“That first day you were like, ‘I’m not ready, I need five more minutes,’ and I’m like, ‘People are lining up. We just have to do it.’ And I opened the window, and it was as brutal as we thought,” Liz Huot recalls, talking with her husband Jesse, co-owner of Grind Burger Kitchen.

“I still have nightmares about that line!” Jesse says. “We did 190 burgers in three hours. We didn’t have anything pre-weighed. It was amateur hour.”

On that spring day in 2012 when the Huots slid open their window and served their first burger, the young couple envisioned their future. “We’d have a restaurant with me in the front, Jesse in the back place and do that till we died,” Liz says.

But first, they had a truck. For this pair new to the restaurant world, the food truck was the – comparatively affordable – first step in that long-term plan.

They decided to specialize on burgers before burgers became the “it” dish. “We looked at what there was and what there needed to be,” says Jesse. “Grinding it ourselves was a big deal. Liz was a vegetarian for a long time.” This level of control made certain the burger was something she’d want to eat.

The pair had more lessons ahead. Their third truck event suffered after the owners spent a late night out at Akiko’s. “Not having a lot of kitchen experience we thought, ‘you wake up, make the food and sell it.’ Rookie mistake,” Jesse says.

They only brought one hundred burgers and ran out in an hour. Then they forgot to turn down the refrigerator, which they had cranked up to keep cool by the griddle. The next day two tubs of expensive, fresh beef were frozen.

That didn’t stop Liz and Jesse from bursting onto the nascent food truck scene. Initially, they built alliances with other popular trucks. Then came, what the Huots describe as the food truck wars, with a “food truck association” pitted against their “alliance” in a battle for the best events.

“We had the health department called on us a couple times to try to get us kicked out,” Liz says. “It got really vicious.”

“The summer the ton of trucks came out [2013]  people either wanted to come after us or came to ask for help,” Liz continues. “We met with everyone who asked. But [most of them] didn’t want to hear what we had to say. People didn’t want to believe that you weren’t making money hand over fist; they didn’t want to believe how much work it was.”

Sometimes the money was good. “There were events where you’d go home and have $4,000 in twenties,” Jesse says. “Then your fridge breaks, and you lose all your beef. Event planners would tell us a number and then half would show up, or more trucks would be there, or you’d lose your ass to pizza in a window.”

The work was grueling on the sweltering truck. “Looking back I can’t believe we did it for so long,” Liz says. “Fifteen, 16 hours a day four days in a row, collapse, and by the time you get rested you go back and do it again.”

The hard work paid off. A cult following sprang up around those perfectly seared patties of uber- fresh beef. The Huots created a custom blend of local beef, ground within hours of the cow grazing in an Oldham county pasture. The foodies in town went wild.

A $13 burger on Preston Highway?

By late 2014 Liz and Jesse were ready to move up. While other restaurants opened their doors to carefully designed locations in trendy neighborhoods, this duo took over a seedy-looking mustard yellow concrete block building on Preston Highway.

“We needed a commissary because of new health department rules,” Jesse explains. “When we realized everything was still here, and we could just cook food and open doors we were like ‘how different can this be from a truck?’ Famous last words.”

The two took on the filth left by the previous occupant. The place was disgusting, Liz says. “We took a thermostat off the wall, and dead roaches fell out.”

They were fighting a battle on more than one front. Word on the street, they recall, was that “nobody’s going to pay for a $13 burger on Preston Highway.” They were undeterred.

“We would go all over the city and [people] would follow us,” Jesse says. “Why wouldn’t they come to Preston Highway?”

And they did, often lining up from the cash register to the door.

That brought new struggles. “You can’t run a restaurant with two people,” Liz says. The early mom-and-pop dream grew into something bigger. However, finding staff with their level of dedication wasn’t easy. “It’s hard getting people to understand it’s not just a burger place,” Liz says. “It’s a nice restaurant with beautiful, plated dishes.”

“It’s a hard lifestyle,” Jesse adds. “A lot of restaurant owners don’t talk about how really fucking hard it is. You don’t ever have any money.”

“At least it’s cheeseburgers,” Liz says, bringing a pragmatic approach to the business. “My dad was a roofer. I was used to ebbs and flows in income and ‘it’s tight this week kids, it’s beanie weenies for four nights.’”

“We never gave ourselves the option to fail,” she continues. “Not in the motivational poster kind of way, but you just figure it out. We’re business owners. We’re not restaurant owners. That’s what makes it less scary.”

If something happened, and they no longer had Grind? “We’ll open a lingerie store,” says Jesse.

Next up: NuLu

But for now it’s burgers—not bras—and team Huot has set their sights on the heartbeat of Louisville’s restaurant scene: NuLu.

Saying goodbye to their first restaurant isn’t easy. “I’m still pretty bummed about having to leave the area,” Jesse says, pointing to an ongoing struggle with parking, changes in the neighborhood, and the fairground/convention center’s loss of business as causes.

NuLu and its resurgence made sense, and they found a big space ready to be transformed at the former The Bodega (more recently Earth Friends Café) location.

The challenges for this opening, however, differ from Preston Highway. Pregnant with their first child, Liz freely shares that she’s been “pretty useless” in helping with the renovations.

But as always, undeterred, work went on. The orange and yellow color scheme has been replaced with dark and light gray paint. Subway tiles now give the dining room a vintage feel. In addition, they built a new bar and updated the kitchen.

Grind is making the move from Preston Highway to 829 E. Market St. on December 22.

Liz and Jesse haven’t sat still since they opened that truck window nearly four years ago. Their resilience, and hands-on, bare knuckles ethic keeps them moving. What’s next? They’ll take Grind to other cities. Lexington is tops on their list.

And a couple of concepts other than Grind are simmering. What should Louisville look out for? Don’t discount any ideas, including one Jesse dreamed up some time ago. “I’d love to take over a church basement and do casseroles.”