100 Favorite Dishes: No 23. -- Eight-Hour Roasted Pork Buns From Dim Ssäm à GoGo

As a countdown to the Best of Broward Palm Beach 2011, coming in June, Clean Plate Charlie is serving up a hundred of our favorite dishes in South Florida. Send your own nominations to [email protected].

Chef Richard Halles' truck is an extension of his Miami eatery Sakaya Kitchen, where whole foods and local ingredients are rendered simply but beautifully into tongue-in-cheek plays on both modern and traditional Korean cuisines. How else can you explain Halles' pork belly banh mi -- you take something as trendy and hip as pork belly, treat it to a slow food-style house curing process, and then gently layer it into homey, authentically old-school strata of pate de tete, kimchi carrots, and a smear of spicy mayo (for good measure). Same holds true for Halles' pork buns. Here, the chef reimagines a thousand-year-old Chinese staple as a sort of folded sandwich, then stuffs it lovingly with another buzz word food (in this case, crisp roasted pork shoulder), itself glazed with a homemade ssamjang sauce so simultaneously sweet and spicy it could make a ying-yang smile. Smoothed out by pickled cucumber and some grassy scallion, it's a bun that's both gourmet and down home; classy enough for a sit-down dinner à la David Chang, or rustic enough to sup curbside, drunk and stumbling, in no more than two or three giant bites. That, my friends, is a food truck worth talking about.