Roy Choi of A-Frame and Kogi on How Cookbooks Changed His Life

I used to be a chef.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Choi began reading cookbooks as a young boy growing up in West Hollywood.

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A-Frame

12565 Washington Blvd.
Mar Vista, CA 90066

Category: Restaurant > Gastro Pub

Region: West L.A.

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Chego

3300 Overland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Category: Restaurant > Korean

Region: West L.A.

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More About

• Anthony Bourdain Books
• Culinary Institute of America
• Roy Choi
• Food and Cooking
• Cookbooks

That sounds funny, because I still cook. But the thing is, the moment I stepped out of those kitchen clogs, said goodbye to that part of the chef community and cooked from my soul is exactly the moment when I became more of a cook than when I actually was a chef. Heck, with all that's happened in the last three and a half years — feeding the streets, hearing boisterous laughter, seeing shivering smiles — it all seems a little hazy. But I look at the cadaver that once was a white chef coat with a toque and see a guy who studied food till his eyes got blurry, and realize, damn, I really knew nothing about food at all.

Cookbooks entered my life when I was 6 or 7 years old. We lived in West Hollywood at the time; my mom had the books around to learn how to cook "American" food, and I naturally gravitated toward them. She had Betty Crocker and Joy of Cooking, but I especially remember The Fannie Farmer Cookbook — its weight, and its drawings. By seeing sketches of fruits, vegetables and meats, I found myself thinking of food and constructing dishes, even then, in my young mind. I also found Fannie to be someone who really enjoyed eating and celebrating with friends, and I was just fascinated by the pages on table manners and old rituals of having a butter plate for butter or a linen doily for tea. That struck a huge chord with me: Our family life, with our own struggles, wasn't as proper as that. The book became an escape, a portal into a land of enchantment I wished I could enjoy.

In culinary school, my newfound kitchen skills combined with my attraction to cookbooks, and the love turned into a straight-up obsession.

I went to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, the CIA. The campus is an old Jesuit seminary on the banks of the Hudson River. It sits nestled among trees and hillsides below the old bicentennial town of Rhinebeck and the muddy footprints of Woodstock. It's a beautiful place where you can smell smoke from steam locomotives, trek through the woods and find morel mushrooms or happen upon a deer lapping a puddle of clear water from the Adirondacks.

I would've taken in the nature more if it weren't for the Conrad N. Hilton Library. This was filled with books only about food. Rows and rows, floors and floors, racks and racks. Kid in a candy shop, go.

I put a Walkman on and books flew off the shelves and into my hungry hands. I found old, obscure books on China, the Mediterranean, Africa, Native American tribes. Books on plant species and butchering. I was really in love with France at the time — I wanted to be a French chef — so I dove headfirst into books by Waverley Root, Patricia Wells and Richard Olney. Our feeble culinary-student minds were imprinted with the foundations of Escoffier; his book became a kaleidoscope for me, an ever-twisting pinball machine that showed me how to take a basic principle and switch that shit up into bar after bar of lyrical, twisting, freestyle flow.

After I graduated, I found my confidence, my rhythm, through cookbooks. My first job out of culinary school was in Borrego Springs, a small town south of Palm Springs, near the Salton Sea. After the golf season ended in late May and during the summer, I was by myself in the kitchen, without a chef to teach me much, and so I did a lot of the prep and practiced techniques on my own. Alone and lonely.

Luckily, I found Jacques Pepin's La Technique as I was cleaning out the storeroom one day, and I just got lost in this book. Chef Pepin helped me expound on my base knowledge, taught me to refine my techniques and understandings. Then I found La Methode in another box, and down another rabbit hole I went. This was the weirdest place at the weirdest time to have the big revelations of my cooking career, but that's how shit happens, right?

The most important moment came when I picked up The Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers — a rock was thrown through my windowpane, letting in a voice that spoke to my restless soul, one that was courageous and knowledgeable. She had fundamental philosophies that challenged my understandings of what was considered the right way to cook. Judy taught me to love the essence of food and ingredients; it was as simple as her teaching me to let go of fundamental cooking rules such as skimming stocks and seasoning only right before searing meat.

Just take one look at her salting principles — try seasoning hours, even a day, in advance for the salt to penetrate the meat, for example — and you'll get a glimpse of what I'm talking about.

Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating also spoke to me, made me believe in my cooking. Forget measuring, just take a handful of this or that, he writes, or make sure your guests are in a good mood before serving spleen. He says it's done, probably, when you think it's done. This book is how cooks really cook: from the heart, cooking a heart, and with a little tongue-in-cheek while cooking tongue or braising cheeks.