By Peijean Tsai | PomeradoNews.com
A popular Poway restaurant has joined the growing street food movement with its spinoff business Super Q, a new gourmet food truck that brings tasty barbecue to workplaces and communities around San Diego.
Super Q food truck’s home base is Kaminski’s BBQ & Sports Lounge, where its meats – pulled pork, beef brisket and chicken smoked up to 13 hours – are prepared at the restaurant before the truck goes mobile.
“A lot of customers are excited about it, and they feel like it’s fun,” said J.R. Kaminski, a partner of Super Q, which is family-owned by the Kaminskis, like the restaurant.
The 23-foot lime green truck features a caped, larger-than-life superhero named “Q” (as in BBQ) and can be spotted weekdays outside workplaces in Sorrento Valley, Sabre Springs, Rancho Bernardo and more. Super Q also appears at events throughout San Diego on weekends and evenings.
The superhero artwork “gives the whole truck a personality,” said Kaminski. “Super Q goes around town rescuing boring lunches.”
This weekend (May 7 to 8), Super Q will be at Bernardo Winery’s 34rd Annual Spring Arts and Crafts Fair Festival. The truck’s schedule is on the Internet at www.superqfoodtruck.com and people can also track its location via the social media websites Twitter and Facebook.
Super Q’s menu offers Kaminski’s barbecued meats, which are influenced by North Carolina-, Texas- and St. Louis-style flavors, on sandwiches, sliders and more – but with a twist. For instance, the Super Q Pork Melt (which is also available with beef brisket or chicken) is only available at the truck, not at the restaurant.
“It’s our most popular sandwich,” said Kaminski, noting the sandwich includes barbecued meat, melted cheddar, sautéed onions, and three-cheese macaroni and cheese, all between grilled sourdough bread.
Super Q’s original menu also includes barbecue asada fries and an assortment of sliders served on French rolls from the Hillcrest bakery Bread & Cie.
When Super Q Food Truck hit the streets at the end of February, the business started with places such as SAIC and Qualcomm because many of Kaminski’s restaurant’s customers work there.
“(The truck) is very much like a restaurant, but different because there are different challenges to being mobile,” said Kaminski, noting parking restrictions at Poway Industrial Park meant the truck couldn’t include it in its schedule. “But it also gives us the opportunity to go out into San Diego and have people taste the food from Kaminski’s BBQ.”
The Kaminski family has been in the restaurant business for three generations, and the restaurant was built with a large smoker that gave it the ability to produce a surplus of food enough to support catering, said Kaminski. But several months ago, the family decided to do a gourmet food truck, therefore joining the latest culinary craze where food lovers follow their favorite trucks on the Internet.
“It’s just in the exploding phase in San Diego,” said Kaminski.
Food trucks, an alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants, have existed for decades, but have surged in recent years – most notably in Los Angeles, where the Kogi BBQ truck is credited with jumpstarting the current trend.
There are currently over 20 trucks in San Diego serving everything from Korean-Mexican fusion to gastropub fare and cupcakes, according to the website www.roaminghunger.com, a Los Angeles-based site that tracks gourmet food trucks and food carts.
