Every once in a while on the Boulevard of the Allies, the boxy yellow PGH crepes truck appears in its yellow glory. The man and woman I’ve seen inside of the truck are kind and quick to ask for someone’s order when a person expresses interest in the menu passing by.
This past week in a spurt of hunger, visiting the PGH truck was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of my ‘Burgh Bites column privileges and eat for free.
Approaching the window, I ordered a strawberry banana Nutella crepe for $12.84. After paying, the woman grabbed a soup ladle and poured pancake syrup onto a circular pan, where she would swirl a tool around to create the thin pancake-like base for my meal.
Once it was firm enough to work with, she took a handful of strawberries and bananas and then placed them onto the pan. She let them sit there to get warm, then after, she took an almost empty bottle of chocolate syrup and squeezed it out onto the crepe before folding it onto itself and placing it into a white portable container adding a finishing touch of powdered sugar.
When she did pull the dish off the pan one singular half strawberry laid on the grill, lonely. All I could do was stand there helplessly watching it waiting for its doom, knowing that I was cheated out of this single strawberry in my meal.
After grabbing a fork and napkins that were inevitably lost, I walked the crepe across the Boulevard to an empty classroom in Academic Hall to enjoy breakfast before my next class. The crepe was formy first meal of the day, so the fruit should have provided a decent breakfast, but the chocolate kind of ruined the healthiness of the meal.
The strawberries were warm, and the outer dough was crispy but also soft. It was not easy to eat the whole thing with a fork, but after some thinking, it was easier to pick the whole thing up by the white paper underneath. In the end, when I finished, all of the warm Nutella syrup came to the bottom of the crepe.
The whole thing was bliss. It was a mixture of everything that you could want in a sweet treat. While the prices are a bit high, whenever they are on campus, it’s convenient and a unique experience for students who aren’t able to get outside of Downtown to try new things.
