Family, motherhood inspire American chef and restaurant owner to 'cook with love'
Becoming a mother has changed the way Esther Choi looks at food, she told Fox News Digital at the opening of her new restaurant in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Choi, a chef and television star, was celebrating the opening of her new restaurant, Mokbar, located in Caesars Palace.
"Being a mom to a 1-year-old has changed everything about how I view food," Choi told Fox News Digital. (See the video at the top of this article.)
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"I generally tend to love to cook for people, but cooking for my baby? Next level," she said. "So much fun."
Choi, 38, gave birth to her son, Leonardo, on Feb. 22, she announced on Instagram.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the culinary expertise of his mother, little Leonardo is being exposed to a wide variety of foods at a young age.
"I feed him everything," Choi said, adding that she wants "his palate to be really great and vast."
"That's the type of chef I am as well," she said, noting she cooks with an "open mind."
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"I love all different types of food. So, cooking for my kid has been one of the best joys in life. And that's kind of how I have always been," she said.
As a chef, Choi said she "loves cooking for people, and my kid is no different."
"It's the heart that you have as a chef – to want to cook for others."
Choi has always been influenced by her family, even long before she became a mother herself. She told Fox News Digital that her grandmother is her "biggest inspiration," not only as a chef but as a human being.
"She is one of those people who has really such a special impact on my life," Choi said. "She raised me to love people. And then how you show that love was through food, for her. And I learned that from her."
Her grandmother cooked everything with her whole heart, Choi said — which Choi believes is the secret of why her grandmother's food tasted so good.
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"And so that's what I always like to keep in my mind. That's my motto as a chef," she said. "Cook with your heart, cook with love and think about the person who you are cooking for."
Mokbar's newest location in Vegas is Choi's fifth restaurant and the first outside the New York area.
Choi's other restaurants include Mokbar locations, as well as a gastropub in New York's Lower East Side named Ms. Yoo after her grandmother.
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Mokbar's menu is "a twist on modern Korean food," she told Fox News Digital, featuring "very authentic Korean flavors, but done in a modern way."
Many of the items feature Choi's favorite food, kimchi, she said.
"We make about five different types [of kimchi] in house, and it's really special to me because kimchi is kind of the heart of Korean culture," she said.
As her other restaurants do, Mokbar's menu has items that are either Choi's grandmother's recipes or are directly inspired by her cooking.
"The mandu, which is a Korean dumpling, is my grandmother's recipe. As with the kimchi, as with the Korean barbecue," she told Fox News Digital.
"A lot of the flavors you see here are my grandmother's recipes, and [they are] the flavors that I grew up with."