Food (Truck) Fight: Putting Griddle to the Metal

New York Times - GET Matt Chernus going on the subject of food trucks — those big refrigerated chuck wagons that frequent construction sites and late-night watering holes — and he could be a 6-year-old describing his favorite Tonka. “They’re just cool,” Mr. Chernus, a tattooed former professional wrestler, said the other day. “They’re big. They’re really noisy. They’re cool to look at. I drove by three new trucks in Hollywood today, and I got so excited. I was like a little kid.”

Mr. Chernus was on the phone from Los Angeles, where he has a food truck of his own: a heavy-metal-themed hamburger joint called Grill ’Em All (a pun on the title of the Metallica  album “Kill ’Em All”; picture a black U.P.S. truck plastered with cartoons of Vikings and wizards, and you pretty much have the idea). “We call her the Beast,” said Ryan Harkins, Mr. Chernus’s friend, sometime band mate and business partner. “She’s beautiful.”

A few months back the two men gassed up the Beast and hit the road. The occasion was the filming of a new reality series, set to make its debut next Sunday on the Food Network, that hopes to do for food trucks what “Jersey Shore” did for tans.