Umami Moto combines Asian cuisine with a light touch of American flavors

July 26 — Love brought Jae Stulock to the Land of Enchantment, but it was his love of New Mexico that ultimately made him decide to live there.

“The most common story is the search for love and a woman,” which brought him to Albuquerque, said Stulock, owner of the Umami Moto food truck. “The other half of the common story is that it only lasted 30 days. I decided to stay. So I bought a house and I moved my business here, and I love it here. I tell people that, you know, I’m not from New Mexico, but I got here as fast as I could.”

Stulock moved here from Cleveland. Before he left, he gained a few fans with his Asian-inspired dishes that he prepared at home.

“I used to own a construction company (the food truck) and in 2008 I completely lost my business,” he said. “It was terrible during the economic crisis. Back East, it was a lot worse than here, apparently. I decided I wasn’t going to go back to construction, I might as well go back to something else. And people had been telling me for years that I needed to sell my food, especially my pad Thai, which was amazing, so I decided to do just that and started Umami Moto.”

Stulock prefers Asian-style cooking and Eastern European cuisine.

“My grandmother was Hungarian, so I was really exposed to that kind of cuisine through my dad’s side of the family,” he says. “And then when I was in high school, a restaurant called Johnny Mango’s opened up, and I was in the neighborhood with some friends and we decided to stop by and check it out. And that’s where I first tasted Thai food. It was pad Thai, actually, and it tasted so different than anything I was used to and it blew me away. So I went looking for my own pad Thai recipe to kind of recreate that flavor that I had tasted, which was so unique, and that I had gotten at the restaurant.” And it took me about 10 years, but I finally perfected my own recipe, my version, and that’s when I opened Umami Moto with pad Thai, a pulled pork banh mi and a chicken rice bowl.”

Today, pad Thai can be labor-intensive to make, so it’s reserved for quieter days and pop-ups. But customers line up for the fish tacos, made with grilled swai fish in a corn tortilla with curry, cabbage, cilantro, mint, house-made pickles and a house-made lime aioli.

Another hit is the Korean burrito.

“It’s our flour tortilla, our mildly spicy cheese, our Chinese cabbage, our bulgogi beef, our homemade kimchi fried rice, our cilantro, our onion, our carrot, our daikon, our pickles, and we make it as spicy as you want,” Stulock said. “We make our own bulgogi seasoning, we make our own cheese, we make our own kimchi for the kimchi fried rice, we make our own carrot, daikon and pickles.”

Customers also come to the food truck for its pulled pork banh mi. This classic Vietnamese sandwich is made with mayonnaise, a special homemade sauce, carrots, daikon, pickles, cilantro and jalapeños. Its seared ahi tuna BLT is another popular request.

“It’s a quarter pound of ahi tuna, seared, sliced, on a toasted brioche bun with our homemade Thai basil, lettuce, tomatoes and bacon, and it’s a perfect sandwich,” Stulock said. “It sounds so simple. It’s beautiful because of the seared ahi tuna, but man, the flavors are really good.”

Stulock said he was particularly proud of his smashed burger.

“It’s prime Black Angus beef that we season and prepare ourselves,” he explains. “We also make the seasoning, the patties, the toasted brioche bun, (lettuce and tomato) and the cheese. It’s so good that I would say it’s one of the best burgers in the city, if not the best. It has a very unique flavor, the beef, it’s so good, it really stands out. And it’s a beautiful burger too. We make so many of them.”

Umami, or savor, is one of the five basic flavors. It is characteristic of broths and cooked meats. It is the theme and name of the food truck for a reason.

“Umami is flavor, it’s just quality and food,” Stulock said. “And a lot of people think the truck is Korean or Japanese because of the name, because umami is a Japanese word, but it’s very pan-Asian and that’s exactly what we’re looking for. And then, moto because we’re mobile.”

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *