Smashboyz started beneath a tent in downtown Chattanooga and grew into a food truck with a following hungry for smashburgers, premium hot dogs, grilled cheese and tallow fries. Now customers are already asking what comes next.

By Sara Turney

There are probably easier ways to start a food business than cooking beneath a tent outside a downtown Chattanooga nightclub until the early hours of the morning.

Smashboyz did it anyway.

Before the food truck, before customers started asking about a permanent location, and before the business developed the following it has today, Sam and the Smashboyz team were serving food to a late night crowd while still working other jobs.

“We started this under a tent in a raging night club, not being able to go to bed till 4:30 AM most nights, and working 2 other jobs while doing that as well,” Sam says.

It was not glamorous.

It was, however, a beginning.

They were tired of corporate jobs. They wanted to serve food. So instead of waiting for the perfect setup, they started with the setup they had.

Eventually, the tent became a food truck.

And Smashboyz found its crowd.

Start with the smashburger

The name gives you a clue about where to begin.

Smashboyz built its menu around smashburgers, the kind of food that makes sense coming through the window of a truck with a name like Smashboyz.

There is nothing timid about it.

The menu also includes premium hot dogs, grilled cheese and tallow fries, giving customers a lineup firmly planted in comfort food territory.

This is food meant to satisfy.

The smashburger is the natural introduction to the business, but the menu gives regulars room to find their own order. A hot dog person can stay a hot dog person. Grilled cheese has never needed much defending. Fries belong beside nearly everything.

For Smashboyz, the food is what turned those first late nights into something customers began looking for.

That matters.

A clever name can get somebody's attention once.

Good food is what gets them back to the window.

From a tent to a truck

Every established food truck has a version of itself that existed before the polished one customers know.

Smashboyz remembers theirs clearly.

There was the tent. There were the nightclub crowds. There were nights ending around 4:30 in the morning. There were other jobs to work while the business was still finding its feet.

Those early days gave the team a chance to learn the business by doing it.

They cooked.

They served.

They figured out what worked.

They kept going.

Eventually, Smashboyz made the move into a food truck, giving the business a home that could move with it.

That transition is easy to summarize in a sentence. Living through it is something else.

For the people behind the business, the truck represents how far an idea has traveled from those first nights under a tent.

Today, the question customers are asking has changed.

They want to know when Smashboyz is opening a restaurant.

When customers start asking for more

There are worse problems for a food truck to have than customers wanting a permanent place to find it.

Sam hears the requests for a brick and mortar location.

He is not dismissing the idea.

He also isn't rushing it.

There are things he wants “dialed in” before Smashboyz takes that step.

That answer says a lot about the business.

The team has already shown it is willing to work hard and take a chance. They started with a tent and built their way into a truck.

Now the goal is not simply to get bigger.

It is to get better while they grow.

A permanent location would be a major next chapter for Smashboyz, and Sam wants the business ready for it.

Customers may be impatient.

That is probably a compliment.

Festival food is supposed to be fun

A Smashboyz menu feels particularly at home at a festival.

There is something about walking through an event with music playing, people everywhere and the smell of food coming from a row of trucks that makes a burger and fries seem like an especially good idea.

For mobile food businesses, those events are also an opportunity to meet customers who might never have encountered the truck otherwise.

Someone walks up because the name catches their attention.

Someone else sees a burger coming through the window and changes dinner plans immediately.

A regular spots the truck and already knows the order.

That is part of the appeal of festival culture. Food businesses become part of the experience rather than simply somewhere to eat before or after it.

Smashboyz has grown inside that world.

The truck can go where the crowds are, serve people who already know the name and introduce itself to the people who don't.

One order at a time, that is how a food truck develops a following.

Building a business when the window is closed

The work does not disappear when the food truck parks.

Sam is open about the difficulty of balancing business and life. Even when Smashboyz is not actively serving, there is usually something connected to the business that needs attention.

That is part of ownership.

Customers see the fun part. They get the burger, the hot dog, the grilled cheese or the fries.

Behind that experience is everything required to make sure the truck can open the window and do it again.

Sam's experience has also given him a straightforward perspective for people thinking about starting something of their own.

Smashboyz did not begin with every piece perfectly in place.

They began by serving food.

The business grew from there.

There is something useful in that for anyone who spends years waiting for a business idea to become perfectly comfortable before taking the first step.

Sometimes the first version is a tent.

What comes next for Smashboyz?

Maybe one day it will be a restaurant.

The customers certainly seem interested.

For now, Smashboyz is still doing what built the following in the first place: serving the food people know them for and continuing to improve the operation behind it.

There is a confidence in not rushing the next chapter.

A business does not have to become something else simply because people like what it is now.

Smashboyz can keep dialing things in.

Customers can keep asking.

And when the time comes, perhaps that brick and mortar conversation will become more than a question.

Until then, there is the truck.

There are smashburgers.

There are premium hot dogs, grilled cheese and tallow fries.

And there is a story that started beneath a tent outside a downtown Chattanooga nightclub with a group of people who were tired of corporate jobs and thought they could build something of their own.

They did.

Now go find out what everybody has been eating.

Meet Smashboyz: Smashburgers, Tallow Fries and a Food Truck That Found Its Following