Austin's Food Truck Scene Is Getting Hotter
Austin's intrepid food trucks punch far above their weight class, and they've long found a receptive audience in the city's uniquely offbeat food landscape.
Since food trucks took off in popularity in the city in the mid-2000s, and even decades before the 'chaos cooking' trend became part of the cultural lexicon, the most successful mobile restaurants in Austin offered new, often funky, takes on diasporic cuisines. Think: Asian Southern fusion at the Peached Tortilla, Korean fusion truck-turned-chain Chi'Lantro, and of course, Torchy's Tacos. Today, Austin's most popular food trucks continue to sling tantalizing twists on cuisines and dishes that keep Austinites coming back again and again to line up in 100-degree weather.
This should come as no surprise in a state that essentially invented the food truck with the chuck wagon, horse-drawn carriages from the late 1800s that fed Texan cowboys salted meat, baked beans, and biscuits as they worked. Austin's food truck scene, which entered its modern form in the 1990s, isn't quite as large as in some other cities — even after the number of food trucks surged from 648 in 2006 to more than 1,500 in 2024, that still pales in comparison to, say, Los Angeles, which is home to over 4,000). Nonetheless, Austin's inventive, nonconformist food trucks have firmly cemented themselves in the city's culture. Today, many stand alongside many of the city's best brick-and-mortar restaurants. (Michelin seems to think so, too.)
Even with all that success, the food truck scene is only heating up and continuing to evolve, pushing further beyond straightforward tacos and barbecue. For some food truck owners, many of whom are immigrants or transplants, trucks have been a successful way to introduce takes on their respective cuisines to the Capitol City, often without the higher labor costs and razor-thin profit margins that come with opening a standalone restaurant. The result: Diverse menus, bold experiments, and profoundly personal food stories told in food trucks across Austin.
KG BBQ pitmaster Kareem El-Ghayesh, a native of Cairo, Egypt, first came to Austin in 2012 and fell in love with the flavors and techniques of Texan barbecue. When he returned to Egypt, El-Ghayesh tried his hand at replicating what he ate in Texas, even though it was difficult — if not impossible — to source the cuts of meat, wood, and smokers.
El-Ghayesh became so entranced that he left his career in finance to move to Austin in 2016, where he enrolled in Austin Community College's culinary school. There, he worked under the tutelage of several different chefs and pitmasters of local barbecue joints, including Miguel and Modesty Vidal of the now-closed Valentina's, which initially opened as a food truck. In 2017, he used his experience to host a series of pop-ups serving classic takes on Central Texas barbecue. Finally, in 2022, he launched KG BBQ as a full-fledged food truck in East Austin — a decision he says was a logistical nightmare, but a much more manageable financial risk than a brick-and-mortar.
'A food truck is a lot cheaper, a lot more profitable, and more approachable. I've had a lot of experience working in barbecue food trucks, so it just made sense,' El-Ghayesh says.
Though his pop-ups focused on traditional barbecue, El-Ghayesh says he quickly realized he wanted to infuse it with Egyptian flavors, inspired partly by Valentina's approach to incorporating Tex-Mex ingredients and dishes into its barbecue. Today, KG BBQ serves a variety of Egyptian-Texan barbecue dishes, including its diner-favorite pork ribs that are first dry-rubbed with Egyptian spices and later slathered with pomegranate barbecue sauce. Egyptian flavors show up in the sides, too, like El-Ghayesh's pink buttermilk potato salad, which uses roasted beet puree, and KG's Mediterranean rice, which is spiced with turmeric, bay leaf, and cinnamon.
El-Ghayesh's fusion-forward approach has earned him a devoted following and awards, including Eater's Best New Food Truck Award in 2023 and a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2024. 'No one really anticipated that, including myself,' El-Ghayesh says of the truck's success, but he attributes it to KG's novel combinations of Egyptian cuisine and barbecue — an entirely new flavor for Austin. 'How well the flavors go together, and also how much effort and love went into this, I think those are the two main ingredients to my success.'
While trucks like KG BBQ captivate diners with Texas-born fusions that pay homage to the chefs' culture, others earn loyalty by preserving food traditions. Run by the Bigi family, Italian natives who split their time between Austin and their home city of Mantua, in the Lombardy region of Northern Italy, Artipasta serves the types of exact, traditional Italian dishes that you don't often see coming out of a truck. The operation, parked at South Austin's Thicket Food Park, eschews Alfredo or meatballs for specialties like bechamel-laden lasagna, spaghetti with clams, and gnocchi with tomato sauce.
Ugo Bigi, the family patriarch, originally got his start in the automotive industry. However, he tapped into his passion for cooking after his honeymoon in the U.S. revealed what he saw as a dearth of traditional Italian restaurants. Years later, the family decided to fill that gap.
'What we wanted to bring here was traditional, typical Italian food from our area … and to make those flavors as best we could and make people from here in Austin taste it,' says Matteo Bigi, Ugo's son. 'The dream is to eventually spread out this type of cuisine to more people.'
Chef Marlon Rison, co-owner of Community Vegan, was living in Dallas when he decided to open his vegan comfort food truck, but the city's 'meat and potato' food culture didn't feel like a great fit. Austin's, however, where his partner was living at the time, did. 'I knew if we had food that tasted good, [Austinites] would show up, regardless if it was vegan or not, and that's exactly what happened for us,' he says.
Locals quickly fell in love with Rison's heavy use of cauliflower, mushrooms, and onions to mimic the umami, savory taste of meat, and his takes on comfort food that yield fried oyster mushroom lemon pepper 'wings,' beer-battered cauliflower 'chicken' sandwiches, and macaroni and 'cheese.'
Rison doesn't have a formal culinary education — he learned how to cook as a child from hanging out in the kitchen with his mother. After transitioning to a vegan lifestyle as an adult, he gained a following online by posting photos of his home-cooked meals on Instagram, incorporating the teachings of his mother and celebrity vegan chefs Babette Davis and Chad and Derek Sarno. 'All the concepts that my mom taught me are exactly what I'm incorporating into the kitchen,' Rison says. 'For instance, I cook my fried oyster mushrooms exactly the way my mom fried chicken growing up. The way we do mac and cheese is exactly the way [my partner] Erica's mother and grandmother did mac and cheese. It just all happens to be plant-based.'
While Austin's vibrant food truck culture makes it ideal for newer business owners to open up shop here, Texas's often unpredictable weather — from severe snowstorms to crushing heat waves — proves to be a significant, even dangerous, obstacle. Food truck teams and solo operators work in what are essentially lightly upgraded metal boxes with fryers and stoves running full blast: Temperatures inside a food truck can reach 10 to 20 degrees hotter than outside and, during triple-digit days, many trucks lose business or even shut down, according to Community Impact.
'No matter how hard the AC fans or everything's blowing, it's pretty intense conditions,' says Rison, who works out of a vintage 1973 Winnebago Chieftain. 'It's not as comfortable as it could be in a brick-and-mortar.'
David Florez, owner of Ceviche7, a pint-sized Peruvian food truck just north of the University of Texas campus, says the climate is especially difficult when trying to prepare dishes — like the cevicheria's popular, lip-puckering ceviche de pescado — that require fresh, raw ingredients. Florez won't remove his fish from the freezer until a customer has ordered, which means preparation takes longer. 'In a regular kitchen, you've got a walk-in storage that you can do preparation … and that is very comfortable,' Florez says. 'But right here, I've got demand like a very, very busy restaurant, but I don't have [that accessibility or space].'
Those conditions have pushed some food truck owners toward the dream of opening a permanent restaurant. After three years as a mobile business, Artipasta opened its first standalone restaurant in 2022.
Rison is saying goodbye to his truck entirely. This summer, he'll replace Community Vegan with three new businesses: a brick-and-mortar version of Community Vegan; Rison and Lott's, a 100 percent vegan smokehouse upstairs; and a lemonade stand in the same property's old smokehouse. Though rewarding, the transition from truck to a standalone restaurant hasn't been easy, Rison says. Expenses have been twice as high as he expected, and the building he's operating out of needed a lot of work — he's had to redo the floors, walls, seating, air conditioning, and even the parking lot.
But others are sticking with their trucks for now. El-Ghayesh plans to expand to a second truck in Houston, then, ideally, to a permanent barbecue smokehouse by 2027.
'I've had many, many moments that I remember working 12-hour shifts and going back home after midnight, going to shower and putting my head on the pillow and just thinking, 'What the hell did I do to myself?'' El-Ghayesh says, but adds that he has few regrets. 'I'm so glad I kept pushing through those darker times when I really had nothing else other than the belief in myself. There's going to be a payoff later.' See More: Austin Food Trucks
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