When life got tough, Brandy Hoover embarked on a new career: meals on wheels — Italian meals
Transplanted Yankee from Ohio opens The Saucy Tomato, a new food truck in Maumelle, selling pizza and pasta on State Farm parking lot between Kroger and Lake Willastein dam.
By Jay C. Grelen, Arkansas Moniteur
Before Brandy Hoover built an Italian cafe on wheels, life had taken some tough turns for the transplanted Yankee from Ohio.
It started in November when her company laid her off from her job as a systems engineer. Without a bachelor’s degree, she couldn’t find another job in her field. Then came the health issues — SI joint fusion and a hysterectomy.
Once she was through all that, she still needed a job.
She loves to cook. So she leased a food truck from the friend of a friend, outfitted it, and her spaghetti and pizza meals on wheels were ready to roll. Anthony Otwell, Maumelle’s good ney-ba, offered to rent her space in his State Farm parking lot, which sits between the back of Kroger and the Lake Willastein dam.
So Brandy kissed systems engineering goodbye. “Those were dark, dark moments in my life,” she says. “I took my credit score and my car title for a spin and got a business loan. The Saucy Tomato is me trying to drag myself out of all of that.”
Brandy and Todd Hoover opened The Saucy Tomato on May 10, 2024. Brandy serves pasta plates, sub sandwiches, meatballs, bread sticks and, the first food on the menu — pizza — herb crust, with Bacio mozzarella.
“When life gives you lemons, you make Italian food.”
Source of sauce?
“I make all my own sauces. They often started from basic sauce recipes that I found here and there, and then just modified and added to them over the past 20 years.”
Bountiful backyard basil
“You can tell when you taste the sauces that I really like basil. I grow basil in my backyard and make olive-oil basil ice cubes, so I always have fresh basil throughout the winter.”
Crust the way it’s supposed to be
“I make the crust from scratch. I am just a small food truck, so I can't really make all the dough and let it proof as much as a pizza connoisseur would like. When we get more than five pizzas at a time, it takes a while to get dough made and get them all cooked.”
Et Cetera
11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Mondays and Thursdays. Telephone: 501.553.8453.
Specialty of the House
Lasagne made with her homemade Béchamel sauce is Brandy’s Number 1 meal, but that’s not on the menu yet because she doesn’t have the equipment for it. She has her eye on a Main Street Equipment E-24-L Liquid Propane 4-Burner 24-Inch Range with a Space Saver Oven-150,000 BTU, and once she’s installed that, she’ll be cooking with gas..
This is Jay Grelen, refugee of the daily newspaper business, clutching at my manual Royal typewriter and trying to stay afloat. For now, I’m afloat on the U.S.S. Arkansas Moniteur.
The need for Arkansas Moniteur is urgent because newspapers and TV news teams are cutting back on coverage, or going belly up altogether. So Arkansas Moniteur is taking flight to write ~ the good, the bad, and the beautiful. With its valiant white horse well-fed, well-rested, and not-quite-well-groomed (disheveled would be apt, much like its rider), Arkansas Moniteur will mount up and take up its lance to tilt against windmills, windbags ~ elected or otherwise ~ foxes at the henhouses, and whatever else needs a good tilting. But Arkansas Moniteur also will ever be on the lookout for stories that strum the heartstrings with optimism, hope, and happy endings, because those lift us up, and that’s how I’d rather spend my time at the typewriter.
I worked in the daily newspaper racket for 35 years, including stints at the Denver Post, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, and the Mobile Register. My last stop was a 10-year stay at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 2017, Governor Asa Hutchinson hired me as his senior writer; after nearly six years with Governor Hutchinson, I sharpened pencils and deleted emails as Chief of Staff to Hizzoner Caleb Norris, mayor of Maumelle. Since Hizzoner promoted me to Chief of Staff Emeritus in August 2023, I now have time to write stories and rake muck as I ride the crest of the wave of the much-balleyhooed rebirth of local journalism. You can subscribe for free or you may pay to subscribe. I’ll write just as hard for everyone. By the end of the year, we will have launched the Birdsong County Whistler, which will pursue the more literary and refined elements of life. However you choose to participate, thank you for reading.
~ Jay Grelen, Arkansas Moniteur