Chef David Choi has always been a hustler. As a teenager in St. Louis, he skipped enough school to rack up hundreds of absences while tracking down celebrities at hotels, getting their autographs, and selling them on eBay. A few years later, he worked four jobs to save up for a BMW, only to sell it and put the money into a beat-up food truck. That truck became Seoul Taco.
Fifteen years later, David has built Seoul Taco into a beloved Korean-Mexican restaurant brand, helped bring Prince Street Pizza to Chicago, and found an entirely new lane creating food for immersive pop-ups built around the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Demon Slayer, and One Piece. Through all of it, he’s remained an operator at heart: obsessed with systems, people, hospitality, and figuring out how to make the next thing work.
We talk about learning Korean cooking alongside his mom and grandmother, the chaos of Seoul Taco’s very first service, what it takes to scale a restaurant without losing its culture, delivery-app economics, taking Prince Street to Asia, cooking for BTS, firing an entire staff after an honest-to-god restaurant Royal Rumble, and so much more!
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