Chef Roy Choi’s Kogi Vinaigrette Recipe

Roy Choi is a celebrated chef widely known throughout the culinary industry as the godfather of the gourmet food truck movement. The 2008 launch of Kogi—a Los Angeles, California, food truck that mixed Mexican and Korean food—blew up the boundaries between fancy restaurant cuisine and street food and put Roy on the map as one of the most original chefs in the United States. But Kogi’s wild success was only the start of Roy’s culinary revolution.

In the years since, he’s opened nearly a dozen acclaimed restaurants, including Kogi Taqueria in Los Angeles and Best Friend in Las Vegas, Nevada; coauthored LA Son, a bestselling memoir and cookbook; appeared on TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list; and starred alongside filmmaker Jon Favreau on The Chef Show, a hit docuseries on the streaming platform Netflix.

Korean vinaigrette is a salad dressing made with rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, gochujang, pepper flakes, and other spices. Chefs and home cooks may serve this Korean salad dressing with a standard leafy Romaine salad featuring shredded carrots or as a dipping sauce for bulgogi and various Korean BBQ dishes.

Kogi vinaigrette is a spicy, tangy spin on traditional vinaigrette salad dressing that Chef Roy Choi developed. The sauce features garlic, ginger, red pepper chili flakes, scallions (also known as green onions), and gochugaru, a popular condiment in Korean cuisine. You can incorporate sesame seeds into the dressing to add texture.

Slaws and Korean-style salads are the most prominent applications for the spicy Korean salad dressing. You can also drizzle this vinaigrette over vegetables, grains, or proteins as a finishing sauce or use it as a marinade for beef, pork, or chicken cuts.