Roy Choi (born February 24, 1970)[1] is a Korean-American chef who gained prominence as the creator of the gourmet Korean-Mexican taco truck Kogi.

[6] In 2019, Choi began presenting a cooking series on Netflix with Jon Favreau titled The Chef Show.

[9] His parents owned a Korean restaurant called Silver Garden in Anaheim, California [10] for three years when he was young.

[3] His family once lived near Olympic Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, as well as in South Central, the Crenshaw District and West Hollywood.

[12] Choi attended a gifted-students program, but changed schools in his early teens when his parents achieved prosperity in the jewelry business and moved their family into a neighborhood in Orange County called Villa Park,[6][13] Choi began getting into trouble, with his marks slipping as he began taking drugs and hanging out with a different crowd.

[3] Choi also worked at the Embassy Suites in Sacramento and the Rock Sugar Pan Asian Kitchen in Los Angeles.

[2][11] After this classical training and years of background in Michelin-star cooking, Choi said that the shift to the food trucks, initially based on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice[15] was great.

which featured rice bowls,[16] and A-Frame which conveyed the Hawaiian idea of aloha and was built in a former IHOP,[6] in addition to Pot[17] at the Line Hotel in Koreatown.

Choi worked as a technical advisor to Favreau on cooking and restaurant scenes and appears in the end credits.

[26][27] Fellow chef and author Anthony Bourdain wrote that "Roy Choi first changed the world when he elevated the food-truck concept from "roach coach" to highly sought-after, ultra-hot-yet-democratic rolling restaurant.

"[26] In 2015, Choi and chef Daniel Patterson opened a restaurant called LocoL in Watts, Los Angeles, with the goal of bringing quality, healthy, and inspired fast-food to inner-city neighborhoods.

[28] In 2019, Choi produced and hosted a TV series, Broken Bread on Tastemade and KCET in Los Angeles.