Coming to L.A.: The Ketel One Canteen food truck

In order to promote responsible drinking this holiday season, Ketel One vodka is rolling out its own food truck featuring free bites created by the Gorbals owner and "Top Chef" winner Ilan Hall.

A note to the soused and saucy: This canteen is dry save for bottled water. That may seem a bit counterintuitive, but handing out bacon-wrapped matzoh balls to the legions of teetering drinkers along the party-hungry Cahuenga Corridor in Hollywood will likely create Ketel One vodka brand allegiance for life. 

After all, nothing says "I care about you, buxom drunk girl in the teensy Juicy Couture skirt" like a gratis mouthful of Manischewitz-braised pork belly.

More importantly though, the Ketel One Canteen will also serve as home base for a fleet of 10 cars ready and able to drive you home should you feel too tipsy to do it yourself.

"I love the message they’re putting out there," says Hall. "One of the things I noticed when I moved here is that many people seem to find it acceptable to drive drunk." (A lack of effective public transportation will do that, and the police in Hollywood know that, so don't take any chances.)

Ketel One's glittering bastion of gourmet beneficence has already served pop-up stints in New York, where it fed and hydrated 600 people throughout the weekend. It is currently stoking feelings of warmth and fuzziness in Chicago before hitting our streets on Thursday, Dec. 17. Once here it will sit on Cahuenga between Hollywood and Selma from midnight (adult noon, if you wish) until 2 a.m. It'll stay through the weekend and disappear into the ether on Sunday. 

The four items on Hall's menu are simple and easy to eat on your feet: bacon-wrapped matzoh balls; butternut squash latkes; gribenes, lettuce and tomato; and Manischewitz-braised pork belly.

"It's perfect drinking food," says Hall, adding that the whole concept is "very nice and quite luxurious. I'd like to partake but I'll be cooking"

-- Jessica Gelt

Photo: Ketel One

Comments

[Natalie DeJohn]

The Ketel One truck? Now that's a truck I would actually follow on Twitter...

[rachel]

That is the most aggressively nonkosher versions of Jewish food I've ever seen.

[JL]

Bacon-wrapped matzoh balls? Manischewitz-braised pork belly? How insulting to Jews, whether or not they personally keep kosher. Surely Ketel One should be more sensitive -- and the LATimes should call them on it.