Huffing and puffing from the intense uphill bike ride there, I arrived only to see a line that went around the corner and down to who-knows-where. I double-checked with the the young couple at the tail of the queue.
"Is this the line for --?"
"Yep," they replied. Right. Apparently there are other people who also use this thing called The Internet. Well, how long could the wait be? They're just tacos. All you do is 1) scoop meat into taco, 2) serve taco, right? Suddenly, the line started moving, and we quietly followed it, an exodus of mostly students and locals marching down the dark residential block toward the promised land. And then we turned the corner.
Oh, crap. There were at least 50 people ahead of me in line, and that was a conservative guess. And they hadn't started serving yet, making us wait until after 8:00 before I could glimpse any movement at all inside the truck. And so we waited. And waited. And waited. After TWO HOURS of listening to the scruffy-haired pair ahead of me musing on whether Shaq's Twitter account was his own, and the chatty sorority girls behind me having a serious discussion about how to style their hair for the next Greek formal, I finally got to the front of the line. And they were out of kalbi. Out. Of. Kalbi.
OK. That's OK. Everybody calm down. "But you do have kimchi quesadillas left, right?" I had read somewhere on Yelp that the kimchi quesadillas were the stuff of dreams.
"We don't have any more cheese," said a pleasant-looking bespectacled fellow behind the counter. He should've been glad to be inside the truck, I thought. It was 9:45 pm and my stomach lining was being eaten from the inside out. How many more of these sorority girls would it take to rock this truck back and forth? I wondered.
Too hungry to engineer a mob mutiny, I ordered three spicy pork and three spicy chicken tacos and sourly handed the guy a twenty. Two hours for no kalbi and no kimchi quesadillas. This had better be the best Korean/Mexican fusion dish ever. Sitting down around 9:55 pm, my boyfriend (who had conveniently made his way over when I was close to the front of the line) and I finally got to dig into these mythical KBBQ tacos. The meat was tender, the sauce was tasty, and the vegetables were surprisingly fresh. Were they good? Yes. Were they two-hours-in-line-on-the-street good? Debatable.
Regardless, I'm glad I finally got to have a taste of the hot foodie trend, although I may just pick up tortillas and pre-marinated kalbi from Trader Joe's the next time I get a KBBQ taco craving.
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