MenuSteve spent years in IT, eventually earning a strong six-figure salary — and then was laid off, and stayed unemployed for three years. Before IT, Steve had actually worked in restaurants for years, including managing one, so the food-service instinct wasn't new. But the direction it took next came from somewhere older than any resume: a large Filipino family where barbecue wasn't a cuisine you researched, it was just what you did. Learning to roast a whole pig, competing in small backyard-league BBQ competitions — that was Sunday, not a side hustle.
During the unemployed stretch, Steve posted in a local Phoenix neighborhood Facebook group, offering to cook and sell food. The response was immediate and real — enough that it led to pop-up cooking at breweries around downtown Phoenix, which kept building over the following months. That momentum is what convinced the family to fund an actual food truck. The build-out itself was scrappy by design: equipment sourced from liquidation sales, a truck put together by hand rather than bought turnkey — the kind of bootstrapped start that doesn't usually make it into the brand story but is exactly how Coronado Smokehaus actually began.
The menu started as straight American barbecue. The Filipino-fusion identity — the lumpia, the bao, the banana ketchup glaze — came later, layered in deliberately as the brand leaned into heritage instead of running from it, and as Steve talked shop with other food truck vendors navigating the same question of what made their food theirs. Today the recipes are pulled from two family kitchens, not one: Steve's side and Lisa's side both show up on the menu, down to smaller things like the Caesar salad and the macaroni salad that don't get top billing but carry just as much family history as the brisket does.
The name itself is a nod to home: Coronado, the historic Phoenix neighborhood that's supported this truck from the beginning — pop-ups, a residency, and now a standing presence in the community that gave the business its name.
Every truck that survived the brutal 2026 summer — a season that closed down a lot of Phoenix food trucks — did it because enough people decided this food, and this family, were worth showing up for. That's the actual origin story. Everything else on the menu is just the proof.