Bulgogi Taco

Most street foods have no birthday, but this one does. The bulgogi taco was first served in late 2008 from a Los Angeles catering truck called Kogi BBQ, and the people who made it are on record: Mark Manguera had the idea of folding Korean barbecue short rib into a taco, and Roy Choi, a Culinary Institute of America graduate then between restaurant jobs, was the chef who worked out how to cook it. The truck rolled out in November of that year and started selling marinated beef on a corn tortilla to whoever could find it, which at first was almost no one and very soon was a line down the block. For a dish this widely copied, that traceability is unusual, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else about how it tastes.

What Choi was cooking is beef built to brown twice. Bulgogi marinade is soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, garlic, and a good amount of grated Asian pear, and the pear earns its place by chemistry: enzymes in the raw fruit slacken the thin slices of beef so they stay tender, while the dissolved sugar sits ready to caramelize the instant the meat hits heat. On a flat-top the beef is chopped and seared hard until the marinade catches and the edges lacquer dark, sweet and salty and faintly burnt. Cook it gently and it stews gray in its own liquid; the point is to drive the moisture off into crust, so the meat comes off the steel dry-edged and glossy rather than wet.

The corn tortilla is the quiet half of the construction, and it is usually given some help. A bare tortilla under a load of damp, sugary beef softens fast and pulls apart in the hand, so a Kogi-style taco warms the tortilla on the griddle and often doubles or chars it, firming the corn and giving it a little toast of its own. The corn flavor stays mild on purpose. Beef this loud needs a base that carries it without arguing, and a charred tortilla reads as background rather than a competing note, warm and slightly toasted around the meat.

Then the dressing goes on, and this is where Choi's restaurant training shows in a two-dollar taco. The build is layered: a chile-soy slaw for cold crunch and a slow heat, a bright salsa, a relish of raw onion and cilantro, sometimes a swipe of charred-tomatillo salsa verde. Each topping is placed against a quality of the meat, the acid cutting its sweetness, the cold slaw cutting its richness, the raw onion and herb lifting its savory depth. The gochugaru in the slaw dressing leaves a chile warmth that arrives a beat late and stays, and the lime and onion keep landing sharp through every bite.

It comes off the iron in a sizzle of soy and sugar, sesame riding under the char. The first thing the mouth finds is the lacquered edge of the beef, caramel and smoke, then the marinade sweetness behind it, then the cold slaw and the salsa acid cutting in from the side. The slaw stays crisp and cool against the hot meat; the corn of the double-grilled tortilla is warm and toasted around it all; marinade and slaw juice run down to the fold and darken the wrapper. It is a fast, loud, generous mouthful, eaten standing up the way it was first sold.

From that one truck window the idea traveled fast and far. Kogi's own menu spun off a kimchi quesadilla, a short-rib slider, and a Korean-barbecue burrito, the same marinade moved into other shapes, and within a few years Korean-marinade tacos in every register of faithfulness were turning up on menus well beyond Los Angeles. The marinade has to be cooked dry and hard, the tortilla built to take the moisture, the sauces set against the sweetness with some intent, and where those things are done the dish holds up under any amount of imitation.

The Chef at the Truck Window

The bulgogi taco was made by a trained restaurant chef working out of a catering van, which is most of why it landed the way it did. Kogi BBQ launched in Los Angeles in November 2008, generally dated to the nineteenth; its founders were Mark Manguera and Caroline Shin, and the cook at the flat-top was Roy Choi. Manguera supplied the notion of short rib in a taco, Choi supplied the kitchen technique, and the meeting of the two is what turned a fusion idea into a dish that worked. Choi was no street improviser: born in Seoul in 1970, he trained at the Culinary Institute of America, interned at the three-Michelin-star Le Bernardin in New York, and had been a chef de cuisine at the Beverly Hilton, which is why a cheap taco carried a double-caramelized marinade and a stack of built sauces he spoke of as his mother sauces.

The truck found its crowd through a phone. Kogi posted each night's parking spot to its followers online, and the lines that formed ran down the block; by the middle of 2009 it had tens of thousands of followers and a standing late-night spot at a Los Angeles bar. The crowd-summoning was novel, but the kitchen behind the window was serious enough that the wider food world noticed quickly, and the notice came as recognition of a chef rather than of a gimmick.

In 2010 Food and Wine named Roy Choi one of its Best New Chefs, the first time the magazine gave the honor to a cook running a food truck rather than a dining room. That was a little over a year after he first chopped marinated short rib onto a corn tortilla at a van window in Los Angeles, and it fixed the bulgogi taco in the record not as a novelty but as the work of a chef who happened to be cooking on the street.