Ever since food trucks came (back?) into vogue sometime last year, I’ve had a hankering to try them out.  These days I feel a lot safer eating out of the side of some stranger’s automobile, what with the crazy backlash there would be if someone got horribly sick from a truck’s food.  With them being so prevalent and banding together into coalitions, I’d like to think they also all try to keep each other honest.

Or maybe I’m fooling myself, and just really wanted to try some truck food.  And then blog about it. >.>

Regardless, last month I  finally got the opportunity!  A coworker and I drove past Atlanta’s Food Truck Park & Market taking an accidentally circuitous route home after a lunch in the city, and he mentioned offhand “I’d like to go there sometime.”  Immediately we set up a lunch day for the following Friday.  Boom.  Magic.

We got to the Truck Park around 11:45, and I took the time to wander about looking at the trucks (they change up every day) and their menus.  There were a lot of really tasty-looking options, but the server standing outside the “Rouxd” truck talked me into his.  Also, he looked sort of lonely and it made me sad.

When I asked him what his favorite menu item was he immediately said, “the Fried Pork Belly Po’boy.”  The menu described it as a po’boy with fried pork belly (duh) and a kind of pickled vegetable slaw.  Not one to be scared of odd or interesting food I ordered it immediately, along with a side of cajun fries.  I love cajun-spiced fries.  They are so good.

So I waited in front of the Rouxd Food Krewe  (“rouxd” as in “rude”.  You know what a roux is, right?) truck for my order to come up. While I was waiting the man taking orders offered me a free sample of their rock crab gazpacho (I believe).  For the record, very tasty!  Though not my preference between that and a down-home po’boy.

The sandwich, as you can (maybe) see, was huge!  It was also already cut in half, something for which I was grateful, but it was still tough to fit the whole thing into even my gaping maw.  Taxing as it was, I made the po’boy work for me.

Overall I found the sandwich very tasty.  I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the pile of pickled vegetables, but their assaulting tartness blended well with the bread and fried pork belly.  A note on the bread – it was perfectly done.  Have you ever bought a sandwich that’s already difficult to eat, and then you find that the bread is just tough enough to turn your planned delicate bite into a wrestling match, inevitably ending with sandwich innards all over the place?  Rouxd successfully made this a non-issue with bread that’s soft and tasty, but still sturdy enough to hold up to the massive amounts of insides the po’boy had to offer.  It was something small, but very important to my enjoyment of the sandwich.

But I stipulated that I liked the po’boy “overall” because while the flavors blended well and the bread held them together well, there was still an unfortunate stratification of flavors.  You can see from the above picture that there’s clearly a “meat-only” bottom half and “veggie-only” top half of the poboy.  While I understand that this holds true for almost every other sandwich in existence, the sheer size of the po’boy meant that the first few bites of it were strictly meat-only or veggie-only; it wasn’t until I came to the end (or “butt” as some [Dad] say) where it was at a manageable enough size to where I could get a mouthful of both pork and pickled vegetables at the same time.

Also while I loved the spices on the cajun fries, they were unfortunately under-done.  For $3 I would’ve hoped for them to be perfect.

Bottom Line

Definitely worth eating here if you like cajun food; I thought the po’boy was delicious, despite it being a little difficult to eat.  I like the inventive flavors and they offered many more options beyond po’boys.  I’d skip the fries and just stick to a single meal item though; it’s definitely filling enough and $3 for under-done fries, no matter how tasty the spices, isn’t worth it.

Rouxd Food Krewe

• Fried Pork Belly Po’boy – $9
  • Delicious, if a little difficult to eat
• Cajun Fries – $3
  • Well-flavored, but not cooked quite right.
• Rock Crab Gazpacho – free sample
  • Great for being free, but I don’t like gazpacho enough to eat it for a price. 😀  Maybe you would!