****JOE'S JURY DUTY YELP-A-THON: reviewing every damn thing, because there's nothing else to do when you're hanging out at the DC Courts and they've got great Wifi. In the spirit of truth and justice, all reviews will be mad real****
This review is an intervention. You know that friend you have (you all have one) with so much raw talent, but they just can't seem to get it together? They're drinking their life away instead of making things happen for themselves? You try to pull them out of it and you even get them a job interview, and they never show up?
Chitti Chitti Grill is that friend, in food truck form.
The bulgogi, kalbi, and chicken they use here isn't bad quality at all. In fact, it's pretty good, and I know because eventually I took everything else off their tacos and just started eating the meat.
What's the other stuff they put on there? What appears to be craft cheddar cheese straight out of the bag. Iceberg lettuce. Bad tortillas they sure as hell didn't make themselves. These are basically Taco Bell tacos with different meat in them.
Don't get me wrong, there's more than one way to do a good Korean BBQ taco. Back in my beloved SoCal, Kogi BBQ and Dos Chinos approach the same fusion-y cuisine w/ very different ingredients and preparations and both manage to do big things with it.
How on earth in 2014 do you get away with selling a Taco Bell taco out of a food truck?
Answer: you don't... they had by far the shortest line of the food trucks lining Farragut for the lunch rush, and this won't end well for them if they don't reverse course.
To get their act together, they've just gotta start constructing dishes like they give a damn -- which means picking real ingredients, fresh good stuff, and not just relying on the fact that your food is fusion to get people to pay food truck prices. I would suggest a plane ticket out to SoCal to taste Roy Choi's cooking, but even within DC they need look no further than TaKorean or Far East Taco Grille to see how to do it.
Hell, just copy TaKorean wholesale; TaKorean copied everyone else wholesale and did a decent job of it, so it's not like they can complain. read more