WASHINGTON DC – Chef Mike Isabella is jumping on the food truck bandwagon. Well, kind of. It’s more like he’s hanging by the fingertips to the back bumper of the food-truck bandwagon, hoping to claim some sort of brotherhood with the rolling tin-can cooks who actually work the streets daily for a buck.

Isabella, and his reservation partner, CityEats, will be rolling out his Graffiato truck tomorrow for a day-long tour of the city, like a traveling circus, except reduced to sites within a single jurisdiction. Isabella’s glass-heavy rental vehicle is not really a full-fledged food truck. The two-time “Top Chef” contestant will do no cooking on it; instead, he’ll pass out bites prepared at Graffiato.

So why do this?

In a soon-to-drop release, Isabella offers up this canned quoted with the promotional tin ear: “Even with CityEats, it can be hard to get a seat at Graffiato because of the high demand, so today I’m bringing Graffiato to people all over D.C.”

Except this will not exactly be a Graffiato experience in mobile form. There will be no menu of fully executed small plates, only samples of certain dishes, all of which will be passed out gratis. Isabella does plan to test his fans with a “Challenge Your Palate” contest, in which eaters at various stops will be asked to identify the ingredients in Isabella’s dishes.

Find the entire article by Tim Carman at The Washington Post <here>