Fresh Off the Boat (38 page)

Strickly for My Astronauts (Lower East Side)

Date: 2010-12-10. 1:06PM EST

Reply to: [email protected]

To this day, my favorite ad was the one titled “Wanna Play Nintendo with Caesar-Leo? Pick up the phone, deliver baos to your home.” From the overwhelming responses to the ads, it was becoming abundantly clear
that we were right all along. Despite my parents, other people’s parents, and an industry of copycats, there was a genuine workforce and customer base that grew up on the ethos of golden-era hip-hop and wanted to do something positive in an honest, real, socially progressive way. We were a generation of people that listened to Ghostface, tried to impeach the president, and wanted all-natural, hormone- and antibiotic-free pork. Among the biggest influences on Baohaus were
Food, Inc
. and the Bauhaus school of design itself. I chose the name Baohaus because my favorite movement in architecture and design was Bauhaus. It stuck with me ’cause shit was simple, clean, masculine, and conscious. It wasn’t aesthetically driven design; there was a mind to it, just like our Baohaus. We didn’t have the money to design shit like Bauhaus, but just out of brokenness, the shit was undoubtedly simple if not clean.

Food, Inc
. is one of the best documentaries ever made and really drove the ingredients at Baohaus. Food bloggers sometimes write that we’re “Alice Waters disciples,” but I ain’t never ate her food. All I know is that she annoys the living shit out of the big homie, Tony Bourdain. We aren’t “locavore chefs” or “farm to table” assholes trying to charge you a premium because we got ramps from some dickhead in a pickup truck. The reason we use all natural, hormone-free, antibiotic-free Berkshire pork belly, beef, and chicken is that it’s the right thing to do. There are a lot of independent farms in the game and with restaurants like Baohaus and the aforementioned locavore joints, the food system is changing. I don’t believe you need to shout out the farm, the name of the chicken, or all that other bullshit on the menu because it should simply be the standard that we serve all-natural meat. I hope that one day it will be economically feasible that we serve free-range chicken and grass-fed beef, but until customers vote with their dollars and support business models that can afford to use those ingredients, we can’t. Customers feel like it’s the restaurant’s job to do these things, but it’s a two-way street; as customers, we’re enablers. Without us, it doesn’t matter if the chef’s heart is in the right place. Someone has to support the vision.

One of the biggest challenges we faced came from cheap-ass Taiwanese people. I remember one chick came up to me and said, “You know,
these baos are a lot more expensive than Taiwan. In Taipei, they are much bigger and cost less than a dollar!”

“Well, why don’t you buy a nine-hundred-dollar plane ticket and go buy yourself a one-dollar bao.”

I had the ill flashback working at Baohaus. It was like Chinese school all over again with the small-minded, conservative Asians that couldn’t understand shit if it wasn’t in an SAT prep packet.

Evan, Asa, Kate, and I made a few decisions. Instead of appeasing customers or playing into their bullshit, we consulted Bill Cosby, who famously said, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.” We refused to carry hot sauce in the restaurant because it fucked up the flavor. We stuck to using all-natural meat and kept our prices right where they were. If people told us their grandmothers made it better, we’d tell them to set up shop across the street. At one point, people kept going on Yelp to complain about the no-hot-sauce policy and gave us one star for not accommodating customers. I decided one night to go online and respond by parodying the user and rating my “hot dick.”

The comment: “OMFG, I fucking hate Baohaus and their hot sauce policy, but when I complained the owner hit me in the face with a hot dick. That shit was so delicious. 5 stars!”

That became the model for the Baohaus style of service: the Anti–Danny Meyer.

Music was also a huge part of the Baohaus experience. All of us made playlists, and numerous employees were either DJs, rappers, producers, or former street team kids. We almost never hired experienced cooks, because the goal was to create a team of artists who just happened to work at Baohaus while pursuing other dreams. It was a revolving door, but I wanted it that way. I hated growing up working at places like Boston Market that expected you to treat the job like it was your life. I’m cleaning chicken butts, motherfucker, this ain’t a lifestyle, this is a cot damn problem! I wanted people to want more for themselves; I wasn’t delusional and expected people to move on. If someone wanted to be a career cook, that was cool with me, too. I’d teach them what I knew, give them more responsibility,
and they could stay as long as they liked. We’ve hired, fired, and reconciled, but over two years, we’ve tried our best to make the Haus a fun place to work.

That was another thing the neighborhood seemed to like. Late one night in the summer of 2010, Tyler, Jesse, myself, and some shawties from South Street Seaport stumbled into Baohaus around 10
P.M
. on a Thursday. Usually, we waited till midnight to blaze, but we were so twisted, we posted up on the right side and just lit up. I remember this couple eating baos across from us who couldn’t fucking believe it, but once we passed, they were down, too.

People started rolling up and it ended up two or three blunts being passed around. Downtown, a lot of people are up on papers, but Tyler and I being from the field, we really fucked with Phillies, shit got stank. As customers started walking in, we just told them, “We blazing so you can either get down or get it to go.” Within minutes, the restaurant filled up and we had to lock the door. Mad people were out partying ’cause it was the summer and everyone tried to get in ’cause we had a glass storefront all hot-boxed. People took photos and by then it was a done deal. Baohaus was unlike any restaurant anyone had ever seen. We came in the game like NWA busting through the “I Have a Dream” banner and never listened to the haters. We don’t wear chef coats, we wear Nikes, and Dipset is the anthem.

At the end of February, about two months after opening, we started getting reviews from every paper:
The Village Voice
, Serious Eats (what up, Joe DiStefano?),
Time Out
, etc. Shit was on and when
New York
magazine dropped their Best Cheap Eats issue, we won Best Bun 2010. In the battle for pork buns, Baohaus took it. The restaurant started getting really packed those days with lines fifteen or twenty deep on random Monday and Tuesday nights. Just when we thought things couldn’t get better, they did.

In the first two weeks we opened, this white guy named Ahrin had come into the restaurant. One of my favorite customers all-time, he proved my assumptions about ex-pats wrong and it made me happy. This dude spent a lifetime traveling all across China, loved the food, culture, but most important, he understood that the people themselves were cultural
artifacts. The last hundred years were the worst in Chinese history and Ahrin had met a lot of people who still remembered the pain despite all the growth and change currently happening. He spoke good conversational Chinese and we talked for at least an hour about food in Beijing. A while after Ahrin got there, his wife joined with their newborn. I didn’t catch her name at the time, but they ordered everything on the menu. I sent them an order of Beijing Vinegar Peanuts on the house, but they insisted on paying. His wife was really nice, but ended up breastfeeding in the restaurant and didn’t talk as much. I figure by this point, Baohaus has seen it all from breastfeeding to hot-boxing to freebasing out of a Mountain Dew can. You want it we got it. I didn’t think anything of their visit beyond what it was: a nice family coming in for lunch and some milk.

A month later, we got a call. It was
The New York Times
. They were sending down a photographer because we were being featured in their $25 and Under column. We couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what Serious Eats,
Time Out
, or Eater was at the time, but I knew what the motherfucking
New York Times
was. I made sure to have my “T-Bone Steak Cheese Eggs and Welsh’s Grape” shirt cleaned, pressed, got a skin to one-and-a-half fade, and threw on my Jordan V Fire Reds. How many times you gonna be in the
Times
, right? If this was the first and last, I was goin’ out in J-Vs no doubt. All red everythang, just like Mao. The day the review came out, I realized it was Ahrin and his wife, Ligaya, all along! To this day, that $25 and Under review has been our biggest moment. You can go online and see the article now. Ning is chewing food, Steve is in a scully, and Simon has glasses on. The review came out February 22, eight days after Chinese New Year 2010. We shut the shop down early, drank some Moutai, and called my parents.

“Dad! We’re in
The New York Times
!”

“New York what?”

“The
Times
, Dad! It’s the biggest newspaper in the world.”

“It’s not the biggest!”

“Whatever, maybe it’s not the biggest, but it’s pretty big. Just get
The New York Times
tomorrow, Dad. It’s gonna be good.”

Evan and I woke up late for work on the twenty-third like a bunch of
assholes. We rolled up to 137 and there was already a line outside. Luckily, I had made the braise the night before so once it got heated up, we were ready to go.
^‡
Usually we just had two people on each shift, but it was a shitshow. The line just kept getting longer and longer. We called everyone in: Asa, Simon, Kate, any of our friends who were unemployed. It was all hands. At one point the line wrapped around the block thirty-some people deep. From 11
A.M
. to 3
P.M
., we had the whole block full, and around 3:30
P.M
. it finally died down. I was still making baos for the customers in the shop, Evan was organizing receipts, and Kate was mopping up by the fridge. It was the craziest shift any of us had ever worked. People had taken Town Cars from work to eat baos and head back to Midtown, Brooklyn, Chelsea, etc. I’ll never forget it. Kate leaned against the fridge. Blond hair flying everywhere, mop in hand, then turned to Evan and me. I had no idea what she had to say, but everything kinda stopped for a second.

“Guys! You realize what just happened?”

“What?”

She smiled at us with this funny look, nose wrinkled, freckles on front street, and said the nicest thing I’ve ever heard come out of a white woman’s mouth.

“You fucking made it!”

Kate was right. Five days from my twenty-eighth birthday, I made it my way.

I told my parents the story, but they just shook me off like they always did. Even on that day, nothing impressed them and it hurt. I started to feel like I’d never make them happy, but I let it go. I had done everything I could. I found myself. I rehabilitated myself. I took every bit of Taiwanese-Chinese culture I’d mustered in twenty-seven years, three hundred and sixty days, and threw it into four hundred square feet of Lower East Side basement. It wasn’t a palace, it wasn’t even a dim sum parlor, but it was the best I could do and it made me happy even if my parents didn’t get it. I realized that night that Cosby’s line about pleasing people didn’t just apply to strangers, but family, too. You only owe them so much and as
Asian Americans we have to break away at some point. For a lot of our parents, the World is not enough, but sometimes the
World Journal
is …