On any given day I can drive from the Heights down to Les Grival’s in Midtown, order a banh mi, sit down and eat my sandwich, and then drive home. Total time: about one hour. Or I could, in the same amount of time, stand in line outside any number of food trucks at this past weekend’s first annual Haute Wheels Food Truck Festival, order a banh mi, wait for said banh mi, and then find a place to eat while waiting to rendezvous with friends waiting the same amount of time or longer for, let’s say, a hot dog at Good Dog. I rest my case.
At least I was able to while away the time I spent waiting in line this Sunday in a West Loop parking lot at the Haute Wheels Food Truck Festival listening to other people complain about how long they had spent in lines earlier or the day before. A 90-minute wait for a cupcake. A two-hour wait for a Korean taco. Placing an order, then waiting another hour for someone at the truck to text you and let you know that your order was ready – or that they’d run out of said item and was there something else you might want?
I’d like to be able to tell you more about the food, but honestly I didn’t have the opportunity to try all that much. What I did try was pretty good, but even with our group of five split up into different search-and-wait parties there were only so many places we had the time and/or inclination to visit. Best in show went to the quesadillas at Rolling Hunger. Their Korean spiced pork with melted cheese and tortillas was absolutely delicious, as were their short ribs.
I also liked It’s A Wrap’s fried mac and cheese balls and Bullbutter Bros. Barbecue’s sausage. (I really wanted to try their BBQ balls, but an hour and a half after opening those were already sold out.) Mmm’s cupcakes were pretty delish as well, especially their chocolate cupcakes with a hint of cinnamon, chocolate chips and turbo-creamy chocolate icing.
There’s much more I would have liked to try, but given the wait time for food and the alarming frequency with which food trucks were selling out of popular items my options were limited at best.
Obviously Houston’s first food truck festival was a success from a promoter’s point of view. But for the audience, the festival left much to be desired. The idea, though is a good one, and hopefully next year organizers will have worked out some of the kinks by having more food trucks, limiting ticket sales and/or allowing food vendors (other than trucks) to set up stalls. There’s clearly an audience eager to shell out money to sample Houston’s increasingly diverse food truck scene. Hopefully someone will respect that audience enough to make the necessary changes next year.