Coolhaus, conveniently parked right behind the Gastrobus at The Brig, sold ice cream sandwiches. Not just any ice cream sandwiches but architecturally themed ice cream sandwiches. There are a lot of write ups about Coolhaus and you can find one here and one here if you’re interested in their background. Like designing a building, an ice cream sandwich has to be sturdy yet flexible. It needs to hold up when bitten into. I’m actually not a big fan of ice cream sandwiches maybe. I pretty much were bored out by the generic rectangular shaped ones that I think we all grew up with. They were, well, uninteresting. Also I hate to get melted ice cream everywhere. Sticky fingers are annoying. But for my quest I had abandon everything I dislike about ice cream sandwiches and order one from Coolhaus.
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The Gastrobus is a 10 week old food truck run by husband and wife, Antonio (former chef for Wolfgang Puck) and Lana Medina. I was set to visit them on Sunday at the Los Feliz Village Farmers Market where they do the most awesome thing. Cook with whatever they find at the farmers market, keeping it local. I’m surprised with all the talks about shopping and eating locally this is the first food truck I know thats doing this. They have expanded this to Tuesdays now at the USC farmers market.
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What is the one important thing that you need to have to keep you going in your job? Dominic, owner of Don Chow Tacos, said fun. You definitely need to love and be having fun at your job. Especially when you’re running on a 2 hour sleep. I was surprised to find out from Dominic that he and Lawrence, the other half of Don Chow Tacos, still have their day time job. Dominic works in the IT department while Lawrence runs the family business. It’s also why they only do 3 nights a week from 10pm to 2am. With that kind of schedule you REALLY need to love what you do. I bow down to these guys. It’s what I call ultimate foodie passion. “I just love to eat” said Dominic. And I thank you and Lawrence for that because I can’t get that bbq pork taco out of my head!! Ugh! Want one now.
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This past Saturday was the 5th Vendy Awards and it was my first time attending. Well I didn’t just attend I was part of the Schnitzel & Things crew. Sean Basinski, the leader of the Vendy Awards, said 5 years ago there were only about 50 people that attended the Vendy but over a 1000 people this year. It’s no longer just hot dogs or halal or taco trucks. The new breed of trucks are leaner, quicker and fancier. There are definitely many factors that play into this whole movement. But one thing is for sure, people love street food. I personally love all street foods. As long as you’re making good food people will come.
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After Donny and I completed our Food Truck Odyssey, he suggested that we attend the Vendy Awards, the annual event celebrating street vendors and the food they serve. I said I didn’t want to go; it was too expensive to attend, and I could get food from the trucks/carts any time I wanted. Then, about a week before the Vendys, Donny told me he’d be going as the photographer for Schnitzel & Things, nominee in the new Rookie-of-the-Year category. He asked me again if I wanted to go, and this time I relented. I’m glad that I did.

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When Howard and I came up with our first food truck crawl adventure, it was mainly for fun and an excuse to get our butts out to different parts of the city to try the old and new food trucks. I believe it was more a dare to ourselves. In the end we were tired, full from all the great food we had and had loads of fun. That was back in July. It is late September now. I just spent a whole weekend chasing food trucks in LA. Of course it wasn’t as successful as the one I did in NYC. Just the amount of time to drive from one spot to another made it impossible to try a good number of them in one day. Also most of the trucks don’t post their weekly schedule and only tweets their location half an hour before. It takes me over an hour to go anywhere from my parents’ place. So I was only able to try the trucks that I knew ahead of time where they were gonna be. Luckily, according to their schedule, Kogi, Marked5, Coolhaus and the Dosa trucks were all going to be in Venice Beach at the popular food truck stop The Brig for lunch. Then afterwards, in my schedule, I had Fish Lips Sushi at Malibu then Calbi Tacos in Santa Monica. There were few other trucks on my schedule but they were doing dinner. I felt bad for dragging my family around LA allllll day chasing trucks so I decided to do the rest on Sunday.
Please stay tune next week when I review all the trucks I visited in LA and ALSO I did some Q&As with the LA food trucks regarding the whole new food truck movement in LA. It’s gonna be good!
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