Road Food

Add bustaurant and broach coach to your foodie vocabulary. “Busing Tables, and Diners Too” in today’s online Wall Street Journal, explains:

The Bay Area's newest food trend is bustaurants, gourmet restaurants built into buses complete with kitchens and dining rooms. While this region didn't invent the bustaurant—that mantle in the U.S. goes to a double-decker in Los Angeles named World Fare—the Bay Area has evolved the concept and is now home to two such moveable feasts, which attract equal parts adventurous diners and bus-loving kids.

The featured meals-on-wheels are Diamond Lil, “a converted silver 1957 Greyhound that takes up to 16 diners on private mobile eating adventures or caters for larger parties where the bus becomes part of the entertainment,” and Le Truc, a 36-foot former school bus whose already excellent name would be even more puntastic—truc is French slang for “thingie” or “whatchamacallit”—if the cuisine were Vietnamese. (It isn’t, if I’m reading Le Truc’s Twitter feed correctly.) From the WSJ article:

Blake Tally, co-owner of Le Truc, says his bustaurant counters a stereotype, however undeserved, that mobile food operators serve greasy, cut-rate food. “People stigmatize the ‘roach coach,’” says Mr. Tally. “We are a ‘broach’ coach. People are easily going to be sitting there eating and forgetting that they are in a bus.”

Is broach a portmanteau of bus and roach? Might be best to shelve that one.

Bustaurants face several challenges unfamiliar to their stationary counterparts, including motion sickness and sliding tableware. But probably not to this extent:

Via Kottke.org, which reports:

On August 1, the Pacific Sun ran into a heavy storm 400 miles north of New Zealand, hitting 25-foot-tall waves and 50-knot winds. Its 1732 passengers weren't prepared to endure the madness that ensued. Absolutely crazy.

(Hat tip for the WSJ story: Betsy Burroughs.)

Comments

[Betsy Burroughs]

Love the tie in to the cruise ship in a storm!

[panavia999]

That is some video clip. While all the furniture and people are flying to and fro in the foreground, the background action in the galley (upper left hand corner) is also very interesting.