Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Gabriel.
Hi Laura, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Laura came to Oregon about 8 years ago from Texas, where she was very fond of the breakfast taco scene, and was surprised to find no such thing out here in Oregon. After a few years of working in recruiting in the medical field she wanted to find a change of pace and try something completely different.
She then moved up to a neighborhood and met me (Will) who was also having thoughts of changing up my career in photo/video work at least for a while, and after a few hang outs and conversations about it, and just like that, a breakfast taco truck started coming into fruition!
Things just seemed to keep falling into place because a friend of a friend had heard that the wonderful owners of Palate Coffee Bar were trying to sell their fully built food truck and also had a great location and clientele for a breakfast truck! After a little bit of food truck modification and a whole lot of paperwork Wandering Ranchero was born!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Opening a business in this day and age has plenty of struggles, from food prices changing drastically more and more, to all sorts of fun with staffing, and sometimes maybe we try to grow a bit too fast at times… haha… but we have endured and gotten really lucky with a great crew now who is amazing and works wonders for us!
Dealing with changing temperatures is always exciting in a metal box too haha. Working with flour tortillas changed a lot during the heat of the summer, and we had to fall back on our backups for a while until we figured out how to adjust the recipe correctly. I sure have a lot of respect for bakers now! Haha
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
As a small food truck we have such limited space for storage and prep that we have to really focus on making every ingredient special. Thats why we make our own duck fat infused Sonoran flour tortillas and make (almost) everything from scratch. Although there’s only a few items, they all have a lot of time and care put into them!
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
In recent years I have stopped trying to predict the outcome of the future haha, but I can hope that if people are starting restaurants or food trucks they care about quality over quantity. There are a lot of big menus out there in restaurants, and the food truck model really makes you be conscious of the space you have and capitalizing every square foot and minute of every day to keep the quality up.
We hope that we can stick around for a while in the Bend breakfast scene, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a good run for a handful of years and end up selling if someone was interested for the right reasons, or just closing our doors and moving onto the next thing. The goal was never to make a ton of money or do this forever, we just wanted to make a cool spot for a few great people to call work, and hopefully make some peoples day with tacos and waffles!
Pricing:
- The pricing is great!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wanderingranchero.com
- Instagram: @wanderingranchero
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61580235651051
