Forget about the Summer Olympics. Those with an appetite for nail-biting competition need look no farther than the blocks surrounding 7th Street and Marquette Avenue S. in downtown Minneapolis. Starting most weekdays at about 10 minutes before 9 a.m., a dozen or so brightly painted food trucks engage in a highly choreographed race along the area's grid of traffic-clogged one-way streets. The prize? A parking space.
A 20-foot vehicle affectionately known as "Big Red" is often in the mix. It belongs to Lisa Carlson and Carrie Summer. When these two pedigreed chefs started cooking in a cramped trailer in 2008, there was just one other licensed food truck operating in Minneapolis. Today there are dozens, and surely more are on the way. All of them owe a debt to Carlson and Summer and the pioneering venture they call Chef Shack.
"Before Minneapolis became known -- or even functioned -- as a great street-food city, Chef Shack was dishing doughnuts," said John T. Edge in an interview. He's the author of "The Food Truck Cookbook," a coast-to-coast chronicle of the nation's culinary movement of the moment.
Carlson is a Brooklyn Center native, and Summer grew up in Rochester. Both spent time working for an impressive constellation of starry chefs in New York, San Francisco and London. They've been a couple for 11 years, and naturally, the two 44-year-olds met in a kitchen, when Carlson, who was running an Uptown Minneapolis restaurant, hired Summer. Turns out they work well together, in a finish-each-other's sentence kind of way, and their slightly overlapping skill sets -- Carlson is Chef Shack's chef du cuisine, and Summer handles pastry and manages the business -- are more than complementary.
Chef Shack was born at the Mill City Farmers Market. It started with a suggestion from their boss and one of the market's driving forces, Spoonriver owner Brenda Langton. Tapping into her lifelong obsession with doughnuts, Summer immersed herself in research, bought a mini-doughnut machine from Lil' Orbits in Plymouth and, through a tenacious trial-and-error period, zeroed in on an all-organic formula for what became an instant Chef Shack trademark: diminutive, puffy, melt-in-your-mouth doughnuts, their golden exteriors twinkling with sugar and a nose-tickling blend of cardamom, ginger and nutmeg. Blindly consuming a fist-sized bag is deceptively easy.
Six years, countless 17-hour days and two more vehicles later, Summer estimates that she's made over a million doughnuts. "I never tire of making doughnuts," said Summer. "When I'm 70, I can see myself driving the truck around, making a living making doughnuts."
The expertise, discipline and ingredient-driven mentality that is part and parcel of the duo's fine-dining background is what set Chef Shack apart from the vast majority of their food truck brethren. After doughnuts, the truck's bestseller is a truly remarkable burger of lean, flavorful, pasture-raised bison. It's an insanely delicious formula: a medium-rare patty brushed with a beef demi-glace and dressed with lettuce, tomato, a runny egg and a slab of Cheddar or pepperjack cheese, all inside a tender toasted brioche bun.
There's more. Braised beef tongue is the foundation for a spectacular taco. Pulled pork, cooked low and slow until the meat teeters towards mouth-melting consistency, is the centerpiece of an awe-inspiring plate of nachos. Vegetarians and vegans also flock to Chef Shack for tacos of pured sweet potatoes, black beans and cilantro, splashed with Carlson's riff on salsa.
