Drink of Choice

Emily Chang has held C-suite roles at Starbucks, Apple, IHG, and Chagee. She’s also the founder of something called The Spare Room - never planned, never formalized, never publicized. Over 25 years, she and her husband quietly took in 18 kids. Child brides. A boy with hydrocephalus. A baby born with spina bifida.

Before any of that, she was pre-med - until a hospital hallway in 7th grade changed everything. And before that, there was a baby named Delceda, whose parents tried to cook her alive.

Shay Fan grew up in Dallas, took the LSAT, lasted a year at a law firm, and ran. What came after was tech PR in San Francisco back when Twitter was still Twitter, a stint at Skype, marketing cancer drugs for a pharma giant, a desk outside a Hollywood producer's office, and now Meta, where she runs Instagram for Business and a program built for the AAPI community. She's also a published children's author with a favorite icebreaker: millions of people have seen her face and don't know her name.

Her drink of choice was an espresso tonic. What she got was espresso in a skull glass and a bottle of Pellegrino, because Han asked an AI instead of asking her... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Ted and Yong Kim were working at an ad agency, making Korean barbecue sausages in their apartments at night. Then Yelp put them on its homepage as the hottest new restaurant in LA, which was a problem, because they didn't have one. What followed was fifteen years of food trucks, a Food Network win, lines around the block on Sawtelle, four restaurants, and eventually zero. Sid sits down with the brothers over three bottles of soju to talk about what those lines never showed, and what they're building now that the restaurants are gone... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Michael Lee grew up in Minnesota, got talked out of a music industry job by his parents, and went to Goldman Sachs instead. He ended up in Hollywood anyway, and became CFO of Perfect World Pictures, a Chinese company that co-financed most of Universal's slate from 2016 to 2024, including the Jurassic World sequels.

He's a Korean American who doesn't speak Mandarin, or much Korean. So how did he land the job? He also explains why a ghost can sink a film in China, and has a take on Sony and KPop Demon Hunters that runs against the internet consensus... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Daniel Yi covered a serial killer's trial for the LA Times. Years later a LinkedIn ad popped up for a company he'd never heard of. He looked it up, realized it was a weed company, and turned it down — then took it anyway after one phone call. That job led to the next one. The label behind BTS.

We also get into what actually killed newspapers, and what AI keeps getting wrong about his own name... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Hyepin Im was an MBA student in 1992, in Koreatown for meetings days before it burned. What bothered her afterward wasn't only the destruction. It was watching store owners who'd lost everything get talked about as perpetrators rather than victims.

So she did something almost nobody was doing then. She went to First AME, a Black church in South LA, and asked how to help. That decision turned into more than thirty years of building between two communities the riots were supposed to have set permanently against each other — and into FACE, the organization she still runs.

Along the way she's spent those decades getting Asian Americans into rooms they'd never been invited to. The part that will stay with you is what she found once she got there. Agencies publish outcomes by race and simply leave the Asian numbers out. She shows up with the figures they didn't print, and they're not what anyone expects.

Also: what she calls her best choice, and the small habit she spent years too embarrassed to practice... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

No guest this week. Just Sid and Han on the Korean wave - where it came from, and why they think K-food is the last piece to fall.

Han has spent his career advising K-pop companies, starting with a JYP internship in 2009 when the Wonder Girls were selling their own CDs at the merch table. He has a theory about why BTS broke globally that has nothing to do with the music.

Sid comes at it from food, and he has a number that reframes the whole thing. America has around 85,000 Mexican restaurants. Guess how many Korean ones. Millions of people now know what gimbap is, but not everyone can buy it.

We also get into trainees as athletes, what it actually costs to break a group, virtual idols, and the ambitious project Sid is trying to launch right now... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Tony Moon immigrated from Germany at five, grew up in Hollywood through the LA of the 1980s, and was nineteen when the Rodney King verdict came down. The internet later claimed him as one of the original Rooftop Koreans, a meme he didn't know existed until 2020. His account complicates it. He argues there were three separate riots that week, not one, and that what happened in Koreatown was not what the popular narrative says. He talks about the friend who called only him, the older uncles pushing cars into a perimeter on Olympic and New Hampshire, and why the story has to be written down before the people who lived it are gone.

We also get into his book, out next month, and his two answers at the end: his best choice was faith, his worst was joining a gang at fourteen. He refuses to excuse it... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Flowsik was born and raised in Queens, discovered by Ice-T at 18, and signed to Cash Money at the height of Drake and Lil Wayne - then watched the label shelve his album and go silent for four years. He won a MAMA Award with Aziatix, blew up in Korea on Show Me The Money, took four years off working in HR at a shipping company, and came back to do it all again as a contestant with nothing left to prove. Koreans call him the Korean DMX. The voice that earned him that name arrived at a church retreat when he was 13, and his music teacher told him it was coming before it did. We talk about ego, reinvention, cultural appropriation, and why he's making country music now... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Johnny Kyungu, or The Fermentation Guy, is half English, half Korean, and somehow more passionate about Korean fermentation than most Koreans. With nearly four million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, he built one of the most unexpected food audiences on the internet - starting with a single anonymous video of kkaennip jangajji that got 50,000 views overnight. We sat down with him in Seoul to talk about makgeolli, nuruk, the science behind fermentation, and how a craving during COVID changed the entire trajectory of his life... here on the Drink of Choice.