Roy Choi wants to be your new best friend in Vegas

Dec. 28, 2018 5 AM PT

It’s three minutes before service begins, and Roy Choi is calmly walking around his immaculate, open kitchen, carrying a deli cup full of rattling plastic black spoons. Opening night at Best Friend, his Las Vegas restaurant inside the Park MGM hotel, probably should be a hectic affair. It’s the first restaurant outside Los Angeles for the chef best known for his Kogi BBQ trucks and his first opening since closing his restaurants at the Line Hotel in Koreatown and since transitioning Locol into a catering operation.

But Choi, wearing a black beanie with the letters BF stitched onto the front, is noticeably chill. And there’s a smile on his face as he shuffles through his kitchen’s kimchi fried rice station, banchan station, taco station and pastry kitchen, pausing to dip his spoon into sauce after sauce.

“Taste this,” he says, beckoning, the tip of a spoon full of a pale pink concoction held just inches from my mouth. “It’s the slippery shrimp sauce.”

Chef Roy Choi is photographed in front of his new restaurant, Best Friend, located inside the Park MGM hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

And so we taste: just-tart-enough ponzu; the spicy, creamy slippery shrimp sauce; a tamarind hot pot sauce laced with chile; an electric salsa verde. Each is punchier than the next, the flavors big and assertive.

As the clock strikes 5 p.m., Diego Echavarria, the executive chef, huddles with the kitchen staff and with a loud “go team,” Best Friend is open, and the ticket printer hums to life.

“Ten years ago at this time, in this month, I was selling tacos on the street with no money in my bank, scared of what was coming next but invigorated and filled with a whole new life that I couldn’t walk away from,” Choi says. He’s looking out over his new dining room, a sprawl of color and movement.

A neon sign proclaiming “Roy Choi is my best friend” welcomes you into a store — full of thousands of chips, sweets, instant ramen packs and knickknacks — that serves as the restaurant entrance. The store’s counters are covered in stickers so that they look like the bottom of your sixth-grade skateboard. Slushy machines churn boozy concoctions like Hennessy and Cola.

Chef Roy Choi left, has a discussion with his executive chef Diego Echavarria, while inside the kitchen of his new restaurant, Best Friend, located inside the Park MGM hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

“The whole idea behind Best Friend was to bring a capsule of L.A. to Vegas. The L.A. I know,” says Choi, who often appoints himself ambassador for the entire city. “The whole restaurant is a gift to L.A. and to Vegas and to myself and to the spirits.”

The pops of pink and neon yellow, the share-size boxes of Hello Panda, the cans of Spam, the shot glasses, the mini marquee over the cash register showcasing Kogi short rib tacos, the photo of Bruce Lee tacked to a wall. The psychedelic red tunnel you have to walk through to get to the dining room. It’s all distinctly Choi, a brand he’s painstakingly developed over the last decade.

He’s prone to saying things like “it’s written in the tea leaves” and describes his process as “a little mystical and witch and warlock.” He’s the first to recognize that he’s an easy target for critics, but he is relentlessly committed to the Roy Choi-ness of it all.

The whole restaurant is a gift to L.A. and to Vegas and to myself and to the spirits.

— Roy Choi

“Creatively, whenever I get into a relationship, I’m always very upfront from the beginning,” Choi says. He’s checking and tasting almost every dish that comes out of the kitchen. “I trust myself to be the oversight committee of everything, of sound, music, lighting, design, uniforms, culture, philosophy, kindness, employee morale, relationships, the food. And through that, it just naturally becomes authentic.”

As the dining room starts to fill, servers dressed in green and red Adidas track suits whisk sizzling skillets of spicy pork and galbi to the tables. Potted plants cascade and sway from the ceiling — an ode to Commissary, the restaurant he ran in a poolside greenhouse at the Line Hotel. Food runners in rolled-up khakis and bucket hats fill bowls of banchan across the line.

“We really wanted to represent the L.A. hip-hop look,” Choi says. “And Rihanna was my muse for everything. I wanted the restaurant to feel as bad as her on all levels.”

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Chef Roy Choi is photographed next to a mural located inside the dining room of his new restaurant, Best Friend, inside the Park MGM hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.