My former colleague, Sloane Kelley, wrote a post on BFG Blog about two small restaurants in California that use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, blogs et al to build their businesses.
One of those restaurants is Kogi Korean BBQ, a mobile operation that fuses “the taste of Korean BBQ with the portability of tacos and burritos.” Since they operate from a mobile kitchen, customers check Twitter for their present location and for daily specials.
According to NPR, Kogi draws a crowd in car-centric L.A. There’s often a long line and this leads people to hang out out on the sidewalk eating, socializing and listening to music.
It took the virtual world of Twitter to bring about all this face-to-face interaction. And that’s exactly the point, according to Kogi’s head chef, Roy Choi.
“You have all these neighborhoods now where people come out when they usually just got in their car and went to a mini-mall,” Choi says. “Now they’re coming out to their streets, talking to their neighbors.”
Choi has spent most of his career in four-star restaurants and he finished in the top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America. Kogi is no ordinary fusion taco truck. It’s a WOM machine, and would be without social media. Yet, by wisely implementing a content strategy for the social space, Kogi is one of the “it” places to eat in L.A. right now.
