Next Up for Boston Food Influencer Everybody Gotta Eat: A Food Truck

Emmanuel Mervil of Everybody Gotta Eat — the catering operation, food-festival host, and food-centric Instagram handle with 18,000 followers that highlights Black-owned restaurants around Boston — is adding another branch to the business: a food truck.

Mervil is planning to debut the truck for hire at private parties as well as for stops around town to serve the public starting in spring 2023, marketing director Dawn Martin tells Eater. The truck is building off of the success of Everybody Gotta Eat’s catering business, which has hired local chefs to roll out Haitian, Dominican, and Jamaican feasts for clients that have included artist Rick Ross and sports company Puma over the past year. “The truck is just going to add to that experience,” Martin says.

Like the catering business, the food truck will feature a rotating roster of local chefs like Krayla Brice of Gourmet Fish in Hyde Park. Customers will be able to track the food truck’s whereabouts using Everybody Gotta Eat’s new website — underwritten by Pepsi, through a fund to support Black entrepreneurs — that is launching roughly within the next month, Martin says.

Everybody Gotta Eat

Mervil, a Cambridge native, first started Everybody Gotta Eat several years ago as a food blog that guided Bostonians on where to eat across town, from popular breakfast spot the Joint in Jamaica Plain to Caribbean restaurant Highland Creole Cuisine in Somerville. It didn’t take long for the business to grow into in-person events, which now include an annual Everybody Gotta Eat Food Fest that drew crowds in June to Roxbury’s Reggie Lewis Center, plus the catering arm and incoming food truck. But, according to Martin, the business isn’t forgetting its restaurant-recommendation roots — “Our bread and butter is the restaurant reviews,” she says — and the team plans to evolve in that department, too, with more videos on Instagram coming up in the future.

Keep an eye on Everybody Gotta Eat’s Instagram account for updates on the food truck as the team gets closer to launch.