Michael Rieux flipped a thin-cut ribeye off the burner onto a roll as steam filled the cramped kitchen. Sweat beaded on his brow, collecting on the netting that held back his hair.

He wrapped the order in paper, turning to the counter where a young couple had been waiting outside. They looked unenthused by the look of their food, and he heard them complain to each other about the time it took to make.

Rieux worked alone, making each order in silence, one after another. Fifteen minutes after he served the couple their food, they returned. They loitered by the service door, waiting to get Rieux’s attention. He worried that they had a complaint.

Instead, they began to rave about the quality of his food. Beaming, they assured him it was well worth the wait. Rieux was relieved, but not surprised.

“That happens all the time,” Rieux said, with a smirk on his face.

Rieux and his wife, Veronica, own and operate Cheesy Phil’s. The food truck serves cheesesteaks right next to the University of Oregon campus, inside the newly opened Annex food cart pod. However this was far from the first location.

The business is their family’s primary source of income. Rieux and his family had been homeless before it opened, living in shelters around Eugene. They’d left their hometown of Fresno, Calif., in search of a safer environment for their kids after gang activity in their community became too much for them to bear.

The truck’s exterior is steel, roughly bolted around the frame of the vehicle with a modified vent on top to let out cooking steam. Rust coats the steps leading inside. The licence plate reads “FUD TRK.”

Outside, Veronica sat on a bench, waiting for her husband to return from a break and keeping one eye out for potential customers. She had a wide grin on her face that remained as she spoke. Her curly black hair was tied up in a loose ponytail.

Before they moved to Oregon, she remembered her husband telling her that God was calling him to leave California. He had been in and out of prison all his life, and hoped to break the cycle.

Rieux, 42, has a calm and purposeful energy when he speaks. His teeth have a whiteness usually reserved for toothpaste commercials or Hollywood productions. He had a calm, bemused look on his face as he scanned the park for customers. Today was slow, but orders often came in bursts.

That afternoon, he was wearing two different pairs of sunglasses. Black visors to cover his eyes, and a second pair resting on the brim of his baseball cap. He wore a black t-shirt, the same as his wife’s. There were several tattoos on his arms. An outline of California was traced across his bicep. A star marked Fresno.

After several of his prior attempts towards food business had failed, Rieux took to YouTube in search of inspiration.

One video in particular that piqued his interest was a 2012 recording of a Philadelphia restaurant called Pat’s King of Steaks. They had recorded a crowd of people lined up outside of the restaurant, waiting for a chance to order Pat’s famous cheesesteaks.

“I was like, wow. How the hell is he doing that?” Rieux said.

After seeing the video, he opened a similar food truck in California, where he began to perfect his cheese steak recipe. As he talked about his business, his voice became commanding.

“There’s going to be no other sandwich like mine,” he said. “My signature is in the preparation.”

Rieux described his first year in Oregon after moving here in February 2023 as one of the most difficult periods of his life. He and his family came to Eugene with a housing voucher, but they ran out of money after three months.

As the weather turned cold, Rieux had to do everything in his power to get his family to shelter. His criminal record from his time in California made it difficult for him to find a job.

Rieux scoured the city for opportunity, but came up empty-handed. While rain poured down on the streets outside, Rieux found himself stealing from stores around the city. He only took food at first, but soon turned to stealing electronics. They were the smallest objects that he could sell at a good price.

He gave whatever he could to his family. On cold nights, he would pay for his children to stay at motels to protect them from the elements. He tried to avoid stealing enough to draw suspicion.

Rieux soon fell back into the patterns that had led to his arrests in California, numbing himself with drugs and alcohol. Despite the change in his environment, his problems had followed him to Oregon. He considered leaving again, but he knew that he could not outrun his demons.

Remembering this period of his life, he grimaced. He covered part of his face in shame. “I had all of these people that relied on me, that I love,” he said.

It was the first time in Rieux’s life that he had nowhere to go at the end of the day. Early in the morning, Rieux tows the food truck into the park. On his passenger seat, he keeps a heart-shaped pillow signed by his wife and his cardiologist. When he feels stress, he holds it to his chest to help with the pain.

Rieux doesn’t mention his health issues when he talks to his regulars.

At first, he thought his back pain had been from overexertion. He thought that his shortness of breath was due to smoking or stress. He didn’t want to risk going to the hospital. He feared the medical bill would keep their finances underwater.

Rieux knew that something was wrong. He felt it every time he took a deep breath. He tried to push through it. And for a while, he did.

When the attack came, it was sudden and crippling.

On Aug. 21, 2023, Rieux’s eldest son, Abraham, turned 10. As their family celebrated around him, Rieux collapsed. He had suffered a major heart attack.

He was transported by helicopter to Portland for a surgery to repair his aorta that lasted 12 hours.

“I don’t remember it,” Rieux said. “I just remember waking up from it.”

Following the surgery, Rieux was barely able to move, let alone walk. He took hundreds of tiny steps in physical therapy, one after another. Progress was slow, but he kept at it until he retrained his body well enough to walk again.

Rieux is not usually sentimental. Still, he keeps the pillow nearby. It reminds him to be thankful and motivates him to move forward.

“Some tragedies became our blessings,” Rieux said. “It’s just been wild for us, but God has been really good.”

Rieux knew that he had to change. He knew that the life he lived was not sustainable. In the wake of his brush with death, he decided to commit to his plans of opening a restaurant. The work he did during his recovery process would eventually lead to Cheesy Phil’s.

Veronica became his official caregiver after the surgery. The government funds she received for helping him recover allowed them to find permanent housing, and they begain saving up for a potential location for their business.

Not long after, while running errands, Michael and Veronica saw a food truck parked outside of a commercial kitchen that didn’t seem to be in use. They pulled off of West 11th Ave. and began to pray. Too nervous to knock on the door, Rieux began to circle the building.

After the fourth lap, he parked beside the truck and prepared to pitch his restaurant in hopes that the owner was willing to sell or lease the vehicle. The truck belonged to Ben Maude, the former owner of Bar Perlieu. Maude had spent the last week online, looking for someone like Rieux to rent to.

“Out of the blue, he knocked on my door,” Maude said. “We started talking, and that was it.”

After their first conversation, Maude was impressed. Once he tried Rieux’s menu, he finalized the lease in early 2025.

“You could tell that he was passionate about what he does. He loves his product,” Maude said. “Not only does he have the experience and the drive, there’s also a need there. He needs to succeed at it.”

On July 1, 2025, Rieux’s bank contacted him about an unclaimed account in his name that had been accruing interest for years. They issued him a check for nearly $30,000. “I’m still having a hard time comprehending it. Until it’s in my hand, I can’t believe it,” Rieux said.

Rieux plans to use the money to reach his eventual goal, a brick- and- mortar restaurant of his own that could support his wife and children.

“The day I opened this door and sold my first sandwich, I was already thinking about where I’m gonna put something that’s gonna stay,” Rieux said. “This has just been a stepping stone since I opened the door.”

Rieux believes that his faith provided him the opportunity to make his dream of owning a restaurant come true. Rieux has owned many businesses over the years, but none lasted. He lost money and he lost time, but he never lost hope.

“I have this whole business plan; this whole dream, this whole idea, this whole thing painted in my head,” Rieux said.

He described pristine white floors, silver countertops and employee dress codes. All of the details were accounted for. A mosaic of choices he would one day make.

Rieux spent countless nights dreaming about this restaurant, at times awake, at times asleep. Cheesy Phil’s has become more than a restaurant to Rieux. It’s his future. A future where his loved ones are safe and comfortable. A future where the tribulations of past years are nothing but a distant memory.

Rieux works long hours day and night in service of this vision. There is no end in sight, but he presses forward. A thousand small steps, one after another, until he can get back on his feet. Then, another thousand before he can finally rest.

“It might be a while before I can take a step back, but… ,” he said, trailing off in thought.

He looked around at the vacant parking lot. There were no other vehicles parked there besides the two he owned. He looked beyond them, right to where the trees met the sky.

“I mean, there’s nothing else to do.”