MATTHEW BURNETTE, Staff Writer

Ninety-eight square feet may not sound like a lot of kitchen space, especially when you factor in all the equipment you may need such as a refrigerator, fryers, countertops, and a sink.

For food truck owner Stacy Rickard, it’s just enough to bring his Old Chef Creations to life.

In an enclosed trailer located next to Beans Creek Winery, Rickard serves up an eclectic array of dishes from poutine with a short rib gravy, a variation on a favorite in his native Chicago, to pulled pork sandwiches with homemade pickles and even dishes like Asian Rice Bowls and pork rinds, all ideas that come from Rickard’s imagination.

“It’s a dangerous world inside there,” Rickard jokingly commented while pointing to his head.

“Where I reach from here is, especially Korean food and my Asian style, I’ve been doing that a long time and I like to do kind of a Southern twist on Asian food, so I lean into that category a lot,” he explained. “Honestly, I dream about it a lot too. I’ll wake up and be like ‘I need to do this special.’”

Rickard puts an emphasis on fresh meat, freshly butchered when he can, and homemade ingredients in his food.

“I like to know exactly where everything is going and where it’s from,” he says. “In general, if I can physically make it, it’s going to get made in here. Bottom line. Everything from the slaws to the queso dip to the pork to pickles, everything, except for the buns.”

Rickard says he “fell into” running his Old Chef Creations truck after a conversation with Ben Miles, the truck’s previous operator and son of Beans Creek General Manager Tim Miles.

“I said ‘I’ll buy that food truck for you’ just totally joking because I had three in Nashville for years, and when I came up here, I was like ‘I’m not going to do it,’” he says. “Then Tim comes walking up and says, ‘I’ll rent you the spot where it’s sitting right now so you don’t even have to move it,’ so by that Thursday I was open and running. We did the deal on Monday morning, I guess, and I went shopping and started cooking.”

Having an extensive background in food, Rickard started at a restaurant called Maxfield and Friends in Chicago when he was eleven or twelve years old, working his way up and learning how to butcher in the process. From there he went to Indian Lakes Resort where he worked for Steven Tyler (no, not that one) who suggested he come to Tennessee.

“I was getting ready to leave, and I just bought a car and said ‘I’m going South. I don’t care’ and he said ‘Why don’t you go to Opryland? I know the Executive Chef at Opryland Hotel,” recalled Rickard. “So, they had a job waiting for me and had an apartment and had a relocation package at like nineteen years old.”

Rickard once again started at the bottom, but quickly worked his way up, and after two years, became the Executive Saucier for the main kitchen. He then went on to help open restaurants with chefs like Jody Faison and Deb Paquette before landing at Vanderbilt where he says, “old chefs go to die.”

“It was good timing. I had two girls and full custody of them at my house. They had childcare, they had great insurance, they had all that stuff, so I went there and ended up getting a job as the Executive Chef to the Vice Chancellor of Health Affairs,” he explained. “The only way i could ever explain it to people is basically any names on the building are the people that I cooked for.”

At Vanderbilt, Rickard got the chance to cook for Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Prize winners, and Country Music stars like Dolly Parton and Brooks & Dunn. It was also during his time at Vanderbilt where he got his first experience running a food truck.

“I got to the point that I could take the summers off, and I had custody of my daughters, so we would take them, and I would book a big event at Telluride or at Red Rocks, and we’d go up to Colorado and we would do a big event for like three days and then we would trickle down and do little things like a strawberry festival,” says Rickard. “We would travel and go to an amusement park and then go and make some more money, and we’d end up in Florida at a buddy of mine’s house and do Bike Week, and then head back in time for Vanderbilt to start back up again and for them to go back to school again.”

Rickard stayed at Vanderbilt until his daughters finished college and made his way to the Manchester area after a phone call from a friend of his.

“A buddy of mine called me and said ‘There’s about ten acres for sale in Altamont just down the road from me. We could be neighbors,’” he remembered. “So, I went up and looked at it and it’s just incredible, so I ended up moving up there.”

That was about four years ago. Rickard says he quickly made friends with the Harringtons who own Interstate Liquors. He would bring them homemade sausage and bologna that were leftover from custom butchering jobs that he did. They eventually let him set up a table to sell items in front of their store which is how Rickard developed the Pimento Cheese recipe he plans to start selling from his truck.

“I needed something to draw people over to my table. You can’t just set meat out on the table, so I started pickling items and stuff like that,” he says.

Rickard didn’t start cheffing as soon as he came to the Manchester area due to a health setback that he had just started recovering from.

“I was sick when I moved out here and I lost a lot of money. I had lung cancer. When I came out here, I literally moved two weeks after my last treatment,” he explained.

He eventually did recover, and in a lot of ways, came out better on the other side.

“I’m a lot happier honestly. I don’t let things stress me out. If I see it starting to happen, I just take a step back for a minute. It’s made me a little more in touch with the things to appreciate in life. I appreciate my family a lot more now. I appreciate my friends a lot more now,” he says. “I think a lot of people waste too much time dwelling on being involved in things that they have no control over. When I got sick, there’s no control over any of that, except for waking up and making sure you wake up again, so, I mean, I’m just happy to do that. Water off a duck’s back, I guess, right?”

Rickard says he eventually would like to have a brick-and-mortar location like the delis he ate at in Chicago where they would slice your meat fresh to put on a sandwich and eventually wants to be able to sell more of his meats and sausages.

He also says he hopes to develop a regular customer base, as well, which is why he doesn’t take the truck out as much.

“There’s one thing to be said about not being too mobile. Once people find you, they get aggravated when they have problems finding you, and I’ve had a lot of people that come here and they tell me that they like it because I’m here,” says Rickard. “They’ll go to like the food truck court and like something and then go back and it’s a month before that one food truck is back, and they’re chasing them down on their Facebook page trying to figure out where they are to get that food, so I’m going to ride it out as long as I can in this parking lot and just try to build my business here. They have plenty of space for me.”

As far as what to expect from a visit to Rickard’s Old Chef Creations food truck, he says he wants customers to have the “old chef experience.”

“Talking to an old restaurant guy that’s been in it for all these years that’s proud of his food and that’s happy with his food,” he started. “I come out and talk to people when they’re over there and tell stories about the restaurant business and stuff like that or just the old days or whatever. I just want them to walk away happy and full and come back again.”