Cora’s Best Chicken Wings Foodtruck – Eden Prairie, MN

My company has started to try to healthy its workers up, so they have been doing a farmers market in the parking lot during lunch every other Thursday. It isn’t much of a market. In fact, there’s one vegetable booth with produce from Aramark (the people that run our office cafeteria), a lady selling jewelry, a booth with a sno-cone machine, and bread from some health food store. Recently, they’ve gotten a few food trucks to show up, as well.

I went outside in the 800 degree heat and found two food trucks today. One from Stanley’s in Northeast and one from Cora’s Best Chicken Wings – a restaurant I’m familiar with from St. Paul – I’ve reviewed it before. I wasn’t going to hit up Stanley’s without D.Rough, so I went to Cora’s.

The menu had some unique things on it, including a Filipino dish I wanted to try (Beef Afritada) – which they were out of. It took me a while to find the chicken wings on the menu, but there it was at the bottom of the list without any sort of flare. That’s ok – I knew not to get the wings. They were out of Canton Steak, as well, so I went with the Nacho Relleno Fusion. I love nachos, so this was sure to be my best bet.

My food showed up quickly, as it is pretty simple preparation. I went back into my building to get out of the heat. The dish looked pretty good, actually. Ground beef, lettuce, sour cream, plenty of jalapenos, but not many tortilla chips. Hmmm.

I dug for the chips and found they were buried in a pool. Of grease. I’m normally not grease-adverse, but this was a surprising amount, even for street food. It hadn’t even sat 60 seconds and there was already a pool of grease a half inch deep in my waxed paper basket. Yikes. I tasted it to see if it was chili oil or something adventurous, but it wasn’t. It tasted like grease.

I only found about 7 or 8 chips in the bottom of the basket, none of which had the slightest amount of crispiness left in them. They were sogged through completely. That’s a pretty disappointing number of chips for an order of nachos. The meat itself was actually pretty flavorful and seasoned well, as long as you ate from the part of the meat mound above the grease line. Once you got below that, it wasn’t the best. The lettuce and jalapenos were good, again, above the grease line.

I was sad after I ate as much as I could from the basket. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t feel very spritely after I ate this, either. In fact, for the rest of the day. I’m guessing a few other people in the office got slowed down as well. I’m surprised the company I work for didn’t suggest people make healthy dishes since this whole farmers market Thursday thing was intended to get people to eat better.

I don’t think I’ll hit up the food truck from Cora’s again anytime soon. But I will likely be back to the actual restaurant in St. Paul for fried rice and chicken nuggets, however….

Not enough for a top 5 on this one.