American Flavors, truck yeah

Star-spangled red, white, and blue flames decorate the sides of the American Flavors food truck, along with a bald eagle, Mt. Rushmore, the statue of liberty, and Joe DiMaggio. It’s the mobile-kitchen version of the National Anthem by Jimi Hendrix. It operates under the tag line Food You Know, Flavors You Love. And, yes, it serves burgers.

It also serves a Chicken and Waffle Cone. Fried chicken and waffles? No. This is fried chicken and bacon, chopped up and served in a sugar-dusted waffle cone — you know, the kind you always get with amusement park ice cream. Then it’s dosed with a heavy drizzle of syrup — you know, the kind you might put on your pancakes. So I guess it’s food you know and flavors you love all tossed together in a unique, street-food savvy, six-dollar package.

It can be a sticky mess, though. The cone breaks apart easily and, unlike ice cream, small bits of fried chicken and bacon held together by nothing more than low viscosity breakfast syrup tend not to stay put.

It seemed to be mostly fried chicken at first, the batter sufficiently crispy and savory to stand against the syrup’s fluid sweetness. The added sugar of the cone may have tipped the balance slightly too far into sweet — that will depend on your preference. Having foreseen this, the proprietors of this American flavors food truck included a couple of small packets of Tapatío sauce to spice things up.

As I got to work devouring the top layer of the cone, I noticed the flavor getting saltier. Turns out the bacon crumbles are much smaller than the pieces of chicken, so they tend to drop down into the narrower half of the cone. Thus about halfway through I found myself biting into a cone of bacon. That’s not a bucket list item, but let’s scratch it off whatever list might be appropriate.

More surprises were in store. A single piece of fried chicken had managed to sneak to the bottom of the cone, so as I ate further, the bacon disappeared and the chicken came back. Once I’d consumed that, I was left with the tiny end piece of cone which had captured the mix of syrup and Tapatío for one last bite of over-the-top, signature American flavor.