Jon Kim runs Seoul on Sixth, a street-side plancha in Westlake that will upend your expectations of what a Korean taco tastes like.
For the last decade, the fusion of Korean and Mexican cuisines has been all but defined by Roy Choi’s Kogi BBQ and a successive invasion of imitators, each with its own kalbi-based taco.
Jon Kim’s tacos are not those tacos.
Kim, 26, runs Seoul on Sixth, a street-side plancha in Westlake that will upend your expectations of what a Korean taco — or, as he calls them, “tacos Koreanos” — tastes like.
A Southern California native, Kim was a business finance student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo when Kogi became a sensation.
He says he was already making his own Korean-inspired burritos and tacos for friends, using leftovers from the care packages of frozen Korean food his mother regularly sent him.
Kogi’s success was an eye-opener.
“Roy Choi is one of my idols,” Kim says. “There are very few Korean Americans that we can look up to, and he’s definitely paved the way for us.”
A decade later, and this self-taught taquero is popping up on weekends, usually in front of Mark’s Liquor, the neighborhood store his family has owned, off and on, over the last 46 years.
