April 2019
The first thing one notices is the patriotism of Yankee Doodle Dandy's food truck. From the red-white-and-blue design of their trucks, to their red-white-and-blue twitter and facebook pages, everything is America-themed. Eiven their website has a color scheme of red, white, and blue. I can see why they would want to emphasize that they're an American company – with a food truck that sells fried buffalo chicken, they must often be mistaken for a French bistro.
Their patriotism extends to a wide range of things about the truck, but let's take a good old American pit stop at the names of their dishes. If you make the unusual choice of getting a salad from a chicken tender truck with a large portrait of a chicken who is also a Revolutionary War general, you'll be ordering the America the Beautiful salad. I won't tell you what to do, but if you order the salad, you and I are very different people. They have a Cajun-spiced sandwich, the Louisiana Purchase sandwich. It costs $10.00, and comes with french fries. The Louisiana Purchase cost 68 million francs, but I can't find out how many servings of french fries Jefferson got with it. I assume a lot, because he acquired the territory from France.
This leads us to our main event: the Buffalo Soldier. For a mere $11.00, you get your lunch delievered to you by a member of the first all-black peacetime regiment in the U.S. Army.
Or you would if that made any sense at all. The meal is four tenders tossed in buffalo sauce, fries, texas toast, potato salad, dipping sauce, and a tiny American flag. For the dipping sauce, you can get the America-themed '76 sauce, or blue cheese. I like America, but I love blue cheese.
The chicken is pretty well done. Some bites pulled the chicken apart, but it wasn't texturally stringy. Perhaps the chicken just had too much freedom. The breading was nicely crunchy at the ends, but lacked texture in the middle.
Fries are nicely crisp, and they even include a good number of ketchup packets for the fries. Or, I suppose, you could dip the buffalo chicken in the ketchup. Why would you do that? It's a free country, but that's still weird.
The texas toast is a thick piece of toast. It's grown on me over time. Not literally. Bread doesn't physically grow. I like it more than I used to. Somehow the bread can cut the burning of spicy food.
Like America, the Buffalo Soldier meal here is large, loud, and made from chicken. 8/10.