Santa Anita Food Truck Festival

Santa Anita Food Truck Festival

Held this past weekend, twenty some trucks were there.    The weather was really good.  It was a bit chilly in the morning but warmed up to a sunny day.  Three friends and I went on Saturday.  It was a pretty cheap entrance fee.  

The food trucks that were participating in this are listed below.  The ones highlighted in yellow are trucks I’ve tasted before.

• The Grilled Cheese Truck
• Don Chow Tacos
• Border Grill
• Canter's Truck
• Chunk'n Chip
• Baby's Badass Burgers
• South Philly Experience
• Dosa
• Yatta Truck
• The Sweets Truck
• Dante Fried Chicken
• Dogtown Dogs
• Barbies Q
• No Reservations
• Knockout Tacos
• Chef Brian's Comfort Truck
• Ragin' Cajun
• Crepe'n Around
• Lobsta Truck
• Fresh Fries LA
• Lardon Truck
• Tapa Boy LA
• NaanStop
• Coolhaus
• Lake St. Creamery

Going into this, I wanted to try Dosa Truck as well as Ragin’ Cajun.  I’ve seen Dosa around but they usually had a long line.  I also wanted my friends to try the garlic and truffle fries from No Res.  The world must know all that is good from No Res.

I’m not sure how many people pre-ordered the tickets.  The lines were just as long as the Rose Bowl event... maybe even longer.  I think the even coordinators didn’t put an attendance cap which sullied everyone’s expectations.  The long lines and even longer wait times must have swamped all the food trucks there.  Based on what people are posting, many have a negative view of the festival itself mainly due to the long lines and wait times.  But when its not a capped attendance, even the fastest fast food restaurants will have a hard time serving people in a timely manner.

Perhaps the best food truck festival would be to cap the people with some formula.  The assumptions would be 80 orders per hour per truck, 5 hour service, and 30 Food Trucks.  
so... 80 x 5 x 30 = 12,000 would be the maximum amount of people to enter.  The assumption of course is that each order consist of approximately 1 appetizer/side dish and 1 main dish.  I assume of course, food trucks are able to handle 80 orders in a hour.  This would roughly be just one REALLY long lunch run for them.

Anyways back to the food, I had my friends try the No Reservations Truck.  They had the awesome grilled cheese special as well as trying out a some new taco service which I think is a *really* good idea.  The grilled cheese they had is one of the best grilled cheeses I’ve tasted.  Their taco idea which I hope they’ll implement is to basically use the same fillings in their wraps and just apply it in a taco form.  So imagine a Rosemary Baby’s in taco form.  Or Goodfella’s in taco form.  My friends liked the Garlid and Truffle fries.  They are super addicting. Goodfella's taco is at the bottom. Rosemary's Baby tacos are at the bottom right. It looks kind of far. Truffle fries top right. The grilled cheese is stacked with the garlic fries and is top left.

Someone went to try Ragin Cajun.  The jambalaya and po’boy were good.  The jambalaya came in a pretty large container surprisingly enough.  I wonder how authentic jambalaya tastes like.  I doubt the Cheesecake Factory one tastes authentic.  

Someone else went to the LobstaTruck.  I had eaten the Lobster + Butter Roll previously.  At the festival I had the Crab roll with mayo.  I think lobster roll with mayo is probably better than with butter.  I will need to try it out next time. The top is the crab roll. The bottom is the lobster roll. Both rolls were with mayo.

And finally after dinner, comes dessert.  I spotted Chunk n Chip some time ago but they usually don’t come close to work or home.  They serve ice cream sandwiches but with more traditional flavors unlike Coolhaus.

Gourmet Food Trucks (14)

Re: Jogasaki Burrito
The food truck has a pretty unique idea.  They take classic sushi rolls and stuff them in a tortilla.  So you can have choose to have California roll, Lobster roll, or even Shrimp Tempura roll wrapped inside a tortilla instead of the normal seaweed.  Interesting right?

Well I happened to stumble upon this food truck on its 2nd day of operation.  When I arrived, two Mexican guys were happily munching on the food and was raving how good it was.  They both went to order 5 more burritos each to bring back to their family.  

I had the Lobster Burrito which those two Mexican guys recommended.  And it was good. The Lobster had that Japanese sweet mayo taste.  They also added some cucumbers for an extra crunch.  There was sushi rice that was placed on the tortilla similar to how sushi rice is placed on seaweed as well.  There was also some teriyaki sauce as well as some orange sauce that was placed on some portions of the burrito.  It added a nice different flavor especially when it was mixed in with the cucumber.

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Re: Grilled Cheese Truck
Grilled Cheese Truck had a Roasted Chicken special when they dropped by in Santa Monica near my workplace.  It had a nice pesto/garlic sauce with roma tomatoes, arugula  lettuce and some cheese I don’t remember.  It was very good as well too.  

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Re: Suzie Cakes
This isn’t really a food truck.  But they make mini-cupcakes and other items.  These mini-cupcakes were pretty good.

The BCS Farce

The bowl game between #1 and #2 is over.  Auburn wins by just a field goal.  So Auburn and TCU end the season with undefeated records.  Yet, Auburn is #1 and TCU isn't?  What silly methodology is this?  Shouldn't the undefeated team be the only team to proclaim that they are #1?  Only in America can you find such a stupid playoff system.

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is college football's profitable money making machine.  Its purpose is to generate revenue for all the colleges and universities which it does by promoting the College Bowl games.  However, the money that is received isn't divided equally.  But money is another topic of discussion.

What irks me about the BCS isn't the money or the uneven disbursement of money.  It is about the promotion of "unsportsmanlike" conduct.  During the college football season, there are advertisements from the conferences that promote the good morals of the school and the conferences in order to entice future applicants.  Morals?  Where is the morality of powerhouse schools running up the score on weaker schools?  In fact, I believe the BCS encourages teams to disregard any sense of common sense that was taught in youth sports.  The ranking system lies at the heart of this problem.

I am positive it is every college football team's dream to play for the national championship title.  To do so, there needs to be a ranking system.  The BCS system was established in order to "properly" rank college teams in order to allow bowl committees from around the nation to choose who to invite to play at the committee's respective bowl game.  The higher a team is ranked, the more prestigious of a bowl a team can play in.  

The ranking system involves a combination of qualitative opinions (Coaches poll, Harris poll) as well as quantitative data from computer generated results based off various tangible data (win-loss, strength of schedule, location).  Unfortunately, the methodology of combining qualitative and quantitative data places more weight on the qualitative opinions.  Each of the polls are weighted equally.  But since the two of the three polls are "opinion polls," opinion polls have a higher weight than the computer polls.  In the end, the polls get weighted 

I have three issues with this ranking system.

1)  The weighting system places more emphasis on the two opinion polls (Coaches and Harris) instead of the computer polls.  The computer polls only look at quantitative data such as win-loss of teams, the score differential and strength of schedule.  Because of the more emphasis on the opinion polls, the "wow factors" like margin of victory, and personal preferences are factored more into the overall calculation which affects the weekly ranking.  

I believe rankings should not be devoid of personal opinions.  It should however not be over emphasized as it is currently with the BCS system.  This would prevent teams from attempting to influence the opinion polls through their play against opponents.

For example, if Team A beats Team B by 40+ points, the qualitative polls will naturally assume that the Team A is better regardless if Team B is of even the same caliber as Team A.  At the start of every new football season, many strong football teams invite weaker football teams to play.  The net result is that the strong football team will win and win by a lot.  If you look here at the 2009 BCS Champion Alabama, they played three schools that were hardly of the same caliber -- FIU (Florida International), Chattanooga, and North Texas.  The combined record for all three teams were 11-24 for 2009.  Chattanooga wasn't even a Division 1-A school and they had the best record at 6-5.  Alabama beat these schools 40-14, 45-0 and 53-7.  Alabama basically obtained three automatic victories playing against these lesser known and weaker schools.  Is it possible that Alabama ran up the score in order to influence the Coaches and Harris polls?  Yes I believe so.

2)  The computer polls do not punish strong teams that play against weak teams.  By punishing strong teams for playing weaker teams, it will force these strong schools to play other similar caliber schools which would lead to a more accurate ranking.  Does Alabama really deserve the "National Champion" title even though they played three weak schools?  If those three weak schools were replaced by USC, Boise State, and Ohio State, would Alabama still have an undefeated record?  Could Alabama really handle the pressure situation of facing top ranked schools so early in the season?

3)  The ranking system does not expand beyond 25 teams.  There are over 100 Division 1-A teams.  Why are only the top 25 teams considered in the ranking?

My solution isn't very revolutionary.  In fact, I have two solutions -- one complicated and one simple.  

The simple solution is to organize a single elimination tournament.  Bowl season ended in the second weak of January 2010.  The first bowl game started in the second week of December 2009.  There are five weekends of play.  If the tournament starts with 64 teams, after the first week, 32 teams remain.  After the second week, 16 teams remain.  After the third week, 8 teams remain.  After the fourth week, 4 teams remain.  After the fifth week, two remain.  And on the sixth week, the championship game occurs.  This is a total of 63 games.  Thats more games than the current number of bowl games scheduled.  More games should translate to more money.

The complicated solution is to revamp the BCS ranking system.  It should include a few key points.  I think the emphasis for the new ranking system should be to encourage teams to play similarly ranked teams.  

First, the opinion poll contribution to the BCS ranking should be reduced to 20% total.  The subjectivity of opinion polls allows the voters to be swayed by teams that run up the score against laughable opponents.  This subjectivity should not be a major factor.

Second, the BCS should rank the top 100 schools.  These top 100 schools should be subdivided into an upper tier and lower tier.  These tiers should not be published as a ranked scale but only as a group.  Only the top 25 should be ranked.

Third, teams that rank in the top 100 should be punished for playing teams that are either not in Division 1A or outside the top 100 excluding their own division.  They should be punished regardless if they win and should be punished even more if they lose.  This would prevent any "top team" from bottom feeding on weaker Division 1A and 2A teams.

Complicated right?  I want to make the ranking system work in such a way that teams of equal strength should theoretically be at the similar ranks.  By being able to weed out schools that play weak teams, the system should theoretically then be able to match up the best schools to play against each other come bowl games.  Ideally, a team that plays all top tier schools and remains undefeated should be crowned #1 if it remains undefeated through such tough schedules.  Unlike... teams that play 3 unranked division 2A schools for 3 easy wins.