The Exchanges

Q Yeah. I'm curious for people who don't know, I mean, probably the most famous to non-Taiwanese folks, um, Taiwanese cuisine is beef noodle soup, right? Or bao sandwiches. Tell me a little bit about the food that you make at your restaurants. Yeah.

A Heinen Crane, you know, it has a very heavy northern Chinese influence on the menu, um, because you have my maternal side, they went from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949 when there was a civil war and they came from this region where they ate a lot of wheat because wheat was the main agricultural product. So a lot of like dumplings, buns, potstickers and my grandmother would always joke about how they would move over to Taiwan and then all of a sudden they were neighbors with native Taiwanese and how like all the neighbors would kind of want to come over and learn like how to make these things because it was more of a rice based diet. And like for a michelle made it from rice instead of noodles made from wheat. Taiwanese food just has a lot of different influences because, you know, you have The aborigines. You have migrations from China in earlier years. You have the Japanese occupation for 50 years, where they thought they would have the island forever. Um, and then you have two million people from all over China, such a large landmass, kind of gather together onto this island and all become neighbors with one another. So I think it makes for, you know, a very interesting culinary melting pot.

AI assessment note: “it has a very heavy northern Chinese influence on the menu”

Q you know, as the pandemic was still raging, and then it would It would become worse, especially in Los Angeles. You opened a breakfast pop-up restaurant called Today Starts Here, and it's been really successful. Um, did you have the plan to do this, or was that kind of born out of the situation with the pandemic? Did you just think, you know, let's open a pop-up, a breakfast restaurant?

A Yeah, um, I think... You know, when you look at it, it seems like we've expanded during the pandemic, um, but we did sort of downscale, like, from our original plans. February, twenty-twenty was a super exciting time for us. Um, you know, I had finished signing a lease that I had personally guaranteed, um, and then we were in the middle of this lease for Chinatown that is, today starts here. We were almost done, um, and I was looking at a different spot, and we had a week where we were like, oh my goodness, this is so exciting. Well, Be working on maybe as many as five projects by the end of the year. And then the pandemic hit, and then, you know, immediately it was like, well, let's push all of that away. But, you know, we had already started the conversation of like, oh, who would we promote to be a manager on our team? And, We've already had those conversations and who would we move to Chinatown to run this project? Um, so we took a break for two months, but when we came back, you know, and I was able to talk to the landlord and be like, look, can we try like a month to month situation? There's a lot of downsides to opening during a pandemic, but there's a lot of upsides too. Um, you know, because no one came inside, we can kind of just, you know, we just scrub down the space, put some old and new pieces of equipment together, um, and got to start up rather quickly, um, quic…

AI assessment note: “we were in the middle of this lease for Chinatown that is, today starts here”

Q you're bringing, as you say, your, your heritage and your culture, um, and your family's culture through food to people in the Los Angeles area. Tell me how you, um, I know you started with a restaurant called Pine and Crane in Silver Lake in LA. Tell me how you came to that, that place. How did you, um, how did you first decide to open up a Taiwanese restaurant?

A I knew I wanted to open a restaurant, and it didn't have to be necessarily Taiwanese food. I just really liked the idea of creating a place and having people come together. I liked the energy of a restaurant. And I like the idea of running a restaurant, but Taiwanese food made a lot of sense because, you know, ultimately it's the food that I hold most near and dear my heart. And then also I felt like it was very underrepresented at the time, um, but had so much to offer. You know, I'll always like to say that Taiwanese food is organically designed to appeal to the masses because of the way, you know, history, um, and migration, you know, with all food kind of like shaped its, Culinary history and where it's going. Um, it just made a lot of sense to me to, you know, share something that I'm from, and then also it was something that, you know, could be shared with more people.

AI assessment note: “Taiwanese food made a lot of sense because, you know, ultimately it's the food”

Q Yeah. You grew up, um, In Bakersfield, California, which is like kind of the capital of America's food basket, right? Bakersfield and, and Modesto, like Fresno, these are like sort of the big cities in the Central Valley of California. Like, was your family in the agriculture industry?

A We actually moved to Bakersfield for that reason. So when I was around five or six, my dad decided to buy a farm and we all moved over and, you know, the earlier years when he, especially when he was growing all sorts of stuff, that was when I was a lot younger. So a lot of memories are planting seeds and like harvesting and playing with plants and things like that. And it was really nice. Um, but then, you know, school started and then I became probably less and less involved over time, but I also started to sort of, I think, Grow up and kind of see, like, oh, this is a really hard industry, and like, my parents would have to try, and there were, you know, definitely rough years in there. I think, ultimately, you know, they, they ran a small business. A lot of people in my family owned small businesses, not necessarily in food, um, and I did like how, you know, even in a moment of difficulty, um, they ultimately got to decide what was the best response, but yeah, I, I grew up in Bakersfield.

AI assessment note: “We actually moved to Bakersfield for that reason. So when I was around five”

Q so I have to assume you're a pretty good student in high school, and how did you decide to, to go into the restaurant industry? Because I have to imagine that there probably were people, maybe even your parents, who were like, Vivian, this is nuts. This is like the, the most unstable, like, the scariest thing to go into. Did you get any, any kind of pushback like that?

A A little bit, sure. You know, I originally went into the industry because some of the very basic reasons, like, everyone else, like, I loved food, I loved going out to eat, I loved creating something, I loved how people are generally very happy when you feed them, and I was like, that's a good way to make a living. I didn't get as much of that, I think, as a lot of, I think, Asian American kids especially got. My grandfather was, is one of my favorite humans ever. He was just Had so much oomph and, um, was a very principled person. Um, and I remember from a very early age, you know, he would say something like along the lines of, you know, there are no inferior jobs, only inferior people. It doesn't matter what you do. It's how you do it.

AI assessment note: “A little bit, sure. You know, I originally went into the industry because”

Q I have to imagine you learned a lot about what could work and what might be more efficient in your business, right? Because it's just breakfast and it's a pop-up, so presumably there's room to do the kinds of experimentation that you might not be able to do as easily in a brick-and-mortar location with critics coming in and all kinds of pressure. Is that, am I right about that?

A Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to having it be a pop-up, I think, It's definitely not profitable on running breakfast alone, so we'll have to figure out something there in the longer term. Um, and I do think, especially during the pandemic, a lot of people have been very entrepreneurial and like cooking out of, you know, their homes and sharing pop-up kitchens, and I think ghost kitchens were already part of the industry before this happened, and I think will be a bigger part of the industry. I'm not as interested in ghost kitchens because you lose so much of the things that That drew me to the hospitality industry in the first place. Um, but it's true, like, um, we were thinking, you know, if we did breakfast in the morning, and then at night the space is available, um, If anyone on our team wanted to do a pop-up, that would be a really good opportunity. We really wanted to pursue this because there's just so much potential. We're not really sure what it is yet, but it's like, we can put our heads together and think of creative things that we can do to make things work.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to having it be a pop-up”