Roy Choi’s Career Highlights and Impact on Street Food Culture

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Los Angeles, Roy Choi spent his adolescence working at Silver Garden, his parents’ family-oriented Korean restaurant in nearby Anaheim. In his free time, Roy feasted on his neighborhood’s eclectic cuisine—from Korean to Mexican to fast food—and got into plenty of trouble: A turbulent young adulthood ensued.

In 1996, Roy decamped for New York’s Culinary Institute of America. He spent the next decade cooking at some of America’s finest hotels and restaurants. Eventually, he returned to his roots and started his food truck Kogi in 2008, forever changing American cuisine.

In the years since launching his now-famous food truck, Roy Choi has opened nearly a dozen acclaimed restaurants, co-authored a bestselling memoir and cookbook, and appeared twice on the “100 Most Influential People” list assembled by TIME magazine. Here are some of Roy’s career highlights:

1. 1. Kogi: After the global economy crashed in 2008, Roy was ready to take a chance on something new. With an assist from the social media app Twitter, which launched two years prior, and a dented secondhand food truck, Roy and his business partners rolled out a concept that would alter the trajectory of American food culture: Korean barbecue in a taco, on wheels.
2. 2. Best New Chef: In 2010, Food and Wine magazine named Roy one of the year’s best new chefs. Roy was the first food truck proprietor to receive this distinction.
3. 3. Chego!: In 2010, Roy opened Chego!, his first brick-and-mortar restaurant. The bumping rice-bowl spot served buttered kimchi fried rice and cheese fries with chilies and garlic. A few years later, the restaurant moved east to Chinatown, portending the revitalization of the historic Far East Plaza, which has since become a well-known food hub.
4. 4. LA Son: In 2013, Roy published LA Son, a memoir and cookbook he co-authored with Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan. The New York Times bestseller, which chronicles Roy’s life and culinary journey, features eighty-five recipes.
5. 5. Chef: Chef is a 2014 comedy loosely based on Roy’s life. Roy served as the film’s head culinary consultant and taught Jon Favreau—its writer, director, and star—how to cook on camera.
6. 6. POT: In 2014, Roy opened a full suite of food concepts inside the Line Hotel in Koreatown. Those concepts included a flagship restaurant called POT, which served inspired takes on Korean stews and barbecue; a cocktail bar; a coffee shop and bakery; and a rooftop-garden diner with a plant-focused menu.
7. 7. Locol: In 2016, Roy and California chef Daniel Patterson launched Locol, a healthy fast-food concept designed to serve low-income neighborhoods. The flagship locations closed two years later, but the Locol vision lives on within a new venture called Chewbox—a food-delivery app designed to benefit underserved communities.
8. 8. Best Friend: Roy opened this restaurant—a self-described “remixed and remastered” love letter to LA and its many immigrant cuisines—at the Nevada hotel-casino Park MGM Las Vegas in 2018. The freewheeling menu includes eggplant schnitzel, slippery shrimp, and uni dynamite rice.
9. 9. Broken Bread: Roy launched his PBS show Broken Bread, which explores Los Angeles through a food justice lens, in 2019.
10. 10. The Chef Show: In 2019, Roy starred alongside American filmmaker Jon Favreau on The Chef Show, a hit docu-series on the streaming platform Netflix.

Throughout his career, Roy has championed the idea that cooking is for everyone; that delicious food doesn’t need to mean fancy food; and that intuition is more important than precision. “I grew up with food everywhere: dumplings on stainless steel countertops, bubbling jars of fermenting vegetables, kimchi stains on everything,” he says. “When I went on to culinary school, those things were not necessarily frowned upon, but people didn’t get it—didn’t get that it was a part of cooking… It took me a long time to understand how to merge the two worlds together.”

The result was Roy’s first food truck, Kogi. Bold, spicy, and unrelentingly flavorful, Kogi’s offerings combined the soulful tastes Roy grew up on—carne asada burritos, spicy pork belly, mushroom dumplings, fast-food burgers, grilled corn—with the insight and ingenuity of his classical culinary background. In addition to its thoughtful merging of flavors, Kogi achieved success due to Roy’s ability to harness the power of social media to create buzz.

These days, gourmet food trucks and multi-ethnic “fusion” restaurants are international mainstays, and Roy’s streetwise philosophy and dynamic approach to food have inspired countless chefs and restaurants. Still, Roy always brings it back to his community, with projects like his food justice–centered TV show, Broken Bread, and ChewBox, a food delivery app supporting underserved neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Part memoir, part cookbook, LA Son: My Life, My City, My Food (2013) tells the story of Roy’s life through the food and culture of Los Angeles. Roy co-authored the book, which includes eighty-five recipes, with Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan.

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