This Food Truck Serves New Orleans Classics, From Boudin to Beignets

If you’ve ever been to New Orleans, then you likely have memories of trying your first po’boy, beignet or bowl of gumbo. So does Thomas Hunt, the owner of the Boudin and Beignets food truck. “You can always take it back to your childhood, right? My parents bounced around with jobs and stuff. We were all over the South and grew up eating Southern food,” he explains. “My love for Cajun definitely came from that.”

Hunt spent most of his twenties and early thirties working various positions in restaurants in East Texas and Louisiana. “I did all of it…anywhere from the kitchen manager, front-of-house manager, to my name on the front of the building. So, that includes washing the dishes, waiting tables, whatever we got to do to keep it up and going,” he recalls.

Although Hunt was well on his way to a successful career in restaurants, he eventually decided to leave the industry and enter the corporate world, which is how he landed in Denver. “I went to work for a car manufacturing company. Found a good job [in Colorado] and stuck with that. Then in 2018, they had cut-downs toward the end of the year. I was one of the names on the list.”

Without a job, he had to consider his next move. “My wife was like, well, if you want to go back into the food industry, let’s do something that we can afford, because a restaurant is a major expense,” he says. That’s when the idea of a food truck was born.

But Hunt still hadn’t nailed down the concept. “I have a son and daughter, and we were watching the cooking show Beat Bobby Flay, and my son asked me, ‘If you were going to beat Bobby Flay, what would you beat Bobby Flay at?’ And I said, ‘Gumbo,'” he remembers. His wife was encouraging: “She was like, ‘Well, there it is. There’s your answer. You got it right there,'” he adds.

The truck itself was ready to roll in October 2019, with a design meant to evoke the French Quarter, but Hunt was still in the midst of recipe testing. Then the pandemic hit, so it rested in storage until it officially launched last May. Now, eight months into operation, Hunt is having the time of his life with his new venture.

“The most popular item right now is the Cajun poutine,” he says, which consists of fries topped with roasted pork, cheese curds and brown gravy. Other standouts include the fried Boudin Balls made with sausage and rice, po’boys, gumbo and beignets, which the truck serves up with rotating sauces, like caramel cranberry and orange cinnamon.

“We’re coming to a brewery near you,” Hunt promises, so follow @boudinandbeignets on Instagram to find out where to catch this taste of the South next.