April 27, 2022

When a father and his two sons are always competing to see who can smoke the best meat or come up with the best recipe, you’d have to figure that what they’ll be serving on their new food truck is going to taste pretty darn good.

Brian Rieger and his sons, Nate and David, bought the former Ma & Pa’s Burger this spring. It’s now Pa & Sons.

“We’re going to hit the ground running,” said Randi Moore, David’s fiancee. “There’s no better way to learn.”

Pa & Sons made its debut at a private birthday party last weekend and makes its first public appearance at the gigantic west-side Kingswood Rummage Sale, which begins today and runs through Saturday. Good News Church at 26th Street and Valley View Road is hosting food trucks in its parking lot, and that’s likely where people will find the Riegers, beginning at 11 a.m. each day, Moore said.

The men are such great cooks that the women in their lives – who are “not as great,” Moore joked – let them have free rein in the kitchen. They’ve always wanted to have a food truck, and when they learned family friends Becky and Robert Kurtenbach were selling Ma & Pa’s, “it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.”

They’re starting with a menu similar to Ma & Pa’s with burgers, hot dogs, chili dogs and fries, and then plan to make it their own once they’re comfortable, Moore said.

“They’re super excited to start messing around with burgers,” she said. Eventually, they hope to have a breakfast menu too.

Pa & Sons also offers a kids menu with grilled cheese and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches.

All three men have full-time jobs, so they’ll start with weekend events, brewery outings and a few weekday lunches. They’ll post locations on the truck’s Facebook page. Pa & Sons will be available for private bookings too.

Nate is in the Army Reserves, and David served in the Army, so the food truck always offers a 10 percent discount for military and first responders.

Moore said she and the other women in the family – Brian’s wife, Sofia, and Nate’s wife, Shelby – plan to help mostly behind the scenes with scheduling, bookkeeping, marketing and cleaning.

“But you’ll see kids and moms running around,” she said. “We plan to do it as a family, spend time together and make some memories.”

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