Attention all taco lovers! According to a recent New York Times article by Jennifer Steinhauer, there is a Korean taco vendor riding around the streets of LosAngeles selling tacos…with a twist. Instead of ground beef, cheese, sour cream, and other standard accouterments, owners Roy Choi and Marguera pack their tacos with choices like tofu soaked in red chili flake vinaigrette, short ribs in sesame-chili salsa roja, and my personal favorite, blood sausage sautéed with kimchi. While taco traditionalists might shake their heads at such combinations, the food coming from Choi and Marguera’sKogi Korean BBQ-To-Go truck has not only been a huge hit in L.A. – people are waiting up to two hours for these bad boys! – but it could also be a sign of big things to come for Korean cuisine.
In the last few years, second-generation Korean Angelenos and more recent immigrants have played their own variations on their traditional cuisine and taken it far beyond the boundaries of Korean-dominated neighborhoods. These chefs and entrepreneurs are fueled in large part by tech-boom money here and in South Korea, culinary-school educations and in some cases, their parents’ shifting perspectives about the profession of cooking. In the last year, new Korean restaurants have popped up on the powerhouse restaurant strips of Washington Boulevard in Culver City and Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. In an area of West LosAngeles dominated by Japanese restaurants, bibimbop has joined the fray.
Now that I’ve been exposed to the glory of Korean cuisine for the last 11 months, I am all for this new trend. Maybe some ojinga (squid) can make an appearance on the menu soon as well.
Make sure you read the whole article. It’s more of a cultural piece than an actual food review. After your finished, go buy yourself some taco shells and some kimchi and get freaky with it!
- More info on the Korean BBQ Taco from Kogi’s Official Site. Taco Bell ain’t got nothin‘ on this!
Maybe it’s a bit of home sickness setting in, or maybe I’m just a sucker for cute animals, but my sister just posted some photos of her Boston Terrier, Birdie, and I feel the need to share them with as many people as possible. Dang thing sure is cute. I think it’s mostly because her tongue is permanently hanging out at a comical length – but hey, that’s just how Birdie rolls.
Babushka Birdie
I think she kinda looks like an elderly lady in this one too.
Related Viewing: “Never Say Never” – That Dog [also one of my favorite one-hit wonders from the 90's]
Here are three things I found interesting this Saturday:
1) February 12th was Darwin’s 200th birthday. A guy named Mike Rosulek whipped up this awesome graphic, which is now available in sticker form! Schweet!
2) L.A. based designer Jonathan Jarvis put together this simple and clean visual explanation of the current credit crisis, in all its utterly depressing, soul-crushing glory. Make sure you watch the whole thing. Reminds me of the Bill Maher quote: “If you have a gun, you can rob a bank, but if you have a bank, you can rob everyone!”
3) Kim Jong-Il may be insane, but damn if he isn’t a sharp dresser. Sure the puffy hat and the over sized gloves are fly as hell, but it’s the shades that really bring it all together. Here he is at a gumball factory – because why not?
Just in time for summer, Lovelee Confections introduces a new product that’s guaranteed to send your taste buds into a tizzy: Natural Corn Ice Cream. Finally!! With the heartiness of freshly-husked corn and the creamy goodness of ice cream, this new flavor sensation is two great flavors packed onto one delicious stick. It’s so good, you won’t know whether to throw this thing on the barbecue or into the freezer. Pick one up at your local Family Mart while they’re hot…or should I say, cold.
Seriously, I tried one of these things out of curiousity and I wanted to die. Avoid this at all costs.
Long Live LoFi: The Fuji Film Instax 7s & The Holga 135
Living in foreign country can be quite an eye-opening experience, which, for a casual shutterbug like me, provides plenty of opportunities to indulge in my photography hobby. For the most part I shoot with my DSLR, the Sony A200, which never fails to impress me with it’s ease of use and high quality images. Lately, however, the crystal clear resolution of the A200, though impeccable, just hasn’t been doing it for me. Do I really need to see every pore on that person’s face? Do I really need to be able to count the nose hairs of the random guy standing in the background? The answer, at least for me (I don’t know what you weirdos are up to) is no.
Thankfully I’ve found a few lo-fi escapes from the digital world. The first is my new Fuji Film Instax 7s which I bought in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronic district for about $65. The instant film camera is an able replacement for the now deceased Polaroid camera of yesteryear. The controls are dead simple. Just pick your light setting – indoors, cloudy, a little sunny, really sunny – point, and shoot. Though the film is expensive (about a dollar per snap) the photos turn out just the way I like them: soft and fuzzy, washed out and warm. My favorite part about the 7S is that it takes business card-sized photos perfect for stashing in your wallet or sharing, you know, with actual people.
The second camera in my growing lofi fleet is The Holga 135, which I picked up in Seoul for about $50. Though it’s billed as a “toy camera” because of its plastic lens, this little guy can actually produce some pretty impressive results. With a rudimentary aperture and shutter settings, photos tend to turn out slightly dreamy and blurry; the perfect antidote the razor sharp clarity of digital cameras. It also has a non-coupled advance mechanism, which means you can take multiple exposures on the same frame before moving on to your next shot (see above right). The 135 model provides the same vignetting, light leaks and other random – though not unwelcomed – imperfections as other Holga cameras, but uses regular 35mm film which can be developed over the counter, perfect for anyone who lost their dark room access when they graduated high school.
I still love my A200, but these two lofi options have a charm that digital just can’t match.
Since I don’t have a scanner, check out more of the Holga 135 and the Instax 7s on Flickr.
Here’s a video from The Onion News Network, the video branch of the The Onion newspaper which is giving the Daily Show a run for its money as the leader in “Fake News” (why is it that fake news is often better and more accurate than the real news”?). This spot has to do with North Korea’s batshit-crazy dictator Kim Jong-Il and a plot to bring the moon to the people of his starving nation. Sure it may seem a little out there, but honestly, I’m pretty sure that Kim Jong-Il is probably planning something exactly like this as we speak.
*Side Note: See if you can spot the glaring innacurracy towards the beginning of the video.
Bonus: Here is latest clip from the ONN (as the kids are calling it). It too is fantastic, but be warned, the language is definitely NSFW.
And one more just for good measure. All I gotta say is “hot, steamy food in your face right now.”
Above is a picture from my recent trip to Tokyo. I don’t know why I didn’t post this picture earlier, because quite frankly it is the most bad-ass advertisement I have ever seen. It is literally just a picture of Tommy Lee Jones’s leathered, weathered face with the word “BOSS” plastered next to it, and then some rainbow colored coffee cans. AWESOME! These vending machines with Jones’s catchers-mitt-like visage on it were all over the place, practically challenging passersby not to step up and buy a semi-cold canned beverage. How his mug relates to selling cola and coffee products and is beyond me, but it worked. I bought like 10 cans of Pepsi, and I don’t even drink soda! If someone could please turn this logo into a T-shirt so I could wear it around town, I would be forever thankful.
Update!!! I just discovered that TLJ has done a series of TV spots for Japanese television, so basically he is the real life version of Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation. I have no idea what is being said in these commercials, but they’re almost better that way. If anyone can translate let me know.
update 2: apparently he did an entire series of commercials with about 20 or so installments. The campaign revolves around him being some sort of alien who’s come to earth to study the human way of life. I’m not certain on the story line, but it sounds like it’s just the exact opposite of his role in Men In Black. That TJL, so versatile!
I don’t normally do a whole lot of posts about sports, but since admitted steroid-user Alex Rodriguez (A-Roid?) rose to fame with my hometown Seattle Mariners, I can’t help but feel a certain bit of schadenfreude regarding his predicament. The sad part is that he is just one of many ballplayers to find better hitting through chemistry. Who knows what other names will be leaked in the coming months. One thing is certain though, baseball is officailly damaged goods. The picture above comes courtesy of Dan Piraro’s brilliant comic, Bizarro, which always manages to be both humorous and timely. Who knows how many current stars would just be washed up bench-warmers without the help of human growth injections and banned substances. Maybe the Major League Baseball should split the players into two separate leagues, but instead of instead of having one with a designated hitter and one without, they can make one with juiced players and one with regular Joes, then let the fans decide: Science or Substance.
Banks, automakers, and now baseball; the list of American institutions that have officially shat the bed this year continues to get longer. If only there was some little bit of feel-good viral video floating around somewhere on the interweb to cheer me up. What’s that you say? There is? Glory Be!! Improv Everywhere does it again.
I don’t normally do a whole lot of posts about sports, but since admitted steroid-user Alex Rodriguez (A-Roid?) rose to fame with my hometown Seattle Mariners, I can’t help but feel a certain bit of schadenfreude regarding his predicament. The sad part is that he is just one of many ballplayers to find better hitting through chemistry. Who knows what other names will be leaked in the coming months. One thing is certain though, baseball is officailly damaged goods. The picture above comes courtesy of Dan Piraro’s brilliant comic, 
