Our favorite 6 new food trucks in Hampton Roads — from cheesy quesabirria to wood-charred pizza

Times of trouble often bring food trucks.

The national food truck revolution of 2008 wasn’t a sudden yen for al fresco dining. It was a response to a financial meltdown, as chefs struggled to secure restaurant loans and instead moved food trailers onto abandoned real estate.

Last year was another troubled time — and a bumper year for new food trucks in Hampton Roads.

This doesn’t mean the pandemic was easy on food trucks. The events that trucks thrive on were shut down during much of last year, leaving owners scrambling to book gigs in residential neighborhoods. Byzantine Hampton Roads regulations make permanent food truck parking more difficult than in many regions — though as you’ll see below, not impossible.

But in times of uncertainty, food trucks offer a flexible and lower-overhead avenue for new entrepreneurs unable to invest heavily in a brick-and-mortar space. They also offer a means for seating-strapped restaurants to expand.

And so a fertile new crop of trucks has sprouted. Since last summer, we’ve seen trendy quesabirria tacos, blazing hot chicken, accomplished wood-fired pizza, a surprising abundance of gourmet hot dogs, and of course, good old Southern barbecue.

As the mercury rises and brewery patios once again fill with frothy glasses, here are our six favorite new food trucks for the summer.

Krazy Trompos

Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake. Often parked at 3578 Holland Road, Virginia Beach. Schedule and menu at krazytrompos.com. 757-352-7008

Krazy Trompos has no trompo — the vertical spit used to cook al pastor pork. But it does get pretty crazy.

In a scene blessedly familiar to people from Western states, Trompos is an always-mobbed taco truck found most often on a gravel lot on Holland Road in Virginia Beach between a phone repair shop and a shipping service to China. A fluttering banner proclaims its tacos and burritos to the world.

Trompos had to fight for that parking spot, said manager Hilda Ramirez — getting bounced from lot to lot until they finally leased a lot where restaurants wouldn’t complain to the city about competition from food trucks.

“We were kicked out twice,” she said. “They said we were competition. And we were like, competition? What do you mean, competition?”

She’s right: There’s little competition. By the time Krazy Trompos opens at 3 p.m. on a given Wednesday, there may already be a crowd waiting for owner Maria Palacios’ Jalisco-style street tacos served with grilled chicken or long-cooked cabeza, brim-filled torta sandwiches or the trendiest trend in Mexican American food this year.

For $14.75 you can get a trio of orange-shelled and beefy-cheesy quesabirria tacos, filled with tender meat slow-roasted with West Mexican spice, and always served with a cup of fire-engine-red consome broth laden with meat drippings. Mexicans tend to sip it; Americans like to use it as dunking sauce. No one judges.

“It’s order after order, order after order — it’s craziness,” Ramirez said. “And every order there is quesabirria.”

Orders may stack up a half-hour or even 45 minutes, she said, and the truck sometimes runs out of meat. But the customers seem happy to wait, a hearteningly diverse parking-lot party extending to the picnic tables on the grass.

Small wonder: It’s some of the finer Mex-Mex — as opposed to Tex-Mex — food in the region. Birria aside, Trompos’ slow-cooked carnitas street tacos are also some of the best you’ll find locally, as are the juicy carne asada and tender beef-head cabeza — meatily plump and garnished with cilantro, onion and radish, served on wondrous corn tortillas that Palacios makes from scratch each day.

Palacios and her crew started not with birria but with pork al pastor tacos on vertical rotisseries, at special events all over Hampton Roads.

But for now, they can’t fit the trompos in the truck, and they can’t spare the staff, especially not while also running a mini-fruteria with fresh-made aguas frescas, chili-sprinkled mango on a stick, and sweet strawberries and cream.

And so the trompos are on hold.

“Customers will ask us about it, but we will have to wait until we have the staff to do it,” Ramirez said. “Maybe on special days we will have a trompo.”

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Sour Street Pizza

Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Schedule and menu at sourstreetpizza.com. 757-403-6705

Nathan Ingram did what a lot of people did while stuck at home during the pandemic: He got obsessed with dough.

While working from home, he made batch after batch of pizza — with a copy of baker Ken Forkish’s “Flour Water Salt Yeast” and no ingredients in his dough except the ones in the book title.

“I was at my house 24-7,” he said. “I had an IT job, I was in sales. And in between calls and working, I was able to start working on the dough.”

He graduated quickly to sourdough the same way they do it in Naples, maintaining a yeast starter he loaned out to Glass Light Hotel chef Zack Close for that chef’s pandemic experiments in baking. Ingram started making his pizza on a Big Green Egg ceramic grill, inviting friends to taste his experiments while socially distanced.

He eventually upgraded to a Mugnaini wood-fired oven weighing down the back of a custom-built trailer from Florida, decked out with a pizzified palm tree in Vaporwave pink, blue and yellow.

As of April, Ingram has been selling wood-fired pizza loosely inspired by the pies of Naples, from simple marinara pies to more offbeat concoctions topped with gorgonzola and fig, or arugula and prosciutto and hot honey.

The dough is already accomplished: thin and crisp at its middle, with a high rise and complex crumb structure around its perimeter, with sourdough character that never slips over into tart or salty, and beautiful leopard spotting beneath its skirt.

Immediately since the truck’s first outings, it is pizza worth traveling for — in particular the more composed creations such as the fig or the prosciutto. You can quibble with the flavor balance on the margherita, perhaps: The sauce was a little too lightly basted and maybe under sweet, the fresh fior di latte mozzarella less moist than some after baking.

But those last tasting notes come, perhaps unfairly, from one of their first days in business. I had been watching Sour Street’s Instagram with such eagerness I simply couldn’t wait.

You probably won’t want to, either.

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Team Fat Kid

Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. Schedule at facebook.com/TeamFatKidFoodTruck. 757-427-1586

Team Fat Kid was on TV before you could ever find it at a brewery near you.

For years, a group of Virginia Beach chefs and butchers and veterans of multiple branches of service — Dennis McKain, Jacob Dooley, Alex Carr, Jason Fossee — got together for backyard experiments in meat and even more meat, whether smoked chicken or cheesesteaks or singular takes on hamburgers.

While searching for a recipe online, Fossee came across an application to be on the Food Network’s “Great Food Truck Race.” He filled it out even though none of them had a food truck.

“I answered the 10 questions and forgot about it … and then three, four months later, I got an email,” he said. After a whole lot more questions, they found themselves in California competing against six other teams for the ultimate food truck crown using a truck supplied by the show’s producers.

They didn’t win, but they’d caught the bug. By fall, Fossee and Carr were ready to roll. They had a couple of gimmicks: Rotating fried Lil Debbie treats and bacon cheese sauce as an option on everything.

But they also had finely honed recipes. The simplest items at Team Fat Kid — the least fat-kiddiest food — may just be the best food here.

Their 40/30/30 hamburger is a walloping 6-ounce monster made with bacon, ground chuck and ribeye, a combo arrived at through much trial and error, smashed down on the grill for heartening char.

It can be ordered in hulking bacon-lettuce-onion-tomato form, but do yourself a favor: Get the basic, topped only with horseradish cream sauce and wrapped up in a yeast-roll pandesal bun from Angie’s Filipino bakery. It might be one of the best burgers you have all year, an exercise in fatty-burger purity.

The Triple-P breaded pork sandwich, topped with bacon cheese sauce and bacon, sounds overwhelming but is also a creature of delicate balance. And the flour-dredged Firebird fried chicken sammy is the soul of Nashville hot chicken tuned to the complex harmonics of jazz — sauced up with a blend of 13 seed-in peppers that conspire to open every pore on your body.

The cheesesteak is also the result of experimentation: To test it, they ordered every high-rated cheesesteak in Hampton Roads and blind-tasted them against Fat Kid’s rendition. Theirs came in second, behind Philly Cold Cuts in Virginia Beach (also The Pilot’s favorite in a 2019 taste test.) So that’s what it says on the menu: “2nd Best Philly Cheesesteak.”

To make the version they call “the best” — why not? — they added fresh jalapenos, french fries and bacon cheese sauce for a sloppy, starchy, spicy, meaty landslide of flavor.

They wouldn’t recognize it in Philly, but it’s certainly the best something.

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Old City BBQ

Serves Williamsburg, Hampton and Newport News. Schedule and menu at facebook.com/oldcitybbqfoodtruck.

If you’re in Newport News around midday and you hear a siren that sounds like the onset of the Purge, it’s pork time at the shipyard.

That’s when Old City BBQ food truck manager Oscar Wong springs to action, turning out 150 sandwiches in the space of an hour to the many hungry mouths of Newport News Shipbuilding. The popular Williamsburg barbecue spot opened a shipyard truck last year. And this year, they started bringing it to Peninsula breweries.

Of course, they serve the same pulled pork, brisket and flour-tortilla tacos Old City offers at the restaurant. But the two best bites at the food truck can’t be found at the restaurant — at least not in quite the same form.

Wong recently debuted his own creation, a thumpingly good loaded mac and cheese made from the white-queso kids’ version of Old City’s mac. Get it with Old City’s estimable smoked chicken — juicy and tannic with smoke — and it’s an unbridled bird pile of flavor slathered with barbecue and hot sauce. Consider it a cheesy heart attack in foil.

Even better are the truck’s take on pork belly bites, cured for three days, smoked for another and then pressed into uniform width. At the restaurant — and in the food truck’s tacos — the belly is grill seared. But the food truck’s “bites” are deep-fried into caramelized and fat-rendered goodness, crispy candy made of meat. Load it up with sweet-hot sauce, peanuts and scallions and it’s Asian-Southern fusion heaven.

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Umami Dogs

Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. Schedule and menu at instagram.com/umamidogs.

The fancy hot dog has come for Hampton Roads. This year, a surprising preponderance of pop-ups and trucks have arrived with inventive dogs stacked with toppings from lox to Korean bulgogi. So far, my favorite has been Umami Dogs, and there are two main reasons: the meat and the bun.

The truck is the product of Paolo Vergara and Andrew Stofan, of Japanese-inflected fried burger spot Oishii Burger in Virginia Beach, who tried out a loaded hot dog pop-up at their restaurant on Halloween.

Eschewing basic and flimsy buns, they opted for the split-top New England versions often used for hefty lobster rolls — all the better to contain a Korean barbecue dog laden with sweet-sauced and Korean-spiced pork, sweet kewpie mayo, brightly crisp pickled onions and a spot of cabbage.

For the dog, they opted for thick franks that Vergara “fell in love with,” made with grass-fed beef from the same western Virginia farm that supplies Oishii’s burgers.

Unlike the precarious Jenga towers at many fancy dog spots, both bun and dog are able to stand up to the ingredients. And so the bacon crumbles and avocado slices on a Perillo dog don’t slip onto the sidewalk when you try to eat. And sweet-curried chili dog can arrive weightily draped with beefy chili and cheddar.

The Halloween pop-up was so popular that it stopped being a pop-up. As of this year, it’s also a truck, roaming two or three times a week among the region’s three largest cities. Hot dog.

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Pitt County BBQ

All over from Windsor to Virginia Beach to the Peninsula. Truck schedule at facebook.com/PittCountyBBQVA. Catering info at pittcountybbqva.com. 919-999-6753

Quindell Jenkins grew up in Greenville, North Carolina, 15 minutes from the whole-hog pork he says he’d trade for his last dollar in the world — the meticulously rubbed and always fresh pig at Ayden’s 74-year-old Skylight Inn. But like a lot of people in Pitt County, he also grew up cooking whole hog at home.

“When there was a family gathering, that’s what people would do,” he said. “‘Let’s cook a whole pig, a whole hog.’ ”

People think Eastern Carolina barbecue is about vinegar, he says, and so they just dump it on their pork. But that’s not what it is. It’s patience. It’s the freshness of pork that’s gone when it’s gone, cooked only over wood for long hours (he likes hickory, himself). It’s fussing and being up all night and tearing your hair out. It’s a secret sauce developed over decades, massaged gently into the meat: Vinegar and cayenne, sure, but also some other stuff he won’t tell you.

He spent his life chasing that flavor. When they tried to make what he called “imitation” pork barbecue on his ship while in the Navy, the junior sailor walked right up to an officer and said, “This isn’t it.” Soon the Enterprise looked forward to Jenkins Barbecue Thursday every week. A visiting Food Network chef tried his pork, said Jenkins, and told him, “Call me for anything you need.”

Sarrah Isenhour, a habitual entrepreneur and Jenkins’ partner at his new Pitt County BBQ truck — a bright orange smokestack steaming around breweries and festivals from Windsor to Virginia Beach — says she was vegetarian before trying his pork sandwich. And now she isn’t.

His pulled pork comes on barky, deeply hickory-smoked, moist, tender, and a bit aggressive in its salt, with depth from something unplaceable — a singular rendition that doesn’t taste like anybody else’s locally.

It’s delicious, and yet the sauce-basted ribs might be even better — with a snapshot-perfect pink ring of smoke, and juicy meat that maintains its integrity and dignity rather than falling off the bone like some lazy cowboy.

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He learned the art of ribs, and the patient art of delectable brisket, from Illinois competition barbecue chef Brad Cox, from whom he also picked up his food truck.

Jenkins is a constant student, he says, and always experimenting. He’s also still adding flavors, like a recent Strange Rootz smoked jerk salmon named in homage to the local band, or a beautiful innovation in sides: a smoked pineapple he concocted after trying smoked watermelon at a New York restaurant.

Just be ready to share in Jenkins’ patience: There’s often a line. And if each meat isn’t perfectly ready, he won’t serve it. He’ll make you wait for it. And then when it’s gone, it’s gone.

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Got burning questions about Hampton Roads food? Articles you’d like to see? Starting in the next few weeks, food writer Matthew Korfhage will hold regular Facebook video chats answering reader questions, and providing deeper context on food stories. Send questions or notes to matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com with the subject line “WHAT’S UP WITH FOOD”

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Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com