‘Your Korean Dad’ Nick Cho Talks Good People and Bad Barbecue

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

On this episode

Nick Cho is beloved by millions for his empathetic and affirming “Your Korean Dad” videos on TikTok and Instagram, but the real-life coffee expert and entrepreneur is so much more than the character he plays online. Cho joined Tinfoil Swans for a robust conversation on growing up in a place where you’re not wanted, the fallacy of “good” people vs “bad” people, what American food actually is, the role of authenticity, his brand-new coffee venture, and why bad Korean barbecue doesn’t get a pass from him.

Meet our guest

Nick Cho is an award-winning coffee expert and entrepreneur, public speaker, and content creator with 3 million TikTok followers @yourkoreandad as well as hundreds of thousands of fans on Instagram @nickcho and YouTube @yourkoreandad. Cho was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the Washington, D.C., suburbs with his parents two years later. He opened his first coffee shop in D.C. in 2002, and went on to co-found Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in San Francisco in 2010. Cho created the World Brewers Cup competition, and served as a founding member of the Barista Guild of America Executive Council as well as the board of directors of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and the World Barista Championship. Cho was the 2006-2007 U.S. Southeast Regional Barista Champion. You can buy his new Your Korean Dad’s Coffee at yourkoreandad.com.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s podcast, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On how “Your Korean Dad” came to be

“The magic/mundane fact about my content is that especially toward the beginning, it was just turning the camera on while my daughters and I were out on some kind of excursion. If we needed to go buy some snacks from Walgreens, it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s make a video while we do it.’ It would take an extra five minutes of our time to shoot little scenes. But these snacks that we picked out, we would take home and eat. When we were eating out, it wasn’t like, ‘Let’s go here and make a video and then we can eat.’ It’s the other way around, ‘Where do you want to eat tonight?’ We would sit down and realize we can make a video right now. It’s sort of a welcoming, voyeuristic insight into a POV experience of being my kid.”

On making people feel seen

“I grew up feeling very ugly and unwanted. When I got to know a lot more disability activists, they described being a wheelchair user, and entering a space, and having people’s eyes exude this feeling of unwantedness, like, ‘Why are you here? I’m annoyed that I have to see you.’ I could instantly relate because that was my experience, especially in the ’80s and all through high school. A ‘What are you, and what are you doing here?’ kind of feeling. My Korean Dad content is oriented toward as many people as can relate to it, but I’m definitely more focused trying to make virtual eye contact with the people who have marginalized identities.”

On American stories

“It matters what order information comes in. If you’re told a story for a decade, and then later the revised version or a different perspective, that’s very different from having been told the other story first. I think that’s what’s happening with the new generations. They’re not in that space of a white dominant cultural storyline. I talk about this with other children of immigrants all the time; their parents emigrated to this country. They’re choosing. They know they’re not home. Whereas for my generation — or anyone who is either raised or born in the States — that’s not how you perceive this existence. I’m not a visitor. I’m an American. Having watched my kids and now my partner’s child, who is Gen Alpha, watching the way that the information is flowing into them, it’s so different.”

On authenticity

“One of the ways that I struggle with authenticity is that Korean food is very personal to me. It’s really hard to do anything particularly fusiony or modernist, or — air quotes — ‘elevated’ because it’s peasant food. A lot of chefs around the country have tried to play with grits, for instance, and the people who enjoy those the most are people who did not grow up eating grits. Having grown up eating Korean food, it’s not a platonic ideal like the perfect Golden Retriever at a dog show. I just had the worst Korean barbecue of my life last week. Everything was wrong. The brisket clearly was not a brisket. The cooking surface they put stuff on was for the wrong kind of grilling. Actually, the kimchi was pretty good, but everything else was this weird facsimile of what it needs to be. It had 4.9 stars on Yelp with a lot of reviews. The word we kept throwing around was ‘bamboozled.’ But the point is that people are enjoying it. Both things are true. They’re allowed to enjoy it. I’m not going to smack it out of their mouth and say, ‘Spit that out, this is trash.'”

On “good” people and “bad” people

“I’m working on conceiving of a video where I talk about how there’s no such thing as good people and bad people. I believe that everyone is trying to be good, but every single person is very capable of causing harm and pain. The most terrible acts that human beings have committed against each other were all caused because people believed there’s such a thing as good people and bad people.”

On why his coffee comes with a note on the bag

“For me it’s always what do I want someone to feel? What can I make them feel from over here through a bag of coffee that is shipped across the country? Putting my head together with my life partner, Kimmie, we came up with that it’s a little note from me. Every time they look across the counter and they see that bag sitting there, it says something, it makes them feel affirmed, or seen, or loved, and cared about.”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Daniel Boulud, Rodney Scott, Asma Khan, Emeril and E.J. Lagasse, Claudia Fleming, Dave Beran and Will Poulter, Dan Giusti, Priya Krishna, Lee Anne Wong, Cody Rigsby, Kevin Gillespie, Pete Wells, David Chang, Raphael Brion, Christine D’Ercole, Channing Frye, Nick Cho, Ti Martin, Kylie Kwong, Pati Jinich, Darron Cardosa, Bobby Flay, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.