There are just a few of the hundreds of delicious portable restaurants. What's your favorite truck, van, cart, wheeled-stall, motorcycle or otherwise mobile platform dishing out food?

Sénor Tacombi
Located in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, the Sénor has combined two great Mexican products: the taco and the VW Combi, which was produced in Mexico until the mid-1990s. The story of Sénor Tacombi is one of a wandering soul/wrestler who marched across the Andes with Che, partied at Studio 54 with Freddy Mercury, and chilled with Gandhi in India. Today, he mostly served tacos to college kids who are looking to carb-up after a night on the town.
Photo Credit: Playa Maya News

Fat Daddy's Ice Cream Truck
We'd never thought of giving the classic lowrider treatment to a GMC Ice Cream Truck, but the folks at Las Vegas' Fat Daddy's Ice Cream did just that. Painted in a creamsicle orange with white walls, the truck has four-way hydraulic control. Oh, and it serves just about any ice cream novelty you might want.
Photo Credit: Roadside Pictures @ flickr

Hey Cupcake!
A trip to Austin's groovy South Congress would be wasted without a stop at Hey Cupcake! Peddling cupcakes out of a frequently shined Airstream trailer, a personal favorite, the cupcakes are simple and delicious. Some noticed that a pic of the trailer sneaked into our Mustang Bullitt review. Our fave is the Michael Jackson, which features a chocolate bottom with a cream cheese top.
Photo Credit: Justwatchthesky @ flickr

The Grilled Cheese Grill
Due to lax food sales regulations and a culture supportive of local businesses, Portland, Oregon is the epicenter of food cart dining. It's hard to just pick out one delicious eatery, but we're fond of the Grilled Cheese Grill concept. Gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches and sides served inside a school bus is 18 kinds of brilliant. For more on the local digs check out Food Carts Portland.
Photo Credit: Truth Development @ Flickr

Kogi Korean BBQ Truck
Big fans of Korean cooking, and there are many in Los Angeles, love the Kogi BBQ-To-Go truck. Fusing Korean tastes with classic American fare, such as tacos and burgers, it's a portable flavor experience. Traveling from place to place in what looks like a typical taco truck, you know you're at a hot spot when the Kogi truck arrives. Korean BBQ slider anyone?

Calexico Carne Asada Cart
New Yorkers take their street food seriously so when someone is named the best street food you take note. The Brooklyn-based, So-Cal inspired Mexican cart serves up tacos with a California twist, thus combining west, east and south coasts. They serve the food all afternoon... or until they run out.

El Ultimo Taco
With an abundance of construction sites and hungry people Houston is a mecca of taco trucks. El Ultimo on the northwest side offers both humongous portions and super cheap prices. A fully stuffed egg, potato, and chorizo taco on a handmade flour tortilla with a spicy salsa is just $1. Wash it down with fresh fruit aguas frescas and you could probably live forever on the food. Just look for the truck with pictures of fruit painted on the side.
Photo Credit: Dave77459 @ flickr

Street-za Pizza Truck
Just like it sounds, the Street-za truck delivers the flat, Italian-inspired pies out of a truck window to hungry Milwaukee residents and visitors. Unlike your typical pizza kart, the very mobile Street-za offers a ginormous slice in between Chicago and New York style with a flakey crust and gourmet toppings such as smoked Nueske's bacon, Gouda, and roasted Italian eggplant.

Magic Curry Kart
The simplest of all carts, the Magic Curry Kart wanders San Francisco on a mixture of non-matching bike wheels. The chef cooks up delicious curry using two gas-powered hotplates on the neon-adorned cart. Put your name on his clipboard with your wants and he'll cook you up a delicious curry in about ten minutes. When you're done with that you can hit up the Créme Brûlée cart. Seriously.
Photo Credit: HoodScope

Goosebeary's
Most M.I.T. grads we know are fairly smart, if not a bit socially awkward, which goes to explain how they figured out the unappealingly named Goosebeary's van on Kendall Square was so good. Top notch pan-Asian cuisine served out of a crappy van and tossed into cheap Styrofoam may confuse some, but the M.I.T. students are prepared for the culinary dialectic.
Photo Credit: Mr. Joro

Morris 1000 Wagon: This nice, well used Morris 1000 Traveller caught my eye while I was trying to check some details on the Quattro/quattro I sent you photos of. The DVLA shows it as a 1000cc 1970 car but it’ll probably be a 1098cc car. I see this little lawbreaker jumping red lights and parking on pavements all over north Edinburgh but I’ve yet to get a good look at the driver.

Bentley Turbo R: Spotted in Roseburn, a nice area of Edinburgh next to the national rugby stadium. It was sandwiched in between two cars with homemade for sale signs in the window, it’s an area of town with little restriction on parking so I often see cars dumped there while they’re for sale. I don’t know if the Bentley is for sale but fuel at £1.10 a litre, I’m not sure if it’ll find a home. The DVLA records show this to be a 1997 car, the last year of production, and it really was in great shape.

Ice Cream Truck: Spotted on Princes St in Edinburgh, adjacent to the National Gallery of Scotland. The van is a 1970 BMC 250JU, 1970 was the last year that the BMC name was used, they were Austin Morris branded by the end of that year. It’s an evolution of a 1956 design that was the first uni-body van BMC produced. It’s powered by a 1.8 litre version of the B-series four cylinder engine, the ‘U’ in the name denotes that the engine was underfloor. The ice cream was decent, but hardly first class and they lacked even the most basic sprinkles and sauces. My Special Lady Friend refused to pose at the van, she didn’t seem to understand the honour of appearing in DOTS for the second time (she’s in the background of the Porsche photos I sent ages ago).

1966 Jaguar S Type: Spotted in Murrayfield, a really plush area of Edinburgh full of Georgian townhouses. It’s a 1966 Jaguar S type with the 3.8 litre XK engine. It’s almost just an update to the Mark II, it shares lots of bodywork and mechanicals though it had independent rear suspension and new lights at the front and rear. This car definitely works for a living, I’ve been chasing it for weeks and it’s never parked in the same place for long. Despite living on the streets, it shows no signs of corrosion and no bodywork damage, really amazing.

Audi Quattro: This is rather mysterious Audi Coupe that may or may not be a pukka UR Quattro. It’s a 1987 registered car with a 2177cc engine according to the DVLA, which would be possible if it had been first registered long after being built, nearly a year afterwards. The flared arches are correct, the interior looks correct but the badges and wheels are wrong. I think this is just a well presented and carefully modified Audi Coupe quattro (with a deliberate lower case Q) though it could be an original Audi Quattro (with a deliberate upper case Q) that has led an extremely hard life and undergone running repairs on a tight budget. It is nice but I’m a snob and I was disappointed that it wasn’t a definite UR Quattro.

Opel Monza: Spotted this Monza on the way back from brekko on Sunday. It’s a couple of streets away from my place in Trinity, north Edinburgh. When I was growing up, I always wished my Dad would buy a Monza. As it happened, he always drove Saab Turbos so I now understand that the Monza would’ve been a downgrade. As with most Opels in the UK, there was a Vauxhall badged version but it was never as cool as the Opel.

Times have been tough for ice cream men due to the sudden preponderance of competition, the downturn in the economy and the price of gas.

Indeed, the steel-panel truck that is rented for $225 per week has no air-conditioning and temperatures inside can reach a sultry 100 degrees. The refrigeration unit continually fouls out and water must be poured on the machine to revive it. And every day there seems to be one less person in Detroit who can afford to splurge on a sundae. Factories are shutting down. Homeowners are going belly-up. Unemployment is almost triple the national average. It makes more sense to move away and yet these immigrant brothers go on, trying to scratch out the American Dream one ice-cream cone at a time.

Next time you hear "The Entertainer" belting out of a steel-paneled truck along Woodward Ave, maybe slow down and grab a sundae. It's a cold world on those hot streets.

[Detroit News , Photo: Max Ortiz/The Detroit News]

First, trucks designed to transport food don't handle that well and aren't capable of achieving a lot of speed. Second, it's a freaking Good Humor truck. You wonder if they didn't consider that it made them kind of easy to spot. Not surprisingly, they were spotted right away and led police on a chase that reached speeds of 80 mph. Due to the poor-handling nature of the ice cream truck, they plowed into a Chevy Avalanche. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured. If only they were driving Japanese drifting ice cream, then maybe they'd have had a chance. (h/t Kitt) [Washington Post]

The name alone on The Pink Pig should be enough. Just think, for a lousy $500 you could have a '64 Jeep-based, Toyota-powered, custom-bodied ice cream truck. An ice cream truck! Now, imagine it after you've swapped the Toyota engine for a big diesel with smokestack exhaust, an interior done in Tijuana's cheapest Hot Pink shag carpeting, and huge radiation-symbol emblems on the sides (done in rhinestones, of course). You could play Ice Cream Truck music through the PA... backwards and at half speed. Oh, it would be great for rattling the squares, all right, but the Pink Pig isn't really, you know, running. Not only that, it has electrical-system woes. Most likely it has all sorts of one-of-a-kind handmade components, requiring vast amounts of fabrication when even minor fixes are called for. Come on, though- you could be the Radioactive Ice Cream Man!

Old school buses are among the all-time favorites for weird vehicles that get taken on with some crazy project in mind and then never finished; they're cheap, iconic, and a real pain to find parts for. This 1957 Ford B500 bus is a classic example; it's already been subjected to some sort of half-assed RV conversion, including wood stove and mahogany door. But that stuff won't matter to you, not once you've created your own Dekotora School Bus! Once the interior has been totally Hello Kitty Disco-ized (including far too many rotating disco balls), you'd be able to cover the exterior with every imaginable 18-wheeler marker light, chrome air horn, and antenna; with a Ford 390 engine you'd simply need to put Cherry Bombs on it for that "Safety First" sound. And just five hundred bucks! It hasn't run in nine years (and was burning oil back then), but the seller is quick to add that the 4-speed transmission is in excellent shape.

(Don't worry, we'll get back to regular cars with this series, but there's no way I was ignoring the Pink Pig!

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