An Austin chef is working on opening a food truck this year specializing in Honduran Creole cuisine. Chef Grace Aguilar plans to open Five O Four somewhere in Austin in the fall of 2024.
Through Five-O-Four, Aguilar hopes to express who he is as a first-generation Honduran who grew up surrounded by Creole cuisine in New Orleans. She used her boudin in her pastelitos and her Cajun sausage in her meat pies. Her baleada (a layer of beans in a flour tortilla) is served with roast pork. She'll feature crawfish boils and roasted oysters, as well as dishes with coconut, plantain and tropical Caribbean flavors.
Aguilar emphasizes that the truck (its name is a New Orleans area code) is Honduran Creole, not Honduran Louisiana, which is intentional. “Honduras, like Louisiana, has Creole and African Diaspora populations that most people don't know about,” she wrote in Eater.
While growing up in New Orleans, Aguilar often spent time at his godmother's restaurant, Delominco's (which was later acquired by Emeril Lagasse in 1997, but ultimately closed in 2022). . However, her diet was not part of her original plans. Originally, she studied political science at university and hoped to attend law school. She moved to Austin and started cooking for herself. That's because, as she writes, she “felt something was missing, so she started cooking because she wanted a taste of Louisiana in her home.” So in 2019, she decided to attend culinary school, and at the same time she started working at La Condesa, a Mexican restaurant in downtown Austin.
Grace Aguilar.Better Say Grace
In order to grow Aguilar's culinary career and open her dream food truck, she has earned various scholarships and grants along the way. In 2021, she received the Bristol-Joseph Culinary Scholarship Fund, created by Austin chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph in partnership with the Greater Black Chamber of Commerce as a way to support Black culinary students, as well as the Caribbean restaurant Canje. I also received an internship at During that time, she works as a private chef and also shares her own cooking videos, food history information, writing, food styling, and e-cookbooks through her Better Say Grace. She also currently works at Ramen del Barrio, a Japanese-Mexican restaurant.
In 2013, Aguilar won a culinary grant from the Austin chapter of Les Dames d'Escoffier to take a baking class in France in 2023. They then won a grant from the Texas Food & Wine Alliance in 2024 to help purchase equipment for their trucks. In February, he held a fundraising event at Origin Studio House, a Black community space and cafe that is still scheduled to open, and participated in other events there.
For Five O Four, Aguilar has started a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for the trailer, permits, licenses and equipment. She is looking for $50,000.
Aguilar doesn't have a location in mind for the Five-O-Four, but he hopes to support the community while sharing the food he and Austin ate and remixed while growing up in New Orleans.
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