CMH Gourmand – Eating in Columbus & Ohio

Facebook: explorersclubmv
(to find the next location for the truck and more on the restaurant)

The Explorer’s Club Restaurant is about eighteen months past the day the doors opened. While other restaurants entered the mobile food world before Explorer’s Club, the team behind the wheel started preparing back in 2012.

Shortly after the restaurant opened, they started to rent a food cart on occasion to help get the word out about the Explorer’s Club and to support community events. They did well and saw the advantages of going mobile including having extra kitchen space in a building where cooking quarters are tight as well as a much easier way to build out a catering business. The truck launched in late May of this year and has been keeping busy doing corporate lunches, events, late night and weddings.

Like the restaurant, the menu is eclectic. While it often has a southwestern / latin themes the sky is the limit for what one might find on the menu on any given day. A few examples are posted below.

A few examples are shown below. Tots one of the most sought items on mobile food menus are frequently on the menu and in many of the Explorer’s Club Menu items. The example below is the Sloppy Jose Burrito which includes mac and cheese, Ropa Vieja (shredded beef), seasons tots and some saucy goodness.

Tacos in various forms are frequent flyers on breakfast, lunch and dinner menus, but always tacos with a twist of one sort or another.

For breakfast, this truck has the best options in the business including breakfast burritos, chorizo sausage Biscuits and gravy and one of my favorites an egg sandwich on Cuban bread with Swiss Cheese, jalapeno mayonnaise and jalapeno slaw.

For vegetarians, there is typically one or more strong options on the menu. For fans of the restaurant, many of the menu items are based on core ingredients at The Explorer’s Club but this is not a recycling of menu concepts, the items are meant to be served fast and friendly to eating on the go.

So that is the news on the truck. Here is what is new at the restaurant. It closed down for the first week of July to paint, clean and add ceiling tiles to reduce the noise level in the main dining area. Added to the space since my first post in October 2012: a second dining room / large party room, a small patio, an outdoor herb and vegetable garden, a cool bike rack, new artwork on the inside and outside and plenty of things I have forgotten. I can say that my favorite addition has been the pomegranate margarita which just happened to be 1/2 price on Tuesdays.