We North Americans are accustomed to seeing food trucks in our cities, mostly based on full-sized vans or the larger "bakery truck" stepvans. In Japan's densely packed cities, though, the little kei van does a better job of squeezing into narrow alleys and tiny parking spaces. We've seen how a Daihatsu Hijet makes a great roasted-potato food truck; on my trip to Tokyo a couple of weeks ago, I spotted a Subaru Sambar van serving as a very successful mobile taco rice kitchen.
As a connoisseur of California junkyard taco trucks, I was excited to spot what I thought was a Sambar taco truck in Minato City, Tokyo. Then I realized that it wasn’t a taco truck but a taco rice truck. Taco rice is a specialty of Okinawa, where American military personnel craved Mexican food in a place in which tortillas were unobtainium, and its popularity has spread to the other Japanese islands.
Most kei vans are quite tall, so the chef can stand up inside while preparing food. Unfortunately, there isn’t room for a kitchen and more than one chef inside a kei van, so the dishes served can’t require elaborate preparation; this means that American-style taco trucks serving combination plates and a half-dozen types of meat would be hard to translate into the interior space of one of these tiny vans.
I wanted to try the taco rice here, but the lunchtime rush line looked like a solid 45-minute wait.
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