Oh, no! The Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck gets cited in Beverly Hills

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Talk about down and out in Beverly Hills: A tipster tells us that the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck received a citation earlier today while parked in front of the MySpace headquarters in Beverly Hills. ‘Seeing the police ‘take down’ the Kogi truck was not cool!’ he lamented. When I called Kogi’s Caroline Shin she hadn’t yet heard the news, but her husband, Mark Manguera, texted her while I was on the phone. ‘You work fast,’ she said.

‘No, the Kogi universe works fast,’ I said. Two more tips came into my mailbox before Manguera called me with the details of his hectic day. While parked in front of MySpace (as it has done for the last month without problems), the Kogi truck was cited by police for lacking the appropriate operating permits for Beverly Hills. (All Kogi’s food permits are in order.)

‘You know how new we are,’ said Manguera. ‘We didn’t know that we needed 50 million more permits here than anywhere else.’ Then he added, ‘You know, Obama is in Beverly Hills today, so there’s a huge police presence.’ True enough.

After making a few good jokes about how Beverly Hills needs to be treated with ‘tender loving care,’ Manguera said he planned to file for the necessary permits immediately and be back in the city in the next 14 days, hopefully sooner. ‘We learn every time something like this happens,’ he said. ‘Without these kind of challenges, we wouldn’t grow.’

-- Jessica Gelt