I’m a huge fan of the movie “Chef” starring actor/producer Jon Favreau. Not only does it have a lot of heart but it’s about food and travel (via a cross-country trip in a food truck), making it very Real Food Traveler! To make sure that Jon Favreau was totally believable as a chef, a real pro chef, Roy Choi, consulted, teaching Favreau everything from how to use a knife to how to lean in and maneuver making the perfect grilled cheese. I must have watched that movie a million times. And, it’s one of my Editor’s Picks on my Gifts for Food & Travel Lovers list. After that movie, the Chef Show came out on Netflix, hosted by Favreau and Choi. They made recipes from the movie plus many others. I loved that series too, all three seasons of it. In one episode, Choi took Favreau to his new restaurant, Best Friend, at the Park MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Choi showed Favreau around (more on that below) and they made several dishes. I loved the concept behind the restaurant and the look of it so much, I vowed that if I ever went to Las Vegas, I’d go to Best Friend. Well, my chance came recently, and the experience almost nearly lived up to the hype I’d built up in my head. Here’s a glimpse of what it’s like to go to Best Friend restaurant in Las Vegas.
Save this article about Best Friend Las Vegas to Pinterest to help you plan your visit to the restaurant. Photos and graphic by RealFoodTraveler.com.
The Story Behind Best Friend Las Vegas
I relay this per the episode of The Chef Show in which Chef Roy Choi introduced Jon Favreau to the restaurant when it first opened. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Choi grew up in Los Angeles, California. As an adult, he took his love of street food and opened the Kogi BBQ truck, utilizing social media to build a following that’s still going strong. In 2010, Food & Wine Magazine named him Best New Chef. He currently owns several restaurants including Tacos Por Vida, Alibi Room and Kogi BBQ in addition to co-owning Best Friend.
Best Friend is hard to find and Google Maps will lead you astray. It’s located inside the Park MGM, right off the casino floor. It’s not visible from the outside. What greets visitors (and those stumbling in from said casino), can be confusing which is very purposeful. Best Friend, at first glance, looks like something between a bodega and liquor store, with lots of neon yellow glow, lots or products you can’t actually buy and so much sensory overload, you don’t know where to look first. In fact, it’s hard to figure out where to go to check in. Turns out you head to the “bodega’s” cashier who is really your hostess for the restaurant.
The front room of Best Friend is intended to look like a convenience store rather than a restaurant. Nothing’s for sale – except the t-shirts, hats and other Best Friend merch.
And how does one get into the restaurant-proper? Through a curtain of ceiling-to-floor red, sheer plastic strips just like you’d find in a restaurant walk-in. That’s part of the fun and the illusion that things aren’t all they seem to be in that first room!
Walk through the flapping strips and you enter another world. Part fern bar, part street art, part nightclub and part restaurant. The entire place is intended to be an art installation according to Choi – an immersive experience and deep dive into his life growing up in L.A.
“This is my whole life in a restaurant,” said Choi on The Chef Show, adding that everything in the restaurant is a reflection of some part of his life and his immigrant friends.
Sitting down, I didn’t know where to look first – the menu or all around me to take it all in.
The interior of Best Friend is an homage to Chef Roy Choi’s upbringing in Los Angeles. Bottom, center, is the Chef’s Table, with a full view of what’s going on in the kitchen.
Hungry for more? Get the list of restaurants in Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower.
The Dining Experience at Best Friend
We committed a faux pas right off the bat. We ordered the Banchan Sampler ($18), not knowing exactly what it was but, after seeing all the tempting appetizers, figured it might be a sampling of several of them. Not exactly.
Banchan are small Korean plates that, I now know, translates to “side dishes.” They are served before the main course but aren’t meant to be appetizers. They are meant to augment the dishes to come. At Best Friend, they included kimchi, pickled daikon radish, broccolini and seasoned soybean bean sprouts with sesame seeds. They were accompanied by sweet Hawaiian-style rolls.
The Banchan Sampler includes a variety of small dishes intended to augment the meal ahead. Or so we found out.
Starving, we dug in as we perused the menu – and then were almost too full for anything else. With so many great-sounding items, we settled on Birria Ramen with braised beef, onion and cilantro ($24) and something we’d been hearing about, Kimchi Carbonara ($24) with garlic, parmesan, cilantro and bacon.
Birria Ramen is as fun to eat, slurping those noodles, as it is delicious to eat.
Our effervescent server suggested we also get an order of Kogi Short Rib Tacos ($19) to help tide us over while we waited for our main dishes. Under the spell of the place, we said “sure!”
Out came the order of three tacos, which were good. Anticipating us being stymied at how to share three tacos between the two of us, he suggested that since each taco had double corn tortillas, we remove one from each and divide the filling between all four tortillas, giving us two tacos each. That worked great but it would have also been great to just make four to an order. While the tacos were tasty, they weren’t tasty enough to have kept us from focusing our stomach-space or attention on the entrees to come.
Kogi Short Rib Tacos are flavorful and filling.
By now, we were full. Truly full. But then our entrees arrived and we miraculously found a way to give it the old college try.
Birria Ramen ($24) was a sizeable bowl with dark, rich broth and all sorts of goodies floating in it. Do yourself a favor and tuck your napkin into your shirt because, where there’s ramen, there’s splattering. You just can’t help it. And you won’t want to because Best Friend’s Ramen is so full of flavor and warmth, the world seems to fall away while you’re eating it. Until, that is, you have a bite of the Kimchi Carbonara ($24). Mixing two things I love and two ethnicities, this dish was such a surprise. Creaminess, heat and umami abound, and you really just want to go sit by yourself and say, “I need to be alone with this meal” to enjoy it fully.
A Bowl of Kimchi Carbonara is a must when going to Chef Roy Choi’s Best Friend.
We stopped ourselves at the half-way point on these dishes. Well, honestly, it wasn’t hard to stop because we really weren’t even hungry by the time they were set down in front of us. But we HAD to eat at least some. Then, we went full-on, what-were-we-thinking, over-the-top and shared a few bites of the Medjool Date Cake ($13) with stocky toffee and caramel ice cream. Oh, it was good. Really good. But we just couldn’t have another bite of anything. We meant it this time.
Medjool Date Cake is one of the dessert options – IF you can manage to save some room for it.
We packed up our entrees figuring we’d somehow be hungry for a midnight snack or would have them for breakfast the next day. What we didn’t count on was that the refrigerator in our hotel room was barely cold. Midnight (and 2am and 4am) came and went and we were still full. Come breakfast time, we had our doubts that hungry little harmful bacteria hadn’t had their way with our glorious leftovers, so we tossed them. It literally pained me to have not gotten to enjoy those two dishes more.
What Else is On the Menu?
In addition to a substantial booze list (and some nice alcohol-free options), Best Friend’s menu is divided up into “Banchan & Snacks” including Korean Wings, Charred Zucchini, Lumpia and the Chef Menu ($75/person) which gives you a good variety of items.
“BBQ” has Southside Sticky Ribs, Garlic Chicken, Yuzo Shrimp and a BBQ Platter.
“Bowls” is where we found the Birria Ramen and Kimchi Carbonara as well as Kimchi Fried Rice, a Pork Belly Hot Pot and others.
Under “L.A.-Ish,” that’s where the Kogi Short Rib Tacos can be found as well as an Eggplant Schnitzel and Aguachile.
Under “Vegas-Ish,” there’s a 34-oz Cowboy Chop ribeye for $165! But there’s also Buttermilk Fried Chicken, a Tempura Relleno and Tostada-Yada-Yada.
Under “Desserts,” besides the Date Cake we shared, there are twists on sentimental favorites like Strawberry Shorty ($13) with strawberry shortcake and lemon freeze or Supa Dupa Shaved Ice ($18) with coconut, raspberry, assorted fresh fruit, boba and sesame. But what I’ll return for is the Gochujang Pot de Creme ($14) with spicy pecans and whipped cream. Why? Because chocolate and some spice are a wonderful thing. Don’t believe me? Try the recipe for Mayan Mystery Cookies in the tab below.
Tips for Dining at Best Friend Las Vegas
- Don’t eat the Banchan Sampler as an appetizer – let it augment your meal like a little break for your tastebuds or a condiment.
- Ask your server to clarify what dishes would be considered a “small plate” and what’s considered an actual entree – you can’t tell by the price or description in most cases. Make your decisions based on that and your hunger level and don’t be pressured into ordering more than you want. We saw several tables around us take servers’ advice and then have to pack most of it up. We could tell those who had been there before because they ordered minimally.
- Be willing to eat early at Best Friend. Although we made reservations a couple of weeks in advance, the only choices were on the early side, like 5:30pm or much later like 10pm. Eating early worked out well for us so we could still spend the evening walking around Las Vegas, working off the heavy meal.
Hungry for more? Make these spicy, chocolatey Mayan Mystery Cookies.
I am so happy I got to go to Best Friend to bask in the respect I have for Chef Roy Choi and to fan-girl over the Chef Food Truck replica that is a functioning food truck, on the other side of the casino!
The atmosphere’s fun, the food is really good, the energy is positive and it’s nice to have stepped into the childhood that contributed to his culinary successes as an adult.
Note: Roy Choi has a new cookbook out, “The Choi of Cooking: flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life.” It’s available on Amazon, through our affiliate link.
Learn more about Best Friend on their website, here.
-Story and photos by Courtney Drake-McDonough, Publisher and Managing Editor of Real Food Traveler
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