When Katie Currid and her husband Tyler Jackson returned from four years in Vicenza, Italy, they came with two new babies in tow — one, their son Fox, and the other, though not a real baby per se, the bones of a new business venture.
A Prosecco truck. Like a food truck for bubbles. A way to deliver the bubs any time of day, in true European fashion.
"It was so cheap to drink wine in Italy. Like you would go to the grocery store and sometimes it was cheaper to drink wine than it was to drink water. So we drank wine," Currid laughed.
And it was over wine that the idea originally came to her. She wanted to bring a Piaggio Ape back to the states.
The Italian farm vehicle is designed like a Vespa scooter, with one tiny wheel in the front, but functions as a truck, with a truck bed built over two rear wheels. Hence the head-scratching.
"I swear the first time I saw it was like two large men and a dog in this tiny, tiny truck," she said.
After extensive research, and running from military office to embassy to other random government buildings and back again — all while seven months pregnant — Currid finally got the go-ahead for that special shipment of a tiny Piaggio Ape. Signed, sealed and delivered all the way to Liberty, Missouri.
All they needed was a name.
"When our son was born in Italy, in the hospital they kept calling him Patatino," she said.
The suffix "ino" means little in Italian. That's how Jackson came up with the idea: Fizzolino.
For the past year, they’ve rented it out as a mobile bartending service. There are three taps.
"We fill it with sangria a lot. We're doing like apple cider now because it's getting into fall. We can do like a flavored lemonade, and we do a lot of local beer, like Boulevard Wheat or KC Dunkel," Currid said.
But there’s always one tap for Prosecco.
"You have it with cheese, you have it with pasta, you have it all the time," she said.
Even for dessert.
"We just wanted to bring a piece of that back with us because we love Kansas City and we loved Italy and we just wanted to find a way to marry those two lifestyles," she said.
Andrea Tudhope is a reporter at KCUR 89.3. Email her at andreat@kcur.org, and follow her on Twitter @andreatudhope.
