Cazuela's food truck parked outside Cazuela's Grill on West Northwood Avenue. Credit: Sara Stacy | Lantern reporter

Cazuela’s food truck parked outside Cazuela’s Grill on West Northwood Avenue. Credit: Sara Stacy | Lantern reporter

New and old customers of Cazuela’s Grill will soon be able to enjoy the restaurant’s signature dishes by having the food come to them.

This week, Cazuela’s Grill is opening its food truck. Yessica Quezada, the operator of the truck, said students can tweet out where they want the truck to come during lunchtime hours.

“We were planning to go around campus and around Columbus so people can try our food,” Quezada said. “We’re planning to open in the morning and, right now, we’re on Twitter and Facebook trying to ask people where they want us to go.”

The restaurant has been located on the corner of High Street and West Northwood Avenue since its opening in 2006 but now will be moving to a new location about a block north of where it currently stands in the next two or three months, Quezada said.

Quezada has been working at Cazuela’s Grill with her family since they opened the restaurant. She said the idea of the food truck was conceived when the restaurant was notified it would have to move locations due to development on West Northwood Avenue.

“At first, they told us that we would need to be closed down by the end of this month,” Quezada said. “That’s when we had the idea of the food truck — because if we don’t have a place we can at least sell tacos to students because we don’t want to lose all of our loyal customers.”

Quezada and her family are originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, and have strived to bring authentic food to their customers. She said they hope to bring that same authenticity to the food truck.

The truck will feature many of Cazuela’s classics, such as tamales and tacos, and will also be serving non-alcoholic Mexican drinks like horchata.

Raul Quezada, Yessica Quezada’s younger brother, has prior experience working in food trucks.  He anticipates the biggest challenge to the food truck structure will be serving people in an organized way.

“The hardest thing about the food truck would be the system, because in a restaurant you have tables,” he said. “So you can just go to the table, and you know they’re going to be there and what you’re going to give them. But in the food truck, you have everybody kind of standing around.”

While he sees serving customers as a potential challenge, he doesn’t foresee any difficulties with the food preparation process itself.

“Wherever you’re at, cooking is pretty much always the same thing,” he said.

In the future, Yessica Quezada hopes they will be able to expand the truck’s hours and serve some of their alcoholic drinks, but, for now she is focusing on learning the ropes and getting used to the structure of the food truck.

“At first, we are going to concentrate on the daytime just to get a little more practice,” she said. “We don’t want to make mistakes, and we want everyone to be happy.”