Roy Choi Doesn’t Want to Be Tokenized

A decade ago, Roy Choi was a guy in southern California with a food truck and a Twitter account. Now, he’s one of the more influential chefs in America. Choi was born in Seoul but grew up in Los Angeles, where the city’s many immigrant neighborhoods informed his interest in cooking—the crispy fried chicken of Koreatown; the overstuffed burritos in Boyle Heights; and pho in the San Gabriel Valley—places that, at the time, weren’t well-trodden ground for the food obsessed.

With his popular Korean BBQ taco trucks, Kogi, Choi ushered in a generation of gourmet food trucks, changed the dining landscape of L.A., and proved the power that social media can have on a restaurant. He’s since opened multiple restaurants, authored a cookbook, L.A. Son, and in 2016, introduced an ambitious, socially minded restaurant concept, Locol, which offered quality fast food primarily within inner-city neighborhoods (the business focuses mainly on catering now). This week, you can watch Choi’s latest project, Broken Bread, a TV series in partnership with KCET and Tastemade that explores people and places using food as a means of activism, from Dough Girl, a pizza spot that provides affordable housing to its employees, to Olympia Auset, whose company, Supermarkt, delivers reasonably priced healthy groceries.

Here is Choi in his own words about the difficult issues the show tackles, and what it means to be an Asian-American chef on television in a landscape that has made some progress—see: David Chang’s Ugly Delicious, or Eddie Huang’s Huang’s World—but still remains pretty homogeneous.

How did this television show come about?

I have been trying to do television for a while. I was like 0 for 1,000 in pitching shows. I would go into these rooms and everyone would be fans of Kogi but then all of a sudden it was awkward and weird. The world wasn’t ready with me being Asian. There was this predominant ideology that Asian men don’t sell, or aren’t sexy. I kind of gave up until KCET and Tastemade came to me with this treatment for Broken Bread and it was everything I had been dreaming of. I never thought the studio would get behind something like that. This was before Crazy Rich Asians. The only time you see minorities on TV en masse is when we are being arrested or stereotyped or tokenized, so to have a show that really illustrates real life—it was a godsend, to be honest.

You could have done any TV show—a scripted show, a Roy Choi eat-a-long. Why this show? Why tackle such difficult and, at times, really sad issues?

It is sad in the fact that this is our reality. It is also inspiring and uplifting that there are people on the ground trying to do something about it. We wanted to do something to make it not feel like a lecture—to make it feel like entertainment. Also, this is my life. When I’m not talking to you I am working with activists and organizers. This is my real life.

So you feel like this show is a reflection of your career trajectory.

Locol and Kogi both have strong connections to being social justice based restaurants. Kogi changed what a generation eats, introducing people to fermentation and different vegetables and flavors. Even my sit-down restaurants like Best Friend and A-Frame have the same ethos—affordability and best quality. Most of my restaurants are at least 20 to 30 percent below market rate. Those things are important because then you are able to open your door to more people. You never know if the next great writer or political leader is out there—you just have to open the door a little bit. That’s how the voices change and we become more integrated.

How did you find the places featured in the show?

It was a combination of three things: one was myself—I am just naturally interconnected with a lot of these people. The other was the partnership. KCET is like having the best study group in the world. And then the young energy of Tastemade—hundreds of minds who are just so eager and can access information in a second. I also threw up a tweet and an IG post that said I was making a show about social good and if you know of anyone, tag me, and tag them. We got thousands of submissions.

Do you feel any kind of responsibility, being one of only a few Asian-American men with such a powerful microphone?

I never look at it like I have to represent all Asians. I don’t look at it as race. I look at it as people on the margins. People that are underground and left out. I represent the voice of the alternative—those left out of the mainstream. If that relates to race as well then I’ll stand up for that, too—like the emasculation of Asian men within America or the objectification of Asian women. I just try to battle everything with love.

What do you think it means to other Asian Americans, seeing someone who looks like them on screen?

In mainstream media, everything gets turned into a stereotype of ourselves. When you never see yourself in the mainstream format you are stripped of the strength of your identity. The main thing with the show is that it doesn’t focus on me, as a minority, being different—it’s about me being a leader. If that’s something younger generations can look at and say, “I can do that. I relate to that. I see myself in that,” that is very important. All we got is Bruce Lee. That shit is real.

Do you think the role of the chef is changing? That the chef is the new cultural commentator?

There are a few, but for the most part, no. I think we don’t have enough power yet. In most cases, chefs are still just employees, and we don’t have a voice. We are controlled by the food media and food celebrity status that underpays us and undercuts us. Food Network and food festivals and all that stuff, man—they are exploiting these chefs. They chew them up and spit them out and they go back to their $40,000 jobs. Chefs don’t have a union. We don’t have a Screen Actor’s Guild.

There’s a scene at the end of the episode about Locol where the police come in and try to break up a block party, where the majority of attendees are black, in Watts, a low-income Los Angeles neighborhood. Why did you decide to include that confrontation in its entirety?

It’s real life. People are killed and arrested daily on these streets for nothing. And as you can see in this case, for grilling some chicken. How would you feel if you were targeted and hunted down by authorities just because of the color of your skin and how you talk?

You said in one episode that the whole point of the show was to get people to admit that they were wrong. What did you mean by this?

That America was wrong. That the forefathers were wrong in having slaves. That segregation was wrong. That infiltrating low-income communities with poison is wrong. That killing animals and mono agriculture is wrong. It’s time to check ourselves and fix it and truly move forward.

Broken Bread premieres on Tastemade TV and KCET at 8:30pm PST on May 15th.

Priya Krishna is a food writer who contributes regularly to the New York Times and Bon Appétit, and the author of the cookbook, "Indian-ish."

Originally Appeared on GQ