By Helin Jung   Photograph by David C. Lee

There are a few things about David Chang we already know.

1. He is built like a house.

2. He has an inhuman ability to split infinitives with the word “fuck.”

3. With his fleet of Momofuku restaurants—Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar, Milk Bar and Ko—he has taken New York City and whipped it into a frenzy.

It’s only been six years (“Not that long in the real world, but in dog years, that’s like 100 years, man”), and in those six years, he went from being an anonymous line cook to one of the most fêted, recognizable personalities in the culinary world.

David Chang. Dave, DC, Chang, the Changster, the Changbang, ruler of the Momofuku empire, or the Momoverse, or whatever. The guy’s such a big deal that an entire lexicon has been created in his honor. The man is a myth, and most of us are all too happy to keep it stoked.

The trouble is, whatever it is we are doing to Chang (which, to him, amounts to a lot of nonsensical fetishizing) is burdensome.

“I don’t give a shit,” the 31-year-old will say about the heaps of awards, the praise, the television appearances, the requests to participate in every food-related event in the city and elsewhere. “I would just rather not be a public figure. It’s just the struggle with dealing with the fact that, I guess I am.”

It’s strange to him that he has become a celebrity, because basically, he’s just a guy who runs a few restaurants. Right?

***

Let’s take it back to the beginning. 2003. An immovable purpose and a 600-square-foot space in the East Village the size of a “two-car garage.”

It was going to be a restaurant, a ramen noodle joint. Not a terribly complicated idea. It wasn’t supposed to amount to anything, because it wasn’t intended to be anything more than a proof.

“I needed to test myself to see if I could actually put a restaurant together, and I didn’t even think about the food,” says Chang, sitting atop a stool in that space. “I was 26 and it was like, “OK, I’ve cooked for four years, I don’t know that much, I should be cooking more, I should be working at other restaurants, but maybe if I went to graduate school or something, that would cost a whole lot more than opening up a restaurant. I’d rather learn in the school of hard knocks.”

He says he would never do it again, not like that, because it was the hardest thing he has ever done in his life.

Success did not come immediately, but it did come eventually, in a downpour—with an unabated rain of buzz, press and constant, unreasonable wait times. Noodle Bar was an irrefutable hit, which led Chang and his then co-chef and partner Joaquin Baca to open Ssäm Bar, followed by Ko and Milk Bar.

“It was like a single-cell organism, now it’s this massive, Leviathan-like entity,” he says. “To see it grow very rapidly like that, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ I guess I’m proud of that? It’s been a lot of people, a lot of hard work, a lot of sacrifice to make that happen.”

***

“He’s as neurotic as he comes across, that’s definitely true,” says Peter Meehan. “I say that in a loving way. He is probably harder on himself in private than he is in public, but I think he’s incredibly hard on himself in public, too.”

Meehan used to write the “$25 and Under” column for the New York Times, profiling affordable finds from the New York City food scene. He reviewed Noodle Bar in 2005, calling it a “plywood-walled diamond in the rough.”

Soon afterward, the critic and restaurateur ran into each other at a Hold Steady concert in Brooklyn.

“I felt this meaty hand slap me on the back. I turn around and it’s Dave Chang,” Meehan says. “He handed me a beer and said, ‘Are we going to pretend like we don’t know each other?’ And that’s how we got to know each other.”

As Chang’s renown swelled and the brand expanded, the cookbook offers started coming. Only if Meehan does it with me, Chang declared (and in typical fashion, he is still conflicted about it—“Nobody thinks that they’re going to do a cookbook one day, you know?”). Meehan accepted the co-authorship, the two friends came up with a proposal and started working on a book.

The cookbook, titled Momofuku, which comes out in October, will serve as a record of the past six years. It will likely be a blockbuster, if internet chatter is any indicator of success. It will include recipes, but it will also be about the stories from the restaurant—the people behind them, the challenges they faced in getting the restaurants off the ground, the philosophies that serve as cornerstones of the food.

The first proposal started out differently. It was going to be Momofuku via David Chang, the origin story, “starting in Virginia with his family, jajangmyeon, galbi, and all that O.G. Korean shit that he grew up on.”

Meehan sees the book’s evolution as having happened in the same way that every other David Chang project has evolved.

“For Dave, there’s always a malleability from the outset,” Meehan said. “Noodle Bar was supposed to be a Japanese-style ramen bar and it turned into the fusional weirdness that it is now—vaguely American, vaguely Asian. Ssäm Bar was supposed to be burritos, and now it’s the 31st best restaurant in the world. There’s always flexibility in terms of design and outcome, as long as you’ve got your eyes on the goal.”

***

The goal, as Chang will say to you time and again, was never to be famous, or to be dripping in James Beard awards. The goal was just to make good food and do it with integrity. He scrolls through the who-knows-how-many messages on his Blackberry, that LED light just won’t stop flashing for a goddamn second, and lets out a haggard sigh.

“I can’t work the line anymore because I get so fucking worked up that I literally just can’t,” he says, rapping anxiously on the countertop at Ko (which eventually took over that two-car garage that used to house Noodle Bar). “I want things to be right all the time, even though it’s not an environment that’s set up to have these expectations.”

One of the commis is taking off too much on a head of lettuce. “Yo, dude, don’t throw out so much of that end,” Chang chides affectionately. “Look how much you threw away, dude.” I still love you, but try to get it right.

“Do I want us to be successful? Do I want us to be busy? Do I want us to have great food? Do I want us to take care of our cooks? Yes.” Rat-tat-tat go his fingers. “I was not aware that it came with all the baggage and the clichés and the bullshit.”

A huge part of the bullshit, for Chang, is the internet. The chatter on blogs gives him agita. Take, for instance, the news that the actor Alan Cumming had been kicked out of Ssäm Bar. Cumming blogged about it himself. “f you momofuku,” he wrote, after describing a scene that involved him and his mother joining a few friends who were already seated and eating.

Chang, who was not present during the incident, is still pissed off about this.

“He fucking cheated,” he says. “Who cares about some movie star? Is he going to impact your life, my life? No. What he did was he fucking cut in line, so he can get the fuck out.”

There he goes again, he thinks the internet is saying. Mr. Dickhead throws a fit. It bugs him. He says he doesn’t give a shit, but he does, because the only thing he’s doing (and it wasn’t really him, anyway) is staying consistent.

“Regardless of who you are, this is how it is. We’ve made it abundantly clear: The only people we’ll take care of are cooks and chefs, that’s it.”

***

Growing up Korean seems to have done quite a number on Chang. To start, there are the overwhelming insecurities and expectations that spasm occasionally, uncontrollably. “I wasn’t destined for this” is one of his mantras.

“Who gives a shit about the fact that I grew up Korean? There are expectations, sure, but I didn’t live up to any of them.”

Since he won’t really talk about his family or his childhood, you only get tiny bits of information. Chang is the youngest of four siblings (“I was an accident”). He played golf when he was younger, football in high school. He wasn’t an exceptional student, and didn’t go to an Ivy League school. His parents were immigrants. His mother still speaks to him in Korean, which he doesn’t speak very well. His father was a businessman and one-time restaurant owner himself, and as a result, was hardly ever around.

“My parents have guilted me so much,” he’ll say when he talks about his last remaining duty as a filial Korean son: marrying a Korean. “I’m so brainwashed that I have a feeling that if I married a Korean girl and had a Korean child, my parents would die. They would be like, ‘OK, we can die now.’

“There are certain things about Korean culture in America that I find disagreeable,” he says, though he does his best to avoid and ignore any explicit associations with his Koreanness. “I avoid Koreans like the plague.”

Chang emphasizes that his restaurants—the food, the philosophy—are American, not Korean, not Asian, not “Fusion.” It’s a sign of the times that the public has accepted his categorization as such, that a menu which includes kimchi, pork belly, ramen and rice cakes is digested unquestioningly as American, or not even categorized at all.

Wylie Dufresne, the chef/owner of wd~50, another one of this city’s inventive and touted restaurants, is one among Chang’s many admirers, colleagues and friends.

“Dave’s importance is that he serves delicious, really well-executed food at a great price point,” Dufresne wrote in an email. “A lot of people espouse locally-sourced American ingredients, but Dave is doing it in an unpretentious and approachable way. He doesn’t hit you over the head with it, which makes the whole idea more attractive.”

***

“I consider David a brother,” says Cory Lane, a partner and general manager of Ssäm Bar and beverage director for all of Momofuku. “I would do anything for him. I know that he would do the same for me.”

This is the kind of loyalty that Chang cultivates. As a Trinity College classmate of his would tell it, “Over the years, he has gotten more famous and met lots of interesting people, but he’s just collected more friends, more good friends, and hasn’t abandoned any of the old ones. He doesn’t forget where he came from.”

He is a guy’s guy who is passionate and funny and blunt, and not incidentally, really into the Redskins. He drinks and he cusses and will likely call you a lying sack of shit, but only if he likes you. He knows how to cook and knows how to run a business. You’d be stupid not to want to be his friend.

As a boss, he will take care of you. He will provide health care, pay you more in wages, make you part-owner and give you a platform to do whatever your heart desires (as long as it’s not embarrassing).

That, you’ll find, is the thing he’s most likely to accept. Your friendship, your loyalty, your devotion. The thing he’s still working on, though, is the success bit.

“I finally understand what it’s like to be an A+ student, when in the past, I only understood from having known or dated girls that were always the best,” he says. “I never understood the pressure of success. How does one cope with that?”

The cookbook is coming out in a few months. Those pesky press inquiries are banging down the door. Meetings, appearances, Copenhagen, and then the question of whether or not there will be more expansion, or a television show, or who knows what else?

Mark Bittman, most recently the author of Food Matters, was one of Chang’s earliest supporters.

“There are a lot of very smart, very good chefs out there who don’t get to the point that David’s at now,” Bittman says. “He could probably find backers and support for doing pretty much whatever he wants, and I’m sure he’s capable of doing whatever he wants. It really just has to be defined by where he wants to go.”

Chang’s answer to that is most often, “I don’t know.” He will sometimes expand that to say that he wants to throw away his Blackberry and travel for a year. Go to Costa Rica, his safe place and retreat, and read some Hindu texts or books about the Civil War.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he says. “I would much rather be working with food, and that’s becoming more and more difficult because I have to wear a hat as the face of this company. We have something that works. I’m proud that we have a place for people to express themselves. It’s been one hell of a ride, and if it all ended tomorrow, I think I’d be pretty stoked about what happened.

“But I don’t see that end in sight.”

SoHui Kim

Executive chef of The Good Fork
Age: 38   City: Brooklyn

When Sohui Kim and her husband quietly opened The Good Fork in 2006, they served about 30 guests—mostly friends and folks in the neighborhood. “It was literally just me in the kitchen with a dishwasher,” says Kim, “and Ben hosting and bartending.”

Weeks later, the little restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn was quickly vaulted to culinary fame after glowing reviews appeared in major publications, including the New Yorker and the New York Times. The eatery, which offers Korean-inflected comfort fare, was suddenly feeding more than 100 mouths a night. Kim wondered, “Where are all these people coming from?”

Kim is the executive chef of The Good Fork, and co-owns the restaurant with her husband, Ben Schneider. They live near the biz with their “cute as heck” one-year-old daughter, and are expecting a second child in a few months.

In 2005, Kim was ready to open her own kitchen—envisioning a neighborhood, mom-and-pop bistro. She wanted to work with Korean ingredients, while offering a menu of Italian fresh pastas, French-style sauces and a hefty burger to boot.

Yet Kim emphasizes that her food is not fusion, a type of cuisine that she dubs “confusing, stupid and the dumbest thing ever.” Rather, her cooking offers a twist (or rather, a kick). Take her signature dish: steak and eggs à la Seoul. It’s a skirt steak marinated overnight, spiced with gochujang, then grilled medium rare to tender and moist perfection. “Then I top that sucker with a fried egg,” says Kim.

Other tasty delights: crab cakes, dumplings, and yes, that burger. “It’s a huge honker that’s served on a potato onion roll and served with tempura fried onion rings,” describes Kim.

With her family, Kim moved to the Bronx from Seoul when she was 10. Coming from an academically-driven Korean household, she was law school-bound (natch), but then decided instead to put her nose to the cutting board at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now called the Institute of Culinary Education). Since, she’s worked with a set of renowned chefs that includes Michael Anthony, Dan Barber, Peter Hoffman, and Anita Lo.

As expected, food was a focal point in Kim’s family. “Cooking was in the blood,” she says. Her mother studied culinary arts in Korea, and her late paternal grandmother, who was a devout Buddhist, taught Kim to be frugal, to waste nothing. “I have memories of being with her, gathering crazy weeds, funky fungi, barks and roots,” recalls Kim. “Just eating off the mountain.”

Today, her mother helps Kim make the kimchi served at The Good Fork, and together, they’ll spice up about 60 heads of cabbage at a time. The hubby makes kimchi, too. “I swear,” says Kim, “he was an old Korean woman in a former life.”

When asked why Korean food is so popular these days, Kim says, “Because it tastes so damn good. It tickles all the senses, it’s sweet and salty, and oh my goodness, it’s zingy. And minus the sodium, it’s very good for you, too.”

—Kai Ma

Debbie Lee
Caterer and contestant on The Next Food Network Star
Age: 39    City: Hollywood

Debbie Lee’s culinary creations are what you get when East meets … South?

That’s right. The vivacious kitchen whiz coins her cooking style Seoul 2 Soul: “It’s a little Korean, a little Southern—basically, my life on a plate!”

When her parents emigrated from Korea to the U.S., they happened to land in Jackson, Mississippi, where they learned how to whip up comfort favorites like black eyed peas and grits. That’s what Lee was raised on as a kid in Arizona, where they later settled.

A budding chef from the start (“When my mom would take me to the bookstore at 5 or 6 years old, I always went straight for the cookbooks,” she recalls), Lee was drawn to all different types of food, but felt a particular connection to Korean fare. Her grandmother, barely knowing a lick of English, taught her how to concoct basic staples.

“She’d teach me by using sign language,” Lee explains. “If I’d add the right amount of pepper, she’d say ‘yah.’”

Through these impromptu lessons, Lee gained confidence both in and out of the kitchen.

“Growing up as the only Asian at my school, food led me to like myself,” she says. “Whenever we invited people to our home, we’d have mandu. People were like, ‘Oh, they’re like wontons.’ Food allowed me to engage with my culture and realize I’m not so different from anyone else.”

Lee attended the New England Culinary Institute and after working for established companies like LaFolie, the Ritz Carlton and Marmalade Café, she started her own catering business in Hollywood. Her specialties? Kimchi mashed potatoes, Mama Lee’s chicken and sesame dumplings, bulgeogi burgers. “I’ve come full circle,” she says.

Now, every Sunday night, you can watch Lee compete to become The Next Food Network Star, meaning that if she wins, she’ll get her own cooking show. But for this soulful chef, it’s more than just about the exposure.

“I’m sending a message out there to the Korean community,” Lee says. “You’re American when you land here. Be proud of who you are. This has definitely been a road for me. I don’t want to be anything other than who I am.”

—Michelle Woo

Kelly Choi
Host of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters
Age: 33    City: New York

What does it take to make it as a host? Kelly Choi may be a good case study.

She’s a former model, a Columbia Journalism School grad and a self-described foodie. She’s hosted a series of shows focusing on New York lifestyle, and is now the host of Top Chef Masters, a spinoff of Bravo’s Top Chef.

“That’s my dream job,” she says. “They called me, and I just up and died. Beyond joy. Truly, truly amazing.”

The new show, which premieres June 10, pits established chefs against each other in a series of challenges similar to the type seen on the original show. Television viewers can watch renowned culinary artists sweat over, say, making a palatable dish with $20 of food from a gas station. Opportunities for schaudenfreude abound.

“It takes so much guts to come onto the show,” she says, “because [the chefs] are ridiculously successful already.”

Food has always been Choi’s primary avocation, which she attributes to its important place in Korean culture. She was born in Seoul and grew up in Virginia. After attending journalism school, she began her hosting career on a series of local news and lifestyle shows in the New York area. Choi broke out with Secrets of New York, on NYC-TV, the city’s acclaimed public television station. The show won several regional Emmys and became a hit for the network, garnering enough attention to be syndicated for public television       stations nationwide.

The average episode featured Choi, dressed in trademark vinyl full-length trench coat and stilettos, delivering tidbits of historical information from, for example, the top of the Chrysler Building, or the inside of a subway tunnel. She became a bit of a local celebrity, with New York’s                 blogosphere fueling her fame with comments about her vampy outfits.

After the success of Secrets, Choi says producers from NYC-TV approached her about doing a restaurant-themed show. She jumped at the opportunity.

“I would always be watching the Food Network,” she says. “Then when they asked me if I wanted to create a restaurant show, I couldn’t believe it.” Choi now produces and hosts Eat Out NY. Each episode features a different New York City chef, with whom Choi cooks a meal and comments on its yummyness.

Now that Top Chef Masters is airing and the shooting for the show is complete, Choi is back on NYC-TV, taping more episodes of Eat Out NY. And though we may not have an answer to the question of what makes a successful host, Choi has certainly become one.

—Sung-Min Yi

Suzay Cha
Executive chef at Cicada
Age: 50   City: Los Angeles

A meal made by Suzay Cha is like an expedition on a plate. Her inspiration comes from all parts of the globe.

Born in Seoul and raised in Japan, Cha immigrated to the United States when she was 14 and made herself at home in the melting pot of Los Angeles.

The first English sentence she learned was, “I want to be your friend.” From then on, she spent her life making new friends—and tasting their food. One friend introduced her to the flavors of Puebla, Mexico. Another turned her taste buds onto Jewish cuisine.

“Eating food is like celebrating your senses,” Cha says. “Food has a welcoming spirit. It’s a beautiful feeling.”

Her travels didn’t stop there. She studied French in Paris. She journeyed to northern Japan to learn a special type of cuisine called kaiseki. She headed to China for training in Beijing-style cooking. She was part of an exchange program in Germany.

Wherever she went, she loved inviting people over to enjoy a good meal.

“To me, luxury means creating something for your friends,” she says. “You don’t need to live in a palace to entertain. You don’t need a lot of ingredients to make something special.”

Once Cha settled back in California, she opened a restaurant in Orange County called Mondu Suzay, which specialized in Korean dumplings. Diners could choose from different dipping sauces like chipotle, lemon vinaigrette or miso with honey.

Eventually, a friend introduced her to the owner of Cicada Restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where she now creates the sophisticated Northern Italian menu. Specialties include the muscovy duck with orange gremolata and grilled jumbo diver scallops.

Whatever Cha makes, she makes with passion.

“Food tastes better when you put your heart in it,” she says.

—Michelle Woo

Corey Lee
Chef  de cuisine at The French Laundry
Age: 31   City: Yountville, Calif.

Since KoreAm last spoke with chef Corey Lee of The French Laundry in Napa Valley, California, he has gone on to win a  prestigious James Beard Foundation honor and been recognized as a rising star chef by the San Francisco Chronicle. But the 31-year-old apparently hasn’t let the recognition get to his head.

“I think you need to find greater and more meaningful ways to calibrate your success and validate your work,” a philosophical Lee told KoreAm last month. He added that while the honors have been flattering, the most important criteria for the restaurant’s success is “pleasing our guests and keeping our staff motivated and inspired.”

If it sounds like Lee has taken a page out of the book of legendary French Laundry founder Thomas Keller, known for his collaborative work style, that’s because he has. And after almost five years as chef de cuisine and eight years working at the French country-inspired restaurant where reservations must be made two months in advance, Lee will be leaving in August to create his own a culinary collaboration—a restaurant in San Francisco.

“It was an ideological decision more than anything else,” says the Seoul-born Lee, who previously worked at top-rated restaurants in London and Paris. “I wanted an opportunity to run a restaurant and offer a style of cuisine and service that truly resonates with me.”

During his time at The French Laundry, where he started as a low-level chef at age 23, Lee says he certainly developed his own personal style, but was always conscious of maintaining the identity of the Michelin three star-rated restaurant—known for its nine-course tasting menu—and of chef/owner Keller.

“My next venture will free me of that responsibility and allow me to express something more personal,” Lee says. But what he won’t discard on this new journey is this lesson: “that a successful restaurant is truly about collaboration, and bringing out the best in your staff.”

—Julie Ha

By Kai Ma

Remember When?

JANUARY

• Fanned by the subprime mortgage crisis, stock markets plunge worldwide. Fears spread of a recession in the United States.

FEBRUARY

• An arsonist torches South Korea’s Sungnyemun Gate, a 600-year-old national treasure.
• School shooting at Northern Illinois University leaves six dead and 18 wounded. According to reports, the gunman admired the tactics of Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.
• Fidel Castro resigns.
• Lee Myung-bak becomes the 10th president of South Korea.
• The New York Philharmonic tunes up in Pyongyang, North Korea.
• Thousands perish as a 7.5 magnitude earthquake strikes near the Chinese city of Chengdu.
• Statue of Seo Jae-pil, a scholar who fought for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule, is unveiled in Washington, D.C.
• Cyclone devastates Myanmar (also known as Burma), killing 100,000-plus.

MAY

• Jeff Han, the brains behind CNN John King’s favorite interface-free touch screen, snags a spot on Time’s list of the world’s most influential people.
• This time, John Cho runs away from the joint in Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.
• The war in Iraq turns 5 years old.
• The shrinking of Arctic sea ice from global warming places the polar bear under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.
• Mixed martial artist B.J. Penn defends his title as lightweight champion in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
• Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) dies on ABC’s brain-twisting drama Lost. Or does he? We still believe.

JUNE

• South Koreans have a cow over imported U.S. beef, with nearly 100,000 protestors hitting the streets of Seoul.
• The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a Washington, D.C. gun law, citing the Second Amendment.
• Rising star Anthony Kim wins the AT&T National, his second PGA victory this year, and will later help the U.S. team win the Ryder Cup.
• U.S. Census Bureau predicts minorities will outnumber whites by 2042.
• Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin becomes the first female veep G.O.P nominee — earning her cult-hero status … until an unfortunate appearance on CBS.
• U.S. swimming phenom Michael Phelps wins a record eight gold medals in Beijing.
• The Ladies Professional Golf Association unveils a controversial English-language policy that it later rescinds.
• Violent clashes break out between Georgia and South Ossetia.
• South Korean tourist Park Wang-ja, 53, is fatally shot by a soldier at a North Korean mountain resort.

SEPTEMBER

• Hurricane Gustav prompts one of the largest mass exoduses in the history of Louisiana.
• Ike barrels into Galveston, Tex. with 110-mph winds, killing dozens.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is rumored to be ill.
• Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) moves on from ex-fiancé Preston Burke (wah!) after a lip-lock with Dr. Owen Hunt on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy.
• As Wall Street continues to crumble, President Bush signs a $700 billion economic bailout plan approved by Congress.
• The war in Afghanistan turns 7 years old.
• South Korean visitors can now enter the U.S. visa-free, under a visa waiver program.
• Los Angeles burns.
• Gus, the world’s fugliest dog, dies after a lengthy and courageous fight against cancer.
• Samsung becomes the leader of the U.S. phone market for the first time, toppling Motorola.
• Bans on same-sex marriage pass in California, Arizona and Florida, triggering protests nationwide.
• Obama is elected POTUS.

By Kai Ma
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi

Hair by Jenny Chung, RA Beauty Core
Makeup by Kelly Yeom, RA Beauty Core

Smith Cho loves animals, and she’s not the first starlet known for advocating for their rights. Think Brigitte Bardot, Pamela Anderson, and the scores of other celebrities who rally behind PETA, while proclaiming their vegan diets and refusing to slip into fur.

Yet Cho, who stars in NBC’s revival of Knight Rider, thinks the description is a bit misleading.

“I do believe that animals need to be protected, and it breaks my heart to see an animal in a cage,” says the Hollywood-based actress. “But I’m not exactly an animal rights activist.”

She pauses, her eyes narrowing on her pretty, angular face. “Plus, I eat meat.”

But back in 2004, Cho did rescue two dogs: Humphrey and Lauren (yes, named after the famed Bogart/Bacall duo). “I didn’t name them,” Cho clarifies. “The rescue center did. They would call my American bulldog ‘Humpin’ Humphrey’ because he used to hump a lot.” Before the adoption, the dogs were seized from an abusive owner and placed at the Villalobos Rescue Center. Lauren, a pit bull-Jack Russell mix, had to undergo an emergency operation to remove 39 pellets from her body because her owner had tied her to a tree before shooting her with a BB gun. “Lauren was in such bad shape that she slept with one eye open. She was a mess if Humphrey wasn’t around.”

It takes a plucky type of determination to rescue, then raise two canines with trust issues, especially when the combination of the dogs’ weight exceeds 150 pounds. But for Cho, who talks animatedly, zips through Los Angeles freeways in a black BMW, and rocks out to the Killers and the Shins, it all boils down to a “battle of the wills.”

“As a kid, I played piano, and my teacher was Korean and abused me,” Cho says in a hushed whisper. “He would hit me with a stick, and it was horrible and traumatizing,” she adds with a giggle. “That’s why I adopt dogs: I feel their pain.”

Which also explains how in just a few years, Cho’s prolific resume has grown to include the most popular television shows out there, as well as small and large castings in films, and a recurring Knight Rider role as Zoe Chae, a Korean American linguistics expert. In the cutthroat world of Hollywood, willpower and a tolerance for pain are practically required traits, and actors can’t be strangers to both.

“Acting is really awesome,” says Cho. “But it’s so driven by self-esteem. It’s about seeking revenge, approval and acceptance. Auditions can be depressing. You feel amazing one day, but the next day, you can literally feel like a balloon that somebody put a pin in. The truth is, we’re all a little sadistic.”

***

Knight Rider was cemented into the American pop psyche shortly after the original series introduced the high-tech crime-fighting Michael Knight, played by David Hasselhoff, in 1982. Yet arguably, the star of the show was not Knight, but his artificially intelligent computer-controlled car, Knight Industries Two Thousand (K.I.T.T.). (In other words, the talking Trans Am).

After a two-hour movie served as a “backdoor pilot” in February, the Hasselhoff-less revival, created and executive produced by Gary Scott Thompson, began airing in September as a weekly series on NBC. Despite some crummy reviews and modest ratings (a recent episode garnered only 6.9 million viewers), NBC picked up its adventure-drama remake for a full season in late October.

Val Kilmer is the voice of K.I.T.T., now code for Knight Industries Three Thousand, a souped-up Ford Shelby GT 500 KR Mustang.

“We never see Val Kilmer,” Cho says. “I think he literally just records all of his stuff out of his house or farm or acreage or forest thing out in Montana or Wisconsin or wherever he lives.” As for Justin Bruening, who portrays Mike Traceur, the estranged son of Michael Knight, “he’s playful and amicable. He really is like a 12-year-old kid. Maybe even younger.”

Cho was the last to join the ensemble cast. Zoe Chae, who is described on the show’s official website as a “ditzy, but surprisingly intelligent office administrator,” tends to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. The series premiere, for example, opens with an explosive, high-action scene: Mike Traceur and Sarah Graiman (Deanna Russo) are with K.I.T.T. when they are hit with a missile. The car motors on, engulfed in flames. “When the temperature reaches 212 degrees, you’ll be boiled alive in your own bodily fluids,” K.I.T.T. informs them, ominously.

“It was this major scenario,” says Cho, “because they were all going to melt to death and die.”

At the Knight Rider Industries headquarters, Zoe is one of many staff members working to rescue the trio. Dressed like a sex kitten assistant, she frantically types on a keyboard and makes phone calls. Ruckus ensues. As K.I.T.T. heats up, so do the actors, who disrobe to provide convenient shots of a topless Bruening and Russo in purple, lace lingerie. Yet K.I.T.T. averts disaster by roaring into the Knight office, where Mike and Sarah are resuscitated.

Zoe’s response to the near-tragedy?

“That was awesome,” she says, grinning.

“Which is so inappropriate,” says Cho. But, “Zoe is mysterious and consistently evolving. You don’t know her completely so she comes off one way, but her abilities are not what you expected from her.”

Those abilities include being multi-lingual. On the show, Zoe has spoken in Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Korean (Cho was already fluent in the latter two). On her script, these lines are spelled out phonetically, and include an English translation, but so far, it’s up to Cho to do her own research to make sure she’s nailing the accent and cadence. “It’s tough,” she admits. “At some point, they’re probably going to have to get me a dialect coach.”

In some ways, Cho relates to her character. “I find myself totally laughing at inappropriate times,” she says. And in other ways, she doesn’t. “Zoe is sexual. She’ll either be playful-flirty, or really sexy-flirty. She likes to toy with Billy Morgan [Paul Campbell] and tease him sexually. But in real life, I don’t do that. I’m not overtly flirtatious. I don’t go around thinking, yeah … I’m sexy.”

***

Growing up in the Silicon Valley sprawl of Northern California, Cho never caught an episode of the original Knight Rider series. In fact, as the only child of a strict, single mom, Cho was barely exposed to television or film, period. “I thought Hollywood was reserved for a different breed of person,” she says, “and that you had to have special blood or be born into it. I thought about TV and movies from a sheltered point of view: completely out of reach.”

That all changed during college at California State University, Long Beach. There, she met a friend that worked as a film extra. “I realized that anyone could be an extra,” Cho says. “And then I realized that all you had to do was take acting lessons, and that anyone could be an actor.”

Upon this discovery, Cho decided to pursue acting full-time and drop out of college. Not that she was getting much out of it to begin with. “I was having such a blast that I wasn’t focused on studying,” recalls Cho. “It was out of control. I was such a screw-up that I wasn’t even getting my financial aid papers in on time.”

During one of her acting classes, a commercial agent showed up and signed Cho on as a client. After appearing in nearly 50 commercials for companies including MasterCard, GEICO, Sears, and Toyota, she was cast in small roles for notable series such as Boston Public, ER, Gilmore Girls, House, and Six Feet Under. As Glitter Cho, she made her network series regular debut in Emily’s Reasons Why Not, starring Heather Graham. Glitter remains one of Cho’s favorite characters.

“I was allowed to be very creative,” she says. “Glitter was evil but fun-evil. She wasn’t, you know, dark-evil.”

Other recurring roles include stints with Entourage, She Said/He Said, and most recently, ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money, as the younger sister of Nola Lyons, played by Lucy Liu. And as expected, Cho is often compared to her famous, onscreen sibling. “Non-Asians will comment that I resemble Lucy Liu,” says Cho. “And I’m like, really? It gets annoying, but when I smile, I can also see how they can think that.”

This summer, Cho wrapped Will Gluck’s cheerleading comedy, Fired Up, which is slated for an early 2009 release, and she also appeared in The Last Lullaby and Meet Dave. But most notably, Cho played the female lead in the 2007 feature flick Ping Pong Playa, written and directed by Academy Award winner Jessica Yu. Cho’s character, Jennifer, described as “rough around the edges,” is the love interest of Christopher ‘C-Dub’ Wang (Jimmy Tsai). “[He] kinda likes me,” says Cho. “And in the end, we’re dating. But that’s after his character matures.”

As for Jennifer’s characterization, “being ‘rough around the edges’ makes her sound like a hooker,” Cho deadpans. “But she’s definitely fun. I do tend to be cast as a ball-buster, and it’s probably because I’ve ball-busted several people in the past,” adding coyly, “but not in a mean way.”

***

These days, when Cho isn’t at a grueling 12- to 17-hour Knight Rider shoot, she’s unpacking boxes at her Hollywood townhouse, where she lives with her “special friend” of six years.

“It’s a mess,” she says, of her new abode. Which posed a problem when Cho visited the KoreAm office for a photo shoot last month because she was asked to bring in various outfits. “My closet is a disaster,” she explains, as she spreads out T-shirts, jeans and a pair of black Vans speckled with pink hippos. “And I haven’t shopped in years. It’s a crisis in my life. I won’t go out because I have nothing to wear.”

After the shoot, Cho settles into a chair, wearing dark skinny jeans and a red fitted tee emblazoned with the words, “I don’t like you.” Her voice, which borders on a breathy purr, is sweet and girlish, and prone to trailing off. Her svelte, 5’4” figure evokes the litheness of a dancer, and for good reason: Since age 9, Cho has trained in ballet and different styles of jazz. During high school at Homestead in Cupertino, Calif., she moved into performance and competitive dance.

“I was really into hobbies,” Cho says. “And it was probably because I was so lonely. My mom was never home so it was just me. I filled my life with playing viola in the school orchestra, flute and piccolo. And then I begged my mom to put me in dance.”

Cho is a fan of Knight Rider’s action genre, but she also aspires to incorporate her dance training into her work. “I’d like to do dance movies like Step Up, Dirty Dancing, Swing Kids. Or the family adventure genre, such as Harry Potter or even Lord of the Rings. I’m all about that magical world.”

Which is why Cho admires the intelligent, fantastical work of Johnny Depp. “He’s got a great career, and an imaginative one,” says Cho. “I’d love to work with Tim Burton, and I adore Chevy Chase and Bill Murray a ton. But really, I want to be in a film like Beethoven.”

The biopic of the German composer?

“No,” she says, laughing. “The comedy about Beethoven, the dog!”

The animal movie, of course.

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