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Present:
Good Food with Evan Kleiman
Los Angeles
Female: My city, Los Angeles is known as this huge megalopolis where people from totally diverse cultural backgrounds end up living right next to each other. The people who love to eat a wide variety of ethnic foods on a regular basis. This is a total gold mine and nothing exemplifies LA as the “we are the world thing” more than the audience for the LA Taco Truck experience.
If you love just completely simple super tasty food for practically free then the Taco Truck is for you.
We’re in Haven Park, which is great like old fashion neighborhood on the eastern part of Los Angeles. It's actually a lot like a neighborhood where I grew up. I group in a sort of like an eco park and when I was growing up, it looked a lot like this. And one of the great benefits to living in Highland Park is that it probably has one of the biggest densities of Taco Trucks anywhere in the city. So let’s go check out this Taco Truck.
[Foreign Language]
The toppings don’t really vary for all the tacos, they tend to do be chopped onion and maybe a few leaves of cilantro, a little bit of salsa roja. It's always served with radishes, sometimes cucumbers and a wedge of lime. I love it with a little bit of limejuice sprinkled on it kind of brightens the whole thing up. It's always pork but marinated in a mixture of chillies, orange juice, achiote paste, various seasonings and pineapple.
It turns out that the Al pastor Taco is often what people use to mark a great Taco Truck, really fresh. Wow, that’s so good. What was that, a dollar and 25? And of course, the radish and the cucumber, both serve to cleanse your palate before going on to the next type of meat.
Asada Beef
Cabeza head
Carnitas fried pork
Lengua tongue
Buche intestine
Tripas tripe
Venice Beach
Female: Now we’re going to go from Highland Park all the way out to the west side to Venice near the beach to the famous Kogi Truck. Now the Kogi Truck is pretty amazing because it fuses together Korean and Mexican food cultures, what could possibly be more Los Angelino than that. It's the ultimate LA fusion food. So we caught up with one of our favorite intropi eaters, Eddie Lin.
Eddie Lin: Rumor has that the Kogi Truck is here tonight but I can’t wait to check it out. Basically, I want to find out if this is all hype or if it's really as crazy delicious as they say it is. Looks to four short ribs and four forks.
Did you call Eddie? Oh the short ribs, the Bulgogi. Thank you. This is the short rib Kogi taco, it's basically marinated in a traditional sweet pre marinated. It's topped with the sesame chili salsa and the cilantro and it looks like a bit of cabbage in there. It's not only this culture fusion but it's delicious and it brings people together so this is an amazing thing that only can happen in my opinion in Los Angeles.
Female: For me the Taco Truck experience is just completely emblematic of what the real LA is, in it's diversity, high proportion of Latino population, easy to eat cheap food that is delicious than more made. It's all wrapped up right there in that Taco Truck experience.
For more information on Taco Trucks in Los Angeles go to KCRW.com/goodfood
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