L.A. Headz -Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck
Swayze
14,705 Posts
any strutters tried these yet?hunted down the taco truck for the 2nd time last night. I'm hooked on this truck. I've only fusked with the bbq beef tacos, but I hear that the kimchi quesadilla is the goodness - the truck was out of kimchi by the time we got there last night. 
Comments
http://kogibbq.com/
twitter is good to figure out if the truck runnin' is on time
first time I went it was a short line and I grabbed a bbq taco.
2nd time I was starving and with a bunch of determined dudes. braved a 2 hour line and bought something like $20 worth of stuff.
Good but I ain't ever doing a 2 hour line for a lunch truck again
I've gone twice - the food is "ok." Not bad, but it's really all about the shortrib, nothing else I've tried was really on par with that.
I do think it's an interesting social experience - the only real street food you'll find in LA mostly caters to the Latino community (York Blvd, holler) and so the Kogi Truck creates a form of street culture that's probably unique to other Angelinos, besides late night drunk folks waiting on bacon-wrapped hot dogs. The last time I went, I was on line for 45 minutes and actually had a conversation with two total strangers on a downtown LA sidewalk. By LA standards, I thought that was rather uncommon and I welcomed the change in social dynamic.
Of course, most of the Kogi truck patrons are people we tend to associate with the forces or products of gentrification and it's telling that the Kogi truck's locations are mostly connected to neighborhoods that have recently gentrified or are in the process of. I'm saying this simply as observation; the Kogi truck is a great mirror of how food, money and neighborhood collide in LA.
Long story short: it's worth doing once, keep your culinary expectations low.
If you want to avoid 2 hours in line, get to its next location about 15 minutes ahead of schedule and you'll be straight.
The one time I ate the food it was just okay. I can't really get into spending two hours in line. But I agree with O that it's an interesting vibe.
End rant.
I don't want to move there, I just want one of those cheese-fried burrito deals when I visit.
You talking about york out in HP?
that neighborhood ain't nowhere close to gentrification. Avenues Gang runs that area with an iron fist. Ironikz and them ain't trying to come by that neighborhood. Galcos is the shit though
In all seriousness, the recession and housing bust will have some interesting consequences for mid-gentrification neighborhoods like Highland Park and Eagle Rock. I doubt any of those places will completely move back to pre-gentrification dynamics but at the very least, they'll end up a lot more mixed class and personally, I think that's a good thing for any neighborhood.
And Guzzo - Thes said "tipping point". HP is a long way from even being Echo Park, let alone Silverlake but that said, York has some signs of shifting in that direction. Exhibit A: Cafe De Leche (not that I have a problem with a good wifi cafe, mind you).
The missing ingredient are better public schools. If/when that happens, that whole area between the 110 and the 2 will go nuts.
You mean Silverlake wasn't always hipster bars, children's clothing boutiques and high-end coffee houses?
I'm shocked!
Serious question: when did Silverlake flip?
Aren't you in San Diego? They don't have taco trucks down there?
then he moved across the street and got a lease that was like the same price. This was like 2000 or 1999 or something, when Marvski lived around the corner. Plastic Fantastic was down the street and was probably paying pennies.
I don't think that neighborhood flipped until like 2001, but there was along slow transition where young latinos were losing their parents and grandparents homes to rising housing costs and aggressive young out of towners buying up properties. Same thing happened about 5 years ago in Double K's neighborhood of crescent heights. A once middle to lower middle class african american neighborhood become almost completely young and white overnight. To the point where agents were literally knocking on old ladies doors making them cash offers to get out. They knew the old folks bought the houses for like 15k$ back in the 50's and owned most of them outright, so they were pure equity. And low and behokd, the playboys and by's couldn't do a god damn thing about it. In all honesty i don't see gangs being able to do a serious thing about stopping gentrification. Ask the harpies, easyriders, black playboys, b.y.'s, shorelines, etc.
Take a trip down york and notice the boutiques starting to spring up. The bars. Tipping point my friend. Once it flips it goes fast and not even gangs can stop it.
I'm in Boston. My vacation doesn't start until Thursday.
Up until Dec. I lived off of 59th and Fig. Theres still some time before the neighborhood is anywhere near gentrified. Granted it's probably looking better than it did in 2005, but the area is still vicious. I had a run path I used to do which was essentially a one mile circle round my house, I was advised to stop running it a week after I started because a dude was stabbed to death there the night before my last run.
Honestly I love HP. I wanna move back, if it wasnt for a landlord/ foreclosure situation I'd still be sitting pretty out there.
I gotta say its kind of weird to even see folks talking about York I never really thought of it as a future Silverlake or Echo Park
I was near your old neighborhood on Sunday night, waiting for some food with a couple of friends. One of them, who lives in Mt. Washington, was remarking how York Blvd. just seems poised for transformation (read: gentrification) and while I'm certainly not as familiar with the area as you are, from a casual outsider's perspective, I could see what he's saying, especially when you compare Highland Park with other, similar neighborhoods that have already gone through that process - from Silverlake, south to parts of Long Beach, over west to Mar Vista. Compared to, say, West Adams (let alone any of the main N-S streets running down through South LA), York seems more likely to eventually flip, despite the violence. It's not going to turn into Fair Oaks overnight but c'mon, you can't see it turning into something closer to Eagle Rock Blvd? Hell, look at the neighborhood right around 56th and Fig - that's just 3 blocks from your old block. There's a new Vietnamese "comfort food" dinette that just opened there; I ran into J-Rocc outside of it the other night and I'd wager it's not unusual to see strollers parked in front.
For real - wasn't Echo Park a mostly Latino, working class neighborhood even only 10 years ago (I wasn't living in LA then so I really don't know for certain)? There's nothing about Highland Park, to me, that separates it, especially given the high % of single family homes in the area; that's always going to be attractive to middle class families looking for cheaper housing in the ridiculous market that is L.A.
Yeah, that's why I think the current economic downturn should prove interesting because in a lot of those mid-transition spots, the transition itself has been brought to a standstill, if not reversing.
As for Silverlake - interesting, I would have thought it flipped even before that; I guess I always associate when that process began with when Spaceland opened (1995) but I suppose that was still when it was at the tipping point. That said, an acquaintance of mine shot a film there around 2000/2001 and it already made Silverlake look post-hipster.
When Beck's first LP dropped.
In the case of Silverlake, he certainly seemed to be the poster-boy of its "Renaissance"...
But I agree - the gentrification possibilities in South LA seem far less likely but I just saw that at the height of the housing boom, a few years back, the median price for a house in the area was $500,000! It's now come back down to reality at a median value around half that (which is where it was before the boom). Not surprisingly, you see a lot of foreclosures on the market there now.
i really like el sereno. im surprised it hasnt been fully engulfed by white folks yet. great location, hills, and that part of huntington drive was kinda on the come up a few years ago.