The day after I left for Tel Aviv, a new food cart opened in the Mission. Started by a cook at Bar Tartine, he was going to serve cheap(ish) sandwiches every Thursday from 21st & Mission. His intent was for it to grow slowly and organically, but before it even opened, a few blogs had picked up the story. This was gentrification taken to its extreme. Instead of just displacing people from neighborhoods, now cultures were being co-opted in the form of taco carts, then stuffed with yippie food and drenched in a thick sauce of hipster irony. This was the crack cocaine of gentrification: some new, advanced, more pure form. The first Pork Belly & Jicama (PB&J, ha ha?) sandwich wasn’t free, but you get the point. I wanted to see it so badly.

Instead I flew off to hang out in foreign bars, dance clubs, and other dark places (and to repeat the phrase “I’m sorry; I only speak English” all day). There were dozens of events in SF in October that I was going to be sad to miss, but unlike most of them (shows, for the most part), this one would be around when I got back.

Or so I thought. Yesterday, I got the news that, in fact, Mission Street Food has already gotten too popular, with lines of people down the block before the cart even opens. So now, instead, he’s going to temporarily rent an as-yet-unknown restaurant for the night and serve food out of there instead. What? Then it’s just, you know, a restaurant! I demand kitsch and irony and the appeal of something new and different (and possibly offensive, if you’re one of those people who thinks a lot). Instead I get a restaurant that’s closed 6 nights a week? I suppose I’ll take what I can get. King Trumpet, wait for me, I’ll be home soon!