Inside Akal Travel Center, a 24-hour truck stop on Wyoming’s high plains, the smells of sizzling garlic and earthy curry powder permeate the air. It’s a gray, windy day in late January, and Ediquis Brown has parked his rig at the fuel station off Interstate 80, about 20 miles from downtown Laramie, Wyoming. He walks past aisles stocked with candy bars and kitschy souvenirs to the checkout counter, where he orders without even looking at the faded whiteboard menu. His go-to: tandoori chicken, garlic naan, one mango lassi, and two cups of creamy chai.
Based out of Fort Lauderdale, Brown travels east to west every week in his 18-wheeler, often driving up to 11-hour shifts and eating in his vehicle to stay on schedule. He is one of the dozens of motorists who come to Akal each day for house-made batches of beautifully blistered naan, golden-hued butter chicken, and biryani bejeweled with carrots and peas.
“We attract customers with the cheapest diesel—and the food,” says Gurjot Singh, who has been the truck stop’s manager since 2014, just two years after owners Mintu Pandher and his wife, Amandeep, bought the property. All 10 of their employees relocated to Laramie from the Punjab state of northwest India and now reside in a housing complex behind the gas station.
In Wyoming, where less than 2% of the population identifies as Asian, Akal serves as a rare hub of Indian cooking and culture along the I-80 corridor: a Punjabi kitchen humming beside rows of fuel pumps. There’s even a Sikh gurdwara on-site for the staff and anyone else who wants to visit or worship.
Back in the wood-paneled four-table dining area, Brown strikes up a conversation with fellow long haul trucker Anthony Masonar as he waits for his food to come out of the pickup window. Both drop by Akal two to four times a month for gas and a hot Indian meal, which they say is a tastier, healthier alternative to the fast-food chains that dominate the landscape, particularly in rural areas. It’s a ritual of sorts, a bastion of slow simmering rarely found so close to the highway. “I don’t like Wendy’s,” Brown says. “This is my spot. A place to get good fresh food.”
