In early 2009 in Los Angeles, there was no food experience more exciting than Roy Choi’s Kogi truck. You’d wait in a long line in a dimly lit parking lot with a menagerie of trendy people, some of them drawn by the truck’s latest Twitter post or Jonathan Gold’s review in LA Weekly, others stumbling out of a nearby bar. Then you’d order too many tacos and stand next to your car to eat, perching your sagging paper trays of Korean Mexican fusion on the trunk.
The truck felt new and surprising, and the big flavors demanded attention. The cheese oozing out the sides of the kimchi quesadilla rounded out the fermentation, while the salsa roja on top amplified the gochugaru. The blend of Korean and Mexican chiles in the salsa coaxed complementary flavors out of the punchy marinade on the kalbi. Funky one-off specials, like pork belly tteokbokki or the Kogi Hogi torta, constantly introduced new combinations.
Leaning on the strengths of Mexican and Korean cuisines, Kogi probably would have worked if the food was only a novelty. But it also tasted definitively of Los Angeles. Choi (and his partner, Philippines-born, California-raised chef Mark Manguera) put many facets of his life into Kogi, including his training in fine dining, his rebellious spirit, and his Korean heritage, but most of all his experience growing up in LA, where Koreatown abuts several predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods. Choi’s cooking prioritized innovation, but it still smacked of home.
“I think it became a voice for a certain part of Los Angeles and a certain part of immigration and a certain part of life that wasn’t really out there in the universe. We all knew it, and we all grew up with it, and it was all around us, but the taco kind of pulled it together,” Choi told Terry Gross in a 2013 interview on Fresh Air. “It was like a lint roller. It just kind of put everything onto one thing. And then when you ate it, it all of a sudden made sense, you know?”
Choi tapped into culinary histories that run deep in the American Southwest and California, where immigrants coming north from Mexico built lives alongside immigrants crossing the Pacific from Asia. (Kogi wasn’t the first in the U.S. to serve food at this cultural intersection; spots like Avatar’s, which has been serving Punjabi burritos in the Bay Area since 1989, are notable precursors.)
But the truck marked a turning point for Mexican Asian fusion as an enduring cultural passion among interconnected communities. Over the last 16 years, Korean Mexican fusion has spread all over the country; in Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, bulgogi burritos now seem as natural as coffee and chili, respectively. A legion of chefs have also popularized all kinds of Asian Mexican fusion, serving birria ramen, halal carne asada, and furikake esquites.
Years before the term “chaos cooking” entered the conversation, these restaurants created cuisine that was fun and different, blending foods from distinct cultures in ways that make emotional sense, even when they sound far out on paper. And chefs keep finding new ways to capture how Mexican and Asian foods crisscross in the U.S. and in diners’ hearts.
Asian immigrants have been forming communities in Mexico, from the La Chinesca neighborhood of Mexicali to Mexico City’s Pequeño Seúl, for decades or in some cases centuries. Chefs in these areas naturally adapted their cuisines to local ingredients and dishes; in the process, they started unpacking some of the natural affinities across cuisines that would grease the wheels of fusion projects well into the future.
To Cesar Hernandez, associate restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a street food aficionado, it makes sense that items like tacos and burritos became go-to formats for fusion cooking over the years. “They truly are blank canvases for whatever. They play well with other flavors,” he says. Hernandez also points to the common ingredients that unite Asian and Mexican cuisines. “A lot of these cuisines love citrus. A lot of these cuisines love chiles. And when you can coax those flavors out with the other cuisines, that’s when it really works.”
For Rhea Patel Michel of Mexican Indian fusion restaurant Saucy Chick in Pasadena, California, the connection between these foodways is elemental. Her background is Gujarati Indian, and her husband Marcel Rene Michel is Mexican American. In combining their cuisines, they found a natural synergy in ingredients like cumin, citrus, rice, and legumes, but they also discovered a connectivity of spirit.
“It’s generous, it’s vibrant, it’s dynamic, and we were really energized by what it could look like,” to bring their food together, Patel Michel says.
When chefs in historic Asian communities in Mexico couldn’t get access to ingredients from back home, they often developed fusion dishes out of necessity. But the clearest progenitor for many contemporary projects might be Sinaloan sushi, created in Culiacán, Mexico, not out of necessity but creative conversation within the restaurant community.
Japanese immigrants to the area, in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, started opening sushi restaurants around the late 1980s, often hiring Mexican chefs. But it wasn’t until those chefs left to open their own spots, bringing their own ideas and style to sushi — and building on recent sushi inventions from the north, like the California roll — that the genre really developed its modern personality.
One foundational operation, Sushi-Lo, brought sushi out to the streets in a cart, and introduced the modern classic, deep-fried mar y tierra (surf and turf) roll filled with carne asada and shrimp. Today, Sinaloan spots both in Mexico and the U.S., like Culichi Town, tend towards extravagance, incorporating aguachile, plantain, beans, melted cheese, jalapeños, or Hot Cheeto dust. And the cuisine only went further when it jumped from Sinaloa to neighboring Sonoroa, edging its way toward the U.S.
“Sonoran-style specialists are more like sushi bars attached to a Wingstop,” writes Bill Esparza, “with menus touting fried chicken wings and fried potatoes covered in melted cheese alongside the calorie-rich sushi.”
Alongside Culichi Town — which has 12 locations in the U.S., including in Dallas and Las Vegas — Sonoran sushi can be found all over the American West, but it especially thrives in Tucson, alongside terroir-defying, cross-cultural icons like the bacon-wrapped Sonoran dog.
Unlike contemporary fusion restaurants of the ’80s and ’90s that became reviled for carelessly throwing together half-assed hybrid dishes and wearing culture as costume, the impetus for Sinaloan and Sonoran sushi wasn’t colonial. Even as chefs tended toward monchoso, a sort of thrilling overindulgence, their fusion remained rooted in mutual respect and open collaboration. Neither culture was being absorbed or assimilated, trod on or lifted over the other.
“Mexican food is not fucking precious,” Hernandez says. “People in Mexico are the first to break the rules. It’s part of the tradition.”
That spirit has persisted in Kogi and the projects that followed, even as restaurants spread beyond the Southwest, more Asian cuisines entered the conversation, and chefs developed all kinds of fusion.
Almost immediately following Choi’s success, chef Bo Kwon created Koi Fusion in Portland, Oregon, in 2009, bringing Pacific Northwest style, a lighter touch on sauces, and an eye for local vegetables to the cuisine. In 2010, Señor Sisig launched as a Filipino Mexican food truck with sisig burritos and tacos, citing Kogi as major inspiration. That same year, the Korilla food truck in New York pushed rice bowls alongside tacos and burritos, drawing winding lines and mostly stellar reviews. Along the way through the many mid-2010s pivots at Mission Cantina in New York, chef Danny Bowien served Mexican kimchi, avocado sashimi, and a Chinese burrito special featuring mapo tofu or kung pao pastrami.
More recently, Taqueria Azteca in New York rolled out phở birria, Phở Vy in Oakland, California, unveiled bò kho quesabirria tacos, and Baysian in nearby San Leandro whipped up Filipino queso-adobo. Back in LA, Holy Basil offers Thai-style prawn aguachile, while New York-born Baar Baar serves birria-influenced tacos with Kashmiri duck and tostadas with tuna bhel.
Hernandez is especially excited about chef Sincere Justice’s Tacos Sincero pop-up, born in Oakland in 2022. The chef draws on his experience growing up in LA’s San Gabriel Valley (which has large Mexican and Asian American populations) to create eclectic dishes like a konbini-style egg salad tostada, calamansi tinga, and a saag burrito. “[Justice is] a real student of ‘I want to try different shit and present it in these formats,’ using tortillas and tostadas,” Hernandez says. “He and a couple other folks are keeping that [multicultural cooking] alive.”
All of it is constantly evolving, even within individual restaurants. At Saucy Chick, the Michels are always creating new dishes, like birria de chivo that incorporates masala spices, halal carne asada marinated in amchur and coriander, and esquites amped up with fenugreek and turmeric.
Along the way, something surprising has happened during all this R and D. “[I’ve been] digging deep with my mom and my dad, [asking,] ‘How do we make this dal?’ or ‘How do we make aloo?’” Rhea says. “I’ve found myself getting even closer to my culture.”
“Kogi came at that right moment,” Choi told Mashed in 2020. In the midst of the Great Recession, the truck offered accessible, boundary-pushing cooking. “People couldn’t afford to go out all the time. People were struggling, lost their jobs, looking for what their next meal could be. And then this funny little beat-up truck came along, serving this delicious little taco.”
The team’s creativity and hustle helped them nail the tenor of the early social media era. During Twitter’s ascendance, the Kogi team tweeted their locations and specials in real time as the truck rolled around town, drawing mobs of fans wherever they went. “It felt like a scavenger hunt when we needed some sort of positive direction,” Choi told Mashed.
Online appeal has remained an important piece of Mexican Asian fusion, clear in dishes like birria ramen (or “birriamen”). Generally said to have been invented by chef Antonio de Livier at the Mexico City restaurant Animo, birriamen builds on the internet popularity of the Tijuana-style stewed beef dish. It might be made with instant noodles or higher-grade stuff, ramen broth or consomé, stuffed into tacos or piled onto vampiros — but in almost every case, it’s big and bold and attention-grabbing, making it ideal for social media feeds.
But in other ways, Mexican Asian fusion no longer resembles Kogi’s scrappy street food operation, especially when it starts climbing into fine dining territory. At Michelin-starred Los Félix in Miami, the tétela is filled with Japanese sweet potato, the esquites get a hit of basil furikake, there’s miso-grilled corn with fish, and corn dumplings come with scallions and trout roe. Anajak Thai Cuisine’s Thai Taco Tuesday, a pandemic-born lark, grew into a signature experience; dishes like a carnitas taco and a sashimi-style yellowtail tostada with nam jim-salsa negra marisquera topped with papaya salad powered the restaurant to national acclaim.
Today, fusion dishes show up at restaurants that are nominally neither Mexican nor Asian. Birria dumplings appear on the ever-changing menu at San Francisco icon State Bird Provisions, while Chicago restaurant Mfk serves suzuki crudo on a tostada with both guacamole and sambal.
This cuisine is everywhere now. It’s not uncommon to see culinary combinations at an airport, the Taco Bell Test Kitchen, or floating up beneath the gaze of social media’s Eye of Sauron. It has been in the mainstream for more than 20 years, practically forever in the modern food era, fully engrained into the way we eat.
Alongside other types of third-culture cooking, Mexican Asian cuisine has largely shed the stigma that fusion picked up in the ’90s. Chefs once chafed if their food was labeled fusion. Now, the pendulum has largely swung back. For Hernandez, it’s a generational thing; the old distaste has fallen by the wayside as new chefs and new diners have come into maturity. “Fusion” is just a convenient shorthand for what so many are doing: transforming culinary building blocks, wherever they come from, to create something new — and awesome — from the parts.
Hernandez brings it back to a conversation with Justice of Tacos Sincero. As much as the chef’s food reflects his upbringing, the specific labels just aren’t important anymore. “Whatever people want to call it, it doesn’t matter,” Hernandez says. “It just has to bang.”
