Perfect? The Ultimate in dining?LOS ANGELES, California-- Finding one of the newest hot spots for dining in Los Angeles may require Twittering and a GPS, because the locations of the Kogi trucks are always changing.
Those mouth-watering tacos are a fusion of Korean and Mexican food and are served from two company trucks that have drawn a devoted following over six months. Word from those satisfied mouths and the social network Twitter has people lining up at the trucks for up to two hours.
Two Kogi trucks, named Verde and Roja, roam the streets of the Los Angeles area from noon until about 2 a.m. Kogi co-founder Caroline Shin-Manguera sometimes has a hard time wrapping her head around their success.
"It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. We make our people wait in line for two hours, and we make them wait in the rain, and we don't give them chairs to sit on, we don't take reservations, we're late half the time, but we must be doing something right."
Choi trained at the Culinary Institute of America and cooked at places like Le Bernardin in New York and Trader Vics in Los Angeles before jumping into the taco truck business.
The company launched in November 2008 with one truck and basically had no customers, so the owners ate the tacos themselves. Today, they have more than 25,500 followers on Twitter, and they can't even estimate how many people they feed a day.
Choi says the goal is to "serve the best possible food for the cheapest price, and just try to get rid of everything you have, and you made everything fresh that day."
Dining from the trucks late at night can be a community or family affair. "There's sometimes 600-1,000 people in the street. Sometimes they wait for us even before we get there. Sometimes late at night, even midnight, they bring their 2-year-old, 3-year-old, 4-year-old kids and they wait in line," notes Choi.
Clouet was pleased with her first Kogi experience and says it's "something to do. Ya know, to spend an hour of your life in line and mingle with people. You've never seen these people before, but they're here for the same reason."
Locations can change at the last minute, so diners better have a phone or BlackBerry with them so they're not standing in some parking lot by themselves waiting for nothing.
"I look at our food as graffiti, ya know, so like some people look at graffiti as a beautiful thing, some people think that it's a menace to society, ya know. I think it's the same thing with Kogi. Some people embrace us, enjoy our food, invite us into their places and their parking lots; some people look at us as a menace."
One song was commissioned by a customer who is wild about Kogi.
-from CNN.com
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