His parents, Brian and Agnes Choi, had planned to make a living selling dried flowers at swap meets. (Eduardo Contreras/The San Diego Union-Tribune)Ĭhoi was 6 years old when his family emigrated from South Korea to the Los Angeles area in 1987.
I had a hunch that chefs might be looking for something new and I wanted to see if I could grow it.”
“You can’t create a market without product. “I call it the supply and demand dilemma,” said Choi. Now the crop is finally viable and oca is being served at chef Richard Blais’ new Carlsbad restaurant Ember & Rye.Ĭhoi said he doesn’t mind failing, because it’s impossible to succeed without trying. For three years, he tried growing the Peruvian root vegetable oca, but the crops were continuously decimated by heat, frost, flooding and wildfire. Many of these crops have failed, either because they didn’t grow well or they didn’t have the unique qualities that chefs were looking for. Over the past six years, Choi has experimented with nearly 130 specialty greens, vegetables, herbs and fruits. that the Chois - avid “Star Wars” fans - have renamed Darth Tater, Starch Maul and Star Tuber. Now home cooks could also buy the farm’s psychedelically colored “Atomic” tomatoes, striped Badger Flame beets and a trio of black and white potatoes from Row 7 Seed Co.
To fill the gap and keep the farm’s 48 workers employed, Choi quickly launched an e-commerce website,, that began shipping specialty produce directly to consumers. “He takes risks with new product and puts it out there, not knowing how it will turn out, and he gets so excited when he’s come up with something new.”īut when the state ordered a lockdown in mid-March 2020, all of his restaurant orders evaporated within 36 hours. “Aaron is growing stuff that other people aren’t growing,” said Eric Bost, executive chef at Jeune et Jolie restaurant in Carlsbad, who first started buying produce from Girl & Dug at his former L.A. Launched in 2016 by Aaron Choi and his wife, Emily Chen Choi, Girl & Dug Farm’s unusual crops have attracted some of the nation’s pickiest customers: Michelin-starred restaurant chefs.īefore the pandemic, the farm’s 60 restaurant customers included all but one of the Michelin-starred chefs in Los Angeles, as well as some of the most acclaimed restaurants in San Diego, New York and Chicago.
Though the menu will shift entirely to the Chin’s lineup, which combines Americanized items and Szechwan dishes, former owner chef Zhu, who has partnered up with Chin’s and will be staying with the restaurant, may feature occasional Shanghainese specials.Hidden inside greenhouses up a dirt road in San Marcos’s Twin Oaks Valley there are plants with leaves that taste like raw oysters, chocolate-flavored mint, lime and pineapple varieties of basil, snow-white strawberries, pink blueberries and full-grown tomatoes as tiny as currants. The restaurant, which recently closed for kitchen renovations, has changed ownership again and will be reopening on July 10 as another outpost of Chin’s Szechwan, a long-running group of local Chinese restaurants which has locations in Carlsbad, Encinitas, Oceanside, Vista, and Rancho Bernardo.Ĭhin’s Szechwan Del Mar will restart operations with takeout and delivery only while the company spends the next few months remodeling the dining room. Though it was renamed as Chef Zhu in 2013 when the former owner and chef of Convoy’s once-great Shanghai City took over, the Del Mar restaurant was still known as Double Happiness, and continued to offer its original Chinese-American classics along with a good number of Shanghainese and Szechwan dishes. A fixture on Camino Del Mar for many decades, Double Happiness served Americanized Chinese cuisine in a pleasantly-kitschy old school setting.
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