Roy Choi Thinks of Himself As an Alleycat Who Always Finds His Way Home

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

On this episode

Growing up as an immigrant latchkey kid, Roy Choi spent a lot of time wandering the streets of Los Angeles alone, thinking he’d never fit in anywhere. He had a scar on his face from cleft palate surgery, and he thought of himself as an alley cat, slipping through the world unnoticed. He took in every detail of the way people interacted, especially at restaurants. It’s this nuanced and empathetic view of humanity that’s made the 2010 F&W Best New Chef such a force in the hospitality world. He joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about going through life feeling unwelcome, how that’s informed every business decision he’s ever made, his new cookbook The Choi of Cooking, and why he sometimes feels like a baked potato.

Meet our guest

Roy Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Los Angeles, California. He is a 2010 F&W Best New Chef and considered one of the founding forces of the contemporary food truck movement, breaking ground with the Kogi BBQ truck which harnessed the power of social media to build a following and is still rolling strong. In 2018, Food & Wine named Kogi one of the 40 most important restaurants of the past 40 years.

Choi created the television series Broken Bread to explore social justice issues and with it won a 2020 James Beard Award for Outstanding Personality/Host as well as multiple Emmy Awards. Choi co-hosts The Chef Show with actor and producer Jon Favreau, bringing the recipes to life at the Park MGM Hotel in Las Vegas, with The Chef Truck. Choi co-owns Best Friend at Park MGM and Tacos Por Vida, Kogi BBQ, and Alibi Room in LA. In 2016 he was named on TIME‘s 100 Most Influential People in the World list. LocoL, the community-driven fast food restaurant he co-created, received the first ever Los Angeles Times Restaurant of the Year award and was named one of Food & Wine’s Restaurants of the Year in 2016. 

L.A. Son, Choi’s first cookbook and memoir, was a New York Times bestseller in 2013. His newest cookbook, The Choi of Cooking: Flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life, was published in April 2025. In it, Choi and co-authors Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan explore the lessons and missteps Choi has made along his cooking journey in order to empower readers to explore healthier food habits that they can sustain over the long term, while still enjoying the foods they love.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On being an alley cat

“I was born in Seoul, but I came [to the United States] right before I was two years old. I was born with a cleft palate and in a country where things are very homogeneous, having any little physical flaw or even a mental flaw means you stand out. My parents didn’t want me to grow up in that environment. I think they looked at each other and were like, ‘We gotta figure out an escape plan because it’s not going to work.’ They figured it out and ended up back in America [where they’d lived before] with me in tow. I look at my scar on my face as a blessing. I lived a very different life than maybe a lot of other people did. Even though I had a family structure, a network, I was also left to roam. 

I’m kind of like an alley cat. I sneak out on my own, but I always return. That compounded with the fact that I had the scar — from a very early age, I was very aware that I had to deal with being different in a certain way. I had to develop the defense mechanisms, the jokes, the, the sense of humor, the laughter, the communication and social tools to be able to deal with that.”

On being invisible

“Being left to roam, I observed a lot of things. When you’re a kid and you’re walking the streets or riding the bus or in a restaurant alone, people don’t really notice you, so they’re being themselves and they’re showing the worst or best of themselves. That has informed a lot of the way that I move through the world and also how I cook and run kitchens and treat the people in my organizations and teams. It’s not just about being number one or being the best kitchen or doing the most innovative stuff. It’s more about nurturing and figuring out how to cook great, delicious food and feed as many people as we can. That’s why street food was my destiny. We always try to cook for everyone and anyone. We never discriminate and we never create any barriers. ”

On sweating the details

“Yesterday I was talking with my general manager at Best Friend in Las Vegas. We have table 87, which sits right next to the bathroom. Unfortunately, inevitably you’re going to have a table next to the bathroom, but we try to make it as discreet as possible. There’s no sign that says ‘restroom,’ and every single customer outside of table 87 complains like, ‘Where’s the restroom?’ It’s in a dark corner, covered by a dark light. It looks like a haunted house. We try to make it as discreet as possible. 

Everyone wants to put the sign restroom up there, but for the sake of one table, I don’t want to put that sign up there. I’d rather us work on our communication and service or other ways of telling that to the rest of the restaurant, versus making table 87 feel like they were stuck next to the restroom. Little things like that matter.”

On finding your people

“I wish when you were younger, you were able to develop a sense of power, but it just takes time and it takes experience and strength to do that. It’s really hard on the youth, and to deal with that, you may end up with a lot of vices, depression, anxiety, or self-doubt. Even more extreme things, like suicide, mental illness, and not being able to cope. 

As you get older, you figure out how to shift and twist those things into superpowers and how to express your beautiful weirdness to get others to create that sonar, so that others can hear it and feel it. Then you start to find your true self. We’re kind of like that in the food industry — where the dust settles. This is where you go when you can’t fit into anywhere else. But more than not just fitting in, we find each other at these stages in our life, because that’s where we’re meant to be. We had to go through being the weird one, the sensitive one, the outcast, or not being able to fit in. You have to go through all of those things until you finally get to the restaurant and you’re like, ‘Wait a second. There’s 30 others of me over here as well.’

Whenever the time is right, you’ll find your place. If it’s meant to be, you’ll find your place in a restaurant or in food and beverage in some way. You’ll find others who have found their place there, too. It’s a beautiful connection.”

On Las Vegas as the quintessential hospitality city

“Shout out to Las Vegas. I don’t think it gets enough love in our food journalist and media community. I think it’s still looked at through stereotypical eyes. It’s not considered the cool place, but it’s actually the quintessential representation of who we are as food and beverage people. It’s an industry and a city built around food and beverage. People do this for a living. It’s a professional profession. Waiters, hostesses, general managers, managers, assistant managers, sommeliers, cooks, dishwashers — these aren’t jobs as bridges or stepping stones to something else. These are careers and these are lifestyles. This is a culture that’s built around the whole city. It’s all intertwined and interconnected. 

It’s almost like being at a summer camp together. Everyone is a part of this. Even when you go outside of work, whenever you’re sitting down or you’re at the store, there’s a chance that 80% of the people you interact with are in the industry. It’s really cool.”

On the unwanted baked potato

“Back a little while ago, a family of Asians going into a fine dining restaurant could be a disaster. You get spoken to differently, you get treated differently. You get rushed out, you get questioned. You get eye rolls, you get spoken to in a slower way. They assume you don’t understand. You get treated like you’re not wanted there. They feel like you’re messing it up for their other customers. Living a life where you experience those things throughout your life, shapes your perspective of how you don’t want things to be. 

It’s a little easier now, but back then, 20, 30, 40 years ago — you were on your own island. It’s kind of hard to speak up sometimes because you’re outnumbered, so you kind of absorb it. Anyone listening who is a person of color or an immigrant in this country understands what I’m saying right now. Sometimes you’ve got to move through life and absorb the pain and the ridicule, and the racism, because sometimes the situation is not in your favor. You eat the meal as fast as you can, you get out of there — or if you’re feeling some type of way, you prolong it and stay there as long as you can and give it back to them. 

As a white person moving through this country, maybe you never receive this, but we receive it all the time. It is something that you just have to hold with you and move through life with, but it doesn’t bring you down all the time. It doesn’t stop you, and it doesn’t make you callous. It’s just something that comes with. It’s the baked potato that comes with the meal. You don’t have to eat it; it’s just there. That’s what it feels like to be a person of color in this country. You get the baked potato even though you didn’t want it.”

On what he’d tell his 10-year-old self

“I would tell him that you don’t have to let go of the imaginary world side of who you are. You don’t have to give up and compromise your belief in doing good and wanting everyone to be nourished and taken care of and have all the things that they want and need. I would tell the kid that it’s OK to continue to be naive and gullible. Those things are considered weaknesses throughout our life. We’re supposed to be completely shrewd and unforgiving and take advantage and knock down anything to get exactly what you want. We’re bred as humans to do that.

But what if we were to teach our youth and our children that you don’t have to do that? Sometimes the more you give, the more you get. I would tell that kid that you don’t have to be afraid of being kind and sensitive. You can put your own edge around it. It’s OK to be a teddy bear; I’m comfortable with that. There were times where I wasn’t, cause the years after being that 10-year-old, I had to put on my own armor. Now I don’t need that armor anymore.”

On legacy

“This book is an homage to and not a fight with The Joy of Cooking — which is the first cookbook I ever picked up. It was at a yard sale and it was the first portal my family had to really understand American cuisine. Before we started writing The Choi of Cooking, the first mission statement on the wall was: If someone found this book 300 years from now — and it was specifically 300 years — in a bin in a yard sale, and they opened it up, would it still be relevant to them? Would the stories and the food and the recipes — like the Korean Crying Tiger sauce — still be bomb 300 years from now? We really wanted to make a book like that, that could transcend time, just like The Joy of Cooking does. 

I’ve lived a life long enough to write a book like this. Not being the best, not trying to be number one, it’s not a competition. I feel like I’ve lived a life that I could put down recipes that could be delicious enough to last.”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowitz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Arielle Johnson, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Kristen Kish, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.