Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony Luhrman.
Tony, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started cooking when I was pretty young, probably ten. I’d mess around in the kitchen, make everyone’s steaks on a tiny charcoal grill we had, make french toast for my family on weekends. I didn’t start cooking professionally though, till about 16 when I started helping out with banquets at a country club, I was working at. My first big job was working in BBQ at a place called Cobblestones on the northern outskirts of San Antonio. Everyone there taught me to cook their own dishes (creamed corn, potato salad, peach cobbler, green beans, charro beans, etc.). I learned to smoke meat from a couple of guys on a gigantic rotisserie smoker. It was at that job that I learned the importance or maybe learned of the possibility that making something by hand made a big difference in the way something tasted.
I continued to work in the food industry while I made my way through college and grad school. I was headhunted out of grad school to work at a big software company in the midwest. Working in tech wasn’t a fit for me, but I only learned that lesson after 5 years or so doing it. At that point, I contacted a long-time friend and we started El Topo together. We started El Topo with the mission of serving locally sourced, handmade Mexican food.
Starting a food truck with this particular mission in Houston was a bit risky. Because of the amount of time our food takes to make as well as the cost and rapid spoilage of fresh ingredients, our food costs a bit more than an average taco truck. At first, that was a hard sell, but we eventually won people over and are now one of the most-requested food trucks in Houston.
The other passion I had when starting the food truck was to create an atmosphere in people’s homes that was perfect for sharing a meal and focusing on the food. What I mean is: oftentimes dinners (even fancy ones) are just rated by: 1) Does the look fancy? and 2) Does it taste good? What I’m after is people learning something about what they’re eating, trying something new, tasting something that was truly handmade, and sharing in an old-school dining experience. Since the very beginning, El Topo has cooked multi-course meals and served them in people’s homes to groups of people ranging from 8-40 and has always had success with our stated mission.
I’d be remiss to not mention the folks at White Oak Music Hall who’ve called on us numerous times throughout our journey. Many of the musicians that come through Houston have specific tastes and dietary restrictions and WOMH originally called us to cook a vegetarian menu for the band M83. Since then, we’ve cooked for the Flaming Lips, CHVRCHES, Sturghill Simpson, The Pixies, The Lumineers, Gogol Bordello, and many others. Each time, it was an absolute pleasure to provide our brand of fresh, handmade food for road weary artists and crew.
El Topo’s next adventure will be a restaurant, though timing and location are still up in the air at this point.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Owning your own business is rarely a smooth road. Luckily, I have a lot of honest, intelligent people in my life that give me feedback and advice constantly.
Biggest Challenges:
Sourcing/Pricing
Because El Topo has always been for local farms and handmade food, finding ingredients and charging an appropriate amount for our food has been tough. Oftentimes, we can’t buy enough food to serve throughout the week, so we’re forced to come up with new menu items to reflect the availability of ingredients. The difference in the food we cook starts with the excellent quality of the ingredients we use, but we still have to convince people to buy something so they can actually taste that difference!
Making a Schedule
Finding a place to park a food truck and serve food is quite tricky, possibly even trickier than actually cooking the food. In Houston, we have a bunch of regular spots for food trucks, but they are mainly all controlled by a select few individuals that determine which food trucks can park there and which can’t. Finding these people and endearing yourself to them is a tedious process.
Permitting/Legal Stuff
Getting a food truck permitted is quite difficult. Last time I checked, there are 1600+ food trucks in the greater Houston area and there were 4 health inspectors for all those trucks. To even renew your inspection of a food truck, you have to show up at 4 am at the public health office just to wait in line for hours just to be seen. The rules and regulations for what passes inspection are convoluted, ambiguous, and almost impossible to find. Navigating this broken system was a huge, time-consuming challenge that I’m not eager to repeat.
Please tell us about El Topo.
El Topo specializes in hand-made interior Mexican street food. Our ingredients are almost entirely locally sourced. We specialize in handmade (to order) tortillas, barbacoa (from 44 Farms beef), and seasonal vegan cookery. I am most proud of all the conversions we’ve made over our three years in business. By this I mean: I’m so happy when someone eats one of our tacos and asks me why it’s so good. I usually answer: “the only secret is that we do it right.” And we do. We source our food responsibly and apply age-old methods of cooking to those ingredients. I’ll give recipes to anyone that wants them.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I always loved Sunday family dinners at my grandma’s house. It’s such a simple thing to cook a meal for a bunch of people and perhaps it’s rare now because it’s relatively speaking, a lot more difficult than it used to be. Meaning: Uber Eats makes getting food to your house so easy that cooking, by comparison, is really hard.
But, I loved the handmade pies, the roasts, the chunky mashed potatoes, and the banter.
Contact Info:
- Address: 3526 Cloverdale St
- Website: http://www.topotruck.com
- Phone: 210-867-0380
- Email: tony@topotruck.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/topotruck
- Facebook: facebook.com/topotruck
Image Credit:
Bethany Brewster
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