NYC Food Truck Lunch: Garlic Sausage Jian Bing From The Flying Pig

Perry, the founder of New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City street food.

For the past few months, we've been hearing about a food truck that serves jian bing, but tracking it down has been elusive. That's why we were excited to run across the Flying Pig truck last week on 52nd St, just west of 6th Ave.

We were not familiar with jian bing until hearing about this food truck. The best way to describe it is as a stuffed savory Chinese crepe. Options for fillings on the menu were veggie ($8), dry pork ($10), garlic sausage ($11) and one option that sold out and had been erased from the blackboard.

Service was quick. Less than five minutes after ordering we walked away from the truck with a freshly-prepared jian bing.

Opening up the lunch box, you could see the outside wrapper was made from batter, like a crepe, but eggier. There were pieces of fried egg mixed in with the batter, as if they intentionally tried to make the batter variegated instead of uniform. That's ok with us. We like pieces of egg in our batter, whether it's jian bing or french toast.

Inside was a nice amount of thinly-sliced garlic sausage, scallions, lettuce, fresh cilantro and what we would describe as a crunchy flatbread. The crepe must have been pretty big, because even folded in half it was fairly large.

Taking a bite, each of the ingredients served a purpose. The fresh cilantro flavor was strong at times, as was the garlic sausage, which was meaty as well. The flatbread provided a nice crunch, and the iceberg lettuce provided crispiness and moistness.

Jian bing was one of the more unique items we've been served from a NYC food truck. Upon further research, we found out that jian bing is often served for breakfast in parts of China. That makes sense given the egginess, although we would be happy to eat jian bing for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Unfortunately, the Flying Pig (not to be confused with the Jolly Fat Pig food truck) is not that easy to find. They have a website here and a Twitter account here, but they don't seem to be updated often.

If you happen to run across the Flying Pig food truck, you now know what jian bing is, and how delicious it is. We suggest definitely giving the Flying Pig jian bing a try if you have the opportunity.