Who says you need 4 walls, a table, and chairs to enjoy a good meal? Not the people who run food trucks or the on-the-go people who frequent them. While grabbing a bite from a mobile greasy spoon is not usually high up on our list of things to do, we’ve wanted to visit the Columbus Food Truck Festival for a couple of years. Unfortunately, we usually missed the festival because we had other commitments. So this year, when the dates of the 5th Annual Columbus Food Truck Festival were announced, we made sure we cleared our schedule.
The 5th Annual Columbus Food Truck Festival was held on August 14th thru August 16th in downtown Columbus, Ohio. One thing that people who are not Ohio natives may not realize is how freaking hot and humid the middle of August gets around here. So imagine packing over 67 food trucks and vendors into 1&1/2 city blocks, throw in a couple thousand sweaty, mostly overweight Columbus natives, and broil them for hours in 90 degree heat and you get an idea of what you might encounter at the Food Truck Festival. Normally, we enter a dining situation looking for food quality, service, atmosphere, and value. On the day we hit the Food Truck Festival, we were just hoping to snag some decent food without picking up a case of the runs.
Since this was our first visit to the Food Truck Festival, you need to understand that there are probably a thousand ways to maximize the number of trucks you visit. Our strategy was to order one item from each truck we wanted to try and share it. We were expecting to be able to hit 6 to 8 trucks. We got to 3 of them. So our advice is to visit the festival early in the day or in the evening, and go hungry. If you decide to go in the evening, you run the risk of some of the trucks running out of some of their featured items. We visited the following trucks: Tortilla Street Eats, Holy Smoke BBQ, and Weldon’s Ice Cream Concessions.
Initially, we were going to visit a different food truck next to Tortilla Street Eats but when we saw how long the line was for Tortilla Street Eats, we figured it must be really good. That might be the case, but not if you got the nachos like we did. The item description for the nachos stated that they came with “diced” onions. They came with onions, but I’m not sure how the people at Tortilla Street Eats called them diced — they were rather large chunks. In addition, cheese is one of the defining properties of a nacho, and these nachos had almost no cheese. What little cheese they did have was runny and wouldn’t stick to the chips and instead pooled at the bottom of the nacho container. We were not impressed.
We had better luck at Holy Smoke BBQ. We decided to try one of their creations cleverly named the Daddy Mac. The Daddy Mac was macaroni and cheese topped with pulled pork and smothered in a spicy BBQ sauce. We’ve had versions of this dish at some of the restaurants we’ve tried, and the version at Holy Smoke BBQ stacked up pretty well. The spicy BBQ sauce had a nice kick but wasn’t super hot, which was nice considering how much it cost to get a beer at the festival.
Realizing that our ambitious plan to visit a half dozen trucks didn’t get cleared by our stomachs, we decided to try a dessert truck for our final truck. We stopped by Weldon’s Ice Cream Concessions for a sundae. The sundae was pretty yummy, but it wouldn’t stack up to a sundae you’d get at Coldstone Creamery or Graeter’s. That might be an unfair comparison since we are comparing a rolling ice cream shop to a couple of established ice cream heavyweights, and the fact that we were tired, hot, and very sweaty might have made the sundae taste better than it normally would. But we would visit the Weldon’s truck again, unless it was parked within walking distance to a Coldstone or a Graeters.
We definitely plan to visit the next Columbus Food Truck Festival. We might need to visit each day it is going on, or we might need to fast for a few days, but hopefully next time we can visit more of a variety of trucks.
grubgraders 