Roy Choi

222, 223, 224, 225, 222, 223, 224, 225.

My name is Roy Choi, and I cook.

I cook for the streets.

I cook inside of buildings, but I try to feed the people of Los Angeles and Orange County.

It's one of those things where there was never really a beginning or end or a middle.

It was just always there, you know, so it's kind of like...

you know, if you're born into a skateboarding family or you're born into a rock family, you know, like, or you're born, your parents were artists.

It was one of those things.

My parents, if you can imagine if my parents were artists, but instead of being artists, they were cooks and they were food people.

And what I mean by food people is we ran restaurants, we ran food stores, but also in our off time, all we did was food.

So 18, 19, 20 hours a day during work time, it was all food.

Running the restaurant, opening the restaurant, cleaning the restaurant, you know, working with purveyors, paying bills, all that.

And then the days off, you would imagine we would

kind of shut that off, but instead we would go... Yeah, stop the food.

Yeah, we would go search for food.

Like we would go to Riverside or Santa Barbara.

Yeah, Newport Beach, wait by the piers at 5, 6 a.m.

for the fishermen to come in.

You know, go out to the farms in Brawley and El Centro and, you know, and just search for food.

It was just something that always happened.