This Gas Station Food Truck Serves Amazing Kyrgyz Street Food in Santa Clara

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t purchase all of my meals from gas station convenience stores and food trucks parked outside of gas stations. But when I do, I’ve experienced close to a 100% rate of deliciousness — immaculately crunchy-skinned Cajun fried chicken, juicy Yemeni scrambled eggs ladled over hot pita, and behemothic tortas Cubanas oozing with melted cheese.

Somehow, the dodgier and more middle-of-nowhere the gas station, the tastier the food.

We were feeling pretty hyped, then, when we pulled into the Platinum gas station in Santa Clara at 9 o’clock on a recent chilly Thursday night to try the cuisine of Kyrgyzstan for the first time in our lives. Tucked behind the gas station mini-mart, hidden in the semi-darkness, was the halal food truck we’d driven an hour to find, its name, “Vostok Gyro & Shawarma,” emblazoned on top in a jaunty, colorful typeface.

Within the grand constellation of Bay Area food trucks, Vostok is a bit of an anomaly, due in part to its unusually long business hours, from noon to 11 p.m. daily. Based on the steady stream of customers we witnessed during our visit, the truck only gets busier as the night gets later.

Even more notably, Vostok is one of the only dedicated Kyrgyz food businesses in the Bay Area (I’m aware of just one other). There’s been a small uptick in Central Asian restaurants in the past few years — in places specializing in, say, Uyghur or Uzbek dishes. Afghan food, another cousin of these cuisines, has been a Bay Area staple going back to the ’80s and ’90s.

Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, remains widely underrepresented. The country shares a border with Xinjiang, China, to the east, and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to the north and west. Its food, likewise, is an amalgamation of all of these regional influences — a kind of culinary middle ground between Russian pelmeni and borscht, Chinese noodles, and the well-spiced shawarma and kebabs that you can find in much of the Arabic-speaking world.

All of which is to say that the food at Vostok is delicious, and several degrees more ambitious than what you might expect from a typical food truck, thanks in part to the fact that it’s rigged with both vertical shawarma spits and a wok station. Just about everything on the menu is cooked to order and comes out piping hot.

We were sold as soon as we had our first taste of the crispy fried pelmeni — tiny, crescent-shaped beef dumplings that burst with meaty juices when we bit in. They were especially tasty dipped in the accompanying tub of dill-infused sour cream.

Meanwhile, Vostok’s Kyrgyz-style shawarma wraps, which come in regular or “king” size, have their own distinct vibe that sets them apart from the shawarma you might get at a Turkish or Jordanian spot. We opted for the beef shawarma, and the meat was both juicier and steakier than we expected. Instead of hitting us with a garlic bomb, the sauce was tangy and dill-forward, with a hint of sweetness. The combination of textures and flavors was fantastic.

What really won me over, though, was the plov, a casserole-like rice dish flecked with tender stew beef, whole garlic cloves, and slivers of carrot cooked very soft. The main thing is that the long-grain rice comes out slicked brown with the grease and juices from the beef, which makes the whole thing incredibly decadent and delicious — not unlike, say, Afghan Qabili palaw. On the side, you get a little tub of raw onions and tomato to use as a garnish, cutting into the richness.

This is the dish I’ll be coming back for again and again.