Ursu Korean BBQ Tacos - Corner of Richards Street and West Georgia Street

I don’t spend much time downtown during the day, but occasionally, I have to go in for a meeting. That was the case one day last week. After my meeting, which went over the lunch hour, I was famished, but rushed, and with very little cash on me. I figured it was a good opportunity to try out some of the new Vancouver street food. I happened to pass by the Ursu Korean BBQ taco truck en route to my meeting and had been thinking about it all meeting long, so I returned to sample their wares. Before saying anything more, I should be up front about my food history. I lived in Mexico for year, and ate lots of great street food, including tacos. I also have had the good fortune to eat lots of Korean food, having lived in places in the US with large Korean populations. (I've even eaten at a great Cuban-Korean joint.) So the deck was stacked against this truck. It sounded intriguing, but I was skeptical. The blending of techniques and ingredients could work, but it could also fail miserably. I was hoping for greatness, but not betting on it.

The have a small menu, appropriate for a street vendor. I ordered two bulgogi beef soft tacos with optional kimchi. They were 2.99 each, so two tacos for basically 6 dollars. The soft corn tortillas were fresh (important for soft tacos), and large enough that 2 tacos was a decent sized lunch for one relatively hungry woman. (I was biking around that day, so hungrier than usual.) They were topped with the bulgogi beef, lettuce, cheese, and a tiny bit of kimchi. The beef was tender, but the strong flavour of the corn tortillas overwhelmed the delicate Korean marinade, compounded by the cheese. Don’t get me wrong, I love cheese, but I thought the combination was a little off.  I like my tacos and my Korean food with some heat, hence asking for the kimchi. Unfortunately, I got only one small piece of kimchi on each taco, which was not enough for me. Too restricted in heat ‘coverage’ to balance the sweetness of their bulgogi marinade (a little too sweet for me in all honesty).

Final assessment is that I liked them, but didn’t love them. They were neither a huge hit nor a disastrous fail. If it were a choice between eating them again as served and McDonald’s, I’d eat the tacos, or even better, I’d try another food truck. However, I do think that some easy changes would make the tacos better, or at least, more to my liking. One, skip the cheese. Cheese may be integral to people’s idea of tacos here in Vancouver, but that’s not the case south of the borders. And it didn’t add anything to these tacos, in my opinion. Quite the opposite, it detracted from them. Two, ask for extra kimchi. The bulgogi is sweet, and needs the counterfoil of the spice. I’ll let you know if I get the chance to try these again, and how I like the modified tacos.

Two thumbs (I’m just doubling my one thumb; Chris didn’t try these with me.)

Quails' Gate 2008 Old Vines Foch

Someone gave us a bottle of Quails' Gate 2008 Old Vines Foch as a gift recently. It was very thoughtful, as they know we love wine, tend to drink red, and have become BC wine enthusiasts. We were a little trepidatious, nevertheless. But with no ‘drinking wines’ at home last week, we thought, hey, let’s give it a try. We did, however, have another bottle picked out as a back-up, just in case, and we just about opened it. Chris initially thought the Foch was off. I assured him that it wasn’t, it was just not a great wine. Thankfully, we were distracted by our 2 year old long enough for the Foch to open up a little. I say luckily not because the Foch was fantastic (it wasn’t) but because I would much rather have the Oregon Pinot with duck as originally planned and the Foch was good enough.  It is an interesting wine, with hints of complexity and fullness, hints that don’t deliver in my opinion. It is dark, but not lush. It is not fruity, nor is it big and inky. It doesn’t have a great deal of tannin or acidity. I am describing it in terms of what it isn’t, rather than what it is. That’s because that’s how we experienced it. Chris described it as being something like a cross between a Beaujolais and a Primitivo. I think it’s a great description, if you do not expect the best of either grape. It fell quite flat with food, but was quite pleasant to drink on its own. I will make what might seem like a strange recommendation though, open it the day before you want to drink it. We decanted it, but it was still very tight on the first night. It was much better on the second night. Even Chris actually liked it, rather than tolerated it, and had a second glass.

We tend to be wine with food people, so wine that is best without food is something I don’t think much about. But this wine fits that bill, and is local (as in from BC), and given it’s apparent heft, appropriate for the current season (fall), so on those points, I can recommend it. The 2009 is listed at $24.99, which is a perfectly reasonable price for this wine.O ne reason why we tend to stay away from BC reds is that they just don’t represent good value. I', happy to say that the Foch doesn’t fit this generalization.