Page 70 - Abilene Living

and having a glass of wine with people you enjoy spending time with. Its life, food, wine and art, and the life part is that you come in here and share life with people… We’re trying to recapture what has been lost.”

In the frst six months, they have served over 4,500. Trueblood has been preparing for this, his frst restaurant, during the twenty years he has spent cooking on a professional level.

“I guess it was 1990 and I was living on the east coast and I had a friend who was a chef in a restaurant,” Trueblood recalled. “He called me one day and said, ‘Hey I need some help’, and I said ‘I don’t know anything about this’, and he told me he just needed hands. A lot of times in the restaurant business if you just have an extra set of hands, it helps. So that’s how I got started. I went in that night, and fell in love with cooking, and I haven’t stopped.” The Truebloods have been living in Clyde for eight years, and fve years ago they opened Tru Blu Catering, serving up “West Texas nouvelle cuisine” at events throughout the Big Country. They continue to work on the catering business as well as the budding restaurant and don’t expect to slow down in either place.

“No one imagined this thing would do what it’s done,” Trueblood said. “I think on our original business plan half of what we’ve done wasn’t even there in terms of volume. Steve, my mentor, has opened four

ABOVE Owner Joel Trueblood. The Truebloods have been living in Clyde for eight years, and fve years ago they opened Tru Blu Catering, serving up “West Texas nouvelle cuisine” at events throughout the Big Country. They continue to work on the catering business as well as the budding restaurant and don’t expect to slow down in either place.