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Food & Wine Names KogiBBQ's Choi a 'Best New Chef'
Roy Choi inside the KogiBBQ truck (Tom Andrews/LAist)
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Honorees named as Food & Wine mag's "Best New Chefs" of 2010 will be formally announced and celebrated tonight at a party in NYC, but news of who made the list broke a little earlier via F&W's iPhone app, according to GrubStreet. Los Angeles can boast one person on the list of ten, and it's someone who up until recently has been doing his cooking on the road: KogiBBQ's Roy Choi.
Choi, however, didn't start his career in a truck. Back when we first met Choi aboard the Kogi truck, we learned he "graduated at the top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America and has cooked at Le Bernardin in New York, in Iron Chef Michiba’s kitchen, at the Beverly Hilton and Rock Sugar Pan Asian Kitchen."
After the undeniable smash hit and trend-setting of the KogiBBQ truck enterprise, Choi celebrated his birthday a few weeks late last month with the opening of Chego, a brick-and-mortar restaurant on Overland, specializing in rice bowls.
With Choi the only L.A. chef on the list, it could be said that our food trucks are driving our reputation on the national culinary landscape.
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