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The BBQ Chicken pizza from Pyro Pizza.
The BBQ Chicken pizza from Pyro Pizza: chicken, bacon, onion, pineapple, cheddar and mozzarella cheeses, and barbecue sauce
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A former UPS truck has become the Pyro Pizza mobile wood-oven lunch truck
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The menu at Pyro Pizza
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"Tiffany," the pizza oven
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A Margherita Pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil and olive oil.
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Left to right, cook/"lumberjack" Steve McIntyre, and co-owners Steve Gleeson and Tony Lee
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The Wayno's truck, ready for business
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Owner Wayne "Wayno" Haggard
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Jamaican pineapple chicken tacos
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Lightly fried pierogies with house-made skins, potato filling, sour cream, sauteed onions and chives are perhaps the tastiest item on the menu
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Caramel-apple cheesecake with graham-cracker crust is wonderfully dense
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Blue Light Special: Wayno's employees (left to right) Diane Reed, Daniel Recker and Deborah Haggard
Has the St. Louis food truck scene finally become oversaturated?
In a word, no. There is always room for more food trucks, and the reason is quite simple: there are enough corporate campuses in the City and County to support as many food trucks as the area’s culinary thinkers want to dream up.
Smart companies want to reward their employees with fun activities, and tromping down from your office, cube, or open workspace to find wood-fired pizza with a wonderful chew and char being dispensed hot from a mobile kitchen makes the day much more bearable. In that spirit, the area’s corporate leadership has warmly embraced the trucks, and wily food-truck owners have busily cut deals to serve large companies all over the metro area – many of them on a weekly basis.
The good news for pleasure seekers is that (in almost every case) you don’t have to work for XYZ Corporation to eat at a truck on its private parking lot. You just have use social media and take a little drive (and park in one of the “Visitor” spaces).
We tracked down two new trucks that both just happened to be vending at businesses in Maryland Heights last week.
Pyro Pizza joins Bravado’s Pizza as a truck that has accomplished a minor marvel: building and installing a wood-fired pizza oven within a truck.
The 2,000-pound oven, nicknamed “Tiffany,” reaches 800 degrees and cooks a pizza to blistered perfection in just two minutes.
The most popular pie, said Pyro co-owner Steve Gleeson, is BBQ chicken (it must be a St. Louis thing), made with chicken, bacon, onion, pineapple, cheddar and mozzarella cheeses, and barbecue sauce. The classic Margherita pizza has tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil and olive oil. A pesto chicken pizza offers pesto, chicken, spinach, onions, mozzarella and spices. The “chili pie” is a new menu addition for fall.
The dough and tomato sauce are house-made. The latter is an authentic, rustic sauce of crushed San Marzano tomatoes and spices.
Truck co-owners Gleeson and Tony Lee, along with pizza cook and wood-splitting “lumberjack” Steve McIntyre, all worked together at a Domino’s Pizza. Gleeson and Lee decided to take pizza back to its roots, and to hang their own shingle; they haven’t looked back. The truck is booked almost daily into 2015, said Gleeson. Pyro just catered a six-year-old’s birthday party, he added.
“With this wood-fired oven, we have definitely found a niche,” he said. “You can’t make it this good at home.”
Immediate plans include setting out a patio heater for customers during the winter months, said Gleeson.
Wayne “Wayno” Haggard has something that most food-truck owners don’t: an MBA. The financial analyst has “diversified his portfolio” by creating his Wayno’s Mobile International Cuisine truck, but don’t think he doesn’t have restaurant cred: Haggard ran the line for six years at U. City neighborhood institution Frank and Helen’s Pizzeria before he became a business guru. He knows from broasted chicken and balance sheets, both.
His new truck has a global theme, so he doesn’t have to restrict the menu to any particular style. The signature dish, Jamaican pineapple chicken tacos offer a bright pineapple-salsa burst followed by the crunch of house-made slaw and the distinctive taste of the jerk-rubbed chicken. Cheese fries, aka fries smothered in what Haggard calls “man dip,” are unusually substantial. The house-made cheese sauce includes beef chunks, jalapeno and diced veggies. On a recent visit, caramelized spicy green beans were not exactly caramelized, but they were spicy.
House-made pierogies (even the dough is made in-house) are a standout here: they’re lightly fried, and better than any defrosted-and-boiled grocery-store variety. Biting into them, first you taste the topping of sour cream, chives, and sautéed onions, then the dough, then the creamy mashed-potato filling. They’re little pillows of happiness.
Other choices include quesadillas, a meatball sub, a bacon-wrapped hot dog and an Asian salad.
A seasonal caramel-apple cheesecake with a graham-cracker crust is wonderfully dense and filling.
Just about everything that can be made in-house is done so, said Haggard, including meatballs, rubs and salsas. He plans to eventually bake his own bread, he said, and introduce new menu items including empanadas and falafel.
Waynos’s is doing a brisk business while parked at a type of business that’s a new one on us: a car wash. The truck parks at a Waterway car wash in the Westport area every Friday. Presumably, the customers come for a wash and grab lunch, or vice-versa, and it’s a symbiotic win-win.
Another Wayno’s touch: Haggard encourages customers to avoid lines by ordering and prepaying online. The food is ready by the time you arrive.
Pyro Pizza
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Wayno’s Mobile International Cuisine
On Twitter: @WaynoSTL
