Roy Choi
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
The food, the culture. I mean, we don't even look the same. But again, it's just the ignorance sometimes of anyone that's not from that part of the world. It's just easier to broad stroke things and put everyone into one box. What's funny is, is that most people that get subjugated to that type of stereotype or that type of broad stroking, we don't think that way about anyone else.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Looking at Matt Damon right now behind you. How would you know? Is that me or is that Matt Damon? I did think it was you when I first walked in. But that was just at a glance.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Maybe the only difference is sometimes why people just take it to the next level.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah, but again, that was only a microcosm, a little sliver that the media blew up and that even professors and teachers and curriculums blew up into representing the whole relationship between the Korean community, the Asian community, the black community.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
If you really go down to the streets, if I could take you guys to Watts right now, Compton, South Central, anywhere, we can go all the way back to the 80s and early 90s to now. There's always a Mrs. Lee, a Mr. Park, a Mr. Kim, whoever that runs a store that has great relationships with the neighborhood. And what you mentioned about the cultural differences, yeah, that existed before.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
But there was also nonverbal acts of love that were shared amongst each other, whether that was tab systems also being just included in the neighborhood, brought to family picnics and gatherings, stuff like that. I mean, it went both ways, but there were certain cases where people were stubborn against each other.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And so there were times where I hated my family or my culture for treating certain people certain ways. And there were times where I had to stick up for certain things. And there were times where I was caught in the middle of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Where I was... doing beer runs or stealing stuff, and then the store owner's Korean. But I'm just an American kid hanging out. You know, you grew up in the Detroit area. I'm just a street kid hanging out in L.A. with a bunch of other knuckleheads. Doing hood rat shit. Doing hood rat shit. That's right. Not even thinking about any connections to your family or anything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
That you're betraying your family. That you're betraying anything, you know. Yeah. Confucius don't mean shit to me, you know. So I'm just going in there grabbing shit, and then I'm running out, and then all of a sudden I see the face of disappointment behind the counter.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
The stakes are so different. And then you got to go out the store and then just continue to be a kid. But then you're carrying the weight internally. Especially when you're Asian, you kind of have to maneuver through that where you're carrying a lot of this silent guilt or this silent shame when you're just doing American shit. That's right. Just growing up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I didn't consciously confront that because I was so immersed within cooking. So sometimes cooking is all we have as families and especially my family and my extended family. So as Asian immigrants, especially in the era that I grew up, we took a lot of shit, man. It was part culture, part language, part just not knowing how to react.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
But a lot of that stuff, you just keep quiet and you just put your head down and you just keep going. People yelling horrible things at you, throwing things at you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Oh, yeah. It was hard for me to grapple with, especially when like Cube made Black Korea. Yeah. You know, it was hard for me because those were my heroes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
yeah and then all of a sudden they're saying these really horrible things about my family and it was really hard for me to reconcile the two for a very long time and I think ultimately I think that came to define the philosophy of Kogi the truck instead of reacting in road rage towards it all I kept it with me and it took me a long time to figure out what will my reaction to it be it's so cool because I think the majority of people are going to feel at least the pressure to commit to one side or the other yeah
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Building bridges, yeah. But sometimes those bridges can take 30 years, like for me, you know. But ultimately, I'm just so happy that I stayed alive long enough to be able to build that bridge. But we ate a lot of shit, so that's just the way it was. But part of it is language too, language and culture. Because when things get pushed too far, I've seen my uncles kick nine people's asses at one time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
So it's not that we can't fight back or that we won't. It's just that in many cases, the first wave of immigrants, Asian immigrants, didn't know what the proper protocol was.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And you got to remember a lot of countries that these people come from, the cops are corrupt. The governments are corrupt. That's the whole reason they're here in the first place. So then you have that, you have the language barrier, you have the cultural incomprehension of what you're supposed to do. So that's why food is so important.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Because during the week, it's so hard that the only time that we had together was through food. And all my extended family, my aunts, my uncles, my parents, they would just be cooking all the time. Like all the time. And I don't mean like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I mean, like making stews, broths, dumplings, like full blown restaurant shit, you know, in their apartments.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And then we would all meet on the weekends and have these like tremendous potlucks every single weekend. It was like growing up with Quincy Jones as your dad or something. Or like Steph Curry, like how Steph Curry grew up, like on the NBA arena. You know, like that's how it is for us with food. So I never really used it as a space of here's my little private Idaho type thing. It was a given. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I love how you just put it all because for people that are marginalized, we never hold any grudges in many cases.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And in many cases, when we do have opportunities, we're just giving back because we're survivors and we know our self-worth and we know ourselves, whether that's the African-American culture all the way to Asian-American to whoever. We know where we come from. We know what we represent. And so you can't just stop it. It just keeps growing and mushrooming. And so for us, it's just about sharing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
The sad part is you go outside of L.A., it's still like that. Anywhere that's not like New York, L.A., San Francisco, it's like that. But we saw during the pandemic, even New York, L.A., San Francisco had to deal with Asian violence too in that same pattern that you just described in the 80s, which is so bizarre. I always equate it to the world that you come from, Hollywood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Well, let's make clear. I don't come from. You come from Detroit. The place you found yourself is because we don't have enough stories and representation within Hollywood. So people are still living off of this idea of who we are. This representation through Mickey Rooney or 16 Candles of who we are. We don't have Asian addicts. We don't have Asian people who fail.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
We don't have the euphoria of Asians that are dealing with sexual problems because we don't have any stories told about us in those manners. What happens is the image of who we are is still trapped. It's almost like trauma. It's trapped within this era and this age.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I agree with that, but I also don't agree with it only in the fact that with all the streamers out there and all the content and all of the shows being bought every single day, right now someone's Zoom pitching a show. The proportion of Asian storytelling is still not represented. Yeah. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I argue that as well. Y'all make it in Hollywood. Y'all got big eyes, features, everything. Us Asians, you know, no islands. You still got to deal with the racism and stuff. But yeah, you got to consider all that. I don't know. Can you Google percent of AAPI?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
More than his wife. More than his wife. Then you'll be truly Asian because you'll be overachieving.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
So only 5.7% of the country is Asian? According to the 2019 Census Bureau. That's because probably like 25% more didn't fill out. Yeah, exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
My Mexican homies, like they don't speak Spanish, you know, but they understand everything. Their grandma or mom's yelling at them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
This sounds like a dream job for me because I just love to talk. It was the podcast before podcast.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And feel good afterwards and spend like five bucks and stay there till like 4.30 in the morning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
People weren't going from city to city and having lists of like, OK, where's the best place to eat?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
The feelings you had were real because that's exactly how they looked at you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah, he's not the upper class or he wouldn't be working there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
But he somehow, he's developed this language and this style and they're just trying to get you out of there. Now things can not only be tailored, but they're also meeting you where you're at versus you having to put on a nice suit and go to a fancy place.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
They don't have to wear all the same uniform. They can come to work with what they're wearing and have their own style. And there's just been an evolution of what service and style is in America and what is considered to be excellence and not just in food.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I think across the board and every, you see it with fashion, you see it with everything, but I think there's been an evolution of again, what excellence is before excellence was defined by that. What you said, the rich blue chip, third general, all that, but now excellence can be defined in any way. And you're seeing that in food.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah, exactly. Yes. What you're touching on is the exclusiveness is cool because it's like nerdy exclusiveness.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And there's real scarcity because there's only so much that can be produced, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so it's a beautiful thing right now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah, you're Midwest. Grew up in an era where you were being infiltrated by the fast food advertising frozen food system. That was all deliberate. You are a product of that experiment. I just spoke with Alice Waters, who is the godmother of this movement of organics, of eating sustainably to the ground.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
What happened in the 70s is that this was a deliberate act by the advertising and food corporations to feed us this idea that things need to be fast. Fast. disposable. Our time is money. We need to keep it moving. There's no time for food because all the time should be focused on what you need to do to push your upward mobility.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
To get rich. And so food was the casualty and there was millions and billions of dollars behind that that fueled that advertising to get us to that point where we were completely desensitized and numbed to even caring about food.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And it took until probably like the early 2000s for us to break out of that cocoon. I'm just so glad because we could have never evolved beyond that. I see the picture in my mind of everything that was from the 70s until the year 2000. And it's so bizarre.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
It is so bizarre for a country to completely devalue food to the lowest level to where it actually you are being told that you don't even have to eat. Ideally, yeah, you'd eat a capsule at the beginning of the month that would nourish you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
for the next 30 days because there's no time for it there's no time for it and none of it matters and flavor doesn't matter nutrition doesn't matter nothing matters within this realm of food growing it wasting it eating it cooking it nothing oh my god this is so fascinating so will you please tell us about how you started watching Emeril Lagasse yeah on the food network
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
It wasn't really an obsession more than it was a last cry for help. So I was here in Los Angeles. This was 1995. I had just come off of a four year deep addiction dive into gambling. What was your game of choice? It went from this game called Pan 9, which is kind of a card interpretation of Paigao. And it's similar to Baccarat, but you use four cards.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
You use three in the hole and you can pull one. Are you getting chills right now explaining that? Yeah. Getting nine, pictures are zero, it's the whole thing. And then eventually led to poker and then high limit poker. Texas Hold'em? Texas Hold'em. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then playing like- At Commerce every day? At Commerce every day, yeah. Bicycle club, Commerce.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Back then it was before the whole World Series of Poker Day, so it was like- Just Doyle Brunson was popular. Yeah. It was me against Doyle Brunson. And Stu Unger. Yeah, Stu Unger and Telly Savalas. That was basically it. There was no like real no limit games. It was all structured. And it was a big game. I eventually made it to like 2040, which is a pretty big game.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And in your 20s, you know, losing $10,000, $20,000 is a lot of money. And a lot of that money sometimes is borrowed. So I burned a lot of bridges over those four years. And I was basically couch surfing. And I didn't have many other options left. The only other options were pretty much being a rail bird at the casino. That was all I had left.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And a rail bird is they toss you a $5 chip to get a water or coffee or something like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Because it actually not only destroys you, but it's a forest fire. It will destroy everything around you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah. Did you have that? I have it every day still. You don't even think about the money. There is no value in the currency at all. And all you do every single day when you look in the mirror is just promise yourself when you get even that you'll quit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
It's so crazy, yeah. What happens is because it's all dealt in chips, the amount of money that you go through, $10,000 feels like $10. So that's where the adrenaline from losing comes into play because you're desensitized.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I agree with that. But also just the magnitude of what you're spending on it will never equal gambling. Right. I can't do 10 grand of coke in a day. In a day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
We have a few shows that were very loyal to us, just like Parenthood. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is another one. It's insane.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I was 25 and then I went off to culinary school when I was 27.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
So yeah, that grilled cheese, that was the anchor to the whole thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Have you ever witnessed how fast John can synthesize something? Have you witnessed it yourself?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And that's how Avenue 26 started to really blossom and emerge.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I have virtually the same Jordans in that color scheme. It came as a set with Dunks and Air Force Ones from Undefeated. And they did like a whole series where they're doing kind of like a Godzilla, you know, like a battle between a Godzilla King Kong battle.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
That's exactly it. That's that democratic socialist, whatever you want to call it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
it is yeah you hit it right on the head like if every line you said and someone had a wad of cash and tipped you yeah favro either gave me nothing or he gave me 20 at the end 20 and then so your mind is like do i kiss his ass do i do better do i tell him to fuck off that's a whole nother podcast the amount of things people say about you in the water station yes you know yes yes well i worked at cpk for a while oh you know i've said those
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Not only that, but we're also losing the diversity and the dynamic nature of the seeds that Seeds are only being built and constructed to survive and be durable in a very specific weather pattern, very specific growing pattern and style. Again, going back to minimizing flavor and individuality and dynamic nature into just something that is indestructible. Right. Right, right, right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
We're 50% there as a human race. The world's seeds are owned by four corporations. 50% of them are. This is actually a great sci-fi movie. There's a whole network of young farmers and individual farmers that are fighting against this in the way farmers do with a smile and really great energy. With a beautiful heart and saving these seeds in their pockets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And so the world that a lot of the seed protectors are trying to save is that world. And the world that the corporations want is the gas flush tomato where all tomatoes are round and red and look the same. And if we're not careful, we will get there. I know, again, it doesn't seem that realistic, but if we start eating all the same foods regularly,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
If we're only all eating one tomato or one seed of a tomato that's engineered, if we're all only eating one form of broccoli or only one form of onion, what will happen to us is we will all eventually become somewhat of an android. We will all become the same. Well, the same microbiome. Same microbiomes. We're eating the same thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
And all those things are controlled and they can be moved like a joystick to however they want us to be.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah. And that's about black entrepreneurship, which is not the topic a lot of people talk about in the uprising and racism and resistance here within America is that there is the stuff that is up front that is very important. Brutality, violence, a lack of access, lack of upper mobility. But the fact that the African-American community doesn't own any property or land. Mm hmm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
is one of the most detrimental, and we focus on that in the episode. In this capitalist economy, if you don't own any land, you're always at the mercy of someone else.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
It has to start there, and that's what we address in that episode. We show examples, and we show arguments, and all this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Do you have a ton of sneakers? I don't. I only wear what's given to me for free. Smart. I'm not like as big a shoe fiend as most people are. I'm not like a sneaker head. I just like, I like wearing shoes. I don't like collecting them, you know? So like as soon as I get them, I wear them and then I go on to the next one. I do too. I've never really been a collector of many things. I don't know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I've never had attachments to like material items.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
No, that's pretty weird. Yeah. I mean, I've had addictions and I've gone down really deep holes and I've stayed attached to many, many things like just where I won't let it go. And I've written like horrible love letters on the back of pizza boxes, like the Jon Favreau scene, the swingers like on the first date. So I've gone down dark holes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Not that I'm perfect in that way, but I've never been attached to material items before. So interesting. I don't know why. But I think it might have been a foreshadowing or a precursor to who I ultimately became, which is creating businesses that make no money. That pretty much was my destiny from childhood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Or they may not have ascended to a level where they're...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
There's not a lot of like recreational... And I feel like I moved to the front of the classroom with crack because it was one week. It was just a burner of seven days, just complete roller coaster all the way through. The lips are burnt to fucking oblivion. To oblivion, walking through the fucking Hell's Kitchen. That's where all the crack was being sold in New York.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
I went so far through that I came out the other end and I was like, this shit sucks. I'm done.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
You want to be around other zombies. And New York was really like that at that time. I'm from here. Speaking of pizza boxes and love letters, I went to go visit a girl that I met in Korea. And without warning her, I showed up at her doorstep in Providence, Rhode Island.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
It doesn't feel dangerous at all. This was before texting. This was just a knock.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Show up. And then I knock on the door and then obviously it didn't go well. So then I ended up in New York at the YMCA. It was $7 a night in Times Square. And that whole street that I stayed on was like Crack Avenue, man. It was zombies. Like, it was crazy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah. So they both came here for college, graduate school. So my mom was from a well-to-do family. My grandfather was a gangster. He was Tony Montana. Oh, really? My maternal grandfather. Can you just tell me the timeline? The Korean War is 50s? 50 to 53. Right. Up until 50, they're living in North Korea. Right. And the war happens. They all flee. But my grandpa's a geek. He figures things out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
He gets to Seoul. I mean, Seoul at that time was basically dirt roads and buildings all blown up. It was just crazy. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
that time the war was coming off of the japanese occupation because it's the peninsula in the pacific ocean we were at the brunt of the whole cold war between you know communism and the u.s right and korea was the pawn in between it all because that was the foothold into asia yeah and so most north koreans came down across the border it closed he's in seoul and it's like tony montana in the detention center washing dishes you know in miami tony montana's a scarface reference just so you know my
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah. And so he figured things out. He was hustling the whole time and he eventually took over kind of like what you would call Midtown Manhattan. Like he took over and owned pretty much all the real estate. So my mom's family was very well to do. But that's a whole nother story because they lost everything. They had nine sisters, two brothers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Both brothers got addicted to gambling and lost the whole fortune. So you come by this addiction stuff, honestly. It's crazy, yeah. And so they sent her here to art school. Dad came from the total opposite. He came from the country in the South, ended up in the city. His father was just, you know, a normal everyday banker. But he figured it out and became like the head of his class.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
So he came on a scholarship to America. They met and then they decided to go back. I always make fun of them. I'm like, why the fuck'd you go?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
back so they went back and they realized because for a lot of immigrant families once you taste america it's hard to go back to where you're from yeah but i also understand the desire and i don't know that this was theirs but to like make it where you're from i think part of it's korea comes from a very confucius model very like male dominated very respect your elders respect your parents always pay tribute to your family so i think they were going back to do things right but once you taste america
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
They were here in the 60s. They were driving like beautiful cobalt blue Impalas, wearing Ray-Bans, smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch. And they go back. And I think they realized as soon as they step back in Korea, they're like, we got to get back. Well, also, they have a new thought, which is you. I forgot about this. This is probably the reason why they came back. I was born with a deformity.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
What was the deformity? I was born with a cleft palate. Oh, okay. Yeah, a pretty bad one. So cleft palate is when your whole top part of your lip is ripped open when you're born. So you're born with a hole in your face. But back then in Korea, they were stitching people together with duct tape. So I don't think they saw me come out and they didn't know what to do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
It's a surgery. Yeah. But there weren't many of them in Korea, I think, at that time. And again, like you're talking about a industrialized country coming off of war, mainly built around textiles, not the most advanced medical equipment and training in the world. They stitched me together. It was all messed up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
But the thing is, because Korea or any country outside of the United States is so homogenous, what happens is if you have anything that is just slightly different, as little as being bowlegged, bucktooth, whatever, you stick out and you can't make it. Yeah, if you're fucked up looking, this is the spot for you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Is that? Absolutely. Every couple of years. Because again, when you're an immigrant in this country, the whole folklore or tale of coming with nothing in your pocket is a true story. Yes. It's a real thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Yeah, Asians did that with each other, especially Koreans, because no one else would take care of us. We're the forgotten minority in many ways. Big time. Because you're the model minority. Or people think or assume that we're getting benefits that other minorities aren't. Right. But in many cases, we're not. We're just invisible and forgotten.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
We're still getting the no's and the closed doors and the racism. It's just coming in ways that aren't so overt.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Absolutely. And just because a certain sector of a certain race or population or culture is successful, that doesn't mean that everyone else is successful or that everyone else has opportunities. If you look statistically, and I know this podcast is about like nerding out and getting the details and info.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
If you look at the economics behind a lot of Asian communities within the United States, we rank as probably the poorest.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rerelease: Roy Choi
Absolutely. And every country and every culture is so different from each other, but we all get grouped into one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.