Terence Gray, left, and Cody Journell have launched the Bluegrass BBQ food truck after winning a grant.
ABOVE: Cody Journell and his new food truck have been making stops at local businesses, including the Christiansburg Livestock Market. RIGHT: Bluegrass BBQ of Pembroke has a new food truck and posts its destinations on Facebook.
Cody Journell
Cody Journell and his new food truck have been making stops at local businesses, including the Christiansburg Livestock Market.
Jeremy Sippel, left, and Terence Gray prepare the food truck kitchen for business. Track the Bluegrass BBQ food truck appearances at www.facebook.com/BBQMen.
A Bluegrass BBQ recent menu board
CHRISTIANSBURG — Andy Hutton cast a suspicious eye on the veggie burger on offer on a Wednesday earlier this month.
“I don’t think I’ve ever eat anything without meat,” he said. “I put meat on my eggs.”
But he had no such qualms when it came to the pulled pork listed on the same menu board. In fact, he ordered two of Bluegrass BBQ’s signature sandwiches from the restaurant’s new food truck parked outside the Christiansburg Livestock Market.
“One’s for me and one for my dog,” Hutton said.
He didn’t mention if he was going to share the French fries with his four-legged companion.
Bluegrass BBQ put its truck on the road on Dec. 3 and since then has set up in several locations around the New River Valley, from Pearisburg to Radford to Christiansburg.
Wednesday’s stop at the stockyard was the first on-site food offered at the weekly auction in nearly a year. Its attached diner had shut down, leaving staff and customers without ready access to a hot lunch.
“It’s hard to leave for lunch,” said Whitney Dunbar, who has worked in the stockyard office for about three years.
So, when she heard that her friend Cody Journell and business partners had opened a food truck, she asked if they would park it at the market for a try- out. If it goes well, she said the stockyard hopes to have it back once a month or so.
Hutton said he liked the ease of having lunch on site again.
“It’s hard to get in a truck and [cattle] trailer and go through a drive-thru,” he said.
Journell, a Giles County native and former Virginia Tech football player, is part of a local partnership that opened Bluegrass BBQ in Pembroke last year. The new restaurant specializes in an Appalachian take on barbecue and, before the pandemic, hosted live music.
The new food truck offers a small sampling of the restaurant menu, and includes burgers and a grilled pimento cheese and jalapeno bacon sandwich, in addition to pulled pork and side dishes. And the veggie burger.
Plans for the food truck predated the novel coronavirus pandemic, Journell said. “But it kind of became a necessity when that did hit.”
They got it on the road using an $8,000 grant the restaurant won in July through the Jumpstart Giles business pitch competition, Journell said.
Several Giles County businesses benefited from the competition, which provided $40,000 in grants funded by the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development and the Rotary Club of Giles County.
Government-ordered business shutdowns made the first months of the pandemic rocky for the new restaurant, Journell said. “We had to get creative.”
So it offered a donation-funded “Feed a Senior” program that provided hot meals to elderly people stuck at home. And, when restrictions loosened, they built a deck for outdoor dining.
But as cold weather set in, things got tough again, Journell said. The hope is that the food truck will make up for some of the losses.
“It’s been a lot of creative pivots to keep business going,” he said. “We want to make sure we can stay alive during this COVID mess and come out good at the end.”
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December 20, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Bluegrass BBQ takes its pulled pork and pimento cheese on the road - Roanoke Times
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