Going mobile: Rollin' In Hot serves up New Mexican, American cuisine

Nicole Wood and Markus Ruegsegger’s shared love of food led to the couple opening a food truck.

The two opened Rollin’ In Hot in May 2021.

“We’ve known each other for 10 years now,” Wood said. “He’s a chef and he’s worked in many restaurants all over, and I’ve been in the restaurant industry since my first job, when I was 14. We’ve been living together for quite a while now and we just decided that we wanted to do our own thing and share our own food items and our passion for food with the community.”

Going mobile: Rollin' In Hot serves up New Mexican, American cuisine

The food truck mostly serves New Mexican and American style cuisine. It offers a rotating menu of burgers, sandwiches, carne adovada fries and tacos.

Wood said the 505 Fries are a top request.

“Those are our carne adovada fries,” she said. “We make our own red chile. We put shredded cheese, fresh cut fries, shredded cabbage, onion, cilantro, and then a housemade creamy jalapeño lime sauce.”

The food truck’s burgers are another item that Wood and Ruegsegger frequently get orders for.

“Our burgers are great,” Wood said. “It’s just a regular third-pound Angus patty burger, but it comes with fries and two additional toppings come included with it. They can add green chile, choice of cheese, avocado and bacon.”

The recently-added Tuscan grilled cheese is another popular request.

“We added it to the menu six months ago, roughly, and it’s a vegetarian option that we offer,” Wood said. “That one has mozzarella cheese on grilled sourdough, a basil pesto and sun-dried tomatoes.”

Business has been good for the Rollin’ In Hot. Wood and Ruegsegger’s attitude starting out may have been the key to their success.

“We didn’t go into it thinking that it was going to be easy, so that helps,” Wood explained. “It’s harder than we imagined because it’s really dependent on the weather, for one. Winters are really slow, so you have to kind of budget for that. The summers are extremely hot and it’s pretty competitive, but we love working with other food trucks.

“We love the food truck community. Everyone’s really great and helpful. Even though they’re our competition, they’re also our friends. It’s a lot of fun being able to just do our own thing, share our food with everyone and just meet so many different types of people because we’re all over the place.”

The food truck has permits to serve in Albuquerque, Corrales and Rio Rancho. It also has a temporary permit for Bernalillo County.

“We travel all over,” Wood said. “We do a lot of different types of events. We do private events, as well as caterings, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and we do a lot of different (functions at) schools and businesses.”

Switching gears from working in a brick-and-mortar restaurant to a mobile kitchen was an uplifting transition.

“It wasn’t too much different, but just the change of scenery is actually really enjoyable,” Wood explained. “We love being able to not be in the same place and seeing the same people all the time. Even though most of those people that we worked with were great. But, being mobile is nice because you just meet so many different types of people and we’ve found so many different events that we didn’t even know existed.”

Wood and Ruegsegger also learned how to adjust to smaller cooking quarters.

“It’s a lot more tight in the food truck,” Wood said. “It’s like trying to prepare and load the truck and you can’t order too much food because you don’t have room for it. So that is a little bit different with a food truck, for sure. Markus has longer hours because there’s a lot of people going out to an event, anywhere from two to six to eight hours. They don’t think about the before preparation that we have to do, before the cleanup, after the food shopping. Some of our days get pretty long, but we still enjoy it quite a bit.”