It’s the last Sunday in March, and the Brother Trucker Commissary in Malden is hopping. Part of the non-profit Triangle complex, the space provides kitchen facilities, refrigeration and freezer space, in what they describe as a “fun but professional atmosphere.” With opening day for Boston’s food truck season less than 48 hours away, “fun” seems a curious choice of words.
“Was I crazy to do this?” Scott Reibling, former Letters to Cleo bass player, one-time Weezer hired hand, and current husband and father asks no one in particular as he moves from his latest endeavor, the decidedly non-musical Stoked Wood Fired Pizza Company’s gleaming red food truck. His smile as he hurries to a walk-in cooler to grab more cheese makes the question rhetorical.
Of course, eventually there will be plenty of questions to come for both Reibling and his partner, Toirm Miller, a former Duck Boat driver with the restaurant game in his blood dating back to his teen years in Connecticut. But at 11:15am on Tuesday, April 1st, some 30 minutes after the Stoked truck has claimed a little street space on Belvidere Street in the Back Bay there’s only question on Miller’s mind.
“So,” he calls out to Stoked’s first ever customer, a local banker named Claude, who admitted he’d been waiting for the truck since first reading about it online, “What do you think?”
Claude was not disappointed, and by the end of that first day the Stoked truck moved 162 pizzas from the 6,000-pound custom wood stove in the back of their truck, and a week later they established a new high with 209 pies served in three hours during the lunch rush at Dewey Square near South Station.
With a number of “dry-runs” under their belts, the Stoked team ran into relatively few hiccups in their first week of being a fully operational pizza station. The one exception being a WiFi breakdown that required staff to write paper tickets by hand versus receiving them electronically from patrons. But all along, truck-to-truck camaraderie was ever-present.
“Everybody’s been super cool,” Miller says of receiving advice from such established rolling kitchen vets like Taco Party and the beloved Mei Mei team. “The coolest part might be that everyone likes trading food, so we’re making pizzas and they’re sending over incredibly delicious food for us to try.”
[NOW OPEN. FIND TRUCK LOCATIONS BY VISITING FACEBOOK.COM/STOKEDWOODFIREDPIZZA]
