It's midnight and more than a hundred twenty somethings, most in jeans and T-shirts, some in high heels and party clothes, queue in the parking lot at the Brig, a nightclub/bar in Los Angeles's trendy Venice district. They've been lining up patiently for more than an hour on a chilly winter night and they're not waiting for a hot new band or a famous DJ. They're waiting for LA's current food sensation.
Kogi is a Korean barbecue catering truck – a gourmet version of the old British hot dog vans or California taco trucks. It tours LA by night, keeping in touch with its customers via Twitter, serving an unlikely but perfect combination of four kinds of Korean barbecue wrapped in miniature Mexican tacos and sold dirt-cheap (a taco costs $2, a burrito $5). The black-clad cooks toil inside the truck like culinary ninjas – I count 11 of them in the cramped space – while those in the queue flash their iPhones and flirt.
Not all of the local chefs are willing to go as far as Roy Choi, Kogi's creator, who abandoned a career running kitchens at New York's Le Bernardin and at LA's Beverly Hilton hotel to cook in the back of a van but Kogi is the extreme example of the change in LA's dining scene. In the 1980s, when LA emerged as a food capital, the restaurants' template featured Hollywood glitz, private reservation lines, A-list clients, and prices to match. Now a second generation of chef-owners has very different attitudes, offering instead back-to-basics, simplicity, sustainability and hands-on craft.