FoCo Joe at Home: Off the Grid

By Joseph Kind, The Dartmouth Staff | 5/26/15 6:50am

This past weekend, for example, my friend Neha and I went to Off the Grid, a food-truck gathering that happens several times a week in various locations across San Francisco. It was a chilly Friday night with fog rolling overhead, but we nonetheless enjoyed ourselves and ate really good food.

First, we each had a chicken taco. It was good — I have not had many legitimate hard-shell tacos before.

Next, we got some delicious Indian food — better than Jewel of India, believe it or not.

Now to the good part – we each shared two different desserts over cups of sangria! We took a lap when we first arrive to survey the hundreds of options, and we quickly eyed a bacon-dedicated food truck offering chocolate-covered bacon. Sadly, and predictably, they ran out of chocolate-covered bacon, but we were lucky to grab the last chocolate-bacon cookie. Picture a regular chocolate chip cookie, crispy on the edges, with bacon bits. Our taste buds were blown away by the addition of salty and savory bacon to the cookie. We both agreed that the saltiness added a nice dimension of flavor. For some reason I felt like I was picking up notes of fruity flavor, perhaps dried fruit. I normally prefer chewier, gooier cookies to crispier, flatter ones, but of course for this cookie I made an exception.

The other dessert we shared over our sangria was a dark chocolate crème brûlée. We both agreed that, at first, it didn’t even taste that good! But then the dark, luscious chocolate hit us hard. The flavor reminded us of the kind of decadent brownie restaurants serve you for your birthday. The weird taste likely came from the burnt cream exterior, to the point where the dessert might have almost been better without it, although we both appreciated the crunchy texture complementing the smooth pudding.

I have been meaning to go to Off the Grid since I got been home eight weeks ago, but for some reason it never happened. Though the collection of food trucks is not dessert-focused, there is so much goodness here that it is worth a visit nonetheless. One of the dessert options we weren’t able to try was a delicious-looking donut with a line as long as the most popular food trucks, if not longer. It amazes me how much good food I’ve gotten to eat in San Francisco, lots of which I have yet to write about – I am excited to bring some new ideas back with me in the fall!


Joseph Kind, The Dartmouth Staff