Chef Roy Choi has won a James Beard Foundation Award, hosted The Chef Show with Jon Favreau, and opened a restaurant in Las Vegas’ Park MGM, but he still operates by the street food mantra: “Move quickly, move swiftly, move quietly, but leave a big mark.”
The celebrity chef and restaurateur changed food culture forever when he launched Kogi BBQ, the Korean Mexican taco truck credited with inspiring the modern food truck movement (and the 2014 film Chef). In the years since, Roy’s expanded to a fleet of Kogi trucks and several full-service restaurants, including Best Friend in Las Vegas. But he always remains true to his street food roots—from the way he manages and operates his businesses, to his latest concept, Tacos Por Vida, a taco stand so good it creates lines around the block.
So what does it mean to run your business with a street food mentality? In his keynote address at Yelp’s 2024 Local Business Summit, Roy emphasized the importance of developing your own point of view, listening to your team, and staying true to your younger self. Check out the lessons he shared.
1. Run your business like a kitchen
I never thought I’d be a business person. I’m a cook. I’m an outcast. I ended up in the kitchen because I didn’t fit into anywhere else. But the culture of food has changed a lot in the last 20, 30 years, and as the industry evolved, we evolved with it too.
Because I wasn’t a businessman, I just took the kitchen mentality and applied that to business. What I mean by that is, we as cooks and chefs are problem solvers. We’re faced with hundreds of problems every single day… but dealing in the restaurant industry with a very young population in many cases, you’re always getting very fresh ideas and raw ideas.
And so I really listen to my team. I try to pose questions. I try to take a strong stance for certain decisions, and then open it up to the room because that’s how we operate in the kitchen.
2. The best ideas come from your team
We never left the streets. We are still an independent, small business. When you are that at your core, you know that next week is never promised. No matter how big things may get or how things look from the outside, you still gotta pay those bills. You still have to take care of your team.
Tacos Por Vida [happened because] our team needed more hours. They were itching for something new and kept pushing us, like: “Kogi is still strong, but we need a new fresh coat of paint. We need some new energy. We want to be motivated. We got friends and relatives and cousins that need jobs.” And I listened. [Tacos Por Vida] is what came out of that.
A lot of it was crowdsourced within our company, as far as: What do you want to do? What do you think is gonna make you happy? That’s why I love my team so much. They weren’t thinking, “We need to go global, you need to get venture capital, you’re going to need all these things”—which is fine, but for us, it was like, “Let’s take it back to the essence.”
3. Find the truth in critical feedback
I’m the 3.5-star king. Back in the early days, a lot of people on Yelp said our food was too saucy. [We didn’t do] modifications as well. We served our food the way we served it… and I almost changed it, but there’s something within me that was very stubborn, and I held the line. That eventually became Kogi—it became our identity, our fingerprint, our stamp. So I’m kind of glad we didn’t change, but I did listen.
I’m not gonna lie to you, [critical feedback] hurts. I read every comment. I read every thread, and it still hurts every time… but then I try to find the truth in all of it. Did someone really have a bad experience? Did someone appreciate the technique but didn’t like the flavor? Were we wrong? Were we rude? Did we mess up somewhere? And is there anything we can do as a follow up?
You gotta take that pain… because those pains develop and inform the joys and the expression of who you are and how you evolve your business.
—Chef Roy Choi
4. Believe in your own point of view
Some things [in business] are evergreen and timeless. Keeping it real in a world where everything is becoming so fake resonates extremely powerfully… If you fully commit, double down, and engross yourself in the thing that you believe in, others will believe in it too.
It’s the idea of focusing not just on your execution, but also how you’re trying to connect [with people]. If you connect to your core audience—one person, two people, 20 people—you can create that connection, that bridge with them, and it’s going to grow on its own. But if you try to get a large audience right off the bat, it’s a house of cards sometimes.
You can see this happen [in restaurants] where they try to put everything on the menu because their philosophy is to please everyone’s palette. Those are usually the biggest failures in business—if you’re too spread out and too general. You have to have a specific point of view, and have the courage to be able to back that up and believe in it.
5. Stay humble and manage your success as you grow
As business owners, [our idea of success is] so linear. It’s like: Start with nothing, do something everyone loves, become hugely successful.
You have to take success like you take failure and like you take hardship and hard times. It can’t be the end of whoever it is that you were. Like all the dualities of life, if you only hear the positive comments, and you don’t hear the criticism, you may not be able to evolve or grow.
I use my disgruntled, cynical, angry, 17-year-old self as my touchstone on everything I do. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna act like a 17-year-old, but I use that part of myself to be like: “You all right with this? You good with this? Does stuff hit with you?”
I think if you get too caught up in success where you get too full yourself, your product is going to suffer… You have to manage your success as you grow. You have to constantly look in the mirror and ask yourself: “Is this good? Am I on the right path?”
For more insights from Chef Roy, watch his keynote session below from Yelp’s 2024 Local Business Summit—now available on demand.
Photos from Kogi and Tacos Por Vida on Yelp
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