Credit Mayra Flores de Marcotte

Mmm… did you hear? Westmont High School is having a food truck rally tonight, Friday, May 3 from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m.

The event, held at the Westmont High School parking loot will benefit the 2013 Senior Grad Night and is open to the public.

There will be three food trucks offering their culinary delights, including:

• Mogo (Mexican/Korean)
• Louisiana territory (Cajun Cooking)
• Grilled Cheese Bandit (Sandwiches)

There will also be a delicious dessert truck making an appearance.

“The purpose of Grad Night is to provide our Graduates with a safe and sober event to celebrate their Big Day,” says Elaina Vaughn, Grad Night Co-Chair. “The Grad Night Committee has been very busy planning fundraisers throughout the year to make this event affordable for all students to enjoy!”

This year, Westmont grads will be celebrating at a private event at Bowlmor in Cupertino, complete with bowling, billiards, bocce ball, karaoke Singing, DJ & dancing, photo booth, temporary tattoo stand, air hockey & ping pong, hypnotist, casino games and a variety of food and refreshments.

Grad Night Tickets are $80.00 per person.

Another Way to Help Students Out

The food truck rally on May 3, although tasty, may not be the way residents want to go in order to help students at Westmont out. Vaughn says that another opportunity will be available in the near future.

“Thanks to Westmont Parent Alumna Paulette Sidi, we are pleased to announce our “Drive to Give” fundraising event,” she says. “We need 300 drivers, 18 years and older to help test drive new Lincoln cars. We’ll receive a donation for each driver that will help with Grad Night expenses. Date and location to be announced.”

For more information, please call Elaina, Grad Night Co-Chair (408) 592-1394.

http://campbell.patch.com/articles/food-trucks-at-westmont-high-school-friday-night#photo-14207879

 When a restaurant has a clever name, usually that’s the best thing about it. Curry Up Now breaks the mold.

Curry Up Now is the second bricks-and-mortar location for an Indo-Cal-Mex mashup that started with a used taco truck. Owners Akash and Rana Kapoor call it contemporary Indian street food. They borrowed recipes and taste-testers from their families, and opened in downtown Palo Alto in December.

As at a food truck, you line up and study the splashy hand-drawn billboard of a menu. Then pay, take your number, fetch utensils and find a table before your food gets there. It’s pretty fast. There are a couple tables out front, and space for maybe 30 inside. A steady turnover of customers is facilitated by easily moveable furniture, backless cube seats and bass-thumping music.

Mostly, the clever fusion menu items work because they respect their ingredients. Curry Up Now isn’t cheap, but portions are generous and there is wide freedom of choice.

The deconstructed samosa ($7) is like a tostada, open-faced with dough on the bottom. It’s overflowing with garbanzo beans and your choice of protein, and topped with cute baby samosas. Spice it up with pico (salsa fresca) and chutney.

Garbanzos are everywhere, and they deserve to be. Their texture finds the sweet spot between mushy and hard, and spices dance in your mouth. On the eight-item thali platter ($11), they occupy a pool in the metal cafeteria tray, along with rice (brown or white), pickles, salad, papadam (lentil-garbanzo) cracker, parantha (which may be a tortilla unless you ask for naan) and two items of your choice. Choose the spinach paneer. Finely ground spinach looks and feels like baby food, but is delicious with cubes of milky cheese. It overshadowed the lamb ($2 surcharge).

Billed as an open-faced sandwich, Naughty Naan ($9) is more of a messy pizza, with a top hat of lettuce mix. It is tasty, for sure, with mild tikka masala enveloping chicken, paneer, tofu or (add $2) lamb. Fingers, or knife and fork? Either way, eat quickly or the naan will become gooey.

On the other hand, the very big burrito ($8.50) has no such problems. This Indo-Cal-Mex mashup works beautifully because the ingredients remain discrete and keep their own personalities. Each bite offers a mix of meat (or tofu, paneer or cauliflower), peas, potatoes and turmeric-yellow rice. The beef was chopped and chewable, not minced.

Curry Up Now is the epitome of inclusiveness, with major access for vegans and the gluten-free. Both get separate menus with lots of choices, including kids’ menu items. Just note that these menus contain a lawyerly statement that vegan and gluten-free items are prepared in a common kitchen with everything else, so if you’re really, really sensitive, buyer beware.

The water machine has buttons for water, ice and ice water. Another nice touch is the tree of jam jars for water and lassi drinks from the lassi machine. Other drinks are served in little chemistry flasks.

One evening, a very polite young man got up to bus his dishes and was told, thank you, but we’ll do that. And they do, just sometimes not in a timely fashion, leaving a sticky tabletop for the next diner.

Downtown Palo Alto increasingly feels like a food court for male tech workers. I guess the women don’t go out as much. At dinnertime, Curry Up Now attracts more families.

The food-truck ethos is infectious. Where past generations scoured El Camino Real to find the most authentic samosa, now the samosa comes to you, whether built into workplaces like Google and Facebook or trucked in at places like Oracle.

For more advanced study of food-truck history, see Heather Shouse’s book “Food Trucks” (Ten Speed Press). Curry Up Now gets top billing. It includes a recipe for the burrito-like Kathi Roll.

Curry Up Now

321 Hamilton Ave., Palo Alto

650-477-1001

curryupnow.com

Hours: Weekdays 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sat. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun. 11:30 a.m.- 9 p.m.

Reservations: no

Credit cards: yes

Parking: street and parking lots

Highchairs: yes

Outdoor dining: yes

Party and banquet facilities: no

Catering: yes

Takeout: yes

Noise level: medium-loud

Restroom cleanliness: good

http://www.mv-voice.com/story.php?story_id=8423

New guidelines are in place for any food truck vendors that have Sunnyvale set on their GPS units.

Due to the growing popularity of food trucks in cities across the nation, Sunnyvale decided to set up parameters to minimize any safety or traffic hazards that may come with the food truck craze.

The city council on Dec. 18 voted unanimously to set up a few key guidelines. The ordinance covers required distances from hydrants, driveways, fire lanes and crosswalks; hours of operation; maintenance of trash receptacles and cleanliness of the surrounding area; and prohibition of amplified speech or music.

Food vendors will be required to display a Sunnyvale business license and must be able to provide upon request licenses and permits from other agencies–such as the Santa Clara County Department of Environmental Health–that ensure food safety and sanitation. The city can take action if a mobile vendor is causing any public nuisance as well.

Dan Hugo, acting director of the Bay Area Mobile Food Vendors Association, voiced concerns about some of the requirements at the Dec. 18 meeting.

Trucks can park on private property for no more than four hours per day, and no more than three vendors are permitted at a time. If property owners want to exceed either of these limits, they would have to get a miscellaneous plan permit.

Hugo was concerned that companies such as Juniper Networks and SIMCO, which share a building, might have difficulty tracking down the property owner. Some vendors may also wish to work both a breakfast and lunch hour, which would exceed the four-hour limit.

Still, Hugo said he was pleased with the ordinance overall. “The Sunnyvale staff did a solid job of reaching out to everybody,” he said. “We hope similar studies in the Bay Area will be conducted so thoroughly.”

City staff said it will continuously evaluate the ordinance and is open to explore any future changes, but for the time being wanted to get overall guidelines in place.

In the last five years, the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety has received about 10 complaints regarding food truck activities. The majority have been from brick-and-mortar restaurant owners, represented by Kirk Vartan of A Slice of New York at the Dec. 18 meeting.

Vartan echoed concerns that food trucks have an unfair economic advantage because they do not pay property taxes or rent space, and they are exempt from land use or building permits, utility bills and other traditional restaurant expenses.

Sunnyvale DPS has also received complaints from residents about late-night noise and other safety concerns involving food trucks on commercially zoned property. The majority of the complaints were associated with noise from nightclubs and the late-night crowds, with some saying food truck service was perpetuating loitering and noise.

The ordinance addresses such concerns by creating a balance between regulations on public streets and private property, according to city staff. Additionally, requiring a permit in certain situations provides a basis for enforcing food trucks that create public safety problems.

http://www.mercurynews.com/sunnyvale/ci_22236062/sunnyvale-puts-new-guidelines-place-food-trucks

The pictures in this post were taken and sent in by On Target Aerial Services, a locally based aerial photography company.

Jim Martin, On-Target Aerial Services 

On Sunday, May 15, the Valencia Auto Center hosted the Gourmet Food Truck Fest and Classic Car Show on Creekside road.

Jim Martin, On-Target Aerial Services 

The event was presented by the Valencia Auto Center and the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Foundation, with support from the City of Santa Clarita, the  Magazine of Santa Clarita, the Signal, Time Warner Cable, KHTS and Newhall Land. More than 50 different food trucks showed up with a variety of classic cars.

Jim Martin, On-Target Aerial Services 

Jim Martin, On-Target Aerial Services 

Jim Martin, On-Target Aerial Services