Roy Choi Wants to Reinvent Fast Food

New York restaurateur Daniel Holzman knows firsthand the drawing power of Roy Choi, the Los Angeles-based chef-turned-gourmet-food-truck operator. Holzman remembers standing with Choi in a Los Angeles parking lot several years ago “in some s-‍-‍-‍-‍- neighborhood on Skid Row, in a place I normally wouldn’t have stopped for gas because I’d be nervous. He’d say ‘watch this,’ and send out a tweet, and 300 to 400 people would show up like that” to queue up at his truck, says Holzman, co-owner of The Meatball Shop restaurants. “No other chef or hospitality business used social media the way he did,” says Holzman, who first worked with Choi in the kitchen of New York’s seafood mecca Le Bernardin in the late 1990s.

Now Choi, whose Kogi BBQ operates four trucks and has 130,000 followers on Twitter, is taking on a harder task: reinventing the burger. Choi has joined with San Francisco chef Daniel Patterson, whose restaurant Coi earned him the 2014 James Beard Award for Best Chef in the West, to start a fast-food chain called Loco’l. Its menu centerpiece will be an inexpensive hamburger that is healthier than anything you’d find at McDonald’s, tastier than those at In-N-Out, and served faster than at a gourmet burger restaurant.