A NEW FOOD TRUCK BLENDS HONDURAN AND CREOLE FLAVORS IN AUSTIN

An Austin chef is working on opening her own food truck dedicated to Honduran Creole cuisine this year. Chef Grace Aguilar will open Five O Four somewhere in Austin in the fall fo 2024.

Through Five O Four, Aguilar wants to showcase who she is — a first-generation Honduran who was raised in New Orleans surrounded by Creole cuisine. There are her boudin pastelitos, where she would use the Cajun sausage for meat pies. Her baleadas — where flour tortillas are layered with beans — come with roasted pork. There will be crawfish boils and oyster roasts, as well as dishes with coconuts, plantains, and tropical Caribbean flavors.

Aguilar emphasizes that the truck — whose name is the area code for New Orleans — is Honduran Creole rather than Honduran Louisianan intentionally so. “Honduras, just like Louisiana, has Creole people and an African diaspora that most do not know about,” she writes to Eater.

While growing up in New Orleans, Aguilar often spent time at her godmother’s restaurant, Delominco’s (later on, Emeril Lagasse purchased the business in 1997, but then ultimately closed it in 2022). But food wasn’t part of her original plan. Originally, she studied political science in college and wanted to go to law school. She moved to Austin and started cooking on her own because, as she writes, it “felt like something was missing so I began cooking because I wanted a sense of Louisiana in my home.” That’s when she decided to go to culinary school instead in 2019 and, at the same time, worked at downtown Austin Mexican restaurant La Condesa at the same time.

To help grow Aguilar’s culinary career and open her dream food truck, she’s won various scholarships and grants along the way. She received Bristol-Joseph Culinary Scholarship Fund — created by Austin chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph in conjunction with the Greater Black Chamber of Commerce as a way of supporting Black culinary students — in 2021, which came with an internship at Caribbean restaurant Canje. In the meantime, she’s worked as a private chef and also shares her own cooking videos, culinary historical information, writing, food styling, and her own electronic cookbook through Better Say Grace. She’s also currently working at Japanese Mexican restaurant Ramen del Barrio.

In 2013, Aguilar won a culinary grant from the Les Dames d’Escoffier’s Austin chapter in 2023 to attend a bread-making class in France. Then she won another grant from the Texas Food & Wine Alliance in 2024 to help buy equipment for the truck. in February, She also held a fundraising event at still-forthcoming Black community space and cafe Origin Studio House, as well as participated in other events there.

For Five O Four, Aguilar launched a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for the trailer, permits, licenses, and equipment. She’s looking for $50,000.

Though Aguilar doesn’t have a location in mind for Five O Four, she know she wants to share the food she had and remixed whens she was growing up in New Orleans with Austin while also supporting communities too.

2024-05-07T21:10:20Z dg43tfdfdgfd