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
The entry point is also the ending point, you know, and that's the problem with the system. There's no way to progress within it. Right. You have to change stations, right?
Yeah, it's the right idea. A lot of big restauranteurs like that, the problem is it doesn't trickle down to the mom and pop. So I think that...
We need those leaders like Danny Meyer or Thomas Keller or whoever the case may be to create the systems and then use their power to demand that these systems trickle down to everyone and become a model for the whole industry itself because they're the leaders of our industry.
A lot of employees are holding out for that right now, hoping that the industry itself will change. I'm just fascinated by what's potentially on the table for everyone right now. What I want to just state also is that it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be affordable food because there should, right? But the argument right now that we're facing because of the pandemic is
is that the reason why it's so flawed is the only answer is not just that we as a consumer need to pay more for food. The reason why we need to either pay more or look at the whole system is because it's not that everyone is not making enough. It's just that all of the costs around them what you're making in a restaurant doesn't allow you to live within a city. Right, where the restaurant is.
Yeah, everything is just too high right now. Yeah. And so the only thing that is being forced to continue to be low or cheap is food, whereas everything else is being raised. Yeah, inflation's hit everywhere. Inflation hits everywhere. You can't expect the restaurant industry to just stay stagnant while everything else continues to multiply. Yeah.
And all we're arguing in the restaurant industry is that just let the restaurant industry multiply with everything else. So if you don't want your noodles or your burger to be $30 or $20 or whatever, and a third of that goes to the staff to help them, then let's lower some of the other things around it.
Can't afford it, yeah.
Well, things are so unbalanced now that I'm like the least political person in the world, but I think that we need some form of like democratic socialism. We still need to be a capitalist country. There still needs to be the opportunity to make it big at any moment in life. Just tripping over a rock, you could become a star or whatever, you know, we need that.
But things are just so way out of whack right now that we need something in the middle to be able to sustain at least just a basic form of life. People can't even get to sea level right now. And that's the
Yes.
That's exactly it. That's that democratic socialist, whatever you want to call it.
We won't. They could do whatever they want to do to trick the IRS and save money. Take that money and then create a fund that will balance things out just a little bit because right now it's just too imbalanced.
I think we're heading towards that. I think the reason why it hasn't existed, because the restaurant industry has been so fractured. And your competitors. Your competitors, there's ego. It's almost a sport.
There's a lot of ego involved. You want to be the best. You don't want to share your secrets. But then there's also this other factor of fast food and conglomerates and chains. Well, that's who you're competing against. They've done it. They've gotten together to create a baseline of pricing. So that's existing.
And then you have the individual restaurants that are all fighting for whatever crumbs are left and not sharing information with each other. But now since the pandemic happened, I think there's a move towards that. The last thing I think that needs to change is the tipping system.
What I think is unfair about the tipping system is that we live in a restaurant system where certain people within the restaurant can make $1,000 a night, you know, servers, work four hours. And then most of the people working in the restaurant, the other 80, 90% are only making minimum wage.
Because this is a bootleg of a European system that was brought into here that lives off of this kind of fantasy that we're all living in Downton Abbey or Bridgerton, you know, like... Things have to be presented in a certain way. There has to be a language that's used. There has to be a face that is synonymous with the illusion of what service is.
But I hope that we can move to an era where it doesn't matter how you look or how you speak or whatever the case may be, that everyone makes the same. If that could happen, that could help a lot. Because these restaurants where servers sometimes are coming in and again, just literally walking in at 4.45pm
right they start at five they leave at nine when the last table is served and they're walking out with a thousand dollars if that money was distributed evenly across to everyone i think there could be a lot more balance just on a micro level with each restaurant yeah there's i think there's been lawsuits about that when when people have tried to do that yeah because again it's a draconian system that exists that if you mess with it there's grounds for people to bring lawsuits against you because you're taking money out of people's pockets and this and that
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