It was bound to happen sooner or later — a California taco truck selling taco-inspired food that isn’t quite a traditional taco.

Since November 2008, Kogi has been serving up Korean BBQ served up in a taco (or burrito). Man, this is so freakin’ awesome — I can’t wait to get back Stateside. Folks, this could only happen in America, and more specifically, only in California.

As chef Roy Choi explained to LAist last month:

We’re Korean, but we’re American and we grew up in LA. It’s not a stigma food, 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 Tacos, the Korean supermarket and all those things that we live everyday in one bite. 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.

So what’s on the menu?

How about a Korean short rib taco?

This is our signature taco. We get the best trimmings of short ribs we can find, let it swim in our own special marinade, and chop it nice and small so the flavors just dance on your taste buds. Once on the grill, the fat melts away to create that soft and tender texture everyone loves and the sugars just caramelize to give the meat that deep and savory flavor. This is the Kogi crowd favorite.

All out tacos are topped with:

* sesame-chili salsa roja
* julienne romaine lettuce and cabbage tossed in Korean chili-soy vinaigrette
* cilantro-green onion-lime relish
* crushed sesame seeds
* sea salt
* garnished with lime wedge, orange wedge and red radish wedge

Compared with East LA or East Oakland tacos, these are a little on the expensive side, but at $2 each or three for $5, it still seems like a bargain. Plus, the clientèle is UCLA students, Venice hipsters and Hollywood club-goers.

The team borrowed a truck and had only $3,500 in startup cash and apparently is already profitable. Hot damn.

And they’re on Twitter. Sheeeet.

As Daniel Hernandez wrote to me in a recent email, after I shared with him my shock in discovering French tacos with fries in them: ‘Real’ tacos come with fries!! the beauty of the taco is its whore-y openness to being influenced by other foods or re-interpreted.. chocotaco anyone?

Point taken.

[Photo: Tom Andrews/LAist]

Believe it or not but there’s a taco truck in the ritzy neighborhood of Brentwood, parked on the northside of the Brentwood Country Club (San Vicente Ave. at Bristol Ave.) weekdays during lunch hours.

I swung by at 2 pm today and there were at least half a dozen other men ordering/waiting for food.

For $8.50 (a fortune at a taco truck), I bought a 0.5 L bottle of Mexican coke, and two carnitas tacos “plate.”

It came with a small side of chips/beans/salsa and sausage and onions with a really good spicy sauce.

Sadly, the carnitas was a bit fatty though, came on the bone, and the tortillas didn’t really hold together very well.

KPCC has released the audio of their May Zocalo forum about taco trucks online:

Remember the Taco Truck!

Moderated by C. Thi Nguyen, Chow Digest Editor at Chowhound.com

Sunday June 29th, 2008 at 9pm on 89.3 KPCC FM

Taco trucks are one of the cultural pillars of Los Angeles, but they could soon be a thing of the past. Led by Supervisor Gloria Molina, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors has passed new anti-taco truck regulations. If the trucks don’t move every hour, they face $1000 in fines, and/or six months in jail.

To weigh in on the issue Zócalo convened a panel of writers, thinkers, and activists: Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold, Barry Glassner, author of The Gospel of Food, Miriam Torres, co-owner of Hermanas Torres taco truck, and Chris Rutherford, co-founder of co-founder of saveourtacotrucks.org, along with moderator C. Thi Nguyen. They describe the joys of the taco truck, their place in Los Angeles culture, and the effect of the legislation.

Recorded before a live audience at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as part of the Zócalo Public Square Lecture Series.

From our friends at SaveOurTacoTrucks.org:

Taco Lovers and Crusaders for Social Justice,

Mexican wrestling has its Rudos, the villainous luchadores who use dastardly tactics to win their matches. (Think of the old folding-chair routine when the referee isn’t looking.) In Los Angeles, we have the bureaucrats who hope to push through oppressive legislation without garnering attention who then plug their ears with their fingers when swamped with our collective outrage.

The County Board of Supervisors’ new ordinance that will effectively eliminate Taco Trucks in unincorporated Los Angeles County goes into effect at 12:00 AM on Thursday morning. Accordingly, we’re having a little get-together to celebrate this wheeled Angeleno culinary institution, while lamenting the myopic politicians who think they know what’s best for us. Meet us in East Los Angeles at Tacos El Galuzo at 5555 Whittier Blvd. between 8 PM and 12 AM. You’ll be supporting Juan Torres, a truck owner directly affected by the new law, and you’ll get to eat good cheap food while enjoying the company of like-minded people. Sr. Torres’ truck isn’t far from numerous other East LA mainstays, so plan an eastside odyssey and add us to your itinerary. Hurry, starting Thursday, purchasing a taco from one of these “peddlers” will be abetting a criminal!

Chris Rutherford & Aaron Sonderleiter
www.saveourtacotrucks.org

Time gets on the bandwagon with a piece about LA County’s plan to kick taco trucks out. Apparently the purpose of government is to take sides in what County Supervisor Gloria Molina, the leader of the crackdown, admits is a “turf war.”

“There are so many other problems in this city. Gangs. Robberies. To focus on people trying to make a living selling tacos? It makes no sense,” says Olegario Hernandez, while gassing up his taco truck on East L.A.’s Whittier Blvd. Taco truck drivers say it takes time to set up and prepare the food, and that moving constantly would make doing business impossible.

Jonathan Gold is my hero.

LA Weekly:

The best thing I had to eat last week was a massive carnitas huarache, from the Gorditas Lupita’s truck on Eagle Rock Boulevard near Avenue 34. I ate it while leaning against a warehouse wall in Glassell Park, washed it down with a bottle of Mexican Coke and perfumed with the exhaust of a thousand diesel trucks. The second-best thing may have been a Puebla-style cemita overstuffed with fried beef milanesa, ripe avocado and shreds of the Pueblan string cheese called quesillo — that one I ate sitting on a plastic folding chair right on Indiana Street, where it runs into César Chávez at Five Points in East L.A.

The third, who knows? A bean-smeared clayuda devoured while sitting curbside at the La Oaxaqueña truck on Lincoln at Rose in Venice? A tostada of fiercely hot aguachile, chopped marinated shrimp, eaten on a milk crate perched next to a Whittier Boulevard medical clinic? A spicy tongue taco eaten at El Pique, in the parking lot of a Highland Park car wash on York at Avenue 53? The carne asada taco at the El Chato truck on Olympic near La Brea, the tooth-staining red sauce at El Taquito Mexicana in Pasadena, the al pastor at El Taurino on Hoover at 11th near Macarthur Park? They all came from trucks; they all made me feel glad to be alive, glad to be in Los Angeles.

. . .

Why would an ordinarily sensible woman wait 45 minutes outside a truck to secure the same plate of food she could nab in one-tenth that time at the related taquería next door? Sure, it’s the communal experience, the great brotherhood of the taco-eaters, but it is also the food. In tacos as in love, timing is everything, and if you’ve ever inhaled a taco of pork al pastor moments after the slivers of dripping meat have been hacked from the spit, you know: At that moment, desire and fulfillment are one. A great street taco is happiness translated into the language of warm tortillas, finely chopped onion and a hot sauce that bring you to your knees. The taqueros will usually ask if you want your tacos wrapped to go, but I have never known an order to last even the few seconds it takes to walk back to the car.

Let me be the first to say, this new LA County law is ludicrous, plain and simple. I really hope David LeBeouf is on the case. This is the same nonsensical argument that was used in Salinas last year.

Los Angeles Times:

Supervisors unanimously agreed to pass the law after business owners, particularly in East Los Angeles, complained that taco trucks were keeping brick-and-mortar restaurants from flourishing by drawing away customers.

“We have received many complaints from restaurant owners who say it is very hard to do business after 6 p.m. because catering trucks park very near restaurants,” said Louis Herrera, president of the Greater East Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. “Many restaurants are forced to close their doors because they cannot compete with a catering truck’s prices.”

Restaurant owners complained that the costs of operating a taco truck are minimal compared with the numerous bills that stationary businesses have to pay.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

There’s a great new book out, Polar Intertia, with some slick photographs of LA-area taco trucks.

From the book: “Each registered taco truck is required by the health department to begin or end its day at one of over 30 commissaries spread across Los Angeles County. For around $25/day The commissaries provide a parking space, cold and hot water hookups and drains for cleaning the trucks, as well as a food market for purchasing food supplies, drink, ice and propane from a wholesale dealer. From these base stations the trucks disperse, each following their own path through the city to find their customers.”