May 23, 2022

A new food truck featuring Thai dishes from owner Meg Brauer’s native home will have a regular schedule in Harrisburg and Tea with added appearances in Sioux Falls.

Thai Dakota will serve stir-fry noodle, red and green curries and fried rice entrees. For a “kitchen test run” Saturday, Brauer served pad Thai, spicy holy basil, cashew chicken and Thai fried rice.

There will be salads and appetizers such as fresh summer rolls.

The food truck’s debut will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Ace Hardware in Harrisburg.

“All of my menu will be chicken,” Brauer said. “It will be easier, and it cooks faster. Everyone can have chicken. Every religion, every nationality can have chicken.”

She will have tofu as an option for vegetarians.

For drinks, she’ll serve Thai tea and green iced tea, both with or without boba, and eventually Thai iced coffee.

“It will be a little different than what you get at Starbucks,” she said.

Her hot pink food truck is eye-catching. She changed some of the graphics, but it looks much the same as it did when she and her husband, Jake, bought it this spring in Oregon and drove it home themselves.

They were parked outside a store, and “one person stopped and said ‘Are you serving now?’ We had to tell him we just bought it a couple of hours ago.”

Brauer grew up helping her family with their food cart in the eastern part of Thailand.

“When I got off from school, I would help my aunt and my mom. I would serve food to people, wash dishes, clean tables, whatever a small kid can do to help.”

As a teenager, she attended boarding school and developed her cooking skills.

“All the ladies in the dorm, we don’t know what we are going to do with our free time, so we’d start cooking. In the dorm, there were a lot of people from all over Thailand. I have a chance to try foods from a different part of Thailand, and I would share some of my recipes with them.”

She came to the United States in 2014 as part of an au pair program and married Jake a year later. They moved from Texas to his home state of Nebraska and then to South Dakota in 2020.

Jake is a truck driver, and she’s self-employed as an Amazon third-party seller.

“I find good deals in bulk, and then I sell a pack of two or three,” Brauer said. “There’s a few private label items too that we have like a party box that holds Solo cups with a marker.”

They live on an acreage between Sioux Falls and Harrisburg, and they also own a home in Sioux Falls that they rent out through Airbnb.

Cooking, however, is her passion, and she’s looking forward to sharing her food with people in the area.

Thai Dakota will be at the Harrisburg Ace Hardware every Thursday, serving either lunch or dinner as Brauer determines which is the best for customers. On Fridays, she’ll be at the Dollar Fresh in Tea from 4 to 8 p.m., beginning this week. Wednesday’s regular spot might be lunch at the Dollar Fresh in Harrisburg, but that won’t start until June 8.

She’s getting licensed to operate in Sioux Falls but won’t be able to serve fried foods until she upgrades the truck’s fire suppression system to meet the city’s new code.

Updates to the schedule and other events will be posted on Facebook.

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