Almost 15 years later, Easy Slider is changing things up

It took two events before Easy Slider owners Miley Holmes and Caroline Perini quit their full-time jobs.

“Hundreds of people are already in line. It’s loud on the truck. We’re still getting our sea legs,” Perini says.

“Someone knocked on the window where I was cooking, and they [news crew] were asking me a question, and I couldn’t even hear what they were saying. I just nodded my head, ‘Yes,’” she says. “I did not know that I had agreed to let them onto the food truck with their cameras and microphones.”

“And I turn around and they’re micing up Miley, and there’s a camera in my face. And I think both of us, our first thought was, ‘Well, guess we have to tell our parents that we quit our jobs to run a food truck.’”

They met in the mid-2000s at the House of Blues, back when Deep Purple, Keyshia Cole and Doobie Brothers were on the concert lineup within a month. Holmes was an operations manager in the concert space, and Perini was the logistics manager for special events.

“I think when we first started talking about opening a bar but had no money, no resources, and about that time, food trucks were really popping off in Dallas,” Holmes says.

Food trucks, which had been all the rage in other cities for some time, were a fairly new concept in Dallas. It’s a city that’s not used to ordering street food.

And Klyde Warren Park, a now mainstay location for food trucks, had been completed in 2009, and the Dallas Arts District was growing. One could argue that’s what propelled the now-thriving Dallas food truck scene.

The all-natural, healthy bites Green House Truck, which utilized an electric car, opened in 2009. Ruthie’s For Good, focused on gourmet grilled cheese with a social-good bent from oil heiress Ashlee Kleinert, opened in 2010. And the now-defunct So-Cal tacos launched in 2010.

“The quality that I saw coming off trucks and the local, independent idea of this business was very attractive and fun,” Perini says. “And really what hooked me was that these operations were a couple of people, and just the all-around experience of, you can walk out of a bar, and there’s a food truck, and you can have one of the best hamburgers of your life. You go have lunch downtown, and it’s one of the best steak sandwiches you’ve had in your life, and that was neat.”

Holmes and Perini started visiting food trucks in Dallas and other cities, asking questions.

“We understood the catering off a food truck, we just had to figure out the other side of it. Where do we find the truck? How do we get this launched?” Holmes says.

They happened upon United Caterers in Grand Prairie, which had a food truck they could buy, and then settled on a gourmet burger concept with good beef and perfect bites.

In 2011, Easy Slider launched as Dallas’s first gourmet burger food truck. Holmes and Perini were both in their early 30s.

Perini would handle cooking, and Holmes would handle operations.

“I love food. I love to eat food. I love to cook food. I love the idea of community around food,” Perini says. “I didn’t go to culinary school. I always joked that I went to culinary school with Dad.”

Perini is from a restaurant family. Her family owns a 640-ish-acre ranch in Buffalo Gap, Texas, population 532, just south of Abilene. A 40-year-old chuck wagon-style steakhouse in a converted barn sits on the property. Ironically, the common consensus is that West Texas born-chuck wagons are considered the original modern food truck.

“I mean for the longest time, we didn’t even have air conditioners,” Perini says.

Her family’s steakhouse is about a good cut of meat, potatoes and something green on the plate. And the ranch cows are pets, not the steaks served in the restaurant. It’s not a Dallas-esque white-tablecloth establishment, but it has a James Beard Award, and President George W. Bush has eaten a steak or two there.

Perini eventually moved to Preston Hollow with her mom, and she remembers the heydays of Dallas dining, where there were delis, diners, and keeping a running tab at a restaurant was normal.

Holmes, on the other hand, doesn’t enjoy cooking. Her parents were teachers. She grew up in McComb, Mississippi, a small town about 25 miles north of far southeast Louisiana and the birthplace of Britney Spears. In fact, Holmes was a freshman when Spears was a senior in high school. It’s Holmes’ icebreaker fact.

She majored in English at Louisiana State University and had stints at Abercrombie & Fitch and Fossil. She ended up in Texas in the mid-2000s, leaving retail to work in entertainment and hospitality.

After five years at the House of Blues, Holmes and Perini found themselves in front of Deep Ellum’s Double Wide in their teal blue food truck serving up sliders for the first time.

“It was great and so awesome because a lot of our friends came out to support, but someone came back to the truck twice in the same night to order another round of sliders, and we both were like, ‘Do you know that person?’” Perini says. “And we were so excited because (that was) a total stranger, not once, but twice in the first night we were ever open for business.”

The food truck’s name is a play on the 1969 low-budget, cult classic film Easy Rider that follows two motorcyclists smuggling cocaine from Mexico into Los Angeles before taking a 2,700-mile trip to New Orleans’s Mardi Gras that served as breakout roles for Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and writer/director Peter Fonda.

Within 11 months, the duo realized they could add a second truck.

“Which I think surprised us both because we had kept saying, ‘We’re a boutique food truck,’ and we’re using the best beef that we can buy and bacon and jam and bread and bottled drinks and potato chips that are were maybe too expensive at the time,” Perini says

One of their original sliders they launched, the Sweet and Lowdown with Angus beef, goat cheese, strawberry jam and bacon, is still one of the bestsellers. They encourage customers to mix and match sliders to get different flavor profiles. There are seasonal additions, but there’s a core set of sliders that have been on the menu since Easy Sliders’ inception.

They expanded into a third truck and had a shaved ice truck side quest before opening a storefront in Deep Ellum in a 100-year-old building.

“It just wasn’t feasible when we first started,” Holmes says. “But that was always our goal with the food truck, let’s fund a restaurant.”

In 2022, they opened a booth in AT&T’s Exchange Hall. They recently flipped their Exchange Hall space into a new concept, In Good Company, featuring all types of sandwiches (including hot dogs) in just 11 days in June.

In 2023, they closed shop in Deep Ellum after seven years. They stumbled across a property on East Side Drive in Old East Dallas, just a mile away from their former space. They tore it down to the studs.

“It was just a conversation of, ‘Are we ready to hang up the towel?’ We still have a liquor license. We have the equipment. We have the furniture. Let’s do it,” Perini says. “And so we took some of our favorite things from that location and plugged it in here. And it’s a different feeling now, owning the space.”

It’s Americana. There’s a gallery wall of framed Coors Light, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Colt 45 and Miller Lite vintage mirrors. A collection of bronze eagles hangs over the door. Dark wood, brick walls and green bar stools are surrounded by plenty of navy accents.

The East Side location includes a restaurant space that seats 25 people, a large wraparound commercial kitchen, the Easy Slider’s offices and a commissary for the three food trucks. There’s a plan to add a patio to the building. It’s the first time that all aspects of their operations are under one roof.

The core of the menu is still sliders, but it includes a full-size version of their burger, wedge salads, grilled cheese and banana pudding. You can add bacon to anything for a dollar.

There’s a short list of specialty cocktails like the Vacation on Neptune – Dripping Springs vodka, Midori, pistachio and pineapple concoctions garnished by lime slice and Luxor cherry. Most of the cocktail menu is the brainchild of Blake, their bartender and Perini’s cousin. A Vieuz Carre is made with rye, cognac, sweet vermouth, Peychaud’s bitters and angostura bitters. It’s a martini forward-establishment, highlighted by a speciality combo of tendies & a ‘tini ($22).

There’s a weekly wine Wednesday featuring Scardello’s cheeses. Monthly pop-up dinner nights, like June’s “Pop your Pupusa” with chef Diana Zamora, are part of the dinner rotation. There’s an Italian night with Negroni specials and chicken Parmesan. Their next event, steak night on July 6, is reminiscent of Perini’s family steakhouse dinners.

“And so that’s the idea — it’s not just sliders all the time, which we love, and we want that to always happen, but we also want you to be hanging out here,” Perini says.

Dallas has become a city where we have a slew of high-end concepts with velvet booths and massive bars and at least four dollar sign menus. Easy Slider-East Side is where the most expensive item is the $16 Martinez, a riff on a margarita with pickled jalapeño brine and seven ounces of Dos Equis. All the food is less than $13.

“Nearly 15 years later, the division of labor is pretty similar. Instead of Perini flipping burgers and Holmes taking orders, the team has expanded to about 30 people. A lot of the original team members from the early days are still around. They knew their marketing manager Tamara Everheart from their House of Blues era. All three of them are East Dallas neighbors.

It’s an early summer Friday night, Perini is sitting at the corner of the bar near the kitchen doors sipping a Vespar made with Kina and snacking on leftover cheese from wine Wednesday. More than half the people who walked in already are on a first-name basis with Blake.

Sometimes, the next neighborhood spot is the one that doesn’t claim to be the next Cheers.