Ever since I had read about the Kogi Korean Taco truck in LA, I have been dying to try a Korean taco or burrito. I mean, I love Korean food and I love Mexican food, so why wouldn't a combination be great?
The Korilla BBQ truck is NYC's answer to Kogi. It stops in various places around the city during lunch and on Weds it stops on Water Street and Old Slip, which is a 20 minute walk from work but the closest location to me that they have. By the time I got to the truck at 12:30pm, there must have been a line 20 people deep. Aarti and I waited about 20-25 minutes to order our food which I hear is pretty standard for the truck. At first I thought that they weren't being operationally efficient, but when you get to the window, you see that they are really doing the best they can. There are only so many people you can fit into a truck that is the size of my bathroom. There is one guy who takes your order and puts the rice on the tortilla, another guy who puts the topping on and another guy who put the sauce on and takes your money. Somehow there is a 4th guy who is prepping and cooking more stuff.
While the menu is super colorful and has a lot going on, there are just a few main options: chicken, rib-eye (bulgogi), pork, kimchi, or wild child (veggie) in a burrito, taco or bowl form. As a meat lover, I got the bulgogi burrito ($7) with fried rice (bacon + kimchi fried rice - a $1 extra) with korilla sauce (aoli mayo basically). I got the works, which means it came with monterey jack cheese, tomato salsa, more kimchi, and lettuce. Aarti got a similar one but with house made tofu and with regular sticky white rice ($7).
The tortilla shell was nice and soft and thin, which is how I like my burritos. As with any good Korean food, there was a nice punch of spiciness and sourness from the kimchi. You would think that all these ingredients together might taste weird but it was super tasty. It was about the size of a Chipotle burrito but I had somehow managed to wolf down the entire thing with nothing left over. My one complaint was that the bulgogi was all the way at the bottom of the burrito. So for the first few bites, it was really just hunks of kiimchi. The best burrito I've ever had was in the Mission district in SF and one of the reasons why it was so delicious was because in every bite you could taste everything. They had somehow mix all the ingredients and place them in the tortilla so that with every bite you could taste sour cream, cheese, rice, beans, chicken, tomato and lettuce. I have no freakin clue how they do it but it's amazing. So with the Korilla burrito I was kind of eating in layers which was kind of annoying. While the fried rice was good, I didn't taste any bacon at all. But then again I also had rib-eye in my burrito so it might be hard to decipher all the different meat tastes, but I didn't even really see it in there either. I didn't try Aarti's but it looked great too and she raved about it. The tofu was the soft silky kind and it looked really fresh and tasty. It would have been great if they gave you wet naps because in the end I was covered in sauce and cabbage. Oh well. Maybe next time I will get the chosun bowl instead. It was totally worth the walk and wait but not sure how my boss would feel about me taking a 1 1/2 hour lunch and then taking a nap in the afternoon from being overly full.
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