Throughout the summer months, a red food truck sits parked just outside the Hungry Horse Liquor Store. Inside, Joseph Barclay Nelson, better known as “Chef Clay,” can be found whipping up a selection of burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries and other finger food six days a week. Although his truck, Barclay’s Burgers, offers Bad Rock Canyon and its visitors one of food service’s “golden three” – pizza, tacos or burgers – Chef Clay’s renditions all come with various twists he’s learned through an on-the-ground culinary education traveling and working his way through the hospitality brand Pursuit’s restaurants in Glacier National Park.
The classic cheeseburger and the popular third-pound Big Smack both come with kimchi pickles on the brioche-bunned burger, while the Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich combines the pickles, a house slaw and dill cream sauce with “super spicy” Nashville Hot Fried Chicken. All fries come covered in savory curry seasoning. A list of loaded finger food touts fries and chicken fingers piled with varied selections of queso, tomato, jalapeno, bacon, Takis, scallions, chamoy and house sauce. While substitutions and omissions are most always an option, it’s the uniquely crafted flavor profiles that wind up mentioned in a majority of the five-star reviews Barclay’s Burgers has received on Google. Standing next to the display of standard Coca-Cola beverages is a second lineup of rotating international sodas – Guraná Antartica from Brazil, Inca Kola from Peru and Thumbs Up from India, to name a few.
Flathead Living sat down with Chef Clay to discuss the ins and outs of opening and operating a one-man seasonal food truck since he opened Barclay’s four summers ago. The following interview excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
Flathead Living: How did you get into the culinary world?
Chef Clay: On accident. I was going to go to college, and I was working in kitchens to get that far, to go to culinary school. Some of the chefs were like, “Clay, you don’t need to go to school, you’ve passed all of that.” I was a sous chef of a restaurant at Sun Valley ski resort. Then I came here, and I think it was 19 years I worked for Pursuit … I was a sous chef at Many Glacier for six, seven years, and then I was the chef at St. Mary’s for six, seven years, and then I got the executive chef job and just bounced around. I loved every minute of it.
FL: Tell me a little bit about the food selection for the truck.
CC: Working in the park here, it’s all summers. In the winters you’ve got to find somewhere to go. And self-teaching yourself culinary, I try to go to cool places. I can’t afford New York. But I can afford Austin, Texas. I went to Austin four times. The food down there is different than any other city. It’s fun, you get to play with it, like my Mushroom Burger. How kind of disgustingly hard it is to eat and it’s just crazy wacky. The Nashville – you can go to any restaurant and order a spicy chicken sandwich. This is supposed to be over the top. Embellished ingredients. I guess it’s just trying to get it as wacky as possible.
Another thing I strive for is big portions. The people who I get here, it’s the construction workers for lunch, the Flathead Electric guys, the BNSF train guys, a lot of those guys come down here, and the firefighters. One of my burgers went on a helicopter the other day … my burgers have been fighting fires.
I’ve been to where the Inca Kola comes from, and where a lot of sodas that I get come from. I understand that we have so many tourists from all around the place. Just different kinds of things, different kinds of sodas, make it interesting. You wouldn’t believe how many times people go, “look, look they have Guraná!” They’re super excited. It’s a nostalgic trigger, just like the Mad Libs. I have Mad Libs for bored people.
FL: What’s your favorite thing to make?
CC: My favorite thing to make is the Big Smack. It’s the tastiest burger. I’m actually playing around right now with the Indie Mac, since I do have a lot of folks from India come over here. The best burger I ever had, by the way, was a McDonald’s “Big Mac” in Delhi. They have what’s called McAloo Tikki, it’s a curried potato patty. It’s not spicy, but it’s got Indian spices on it. Then it has some of the same things a Big Mac has on it, but instead of cheese you can add paneer. It was the best burger I’ve ever had, and I’m thinking of doing something kind of like that next year, but who knows what it will be when it shakes down to it. I might make a menu with it on there, but by the time I bang it around to a few people like my mom and my girlfriend, they might think it’s too weird.
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FL: What’s it like running a one-man show in the summer?
CC: I do 15-hour days, six days a week, and on my Sundays I go down to the U.S. Foods store in Kalispell, and then I come back, put it all away, and that’s all I do on Sundays. But I lock in so hard in the summers that I’m perfectly fine not working in the winter. I’ll live cheaply, and my travel is not first-class by any means.
FL: What’s your favorite thing about running the food truck?
CC: The people, the locals. When I first started off, I thought that I would mostly be serving mostly tourists, but that’s not even half my business. It’s the locals that have really come around and become my bread and butter. They’re so nice and so great. Another honorable mention too is the people that own the liquor store, Chris and Alan Ruby. All of the employees are great and they’ve just been so great to work with. It’s such an easy relationship I’ve had with them over the past four seasons.
Barclay’s Burgers is open everyday except Sunday from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. starting the first of May until the first of October. For the last two weeks in September, Barclay’s is open from noon to 7 p.m. everyday except Sunday and Monday.