Organ Mountain: Who you are, and what do you do and what inspires you to do it.

Gabriel Payan: My name is Gabriel Payan and I’m the owner of Wannabe Farms food truck. We started out this business as local farmers and we saw that the need was for a farm-to-table truck that made everything out of the market here locally. So, I became a chef, to a farmer, to now back to a chef again. And it’s one of the things we love the most. I love making food and then seeing the reaction on peoples face that they can be like, “Wow, this is local food.” And it’s all local, all locally produced and locally sourced…we’re the local guys.

OM: Tell us more about your product and your business.

GP: We are Las Cruces’ first farm-to-table truck, meaning we try to get as much of our produce and local products from locally sourced places. If we don’t grow it, we know the person who does. Everything we try to do is based off of the Las Cruces downtown (farmers) market.

OM: What separates you from other food trucks?

GP: The thing that separates us the most is that we are farm-to-table, we try to get everything as locally produced. Our menu is never the same, it changes usually on a two week basis. What I can find in the market is what we sell in the truck.

OM: What do you think the future holds? Do you want to keep doing this down the road or do you want to open up a restaurant eventually?

GP: We're not sure about the restaurant right now, but we definitely feel like we’ll be doing this for the long haul. The other thing we do a lot of is music promotion throughout the town. We know a lot of people throughout the country and as they’re touring we try to promote their music and use the truck as a promotion tool. But other than that, yeah, we’ll be doing this for I think the long haul, my friend.

OM: Once you close up shop and you’re headed out of the market, what do you take away from the day, what experiences makes it worthwhile? 


GP: What makes it worthwhile is the comradery between market vendors and us. Where, every morning I walk out and go shopping, see what the market has to produce and what I can make. After that, when we leave, it’s a sense of community, that we’re all in this together and we just try to make the community a better place to eat and live in.

Interview & Photography by Kobi Shillings - Instagram: @kobiwayne