Roy Choi's fast-food revolution gets funded

Upper left, clockwise: A hamburger using the best ingredients, a bun created just for Loco'l
and their version of chicken nuggets.

THE IDEA of challenging the McDonalds and Burger Kings of the world may sound daunting but the first steps in revolutionizing fast food has been launched.

The dream of celebrity chef's Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi last week reached their goal of $100,000 through the crowd funding platform indigogo. The celebrity chefs and their friends in the foodie world will open their first restaurant serving fast-food standards like hamburgers and chicken nuggets in San Francisco's Tenderloin. A future location in Watts will spread the message of "good" fast food.

Why the Tenderloin and Watts? The people in these low-income neighborhoods often have more than their share of fast food outlets but, as Choi says, that is their main dining out experience. They don't have a choice. Loco'l wants to bring healthy and affordable fast food to those underserved neighborhoods.

Choi and Patterson believe that people will opt for healthier food over the old standbys if they had the opportunity and if it was conveniently located in their neighborhood. Take a look at their R&D session in the video below. The food looks so tempting.

"People love a Big Mac, people love a Quarter Pounder, people love KFC and Church's and Popeye's. People love that. It doesn't help if we're going to just try to say, "Don't eat any of that stuff," they say on their webpage.

"We can sit here and blast all day long about fast food, but the fact is they're winning.

"It would be ignorant and stupid of us to not acknowledge and understand all that. Loco'l is a small bridge; to use the familiar to our advantage to bridge us over to healthier, wholesome ways."

"We want to go toe to toe with fast food chains and offer the community a choice," says Choi.

"Price point, culture, design, hospitality, relevance, and most of all flavor. We will be using all our sciences and knowledge and sixth sense as restaurateurs/chefs to create a concept people love and a menu they crave but keep it all in the pocket, keep it all affordable and delicious and speak directly to what the people want."

The chefs are looking at Oakland and Richmond for future potential sites. After that, the world.

"This is a movement. I see it, I feel it, the proof is there. We’d like it to go global,” Choi told San Francisco's CBS affiliate. “And maybe it’s not just us. Maybe it’s like a collective. Like a hip-hop collective, where it goes global and others take it. And then they morph it and grow it. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I do know that as long as Daniel and I are involved, we’re going to protect and nourish the vision of it and the soul and the culture of it.”

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Chef Roy Choi and friends launch a fast-food revolution

Top chefs take on fast food

Roy Choi demonstrates his cooking "moves" to John Favreau.

DID YOU watch the movie Chef? During the cooking closeups, did you notice the tattoos on the hands and forearms of the chef? The audience thought they were the arms and hands of actor John Favreau's character, they were - in actuality - the hands and arms of Roy Choi, celebrity chef and food truck owner extraordinaire. (He combined the taco with Korean BBQ - voila - fusion cuisine.)

Choi and a few of his celebrity chef buddies are fomenting a revolution in fast food. It began a couple of years ago at a symposium for chefs from around the world meeting in Copenhagen. Choi stood in front of the some of the best chefs in the world and talked about hunger.

“We have a hunger crisis in Los Angeles,” Choi told the Copenhagen audience. “In many parts of our city, this is how we supply our neighborhoods: liquor store, liquor store, liquor store.”

Choi suggested that to combat hunger and access to good food, his peers in the room should leverage their investors so that “for every fancy restaurant that we build, it would be a requirement to build a restaurant in the hood too.”

After that talk, he was contacted by Daniel Patterson, chef-owner of Coi, one of the high-end restaurants in San Francisco. No, I haven't eaten there yet, but professional restaurant reviewers place Coi as one of the best in the foodie-haven city.

Together, the chefs formed Loco'l and started a fundraising campaign through Crowd-Funding to raise $150,000 to build Loco'l first-ever location in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, where the homeless intermingle with tourists and strip joints are next door to pizza joints.

Choi and Patterson test and taste for their Loco'l venture.

“The core of Loco’l has to strike the same nerve that Burger King, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and KFC strike, which is affordability, youthfulness, addictiveness, cultural relevance,” he told TakePart's food editor Willie Blackmore, “because the only people talking smack about fast food, a lot of times, is the people who have the privilege to not have to eat it every day.”

Soon, other top chefs wanted to partner with them.

After the Tenderloin, there are already plans for expansion to cities such as Richmond, Anaheim and across the Bay in East Oakland.

The online fundraiser campaign was started because so many people wanted to get involved. "And it was a way to start building a community; a way for people to participate on a very low level but feel like they are a part of it and it's their thing."

If you want to join the revolution, click here. The deadline is March 19 so there is only a few days to go and they are not even half-way there. Pick what level you want to contribute so you can be eligible for a lot of perks from t-shirts to cooking lessons to an invitation to the grand opening. The revolution is on!

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