Mom's grilled cheese truck

Mom's grilled cheese

Location : Howe & W Georgia

'Classics' $5.50 Additionals: 50c or $1.50 Specials range from $8.50 up

It's not often you are offered free samples while standing in a busy line at a food cart and watching how the people around you react is very interesting. Most people look at each other, the floor or find something exciting to peruse behind them, anywhere but at the person with the piece of sandwich. Nobody wants to be the first or only person to take the offered tidbit. Maybe they feel it would be considered greedy or impolite. 

Well, not me. "Yes please" I usually answer when offered something edible, especially when the server is thrusting it towards the crowd with exasperated cries of  "C'mon, free cheese"! The illuminating sample in question was a piece of the 'Jackson 3', a  gourmet menu item at this new food cart. Sourdough bread with Brie, Boursin and Gruyere melted inside. It was nutty, creamy, cheesy and toothsome. Exactly what you want from grilled cheese.

October seems a strange month for a whole load of new carts to be opening and you would imagine that to survive the Winter months they would have to offer more comfort food standards, exactly as this one is providing. Grilled cheese was a new concept for us Brits coming to Canada, where we are more likely to eat it as an open sandwich, which we call cheese on toast. Either that or a 'toasty', which requires a Breville toasty maker, but never fried in a pan as seems traditional. This truck used a type of panini / toasty making press to grill the bread from both sides. 

We chose a classic combination of marbled rye, cheddar and added a deluxe option of red onion. For $6.50 we had a decent sized lunch complete with thin, crispy potato chips and a dill pickle. Perhaps my choice of bread was a mistake as it seemed a little dark, maybe a touch burnt, but the filling was excellent, melty, savoury cheese and onion still retaining it's bite but slightly softened. Neil and I both agreed that a different choice of bread, maybe sourdough or white and something sweeter and juicier, maybe tomato, would create a better sandwich and the fun is to return and try the many combinations possible.

More offerings : Both deluxe choices with bacon (first image) and red onion and gherkin in the second.