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
Yeah. You always sit down and say, I could take them. Everyone around you is a loser. That's a big part too. And everyone has their 15 seconds somewhere or another. And so what happens is you're swimming in this kind of lagoon of losers. And then all of a sudden you pop up and then you're the hero and you confirm the story.
Everyone flocks to you and you're in this room and it's the best fucking feeling in the world. I'm not going to not admit
it it's the best feeling all of a sudden all these dreams that we have in the real world get condensed and clarified into that moment for you so it becomes more than just the gambling it's like there's something poetic about it and so for four years i was on that roller coaster oh my god that's an eternity
yeah it probably went by like this for you if i like that and i was on my last couch just like this in the middle of the afternoon just like this and emerald came on and um i had an out-of-body experience this was 1995 so this was before the emerald live people don't talk about out-of-body experiences that much anymore i know in the 80s and 90s they used to talk about everyone was having a
I had one, and he came out the TV. Oh, wow. Yeah, he came and he kind of slapped me around. He's like, what the fuck, you know? Oh, wow. What are you doing? And I kind of woke up. I have that tendency, too, to where I can, like, drop things on a dime. It happened with crack, like we were talking about. Yeah, yeah. On the seventh day, God created. God created. Yeah. I quit crack.
And yeah, there's sometimes I'm just done with shit. This was like before the internet was popping. So like this is when you went to bookstores to research shit. So like I was at bookstores all day just researching, you know, I knew what it meant to cook food, but I really didn't know what it meant to be a chef. And I enrolled in night school here in L.A.
It was a culinary night schools on Robertson and Melrose, you know, right across from Ciccone's learning. And then the whole time I was selling at my lowest points. I'm a bit of a Mr. Magoo. I always end up in this huge pool of luck. The Kogi truck was no different.
At this point, I had spent the next year and a half basically working, selling mutual funds, which is basically a used car salesman selling mutuals. Packaged securities. Packaged securities. I had a briefcase. I had one suit. I had like three ties, one suit. I was going around and I was really good at it.
And I was really good. I had no idea what I was doing. Okay. But I was like at the racetrack, I would close my eyes and I would pick one and it would fucking hit. It's kind of like gambling 2.0. It's like gambling 2.0. And I made a bunch of money. I paid everyone back. I mended all my bridges as much as I could. I went off to culinary school. You kind of got even. I kind of got even.
I'm really big on like, I like to tidy shit up spiritually and also physically. Like the whole philosophy of when we started Kogi, I wanted to be like a graffiti artist where no one would even know we were there other than the fact that they could see what we just did. Because we would crush it here on the streets, like 2000 people just flash mobbing on the streets.
But I would always say like when we leave here, it has to be as if we were never here. And it's just a big thing for me to like tidy things up like that.
We have a few shows that were very loyal to us, just like Parenthood. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is another one. It's insane.
That's one of my favorite moments when I see folks that aren't expecting anything. When they first bite into a Kogi burrito or taco or quesadilla and their eyes just open and there's a holy shit.
I love it. I've seen so many of those moments over the last 10 years. That all happened because of that out of body experience from Emeril. If I wouldn't have been on that couch in that moment, obviously maybe something else would have, but I believe in these like kind of like intersections of life. Because of that, everything unfolded for me in the second part of life. How old were you in that?
I was 25 and then I went off to culinary school when I was 27.
The first time I made a grilled cheese with him was on set of Chef the Movie in 2013, and he had the clip rolling. So I was John's custom model, right? And so we were always by each other's side. I was in his ear. I was his corner man. And even before— That's a Rocky reference. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Even before shots, like I would be like just behind camera and it would be like, put your elbow up a little bit or make sure you bend down and look at the cheese from this and that. And so we would be doing that all the time. It would just be natural. But one time he just kept the camera rolling and then he put that in the credit scene.
God bless the amount of butter that was used. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the number one thing is most people don't put enough butter on anything. Right. Or salt. Or salt. And again, going back to the conditioning of us not enjoying flavor, the amount that we somehow got to the point of convincing ourselves was enough is like way, way below anything substantial.
Yeah, we were so deranged that we would eat all of that processed food. And then the things that are supposed to be delicious, we would make undelicious because we're compensating. Whereas really, the key to life is eat delicious food from the start. And then you can indulge because it's actually good for you all the way through.
So yeah, that grilled cheese, that was the anchor to the whole thing.
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