Not just a side

What goes with cinnamon sugar, white-and-red barbecue sauce, kimchi and Nutella?

If you ask Michael Cannova, he’d tell you it’s tater tots — just not all at once.

Cannova, who was raised in Cahaba Heights and now lives in New York City, launched his specialty tater-tot food truck, Tot Spot, in Birmingham in June, and he is working to bring any and every flavor to the popular potato-based side.

“I’ve never heard one person say, ‘I hate tater tots,’” Cannova said. “There’s something fun about them. There’s something comforting about them.”

Even after moving to New York City in 2006 to work in advertising, Cannova would return to Birmingham to visit family and started to see changes in the city, including with the food scene.

“I just noticed that Birmingham was opening their mind,” he said. “They were just becoming more open to creative things in Birmingham, and this renaissance and resurgence kind of started with downtown.”

Inspired by the food trucks he saw in New York, Cannova said he knew he wanted to open one of his own. As someone who enjoys interacting with a restaurant’s kitchen, Cannova said the openness of a food truck is what appealed to him.

“There’s a more fun experience with a food truck,” he said. “You’ve got this interaction with people. It doesn’t feel stiff or stifled by having to go through a routine.”

The next step was figuring out what food on which to base his truck. Because the food truck scene has grown significantly in Birmingham over the last few years, Cannova sought something previously untapped — meaning no tacos, no seafood, no sandwiches.

“The food truck scene, it needed something fun and new,” he said.

He noticed tater tots cropping up on restaurant menus but said there were not many variations. That’s when his opportunities from advertising and passion for tots merged.

“I’ve traveled the world in advertising, and I’ve eaten cuisines all over the world, and I just started thinking about how I could merge these things with tater tots,” he said. 

Cannova started by topping tater tots with his favorite foods — sweet potato tots topped with kimchi, russet potato tots with white-and-red barbecue sauce — and has since developed more than 100 recipes.  

When the food truck first launched, each tot was made by hand by staff. That soon became unsustainable, Cannova said. After turning customers in as little as an hour due to tot shortages, Cannova said they started outsourcing the tot-making process in order to keep up with demand.

The Tot Spot menu will constantly rotate, Cannova said, and will not be dictated by normal meal times. That means there might be cinnamon-bun-inspired tots at dinnertime and buffalo tots first thing in the morning.

“I want it to be kind of diverse because I’m one of those people where I eat the wrong foods at the wrong time,” he said. “I don’t have a schedule.”

The sense of novelty that will come through tater-tot recipes is something Cannova said he hopes registers throughout the brand. The Tot Spot food truck, for example, is not wrapped in the typical vinyl — it’s one giant chalkboard.

“Even before I made a first tot, it was, ‘How do I make this [food truck] interactive? How do I make this fun?’” he said.

Cannova got the idea of making the truck a chalkboard from the chalkboards commonly seen in restaurants. The truck’s side will be used to display that day’s menu, and he said he hopes to bring in local artists to help decorate.

“We want consumers, whenever we don’t have art on the side of the truck, to come out and doodle on it,” Cannova said. “There’s something beautiful about the organic, like an old handwritten letter. There is a charm to something that is tangible.”

Cannova will continue to live in New York and plans to return to Birmingham as often as possible to work with the truck.

When he’s not in Alabama, however, he has Seth Beisher, the “man in the window,” and a part-time employee running the truck. Cannova continues to send over new recipes.

“I’m sad not to get to be there the whole time, but they’re awesome people and well-equipped to deal with it,” he said.

In the truck’s first few weeks, Cannova said they received great feedback from customers, and they are looking forward to bringing more recipes and more tater tots to Birmingham.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun with this brand; we’re going to have a lot of fun with this food,” Cannova said. “We’ve got a lot of things in the works.”