Boston: Food Truck Festival of New England

I'm interrupting my final Cleveland post and postponing my San Francisco/Northern, CA trip recap (which is a month overdue) to talk about our awesome time at the Food Truck Festival of New England! I guess the two kind of tie together, because we did eat at a few food trucks in SF and I'll talk about those when I get around to writing those posts. :)

We headed out to Boston this past weekend to celebrate our second wedding anniversary a few weeks early. We honestly weren't sure what we were going to do on Saturday until a few days before we left. The conversation went kind of like this:

Kristin: (On Monday) Hey Adam, you should check out this website for the Food Truck Festival of New England.

Adam: (no response)

2 days later...

Adam: (comes downstairs and looks excited) I found something I think you should look at. Open up your web browser. OK, now go to www.foodtruckfestival...

Kristin: (thinking this looks familiar) Um, do you realize that I sent you that address like 2 days ago?

Adam: Ohhh... I thought it looked familiar!

We were cracking up and it was our running joke up until we went to the festival this weekend.

We got to the festival at about 11:30 AM and decided to purchase 30 tickets for $37. They had some sample menus available to give you an idea of how many tickets you'd have to pony up for different types of items. For example, most things were between 4-6 tickets, this included everything from sandwiches to chowders to noodle bowls. We figured that between the two of us we'd probably use 30 tickets and not feel disgusting afterwards. Looking back, we probably should have bought the next level up, to factor in for some drinks which were in the 2-4 ticket range.

Our first stop was Gabi's Smoke Shack. Adam loves BBQ so this was a must try for him. He got the pulled pork sandwich with cole slaw. We both thought this was really yummy. He didn't even offer me any until I asked if I could try it, so I guess it was just that good. They had containers of different BBQ sauces on tables next to the truck so you could add some extra flavor to your sandwich.

While Adam was enjoying his BBQ, I headed over to the Paris Creperie truck. I thought about getting a crepe "sandwich" from them, but when I saw Nutella and strawberry crepes, my heart skipped a beat and I instinctively went with that.

It was heavenly. I didn't really want to share, but I figured Adam should have a bite of this messy, but delicious crepe (you can see the patches of Nutella all over my face).

After we finally finished with the crepe, we headed towards the second section of trucks. In this section we grabbed some braised beef dumplings from Mei Mei Street Kitchen. Wow. These things were seriously delicious. I probably wouldn't have given one to Adam had I eaten one first. If I had extra tickets I probably would have bought another order of these.

I noticed on the pathways around the trucks there were signs sprayed basically saying "free Sabra hummus" -->. I moseyed on over to check out what the deal was. The were giving out a free container of hummus and two bags of parmesan and herb Sunchips. By this point, I was starting to get full, so I only really tasted the hummus and ended up putting the bags of chips away for later. I buy Sabra hummus a lot at home, especially the ones with roasted vegetables in the center. So good.

We walked around a little before heading over to check out the last section of trucks. Between that time, we ended up getting samples of Starbucks Via and Izze soda. Those were definitely welcome, as it was getting pretty hot out.

For our last non-dessert food, I picked the spice rubbed chicken sandwich from Bon Me Foods. Adam wasn't too excited about getting a sandwich, but I reminded him that I hadn't really eaten any non-dessert foods, except for the dumplings. The sandwich had carrots, red onions, daikon, cucumber, cilantro and spicy mayo. I picked chicken, but you could also pick BBQ pork or tofu with shiitake mushrooms.

Funny enough, this ended up being Adam's favorite food out of everything we ate.

We found a bench and just chilled for a while. The bench we picked happened to have a clear view of the Charles river, so we watched people boating and paddleboarding while we ate. You could rent a boat or board from the Paddle Boston launch at the festival.

After we finished our sandwich and had relaxed for a little while, we decided to hit up Kick Ass Cupcakes as our last stop before heading back to our hotel. We definitely like our cupcakes and make it a point to find a new shop where ever we go.

We picked the "Lucky Cupcake", which was a lemon cupcake with white chocolate buttercream and candied ginger. Well really, Adam picked this one. I'm not a lemon cupcake kind of gal, I would have rather tried any of the other flavors (I tried to get him to buy the cookies and cream with our remaining 3 tickets - no dice). I really liked the frosting though. It was sweet, but not super sweet.

I totally give them bonus points for adorable cupcake decoration.

We definitely had a great time and wish we were sticking around MA a little longer so we could go to another event. Maybe some day we'll get back to Boston to try some more trucks!