'There's a lot of love in this'

If you’ve driven through downtown Springfield lately, you’ve probably noticed a new fixture. It’s not a newly renovated retail block, nor a brick and mortar business. Rather, it’s a food truck: a 1973 Chevrolet truck that was once used for emergency services to be exact.

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2017-07-05 / Front Page 'There's a lot of love in this' Couple serves fresh Thai, Asian fusion with new food truck By KELSEY CHRISTENSEN kchristensen@eagletimes.com Moni Parintaprasert (left) and Nathan Salisbury (right) stand with their food truck, Simply Asian, the newest offering in the downtown Springfield dining landscape. — KELSEY CHRISTENSENMoni Parintaprasert (left) and Nathan Salisbury (right) stand with their food truck, Simply Asian, the newest offering in the downtown Springfield dining landscape. — KELSEY CHRISTENSENSPRINGFIELD, Vt. — If you’ve driven through downtown Springfield lately, you’ve probably noticed a new fixture. It’s not a newly renovated retail block, nor a brick and mortar business. Rather, it’s a food truck: a 1973 Chevrolet truck that was once used for emergency services to be exact. Now, the Chevy is painted a chocolate brown, and rustic wood frames the sliding windows while inviting aromas of fresh spice, handmade sauces, and fried rangoons waft welcomingly from within. The truck in question is called Simply Asian, and it’s serving up Thai-leaning Asian fusion food from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily on River Street in Springfield. Simply Asian is owned and operated by the duo Nathan Salisbury and Moni Parintaprasert, who met while working at PCM Image-Tek in Springfield, Salisbury as a supervisor and Moni as a quality inspector. Salisbury had a background in restaurants and restaurant management, while Parintaprasert cultivated her culinary skills from her parents and grandparents while living as a Laotian refugee in Thailand as a child, before moving to the states as a teen. The two quickly linked up in their job at Image-Tek, and after Salisbury tried some of Parintaprasert’s home cooking, they began joking about opening a food truck. “I tried Moni’s food and I was pretty blown away,” Salisbury said. “Then a running dream became a reality for us, and we started investing our money into this place.” It took Parintaprasert and Salisbury two-and-a-half years to develop the menu, plan the truck design, cultivate a business plan, and source the equipment. Inside the truck, Simply Asian boasts a fryolator, a line fridge, and a sautee station, as well as a mirror facing the kitchen line so that customers can see what the chefs are doing. Salisbury says the recipes and offerings are primarily modeled after Moni’s own tradition and heritage, and it’s a labor intensive process. Their food is handmade and fresh, wherever possible. Their sauces are made from scratch, meaning employees at Simply Asian have to spend hours scraping tamarind off the root, or grinding pepper into powder. Meanwhile, items that some restaurants may source mass-produced and frozen, like egg-rolls and crab-rangoons, are made to order and prepared daily. “Our food is not frozen, it’s hand-cut, hand-processed, we don’t have a microwave. It’s as uber fresh as we can make it, and we build all our dishes to order,” said Salisbury. “There’s a lot of love in this.” Simply Asian started showing up at River Street about a month ago, after a stint of trying to operate on Route 11, towards Chester. That iteration of the mobile eatery didn’t work out, but now that operations have been moved to River Street, with increased visibility and foot traffic, Salisbury says business is excellent. “We really go with the flow here,” said Salisbury. “We’ve adjusted our menu to the likings of everyone here.” In fact, going with the flow is exactly why Simply Asian started as a food truck, and not in a storefront. Salisbury says that, as well as reducing overhead costs, the mobile model gives the business an opportunity to move around. Simply Asian is available to cater weddings or parties and attend festivals and events. Just last weekend, the food truck showed up at the Crown Point Country Club for Independence Day festivities, although the fireworks show was rained out. Simply Asian isn’t the first eatery to try the mobile model in Springfield. Just beside the Asian-fare bearing Chevy, in fact, is a little red trailer called Nothin’ Fancy serving up American-style barbeque. Salisbury says they’re expecting another food truck to set up shop nearby soon. “We’ve got a little food truck community here,” he said. Even with the food truck nearing only it’s second month of business, expansion prospects are ambitious. There are talks of a seating area and the possibility of bottling some of their homemade sauces for sale. Simply Asian even has enough equipment to outfit a second truck. “But that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves,” said Salisbury. With freshness and a committment to from-scratch techniques at the forefront of the Simply Asian model, Salisbury hopes to challenge stereotypes of a food truck. “There’s a stigma against food trucks, that they’re dirty, dingy. People call them roach coaches,” said Salisbury. “Here, I want to run the best possible kitchen I can run.”