Food Truck Catering in Middle Tennessee
We pull a 22-foot trailer onto your site and cook there. Potatoes come out of the oven during your event. The pulled pork and chicken are slow-roasted in the truck with our house spice blend, and the four-cheese sauce is made from scratch and goes on hot.
That is the argument for a food truck over a row of chafing dishes. Food that has sat under a lid for two hours tastes like food that has sat under a lid for two hours. Ours has not sat anywhere.
Three ways we serve
Which one suits you depends on your room, your timeline, and how you want guests moving during the meal. All three run the same food off the same menu, and you pick the entrees.
Loaded Stations
Serving stations set up inside your venue. You pick four entrees off the menu and choose potato, pasta or both. Guests walk up, say what they want, and watch it built. Up to 300 guests.
Loaded Truck
The same four entrees you picked, ordered at the trailer window and handed over a minute or two later. The trailer ends up being part of the event. People like watching the window.
Loaded Bar
The buffet. You pick three proteins, two toppings and three sauces. Potato and pasta go out in bulk, guests walk the line, and our staff top each plate as it passes. Up to 400 guests.
How many guests, and how long it takes
We serve up to 400 guests for the Loaded Bar and up to 300 for Loaded Stations. Our lines go just as fast as any normal buffet, and the buffet stays open afterward for seconds. When you send an inquiry, we'll give you an estimate of how long it will take to serve your guests.
Speed decides how the rest of your event runs. A wedding has toasts waiting behind dinner. A training day has the room booked until one o’clock. A reception has a band with a start time written into its contract. When the meal has something immovable on the other side of it, how quickly the room gets fed stops being a detail about food.
Small events come up often enough to answer here. Whether a twenty-guest event works comes down to where the truck already is that day. It is always worth asking. More on sizing an order is in how many guests we can serve.
What we bring, and what you set up
We are self contained for catering. There is nothing to plug in and nothing to hook up.
We bring
- The trailer, the staff and the cooking, all of it done on site.
- Biodegradable bowls, which the food is served in.
- Travel, folded into the quoted price. No mileage line arrives later.
- A written contract, so what was agreed is written down.
You set up
- One 8-foot table for every two serving points, with at least 3 feet of clear space behind it for staff. Tablecloths welcome if you want them.
- A rough potato-versus-pasta split about 14 days out. An estimate is fine.
- Plates and utensils, if you would rather supply your own. We can also provide them for a fee, and you pick which way at booking.
What your site needs
Venue coordinators ask this first and almost nobody publishes the answer.
- The trailer is 22 feet long and is towed by a full-size Chevy van, so it needs a route in and room to maneuver into the spot.
- Solid ground. A trailer this heavy will sink or get stuck in soft ground, and that matters most after a wet week.
- Nothing else for catering or a one-day festival. We are self contained.
- For festivals of two days or more, a 50-amp RV-style outlet within 50 feet, and access to potable water.
If your venue has no kitchen at all, that is normal for us and it changes nothing about what we can serve. There is a longer answer in catering a venue with no kitchen.
Where we go
We cater across Middle Tennessee, North Alabama and North Georgia, bounded by Nashville to the north, Huntsville to the west, Dalton, Georgia to the south and Cookeville to the northeast.The truck’s weekly public stops cover a smaller area than our catering range does, and the two are not the same map. If you are looking for where to find us on an ordinary weekday, the current stops are on the schedule.
Planning something in particular
Different events run into different problems. These go deeper than this page can.
- Pasta bar catering, including an Italian menu.
- Wedding catering, including what happens to the timeline when the food is cooked on site.
- Corporate and workplace catering, where the window is usually fixed and short.
- What food truck catering costs, and which parts of a quote tend to arrive later as surprises.
- How many guests we can serve, and what decides how fast a room gets fed.
- Fairs and festivals, for organizers booking vendors rather than buying a meal.
- Questions worth asking any caterer, ours included.
- Catering questions, answered short.
- Or read everything we have written, grouped by subject.
Ask for a quote
Tell us the date, the town, roughly how many people, and what time you want food going out. That is enough for a real answer instead of a range.
Call 931-271-7455 or email nicholas@itsloaded.com.
Most dates are booked well ahead, and booking early is the surest way to get the one you want. If your event is a week or two away, call anyway. Sometimes it works.
About a week before the event we confirm your final guest count, your entree picks and the serving time. A rough potato-versus-pasta split comes about two weeks out, and an estimate is genuinely fine there. Nothing else is needed from you before those points.