Roy Choi will bring his Koreatown-coded Las Vegas restaurant, Best Friend, to California next year with a location in Orange County set to open in 2027. The restaurant will debut at OC Vibe, a forthcoming 100-acre mixed-use development in Anaheim, in fall
2027.
When Choi first opened Best Friend at the Park MGM in 2018, expansion did not seem on the horizon. “I don’t have a multi-outlet growth type of fucking outlook,” Choi says. “I just create albums. I just create the thing and then try to make it the best I can.” Eight years later, OC Vibe reached out, and, for Choi, the timing and location felt right. Although Choi mainly grew up in Los Angeles, his family moved to Orange County while he was a teenager; he graduated from Villa Park High School and later California State University, Fullerton. “It’s very full circle,” Choi says. “Literally the riverbed that OC Vibe lives on is where I first started smoking weed.”
He recalls memories of watching the Honda Center being built while biking up and down Katella and getting his first tattoo just a few blocks away. “It just felt like the universe was calling,” Choi says.
With Best Friend’s Vegas debut, Choi hoped to bring a piece of Los Angeles — and its immigrant communities — to the Mojave Desert. “The lens that I used when we first opened it was, like, if they could create all of these fantasy lands on the Vegas strip, let me recreate LA, but in our own way, in a different way,” he says. Stepping through the liquor store front, guests get greeted by photographs of Los Angeles as West Coast hip-hop bounces off the walls and lush greenery hangs overhead. Still, Choi says Orange County was always part of the restaurant’s story. “I never really knew the borders because I moved from LA to O.C. back to LA,” he says. “In one day I could go from Koreatown to Little Saigon to Carson up to West Covina. That’s always kind of been reflected in the food that I cook, the places that I try to create, even the shows that I’m a part of. I always try to represent this whole region.”
As Choi develops the menu for Best Friend’s Orange County outpost, he weighs what will carry over from Las Vegas. “It’s weird because Best Friend is such a hit right now in Vegas,” he says. “Right now what I’m going through psychologically and artistically is fighting that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality.” Choi plans to cook through the entire Las Vegas menu, along with a handful of previous hits that have cycled through over the years, to decide what will make the cut at the new location. As the opening nears, Choi will also head down to Orange County to eat through the region’s restaurants. “I think I’ll get a lot of inspiration from seeing what’s happening right now in Orange County, remembering what it was like when I was a teenager, and then mixing those two,” he says. “Maybe I’ll create five or six dishes.”
Choi wanted to approach the restaurant’s design in Orange County differently from the Vegas original while still keeping the same spirit. New York-based Home Studios will collaborate with Choi on design; the firm is best known for its work with restaurants such as New York’s Theodora, which leans into soft curves and warm, inviting woods. The firm’s work comes in quite a contrast to Best Friend in Las Vegas, which is what Choi hoped for. “Imagine that beautiful stuff, but then we came and scruffed it up,” he says. “A bunch of skateboarders came and scruffed it up or put a bunch of stickers on it or stuff like that. So we’re kind of looking in that direction.”
In the years since Best Friend’s opening in Las Vegas, Choi has approached his work as a chef with a different mindset. “I truly have found a spiritual kind of zen place where I just want to cook and take care of people,” he says. He compares his current state to that of a jam band, more concerned with creation than with charts or accolades. “I’m just trying to cook delicious food and feed people and nourish people,” Choi says. “It’s not about me anymore. It’s not about me being the chef. I’m just the caterer — I’m like the spiritual caterer in life.”
Alongside the opening of Best Friend, Choi is also still working to revive his cult-favorite rice bowl restaurant, Chego. The restaurant closed its Chinatown location 2019, but in the years since, the chef has teased its return as it looks for a new home. Choi points to challenges in finding a location that would allow the restaurant to remain affordable as part of the impetus for its delay. “It’s really important for me that the bowls aren’t $25,” he says. “I feel like Chego has to still stay at $12, $14 even though the world has changed.” Choi says they are getting “closer and closer” and hope to reopen in 2026, though development may bleed into early 2027. When the restaurant reopens, Choi says he wants for it to feel like a cafeteria for the community; a place anyone can come in for an accessible meal no matter their financial situation. “At this part of my life, that’s who we feed,” he says.
As Choi works toward the opening of Best Friend at OC Vibe, he looks forward to rekindling relationships with the people he grew up around and getting to know the region again. “Now I get a chance to reconnect with the O.C. side of my life,” he says. “It’s really exciting, man. I feel like I get a second wind at creating a whole nother chapter.”
