When Louie Orleans was trying to persuade his Colorado-born wife to move to Burlington several years ago, he took her to the ArtsRiot Truck Stop. The South Burlington native wanted to prove that the city had fun things to do on a Friday night.

“It was a total recruiting trip,” he said. “‘Look! This place is cool!’”

When the couple eventually moved to Burlington in 2021, Truck Stop was gone. ArtsRiot had changed hands in 2020, and the weekly summertime food truck event was on hiatus.

In 2022, Louie and his twin brother, Max Orleans, took over management of the event — with the permission of Truck Stop cofounder PJ McHenry and ArtsRiot’s owners at the time — and moved it across the street.

“It was a bit selfish, like, ‘There are still things here,’” Louie said. “If we have to create it, we’re gonna create it.”

Louie and Max are now in their second season running the popular Friday night food truck gathering at 377 Pine Street. This year, they’ve given it a new name to go with the block party vibe: the South End Get Down. With the help of childhood friend Tyson Ringey, they’ve also added an outdoor beer garden, the Pinery, with a view that somehow makes the Barge Canal look good.

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• Daria Bishop
• The Pinery co-owners, from left: Max Orleans, Tyson Ringey and Louie Orleans

The trio, all 33, moved home to Vermont and created a South End destination that takes maximum advantage of the state’s fleeting summer days — an outdoor space for people to gather for a drink, a bite to eat and a killer sunset over Lake Champlain. And they did it all with help from locals, many of whom they’ve known since high school.

The Pinery’s official opening coincided with the first South End Get Down of the season on Friday, May 26. The sunny, 70-degree weather drew 2,600 people over the course of the evening. Eighteen food vendors — including Truck Stop OGs Taco Truck All Stars, Southern Smoke and Burger Barn — served everything from burgers to empanadas to poke to maple creemees, while the mobile bar slung local beers, wine, cider, nonalcoholic drinks, margaritas and rum punch.

The next day, Broccoli Bar was parked back at the beer garden in time for lunch, ready to serve folks looking for a place to hang after shopping at the Burlington Farmers Market next door. On Sunday, the Caracas served Venezuelan arepas.

That’s the plan through Labor Day: The Pinery runs the bar on Friday for the Get Down, then a food vendor sets up each weekend day beside the beer garden in the southwest corner of the spacious lot. Well-known trucks and smaller, newer businesses will rotate in that spot.

The Orleans family has a history in the Pine Street lot: Max and Louie’s father, Bill, has operated his PP&D Brochure Distribution business for more than 15 years in the back of the warehouse there, which is also home to Barge Canal Market, Speaking Volumes and the original location of Myer’s Bagels. In August 2021, Max, Louie and Bill bought the lot and the buildings on it. They named the complex Coal Collective in honor of its history as Citizens Coal Company in the early 1900s.

The brothers have big dreams for supporting artists and community events in the space as they make their entrepreneurial mark on Burlington. In addition to the Get Down, they’ll bring Oktoberfest Vermont back to Waterfront Park on September 22 and 23. Founded by Lou DiMasi in 2015, the festival has been on hiatus since 2020; tickets go on sale June 30.

“This has all happened much faster than I could have imagined,” Louie said. “I don’t know if we’re always going to move at this speed.”

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• Daria Bishop
• The Pinery beer garden

Watching Ringey and the Orleans brothers on opening night of the Get Down, one could see that speed in action. The longtime friends were everywhere: greeting event-goers, running the bar, smoothing out logistics for vendors and even sorting their new reusable, branded cups into the right receptacles. The larger tasks were already behind them: navigating 60-something food vendor applications for the Get Down, building a schedule for 16 to 18 trucks and tents per week, getting insurance and approval from the Burlington City Council, constructing the beer garden area, and retrofitting the Pinery’s trailer into a mobile bar.

There were hiccups along the way. In early March, the trio drove to Massachusetts to buy a 30-year-old concessions trailer that Ringey had found on Facebook Marketplace. It was exactly what they wanted for the Pinery: a mobile unit with big windows on the side for customers to walk up and order. But it was completely rusted out underneath.

They scrapped that plan and headed straight to a coffee shop to search Craigslist for other options. On the way home via New Hampshire, they picked up a windowless trailer that had been used to transport cars.

“When we were leaving the dealership, we told the guy we were going to put windows in it,” Max said. “He was like, ‘These guys are idiots. Structurally, that’s gonna fall apart.’ We drove it four hours back to Vermont thinking, I really hope he’s wrong.”

Back in Burlington, they searched for a window installer and found South Burlington’s CHC Vans. With the windows in — and the trailer intact — they had two months to finish building the bar. They did the work themselves, with help on electrical, woodworking, landscaping and insurance from their high school friends.

“It’s really goofy how many of our friends have moved back and have their own professions and how much this project relied on all of them,” Ringey said. “It takes a village to build a beer garden.”

“And to drink at it afterwards,” Max added with a laugh.

Max and Louie have known their first Pinery employee, bar manager Ben Blanchard, since kindergarten.

The brothers met Ringey in sixth grade. Since then, their lives have overlapped in ways that make Ringey seem more like a triplet than a friend: Max and Ringey were college roommates; Louie and Ringey studied abroad together for six months. The Orleans brothers moved to Lake Tahoe together; then Louie and Ringey both ended up in San Francisco. Ringey officiated at Louie’s wedding, Louie officiated at Max’s, and Max officiated at Ringey’s.

Along the way, they dabbled in entrepreneurial ventures, including a music blog and a bathroom-centric blog called Poopin’ in the USA. Other ideas — coffee shops and pickle companies — remained theoretical.

“We knew it was going to work out when we did something like this,” Louie said.

Coming back to Vermont — Max first, then Ringey in 2020 and Louie in 2021 — gave the partners the impetus to leap from idea to business reality. In the Bay Area, the competition, finances and risk didn’t make sense. In Vermont, they have community support and a relatively novel concept.

Louie, whose background is in sales, has taken charge of spreadsheets, numbers and financials for the new venture. He’s also turned out to be a handyman, tackling plumbing and building a walk-in cooler. Ringey has handled marketing and branding for the Pinery, plus payroll and landscaping — though he’d never planted a flower before this, he said. Max, who has led bike tours all over the world and worked at Zero Gravity Craft Brewery, does business outreach as “the shaking hands, kissing babies guy,” Ringey said.

The businesses they’ve built differ vastly from what they would have done five years ago, Max said, reflecting where they and their friends are in life: in their early thirties, thinking about stroller and dog accessibility, and glad to find ample seating and Porta-Potties.

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• Daria Bishop
• Max Orleans serving a drink to a customer at the Pinery

At 5 p.m. on opening night of the Get Down, the strollers and dogs were out in force. The event tends to draw people in waves: young families first, then an older crowd — “every parent we’ve ever known,” Max said — then, around 7:30, twentysomethings dressed up for their Friday night out.

Mister Foods Fancy, a Get Down staple, did almost the same amount of business the first night as it did last year in midsummer, owner Paul Trombly said.

“It’s been pretty key to making our business exist,” he said. “[The Get Down] really celebrates the food trucks, and that makes it something to look forward to.”

Trombly appreciates the Orleans brothers’ positive energy; he noted that they rarely cancel the event when it threatens to rain.

“They understand our side of things and really try to make it happen, no matter what,” he said.

Matt Hiebsch and Alina Alter were frequent vendors last year at the Orleans’ event with Kitsune, their Japanese pop-up. Many of their Burlington regulars drove all the way to Stowe this winter for their residency at Tälta Lodge.

“If we hadn’t done the [Truck Stop], it’s likely we never would have reached that crowd,” they wrote in an email to Seven Days.

Kitsune will be busy with a summer pop-up back at Tälta starting June 22, but the pair will squeeze in several nights at the Get Down in early June and August.

“We always get such a kick out of the twins riding into the event on their scooters together,” Hiebsch and Alter added. “We still have trouble telling them apart, but they always take it in stride.”

Ringey has known Max and Louie for 20-plus years and still struggles to distinguish them, he said. The twins often have duplicate conversations with vendors at the end of the night, so they’ve started taking different sections to prevent confusion.

“If they need us, they’ll shout, ‘MaxLouie!’” Louie said. “We don’t care. We’ve been doing this for years.”