Week 4 of The Great Food Truck Race

This week the five remaining teams drove out to the college town of Manhattan, Kansas, where they faced a series of challenges ultimately resulting in one team being eliminated. After dominating performances last week and weeks before that, Lime Truck was bested in the first Truck Stop challenge by Seabirds Truck. The teams were all granted a $5 debit card to come up with an original recipe and impress a Kansas City food critic. The Seabirds created a raw food cupcake with barbecue sauce, and they were awarded exclusive access to a huge restaurant/bar area, while the rest of the trucks duked it out for space on campus.

The teams were each given $400 to plan their menus for the elimination phase of the challenge. Seabirds had a huge crowd waiting for them after shopping, Roxy’s pulled away from the rest and the other three teams set up at City Park, where college students had already anticipated their arrival. Tyler Florence introduced the speed bump early this time, immediately requiring the teams to price everything on their menu under $1. Some trucks with planned expensive menus had more trouble with this than others, but many made do. Korilla introduced $1 tacos, and Roxy’s made grilled cheese sliders. The Lime Truck based its menu off $8-$10 dollar items, and the Seabirds made $1 half sandwiches but worried that they were charging too little for their premium products, and began falling behind on their orders again. Several teams headed back to reconfigure their menus, while others targeted bar crowds and prepared for the next day.
The next day the teams faced similar large crowds, but the difficulty was in filling orders quickly and dealing with the low menu prices. Hodge Podge Truck began pulling customers off Korilla’s long lines to take orders. I thought a fight was about to break out when the Korilla guys confronted them about having no food truck etiquette in front of many customers, but Hodge Podge just kept taking the customers they could get.
In the end, Korilla BBQ came out on top again, with $5,245, and Roxy’s in a close second with $5,132. The Lime Truck and Seabirds were in the bottom 2, and in the end Seabirds got eliminated selling less than Hodge Podge and Lime truck. Next week the teams head to Memphis, Tennessee to create all vegetarian menus, as the Seabirds lament that they won’t be there for what could have been a triumphant week for them.