Elina Shatkin
As a scrappy upstart in a brutal business, Street Kitchen isn't doing itself any favors with its branding. No website or Twitter feed (that we can find). The most SEO-unfriendly name in food truck history. A culinary magpie of a menu that includes everything from jerk chicken tacos and pulled pork sliders to filet mignon quesadillas and a “Cajun Philly Steak Haogie” [sic]. (Combos like that may be the reason “fusion” is used as an epithet.) Hell, it isn't even a truck, it's a trailer, easily missed among the bigger, brighter trucks that populate the Miracle Mile.
Street Kitchen, however, has at least one indisputable weapon in its arsenal: The OG hot dog.
With more snap than the gangsters of “West Side Story,” the natural casing splits open on the grill, yielding a soft, crumbly interior more like fresh loose sausage than a tightly bound hot dog. Dark reddish brown on the outside, tender fleshy pink on the inside. Maybe 7-inches long, it's a weighty contender. It's thick too. Not one of the freakishly large but oversalted hot dogs of the county fair circuit. This is no trifling dog.
It's also no Chicago dog, which is how it's described on the menu — right above the line that says it's served with mustard and ketchup. My companion, a Chicago native, nearly did a spit take. Onions, mustard, lime green sweet relish, maybe hot peppers — not ketchup. Never ketchup! But this is 2011, and we're in the heart of Korean-Mexican taco country.
Never mind the bollocks — or Chicagoans' antagonism towards ketchup. This is the best $4 we have spent at a food truck in months, and it may also be the best hot dog on wheels in Los Angeles.
Street Kitchen: OG Dog, $4.
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