Getting Trucked Up

Now that the curd-grease has settled (and our butter burns have healed) we’ve had time to reflect on last month’s Grilled Cheese Invitational – a claustrophobic, mostly lucrative, without-a-doubt triumph in which we graduated from grilled cheese champions to commercial capitalists and busted our food-truck cherry.
That last bit just meant we rented a 4-wheel kitchen, not that we engaged in any sort of lurid sexual acts inside a taco truck. (Although we did watch a coupla pedigreed chefs toke medical-grade weed in our ride).

For this year’s Grilled Cheese Invitational – which we’ve competed in thrice and won, errr, fice – Hot Knives rented a food truck from the company Road Stoves. Our buddy Tucker Neel set to making a psychotic truck banner of neon stripper knives slicing into the gooey center of a muscleman sandwich. We sold three different grilled cheese sammiches for $2 a slice. We burned through more than 50 loaves of bread, 18 pounds of Vermont butter, 13 pounds of homemade kimchi, and 2 tiny summer truffles (off-menu, motherfuckkah). The line at times sprawled several city blocks and, we were told, lasted 30-40 minutes. We needed no fewer than four assistants to manage the beasts. And between noon when the gates opened and about 4:30 we served just over 1300 slices.
At some point during the crush of the mid-day crowds, with our truck out of battery, the fridges warming and the health inspector about to board our bus, we looked at each other and exchanged ‘what the fuck are we doing’ looks. How did we get here?
It started with whiskey, of course. We were drinking several months ago with GCI Founder Tim “Cap’n Shady” Walker when he asked us to consider being vendors at this year’s festival in his quest to offer more festival goers the chance to eat copious amounts of cheese. Whereas in previous years, the 100 or so attendees would easily consume vom-levels of dairy just by showing up, it’s gotten a lot harder to please 8,000 people, he told us. So Tim was courting all manner of chefs from Mark Peel to Eric Greenspan to the Border Grill ladies to placate the huddled masses. After mulling it over (sober) we said yes and set to grilling. It seems like we spent the entire month of April debating the merits of thick bread and the magic of using steam to melt cheese quicker (it works).
After trying numerous iterations of flavors we set on the following sandwiches:
Band Camp: Hook’s and Fiscalini aged cheddars with Ha’s Apple Butter
Lemon Sunn: Cana de Oveja sheep’s milk cheese and lemon oil
White Light/White Heat: Beemster goat gouda with homemade kimchi

But rather than deal with customers walking up to the window saying, “Gimme two Band Camps, one Lemon Sunn, and… what’s goat gouda?” we implemented a Soup Nazi-like system of giving people no options. Chef’s Choice, we called it. Take it or leave it. Each sandwich had a stage time and we served it until we ran out. And we did run out. So other than raking in green, what were our fondest memories? Well for starters, we met Chef Roy of Kogi fame outside one of his trucks at the Road Stoves depot. And Dave from the Grilled Cheese Truck let us in on some fascinating trade secrets for how to grill 1200 sandwiches in three hours (can’t tell).
Now, picture this, if you can. It’s 7:30 the morning of the festival and the two of us are pulling the truck out of the truck depot south of downtown L.A. only to find that bicyclists are passing us. The truck won’t go faster than 5 miles per hour because we are… Out. Of. Gas. So we pull over to an already bustling Chevron near the Staples Center and we yank the sliding door to hop out. Except the door is jammed and it won’t budge no matter how hard we pull. Okay… Sweatshirts are taken off, and sleeves rolled up. Nothing works. And it’s the only exit. Not until we started really sweating (just imagine not showing up to a massive festival you’ve helped promote because your dumb ass is locked in a truck at a gas station) and we started prying at the door clasp with our grill tongs did it finally creak open.

Other classic memories include: mind-blowing street mural at the Road Stoves depot of a cop spray painted with “187”; borrowing a dozen lemons from a grandma in a taco truck, putting us in karmic debt; passing our health inspection with flying colors (they tried to shut Tillamook down); abusing our bullhorn by making all sorts of announcements to the crowd; and watching our friend Juvenal who manned the grill with us for the first half of the day furiously chop at big piles of our kimchi on the griddle with spatulas like some deranged Mongolian Barbecue chef. Whatever next year holds, we know this: We will butter the ever-loving shit out of it.