Roy Choi is coming back to Anaheim, his onetime home and stomping grounds, this time with a restaurant of his own.
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Best Friend, the chef’s Korean- and Los Angeles-inspired restaurant at Park MGM in Las Vegas, will open a second location at OCVibe, slated for fall 2027. It will mark the concept’s California debut and the first restaurant announced for the budding Anaheim district’s “signature collection.”
For Choi, the opening is less of an expansion than a return to the place that, in part, helped form him.
Although raised in Los Angeles, Choi spent his early teen years and high school era in Orange County — specifically, in Anaheim, Orange and Villa Park. His parents operated Silver Garden, an Anaheim restaurant near Brookhurst Street and Lincoln Avenue, during an era when Garden Grove’s Koreatown and Little Saigon were starting to take shape.
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“A lot of the way that I express myself goes back to those times in Orange County,” said Choi in an interview. “If I didn’t have that experience in my life, I don’t know if I could cook the food that I do or create the spaces that I do.”
Those years introduced a young Choi to the glories of new wave music and ska and punk, along with BMX, skateboarding, burger stands, taquerias and that particular geography of North County: Anaheim Boulevard, Garden Grove Boulevard, the Santa Ana River, Orange Circle and even Camelot Golfland right off the 91.
Choi described his adolescence as a “surf and turf platter” split between growing up as a latchkey kid in Los Angeles and coming of age in the Orange County suburbs. The collision of those two worlds, he said, taught him how to make restaurants that speak to different generations, cultures and diners.
Now he plans to fold those memories back into Best Friend’s second-ever spot.
“It’s going to be in the DNA,” he said. “Every little thing, from the design and the menu, we will highlight the cities, we’re going to highlight the streets, we’re going to highlight the little idiosyncrasies and nuances” of O.C.
His upcoming Anaheim restaurant, he said, will not be a carbon copy of the Las Vegas original. Choi hopes to work with local artists and photographers, while developing food that pulls from his earliest independent explorations of burger shops and taquerias in Anaheim, Fullerton (he’s a Cal State Fullerton grad, receiving an honorary doctorate in 2024) and Santa Ana. Specific dishes have yet to be announced.
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Choi’s return also carries more weight than the arrival of any other celebrity chef. In 2008, he helped launch Kogi BBQ, a Korean-Mexican food truck, whose short-rib tacos, roaming trucks and early use of social media turned it into a Los Angeles phenom. Kogi also helped usher in the contemporary food-truck era and made Choi one of the most influential chefs to emerge from Southern California.
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He later opened restaurants, penned cookbooks, authored a memoir and expanded into television. His credits include “Broken Bread,” a series focusing on food insecurity and social injustice, that earned him Emmy and James Beard awards; Netflix’s “The Chef Show” with Jon Favreau; and even a cameo in a bawdy-foodie Katy Perry video. Best Friend, which opened at Park MGM in 2018, gathers much of the chef’s cooking and personal history into a neon-lit space modeled, in part, after a Los Angeles corner liquor store. Part bodega, part eatery.
Being the first “signature restaurant” chef announced for OCVibe (i.e., dining spaces not in the Katella Commons market hall) is a major responsibility he doesn’t take lightly.
“I wear that as a badge of honor,” he revealed. “I’m a shy person, but when the ball’s in my hands, I’ll step up.”
Best Friend will join the broader OCVibe development surrounding Honda Center, a 100-acre mixed-use project that will bring new dining, entertainment and third spaces to the area. More than 35 food-and-drink concepts will open at the complex.
Among them is Katella Commons, a two-story, roughly 50,000-square-foot market hall scheduled to open in early 2027. Plans call for 21 kitchens, six bars and lounges, around 1,000 indoor and outdoor seats, three event spaces and even — why not? — a podcast studio.
Previously announced Katella Commons chefs include Danielle Duran-Zecca and Alessandro Zecca of Amiga Amore, Alberto Bañuelos of Burritos La Palma, Alex Garcia and Elvia “La Bruja” Huerta of Evil Cooks, Kanate Ungkasrithongkul and Anita Lin who will bring the curry-focused Khao Soi; and Chrysalis and Darkroom’s Zach Scherer, who will develop pizza and fried chicken concepts for the hall.
Best Friend will be separate from Katella Commons, arriving later in 2027 as part of OCVibe’s collection of full-service restaurants. Additional chefs are expected to be announced in the coming months.
But Orange County has never strayed too far from his heart: Cho still visits Orange County for Vietnamese food along Bolsa Avenue and Korean spots in Garden Grove, while naming Disneyland churros as “the best thing on Earth.” He also gives high praise to 61 Hundred Bread and Le Hut Dinette as two of his current local favorites. But bringing Best Friend to Anaheim offers him something dining elsewhere in the county can’t — namely, the chance to return to his source material.
“I just want to tell the people of Orange County that I love them, that I’m coming back home,” said Choi. “We’re going to build the best restaurant we possibly can.”
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