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.”
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.”…