by Kristen Wile

Chef Michael Bowling at an Unpretentious Palate event. TM Petaccia/UP

Food from Hot Box Next Level Kitchen will soon be available for delivery to South End and nearby residents. Chef/owner Michael Bowling has signed a lease on a ghost kitchen space, and hopes to have service up and running in a month. The Hot Box gained popularity as a food truck for offering eclectic street food and bar fare before opening as a fast-casual restaurant inside Southern Strain Brewing in Concord.

“It’s a small kitchen in comparison to what a restaurant would be, but it gives us the opportunity to be able to offer Hot Box food in South End and to the delivery radius we’ll have there,” Bowling says. “It’s a good time for us and it’s a perfect situation. We don’t have to worry about the overhead of a full-blown restaurant. We don’t have to worry about servers. It’s just me and a couple of guys in there just serving our good food: burgers and wings and things.”

The menu will be similar to that of the current Hot Box menu in Concord, with a few adjustments. Bowling says they’ll likely swap to their house-made chips instead of fries to better adapt to delivery, and will expand their burger and wing options. Delivery will be available through UberEats and Door Dash for lunch, dinner, and late-night service.

The move will also enable Hot Box to seek more business delivering to office buildings, with boxed lunches and salad offerings available as well as catering set-up.

Bowling plans to introduce Hot Box to the neighborhood through what he calls guerilla marketing, a man-on-the-street campaign of flyers and conversations encouraging neighbors to try them out. The chef has been hoping to expand to the Charlotte area for a while now, specifically West Charlotte, with expansion to places such as Greenville and Raleigh.

“Hopefully it’s a situation where we get in there, things go really, really well, and it’s a bridge to a brick and mortar,” Bowling says.

The Hot Box food truck is currently on the market for sale as Bowling focuses on the new ghost kitchen location.