I recently interviewed chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson about their joint fast-food concept, LocoL, for an article in a men’s magazine. The LocoL idea is as simple as it is revolutionary: Serve good, healthy, well-sourced food at a fast-food price point.

Choi is, of course, the L.A. street-food king who made his name with a fleet of Kogi Korean BBQ and taco trucks. Patterson oversees the Michelin-starred restaurant Coi in San Francisco.

As is so often the case with magazine articles, though, I used but a fraction of the interviews I did with the two chefs (Choi on the phone, Patterson via email), and therefore communicated very little of what is so truly important about this idea — that everyone deserves to be cared for and served great tasting, high-quality food. Not just those of us who have the luxury of food being…well, a luxury.

Everyone.

Seeing that there wasn’t much in the way of new interviews or articles as LocoL finally approached its opening day, I decided to edit my two original interviews into a sort of Q&A format and publish a lot of what was left on the cutting-room floor here on Medium.

Feel free to lift quotes and material for your own articles; a link back and citation is, of course, always appreciated.

The first LocoL store opens officially in the Watts neighborhood of L.A. on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Here’s why, according to Choi and Patterson — and what to expect, now and down the line.

“The head of the snake is the cheeseburger. If we’re going to cut the head off the snake, we’re going to attack that first.”

How did you come up with the idea for LocoL?

Daniel Patterson: The idea for Locol started with a charity foundation I started in San Francisco called the Cooking Project. We work with inner-city youth, often from Larkin Street youth services, to teach them basic cooking skills so they can feed themselves healthy food. What I realized is that the biggest problem is that the kids had no taste memory of real food. It’s hard to follow a recipe if you don’t know what the end result should taste like. Also, we teach about 500 kids a year, which is good, but not enough to create wider change. I like projects that change the world around them. So I thought what if there was a community-embedded fast food restaurant that could serve real food at fast food price points? That could reach a lot of people. So that’s how it started. And then when I saw Roy’s speech at MAD I knew he was the guy.

Roy Choi: I gave a speech in 2013 in Copenhagen at the MAD conference, which is held by Noma and Rene Redzepi. The theme was “Guts,” and I talked about hunger. I took it as an opportunity to try to just put a mirror and a megaphone up to the chefs. It was a moment in time. It was the best chefs in the world all in one tent and I was like, “Listen, man, if we collectively get together and do something, then we can start to feed neighborhoods that we’re not reaching currently.” It was just kind of a call to awareness. I didn’t know what would come of it. And then went back to my regular life. And then a couple of months later Daniel called me and he’s like, “Listen, man, I really was affected by your speech. I have this idea.” So he flew down to L.A. and told me the idea, and it was one of those things like when a friend says, “Jump in the car, let’s go to the beach.” It was kind of like, of course. Let’s do it.

How did you settle on the LocoL name?

Roy Choi: I went through a bunch of different names and then I spelled “local” wrong. Seriously, I spelled it wrong and then I looked at it and I was like, “Whoa, that’s kind of dope. That’s nice.” And it sounded right and everything. I showed it to Daniel and he loved it too and the name stuck.

How important is it, in order to make an idea like LocoL succeed, with $5 or $6 price points, for the people that you’re creating the menus for to understand the message that “this is real food and it’s good food”?

Roy Choi: I think the message that is more important is that we care for them, and that someone cares for them. That the choices that we make are because we truly care about your growth and your development and your life and we’re investing in you. If that entails healthy choices of food, then great. But that’s only one facet of it. It also entails economic growth, knowledge, teaching, developmental growth, opportunities. It involves providing communities with new futures and outlooks and pathways and bridges for people to invest in communities. Show successful, thriving, profitable businesses in inner cities so that people can invest, so banks can invest, so investors can invest and provide more opportunities and growth for our communities, for our families, for our kids, for our friends. To me healthy is one part of that. But it’s not all of it. To me, it all wraps around just caring and giving shit and saying everything we have, everything we are, we’re here and we’re giving it to you and we hope you love it. This is a very complex project, far more nuanced and, yes, radical, then anyone realizes. The deeper we get the more we realize that the food is the least important part. This is about creating jobs, and creating a sense of possibility in communities where hope is in short supply. We have to reimagine every aspect of what a restaurant is, from the supply line to the kitchen culture to the business model.

How does the relationship between the two of you work?

Daniel Patterson: It’s been really an amazing partnership. Everyone thinks we seem different, but we have very similar values, and our cooking minds have a lot in common.

Roy Choi: I think I found my soul mate in a way. We really complete each other, like finishing each other’s sentences in many different ways. We’re able to fill in each other’s gaps a little bit. We’re both proficient in our own things. Like any human, even like a boxing champion has an Achilles heel. And so what we’re able to do together is kind of compensate for each other’s Achilles heels. So together we’re almost unstoppable. Almost like two MCs going back and forth to make one song. Like we can truly be fluid with each other and I can step back in the kitchen when I know Daniel is better to step forward. And then he can step back in the kitchen when he knows that I may have a final answer to the riddle on a flavor. And together we become better. Hopefully it continues. Because the more and more Daniel and I become cohesive, the more and more LocoL will become cohesive.

LocoL is built around this healthy fast-food-style burger you developed. And if you can sell that, then you know you can sell the whole idea. Am I reading that right?

Roy Choi: When we started we knew we had to go with something that was iconic and was being fed to the public. Every single day to us we look at ourselves as activists and revolutionaries in bucking the system. To do that we’re going straight after things that are infiltrating our communities and we’re going to flip them. The head of the snake is the cheeseburger. If we’re going to cut the head off the snake, we’re going to attack that first and we’re going to try to grill a better burger that still meets all of the instinctual and psychological touch points that a double cheeseburger will hit, but is made with ingredients like we would cook a dish in our restaurants and that exists in that place at that price and after you eat it you don’t feel like your life fucking sucks. The LocoL burger is made with a rice bun. The patty is cut with grains and quinoa and farro and tofu. We use real cheese, not processed. It has a sauce that we created to try to mimic all of the flavors combined in a burger, like the relish, pickle, the mustard, the mayo, and the Thousand Island dressing and the ketchup, all in one kind of emulsified sauce. But then all the ingredients of that are based around real cooking principles: sweating onions, garlic, adding chili paste, tomatoes, cooking those down with water. I think I’ve said this before, but when you eat it, it feels like you’re eating a greasy cheeseburger, but then after you eat it, it feels like you’ve eaten just like a real fluffy bowl of rice. That’s how light you feel. It’s really amazing. But you feel full.

Taste-wise, how do you think it stacks up?

Roy Choi: As a chef and as a guy who’s cooking for a lot of people right now, like I can’t lie to myself. If it wasn’t hitting those points I’d have to be honest. I’d have to look in the mirror and say, “Yo, this is not hitting it right now.” Because it’s very important for us to come out of the gate and have these items become cravable and become addictive. I feel they do. I really do. I think we got it to a point where once you eat it you’re going to want another one. And it’s going to make people talk about it and take pictures of it. That’s the most important thing, that it is addictive.

I have a friend, Bryan Mayer, who is a butcher who deals solely with local and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat. He thinks it’s possible to have something like a fast-food burger chain around the country, but the expectation should just be that it tastes like the areas that it comes from and not like a place like McDonald’s where it tastes the same everywhere. Is that sort of a vision for LocoL as well, where you’re able to have this blueprint but the burger might taste a little bit more like Upstate New York in New York and a little bit more like the Central Valley in L.A.?

Roy Choi: Yeah, and that does come through the cheese, through the meat that’s being used. The sauce and some of the components will always be kind of a unifying factor. But we already thought the cheese can be different. Like in Wisconsin it would be different. We’re starting with a Jack cheese, a California Jack cheese, because it’s a California company. But then as it moves to a place like Wisconsin or Chicago, it could be a different cheese. And it could be a different blend of meat, a different cow. And so yes, I think that’s possible. But I do also believe that there has to be some sort of unifying factor to pull it together so that it does signify LocoL, the brand. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be naturally different. It will have to have its own identity in each city it goes to. But it will also have to represent LocoL.

“Imagine that you’d been raised on garbage because there was nothing else where you grew up. And then a restaurant opened that was beautiful, where people from your own community cooked delicious food with love and care and served it to you like you’re family, for the same price. Would you reject that in favor of the disgusting, almost sadistically indifferent food you grew up on? Nah.”

Let’s say there’s a 12-year-old kid who has been raised on fast food, and now he or she has a choice: There’s a large fast-food chain and there’s LocoL next door. Do you think it’s achievable where the kid is going to crave and want the LocoL burger, and maybe even sort of understand what the food is made of, rather than choosing the traditional fast-food option?

Roy Choi: That’s our goal and that’s why we’ve spent as much time on branding and ideation. We are a food. And I know that I’m trying to really harness what I know about feeding people. The Kogi taco is pretty effective in the world. We have our own fan base. We have our own culture. If I do a Kogi taco truck next to a McDonald’s I think people will choose Kogi over McDonald’s. And so to me that’s the same kind of confidence and attitude I have towards LocoL, is that in many ways I want to almost confront the beast face on and look for a location right next to a McDonald’s and just start cooking and start pressing a whole-court defense and just press and provide a more holistic experience for the people. And I truly believe that the people will choose. And if we’re not good enough, then they’ll challenge us to find ways to get better. I’m not naïve to think that McDonald’s will go out of business because of LocoL. But what we can do is we can pressure them and we can open people’s options.

Daniel Patterson: It’s funny, we get asked that question a lot, about if we can win over people who have been raised on fast food. If you think about it, it’s a strange perspective. Imagine that you’d been raised on garbage because there was nothing else where you grew up. And then a restaurant opened that was beautiful, where people from your own community cooked delicious food with love and care and served it to you like you’re family, for the same price. Would you reject that in favor of the disgusting, almost sadistically indifferent food you grew up on? Nah. Neither will the people who live in that community. That doesn’t mean that they’ll like everything on the menu, but my experience is that in general humans physiologically gravitate towards delicious food. The kids we teach at the Cooking Project who grew up on fast food absolutely love the food that we cook together, even though it’s often new to them, because it tastes good.

Roy Choi: Let’s say LocoL does make a difference and the kids actually do make a choice. Then what it does is it pressures McDonald’s or Taco Bell or Burger King to really look at their model, and say, “Wait a second, the train has passed us and we got to get this going.” Ultimately that’s what our dream is.

So it’s sort of like an “all ships rise together” thing.

Roy Choi: Yeah, that’s really what the dream is. We really want all boats to rise, all ships to rise. Again because if all ships do rise then that means everyone wins in some way. The current businesses and investors in fast food and conglomerates will continue to thrive, which is fine. That’s business. But then they’ll be doing it in different ways and we can turn back the clock a little bit and go back to some fundamental and empathetic ways of how to run business. And then the communities will thrive because they’ll be getting better food.

Daniel Patterson: The restaurant will also have many connections with the community, from creating jobs to working with schools, so our hope is that it becomes their place, one that the community is proud of, that means something more then just a place to eat.