Local Los Angeles lore credits Raul Martinez with creating the first lonchera— also known as a taco truck—when he converted an ice-cream van and began selling tacos in front of an east LA bar.1 Martinez’s innovation proved so lucrative he eventually parlayed his mobile money into a popular brick-and-mortar chain named King Taco. The company still operates taco trucks on the streets of LA—you can even hire one to cater a private party—and while they rarely come up in conversations about the city’s best loncheras, the fact that one can even have such a debate is a credit to Martinez’s ingenuity.
Estimates of exactly how many food trucks exist in Los Angeles are hard to pin down. In 2006, journalist Jesse Katz estimated there were around four thousand loncheras operating in Los Angeles County, enough for “one taco truck for every square mile of land.”2 A different source cites Erin Glenn, CEO of the advocacy group Asociación de loncheras, who put that number closer to seven thousand in 2010.3 Either way, as the photo essayist Mac Kane explains, these thousands of loncheras can be divided between two types: “the transient taco truck moves quickly among lower-density locations to serve a diverse mix of needs, the semi-permanent truck takes on the location memory of a fixed restaurant.”4 The average Angeleno roaming the city is likely to see the former at construction sites, serving daytime laborers and can often find the latter close to bars and nightclubs (among other places), waiting to capitalize on late-night revelers.
In these ways, loncheras are an indelible part of the Southland’s business, culture, and community, what Kane describes as “the unconscious connectors of the city … responding to the daily changes and needs of its citizens, piggybacking on the larger infrastructure of communication, power and transportation networks.”5 In other words, by traversing the city and occupying space (however briefly), the trucks help bring hidden social patterns into greater relief.
For example, by design, many loncheras seek out customers otherwise underserved by existing foodways, bringing into the open the voids and gaps in food distribution.6 In other cases, the proximity of loncheras to brick-and-mortar restaurants has led to protracted battles between the trucks and fixed businesses, politicians, and the police, highlighting the contested relationships between public space and private enterprise, culinary practices and municipal laws.7 Certainly, in a city as food obsessed as Los Angeles, loncheras are one of the most prominent examples of an “authentic” street cuisine, empowering socially and culturally mobile “foodies” with a sense of one-upmanship that comes with claiming to know where the best taco trucks in the city are.8 As foodways scholar Allison Caldwell describes them, food trucks have become “traveling containers of cultural capital.”9
Loncheras are so omnipresent that Kane argues they have attained a certain kind of invisibility through overfamiliarity: “The average resident will pass several taco trucks over the course of a day, but their ubiquity hides them in the everyday life of the city.”10 That may have been true once, but not since 2009, when a wave of so-called luxe loncheras emerged in the city, led by the Asian American venture Kogi BBQ-to-Go.11
Kogi began operating in November 2008, the brain child of Filipino American Mark Manguera, Korean American Caroline Shin-Manguera, and Korean American chef Roy Choi. Launched with a Korean-inspired short rib taco, Kogi initially struggled until the social media specialist Mike Prasad came aboard and suggested that they use the Twitter platform to reach out to potential customers, especially to update the truck’s locations.12
As the most prominent of the new, haute-meets-street cuisine trucks (nueva trucks), Kogi behaved much like a hybrid lonchera. Although its constant movement resembled that of transient trucks, its desire to cultivate a brand memory was more akin to that of a semipermanent truck. Social media technology made this dual strategy possible. Kogi customers could either visit the company’s website (http://kogibbq.com) or subscribe to its Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/kogibbq) to determine where and when the truck would appear. Especially in its early days, when Kogi had one lone truck rolling across the city, tracking it down became “like a treasure hunt,” according to Kogi’s public relations chief, Alice Shin.13
In hindsight, Kogi’s strategy was a perfect trifecta of media catnip, combining cutting-edge cuisine, technology, and culture angles. As I suggested, “The Kogi storyline wrote itself: inexpensive, ethnic fusion street food with a hip, technorati twist.”14
It also did not hurt that its short rib taco was, in the words of one customer quoted by the New York Times, “this Korean Mexican fusion thing of crazy deliciousness.”15 The taco begins with a griddle-warmed corn tortilla, on which are heaped finely chopped pieces of soy-sesame marinated beef short rib that would not be out of place in dozens of Korean BBQ restaurants in town. Add to that a sesame-chili salsa roja and a lettuce-and-cabbage slaw with chili-soy vinaigrette, all of which is garnished with a cilantro onion relish (see http://kogibbq.com/category/menu). The result is a brilliant, unexpected contrast in flavors, a sweet/salty/spicy/sour combination that fits in your hand.
This was the other story that wrote itself: how Kogi’s mélange of flavors reflected Los Angeles’s larger social/cultural mixtures. As Roy Choi told Newsweek, “These cultures—Mexican and Korean—really form the foundation of this city. Kogi is my representation of LA in a single bite.”16 Those sentiments were echoed by others, most notably the Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times food critic, Jonathan Gold, who described the short rib taco as “unmistakably from Los Angeles, food that makes you feel plugged into the rhythms of the city just by eating it.”17
The impact of these trucks goes beyond just representation. According to New York City Food Truck Association president David Weber, “Food trucks activate public space.”18 One example that comes to mind is from my second trip to Kogi in the spring of 2009, an impromptu, late-night stop in downtown Los Angeles, outside the Golden Gopher Bar. The line was easily thirty to forty people, and as I waited, I eavesdropped on and interacted with fellow customers. The two men in front of me were two twenty-something African American men, both working in marketing. Ahead of them was a pair of forty-something white gay men, and behind me, I noticed a pair of twenty-something Asian American women, each holding a small lap dog in her arms. I later wrote about that experience, noting:
I couldn’t remember ever spending even 15 minutes on an L.A. sidewalk talking and mingling with complete strangers, let alone downtown at 10 p.m. I could appreciate [Los Angeles Times’s] Jessica Gelt’s idealism when she described Kogi … as “a sort of roving party, bringing people to neighborhoods they might not normally go to, and allowing for interactions with strangers they might not otherwise talk to.”19 It’s tempting to see Kogi as powering a tech-driven, heteropolitan form of sidewalk contact, forging, in urban planner Jane Jacobs’s words, “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust.”20
Lest this wave of urban utopianism—fueled by short rib satiety—go too far, however, I should note that in Jane Jacobs’s time, there was not the same kind of virtual panopticon of electronic surveillance watching over the sidewalk (however incompetently).21 Likewise, as Kristin Day points out, even in the supposedly “safe” streets of Irvine, California (a popular Kogi destination), the intermingling of racialized and gendered bodies can produce an aura of fear that challenges the ideal of a neutral public space.22
Especially interesting to consider is how nueva trucks like Kogi fit into a larger history of Los Angeles’s city-planning schemes that seek to create an idealized “urban experience,” but in highly privatized terms and on literally private grounds. An example is CityWalk by Universal Studios, a pioneering outdoor mall design with a faux urban decor that serves as a Vegas-like simulacrum of a Manhattan-style “city street,” but one that is completely private and highly surveilled.23 Part of food trucks’ draw lies precisely in their signifier of “urban-ness,” not to mention culinary urbanity. Especially in Los Angeles, with its long-standing rivalries with more classically conventional cities like San Francisco and New York, there is a deep attraction to the nueva trucks’ ability to “activate public space.” As I discuss later, which public spaces the trucks choose to “activate” have meaningful implications for existing inequities in space, especially along class and race lines. Do the nueva trucks transform those borders or merely reify them?
These concerns intersect with a long history in Los Angeles of what has been described as “multicultural triumphalism.”24 Celebratory descriptions of Kogi-as-LA recall Lisa Lowe’s warnings that while “multiculturalism claims to register the increasing diversity of populations, it precisely obscures the ways in which that aesthetic representation is not an analogue for the material positions, means, or resources of those populations.”25 What we have seen with the championing of nueva trucks and their fusion fare is that the Korean taco can become a potent symbol of a city’s embrace of diversity: “the only-in-L.A. combination of two of the city’s most beloved ethnic cuisines,” as Jessica Gelt wrote.26 Yet, harmony between flavors can belie the often discordant reality of urban social relations.
In this regard, I agree with the general notion that Kogi can represent “L.A. in a single bite,” only it is a far more complex and fragmented Los Angeles than is often acknowledged. Jonathan Gold contends that “Kogi represents mobility in a city that worships mobility; it is a vehicle for traversing lines of race, class and ethnicity,” and I would add that it defines the borders in addition to crossing them.27
Just as loncheras reveal the hidden social structures and forces that flow through the city, I suggest that the nueva trucks, led by Kogi, also offer a way to confront the heterogeneity of Los Angeles, where diversity and inequality alike leave their mark on the city’s cartography.
For all the attention paid to the social media angles of the nueva trucks, surprisingly few publications, either popular or academic, focus on what would seem like an obvious advantage of mobile food trucks: their mobility. As one social media–centric essay on Kogi observes, “A sense of [consumer] community goes beyond geographical parameters.”28 This is not necessarily wrong—certainly, the notion of a community, whether local, national, or transnational, is not solely bound to geography—but in the case of food trucks, whether or not they tweet, a relationship to space is integral to their entire raison d’être. Without their transient model, these trucks would simply be stationary food stands. Once they are on the move, “geographical parameters” are absolutely central.
That said, Twitter does offer a valuable source of data for investigating the travels of a nueva truck like Kogi. Twitter’s public database allows anyone to look through as many as 3,200 past tweets, and for Kogi, that equals approximately a year’s worth of tweets and, by extension, a year’s worth of locations. At various times since 2009, I have used Twitter to trace Kogi’s unique stops, compiling a complete list of its locations in 2010 and 2011 (but only a partial database for 2009).29 I then used Google Maps to find these locations, creating a coverage map that displays all the places in Southern California at which Kogi has made at least one stop. I next turned to the New York Times’s “Mapping America” site, which allows users to overlay Google-generated maps with census block data on race, income, education, and the like.30 In that way, I could compare patterns in Kogi’s stops with demographic information about those same locations.31
Between 2010 and 2011, Kogi made nearly five thousand stops at more than three hundred unique locations, spread across a geographic space ranging from Santa Clarita in the north, Diamond Bar in the east, Laguna Niguel in the south, and Canoga Park in the west: more than four thousand square miles in all (see map 4.1).32
Map 4.1. Los Kogi Angeles, 2010–2011. Each marker represents a location but does not indicate the frequency of stops made at that location. Map by Terrametrics, 2012.
The following analysis should be treated as preliminary, especially because I am focusing on a small handful of observations compared with the potential depth of the data represented in these locations. In addition, I have excluded the 2012 data, so this should be treated as only a snapshot of Kogi during these two years (hence my use of the past tense when describing where Kogi “went” instead of where it “goes”).
In 2010 and 2011, what I am calling “Los Kogi Angeles” was split between two large regions. Almost all of “Kogi South” was in Orange County, where it was assigned two trucks, Rosita and Naranja. “Kogi North” was served by two trucks, Roja and Verde, which covered Los Angeles, mostly north of the 10 Freeway and west of downtown, with other stops scattered throughout the sprawling county.33 Within these regions, I identified three broad categories of Kogi’s destinations (or lack thereof):
1. Magnets: locations—whether individual or grouped into clusters—where Kogi went the most often. The most popular magnets were essentially weekly stops in Venice, Granada Hills, West LA, Eagle Rock, and Orange. The most popular magnet was The Brig, a bar in Venice, where Kogi trucks stopped at least 270 times in 2010/2011.
2. One-stops: locations where Kogi stopped once, although I expanded the term to apply also to locations of two or fewer stops. Sixty percent of Kogi’s locations were one-stops, not including those stops clustered around magnets. The more important one-stops were those appearing within voids.
3. Voids: large areas (a radius of more than five miles) where Kogi had a minimal presence.34 The most obvious example is what I term “The Void”—the twenty-mile-wide band separating Kogi North and Kogi South. Smaller voids included the beachside stretch from El Segundo to San Pedro, the neighborhoods in Santa Ana / Fountain Valley located between the 405 and 5 Freeways, and the adjoining west San Gabriel Valley cities of Pasadena, South Pasadena, Alhambra, and Monterey Park.
The first time I made a map of Kogi’s locations, in the summer of 2009, The Void was one of the most obvious features, not only for its size, but also because it so closely encompassed long-standing zones of class and racial segregation in the area, including the South Bay, Harbor, South LA, Southeast LA, and East LA. Map 4.2 looks more closely at The Void (shaded gray).35
The neighborhoods within this space are overwhelmingly African American and Latino, which took the brunt of the region’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s and suffer from some of the highest concentrations of poverty and homicide rates in Los Angeles County.36 In short, The Void covers those neighborhoods that have long been marginalized racially, economically, politically, and educationally. In that sense, the minimal presence of a nueva truck like Kogi is not surprising, as many other companies, institutions, and nonresidents have steered clear of The Void for decades.37
To its credit, Kogi did make stops throughout the region, including locations in Inglewood, Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills, Huntington Park, Whittier, and Bellflower; by no means am I suggesting that Kogi practiced a deliberate policy of abandonment, let alone discrimination.38 In fact, one of the most vocal critics of what one might term “geographically conservative” nueva trucks has been none other than Roy Choi.
In a May 2011 article for the Los Angeles Times, Gelt quotes and paraphrases from Choi’s comments about how other trucks have failed to serve the city:
He says trucks need to stop congregating in the same lots and go out into L.A.’s vast outer reaches to feed neighborhoods “stacked with relatives,” such as Santa Fe Springs, Downey, La Puente, Hacienda Heights, Granada Hills, Northridge, El Segundo, Torrance, Reseda and Arleta. If you “don’t serve and honor the culture and soul of L.A.’s neighborhoods, what differentiates you from that Marie Callender’s across the street that you are so blatantly fighting against?” asks Choi.
Map 4.2. The Void, 2010–2011, frequency of stops at each location not indicated. Map by Terrametrics, 2012.
On the one hand, Choi and Kogi certainly have covered a tremendous amount of ground in Southern California, seeking locations far from where many other nueva trucks cluster (midcity, Hollywood, West LA, and so on). Still, The Void looms in the backdrop of his comments, especially in mentioning Downey. It is true that Kogi has serviced Downey, but in 2010/2011, it was a “one-stop” location: February 19, 2010. I found no other evidence that Kogi stopped there for the rest of the year or the year after.39 Likewise, another one-stop in The Void was Figueroa and Fifty-Ninth Street, just west of Huntington Park. As it turns out, that stop was accidental; on March 26, 2010, Kogi sent out a tweet: “Verde will continue serving @Figueroa and 59 Ave! Truck broke down here! Might as well serve u guys!! Come on by!!” In cross-checking the addresses that appear in the middle of The Void, I found that the overwhelming majority were one-stops. Map 4.3 shows Kogi’s most frequent repeat-stop locations, and The Void is so clearly represented that it needs no shading.
Notably, the most popular stop in the heart of The Void was at 9325 California Avenue in South Gate, an address that turned out to be a venue regularly holding a rave party (see http://twitter.com/rvdie). That this was an exception to The Void highlighted an obvious fact of food-truck locations: trucks travel to where they think they can find customers, thus the trucks’ geographic patterns suggest something about the kinds of consumers they are seeking (and where they find them) and perhaps, by extension, what kinds of consumers they may want to avoid.
One way to address these questions would have been to interview the Kogi staff themselves directly, but despite a good-faith effort to arrange such a conversation, their management politely declined my request, citing a general moratorium on interviews.40 Instead, I relied on an inductively built profile of Kogi’s customer bases by analyzing its locations, especially magnets. Map 4.3 shows the magnets at which Kogi stopped at least fifty or more times in 2010–2011, on average, stopping at each location at least once every two weeks.
The typical Kogi consumer was likely to be young (in his or her twenties or thirties), and/or upwardly mobile, and/or white or Asian. There were, of course, exceptions to this, but overall, Kogi’s locations and business model seemed to cater to these people.
I began with the magnets near college campuses: the Westwood cluster (UCLA), Eagle Rock (Occidental), Northridge (Cal State, Northridge), Diamond Bar (Cal Poly Pomona), Orange (Chapman), and the Irvine cluster (UC Irvine). Then I added clusters of magnets near bars and nightclubs: Hollywood, Koreatown, Sawtelle (West LA), Abbot Kinney (Venice), downtown LA, Silver Lake, and so on.
Young people are more likely to be adopters of the necessary technology (smart phones and social media accounts) used to find Kogi and other nueva trucks. Also, given that popular culture trends are often driven by youth culture, it is not be surprising that such a culturally trendy movement as the nueva trucks would be especially appealing to younger consumers. Also, as Jonathan Gold e-mailed me, Kogi’s typical consumer is someone who would see “nothing unusual about going out for tacos at 11 P.M. … and saw half-hour waits less as a burden than as an opportunity to socialize.”
Kogi may take its inspiration from the loncheras, but whereas the latter cater mostly to workers with $1 tacos and $4 burritos, Kogi’s markup is anywhere from 50 percent ($6 burritos) to 229 percent ($2.29 tacos) higher.41 Per item, the difference may seem negligible, but scaled up for a meal, especially for a family, it is the difference between feeding three people for $12 (lonchera) and for $24 (Kogi).
Map 4.3. Kogi’s most common locations, more than fifty stops in 2010–2011. Map by Terrametrics, 2012.
The major difference is that the transient loncheras cater mostly to blue-collar workers looking for a quick meal between work shifts; they sell convenience by going to where the workers are.42 Inversely, nueva trucks set themselves up as destinations. As Alice Shin noted, determining where and when a nueva truck is going to be is akin to a “treasure hunt,” and it is not just food that awaits the successful quester, it is also the bragging rights to say, “I went to Kogi.” Such self-selected consumers, one might rationalize, would be willing to pay twice as much for their food, given that they have already shown they are willing to drive across town and wait forty-five minutes to buy a taco from a truck. I should note, too, that even to begin the hunt, it helps to own a Twitter-enabled smart phone and pay $400 a year for its data plan.
The nueva truck’s transience also presumes that its patrons have access to a private vehicle.43 Transient loncheras regularly travel into residential and industrial neighborhoods in search of workers to feed, but again, that is a convenience-based model. In contrast, Kogi’s magnets lay mostly in commercial zones, next to, for example, Northridge shopping centers, Santa Monica office parks, and Orange saloons. These, too, are destinations, ones that typically offer amenities such as wider streets and available parking that are boons to both trucks and car-borne consumers.
It thus is not surprising that Kogi’s locations maximize the possibility of drawing local consumers with either disposable incomes (office workers, shoppers, late-night revelers) or, at least, the willingness to spend limited economic capital to accrue cultural capital (college students or other young people). Likewise, where its coverage is weaker are those areas with lower household incomes, that is, where people have less to spend, particularly on food truck meals substantially marked up from lonchera fare.
Looking at a Los Kogi Angeles map of primarily 2010 locations, overlaid with 2010 U.S. Census data on racial distribution, it becomes apparent that Kogi’s top magnets were where the largest racial groups were typically white or Asian (though other magnets were located in “nonmajority” tracts). In fact, the best predictor for where Kogi’s coverage thinned out is those neighborhoods with low percentages of both white and Asian households. That is the case in places like central Santa Ana, central and western San Fernando, central Anaheim, and, as noted earlier, most of The Void. Although Kogi stops appeared on the fringes of those voids, they were only where the demography had shifted to include more white- and Asian-populated tracts (e.g., Gardena and Torrance, which sit at the southwestern edge of The Void).
This was a challenging area to explore since I am not in a position to guess intentionality, least of all regarding a topic as sensitive as the racial preferences of consumer bases. For example, in my casual conversations with others about this issue, some suggested that perhaps it is an “issue of palate”; that is, the culinary tastes of Latino and/or African Americans living in these neighborhoods are less likely to embrace a Korean taco or a kimchi quesadilla. But I do not think this theory holds up to any reasonable scrutiny given that food preferences cannot possibly be essentialized so rigidly, especially when the food cultures in all these communities encompass wide ranges of flavors and ingredients. As Gold pointed out, in parts of east LA, where Kogi rarely goes, “The area was once home to a fairly substantial Nisei population, and … teriyaki was as familiar to the local palate as hot dogs.”44 Moreover, the argument reifies the assumption that residents in The Void self-segregate and never, for example, cross north of the 10 Freeway or east of the 5 Freeway to get a meal. It also plays into a middle-class self-image of cosmopolitanism, compared with the less refined tastes of “others” (which, in this case, has both racial and class overtones).
The correlation of race, class, and space concerns how the tracts with more white and Asian households coincide with higher median household incomes. As just noted, if Kogi’s typical consumer is middle class, then it makes sense to travel to where the middle class works, lives, or plays. This correlation of race, class, and neighborhood is itself a partial product of the “cumulative advantages and disadvantages” stemming from racial privilege and policies, especially in a historically segregated housing sector.45
In summation, Kogi’s location preferences help illuminate the social topographies of race and class in Los Angeles. Furthermore, just as faux urban malls like CityWalk and The Grove offer privatized, sanitized experiences of “city life,” the decisions of nueva trucks like Kogi to locate in middle-class / professional spaces while bypassing hundreds of square miles of central-city neighborhoods may indicate the city’s discomfort with its own urban spaces.
The other factor not yet mentioned is the role of Asian Americans, on both sides of the truck window. Given the pan-Asian roots of Kogi’s founders and the Asian influences on the cuisine itself, it is not unreasonable to assume that Kogi would seek out Asian American consumers by establishing magnets in and around neighborhoods with high numbers of Asian households. In fact, the data mostly confirm this, as I found Kogi magnets around Asian-heavy college campuses such as UCLA and UC Irvine, as well as in Asian-identified cities and neighborhoods such as Gardena, Carson, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Westminster, and Rowland Heights.46
In this way, I suggest that Kogi also helped highlight the growing role and presence of Asian Americans in Los Angeles’s social and cultural milieus. It is notable that Roy Choi’s rise coincided with that of other prominent Asian American chefs and restaurants in the area, including Sang Yoon (Father’s Office), Diep Tran (Good Girl Dinette), and Ray Byrne (Slaw Dogs).47 It is not even that all these chefs’ menus are Asian inspired—Father’s Office and Slaw Dogs certainly are not—but that Asian American culinary talents are claiming space in an industry that historically has been almost completely dominated by white chefs.
This phenomenon also caught the attention of Gold, who situated it as
part of the new movement in Los Angeles cooking, the one where Asian-American chefs claim the chicken-pot pie, the taco and the Cobb salad as their own, relating the dishes back to similar ones in Thailand, Korea and Taiwan, but celebrating the differences in culinary culture rather than trying to bury them in a flurry of catsup and processed cheese.48
I agree that there has been a “new” movement afoot insofar as these personalities arose in the media spotlight in the same general time frame, but of course, this also may be part of a far older movement of Asian American cultural hybridity—chop suey, anyone?
As Samantha Barbas writes, “The story of chop suey and Chinese American dishes in the first half of the twentieth century illustrates the way that restaurants have been able to initiate, however slight, crosscultural interaction and culinary diversification,” and she then points out that “food and eating establishments have often been more successful in promoting exchange between diverse cultural groups and traditions than other social institutions.”49 But Barbas also warns that “Americans’ exposure to Chinese American food … seems to have done little to change dominant attitudes toward Asian immigrants” and that “chop suey became more popular … the further it moved from Chinese American people.”50 Whether our current moment represents a different balance in power remains to be seen—can one co-opt the Korean taco?51—but it is tempting to see the rise of Kogi, among other operations, as one in which Asian Americans are not so much “introducing” Asian traditions into the American menu as reshaping American culinary traditions by means of a polyglot method of adaptation and innovation.
Asian American consumers also have a significant but understudied role in emergent forms of what, for lack of a better term, I call “food documenting” (since it goes beyond writing). This certainly includes blogs and websites, but Asian Americans also seem to have a notable presence on restaurant review sites, such as Yelp.com. In particular, some of my friends insist that using smart phone cameras to share photos of meals is somehow a uniquely “Asian thing.”52 This may be an overgeneralization, but it is interesting to think about how some long-standing assumptions of Asian Americans—our technological prowess, for example—ends up aligning with an emergent popular discourse on food that has flourished through such digital media as blogs, review sites, and camera phone–sharing services.
Its Asian American fans have played a vocal and visible role in fueling Kogi’s “buzz,” and notably in the immediate post-Kogi boom of nueva trucks, several of the more prominent ones have been founded by young Asian Americans, including the Nom Nom Truck (Vietnamese), the Don Chow Truck (Chinese), and the Flying Pig (pan-Asian). I have no conclusions to offer, only the observation that Asian American consumers and chefs alike seem to be coalescing into a critical mass that might be able to alter the Southland’s culinary landscape. As Alice Shin posted on Kogi’s website, “We don’t call it fusion. But what we do call it is Angeleno. The thing is, THIS is what Los Angeles tastes like. To us 2nd and 1.5 generation Asians living in LA County anyway” (http://kogibbq.com/2010/03/ess-not-fusion/, italics in original).
In Los Angeles, the new conventional wisdom is that the nueva truck craze has plateaued, either because it has become oversaturated and/or the recession has forced it to scale back.53 Even Kogi had to downsize: from 2009 through 2011, it slowed from roughly seventy-five stops per week by five trucks to roughly fifty stops per week by four trucks.54 Despite this slowdown, the nueva truck phenomenon has not shown signs of abating elsewhere. Outside Los Angeles, many other cities are experiencing their own rapid expansion, creating many of the same problems of licensing, excessive competition, and brick-and-mortar tensions seen in Southern California in recent years.55
There are many unanswered questions about what this movement means. In regard to the relationship between nuevas and loncheras, some people, including Choi, have suggested that the nuevas helped redeem people’s previously poor opinion of loncheras, often derided as “roach coaches.”56 But it seems more likely that nuevas carved out a different niche for themselves, one that comes with culinary school pedigrees, reputations first burnished in established brick-and-mortar eateries, and the blessings of prominent food writers and publications. These all have helped make nueva trucks more acceptable, even desirable, to certain middle-class consumers, but meanwhile, loncheras continue to be as invisible as before.57
Another concern, especially if nueva truck operations are downsizing, is whether the progress of shrinking voids will also slow if these operations grow more conservative and fall back to more familiar locations. As I have stressed, many voids are located in historically underserved neighborhoods, and if the nueva truck movement wants to live up to the rhetoric of “representing the city,” it must find ways of expanding into these areas. A truly transformative activation of public space would find a way not just to bring people from West-mont to Westwood but go in the other direction as well.
Future research could go in a variety of directions. My project was to look at a single truck and to examine and map its location data. But there are more than three hundred nueva trucks in Los Angeles alone and thousands of loncheras, some of which have also started using Twitter. I therefore hope to use this research as the basis for a collaborative project that looks more closely and critically at how food trucks relate to their cities, and vice versa. As should be evident, my analyses are highly inductive and speculative, closer to a series of critical thoughts or primordial hypotheses than firm conclusions. I find it especially revealing that whenever I have discussed my project with like-minded scholars and journalists, they suggest new directions I had never considered. It shows that mobile eateries are a rich topic on which to ruminate but one that we have only begun to sample.58
I would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Miriam Fraire, Danielle Abdeljaber, and Brenda Martinez, as well as additional suggestions for this project from Oiyan Poon, Jeff Chang, Sean Slusser, Jenny Banh, Jonathan Gold, David Leonard, and Mac Kane. Thanks also to Karen Tongson, the first to mention Kogi to me in late 2008, and Linda España-Maram and Larry Hashima, my coteachers at Cal State University, Long Beach, who assigned our first field trip to Kogi.
1. Jesus Sanchez, “King Taco Got Start in Old Ice Cream Van,” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1987, available at http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-16/business/fi-14263_1_ice-cream-truck. Lonchera is translated literally as “lunch box” but in colloquial parlance, it refers to a catering truck in Los Angeles, of which the taco truck is one of the most prominent configurations.
2. Jesse Katz, “Wheels of Fortune: Nearly 4,000 Taco Trucks Roam the Streets of L.A. Tacos Jeesy’s Is Hoping There’s Room for One More.” Los Angeles Magazine, October 1, 2006, available at http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1531012. Katz’s estimation combines 2,422 officially health-permitted food trucks with 1,465 formerly permitted trucks that could still be in operation.
3. Heather Shouse, Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press), 6. Shouse claims there are “3820 licensed trucks on record” and quotes another estimate, putting that number closer to seven thousand. For both Katz and Shouse, what is clear is that non permitted/off-record trucks are the hardest to keep track of, thus obfuscating the true number of trucks in operation on any given day in Los Angeles.
4. Mac Kane, “Taco Trucks,” Polar Inertia, 2006, available at http://www.polarinertia.com/jan06/taco01.htm (italics added).
5. Ibid.
6. Food access is an ongoing issue in poorer Los Angeles neighborhoods, many of which rely on a loose combination of fast-food franchises, liquor stores, greengrocers, and mobile eateries to fill in the gaps left by the absence of larger, full-resource supermarkets. While loncheras play a part as a stopgap measure, from a community health perspective they are not ideal, given the poor nutritional content of what they often serve. See Andrea Azuma, Food Access in Central and South Los Angeles: Mapping Injustice, Agenda for Action (Los Angeles: Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, May 2007).
7. Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez, “LA’s Taco Truck War: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests,” Chapman University Law Research Paper, 2010, available at http://works.bepress.com/ernesto_hernandez/10. Chapman University law professor Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez conducted an in-depth exploration of the “taco truck wars” of 2008 and 2009, during which many loncheras came under regulatory fire from LA city officials. See also Gustavo Arellano, “Bribery, Threats, Broken-Down Vehicles, Lawsuits, Pioneers, Good Food: Tales from OC’s Taco Trucks,” OC Weekly, July 23, 2009, available at http://www.ocweekly.com/content/printVersion/479478/. Orange County Weekly food writer Arellano also described similar issues in Orange County.
8. The correct answer: Tacos Leo on Venice and La Brea, but only on weekends when it brings out the al pastor spit.
9. Alison Caldwell, “Will Tweet for Food: Microblogging Mobile Food Trucks—Online, Offline, and In Line,” in Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, ed. Psyche Forson and Carole Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2011), 316. Caldwell writes about the new generation of food trucks in New York City, but there is no reason to think the same idea applies to LA loncheras, especially with sites like The Great Taco Hunt (http://greattacohunt.com) devoted to meticulously evaluating and documenting these traditional trucks. L.A. Taco (http://lataco.com) has a running series, My Favorite Taco, in which it asks local culinary and cultural luminaries to name their preferred taco trucks and stands.
10. Kane, “Taco Trucks.”
11. The term “luxe lonchera” was coined by Arellano. See Gustavo Arellano, “Where Are the Loncheras at the Luxe-Lonchera Fests?” OC Weekly, September 1, 2010, available at http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/2010/09/where_are_the_loncheras_at_the.php. I use the term “nueva truck,” but they both refer to the same phenomenon.
12. Alison Abodeely, “The Kogi Effect: Food Trucks and Social Media,” allieabo2, March 19, 2011, available at http://allieabo2.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/kogi-effect/.
13. Caroline McCarthy, “When Twitter Met Food Trucks,” CNET, May 18, 2009, available at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10242185-36.html.
14. Oliver Wang, “to live and dine in kogi l.a.,” Contexts 8, no. 4 (fall 2009): 69.
15. Jennifer Steinhauer, “For a New Generation, Kimchi Goes with Tacos,” New York Times, February 25, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/dining/25taco.html.
16. Andrew Romano, “Now 4 Restaurant 2.0.,” Newsweek, February 28, 2009, available at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/02/27/now-4-restaurant-2-0.html.
17. Jonathan Gold, “The Korean Taco Justice League: Kogi Rolls into L.A.” LA Weekly, January 28, 2009, available at http://www.laweekly.com/2009-01-29/eat-drink/the-korean-taco-justice-league-kogi-rolls-into-l-a/. Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano was not content with just viewing Kogi through a LA filter when he wrote, “Kogi’s rapid rise reflects the same cultural moment that produced Barack Obama; youthful, urban, multiethnic, wired and communal” (“Now 4 Restaurant 2.0.”).
18. Kim Severson, “Should Cities Drive Food Trucks off the Streets?” New York Times, July 16, 2011, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/sunday-review/17foodtrucks.html.
19. Jessica Gelt, “Kogi Korean BBQ, a Taco Truck Brought to You by Twitter,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2009, available at http://www.latimes.com/features/la-fo-kogi11-2009feb11,0,4771256.story.
20. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 56; Wang, “to live and dine in kogi l.a.,” 69–70.
21. Andrew Blankstein and Richard Winton, “LAPD Botched Use of Downtown Crime Cameras,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2011, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/24/local/la-me-police-camera-20111224.
22. Kristen Day, “Being Feared: Masculinity and Race in Public Space,” Environment and Planning 38, no. 3 (2006): 569–86.
23. As the CityWalk’s own planners put it, the mall was designed to evoke the funky, polyglot experience of visiting Venice Beach or Melrose Avenue without “somebody on every corner with a ‘Work For Food’ sign.” See Kevin McNamara, “CityWalk: Los[t] Angeles in the Shape of a Mall,” in The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis, ed. Ghent Urban Studies Team (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999), 188.
24. Claire Kim, “Imagining Race and Nation in Multiculturalist America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no. 6 (2004): 989, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0141987042000268567.
25. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
26. Gelt, “Kogi Korean BBQ.”
27. Jonathan Gold, “How America Became a Food Truck Nation,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2012, available at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/How-America-Became-a-Food-Truck-Nation.html.
28. Abodeely, “The Kogi Effect.”
29. I initially began data-mining Kogi’s Twitter feed in the summer of 2009, but I did not revisit this project until early 2011, by which time the second half of 2009 already lay beyond Twitter’s 3,200 limit on past tweets. The Library of Congress is supposedly in the process of developing a searchable archive of all public tweets ever made. Once this goes online, I may be able to recover the complete set of Kogi’s 2009 locations.
30. There are important caveats in analyzing geodemographic data in this way. First, the census data I used were based on where people live but not where they work or “play,” and in a commuter-heavy city like Los Angeles, the demography of specific neighborhoods can literally shift complexion from day to evening. Since food trucks, especially nueva trucks, target mostly workers and people engaged in social activities, the residential census data may not accurately reflect a truck’s actual clientele. Likewise, as geographic spaces, census tracks rarely conform to the same shapes and borders as areas understood as neighborhoods. In other words, our sense of a neighborhood is as much constructed through lived, cultural practice as any formal cartographic process can designate. Looking at geodemographic data is useful for developing an impression of an area, but an accurate assessment of any neighborhood at any given point in time requires metrics that census data simply do not collect.
31. A self-reflexive observation about the research process: this project came together in discrete and largely separate phases—a short journal review in 2009, a conference paper in 2011, and now a book chapter—and while I think that reflects an organic evolution, it also meant that my methodological approach came together in fits and starts. With the benefit of hindsight, I have come to see the areas where I could have improved my data management. For example, because collecting and mapping more than two years of addresses was labor intensive, I tried to expedite the process by stripping off both date and truck information. The biggest problem with that is that I lost the ability to create a useful, longitudinal database of Kogi’s locations. Obviously, in any research project, there are untapped methods that seem obvious with hindsight, and as noted, this project is in an early stage. Nonetheless, I find it worth disclosing my own process of discovery (and self-admonishment) in this process as a way of unpacking the challenges of doing research in “small batches” over time.
32. Kogi has gone farther west; in 2010, it experimented with a handful of stops in both Thousand Oaks and, even farther away, Santa Barbara, but I am treating these two locations as literal outliers.
33. A fifth truck, Azul, roamed in both regions but was taken off-line, without notice, in May 2011. I cannot find any record in Kogi’s Twitter feed of how or why Azul disappeared—my presumption is that the company was forced to scale back its operations—but what was notable is that in the course of analyzing location data, Azul appeared to be the truck most responsible for Kogi’s one-stops. To me, this suggested that it was used as an “exploratory” truck, sent off to new locations either to test its viability or perhaps to extend Kogi’s reach during the most ambitious part of its geographic expansion.
34. Voids exist within the normal range of Kogi trucks. Ventura and San Bernardino Counties, therefore, would not be considered voids, since they lie outside Kogi’s historical service area.
35. Numbered locations coincide with the locations mentioned in this chapter.
36. Even though these are adjoining regions, they are considerably different, at both the macro level (e.g., east LA has lower crime rates than south LA does) and the micro level (there are affluent neighborhoods interspersed, despite disproportionately low median household income levels overall).
37. Photo essayist Mac Kane examined my maps of The Void and sent an e-mail reply discussing his research on cell phone “dead zones”:
I seem to recall there being large cell dead spots in the space you have located in grey [The Void]. I am not sure if it’s related to the economic forces which are the main motivators for private infrastructures (cell phones and taco trucks are fluid and respond directly to the demand on the ground) or other factor related to density of population?
As I have noted, there is a definite correlation with household income, but there is no correlation with population density. Kane’s cell phone coverage research echoes the idea that The Void is separated from entire spectra of businesses, with nueva trucks simply being one of many. This is not true of loncheras, however, especially in east LA, which has some of the highest density of semipermanent loncheras in the city. In other words, food trucks thrive in parts of this area, just not nueva trucks.
38. The same cannot be said for other private industries and government bodies.
39. Based on a cursory scan of the 2012 data, by that fall, Kogi did begin returning to Downey, with at least half a dozen stops.
40. In my correspondence with Alice Shin, she offered to let me book time with Roy Choi (the only Kogi staffer authorized to address my questions) “at a standardized rate … [of] $350 an hour.” For ethical and budgetary reasons, I declined that option.
41. If my recollection is accurate, these prices are slightly higher than when they first started. Burritos rose from f$5 to $6, and tacos, from $2 to $2.29.
42. Kane estimates that some transient loncheras make up to twenty stops a day, moving from work site to work site.
43. Almost all Kogi stops are within one to two miles of a freeway access point. By avoiding city traffic as much as possible, Kogi gives its trucks more time to move between shifts and makes it easier for customers to reach them.
44. Gold, “How America Became a Food Truck Nation.” In the interests of full disclosure, Gold interviewed me for his article, specifically to talk about the research that appears in this chapter. But in his article, he writes as though I were stating my own speculations regarding the “limited palette theory,” when in reality I was relaying to him the speculations that others had given to me in casual conversation as to why The Void existed.
45. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2006), 53.
46. The main exception is enigmatic; another Kogi void appears in the west San Gabriel Valley, from Pasadena south to Montebello. These are neighborhoods with higher household incomes and very high numbers of Asian households. In discussing this with Gold, we both agreed that it would be “common sense” for an Asian-themed food truck to pursue locations in Alhambra, San Gabriel, and Monterey Park; yet Kogi had only one stop in that area in 2010 and 2011 that I could find. The other mysterious void lies along LA beachside cities from El Segundo down through San Pedro. Many of these cities are affluent and similar in demographic profile to the Orange County beach cities where Kogi has a strong presence. Permission issues may have kept Kogi out of places like Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, but this is not clear.
47. Nationally, Roy Choi’s East Coast counterpart would be another Korean American chef—David Chang (Momofuku, Ssäm Bar). See Larissa MacFarquhar, “Chef on the Edge,” New Yorker, March 24, 2008, available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_macfarquhar.
48. Jonathan Gold, “Three Dog Night: Frank Talk about a New L.A. Food Movement,” LA Weekly, June 10, 2010, available at http://www.laweekly.com/2010-06-10/eat-drink/three-dog-night/.
49. Samantha Barbas, “‘I’ll Take Chop Suey’: Restaurants as Agents of Culinary and Cultural Change,” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 4 (spring 2003): 681.
50. Ibid., 682.
51. Interestingly, one of the many Kogi “clone” trucks—Calbi Fusion Tacos—was purchased by the Baja Fresh chain, though, I should note, Baja Fresh’s CEO, David Kim, is Korean American himself. See Lisa Jennings, “Baja Fresh Owner to Franchise Calbi Taco Truck,” Nation’s Restaurant News, October 2, 2009, available at http://nrn.com/article/baja-fresh-owner-franchise-calbi-taco-truck.
52. I happen to be one such person who does this, but it had never occurred to me that this was specific to Asian Americans.
53. Jessica Gelt, “A Wrong Turn for L.A.’s Food Truck Scene?,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2011, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/06/food/la-fo-food-trucks-20110506. Gelt argues the oversaturation angle, while Clements posits the recession as a major factor. See Miles Clements, “The Find: Taco María Truck Survives the Downturn,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2012, available at http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-find-20120119,0,3934262.story.
54. By the time of this writing, in the fall of 2012, Kogi’s website still had four trucks listed, but only three with active daily locations. The fourth truck (Rosita) is used sparingly during the week and seems to be in service mostly on weekends (it may also be used for unlisted private catering events).
55. For examples of food trucks in other cities, see John Tanasychuk, “What’s Next for South Florida’s Food Trucks?,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, January 19, 2012, available at http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/fl-sh-food-trucks-012012-20120119,0,365491. story; Tim Carman, “D.C. to Propose Zones for Food Trucks,” Washington Post, January 20, 2012, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-to-propose-zones-for-food-trucks/2012/01/19/gIQAHYZWCQ_story.html?tid=pm_local_pop; and Danielle Dreilinger, “Somerville Scene: We Need More Food Trucks,” Boston.com, June 10, 2011, available at http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-10/yourtown/29643636_1_food-trucks-mobile-food-vendors-new-food.
56. See Jace Lacob, “Street Food Guru Roy Choi on Sunny Spot, Food Trucks, Kogi and More,” Daily Beast, December 13, 2011, available at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/09/street-food-guru-roy-choi-on-sunny-spot-food-trucks-kogi-more.html; and Jace Lacob, “The Hunt Resumes: Interview with Bandini, Taco Hunter,” L.A. Taco, August 11, 2009, available at http://www.lataco.com/taco/the-hunt-resumes-interview-with-bandini-taco-hunter.
57. For example, the esteemed Zagat restaurant guide recently ranked “LA’s 10 Best Food Trucks,” and all of them are nuevas (http://www.zagat.com/buzz/las-10-best-food-trucks). Likewise, food truck aggregator sites like Foodtruckmaps.com and Foodtrucksmap.com have more than two hundred and three hundred trucks in their respective directories; all are nuevas.
58. For example, I find it astounding that even though the loncheras figure heavily in ethnographic and literary sketches of Latino communities, I was barely able to locate published scholarly articles dedicated to them, let alone an entire monograph.
