Kogi food is LA food. It’s not fusion; it’s not a gimmick; and it is certainly not a PR-driven endeavor that sprung from the minds of enterprising big thinkers.  It’s food that comes from the gut and the heartbeat of what makes LA, well, LA.

Here, we are either immigrants or children of immigrants.  For decades, Koreans have worked side by side with Latinos and in my own youth, it wasn’t unusual to reach for the tortillas when the rice had run out at a community barbecue.  So the very idea of putting Korean barbecue in a taco or burrito was not exactly new to LA or the Koreans in LA.  When there’s no more rice and you still need starch for your meat, what do you do?  You run to the nearest store to grab a pack of tortillas.  I doubt anyone brought an extra sack of rice to wash and cook for the next hour — much less, a rice pot to cook it in.

When you’re an immigrant or child of immigrants, when it comes to barbecues, authenticity goes out the window.  Meats and starches are the first priority — so we often have hot dogs grilling alongside our LA-style kalbi marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, garlic, green onion and 7-up.  There would be rice and hotdog buns and tortillas. Cheetos and Chocopies and Doritos.  No one thought, “Hey!  Let’s make fusion food!  What an enterprising idea!

Add a little bit of LA sunshine, and you’ve got yourself a really chill vibe when it comes to food.  If one or two ingredients are missing, you readjust the recipe and adapt.  Instead of crushed pears, add Sprite.  Instead of rolling out a thick slab of meat and cooking the thick bone it comes with, cut it directly across so that everything grills a lot more evenly.  Scissors need not apply.

When Chef Roy was creating our tacos, his intention was not to turn a quirky idea into a reality – he just wanted to make the best friggin taco you’d ever eaten.  He dug deep into his roots as a latchkey kid growing up on the streets of K-town; someone who strongly connected with the Latinos in every kitchen he’s ever worked in. Roy is the kind of person who never had any problems with making friends – be it some Stepford wife, a drug addict, a lady of the night or her pimp.  He saw a connection in everything.  And in Kogi, he saw a strong connection between the strong, loud flavors in the Korean food he grew up with and the very vocal LA-style Mexican food that’d been served street side all these years.  And somehow he was able to connect that to the heartbeat of LA.

That is why Kogi food isn’t a crafty, premeditated idea, a gimmick or a ploy for your money.  It’s just LA food.  It’s food from a unique perspective and it’s really, really good.