Seattle food truck raises the bar with Korean-Mexican fusion

This town brakes for al pastor.

In the past five months, I’ve nearly gotten into two fender benders around Seattle as drivers slammed on their brakes to pull over for tacos. Maybe the city needs to put up warnings: “CAUTION, AL PASTOR TRAFFIC AHEAD.”

I would plop the first traffic alert at the elbow of Northeast 80th Street and Lake City Way Northeast, where every taco obsessive in the Seattle area has converged in the last six weeks, searching for the food truck Mexican Seoul. Parked in front of Project 9 Brewing Company, this fusion of Mexico City and the Korean Peninsula is causing taco mania in North Seattle, as well as parking congestion around this commercial drag south of Maple Leaf Reservoir Park.

The menu: kalbi-marinated meat. A kimchi-salsa bar. And condiments like chipotle-gochujang hot sauce. It looks like it could have been cribbed from the playbook of L.A. chef Roy Choi and the Korean taco frenzy that he unleashed around 2008.

But Mexican Seoul is chasing a more recent fad, one that has taken over the Sound lately: al pastor, a style of cooking often seen on the streets of Mexico City. It’s recognizable by el trompo, the beehive of pork that roasts on a vertical rotisserie spit. A taquero carves shards of pork from the stack and serves them in a warm tortilla.

Mexican Seoul specializes in a riff called al pas-Kor, with pork marinated in gochujang and enough garlic to ward off vampires, then turned on the flame-licked spit until the meat singes and turns lacy.

It’s essentially a bulgogi taco infused with the sweet-savory notes of soy sauce and rice vinegar. Depending how you play the kimchi-salsa bar, the al pas-Kor could be tweaked with sour-fermented twang or a three-alarm-fire spicy sauce.

The result is a clever reimagined street food with a kaleidoscope of textures and flavors — served at a food truck that has become one of the hottest restaurants in North Seattle.

A surprise culinary hit, the concept was conceived by Mukilteo chef Adrian Ramirez and Seattle brewery owner Barry Kinter.

Ramirez had been bouncing around town with his trompo cart in tow when he noticed that Project 9 Brewing had space for a taco truck but didn’t have its own kitchen. The two struck a deal in fall 2023 and an al pastor taco special was born.

But Kinter, who has a soft spot for Korean barbecue, soon figured that it was time to pivot, since Seattle has become oversaturated with al pastor taco slingers flooding street corners already in the past year.

“There’s a lot of similarities in flavors with Mexican and Korean food — both like bold flavors and spicy things, and tacos are a great fit for a brewery,” said Kinter, who met his wife in Seoul, where he taught English.

Kinter and his wife, Keunae Lee Kinter, cajoled Ramirez to tweak Korean family recipes, combining them with his Mexican cuisine. Mexican Seoul launched this January — and they hit the jackpot. The truck goes through two hives of pork on a busy day, with each spit consisting of about 70 stacked slabs of gochujang-tinged pork shoulders.

When no pork remains on the spit, people in line make do with chicken or beef tacos. The grilled ginger pollo can be stringy and dry, but that kalbi asada is more than a consolation prize.

The nubbins of chopped sirloin, well-browned and perfumed with smoke from the charbroil grill, hold their own with the al pas-Kor — whether wrapped in a tortilla or found in a bibim rice bowl that gets topped with a fried egg. But it’s best served as koji asada fries.

The chef covers the mound of crinkle fries in kimchi-pico de gallo and a lava of queso and crème that has been infused with Korean sour and spicy flavors. A riff on a SoCal taco truck staple, this cheffy take might be the best asada fries in Seattle.

But make no mistake: The queue — up to 45 minutes long on weekends — is for the pork tacos. Each gets a heap of bulgogi that’s been seared long enough for the surface to caramelize, served in a two-ply tortilla that’s been warmed in the rendered pork fat until slightly blistered. It’s more filling than the usual street taco, a good deal at four bucks.

Unlike a traditional al pastor taco, which typically receives just a few raw onions, cilantro and a squeeze of lime, this fusion version is aggressively seasoned and meant to be augmented with lots of foliage from the salsa bar.

You can make the taco fiery with the soy pickled jalapeños and with a douse of both chipotle gochujang and spicy poblano hot sauces. Or you can cut into the meat’s richness with a dollop of kimchi-pico de gallo, some pickled purple cabbage and a squirt of salsa verde.

It’s a perfectly solid taco. But better is the Vampiro version, a cheesy, crunchier take on its popular street-style taco. It features pork splayed on a sheen of melted Monterey Jack cheese that’s been caramelized onto a corn disc to create a Maillard reaction like one you’d get from a good Detroit-style pizza crust. The fried cheese mimics the intense, savory essence of miso, and with bulgogi and masa, it makes for one of the better Korean tacos I’ve had north of Los Angeles.

Just remember to leave enough room in front of your car to brake in time if you drive to this taco truck.