The chef credited with starting the food truck frenzy now has his sights on a new kind of culinary empire. Roy Choi says it all began at the Redondo Beach pier.
Whack! The poised swing of a wooden mallet cracks open the exoskeleton of a crab that was alive only minutes ago, revealing its steaming, white insides. A little Korean-American boy with a bowl-shaped haircut squirms on a cold, concrete bench to get a better look at the spread, his mouth open like a baby bird anxious to be fed. Plates piled precariously with lettuce leaves and green kochu chili peppers clutter the table. The piquant, tangy smells of kimchi and doenjang, a thick, mahogany-colored fermented soybean paste, pervade the air. Lunch is served.
The year is 1977. Seven-year-old Roy Choi is eating with his family at Quality Seafood, an open air fishmonger on the Redondo Beach Pier. Choi gets up from the table, still chewing the ssam — a bite-size bundle of crab and doenjang wrapped in a lettuce leaf — his mom made for him. A stack of quarters in his pocket, he runs over to the Redondo Fun Factory, his eyes scanning the maze of arcade games. His bum is still sore from yesterday’s smack for speaking Korean in front of his parents, who want to Americanize him by having him only speak English. School is equally confusing. His family’s expectations are high, but the boy possesses an innate stubbornness, an almost involuntary urge to do the exact opposite of what he is told. Trouble seems to follow him, as does punishment.
Today, that world of stress is far from his mind. He eats with his family and wanders the pier in solitude, which he prefers. On days like this, the world is his oyster — or, in this case, his pile of fresh crab.
“Very simple,” Choi says. “Just crab, newspaper, mallet, butter, lemon — and the Koreans would bring kimchi.”
Three decades later, on the cusp of establishing a food empire the likes of which the world has never seen, Choi paid a rare visit back to his childhood haunt. He took a walk around the Redondo pier, then settled into a table at Quality Seafood.
“Some people have stuffed animals; I had concrete tables,” he said, gesturing toward the dozen or so Brutalist concrete benches that fleck the patio of Quality Seafood. “This was a teddy bear that I always imagined and used in my mind to comfort me.”
Choi has exerted an influence nearly unprecedented in recent American food history, largely due to this simple quality: he has stripped away the pretension that so often comes with taking food seriously and replaced with it with comfort. It is a lesson he learned on the Redondo pier.
“I know every single corner of this pier,” said Choi, whose rise to culinary stardom started in 2008 with Kogi, the Korean taco truck that arguably birthed the modern food truck craze and the new foodie movement that followed. “I spent almost every weekend on this pier for six or seven years. I know every game in that arcade, every ride, every store, every shop on the other side of the pier.”
In the six years since Kogi, Choi has built an impressive arsenal of six restaurants — most recently Commissary, set in a greenhouse on the pool deck of The Line Hotel in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. He has become a nationally known culinary figure — the movie “Chef” is loosely based on his meteoric rise — and has been lauded as a revolutionary in the future of American food.
“Roy Choi sits at the crossroads of just about every important issue involving food in the twenty-first century,” said Anthony Bourdain in review of Choi’s 2013 book L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food. “As he goes, many will follow.”
But if Choi is revolutionary, the revolution has just begun. Last year he gave a talk at the MAD Symposium in Copenhagen titled “Gateway to Feed Hunger: The Promise of Street Food.” It was less a speech and more a call-to-arms, imploring his fellow chefs to “not just cook for rich people.” Last month he announced his intention to open a new fast food chain called Loco’l, which will make chef-driven food affordable to mainstream America.
“What I would love to do in the big picture is change the paradigm of how people eat, how younger generations, and people that aren’t within our foodie world view food,” Choi told Star Chefs after he was given the organization’s Community Award. “Like skaters or the kids that I grew up with that don’t even know what vegetables grow in what season, that live off fast food for 70 to 80 percent of their lives. But then they eat Kogi and it speaks to them on that same level that their skateboard speaks to them, because it’s got that vibe and that credibility.”
Choi, 44, is true to his roots. He and his family were part of a wave of Korean immigrants in the early ’70s who made it stateside in search of what proved to be a very elusive American Dream. They were working-class immigrants, and nothing came easily. The family opened a liquor store, sold jewelry door-to-door, and eventually established a successful jewellery business. On weekends when they could, they drove out to the Redondo Beach Pier, finding solace and respite from the workweek by gathering around Quality Seafood’s concrete picnic tables to share fresh crab with friends and family.
“Everything was geared toward that,” Choi recalled. “‘Can we make it to Redondo this weekend?'”
“That’s why this place was so important…for me personally, and my family,” Choi added. “They worked a lot as well; I was a latchkey kid and I didn’t get to see them that much during the day. So on the weekends, it was a very special thing for them to come and bring me here, because everything stopped, and it was just us. “
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
The wave of Korean immigrants that arrived in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, Choi recalled, were subject to “laughingstock” racism — a subversive discrimination that was facilitated by their typically brash demeanor and poor mastery of English. Coupled with Confucianist tendencies and the “submissive nature of that generative of Asians,” as Choi noted, Koreans were often relegated to inner city, working-class merchant jobs such as owning gas stations or liquor stores.
“The new life, the dream, wasn’t as picturesque as was imagined,” Choi said. “There wasn’t really a way to express yourself as an Asian in this country…but then a place like [the Redondo Beach pier] was a chance to take your shoes off, break off crab and feed it to your kids, talk about the old days, and just be yourself.”
Pete Dragich, Jr., whose family has overseen operations at Quality Seafood for three generations, recounted how Hawaiians were the first to frequent the family’s pier market, even bringing some back to the islands until it was outlawed, with Japanese and Korean immigrants coming later, in the ’80s. Business is still doing well, with Latinos and Chinese families making up the bulk of current patrons.
“We’re getting a lot of people from out of the area,” Dragich said. “They want to try everything. We offer an open air experience, and sitting out there is kind of tribal. You sit out there you eat with your hands and have a good time.”
For Choi and his family, eating crab at the pier was more than a meal. It was an unspoken reminder that even though times were hard, they were doing alright. They could still come together as family and could afford to eat crab. It was comfort food, a salve for their Korean pride.
“Koreans are a trippy group of people because they always desire more than what they have,” Choi said. “They always desire to be and to live more luxuriously than they actually do….Even if they are not making that much money, their kids have to go to Ivy League schools, have to drive [Mercedes-Benz] S-Classes; they have to wear Hermes and Chanel. They have to have a lot of these materialistic things. And I think eating crab is one of those things as well. Being able to have an abundance of crab, which is really expensive, to be able to afford it, it says something about where you are going in life in this new country. Another part of it is just reminiscing about the old days. A big part of the culture is getting together, sharing, eating with your hands, going on picnics, and Koreans love seafood. But most of all, for the early immigrants, it was a time for us to get together on a weekend and commiserate. Life was a bitch, straight up.”
Choi had a complicated relationship with his parents. Immigration brought its highs and lows, and Choi as a child was often left to his own devices. When his parents came home, he rode their emotional roller coasters, second-hand. To their chagrin, he never excelled in school, though he relished Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
During his teenage years, Choi began openly rebelling, running away from home several times, dabbling in drug use and hanging out with borderline criminals. His parents reacted strongly, sending him to military school, which, to Choi’s surprise, united him with a whole cadre of like-minded souls.
He subsequently studied philosophy at Cal State Fullerton. Then, in an attempt to accede to his parents wishes, attended Western State University Law School. The structure was claustrophobic for him, and he dropped out after a semester, ending up back in LA’s Koreatown, couchsurfing and drinking heavily. It was at this time, watching TV on a friend’s couch, he saw Chef Emeril Lagasse’s “Essence of Emeril” show and was spellbound. All his memories involving food and its comforting role in his life crystallized into a new aspiration. He enrolled in culinary school.
“Emeril saved my life,” Choi later told The Wall Street Journal.
He attended the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., where he regularly teetered on the cusp of expulsion — veering wildly from recipes, questioning everything — but where he also showed a natural gift for combining ingredients unusually. During his post-graduate stint at Le Bernardin in New York, his contrarian nature resulted in him being kicked out of the kitchen on six occasions.
Choi then worked nearly a decade in corporate kitchens, including a long stint with Hilton Hotels, where he would meet Mark Manguera, a hotel food and beverage director. Together they had the idea for a “Korean taco” and launched a single Kogi food truck in 2008. Kogi’s claim to fame was the short rib taco, a perfect medley of Mexican and Korean flavors with galbi taking center stage in lieu of carne asada.
Kogi was an immediate hit. Within months they had five trucks and were garnering national attention. People flocked to the truck, and Choi realized he’d found his calling. It wasn’t just about Kogi’s economic success, but the way the food resonated with people who often had never had a real chef cook for them. It represented a full circle in more than one way — his rebelliousness had found a purpose and Kogi found a particularly enthusiastic reception in Redondo Beach and Torrance.
“All of the South Bay is a seminal cornerstone of Kogi,” Choi said. “Anyone will know. Torrance was one of our first neighborhoods. Seeing all the people and their faces and the hunger, their energy and the love — that started to inform me more about what Kogi is doing, and then it became a deeper thing.”
He rebelled from the established structures of a culinary career, and each dish he subsequently created pulled off this same trick: breaking from tradition while uniting disparate elements.
He grapples with structure to this day, even with media appearances. He can’t give TED talks because the module structure is too rigid for him and he recently had trouble meeting the format at a storytelling event for public radio.
“When someone tries to tell me what to do, I completely go blank and I can no longer retain any of the information,” Choi said. “I become the Incredible Hulk and I can’t breathe anymore. I need to run away from that situation and I will burn down everything around me to get away from it….If i start to read things too long in the way you are supposed to read it, by the fourth or fifth sentence everything becomes blurry and everything becomes code.”
Choi believes he has a learning disorder, but he has turned what is often perceived as a character flaw in society’s terms into one of his biggest strengths.
“My stubbornness and my aggressiveness is what allows me to create things that people don’t believe can exist in many ways,” Choi said. “I still operate that way, like as a kid, where if I see something, I do anything I can to try to bring it to life.”
“It’s kind of like someone set the table, like life set the table, and I looked at the table and I was like, ‘This does not look delicious at all.’” Choi said. “So I went out and made my own meal. And I look around and I see everyone eating the same thing, metaphorically, and doing the same thing. It never fit for me.”
THE REDONDO BEACH POT
As a chef, Choi’s greatest desire is to distill an emotion or experience into his food. He compares his creative process in the kitchen to songwriting — he takes a sentiment and “stretches it like taffy.”
POT, which opened in March, is Choi’s ode to Koreatown, the chaotic, hodgepodge neighborhood in central Los Angeles where sightings of three-inch cockroaches in aging Old Hollywood apartment buildings are as common as the myriad late-night sool jeebs, Korean dive bars that serve street food alongside frosty pitchers of Hite lager and soju.
Before POT, there was A-Frame, Choi’s first sit-down restaurant on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, which opened in 2011. The restaurant, whose name comes from its A-shape, was a pioneer in the communal dining experience with its “modern picnic” concept. Its concrete tables seat no fewer than four, so dining couples will inevitably be brushing elbows with strangers. This was all planned by Choi, who wanted to recreate as much as possible his childhood experiences at the Redondo Beach pier.
One of the entrees at POT is called Redondo Beach. It’s a steaming hot pot consisting of blue crab, tofu, soybean sprouts, anchovy shrimp broth, kimchi paste, cured pollack roe, and flat chives.
“It’s spicy, but in an effervescent way with lots of umami,” said Jude Parra-Sickels, the chef de cuisine at POT, who has worked with Choi for six years. “You gotta eat the crab with your hands. Slurp the crab, slurp some broth with rice. Just get down.”
Choi said the Redondo Beach pot is loosely modelled on kkotgetang, a spicy crab stew made with kochujang chili paste and vegetables.
“When done right, there’s a certain transcendence to it. There’s a delicate nature when you experience a true bouillabaisse or risotto that takes you to another place. That’s the same thing for kkotgetang…it’s something you just can’t stop eating. You’re sucking the crabs ‘til there’s nothing left. It’s very messy and extremely fun and convivial.”
For Choi, the Redondo Beach pot is more than just its combined ingredients. The dish channels his early life, his struggles with finding identity as a Korean immigrant in an American society, and his journey to self-realization.
“With the Redondo Beach [pot], I’m trying to take a time warp back to when I was a kid and before things were complicated. That feeling that a kid must have when you’re being thrown in the air, that split second when you’re floating, and your tongue’s wagging, where you think everything is okay. That’s what these benches and tables mean to me. There was a time when these represented a safe zone for me.”
The dish is his homage to the Redondo Beach pier, to Quality Seafood, to the Korean restaurants that would later arrive, and to the sense of comfort, possibility, and belonging that Choi found there.
“It’s my personal poem to here,” Choi said.
FINDING HIS IDENTITY
Anomalies in his early life now make sense to Roy Choi. His days of solitude as a wanderer, struggles with drugs and addiction, and understanding of varied cultures and social strata enable him to now be an alimentary bridge-builder, connecting people through food.
Choi celebrates the burgeoning vegetarian, natural food world. He calls it a “beautiful, intricate, very advanced, high-minded, deep-souled” thing. But he understands that it can also be exclusionary and inaccessible to people unfamiliar with its principles and benefits. His hope for his newest restaurant Commissary is to make vegetables and plants more approachable.
“I wanted to create a vegetable restaurant where things didn’t have such a high degree of entry status, where things weren’t precious,” Choi said. “Where homies and skaters and young high school kids, families, carnivores, unhealthy people, healthy people, beautiful people, ugly people, fat people, skinny people — anyone can come and just eat….The core and the infrastructure of what they’re eating would be based around plants and vegetables but they didn’t feel like they were in an opera.”
It’s all connected, from Kogi to Commissary to Loco’l to the Redondo Beach pier’s enduring influence.
“My role is to try to be some sort of translator,” he said. “To create venues where people can come together and where I can shift social experiences.”
When we eat, an energy transfer is occurring. As the adage goes, you are what you eat. But for Roy Choi, it goes beyond physical nourishment. It is food for the soul and spirit.
“I can transfer that energy that I felt to other people and they can take that little bit of joy,” said Choi. “Like a mutation, it can grow into something else for them.”
