With high-class menu, Kitchen Eighty-Eight takes food truck cuisine to the next level
Kitchen Eighty-Eight's Tri-tip Steak with barbecue and Peri Peri sauces on mashed potatoes.
Kitchen Eighty-Eight's Roasted Beet Salad.
People line up during the last minutes of lunch hour for food from Kitchen Eighty-Eight in Orem.
The Hand Cut Fries at Kitchen Eighty-Eight.
People line up during the last minutes of lunch hour for food from Kitchen Eighty-Eight in Orem.
Kitchen Eighty-Eight's Tri-tip Steak with barbecue and Peri Peri sauces on mashed potatoes. Visit heraldextra.com/entertainment/dining to read the Herald's review.
The best part about Kitchen Eighty-Eight might be how unlike a food truck it is.
The local food truck, which got eliminated in the first round of the Daily Herald’s Food Truck Faceoff, pulled out all the culinary stops during our visit this week. In a perfect world, Kitchen Eighty-Eight would have made it through a few more rounds in our bracket. Consider this a tribute.
I like food trucks conceptually: tasty, relatively easy food served quickly and conveniently at a variety of locations. The problem is, most trucks stick to desserts or greasy fried foods — novelty items, essentially. I only eat that stuff sparingly. Plus, dining outside is a crapshoot, with the weather and terrain being wildcards. I’m a sucker for a table, a chair and a temperature-controlled room.
Kitchen Eighty-Eight didn’t solve the weather issue, obviously, but its menu more than made up for it.
The truck serves up stuff you’d expect at a fancy sit-down restaurant. As we surveyed the menu, complete with tri-tip steak, pork tenderloin, mashed potatoes, and fancy sauces, salads and desserts, my inner monologue proclaimed, like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Django Unchained,” “You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.”
We ordered the Tri-tip Steak, which was served with sugar snap peas atop a bed of mashed potatoes, and a chimichurri sauce (parsley, cilantro and mint) drizzled on top. Kitchen Eighty-Eight offers a few different sauces that patrons can pair with the various grilled menu items. We got the sweet mustard sauce on the Pork Tenderloin, which came with grilled asparagus and was also served over mashed potatoes. Both of these were stellar. The meats were perfectly plump and juicy, cooked just right with a nice amount of redness inside.
They cut the meat into bite-size pieces before handing it over, which was a nice touch. I think this is why they only gave us a fork and not an accompanying knife. It would have been nice to have a knife, though, since some of the pieces were either a bit large or still connected to the others.
Don’t skimp on this truck’s salads. We got the Granny Smith salad, which comes with apples, manchego cheese, mixed greens, cranberries, smoked almonds and a red wine vinaigrette, with your choice of meat. The chicken is a good pairing here.
These entrees are all served in convenient to-go boxes. This proved handy, because we had a lot of leftovers. (As I write this, I’m eagerly awaiting our Pork Tenderloin leftovers; it’s nearly lunchtime.)
The Hand Cut Fries at Kitchen Eighty-Eight were similarly fancy. However, we would have preferred them cooked a tad more. They were a bit undercooked on the inside.
We topped it all off with an order of Vanilla Mousse. The mousse is served with a crumbled graham cracker crust underneath and fresh strawberries and blueberries on top. A special shout-out to those blueberries, by the way — they were almost comically big, and made my Pacific Northwest-bred heart proud.
With a menu like theirs, we expected our order to take a while. Not so. I don’t think we waited more than five minutes. Whatever kind of strange magic Kitchen Eighty-Eight is working, it better not stop anytime soon.
KITCHEN EIGHTY-EIGHT
Prices: Entrees $6-$9, desserts $3, sides $3
Info: Facebook.com/kitcheneightyeight88, Instagram @kitcheneightyeight, Twitter @kitchen_88