This south Alabama food truck’s burgers are a smashing success - al.com

Nov 01, 2024

Beef patties on the cooktop in the Frank N Lola's food trailer display the crispy sear that make smash burgers so tasty.Lawrence Specker | [email protected]

They arrived in south Alabama almost by accident, and when they started a food truck they thought Chicago-style hot dogs were going to be their claim to fame. But now they’ve gone and taken top honors at Mobtown Burger Week two years in a row with their over-the-top smashburgers.

It’s safe to say that it’s been a quite a ride for Kyle and Christina Urrutia, the proprietors of Frank N Lola’s food truck. Especially the during the 10-day October run of Mobtown Burger Week, when they successfully defended last year’s title.

“That was insane,” said Christina Urrutia. “We have never been as busy as we were, ever.”

Kyle Urrutia, left, and Christina Urrutia, right, with helper Deyse. The Urrutias launched Frank N Lola's after moving to coastal Alabama during the pandemic.Lawrence Specker | [email protected]

The results speak for themselves. In 2023, Frank N Lola’s lined up with some heavy competition in Mobtown Burger Week, an annual fundraiser for Restore Mobile. Nearly 30 venues took part, including some that are famous for their burgers. The Urrutias took the People’s Choice award with something they called the Maple Mayhem Smash Burger. It exemplified the kind of adventurous flavor profile you may find in a Frank N Lola’s entrée: “Triple meat topped with cheddar, candied bacon, maple brown sugar grilled onions, spicy maple glaze, mayo finished with a light sprinkle of sea salt,” read the official description.

They’d entered the 2023 competition on short notice and whipped up the Maple Mayhem as a deadline loomed. But going into the 2024 event, they were no longer a dark horse. “It put a lot of pressure on us,” said Kyle Urrutia.

With this year’s entry, they gave diners something to reckon with: The “Super Nova” smash burger was topped with smoky bacon jam, hot honey aioli and a slab of fried brie. Restore Mobile described the results as a “historic double win:” Frank N Lola’s got the most People’s Choice Votes and took home the crown for selling the most Burger Week burgers. (Note to the hungry: The Shipyard Café took second place, and third went to Three Little Birds Smokehouse. Both venues are in Chickasaw.)

The double win puts a nice bow on several years’ worth of scrambling and happy accidents.

Christina Urrutia had a long career going as a travel agent and travel executive when the COVID-19 pandemic came along and shut her industry down. She lost her job. She and Kyle had already been pondering a move from Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast, and this gave them the push they needed.

The garlic smash burger is one of the simpler burgers you'll find on the menu at Frank N Lola's, but it's not exactly plain.Lawrence Specker | [email protected]

It also complicated things, a lot. New Orleans might have been an option, but she wanted to live on the water, and that made it harder to find the right place to land. So did the difficulty in connecting with a real estate agent, or even lining up a mover, at the peak of the pandemic. One thing led to another and they ended up in Coden.

They found various ways to make ends meet, but it was tough landing a suitable 9-to-5 gig in the post-pandemic world. They thought maybe they’d start with a hot dog cart, and as they considered the logistics and the legal requirements, they scaled that up to a full trailer.

“We were trying to determine names, going back and forth,” said Kyle Urrutia. “And being from Chicago, they have a hot dog stand up there, it’s called Gene & Jude’s. Any given time of the day when they’re open, you can go out there and there’s a line of people out the door, year-round, cold weather or not.”

They wanted something with the same catchy rhythm to it. They found it close to home.

“We have an English bulldog and her name is Lola Sue,” said Kyle Urratia. “My sister-in-law has a pug named Frank. And so we just put those two names together, Frank and Lola, they’re named after family pets. You know, a lot of people think maybe it was after the Jimmy Buffett song, because he has a song called ‘Frank and Lola.’ But it’s the pets and their pictures are on the side of our trailer.”

As for how hot dogs evolved into not just smashburgers, but smashburgers with some truly mouth-watering toppings, Kyle Urrutia has a simple explanation.

“That is my wife,” he said. “I tell everybody I just drive the trailer and cook. My friends call her the Frankenstein of food. And I mean, the success we’ve had is really a credit to her creativity with putting flavors together and making them work and making it efficient for us to make, too, because we do cook to order and it does take a little longer doing that, but it all comes out as an overall great product.”

The Frank N Lola’s food truck does a brisk business outside Mobile Infirmary on Sept. 25, 2024.Lawrence Specker | [email protected]

Samples from the Halloween-season menu, all doubles: The relatively basic Bigfoot Garlic Smash Burger with garlic pickles and garlic aioli. The Chupacabra with cheddar, queso de freir and hatch green chiles. The Tropical Yeti with cheddar, thick-cut bacon, grilled pineapple and teriyaki sauce. The Poltergeist with pepper jack, ghost pepper cheese, habanero pickles and garlic parmesan aioli.

Inside the trailer, the magic happens on a flat-top griddle that takes up a big chunk of the trailer’s limited interior space. Kyle Urrutia uses a hefty handheld press to mash a couple of patties down onto the hot surface, squashing them down thin.

It’s not the most common burger method in this part of the country, so they occasionally have to explain it. “Some people think we smash the whole thing after it’s done,” said Christina Urrutia. “They’ll say, ‘I don’ t want you to smash my bun.’”

A smash burger definitely is different from burgers built around a thick slab of beef, even if two thin smashed patties add up to the same quantity. But there’s a method to the madness.

“People love smash burgers and what they love about smash burgers is, one, they’re always fresh,” said Kyle Urrutia. “We don’t use any frozen hamburger meat. That’s all fresh. I hand-form every patty in the trailer as I make them, they’re all made to order.”

The cooktop kisses a lot of surface area on those smashed-down patties, searing them with flavor. Because they’re thin, it’s not long at all before they get flipped and slathered in cheese, some of which runs off the edges.

“The beauty of the smash burger, if you put it on the grill, you put that initial smash on there, it gives a really nice charred crust on the side,” Kyle Urrutia said. “And then you work your magic with it and you flip it over and you put your seasoning or whatever cheese that goes on the burger and the cheese melts. They call that the cheese skirt. It’s a nice crispy skirt around the edge of it and people just absolutely love it. I think that’s what people enjoy about our burgers. That’s what they tell us.”

The emphasis on freshness doesn’t end with the patties. As Kyle Urrutia demonstrated his smash technique before the lunch rush on a recent weekday, a huge bin of potatoes sat nearby. No big bag of precut frozen fries here: One at a time the spuds would be fed to a wall-mounted industrial slicer with a big lever like an office paper cutter. With a pull of the handle – shonk! – the potato would be converted into a handful of fries ready for the cooker.

The Fried Feta Smashburger from Frank N Lola’s, complete with a slab of deep-fried feta cheese.Lawrence Specker | [email protected]

The Urrutias credit much of their success to a mentor, Norman Vining, who helps run his wife’s namesake food trailer, Lith’s Asian Cuisine.

“When we first started, we were so clueless on exactly how to do our bookings, where do you set up?” said Kyle Urrutia. “He was so instrumental and kind of took us under his wing.” He helped in many ways, from sharing Frank N Lola’s social media posts to sharing his own knowledge about good locations to work.

“We like that business model,” he said. So the Urrutias now do the same, helping newcomers get a foothold in the business and promoting other operators rather than seeing them as competitors.

“That’s part of who we are as a food truck, we want to be known as, you know, people that are willing to help other people get their feet up underneath them,” he said. “There’s another food truck that started up earlier this year and he was a smash burger truck and we were helping him and people are like, ‘Why are you helping him? He’s your competition.’ I said, ‘He’s not my competition, he’s my friend.’ There’s enough meat on the bone out there for everybody. His food’s not gonna taste like mine, our food doesn’t taste like his.

“I think a lot of people appreciate that about us because we don’t just cook food,” he said. “We’re into helping people and trying to make other people successful. Norman Vining, the guy I was telling you about, this one time he goes, ‘I want everybody to be successful. I just wanna be more successful.’ We kind of adapted that mentality as well. We want everybody to be successful, and if we help somebody and they become more successful and better doing what we’re doing, we’re proud for them. We’re rooting for them the whole way.”

The future seems bright for Frank N Lola’s: The Urrutias say they’re practically booked up for 2025. And it’s not all home stands either: Dig through their Facebook posts about life in a mobile kitchen, and you’ll see they occasionally venture out-of-state to events such as the Mothman Festival held last September in West Virginia.

Such trips are a big effort. But the freedom to make them is part of what makes food truck life so rewarding for the Urrutias, they said.

“What we make on the road, we can make in a few days what we make in a month working here,” said Christina Urrutia. “It’s just a bigger audience.”

“We like to move around and that’s what we enjoy about the food truck, is that we’re always in a different place,” said Kyle Urrutia. “Meet new people, go see cool places … and just enjoy our time on the road because it, you know, it is a lot of fun.”

For updates on Frank N Lola’s menu and locations, visit www.facebook.com/FrankNLolas.

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