Utah has a dearth of trendy, unusual, exciting and catchy food spots so when I heard the Great Food Truck race was coming to town to film an episode for the food network, I was excited. In case you don’t know, The Great Food Truck Race is a cross country food truck show where trucks compete against each other and local trucks to see who sells the most food. Loser gets booted from the show and they roll onto the next town.
SLC has a few food trucks but the whole food truck phenomenon has not caught on like it has in other cities. These great rolling little restaurants have brought out all sorts of great, relatively cheap and tasty offerings to cities across the country. SLC’s a little behind on most trends so it was exciting to have the chance to sample foods from trucks from across the country as well as the local faves.
Local trucks So Cupcake (twitter @socupcake ), Chowtruck (@chowtruck) and Torta Truck (@tortatruck) were the locals along with the out-of-state trucks Roxy’s grilled cheese (@RoxysGrilledChz), Devilicious (@deviliciousfood) The Hodge Podge truck (@hodgepodgetruck) and the Kirolla BBQ truck (@korillabbq) were supposed to be participating.
We started at the REI location where Roxy’s and the Chow truck set up shop. Lines across the parking lot were forming fast! At least the Chow truck was open but the Roxy’s truck was closed. We split forces and had wifey wait in the chow truck line which was fortunate, since Roxy’s took another 90 minutes to open then took another hour to actually order and 20 more minutes to get your sammich after that. I ordered the Brie, carmelized apple and bacon sammich along with rosemary and gorgonzola fries.
The fries were awesome but the sammich was meh. Not worth the wait. Fortunately the Wing Nuts restaurant whose parking lot our line was into, brought out free coupons for wings for people waiting forever in Roxy’s line. Wifey made it through Chowtruck’s line pretty fast and brought some great food over so I didn’t starve. Their skirt steak and jalapeno salad soft taco was awesome.
We headed over to the other food truck location and were met with fail. 2 trucks, the so cupcake truck was out of cupcakes and the devilicious truck was out of food too. No sign of the Torta truck and the Korilla truck was MIA.
I overheard the Devilicious truck owner saying that people don’t come out in this weather in San Diego, so they didn’t plan on needing much food. Guess what: SLC is not San Diego. It’s not clear and sunny 300 days a year anywhere but San Diego.
Overall the day was a bust. The twitter world was posting new locations for some of the trucks but chasing them down all over town was just a hassle at that point. The fun of having a lot of different trucks organized and serving a smorgasbord of culinary delights in an easy to access way was lost. There was a lot of potential to turn SLC onto the national food truck fury, I’ll keep my eyes open for more to pop up….
