Food Truck Travel Tips

So...I didn't have the best experience yesterday going to a food truck festival that Tony found for me to go to. But! The experience inspired this blog post because I am hoping if other people have had this problem in the past, these tips will help you for future food truck eats. 

Tony had a work lunch at the conference we are at in San Diego and I was on my own for food. I set the GPS to take me to Central San Diego and headed out a bit after 12:30. Things got off to a rocky start when I had a terrible time trying to find parking. There just was none or, there were parking garages and I didn't see prices or, there were public lots you had to pay for. I was just going to order food! I didn't plan to stay long and I did not want to pay extra to do that. I ended up parking in a 15 minute zone with homeless people a few feet away. Very nerve wracking and I quickly walked across the street and down the block to where about 6 food trucks were set up.

I quickly scanned the menus at each truck. One truck didn't even have a menu out but I could tell it was seafood so that's a pass for me. 

I finally decided on one and luckily they had a big menu set up so I could see what all my options were. 

By this point I was super hungry, time was ticking and I had to make a decision. So, I thought I would get a bowl, fairly inexpensive, and a smoothie. But then I decided I was more hungry than thirsty and decided to get a plate of the beef teriyaki which was $11. I don't make the best decisions when I am starving.

Here it is - the plate for $11. Does this look like $11 worth of food to you? It certainly did not to me and the box felt so light when I got it. Super disappointing! I had to choose salad over rice because they didn't have any rice left apparently. I ordered my food at 1pm. The event went until 3pm, or so the internet said. 

The only thing I did like was that the salad had a good dressing on it and the orange slices were flavorful (of course, it's California!) but the teriyaki meat..ew so gross. There was lots of rubber parts which I hate and that made it hard to eat much of the meat. 

My tips for eating at food trucks you aren't familiar with are - 

• Look them up beforehand! Check their Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter. Check Yelp and Google to see what people are saying. See if they have good reviews. Plus occasionally you can find coupon codes which is nice when it's a truck you have not tried before.

• Take a look around when you get to the event at the people sitting and eating. Does anything look especially good? How are the portion sizes? 

• Try to find a good place to park with no time limit if you can so that you don't feel rushed trying to make a decision on the food. You also don't have to spend time worrying your food is taking too long and your car might possibly be getting a ticket.

If I had followed these steps before going to the food event, I would have been a lot better off and saved myself a bunch of time and money. I would have looked up the food trucks online to see what food they had, see what their prices were and what people were saying about them. This would have saved me a lot. I'm not sure if I could have figured out parking that well before heading to the event but most important to me is not wasting money on food that isn't good. 

Feeling down about 2 bad meals in a row I went back to Boudin's (where I had my first bad meal on the trip - chili with too many beans) and had a $3 off survey coupon to use but the survey would never work but they gave me $3 off the turkey cranberry sandwich anyways. And boy, was it good. Redeemed!