Coming Full Circle with Chego

I was sitting outside with my friend on a hot day late last spring, the sun beating down on this formerly anonymous strip mall in Palms, wondering if we could sit inside the newly formed eatery that was built out of an ethnic market of sorts. We were rebuffed and chose to walk away rather than wait for the place to open. We were admittedly early. They weren't ready to open, but the afternoon was beating on our brows. Like, hardcore. The ensuing tit-for-tat that ensued on Twitter and the Kogi blog response to some of our twitter complaints was more of a whimper, dying out, forgotten with the numerous other banter that clogs the interwebs and our digital consciousness, but it wasn't pretty.

A year later, I'm standing outside Chego, the casual eatery that defies a clear-cut definition of "restaurant," chatting with their manager, Micko. Micko's an amiable guy who's sure to display a certain American Rag-type sartorial assemblage, and always up for the restaurant industry requisite fist-pound as greeting. Chego is the culinary brainchild of Roy Choi and the rest of the Kogi crew, who probably realized that mobile cuisine was going to have its heyday and then see a bit of a drop off with the extreme proliferation of Twitter-ized food truck-dom. They smartly retooled for a concept that's more Le Fooding than fast-casual. By Le Fooding, I mean a distinct direction toward good cooking and high-quality ingredients without pretension or unattainable cost. Chego embodies a culinary approach that speaks for itself in the bowl. While there are obvious influences, in this case, Korea, Southeast Asia, Thailand, Phillipines, and Hawaii, Chego calls itself "chillax peasant cuisine from the soul." It's comfort with a bit of attitude, albeit a relaxed one.

Scoops Westside is a stone's throw from Chego, so I get to eat here more often than the average person. I've tried almost everything on the menu, from appetizers to desserts. I try to get every week's special, though it can be a daunting task at times. The bowls are tough to finish on your own - I sometimes goof around and try to weigh them on our digital scales, and some bowl have topped 2 pounds.

There's a certain part of you that has to be either crazy, insanely hungry, inebriated (in whatever form that might be), desperate for a local bite, or otherwise hankering for some real grub to attempt a Chego bowl by yourself, let alone with the company of others. The appetizers are low-level versions of what you might expect at Momofuku (like the pickled kimchi platter), but with lower prices, much lower prices.

Chego is truly the kind of place that you want to have near you so that you can enjoy the convenience that cheap, good food offers. Actually, it defines the direction of food these days - you have corporate giants like Chipotle trying to capture the zeitgeist with a place like Shophouse, and you also have Top Chef contestants like Angelo Sosa replicating the inexpensive Asian-fusion at Social Eatz, with his much celebrated bulgogi burger. With the recession seemingly never at an end in the U.S., people still want comfort, but not quite the heavy, fat-laden stuff of the American mid-century, but flavors sourced from Asia and Latin America.

Roy's taken the concept a step further with A-Frame, with a decidedly unpretentious dining scene that defies anything remotely "fine" about eating out, and making the whole affair fun again, with messy entrees that require you to get your fingers sticky and plates lined with the sauces of more than four different dishes. For a while during this past summer, it was the definitive restaurant of L.A., one-stepping the ever popular Animal Restaurant.

What this all means is that the era of comfort food is now an era of nearly the same equation: cheap(er) plus Asian/Latin American plus big portions. Chego fits the bill pretty well, but I seem to sense a bit of fatigue. It'd be nice to see a complete retooling of the menu, to breathe some new life into it. There are a few dishes that seem like they'd feel missing if they were replaced, like the kimchi sampler, pork belly bowl, the pineapple rice dessert, sriracha chocolate bar, or the ooey gooey fries. I'm sure it'll get some new love from Roy soon - the man is a master of a juxtaposing flavors that seem so obvious yet never done previously.

Chego
3300 Overland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Tuesday-Saturday 5:30!-11:30PM