Friend or Foe: An LA Food Story

I recently went to LA food truck hero Roy Choi's Best Friend in Las Vegas. It was very good...a colorful conveyor belt of creative and tasty Korean-themed foodstuffs in a whimsical faux street/speakeasy setting. Banchan...on point. Bulgogi tacos...great. Grilled shrimp...even better. Kimchi fried rice...nice. I'd go again for sure and bring friends and family to revel in the delicious excess.

Now...just because it's good doesn't mean that it was any more real than anything else in the sweaty plastic swirl of artifice and commerce of the Strip. Our bro-waiter, seven years too old for this job, would allow me to unironically stamp multiple squares on our Urban Dictionary faux-hipster bingo card. The entry "bodega" bar theme was like 3-D wallpaper, with repeated patterns of fake bagged snack foods arranged with a military degree of whimsy around the walls. The back patio was under a painted sky just as impressively stupid and tacky as the one in the Paris casino. No matter how loud the motif screamed "this is LA, homie," all I could hear was "this is Vegas, sucker."

Our boy Roy had sold out.

To clarify, there is nothing wrong in my mind with selling out for the cash. Roy Choi started a food truck that blew up so spectacularly that it resulted in this panting replica of real LA street food...good for him.

But the experience got me thinking this morning. This gentrified experience...street, but not really street...Korean, but purposefully inauthentic...BBQ, but on an expense account...is it a good thing or just a Vegas thing?

And frankly, who am I to say? As a white male of certain means, there is no doubt that I am certainly not the ultimate arbiter of what's authentic or inauthentic Korean food. Growing up in the South, I can lay greater claim to some BBQ expertise, but not the Korean kind. Hopefully, I've been to and eaten at enough places in the world to make my take on the overall issue of the stuff you eat credible or at least referenceable.

I'm telling on myself by starting my Roy Choi experience in Vegas. But I'd like to know: can I bang a big enough hole in my own white privilege to understand better where a guy like Roy started? To improve my chances of having an opinion that matters to anyone else, I committed to do some research. I definitely needed to go to an original Roy Choi place in LA.

So, I hit Google Maps and headed for Locol. Why not Kogi, the brick and mortar evolution of Choi's eponymous food truck that started his run, you ask?

"Primarily because I am an idiot," I can answer in retrospect.

I drove up Wilmington Avenue to Compton the day after I got back from Vegas to find that Locol is boarded up and has been since mid-2018. The people on the street near the shuttered restaurant in Watts looked at me with the knowing glances of those who knew I was new to the neighborhood, and likely not staying long.

So much for me knowing anything about anything. My deep dive missed the pool entirely.

As I shook my head at my hubris-drenched false start, I found an LA Times article about Locol and lots of quotes from Choi. I read about Choi's "local guy makes good" story, and his desire to insert a healthy food place into the context of a community that had been labeled a "food desert." The concept was accessible and nutritious scratch food prepared and served up by neighborhood employee/customers. Choi announced his intent to open "a million" Locols worldwide and become the humble, local guy who heroically divines better than everyone else what will work in the real world. Roy Choi wanted to save us all, one hormone-free fusion taco at a time.

But now Locol is padlocked and Roy is calling Vegas his second home. I stopped reading the article when it talked about Roy "clearing his head" while sitting on the shores of Lake Tahoe upon Locol's closing and musing about writing a book on his experience so that others might learn from it. Because I know that two years down the road, Roy was selling me a delicious though vacuous gold-plated version of his LA street food experience at a casino on the Vegas Strip.

So...yeah.

Selling out is more than okay...hell, it's the goal. Just smile and wink. Give in to it. I'm not mad at you, Roy...though I wonder if you are? Maybe a little?

After I slunk away south on Wilmington from the closed Locol with my own lessons to learn, I still was looking for lunch. I passed a place that said, "BBQ and Soul Food" and immediately started looking for a place to pull a U-turn.

The place was called Rena G's. I don’t know owns it or coooks there, but it was in a spot that had obviously lived other lives before its current one. It had bars on the windows, and an old barber shop sign on a strangely attached room off of the main structure that looked like it was once a drive-up ice cream stand or old Fotomat booth. It was in an outparcel parking lot in front of a dubious motel. The guys who worked there were outside in the lot as I parked and headed back inside when I walked up.

I ordered through the heavy screen, asking the guy I could barely see what was good. This was as much a question as it was an admission that I had no clue...an al fresco confessional to a priest of an unknown denomination. My only prayer was that we both believed in Good Food. He told me rib tips. Greens and black-eyed peas. And he said he'd throw in a corn muffin straight from the oven. I told him I hoped that he was gonna say that.

I ate it in my car while driving past hundreds of local places on the way home. It was pretty damn good.

Maybe I'm learning.