When you think food trucks, fast, furious and fun tasty food immediately comes to mind; what you don’t expect is impeccably-sourced ingredients and food made to the same exacting standards and precision that you’d find in a starred restaurant. But that’s the case for , a food truck in the Gold Coast hinterland, dishing up full-flavoured Latin American street food - from seven-hour slow-braised pulled pork gorditas with charred pineapple salsa to hand-pressed ricotta-filled empanadas topped with couverture chocolate sauce.
For Trent Mitchell, owner of Little Wahaca, running a mobile food truck business has been a long-time dream. “I’ve wanted to do a food truck for years and I’ve always had an affinity for Latin America - the flavours, the techniques, the whole way of life,” says Mitchell.
His Latino fire was stoked during a five-year stint as head chef of popular Gold Coast tapas bar, Espana, where Mitchell honed his craft, zeroing in on details like using the best possible ingredients.
This ethos is what the food coming out of the mobile Little Wahaca kitchen is built on. Through the truck’s service window, you’ll seen Mitchell hand-pressing tortillas and gorditas to order using a traditional Mexican tortilla press. You’ll see him speedily slicing plantains on a mandolin straight into the fryer as each order comes in, the plantains transforming into golden crisp chips - the perfect scoop for his guauc with chicharrón (pork crackling) laced with housemade smoky hot sauce.
“I wouldn’t want to do something that was more convenient,” says Mitchell. “I’d rather work harder to make a product with care and love.
“If I can’t make something myself, I’ll source the best ingredient I can find to do that dish,” enthuses Mitchell. “My favourite on the menu at the moment is the beef tostadas. I don’t make the tostadas. They’re made by a Mexican family just outside of Byron – – and they’re made from 100 per cent organic masa [maize flour]. We serve them with a smoky creamed corn puree, and a beef braised with mole, then shredded and topped with pickled onion and fresh radish.”
Mitchell’s ethos and hard work has paid off, and business is booming from Byron to Brisbane, for Little Wahaca, which celebrated its one-year birthday in June.
Key to Little Wahaca’s success has been adapting its food to the customers, especially vegan ones. Mitchell has taken some of the most popular menu items and made them vegan friendly, like their pulled pork gorditas.
“For our gordita pastry, which is 50 per cent flour and 50 per cent masa, we’ve been using coconut oil instead of lard [rendered pork fat], which it’s traditionally made with,” explains Mitchell. “I was experimenting with coconut oil and found that the gorditas hold up better when fried and puff up more.
“For our yuca fries – it’s a vegetable between a potato and parsnip that fries up golden and is nice and fluffy on the inside – if we’re at a vegan market, like Lovechild, we serve them with chimichurri, an Argetinian herb sauce, and toasted sesame seeds,” says Mitchell. The vegan sauce replaces the regular chilli cheese sauce made with the Peruvian yellow chilli, amarillo.
Also instrumental to Little Wahaca’s success is that it’s a family affair, with wife Brodie keeping the wheels on the van going round, overseeing the bookings and books, and working front-of-van on the odd occasion too.
Even their one-and-a-half-year-old son, Van, helps out cooking for customers. Check out Van's sous-chef style here:
"We work hard. We do a lot of hours," says Mitchell.
But it all seems to be coming up tacos.
