As you may have heard, mobile food service is all the rage. There’s so many interesting offerings out there and they could be driving into your neighborhood right now. Arguably one of the hottest food trucks in the last two years is LA-based Kogi which offers a hybrid of Korean bbq tacos. So hip is it that the deep lines are notorious. Of course many scratch their head at the mere fact people would wait upwards of an hour or for tacos in LA. Akin to waiting in a line for vodka in Moscow.
Los Angeles seems to be the epicenter of the movement of mobile food though many in New York, Portland, San Francisco and even here in my fine town of Durham would take issue with giving LA the top honors. Just google “food truck” and see how many LA-related sites come up first. If you think about it for a moment it makes sense when you consider southern California’s car culture that mobile food would be born there.
Before the food truck thing got noticed by hipsters and white people in general (let’s face it, there have been food trucks serving brown people for decades in SoCal. Let’s not co-op something that isnt yours) there were and still are food stands. Static locations that served rich, local fast food from a not quite traditional brick and mortar restaurant. Seating was sometimes a picnic bench at best or a few stools at a counter. Again, Los Angeles has a variety of nationally known food stands in Tommy’s and Pink’s Hot Dogs.
There was also a place in my neighborhood of LA called Jay’s Jayburgers on the corner of Hillhurst and Santa Monica Blvd. Open 24/7, they served some of the best chili/egg/cheese/onion burgers one could ask for after an evening of bar hopping. So intense were these treats that if you carted a sack of burgers home, especially in the summertime, a delightful pungent smell sat in your passenger seat, urging you to go back the next day and see Jay as if to have Meatwad saying “C’mon Patrick, make it Jay’s Jayburger today.”Legend had it that Jay and Tommy first started out together opening Tommy Burger together (though no mention of Jay in their history page). For one reason or another the relationship soured and a year or two in, Jay started his own burger stand a few miles up the road. Nearly 45 years later, Jay’s Jayburger would meet its demise. In 2000, during a period of runaway gentrification in the Silver Lake neighborhood, the property owners raised Jay’s rent by more than 100%. Coincidentally they also owned a 7-11 across the street. This in effect shut Jay’s down and Jay apparently had no fight left in him.
After many a protest, rallies and benefits to save Jay’s (after one particularly rowdy night involving whisky, me and my cohorts bombarded the 7-11 and shouted protests at the clerks, who along with the guests just looked at us in awe) Jay’s Jay Burger was to close. I was there on closing day to have one last burger. He offered free burgers to the community on that day as a way of saying ‘thanks’. Hundreds of people turned up and Jay cooked every scrap of burger meat he had.
And then he was gone.
In later years I would go on to replace Jay’s with one or two taco stands when I moved into the barrio further east of Silver Lake. The kind of places that seemed like a good idea late at night after drinking, or on a late Sunday afternoon when you were too lazy to cook. Now 3000 miles away, I have yet to replace the experience of great local fast food. In Durham we have a fistful of burger, taco and indian food trucks but its just not the same. While these largely unregulated food vendors enjoy a hey day, its only a matter of time and lawyers before corporate and brick and mortar fast food find someway to put the food trucks back into the industrial wastelands and construction sites they once came. Perhaps I’m overstating that expectation or underestimating the ability of KFC and the like to start revving their engines.
