Street food showdown #2 - Brick meets mortar

It should be no surprise to most that I like street food. I like the idea of trucks moving around the city giving people a different options for lunch on the fly. The worst part of getting lunch when you've worked at the same office for three years is trying to find somewhere exciting and new to eat when you only have half an hour. I don't have this problem anymore but I know it's a real one.

While I love the idea of owning a street truck, I also realize there are many issues associated with a moving kitchen that a brick and mortar operation do not have to deal with. Some follies include; knocking the ventilation hood off the roof while going under a low hanging tree branch, forgetting to fill the water tank, engine breaking down, sub-frame of airstream trailer cracking. These are all issues I've heard of first hand from the owners and all of these can lead to a day or more of lost business.

So what do you once you've made it big? You open a joint that no big bad wolf can blow down. Enter our two contestants, Marination Station and Skillet Diner.

Marination is not your typical taco truck. They are a Korean taco truck with the aloha spirit of Hawaii and the spam sliders to drive the point home. Then there's Skillet doing what they do best, anything they damn well please.

Marination
I had all four different types of tacos as well as a couple bites of Jill's kimchi fried rice. The four tacos served are; kalbi beef, spicy pork, miso ginger chicken and sexy tofu. The kalbi had some sweetness to it and a lot of earthy flavor, it was quite greasy. The pork had an interesting lingering spice, not spicy though. The meat had a re-fried granular texture and It was greasier than the kalbi. The chicken had the sweetness of white meat chicken, but the sauce was seriously lacking in flavor. I could barely taste either the miso or the ginger and this made me sad. Finally the sexy tofu. You're really going to have to try hard to convince me that your tofu is sexy and let's just say the effort was lacking. The kimchi fried rice was good but the rice was slightly under cooked and although we got the fried egg to top it, I wish there was more egg involved.

I honestly think that my experience here was due to poor execution. All of the food needed more salt besides the fried rice and the chicken taco, which just needed more miso. The sauces that accompanied the taco fillings just needed the extra flavor that salt helps bring out. Granted I'm addicted to salt and I've been trained to salt things within a couple of grains of over-salted, there was room for more, far more. Anyone serving spam on their menu should know this.

Skillet Diner
I'm not really a sweets guy. Generally when I go out for breakfast I like the savory stuff like biscuits and gravy. About once a month I get a weird itch for something sweet and nothing can stop me. This month it was pancakes.

I arrived first on a quiet Wednesday morning when most people are starting their 9 to 5. One thing I love about diners is the booths. These booths were comfy. The whole place was comfy. A modern diner for sure, but a proper diner none the less. So I grabbed a comfy booth and waited for Jill to show up. In the meantime I ordered one of their fresh made agua frescas, pinneapple-strawberry-basil. Yum. #$*!ing yum.

Jill showed up and we ordered. I ordered the flapjacks with rhubarb compote and lemon zest butter while Jill got a chopped green salad with an egg on top. If you haven't noticed a pattern, Jill likes an egg on top. It's a solid move and it impresses the wait staff almost every time.

The flapjacks were great, a good combination of fluffiness and density. The edges were ever-so-slighlty-yet-magnificently crunchy from all the butter used to cook them. The lemon butter was subtle, but a very nice touch. My only complaint was with the rhubarb compote. I believe there are two camps on rhubarb, those that want it to retain some of it's tartness, and those that want it sweetened to the point that your teeth disintegrate upon contact(there is a third camp actually, my dad, who thinks that rhubarb and mallard ducks are the devil). Personally I'm in the tart camp, and this compote was just a little too sweet for me.

There was no real competition here, Skillet walked away with this one. Marination has the motto of doing one thing well while Skillet wants to do everything. You would think this would give Marination the upper hand but it doesn't. When you fall into the monotony of doing the same thing every day over and over, you're bound to get lazy and it showed in the tacos. I won't give up on Marination, I know they can do a great job because they wouldn't be this far in the game if there wasn't something to their formula. Perhaps they just misplaced it and forgot to add the salt.