Stan’s Big Biscuit food truck started as a little idea. “It just fell in my lap, really,” says owner Stan Cothren.
It began when he and a friend were at a pub in Yachats, Oregon. “This lady heard me talking and asked where I was from,” says Cothren, 58. “She couldn’t figure out my accent. I said, ‘Well, I’m from Memphis.’ She goes, ‘Okay. So, you do barbecue down there.’”
That took Cothren by surprise. “Usually, everybody asks me about Elvis, and you get tired of that.” Then, the woman says, “Have you ever thought about doing biscuits instead of just barbecue?” She said she was a “trained biscuit judge” for biscuit competitions they did in the area.
Cothren thought about doing a food truck specializing in breakfast. “There was nobody except gas stations that really had a quick in-and-out breakfast [aside from] normal drive-throughs. So I said, ‘I’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, so what?’”
He bought a secondhand food truck and ordered equipment. The woman at the pub had given him a biscuit recipe. “A friend of mine worked for me, and we started working it back and forth. Next thing you know, we had a real versatile biscuit you could do multiple things with.”
Cothren’s biscuits are “Northern-type biscuits. Not a Southern biscuit, not a ‘cathead biscuit.’ It’s not what you’d find at a drive-through or at any restaurant. It’s a much breadier biscuit. Nothing fancy in it, just self-rising flour. We have to let it rise a couple of times.”
He describes the taste as “sweet, salty.” A “Southern-type biscuit” is “just regular, round, crumbly, doughy, hard-shell biscuits.”
(Photo: Jeff Howell)
Stan’s Big Biscuit originally opened in the Memphis Food Truck Park. “Food truck people are more than willing to help you out and give you little hints and tell you things,” he says. His girlfriend, Dina Capizzi, began posting on social media about the truck.
The four-inch square biscuits served resemble “a big hamburger.” Customers order whatever they want inside: “Sausage, egg, and cheese; bacon, egg, and cheese; smoked bologna and cheese.” There’s also an open-faced chicken biscuit with gravy.
For their cinnamon biscuit bites, the biscuits are cut “like little bread slices” and covered with icing. “They’re made fresh while you wait,” Cothren says.
A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Cothren didn’t grow up cooking, but he loved to eat. “I grew up on a farm, so if you put it in front of me, I pretty much ate it.”
Cothren, who worked at an Italian restaurant/college bar after high school and at a barbecue restaurant while attending Arkansas Institute of Technology, liked the idea of owning a restaurant, but, he says, “I was a computer person getting a computer degree.”
Cothren opened a CD Warehouse in Denton, Texas, and was approached by an investor who wanted him to open a store in another city. “My dad was like, ‘Go to Memphis. It’s a pretty good, steady city.’ I thought, ‘I’d probably do well there as anywhere. And it’s not too far away from family.’ I went to Memphis. I love it, obviously. I’ve been here 28 years.”
Cothren, who closed his business — which he’d renamed Replays and had converted to a used CD/video game store — now works the truck around town from 8 to 11 a.m. every day except Sundays and Mondays. Eventually, he’d like to open for dinner. “We’re just trying to figure out nighttime comfort food using a biscuit.”
Cothren thought about opening a brick-and-mortar, but, he says, “People are nicer to you on a food trailer than in a restaurant. We’re working on a trailer, making food right in front of you. They see you in the window.”
And, he says, “You’re not stuck in the same place. You still have to make a living, but it’s different. If you burn a batch of biscuits, you just start over.”
Check “Stan’s Big Biscuit” on Facebook to see where the food truck will be each day.
