Elina Shatkin
It was inevitable, this shotgun wedding of the two hottest culinary trends of the last few years: food trucks and bacon. Even in the current cultural moment, when gluttony has practically become its own cuisine, the launch of the Get Your Lardon (@getyourlardon) truck in September might give one pause.
Even excess has to pause once in a while, lift up those triple chins and take a hard look in the mirror. Does Los Angeles need a bacon truck? Does the world?
Few of us will ever sample one of Grant Achatz's gelatinous edible cocktails or Ferran Adrià's latest edible freeze-dried bauble, but we can all participate in the cuisine of gluttony, especially when it rolls up to your doorstop wafting smoky puffs of Nueske bacon.
Get Your Lardon does best when it does least. An Elvis-themed brownie ($4) (from Lark in Silver Lake) slathered in peanut butter, bacon crumbles and bananas seems outrageous at first bite but by the third bite, it's a punishing slog.
Specials like the Hog Me Tender ($7) — a breakfast sandwich made of heavy, syrup-soaked slices of French toast cradling peanut butter, bananas and (take a guess) bacon — overwhelm the palate and pale in comparison to regular items like the breakfast burrito ($6). Get Your Lardon's breakfast burrito is nothing but a basic flour tortilla, hashed up breakfast potatoes, cheddar cheese and bacon, something served by countless lunch trucks millions of times over, but man, is it good.
Their BLT ($6), a chewy baguette smeared with blue cheese instead of mayo and layered with fresh butter lettuce and sliced baby tomatoes, is a cut above most café versions of this sandwich. We could quibble about the thickness of the bread — a tad thinner and maybe that Nueske bacon would really sing — but we can't quibble about the baco.
Get Your Lardon's pièce de résistance, the baco (pronounced “bock-oh” and not to be confused with Josef Centeno's bäco) is a reverse taco, with the swine on the outside and the carbs on the inside. Strips of bacon are woven into a shell and fried around the same chunky hash you'll find in the breakfast burrito. This is the kind of treatment bacon deserves. Simple but unique, hearty but not overpowering, thoroughly bacon-y without overreaching. And at $4, it gives you plenty of bang for your bacon buck.
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