The Crowd Decided. They Picked Damian.

Nito's Empanadas wins Peoples Champion at the Myrtle Beach Food Truck and Music Festival — in year one.

Somewhere between the eightieth food truck and the end of a long festival afternoon, the crowd at the Myrtle Beach Food Truck and Music Festival made a decision.

They voted. And they voted for Damian.

Nito's Empanadas took home Peoples Champion at this year's Myrtle Beach Food Truck and Music Festival — the top award, the one that doesn't come from a panel of judges. It comes from the people who showed up, ate, and decided. Eighty-plus vendors on the grounds. A waitlist that most first-year operators know well, because most first-year operators don't get in. Damian got in. Then he won.

The compression of that is worth sitting with for a second. Damian had a five-year plan to make this festival. He made it in year one.

If you've been following Nito's — the truck, the social media, the abuelo story — none of this should surprise you, exactly. What Damian built over the past year wasn't a marketing strategy. It was presence. He showed up at HOA events and school bingo nights and corporate lunches and community gatherings across the Grand Strand, consistently, with fresh dough and the same fold technique his grandfather used on a street corner in Uruguay in the 1970s. He made goofy cooking videos that people actually watched and shared. He answered questions. He remembered regulars. He posted his schedule every Monday so nobody had to guess.

That's the thing about a Peoples Championship. You can't campaign for it. You earn it in the parking lot at Metglas on a Tuesday, or at a Super Bowl setup on Clear Pond Blvd, or at a bingo night at Ocean Bay Elementary where the empanadas are gone before the second round of cards gets called. The votes at the festival were just the count. The work happened everywhere else.

The menu didn't hurt either. The Steak and Cheese has been the top seller since the truck launched — but the thing that makes a crowd stop and come back is range. Savory to sweet, traditional to inventive. The Biscoff Tres Leches sweet empanada is exactly the kind of thing you hand someone without explaining it, which is, as Damian himself once wrote, the only honest way to describe it.

What the win signals is simpler than it sounds: a community chose one of its own. Not the biggest truck. Not the most established name. The one that had been showing up — at their neighborhoods, their kids' schools, their weekend events — and making something worth lining up for. Nito's abuelo built that same kind of reputation on a single cart. The geography is different. The principle isn't.

The Dragon Boat Festival is coming up next, and Damian will be there. If you want to skip the line — and after a Peoples Championship, there will be a line — pre-orders are open now through the app. Tap into Nito's on Shortlist Pass, pick your empanadas, choose a pickup time, and they'll be ready when you arrive. Favorite Nito's while you're there and their schedule drops straight into your home feed every week — no more checking Instagram to find out where the truck is parked.

Three generations of the same recipe. Year one. Peoples Champion.