R. R. Branstrom | Daily Press Dan Lewis of the Grateful Cheese hands a sandwich fresh off the grill to customer Kye Jolma.

EDITOR NOTE: The Daily Press will be featuring a series of articles on local businesses, highlighting their history and what makes them unique. The series will run on a regular basis in the Daily Press.

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ESCANABA — It’s been trial and error and redirected goals that brought the Lewises’ initial business model to what it is today: a popular food truck slinging cheesy grilled sandwiches from Rapid River, Mich. to Appleton, Wis.

Before starting the Grateful Cheese, said owners Dan and Heather Lewis, they’d had multiple other plans in mind. Those ideas were spawned from trips they took to other places. By Dan’s account, Heather would say things like, “someone should do this in the U.P.,” and he would say, “do it.”

So the couple started looking into spaces that were available. But the shells of former restaurants were like brokedown palaces, reminders of how difficult it can be to start and maintain a business, especially a brick-and-mortar eatery.

“You get such a high failure rate. Being short-staffed, having trouble getting employees, is already a thing [other businesses experience],” Dan explained. “So then we started thinking about food trucks, and it just seemed perfect.”

Their plans began building in earnest in 2019 and 2020.

“Heather was going to open up a pizza trailer, and she was going to go to school in San Francisco, and we were going to the pizza expo in Vegas,” Dan said. “When we were researching for the pizza, I started getting the bug for barbecue.”

They bought two trailers and intended to bring both ideas to life — one pizza truck, one barbecue truck. Heather enrolled in Tony Gemignani’s International School of Pizza.

Then COVID arrived to blow away those dreams.

“They canceled the expo. They cancelled her school,” Dan said. “And I told Heather, ‘you know, we could sell grilled cheese sandwiches like they do at the Grateful Dead shows.'”

What became known as Shakedown Street beginning in the late ’70s and early ’80s was whatever lot at Dead concerts people set up to tailgate and vend. As portable grills, frying pans, bread, cheese and butter were easy enough to come by, grilled cheese became a popular feature.

Of course, that was before custom trailers like the ones the Lewises ordered from Georgia came onto the scene.

“I said we could do whatever as long as we got a nice trailer. We kept talking about it as COVID lingered on, and that’s just what happened,” Dan said.

On this long strange trip, however, there were a few other steps along the way.

The Grateful Cheese opened in 2021. Also that year, the Lewises leased a building at 1402 Ludington St. Still wanting to implement pieces from their other, previous plans, they hoped to turn part of the building in to a carry-out pizzeria. “We almost went bankrupt there,” Dan confessed.

Fortunately, they were not completely without a net.

Instead of converting the building, they operated two food trucks out front — the Grateful Cheese and Tin Can Taco.

The bright red taco truck was short-lived; it was harder to stock and estimate the amount of fresh ingredients needed.

“It was so much waste,” said Heather. “With tacos, there’s the tomato, the lettuce… every day, if we don’t use it, you’re just throwing it away.”

In the beginning, too, they booked events without knowing the number of attendees. Dan said that some of those early days were “devastating,” when they were “not coming close to breaking even.” But he called the experience “eye-opening,” too.

“It’s how we learned. … Working it ourselves, going to the better events… and then getting rid of all the ones that aren’t, you know. And that’s taken years to tweak just the calendar.”

With a home base of Rapid River, the Grateful Cheese travels around the central and eastern U.P., but their biggest events are in Wisconsin. They belong to the Green Bay Food Truck Coalition and the Fox Valley Food Truck Coalition. For a few years, they’ve been going to Blaser’s Acres, a popular pumpkin patch in Green Bay, and this year, they’ve even been going to the home of the Packers themselves.

“A couple weeks ago, we started doing the Green Bay Packers summer training camp … feeding all the people at Lambeau Field,” Dan said. He stated proudly that the Grateful Cheese will be attending the NFL kickoff concert that features the Counting Crows in the Lambeau Field parking lot on Sept. 14.

The custom food truck has an exceptional amount of fridge space, so running out of cheese even on the busiest days hasn’t been a worry.

“At the Fourth of July and stuff, we’re able to hold so much food so we can just keep going. As long as our bodies can keep going, we can just keep putting out food,” Dan said.

They do make more than just grilled cheese, however. Dan said without hesitation that their steak sandwich is the most popular item: “We get really good steak — we get top sirloin, and we get that sliced thin; we put real cheese on.”

Their french fries and cheese curds move well, too.

Though the menu started off with many items, Dan pointed out that a lot of food trucks have only six to eight, so they’ve since whittled it down to now just the best-sellers. And the offerings flex a little; Heather said they don’t offer smashburgers during the busiest events because of the time they take to make.

Having found the rhythm to overcome the touch of grey that rippled through their earliest days, the Lewises’ food truck has made many customers happy.

“If we weren’t on wheels, we would have went out of business a couple times for sure,” said Dan. “But being able to move around and go where there’s events — it makes all the difference.”

Now, with so many roads open to them, the Grateful Cheese will keep truckin’.