Of course this age-old question will not get settled by you posting it on a blog. Why not set out to answer it for yourself by traveling to a few places known for food trucks and seeking an epiphany?

Los Angeles has been all excited about a mobile Korean taco truck for some time now. Portland is getting famous for its “pods” of trucks that soon may even serve wine and beer. And if you go to Albuquerque, you could write a whole article just by going around asking people, “I heard there used to be a truck called Dave’s Not Here, what’s that?”

(Full disclosure: I live a few blocks from Izzoz and am a regular customer.)

Cognition #1: I am a well-known and highly respected financial journalist.

Cognition #2: I’m getting my lunch from an effin truck.

Relief of Cognitive Disequilibrium: Mmmmm, these truck tacos taste so much better than the restaurant ones.

At a taco truck, you’re only a few feet away from the cooking al pastor.

Breakfast burrito for me. It could be something about breaking my fast.

But, I always remember this restaurant in Novata, CA that used to be extremely popular with families. They had “pretty good” tacos, but the big draw was that their prices were the best for miles. Always packed.

Then, one night, somebody (maybe a homeless guy) looked in their dumpster and found piles of carcasses. Carcasses of dead cats and dogs. This eventually got reported to the police, who called in the health department. It turned out that the restaurant owners had some connection that picked up the dead animals at the various animal shelters/pound facilities in the SF Bay Area and brought them to the restaurant where the staff would butcher them. The families in ritzy Marin had been eating cat and dog tacos for nearly ten years.

The restaurant re-opened “under new management” but nobody went. It was a bit of a flap. Always surprised me that it never hit Saturday Night Live.

In my experience, however, the taco trucks reach a threshold of quality, or an upper limit of quality-to-price ratio. If you want better you have to the little flash grills that get set outside bodegas, or go to a party where there’s nothing but carne asada or chopped tongue on the menu — and even-fewer-balls-in-the-air analysis. The trucks, meanwhile, trade off a little bit of quality for mobility and price.

I conducted an informal review of taco trucks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn a while back and found them wanting (trying to hard). I also contrasted trucks in L.A. and trucks in New York, although I didn’t come to any meaningful conclusions:

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/economy/2011/1 0/21/3661/visual-aid-food-truck-business -nyc-edition/

In fact, I’ve gotten better (to my taste) tacos from two tacquerias in the new haven area (shout out La cosinita downtown and Tacqueria Mexicana in West Haven to anybody in the area) that do not operate trucks, but of course, the tacos at both places are made and served fresh to order.

But there is one restaurant, where I’ve had their truck tacos, and they have been almost as good as my favorite tacquerias, but when I ordered tacos in their restaurant I was terribly disappointed.

What I think is that their truck on the docks has a clientele of 90% immigrants and a 10% foodies who know where to get a good cheap lunch, while their clientele in a suburban strip mall sit down restaurant is 90% white tequila drinkers.

On the docks I paid $3 for a plate of 3 small but actually good tacos. In the restaurant I paid $10 for a plate of 3 larger tacos with rice and beans that wasn’t much different from what I might have been served at a Chi-Chi’s.