GETTING THE FOOD ROLLING

Getting THE Food

Rolling

The grills are sizzling and the tasty aromas of cooking meat and vegetables wafts through the air. You are standing at a large window of a beautifully painted food truck on a sunny afternoon. Everything on the menu looks so scrumptious and your mouth is watering with anticipation. You finally decide on something to order and the chefs inside the truck quickly whip together your luscious looking meal. Food trucks are vehicles that are specialized to be a mobile miniature restaurant. They are manned by one or two chefs that serve out of a large window on the side of the truck. These restaurants on wheels have recently exploded in popularity, especially in Austin, where there is estimated to be more than 1200 food trucks. People who start up food trucks often love making food and don’t want to, or simply can’t, open a full-scale restaurant. Josh Wilson is the owner of the

By Fritz Kokinda

The process of starting up and running a food truck in Austin today

Drafthouse Pub and Brewery in North Austin and he opened a food truck, called Little House, to provide food for the customers of the pub. Wilson got the food truck up and running from the very beginning in late 2018 to the present day. He expressed his opinion on how hard food trucks are to make money off of without any other source of income, like his pub for example. Wilson explained how volatile and subject to change the food truck industry can be. “When food trucks first started getting popular in Austin, food trucks were hungry to get their name out,”

Wilson said. “But then as things started getting saturated, and people realize how hard it is to turn a dollar on that whole food truck gig, it was harder to get people to commit. If it looked like there was a cloud in the sky and looked like it might rain, they wouldn’t show up and then that was bad for business.” Fritz Kokinda (left) and Little House food truck owner Josh Wilson standing in front of the Little House Food Truck. Photo taken by Moses Wilson. Wilson talked about what he believes are the most important aspects of your food truck you need to plan out before you can create a successful business. “So first, you start with the menu,” Wilson said. “You have to decide what kind of food you’re gonna make. Then you have to decide how to create the space to make it, then you have to decide who’s going to manufacture the truck, and to get everything in, you have to get everything permitted. When I started, I didn’t even hire a cook yet. I designed a simple menu, then designed the truck with the software, had this company in Memphis build it, and then flew up there and took a look at it. They made a couple of errors and corrected them and then I paid a guy to pull it back over here to Austin.” Designing a food truck can be a more difficult task than one might think. Wilson explains some of the processes he went through in his designing journey to make his vision a reality. “I tried to make as much like a commercial kitchen as possible because I wanted to attract good cooks,” Wilson said. “Because if you get a chef of any value, they’re not going to want to work in some sort of broken down thing. I tried to build

something out that was nice so I spent a lot of time designing the space to make sure that it was ergonomically well done and efficient in terms of both the counter space and the flow of the making of the food, have like good lighting, a couple of AC’s and a couple of heaters so it’s not as hot or cold as it could be, windows, that kind of thing.” Even though Josh Wilson designed and owns the food truck, he doesn’t play a huge role in the everyday operation of the actual truck. “So when I hired the chef, one of his stipulations was that it was gonna be his gig,” Wilson said. “We talk about what’s going to work and what doesn’t, and what kind of price range, but he pretty much has full range on the menu but with a full on understanding of what the concept is. I gotta make sure that everything’s operational and that [the chef’s] are happy and they have everything they need, but I don’t do a whole lot with the actual running of the kitchen part of it.” The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the food truck industry just as hard as it has hit everything else with social distancing. Many food trucks have to accommodate for this, like Wilson did. “Since the pandemic, we’ve sort of leaned down, everything’s you have to get you have to order online,” Wilson said. “We have less staffing and we don’t take physical orders. And then our menu has gotten smaller, so since we have less people, we do less prep. It’s just the operations got a little bit simpler, more streamlined.” It isn’t the most realistic idea to start up a food

truck just to make a lot of money. Wilson recommends not going into the food truck industry if you want to get really wealthy from it. His food truck is really just there to complement his brewery and boost its sales, not to make money on its own. “If you were to isolate the sales from the food trailer and then look at the amount of money that it costs, it’s probably not paid off just on its own,” Wilson said. But if you look at the fact that, and you can’t really crunch this number, but if you look at the beer sales, which is where we really make our money, then definitely it’s paid off. So but it’s hard to know how you calculate a sale that you could have lost.”

If you are looking to start up your own food truck business, Wilson does have some advice on how to be successful with food trucks for

you. “My main thing to tell the person is partner up with a business where you have a permanent location,” Wilson said. “I’m sure those trucks do really well. So instead of going out and spending a million dollars opening up your restaurant, spend $50,000 making a food truck and then go out and see if if the reception is good. You can build your brand a little bit with the eye on the actual restaurant, because food trucks are not gonna make a lot of money, but you’re not going to lose much as a restaurant if it fails.”

Nicolai McCrary reviews food and writes for The Infatuation Austin. He has reviewed food for many years and he operates pop-up restaurants one to two times a month. He

Little House chef seasoning fish & chips, made with wild pacific cod, battered in Topo Chico tempura, and served with Danish remoulade and hand cut fries. Photo courtesy of Yelp.