On Monday, Dave wrote a post listing his food-truck meet-up pet peeves. In the first paragraph, he recalled Gustavo's report on last Friday's $5-admission debacle at the food-truck fest at Boomer's. In the second paragraph, he turned a critical eye to the planned Irvine Hyatt Regency's “Food Truck Jamboree”'s stingy 30 minutes of free parking.
The day after this “Five Rules for Food-Truck-Event Planners” post went live, it seemed to have an effect on actual food-truck-planning.
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The Hyatt Regency gathering's organizers announced on Tuesday it has upped the parking to an hour: a 100 percent improvement, although it's still anyone's guess if it is possible to find a spot, walk to the site, order, wait and eat in the time allotted. They even stipulated the updated parking news with a warning: “provided there is space left in the lot.”
The event is set to happen Thursday of next week at lunchtime (11 a.m.-2 p.m.), with 10 trucks, most of whom were not named on the Facebook page until someone was good enough to ask. But the presence of one touted truck in particular strikes me as a bit odd. This would be the 6ix Park Grill truck, which will “dish up variations of its signature sliders including beef, chicken and ahi tuna.”
Now, as you know, the actual 6ix Park restaurant is, ahem, right there at the Hyatt Regency, presumably within steps of where the 6ix Park Truck will park. While I won't discount or deny the novelty of eating gourmet food out of a truck or the fact that you don't have to tip, the 6ix Park Truck seems as counterintuitive as opting for the plastic wading pool when you already own an Olympic-sized one. And I'm pretty sure the real restaurant might just validate your parking, too.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.