Cross mountain boys and Japanese grilling, what do you get? Hillbilly Hibachi.

When it comes to having a “following,” that word can have a few different meanings for a restaurant. It can mean having a loyal customer base that frequently dines at an establishment. It also can be the number of people that “like” or “follow” it on social media.

Hillbilly Hibachi has both.

This Asian-meets-Eastern-Kentucky food truck has more than 26,000 followers on Facebook at facebook.com/hillbachi and more than 1,100 on Instagram.

But it also has diehard customers who will follow the food truck from stop to stop in and around Louisa, Kentucky (sometimes twice a day for both lunch and dinner.)

“We’ve got some regulars who really support us,” said Hillbilly Hibachi co-owner Travis York.

York, along with co-owner Adam Brown, both loved to cook when they met playing pick-up basketball in 2014. York was a head basketball coach in Lawrence County and Brown was going through rehab for drug addiction and regained his childhood passion for cooking in the process. Living in a halfway house of 20 guys, Brown cooked three meals a day for 100 straight days for all the house’s residents.

“I just love it, I get that from my grandmother. She just loves to feed people,” he said. “I just love to watch people enjoy what I cook.”

As York and Brown bonded over basketball, they also increasingly bonded over food. They would go out to eat after tournaments and exchanged meals at each other’s houses.

“Sometimes, he would fix something,” York said. “I’d post something on Facebook. He’s make a comment and I’m like, ‘come over and get some.’”

The first time the two cooked together was at The Table, Brown’s brother’s church in Louisa. Since they both had Blackstone flat-top grills and had to basically feed an entire team quickly and on a budget, they decided to go with a mainstay of Asian cuisine.

“We made hibachi because we didn’t have access to it,” York said. “If you wanted that, you kinda had to make it yourself.”

“The next week, we were getting messages like crazy saying, ‘when y’all going to do that again?’” Brown added.

They did that again, pulling their trucks up, firing up the grills and setting up at softball tournaments and other community events around Louisa for the first four or five months. They experimented with their own yum-yum and teriyaki sauces and incorporated a few secret seasonings not usually found in Asian cuisine to land on the flavors that would become the essence and the draw of Hillbilly Hibachi.

“We just put our own flair on it,” Brown said. “It took us a long time to figure out the right combination.”

“There’s some subtleties that from us being from Eastern Kentucky, there’s a few spices we are doing to use,” York added. “It’s kind of like a musician who hears the song but doesn’t know the notes and just plays it by ear. That’s kind of what makes us unique.”

Pulling up with grills and a tent gave way to renting a place downtown with a storage facility, opening a couple times a week pop-up style and cooking until they ran out of food. They eventually invested in a food trailer and had Riley Burchett, a friend and tattoo artist from Huntington, W.Va., create the restaurant’s logo.

Brown and York strategically would drive Hillbilly Hibachi to smaller towns within an hour of Louisa like Inez, Salyersville and parts of neighboring West Virginia, bringing within smelling distance the hibachi flavors customers normally would have to drive over an hour to experience.

Hillbilly Hibachi offers menu items like teriyaki steak, chicken, shrimp, veggies or a combination of those items with either noodles, white rice or fried rice. The restaurant posts its weekly schedule on social media on Sundays, typically hitting a location an hour outside of Louisa for lunch and coming to another town on the way back to open up for dinner hours. They also make a point to stay in Louisa twice a week.

Hillbilly Hibachi even travels to Ashland and Winchester, places with several Asian establishments of their own, and finds returning satisfied customers. Thanks to its social media presence, traveling schedule and other events throughout the year, Hillbilly Hibachi has received requests to cater or set up at events in Cincinnati and even places as far away as Panama City, Fla., and Atlanta.

“I don’t even know how they heard about us, but they heard about us,” Brown said.

What is in store for Hillbilly Hibachi? For Brown, that depends. Sometimes, he thinks about a franchise. Other times, it is a storefront location of just another trailer.

“I have a different plan for it every day. I probably drive my business partner (York) insane, which I’m sure I do,” he said. “Right now, we ain’t gotta change nothin’. I don’t want it to get too big to where it ain’t manageable and the quality of the product goes down. If that means one trailer, that means one trailer.”

York and Brown are blown away from all of the unexpected surprises Hillbilly Hibachi has given them, whether it is a devoted social media following or the chance to cook up food and donate money to charities and families in need.

“It was just a fun side gig that has turned into a full time job,” Brown said. “Well, it’s not a job. I love it.”