Korilla BBQ

I've seen the Korilla BBQ truck around the city for a while now, and have been itching to try their food.  I heard loads of great things about Korilla: they make authentic Korean food accessible to New Yorkers (i.e. in portable Mexican-food-style burritos, for example), they were on The Great Food Truck Race, and the original founders and I went to the same high school (STUYVESANT PRIDE).  On Saturday, October 29, 2011, henceforth known as "White Halloween", it started snowing like mad while I was in lab, and around lunch time, we peeked out the window to observe the snow when my friend pointed out the Korilla truck was across the street.  Godsend.

Turns out the weather was still terrible to suffer through even though I only had to cross the street.  The rain/snow felt like icy hail and it was bone-chillingly cold.  I came up to the truck and it looked like their lights were out and four guys were huddled inside looking really cold and lonely.  Aw.

 

The truck had a really cute menu on the side, and I give big props for an easy-to-read menu.  Sort of Chipotle-style, you can pick the form of food you want (tacos, burrito, or chosun bowl...which I'm guessing is like a burrito bowl), protein, rice kimchi, cheese, and sauce.  They were out of the two things I really wanted: rice and chicken.  Kind of a bummer...but they promised to make me a delicious and equally filling burrito filled with veggies and pork instead.  So, my burrito came out to be spicy pork, veggies (lettuce, carrot, daikon, mushroom), shredded Monterey Jack cheese, mild kimchi, and Korilla sauce (smoky barbecue mayo).  It was all $7, a pretty nice price compared to Chipotle, and I was happy to help out these poor guys camped out in a snowstorm.

So, this burrito was pretty spicy.  Probably because I asked for spicy pork, kimchi, a spicy cheese, and a spicy sauce.  I dunno, just a guess.  It was surprisingly fresh for food from a food truck camped out in a snowstorm.  At about the middle of the burrito, my mouth was really dying from the heat, a really low burning but creep-up-into-your-throat-and-kick-you-in-the-tastebuds heat.  I was glad for the vegetables to dull the spice: the veggies were mostly cut into a slaw and I had some pleasant carrot and daikon shreds.  I also got a bite of one big shiitake mushroom, which was probably about the weirdest burrito-eating experience.  A burrito is seriously the last place I'd expect to get a shiitake mushroom, but since I am a big fan of mushrooms, and this was an appropriately Asian mushroom for an Asian burrito, I accept.  After a while, the spice sort of overwhelmed my mouth and I couldn't really taste anything else.  I saved about 1/3 of the burrito to eat later, and because I sort of needed my tongue and tastebuds to last me the rest of my lab shift.

Overall, I think Korilla BBQ is doing a great job with their food venture.  I wasn't a huge fan of the burrito I had yesterday, but I think on a day of better weather and more plentiful produce and me not ordering a combination of every spicy thing available, they would definitely make me a delicious meal.