Hot Meal: Liba Falafel Truck

The falafel sandwich: A handheld mezze platter.

​Today marked the San Francisco debut for Liba, Gail Lillian's taco truck turned falafel wagon, splashed with tendril-y design elements and an electric honeydew-green color scheme. Its location: a strip-like lot skirting an old loading dock at 155 De Haro (at Alameda), behind Showplace Square East in the Design Center district, at the base of Potrero Hill.

Sweet potato fries come sprinkled with persillade.

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The limited menu offers falafel sandwiches and bowls, with fries and quirky bottled soft drinks like Boylan's seltzer from New Jersey. The falafel themselves? Pretty much textural elements, craggy and free-form, like hunks of dislodged popcorn ceiling turned brown and savory. The real focus of Liba's falafel sandwich ($7.50) are the salads, spreads, and relishes that turn it into a kind of handheld mezze platter. You get to pick three

The optional hummus may've been little more than a line of subtext wrapped in tahini bitterness, but Liba's olive-orange relish with thyme (again, optional) was the falafel's spiritual thesis: a rush of salty kalamata tannins that nudges the whole thing into the realm of epic. A tomato cucumber salad (our third option) was all about goodness of the central element: ripe, deep red, and tender, and with lush tomato sweetness. All that, plus a flurry of feta crumbles and a neon-sour dill and cardamom pickle, and with self-serve garnishes like rosemary peanuts and sumac onion relish. We couldn't even taste the smear of chimichurri paste the menu promised would be there.

The truck parks in a lot that fronts an old loading dock.

​Good thing the pita bread is thicker than you're used to. Liba owner Gail Lillian sourced it from Hamati Bakery in San Bruno. White and faintly spongy like exceedingly flat focaccia, but with characteristically pita brittleness.

Thick sweet potato fries ($3) are sweet and palpy, vaguely crisp, and yet far from flaccid. The taste is all about browning reaction, perfumed with a scattering of the chopped garlic-and-parsley mix known as persillade. Not bad for a San Francisco debut. Liba opens for business in S.F. 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Mon., Wed., and Fri. It appears in Emeryville Tue. and Thu.