→ Nominated by Moy Zhong, designer
→ Written by Hannah Doyle
Tina Choi’s mornings are anything but average.
On any given day, she’s training staff, headhunting for new recruits, or harvesting vegetables for her restaurant’s dinner service. It’s a far cry from what you’d expect from a food content creator who also does their own editing, shooting, cooking, and recipe development. But as Choi’s 3 million+ YouTube subscribers on her Doobydobap channel know, this year has been different. She’s made her next big move: opening a restaurant.
"Since moving in together, I think my partner and I have been trying at least one of Dooby’s recipes each week. Food is an incredible medium for storytelling, and it’s been a joy seeing how Tina’s always evolving how her audience can experience food with her—from shorts, to recipes, to food tours, and now Mija Seoul."
— Moy Zhong
→ In early December, Tina released a merch drop that included her first line of chef’s knives. / doobydobap
Investing over $200,000 of her savings to start a restaurant called Mija Seoul in South Korea. It opened in May as a curated seasonal menu every night under the leadership of Choi and her partner and professional chef Kevin Kroløkke.
For perspective
Most creator food endeavors start with VC funding, like Sidemen’s Sides and MrBeast’s Feastables. And even with a healthy amount of backing, the landscape is plagued by razor-thin margins and high labor costs. Nearly 80% of restaurants fail in their first five years. And creators are not immune—just look to MrBeast Burger and Dylan Lemay’s NYC ice cream shop, both of which have either faced legal troubles or closed outright.
Choi was well aware of the stakes, which is why she took a different approach. She funded the project herself, chose a location with lower startup costs than the U.S., prioritized making the restaurant a singular experience for fans over being profitable, and brought her audience on the journey with her.
“Because I knew a lot of people who would come would be subscribers and people who support Kevin and I’s journey, I didn’t want to be swayed by [investors] who’d want a return back. So everything was self-funded from what I earned with YouTube and in a way a bit of a ‘thank you for letting us do this,’” Choi told us.
Choi cultivated such a devoted following over two years on YouTube that, despite 90% of her Western audience being half a world away from South Korea, 3 months of reservations for the restaurant were booked up within 24 hours of opening.
“I was really iffy about the opening, but that kind of proved the point that people were really invested [in our journey] and a lot of people booked their reservations first, then booked tickets to Korea,” Choi told us.
She innovated by…
→ “it’s not going so well,” doobydobap (January 2023)
→ “The Test Kitchen,” doobydobap (August 2023)
Where Tina Got Her Start
Choi began posting on TikTok in February 2021 as a way to build a content portfolio after college. She got over 1M followers in two months.
Later that year, she started posting longer videos on YouTube, and her channel reached over 80 million views after two months.
By December 2022, she felt burnt out by vlogging her personal life, so she started making videos about building Mija Seoul.
Mija Seoul’s Milestones
→ This timeline captures milestones in building up Mija Seoul. Tina has also shared clips from the process on her YouTube channel, including renovations, testing, gardening, and more.
→ *FOH = “front of house”
The Path She’s Paving For Creators
Choi shows how creators can seek artistic growth while maintaining a content business. Perhaps counterintuitively, the restaurant is Choi’s creative expression while the brand deals and day-to-day of her YouTube channel are the business keeping the lights on.
“I realized something I think is artistic and meaningful is very different from what is relatable and I had to kill and sacrifice that relatability aspect to do what I really believed in,” Choi said.
She’s taking big swings as a 25-year-old creator, and it hasn’t been easy. Over the last year she’s faced a costly lawsuit over the restaurant after being wrongly evicted, disapproval from her family, and hate comments and emails from viewers claiming she and Kroløkke were pretentious and underqualified.
“This was a hard year. It aged me considerably,” Choi said. “But if I lose everything that I put into Mija Seoul, that’s a life lesson [and character development content] of its own.”
Choi explained that what matters most to her is not the success of the restaurant (though it has done well) but that she took the risk and evolved her brand from being a cooking vlogger to also being a restaurateur.
“Now I do a more curated mix of restaurant stuff which doesn’t get as high views as topic-driven videos, but it’s something that I do because I think of it as a portfolio. I don’t want my channel to be just one thing, I want to have multiple layers and different things going on.”
Looking ahead
Choi wants to take what she’s learned at Mija Seoul and establish a more scalable fast-casual food business in the U.S., seeking outside investment so she can build a business that can generate more income than her YouTube channel.
“We think of Mija Seoul as our flagship store. We wanted to use the space as a foundation for teaching people more about seasonal produce, cooking techniques, and behind-the-scenes operations of a restaurant,” Choi said. “We never intended for it to be a place where it'll be a high-profit business, but more a place to be creative and experimental with what we can achieve.”
🔗 Tina’s Links:
Watch
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“This was a hard year. It aged me considerably. . . but if I lose everything that I put into Mija Seoul, that’s a life lesson [and character development content] of its own.”
— Tina Choi
