Yesterday, I reached out to a few food vendors and restaurants to find out how they’ve been preparing for the Austin City Limits Music Festival, which attracts thousands of avid music fans from all over the world. To start things off, I spoke with David Bull of Second Bar + Kitchen who gave us his account of how his team chose to sell three different bánh mì sandwiches during the three-day festival. Today, Michael Rypka of Torchy’s Tacos and Jay Knepp of The Salt Lick tell us how their restaurants have been diligently preparing for the musical event.

Jay Knepp of The Salt Lick

What factors go into deciding what dishes you’ll serve at an event like this?

As far as the dishes we serve, we do staples that everyone knows and that The Salt Lick serves every day. We see it as an opportunity for people to visit The Salt Lick while attending one of the best music events around. We bring a pit out and smoke brisket, sausage, and ribs. We also serve some nachos with chopped beef, queso, and smoked peppers.

What sort of prep work and labor goes into an event like this?

The prep work starts about two months out, since we’re serving thousands of pounds of product.

Tagged: Austin City Limits, Layne Lynch, The Salt Lick, Torchy's Tacos

The Austin City Limits Music Festival (ACL) kicks off today, and it isn’t just the music scene that is attracting hoards of attendees to the festival grounds. The food lineup is just as alluring as the assortment of bands scheduled to play this year.

A myriad of Texas restaurants, including The Salt Lick, Second Bar + Kitchen, and Woodshed, will be just some of the many food vendors at the event. In years past, places like The Mighty Cone, Amy’s Ice Creams, and P. Terry’s Burger Stand have been the main culinary attractions of the festival, but this year there are some fresh talented faces in attendance, such as Pâté Letelier and Torchy’s Tacos.

To get an idea of what kind of preparation – not to mention anxiety – goes into an event like this, I reached out to a few of the vendors and asked them about the work that goes into the days leading up to ACL. You’ll see answers from them posted over the next three days of ACL. To start things off, David Bull of Second Bar + Kitchen explains how his restaurant is handling its first year as an ACL vendor.

What factors go into deciding what kind of dishes you’ll serve at an event like this?

We’re serving three different bánh mì sandwiches and our black truffle pomme frites. It was actually a long and grueling process to decide on the sandwiches. We surveyed our team on what they would want to eat, and we landed on something that was healthy-ish, hand-held, and had spice.

Avocado Bánh Mì

After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with the bánh mì sandwich, which is delicious, fresh, and hits all of the earlier points. Once we decided on the bánh mì sandwich, we then had to determine costs, yield percentage tests, and product availability, and most importantly, make sure it tasted great.

What sort of prep work and labor goes into an event like this? 

We’re preparing food for tens of thousands of people within three days; it’s crazy! By the time ACL hits, we’ll have been working for a week prior to make sure we’re prepped and ready. We’re bringing on extra hands from the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts to help us prepare and serve at the festival – which will be invaluable experience for the students.

Pork Belly Bánh Mì

Are you going to catch any shows during ACL? If so, which ones?

If I get a chance to see shows, I will be extremely lucky!

Tagged: ACL, Amy's Ice Creams, Austin City Limits, bánh mì, David Bull, Layne Lynch, P. Terry's, Pâté Letelier, Second Bar + Kitchen, The Salt Lick, Torchy's Tacos, Woodshed

Torchy’s Tacos is quickly making the rounds in Texas. The taco madness all began at a small trailer in Austin. That little trailer helped sprout several brick-and-mortar locations. Over time, Torchy’s grew and is now exploding onto the Dallas and Houston culinary scenes. The taco establishment seems to be opening a new location every month and shows no signs of slowing down. So what’s the secret behind the restaurant’s statewide success? Michael Rypka, founder and executive chef of Torchy’s Tacos, says it’s the restaurant’s commitment to honoring the local Austin roots that helped the business grow from the very beginning. Rypka chatted with TEXAS MONTHLY about the unique growth of Torchy’s Tacos, resisting any and every urge to franchise, and his upcoming plan to create a “secret” menu for all his diehard taco fans.

Michael Rypka in front of the trailer that started it all. Photo taken by Cort McPhail.

What made you know it was time to go to Houston?

The main reason was that we had a lot of customer requests asking us to be out there. We also have a lot of requests to have more stores in Dallas as well. I should mention Dallas is the main focus of our future expansion. We’re headed that way in the next six to nine months.

Why is Dallas the main focus?

Again, it’s all customer requests. Dallas is our most popular area outside of Austin. We picked up, headed out there, and decided to see what would happen, and so far everything is going really great. We want to keep that up.

A lot of restaurants shy away from expanding into other cities in fear that the quality of their cuisine might go down. How do you guys handle that?

It has a lot to do with training and hiring people that have the same vision as you. We put them through rigorous interviews and training when they join our team. I’ve been in the restaurant business my entire life. I’ve never not done anything but restaurants. It’s in my blood, and it’s something I’ve always been around. I know what works and I know what doesn’t work. I think that’s what has kept us so successful all these years.

I know you are opening a second location in Houston soon. Are you going to stop at two locations in Houston and then focus on Dallas? What’s your plan?

I would imagine that we would explore more locations in Houston if the second one does as well as the first. What I’m really most excited about is next month we’ve got the SMU location opening in Dallas. I think that’s going to be a really great store for us.

Tell me about the differences you see between the Houston, Dallas, and Austin culinary markets.

Good food is good food. It doesn’t matter where you come from, or what city you are in – you know it when you taste it. I hope we do well in all of the cities we’re in. I think the culture in Austin, being such a locally focused culture, has really helped us expand over the years. We’ve tried to maintain those roots in our organization. That’s why I won’t ever franchise. I like keeping it privately held and staying involved in the day-to-day business.

Where do you draw culinary inspiration from for your tacos?

I’m the chef of the company. A lot of the inspiration comes from me. Sometimes it’s that I have a dish at a restaurant somewhere that’s really great and it sparks an idea. It might be a suggestion from an employee or customer and that sparks an idea. Sometimes it’s just me sitting around at night and something hits me upside the head and I go and make it. It is all pretty random most of the time, which is good. I think if you try to force creativity it never turns out well.

This is going to be an unfair question, but which of your tacos is your personal favorite?

That’s not unfair. My two favorites are the green chile pork and the baja shrimp.

Austin’s culinary scene has really evolved in just a few short years. Where do you see the city and yourselves going in the future?

I hope we’ll be around for years to come. There are a couple of stores we’re going to be opening in the outlying ares of Austin in the future. Again, that’s from customer requests. I think we need to keep staying on our game. One thing we do right now is our taco of the month, which I think keeps things fresh and new. I’m working on a secret menu that will just be for the people who are really in-the-know about Torchy’s. I hope the menu will eventually get out there and more people will learn about it. I don’t know if you know this, but In-N-Out Burger has an animal style burger that’s not on their menu, but a lot of people know about it. We want to do something like that. I think when you do that kind of thing it keeps people interested in everything you do.

Tagged: austin, dallas, Houston, Layne Lynch, Michael Rypka, Torchy's Tacos

For the past few years, food trailers, trucks, and carts have rivaled the traditional brick-and-mortar building as primary sources of delicious, affordable modern cuisine. In fact, take a look around the state of Texas and you’ll see cities like Houston, Austin, and even Dallas jumping on the mobile food wagon with their avant-garde takes on American street food.

In his latest book, The Truck Food Cookbook, renowned author John T. Edge travels across the nation to some of the most notable mobile food cities in America, including Houston and Austin. Below, the distinguished author discusses his experiences in compiling an exciting cookbook that includes recipes from some of the most well-known food carts, trucks, and trailers across America.

Tell me the background behind The Truck Food Cookbook.

The book really has two or three origin points. For the first magazine piece I ever wrote for the Oxford American, I had an idea of working a Lucky Dogs cart in New Orleans and writing about what life was like working on the streets of New Orleans in a hot dog cart. I did that for three nights and came away from that experience absolutely changed. I developed a better understanding of what is involved in street food. It is scary as hell to work one of those things, and I had a romantic notion of street food before that. Inspired by that experience, I opened a hot dog cart three years later called Dunce Dogs. We had natural casing hot dogs with pimento cheese, and if you wanted your cheese melted, we would melt it with these crème brûlée torches. It was goofy, but it was invigorated by this passion. Fast food doesn’t have to be bad or expensive, and I waned to contribute to that idea. I had no business doing [the cart]: I had a full-time job, a young son, and a month before we opened the cart, I got a four-book contract. It was completely ridiculous, but it was all working toward the same point, which really came to a head when I traveled to Vietnam. Great street food using local ingredients isn’t something precious over there; it’s mundane, everyday. I came home from that experience asking why we didn’t have great street food in America, and as I was asking that, this surge of street food was starting and gathering steam.

When did the idea for the book come about?

From 2009 to 2010, I was doing research for the book. Austin is an exception to this, but at that time around the country there were many cities that were developing their street food scene. I started out with a list of twenty cities that were possibilities, ended up going to about sixteen or eighteen, and settled on twelve as the primary cities. I was lucky to write this just as everything was changing.

Where all do you go in Texas in the book?

The two cities I concentrated on were Houston and Austin, and I thought about those cities as two sides of the same coin. Austin has great balance between novel trucks and trailers, but with more traditional trucks like Mexican-American tacos that don’t know what Twitter is, or honestly don’t care what Twitter is. I liked that about Austin. Houston, on the other hand, the point of interest was almost purely Mexican-American taco trucks. That was a great experience for me to see how these trucks serve the working class of Houston.

How did you get the recipes from these trucks? Did you develop these on your own, or did they hand them over to you?

That varied. I would come home with something from the truck, and in some cases the trucks were so savvy that they would have recipes ready on their website. In most cases, it was Angie [Mosier], [the photographer and recipe developer], working with the truck or trailer owner that would say “Here’s what I do. Here are the ingredients,” and we would try to codify that.

Where did you go in Austin or Houston that really made an impression on you?

In Houston, I had these really simple green bean scrambled egg tacos. After weeks of al pastor and meats, I couldn’t imagine that there specialty was green bean tacos. They were great. Also, I also admired the inventiveness of Torchy’s Tacos, whether it’s their migas inside a tortilla or using avocado as a garnish.

What else should people know about this book?

One thing I’d like to point out is that when people ask me, “Where’s the best street in America,” I always dodge that question, but you can make a good point that the cities that have embraced and supported street food, trailer food, and truck food most successfully are Austin and Portland. There is a connectivity between those two cities in terms of attitude, restaurant culture, and music culture, and I think that as we keep going and the trend evolves, I think those two cities will be the ones that everybody looks to. They are the exemplars.

Tagged: austin, Houston, John T. Edge, Layne Lynch, The Truck Food Cookbook, Torchy's Tacos

Flickr/Sean Loyless

Equipped with cash, personal utensils, and moist towelettes, a peaceable horde of eaters descended on the Gypsy Picnic Trailer Food Festival the minute the gates opened. Employing a divide-and-conquer approach, they dispersed to the forty or so trailers, only to return minutes (not hours) later with their spoils, ready to load up their commandeered picnic tables with paper boats of bacon fried rice, Loaded Nacho-Dillas, and Jalapeño Shrimp Bopper Salads.

Meanwhile, I sat ensconced in a tent with nine other lucky souls, honored with the opportunity to serve as a judge for the Gypsy Picnic Cook-Off, one of the perks of which was having all kinds of delectable dishes brought to me (the others being my own parking space and an unsullied portable toilet).

After about an hour spent stuffing ourselves, we chose the winners. Austin heavyweight Torchy’s Tacos got Best Taco (Baja Shrimp). East Side King cleaned up, winning both Fan Favorite and Best on a Bun (Poor Qui’s, with roasted pork belly, hoisin, and cucumber kimchee). Kebabalicious got the Best Vegetarian award, for their falafel kebab, and Mmmpanadas’ Traditional Argentinean empanada won the Best Ethnic category. Best Dessert went to Hey Cupcake, for their Pumpkinator. And MamboBerry took Best Drink, for their strawberry basil smoothie (which was, unfortunately, the only entry in the category but still a big hit in the judges’ tent).

It was nice to see everyone having such a good time, since the overall response to the first Gypsy Picnic, last year, was less than charitable, with complaints about long lines, insufficient food, and a bunch of other annoyances you’d expect from an inaugural endeavor of that size.

But, as Oprah says, when you know better you do better. Other than a dust storm here and there and a real-live dustup between Firefly Pies’ wood-fired oven and the fire marshal, there wasn’t much to complain about this year. So kudos to organizers Tiffany Harelik, the Sustainable Food Center, and C3 Presents. I mean, really, live music, beer, activities for kids, rest stations for dogs, and every major food trailer from the area, parked in one beautiful place for nine hours (which solves two of the biggest obstacles to satisfactory trailer dining right there). What more can you ask for? Here’s to next year.

Tagged: East Side King, food trailers, Gypsy Picnic, Hey Cupcake, Kebabalicious, MamboBerry, Torchy's Tacos