At Off The Grid at the Belmont Caltrain station, I saw Paddy Wagon Sliders, a dedicated food truck serving sliders. It has a whimsical theme of prison food, with the truck decked out to look sort of like a paddy wagon the police may use. It even has a stereotypical jailbird prisoner on it.
The menu is chock-full of tantalizing contraband. Like the Korean Zombie Tots (really wish I ordered them), which are tater tots loaded with Korean barbecued rib eye, kimchi, PWS aioli (their house sauce), and green onions. The menu is divided into sections, one for tater tots and the other for sliders. You can add quail eggs to a slider for 50 cents. Each order of sliders comes with two of them, and an order of tater tots contains more than enough crisp golden husks of flavor.
To me, sliders are a much more convenient burger. Since they are small and cook a lot faster than regular burgers, you can make them small firecrackers of flavor. Plus, their more incognito profile allows you to store them in smaller spaces; their conveniences are nearly unlimited.
I ordered the Early Bird slider which comes with pork sausage, cheddar cheese, a quail eggs, and their PWS aioli. Just a heads up, their version of cheese is a very interesting cheese crisp. The cheese was essentially like a flat solid crisp of cheddar cheese, but have no worries: the cheese retains all of its flavors, and to answer that burning question: no it’s not burnt, it’s simply just style.
The sliders are essentially breakfast sandwiches for dinner. It’s odd but it works marvelously.
From what I understood you do get a few tater tots with your slider on the side. So you don’t necessarily have to order a side of tater tots. The cheapest tater tots are the $5 Plain Jane tots. Whereas the rest of tater tots and the sliders cost around $9 on average. Yes, they are on the pricey side, but they are quite rich and definitely an extremely potent catalyst of flavor. And extremely tasty as well.
The sliders were very good with a whole galvanizing explosion of flavor in every bite. The quail eggs cascaded down the soft buns and freshly cooked pork.
The pork itself was cooked in a sort of butter sauce, reminiscent of breakfast, which reflects its name the “Early Bird.” The cheese crisp was actually pretty good; any parts that fell off could be used as a chip to dip in the egg yolk. It’s overcome the niche uses of cheese and ascended to an entirely new level of godhood among cheeses (okay, I admit it: I like cheese a lot).
It’s almost like a bourgeois Egg McMuffin, but it vastly outclasses the McDonald’s breakfast sandwich in terms of flavor, texture, smell, and looks. Sadly I don’t think Paddy Wagon Sliders is open in the morning, so an Early Bird brunch is perhaps what you may need to settle for.
You sometimes have to get messy with street food: mixing the sliders with the tater tots into a pile of food is a great idea.
As for the tater tots, they’re crisp, hot, and have a superb crunch to them. I’ve had tater tots that are soggy or flimsy, but these are crisp and firm. They have a good distribution of whatever seasoning they put on the tater tots, and all had the homogenous and equal tastiness.
Paddy Wagon Sliders has crisp, firm, and flavorful tater tots that aren’t anything like cheap fast food ones.
Paddy Wagon Sliders is overall a very good food truck. It’s more on the expensive side, but still very good. Any of the sliders would probably be delicious and the same thing goes with the tater tots as well. If the price deters you, split an order: the sliders are rich enough to fill you a good deal even with just two, so one will do a good job of that as well.
