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
I imagine that was what was shown to pitch the show. Yeah, it wasn't just me. It was John, too. He did all the sound mixing for the grilled cheese at Skywalker Sound. So the same thing, the same machines or whatever they use for lightsabers was used for grilled cheese.
It was just all those little things that, you know, John. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's just such a genius. And he's just thinking about every little nuance and every little thing. And it was just all the points of the universe coming together into that one grilled cheese.
Have you ever witnessed how fast John can synthesize something? Have you witnessed it yourself?
Same thing with cooking.
20 years of my life and he got it within five minutes. And so he did come in with what you had described of, I don't know anything, teach me everything. Yeah. I'm completely a sponge. But he would be proficient at it within minutes. Yeah.
I don't know what percentage, but my armchair guess at it, it would be 30, 40%, you know, of small businesses. Wow. And those are the ones we want most should be out there. Because it was a game of charades this whole time. I think that's what the pandemic exposed is like,
One, a lot of the reasons people are opening restaurants, including my family back in the day, is because there's no other outlet. No one's hiring you. There are no jobs available for non-English speaking people. But what we saw in the pandemic is that the restaurant model itself is so flawed because it doesn't allow anyone to get any step forward.
But the illusion of it actually hurts the industry more than it helps it because every restaurant looks like it's busy. So the Meeting in the alleyway for the sandwich or going to the noodle spot or the Thai joint down the street, you know, here in Hollywood. And you can't get in. People are waiting in the parking lot. It's so packed. Mindy's outside of Chitlada, you know, she can't get in.
Whatever, you know, it looks like something amazing is going on. But behind the curtain, maybe Chitlada can last a week without money. It's hard to fathom that because usually when something looks good on the outside, it means it's probably pretty good on the inside.
Yeah. So what happened is it's the energy, it's the action that keeps things afloat. And then once everything stopped, everything was exposed. And literally within the first week of the pandemic, you saw restaurants just say, I can't, I have no more money. And then it turned where people lost everything, but then started a cart or street food.
And that's how Avenue 26 started to really blossom and emerge.
There's multiple. Part of it is we don't pay enough as consumers for food or certain types of food. Again, going back to racial marginalization and stereotypes and things like that, we will go to an Italian restaurant on the west side and pay $42 for pasta because of all of the folklore and storytelling behind it, which helps a restaurant thrive.
But we won't pay more than $6 or $7 for pho or for chow mein. We're not paying enough. There are no loans, really, for a lot of people. So a lot of this money is self-generated money. It's check-to-check money that they're using to keep their business afloat.
Highest fail rate. The dangerous loan. Absolutely. And then just the mathematical equation of opening a restaurant makes no fucking sense to the capitalist system that we want to thrive upon. For example, if we were to sell just product like this model right here, we have what's called margins, right? Which is very simple math.
You buy this product, you create a certain quantity, you leverage your purveyors to give you a certain price, you maximize efficiencies and you make 30, 40% profit. Restaurant business has 5% profit if you're doing well. Wow. Even if you're doing well. The big boys are different because they're able, the larger you become, the more you're able to leverage your pricing with your purveyors. Right.
And you're able to compromise decisions based on qualities. And a lot of times they have investors that give them runway to make it up. But if you're a small business, okay, so the basic numbers are about 30% food cost. It's about 20 to 30% labor cost. So that's 70% right there. And then you have fixed costs, rent.
I know this is not the most exciting podcast information, but you have costs, utilities, paper goods, toilet paper, plumbing, all that stuff. A squirrel system, internet. POS system, point of sale system, taxes, all that. And that's another 20, 25%. That's 95% right there, just off the top of my head. That leaves you with 5% profit.
It's all those things. It's all those things. And on top of this, because the profits were so little, the industry itself was living off of exploitation. We don't have any safety nets. We don't have insurance. We don't have healthcare. We don't have sick pay. We don't have PTO. We don't have vacation time. None of that stuff. So there are a lot of exchanges that need to be made.
I don't know if they're going to be made because now that things are getting back open and stuff, everyone's kind of rushing back to the same things. This was an opportunity for us maybe to take a step back, put value into food again, raise some prices a little bit, maybe put a surcharge on certain things, maybe a certain form of like,
Kind of like a tax in a way, but like a good tax, you know, where it's shared amongst people. And I think it's also a philosophy and a mindset of like, we shouldn't want people to live less than. And I think that's the most important thing to think about, whether it's farming or restaurant business or any service business.
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