Review: Sophie's & Ajumama

Part II of  The Happy Day I Got to Try Lots of New Food

On the same day Karla and I had brunch at Skillet, there was a food truck party at a new-ish little brewery in Columbus. The place is called Zauber Brewing, and they occasionally have these events where you can try their beers by the pint and they bring in a rotating cast of food trucks while they're at it. I, like many other self-proclaimed foodie-types, am a big fan of the food truck scene, added to which, not one but two of the trucks I've been wanting to hunt down were both scheduled to be there! So of course, I had to go.

Justin and I headed down around dinner time, and probably would've missed the brewery if it weren't for the food trucks out front because it's so small. We then walked all the way around the trucks because there was a cord around them, not realizing until we got to the other side that we had to duck under it to get in. Ha. It didn't occur to me they were making an enclosed space until I saw people with pints of beer in hand.

Once we finally managed to get inside, we started at one end of the line and perused the menus of all the food trucks they had circled up like a caravan of conestoga wagons. According to the Zauber Brewing website, the line up that night was: Hungry Monkey, Mojo TaGO, Tatoheads, Ajumama, Blu Olive, Sophie's Gourmet Pierogi, Short North Bagel, and Street Thyme. Every truck had something (or several somethings) that sounded good, so it would've been hard to decide where to go if I hadn't already been following a couple of them on Twitter and getting hungry from their updates. Plus, Justin wanted pierogi too. So now, on to the food:

What We Ordered:

From Sophie's: Justin - The Vintage, Me - The Soph

From Ajumama: Traditional Hodduk 

Definitions (just in case): 

Pierogi - Similar to a big fat ravioli, but usually filled with mashed potatoes and cheese or onion. Origin: Poland.

Hodduk - Kind of like a chewy pancake, but filled with cinnamon, brown sugar, and walnuts. Origin: Korea.

Why I ate two filled-dough-type things for dinner - They were delicious.

Photographic Evidence:

Me and my delightfully-international, truck-made dinner.

Verdict of the Noms:

All very good! I don't know how Justin's pierogi tasted because he ate them so fast, but he said he liked them. I liked my pierogi a lot too and the pork belly that came with it was super tasty. The flavor of the vegetables reminded me of when my grandma would make stuffed cabbage when I was younger.

As for the hodduk? Just typing that word makes me want another one, if that tells you anything. I've had the make-at-home kind from a box and didn't like them at all. The real thing is so much better. You have to wait a while for the sweet, molten insides to not burn your mouth off, but believe me, it's definitely worth it.

Final Words:

I would get food from both these places again in a heartbeat. I think I would pick something new at Sophie's and definitely get some of their Italian ice next time because that looked really good too. From Ajumama, I would obviously order hodduk again, but it might take me a while to get brave enough to try some of their other menu items. I've never had much Korean food, so I really don't know what I would or wouldn't like. That's the nice thing about these food truck events though; you can sample a couple different things when they're all together like this.

For me, the other good thing about this event was that Karla told me she was jealous we were going and she had to work, so I was able to repay my brunch debt to her by taking her some dinner from the trucks. We got her an orzo pasta salad from Blu Olive (since I figured it would travel well) and took her a hodduk also. And the next time Andrea and I are both in Cbus, we'll have to go find Ajumama, since she's the one who introduced me to hodduk; otherwise, I might never have tried it!