Even as these powerful early food memories were being laid down, these chefs also grew up attending American public schools, listening to '80s and '90s hip hop, watching TV cooking shows, and idolizing NBA superstars. "We look in the mirror and we see Americans," says Choi, who did a short stint at the Michelin-starred New York restaurant Le Bernardin after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America and before working his way up the ranks of the hospitality industry. "Our food is a reflection of that."

Even as they were becoming fluent in American popular culture, these Asian Soul Food chefs were acutely aware that their parents were sacrificing their lives--some of them by working in or running their own restaurants--to give their children a chance at becoming highly paid professionals. Chang's father got out of restaurant work, but many of his friends were restaurant owners, Chang told the Washington Post. "He would tell the chefs to take me down and have a conversation to convince me that the kitchen was no place for a kid like me."

Roy Choi first fell off the gifted-student path at 13 to experiment with drugs and run with a dangerous crowd. The people he most identified with were Spanish speaking. "I grew up in Latino neighborhoods, which is why kitchens are so comfortable for me," he explains. "My humor, my life, my rhythm, I am in my soul and my spirit Latino." He speaks kitchen Spanish with his Mexican staff, whom he calls, "mi familia," and one of his most powerful memories is of a Mexican dishwasher friend who let him in on a family tradition of buying a goat every week to skin, butcher and take to Mexicali to make birria (pit-barbecued goat).

But it was only after struggling through one year of law school that Choi was able to admit to himself, "This whole thing to please the parents is over!" and embrace his "own little private secret": he wanted to cook for a living. "No one ever fostered that," he says. "Being Asian, it wasn't even part of the conversation. It would have been like saying you wanted to strip and give blow jobs."

Even after he rose to become a hotel executive chef, first at the Embassy Suites and then as chef de cuisine for the Hilton chain, Choi's parents wondered why he couldn't get a job at the Ritz-Carlton. Instead, was recruited to become the top chef at a restaurant called Rock Sugar, the first Asian concept from the company behind the Cheesecake Factory chain. And then he hit a wall. "I just failed," he says simply, "the restaurant was too big, it became too busy, and there were these very rigid systems."

It was during this period, when no one was returning Choi's calls, that he got a call from Mark Manguera , a Filipino American friend and former colleague who had worked the front of the house at the Beverly Hilton. Manguera had a crazy idea: to put Korean barbecue in a taco and take it to the clubs after hours in a truck. Choi was desperate enough to sign on. Creating what were to become his signature Korean-Mexican dishes, he says, was both a culinary and a spiritual breakthrough moment for him.