MISQUAH — It took Misquah about three days to decide it could not live without the taco truck, which is roughly two days longer than it has taken the truck, most evenings, to sell out of carnitas.

Mateo and Sofia Martinez opened the truck — silver, as yet unnamed, parked on the gravel by the Loon Lake landing with the city’s blessing and a handshake with the clerk — last Thursday. They run lunch and supper, Thursday through Sunday, “or until we’re out, which keeps being sooner than we plan,” Sofia said. The menu is short and chalked on a board: carnitas, chicken, and fish tacos made, when Mateo can get it, with local walleye; rice and beans; and a salsa that has, in under a week, become the most-discussed condiment in the history of the lake.

It is the salsa that has done the cultural work. Eunice Dahlquist, whose endorsement carries weight in this town roughly equal to the Ladies’ Aid and the Sheriff combined, came prepared to be unimpressed — “as is my way” — and left a convert. “It is a revelation,” she pronounced, “and I do not say that about anything but my own bars.” She asked Sofia for the recipe. Sofia, with what witnesses described as total warmth, said no. “I respect it,” Eunice said. “I’d have said no myself, and have, to several people, about the bars. A woman is allowed to keep one thing.”

The Martinezes moved north from the Cities this spring, nearer Sofia’s family and farther from a commute Mateo described, with feeling, as “the reason — the whole reason, the only reason a person needs.” They had braced, they said, for the smallness, and found that the smallness was the point. “People here keep apologizing that it’s small,” Sofia said, handing two baskets through the window without looking. “They say it like a warning. We didn’t come by accident. We came on purpose. You don’t move a taco truck four hours north by accident.”

By Saturday the line ran from the window to the boat launch, a development that produced one of the week’s more pleasing blotter entries when a Sheriff’s deputy, dispatched to a complaint that the line was blocking the ramp, confirmed the obstruction, considered his options, and resolved the matter by taking a place in it. He had, witnesses reported, the carnitas.

The Martinezes have no plans to expand, name the truck, or, Sofia stressed a final time as the supper rush built, share the salsa. “Some things you keep,” she said. “That’s allowed. That’s the whole thing, actually. You keep one thing, and you give everything else away, generously, with extra cilantro. That’s how you stay.”