Deli-Q: All the BBQ’d flavor that can fit between two hunks of bread

COCONUTS HOT SPOT — Caitlin Haas is about as American as you can get. Blue-eyed and blonde, she can be seen grilling up juicy slabs of meat in jeans, T-shirt and a red bandana. She pulls off a Rosie the Riveter look with absolute ease. It’s only when she directs her staff in fluent Thai it becomes believable that for the last 25 years she’s called Bangkok her home. It was opening Bangkok’s newest food truck, Deli-Q, that bridged that gap between her native Texas and Thailand’s City of Angels.

So what separates Deli-Q from the pack of mobile madness that is the food truck trend? To start with, Haas claims that she might have the only lift-gate food truck in Asia. A lift gate-equipped truck is one where the rear section is lowered to ground level, and the advantage is the ordering window doesn’t tower over customers.

Building the truck was only the beginning, though. Deli-Q got off to a rough start at its debut during Emporium’s first food truck gathering. Diners were waiting the better part of 30 minutes for their food and the kitchen in the truck seemed to be in a state of chaos after a flat tire on the way to the event. But what seemed like a comedy of errors in the beginning has shaped up into a heavy-hitter on the food-truck circuit, they’ve even scored a routine spot at Wishbeer Home Bar.

The oddly shaped, truck-mounted kitchen isn’t exactly a trendy simulacrum of the American deli scene, as the name might suggest. Haas said she’s had to adapt to local tastes, and that meant cutting out some of the traditional deli items.

Deli-style sandwiches aren’t “really a thing here,” Haas said. “Barbecue is much easier.”

The barbecue at Deli-Q is plenty and flavorful – very satisfying, and that’s thanks to the American tradition of both slow cooking, smoking, and piling on slightly more meat than necessary when assembling the sandwiches like the pulled pork. Bread is from the rising star Ciao Pane while all the sauces are made in-house. While pulled pork is the de facto go-to, the shredded chicken works well by taking on the flavors of the hyper-flavorful sauces. Ask for a sample of the sauces before you ask them to slather up the sandwich, as there are three styles. While even Americans can’t agree on what exactly North Carolina-style barbecue sauce is; to me, North Carolina is closer to a vinegary mustard, but Deli-Q’s is like a spicier, more vinegary ketchup.

Honest-to-goodness grilled cheese is on the menu, but what’s becoming the nascent food truck’s biggest hit is undoubtedly the patty melt – a mess of onions, bacon, and gooey cheese atop a seasoned patty of beef shoved between two toasted pieces of wheat bread.

While Caitlin may have spent most of her life in Thailand, the way she refuses to have a “home base” for the truck is much more like Western food trucks, simply floating around the city to different events as opposed to parking the truck as if it were a stationary restaurant.

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