NYC Food Truck Lunch: Shrimp Tempura Rice Bowl From Domo Taco
Perry, the founder of New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City street food.
Domo Taco is one of the more consistent food trucks in NYC, putting their unique stamp on lunch for working folks like us. The menu uses the ubiquitous mix-and-match system found at many food trucks. Pick an entrée, pick a protein and you're ready to go.
Entrees include tacos, burritos, quesadillas and rice bowls filled with (mostly) Asian and Mexican ingredients. Proteins are where the differences come in, with offerings like teriyaki steak, five-spice pork, lemongrass chicken, tempura shrimp or fish, or kimchi falafel. We chose the shrimp tempura rice bowl for $9.
Opening the container, there were five long shrimp in tempura batter. That's a healthy amount of shrimp tempura for $9, plus you get all the side dishes, too.
The worst thing is when the breading on tempura shrimp is soft and soggy. Luckily, that was not the case. The tempura shrimp was still crunchy, even with sauce covering most of the shrimp. The sauce was creamy, slightly sweet and slightly spicy.
Another difference at Domo Taco is the addition of black beans placed on top of the white rice. That gives the rice an added dose of flavor and protein.
On the side were kimchi, pickled carrots and daikon, red cabbage and pico de gallo. These are all fairly standard side dishes at Asian/Mexican fusion food trucks, but they were still enjoyable.
Lastly, there was shredded Monterey jack cheese on top of the sauce, which is rare in Asian cooking. You don't see much in the way of dairy in most Asian dishes, especially cheese.
The Domo Taco truck makes the rounds of the usual Manhattan and Brooklyn lunch spots. You can find the truck on Twitter here, on Facebook here, and their website is here. They also have a brick-and-mortar location at 733 Franklin Ave in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
It was nice to get shrimp tempura from a street vendor for lunch. That's something we usually need to get at a Japanese restaurant (and it costs quite a bit more, too.)
