Garrett Snyder
Ever since the closing of Pasadena's Tutti Frutti two years ago, Los Angeles has found itself lacking a single, solitary purveyor of the Colombian street food known as the super perro.
What is this bizarre semitropical creation? Imagine a hot dog taken to its architectural extremes, layered with avocado, pineapple relish, cilantro, onions, tomatoes, crushed potato chips and a latticework of squeeze-bottle spreads — garlic mayonnaise, mustard and a chile-spiked fancy sauce, among other things.
In certain neighborhoods of New York, the super perro is known to draw a cult following — a reality that becomes all the more alarming when you consider our fine metropolis had nothing to match it.
Until now.
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Luckily, the past few months have blessed us with not one but two exemplary specimens of the famed super perro. There is Mucho Perro!, a colorful food truck that can be found traversing the Valley after sundown, churning out overburdened creations to drunk clubgoers, and also El Pan-Americano truck, which serves West L.A. with an array of South American sandwiches whose design seems to include fitting as many ingredients as possible between slices of bread.
The logistics of handling a Colombian hot dog undoubtedly will prove overwhelming at first bite, which might be sort of the point. About halfway through, the splattering of toppings will begin to make sense, and you'll begin to wonder how this frankfurter niche went unfilled for so long.
Our advice? Hunt this beast down like Hemingway pursing a cape buffalo — who knows how long its existence might last.
El Pan Americano Truck; Credit: G. Snyder
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