Vegetable State of Mind

Roy Choi is L.A.’s David Chang; an ambitious, flavor-forging Korean-American chef with a “crazy lemonade stand” approach to the restaurant business and credibility with kids. In 2008, Choi, a former hotel-banquet chef, became an emblem of stoner ingenuity when he invented the kimchi quesadilla, rented a truck, and started a Twitter account. The Kogi truck introduced a taste—Korean barbecue—that already feels like it’s always been with us, and a means of delivery that has become a national fixture. (A year after Kogi, the L.A. Times reported that Subway and Sizzler were getting in on food-truck game.) By 2010, Food & Wine had named Choi a Best New Chef.

Now Choi has a fleet of trucks, four restaurants, and told me he feeds about ten thousand people a day—more, he believes, than any other chef in America. My favorite Choi enterprise is Chego (“Chillax peasant food from the soul”), a cool little rice-bowl spot in a West L.A. strip mall, whose menu offers dishes like 3PM Meatballs, Steak in the Heart (a prime-rib sandwich) and Chubby Pork Belly (kurobuta with fried egg, pickled radishes, peanuts). I always get the Sour Cream Hen House—grilled chicken, Thai basil, jalapeno, sour-cream sambal, Chinese broccoli—double greens, no rice, if I’m being abstemious. If I’m not, I get the dish as it was meant to be (on a mound of white rice) and, for dessert, a Sriracha bar. When my husband announced a couple of months ago that he was going to try not to eat animal products for a while, my first question was, “What about Chego?”

Choi once said that he got into cooking when, coming down from a high, Emeril Lagasse spoke to him from the television. The other day, he roiled the culinary world with a new auditory illusion. On his blog, Riding Shotgun, he announced that he had quit eating meat, a decision that might lead him to give up cooking altogether. He wrote, “Animals be talking to me. They told me… stop. Stop, Roy. Please.”

When I asked him about it on the phone, he said he was shocked by the response he got. Chef friends called, worried. “I saw Vinny”—Dotolo, one of the chefs at Animal, and a fellow-traveller—“the other day at the Rene Redzepi speech at U.C.L.A. It was like, ‘Yo, you alright, dude?’ ” But, he went on, “I don’t think anyone felt like I betrayed them. You can still get the chewy pork belly any time you want.”

That is a key piece of information for his followers. The restaurants will stay open, and the old standbys will remain unchanged. Using more vegetables is, at least for now, mainly a culinary challenge. “Now everything I do, I’m trying to cook in vegetable state of mind, and if meat flies in meat flies in,” he said. “I’m like a boxer tying one arm behind my back, to see if I can knock you out.” Now at Chego, instead of just the Beefy T;—prime rib in chili fried rice—Choi is serving the Leafy T, featuring tofu. A special named MCA, in honor Adam Yauch, of the Beastie Boys, who died last week, is a rice bowl with mushrooms, cauliflower, and asparagus. I am quite certain that someone in my family will have tried it before the week is out.

Photograph by Axel Koester/The New York Times.