The Night That Changed Everything
Picture this: it’s a cold December night in 2008, and a beat-up taco truck rolls up to the UCLA dorms during finals week. Students are stressed, hungry, and desperate for comfort food. But what they got wasn’t your typical late-night taco – it was something completely revolutionary. The truck pulled up outside the UCLA dorms during finals. Twitter was just becoming popular. Word got out…about this mysterious taco truck that served Korean barbecue for $2 and it’s coming here. That single burrito – a Korean short rib masterpiece wrapped in a tortilla – would spark what we now know as the modern food truck movement. It kind of created this kind of urban myth and groundswell. That was the turning point.
From Culinary School to Street Food Revolution
Roy Choi (born February 24, 1970) is a Korean-American chef who gained prominence as the creator of the gourmet Korean-Mexican taco truck Kogi. This wasn’t some random experiment – Roy had serious culinary chops. Roy Choi, a former valedictorian at the Culinary Institute of America, is the chief chef and considered “a sort of post-Abstract Expressionist food artist” But here’s the twist: after years of fine dining experience, he decided to throw it all away for a dented food truck. After this classical training and years of background in Michelin-star cooking, Choi said that the shift to the food trucks, initially based on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice was great. Sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected places.
The Birth of Korean-Mexican Fusion
The idea wasn’t even Roy’s originally. Its owner/founder, Mark Manguera, a Filipino-American, married into a Korean family and was inspired to combine Mexican and Korean food as a result. After Choi’s friend and Kogi partner (eight people run the company) Mark Manguera came up with the idea of mashing up Korean BBQ and Mexican tacos, the Kogi truck began heaving through the streets of L.A. What seems obvious now – marinated Korean short ribs in a taco – was absolutely mind-blowing in 2008. Korean BBQ in taco form is a flavor mashup that might seem obvious in hindsight, but it was revolutionary back when Roy Choi started the Kogi truck in 2008. Los Angeles was the perfect testing ground, with its massive Korean and Mexican populations living side by side.
The Twitter-Powered Food Truck
Here’s where things get really interesting. Kogi Korean BBQ is a fleet of five fusion food trucks in Los Angeles famous both for their combination of Korean with Mexican food and also for their reliance on Internet technology, especially Twitter and YouTube, to spread information about their offerings and locations. They didn’t have a storefront or advertising budget, but they had something better – social media savvy. Its subsequent use of Twitter to announce its location led to considerable buzz on social networking services, leading Newsweek to proclaim Kogi “America’s first viral eatery”. Imagine hunting down a food truck using only tweets – it was like a real-life treasure hunt that made eating an adventure.
The Secret Sauce Behind the Success
The short rib taco is the quintessential Roy Choi dish: bold and complex in flavor but simple in concept and unfussy in presentation. But what made it special? Double caramelized Korean barbecue short rib, a salsa roja made from Korean and Mexican chillies, our cilantro-onion-lime relish and our chili soy Kogi slaw —all over two, crisply-griddled corn tortillas. The magic was in the details – Roy didn’t just slap Korean meat on a tortilla and call it fusion. Double-caramelize the meat. These tacos are the perfect way to use up leftover BBQ kalbi. Grill the kalbi the night before, then chop up the leftover meat and reheat it on an oiled griddle. Roy calls this “double-caramelized” meat, since the short ribs get seared once on the grill and again on the griddle before serving.
From Slow Start to Sudden Fame
Kogi didn’t take off overnight. It was slow going at first, more a curiosity than anything else. For months, they were just another food truck trying to make it in LA’s competitive street food scene. Kogi’s first big break came when it got the idea outside of Green Door in Hollywood to contact food bloggers about trying the tacos who then wrote about Kogi. But once that viral moment hit at UCLA, everything changed. By mid-2009 it had 36,000 Twitter followers, and its first fixed location in the Alibi Room, a local lounge. In the age before Instagram, Twitter followers were the ultimate currency of street credibility.
Recognition from the Culinary World
The food establishment couldn’t ignore what was happening on the streets. He was named one of the top ten “Best New Chefs” of 2010 by Food and Wine magazine, and is the first food truck operator to win that distinction. Think about that for a second – a guy serving tacos from a beat-up truck was being recognized alongside chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants. Choi went on to become the first food truck cook to be named Best New Chef by Food and Wine magazine. It was like David beating Goliath, but with burritos instead of stones.
The Cultural Impact Nobody Saw Coming
The New York Times opined, “The food at Kogi Korean BBQ-To-Go, the taco vendor that has overtaken Los Angeles, does not fit into any known culinary category.” That’s exactly what made it so powerful. Los Angeles, like many large American cities, has a large percentage of residents from different cultures, and Kogi relies on the familiarity people have with other cuisines. The attraction, however, depends only partly on the flavors. Media accounts emphasize the social aspect of eating at the ever-mobile Kogi. Suddenly, food trucks weren’t just about quick, cheap eats – they were about community, adventure, and cultural fusion.
Building an Empire Beyond the Truck
Today, Kogi is but one piece of Choi’s sprawling empire. There are restaurants (Chego, A-Frame), a cookbook slash memoir, L.A. Son; a hotel, The Line, that Choi designed and filled with his restaurants; and a new CNN.com series called Street Food, in which Choi channels his mentor-pal Anthony Bourdain and slurps ramen with guests like Michelle Phan and Jon Favreau. In 2010, the creators of Kogi opened two sister restaurants serving Korean inspired food. The restaurant Chego, with a primary focus on bowls, opened on April 7, 2010. Another restaurant and full bar, The A-Frame, was created from a former IHOP and modeled around the sloped architecture; it opened on November 4, 2010. From one truck to a culinary empire – not bad for a Korean-Mexican taco.
The Fleet Expansion Strategy
By mid-2011, Kogi had expanded from the original truck to five. But they didn’t just copy the original formula – each truck had its own personality and following. In the tradition of LA taco trucks, Kogi operated entirely from a mobile vehicle driven around the city and parked for a few hours in different locations, with some preparation done from a home base in Culver City, California. Its fan base has been built up through effective use of the Internet and cell phones to promote an online “Kogi Kulture”. They created a brand that was bigger than just food – it was a lifestyle, a movement, a culture.
The Attempt at Brick-and-Mortar
Success brings temptation, and eventually Kogi tried to go legit. In April 2016, Kogi opened their first brick-and-mortar version of their food trucks in Palms, Los Angeles. Called Kogi Taqueria, the new operation carried all of the favorites from the food truck menu, some favorites from their Alibi Room, plus some Mexican-American standards such as carne asada, carnitas, and pollo asada. They even tried the airport game. To serve airline passengers at Terminal 4, Kogi opened a stationary location within the secured area at the Los Angeles International Airport in December 2014. What distinguished this airport terminal eatery from its competitors within the food court is that it was made to look like a Kogi food truck. But sometimes magic can’t be replicated in four walls.
The Philosophy Behind the Empire
But Choi says that his next restaurant, A-Frame, is the project that most defined him as a restauranteur and artist at that point. “A-Frame was a real, pivotal moment because that’s where I really got to channel a lot of emotions. A-Frame became an expression of creating a place where everyone would feel comfortable, even if you were made to feel uncomfortable in restaurants before. This wasn’t just about making money – it was about democratizing good food, making it accessible to everyone. We’ve never been established. We’re still not established. Roy understood that staying hungry, staying rebellious, was part of the brand’s DNA.
The Legacy That Changed Everything
Kogi set off a flavor bomb that would shake up the foundations of the industry so that street food would never be looked at the same way again. In recent years, food trucks have become as integral a part of Southern California’s DNA as sunshine and palm trees. But that may not have been the case were it not for chef Roy Choi. A few years back, he merged his love of Korean and Mexican cuisine in dishes like kimchi quesadillas and BBQ short rib tacos and put it on wheels. And thus, the Kogi Taco Truck phenomenon was born. The most iconic Los Angeles and Orange County based taco truck that birthed the Korean Mexican taco movement and put the godfather of food trucks, Roy Choi, on the map. Today, fusion food trucks are everywhere, but back in 2008, one Korean short rib burrito changed the game forever.
That beat-up truck with the dented fenders didn’t just serve food – it served up a revolution. And it all started with one perfectly imperfect burrito that nobody saw coming. What would you have guessed could launch an empire from the back of a truck?
