Philadelphia, PA: Summer Food Truck Favorites

By  Contributor |  Philadelphia Weekly

Food truck sea­son is upon us. Not that you can’t get street food when the weath­er is be­low zero and there’s a foot of snow on the ground, but it’s ob­vi­ously nicer to dine on the street in these warm­er months. Just in time for the peak sea­son, 33rd Street Hos­pit­al­ity an­nounced new menu ad­di­tions for sum­mer at their food trucks Taco Mondo, Say Cheese Philly and Street Food Philly.

Dishes like Say Cheese’s new French Onion Grilled Cheese ($7), which in­cludes shal­lots, leeks and onions cooked in red wine and thyme, plus, of course, the cheese and a roas­ted gar­lic spread and Street Food’s Hot Roast Beef Po’ Boy, topped with homemade pickles and Cajun mayo ($8) fo­cus on homestyle fa­vor­ites with up­graded twists.

Mi­chael Sul­tan, Car­o­lyn Nguy­en and Alan Kraw­itz, the culin­ary team be­hind 33rd Street Hos­pit­al­ity (who of course now boast a brick-and-mor­tar spot with Re­volu­tion Taco) take the menus for their mo­bile trucks very ser­i­ously. “The onions in the French Onion grilled cheese are cooked for hours and then re­duced with red wine and thyme. You get that fla­vor of a French Onion soup but it’s all ve­get­ari­an, no beef or chick­en stock like you’d nor­mally find in a French Onion soup,” ex­plains Sul­tan. “We wanted the bread to be nice and thick be­cause it could be a messy sand­wich, but we also wanted the bread to kind of be like a crouton. So you have the whole she­bang of the soup.” Say Cheese Philly can be found every Fri­day in June, from 11 am to 2 pm at The Porch at 30th Street Sta­tion in Uni­versity City.

And then there’s The Steak­house Bur­ger ($10) from Street Food, an in­cred­ibly tender loc­ally dry-aged beef with homemade gar­lic chili, ba­con, but­ter­milk onion rings, white ched­dar cheese, chi­potle BBQ sauce and gar­lic mayo. Even non-bur­ger fans might be­gin to crave this sand­wich. “It’s something dif­fer­ent be­cause some­times bur­gers get over­looked on food truck menus,” ad­ded Sul­tan. “We wanted to el­ev­ate it.”

And which is Sul­tan’s fa­vor­ite of the new crop? “The Roast Beef Po’ Boy. Something about how the jus hits the mayo and makes this amaz­ing gravy. There’s a little tang and it’s salty and crispy and these homemade pickles are like re­fresh­ing. It might not be the most pho­to­gen­ic, but it is so fla­vor­ful.”

Not only have the trio loc­ally sourced their in­gredi­ents, they’re grow­ing some of their own pro­duce at their 33rd Street Hos­pit­al­ity garden AND mak­ing their own spices, season­ings and sauces from scratch. “We wanted to put to­geth­er a menu that had the cus­tom­ers ask­ing them­selves why they would want to go any­where else,” says Sul­tan. “You can get a chick­en sand­wich any­where, but it’s the homemade touches and small de­tails that really make the ex­per­i­ence.”

www.therevolu­tiontaco.com 

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