Word: choi
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...Choi, who does his proselytizing from a fleet of culinary clunkers, became the leader of this movement not just by creating a whole new cuisine--a mashup of Korean and Mexican food that has given rise to short-rib tacos and kimchi quesadillas--but by dishing out punk attitude. Peer inside one of his Kogi taco trucks (the name is Korean for meat), and you'll see him yelling in Spanglish, baseball hat askew, arms tatted up, hands flying like a rapper's. This is performance art, and people often wait in hour-long lines for the privilege of snarfing...
...this $2 taco affecting people on this level?" Choi asks, standing next to one of his four trucks. "You have these famous chefs and farmers' markets with fresh vegetables, and you have fast food--and nothing in between," he says. "If I introduced you to 100 people in my life, 90 of them will never have eaten real Parmesan cheese...
...doesn't really matter that gourmet food trucks were busting out in American cities a few years before Choi parked his first food truck, in November 2008. Or that short-rib tacos weren't even his idea. (A former co-worker's sister-in-law, Alice Shin, had read about a homemade version on a food blog and, as Kogi's publicist, helped hype them through masterful Twitter and website work, which turned the truck's mysterious whereabouts into a hipster happening.) Choi's amazing food has become one of the movement's signature successes. Kogi made $2 million...
...Choi's sensitive-burnout passion is the movement's story. He gets choked up about replacing McDonald's cuisine with freshly prepared, price-competitive, high-end food. "It's convenient to eat horrible food, and it's so difficult to eat great food. It's O.K. to eat flaming-hot Cheetos and never read books or eat vegetables," he says. "This is where we've come as a country, and I'm not cool with...
...March, Choi is scheduled to open a restaurant in an old strip mall; he and his partners bought the space for $30,000. They're not going to fix it up and instead will serve $7-to-$9 rice bowls--including lacquered pork belly, and steak topped with horseradish cream and poached eggs--in the 30-seat space, where Choi believes he can somehow serve 1,000 people a night. Kogi's current operations serve about...