EZ Eats Brings Poke Bowls, Curry and More to Levitt Pavillion Concerts All Summer Long

I guess you can say I’ve just always had a lot of food in my DNA,” says Dylan Mullins, owner of the EZ Eats food truck. “I originally grew up in a small town in Virginia, and I was surrounded by good cooks. My mom and my grandmother were great Southern cooks. My dad is Puerto Rican, and he’s a really great cook. He actually has a little food truck thing that he does part-time outside of Phoenix.”

That food-centric upbringing led Mullins to decide to attend culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Los Angeles. “I was working an internship on Catalina Island. It was the end of the summer season, and the sous chef I was working for was like, ‘I go to Colorado, to Winter Park for the winter season and then come back. You want to get a place with me and go to Colorado?'” he recalls. “I came out here and I was like, I’m never going back to California.”

Shortly after arriving in Winter Park in 2012, Mullins landed a job at Devil’s Thumb Ranch. “I started out as just a prep line cook and made it all the way to banquet sous chef,” he says. “I worked with a James Beard Award-winning chef. It was great. Gained a lot of experience and saw a lot of things.”

Mullins also found part-time work at a small restaurant, the now-closed La Collina Kitchen + Wine Bar, which specialized in Italian food and fresh pasta.

But, after spending four years in the mountains working the busy winter seasons, Mullins was looking for a change. And, it turned out, so was the owner of La Collina, who opted to open a new restaurant in Englewood called Acres.

“I followed him down there to work with his chef,” Mullins says, but then that chef ended up leaving because of family issues. “I was really young at the time, and I told the owner to give me a shot. I was like, let me try to take over everything as head chef, and if I mess up, you can hire someone to be my boss.”

Mullins got his shot, and “we were rockin’ and rollin’, and then, you know, COVID happened,” he says.

The lease at Acres was up and the owner wasn’t sure about renewing, so Mullins decided to take his career in a new direction. (Acres never did reopen.) “I started EZ Eats as a meal-delivery concept, targeting families doing a family-style drop-off with everything pretty much done for you. Just throw it in the oven and you have a meal,” he recalls.

While the concept gained traction, Mullins encountered some challenges. “It’s really hard to find that customer base when trying to grow a meal-delivery business”, says Mullins. “So we bought a food truck to help promote the business at farmers’ markets and whatnot.”

Then, as restaurants began to reopen once indoor dining was allowed again, Mullins noticed that the meal-delivery sales began to drop. “Thankfully, we had the food truck to fall back on. And then, you know, one thing led to another, and the food truck kept us busy,” he says. “We shifted all of our efforts and went full-time with the food truck, abandoning our original business idea. It kind of happened randomly, in a way.”

Now three years into operating the EZ Eats food truck, Mullins is happy with his decision. “Our first main event with the food truck was at Levitt Pavilion, and we’ve been working there every summer,” he says. “Our menu has evolved since then, because we realized you’ve got to figure out how to make the work flow on a trailer.”

These days, the dishes are designed specifically for events. “We do all the hard work – all the slicing and everything – in the commissary so when we’re at an event, it’s kind of a scoop-and-go method,” explains Mullins.

In order to stand out from the crowd, he decided to focus on stir-fries, curry and poke bowls instead of more typical options like tacos and burgers. “My wife is Filipino. She made this yellow curry for me one day, and it is a unique dish that’s a little sweeter curry than most because it’s got that Filipino style to it,” Mullins says. “Actually, that’s kind of how our menu got started, and it just kept growing from there.”

That curry remains his personal favorite, but the best seller is the chicken tikka masala. Other popular items include salmon and tuna poke bowls and stir-fry bowls with orange chicken or bourbon chicken, all of which are served in satisfying portions.

For the full EZ Eats schedule, visit ezeatsco.com. It’s also planning to go all out for the Octoberfest season, when it will post up at Zuni Street Brewery with a special menu of items including braised duck and traditional spÁ¤tzle.