How we meet!
Hi, we are Bryce and Malou, a husband and wife team. It all started when we met each other at a hostel in Phuket, Thailand in 2019. Malou was bartending. I went up and asked if she needed any help. I used to be a bartender, so I thought I could impress her with my skills. Nope, she looked at me like, “why are you bothering me.” Throughout the night, we got talking and realized we had so much in common. The night turned into morning, and Malou was leaving for Hong Kong that day.
That same day, a random couple asked me if I wanted to hop in their jeep and go to Chiang Mai (North Thailand). I started to tell them about the girl I met and how amazing she was. Turns out it’s her brother and his girlfriend. We end up traveling for a month together around Thailand, having a lifetime’s worth of adventure. Malou and I stay in contact the whole time and start to build a relationship. After about 3 months of traveling around Southeast Asia, we decided to meet up in San Francisco to visit wine country. Malou is a Level 2 Sommelier and has done business with many of the wineries in Sonoma. So she had hooked us up with exclusive wine tours and tastings.
After 2 weeks, Malou went back to Denmark. By this time, we had started to talk about future plans. We didn’t want a long-distance relationship. We knew if we wanted this to work, we would need to commit. I went out to Denmark to visit Malou’s family. A little while later, Malou came to visit my family in Georgia. It had only been 9 months since we had met, but we knew we could build a beautiful life together. On Sept 21, 2019, we got married, and we’ve been living our most adventurous lives ever since.
Our Food Truck Journey
In 2019, we both moved to Marietta, Georgia, to start a life. We had a common interest in being entrepreneurs. Both of our professional lives, we had been working in the Culinary Arts Industry. Malou was working in Copenhagen at a Michelin Star Restaurant. Bryce had been bartending at a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in Denver. We thought it would be a good idea to build a Mobile cocktail bar and do events. So we took a leap of faith and purchased a 1957 Canned Ham Camper for a mere $800 bucks.
We thought we could knock out the project in 2 months max. We soon found out this was going to be way more challenging than we thought. It needed a lot of work done. We pretty much took the whole thing apart and put it back together. Lucky we both had a little construction background, but most of the process was a learning one. We would spend hours on YouTube or go and harass the employees at Home Depot asking, “how do we put things together.” Many days we were questioning if this was going to work, but with perseverance and determination, we got through it.
Finally, after 9 months and spending about 9k, we had a Beautiful Vintage Mobile Cocktail Bar. We were ready to start making our own money. This was February 2020, right before the Global Pandemic. We were just about to sign a lease for an apartment in Atlanta right as COVID started. We lost our jobs and the events we had planned for the summer all shut down. Both of us knew we didn’t want to stay in Georgia any longer, so we decided to buy a van and convert it into a travel home. We had learned a lot from the previous projects, the van build only took about a month. Our new mission was to travel around America with our converted van towing our mobile cocktail bar.
That summer, we left Georgia and headed down to Florida. We would just pop up at random places getting gigs along the way. At that time, many bars were shut down because they needed to serve food to stay open during COVID. We would ask the bars around town if we could serve sandwiches out front so they could be open according to COVID Law. That’s how our mobile cocktail bar turned into a food truck. We needed to make money during our travels; it was very easy to pop up and serve delicious sandwiches. We would pull into cities, source local bread and produce from farms around our travels. This was the beginning of our first food truck THE RYE BREAD BAR. We traveled all around, doing events all over Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, loving every minute of it.
8 months into our travels, we were doing an event in San Antonio. It was called Mardi Paws (a Mardi Gras parade for dogs) This was February 2021. In Texas, it’s known as “Snowmageddon”. The whole city shut down, gas stations, groceries, and all the roads. We got stuck in a Walmart parking lot for 4 days. Freezing and having nothing to do, we started talking about settling down somewhere. We did some research and saw that Austin has a great food truck scene. After the storm cleared, we scheduled a health inspection for permitting our food truck in Austin. 2 weeks later, we had our grand opening on South Congress on March 17, 2021.
In the beginning, it was hard to start our business in a city where we didn’t know anyone or anywhere. We never gave up; each day became a new experience, any mistake became a learning lesson, and every customer became a friend. It took a while to find where to get the best ingredients suited for our recipes and to build a reputation. After about 4 months, we started to get into a rhythm. The business seemed to be picking up. We started to have regulars, and those regulars would bring friends and family. All of a sudden, we were getting busy. That’s why we love Austin so much. There’s so much love and support here. The people are friendly and seem to favor the small shops over big corporations. After one and a half years of being in business, we were getting so busy we needed to upgrade to a second food truck. With our second food truck birthed to Brunch Brunch Baby. We have been in business for 3 years now and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Our goal is to have our own restaurant/bar, where we distill our spirits, grow our produce, and have our livestock. We want to make food that’s good for our bodies and consciousness. Thank you so very much for supporting our ever-growing dream. YOU are the best part of our story.
brunchbrunchbabyatx.com 