Denver’s own The Easy Vegan won the 16th season of the Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race” besting eight other teams over a series of challenges on the popular show. Co-founders Taylor Herbert and Alexi Mandolini are planning to use their $50,000 show winnings toward a brick-and-mortar location.

The Easy Vegan team, fresh off their victory, still sets up as a seasonal popup tent at the City Park Farmer’s Market every Saturday and the South Pearl Street Farmer’s Market every Sunday. While The Easy Vegan team operated out of a food truck for the show, you can find them: “Under the tent, not a truck! We’ve had a lot of people look for us in the truck,” Herbert said.

The pair have not had much time to process their victory, following the conclusion of the eight-episode show featuring more than a dozen challenges — all filmed in Los Angeles.

“Maybe next year [we’ll take a vacation],” Mandolini joked with a regular.

“This is the experience of a lifetime, it still really hasn’t even sunk in that we won,” Herbert said.

For the pair, the victory represents the culmination of years of hard work, starting from step one during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“During the shutdowns, [Alexi] was working in catering and lost her job. I was bartending and I lost work. The bar that I was working at actually closed down two days a week because they were slow and let us take over the space and start kind of figuring our concept out. That’s where The Easy Vegan was born,” Herbert said.

Herbert calls The Easy Vegan’s concept, “plant-forward street food.”

It was there, during the two days a week Herbert’s bar, which had closed due to slow business, that the duo began to experiment with flavor combinations, plating and more in socially distanced pop-up dinners and takeout settings. After a casting team reached out to Mandolini and Herbert to compete on the show, they brought on executive sous chef of Local Jones, Matt Heikkila, to round out their three-person team.

“This was really humbling. I feel like the teams that they had this year, there was just so much culinary talent. We definitely had a little bit of imposter syndrome to deal with and kind of just put our heads down and worked as hard as we could to make the connections we needed to make to be able to take home the win,” Herbert said.

Denverites have taken notice too.

“One of the things we say we love about having a tent instead of a food truck, I feel it’s more of an intimate experience. We get to talk to the people who come to see us. We get to know our regulars who quickly become friends and since we’ve been on the show, we’ve had so many more people we get to meet for the first time who come out to see us.” Herbert said.

The pair plan to ride their momentum into a brick-and-mortar location, which will be a different name and concept.

“[We’re] really open to any part of Denver. We’ll keep the Easy Vegan as a seasonal popup at the farmers markets… We’re really excited to share more about that as soon as we have some news,” Herbert said.

The brick and mortar may help fill a gap in Denver’s vegan food scene, which Herbert noted is predominantly mobile, either as trucks, tents or other options.

“Our goal is to get into a restaurant brick and mortar space and that’s what I feel like Denver definitely doesn’t have enough of,” Herbert said.