Flying Stove, pioneer of Wichita food truck scene, turns 10 with brick-and-mortar dreams
In 2021, Wichita is full of food trucks serving tacos, cupcakes, burgers, barbecue, hot dogs and coffee from parking lots and street corners.
But just a decade ago — in late 2011 — modern food trucking was not yet a thing in Wichita. The trend had taken off in California around 2008, when the great recession sent many cash-strapped laid-off chefs scrambling to start their own businesses.
But just like most big trends, the concept hadn’t yet migrated to Kansas.
In December 2011, though, two brothers who grew up in Wichita and had spent their 20s in Los Angeles decided to move back home and see what Wichita thought about food trucks. On Dec. 8, 2011, Jeff Schauf and his chef brother Rob parked their new The Flying Stove food truck in the courtyard at The Brickyard, hoping to use the basketball fans swarming Old Town before heading to the Kansas State vs. West Virginia game at Intrust Bank Arena as a test audience.
They were slammed, the brothers remember. People stood in line to try their purple potato duck fat fries, their Thai tacos and their burger with pepperoni jam and red onion marmalade — and many came back after the game for another taste. The Schaufs didn’t get home until 4 a.m.
“It was just nuts,” Jeff said. “We had no idea what to expect or if anyone would even come. I don’t know how word got to the right people, but we were inundated.”
Now, a decade later, the Schauf brothers — considered by many to be the founders of Wichita’s modern food truck scene — are still at it. Much has changed since that night at The Brickyard, and dozens of food entrepreneurs have followed the trail they forged.
.JPG "092814trucks_jg12 (1).JPG")
As their food truck’s 10th birthday arrived, the Schaufs sat down to reminisce about The Flying Stove’s early days, about how much they’ve learned over the last decade and about where they think their groundbreaking business may be headed during its next 10 years of life.
But it’s hard not to think back to the early days, when few Wichitans even knew what a food truck was.
“It’s not just like ‘Field of Dreams,’ “If you build it...’” Jeff said. “If you show up in a new town, people aren’t going to know who you are. We spent the time in Wichita trying to build our craft and hone a following.”
‘He’s the DJ, I’m the rapper’
The Schauf brothers grew up in Wichita in the 1980s and 1990s, and both went to Bishop Carroll Catholic High School. Jeff graduated in 1998, and Rob followed in 2000.
Jeff and Rob — who have an older half brother and a younger brother — were always close. Jeff was the outgoing charmer. Rob was quiet but focused.
After high school, Jeff moved to Los Angeles to finish school, work in the film industry and be close to the ocean. Rob headed to Le Cordon Bleu culinary school Austin.
When he was finished, Rob joined his brother in L.A. and got jobs working with some of California’s top chefs, including Govind Armstrong at Table 8 and Andrew Kirschner at Wilshire. But eventually, both brothers decided they were ready for a change.
“We both had gotten to a point where we were completely burned out on what we were both doing,” Jeff said. “Also, around that time, food trucks were starting to become popular, and it seemed like realistic step as opposed to starting a restaurant.”
Inspired by contemporaries like Roy Choi, a U.S. food truck pioneer who opened his Kogi BBQ Taco Truck in Los Angeles in 2008, Rob and Jeff decided they wanted to start a Mexican food truck. They decided they’d do it in Australia, where Jeff had previously spent some time.
They packed up and flew there, but after two months — most spent fighting near nonstop rain — they realized their plan wasn’t realistic. There was too much red tape to navigate in Australia, which really had no food trucks at the time. Plus, because of the recession, the Australian dollar was weak and the brothers realized they’d lose value on any money they took there.
“Not to mention that the steering wheel was on the other side,” Jeff said.
Their best move, they decided, was to go back home to Wichita, where they knew people and had connections. They located a truck in Alabama that had been used as a delivery truck but was in pristine condition. They bought it and took it to Houston to have its interior designed.
Rob would be the cook, obviously, and he set about creating a menu that allowed him to experiment with seasonal ingredients and different flavor combinations. At first, he decided, they’d offer a new menu every week, though that labor-intensive plan was quickly scrapped and menus started sticking around for several weeks.
Jeff, who until the truck’s first service had never worked in a kitchen and didn’t speak his brother’s chef language, would be the front man, and his easy-going personality and natural public relations instincts would help the truck become a fast fan favorite.
“He’s the DJ, I’m the rapper,” Jeff said with a laugh.
By December 2011, they were ready to roll.
Food on the fly
Buoyed by their success at The Brickyard, the brothers decided to start taking their truck to the people. They wanted to be sure they followed Wichita’s food truck rules, but at the time, there really weren’t any. Wichita had for years been home to various taco trucks, but this was something new. The Schauf’s started with an “ask forgiveness not permission” approach.
They began taking the truck to Old Town hoping to attract an after-bar crowd, hitting the streets around 11 p.m. or midnight. But it was an extra cold December, and they quickly learned that people leaving the bars wanted to get to their cars quickly. Stopping for 2 a.m. duck fat fries wasn’t a priority.
So they decided to focus on lunch instead and took their truck — wrapped in eye-catching bright orange vinyl and decorated with a logo of a stove with blue wings — out almost every day. They’d look for public parking spots where customers could safely cue up at the truck’s window, spots that weren’t too close to other restaurants. Some of their earliest services were in the Farm and Art Market Plaza in Old Town and in Riverside Park, where they started drawing big Sunday crowds of hungry fans who wanted to try Rob’s gourmet burgers, Asian-influenced tacos and legend-in-the-making truffle fries.
.JPG "IMG_flying_stove_fries_4_1_PH5CB833_L143349335 (1).JPG")
“We had this idea that we’d serve every different part of the city,” Jeff said. “We’d hit the west side up and the north side and south side and east side and everywhere in between. We just wanted to be available.”
It wasn’t long before word-of-mouth buzz grew around The Flying Stove, and Wichita foodies would line up in the cold to wait for their food. It also wasn’t long before The Flying Stove had company. Shortly after it hit the streets, several other local food truckers rolled out their new rigs, including Michael Awesome-Noyes’ MMM Sandwiches, Doug and Jodi Buchanan’s B.S. Sandwich Press, Summer Schoenhals’ Cake Face and Warren and Ann Tandoc’s Espresso to Go Go. (Of those, only Flying Stove and Espresso to Go Go is still operating in Wichita, and the latter transitioned to a brick-and-mortar spot in 2014.)
When The Flying Stove got competition, though, is when things started to really come together, the Schafs said. The food truck owners decided to band together and formed a loose coalition to help each other understand and navigate the rules that the city and county were tweaking to help regulate the growing food truck scene.
The Schaufs set the tone, and they wanted the tone to be friendly.
“I remember that I wanted to make sure that it was an inclusive environment. We didn’t want it to turn it into a cutthroat situation,” Jeff said. “Instead of that, we kind of joined together and tried to help each other out as much as possible. There was more or less a lot of camaraderie.”
.jpg "IMG_1114 (1).jpg")
Their fellow food truckers noticed, said Lisa Palacios, who in 2014 opened Funky Monkey Munchies food truck with her husband, Eddi. She remembers that when they first got the idea, they went out to find other local trucks, especially The Flying Stove.
“We hunted them down and tried out their truck, and later we introduced ourselves to them,” she said. “Jeff said, ‘Oh, welcome aboard,’ and he was super welcoming. We felt like we were doing a good thing once we spoke to him and felt how welcoming he was.”
In 2016, Jeff and a few other tuckers officially formed the Wichita Food Truck Coalition, a group that would have officers, regular meetings, membership dues and goals. He served as the president.
Brick-and-mortar goals
Much has changed since the Schaufs moved back home to give food trucking a try.
Dozens and dozens of trucks have opened, and dozens and dozens have closed. The food truck population in Wichita is always “contracting and expanding,” Jeff said, with some making it a ways down the road and others quickly running out of gas.
Where people find trucks also has changed. In 2013, the Schaufs founded Wichita’s first and longest-running food truck rally — Food Trucks at the Fountain — which for years has drawn dozens of trucks to the Wichita WaterWalk on the final Sunday of each month. (Several other regular and semi-regular rallies followed.)
The ICT Urban Pop-Up Park, which opened in 2014, was also a reliable place to find food trucks downtown, but developer Michael Ramsey and his Bokeh Development closed it in August 2020.
The pandemic has had a big impact on the food truck scene, Jeff said. The rallies didn’t happen in 2020 because of COVID-19, and when they came back in the spring of 2021, attendance was spotty. Truckers are now often finding their own permanent parking spots or focusing on private events. The scene is more fragmented now, Schauf said.
The brothers have also changed how they do business. Lately, they’ve mostly stuck to the west side, where their commercial kitchen is, doing pop up events at Kookaburra Coffee at 9414 W. Central or Natural Grocers at 10520 W. 13th St. Their focus has also drifted to corporate and private events, and as much as 70% of their time is now spent on those catering jobs, which don’t require as much staff. (The Schaufs, like all other food businesses, are struggling these days to find people to work for them.)
They still love their truck, but after 10 years, it’s getting older and slower. And so are they, the brothers joke. They admit they dream about getting out of the extreme hot and cold that food truckers must endure and finding a brick-and-mortar spot where they can continue serving their food. They’ve talked about it for years.
“I feel like there’s no way we won’t open some kind of a restaurant one day,” Jeff said. “I just don’t know when that is.... You never know — 2022 maybe will be the year.”
The Schaufs don’t have big plans to celebrate the truck’s 10th anniversary, though early next year they may introduce a limited run of shirts, hoodies and hats marking the occasion.
But they have been spending time thinking about how far they’ve come, Jeff says, and about all of the interesting people they’ve met, from customers to fellow truckers to food suppliers to tortilla makers.
“I’m glad we did it in Wichita — no regrets,” he said. “It’s been a really cool journey.”
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 12:51 PM with the headline "Flying Stove, pioneer of Wichita food truck scene, turns 10 with brick-and-mortar dreams."
.jpg)