Cuesta College has students lined up to taste meals from Bear City Social, the newest food truck on the San Luis Obispo campus – or as owner Shaun Behrens prefers to call it, the newest “mobile kitchen.”
“Sometimes I call ourselves ‘the anti-food truck,’ because we have the ability to do more than just normal food trucks,” Behrens said.
Though not directly listed on the menu, the owner and chef explained his team’s commitment to ensuring gluten-free and vegan options are available to any students who request them. “We make everything from scratch, and we focus more on adaptive, dietary restrictions so we have the ability to feed everybody, really,” Behrens said.
The mobile kitchen opened its doors to students on March 4 and will be returning to campus every week for the remainder of the spring semester.
Bear City Social was born out of Los Osos and has been cooking on the road for over five years. However, the “farm-to-street” business soon plans to expand beyond just a mobile kitchen.
“We actually signed a lease on a brick-and-mortar in Morro Bay,” Behrens said. He is looking forward to having a storefront for the first time and hopes to also continue using the mobile kitchen for events.
Students can expect to see different items on Bear City Social’s menu every week. “Wherever we go, we can sort of write the menu into the demographic that we’re serving,” Behrens said. “We also shop at farmers’ markets… so basically, whatever’s in season is what I can kind of utilize and wrap my head around.”
Behrens said his favorite order on the current menu is the classic smash burger with lettuce and tomato. “I never really wanted to do a smash burger,” he said. “But we’ve sort of landed on it. It’s been really great, and people love us for it.”
As for the next week’s meals, Behrens stated that Bear City Social is considering adding hand-cut fries to the menu. Later on, the mobile kitchen also hopes to lean into cooking more global street food, such as empanadas.
All food truck services are open on the San Luis Obispo campus Monday through Thursday, running from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. While Bear City Social currently visits Cuesta on Wednesdays only, a variety of options are available during the rest of the week, and can be found in the courtyard outside the Dovica Learning Resource Center.
Behrens enjoyed interacting with students who stopped by for lunch between classes or study breaks and looks forward to what Bear City Social will bring to the table in the coming weeks.
“It’s really a pleasure to be opening up the window, and it’s a different office every day,” he said. “The most important thing to me is that everybody’s having fun with it, you know? The guests, the employees, everybody’s having fun.”
