Like New York, Los Angeles is a melting pot experiment of macro petri dish proportions. Nowhere is this more evident than in something all human beings can understand and enjoy- food.
Like Korean style tart yogurt and Korean fried chicken, Korean culinary delights show up in the most unusual of places. One of the hottest recent trends in the streets of Hollywood is the Korean BBQ taco truck. Yes you heard right — Korean BBQ taco truck.
The Korean American Chef Roy Choi, is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, one of the founders of the Kogi taco truck and has has fused bulgogi with tortilla. It’s a taco truck that has its own website and twitter and has been the talk of the L.A. foodie blogsphere. Nightclub-like lines form whenever the truck stops and people drive as far as 20 miles just to try out the food. It’s fame is not as localized as one would think as even Penn State fans who visited L.A. for the Rose Bowl made sure they paid a visit.
Chef Roy Choi summed it up best:
We’re Korean, but we’re American and we grew up in LA… it’s a representation of who we are…. Everything you get in that taco is what we live in LA. It’s the 720 bus on Wilshire, it’s the 3rd street Juanita’s… That was our goal. To take everything about LA and put it into one bite… It’s Mexican, it’s Korean, it’s organic, it’s California, it’s farmer’s market, it’s drunk people after midnight.
Note: Despite everything a government thinks it can do to popularize its food culture, that effort will be trumped by a few smart individuals acting creatively.
Update: Looks like Jonathan Gold and LA Weekly has got scent of the scene. Nice photo slide show here. Gold reviews Kogi here.
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This smells like a savvy business model. Obviously, a food truck requires a less substantial upfront investment than opening up a regular restaurant. Combine that with a novel food concept and you have what looks like a winner.
I wonder how long it would take for them to break even? I know for a restaurant, the average is 3 years.
They borrow the truck. Start up was $3,500. They are already turning a profit. Crazy, huh?
You can’t patent food, so like Pinkberry, expect imitators SOON…
Korean food as a world cuisine? I wish they’d stop watching too much ‘Blade Runner’….
During high school, my brother and I had an awesome idea of running a Galbi Truck near beaches. We never implemented it. We would have been millionaires.
I second WangKon’s statement that “despite everything a government thinks it can do to popularize its food culture, that effort will be trumped by a few smart individuals acting creatively.”
I trust Korean Americans more than either non-Korean Americans or Korean Koreans to create a better fusion dish.
I once had kalbi at a “Korean BBQ” place in the States that was totally smothered in BBQ sauce. It turns out that the owner had married a Southerner who adapted the dish to his own taste and totally obscured rather than enhanced the distinctive qualities of kalbi. By contrast, Olive Garden currently offers a Chianti short rib meal that is quite acceptable. Like Korean marinade, it brings out the taste of the kalbi rather than obscures it under some intrusive, smothering sauce.
I find fusion foods in Korea pretty distasteful in general because they too often repeat the mistake of that American southerner in disguising the true quality of a foreign food by smothering it under an obtrusive local sauce. Foods like spaghetti smothered under kochu jang, lose their distinctive flavor.
On the other hand, Korean Americans raised with a foot in each culture would be better able to bring out the best of both cuisines.
One ajosshi I met here in the States was going on and on about how Korean food is the best in the world. I asked him “yes, but from whose perspective?” The fact is, as much as we love Korean food (I consume it daily), triumphalism has no place in the kitchen. We all need to open our minds before we open our mouths. Authentic Korean cuisine will never become mainstream fare for because it is more suited to the Korean than American tastes. The best way to introduce it to a wider audience is to adopt it, but in a way that maintains its integrity of the food itself.
Can’t wait to try the tacos!
*triumphalism* has no place in the kitchen, that is. My typos and misspellings are the stuff of legand.
“Authentic Korean cuisine will never become mainstream fare for because it is more suited to the Korean than American tastes”
‘American’ = whole America or only US?
Anyway, I think the proper expression would be “global tastes”. Despite a very few dishes, Korean food is not something that pleasant like, say, Italian food, Spanish food, Mediterranean food, Middle East food, Thai food, Southeast Asian food, Mexican food, Brazilian food, Latin America food, Greek food, Indian food, Japanese food, Chinese food, to name a few.
Agree with Mizar5 that foreign food is so transformed here in Korea, that you cannot enjoy something for real, unless the owner keeps it original (most of the Middle East places keep it. Italian food in Korea = blergh).
However, having the opposite thing happening abroad (i.e., Korean food being adapted to local tastes) can make it more accessible. Not that I would drop my pasta for a bulgogi, but once in a while, who knows…
Hope the gyopos can be creative enough to do that.
I think Korean food can be made bigger in western countries without having to make the taste more suitable to westerners. I think it is mostly a case of confidence. Koreans seem to assume automatically that westerners won’t like Korean food and don’t really give them a chance. That being said, though, Korean food sometimes needs some warming up to. At first something like dwen jjang jjigae may seem disgusting, but it is actually quite good after you get used to it.
“dwen jjang jjigae may seem disgusting…”
This is another problem: we also “eat” with our eyes and noses. When we look to a beautiful spaghetti, or smell a nice paella, we immediately want to dig into it.
Now, when you smell most of the Korean food (fermented paste, anyone?), or look at it (the simple cabbage kimchi), you feel sick and want to run away from it. Showing raw meat at the restaurants signs??? Good for Koreans, not for the rest of the world. It’s a restaurant, not a butcher!
Some westernization is necessary. Maybe a little, but still important.
By the way: also need to commonize the writing. It’s the first time I see “dwen jjang jjigae”. I thought the standard was “doenjang jjigae”. Semantics, yes, but important in the West, otherwise, it sounds like two different things.
Enough already with the Koreans in Los Angeles.
Jesus, what the fuck is coming next? Dog meat in a taco?
Wait, I’ve actually done that (Andrew Jackson will back me up on this).
“You can’t patent food, so like Pinkberry, expect imitators SOON…”
Oh, you’re talking about how Pinkberry’s menu resembles Red Mango’s? Well, Yogen Fruz has been around since 1986.
so, Wangkon, in other words, they will kill each other.
I used to think this was a Korean thing. Absolutely no benefit of belonging to a group. None. Zero.
I realized it wasn’t, but ajums and ajushs will still complain that gaenomsaeki opened up the same shot right next to mine, and even asked me for help on running the shop, and the sicko even attends my church.
i think that case would be beyond glib, and deserving of a whoop ass.
ssangnom Mizar, please shut the fuck up on whatever you’re trying to portray.
go jack off and slurp your hand.
by the way, Wangkon, thanks for bringing this up.
this looks like a great idea.
i’ve eaten off some taco trucks, but they tended to be in Hispanic hoods. Kind of bland for the Taco Bell taste bud.
today, I ate off in a Hibachi restaurant, where a white teenager was attempting to do his thing. Last time, it was an Iraqi.
it was weird seeing a white girl wear a kimono and even have her hair like a Jap.
that was a Japanese restaurant.
so far, never seen a parallel in a Korean restaurant.
Korean food smells more. vs Chinese vs Japanese. I think that’s the ceiling.
“a melting pot experiment of macro petri dish proportions”
yikes…
Finding for once that I have something to agree with Mizar5 about, I would like to post this link to this excellent article by Andrew Salmon on said topic “how to globalize Korean food.” When I met him at lunch today he told me the story of the most expensive Korean restaurant in town, owned by a jaebeol (forget name now). It has failed here and overseas, largely for charging obscene prices for unfilling high-falutin food, and is – you guessed it – asking the Korean government to support its continued presence overseas because it is good for Korean food.
Here is Salmon’s article:
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/ww.....sIdx=36175
wjk’s notion of Korean fusion:
“go jack off and slurp your hand.”
Interesting KBS America mini-documentary on Kogi…
http://www.kbs-america.com/vod.....?vid=2247#
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