Hold onto your gochugaru taco sauce! Chef Roy Choi released a new cookbook in April 2025, entitled The Choi of Cooking: Flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life.
Is an introduction of Roy Choi even necessary? For the sake of manners, let’s do a quick one. The guy’s name is nearly synonymous with “food truck revolution.” The L.A.-based food truck Kogi BBQ is his baby. And thanks to Choi and Kogi’s success, Korean-Mexican food is a mainstay menu item everywhere.
His first cookbook, L.A. Son, was released in 2013 and is as much a tribute to the city that raised him as it is about food. In it, he says he had to write the book to tell his story of his journey in life, “from immigrant to latchkey kid to lowrider to misfit to gambler to a chef answering his calling.”
Choi’s an anti-hero; a kid who grew up left to his own devices, exploring and growing up on the streets of L.A.’s Koreatown while his parents did that immigrant hustle to make a life for them all.
That hustle in his bloodline paid off. In his mid-twenties, Choi found his calling in the culinary arts and channeled an unstoppable amount of talent and energy into getting into the Culinary Institute of America. After the Institute, he worked as a chef at the Beverly Hilton. He was eventually fired, which didn’t slow him down and in fact fueled his ambition.
He started his Kor-Mex food truck Kogi BBQ in 2008, which has gone on to become the OG of food trucks. Kogi BBQ is still going strong along with his restaurant Best Friend in Las Vegas and a food truck LocoL, operating through the support of Alta Community, a nonprofit whose mission is to empower communities through food.
So, onto The Choi of Cooking, co-authored by Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan, with photography by Bobby Fisher and illustrations by Adela Gersaqi.
In the introduction, Choi refers to this cookbook as his heart and soul. “It will fill your life with flavors so vibrant, so good, it will possess you,” he writes. “It’ll teach you how to make things that are good for you and good to you.”
You’ll notice a significant difference between this one and L.A. Son and the dishes and ingredients he’s traditionally known for. While L.A. Son’s recipes lean hard into the meat aisle, this one explores the garden. The recipes in The Choi of Cooking embrace a rainbow of fresh vegetables, fruit, herbs and spices. “Veg Head” is the largest chapter in this book whereas vegetables definitely were a sideshow at best in L.A. Son.
Choi’s always been open about his vices–drinking, drugs, fighting, gambling. And eating unhealthily was also one that caught up with him.
Some of this had to do with growing up in a food desert. In his upbringing, he and his friends ate unhealthily because that’s what was there. There wasn’t convenient, affordable or neighborhood-based access to stores with fresh and organic options. But there was no shortage of greasy joints, liquor stores and tobacco products. What was available to him became his go-to comforts.
As a chef, he used the finest of organic produce and protein while at the Culinary Institute of America and the Beverly Hilton, but he didn’t prioritize doing so for himself in a healthy way.
“We cook great food all day, but to ourselves, we eat the worst food,” he said about his chef lifestyle in a recent book tour appearance on Good Morning America.
“It got to the point where maturity and age allowed me to confront it,” he said, regarding confronting his food demons. And as he did, he realized he wanted to share the benefits of this life transition with others.
In The Choi of Cooking, Choi shows a mastery in using flavor and texture to incorporate produce, herbs and spices into daily meal choices. He calls it “tricking your eyes” into thinking you’re eating your favorite comfort foods. At the same time, he says the whole concept of the book is balance and intention. Don’t deprive yourself, just learn how to diversify.
And of course, this isn’t at all a vegetarian cookbook. There’s a chapter of recipes called “Meat Me Here” and meat also makes its way into several other recipes across the seven other chapters. Choi just demonstrates different methods of prepping that prioritize a healthier approach.
This is a cookbook meant to meet you where you’re at. Choi says, “I lived it, so you can live it.”
