The name alone—Buttermilk Truck—was enough to get me excited about breakfast. One of the most popular mobile food operations in LA, a city that has taken to the nouveau street food trend quite happily, Buttermilk Truck serves breakfast food in the morning and late night. This morning it was parked outside a coffeehouse in Echo Park called Fix, which is tucked way up in the hills amidst winding streets, funky old houses, and parklike foliage.

When I got there Buttermilk Truck had just closed its window for the morning. But I pleaded and they were nice enough to reopen, just to make me some of their famous red velvet chocolate chip pancakes. The other things they offer include Hawaiian bread French toast sticks, buttermilk biscuit breakfast sandwiches, and homemade doughnuts. At night they serve chicken and waffles.

The pancakes cost $5 and were stacked in a little cardboard container; they were the requisite bilious shade of red, crowned with two dollops of what looked like honey butter but was actually cream cheese and butter, to mimic the cream cheese frosting found on red velvet cake. The pancakes themselves were insanely moist, and as I plunged my plastic fork into them, the chocolate chips oozed like a Toll House cookie fresh out of the oven. The texture was mushy in only the best sense, and although it could have been easy to way overdo the sugar in the batter, they did not, letting the chocolate chips and cream cheese frosting sweeten it. Needless to say, no syrup was offered, nor was any needed.

Posted on Saturday, July 10th, 2010 by Lessley Anderson in CHOW Tour: Innovation 3 Comments