Bourdain’s Field Notes
LOS ANGELES, April 2013—Good Korean kids grow up to be doctors or lawyers. There are expectations—but what if you’re a bad Korean? What if you become a chef or an artist?
We traveled to Los Angeles to explore Koreatown and what it means to be Korean-American. I meet up with a “bad Korean,” Roy Choi, a chef who managed to harness the strange and terrible power of social media to alert customers where to find his much-loved food trucks. He dropped out of law school, trained at the CIA and Le Bernardin, and then started his ever-growing empire with a purely LA invention: Korean tacos.