For years, I didn’t think anyone could contend with Mullet’s Fish Camp for my favorite wings in St. Pete. Then I tried the crispy, messy, breaded and beautiful creations of Ashley Reed at her food truck The Brunch Munch.
Whether they are the best in town is entirely a matter of preference and style. The only thing her wings have in common with those at Mullet’s is that they’re chicken. Both are amazing, but being poultry-based is where the similarities end. From there, The Brunch Munch wings follow a different path.
Ashley has perfected what I’ve long considered one of the more difficult tasks in chicken wing prep. They are breaded heavily enough to be crunchy on the first bite and fried enough to add crispy skin to that experience, all without sacrificing the juiciness and tenderness of the actual meat on the bone in the process.
Texture goes a long way, but the flavor drives it all home. Ashley has created her own breading for the hand-battered wings. She makes her own marinade, and each wing gets a 24-hour soak at a bare minimum. She seasons the wings with a heavy hand. And all of those wings come topped with a homemade sauce. The honey hot is her most popular, but if you don’t mind a mess, the housemade Hennessy BBQ is a must-try for anyone who loves a traditional sweet-and-smoky barbecue sauce. It’s made with actual Hennessy, though don’t worry, the alcohol gets cooked out.
While it was new to me, The Brunch Munch food truck has been around for almost exactly two years. I only got my first taste in February at Localtopia, but I’ve now been back twice in the weeks since, most recently for Ashley’s monthly Soul Food Sunday on The Deuces. And really, that’s where her story began.
While her wings get the headlines around town, Ashley’s cooking is about far more than crispy chicken paired with homemade waffles (both drenched in syrup, ideally). The Brunch Munch is soul food on wheels. It’s southern cooking from the heart. From fried fish, oxtails, and fried shrimp, to collard greens, candied yams, banana pudding, and cornbread that’s worth the price of a meal alone, her platters are rib-sticking, coma-inducing, made-with-love scratch dishes served with a smile.
When she’s around town for events, the smaller menu focuses on chicken wings and waffles, with some desserts and her fantastic specialty lemonades. If you can catch her at her home base for soul food, you’ll get to taste the full array of her talents.
The irony is that Ashley was actually raised on Jamaican food, not discovering soul food until later in life. She spent her childhood helping out in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, learning by their side. She cooked her first solo meal when she was only seven years old: lemon pepper chicken. Decades later, she has a variation of that same recipe on her truck now.
But when she got older, Ashley started traveling. With a dream to open her own food truck, she started researching. Traveling across the country, she was inspired by the food she found in cities like Houston and Atlanta. She took heavy notes in New Orleans on their thick roux and decadent shrimp and grits.
Then she came back to St. Pete ready to get started. She became a self-taught soul food chef while working full-time as a nurse. Even still, she’s in scrubs 9-5 every day. If you see her out cooking on a weeknight, she likely came straight from patient rooms to the kitchen in her truck.
She may never get to sleep, but two years in, Ashley still has the same smile on her face every time she gets to make food for her community. Her love language, she says, is acts of service. Cooking for others is how she shows it.
It helps, of course, that she’s surrounded by loved ones while she does it. Ashley’s mother is on the truck with her any time she’s out, happily manning the pick-up and order window while Ashley and their teammate Robert run all the cooking and plating. It may not be the Jamaican food she was raised on, but Ashley’s mom is clearly proud of her daughter’s talents.
Long-term, the dream is to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. In fact, Ashley actually owns the lot she serves from on The Deuces when her truck hasn’t been contracted elsewhere around town. Located at 925 22nd St S, she’s nestled between Lorene’s Fish House and Heavy’s Restaurant. It’s a bustling block of great food, and that’s where she wants to build her restaurant when the time comes.
Ashley couldn’t be happier with the location. She was born and raised in South St. Pete, and she knows the significance and history of that 22nd Street corridor.
“The community is coming to life, and I love it,” she said. “It’s a historic neighborhood in the Black community, so I wanted to put my truck there and serve good food to the community.”
One day, she hopes, that truck will become a full restaurant. If the lines are any indication, there’s plenty of demand.
Follow The Brunch Munch on Instagram to keep up with where they’ll be next. If you can make it to the next Soul Food Sunday, arrive with an appetite.