In 2008, Rich Cho, then an assistant general manager for the N.B.A.’s Oklahoma City Thunder, was scanning the menu of a Burmese restaurant in Los Angeles when he turned to a stranger next to him. Cho was born in Yangon, Myanmar; his parents immigrated to the United States in the mid-sixties, when he was young. “Do you know any other Burmese places in the area?” Cho asked. The man offered to take him to another place the next day. The following morning, they travelled eight miles east, to a house in Monterey Park, where, on a wooden porch built under a makeshift tent, Cho met an elderly Burmese woman named Bee Bee who was serving patrons dishes of soup and fish cooked on the stove of her home kitchen. It was “incredible,” Cho told me recently, over coffee in midtown Manhattan.

Cho has since become the first Asian-American general manager in the N.B.A., first of the Portland Trail Blazers, in 2010, and then of the Charlotte Hornets. He is also the founder of a food blog, Bigtime Bites. The site reviews dishes rather than restaurants, and it only covers food that people love. “You don’t have to sift through all the negativity,” Cho said, in between sips from a large black coffee cup adorned with the Bigtime Bites logo. On the site, dishes are graded according to both taste and presentation, and they are grouped into basketball-themed categories: a “rotation player” might be a desirable choice occasionally, depending on mood, whereas a “franchise player” is a good pick any day of the week.

Cho, pictured with his daughters Miranda and Annika. Photograph Courtesy Rich Cho

Cho, who’s five feet ten and slightly built, was wearing Jordan-brand sweats. (Michael Jordan, who owns the Hornets, is his boss.) When I asked him how he stayed thin despite his passion for eating, he shrugged. Cho only sleeps about a four hours a night, and he doesn’t drink alcohol or eat breakfast. He’s worked in the N.B.A. for more than two decades, starting as an intern with the Seattle Supersonics while he was still in law school. (Previously, he’d spent five years working as an engineer at Boeing.) As he climbed the league’s corporate ladder, travel became a bigger and bigger part of his job, and, like many N.B.A. employees, he began relying on room service and chain restaurants. He started asking hotel concierges for recommendations and, sometimes, soliciting suggestions from strangers on the street. He jotted down listings in notebooks, and the blank pages filled up. He created an Instagram account for his food finds, which became a hit among his peers.

Two years ago, Cho decided that creating a more easy-to-use database would make for a fun hobby, as well as a helpful tool for those in his situation: on the road and hungry. He eventually purchased a Web domain and enlisted a couple of interns to help him design and maintain the site. (He has since applied for a federal trademark.) Now anyone who visits the site can register to submit a review, or a “scouting report,” as he calls them. Cho evaluates each post and selects a “Scouting Report of the Week” (the winner receives Bigtime Bites-branded gear). He posts a new scouting report himself nearly every week, as well—ninety-five now, and counting. (There are more than seven hundred from his readers.)

Since that first trip to Bee Bee’s, Cho has become a frequent customer whenever he is in the L.A. area. Last year he brought Sam Goldfeder, an agent representing the Hornets center Cody Zeller, to negotiate Zeller’s four-year, fifty-six-million-dollar contract extension, on Bee Bee’s terrace over bowls of mohinga, thin noodles with fish. During our conversation, he often used basketball terms to describe his eating habits. He might “post up” at a table for hours, or ask Bee Bee to “run it back” when he wants another course, twirling his right finger in the air, the basketball symbol for repeating a play. “This place is big time,” he said, pulling up a photo of a soup dish that earned a “Hall of Fame” ranking on Bigtime Bites.

Cho spent the next fifteen minutes flipping through his phone, cueing up various scouting reports from the site. “The problem,” he said, “is that the a lot of these visitors’ pictures don’t look that vivid.” He opened his bag and pulled out a portable light that his wife had bought him. “You see the difference in my pictures and the others?” he asked. In Cho’s photos, which are featured higher up on the site, the food is presented immaculately, in vibrant colors, with each part of the dish visible and enticing. Cho carries the camera light with him wherever he goes—in part because he never knows when a bout of hunger might strike, or when a restaurant might be worth a scouting report. “Have you ever been to this place Minetta Tavern?” he asked. “They have this burger that’s supposed to be big time that I was looking up last night.” I told him I hadn’t, and a few minutes later, Cho was off to scout another meal.