Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Tampa Food Truck Rally

                                  downtown Tampa Skyline. This is known as the "beer can building."
                                                             Jerk Hut Express truck
                            John's Curry Chicken. The things in the lower left side are the fried plantains.
                                                  My Jerk Pork. Yumalicious!
                                               Crepe truck.
                  Killer Sammich Truck. They were wiping things they'd run out of off their board!
                              Fire Monkey truck. Can you tell where the line begins and ends?!
 Taco Bus Truck. They were featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives this week. We are going to their permanent location soon!
Dessert! There's Bavarian Creme filled, Raspberry, Strawberry and Apple filled, Sour Cream cake and Pumpkin!


John and I spent a lovely fall afternoon in downtown Tampa today. We all know what a bad rep food trucks of old had. Most were known as "roach coaches" with food of questionable origin and how long it had been sitting around. But no more! Food trucks are THE next big thang! And Tampa is getting in on the action. This is the third Rally they've had and each one draws bigger and bigger crowds. Tampa's Mayor Bob Buckhorn has said that the first Wed of every month from now til May will be a food truck rally in downtown at Gaslight Park. And  there were quite a few people from Occupy Tampa who came over from their "Headquarters" at Curtis Hixon Park, they were well mannered and well behaved. Most of them spent most of their time trying to get on TV because every local station was there filming.

I really wanted to dry the duck confit at the Fire Monkey food truck ( I had read about it in the paper!), but it was so jammed packed with people in line that we could not even see his menu board, much less order anything. We stood in what we thought was the line for quite a while, only to learn it was the pick up  line and we had to go "over there" to place our order. And "over there", we could not tell where the line ended and anyone we asked didn't know either. So we ended up at the Jerk Hut Express truck. And it was wonderful! John wanted curry goat and so did the lady behind us. When John ordered his, they announced they were now out of curry goat. And he graciously told them to give it to the lady behind us and he'd take curry chicken instead. :::I'll wait while y'all awwww for John!::: I wanted jerk pork and it was fantabulous! Both meals came with Jamacain rice with red beans and salad and three plantains. John's meal was $5.00 and mine was $6.00, and you can see by the styrofoam containers that they were slap full. I brought over 1/2 of mine home! I'd love to try again next month and maybe get there a bit earlier so hopefully I could try the duck at Fire Monkey. On the way home, the "hot now" light was on at Krispy Kreme, so we got donuts to bring home for later. Temps were in the upper 70's. Not a cloud in the sky. All in all, a great afternoon.