A gentle blush creeps across chef Esther Choi’s cheeks as she takes her second bite of spicy tteokbokki at a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. She remains mostly unfazed though, on this first episode of First We Feast’s new YouTube series “Heat Eaters.”
Choi continues to scoop up more of the saucy deliciousness with her chopsticks while explaining to two friends the depth of the chili-based sauce used to coat the stir-fried rice cakes. The friends begin to sweat visibly. Choi fans her face. It’s too late now. They’ve all been seduced.
Choi is your fearless guide on this thoughtful spinoff of “Hot Ones,” where we’re taken on a lip-searing flavor crawl through a different cultural enclave in every episode. She begins, of course, with the cuisine she knows intimately.
While Choi is now at the precipice of what I like to affectionately call a gochujang-glazed empire, she started off helping out in her family’s kitchen as a kid. “I started young, eating spicy foods at like 4 or 5 years old,” Choi tells me, as we sip smoothies at a cafe back in New York. “I grew up making kimchi with my grandmother. For little kids, that’s spicy. So it’s something that was kind of built in.”
She opened her first restaurant, Mŏkbar, in Brooklyn in 2014 and has been building from there. Eating at one of her restaurants is a transcendent experience, especially if you grew up embracing bold flavors like I did. I often daydream about the small bowls of kimchi that arrive at the table — daikon, cucumber and the classic napa cabbage — unabashedly glistening in a briney melange of spices. Each bite yields flavors that unfold second by second, underscored by a type of heat that unites every note of sweetness, tartness and umami.
“Risk takers,” Choi says, when I ask her if there’s a “type” of person who loves spicy food. “It’s people who have that free spirit or are willing to try…
Read the full article here
