Jacksonville’s food truck scene is really heating up lately. Last month’s issue of Jacksonville Magazine contained a food truck feature listing 10 trucks in the Jacksonville/St. Augustine area! Mario and I visited one of the newest, The Salty Fig, for lunch last week.

The Salty Fig

The owners are dipping their toes in the restaurant waters with a food truck, with plans to open a restaurant in Riverside in the near future. All of their “Southern gastropub” fare sounded appetizing, but we finally settled on the Intuition Ale-braised pork belly sandwich (spring lettuce, tomato, homemade pickles, thick Texas toast) with side of serrano chili-honey slaw and the shrimp, andouille, and grits (goat cheese stone ground grits, creole trinity, New Orleans BBQ sauce):

Pork Belly Sandwich

Goat Cheese Shrimp & Grits

Serrano chili-honey slaw

It’s official–I’m just not a coleslaw fan. It’s likely just the cabbage I’m averse to, because the flavors in this side were good, but it just wasn’t my favorite. For those of you who do love coleslaw, this one was light and crisp, no soupy mayonnaise coating here.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from “light and crisp” sits the pork belly sandwich. A glorious mound of bacony goodness is cradled between two slices of Texas toast and tempered with the perfect tart homemade pickles. Can’t you just smell it now? Mario, who tends to be suspicious of anything he’s never tried before, decided to go out on a limb by trying the goat cheese grits. Despite a strong goat cheese flavor (which to me always = delicious, and gave the grits a creamy texture), he loved them! Savory sausage and plump shrimp nicely cut the richness of the grits.

The Salty Fig has a nice setup behind a building on the corner of Stockton & Oak in Riverside, which included a tented table and chairs with trash can (you’d be surprised how many trucks don’t provide this). You can keep track of their other whereabouts via their Facebook or Twitter feeds, or on the Jax Truckies Twitter which provides the locations of all of Jax’s food trucks daily. If this is the type of food we can expect from the Salty Fig’s upcoming restaurant, I can’t wait to try more of their menu.