A friend and I did a scouting trip for the proposed group crawl to the Coliseum Way food stalls. There were a couple of dozen stalls, but one man remarked there are usually more, especially on Sunday. Even though they are stalls, they are like mini-restaurants, with tables and table service. English varied from excellent to nonexistent, but everyone was friendly and helpful: our waitress at a pupusa stand asked one of the customers to speak to us. Fortunately my friend speaks some Spanish and my menu Spanish is pretty good. Did not see any other non-Latinos.
At first glance a lot of stalls look the same. However among the Mexican and Salvadoran offerings I saw stands with Colombian and Venezuelan.
Sometimes you have to tease the specialities out of a menu that looks like standard taco truck fare. There are also a couple of offstreet, I guess you could call them food courts, that look to be semi-permanent. Sadly, I did not see any fresh churros, although there were raspados and an ice cream (nievas) truck. Most stalls were serving handmade tortillas.
The pupusa I had came with surprisingly good curtido and salsa (my experience has been that the salsa served with pupusas resembles watered down tomato juice). The taco de borrego was juicy and delicious. Haven’t broken open the Colombian empanada (fried to order) yet. My guess is that with all the competition, unless a stall is either above-average or offering something special, it gets weeded out.
