He Built the Kitchen His Competition Needed

Tommy Festa runs The Clever Cleaver, a meat-forward food truck across the Grand Strand — and just built the commissary kitchen the whole scene needed.

Most food truck operators are looking for an edge on each other. Tommy Festa built a kitchen and handed the edge to everyone.

The commissary is in Murrells Inlet — brand new, just passed inspection, clean in the way a space is clean when someone built it right the first time. Tommy didn't build it for The Clever Cleaver. He built it for the area's food truck operators: a licensed, inspection-passed prep and storage facility where trucks can operate the right way, not scrambling for workarounds. That's infrastructure. That's the kind of investment that doesn't pay off in a single season.

It also tells you something about who's running the truck.

Tommy's from New York, and the food traces straight back to where he started. He came up in the butcher trade and spent years working inside the family's supermarket — the kind of upbringing where you learn early that the quality of the cut is the whole game, and that the person on the other side of the counter is what you're actually working for. There's an old-school pride in how he approaches food: consistency matters, details matter, customers matter. It shows up on the menu — meat-forward, thought-through, not trying to be anything it isn't.

The Clever Cleaver's menu is the kind that rewards people who take it seriously. The Bacon Smashburger is the baseline — smashed, the way it should be. The Caprese Burger goes further: fried mozzarella, bruschetta, pesto, balsamic, a burger that's genuinely doing something. The Hot Honey Chicken Sandwich comes with homemade pickles, which is the detail that separates someone who learned to cook from someone who decided to cook. The BBQ pulled pork loaded pretzels are the thing you order when you want to stop explaining yourself. All prices include tax. No math at the window.

Megan keeps the operation moving. Tommy runs the kitchen. It's a husband-and-wife setup, which means accountability goes all the way down — there's no middle manager absorbing the feedback before it reaches the people who can act on it.

The Clever Cleaver just joined the Shortlist Pass network, and preordering is coming online soon. The truck is mobile, so the schedule shifts — Conway, Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island, Georgetown, wherever the next event lands. That's exactly why following them on the platform matters: their stops drop into your feed before the line forms.

Favorite The Clever Cleaver on Shortlist Pass and their location drops and schedule updates land on your home feed — you won't need to guess where they're parked next. When preordering goes live, you'll be able to order ahead directly through the app. If you want to book them for an event, that's available through the app too — tap their SmartPage and send the request.

A guy who only cared about his own operation doesn't build a commissary kitchen for the competition. That's the whole story, really — and the Bacon Smashburger is just where it starts.