From a truck that looks like a haunted house, tasty San Diego tacos and crunchy quesadillas

Frank’s Monster Munchies is a truck you don’t forget once you’ve seen it. For around three years it has been a hulking green-and-black machine roving the breweries of Hampton Roads, adorned on its front with multiple versions of the stitched-up face of Frankenstein’s monster.

A couple of the Frankensteins seem friendly. One does not. Skulls laugh goofily on one side, and the windows are “cobwebbed” with sheer green.

According to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein was a vegetarian: He mostly foraged berries, and drank water from the stream. But this Frankenstein monster-truck serves San Diego-style tacos.

And the street tacos at Frank’s Monster Munchies are some of the tastier renditions you can get from a truck in Hampton Roads. Their grilled corn tortillas are laden thickly with carne asada beef that’s long-marinated before it’s grilled on the flat-top; occasional slow-cooked carnitas; or chicken spiced up with owner Charlie Timms’ personal blend of seasoning.

Before he started the truck, Timms worked as a tractor-trailer hauler. He was a locksmith. He worked on the docks.

“I’m a fan of Frankenstein,” says Frank's Monster Munchies owner Charles Timms. “I always liked him. He’s an old-school monster. He didn’t hurt people.” (Matthew Korfhage/Virginian-Pilot)

But he learned how to cook from his Mexican-heritage mother and grandmother as a kid in San Diego, and always had a restaurant in mind. He moved to Virginia while he was still a teen, and ever since then he’s missed the taco shops of his California youth.

“I kept making my own food, and everybody kept saying, ‘Hey, you should open a restaurant,’ ” he said. “But I didn’t have the money for a restaurant.”

Instead, he pulled together funding for the food truck he’d originally planned to open with his cousin in California, who has since passed. Instead of the original name they’d planned together, Los Primos, Timms went a very different way when he began his truck in 2018, mostly visiting breweries and cider spots in Hampton and Newport News.

“I’m a fan of Frankenstein,” Timms said. “I always liked him. He’s an old-school monster. He didn’t hurt people.”

Alongside his San Diego-style street tacos and smothered burritos, the Frank’s name gave Timms and his family the freedom to play with some much less traditional foods, including a monster of a quesadilla Timms invented himself.

The Game Changer CrunchyDilla at Frank's Monster Munchies contains the sort of innovation you'd expect from a late-night session: crunched-up tortilla chips inside. (Matthew Korfhage/Virginian-Pilot)

The Game Changer Crunchydilla comes laden with the same spiced chicken that goes on the tacos, but also a world of cheese, chipotle mayo and the crisp crunch of tortilla-chip crumbs that Timms pours inside the folded-up flour tortilla before grilling it up with butter on the grill. It’s the sort of late-night munchie innovation that might be familiar to countless California stoners; it’s also pretty delicious.

Still, for reasons of utility and simple spectacle, the signature dish at Frank’s might be the stacked-up nachos, loaded with beans and queso and tomatoes and lettuce and multiple drizzles of sauce. It’s a fatty, crispy platter of messy-fingered bar snack custom-made for groups of brewery-goers. Served platter-style, spread out horizontally for maximal queso coverage, Frank’s rendition shames most bar nachos in town.

The nacho platter at Frank's Monster Munchies food truck. (Courtesy Distorted Image VA)

But depending on the week, Frank’s might also go completely off script. Perhaps during Mardi Gras, the truck might serve seafood gumbo and jambalaya, an ode to the Creole heritage of Timms’ wife, Theresa. On a whim, churros might make an appearance.

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Or maybe the truck will join a friend — Chicken Stop food truck owner Dwayne Jones — for a Frankenstein mash-up of tacos and wings that might also include quesabirria-style tacos made with chicken and chorizo and dipped in chicken consomme. (Note that on our visit, that mash-up was too popular for its own good: Orders backed up more than an hour.)

Timms said Frank’s is also planning to cross the bridge-tunnel for the first time in a while, and has applied for a license to begin bringing his truck around to Virginia Beach, to Farmhouse Brewing and other spots. For now, you’ll find him on the Peninsula, at Sly Clyde Ciderworks in Hampton, or at breweries such as Tradition (Newport News) or Oozlefinch (Fort Monroe).

But even though the truck was founded in part because Timms couldn’t find the Cali-Mex tacos of his youth — expertly grilled and seasoned meats, cilantro and onions — he has had to make a small concession to the childhoods of many customers who grew up eating tacos in Virginia.

“People get a traditional Mexican taco and they’re shocked. Maybe they don’t read the ingredients list. They say, ‘Cilantro and onions and that’s it?’ They want that ground beef, lettuce, cheese. So I came out with something I’m calling the gringo taco.”

He doesn’t mind doing so. As he’ll remind you, Frankenstein is a friendly monster.

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If you go

Frank’s Monster Munchies posts its schedule weekly at facebook.com/FranksMonsterMunchies, or at streetfoodfinder.com/franksmunchies. Order in advance at franks-monster-munchies.square.site.