Dallas Shaw
As part of my story about how Nashville restaurants are reacting to the “new normal” of post-pandemic dining, I spoke with several local hospitality pros about what they were seeing in the industry. One of the experts I consulted was Dallas Shaw, who operates both the Hoss’ Loaded Burgers food truck and a brick-and-mortar restaurant in Nolensville. His perspectives were unique and illuminating, but didn’t necessarily fit in with the experiences that other Nashville food and bev workers were encountering, so I decided to give him a separate venue to share his reflections here on Bites.
He discovered that his diversified business was a godsend during the teeth of the pandemic. “I’m glad I had a year opened as a brick-and-mortar before COVID hit, but the food truck was the lifeline," Shaw tells the Scene. "It helped fill in the gaps with very little overhead." Although he never had to shut down completely under the different regulations of Williamson County, he did shift to a carryout-only model for several months. With no large events to cater out of his truck and no workers to feed outside of shuttered office buildings, Shaw found a new solution.
“Some people that only had a truck lost everything," says Shaw. "We were all looking for anything we could. We discovered neighborhoods and HOAs were looking for someone to come feed them while they were quarantining, and [we] started dinner service as a nice extra revenue source. We’re still booking 12 to 15 neighborhoods on a weekly or biweekly basis and hoping it’ll stick around.”
With the rise of carryout service at so many restaurants where diners would probably have never considered ordering to-go before the pandemic, you can almost treat any eatery like a food truck. Two years ago, who would have thought about ordering a take-out menu from Husk, for example, and chowing down on it in your car in the parking lot like a quick Chick-fil-A run? But that’s exactly what many of us found ourselves doing in the past year.
Shaw still believes there are advantages to grabbing and going from an experienced food-truck operator. “It’s about the freshness of the food," he explains. "We’re used to making food that is ready to go quickly and handing it hot out the window to our customers." Indeed, many traditional restaurants discovered that the dining experience from delivery and carryout services just didn’t present their cuisine in the best light.
Shaw did fortunately sign up for DoorDash delivery service a month before COVID struck, and he saw that option become a big portion of his sales during the pandemic, both through delivery and carryout. He still enjoys traveling to gatherings of food trucks as part of his normal business. “Having a group of us together creates sort of an event,” he says. “Multiple food trucks means that you can choose both savory and sweet together. There’s been a successful food truck park on weekends at The Marketplace in East Nashville and the weekly Deaderick Street food truck round-up has started up again. Now that more state and Metro employees are coming back to work downtown, it’s started to feel normal again.”
Not only does Shaw like to take a turn on the truck every now and then, it’s good for the bottom line and his employees. He explains, “I enjoy doing what I started out with. There’s very little overhead with the truck, and labor is only about 5 percent of the cost. And that’s only when we’re open. It’s also an incentive for our hard-working employees to get to go out on the truck, because the tips are split between fewer people.”
At his Nolensville outpost, Shaw faces different staffing difficulties because of his unique labor force. “We intentionally chose Nolensville in part because we thought it would be easier to find people to work. Almost all of our staff is 19 and under, so every August we lose them to college. We pay well, but high schoolers don’t have to make as much money to be happy. But [scheduling during] proms and graduations can be difficult.”
While he knows that he is lucky to have a fairly stable work force and that his business is bouncing back strong, Shaw definitely keeps one eye on the griddle and one eye on the future. “We were up 74 percent Sunday over Sunday last month, and we’ll need to staff up more as we see more dine-in customers. In another month it may be different, but I’m hopeful!”
