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Joshua Lurie-Terrell chases taco trucks like disaster freaks chase ambulances. He knows where they park, when they leave, what's for dinner. Call them lunch wagons or the pejorative "roach coach," Lurie-Terrell calls them necessary to society.
"I can't afford to eat fancy meals all the time," Lurie-Terrell says. He's a graphic designer for the California state Senate, which makes him a state employee. "When we want to go out and have a good time, we go to the trucks."
He meets friends at one or two at a time, for a big night out on Saturday night. They'll park and tailgate, then hit a movie. Most often, a filling meal at a taco truck costs less than admission to the cinema.
A typical taco-truck dinner might be marinated spicy pork, known as adobada. Maybe a sampler of little packages of filled corn tortilla dough, called sopes. There's always the beached whales of gringoized Mexican food -- super burritos with "the works" of rice, beans, cheese, meat, lettuce, tomato, salsa, avocado. All meals on wheels.
Lurie-Terrell, 39, has been an active taco truck go-to guy for several years. After he tried a number of menus at trucks around Sacramento, he started taking notes. Those notes grew to an original list of mobile munching.
He was asked so often for street-food referrals, he turned to his wife, Jineui Hong, a cartographer, for help in mapmaking so he could send all requests to a central site for taco-truck tracking.
In January 2008, he launched Yumtacos.com using a Google platform. Lurie-Terrell wanted the map to be interactive so additions, corrections and comments could be entered from anywhere in the world.
The Yumtacos.com map began in California, so it's California-strong with a lot to choose from in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. There's more around Seattle, Portland, across the American Southwest and a big colony around Chicago. Today, the map's knife-and-fork icons pinpoint 165 taco trucks in 12 states. Internationally, there are a few in Canada and one in Japan.
The 30-minute limit
Not all mobile food facilities are taco trucks, strictly speaking. Some are traveling restaurants with breakfast burritos, cereal and milk, sandwiches and cookies. San Francisco is home to an amuse-buche truck and numerous Adobo Hobo carts seen at the city's parks and festivals. In L.A., a truck called Kogi makes what appear to be tacos, but the filling is Korean barbecue. Depending on a driver's ancestry, a truck may stir-fry noodles and deep-fry egg rolls.
Yumtacos.com is strictly a map of taco trucks, inspired by the discovery of Sacramento's substantial selection. But despite Sacramento's taco-truck culture, fewer of them do business inside the city limits than in county territory. "There is very little wildcat food culture in Sacramento," Lurie-Terrell says.
He blames it all on the Sacramento City Council.
Brick-and-mortar restaurants, sensing competition from taco trucks parked nearby, petitioned council members to curtail the activities of the so-called lunch wagons. The council voted to require that taco trucks move every 30 minutes. It gave the trucks and their owners a five-year sunset to comply. The countdown began in 2008.
"It's a shame the Sacramento City Council has gone to such lengths to kill these aspiring business people," Lurie-Terrell says. He believes taco trucks are good business incubators for immigrants.
He says many of the best trucks have settled down in spots they lease on private property, such as parking lots. "They're easy to find and track," Lurie-Terrell says of efforts to confirm locations for the Yumtacos.com map.
The truly mobile, itinerant trucks that roam roads in search of construction sites with hungry laborers "they're harder to find," Lurie-Terrell says, "unless they cluster near factories and plants and warehouses with big night shifts."
Lurie-Terrell is dedicated to the continued prosperity of the people who feed his passion. "I want to support them in any way I can."
Taco truck birthday bash
Last summer, he hired one of his favorites -- the Tres Hermanos taco truck -- to cater his birthday party at his home in downtown Sacramento. Owner/driver/cook/server Aurelio Torres arrived at Lurie-Terrell's tree-lined street behind the wheel of his rolling kitchen with fans on, roof vents up, water running, fridge chilling, fryer heating and griddle smoking. In a word, juiced.
 "It was a real pain because the city would not let them park on the street in front of my house for more than 30 minutes," Lurie-Terrell remembers. "This in a neighborhood where all the neighbors were coming to the party and nobody was going to complain and there were no restaurants anywhere."
The solution was to have Tres Hermanos park next door on private property. "For $350, they made an unlimited amount of food for 50 people for three hours," Lurie-Terrell says. All he had to do was pre-select four menu items to be made throughout the night.
Lurie-Terrell loves lengua, which is marinated and long-cooked beef tongue usually cut in small cubes and set on several layers of mini corn tortillas. He can't pass up cabeza, spicy beef cheeks with the texture of meat braised for days. Many trucks offer ceviche made from refreshing and original recipes gleaming from lime juice poured over raw chunks of Pacific snapper, shrimp and avocado and flecked with minuscule pieces of jalapeno that pierce the palate.
Lurie-Terrell's cut back on another of his taco loves: buche, or pork belly.
"After my heart attack," he says, 1½ years after the occurrence, "I don't try everything like I used to. Now I stick mostly to ceviche and chicken tacos."
Except when he can't help himself.
He'll show up Saturday night at the Tres Hermanos spot in a lot just over the city limits, tilt his head back to speak to the cashier at the high window inside the truck, and say:
"Lengua taco, por favor. Uno."
Elaine Corn is a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and food editor. A former editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Sacramento Bee, Corn has written six cookbooks and contributed food stories to National Public Radio.
Photos: Joshua Lurie-Terrell at a favorite taco truck on a warm Sacramento evening.
Credits: Elaine Corn.
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