Kogi Loses a Wheel: Mike Prasad Tweets Out

Anne Fishbein

Perhaps it's a premature observation, with the Willoughby Road food truck entering the mobile dining parade yesterday and the dozens of coaches still standing, but it seems that some food trucks might be heading in reverse. For some, the trucks have served as training wheels for food ideas that will eventually become restaurants. For others, a truck is just a pop-up (pull-up?) with no intent of transitioning to a permanent home.

Now Kogi has leased a space on Overland, with plans to open a restaurant that won't have to tweet traffic apologies, and word on the street is that Mike Prasad, the man behind the Kogi brand, is parting with the "familia." Prasad popularized the tweet as a medium for food trucks to communicate with their customers, enabling diners to track their favorite mobile food sources as they make their way around the city.

Will the food truck fad turn out to be a long-winded road trip that groupies remember more fondly than the folks in the front seat? If the final destination for even a handful of these trucks is a physical restaurant with tables and a front door, than perhaps it was a good launch pad for local entrepreneurs, and a chance for people like Prasad to work with a new medium: the fashion of transitional dining. Either way, according to lalawag and LAist, it sounds like the parting of Prasad and Alice Shin wasn't pretty. There is no announcement on the website, but yesterday Prasad tweeted that he was "no longer working with Kogi," while Shin gave Kogi a pat on the back. What will the king of food trucks do without the mastermind behind their social networking and media? Only the tacos will tell.