Surely by now you've heard about Kogi Korean Taco Truck, right?
If you haven't, catch up by reading up on it over on our buddy Eddie Lin's blog, Deep End Dining (or listen to Evan Kleiman's KCRW show, Good Food, where Eddie talks about it).
But really, it should be obvious what it is. It's bulgogi meets corn tortilla. Korean meets Mexican. A cultural mash up on a roach coach that's the buzz about town with a cult following that is literally FOLLOWING the truck around.
So now you're asking, where can I get this? The answer is, not in O.C. At least not anytime soon.
I've been conversing over e-mail with Alice, one of the people behind the genius idea. In December she pinged me asking whether I knew of possible parking lots in O.C. that wouldn't mind having them around. I immediately thought of Freshia Market in Tustin.
It was:
a) Korean
b) Already the host of one previous food catering truck
c) and most importantly…It was within blocks of where I lived!
But when I e-mailed her again asking about the status of the O.C. roll out (pun intended), she had bad news.
She wrote:
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I dunno if you're going to like this, but… not anytime sooooon. We were really pushing for February with the new truck, but the rent ended up being a lot more expensive than we expected to add on a second truck. Did you know you need to pay home owner's insurance??? I mean, dude, it's a truck!
So we decided to extend Team 2 to run the truck during the day instead of hopping on a 2nd truck.
To make the run to the OC with the cost of gas would, unfortunately, end up bumping up the price of our tacos, which we want to keep as low as we can for as long as we can. Plus we wouldn't make it back to LA in all the traffic in time to restock.
I think we may aim to go there at least once just to hit it up, but at the present, it probably won't be a regular thing. =( Plus we haven't gotten many requests to go to Orange County, much less assistance in finding a parking spot.=/ In general, we respond to whoever's calling our name the loudest. For example, a lot of people from the San Gabriel Valley were asking for the truck and someone even helped us find a place to park without fear of the cops chasing us out. Bahahahaha. In general, that's how it works.
While I think it'd be suuuuuuuuuuuper cool to go to the OC, at the moment, the team's running on less than 4 hours of sleep a night. So I think I'll try to pitch it again to them when things calm down and we have more funds to expand a little.
SORRY EDWIN! I HAVE FAILED YOU!”
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.