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After several years working as a cook and executive chef for catering companies, Antonio Medina was ready to try something on his own. Seeing the the designer food truck trend, he and his wife took to some of their favorite food and hit the road.
"It sounded a lot more reasonable than opening a restaurant" Medina explained as he chopped vegetables. "And this is something we can do together," pointing to Lana, his wife of three years, who gave up her job as a teacher to pursue the truck with him.
Medina wanted to do something with bistro food and with more and more gastropubs popping up around Los Angeles he went in that direction, finding a nice play on words, naming his truck The Gastrobus.
There's no beer (that would illegal), but his menu serves up a great variety of pub foods like pulled pork, smoked bacon and skirt steak sandwiches ($6) with sides such as salads and sweet potato fries ($2.50). Specials found at the recent Downtown Art Walk included corn flapjacks ($2.50), cheeseburger sliders ($6) and root beer floats ($3).
"I fancy myself a bit of a sweet potato fry connosieur and these were nearly perfect," wrote Yelp's Los Angeles Community Manager Dawson S. on her review of the truck. And she's right, they were damn good (as well as the corn flapjacks).
Medina has also taken to locally bought fresh food, setting up shop every Sunday morning at the Los Feliz Farmer's Market. He gets there early, buys a variety of vegetables and improvises dishes right there and then. "This is where his creativity and talent really comes into play," says Lana.
You can follow The GastroBus on Twitter at @thegastrobus
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NO BEER?!?!?! i call foul, "gastrobus"!
If they served beer, I have a feeling they'd be gastrogone thanks to the watchful eyes of the food truck police LAPD.
Oh man! I was there last night. I'm sorry I missed you, Zach.
I love the new truck trend. Here's a tip to my fellow truck fans: use TweetDeck as your Twitter client, because it lets you organize tweeters into groups. I just check my "food truck" column in TweetDeck to check locations of over a dozen trucks
Antonio Medina is a good cook, but one of the biggest a-holes I have ever met. He is arrogant, vindictive and an all-around miserable human being.
There are SO many other trucks owned and staffed by GOOD human beings...I would not give this guy a dime.
The food may be good, but they need to work on their Twitter etiquette. Tweeted that they'd be in Glendale from 11:30am-1pm the other day and then bailed a half hour early with out a update tweet to let people know.
If you're going to jump on the new media/web 2.0 bandwagon to promote your business, then you should actually learn how to do it right.
I follow a lot of the "nouveau food trucks" on Twitter some are bad about letting you know when and where they are, but many are very good about it, pre-announcing their destination, letting you know if they're running late and letting you know if they're leaving early.
I'll give their food a chance, that's if I can catch up to them some day.
Really? cuz I met up with them a couple of weeks ago (Westgate/Whilshire), he and his wife were extremely pleasant!
not only that, but they had just finished serving the volunteers and evacuees at the Red Cross, seems like a pretty HONORABLE guy to me.
Food was great! good size portions. I hope they'll come back to the westside!