Flames in the parking lot: A kabob truck on San Pablo
You order through a window. You wait fifteen minutes. At some point, you see actual flames licking up inside the food truck, and you think: good sign.
The Kabobi Persian Grill food truck is parked in the lot of a used car dealership on San Pablo, next to a smog station. Traffic is loud and more or less constant. There are a few tables out front, technically, as it turns out, on the other side of the Richmond city limit sign, which may or may not complicate matters depending on your relationship to municipal boundaries. We decided it was too cold and windy to find out and took our dinner home.
While you wait, there are books on the table, a history of Iran. A sign politely suggesting you not believe everything you've been told about Iran. We got to page 13, a lot of groups, a lot of names, hard to follow, genuinely interesting.
There is a sign advertising Persian burgers for $12. We didn't try one. We are still thinking about it.
The food. You get rice, regular and golden, both fine, a whole roasted Roma tomato (an entire one, just there, committed to the plate), large leaves of fresh basil that you're not quite sure what to do with, a packet of sumac, and a little cup of yogurt with onions.
The chicken kabob is large chunks of white meat, real pieces, not compressed anything, with some char on the outside. It runs a little dry, which is the eternal risk of white meat over flame. A squeeze of the lemon that comes with it helps. The yogurt cup helps more. It's not transcendent, but it's honest food cooked over an actual fire in a parking lot, and that counts for something.
The lamb kabob is ground meat, formed onto the skewer in the classic koobideh style. This is the move. It's fatty in the way lamb should be, spiced with care, you can taste the work, but not spicy in the heat sense. It disappears faster than you planned.
At $25, the meal lands on the high side for what comes off a truck in a car lot. But the portions are real, the fire is real, and nobody's pretending this is something it isn't.
San Pablo being what it is, you probably drive past this place three times a week without registering it. Worth registering. Get the lamb. Read to page 13. Consider the Persian burger next time.
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