Hansik, the Taste of Korea

Tasting the T.G.I. Friday's Korean taco - By ELISA UNG

Korean tacos at Friday's come with steak, ginger-lime slaw and sriracha.

Tasting the T.G.I. Friday's Korean taco Sunday, May 13, 2012

By ELISA UNG, RESTAURANT REVIEWER

"Spicy new Korean steak tacos." Available now – at a T.G.I. Friday's near you.

T.G.I. FRIDAY'S

Korean tacos at Friday's come with steak, ginger-lime slaw and sriracha.

I read this, picked my jaw off the floor and flashed back a few years, to my first Korean taco. I sat on a Los Angeles sidewalk, the air thick with exhaust fumes, and marveled at how the groundbreaking food truck named Kogi had captured the sweet-heat dance of Korean barbecue in a package that tasted so much better than a fad.

Kogi is widely credited with simultaneously launching both food truck mania and Korean taco mania. Businesses sprouted all over the country with names like Chi'Lantro, Koi Fusion, Seoul Food, Marination Mobile; customers who had no previous experience eating Korean flavors lined up for tortillas filled with them. Experts predicted that this was the start of a wider audience for Korean food; that the cuisine was poised to become the next Chinese, or at least the next Thai.

And then last month, a chain of 566 restaurants nationwide upstaged everyone by adding Korean tacos to the menu. Right there with Horny 'Ritas and Jack Daniel's wings.

Is this how a food trend dies? Or is it how one really gets started? I headed to Route 3 in Clifton looking for the familiar Friday's red-and-white-striped awnings, and some answers.

Meanwhile, I started thinking about a conversation that I had last year with Einav Gefen, the North American corporate chef for Englewood Cliffs-based food giant Unilever, who said she could foresee a possible supermarket product around Korean tacos that even her hypothetical target consumer in the Midwest might try.

After all, taco night is a tradition in many American homes, and Gefen said she could envision customers saying, "Oh, maybe Korean tacos can be a nice tweak on something I already do because my kids are bored already with my regular tacos."

In North Jersey, versions of Korean tacos have been popping up in casual fusion restaurants, some of which have already come and gone.

Generally, they start with Korean-style marinated meat – the most common are short ribs (known as galbi or kalbi) or rib-eye that's usually thinly sliced (bulgogi). The marinade might include ingredients like soy sauce, garlic, the Korean red pepper paste known as gochujang; maybe sesame oil or rice wine, and some kind of sweet element, such as sugar, Asian pear or even soda. Spicy pork and chicken are also common.

The meat is then topped with a fresh garnish – maybe cabbage, onions, cilantro; a spicy ingredient, perhaps kimchi or sriracha, and sometimes a creamy sauce. It all might be wrapped in a corn or a flour tortilla.

The most successful one I've tried in North Jersey was at Kraverie in Jersey City (a café that evolved from two former food trucks). Flour tortillas are topped with small pieces of caramelized galbi, bulgogi, pork or chicken, finely minced kimchi and a sour-cream sauce; you get the tender, sweet-savory meat with punches of heat, cool and crunch in each bite. For me, the fusion dish captures the real allure of Korean barbecue, and of the cuisine in general – all of the yin-and-yang flavors balancing and bouncing off each other.

Would I find that back at T.G.I. Friday's (which also has locations in Hackensack, Wood-Ridge and Wayne)? I settled into a booth and read the menu description: corn tortillas, filled with strips of marinated Black Angus flatiron steak, topped with ginger-lime slaw, cucumbers, fresh cilantro, basil and sriracha. Served with jasmine rice pilaf, for $9.99.

The tacos were served nestled in foil, in a wire rack. The chunks of steak were tender; the dominant taste was soy sauce, but it was fairly mild. The meat also had a faintly sweet undertone, and bore some tinges of caramelization.

And that was basically the good news. Everything was wrapped in taut, sandpaper-like corn tortillas. I didn't taste ginger – though that may have been drowned out by the liberal globs of sriracha – and I saw no cilantro or basil, but my tacos were topped with a lettuce mix that included plenty of arugula.

Arugula! On a Korean taco! I could hear grandmothers from many different cultures howling as I ate.

I later tweeted Roy Choi, the acclaimed chef behind the Kogi truck. Was he going to try the T.G.I. Friday's tacos? "Wasn't planning on it," he tweeted back.

Does this dish show that Korean food is so common it now has the honor of being watered down into mediocre fare acceptable to the masses? That's nothing to celebrate. But the general prospect of more people discovering flavors? I'll raise a real bulgogi taco to that.

Email feedback to me at ung@northjersey.com. If you include your name, town and phone number, your thoughts may be included in future columns. Twitter: elisaung Blog: northjersey.com/secondhelpings