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Pambazos Food Truck

Food Truck Report This 'Mad Max'-themed truck serves pambazos (salsa-dipped sandwiches) with 12 hot sauces

When you find the Mad Pambazos food truck, either in the courtyard of a brewery in San Pedro or parked along Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, your eyes will inevitably be drawn to a dozen or more rainbow squeeze bottles in front of the truck. This is the collection of hot sauces that chefs Macks Collins and Bryan Kidwell make themselves and proudly display in an ice chest.  The lemon habanero is a pale yellow, the jalapeño sauce an electric green and the carrot habanero a deep, burnt orange. Very pretty. And the flavors change based on what Kidwell and Collins find at the markets.

What you’ll learn about Kidwell, Collins and partner Joe Drewer pretty quickly is that they’re really passionate about their truck, their hot sauces — and the “Mad Max” movies. The “Mad” in the name is a nod to their favorite films, as are the names for the dishes on the truck: Toecutter, Dr. Dealgood and Ton Ton Tattoo, all characters from the movies. You get the idea.

Then again, you’d have to be pretty passionate about something to quit your restaurant jobs in New York City and move to Los Angeles to open a food truck that specializes in a sandwich called the pambazo. It’s a salsa-dipped sandwich popular in Mexico City. Collins and Kidwell first tried one when a dishwasher introduced it at a staff meal in New York.

“We were like, ‘Wait — what?’ ” said Collins. “This needs to be exploding.”

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