The Beginning
I spent my childhood living in Chiang Mai, Thailand and hung around my aunts’ Thai restaurant kitchens during summer breaks in Los Angeles, CA. From an early age, I grew up around food and gravitated towards creating in the kitchen. While others my age watched cartoons, I spent my free time watching Emeril and Nigella make lasagnas and roast chicken. Ina Garten and Anthony Bourdain were my idols in high school (they still are). Food was always my world.
I didn’t go into cooking right away. I went to college at UC Berkeley, got a degree in environmental economics, and worked in tech for 10 years. I’m sure my fellow AAPIs can relate. My family wasn’t supportive of me working in the restaurant industry; heck, I wasn’t ready to take that risk. The world seemed scary and I wanted to feel secure. But I was never able to shake the idea of opening a restaurant one day.
Chiang Mai Breakfast Pop-Up - Mission District, SF
While living in San Francisco in 2015, I attended pop-up dinners hosted by talented chefs in the area. I was inspired by the idea of an intimate space, creative menus, and strangers dining together. With the help of my friends and then-boyfriend (now husband), I decided to host one myself. I had an amazing time and hosted a few more thereafter. I kept my full-time tech job and worked on weekends to make things work. When I wasn’t hosting, I’d work with other chefs on their pop-ups. There was nothing glamorous about washing dishes and breaking down 25 quails but I loved every minute of it. I vividly remember driving a box of pristine white truffles from SF to Napa for a dinner event. My car smelled like truffles for a week; it was glorious.
In 2017, we moved to NYC to pursue a great career opportunity for my husband. I stopped working on my pop-ups and focused on my tech career. When COVID-19 hit, we were in the thick of it. The stock market panicked and so did my company. I was laid off from my tech job. I knew I was one of the lucky ones. I received severance pay, I had an apartment, and my husband still had his job. We were financially and physically secure unlike the millions of people who were impacted. As a result of being home and having no job, I started cooking every single meal from scratch. We were afraid to make our weekly Chinatown grocery runs (we lived in Brooklyn) so when we ran out of noodles, I learned how to make them from scratch. I started making everything from scratch from noodles to sourdough bread (yes, I was one of those people). I’d wake up early to make breakfast which usually involved sourdough toast with a french omelette or with chili jam and pork sung. On weekends we’d have sourdough pancakes made with the starter discard. Lunch was usually a one bowl meal so my husband could work and eat if needed. Usually it was Thai dry tom yum with homemade egg noodles or rice vermicelli with curry and fresh greens (kanom jeen). Then I might spend time folding my sourdough to bake the next day. Dinner was always elaborate (think okonomiyaki, hainan chicken rice, khao soi, larb and sticky rice). Those 9 weeks were the happiest I’ve been in a while.
But reality calls. I landed a job at another tech company thanks to my mentors (thank you if you’re reading this). Initially, I suffered from imposter syndrome. I didn’t think I was qualified to do the job so I dedicated 110% of my time to make sure I didn’t let my mentors down. I put in extra hours which meant less time to be creative in the kitchen. We ate takeout for lunch and dinner. My creativity was starved and I was mentally drained. I went from spending 100% of my time doing what I love to spending 0%. My husband could tell something was off. Writing about it now, I definitely went through a bout of depression. All I did was work and all I thought about was how to do better at work. No one forced me to work, I thought that was what I had to do to be successful and when you work from home, there is nothing else to do! The last three months of 2020 were some of the most mentally taxing months; I missed being happy.
As a result of COVID, we decided that it was time to move back to California to be closer to family. We arrived in February 2021 and moved in with my in-laws temporarily. We were at an inflection point in our lives. Here we were, bumming around, not paying rent and trying to figure out our next homebase.
The idea of moving across the globe had been something we entertained in 2016, however, it seemed crazy in 2021. If I wanted to do something crazy like move to Thailand to do research for a future restaurant (also a crazy idea), it was now or never. So we decided, why not now? I quit working in July 2021. We booked our one-way ticket for mid-August.
I started this website to document my journey and share my experiences with you. Thank you so much for reading. Much more coming soon!
