Food Truck

The sound of Sonny Rollins' sax and the sizzle of grass-fed meat were wafting through the open window of the Lucky Old Souls Burger Truck the other day. And the sensory combo wafting over the hungry crowd gathering at LOVE Park was so potent, the first customer in line was moved to ask: "Are you guys on the Food Network yet?" "Not quite yet," said Matthew "Feldie" Feldman modestly. "We've only been open five weeks. " But if anyone appreciates life in the fast lane of Philly's accelerating food truck scene, it would be Feldman.

Menu: All vegetarian, mostly Middle Eastern, totally filling. Two locations: 34th Street between Walnut and Spruce, 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m.; Spruce between 35th and 36th, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday. Look for: A dark-green awning and a line about 10 deep. How long: Family-owned and -operated since 1984. Web: magiccarpetfoods.com. Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Magic-Carpet-Foods/130251873665043 . The old-fashioned way: 215-334-0948. Order: Magic meatballs.

A rainy, windy forecast is a day to sleep in for many food truck owners. But the weather didn't deter Jonah Fliegelman, Nathan Winkler-Rhoades, and Eric Hilkowitz, the owners of Pitruco, a two-month-old, Ferrari-red pizza truck, from serving lunch recently at 33d and Arch Streets, one of their regular spots. (Eric gets there at 8:30 a.m. to snag the space.) Jonah called out to a customer, "Would you like an umbrella? We have some you can borrow. " He turned back to manning the truck's centerpiece, a wood-fired oven where pizzas puff up to golden goodness.

The design came to her in a dream. Just as Keith Richards came up with the riff to "Satisfaction" in his sleep, Cupcake Lady Kate Carrara woke up one Sunday in 2009 and quickly grabbed crayons to record her vision of a cupcake truck. When she brought the drawing of the white box truck sprinkled with giant jimmies and lined with a metal flounce to a car detailer, he said he could do everything except the giant cupcake springing from the roof. "Go under an overpass and you'll knock that thing right off," she remembers him saying.

The Mini Trini Menu: Hearty, spicy and sweet Trinidadian fare. Find it: LOVE Park, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., Mondays and Thursdays. Look for: A bright, red-with-black-stripe Trinidadian flag on wheels. How new: About a month and a week. Web: www.theminitrini.com . Twitter: @ theminitrini . The old-fashioned way: 610-348-5401. Order: The double, two rounds of split-pea dough (way better than it sounds)

If you went to the Chinatown Night Market expecting oodles of unusual Asian dishes, you may have been disappointed. If, on the other hand, you went to explore unusual dishes from China, Indonesia, Mexico, the Caribbean, Italy, France and more - and enjoy beer, bubble tea, and Lion Dancing under a harvest moon, you would have been pleased. Thousands were. A crowd of 10,000 was expected at this, fourth night market planned by The Food Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing affordable, healthy food to neighborhoods throughout the city.

FOOTBALL, EVERYBODY from Domino's to Doritos will tell you, isn't only about winning, losing or playing the game. It's about how much junk food fans can consume from approximately two hours before coin toss until the final pom-pom wave. It's about cheesesteaks and hoagies and cookouts and all-u-can-drink beer. Garden salads need not apply. So it's seemed odd for the past eight years that when it came to handheld grub, Lincoln Financial Field never, well, satisfied. It wasn't that the fast fare wasn't there - by the end of last season, Chickie's and Pete's was selling crab fries from eight locations - it just seemed hard to find.

Here is an excerpt from Craig LaBan's online chat: Craig LaBan: I attended one of the funnest food parties in a long time Saturday - and a unique one by Philly standards. One of our new neighbors is from Texas, and September for Southwesterners, apparently, is Hatch chile-roasting time. So with 50 pounds of Sandia hots ordered in, my friends Devin and Meg rustled up some pals for a blue-glove event to char-grill roast, peel, snack, and freezer-bag a year's supply of smokin' hots.

Night Market, an evening street-food festival launched as an experiment in 2010 along a stretch of then newly popular East Passyunk Avenue, proved the wisdom of its ways last Thursday on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy. "People are talking to each other as they wait in the lines at the food trucks," said Jim Villarreal, a local with his own cable show about dreams. "They're talking to people they never would have talked to in other circumstances," he marveled at the scene before him. They're all mixing and doing what Mount Airy is all about.

"DUDE, YOU KNOW what would be so rad? A food truck. We should totally start a food truck. " If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that one over the years, I could probably . . . start my own food truck, dude! The first time I heard the idea was years ago in a smoky, hazy dorm room at the University of Vermont. The patchouli-smelling guy who uttered it eventually did go on to nominal food truck success, selling grilled-cheese sandwiches at Grateful Dead and Phish shows. The last time I heard the sentiment was a few weeks ago, when a friend told me her dream was to quit her job and sell organic pancakes from an Airstream trailer.