Earlier this month L.A. lost the Fresser’s Deli Truck and now it appears to be Orange County’s turn. Fast Food Maven announces the early passing of Brooklyn Boy’s Deli truck, reporting that chef Marc Gabriel will slam on the breaks to work back in a conventional restaurant in his hometown of Temecula. With prices nearly double the cost of a Kogi burrito and a possible communication breakdown on Twitter, Brooklyn Boy might have missed the whole point of food trucks providing reliable, cheap eats. But the owner of Piaggio-On-Wheels agrees with Gabriel that it’s harder than most people think to attract a fan base to food trucks, especially in O.C.
Coli Piaggio relates that, “People think they can start a truck and it will be Kogi overnight…This (running a truck) is a whole other animal.” And apparently so is O.C., where the trend of street-eating has failed to catch on like it did in L.A., even if a few specific trucks have devotees willing to wait in line or travel to Irvine for a favorite dish. For his part, Gabriel contends that he was making money and is working to get his Sloppy Moe into retail stores, though no explanation for the closure is given short of a long drive to O.C. and the fact that local residents there “still aren’t getting it.”
This closure in O.C. and previous ones in L.A. make us less curious about O.C.’s eating habits as it does about the entire nature of the truckin’ trend. Wasn’t it Kogi’s innovative recipes that really kicked this thing off much more than the prescense of wheeled restaurants? Isn’t the supposed “food truck trend” really just the aftermath of this one truck’s popularity, or as the O.C. Register calls it, a “Kogi-Craze?”
Let us know if you think the popularity of food truck is on the wane in our comments.
First food truck exits O.C. as ‘Kogi-craze’ slow to catch on [O.C. Register]
