
So I grew up thinking that tamales were tasteless little greasy logs wrapped in some sort of wax paper from hell.
In High School, however, I learned to love, not only the tamale, but the Nacatamal. A Nacatamal is unique to Nicaragua. It is pork filled masa wrapped in a plantain leaf. What sets it apart is that a Nacatamal is big. It’s a giant string-wrapped green thing full of mysterious steamed goodness. Every street corner in Managua had someone with a big pot full of them for sale. It’s my favorite sleep-late breakfast in the world. Unfortunately, you really can’t get a Nacatamal outside of Nicaragua and that’s a bit of a drive.
So the closest I can get here in Texas is the standard plantain wrapped Central American tamal, usually of Salvadorian origin. Which is cool, because that means Gloria’s.
The original Gloria’s was a tiny place off of Davis Street in Oak Cliff. I first went there only a month or so after it opened – even then you could tell that it was a cut above all the other places sprouting up all over. It was in a pretty rough neighborhood. Once, I had a co-diner tell me, “Bill, go check out the paper towel dispenser in the men’s room.” The bathroom was like a small closet, with a toilet and a sink and barely enough room to stand. The silver colored metal paper towel dispenser was right over the toilet. I looked at it and it had a bullet dent in it. I know a bullet dent when I see one. I turned around and found a spot in the door that had recently been filled in with plastic wood and painted over.
I wanted to ask whether someone had been murdered in the bathroom or if it was only a bouncing stray from the neighborhood. But I couldn’t work up the nerve.
Over the decades, Gloria’s has multiplied, expanded, and changed (its atmosphere, not its food) until now it is a healthy metroplex chain of semi-upscale hip and stylish eateries. They recently closed the old hole-in-the-wall and opened a big new two-story establishment in Oak Cliff, in the Bishop Arts District. They bought an old brick fire station and converted it into a restaurant.
I might have eaten at Gloria’s a hundred times and have ordered the same thing every time. Gloria’s Super Special Sampler.
One tamale, one pupusa, yucca, plantain, black beans, black rice and sour cream.
Every time I unwrap that plantain and the steam rises from the masa within I feel young again.
Gloria's Super Special: Tamal, rice, beans, fried plantain, pupusa, yucca
Tamal unwrapped
And finally, that brings us to the classic tamale, the Mexican Style Corn Husk Tamale. These are what you want to eat on Christmas eve. There are plenty of charities that offer homemade tamales by the dozen – and plenty of wholesale places that will sell you a bunch. If you are unlucky enough to live outside of Texas, you can have them shipped.
If you are lucky, you know someone that gets together before the holidays and makes a few hundred of these wonderful things and steams them up for guests to come over and eat until they are stuffed. You have to have red and green sauce (the green is made from tomatillos) but then you are set.
There were four food trucks hanging out on Flora Street downtown for lunch when I stopped by as part of the Dallas Arts District Bike Crawl on Thursday. I have already tried three of the trucks (and found them good) but the fourth, Easy Slider, was new. When presented with a choice, I will choose the one I haven’t tried before.
I looked over their list of sliders and chose two – a Black n Blue – beef, blu cheese slaw, and bacon, and a Baby Bella – portobello mushroom with mozzarella, pesto, and a tomato. These came in a deal with a drink and chips for ten dollars – which came with a homemade caramel for dessert – and the candy was especially good.
The sliders were great. The beef slider actually had enough meat on it to taste like a hamburger. The grilled portobello mushroom was good too, with a round cheese and tomato stuck onto its skewer.
I usually like to take pictures of my food for these reviews. Unfortunately, I was so hungry and the sliders looked so good, I lost my head and ate the beef slider and a good bit of the portobello mushroom one before I remembered to take a photo. No problem, though, this blog has a review with better pictures than I take anyway.
The wrapping paper has been rent and Santa has been sated. The day now stretches sleepily on – sports on television, fudge on the kitchen table, a cold, gray spitting rain day outside. What is there to do other than lounge around in a mouldering Snuggie® and watch the entropy increase?
For my dollar, there is no better way to spend a few hours on the Christmas Holiday than to go for an afternoon lunch at Bistro B. Actually, I like the pho at Pho Pasteur near our house (the broth is just right) but Bistro B is such a hopping place, even on a holiday, that is impossible to pass up. Plus, Pho Pasteur isn’t open on Christmas Day.
The place, as always, was packed. We waited for a few minutes, which I enjoyed. I stood by the little altar with the burning incense spiral, the electric-powered prayer wheels, and the little shrines decorated with offerings of change. I looked around at the tables to see what other folks were ordering. There were a lot of butane portable table burners heating hot pots that were being shared by a whole family – three generations or more – packed around the big round tables. I love watching a family eat, the heads bent, concentrating on the food, with a ballet of chopsticks dancing in a circular chorus while everyone picks up their food, talks, and laughs.
Its a noisy, happy place, with an army of black-clad waiters rushing, cleanup crews pushing a big square cart, a thick crowd at the registers – some clutching inscrutable bills, but most there for take-out. Some odd genre of electronic dance music pulses… loud but barely audible over the conversations, and a phalanx of flat-screen televisions incongruously simultaneously shine out an NFL documentary. The kids reported that the restroom was, “Like a nightclub.”
It didn’t take long before we were seated and began to attack the menu. There are too many choices at Bistro B – the menu is a little spiral bound plastic laminated book, with page after page of wonders, many with photographs of the food. It is intimidating. (you can download the main menu here – but be warned, it’s a seven megabyte PDF file) Lee recommended shutting my eyes, thumbing through the menu blindly, and then picking something at random. He said he did that a couple of times – once he had something good, but the second time the waiter had told him, “No, you don’t want to order that.” I tried it and came up with Chicken Curry… no, too tame.
The menu items are numbered and the numbers go up 523 – though there seems to be some gaps here and there.
It was cold outside so I thought about some hot soup. I ordered the #43, Special Bistro B Noodle Soup. The waiter asked what type of noodles and I asked for rice. The kids had smoothies and Candy and I hot tea. Nick had Pho, Candy and Lee had chicken. We sent for a couple orders of spring rolls… it was too much food.
Spring Rolls and dipping sauce
My soup as it arrived. What mysteries await in these warm and fragrant waters?
But it was delicious. My Special Bistro B Noodle Soup didn’t have the perfect simple balance of subtle flavors that I like in Pho – but it was like eating a Forest Gump box o’ chocolates – you never know what you are going to get. Every time my chopsticks would dive into the spice-murked liquid they would emerge with a new surprise. After eating whatever came to the surface – I was able to figure out more or less what it was about half of the time.
Like all Pho – serving places, the table was equipped with a bounty of condiments and additions. Plates of bean sprouts, sliced jalapeño, Thai basil, and cilantro. Bottles of soy sauce, fish sauce, rooster sauce, hoisin, and two unlabeled bottles of mysterious somethings. Plus little containers of chopped garlic, pepper oil, and the most flavorful (and hot) chili paste I’ve had in a long time. I spent some time working on the flavor balance of hot and sweet, salty and savory, in my broth. Then I used the hoisin and rooster sauce to draw a bright red and dark caramel ying-yang symbol (for good luck in the coming year) in one of the little plates they supply and used my chopsticks to dip various morsels in there before I ate them.
The soup after I added sprouts and other vegetables. Those little eggs were hiding down in a nest of rice noodles. I don't know what creature they originally came from
I ate ’till I was full and then I ate some more. And it was good.
There was a separate menu on our table that outlined the group meals. We thought about the dinner for four – but there were too many fish items on it for Candy. They had a dinner for ten that looked fabulous. I need to get ten people together to go down and do it. That sounds like a plan. Drop me an email if you want in.
The outside of Bistro B - complete with a vaguely unnerving inflatable snowman.
After walking around looking at the ice sculptures in the Zen garden Friday night, I decided to get something to eat. There was a lot going on – a huge crowd had gathered around the Arts District for the Tree lighting ceremony. To feed these hungry horde, a line of food trucks were ready and rarin’ to go.
Mae West said, “When given the choice between two evils, I’ll pick the one I’ve never tried before.” I have the same philosophy on Food Trucks… I’ll pick one I’ve never tried before. Jack’s Chowhound it was.
There were lines at the trucks, and I stood there, trying to decide on an order. One problem waiting late to eat at a truck, is that they will start running out of stuff – they had all been serving since before lunch and only so much inventory will fit in a truck.
I was thinking about ordering a grilled cheese with tomato soup, but was a little bit worried about how to eat the soup, when the guy in front of me ordered “Steak Frites.” I had no idea what that was, but it sounded cool, so I said the same thing when it was my turn.
This was a mistake, because the guy in front of me stole my Steak Frites when he picked his up, and I had to wait for another order.
Steak Frites are French Fries with chunks of steak on them. Pretty good if you like that sort of thing, but I think next time I see Jack’s Chowhound I’ll go for the grilled cheese. I’m just not that big of a steak fan.
One of the sometimes difficulties with a gourmet food truck is finding a decent place to eat. Here, they had provided a small sea of stand-up tables with candles on them and I managed to snag one in the crowd.
As I was finishing, a couple walked up and the blonde woman asked if she could share a bit of my table.
“Of course,” I said, “I’m done really, anyway.”
I thought maybe they were going to eat, but she gave a murderous stink-eye glare at her man and started grabbing shit out of her purse and whacking it down onto the table with obvious aggravation. I really wanted to stick around and find out what the argument was about (I would guess they had lost something and the guy had asked one too many times, “Are you sure it isn’t in your purse?”) but since I didn’t have any food left, it was a little awkward to simply stand there and stare at this woman having a temper tantrum, so I turned and walked away.
After the Christmas festivities wound down and I was disgusted by the drunken revelers trodding all over the artwork, I hoofed it back to my train. Along a fairly dark and isolated stretch of street I walked past some guy and his wife and toddler. They looked lost, the kid was crying and the wife was yelling at her husband. I was about to offer help, but I recognized the guy as the one that had stolen my Steak Frites.
So he was on his own. I thought about saying something, but he looked miserable enough already.
Jack's Chowhound in the Dallas Arts District
Lined up to order at Jack's Chowhound
A cute couple in front of the SsahmBBQ truck
The line of trucks, the little stand-up tables, and a crowd of hungry Christmas - tree - lighting - fans
I wanted to do the right thing. When the alarm screamed, I tore myself out of bed and put on my bicycling clothes. I had meant to work on my bike the night before, but had run out of time, so I went out in the garage and cleaned and oiled for about an hour.
Then I set off down the trail. I had been looking at google maps and, in my mind, had a long route planned, through some newly constructed bits. A small camera was in my bag – I wanted to take some pictures here and there.
But things didn’t feel right. The saddle was uncomfortable, so I stopped and fiddled with it – to no avail. Then I turned and faced into the wind and it felt surprisingly cold, harsh, and impenetrable. Things were fading fast, so I turned and headed home. I felt defeated.
Well, it was a good thing. Over a short period of time, about an hour, the weather turned dramatically. The mercury plunged and the wind grew to a cold howl from the north. Jagged rain started spitting and the whole world became a dark grey. I was not dressed or prepared for that.
If I would have stayed on my bike I would have been trapped a few miles from home huddling in a doorway somewhere calling people on my cell – hoping to convince someone to come rescue me and give me a ride home. For once, my instincts had served me well.
I decided to celebrate by finding a new food truck.
The folks that brought us Gandolfo’s have a sister truck out, The Butcher’s Son. It is in cahoots with a sausage company and offers a selections of meaty treats. Two trucks were perched out in a busy parking lot not too far from our house.
I decided on the selection of sliders – the tiny hamburger-like sandwiches are perfect for slinging from a gourmet truck – sort of like round bread-y tacos.
Like usual, it was pretty good.
The two trucks in the chilly parking lot
The Butcher's Son gourmet food truck
Three Sliders
This is a selection of sliders called “The Butcher’s 3-Way.” Clockwise, from the bottom – The Longhorn “Braised Mexican Beef, Fresh Jalapeno, tomato, and pepper jack cheese on a mini brochette bun” – The New Frontier “Johnsonville Andouille, Naval Pastrami, sautéed onions, Swiss cheese and spicy mustard on a mini brochette bun” – and The Southern Belle “Johnsonville Chipotle Monterey Jack Cheese Chicken Sausage, fresh onion, cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce on a mini brochette bun.”
Bill Chance 