Three LIers team up on Alaska-based 'Great Food Truck Race'

Three Long Islanders who barely knew each other, who had never teamed on a food truck before, and who didn't even own a food truck nonetheless toured Alaska last fall as contenders on Food Network's "The Great Food Truck Race" season 13, premiering Sunday at 10 p.m.

Alaska in October and November, when the nights last longer than days, was a change of pace for the trio. "It was cold for us out there, right, guys?" inquires Ronkonkoma native April Nothdurft, 24, of teammates Kate Wurtzel, 45, originally of St. James and now of Nissequogue, and chef-restaurateur Harry Poole 43, of St. James, who with wife Shelby owns Jackson's in Commack and Morrison's in Plainview.

The trio's journey to appear on the show — in which host Tyler Florence puts seven teams of aspiring food-truck owners through an amazing race in a different locale each season — began essentially on Wurtzel's whim.

"So I happened to be on Instagram — I follow Tyler Florence — and he had posted, 'Who wants to be on the next "Great Food Truck" race?' And I put a 'hand raised' emoji in the comments and before I knew it, I was contacted by casting and we were off to the races." Literally.

But she needed a couple of things first — like a team. "I had to find Harry and April because I'm not a professional chef. So it took me a scramble of 24 hours to find Harry. Even though we had lived in the same town, we just never crossed paths. I met Harry and April for the first time" — April having worked in Harry's restaurants — "and after knowing each other for 24 hours, we interviewed to be on the race, with a Skype call."

The trio had a concept and a name for the truck: BFD — "Breakfast for Dinner." But they had no truck. Food Network, it turns out, supplies contestants the trucks and requisite permits. "They had it wrapped for us with our logo that we designed on it!" marvels Poole. "All we had to do is show up with our team, buy food and start cooking."

That took longer than expected. While the three originally were scheduled to fly out in March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic intervened. "Mid-March we found out the show was going to be on hold for at least four to five weeks," Wurtzel recalls. "Then we didn't hear anything for months. I want to say it was mid-September when we got the call that it was back on, and were we still interested?"

They were. They'd been planning menus in the interim, in addition to working their regular jobs — Poole at his restaurants, Wurtzel with her home-based spice company, Keep It Spicy!, and Nothdurft as a server-bartender at The Brixton, in Babylon Village. They devised dishes including a breakfast burger layered with bacon, cheese and an egg on a glazed doughnut. Spicy chicken waffles did well. So did Hawaiian hot chocolate, flavored with toasted coconut and a proprietary blend of Wurtzel's spices.

The trio did adapt to a local staple. For their burger as a special, "We added reindeer meat to that." It's nothing exotic there, they say — you buy it in grocery stores. Indeed, says Poole, reindeer is "one of the things they eat all the time that we noticed when we were doing our research. Reindeer kept popping up on menus all over the place."

Perhaps they'll bring those recipes home to Long Island. Wurtzel might try serving reindeer to her sales-VP husband, Matthew, or their teenage sons Jake and Kyle. Poole and wife Shelby, who does media relations for Blue Point Brewery in Patchogue, might enjoy having their daughter, Riley, 10, or son Wyatt, 4, trying it out, or even Poole's 17-year-old son Austin from a prior marriage.

That should remind the trio of their time in The Last Frontier, where they plied their food from outside a Walgreens in Anchorage and Alice's Champagne Palace in Homer; and in such towns as Palmer, Seward and Talkeetna, a remote arctic village.

Sounds like they all could use a nice Hawaiian hot chocolate