Roy Choi
speaker
872 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Mar
Roy Choi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, first time I went was in high school. My parents took me there when I was 16. That was the first time I ever went back. Did you speak Korean? No, I have never really spoke that good Korean. I understand it because, you know, parents speak to me in it, but I don't speak that well. I always say like I'm like a L.A. Chicano, but in Korean.
My Mexican homies, like they don't speak Spanish, you know, but they understand everything. Their grandma or mom's yelling at them.
So when you went to Korea, though, you taught English there? Yeah, that was later on. That was in college. I don't know if they're still doing it now, but there was a whole era for us as like second generation Koreans where we just like were fuck ups here. And then we're like fucking gods over there. Like we're like intellectual savants over there because we speak English. Okay, okay.
But it was great because you go there and you'd make like a ton of money and you'd have a class that was just completely into you and you could say whatever you want. I think the whole time I taught English, I don't even think I really taught anything. I just talked. And they just kind of took the class to like hear the words and hear the lingo and the rhythm.
This sounds like a dream job for me because I just love to talk. It was the podcast before podcast.
No, I think once I got to Korea, what amazed me is just how fluid and affordable food is, but it's still the same food. Here in the States, the difference between nutritional food, delicious food, and processed food, it's all an economic barrier, right? And so anything that is below a certain price is usually fast food in most cases. But in Korea, it's not that way at all.
When I first started going there, that just really opened my eyes to like, you know, food being so cheap yet so delicious. It's like more democratized. And just filled with nutrients, chili paste, ginger, garlic, green onions, different herbs. And so that opened my mind because it made food a part of culture. I was young. I was in my early 20s.
And here, when you're in your early 20s, you go out of the club or whatever, all you're doing is just debauchery or going through the drive-thru and yelling into this fucking intercom and eating fries and Big Macs and this and that.
But over there, it opened my mind to like food is a part of it all. Right. So it's not just complete destruction of your body and soul and everything and then lazy boy and conk out and then wake up. Wake up hating yourself and have to get drunk again to deal with it. It's like you can sometimes have the best meal of your life. And feel good afterwards.
And feel good afterwards and spend like five bucks and stay there till like 4.30 in the morning.
It's getting better now, obviously, with the street food that's evolved, but also just food culture has evolved in the last 20 years here.
He started it all. He started this wave, you know, and Kogi came on the heels of that. But really, it was Momofuku that kind of broke the mold and really allowed a pathway for this millennial generation to really have something to connect that experience to.
Yep. And it became a part of culture and he became culture and the restaurant became culture. And that just led to so many things to where now food is probably more in demand than sneakers. It's harder to get sometimes than sneakers. We've definitely come a long way. Now that we're in it, it's hard to imagine a world where it wasn't like this. Even 20 years ago.
People weren't going from city to city and having lists of like, OK, where's the best place to eat?
I agree with you on that, but also the reality was that way too. You had to spend that much. Because food was separated. So anything that was chef-driven or ingredient-driven or market-driven or even considered to be a part of whatever is the hottest thing in that city at that moment, was all driven by price. Price and experience and your parents or an older generation going.
And that's why I say it was Dave who broke that mold. By opening Momofuku, what he did was it broke the levy to where the saltwater and the freshwater merged together, you know, and created a whole new thing. It became an estuary. It became an estuary.
The feelings you had were real because that's exactly how they looked at you.
It's real. I wrote about it in the book too. Like we've always been a family of food, right? So like we would go to restaurants and as I got older, I would like research these restaurants and try to take my family. So when we had family visiting, I would go to the hottest restaurants in town. And you know, you get treated as if you don't belong there. And you know, this waiters fucking...
He doesn't know anything either.
Yeah, he's not the upper class or he wouldn't be working there.
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