alligator onto my Le Tigre shirt. I remember wearing my shoes
inside out.”
As his parents filed for bankruptcy again and again and moved
Choi and his sister from place to place—Englewood, West L.A.,
Koreatown, La Cienega, Norwalk, Anaheim, Mission Viejo—Choi
didn’t realize how poor they really were because he was always so
well fed.
“Every day my mom would wake up at four a.m. and cook a
feast like Americans cook for Thanksgiving. But she would do it
every day.”
Choi would regularly wake up to the smells of stews
simmering, fish frying, and cabbages fermenting. When I ask if he
got teased for taking smelly food to school, Choi says, “The
people who poke fun at that kind of food were probably eating
shit. The food my mom made was full of vitamins and protein and
love and care.”
Love and care are precisely what matters most to Choi when
cooking in his own kitchen. As we coax the onions out of the wok
(we’re cooking Chego’s Chicken Henhouse Bowl in stages because
a home stove doesn’t get hot enough), Choi watches me add the
greens and, finally, the rice.
“Does rice play a prominent part in your cooking?” I ask.
“Um,” he replies, “this is a rice-bowl restaurant.”
Rice, it turns out, isn’t just a prominent part of Choi’s cooking,
it’s a central component to an entire way of life. “You have to
wash your rice thoroughly five times,” he tells me.