What is GUP? GUP, stands for Ground Up and is a concept of food and way of making it. GUP’s namesake comes from the idea that you should know where your food comes from; “literally from the ground up.” It also implies the reality that, everything you will eat is seasoned with hand-ground and custom-blended spices and sauces. GUP is a mobile cuisine based in Lincoln, Nebraska combining scratch cooking and local ingredients to provide a unique experience for everyone. Who are we? Erik Hustad, Chef and Co-Owner, studied Culinary Arts at The Art Institute of Seattle and recently came back home to start GUP with cousin and Co-Owner, Gabriel Lovelace. What we do. Where there’s a WILL. There’s a WAY. This common expression is used to refer to a lot of different things, but the mobile food movement is a perfect example. There are a lot of creative, food loving entrepreneurs out there looking for a way to convert the ideas in their heads into a product they can sell. The same goes for writers, actors, singers, designers and every other artist. We all have some wired-in desire to express our creativity through some form of ART. With today’s access to technology and the internet, millions of great artists have been able to share their gift to the world, and this ART would not have been loved by nearly as many people without this technology. At GUP, we have developed a passion for the art of food. That art, however, cannot be downloaded on a computer. The best thing a chef without a restaurant can do is to get a food truck and get that food out there. We knew that our art was ready to be shared, but during a national recession, a million dollars is hard to come by. That’s okay, in fact, there are a lot of benefits to being a mobile restaurant. - We can come to you, maybe not everyday, but we’ll be close to you at some point. - There are no bells and whistles here, what you see is what you get, and it’s all about the food. - The food HAS to be good, or we won’t be able to convince you to choose us over the other options. - It’s fun. It’s different. We don’t have any franchise big-wigs to listen to. We can make whatever we want, which means you’ll actually find food that’s in season here. If you want to eat laboratory-grown plastic tomatoes in the middle of winter, go to your nearest chain restaurant. If you want a BLT featuring heirloom tomatoes, ripe and bursting with flavor, grown and picked by local farmers, that’s what we’ll give you (late summer, early fall of course). We have a passion for our craft, and we hope that it brings you joy.