Drink of Choice

EP 25 Sung Yoo - From L’Oréal Packaging to Designing Entire Buildings

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 09:17:19 -0800

Sung Yoo went to Parsons to study fashion and walked away from it in her first year. She spent the next stretch designing packaging for L’Oréal in New York - until a stranger at a party asked what she did, assumed an answer, and she decided not to correct them.

That became apartment staging, then five buildings, then her own studio, and now creative direction on entire residential developments in LA. Somewhere in there she moved west for a relationship that ended, stayed anyway, and signed a lease on a 430-square-foot prefab she’d only seen in pixelated photos.

She also tells Sid and Han where she thinks AI stops, and declines one of our two closing questions outright. Over a yuzu Sanzo, 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.

EP24 Asha Madhukar - From Shakira's Backup Dancer to Lawyer at Hybe

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:14:05 -0700

Asha Madhukar sang her first professional gig at 12, in an all-Italian opera. She went on to sing and dance behind Shakira, landed her first cut as a writer with Daddy Yankee, and put out a single that debuted on Billboard’s Hot Single Sales - under a name none of us recognized.

Then she went to law school. She’s since worked at iHeart, Capitol, SB Projects, Universal Music Publishing Group in both LA and London, and Clintons, before a boutique firm in San Francisco and now business and legal affairs at HYBE Americas, where she’s been part of Katseye’s rise.

She also explains why she thinks nothing has gone wrong for her, and then corrects the record. Over a Matcha x Matcha from Bonsai Coffee... here on the Drink of Choice.

EP23 CJ Yu - Inside Amazon Studios, TMZ, and Mark Burnett

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:56:14 -0700

CJ Yu has spent his career inside the rooms where shows get made - Mark Burnett Productions, E! News, Endemol, TMZ, and seven years at Amazon Studios running unscripted development around the world.

He got there by interning everywhere from his first quarter at UCLA, choosing unscripted partly because he didn’t want to read any more bad scripts, and learning how to sell a twenty-million-dollar show in a ten-minute meeting. At some point he decided his own name was going to cost him the first phone call, and he did something about it... here on the Drink of Choice.

EP22 Emily Chang - She raised 18 kids nobody asked her to

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:38:14 -0700

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.

EP21 Shay Fan - The Southern fried Asian at Meta

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:53:55 -0700

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.

EP20 Ted & Yong (Seoul Sausage) - Two babos and a food truck

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:20:19 -0700

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.

EP19 Michael Lee - From Goldman Sachs to Hollywood

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0700

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.

EP18 Daniel Yi - Serial killers, weed, and BTS

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:22:53 -0700

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.

EP17 Hyepin Im - She could've gotten angry, but instead she got us in the room

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0700

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.

EP16 Sid & Han - The Last Stage of the K-Wave

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:30:53 -0700

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.

EP15 Tony Moon - OG Rooftop Korean

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 23:11:28 -0700

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.

EP14 Flowsik - From Queens to Korea: tales of a Asian-American Rapper

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:03:25 -0700

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.

EP13 Johnny Kyunghwo - The path to 3.8 million followers

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0700

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.

EP12 Mark Arbitrario - From VHS to Hollywood. The story of a Filipino-American filmmaker

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:03:02 -0700

Mark Arbitrario started filming with his dad's VHS camera at age 10, co-founded the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and wrote a screenplay for James Hong - all before landing on Survivor, The Apprentice, and The Contender. A Filipino-American who learned Korean, embraced the jung, and eventually found himself directing music videos for BooHwal in Seoul. Along the way he learned the one thing his immigrant parents never taught him: hard work alone won't get you there. You have to make noise. We also talk about family, loss, and the one choice he wishes he could take back... here on the Drink of Choice.

EP11 Jon Hwang - An entrepreneur who built the drink he couldn't find

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:04:10 -0700

Jon Hwang spent a year turning his kitchen into what looked like a Breaking Bad lab: bags of white powder, mystery ingredients, and a food scientist who had never tasted milk tea in his life. The result is MAKO, a boba-inspired high-protein milk tea designed to do what no ready-to-drink protein shake has done before: actually taste good. We talk about leaving a tech career behind, bootstrapping a CPG brand from scratch, navigating supply chains, trademarks, and co-manufacturers - all as a team of one. Plus, why the Asian fitness market is about to explode and why milk tea protein might be exactly what it's been waiting for... here on the Drink of Choice.

EP10 Paul Dimalanta - The most important shot

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:25:44 -0700

Paul Dimalanta grew up in Oxnard, California, the son of a Filipino Navy engineer who gave up a college degree for a one-way ticket to America. Paul was supposed to follow the path - engineering, stability, the whole thing. Then he watched Office Space and changed his major. What followed was a career that took him from the accounting department of Robb Report magazine to shooting luxury brands across the world for clients like MasterCard - from Lake Como to the Yellowstone Club in Montana. Along the way he had to learn that his photos could look too good, that car ads don't always need cars, and that the most important project of his career wasn't for any client at all. It was photographing the faces of his own Filipino community. We talk about art, identity, AI, and what happens when you finally stop apologizing for who you are... here on the Drink of Choice.

EP09 Noelle Song - The pancake that started it all

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0700

Noelle Song had a dream job, a marketing degree, and a plan. Then she quit. What followed was a tiny pancake, five million views, and the beginning of something she never saw coming. Today she's a fitness coach, content creator, and musician navigating the space between going viral and building something that actually lasts. We talk about fear, identity, and what it really means to bet on yourself... here on the Drink of Choice.

EP08 Tom Li - Beijing to to America, and his Choice to Stay

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0700

Tom Li was born in Beijing, fled to America as a child in the wake of Tiananmen Square, and grew up in a high school that was 80% Asian - never once setting foot in a majority-white space until law school at age 22. He decided to become a lawyer at five years old, not out of passion, but because it seemed safe. It took twelve years of practicing law to finally find his footing. We talk about identity, belonging, code-switching, and the quiet choices that shape who we become... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is an interview podcast co-hosted by Sid Kim, restaurateur and entrepreneur, and Han Kim, entertainment lawyer. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation about their life. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices, artists, creators, chefs, entrepreneurs, and anyone who carries a story worth telling, Drink of Choice creates a space that is intimate, unhurried, and culturally grounded.

New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

EP07 Alice Kao - She Didn't Find Her Sport. Her Sport Found Her.

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 03:28:31 -0700

A bad breakup sent Alice Kao to a climbing gym in London. That one afternoon changed everything. Today she's the co-founder and CEO of Sender One, one of the premier climbing gym chains in Southern California — built with no plan, a lot of grit, and a Harvard-educated husband who gave up his law career to hand out shoes at the front desk.

New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

EP06 Tiffany Law - From Hong Kong to Big Law to Dance Music

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:24:50 -0700

Tiffany Law is an entertainment lawyer, entrepreneur, and lifelong lover of dance music whose career has taken her across four continents and through some of the world’s most competitive industries. From growing up in Canada after immigrating from Hong Kong, to living in Africa and Europe, surviving Big Law, and eventually finding her place in the music industry, Tiffany shares the experiences, setbacks, and life decisions that shaped who she is today.

EP05 Sam Gollestani - September to Remember

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:06:39 -0700

A receptionist became a producer, a producer became a showrunner, and a showrunner became a director. Along the way, Sam Gollestani got Sylvester Stallone mad at him and wrote the untold story of what it felt like to be Iranian American on September 11th. That short film won at Cannes — and changed someone else's life. Not getting help sooner was his worst decision. Finding the right person was his best.

Grab a glass. This is Drink of Choice.

New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

EP04 Big Phony — How Bobby Choy Hid His Identity to Break Into Music

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0700

Bobby Choy has spent his entire life doing things he wasn't supposed to do.
As a kid, he moved 45 times, taught himself guitar using cassette tapes, and was left to fend for himself in New York at 14. As a young man in LA, he decided to become a musician at a time when Asian Americans simply weren't supposed to. So he hid behind a name: Big Phony.

New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

EP03 Young Kim — Behind the K-Pop Curtain: Scandals, Soju, and Starting Over

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0700

Young Kim had a dream, a one-way ticket, and no real idea what he was walking into. As a member of S#arp and Uptown, he was a young kid from the States trying to learn to rap, dance, and sing in a language and culture that wasn't his own — all while being constantly scrutinized for the way he looked. The K-pop machine made him plenty of promises. It didn't keep all of them.

His years in Korea took him through broadcast politics, industry scandals, and the kind of late-night soju conversations that either break you or bond you for life. He found his footing in radio and television, built a life far from home, and somehow kept a marriage intact through all of it.
Then he came back to the States with no plan and had to start over from scratch. He sold cemetery plots at a funeral parlor. He hustled. He figured it out. Eventually he found a small restaurant in Inglewood — one that's been feeding the same neighborhood for eighty years, with a loyalty that spans generations. He wasn't looking for peace and contentment. He just followed the next open door until he found it.

His drink of choice? Red top soju. Naturally.

Every week, Sid and Han sit down with fascinating guests, each of whom arrives with a drink that means something to them. What follows is a conversation about the choices — big, small, accidental, and hard-won — that shaped who they are.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

EP01 Han Kim - JD? Or DJ? Or Both?

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0700

Before Han Kim was negotiating deals for K-pop's biggest labels, he was in the booth — rapping, producing, and managing artists out of pure love for the music. He had a front-row seat to the early days of Epik High and the Wonder Girls, cold-DM'd an artist he discovered in a Facebook group and talked his way into becoming their manager, and made beats on an old MacBook and GarageBand while most kids were just trying to pass high school.

He went on to work with Far East Movement, Black Label, and JYP Entertainment — a career path that started with a nickname his mother gave him and a relentless belief that he could figure it out along the way. When the music industry's notoriously thin margins caught up with him, his mother (in her infinite wisdom) suggested he go to law school. Her pitch? Become a JD DJ. He listened.
Now he sits at the intersection of law, music, and culture, protecting the choices of artists who are living the dream he once chased himself.

His drink of choice? An unlikely combination of creatine and matcha, and he'll tell you exactly why it changed everything.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

EP02 Sid Kim - The Long Way Home

Sid Kim & Han Kim — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0700

Sid Kim didn't plan any of this. A year became thirty. A lazy afternoon at Barnes & Noble became an internet business. An idea and a little luck became an F&B group across Asia. Then a health scare reset everything. Now he's telling stories through food — here on Drink of Choice.