A Year in the Life Of…

It has been:

41 days since I’ve cooked anything.

53 days since I touched another border.

73 days since I was in America.

104 days since I worked a gig.

183 days since I had a steady gig.

321 days since I spent more than 3 weeks at home in Cambridge.

And

366 days, also known as one full leap year since Night Market closed.

It has been a very interesting year of being a ronin, walking the earth, looking for work, inspiration, answers, and energy.

When I found out that Night Market was closing, the third message/phone call I made was down to my mentor, Michael LaScola down on Nantucket. He told me that if I wanted to come hang out down on Nantucket, I was more than welcome to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. I took him up on the offer. I just couldn’t be in Boston or Cambridge then. It had been a long 5 years of an uphill battle, not only with trying to get non-restaurant people to understand restaurants, but also trying to figure out how to crack open the Boston restaurant scene in a way that wasn’t undervalued like a lot of traditional Asian food is, or pretentious the way that so much fine dining can be. For five years, I tried to break out of boxes that I believed the Boston food scene tried to put me in. As people would say that whatever I was doing wasn’t authentic, I would push back and say that I wasn’t trying to be anyone’s authentic. Every day, I tried to cook food that was inspired by both my Chinese -American upbringing (which meant that I was neither and both Chinese and American), as well as some of the flavors and techniques I had picked up from my travels throughout the world, both domestic and international.

I spent a fair amount of the past five years pulling my hair out trying to explain things to the public, to consultants, to accountants, and to other decision makers. Add on a rough labor market, an old building that was constantly in need of repairs, and not enough seats to really maximize profits, and it was just exhausting.

So heading back down the island sounded like a good idea to me. I could turn my brain off for a hot second. Shortly before I headed down, I came up with my mantra for the year: “I don’t want to hire. I don’t want to fire. I don’t want to schedule. I don’t want to train. Tell me what you want me to do. I will do it. If you see something wrong with what I’m doing, tell me. I don’t have any feelings. I will change it and make it right. I am here for you.”

It was a beautiful thing to just walk into a kitchen, get shit done, and piss off. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the company of people that I worked with over the past year. I just needed to mentally still myself.

Even before Night Market closed, I had been tossing around the idea of trying to find a way to move to Bangkok. I knew that if I went right after Night Market closed, in January, I would need to come back to do taxes at the turn of the year. My thinking was that if I left shortly after I did my taxes, it would give me a full year to try to pin down a job in Bangkok. The idea was to go at the end of January, come back to Boston for a wedding in June, and if I had someone who wanted to hire me in Bangkok, I would close out my life in Boston when I came back for the wedding and return to Bangkok permanently.

During my time down on Nantucket, I plotted out my course. Once I got off the island, I would go to San Francisco and try to work out there for the late fall and early winter. Luckily, I have a few friends out there. One of whom graciously allowed me to crash on her couch from the first week of November until the second week of January.

In San Francisco, I stuck to my mantra, and it was amazing what kind of positive response I got. I gigged my face off, working for two different catering companies, as well as picking up shifts on a gig-based app for cooks. Some weeks I worked 6 days a week with 4 doubles. Other weeks (Thanksgiving… Christmas… The week after New Years), I worked less than 3 shifts. It was a lot of fun, and I got access to a lot of cool venues like the Clos du Val Vinyeard and the Moscone Center. I did a lot more mass production than I ever had before at any of the restaurants that I had worked at in the past. It was a true education on volume cooking working at the two catering companies. The couldn’t have been more different as well. One catering company used corporate lunches and dinners for their bread and butter, and filled out the rest with big party events. The other one was much more fine dining focused, but also did big events like Dreamforce. The touch to the food was completely different, but the volume was the same.

The gig-based app, I probably used a dozen times or so over the few months I was in San Francisco. It was pretty cool, because going in was like under promising and over delivering every time for me. I walked in. They assumed I was a dum dum. I proceeded to prep my face off until they had exhausted all of the tasks they had set aside for me. I did prep shifts, catering shifts, and line shifts. All of them were pretty mind numbing. A few times I got paid around $28 per hour to stand at a raw bar that wasn’t even all that busy.

I knew that work was going to get slim after Christmas. Everyone told me so. So, I ended up picking up work as a bartender at an EDM festival in Lake Tahoe. I have to admit that it was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. I was thrown into a situation with a bunch of people I really didn’t know. Some turned out to be pretty amazing excellent people. Others turned out to be drugged out, self righteous douches. I think I was in Tahoe for a week, but only worked 4 days. The mountains up there are truly beautiful, but for any of you that don’t know me, I’m much more of a warm weather person, which made the 8-10 hour shifts standing outside in the cold serving drinks to little raver kids a little tough at times.

The week after New Years was absolutely abysmal for work. I found myself sitting and stewing quite a bit. That’s one of my big problems. I am mentally my best when I’m busy. When I’m left with copious amounts of free time, I find myself thinking too much about the past, the future, what I could have done, what I need to do, minutia of things that can no longer be dealt with or are best left to deal with later. Spare time, for me, is the enemy of mental peace.

I left San Francisco after the second week of January and went to see my buddy up in Portland, OR for a week of snacking and checking out cool shops, and then it was back to my apartment in Cambridge to wait for all of my tax forms. They seriously couldn’t get there fast enough. It was kind of insane. The three weeks that I spent back home really kind of sucked. I tried my best to find some gig work, but none of it panned out. I saw friends. I tried to save money. And I sat on my ass. It was simultaneously the longest and shortest three weeks of my life as I waited to come out to Asia.

That has pretty much been the story of my life for the past year post Night Market. With all of the craziness this past year, especially the past few months, I find myself looking back on the time at Night Market and realizing that there really wasn’t any more that I could have done in that space with the structure that was there. Am I bitter about it still? Yeah. A little. But now that it has been a year, I am going to make a conscious effort to try to let it go.

There are things I will never let go of. Aside from the experience I gained from being the actual driving day to day force opening and maintaining Night Market, I was able to meet and work with a number of amazing people that I carry with me wherever I go, whether they know it or not. People like Tamy, Kayla, Ash, Ed, Tess, Suzu, Jorge, Joe, Brennan, Lily, and Mikey constitute the dream team. They’ve set an impossibly hight bar for any team that I may encounter in the future. They’re people I know that I will still talk to in ten or twenty years, provided that I live that long. They’re people I’ll keep my eye on and look out for. They’re people I’ll recommend and rehire given the chance. Some have moved on to other industries or ventures, which is great for them, but a great loss to the hospitality industry.

So at the one year mark, I’m going to try to let go of any bad feelings, trying times, annoyances, and coulda-woulda-shouldas, and try my best to remember the smiles from the people that I can truly call my crew, my regulars, my dishes, and my menus.

Just before this whole lockdown thing happened here in Bangkok, I went to a meetup group based around the idea of happiness and positivity (I know. Sounds crunchy as hell, but I was in need of some positivity). There were a few people there who talked about daily gratitude. It’s something that I have never really been into, as I pride myself in being able to see a lot (if not all) of the angles. That means accepting the negative as well as the positive. A lot of the time the negative will outshine the positive. However, after this year, I’m going to try to give more gratitude to what I have gotten out of life and my experiences. I’m going to try to put that out into the world so that I don’t forget.

I am grateful that in the end, I was able to run an approachable restaurant that had edge and punch. I’m grateful that I was able to make some many friends out of regulars and I hope they all know that I will rise from ashes one way or another. I am grateful that I was able to work with such an amazing core staff that was strong enough that we could scream at each other and apologize five minutes later and be okay. I am grateful for all of the cheesecake I was able to eat over the course of the five years Night Market was open. I am grateful I was able to rope in so many old friends to work with me from time to time. I am grateful that we had a team that wouldn’t allow ourselves to take ourselves so seriously. I am grateful that I have pals that have listened to me piss and moan about this, that, and the other thing for the past five years. I’m grateful to the friends I have that I able to check in on from this part of the world. And, finally, for tonight, on the anniversary of the end of one of the biggest projects in my life thus far, I am grateful to be able to take this beat, this breath, this break that I am taking right now.

Things here in Asia haven’t worked out like I planned, but I know if I can get here once, I can always get here again. This social distancing break, though challenging, may be one of the best things for me. With all of this time, maybe I will exhaust all of the thoughts running around my brain, and I will be able to come to next project a blank slate. Maybe I will be able to approach the next step, not from a place of fear, but with the gratitude that comes with the opportunity to take a crack at something new. As I said, spare time may be the enemy of mental peace, but maybe if I keep pushing through, I can win the war, and come out on the other side, a person with more gratitude to give, more imagination, more energy, and and more life.