If you have an emails job, the day-to-day routine of going to a corporate office can become stifling. Life loses a bit of surprise. Perhaps things seem a little gray.
But then you remember you live in a city where all kinds of unexpected things happen, and these things bring pops of color to your life. This is the province of the food pop-up.
The food pop-up is easy to access, casual and temporary. You don’t need to make plans, or fuss over a big menu. You just show up and trust that the food will be good and that you might even bump into a friend or two. So long as you get there before the food runs out, you get to enjoy something special that is not available to you 24 hours a day.
On all these fronts, El Camino delivers. It’s the platonic ideal of a food pop-up.
I missed their first breakfast appearance in the parking lot outside of Heirloom Rustic Ales last month and regretted it because the menu looked really fun and the video they made to promote it was charming. That squeaking, camo-pattern blue van instantly became iconic.
And so I walked up this morning to find chefs Ben Deibert (Et Al, Cork Wise) and Marco Herrera (Noche) working the griddles alongside guest chef Alex Koch (Tina’s) and a few other folks. Herrera talked me into ordering one of everything.
Everything meant a brisket burrito, a biscuit served with pepper jelly and guest chef Koch’s contribution to the pop-up: a griddled brioche breakfast sandwich. I called in backup to help eat it all.
So here’s something I must now admit: I am a fancy coffee guy. If it’s sitting in a pot on a burner, I have no use for it. I keep the house stocked with freshly roasted beans which I grind each morning in a burr grinder and then either steep in an Aeropress or make pourover-style. On its own, each dish on the El Camino menu is fantastic, but pair one with a cup of freshly-brewed, freshly-roasted coffee from Coffee at Heirloom, and you are starting your day off on a rocketship to heaven.
The camino burrito was tremendous: tater tots and brisket marinated in Claude’s BBQ Sauce gave the dish a nice heft while the cheesy beans and a bright green salsa filled the gaps and brightened things up. I bit into it, found an over-easy egg, and the yolk ran amok, blending pleasingly into the other ingredients. The whole thing was wrapped up in a Caramelo tortilla that soaked up all the loose bits.
The breakfast sandwich was a griddled brioche sprayed with sriracha that housed a fried egg, bacon, and Jif peanut butter. It smelled like both of my kids, who basically live on the latter three ingredients. Again the egg yolk ran freely, pooling in the bottom of the taco boat.
And the biscuit, which came textured and jagged on the outside but soft and almost cake-like on the inside, was served with a sweet and spicy pepper jelly that lingered on my palate for longer than I would’ve expected. It went beautifully with my coffee.
What a morning! A little after 11 am, I saw the crew packing up, presumably sold out of vehicles for drippy eggs. All pop-ups, I suppose, must come to an end. And that’s part of their charm.
