Jason Carillo built Mama O’s Sarap Stop around the Filipino food his mother made for him, his faith and a belief that the best meals create more than customers. They create conversations, memories and, every once in a while, the unmistakable feeling that you have somehow found your way home.

By Sara Turney

Jason Carillo says his lumpia is a 10 out of 10.

He is right.

I do not say that casually. I am an award winning chef and international culinary instructor, and some of the young adults I had the privilege of teaching came from the Philippines. They taught me plenty in return.

One stop at Mama O’s Sarap Stop took me somewhere I had not expected to go.

Suddenly, I was back in a dorm kitchen at two in the morning with my students, learning Tagalog over beers and experiencing some of the best food I have ever eaten. Those were the kinds of nights when teacher and student became considerably less important than the people gathered around the food, laughing, talking and passing something across the table that you absolutely had to try.

Food can do that.

A flavor can collapse years and miles before you have had time to understand what is happening.

Jason’s did.

That is why I think there is a better way to describe Mama O’s than simply calling it a Filipino food truck.

Mama O’s is a master class in welcome home.

Jason accomplishes that with lumpia, adobo, pancit, turon and mango slushies, but the food is only part of what makes the experience work. There is Jason himself, with enough personality to fill the space around his truck, an obvious love for feeding people and a faith that informs the way he understands what he has been given.

And then there is Mama O.

The food Jason serves is connected to dishes his mother made for him. Those memories became the foundation of a business that now has an extraordinary way of pulling memories out of other people too.

Jason has a phrase for what he wants to happen at his window.

“Interactions not just transactions!”

Spend a little time there and you understand that he means it.

First things first, get the lumpia

Ask Jason what you should order and apparently there is only one acceptable place to begin.

“My lumpia. Its a 10/10...what, you havent heard? You better ask somebody!”

Then, in case there was any ambiguity:

“Lumpia!! Its my hook! Once you try one, you'll have ten!”

Normally, I would be suspicious of a man reviewing his own lumpia with this much enthusiasm.

Very fortunately for me, I have eaten Jason’s lumpia.

The man has a point.

It is a 10 out of 10.

For someone unfamiliar with lumpia, it is a Filipino spring roll, but reducing it to a definition misses much of the pleasure. There is the crisp wrapper, the savory filling and the particular danger of telling yourself you are only going to have one.

Jason has apparently built part of his business model around knowing you are lying to yourself.

The rest of the menu gives you plenty of reasons to stay.

There is adobo, pancit and a cold mango slushy, along with a dessert Jason describes rather modestly as a plantain eggroll.

That would be the turon.

Except at Mama O’s, Jason serves that turon with vanilla ice cream, cinnamon sugar, pink Himalayan salt and cayenne pepper.

Sweetness, salt, spice, heat, cold and crunch all show up to the same party.

This is not food Jason approaches timidly.

Then again, nothing about Jason suggests timidity was ever going to be the house style.

Mama O is where the story really begins

The food did not become meaningful to Jason when he opened a business.

It was meaningful before there was a business to open.

“I love to share some of my favorite dishes that my mother used to make for me,” Jason says.

That is the foundation beneath Mama O’s.

He is not simply selling a cuisine he decided would make a good concept. He is sharing dishes connected to his mother and to his own experience with Filipino food.

That makes every new customer a little more personal.

Someone who has never eaten Filipino food before gives Jason the opportunity to introduce them to something he loves.

Someone who already knows the food may bring an entirely different experience to the window.

They remember something.

They tell him about it.

Maybe it is a dish they ate growing up. Maybe it reminds them of someone. Maybe they spent time somewhere Filipino food was part of their life and have not tasted it in years.

Jason wants those stories.

“I love to share some of my favorite dishes that my mother used to make for me,” he says, “as well as sharing my story and hearing about your stories and memories regarding Filipino foods!”

Food goes out the window.

Stories come back through it.

Interactions, not just transactions

Plenty of businesses talk about customer service.

Jason is after something a little different.

He genuinely enjoys the interaction.

“Interactions not just transactions!” is how he describes the mission, and the distinction becomes more meaningful when you understand how he talks about the people coming to his truck.

He does not want to process an order and move immediately to the next number. He wants Mama O’s to be a place where people can talk, laugh, ask about the food and share something about themselves too.

That does not require every lunch to become a profound cultural exchange.

Sometimes a guy just wants ten lumpia.

Jason can work with that.

But the possibility of connection is always there, and Jason has come to see that as part of the purpose of what he is building.

He says Mama O’s has reminded him how much food can bring people together and how important the little joys in life can be.

There is something especially fitting about that realization coming through food connected to his mother.

Jason received those memories through a family table.

Now he gets to create new ones for somebody else.

Faith sits at the center of it

Jason speaks about God without treating faith like a decorative part of his biography.

It is foundational to the way he understands Mama O’s.

“Mama O’s is truly a gift from God and was created to fulfill a purpose which is just now being realized by me,” he says.

There is humility in that last part.

Jason does not claim that he had every piece figured out from the beginning. The purpose has become clearer while he has been doing the work.

He wanted the mobility and freedom of running a food trailer. He wanted to share Filipino cuisine and culture. He wanted to make people happy.

Then he started noticing what happened when he actually did it.

People connected with him.

People connected with the food.

People told stories.

A business he needed to make a living began giving Jason opportunities to serve people in another sense of the word.

His faith gives him a framework for understanding that.

The truck is work, certainly.

It is also something he considers a blessing.

And Jason seems determined to enjoy that blessing loudly.

He wants his favorites to become your favorites

Jason has a line for that too.

“I look forward to feeding your face and watching my faves become your faves!”

It is difficult to imagine that sentence coming from a carefully focus grouped restaurant brand.

Thank goodness.

Mama O’s works because Jason is all over it.

His humor is there. His mother is there. His Filipino heritage is there. His faith is there.

His confidence in the lumpia is definitely there.

That makes introducing people to Filipino food feel less like a lesson and more like an invitation.

Come over here.

Try this.

Now try this.

No, seriously, get the lumpia.

That kind of hospitality can be particularly effective at a festival, where someone may have arrived with no idea what they planned to eat.

A food truck has only a few moments to catch someone’s attention.

Jason tends to make good use of them.

The food is also a way of sharing culture

Jason is clear that Mama O’s has a cultural purpose alongside the business one.

He wants to share Filipino cuisine and culture while making people happy.

No single food truck needs to represent the entirety of Filipino cuisine. What Mama O’s can do is something far more personal and, in many ways, more meaningful.

Jason can introduce people to the dishes he knows, the flavors he loves and the food connected to his own mother.

Culture becomes powerful through that specificity.

A dish matters because someone actually cooked it for you.

A recipe matters because somebody remembers eating it.

A business becomes interesting because there is a real person behind the menu who can tell you why this particular food made it onto the truck.

For Mama O’s, that person is Jason.

Behind Jason is the influence of his mother.

And on the other side of the window is whoever happens to walk up next with a story of their own.

Then Jason leaves the food truck and goes competitive shooting

Here is where the profile takes a turn.

Ask Jason what he does when he is not cooking Filipino food and talking to customers, and you discover that one of his hobbies is competitive shooting.

“I basically race against the clock with firearms,” he says.

Of course he does.

There is something almost comically appropriate about finding out that the man operating a fast moving food truck also chooses a hobby built around precision, focus and a clock.

It is also a reminder that the people behind vendor windows have entire lives customers may never know about.

Jason is not simply “the lumpia guy,” even if he would probably be perfectly happy for you to remember the lumpia.

There is more to him than the menu, which is precisely why these conversations with vendors matter.

You stop long enough and people surprise you.

Jason has a tendency to do that.

Find the truck before Jason feeds somebody else your lumpia

Because Mama O’s is mobile, customers need to know where Jason is going to be.

He can be found through the Dadbod Go App, where customers can check the truck’s location and find out where Mama O’s is serving.

There is also one date Jason is particularly excited about.

August 29 at Tennessee Riverpark.

Mama O’s Sarap Stop will be at the Chattanooga World Food Truck Festival, putting Jason exactly where this business makes sense: surrounded by food, people, independent vendors and plenty of customers deciding what they are going to try next.

For someone who believes in interactions rather than transactions, a food truck festival is a pretty good room to work.

And for someone who wants Chattanooga eating more Filipino food, it is an opportunity to put lumpia into a lot of hands.

Jason appears ready.

Welcome home

There are meals you enjoy and meals you remember.

Every so often, you find one that takes you somewhere.

That is what happened to me at Mama O’s.

Jason could not have known what memories were sitting on the other side of his food truck window when I ordered. He did not know that his cooking would send me back to those late nights with my Filipino students, laughing in a dorm kitchen, learning bits of Tagalog over beers and being welcomed into food and culture they were generous enough to share with me.

He just fed me.

Maybe that is the beautiful part.

Jason talks about Mama O’s being a gift from God and about slowly understanding the purpose behind what he has been given. He talks about his mother, about sharing Filipino cuisine and about wanting interactions rather than transactions.

I think he is already doing exactly that.

Because hospitality at its best is not performance.

It is recognition.

It is someone putting food in front of you and, whether they know it or not, communicating something very simple:

There is room for you here.

Eat.

Stay awhile.

Tell me your story.

Jason has taken food his mother made for him and turned it into a way of creating that feeling for other people. Some will come to Mama O’s already knowing lumpia, adobo, pancit and turon. Others will be meeting those foods for the first time.

Somebody else may take a bite and unexpectedly remember a kitchen thousands of miles away.

That person was me.

So yes, Jason.

Your lumpia is a 10 out of 10.

But the thing I will remember most about Mama O’s is not a score.

It is that for a few minutes, standing at a food truck in Tennessee, I was back in that dorm kitchen at two in the morning.

And somehow, I was home.

Mama O’s Sarap Stop is a master class in welcome home.

Meet Mama O’s Sarap Stop: A Master Class in Welcome Home