The presence of high-quality food trucks roaming Lexington’s streets is a flavorful phenomenon only a few years old.
Across the nation, chefs are using mobile kitchens to launch their restaurant businesses first, then later opening brick-and-mortar eateries. Others are doing just the opposite: restaurant first, food truck second.
Lexington operators recently have created both scenarios. After years of hauling the heat, help and helpings to customers, Athenian Grill and El Habanero Loko have added static locations, while Fork in the Road Mobile Galley’s restaurant is under construction.
Named middle fork kitchen bar, the business will open in the renovated James Pepper Distillery later this year.
Taking the opposite tack is the former Thai Orchid restaurant, which changed its name to Thai and Mighty Noodle Bowls.
Operators say going in either direction feels natural in a dining culture demanding convenience and choice. Where some customers prefer the spontaneity and relaxed atmosphere surrounding a food truck, others want the comfort of a physical space where chefs offer expanded food and beverage menus. Seemingly all want both options when stricken by the mood to masticate.
Ilias Papas, owner of Athenian Grill, said giving customers more choices in a restaurant setting pleases him as much as having more elbow room to cook in a larger space. After years of serving customers from a small tent, he opened the restaurant at 313 S. Ashland Ave. in October.
“Our cuisine is very complicated, so many Greek items are impossible to offer in a foodtruck environment,” said Papas. “We’d had a lot of requests from customers for more dishes, traditional things like moussaka, kebabs and pastisio. But to boil pasta and make béchamel, we need a commissary kitchen.”
To fund the move to the new site, Papas launched a Kickstarter campaign last year with a goal to raise $15,000. By that June, 208 backers contributed $18,205. To get the leased, 14-seat restaurant up and running, Papas invested about $70,000 total.
“Now we can offer about quadruple the menu we had before,” he said. Using a fast-casual service model, Papas said dining room turnover is quick and efficient. “We do a significant amount of dine-in business, but we also are doing a lot of carryout and catering.”
Fork in the Road Mobile Galley owner Mark Jensen said he didn’t envision having his own restaurant when he began catering several years ago. Yet he allowed that having a dine-in option is a natural progression for a guy who worked in his family’s restaurant growing up in Vermont.
After moving to Lexington several years ago to work on his Ph.D., he needed income and launched Mark Jensen Catering. Luckily for him, he never had to spend a dime on marketing — he just answered the phone.
“I had the perfect clients; if someone asked me to come cook, I’d be there. I didn’t reach out much,” Jensen said.
But his business didn’t grow much either. Jensen considered expanding by doing special-occasion pop-up restaurants, only to dismiss the idea after studying what was happening with food trucks elsewhere in the United States. In the end, he assembled a trailer-mounted galley in 2011, which he towed to events.
“That was a toe in the water, designed to see how many more people I could get interested in my cooking,” Jensen said. Inside the stainless-steel trailer is a flat-top grill and some gas burners. “When we arrive somewhere, it’s like the circus coming to town, because all this stuff comes out of it really quickly when we set up. In about 45 minutes, we’re ready to go. Simple.”
Or not. Jensen realized that operating the galley four nights a week in peak seasons required 60 to 80 hours of work each week, creating menus, cooking, serving and sanitizing the truck.
“So I thought to myself, ‘I’m already working about as much as I’d work in a restaurant by hauling the galley around, and all I’d need to do is hire a few more hands to have a restaurant,” Jensen said, laughing at that long-belated epiphany.
To make it happen, he needed money, so like Papas, he also began a Kickstarter campaign, which raised $24,000 in 24 days. It was a nice return but far short of the $300,000 required to start middle fork.
“That was a huge validation of what our patrons are getting excited about with the opening of the restaurant,” he said. To finish the job, he needed a commercial lender. “Not sure why, but I hate asking for money from banks,” he said.
To control costs and because he likes the work, Jensen is doing some of the restaurant’s carpentry to put his own touches on it. Jesse and Liz Huot, owners of Grind Burger Truck in Louisville, Kentucky, did much the same when modernizing an old restaurant space into Grind Burger Kitchen. After building a regional reputation through the truck for great hamburgers, they found a static location “in a neighborhood where people were begging for a good restaurant,” said Jesse Huot. “Having a restaurant was always the goal. But if we had done the restaurant before the truck, it would have been a big mistake.”
Not only was the investment in a towable kitchen — in Grind’s case, about $20,000, $15,000 of which came through a Kickstarter campaign — less than the restaurant (closer to $30,000), the smaller scale of operating a mobile operation allowed the couple to create, build and understand their brand together, rather than learning as they went while teaching a team.
“The truck thing was a great way to create a following,” Huot said, adding that he misses serving Grind’s Lexington fans on the event and brewpub circuit. He and his wife even considered launching a restaurant in Lexington before opening in Louisville.
“It’s all fun and games for Liz and I to take the truck Lexington, but to send employees we have to pay that far down the road is costly,” Huot said.
Huot said business is solid at Grind Burger Kitchen, which means the truck is parked more than it’s rolling. With winter setting in, he now has an excuse to keep it still and focus on the restaurant, but he knows that doesn’t please some customers.
“What’s really funny is there are still longtime fans who will only go to the truck,” he said. “I guess they like the novelty of it.”