New food truck features ‘real food by real chefs’

Oct. 31, 2018

The newest food truck in the Sioux Falls area is getting a late-season start but hopes to build its brand for next year and for catering jobs over the winter.

Dean Marshall of Harrisburg and Allen Wright of Worthing made their debut with The Big Orange Truck at the three-day ZooBoo event for the Great Plains Zoo.

“Our first event was 10,000 people,” Marshall said. “I thought it went fantastic. We had a couple of hiccups on the truck, but no one outside knew it was happening.”

The team created a special menu for the event with items such as corndog “mummy dogs,” chislic “brains” and apple cider “vampire blood.”

Typical offerings will draw on locally sourced ingredients and made-from-scratch foods.

“We’re both chefs. He’s classically trained, and I went to culinary school,” Marshall said. “It’s going to be real food by real chefs. … The menu will change weekly based on what’s available to us.”

Wright lives on a farm, so they’re planning to use produce from his garden next year. Marshall will plant a garden in his backyard, likely with melons because his soil is more sandy.

“We want to eliminate fillers from the food,” Marshall said. “Everything we do we want to cook by hand, so we know what’s in it. … We’re not taking the easy route.”

This week, The Big Orange Truck will be downtown Friday night for First Friday. Marshall and Wright are planning to serve made-to-order ramen with a choice of pheasant or venison, Cubano sandwiches with fries, beef chislic, hummus with smoked veggies and fish tacos with a mango, pineapple and serrano pepper salsa.

Next week’s schedule includes lunches at Carsforsale.com on Tuesday and downtown on Wednesday and late-night food for the downtown bar crowd Friday and Saturday night. The Big Orange Truck will post locations and menus on its social media accounts.

Through winter, Marshall and Wright hope to have The Big Orange Truck out for lunch at businesses a couple of times a week and also do events and catering. They’ll focus on smaller catering jobs, such as business lunches for 20 to 30 people, and not 300-person events, Marshall said. The chefs also will cook at private house parties and do small-group cooking classes at customers’ homes.

The food truck’s former use was as S Bar S BBQ, which had been in Sioux Falls a few years ago before the owner, Smity Smith, moved to Nebraska. He returned in 2017 and planned to restart the truck last summer, but health issues prevented that.

Fox Print gave the truck its new look, which might be replicated with the chefs’ long-term plans for their business.

“We’d like to create an empire of trucks,” Marshall said. Each truck would have a different color and focus. While The Big Orange Truck is high-end fine dining, The Big Green Truck, for example, would serve vegetarian meals, and The Big Red Truck would be strictly meats like jerky, he said.

Marshall entered the concept in a Newchip contest for funding and has made it to the second round.

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New food truck features ‘real food by real chefs’

The newest food truck in the Sioux Falls area is getting a late-season start but hopes to build its brand for next year and for catering jobs over the winter.

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