Food Truck to Restaurant: Part 1

           From Food Truck to Brick + Mortar: Part 1

Love, Chimichurri, + The Blue Ridge Mountains

After moving from Miami, Florida to Asheville, North Carolina almost four years ago with our then infant daughter,  we (Nestor + Ashley Teran) became inspired by the many young business owners in town who decided to try to make a living from pursuing their passions. We knew that we could take our talents and turn them into a career! With Ashley’s love of design and Nestor’s amazing abilities in the kitchen, we had a recipe for success. We decided to put our entire life savings (Ashley's inheritance) into the creation of Smash Events, Inc., an event planning, and catering company with a food truck serving both locally in Asheville and at private catered events.
 
Business really took off. In our first season, we did several festivals and one wedding with Smash Box Mobile Kitchen. People began to see the love we put into everything we do. They also appreciated the fact that Nestor is bringing an entirely different type of Latin American cuisine to this part of the country. Through our food, folks are learning that Latin American cuisine has many different flavors!


Now, in our third season, we have over 15 weddings, several large multi-day festivals, and lots of regular food truck gigs on the books for 2015 alone. In addition to foodtrucking and catering, in our second year of business we expanded to include complete floral and event design too!



Winter is Coming.

As a food truck, we can only operate so many hours and days per week. Although we have worked so hard to build a brand and a decent fan-base in Asheville, we are not able to reach as many people as we'd like. Our catering business is also expanding at an exponential rate, and we simply cannot continue to grow using our little 12' truck as our sole kitchen. We need a homebase for our floral and design side as well. Smash Events needs a home.

As we put our entire life savings into the creation of our food truck, we simply have nowhere else to turn than to our loving fans, family, and other investors to help us continue making this dream a reality. We will be personally investing in our transition into a permanent space, but we can't do it alone!



A Two-Part Campaign

Our campaign will be broken up into two parts. Part 1 will help us get into a space, once we find something that suits our needs. Part 2 will help us cover permitting fees, cosmetic improvements, a new sign, and any additional equipment we may need before our big grand opening. 

We plan to keep Smash Box Mobile Kitchen, to be used for catering and larger festivals. Our clients love the fact that we cook onsite at their events, and catering is something we have very much grown to love! Having a brick and mortar will allow us to share everything we have to offer with a much larger audience. 


We want to be able to expand our menu to include many of the Latin favorites that we grew up eating in Miami, including many Nicaraguan dishes we cannot create on the truck. We'd like to add some of Ashley's Italian family dishes to the menu as well.  We'd love to expand our work with Asheville City Preschools because being able to create a sense of wonder for kids is EVERYTHING.  We envision a coffee counter, with native Ashevillians enjoying small-talk over a colada. We want to provide that kid-friendly, beer-serving, dog-lovin' atmosphere that is so integral to the Asheville we fell in love with four years ago. We want live music, brunch on the weekends, the whole nine.


Thank you so much for considering contributing to our campaign.