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He’s been called a genius, a visionary, a groundbreaking chef. His story has been told a thousand times by a thousand people, and sometimes the myths, the legends, and the truths get tangled up in the poetic pixie dust of it all. But Kogi’s Roy Choi isn’t the one casting spells—he’s a bluntly honest quick-talker who drops f-bombs as often as he stamps out cigarettes, and he moves with a saggy-pants swagger that goes hand in hand with his line cooks calling him “Papi,” his forearm tattoo that reads “Kogi Por Vida,” and his cred as the creator of Korean-Mexican fusion. To be clear, he’s a taco truck chef. But he’s a Food & Wine Magazine Best New Chef taco truck chef whose fleet of four Kogi trucks reportedly did $2 million in sales its first year on the streets. Roy has plenty to say about plenty of things, including his desire to tell his own story instead of hearing others tell it. So here it is, from drug-induced hallucinations to getting salsa to sing like Britney Spears.
ON BECOMING A CHEF:
“When I was about twenty-two to twenty-five I was a fuck-up. I was hanging out in Koreatown drinking every night, getting into fights, doing horrible things. By the time I was twenty-five I was a true deadbeat. I owed a lot of money to people, I was doing a lot of bad things, I was strung out. I moved around on friends’ couches. I was coming out of something one morning in 1995 and I was watching Emeril. He walked out of the TV, grabbed me on the shoulder, shook me, and asked, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Taste this, smell this, eat this, look how beautiful this is.’ And he’s like, ‘Get off the couch.’ So that day I got up, took a shower, and since then it’s been on. I just buckled down and worked odd jobs and paid all my debts. I went to a local culinary school, I applied to the CIA, and I got on a Greyhound bus and started working in Manhattan. I went to the bookstore every day and read about cooking. Then I got my acceptance to CIA, and when I got there, everything clicked. It was like everything connected and finally made sense.”
ON THE IDEA:
“Of course there’s the story of [founder] Mark [Manguera] drinking Champagne at 4 a.m. and wanting something to eat, then having this idea. But what happened was he called me and we had a cup of coffee in Koreatown, and he was like, ‘Yo, until you find another job, what do you think about helping me out with this?’ And I wasn’t doing anything, so we bought $300 worth of food, tinkered around with the recipes, and within a month we found it. He came to me with ‘Korean barbecue meat inside a tortilla,’ and from there it all kind of came to me spiritually. I grew up on the streets of L.A. eating tacos and eating Korean food at home, so when I made this taco it just became a lyric to me, a flow, it just came together. I thought about Mexican chiles and lime and about the pickled salads you get at a Korean barbecue right before you eat the meat. I thought about the cilantro-onion mix you get at taco stands. I thought about the tortilla and how I always wished tacos would be [made with] tortillas [that are] just a little bit crispy with oil but still pliable. I thought about Korean meat being double cooked and charred and caramelized. Then it all just came together.”
ON TEAM KOGI:
“We fuck around a lot, but we’re not fucking around. We’re a tight, focused militia. We attacked people on so many different fronts that they couldn’t figure out which way we were coming from. Mark is the master of schmoozing. He can make you do anything. He’s a hustler, always crackin’ deals. He lives the part wherever he goes, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can; he can make the teller at the bank smile. From that, he’s always opening doors for Kogi. [Co-founder] Caroline Shin-Manguera handles the books, and she established the service end of who we are. She was the order keeper in the beginning. With her Four Seasons background, no matter what was happening on the outside she was calm. It was like you walked into the Four Seasons, like, ‘Welcome. Thank you for coming.’ And [marketing director] Alice Shin being a semi–food blogger herself, freelancing for SeriousEats.com, she just reached out to food bloggers, writing things with heart and with a fiction mind. It was like reading short stories: the prose and diction on our website wasn’t what you’d expect from a taco truck.”
ON THE EARLY DAYS:
“The first two weeks no one bought tacos. We went in front of all the biggest nightclubs in Hollywood. So our core business was between 1:45 to 2:30 in the morning, when there were literally two thousand people funneling out of the clubs. Imagine if you’re young and you go to clubs every weekend, and every time you come out all you see is a row of carts selling dirty dogs. Then you see this taco truck, but with us in it. This is exactly what happened every night: ‘Yo, there’s motherfuckin’ Asians in the truck. Check it out, there’s motherfuckin’ Orientals in that taco truck.’ And we were like, ‘Just eat it, check it out,’ targeting the mother hen of the bunch, giving him the taco for free, and they’d be like ‘Holy shit, yo, yo, come here.’ And they’d buy, like, fourteen for the girls. And that’s how Kogi started. Those guys buying for the girls, then the girls getting into it, then the other guys seeing the girls in miniskirts eating our tacos and then getting their own.”
ON THE POWER OF THE INTERNET:
“Kogi was a forgotten memory at two in the morning. It was nourishment, this wonderful, beautiful taco going to runaways and hookers. So even though it was getting out to people, it wasn’t getting any real attention. Then some of the girls from the club were like, ‘Oh, you gotta come to UCLA. We’ll tell all our friends.’ We went there on a Thursday night and we had food for, like, 150 people. We rolled up into an area that was like off-campus dorms, all high-rises, co-op housing. It was almost like if you imagine old projects with people hanging out the window looking down. All of the windows had heads sticking out of them and there were six hundred people on the streets, all with iPhones and BlackBerries and laptops and cameras. And that was it. That was the moment we became famous.”
ON THE FOOD:
“The key was that we put a taco in their mouths that was the most delicious fucking thing they’d tasted. Like hearing rap music for the first time. It just came on the scene so fresh. Our best sellers are the blackjack quesadilla and the kalbi taco, short rib marinated in this emulsion of soy sauce, garlic, onions, sesame oil, Asian pears, kiwis, sesame seeds, orange juice, orange zest, ginger, a touch of lime juice, black pepper, and salt. That same meat also gets mixed into mini burgers for the sliders, then topped with sesame mayo and salsa roja, which has, like, twenty different ingredients, mainly guajillo and California chiles. I do four different salsas, and right now I’m really feeling the Azul, our blueberry salsa. It has blueberries, opal basil, habanero chilies, roasted garlic … it’s a little complex. Alone, it’s like listening to something a little bit rough, like Nine Inch Nails. Together with the food, it sounds like Britney Spears.”
ON THE FUTURE:
“We’re not what a lot of people may think we are. We’re not this marketing juggernaut that is ten steps ahead of everybody else. We’re complete nomads that are free in what we do. My philosophy is I’m willing to walk away from all of this, Kogi, right now and start something fresh tomorrow. With that philosophy, it drives us to go for broke every day. I don’t give a shit if Kogi goes away. It’s about the food and the energy. If people aren’t feeling Kogi anymore, I’m not going to twist it to try to make it fit. If Kogi isn’t relevant anymore, I’ll just stop. I’m a cook; I’ll come up with a whole new thing and a whole new flavor.”
Kimchi Quesadilla
Serves 4
½ cup unsalted butter
2 cups chopped kimchi
4 tablespoons canola oil
4 (12-inch) flour tortillas
4 cups shredded Cheddar-Jack cheese
8 sesame or shiso leaves, torn
¼ cup toasted sesame seeds
Melt the butter in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the kimchi and cook, stirring, until caramelized and slightly charred, about 10 minutes.
Add 1 tablespoon of the canola oil to a large nonstick pan or griddle ov
er medium heat. Place one of the tortillas in the pan and sprinkle 1 cup of the cheese on one half of the tortilla. Add about a quarter of the caramelized kimchi, a quarter of the sesame or shiso leaves, and a quarter of the sesame seeds. Fold over to create a half-moon. Continue to cook until the bottom of the tortilla blisters like a Neapolitan pizza. Flip the quesadilla over and cook the second side until it reaches the same doneness. Transfer to a plate, cut into triangle-shaped pieces, and serve.
San Francisco, California
When an unlicensed street food vendor known as “the Tamale Lady” has nearly as many Yelp reviews as The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton, it’s clear that you have an interesting culinary community on your hands.
Virginia Ramos, a.k.a. the Tamale Lady, operates on foot, not on wheels, but the Mexican immigrant recalls that when she started her side job in the early 1990s, the only other mobile food vendors were other Latinos operating taco trucks. Today, San Francisco’s street food scene has changed considerably, and as this book was going to print there was so much interest in curbside dining that city officials were holding public hearings with restaurant owners, cart operators, and members of the police force to figure out how to navigate the massive spike of interest in mobile food vending. For established restaurants with plenty of capital, fancy trucks, and a foothold in the business community, the leap to going mobile is fairly easy. For creative cooks looking to build some buzz and make some dough by hawking their homemade soups or made-to-order curries, the red tape can be daunting.
Part of the confusion and complication seems to stem from the fact that San Francisco has two different agencies issuing permits: the police department oversees mobile food vendors on public property, while the Department of Public Health is responsible for vendors working on private property. Not surprisingly, vendors cite instances in which the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Still, around 150 trucks and carts, both public and private, are operating legally, with a few taking advantage of organizations formed in recent years to help vendors get street legal. In 2008, Matt Cohen formed Tabe Trucks, a food truck consulting company that essentially gets ideas up and running, complete with design, branding, truck build-out, and permit navigation. By early 2010, the demand from small cart operators for guidance led him to start the San Francisco Cart Project, an online headquarters for the Bay Area’s mobile food vendors. There, they can utilize the message board to voice concerns and ask questions, as well as purchase permit documentation for a nominal fee. The organization La Cocina performs a similar service, although its mission is aimed at women of color and immigrant communities. In addition to providing an incubator kitchen for these talented cooks, La Cocina helps its clients navigate the legalities of starting a food business, both stationary and mobile.
Across the Bay in Oakland, the 2010 Eat Real Festival featured ninety of the scene’s most diverse and interesting food trucks and carts. More than 100,000 fans showed up as proof of a paying public that supports the mobile movement, and the smart ones figured out that the only way to beat the lines was to get your hands on some food, jump in another line, and eat the first plate while waiting for the second. It sounds gluttonous, but this street food scene is insatiable.
Curry Up Now
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A lot of people hear about L.A. food truck juggernaut Kogi and think, “Cool,” but their thought process typically doesn’t go much further than that. But when husband and wife Akash and Rana Kapoor heard about Kogi, after thinking “Cool,” they then thought, “We could do that, but Indian.”
But unlike Roy Choi, the culinary brains behind Kogi, the Kapoors are not trained chefs. What they are is Indian, and what they have is experience cooking the food of their homeland, eastern India. The couple grew up in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, living two blocks away from each other before reuniting and marrying in California in the mid-1990s. Akash made the move to the United States first, selling cars and then working in credit consolidation and eventually starting his own mortgage company. Rana jumped in and helped with the mortgage business, but she focused her energy more on raising their three kids and cooking for her extended family, which included Akash’s parents, making for a crowded dinner table. “Akash’s mom is an excellent cook, a celebrity cook back home in India, and she has held cooking classes,” Rana says. “We both enjoy cooking, but it’s nothing professional. It’s just what your gut instinct is. If you ask me what goes in my chicken tikka masala, today I put this in, but tomorrow is different. It’s what your heart wants to cook.… I can’t cook under pressure. It’s gotta be fun.”
And to Rana, a project like Kogi sounded like fun. So she persuaded Akash to buy a former burrito truck off Craigslist in late 2008 and, while he figured out the business end (including the name), she set about bridging the gap between Indian and Mexican cuisine. Taking a cue from the truck’s former life, she filled giant fourteen-inch flour tortillas with chicken tikka masala, tucked paneer and cumin-spiced lamb into corn tortillas, and dressed her tacos with cilantro chutney rather than salsa verde. In a twist on the quesadilla, potato-filled paratha stands in for tortillas, and Indian-spiced meats like chicken tikka or keema (ground beef) get sandwiched in between with gooey cheese and caramelized onions. The Indo-Mex concoctions were purely Rana, but for the traditional Indian street snacks like samosa chaat (dubbed “deconstructed samosa” at Curry Up Now), the patriarch in the house was the consulting chef. “Akash’s dad tested it all,” Rana says. “Especially the channa, the chickpeas. Something like fifty to sixty times he tested it and perfected it. You just know the one that hits the chord. You gotta do that with your food, otherwise it doesn’t do the trick.”
Dad Kapoor’s channa does the trick, especially piled on top of a smashed-up samosa and drizzled with cilantro and tamarind chutneys. His channa, deep and earthy with cumin but balanced with a good dose of ginger, also shows up alongside what’s listed on the menu as “Trinidad & Tobago doubles,” but could just as easily be credited to India as chole bhature. Whatever you call it, this classic snack, traditionally eaten for breakfast, is served out of trucks throughout Trinidad and Tobago, as well as in most parts of India. The puffy fried bread is either used to scoop up spiced chickpeas or, in a “double,” used in pairs to sandwich the chickpeas. In the rented kitchen she uses for her prep, Rana makes a new batch of dough for the doubles each day, letting it rise overnight before it’s transferred to the truck and fried fresh to order. Her rolling pin gets plenty of use, churning out beignet dough for “Desi donuts” (spiced like chai and dusted with powdered sugar and crushed pistachios) and also the paratha for her kathi roll, the Indian take on the burrito and the quintessential street snack in Kolkata. The thin, flaky wrapper is layered with egg and then stuffed with curry chicken, mint-cilantro chutney, and perfectly tart pickled onions. “So good. It’s my favorite,” Rana brags. “And I have to have it with the Desi hot sauce. No toning down the spices. We go all out. It’s authentic street food. The only thing is we do an ‘American hot’ and a ‘Desi hot,’ which people call the ‘killer hot.’ ”
Curry Up Now actually gets more requests for the “killer hot” than the American, primarily because Akash has been business-savvy enough to secure regular weekly spots at major corporations with a huge number of Indian employees. Software giant Oracle, based in the Bay Area suburb of Redwood City, employs about ten thousand Indian-Americans, and Rana and her truck are in the parking lot for lunch every Tuesday. Wednesdays she has standing gigs in the lots of Walmart.com and YouTube, Thursdays it’s video game developer Gazillion, and Fridays it’s Virgin Airlines’ headquarters. Weekends the truck usually hops around the affluent suburb of Burlingame, a short drive from the Kapoors’ house, and Mondays the crew regroups, spending most of the day prepping for the coming week. “I stopped counting how many hours I work, but it’s way more than a full-time job,” Rana says. “It’s gratifying seeing people enjoying what you envision.
It makes me happy, you know? I’m cooking, I’m at the truck meeting people, talking to everyone. That’s what we do in India. You’re talking through the window to your neighbor, to people on the street. I do that all the time and they think I’m crazy but I don’t care. I love every bit of it.”
Rana’s Chicken Kathi Roll
Serves 12
CHICKEN
⅓ cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger, pressed to make a paste
1 tablespoon crushed garlic, pressed to make a paste
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
½ teaspoon garam masala
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs, cut into bite-size pieces
3 small green chiles, coarsely chopped
2 onions, finely diced
4 Roma tomatoes, diced
Handful of cilantro leaves, finely chopped
Salt to taste
WRAPS
2 eggs
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Red pepper flakes
12 white or whole wheat flour tortillas or frozen roti
¼ cup chopped cilantro leaves
2 limes
Mint or cilantro chutney (available at most Indian grocery stores)
To prepare the chicken, heat a wok or large, heavy sauté pan for a few minutes over medium heat. Add the oil.
Add the ginger and garlic and cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Add the dry spices and cook, stirring constantly, until the oil begins to separate, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the chicken, cover the wok, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Add the green chiles, onions, and tomatoes and cook, uncovered, stirring constantly, for another 5 to 7 minutes, until the oil separates and the water evaporates from the chicken.
Food Trucks Page 3