The Grilled Cheese Truck - Los Angeles

Anything can be called art nowadays, but we mostly lump it into two inadequately-descriptive categories: classic and contemporary. Same goes for dining. There will always be the classic, the paradigmatic, the iconic. If the statue of David were made of food, it would be cooked by the chefs at Per Se. Daniel and Craft revel in immortality, and replicas of Ruth's Chris hang in more hotels than Claude Monet. Then there is contemporary dining with all its creative curiosities. A melange of every ethnicity is served in restaurants without tables, and sometimes you literally have to catch your food as it falls off the back of a truck.

There's no doubt the food truck trend is here to stay. Roy Choi catapulted himself to fame from the back of his Kogi truck, and nowadays, you can find almost anything anytime if you know which truck to chase. Kogi was clearly the little engine that could, but unfortunately, it's spawned some sub-par clones, among them The Grilled Cheese Truck.

The Cheesy Mac Fully Loaded should be called the colon cleanse, and the quality wasn't worth the pain. The mac and cheese was mediocre, and there was no way the so-called sharp cheddar could overcome the BBQ. The shredded pork was chewable, and the caramelized onions were close enough. It's what you would get on a barbecue plate if you stuffed everything into your mouth at once except there's extra bread to dull the flavor.

The Roast Beef at least made sense. Double cream brie goes with almost everything and makes for a cogent combination with creamy horseradish sauce.

Dessert was a dry sculpture of starch. The S'more Melt was accurately named, featuring Nutella instead of conventional chocolate, but you don't need to be a chef to know that cramming dry graham crackers between slices of toasted bread is a bad idea. My mouth was more dry than Vegas on a Wednesday, and I could barely swallow the last couple bites.

Grilled Cheese Truck is a misnomer. A more accurate name would be Stuff-as-Much-of-Whatever-You-Can-Between-Two-Slices-of-Grilled-Bread-and-Cheese Truck, but I'm guessing that didn't fit on the side.

When it comes to food, I love it all, but when it comes to art, contemporary isn't my thing. The same is rarely true of food, but I look at the Grilled Cheese Truck the same way I see a sculpture of chewed gum and hair. I can only shrug my shoulders and say, "It just doesn't do it for me."