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1 10 22 https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/e4ecbbe0b01452c6037e66390ec570ae.jpg b303ccce90291bd98a39f65fe84a3678 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Aman Singh OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 2022-02-18 Interview with Xay Senephoumy, February 18, 2022 2021 oh002_di_006 01:13:27 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking Lao Grocer, Asian American Xay Senephoumy Betsy Brody m4a oh_audio_dig_senephoumy_xay_20220218.m4a 1:|14(7)|24(12)|36(2)|50(5)|76(1)|93(8)|145(6)|157(6)|169(4)|180(7)|209(1)|237(1)|253(7)|266(7)|281(11)|290(7)|304(8)|314(9)|327(11)|344(9)|353(6)|366(7)|380(8)|411(13)|424(9)|452(4)|467(4)|477(14)|489(15)|502(1)|538(7)|551(4)|562(7)|572(9)|584(3)|598(2)|616(15)|629(7)|651(2)|666(4)|676(12)|685(11)|711(10)|723(3)|756(4)|764(5)|774(2)|787(8)|797(6)|810(12)|820(8)|828(6)|841(14)|849(14)|859(2)|876(13)|907(2)|928(4)|936(14) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/162895 Aviary audio Asian American grocers;Asian Americans;Cooking, American;Cooking, Lao;Texas--History 35 Moving to the United States from Laos Colorado;Houston;Laos;Nebraska;Texas 235 Arriving in Dallas in 2000/ Opening Nalinh Market Asian grocery;business;chewing tobacco;community;Dallas;family run restaurant;grocer store;hub;laab;Lao;Lao food;Laotian;Laotian community;Laotian food;larb;Nalinh Market;papaya salad;sticky rice;Taco Bell;vegetables 32.81330398611661, -96.9237610554398 17 631 Lao community in Dallas culture;diverse;diversity;Lao;Lao New Year;Lao Temple;Laos;Laotion community;New Year;Rockwall Temple;Saginaw Temple 893 Beginning to serve food at Nalinh Market advertising;Asian grocery;business;customers;food;grocery store;house party;hub;Irving;kitchen;landlord;Lao;Lao food;Laos;Laotian community;license;permit;racism;social media;sourcing;street food;Thai;vegetables;veterans;word of mouth;Yelp 2058 Opening Saap Saap and the impact of COVID business;COVID;curbside;Lao;Laotian food;marketing;Nalinh Market;pandemic;pivot;Saap Saap;shutdown;takeout;training 2606 Reflections on the concept of "authenticity" and ethnic food authentic;authenticity;ethnic food;Hunan beef;orange chicken;palate;Taco Bell;upscale;western palate 2888 Food as a tool to educate and connect/ Nalinh Market as a community hub bridge;community;connect;connection;culture;curiousity;educate;education;food;hub;Lao community;Lao culture;Laos;respect;word of mouth 3415 Future of Lao food in Dallas authentic;authenticity;Bon Appetit;Dallas;diverse;diversity;educate;education;immigrant;Lao;Laos;Laotian food;Laotian restaurants;neighborhood;palate;Restaurant City of the Year;Saap Saap;Thai food 3886 Senephoumy's mother's background cooking;food;Lao;Laos;Laotian;refugee;refugee camp rel transcript |00:00:04| BRODY This is Betsy Brody. Today is February 18, 2022. I am interviewing for the first Mr. Xay Senephoumy. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and as part of the project end "Digging In: How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped the Story of Asian Dallas." All right, Xay, thank you so much for meeting me and sitting for this interview. Let's just start out real quickly with where and when were you born? |00:00:39| SENEPHOUMY I was born 3rd of February 1979 capital city of Laos at the trail end of the, during the trail end of the Southeast Asian conflict in Vientiane, Laos. |00:00:59| BRODY What brought you to Texas? |00:01:01| SENEPHOUMY What brought me to Texas? That's a long story. In short, I came to America. My parents came to America when I was about a year and a half, less than two years old. I think we landed in Houston, stayed in Houston for two or three years or whatnot, bounced around between Grand Island, Nebraska and the Greeley, Colorado area, maybe for the next couple of years. By the I was five or kindergarten, something like that ended up going to New Britain, Connecticut, where I was raised. Until I think fifth grade. I moved out to a podunk town called Grand Island, Nebraska, graduated high school there had to get out of there as soon as possible. We moved out to the closest Metro- Denver- and stayed there for about two years and ended up here in in the Dallas area in about the year 2000. And I'd been here pretty much since then. Have moved a couple of places while I was here, but I always ended up back here. |00:02:25| BRODY What was your family doing that you were moving to all these places? |00:02:28| SENEPHOUMY Um, you could kind of compare them to migrant workers. They just went to, you know, they weren't formally educated in the U.S. So they just went wherever the work was. And that's how the Laotian community was at the . If one family hears about one job somewhere, they... They would ask if there's other positions available for the other 20 people they know and we would just follow. We're like migrating herd. Any kind of work, really factory work. I remember my mom doing. She was working for an electronic or electrical coil wire manufacturing company in Connecticut. She was doing the assembly line for that. And then after that, most of the Asian communities at the ended up going to places like Kansas and Nebraska to work the slaughterhouses- slaughter cows. |00:03:34| BRODY Right. So you mentioned your mom. How large was the family that you were, your immediate family? |00:03:40| SENEPHOUMY My immediate family was pretty small, consisted of mom, my older sister and I, and every once in a while, dad would that would pop up in and out of the picture. Yeah. So three or four of us consistently. |00:03:55| BRODY OK. So you, you all ended up in Dallas around 2000. What was going on then? What did you do then? |00:04:02| SENEPHOUMY 2000. What I did, I was, was trying to find myself. I was young. Two years in a college. I left college because I wanted to work and hang out. I wasn't sure who I was. So my ah, my parents, my mom and stepdad bought a little- they purchased a little grocery store down here, a little convenience store that was owned by another Laotian family. And I wasn't really doing much in Denver, so they asked me if I wanted to come and help with the family business and I came down. |00:04:39| BRODY So they bought the grocery store. And so it was all- it was- what was it called? Oh, do you remember? |00:04:46| SENEPHOUMY I don't remember the name of it. |00:04:49| BRODY But they were already serving the... |00:04:51| SENEPHOUMY No, definitely not. |00:04:52| BRODY OK. |00:04:52| SENEPHOUMY Serving food? |00:04:53| BRODY No, serving the Laotian community? Or was there a Laotian community? |00:04:56| SENEPHOUMY Yes, there's Dallas. At the that my parents moved here, where Dallas was probably, probably still is the biggest Laotian community in America. |00:05:07| BRODY Oh, really? Yeah. Why do you think that is? |00:05:11| SENEPHOUMY Business opportunities, cost of living? And I think because we're jungle people, you know, we can take the heat. I can't, but they can. |00:05:25| BRODY That's funny. So, OK, so the grocery store, they bought it. Your mom and stepdad. And...Tell me about what that was like when they first started. |00:05:34| SENEPHOUMY Oh, when they first started, it was just a little like bodega , little grocery store- sold veggies and imported goods that that were hard to find in the bigger Vietnamese super, super grocery stores. |00:05:51| BRODY What kind of things? |00:05:55| SENEPHOUMY Maybe some clothing, some special like wicker imports that we would use to- like kitchen utensils, things to cook with and whatnot. And it's funny. One of the big things that you can't find at other stores that the older ladies, they, they chew this like chewing tobacco or that of thing. And we sold that where most places wouldn't. So at the in Irving, there was a there was a older Laotian community and we were the place to serve the older generations. |00:06:40| BRODY What is that? Chewing tobacco called? |00:06:43| SENEPHOUMY In our language and you can look it up...Yeah, we call it "chian maak" which literally translates to chewing, "chewing plants" |00:06:55| BRODY Chewing plants. |00:06:56| SENEPHOUMY But it's it... |00:07:00| BRODY It was a big seller. |00:07:01| SENEPHOUMY Yeah, it's...I'm trying not to laugh because unless you've seen it before, you'd understand, well, why, why I'm giggling. 80 year old ladies chewing tobacco. Their mouths are fuller than any cowboy you've seen around here. And they don't have a spitting cup, you know, they're just right there. Big old...like what looks like a half a gallon coming out of their mouths. It's an amazing sight. |00:07:29| BRODY That's a great image. So, had your mom or stepdad ever done anything like that of a business before? |00:07:37| SENEPHOUMY Actually, yes. When, when I was living in Connecticut as a child. One of my aunts owned a grocery store in Danbury, Connecticut. And every weekend we would drive up there- about an hour away from New Britain, where I grew up, and we would help out at her grocery store and I would just hang out there all day. And I guess that's what planted the seed. |00:08:06| BRODY Right? Kind of learned the ropes there. |00:08:07| SENEPHOUMY Yeah. |00:08:08| BRODY And it seemed doable and manageable. |00:08:11| SENEPHOUMY Yeah. You know, we weren't thinking about it at the . At the , we were just helping family members, you know, we had nothing else to do on the weekend, go help family and cook and eat and hang out. |00:08:21| BRODY Right? Tell me about Laotian food. |00:08:23| SENEPHOUMY Oh, Laotian food. And I get asked this all the . What's the difference between Laotian food and Thai food? And if people just ask me outright "Can you tell me about Laotian food?" I say, "Well, it's just like Thai food, but more rustic, very bold flavors, unapologetic, bold flavors." It's definitely not made or masked for, for the, for the gringo palate. And I like, I like to give this analogy to a lot of people. I tell them it's like it's like trying to call Uncle Julio's or Taco Bell "real Mexican food" when you know it's not. |00:09:14| BRODY Right. What are the like sort of signature dishes? |00:09:19| SENEPHOUMY Oh, sticky rice. Of course, sticky rice is a must have in every household. Sticky rice and steamed rice, but mainly compared to, compared to Thai households, we definitely will have sticky rice. Thai households won't. Papaya salad stands out. It's made with this real stinky, anchovy based sauce that's fermented for anywhere between weeks to months. The stinkier, the better. That's, that's just how that dish goes. Some more traditional ones would be like a laab, beef laab. Its minced meat of choice dish, whether it be chicken, pork or beef. Traditionally with Laotians, it's a, it's mostly beef, where the meat is the showcase, and then it's mixed with herbs like onions and just, just mince, and whatever fresh herbs that we would find in our backyard. |00:10:29| BRODY Sounds really good. Oh, so what was Dallas like when you got here? |00:10:35| SENEPHOUMY When I got here, when I got here in 2000, let me rewind. When I got here in 2000, it was like a second home to me because all my all, my extended family members live here- my uncles and cousins and whatnot- and they're in business themselves here. But the whole I was with...I was living in Nebraska as a teenager. We would often periodically come, come down here to visit. So it wasn't a culture shock to me. So I was ready for it and I was used to it. The only thing I was shocked me was, was the summer heat, which I've been here about 20 years worth, and I still can't take it. I was raised in the snow. So this isn't... |00:11:22| BRODY It's a whole different thing. So you mentioned that you knew a lot of, you know, family, extended family, and that the Laotian community here was established by 2000. In terms of sort of diversity. You know, were you with, I mean, coming from Nebraska, coming from Connecticut, what were what were your impressions? |00:11:46| SENEPHOUMY Diversity wise. I was, you know, Nebraska is the majority white working class, Caucasian working class. I would assume at the all the brown people worked at the slaughterhouse with my parents. I was used to the diversity because I would travel here a lot and, you know, I was fortunate to visit another country and go to many states when I was younger, too. But if I were to take an average Nebraskan and bring them to Dallas, the first , which I did... Brought my best friend down to the to the Houston, NASA thing on a family vacation with us, who were about 16 at the . And he, he didn't know what to do. He was scared and shocked. It was, uh, too colorful for him, to say the least, but, you know, for regular people like that, it could be a surprise, but you know, fortunately, not for us. |00:13:01| BRODY Texas was more diverse than... |00:13:03| SENEPHOUMY Oh yeah, definitely. Very, very diverse. Very. |00:13:06| Diverse. |00:13:08| BRODY How about with connecting with the larger Lao community? Were there events or more casual get togethers? |00:13:19| SENEPHOUMY Yes. |00:13:20| BRODY At that . There are, and there still are till this day. One of the big events is Lao New Year's, which happens in April. And what they do, what they do is they do a food celebration. People just come out sing, eat, drink. It's a community gathering and there's about four main temples in the DFW area, and they'll split the weekends. Like they'll do Lao New Year party at one and the other. That way, we're not favoring one part of town or one side of the community or, you know, we show some love at all the all the local temples. And that's a big thing. People come around from all over the country, Lao people, a lot of different Southeast Asian people, even Caucasians. Some of my Latino friends from Atlanta fly in just for that. |00:14:18| BRODY Wow. That's where is it held? At the temples, physically? |00:14:22| SENEPHOUMY The yeah, the big one is the Saginaw Temple. That's the big hoedown right there. That's the one everybody wants to go to. The big Rockwall Temple is pretty nice, too. They do a big thing over there as well. A couple more. I can't recall the name of the other two, but yeah, those are the two big ones. But the one that people travel for is the Saginaw party. |00:14:53| BRODY So tell me about the store. When you, so when, your mom and your stepdad opened it, what was it called? And what was the sort of a typical day for them? Who were their customers then |00:15:06| SENEPHOUMY Basically just the local Irving Lao community was their everyday customers. We did the same customers every day, every weekend. You know, like I said, we just pretty much catered to the local population, to the Irving population. When they opened it, it was called Nalinh Market, because my mom's brother, Nalinh from Nebraska, she my mom, convinced his family to move here with us as well to start this business. So it was named after him. His name sounded better than everybody else's name. It just rolled off your tongue a little better. |00:15:52| BRODY And it was in Irving where exactly.? |00:15:55| SENEPHOUMY Irving. Irving Boulevard and Loop 12...boulevard and Loop 12. It's... Right next to the to the 7-11, right off the highway. |00:16:08| BRODY So initially, you said they bought it, were they renting the space or they bought it outright? |00:16:14| SENEPHOUMY They, they bought the business and equipment from the previous owner. I don't know how much it was, but. And we're still renting the space out from the landlord to this day. |00:16:27| BRODY Yeah. So sort of the nuts and bolts of starting and continuing a business for such a long . You know- what goes into that? What, what has your family's experience been with sourcing and maintaining the space and so on? |00:16:44| SENEPHOUMY Initially, the nuts and bolts of it were pretty simple. We were just retailing grocery items and fresh veggies. You know, my mom would just basically repackage vegetables. She would go get them from the bigger supermarkets, chop them down in smaller quantities. Made them prettier, you know, and just dressed them up and sold them in smaller, more affordable quantities. And that was pretty much it for the first. I'd say, like 10 years of their business |00:17:17| BRODY And then what happened? |00:17:19| SENEPHOUMY And then what changed our lives was- Different families from different states started moving to Texas. Some old friends of our family. And my mom was known back in the 80s for making food, great food at house parties. And you know, we get her old friends moving here and they're asking, "Hey, are you still a good cook and whatnot? I miss your food from...Remember in 1984, when our kids were little rugrats and you made this special dish at the house? Can you still make it?" Mom's..."You know, yeah, I think I can still make it." So she was unbeknownst to her, she was coerced to make a couple of dishes for sale by her old friends and just snowballed from there. |00:18:17| BRODY Really? So did she make them right there in the store? |00:18:23| SENEPHOUMY Not, not, after the first initial request, she just said, I don't have those items with me right now. Let me get them. When do you want to come back? Couple of days? The weekend? So they came back on the weekend. But those dishes, they loved them and word spread |00:18:41| BRODY The rest is history. |00:18:42| SENEPHOUMY The rest is history. There's a funny detail involved in that too. Where there was no kitchen in Nalinh Market. It was just a little grocery store, a little bodega. And mom was trying to think, "Well, I don't want to cook from the house and bring my friend this food." So she grabs a Bunsen burner and a little frying pan and just cooks that for that individual. And as word of mouth got around, she was using the same Bunsen burner to cook food for the next....who knows how many people, right? Just, you know, and we didn't...We don't even have....We didn't have a food permit. We're not supposed to cook back then, but she's doing it for these people. And then and then she hit it big to the point where she had to upgrade to a double Bunsen burner to keep up with requests. Yeah, and months roll by, and she's still cooking, and the demand increases as the popularity, word of mouth in the in the neighborhoods is spreading, and I just I have a talk with mom. I say, "Mom, you have to put the Bunsen burners away. It's embarrassing. Why don't we? Why don't we build a little kitchen back here?" And, you know, we started with a little makeshift kitchen. And it's still, if you go into Nalinh Market today, it still looks like a little makeshift kitchen because that spot was never meant to be a restaurant. And, you know. And that that's where it all began with a Bunsen burner. |00:20:40| BRODY That's fascinating and a really great story. Do you remember what the original food was that she was cooking? |00:20:48| SENEPHOUMY Laab. Beef laab. Which is a traditional dish, yeah. |00:20:53| BRODY And you mentioned that, you know that the demand started to grow through word of mouth. Was it mostly Lao people who were coming? |00:21:02| SENEPHOUMY Yes, it was definitely Lao people at first. It was definitely Lao people at first. And then when we got to the point where we had to have where we decided to put just two little sit down tables, four chair, sit down tables. I don't know if we were even allowed or permitted by the city yet to, to cook there. But you know, it's what we did until we were told differently. Yeah, so we were, we were mostly serving people we knew- friends or family. And then it would spread out to the local Laotian residents and then as we got more popular and this is when technology kind of changed the game a little bit, Yelp first started coming out and I- they, my parents still don't know this to this day. I created two fake Caucasian accounts. I remember the first one, Mr. Steve Martin, and the next one was like Mr. Sam Sampson, and I created our very first reviews for Nalinh Market, and I said, "I've never had this of food before. Wow, this is great. Southeast Asian food reminds me of Thailand." you know, because Americans are familiar with Thailand. People saw those reviews and then the other ethnicities started coming. |00:22:38| BRODY That's really interesting because, well, first of all that that you created the Yelp accounts and secondly, that the way that you went about doing it. That I mean, were you thinking that this food is really great, but this is how to introduce it to a different... |00:22:58| SENEPHOUMY Not the, not the "really great" part yet because of I was an IT guy at the . I went to school forIT. And I started doing, you know, basic IT work at any place I can. So just the fast forward, I ended up having a 20 year IT career before I opened my first restaurant, Saap Saap. So back at the when I created those fake accounts, I was already in the IT realm. And you know, I heard of Yelp and these review apps and whatnot, and I just said, "Hey, I'm going to give us a review. The world doesn't know about us. The real world does not know about us. Let's, let's get this out to, you know, let's expand it beyond our community." |00:23:45| BRODY Did that happen? |00:23:46| SENEPHOUMY Immediately. |00:23:47| BRODY Yes. Tell me about that. What was the cause and effect there? |00:23:52| SENEPHOUMY Well, we would get our first Caucasian set of customers in. My parents would ask them if they were lost or if there's anything particular they're looking for. And they just said, "Hey, we heard the food is the food is good here. I have some Thai friends, you know? Is it similar to your food?" And we just introduced them to our food and it was all word of mouth at the . And it still is. We don't do any marketing. We didn't spend a dime on marketing then. Just as I told you, the only marketing we had was me and my free fake accounts. And yeah, it just, just, just spread by word of mouth and we started getting other, other people of other ethnicities and... Yeah, yeah, we just saw that the demand was starting to grow, and I convinced, eventually convinced my mom to get legitimate licenses and go to the city and whatnot to where we could actually have a mini full kitchen in that location and convinced her to put out a third and fourth table. |00:25:20| BRODY So when those non-Lao people started coming in, did they know what they were looking for? Did they use your family as a guide to, you know-"What? What is this supposed to taste like? What am I looking for? What's good here?" |00:25:39| SENEPHOUMY Initially, they played it safe for the for the most part because, you know, everybody's eaten Thai food, ordered the things that they're used to, the familiar dishes, Pad Thai and whatnot, egg rolls and whatnot. And then what I did, you know, I'm more talkative than my parents. So when I was working my IT job, I would come and help them out on the weekends. I'd get hungry, free food, right? And I, I would see the same Caucasian customers returning and same Mexican customers returning. I would say, "Hey, I see that you're eating spicier. You should try this dish." And suggest other dishes and whatnot. And that's...That's how we got them to open up their palate a little bit. |00:26:29| BRODY Right? Had many of them even heard of Laos before? |00:26:32| SENEPHOUMY Most of them...No. I'd say like 95 percent of the people didn't. The older generation did. There would be some which I later learned after they become my friends. They were...They were veterans of the war and they were stationed in Thailand, et cetera. And you know, they said this, this reminds them so much of the Thai street food, and they were versed. But for the most part, no, we had to, we had to guide them and ease them into it. |00:27:03| BRODY Did the menu expand rapidly or it sort of stay to a small number of items? |00:27:10| SENEPHOUMY I'd say initially very small because we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We weren't prepared for the business side of things, so we were only able to manage what we could handle. And then after we were getting more popular with, with just a general DFW population, there are more requests for certain traditional dishes, which were easy for us to do. We just, I think we just needed, needed that convincing, you know...needed that little push. Customers asked for it and we shall provide. |00:27:58| BRODY That's great. So eventually, you did interact with the city and get the permits, and all of that stuff. Can you tell me more about that? |00:28:09| SENEPHOUMY It was pretty simple. We just. Well. Probably not the best. Initially, they would come in and tell us, "Hey, you can't do this. You don't have permits for it. Where your permits?" "OK, sir. So what? What do we need to do to get to that point?" And they, you know they walked us through it. |00:28:29| BRODY It was pretty cooperative. |00:28:30| SENEPHOUMY Yeah, yeah, it was cooperative. And there was there was no negativity at all. They saw that we, you know, they probably saw us as an asset to the community for the things that we were doing and that they help us out. |00:28:43| BRODY Yeah. Did you experience with that in that period, any kind of racism or any difficulties or challenges that way? |00:28:54| SENEPHOUMY I would say 2007ish, you know, there was really no racism. The markets were good, everybody was making money. I think oil was, you know, the economy was great. Everybody was happy. There was no, no public tension. You know, we get a few idiots here and there, but not nothing that would stand out. Nothing bad. All that racist stuff comes later. |00:29:25| BRODY Yeah, some people who have businesses that are, you know, Asian businesses or other immigrant businesses talk about difficulties, maybe with the immediate neighbors, neighborhood difficulties over signage or things like that. Did you experience any of that? |00:29:44| SENEPHOUMY Not really, because our location in South Irving. It's a minority community, to say the least, you know. So we didn't we didn't really have any problems and our neighbors, like our business neighbors, they...They specialized in their own businesses, so we weren't stepping on anybody's toes or anything like that, and we all got along well. |00:30:12| BRODY Good. That kind of raises the question of competition. At that , was there any other business that was selling Laotian food? |00:30:22| SENEPHOUMY Not really. There were, at the , there might have been one or two, but they were, they were located so far, like in Fort Worth and I think maybe one in Haltom City, to where we, we didn't compete. |00:30:42| BRODY Right. Did you...Were you, not competing, but did you have a relationship? |00:30:47| SENEPHOUMY Oh yeah, it's such a small community. I'd say more, more- more of my mom's knowledge. The older community just knows everybody. They know everybody. The younger people like me, we have no idea whose kids are who and whatnot until we see each other events or parties. |00:31:10| BRODY So that's interesting that the community is so small that, you know, if you have a similar business that you could maybe compare notes or, you know, share information. You mentioned earlier that you were just, you know, early on sort of trying to keep up with the business side of things. What were some of the challenges and factors there? |00:31:34| SENEPHOUMY Well, I would say a lot of it would have been the accounting. I, at the , was the only first person...I wouldn't say first, my sister was kind of starting too. I was the only one in our family with the real American formal education. So my mom and stepdad who were running the business, they were just...They were just running it off of muscle memory, really. They...They didn't have the accounting education to handle business the right way at that . |00:32:11| BRODY And taxes and all of that kind of stuff. |00:32:13| SENEPHOUMY Right. The, you know, even though they didn't understand all the taxes and whatnot, they would just hire a local tax person to handle that for them. |00:32:25| BRODY Great. And the status of the business now? Still, still going? |00:32:28| SENEPHOUMY Now? My sister runs that location. She's considering getting out of it. Prior to COVID, we were, I would say, maybe the top three most popular Lao family restaurants...Maybe, maybe in the country. In the state, for sure. You know? |00:33:04| BRODY Tell me about what your trajectory was after that period of , what did you do after the Nalinh Market and the initial run of that, of that restaurant and turning it into a restaurant. |00:33:20| SENEPHOUMY Um, my goal was just to expand the audience and my family was fortunate that I was, I have am IT background, so I used whatever social media was available at the , and just wanted to reach out to different audiences just to, you know, spread the word a little more. I was still very reluctant to marketing. And I think if I was more educated on that and knew more people to help, I would say, we would have actually been, been in better business than we were. Yeah, we probably would have made an even bigger impact. |00:34:17| BRODY You went on to start your own restaurant as well, right? |00:34:21| SENEPHOUMY Yes, yes. A sidebar and we can talk about this off, off camera, off the mic, but mom and I decided it was to two separate ways from Nalinh Market, so we had a good talk. Mom said, "You know, use your education. You didn't go to school for nothing. You've been the IT field for umpteen years, 15 years. You've held whatever government clearances for your jobs and whatnot, you know, you have a decent future doing that." And I said, "Mom, you know, if you stop the community going to be sad." So it made me think and it made me realize that I had to carry on the tradition. And in short, I decided to open up the restaurant. The second restaurant, which was called Saap Saap and Mom and I ran that from 2017, January of 2017, till its closing day, few, couple of months ago, I would say November of 2021. |00:35:35| BRODY So that kind of puts you smack in the middle of COVID and all of, all of that. How did COVID impact both businesses? |00:35:45| SENEPHOUMY COVID didn't really impact the original location that bad, because we've already established a good customer base- about 20 years worth of work of customers- and then the location was ideal too. It's right off the highway, easy to find and whatnot. We've already had a good social media following, so the fan base was there. At Saap Saap, it impacted us tremendously and horribly. So COVID really started for the public in what? January or Februaryish of twenty, right? 2020. OK, so I've already been in business there three years and the trend was that we were very slow in the winters. We're basically dead in the winters. And but that year, right before COVID, my, my doors were open every night. All the seats were full. You couldn't get a seat in my place. We were peak. I had, I had the perfect staff. It took me three years to cultivate a great staff. I had everything we ever needed and my staff and I were even looking at each other going, "Wow, this is this is January, this is February, and people are waiting for seats here. This this is amazing." So we're peaking. We're at our very best. And then....Not even a few weeks later, we, we get hit with the COVID rules, you know? Dine in is chopped down to what, a quarter? 25 percent of the ? I'm a dine in location at Saap Saap, so automatically, you know, 75, 75 percent of my income is affected, is taken away. So I'm...from the very first or second week of the COVID rules and laws, I'm already so, so deep, you know? |00:37:58| BRODY It hit you hard. |00:37:59| SENEPHOUMY Yeah, I'm just trying to trying to fight an uphill battle. |00:38:06| BRODY That's really hard timing because you were hitting your momentum, |00:38:10| SENEPHOUMY Yes. |00:38:10| BRODY ...hitting your stride. |00:38:11| SENEPHOUMY Yes. And on top of that too, we emotionally it, it just it. It took its toll on us, but we had an exit plan for Mom because we built up our staff and, in that business and especially with our family's food, it's so hard to get the cooks to make the food the way we do it, because there are no formal recipes. It's, it's our family's recipes, it's the school was my mom's kitchen, you know, and I've, I've been clinging in on her butt since I was a little kid and that's how I learned to cook. It's very hard to teach anybody how to make food the way we make it, and we were able to do it with our new staff or current staff at the . So we had an exit plan for Mom. We said, we had a team meeting, "Hey, can we do this without Mom?" Yes. "Do you know your job?" Everybody knows their job. Fine. Mom's going to retire in April and we'll give her some retired benefits. But she's out of here. She's, getting old, let her go, see the world and whatnot. And once COVID hit, those plans were scrapped. Ended up losing my, my staff, my whole staff and Mom and I were left to run the business by ourselves. Just the two of us. |00:39:42| BRODY Wow. So did you...A lot of restaurants pivoted to curbside and takeout. Is that sort of the strategy? |00:39:51| SENEPHOUMY Um, we had to...we had to adapt to it. We didn't have a choice. Our- what services did we use- the carry out services like what Uber Eats and whatnot? Our orders went up, but, we that just didn't help because our customer base were a dine in base and most of our customer base loved the intimacy of what we provided. |00:40:29| BRODY Yeah. Can you tell me about, you know, just it's a sad ending, but to go back to the happier s when you were hitting your stride, what was your vision for Saap Saap? What was what of place was it? What was, what did you hope your customers would feel when they were there? |00:40:46| SENEPHOUMY I, um, I didn't have any plans for how I hoped the customer would feel. My, my initial vision was just to use our food as a tool to educate the community and you could say the rest of the world, expose them to, to our culture and to my people. And what better way would there be to do that than to break bread with somebody, right? Feed people. They're happy. You get talking. You become buddies and the word spreads around, you know? Just to educate the community about our culture and our -through, through our food, really. And business wise, I wanted to open multiple locations like maybe three or four locations. We had another location in the works at the right before COVID. We're planning that out. We're strategists, we were strategizing for about, you know, two, two or three additional locations. And I think that'll work, that would have worked out well. The, the vibe of our patrons just came naturally. You know, we, we grew up in Podunk, Nebraska, where everybody knows everybody and we're just comfortable talking to our neighbors. You don't really get that in most restaurants that you eat at nowadays. And you know, the customers at the table don't get to speak with the executive chef. Call them by first name. Say hi to them every they eat. It was like that at our place. And that's what the customers liked and wanted. And that's also why the, the takeout option during COVID didn't work, because that wasn't our customer base. You know, they wanted to be there for, for the whole atmosphere, for the whole experience as well. Not- they didn't just want to grab their food and go. |00:42:55| BRODY Right. Well, it kind of ties together what you were saying earlier that- about training chefs that, you know, that it's hard to teach people exactly the ins and outs of your mom's cooking or your family's cooking, and it sounds like the restaurant anyway was something like being in your in your home. |00:43:19| SENEPHOUMY Yes, yes. |00:43:19| BRODY Right? With you and with your, you know, with your mom. So that makes sense. That kind of leads pretty naturally into another set of questions that deal more generally with when we're talking about food from immigrant communities. Did you do things with the recipes, with the food to appeal to certain groups? |00:43:55| SENEPHOUMY Well, for our Southeast Asian community, you know, we are we offered we offered party catering and whatnot, and we felt honored because, you know, a bunch of-we were, we were commissioned for, for quite a few weddings. You know, it's a major important, major event in those people's lives. And for us to provide a service and to be a part of that is just something special. So we were well known for that service as well. We didn't really go out of our way or out of our path to, to, to formulate a special game plan to try to reach out to certain groups, you know, we just kept doing what we were doing. |00:44:51| BRODY And then as far as...A lot of s people talk about, you know, quote unquote ethnic food as being, you know, authentic. Did you feel like you...What are your feelings around that concept of "authenticity"? |00:45:11| SENEPHOUMY When it comes to ethnic food, I myself, before I even opened up the restaurant, before we even had our first couple of tables at Nalinh Market, I would purposely go seek out places that I knew served food that didn't look like a restaurant because I knew that's where the real food was at. You know, the less fancier places. Most likely that's where you can get the best food, the most authentic food. I, I live in, I live in the, in, in a dichotomy where our food is known to be authentic and expect it to be authentic, but at the same , to survive in business, you know that you have to...You can't follow that 100 percent if you want the dollars to come in, you know? You have to, you have to adjust your foods to the western palate and make, make-And you guys can't see this, but I'm rolling my eyes when I'm thinking about it, you know, to make Taco Bell food. You know, you just have to to stay in business. But... |00:46:37| BRODY So for your menu, what did that look like? What did that look like across the board...Changing things for the western palate? Or did it mean to include certain items on the menu that were good sellers? |00:46:50| SENEPHOUMY I wouldn't do it, and that might have been part of my demise. I was stubborn about it. We've even had internal meetings about this to where, "Hey, you know, you have customers coming in wanting orange chicken and stuff like that." That's just not us. And I, you know, I would put my foot down and yeah, I could've made a ton of money making orange chicken and whatever Hunan beef and whatever else. But that's just that's not who we are. That's not the food we make. We've we become- we've grown as a business in the last 15 years because of what we do, because we make authentic food from home, from when my mom was 10, 11 years old, cooking for her 11 siblings and her parents in the jungles of Laos. You know, and we just wanted to provide those same foods and we didn't want to stray from it, no matter what cost. I mean, that's what we became known for. So there's, you know, I don't want to stray from the authenticity of what we were doing. |00:48:08| BRODY Earlier you mentioned that you wanted to use food as a tool to educate people, customers about your culture and about, you know, about the food. What are the main messages that you would have, that you did and you do want to convey to the public through your menu? |00:48:28| SENEPHOUMY Um, curiosity leads to exploration. Exploration leads to education, you know, and the education is what just brings people together. You know, the more you know about your neighbor and, and your potential friends and just better off. It's just, it's just going to be better off for everybody, for the world, for society. And, you know, it's just a simple formula. That's all I ever wanted to do with my food. |00:49:03| BRODY To connect with people. |00:49:04| SENEPHOUMY Yes. Yes. |00:49:07| BRODY Sort of thinking about your customers, both at the Nalinh Market and at Saap Saap, did it end up being a pretty multicultural, multiethnic crowd that you were able to reach? |00:49:22| SENEPHOUMY Yes, very. Yeah, we've reached just about everybody on the spectrum. I, you know, Nalinh Market, they...It's just well known. Everybody knows them, so word of mouth gets friends of friends from this ethnicity to the next ethnicity coming in. I didn't spend a lot of there, because I was busy at Saap Saap, but what I experienced at Saap Saap was I had Russian people flying in from Chicago just to eat our food. We'd have visitors from Peru who told us that they're in America because they just want to explore the best of what America has to offer. You know, and I'm humbled they're eating at our restaurant. Just- wow speechless, right? And, you know, you know, people from Peru, people from Russia. Thai people who are visiting California, flying into California, flying into Texas here to eat our food and Canadians. It's humbling. It's fantastic. It's a, it's a neat experience. |00:50:47| BRODY Yeah, a lot of the interviews that I'm doing, I'm finding that the restaurants have served as a bridge to other communities and other s of people, and that the food, as you said, has been a really good, you know, impetus for people connecting with each other. Do you have any stories that you want to share about examples of something like that happening? |00:51:14| SENEPHOUMY Oh. Many, many, many that I can't pick out specifically. Like, for example, there's one guy I can think of. He's been to Thailand a couple of s and probably when he was a kid, maybe a teenager. He hasn't eaten that food in forever and after we opened up Saap Saap, he would eat there pretty much on a weekly, weekly basis, somes a couple of s a week. It made him travel more to Southeast Asia. Every like six months or so he would, he and his lady would go to a new country in Southeast Asia and come back, tell me all about it. He gets a tattoo written in Lao or Thai. On his arm, and yeah, yeah, it's amazing how, you know, food can just open those doors and touch people in those ways. |00:52:31| BRODY That's a great story. Another pattern that people have noticed is of, and this may be more true of Nalinh Market maybe, of immigrant businesses becoming sort of a hub for the, their own community. Did you find that to be the case? You know, I know you mentioned that the grandmas and their chewing tobacco, but are other examples of ways in which the market itself was a hub. Other examples, you know, sharing information, fliers, community events? |00:53:12| SENEPHOUMY Yes. Whenever there would be a community event like, for example, the big old Lao New Year parties, people would drop off fliers, concert fliers, long lost friends who haven't seen each other in a while, they'll stop by and ask us to pass messages, messages or phone numbers to them |00:53:39| BRODY Wait, really? Like, people would come to shop and say, "Oh, if you see so and so...". |00:53:42| SENEPHOUMY Yes. Yes, exactly. And I'm sorry (drinks water) |00:53:49| BRODY So people would come to shop and say to your mom, "Have you seen so-and-so in a while?" |00:53:56| SENEPHOUMY Because, you know, my mom's older? And, she... the people, the people of her generation from the 80s, as I mentioned earlier, they just know, know everybody who came from Laos through the same situations that she did. Long lost friends, long lost family members who are seeking the other person would drop their phone number and ask my mom, "Hey, if you see this person, can you give it, can you give it to them?" |00:54:36| BRODY Obviously, before the internet and... |00:54:39| SENEPHOUMY Even during the internet because the older people of our culture, you know, they, they don't know how to navigate the technology that's provided today. So, so our location still to this day would be used as a hub or a meeting point or, and we've seen this a lot throughout the years, throughout the last two decades where people would be out of work, you know, and they just need a place to hang out to feel like home. And they would do that at Nalinh Market. And somes we would we would hire them as an extra hand put them to work. You know, we need our walls, walls painted or whatnot or, or even just outside jobs. If we knew other Asian business owners or not even Asian business owners or customers of other ethnicities. If people were hiring, you know, we could refer them to them. |00:55:42| BRODY It's great. So sort of a neighborhood hub and in your, yeah, community hub as well. |00:55:46| SENEPHOUMY Definitely. And there would be s where people will just hang out there the whole day for eight to ten hours hoping to see whoever they're there to meet up with or just, just for a sense of belonging to a sense of belonging somes. |00:56:03| BRODY That's nice. Did people come on the weekends to kind of shop for the week or was it kind of a steady stream? |00:56:12| SENEPHOUMY Oh, you'd get more on the weekends. During the week, we would pretty much get a lunch crowd and then just a casual grocery shopper. But before we, before we started cooking food at Nalinh Market, that was like the place to be on the weekend. Like everybody just had to be there for no reason just to see each other's faces and whatnot. |00:56:43| BRODY Yeah, you'd run into people, maybe even more so than the Temple or... |00:56:47| SENEPHOUMY Yeah. Yeah, exactly. |00:56:49| BRODY So it's really interesting. So the current landscape, post-COVID, you know, Dallas has been named, you know, "2019 Restaurant City of the Year" by Bon Appetit magazine and one of the things that the magazine cited in choosing Dallas was the large number of immigrant neighborhoods and restaurants, that diversity and in choices. Going forward, where do you think... What do you think, in Dallas, the future of Lao food is? |00:57:29| SENEPHOUMY Well, I think going forward, it's going to, the future of Lao food should expand exponentially. I mean, if we go backwards a little bit, you'll see that we may be about 15 years ago, we might have had three Lao restaurants and now there's probably, I'm guessing, 20 plus owned, family owned Lao restaurants. So the demand is there and the education of the Lao food is definitely there and reaching out to other communities and in other geographical locations in DFW. So I think that demand will keep keep growing. And I think... I don't know if it'll ever become commonplace, but you'll see more of it. |00:58:30| BRODY Well, with the popularity of Thai food and sort of the similarities. |00:58:34| SENEPHOUMY Yes. Yes. And. The sophistication of our food is surprisingly growing. Especially in other, other ethnic groups that are non-Laotian. You have American raised individuals who, who know the distinction now between Lao and Thai food, whereas 10 years ago we didn't have that. You know, and they're even, they're pickier nowadays, they're more precise about what kind of Lao food they want. And yeah, you would have never guessed this 10, 15 years ago. It would have blew your mind if, if you ran into this kind of aficionado from, from non Laotian people. |00:59:27| BRODY Yeah, I've read that, you know, initially people who were trying to serve Lao food would need to sort of label it "Thai and Lao" or something just to give people a reference point. It sounds like what you're saying is that's no longer the case. |00:59:44| SENEPHOUMY Yeah, definitely. It's, it's still the case to a certain extent. Like even, for example, my restaurant Saap Saap, I got flak from the Laotian community from, from a lot. Hey. So, so I had a sign that said "Saap Saap Lao and Thai Cuisine." "Why are you adding the word 'Thai' in your restaurant ?" Well, not everybody knows what and where Laos is, so I have to do that to attract the people who are familiar with what the Thai culture and Thai food. It's just numbers. They have a bigger population than we do. They've been here longer than us. People know about them more. So we have to do that. But like I said, the flak I was getting, you know, "Hey, if you're really trying to stay pure, if you're really trying to stay authentic and whatnot," you know, and I got a lot of trouble or flak for this or a lot of negativity for this. And my response is, "Hey, we do this because we have to." People who are familiar with the Thai culture. And plus it's not that I'm not trying to be a purist. In order to get to that level, we have to find a happy medium, you know? Yeah, we just,, we have to start somewhere. |01:01:19| BRODY Yeah, I mean, it sounds, when we put what you're saying right now together with what you know, the issues of- that we talked about earlier that you could sell tons of orange beef if you know, if that's what you were comfortable selling. That, you know, that walking that fine line between wanting to be authentic to the mission, you know, the vision that you have and also be a thriving business? You know how everyone's line is somewhere. |01:01:49| SENEPHOUMY But then again, to the people who are giving me flak, I respond the same way to most of them "Hey, you go open your own Lao restaurant and you could call it and do whatever you want with it." |01:02:02| BRODY Oh, so looking back at both, you know, both the businesses and the experiences that you have and continue to have, what are some lessons or reflections on sort of the whole experience as well as Asian food in Dallas in particular? |01:02:23| SENEPHOUMY Well, this ties in to another question you asked me earlier what is the difference between Lao and Thai food? And I tried to explain to you technically about the ingredients, but there's a there's an ingredient that I didn't mention-the people. My mother and I, you know, we were fortunate to spend a lot of our in in Nebraska, in the Midwest being raised Midwest. You, you pick up on the work ethics, ethic that's just there. It's inherent with that, with that growing up in that part of the country. And, you know, we bring that with us and we bring our, our, just the way we communicate and feel for our neighbors and that, that is a major ingredient that people don't understand in this business, you know, (inaudible). That's such just what you need. And we need more of that, not just in the Lao food restaurants, but just generally speaking. And I think that's where a lot of our popularity came from. You know, we provided that that sense of community and then just, just having an environment where people felt good to be a part of, to be around, and it, it understandably gets easily lost when you're trying to run a business, you know, it's all you're thinking about is numbers and money. But one of my philosophies have always been, you know, don't worry about the money, just take care of the important things first. And the money will come. If you're good at what you do and you like what you do, the money will come. |01:04:34| BRODY A good spirit to have. Well, those are some really great stories and really interesting reflections. Is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you'd like to share? |01:04:46| SENEPHOUMY Probably too much that we don't have for. A lot of...Since, since this is supposed to be archived for a for a cultural influence and whatnot, a lot of the questions that were missing would probably pertain to my mother. And, you know, she's a big part of this story. The work ethic that that lady is, her work ethic is untouchable. And it's just crazy. People say the same thing about her work ethic all the , and it's just a history where she came from during the war and being in the refugee camps before, before coming to America. And this is a lot of other Laotian families going through the same thing. But, the character that, that the character that was instilled in her, you know, just the history in the past of coming from Laos, the way she did and the poverty and the way she had to raise her kids here in a foreign land, not speaking the language and without the education. It just it lit a fire in her and pushed her to, you know, work with whatever God given tools that you have and just make the best of it. Yeah, so I mean, if, if, if you have some questions leading towards that, I'll be happy to answer. But regarding my mother, but you know, if you're open to conversation with her or details, that's an available option as well. I'm just afraid things might get lost in translation. |01:06:57| BRODY Yeah. Tell me about her journey over here. How old was she? And she already had children at the point that she... |01:07:03| SENEPHOUMY Yeah, she had three kids to take care of at the . I'm guessing she was. Let's see, we came about '80, '81. 63. What's that... Born in '61, '81, 20 years. |01:07:24| BRODY Oh, yeah, yeah. |01:07:26| SENEPHOUMY Twenty years old. You know, in a refugee camp... |01:07:33| BRODY Where was the refugee camp? |01:07:35| SENEPHOUMY Somewhere in Thailand. On the border of Laos and Thailand? Yeah. |01:07:39| BRODY So was she separated from her parents at that point? |01:07:43| SENEPHOUMY Yes. Yes. So her parents stayed in Laos. She, when she was in the refugee camp, her- some of the family got split up as well. I think I think we got separated from my older brother. He ended up going to Australia because I think at the there's about like six or eight options where you could get deported to right or imported to go to and... My dad's side of the family ended up going to Australia. My mom and our were immediate family came here to America. I think my older brother got lost in the mix somehow, and he ended up staying with my dad's side of the family in Australia. You know, tough life. He had to struggle with that growing up without his real family over there. And...So currently, they're there, the Australia side of the family there... They also own four restaurants in the Sydney area. |01:09:02| BRODY Oh, really? |01:09:02| SENEPHOUMY Yeah. |01:09:03| BRODY All Laotian? |01:09:05| SENEPHOUMY Yes. But they're more, they're more of a Thai restaurant because they have to be. They're in Sydney. So, you know, they have to, they have to cater to that crowd. But I've seen their menu and they do authentic Lao foods as well. Yeah, but they're very busy over there and... |01:09:30| BRODY So your brother is involved with those restaurants? |01:09:32| SENEPHOUMY Oh, no, no, he isn't. But my dad's side of the family is my dad's brothers and sisters are in Sydney. |01:09:43| BRODY So your mom sounds like a pretty remarkable woman, so |01:09:48| SENEPHOUMY Yeah, yeah. And I've been told, you know, I don't. I don't realize it myself until I step back a little bit, you know? See things from a third person perspective, but it's like mostly everybody I run into, says, "Xay. She's the hardest working I've ever seen." From teenagers to adults, you know senior adults in their 80s. They just man, you just got to be around her for at least an hour or two. It's, it's, you know, you have people like that anymore nowadays. |01:10:29| BRODY She sounds amazing. How long was she in the refugee camp there in Thailand? |01:10:35| SENEPHOUMY I'm not sure,. |01:10:35| BRODY Roughly. |01:10:36| SENEPHOUMY I'm not sure exactly. Maybe anywhere between six months to a year. |01:10:40| BRODY And then the came for it, and then she came directly to Houston. In your understanding? |01:10:46| SENEPHOUMY Yes. But before that, if we were rewind a little. I later learned in life that when she was in Laos, prior to going to the refugee camp, she was actually working as a nurse under the UN, under the UN umbrella. So she was patching up soldiers and civilians and whatnot, and she couldn't have been any more than what, 17 through 20 at the . And I think one of the one of the major factors that got her into that position was a sponsor family here in the Houston area. There was a, there was a doctor and his wife, and I think she was in the medical field as well. But they, there was like some educational child sponsorship program back then. You know, they're probably like the UNICEF commercials that you see on TV nowadays. My mom happened to fortunately be the recipient of one of those programs. And, you know, she's always kept in touch with that family and I to this day have never met him. I wish I could have. He's already passed. You know, I know, I think I think she felt like she really owed it to their family to keep pushing. You know, it's probably what is a part of that fire, you know. |01:12:27| BRODY So, they sponsored her to come here? |01:12:31| SENEPHOUMY I, I'm assuming they probably through, that program, helped her become a nurse. And then since she was working under the U.N. umbrella, made it easier for us to get to America through the refugee camps. |01:12:55| BRODY That's an incredible story and thank you so much for sharing all of that. Well, I really appreciate your today and look forward to learning more about your family's experiences. Thank you so much. |01:13:09| SENEPHOUMY It was my pleasure. I hope I got whatever information, you know. I just hope I answered most of your questions as best as I was able to. |01:13:22| BRODY It was wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you. |01:13:25| SENEPHOUMY The pleasure's mine. Thank you. 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Title A name given to the resource Interview with Aman Singh, September 22, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_019 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Indian Ice cream industry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-09-22 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/887689f930bd5b3b1e10527988a1115a.jpg 73f2f05179548814bcccfdc3fb538009 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Brian Reinhart OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Brian Reinhart, December 20, 2021 2021oh002_di_004 01:35:34 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Food writing Brian Reinhart Betsy Brody m4a oh_audio_dig_reinhart_brian20211220.m4a 1:|18(11)|41(12)|52(14)|68(3)|80(2)|93(3)|106(5)|121(14)|135(10)|146(11)|160(15)|175(7)|188(11)|200(9)|212(8)|231(5)|241(6)|254(5)|269(8)|286(10)|302(14)|313(2)|327(1)|336(5)|347(8)|358(4)|368(13)|394(3)|410(1)|423(1)|440(8)|458(12)|470(15)|478(7)|499(6)|510(3)|520(15)|534(12)|546(11)|556(2)|566(1)|578(5)|593(8)|605(13)|624(7)|635(5)|654(7)|664(14)|674(8)|688(4)|700(1)|714(2)|727(2)|738(6)|751(2)|761(13)|774(7)|787(9)|798(6)|818(4)|831(8)|844(2)|856(4)|874(9)|889(8)|903(6)|913(13)|926(1)|939(11)|953(2)|964(1)|974(1)|994(5)|1005(14)|1019(6)|1029(11)|1039(6)|1052(11)|1063(11)|1088(14)|1106(8)|1120(8)|1133(5)|1147(10)|1160(3)|1172(11)|1184(1)|1198(15)|1210(11)|1223(7)|1233(6)|1247(10)|1257(7)|1271(7)|1298(6) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/162877 Aviary audio 8 Introduction Asian Americans ; Cooking, American ; Food writing ; Texas--History 40 Moving to Texas from Indiana Dallas ; Texas 97 Food writing at the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News Dallas Morning News ; Dallas Observer ; food writing ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews 353 Food landscape in Dallas Anthony Bourdain ; burgers ; chain ; chicken fried steak ; corporate ; culture ; Dallas ; Dean Fearing ; diverse ; food landscape ; Food Network ; food scene ; James Beard Award ; Southwestern ; steaks ; Stephan Pyles 703 Dallas named &quot ; Restaurant City of the Year&quot ; in 2019/ Role of food media Bon Appetit ; food media ; media ; responsibility ; Restaurant City of the Year 827 Impact of tornado, COVID, labor shortages on the food industry in Dallas alcohol ; corporate ; COVID ; family style ; Korean barbecue ; Koryo ; labor shortage ; lease ; pandemic ; shutdown ; supply chain ; tornado 1235 Trends in Dallas food landscape today Asian restaurant ; barbecue ; Dallas ; design ; diverse ; ethnic food ; fine dining ; interior design ; middle class ; plating ; working class 1325 Restaurants as community hubs Asian community ; community ; Dallas Cowboys ; grocery store ; hubs ; Lao ; Laos ; Nalinh Market ; Plano ; restaurants ; Richardson ; Southeast Asian 1449 Restaurants serving as bridges between communities/ Protest dinner at Bilad Bakery Bilad Bakery ; bridge ; community organizing ; connect ; connection ; Iraq ; politics ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; travel ban 1698 Thai food as a bridge to Cambodian and Lao food Apsara ; bridge ; Cambodia ; competition ; competitor ; Donny Sirisavath ; Khao Noodle Shop ; Lao ; Laos ; Nalinh Market ; Nam Khao ; Sikhay ; Thai ; Thai food 1921 Reinhart's philosophy around food writing/ Goals of restaurant reviews culture ; Dallas ; food ; Garland ; law ; neighborhood ; Plano ; politics ; restaurant critic ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; spicy ; suburbs ; Vietnamese 2319 Qualities that make a good restaurant critic Carrollton ; chef ; cookbook ; negative reviews ; restaurant critic ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; Too Thai Street Eats 2562 Impact of social media on food writing Asian Grub in DFDub ; Dallas ; Dallas Halal Restaurant Reviews ; dumb down ; Facebook ; food industry ; industry ; photography ; recipe ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; salty ; spicy ; star ; Yelp 2798 Process around restaurant reviewing Black owned restaurants ; diverse ; diversity ; East Dallas ; Facebook ; Hispanic ; hole in the wall ; internet ; Oak Cliff ; PR ; price points ; public relations ; representation ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; social media ; Yelp 3158 Reflections on the concept of &quot ; authenticity&quot ; and &quot ; appropriation&quot ; American ; Americanized ; appropriation ; Asian restaurant ; authentic ; authenticity ; Baton Rouge ; Beaumont ; Brandon Jiu ; Chef DAT ; Chinatown ; culture ; culture wars ; food ; income inequality ; Manhattan Project Beer ; Mister Jiu's ; mom and pop ; New Orleans ; palate ; political ; politics ; respect ; restaurant business ; Roots Southern Table ; San Francisco ; spring rolls ; Tiffany Derry ; tradition ; western palate 4149 Spectrum of the Dallas food landscape Abacus ; Asian flavors ; chef ; family run restaurant ; fine dining ; food truck ; Kent Rathbun ; mom and pop ; steak ; sushi ; sushi chef ; upscale 4369 Asian restaurants in Dallas- trends and patterns airport ; Asian restaurant ; brand ; cricket ; design ; DFW airport ; Donny Sirisavath ; Everest ; Halal ; interior design ; Irving ; Japanese ; Khao Noodle Shop ; Korean community ; millenials ; Minerva ; momo ; Mr. Sushi ; Nepal ; Nepalese ; ras malai ; remodel ; saku dumplings ; seafood ; supply chain ; Teiichi Sakurai ; Texas Instruments ; tradition ; Tres Leches cake 4877 Reflections on &quot ; fusion&quot ; in the food industry banh mi ; Bishop Arts ; culture ; dumplings ; French ; fusion ; Indian ; Indian food ; Kent Rathbun ; Korean freid chicken ; Pad Thai ; sushi ; tandoori chicken 5002 Impact of &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurants passing to the next generation aesthetics ; biriyani ; Chip and Joanna Gaines ; cleanliness ; creativity ; Dallas Morning News ; Desi District ; design ; ethnic ; ethnic food ; food critics ; generation ; gulab jamun ; health inspection ; Indian restaurants ; interior design ; labor ; lower class ; Magnolia ; mom and pop ; negative reviews ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; stereotypes 5329 Future of Asian food in Dallas Asian restaurant ; Carrollton ; chef ; Dallas ; downtown ; growth ; H Mart ; Han Gil Hotel Town ; hotel ; immigrant ; J.C. Penney ; Korean barbecue ; Koreatown ; landlord ; Michelin ; NGON ; Nuri Grill ; Old Denton Road ; real estate ; restaurants ; segregation ; Seoul ; South Korea ; suburbs ; Toyota ; Troy Gardner ; Uptown ; Vietnamese ; West Dallas |00:00:08| BRODY This is Betsy Brody. Today is December 20th, 2021. I am interviewing for the first time, Mr. Brian Reinhart. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and as part of the project entitled Digging In: How Food Culture and Class Shaped the Story of [Asian] Dallas. Hi, Brian, how are you? Thank you for coming today. |00:00:38| REINHART Thank you. Thank you. |00:00:39| BRODY Just to start out with, would you tell me briefly where and when you were born? |00:00:45| REINHART I was born in 1989 in Columbus, Indiana. |00:00:48| BRODY Great. What brought you to Texas? |00:00:50| REINHART I moved with my family when I- the week I turned 16. We came down for employment reasons and settled outside of San Antonio. And then I... so I&#039 ; ve lived in actually three major Texas cities because I went to college in Houston and then moved to Dallas in 2012. |00:01:12| BRODY What brought you to Dallas? |00:01:14| REINHART My first full time job out of college was here in Dallas. |00:01:19| BRODY What were you doing? |00:01:21| REINHART I work and I worked and still work. I&#039 ; ll start over. I worked and still work at a community college in the Dallas area, doing marketing materials and website updates and writing of various kinds. |00:01:37| BRODY Fantastic, well, what is your current position in terms of food writing? |00:01:43| REINHART I&#039 ; m the restaurant critic for the Dallas Morning News and from 2016 until earlier this year held that position for the Dallas Observer newspaper. [After this interview was completed, Mr. Reinhart was named Dining Critic for D Magazine.] |00:01:53| BRODY What led you into that line of work? |00:01:58| REINHART I became a food writer more or less by mistake. My friend and I applied to do blogging for the Dallas Observer. Together...Observer. Together. We started off as coauthors. She&#039 ; s from Singapore, and she wanted to go to places that reminded her of home and have the foods that she missed from Singapore that aren&#039 ; t over here or aren&#039 ; t as common. And then I did the writing part. And so she would more or less we would go together and she would tell me how good it was. And then I would do the massaging of the words, basically. At the time that was 2015, and at the time we were splitting the author fee. So we were making a whole twelve dollars and fifty cents per person per article, which we spent while we were at the restaurant more or less. |00:02:55| BRODY I would imagine. How did you decide on which restaurants to go to? What was your method? |00:03:02| REINHART Initially, she had a list of places that she wanted to try, that she wanted to, you know, investigate for nostalgic purposes. So we stuck to that. Eventually, we started branching out, and I ever since have followed my own interests more or less. I initially- I&#039 ; m half Turkish, my mother is from Istanbul, so I started writing about Turkish pizzas and baklava and things like that. And then, you know, if I heard about a place that sounded interesting to me, I would cover that. Fortunately, have only been asked or assigned to review a restaurant. Once, maybe twice. Everything else since then has just been purely curiosity driven. |00:03:48| BRODY Yeah, that&#039 ; s fantastic. What types of things interest you? What types of foods and what types of restaurants excite you? |00:04:05| REINHART I didn&#039 ; t grow up with a lot of fine dining or European continental, traditional western restaurants and my background, it wasn&#039 ; t really something that we went to. There weren&#039 ; t a lot of, you know, four star type restaurants in southern Indiana by the conventional measures that people use at the time. So I didn&#039 ; t have a lot of experience with that. I didn&#039 ; t know a lot about French cooking. I first had caviar on the job for the Dallas Observer. |00:04:40| BRODY What did you think of it? |00:04:42| REINHART It&#039 ; s fine. It&#039 ; s salty, but it&#039 ; s nice. I. You know, it&#039 ; s it doesn&#039 ; t live up to their reputation in anything other than the difficulty of sourcing it, I guess. Right. Like, I also first had truffles the year before, and they&#039 ; re fine. They kind of taste like potato chips, but so always, always drove us... I&#039 ; m going to start over. What always drove us was a curiosity about different cultures and different cuisines. We moved to Detroit and we immersed ourselves in eating all of the Lebanese food that we could. We spent, you know, weeks and weeks going to various different shawarma places and shish kebab places. And whenever we traveled, we&#039 ; d find like, &quot ; Oh, there&#039 ; s a Polish restaurant, oh, there&#039 ; s a Hungarian restaurant.&quot ; We weren&#039 ; t really looking for, &quot ; Oh, there is a place with white tablecloths and a fixed price menu and that kind of thing.&quot ; |00:05:48| BRODY Great those sound like great memories as well. What did you know about Dallas and particularly the restaurant scene in Dallas before you got here? |00:06:02| REINHART I think I knew almost nothing about food in Dallas before I got here. Before I moved, I&#039 ; d had one meal in Dallas, which was a Hunky&#039 ; s Burgers in Oak Cliff in Bishop Arts Neighborhood. Oh, and I visited a friend and had another burger at another place, Twisted Root, so everything I knew about Dallas was burgers. I didn&#039 ; t, you know, there was a bit of a reputation about Southwestern food, cowboy type food and, you know, steaks and so forth, but at the time, being 22, I didn&#039 ; t have the budget for steaks and didn&#039 ; t really know a lot to didn&#039 ; t know what to expect, didn&#039 ; t know a lot about it at all. |00:06:47| BRODY So then your impressions when you got here were fresh and not full of preconceived ideas that were being overturned, what were your initial impressions? |00:06:56| REINHART Yeah, actually, you know, even to this day, there are lists that people produce of like the iconic Dallas restaurants that you have to go to before you can say that you&#039 ; re a Dallasite. And I&#039 ; ve been to maybe half of them. |00:07:06| BRODY That&#039 ; s really interesting. |00:07:08| REINHART Because a lot of them are very old school and very, you know, traditional American and especially white American food. Chicken fried steaks or ice cream sundaes or whatnot. And I just haven&#039 ; t had the chance. |00:07:28| BRODY And it sounds like because you&#039 ; re driven by curiosity and what&#039 ; s interesting to you, that maybe you&#039 ; ve been doing some- exploring some other things. So today, how would you characterize the food landscape in Dallas? |00:07:44| REINHART I tell other people in the business there&#039 ; s probably there&#039 ; s almost no other city that I&#039 ; d rather be in and write about the food in. Dallas is an extraordinarily rich and diverse city for its food. We have all kinds of- we have more or less everything you could want. And we also don&#039 ; t have a lot of people covering it. We don&#039 ; t have the reputation for it. So it&#039 ; s kind of free rein. I have the ability to cover all these things that nobody else is talking about and talk about them as much as they want to. It&#039 ; s-it&#039 ; s a treat, you know, I could, I&#039 ; m sure, go to New York or Los Angeles and enjoy, you know, the superior offerings that they may have, but they also know about it, they know that they have great food, they have many, many writers who are covering it. They have television programs about it. They have documentaries. And we don&#039 ; t have any of that. So it&#039 ; s kind of like, it&#039 ; s like exploring. It&#039 ; s really fun. |00:08:47| BRODY Why do you think Dallas doesn&#039 ; t have that reputation? |00:08:51| REINHART We&#039 ; ve- our food scene has been dominated by corporate run concepts for a long time. And it is known nationally as- for two things, one of them is the creation of chain restaurants, you know, we originated Chili&#039 ; s, we have the headquarters for that&#039 ; s I think Brinker, the Olive Garden people. I might be getting that wrong. It might be the Red Lobster people or- no, the Red Lobster and Olive Garden are the same people. Anyway, the first thing, we&#039 ; re dominant. We have a national reputation for chains and producing and distributing chains. Oh, Fuddruckers, that was us too. Now it&#039 ; s headquartered out of Houston. But the second thing is, I think also that kind of cowboy steak thing is what established our reputation nationally. Our only two James Beard Award winners for Best Chef in the United States |Southwest| have been Stephan Pyles and Dean Fearing, who are boomer generation men who became famous for steaks and, you know, southwestern food and big, hearty portions of really big, rich meals with lots of, you know, peppers and vegetables and slabs of meat. And I think that&#039 ; s affected our reputation ever since. I don&#039 ; t think really it&#039 ; s...I don&#039 ; t think that the changes that have happened in the last 20, 30 years have been noticed outside of Dallas until pretty recently. |00:10:22| BRODY Yeah, why do you think so? Why do you think that&#039 ; s the case? Any theories? |00:10:27| REINHART We&#039 ; re not America&#039 ; s favorite city to start with. I think. We fly under the radar because we are kind of ugly. We don&#039 ; t really have tourist attractions. You know, when people are talking about where should we go? You know, you can say, Oh, let&#039 ; s go to Dallas to see where JFK was assassinated, right? You know, when my family visits, I have a hard time finding places to take them. And you know, people know us for the airport. People know us for being a stop on the journey to somewhere nicer. People know us for economic opportunity, but not necessarily culture or having beaches or mountains or any of those things. So it&#039 ; s been pretty easy for us to slip by under the radar. I think actually the same thing happened down in Houston until about 2010, when people like Anthony Bourdain and the Food Network started finally noticing that Houston was really, really exciting and diverse and full of different people doing different things and pursuing their own crazy ideas. We&#039 ; re very similar. We&#039 ; re just five to 10 years behind in the perception. |00:11:42| BRODY Do you think that same pattern will hold? And do you think Dallas is about to be discovered? |00:11:48| REINHART I think so. I think our time is coming. I think it helped that the magazine Bon Appetit called us the Restaurant City of the Year in 2019. Now, their previous winner was Portland, Maine. So, you know, there is a little bit of arbitrariness to that. But we had a lot of momentum. And of course, the pandemic has affected that momentum pretty significantly. But I think that the people here, the restaurateurs here, the chefs here, are ready to take that momentum right back. I think they&#039 ; re ready to keep going. So, you know, in the media, I think we feel a sense of purpose to help them keep that going and help keep us in the spotlight. |00:12:34| BRODY Yeah, that&#039 ; s a good point. The sort of the relationship between food media and the people who own and run restaurants...What do you- how would you characterize that relationship and even the responsibilities? |00:12:53| REINHART Yeah, it&#039 ; s a two part relationship. I see us as being consumer advocates first, so we act in the same way that, you know, Consumer Reports would or any other, any other group that&#039 ; s standing up for the customer. But then I also see us as standing up for the restaurant owners and restaurant industry in the national context, in the statewide context, and, you know, in the marketplace. So it&#039 ; s a challenge. It&#039 ; s a balance to be kind of an encouraging and a cheerleader, but also to make sure that people are accountable and they&#039 ; re not, you know, outrageously bilking customers or stealing recipes or exploiting labor, et cetera. |00:13:40| BRODY Right? That&#039 ; s really interesting. That kind of.. I&#039 ; m going to ask you...In Dallas in particular in the past few years and you alluded to COVID already. People in the food industry have faced a number of challenges, starting with the tornado in 2019. That hit a lot of a lot of people in Dallas, but certainly some restaurants as well. Then COVID shortly thereafter and then the labor shortages and challenges that with supply chain that have come since then. What are, you know, in light of all that, are there any anecdotes or observations or reflections that you have about this, those patterns? |00:14:24| REINHART I&#039 ; m amazed people are still serving food. I&#039 ; m amazed that people are still walking into this industry, but I&#039 ; m more so, I&#039 ; m impressed that it hasn&#039 ; t turned into corporate big business like I expected at the start of the pandemic, we were very afraid that everybody would kind of fail on their lease and then all the big chains and big investment companies would take up all of the leases and all those little guys and convert them into the next, you know, Applebee&#039 ; s or whatnot. And it turns out everybody has been suffering more or less equally. And in fact, a lot of those big chains have been suffering more so than the little independent restaurants, which is not something that we expected. |00:15:09| BRODY Interesting. |00:15:10| REINHART Yeah. |00:15:10| BRODY Why? Why do you think that it turned out that way? |00:15:14| REINHART I&#039 ; m not sure. I mean, I could have theories, but I could also be completely wrong, right? I know restaurant owners have told me that after the shutdowns happened, when people were able to come back, they thought people wanted to come back for a real experience that you couldn&#039 ; t have at home. Right? So Korean barbecue is booming right now. I think it&#039 ; s probably Korean barbecue and Chinese hotpot are probably two of the most successful sectors in the food industry right now, and they&#039 ; re opening very, very regularly. You know, Haidilao in Frisco is a Chinese chain. My father has been to locations in China, several of them, and he was very excited about it because apparently it&#039 ; s very high end and posh hotpot. But they were having two hour waits in line and people were waiting in line for two hours. The first few months when they opened, he, my father, came and I said, &quot ; Oh, I&#039 ; ll take you there.&quot ; And I looked it up. And you know, it had been open for several months already and people were saying, You really need to call, put your name on a list because they&#039 ; re overrun. And then our Korean barbecue scene has probably doubled just this year and last year. I was talking to the owners of Koryo... |I&#039 ; m going to take a little break and start over.| Koryo was previously known as Koryo Kalbi, and that restaurant then had a previous name in a previous ownership, and it existed since at least the mid 1990s. It&#039 ; s one of the oldest Korean restaurant institutions in the Dallas area and. I believe, but I can&#039 ; t be certain that the previous owner died of non-COVID reasons during the pandemic. |00:17:11| BRODY Oh no. |00:17:13| REINHART And at the time was apparently in the middle of the sale to the new ownership, which is really unfortunate. He apparently had plans to sell and then they would reopen pretty much immediately. But a lot of legal hassle and legal trouble ensued over the estate, and they were recently able to reopen. And now I need to remember where I was going with this. But they recently reopened, and they changed the format kind of from a traditional Korean restaurant with all sorts of like- all the soups and the noodles and so forth to being more of a steak house. They actually dry aged meat. They got one of those really fancy dry aging fridges where they can store meat for up to 120 days before they serve it for the barbecue. Yeah, they&#039 ; re putting in a wine list and a wine cellar. They&#039 ; re doing happy hours with oysters. It&#039 ; s a very upscale experience, and they told me that they thought people really wanted to come out and have that shared experience of a night that&#039 ; s really an event, not just, you know, well I can sit at home and order a pizza, or I can go out with all of my friends and we could grill fancy dry aged meat that we don&#039 ; t have access to at home. And we could drink a bunch of wine and have a bunch of oysters shucked for us and so on. |00:18:38| BRODY And have that communal experience. And so it sounds like what you&#039 ; re saying is that that one effect of COVID and some of these other challenges is that people are looking for something different in their night out. |00:18:54| REINHART Yeah, I think there&#039 ; s definitely a changed expectation for the experience. They also put in at Koryo, dimmer switches for all the lights in the private dining rooms, which there are six or seven of and dimmer switches for the music. So if you think it&#039 ; s too loud, you can go up to the doorway and turn the volume down. |00:19:17| BRODY And these are private rooms that you could just have your own group. |00:19:20| REINHART Yeah, you can have a table for four or six in there. |00:19:22| BRODY Yeah, yeah, that seems like it&#039 ; s a balance between, you know, being with other people in a restaurant setting, but also just being with your own intimate party as well. It&#039 ; s really interesting. |00:19:35| REINHART I talked to another restaurant owner. Sorry. Now this is this is more of a corporate group. This is not a small or even Asian owned property. But he told me that during the pandemic, their pizza place did record business and never died down and never had a problem. But everything else did, of course. And now they&#039 ; re kind of...They are also trying to capture that experiential feel. They&#039 ; re doing, it&#039 ; s a, like a yacht, marina, San Diego themed restaurant where they have TVs, but the TV&#039 ; s don&#039 ; t show sports, the TV shows like pictures of beaches and sea anemones and all these are like cute, vibrant coral type colors. And you know, the cocktails are themed and everything is themed. |00:20:27| BRODY So to feel like you&#039 ; ve transported yourself somewhere else,. |00:20:30| REINHART You&#039 ; re no longer in your home office. |00:20:33| BRODY That&#039 ; s really interesting. So how would you characterize the food landscape in Dallas today? |00:20:40| REINHART I think we have one of the best and most diverse food landscapes in the country. I think probably top 10. What I usually tell people is six or seventh. I think that we are- we have grown in certain ways in the past five to 10 years. We&#039 ; ve grown in the middle class sector, especially. I think that there&#039 ; s always been a very healthy scene for people who have a lot of money to spend and a lot of prestige to acquire through their dining, so to speak. And I think we&#039 ; ve always done fairly well down at the more working class end with barbecue and burgers and various nationalities expressing themselves. Tacos. But we&#039 ; ve really seen a stronger development of kind of the middle class areas, places where you might go for a date night or also we&#039 ; re starting to see the second generation of a lot of immigrant families who are opening places that have a little more style or a consistent, like a design aesthetic, or they pay attention to plating or something like that. And that&#039 ; s become. Very apparent in a lot of Southeast Asian and South Asian cuisines, I think especially so that&#039 ; s a very interesting development. |00:22:02| BRODY Really interesting. And some people say that restaurants, especially restaurants that represent a particular nationality or a different culture, can serve as a hub for the communities. Has that been your observation of restaurants in Dallas, whether Asian or not. |00:22:22| REINHART Oh, absolutely. In my neighborhood, we have a Mexican restaurant in Oak Cliff, where everybody comes for Cowboys games. If you go Sunday at 12 noon, nobody will be eating lunch. The restaurant will be empty. And then if you come Sunday at 2:00 p.m. when the game starts, every single table is full. Everybody has brought a case of very cheap beer and you know, the restaurant has become absolutely a center for community togetherness over the Dallas Cowboys. And that&#039 ; s true I know in a lot of cultures. I think that a lot of, for example, Nalinh Market started out as a grocery store for Southeast Asian and especially Lao people and became a Lao community hub. They started to ask the owner, &quot ; Well, can&#039 ; t we stay? Can&#039 ; t you make us some food? And then we can stay here and talk to you?&quot ; And she started off with a Bunsen burner and she would cook meals over a Bunsen burner so that people could stay and chat and have that sense of togetherness, togetherness...Yeah. I mean, there are many more examples. I think that a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants do a remarkable job of that because they also have charitable sides. If you&#039 ; re. Not able to afford a meal. You can still come and eat, and you don&#039 ; t have to worry about paying. Bilad Bakery in Richardson does that. I think, I think there are quite a few others in Richardson and Plano who do that. |00:24:08| BRODY And what about also we&#039 ; ve just talked about restaurant serving as hubs for their own communities, but also as bridges. And maybe your Dallas Cowboys story is an indication of that. But are there ways that you&#039 ; ve observed that that restaurants serve as bridges between different communities or different cultures here in Dallas? |00:24:34| REINHART OK, that&#039 ; s a good one. And just that bridges that I wasn&#039 ; t able to think about it. Well, I have one example that I immediately think of. In...it was, let&#039 ; s see, in December 2016. I was thinking about what restaurants to review in the new year and particularly what restaurants to review after the beginning of the new presidential term at that time. And I chose to do, I think it was 10 in a row immigrant run restaurants that were not- Western Europe, it didn&#039 ; t count. It couldn&#039 ; t be French. That couldn&#039 ; t be Italian, they couldn&#039 ; t be Spanish. And one of them was Bilad Bakery, the Iraqi restaurant in Richardson. And I became concerned because then the travel ban started where people from Iraq could not travel to the U.S. and I started thinking, &quot ; Well, if maybe if I publish this, something bad will happen to them,&quot ; or somebody will mark them out and say, &quot ; Look, that&#039 ; s where the Iraqi people are.&quot ; You know that there might be some harm that might come to them of that in that political climate that was prevailing at the time. But instead, it became our most read restaurant review ever at the time. And a community organizer came from New York to do sort of a protest dinner to raise awareness about the travel ban and about communities from travel banned countries. And they arranged for the dinner to happen at that restaurant, and they arranged it was going to be basically like there was going to be one dinner on a....whichever night it was...Thursday night and you know, they were going to seat 40 people and because that was the restaurant&#039 ; s capacity. And that would be the whole thing, that was it. It sold out so quickly that they added a second seating. They had dinners at six and eight and then further they had to go out and rent a bunch of tables and chairs. They rented plastic, you know, bulk. I think it&#039 ; s Lifetime brand tables and chairs. And that night, you know, that was that was the most customers they&#039 ; d ever had. Obviously, it was, you know, they seated more than their capacity twice. Almost all those people had never been there before. I think I was probably one of two to three people who&#039 ; d ever been there before at all. And, you know, I think almost everybody became a regular. That&#039 ; s still the number one place that people ask me about or tell me about. Like somebody stopped me in a grocery store line and said, I still go to that place in Richardson. And that was- that came from that dinner. You know, nobody there was in that community at all. |00:27:38| BRODY Right. So that built a whole new clientele and a whole new set of connections. |00:27:42| REINHART Right. |00:27:43| BRODY And I know they still have your review hanging above the cash register. |00:27:47| REINHART It&#039 ; s kind of enormous. |00:27:49| BRODY It&#039 ; s very big. |00:27:51| REINHART One of their friends did that. For them, that was a their friend owns a print shop and they did that for free and gave it to them as a gift. |00:27:57| BRODY It&#039 ; s really nice and it&#039 ; s a great review as well. |00:28:00| REINHART Yeah, so you can&#039 ; t you can&#039 ; t blame them for how huge it is. |00:28:03| BRODY No, not at all. And that&#039 ; s a really. That&#039 ; s a great story and a great. |00:28:11| REINHART Oh, I have another. |00:28:11| BRODY Connection between this, you know, the community organizing and the restaurant review. Go ahead. |00:28:18| REINHART Yeah. Well, I was talking to Joseph Be, I think is his name from Apsara- a-p-s-a-r-a, which is a new or newish- its a year old- Cambodian food court stall in Grand Prairie. And he was talking about how he wanted to use the restaurant as that bridge to make those connections to bring more kind of awareness of Cambodian food community. And he used the example of the way that Khao Noodle Shop and Nalinh Market have been able to do that for Lao food in Dallas. He said, You know, five years ago, nobody knew what Laos was, where it was anything about the food outside of the immediate community, outside of actual, you know, Southeast Asian people in the area. And now they do. And now they&#039 ; ll go to Khao and they&#039 ; ll eat the bowl, and now they&#039 ; ll go to the Nalinh and get the Nam Khao or something like that. So he said, Well, I&#039 ; m planning to do the same thing for Cambodia. There&#039 ; s no reason that Cambodia can&#039 ; t have that same success that Laos had. And because our food is delicious, too, was essentially his feeling. So he started off and it is called, I think it is called &quot ; Thai and Cambodian.&quot ; And he said, Well, you have to put the &quot ; Thai&quot ; in there because people know Thai food is. And that&#039 ; s the same story that has happened with a lot of the Lao restaurants. They all say, like Sikhay in Fort Worth, they all say &quot ; Lao&quot ; and &quot ; Thai&quot ; in the title. And he said, &quot ; Well, someday maybe we&#039 ; ll be able to drop the Thai and people will know and they&#039 ; ll be coming for the Cambodian food, but we&#039 ; re not there yet,&quot ; but he said, &quot ; maybe in a couple of years. We will be. And maybe there will be competition and people will learn from the competition and they&#039 ; ll see, oh, there, you know, six or seven different Cambodian restaurants now and become more familiar that way.&quot ; |00:30:14| BRODY Right. And using that, the Thai as an entry and entry way for people to sort of know it&#039 ; s kind of like this... |00:30:22| REINHART A really common thread that I&#039 ; ve observed in immigrant communities like that is that they really, really want competition. And they&#039 ; re always very happy to have competition because they always tell me a rising tide lifts all boats, right? The more people know what Lao food is, the more people will go out and order it, and they don&#039 ; t care if you&#039 ; re ordering it from their restaurant or somebody else&#039 ; s restaurant. The more they you know what larb is, the more that you know what all these other dishes are, the more that you&#039 ; re going to want them. Right, right? And that was their thinking. You know, they want to be like Italian food. They don&#039 ; t want to be the only one. |00:30:58| BRODY Right? And also, you know, to communicate with each other and make those choices about what you know, what you&#039 ; re putting on the menu and what you&#039 ; re exposing other people to from your own culture and sort of share the responsibility in the work. Thank you for that. Can you describe some of your most memorable experiences as a food writer in Dallas? |00:31:24| REINHART OK? |00:31:25| BRODY You&#039 ; ve described a few really great stories on |00:31:27| REINHART Done a few already. I feel like it would be very easy to like go down the negative road of times that crazy things have happened, but... |00:31:42| BRODY Whichever, whichever direction you&#039 ; d like to go in. |00:31:44| REINHART Let&#039 ; s see. I don&#039 ; t know, I mean, I think I&#039 ; ll probably come up with a really good answer 20 minutes from now. |00:31:56| BRODY That&#039 ; s OK. Well, we can come back to that. But let&#039 ; s shift gears and talk about food writing in general. What is your philosophy around food writing? |00:32:08| REINHART Oh, OK. I think I&#039 ; m more of a descriptive person than a prescriptive person, and despite the title being &quot ; critic&quot ; you know that generally is associated with the idea that you should be telling people, &quot ; Well, the pasta is overcooked and the you know this and that, and here is where you should be eating.&quot ; I see it more as documenting where people go and what they&#039 ; re having and what they want. And kind of observing things in a more, in a more neutral way? No that&#039 ; s not right. I don&#039 ; t know...I&#039 ; ll have to think about that, but I see it more as approaching the city where it is rather than wishing it were a little bit more like somewhere else. And I think also I had another thought. I&#039 ; m interested in going beyond the food also, right? Going beyond the plate, food can be used to talk about culture. It can be used to talk about politics and law. It can be used to talk about history, certainly, and those things also have a lot of interest for me. Obviously, it&#039 ; s great that delicious food is delicious, but you can also learn about the neighborhood and the people and the culture. I think actually some of the Asian restaurants in old east Dallas are really important to that because that is a neighborhood where a lot of people were settled right after they came to the country in the 1970s, and since then, a lot of them have moved out to the suburbs and kind of gone to Garland or Plano or wherever. But there are a couple of originals still down there. And I know you&#039 ; re going to be talking to some of them are trying to talk to. |00:34:20| BRODY Hope so. |00:34:20| REINHART But that, you know, for somebody who doesn&#039 ; t know, they may just think, Oh, cool, it&#039 ; s cool that we have a Vietnamese restaurant in, you know, on Ross or whichever street it is. But that is a real link to our past and that a real piece of Dallas history, you know, it&#039 ; s something that speaks to something the way that things were going 40 years ago and the way that the neighborhood was. |00:34:43| BRODY Exactly, and sort of the story of the changing face of Dallas. |00:34:48| REINHART Mm-Hmm. |00:34:50| BRODY What is the goal of a restaurant review, in your view? |00:34:55| REINHART Oh, OK. That&#039 ; s a really good question. I think probably traditionally the goal of a restaurant review is to tell people where to go and where not to go, right? I think that my thought is a little different. I want you to be able to come away from the restaurant review, knowing whether you want to go there, regardless of how I felt. So I think it is totally possible that I might not like a place and but you&#039 ; re going to think it&#039 ; s great. So I try to convey that or the opposite that, you know, maybe I&#039 ; m getting carried away here. Just, just last week, we went to a place and it was fabulous and it was perfect and we went crazy for it. And my partner said, &quot ; You have to write a review of this&quot ; after about three bites. But we also had had a couple of beers. So we&#039 ; re going back on Tuesday sober this time to visit because it&#039 ; s I think it&#039 ; s very subjective in general. And, you know, there are parts of it that always will be, you know, I could say, well, the food is really spicy. That doesn&#039 ; t really help you at all. You know, my mother can&#039 ; t really handle spicy food at all, and she thinks that a single jalapeno is terrifying. And then, you know, you have people on the other end of the spectrum. I have friends who will go to the Thai restaurants and they&#039 ; ll ask for something to be level six or whatever, like, Oh, you have five levels, OK, I want the sixth level, so I don&#039 ; t think that&#039 ; s really... So I try to write around those issues and I try to write so that, you know, you can make your own judgment at the end. But also, I want to say I feel like going back to the very original question, which was the point of a restaurant review. I think also we&#039 ; re painting a picture, right? I think we&#039 ; re painting like a big group portrait of the city and its dining. It&#039 ; s like a 1700s painting, like the painting of the Greek philosophers on the steps- or I mean, maybe even a painting of the Last Supper or whatever. Because as the critic, you&#039 ; re deciding who gets in the frame of the picture and who gets left out of the frame of the picture and with each review, you&#039 ; re kind of incrementally building a case, it&#039 ; s, you know, it&#039 ; s a one off in the sense that you&#039 ; re telling people where to go. But cumulatively, hopefully you&#039 ; re building a body of work and you&#039 ; re building an argument and you&#039 ; re painting that picture. And that&#039 ; s kind of been my project for the last five years has been kind of reframing it and getting more people in there. |00:37:45| BRODY What would you say is your argument in a nutshell? |00:37:52| REINHART Oh, OK. I think I&#039 ; d say my argument in nutshell is you got to come down to Dallas and try all of this amazing stuff and that you need to be looking, not necessarily in the places and neighborhoods that you would expect to be looking. You know, you can eat for a week here outstandingly without ever going downtown or to uptown. And you can eat outstandingly without ever having a meal that costs more than $70 or whatever. And there&#039 ; s things...new things happening all the time. You know, come on down. Visit us. |00:38:35| BRODY I love hearing about your you&#039 ; re thinking in your process. Just want to follow that up with what qualities do you think make a good restaurant critic? |00:38:44| REINHART Oh, OK. Well, I&#039 ; ve been watching a lot of TV shows like Psych, where the restaurant critic gets murdered and then they have to solve. [Alarm goes off] And then they have to solve the case, right? I think there&#039 ; s generally a perception, at least in trashy television murder mysteries. There&#039 ; s a perception that restaurant critics are either on the take or just kind of mean or kind of playing a game or, you know, toying with people the way that like a cat might catch a mouse and play with it before it eats it. You know, there was there was one on the Mallorca Files where, like the restaurant critic comes in with all of his chef buddies and then like yells at the chef who works at the restaurant says, like, &quot ; Well, we need these 27 different accommodations and substitutions.&quot ; And then of course, somebody poisons him. But, you know, I don&#039 ; t think it&#039 ; s like that at all. I think you need to have humility and basic decency and niceness, actually, because, you know, if you&#039 ; re going to be delivering bad news and saying unkind things or saying critical things, and it needs to be coming from a place of constructive feedback and a place of empathy and a place of, you know, genuinely trying to help. There are a couple of places that may be well beyond our help. There may be, you know, genuine rip offs out there. It happens every once in a while. But other than that, you know, you have to you have to care and have heart and you have to know what a restaurant can take. I don&#039 ; t think...I think I learned very early on it&#039 ; s not worth it to write harshly about small mom and pops, because without you, they wouldn&#039 ; t have a lot of publicity anyways. So they don&#039 ; t. They don&#039 ; t. They certainly don&#039 ; t need negative publicity is not going to help them, you know, change or improve or. Or survive. |00:41:08| BRODY It seems like that ties back into your sort of philosophy around food writing in the first place that it&#039 ; s not really to tell people where to go, but to paint a picture. |00:41:19| REINHART Yeah. I think also a good critic, obviously should be super curious. Right? That&#039 ; s something that I&#039 ; ve been--that was something I was lucky enough to start with, but also, you know, I have a research background. So for example, one time I was reviewing a restaurant and I didn&#039 ; t understand how the dishes worked, so to speak, how you prepare them. It was Too Thai Street Eats in Carrollton, which is fabulous. They have they have like a really crispy fried pancakes with mussels in them, which are fabulous. They, the &quot ; fried-ness&quot ; is very hard to describe. It&#039 ; s very bubbly. Like, I don&#039 ; t even know. I mean, it&#039 ; s not like a pancake or anything. It&#039 ; s...very airy and light. Except when you hit a mussel. But so, I didn&#039 ; t know how on earth do you do that? So I went out and started buying cookbooks so I could read through the book and then go to the restaurant and see like, Oh, OK, well, they followed this and that taste I was getting was this thing in the cookbook. |00:42:32| BRODY That&#039 ; s really above and beyond. |00:42:34| REINHART Yeah, yeah. They didn&#039 ; t pay me back for the cookbook either. |00:42:37| BRODY That&#039 ; s a bummer. Oh, something that when I think about restaurant reviewers and food writers, I wonder what has been the impact on the way that you do your work of the internet and the advent of sort of online, crowdsourced, you know, Yelp and things like that? Has that changed how you approach restaurant reviewing? |00:43:08| REINHART Only a little bit, I think people are surprised when I say that because they expect the answer to be, well, it&#039 ; s, you know, an existential crisis. And that&#039 ; s true in the sense that we&#039 ; re probably not getting paid very much anymore because the internet exists. But for me personally, when I am doing research, I use the photos that people post on Yelp and I use the photos and kind of news items that are put in Facebook groups. There are some excellent Facebook groups that are great resources in the Dallas area. &quot ; Asian Grub&quot ; of course, and then &quot ; Dallas Halal Restaurant Reviews,&quot ; which is also a source of just amazing drama. They are fighting all the time. They are yelling at each other and actually related to something we&#039 ; ve alluded to in a past conversation. They sometimes will just switch to Urdu so they can yell at each other in the comment section. It&#039 ; s fantastic, but... |00:44:08| BRODY It sounds amazing. |00:44:09| REINHART I use photos because I think you can see, you know what you&#039 ; re going to be getting and how much care the restaurant is putting into it. The reviews are almost worthless. You don&#039 ; t know. I mean, some of the things that we&#039 ; ve talked about already, you don&#039 ; t know. What their experience level is. You don&#039 ; t know what they know about the food they&#039 ; re talking about. You don&#039 ; t know how spicy they can take things or how sweet or how salty, etcetera. And a lot of times, you know, those are vengeful, one star, &quot ; Well, they told me to wear a mask.&quot ; . |00:44:44| BRODY Right? |00:44:44| REINHART You know, I think that if anything. It means I&#039 ; m more aware of the way that my work affects people in the industry because I think people in the industry are wary of those platforms, and they have a little bit of fear about, you know, what could happen if people on Yelp decide to tank us and destroy our reputation, right? But for genuine, honest, serious feedback, they&#039 ; re looking to the professionals. They know they can&#039 ; t really trust what people on Yelp say and in terms of like, &quot ; Oh, am I getting this recipe right?&quot ; Let me, you know, let me look on Yelp. And, you know, influencers and people on Instagram and something like that. Same story. So they look to the professionals even more, I think, for, you know, some of that genuine, honest like...Oh...some of that genuine desire to improve. Right? I did have a case where there was a restaurant that was changing the recipe. Every time somebody on Yelp, somebody said something, I went and looked at their page and you know, people, the restaurants are allowed to reply and they&#039 ; re replying to all these reviews saying, &quot ; So sorry, thank you. We&#039 ; re going to change our recipe.&quot ; And all I could think was, you know, how on earth do they maintain any consistency from week to week because they&#039 ; re going to have somebody coming in every single day and are going to be changing it every single day? |00:46:16| BRODY Right. |00:46:16| REINHART And, you know, a month from now, what on earth are they going to be making? They&#039 ; re going to have no idea, right? They were only open about five months. |00:46:27| BRODY Wow. Yeah, I mean, hard to please everybody. You know, and the the loudest people are the ones that are really leaving the review. Just from a nuts and bolts sort of process perspective, what are you looking for like when you walk into a restaurant or when you decide you&#039 ; re going to and to, you know, to review a certain place? |00:46:52| REINHART Does that include how I decide to? OK, cool. Well, because it&#039 ; s very fluid, actually. And you know, for example, last week with the aid of those beers, we decided, Oh, we gotta, we gotta punch this one into the schedule somewhere soon, right? But generally, I think I probably spend more time deciding where to go than actually going there. I think I&#039 ; m, you know, I look at new openings and new listings. Actually, Yelp is a little bit helpful for the &quot ; hot to new&quot ; filter, which is their filter that shows you new openings. The only problem is that they don&#039 ; t show you new openings, or I should say they&#039 ; re I think they&#039 ; re pretty much customer reported. And Yelp is more popular among certain races and demographics. So, for example, Black restaurant openings in South Dallas, Black owned restaurant openings in South Dallas almost never get reported on Yelp. So that is something I have to find other ways. Anyway, I scour the internet in general, looking for new openings all across the region, and then I kind of build the schedule based on diversity. So that&#039 ; s regional. Like, OK, I did something in Oak Cliff. Now I&#039 ; m going to try to do something up north in Plano. And then I, you know, after I do something in Plano, maybe I&#039 ; ll try to go to Irving or East Dallas or something like that. And then that&#039 ; s also price points. We don&#039 ; t want to do three expensive places in a row for either budget reasons or, you know, reader reasons. Culinary diversity also. Every year I try to do, you know, one or two Korean places. A few Hispanic places try to keep the mix resembling what I perceive to be the mix of the food in Dallas. We had to overcorrect at the beginning, I think, because, you know, everybody had talked about all of the really famous places downtown and all of the, you know, kind of good old traditional places downtown. So I overcorrected for a few years and spent all of my time in the suburbs and spent all my time eating, you know, a little hole in the wall and little lesser known places or places that were not very well known outside of their immediate community. But now I think I can try to... I can try to authentically capture some of the city&#039 ; s diversity without forcing it, without having quotas, without having, you know, strict rules about, well, I can only do one fancy restaurant a month or whatever. |00:49:47| BRODY Right? So balancing a desire to kind of represent all different styles and types and price points with sort of the natural flow of what&#039 ; s opening and what&#039 ; s, you know... |00:49:59| REINHART Yeah. So that is actually that is a bit of contention is that, you know, a lot of them have to be newish, right? And just the way that it works is that the newish places that get a lot of attention and get a lot of hype are places that have professional PR people who can email all the media members. Right? So then there becomes an expectation. Oh, well, you&#039 ; re going to review this place, right? Because everybody is talking about this place because it more or less self-generated all of that story, right? And I think for a long time, I think for a long time, restaurant critics were kind of hamstrung by that. The fact that there was this machine kind of determining notability of new openings, but perhaps fortunately, I just didn&#039 ; t know. I didn&#039 ; t know that was the thing, I wasn&#039 ; t part of the system, so, you know, I thought, &quot ; Well, hey, I- part of the privilege of this job is I get to decide what&#039 ; s a notable new opening.&quot ; And it&#039 ; s harder to find places that don&#039 ; t have the PR backing. It&#039 ; s harder to find places to, you know, they don&#039 ; t really know how to get the word out. They- I&#039 ; ve had a couple of cases where they thought that we were advertising and like, I ran a review last year and the person texted me and said, &quot ; Thanks for the great ad.&quot ; And you know, there are places that only know how to use Facebook if that or, you know, right? They can&#039 ; t, they don&#039 ; t have a website. So it&#039 ; s a challenge to find them. But then of course, it becomes much more rewarding to say, &quot ; Hey, look, here&#039 ; s something that&#039 ; s really important that just opened that you need to go to. And also, you don&#039 ; t know about it yet.&quot ; |00:51:48| BRODY Right? That&#039 ; s yeah, that you&#039 ; re a little bit of an explorer, pioneer in that sense. |00:51:55| REINHART I mean, yeah, and I&#039 ; m not really a pioneer, but I think the magician, Teller has a really great quote about how a lot of the time magic is spending more time on something than anybody would reasonably expect you to spend. OK, so if you&#039 ; re, you know, if you&#039 ; re spending hours of your week looking for a cool new restaurant, then going and trying them, I think a lot of people are not expecting that level of intensity. |00:52:21| BRODY Right? That&#039 ; s I mean, it&#039 ; s true. It takes...even with the tools of the internet and all of that, it&#039 ; s, you know, it takes work to find something new, something different, something off the beaten path. So. This kind of relates to another thing that comes up a lot when we talk about especially restaurants that are representing foods of other cultures, you know, the PR ,sort of corporate machine that you were alluding to a second ago that, you know, where a well-known, well-funded restaurant might have publicists and so on. You know, they can portray that restaurant as authentic or as this or that, whereas the, you know, mom and pop shop that, you know, may or may not be more authentic that, you know, doesn&#039 ; t necessarily have that kind of public relations behind them. How would you just sort of describe your experience of this question of authenticity when it comes, especially to restaurants? You know, Asian restaurants or other restaurants from other parts of the world? |00:53:39| REINHART I know I just use the word in a different context, but I don&#039 ; t really actually like the word &quot ; authentic&quot ; and I think it&#039 ; s because, you know, everybody&#039 ; s authentic experience is different. You know, my mother makes Turkish food one way, and all of her friends make things a little bit differently, and they&#039 ; re always begging her for certain recipes. Her red lentil soup, they&#039 ; re always asking what she did differently to make it so much better. And I think restaurants can probably use that too sometimes. But. And then I was talking to, just a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to somebody from New Orleans who works for chef Tiffany Derry at Roots Southern Table, which is Tiffany Derry&#039 ; s very excellent and very acclaimed, kind of upscale or creative or imaginative southern place. And Tiffany Derry is from Beaumont, and she was telling me, well, her gumbo is different from mine. And at first she said, &quot ; Well, mine&#039 ; s more authentic.&quot ; And then I kind of I asked her to explain it a little bit differently, and she said, &quot ; Well, actually, you know, in New Orleans, we just make gumbo a little bit differently. And in Beaumont, they have different ways and they have a different recipe for preparation of gumbo. And then Chef DAT, David Anthony Temple, he&#039 ; s from Baton Rouge, and they make gumbo differently there, too. And his gumbo is different from both of us. And you know, it&#039 ; s only an hour and 15 minutes up the highway, but they&#039 ; ve got a whole different style of gumbo there.&quot ; And I think when you start talking about &quot ; authentic,&quot ; you&#039 ; re always going to run into that. I think I have learned to filter out a lot of the conversation, even within a community online, because when they&#039 ; re saying, &quot ; Well, this is not authentic,&quot ; they may well be saying, &quot ; You know, this is not the way my grandmother did it. This is the way your grandmother did it.&quot ; Of course, the challenge is that then you run into places that genuinely may not be. They may be intentionally Americanized or otherwise playing to the crowd or not fully respectful of the rules. I think I was just reading something from a chef in San Francisco, Brandon Jiu, who&#039 ; s in Chinatown, Mister Jiu&#039 ; s is a very acclaimed restaurant there. And he was talking about how if you learn the culture and if you learn the rules and you respect them, then when you break them, you&#039 ; ll be better at it. And that&#039 ; s kind of what I come back to with the question of authenticity, I guess, is I come back to...Are you showing adequate respect? Do you really genuinely engage with the tradition, do you understand what the tradition is and then is your variation or your invention or your crazy idea- if it comes off of that- Is it delicious? |00:56:45| BRODY Bottom line. |00:56:45| REINHART Yeah. I mean, honestly, that&#039 ; s really the best way to show respect or care for a culture is to make it be good. I think if you if you want to say, for example, you&#039 ; re a white person and you want to make Thai food or whatever, if you&#039 ; re not so good, maybe find something else to do. |00:57:08| BRODY Right. Well, and that kind of brings us right into this. You know, the other side of the coin, I guess, about appropriation. Right? So if you know you&#039 ; re- what -if I&#039 ; ve understood what you&#039 ; ve said that the idea of authenticity to you is rooted in respect because even within a culture, there might be different versions of different foods that are equally authentic. But when? When does appropriation or what you know, what counts as appropriation to you or is that even a thing when we&#039 ; re talking about food? |00:57:47| REINHART It is, I think, from a purely from a writer standpoint, from a rhetorical standpoint, I actually avoid using that word too, because I don&#039 ; t want to lose any readers and because I try to reduce things, this is going to sound condescending, but I try to reduce things to a kindergarten type of level of language. So I try to reduce things down to, you know, &quot ; respect,&quot ; &quot ; listening,&quot ; you know, reserve your judgment or use your judgments, things like that that we all learned in school. Because I think a lot of the time issues of appropriation come back to that. You know, if I decide I&#039 ; m going to open a restaurant and put bacon cheeseburgers into spring rolls or something, I&#039 ; m not really doing my homework. I&#039 ; m not really thinking too carefully about it. I&#039 ; m probably not...If I&#039 ; m coming from a place where I love spring rolls, I might be doing that only superficially. I might not be, you know, actually learning how to make them, you know, training with somebody or, you know, buying all of the cookbooks to study spring roll creation and figure out how to stick bacon cheeseburgers into there in a good way. This is a real example, by the way. I should point out. |00:59:08| BRODY Is it real? |00:59:08| REINHART I had a...Yeah, I&#039 ; ve had a...so they were deep fried, but they were called spring rolls. I know. In Vietnam, spring rolls can be fried. I don&#039 ; t necessarily have to or maybe it&#039 ; s oh, shoot. Man, people are going to judge me if they hear that it&#039 ; s wrong. No, but anyway, the they&#039 ; re much smaller, right? But yes, I had a cheeseburger spring roll. |00:59:31| BRODY Incredible. Was it good? Was it delicious? |00:59:33| REINHART It was.... It was....The flavor was good, but it was very greasy and the meat dried out pretty fast. So I guess when you roll it up and fried it, and then I think they&#039 ; d already cooked the burger patty inside. So it got very dry and then the cheese just kind of like turn into ooze. But I mean, the flavors were, you know, burgerry. But I think they had just, you know, they had the idea and they hadn&#039 ; t really done much of the homework that you might want to put into it. And I think that, you know, showing that respect and doing the research and being willing to listen and learn. It&#039 ; s surprising how hard... I mean. Yeah, it&#039 ; s surprising how hard some people find it to listen. You know, so that&#039 ; s another one that I kind of come back to that can be an example. Actually, there was a brewery, Manhattan Project Beer, so their name is Manhattan Project and all their beer can names are related to science and particularly the Oppenheimer Project and the atomic bomb. They actually have a Hoppenheimer beer, which I think is kind of funny. |01:00:43| BRODY It is kind of funny. |01:00:45| REINHART But they also had a beer called Bikini Atoll, and it was a Gose, which is kind of a tart light summer beer with a fruit flavor in it. I think it&#039 ; s like raspberry Gose and Bikini Atoll was selling well enough that the people who used to live on the Bikini Atoll found out about it, and they said...They sent a letter like the- I think it&#039 ; s the Marshall Islands Minister of Tourism or something- sent a letter to them saying, &quot ; Hey, look, you know, we used to live on the Bikini Atoll, and when they started dropping atomic bombs there, everybody had to leave and most of those people wound up getting cancer. And the cancer rates in that community are 80 percent higher than- or whatever the number was- higher than the cancer rates in normal society. And you know, there are people who are still living with the after effects of that. You know, there are children who are born with defects who are still alive today, and there are older people who have had whatever problems because they were young people at the time. Can you please change your beer name to something else? Can you please change your beer name to something that doesn&#039 ; t seem to celebrate, you know, all the misfortunes these people?&quot ; And they said, &quot ; No, we like the name, we&#039 ; re keeping it. It sounds tropical and the beer is tropical. So no.&quot ; And then, you know, there was kind of an uproar locally. There were a couple of news articles and there were debates on the internet and they said, &quot ; Look, we&#039 ; re not changing the name of the beer and that&#039 ; s final the end. We will not discuss this any further at any time.&quot ; And that was it. And I thought, &quot ; Well, you know, certainly that is something where appropriation is an is an apt word to use because they&#039 ; re taking that name from those people and using it to sell beer, to sell alcohol. But on the other hand, you know, we could reduce it to something even simpler. We could just say, like, &quot ; Look, these are people who didn&#039 ; t want to listen. These are people who didn&#039 ; t want to show a little bit of respect for the wishes of these people.&quot ; So that was an example, one where I don&#039 ; t think I use the word &quot ; appropriation&quot ; because it seemed like they were failing at just a much more basic level of human decency. |01:03:06| BRODY Right? Yeah. And the words definitely &quot ; authenticity&quot ; and &quot ; appropriation&quot ; have taken on something of a life of their own. You know, as I think you&#039 ; re alluding to in trying to avoid using... |01:03:19| REINHART I think it&#039 ; s very easy for somebody to see that and decide like, &quot ; Oh, he&#039 ; s a political whatever&quot ; and then dismiss or attack me on that basis. You know, I&#039 ; ve gotten emails accusing me of being a communist and all sorts of things. Right? |01:03:37| BRODY Really? |01:03:38| REINHART Yeah. We just ran a thing that was talking about how American income inequality might affect the restaurant business and how, you know, the fact that there is a small group of really, really wealthy people who can eat wherever they want, and the rest of us are having to save up our money a little bit- how that would affect the restaurant business and how that&#039 ; s affecting the bottom lines of restaurants that don&#039 ; t serve the super wealthy people. And yeah, that got a lot of reader emails being like, &quot ; Oh, you&#039 ; re super lefty, whatever, whatever, whatever.&quot ; So part of what I&#039 ; m thinking with words even like &quot ; appropriation&quot ; is I know there&#039 ; s culture wars going on and I want to see if I can... I want to see if I can affect somebody&#039 ; s mind without saying what it&#039 ; s about, you know? And of course, it might not work. They might. They might read the article and agree with me and then turn around to the next minute and disagree with everybody else making those same arguments because they see the word &quot ; appropriation&quot ; or something like that. |01:04:42| BRODY Yeah, it sounds like you&#039 ; re saying that it&#039 ; s a goal to you in your reviews and in your writing to be clear and to steer clear of being characterized in a certain way...just for using particular words. |01:04:59| REINHART I don&#039 ; t think -I don&#039 ; t think I care what people think of me. I think what I have learned is that there are certain words that can get people to tune out of your own ideas and substitute in what they think you&#039 ; re going to say in exchange for what you&#039 ; re actually going to say. There are certain words. I mean, I want to say that there are triggers, but of course, the word &quot ; trigger&quot ; is another one now. Because as soon as you hear that word, you know, you think, you know, you know- how it&#039 ; s going to go and what people are going to say and what this side thinks and what that side thinks. And I just don&#039 ; t want people to get replaying their the stuff they saw on television when they read the article, I want them to have to think a new independent thought and think something a little differently than the way they&#039 ; ve been thinking about it all the previous times. |01:05:55| BRODY Great. It strikes me that a lot of the things that we&#039 ; ve talked about today and the stories that you&#039 ; ve shared are making me think about restaurant reviewing and writing- food writing in a different way, namely that, you know, it does sound like what sounds, it seems, I think, to, you know, in popular media and so on, like a, you know, a person is going out and eating and writing about it. You know, it goes a lot deeper in that you&#039 ; re faced with, you know, in some cases, you know, politics-adjacent choices, some maybe overtly political, you know, things that you&#039 ; re dealing with, like with the travel ban and the Bilad Bakery, you know, things like that. You know, issues of, you know, where you fit into the larger media ecosystem in terms of, you know, language and what you know what people might be coming with you- to your articles with. So do you have any reflections on sort of the deeper context of the work that you do? |01:07:05| REINHART I think that&#039 ; s a I think it&#039 ; s a gradual change, which has become a very rapid change very recently. I think that for a long time it was a really fun, easy job, you know, it really was that you just got to go out and eat and be catty about it. And I think a lot of people got to enjoy that. I think kind of during the late 90s bubble, especially people got to enjoying it rather too much, right? There are whole magazines that went belly up because the expenses they were handing out to people to travel and so forth were outrageous. And I know, not to officially name names on the record, but a predecessor at the Morning News got more money for expenses for going to restaurants and eating food and drinking wine than I got for my entire salary at that time. Like in the year, whichever year I might be talking about, you can do your own guessing. |01:08:04| BRODY Will do. |01:08:05| REINHART They were? They were. Yeah, they had more money to play with for expenses than I had money, period. And that was kind of, I mean, maybe at the time that was seen as a wise use of resources. But I think now it&#039 ; s understood that that was a waste and frivolity. And now, especially so I started officially taking the title of restaurant critic, our food critic in May 2016, which means that I had absolutely no time to have fun before things really got real. Right, right? Especially as somebody who is, you know, the child of a Muslim immigrant to the United States. Already at that time, we knew there was going to be serious trouble. So already at the time, that was at the forefront of my thinking and I knew that, you know, all sorts of real life things are going to intrude on our lovely little job of going out to eat and talking about it. |01:09:07| BRODY Right. Dallas, is as you&#039 ; ve alluded to already, sort of famous for these, like high end upscale places and has historically been, you know, home to many of those. And yet also, today&#039 ; s landscape, as we&#039 ; ve talked about, has, you know, a lot of family run businesses, family run restaurants and, you know, even now food trucks and things like that. What is what are your thoughts about that? Is there a tension between those two ends of the spectrum when we&#039 ; re thinking about food in Dallas? |01:09:46| REINHART Yeah, I think that&#039 ; s part of why our reputation has been so strange nationally is because, you know, most people, most tourists, most media members are looking for something a little bit in the middle of that. Generally. Obviously, food trucks are having and have been having their moment for a long time, but that&#039 ; s generally the case. I think I&#039 ; m going to willfully ignore your questions for a second and say like in the in the context of Asian food, particularly, our high end has had a very strange feature globally since the 90s. It&#039 ; s become very popular to for white chefs, right French, especially to use some Asian flavors in their food, right, Jean-Georges and people like that are very big on, you know, &quot ; Well, we&#039 ; re going to serve something with a butter sauce, but now the butter is going to have lemongrass too.&quot ; That&#039 ; s actually that&#039 ; s a dish I had a couple of weeks ago somewhere, but anyway. Dallas has a kind of odd twist to that, which is, well, at least one of them is the combination sushi-steak house? Abacus is a good example. Abacus opened in the 1990s, I think, with Kent Rathbun as the chef in Uptown, and the whole idea was that he would cook great steaks like everybody in Dallas is expected to, and there&#039 ; d be a full sushi bar with a sushi chef making rolls, specialty rolls. And that kind of became like an accepted format of restaurant here in Dallas to have Asian food kind of imported wholesale into Dallas high end cooking. There&#039 ; s now a place downtown. I don&#039 ; t think I remember the name of it. It&#039 ; s in the Exchange Hall. I think that&#039 ; s the name of it. It&#039 ; s actually two restaurants. It actually is... You sit in a communal area like at a mall food court, but there are two fancy restaurants on either side of it, and one of them is a sushi bar owned by a white man, and the other one is a steakhouse. And so we&#039 ; re still kind of doing that now. That. We... I don&#039 ; t even know how you describe it, like it&#039 ; s almost like a decoration. |01:12:07| BRODY Yeah, is that a... I don&#039 ; t know? Is that a thing that happens in other cities too? Or is that a particular Dallas invention? The sushi-steakhouse? |01:12:15| REINHART I think there must be other ones? I&#039 ; m sure that there are some in New York. I don&#039 ; t know if it&#039 ; s just that, like the media doesn&#039 ; t really talk about them because they&#039 ; re seen as very 90s and very over the hill. Right? So maybe I just don&#039 ; t know about them, but I don&#039 ; t know about them. I feel like I should google it now. |01:12:35| BRODY Well, so many food trends and restaurant trends seem to have started in Dallas and been sort of exported to other parts of the country. I just wondered if that was one that fell into that category. |01:12:46| REINHART Maybe. |01:12:46| BRODY To look into that? Well, that&#039 ; s a perfect segue, then, to talk about Asian restaurants in Dallas and sort of...in the time that you&#039 ; ve been here specifically, what are the changes you&#039 ; ve noticed or trends or patterns in the Asian restaurant landscape? |01:13:07| REINHART Yeah, OK. I think for one thing, we have had for decades an amazing Japanese food scene, right? Partly because of one man, Teiichi Sakurai, who came over here and started opening new restaurants and basically populating them with his old friends and his old coworkers. And I think a couple of high school classmates. And they have gone on to build kind of a dynasty. He only owns two of them now, but the other ones are still going and they have different ownership and they&#039 ; re mostly his friends. And then we have Mr. Sushi is really old, I think. But anyway, the idea is, I think, partly because of the airport. We&#039 ; ve had so much better access than a lot of other inland and middle America cities to that really fresh seafood and to employers like Texas Instruments who are hiring a lot of people from those cultures. So we&#039 ; re almost to the level of like Seattle in that regard. I know when I talked to people in the Korean community, they told me that the airport was a big reason that the Korean community is so big here because...And that&#039 ; s why the other big Korean community between L.A. and New York is Atlanta, because Hartsfield is another gigantic airport, right? So they were very easily able to establish business and supply chains and business and community networks basically. |01:14:46| BRODY Really interesting. |01:14:47| REINHART They could easily get back home. I think that the arrival of...I think a lot of cultures arrive first in reality, and then they start to translate into the food scene a little later, right? And then sometimes it&#039 ; s the reverse, I think. I think a lot of I think sometimes that&#039 ; s a bad idea. I&#039 ; m making things up. OK, so I&#039 ; ll go back and I&#039 ; ll say, you know, you know, for example, the Nepalese community came to Irving in the 1990s at the beginning, and then they&#039 ; ve been coming ever since. I think there was some rule. In 1995, Congress passed some immigration reform, which lifted the quota on Nepal, particularly or maybe it was all the countries that they&#039 ; d forgotten to do in the previous bill or something like that. And that was when they started coming to Dallas Fort Worth, and they&#039 ; ve been coming in a steady stream ever since. And it started with one restaurant, which I think was Everest in Irving. And now we&#039 ; re up to past the dozen mark. There&#039 ; s a Nepalese sports bar with wings and TV, and they play cricket games on the television. There is, there are multiple Momo places in gas stations, and those are all relatively recent developments. I worked in Irving from 2012 through 2019 and the first few years, that wasn&#039 ; t really an option to go get lunch. It wasn&#039 ; t a thing that, you know, it wasn&#039 ; t something that we had on our radar. And then Cafemandu and Momo To Go and whichever one the other one was- shoot- Momo Express? Can&#039 ; t remember. I think it&#039 ; s on the Chevron station at Northgate and Beltline, though. I know which gas station it is, I just don&#039 ; t know the name of it. And oh, and there was another one on MacArthur that closed recently, but they all started opening up and to in like 2016, 2017. And that became one of the coolest and most fun kind of recent trends. Of course, Lao food has been around for a long time at places like Nalinh Market, Overseas Market, a lot of kind of traditional old grocery stores. But Donny at Khao Noodle Shop has taken it to a whole new place, right, and that&#039 ; s gotten national reputation. There have been magazines, articles about him and about them, and he&#039 ; s kind of...You wouldn&#039 ; t say modern, but he cares about plating and he cares about making things from scratch. He makes the saku dumplings, the tapioca dumplings from scratch by cooking the tapioca and breaking it down, and it&#039 ; s really intense. If you get to, just ask him how to make that as one of your questions. |01:17:53| BRODY I hope so. |01:17:57| REINHART And so that&#039 ; s become kind of a...top to bottom dining scene out of its own, almost, you could say, like they&#039 ; ve really very quickly gone from being little mom and pops to covering every part of the every sector of the market. You know, he recently was trying to open a very high end fancy tasting restaurant and didn&#039 ; t get off the ground, but it was a possibility and it still is a possibility in the future, for sure. So that&#039 ; s another good sign. I think there was something else I was going to say, Oh, I just wanted to talk about millennials. Good old millennials gotta love us because in the last few years, as I think as parents have handed off restaurants to children, especially, you&#039 ; ve seen rebrands and redesigns and rethinking of how things are going. And there&#039 ; s a lot of really cool stuff coming out of that. A really recent example is that there was a very traditional old school Indian place in Plano called Minerva. I don&#039 ; t know if you know you&#039 ; ve heard of. |01:19:06| BRODY Yes. |01:19:07| REINHART Yeah. When did you go? Have you been recently? |01:19:11| BRODY No. |01:19:12| REINHART Well, they passed it to their children, I think. And the children renamed it to &quot ; Minerva Indian Bistro.&quot ; So already &quot ; bistro&quot ; is kind of...that&#039 ; s not...It&#039 ; s a not traditional Indian word. And they&#039 ; ve they started making like introducing their own little inventions around, like there&#039 ; s a there&#039 ; s a menu of mocktails, nonalcoholic cocktails, and there&#039 ; s a dessert menu of inventive little things that are kind of spins on tradition they take ras malai, is that the name of it? |01:19:49| BRODY Yes. |01:19:50| REINHART Yeah. So they&#039 ; re taking that and they&#039 ; re turning into a Tres Leches cake. |01:19:53| BRODY Oh, interesting. |01:19:54| REINHART Yeah. And then they put like rose water frosting on top and little cute little swirls. And then they plate it in a little tiny bowl so that the milk, the coconut milk can kind of spill out the bottom. |01:20:05| BRODY That&#039 ; s a really good example of a bridge, right? Between two different cultures that are both immigrant cultures. |01:20:12| REINHART And I think that&#039 ; s happening a lot. The guys who run L.A. Burger are in there. Oh gosh. And they are no longer in their 20s, but recently were in their 20s. And they found the restaurant when they were like 24 and 22. They&#039 ; re brothers. And yeah, they&#039 ; re putting kimchi on cheeseburgers and putting kimchi on hot dogs and all sorts of... |01:20:33| BRODY of like sauerkraut. |01:20:34| REINHART Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it&#039 ; s delicious. I&#039 ; m sure there are more examples. Well, Halal Mother, Mother Truckers, the food truck? That&#039 ; s very hard to say. Halal Mother Truckers is a youngish guy who does basically curry tacos, and he has a, I want to say it was like a butter chicken and something paneer taco. And those are his staple offerings. And he goes around, yeah. And I mean, they&#039 ; re legitimately good and he uses. He uses Mexican tortillas, he doesn&#039 ; t use any kind of Asian flatbread, and then he serves the traditional foods in the tortillas. |01:21:17| BRODY It&#039 ; s reminded me of our previous conversation where we were talking about the...those words &quot ; authenticity&quot ; and &quot ; appropriation&quot ; and so on. This seems like a, you know, I mean, I guess the word that comes to mind is fusion, but that word too might mean something different. |01:21:38| REINHART Yeah, fusion has long been kind of a bad word, and it&#039 ; s kind of meant different things over the years, I think. I think what we&#039 ; re seeing now is fusion as well. Fusion has always happened, right? Fusion has always happened in every culture. I think the banh mi as a glorious example of culinary fusion, right? But I think what we&#039 ; re seeing now is that the people from the non-dominant culture are getting to do the fusing. For a long time, it was, you know, it was the white guys who got to have the steak houses with sushi in them, right? Or. He&#039 ; s actually since opened a fusion place, that gentleman, Kent Rathbun, which serves tandoori chicken and sushi and Pad Thai and Korean fried chicken and Chinese dumplings. |01:22:35| BRODY That&#039 ; s an interesting combo. |01:22:37| REINHART Yeah. But so now what we&#039 ; re seeing is that the people who come from those cultures are turning the tables, right? We&#039 ; re seeing, you know, Mexican chefs get to absorb French technique into their food rather than the other way around or, you know, a Afifa Nayeb, who&#039 ; s from Afghanistan. She&#039 ; s got that restaurant in Bishop Arts where she uses French, French ingredients and copious amounts of butter to make Indian food. I&#039 ; m not I haven&#039 ; t actually been to that. I&#039 ; m a little worried about the concept. It sounds very it&#039 ; s....I don&#039 ; t really understand it yet, but it&#039 ; s an example. |01:23:19| BRODY Right? Right. Earlier, you talked about how the some of the, in that sort of changing of the guard from the parents to the younger generation, they had incorporated a lot of different design and style elements. Would you like to speak to that a little bit? |01:23:36| REINHART Yeah. I mean, I think, you know. I think there&#039 ; s a kind of a stereotype of &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; places as having traditional music playing and having kind of a living room type feel and really soft cushy chairs or whatever or buffets, whatever you might wish to imagine, I think. You know, we&#039 ; ve seen the younger generation go towards flashy signage and nice logos and hard tile floors and walls and kind of even some of the like &quot ; Chip and Joanna aesthetic&quot ; with the wood and shiplap and so forth. And I think, I think What The Biryani in Irving...Yes, that&#039 ; s the actual name of it. And they have a thing on the wall that says &quot ; WTF&quot ; and then &quot ; OOD&quot ; at the end. But I think they have a very like kind of &quot ; Chip and Joanna aesthetic&quot ; going. They have lots of white painted wood and they have lots of like little fake plants everywhere. And it looks very much like a like an American hipster coffee shop type of feel. And they put their menu on those little sign boards where you push the letters down the slats, except that it&#039 ; s all biryani. |01:24:50| BRODY Yeah, yeah, that&#039 ; s really interesting. I mean, a lot of people. I&#039 ; m going through all these old restaurant reviews and so on and certainly in the literature about quote unquote ethnic restaurants, there&#039 ; s a lot of derogatory talk about smells about, you know, looks, about, you know, I guess, aesthetics, about cleanliness. Do you think some of this change in aesthetic or move toward design is a nod toward some of those stereotypes? |01:25:24| REINHART That could be. I know there are lots of restaurant owners who are very concerned or borderline obsessed with proving cleanliness, right? I actually interviewed one from a Bosnian restaurant a couple of months ago who at the end of the interview, he was like, &quot ; Look, I show you the kitchen.&quot ; And he took me to the walk-in and he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Look, everything is dated and covered with Saran Wrap.&quot ; And I was like, &quot ; I&#039 ; m not the health inspector. I&#039 ; m not looking for the dates on all of your product.&quot ; I think that, I think also, you know...You know, that is still actually a bit of a concern at times. The Dallas Morning News ran a review of Desi District, which is a restaurant that I love in Irving and also kind of represents kind of the younger generation of thinking and creativity. They have gulab jamun cupcakes. Oh, they&#039 ; re so rich and so good. And, and the Morning News ran a review and I think 2017 or 18, and it includes a sidebar that was like, &quot ; Hey, their health inspection. Score is not good, it&#039 ; s a C.&quot ; And the author looked it up. The author was a white woman, and she said, &quot ; Well, it looks like all the worst health inspection scores in Irving are Indian restaurants. So I called the head of the Irving Health Department and I said, Hey, is there anything about Indian restaurants that would make them fail?&quot ; And I thought, &quot ; Wow, you&#039 ; re you didn&#039 ; t acknowledge, you know...That there might be anybody out there who&#039 ; s going to read that and come away with a prejudiced response to that.&quot ; There was no attempt to say like, look, this is not...racially, anything. There was no attempt to address that, that was even a possibility. And I think it was, you know, kind of hopelessly naive at best. I personally wouldn&#039 ; t have even touched it. I don&#039 ; t know why she was looking up what all the lowest scoring restaurants were. |01:27:25| BRODY Right, and it gets back to the sort of philosophy of the food writing in general, and responsibility. |01:27:31| REINHART And what&#039 ; s in your scope? Yeah. She had a particular fixation with health inspection scores, which I support, but it just it&#039 ; s just an example of how food critics can have different things that they really care about, right? And I can&#039 ; t fault anybody for, you know, having health and safety, be one of them. But yeah, so it is an ongoing thing, I guess. Still? You know, I don&#039 ; t really think about it, but I have to keep in mind that others do. And that might be part of it. I think also, you know, young people. They have grown up with a certain expectation of restaurants, and they might want to get away from that or they&#039 ; re on Instagram all the time or, you know, there you&#039 ; ll talk to people who will say, &quot ; Well, my parents didn&#039 ; t want me to open a restaurant because, you know, it&#039 ; s what they did to earn a living and it was backbreaking work and it&#039 ; s, you know, kind of lower class labor. And they were hoping I was going to become something else.&quot ; And then as a result of that, they have to, you know, they feel like they should show like the restaurant shows that I&#039 ; m doing something really cool and fun, right? Right. And something successful, right? |01:28:50| BRODY Finally, Dallas is not just downtown, as you mentioned earlier, anymore. And the spread into all these suburbs and you mentioned going- trying to cycle through different parts of the Metroplex. Specifically dealing with thinking about the Asian population, where do you see the most growth or the most exciting changes in terms of that? |01:29:16| REINHART Oh, that&#039 ; s a great question. I think it&#039 ; s important to say first to start on downbeat by saying that, you know, the reason that we have to talk about this is because Dallas is pretty significantly segregated, right? At least as a matter of fact, not a matter of law, right? But for example, a lot of the areas central close to downtown have not really been opened in recent years to restaurant owners of immigrant or black culture. There are stories from chef Troy Gardner, who tried to open a restaurant in Uptown and continually was rebuffed and finally got to open a restaurant in West Dallas because they told him like, &quot ; Oh, that neighborhood&#039 ; s fine for you, right?&quot ; Horrible. And I think that in recent years, like when something like a NGON opens on Greenville, N-G-O-N, the Vietnamese place. That is almost like a huge victory to me, the fact that one of the prime real estate spots on Greenville is now given over to a really traditional, really fantastic Vietnamese restaurant that&#039 ; s run by all Vietnamese women is just fabulous. We went on Sunday. We say it&#039 ; s one of my favorite places and it&#039 ; s ah, we went on Saturday- anyway. You know, it&#039 ; s a really exciting sign that maybe something is finally changing down there and in the city center in general. But a lot of the most exciting stuff is still happening out in the suburbs. I think the two Koreatowns are kind of on different tracks right now. The one in Carrollton almost all has the same landlord. That whole center at like Old Denton Road and the Tollway, I think is almost entirely owned by one guy. And people are starting to fight with that guy and they&#039 ; re starting to slowly move northwards up Old Denton Road towards whatever the next tollway is. Is that 121? |01:31:24| BRODY I think so. |01:31:24| REINHART Yeah, that goes to Frisco. Sam Rayburn Tollway. So you&#039 ; re starting to see things move up there. And the original Koreatown is reviving itself and coming back in a really strong way. I think for a long time, it had a poor reputation and there was crime, and there remain a lot of massage parlors and things like that. And that hotel town, Han Gil Hotel Town, was torn down a couple of years ago. That was a really horrible, traumatizing place that was basically, you know, oh, I don&#039 ; t know if you know, news reports about this, but it was a Korean run hotel where each room was basically a different drug den more or less. And the owners at the front desk, they photocopied everybody&#039 ; s driver&#039 ; s licenses more or less so that like they, you know, they knew who you were in case something happened from a liability standpoint. And you know, you&#039 ; d come in and you&#039 ; d say, like, I&#039 ; m visiting and my friend in room 314 or whatever. Oh yeah. And I mean, they took cash payments for rooms by the, you know, short timeframes, and it was just so that&#039 ; s been razed. And I think a lot of the old reputation that neighborhood had is not as warranted now. There are new places going in there. There&#039 ; s a very fancy new barbecue place that opened down the street from Koryo, which is from talent who flew in from South Korea to start it, a chef who came from Seoul. I think to start it. |01:33:06| BRODY Specifically to Dallas, on purpose? |01:33:09| REINHART Specifically Dallas on purpose. I believe the owner of that, it&#039 ; s Nuri Grill, N-U-R-I, and the owner of that is the former CEO of Smoothie King, the chain, and he is a Korean-American man and yeah, he brought the chef. And it&#039 ; s, they&#039 ; re calling the chef &quot ; a Michelin recognized chef&quot ; which I think means they got Honorable Mention in the Michelin guide at some point. But it&#039 ; s still, you know, it&#039 ; s still impressive, I suppose. And one of the strip malls there that&#039 ; s more older and more traditional is now the land is owned by H Mart. So we think H Mart is probably planning to plant a location there sometime in the next few years. So a lot of stuff is happening there. Unfortunately for me, living in the south of Dallas, a whole lot of fun stuff keeps happening way up north by Frisco, Prosper. I keep looking and it&#039 ; s almost every month there&#039 ; s something especially Chinese that&#039 ; s opening up there. Highland Noodles. 888 Cookhouse, Uncle Zhou. There&#039 ; s all sorts of stuff I want to get to up there. Like I almost want to go get a hotel for the weekend. Just have Chinese food. |01:34:24| BRODY A staycation. |01:34:24| REINHART Yeah, yeah. And then actually up there also the old J.C. Penney headquarters, which is on like the Plano-Frisco border. Part of that is going to turn into an upscale Japanese hotel for like people visiting Toyota. |01:34:41| BRODY Oh, OK. |01:34:42| REINHART And that&#039 ; s going to have the press release was very cryptic and said it was going to have &quot ; an already famous sushi restaurant.&quot ; |01:34:51| BRODY Interesting. |01:34:51| REINHART Yeah. |01:34:52| BRODY Interesting. Something to look forward to. |01:34:53| REINHART We don&#039 ; t know what that is going to be, but we know it&#039 ; s going be something. |01:34:55| BRODY So there is a lot of growth up there. Yeah, in the North. Well, is there anything that I haven&#039 ; t asked you that I should have or anything that you&#039 ; d like to add? |01:35:05| REINHART Goodness. We&#039 ; ve covered a lot of ground. You know, I feel like we might think of something like a week or two. |01:35:18| BRODY Well, we can we can talk again when we think of something, but thank you so much. I really appreciate all of your time and your insights. It&#039 ; s been really, really interesting. |01:35:26| REINHART And yeah, thank you. Yeah. Well, OK, I look forward to seeing everything else. |01:35:32| BRODY Thank you. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_004.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Brian Reinhart, December 20, 2021 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_004 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Food writing Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-12-20 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/69f1a72a40ee74c5d5d1bcb2f071a514.jpg 08ee8f7d176c32e75061a8825c01ab7a Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daisy Chuskul OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Daisy Chuskul, June 6, 2022 2021oh002_di_015 01:20:57 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Thai Daisy Chuskul Betsy Brody m4a oh_dig_audio_chuskul_daisy20220606.m4a 1:|16(11)|31(10)|49(13)|62(12)|81(2)|94(6)|110(12)|121(5)|135(1)|148(3)|160(8)|172(14)|183(5)|194(16)|207(9)|216(3)|225(3)|238(9)|249(4)|260(12)|276(12)|285(10)|296(2)|313(3)|323(5)|334(14)|343(8)|354(3)|363(1)|378(1)|389(12)|402(4)|418(5)|427(4)|446(5)|458(2)|465(9)|476(9)|487(3)|494(15)|508(11)|520(3)|532(3)|546(13)|558(3)|566(1)|573(9)|581(10)|593(8)|610(11)|619(1)|629(10)|638(8)|653(5)|662(10)|672(6)|682(14)|691(6)|704(6)|712(11)|721(8)|737(8)|749(7)|761(7)|771(1)|778(8)|794(5)|800(11)|812(3)|822(8)|830(9)|839(12)|848(1)|867(3)|881(10)|887(6)|894(14)|903(1)|911(4)|918(15) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/163115 Aviary audio 4 Introduction Asian Americans ; Cooking, American ; Cooking, Thai ; Texas--History 32 Chuskul family's arrival in Dallas Baltimore ; Dallas ; doctor ; Thai ; Thailand 183 Chuskul family opens Bangkok Inn Asian restaurant ; Bangkok Inn ; customers ; Dallas ; East Dallas ; family run restaurant ; food ; landlord ; line ; lines ; mom and pop ; own ; Pad Thai ; rent ; restaurant reviews ; University of North Texas 32.81989973850803, -96.76241463326922 17 http://www.bangkokinndallas.com/ 496 Chuskul describes her mother's Pad Thai customers ; family run restaurant ; generation ; neighborhood ; night market ; Pad Thai ; Ratburi ; recipes ; social media ; Thailand 776 Thai hospitality family run restaurant ; food ; hospitality 866 Customer profile cultures ; neigborhood ; neighbors ; regulars 950 Approach to the menu/ Thoughts about &quot ; authenticity&quot ; approachable ; authentic ; authenticity ; brand ; culture ; customers ; educate ; education ; food ; fusion ; generation ; home cooking ; innovation ; menu ; palae ; rebrand ; regulars ; sauce ; stir fry ; street food ; Thai food ; vegetables ; western palate 1245 Racism and discrimination/ Thai community in Dallas competition ; discrimination ; racism ; Thai community 1430 Suppliers and sourcing ingredients for Bangkok Inn Asian grocery ; groceries ; Hong Kong Market ; sourcing ; Southern Star ; supermarket ; suppliers ; Thai Oriental 1624 Opening a second location of Bangkok Inn Bangkok Inn ; expansion ; growth ; Italian ; landlord ; rent 1797 Relationship with neighbors and neighborhood laundromat ; neigborhood ; neighbors 2038 Bestsellers and recognition of Bangkok Inn Asian food landscape ; bestsellers ; Dallas ; Dallas Observer ; food landscape ; hole in the wall ; innovation ; innovative ; menu ; mom and pop ; Pad Thai ; peanu chicken ; peanut sauce ; recipes ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; social media ; Thai ; Thai food 2255 Distinguishing characteristics of a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant/Impact of social media Asian Grub in DFDub ; brand ; branding ; food ; hole in the wall ; marketing ; mom and pop ; photography ; photoraphy ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; social media ; Yelp 2634 Balancing maintaining legacy and innovation for the future brunch ; BYOB ; expand ; family run restaurant ; fish sauce ; growth ; innovation ; laab ; legacy ; palate ; recipes ; Thai brunch ; Thai flavors ; tradition ; western palate 3221 Decision to be a BYOB restaurant alcohol ; BYOB ; family run restaurant ; liquor ; mom and pop ; neighborhood ; tradition ; wine 3371 Studying Hospitality at the University of North Texas Asian restaurant ; business ; hospitality ; legacy ; mom and pop ; POS system ; restaurant ; University of North Texas 3828 Taking over a family run restaurant business ; community ; family run restaurant 3990 Connections the the Thai community connect ; connection ; culture ; internet ; relationship ; social media ; Thai ; Thai community 4144 Impact of COVID and ice storm on Bangkok Inn COVID ; ice storm ; pandemic ; takeout 4462 Food and culture authentic ; authenticity ; culture ; family ; food ; home cooking ; recipes ; technique ; Thai ; Thai flavors |00:00:04| Brody This is Betsy Brody. Today is June 6, 2022. I am interviewing for the first time as Daisy Chuskul. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and is part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In: How Food, Culture, and Class Shape the Story of Asian Dallas.&quot ; Hi, Daisy. Thank you for joining me today. |00:00:30| Chuskul Hi. Thanks for having me. |00:00:32| Brody To start out with, why don&#039 ; t you tell me where and when you were born? |00:00:37| Chuskul So I was born in Greenville, Texas, but my parents lived in Dallas at the time. I was born November 17th, 1989. And the reason I was born in Greenville was because there&#039 ; s a Thai doctor who births a lot of the Asian or the Thai families in the area. So we all, I guess, trek over there to have him deliver our babies. So, yes, but I&#039 ; m a Dallas native. |00:01:13| Brody So your parents were Thai? |00:01:16| Chuskul Mm hmm. |00:01:17| Brody Tell me about what brought them to Texas. |00:01:19| Chuskul So my mom was studying nursing for the Red Cross, and they brought nurses over to the U.S. and that&#039 ; s how she came in. My dad&#039 ; s history is like a little fuzzy. I think he just, you know, wanted to come to America to work. And so he made his way here and was working as a cab driver in Baltimore, Maryland. And that&#039 ; s where both of my parents met in Baltimore. |00:01:51| Brody Great. And what brought them to Texas? |00:01:55| Chuskul I think they had friends here and they probably were more used to the climate in Texas compared to Baltimore. So I think, yeah, the weather and maybe some opportunities and friends. |00:02:09| Brody You mentioned the doctor and the friends. Was there a large Thai community to your knowledge at that time when they came? |00:02:19| Chuskul I&#039 ; m not, I&#039 ; m not really sure, but I know that the doctor is one of my parents&#039 ; first friends, and they have been good friends for, you know, all these years and... |00:02:32| Brody When, do you know what year they came to Texas? |00:02:36| Chuskul So we opened our restaurant in 1982 and I think they came to the U.S. maybe around 76 or 77 and got married, I think, in 78 and had my sister. She was born in 1980 and she was born in Maryland. So I think shortly after she was born, they came to Texas. |00:03:03| Brody Tell me about the restaurant. |00:03:06| Chuskul Yeah. So we&#039 ; re a family run restaurant in East Dallas called Bangkok Inn. We&#039 ; ve been open for- this is our 40th year. And my parents ran the restaurant all that time until about 2012. That&#039 ; s when I graduated from the University of North Texas, and I studied hospitality management there. And so I already had the idea that I would come after I graduated and start taking over with my older brother and sister. So we started running the restaurant back in 2012. |00:03:46| Brody Had your parents ever done anything like a restaurant before, any food related businesses? |00:03:54| Chuskul No, I don&#039 ; t, I don&#039 ; t think so. And I haven&#039 ; t personally heard this story, so I&#039 ; m not, I&#039 ; m a little bit skeptical of it, but this is the narrative that my brother tells. And what he remembers is that my parents met at a mutual friend&#039 ; s wedding in Baltimore, and my mom had made lots of food and kind of catered that wedding. So he ate the food and was like, &quot ; Who made this? I have to meet her.&quot ; And that&#039 ; s when the suiting began. So. |00:04:24| Brody Wow, that&#039 ; s a great story. |00:04:25| Chuskul I know. I was like and it&#039 ; s a great story. I don&#039 ; t know if I believe it, but that&#039 ; s what we&#039 ; re sticking with. |00:04:33| Brody So still, though, what possessed them to open a restaurant? |00:04:37| Chuskul I think that&#039 ; s just what a lot of Thai people that came here, it was just something that there wasn&#039 ; t any Thai restaurants here at that time. I think we might be the oldest or one of the oldest still running from that time period. And so I think they just saw that there is an opportunity, a lack in the market and something that they could do. |00:05:06| Brody Do you know much about sort of the nuts and bolts of of how they got the restaurant off the ground? |00:05:12| Chuskul No, I&#039 ; m very surprised. So there&#039 ; s quite an age gap between me and my parents. So they had me when they were 45. And so I&#039 ; m always so curious about like what their twenties and thirties even looked like and how they navigated even opening the restaurant. Like running it now, there&#039 ; s all these like technical permits and stuff and things I have to figure out and I&#039 ; m like from here. So it&#039 ; s difficult for me. So it must be, must have been like a community effort of friends and helping each other out. |00:05:52| Brody Did they buy the property or the building or... |00:05:56| Chuskul I think they were renting it for a while, but the owners were ready to sell at some point and sold it to my parents. So we owned, we own that space and property. We don&#039 ; t own the whole little shopping center corner, but we just own that little pocket. |00:06:17| Brody Where is the restaurant? |00:06:19| Chuskul So it&#039 ; s, the address is 6033 Oram Street, Dallas, Texas 75206. So it&#039 ; s in the East Dallas Lakewood area. It&#039 ; s very close to, it&#039 ; s kind of like adjacent to Lower Greenville or Lowest Greenville. |00:06:42| Brody Do you remember, or in your family are there stories of sort of the as the restaurant was getting off its feet and the growth or you know, who the customers were and what that felt like? |00:06:54| Chuskul Yeah. So we have a lot of customers that have been eating at our restaurant for, you know, decades. And it used to be only a portion. Our restaurant was only a portion of what we have now. And I&#039 ; ve heard stories of people...I think we only had maybe six or seven tables. So we would have people line, line up in the parking lot, waiting to eat and would like bring coolers and stuff and kind of like tailgate our parking lot, wanting to try a probably my mom&#039 ; s Pad Thai. And I know there was like an early article in the, I think it was a Dallas Chronicle, and they did a profile on my mom and that was probably like really what kept things buzzing at that time, I think. |00:07:53| Brody Do you remember what the article featured? |00:07:57| Chuskul I think it was just showcasing like South Asian, Southeast Asian cuisine in Dallas. And so they had a picture and a little blurb of her. And I think we have it somewhere. So if I can find it, I&#039 ; ll send it to you. |00:08:14| Brody Thank you. So how did your mom learn to cook? Was she... |00:08:21| Chuskul Yeah. So this is...She was the oldest of maybe nine siblings. I&#039 ; m like, I don&#039 ; t have all the accuracies, but she used to tell me all the time how she&#039 ; d have to wake up at the crack of dawn and travel to the market and get ingredients to help cook all of her siblings like little probably, like sort of similar to like a bento box, like lunches for the day. And she just did that every day. And I think Pad Thai was her mom&#039 ; s favorite. And so she would go to the night market and kind of watch how they were making Pad Thai. And she knew the most popular one was the one to look for. And so she would spy at like their trash and see which trash had the most eggshells because like at the night market, they would crack an egg for each order. And so the one that had the most eggshells like was, had the best Pad Thai. So she just would watch and study. |00:09:34| Brody That&#039 ; s really clever and was this in Bangkok? |00:09:39| Chuskul So she was from a small town called Rat Buri. I think that&#039 ; s right, yeah. |00:09:51| Brody What was your what would tell me your mom and dad&#039 ; s names again? |00:09:53| Chuskul Oh, yeah. So my mom is named Patcharee. She would go by Pat or Noi, and my dad is named Threechok and he would go by June like the month. |00:10:07| Brody Great. So describe the Pad Thai that your mom would cook. |00:10:13| Chuskul Yeah. So our Pad Thai just is...The sauce is based on like a tamarind reduction. And so we would like either use a tamarind mash or like, now what I do is, like, fresh tamarinds, and we soak until the meat breaks down of that fruit and and reduce that into a sauce. And so that&#039 ; s like a brown color, right? And so our Pad Thai is always a lot lighter than what I&#039 ; ve seen at other restaurants that add a red coloring, either like through paprika or even maybe like a food coloring. But it&#039 ; s funny that that&#039 ; s what people think of Pad Thai and versus the Pad Thai I grew up with. So I know it&#039 ; s very good. There&#039 ; s a mixture of the tamarind sauce and fish sauce and some vinegar for acidity. It has the egg and some red and green onion, bean sprout, and crushed peanut. |00:11:20| Brody It sounds wonderful. So you mentioned that you have customers that have been coming for about forty years and how it used to be with people lining up. How did your parents, other than, you know, when they were featured in that article, how did they reach their clientele? |00:11:40| Chuskul Yeah, I think a lot of it was just word of mouth. And so I think that&#039 ; s what sustained us for so many years, because even now I&#039 ; m just starting to, everything has changed with like social media, but we didn&#039 ; t have that base before. So I think we were just really like a neighborhood restaurant. We&#039 ; re in Lakewood and I think the community there is really open to trying like new foods. And it was something affordable and quick and different that they couldn&#039 ; t cook at home. And so it was just like an easy weeknight pick up for them. But it&#039 ; s been really fun to see generally, generationally our clientele who have watched me grow up and have and I&#039 ; ve watched their families grow up and now their kids eat here and they bring their kids. And so I see multiple generations coming through the restaurant. And I think probably one of the biggest draws also was just my mom. She was just so hospitable and everyone called her &quot ; Mom&quot ; and just wanted to be around her and spend time with her. And I think that&#039 ; s why they enjoyed coming to the restaurant. |00:12:56| Brody Yeah, a lot of people that I have been talking to for this project talk about their philosophy of hospitality. What would you say your mom&#039 ; s and dad&#039 ; s philosophy of hospitality was in those days of setting up and starting the restaurant? And then for you, what does hospitality mean? |00:13:16| Chuskul Yeah, I think. Hospitality and and food are like...That&#039 ; s just immediately what we are ingrained to think about. And. I was watching. Sometimes I follow some Thai language instructors on Instagram, and one tip that they gave was, one teacher gave was, if you want to sound like a native, you have to learn this phrase. And it&#039 ; s &quot ; kin khao reu yang&quot ; like, &quot ; have you eaten?&quot ; And that&#039 ; s how people greet each other. And it&#039 ; s just like making sure that, you know, just entered someone&#039 ; s heart, through their stomach and make sure they&#039 ; re fed and that warmth and care that&#039 ; s taken through food. So, I think with the restaurant is, we wanted to create an atmosphere that&#039 ; s like, come into our home and we&#039 ; re going to feed you. |00:14:24| Brody That&#039 ; s really nice. I&#039 ; m sure your customers appreciated that and that&#039 ; s why they lined up and kept coming back. Speaking of your customers, is there a typical profile of your Bangkok Inn customers or how would you describe them? |00:14:45| Chuskul Yeah. I think a lot are families and some older customers that still enjoy coming. So yeah, I feel like we have kind of more of an older clientele and just like that neighborhood family spot. And then I guess there are younger people wholive in that area and work and that come too. I was like, I don&#039 ; t know if this is...They&#039 ; re mostly white. So we live in, I guess in that area it&#039 ; s not as ethnically diverse. And we&#039 ; ve talked about because we live in Richardson and there&#039 ; s a lot of different cultures around here, but I think closer to where the restaurant is more of a white clientele. |00:15:51| Brody Well, that makes me think based on who your customers are, do you approach the menu in a different way or... |00:16:02| Chuskul Right. Yeah. So I think that the menu that we&#039 ; ve had for many years, it&#039 ; s pretty accessible and I was having a conversation with someone earlier talking about how a lot of the Asian cuisine seems more centered on Cantonese or doing the basic stir fry stuff when there&#039 ; s so many other kind of more interesting and fun dishes. And it made me think about, &quot ; Oh, is our menu not authentic? Or, what does that mean?&quot ; And I think yes and no. So obviously, my parents were one of the first restaurants, Thai restaurants in the area, so I think they did want to create something that was going to be like palatable for people trying Thai food for the first time. And but then when I think about the stir fries and, the base and sauce that we use for that, that was just such a staple for them in my home. That&#039 ; s just a very home cooking, we&#039 ; re going to do some veggies and meat or whatever and have this kind of standard sauce. So it feels very authentic in that way because it&#039 ; s like, well, this is literally what my parents were eating when, you know, they were at home or off work. |00:17:34| Brody Yeah, I mean, the concept of authenticity is a little bit tricky. It&#039 ; s a slippery concept, right? What does what does that mean when we&#039 ; re talking about food from other cultures? |00:17:47| Chuskul Yeah. Yeah. Because I think everyone&#039 ; s wanting to try some of the more like street foods or some things that might have been more time consuming. But what I&#039 ; ve observed, you know, from my family and family friends, it&#039 ; s going to...what they have at their table is pretty basic. You know, they&#039 ; re not makingelaborate things all the time. Who has the time? So it&#039 ; s been interesting thought to...How do I want? What direction do I want to go in expanding and exploring those those kinds of dishes that people can&#039 ; t find? You know, but then. What&#039 ; s going to be profitable or make sense for me with how I organize my kitchen and how time consuming certain dishes are that people are wanting to explore. |00:18:50| Brody Right. Yeah. That sounds like for a lot of people who own restaurants, it&#039 ; s a balance of trying to put things on the menu that are, as you said, accessible, that people will order, because after all, it is a business. But on the other hand, education piece of it, a lot of people have said in putting different things on the menu, so people have a chance to try them. |00:19:17| Chuskul Yeah. Yeah. And it&#039 ; s also tough with, you know, we&#039 ; ve been running for forty, we have forty years of clientele that are used to and still love what we do and not trying to change things too much and like, &quot ; Okay, I&#039 ; m going to rebrand into this like really modern fusiony thing&quot ; is like, &quot ; No, I don&#039 ; t want that.&quot ; So yeah, trying to straddle that line because I think I&#039 ; m interested to explore, especially now that my parents have passed. And so it&#039 ; s kind of been a mission for me to dive even deeper into the cuisine and kind of unearth these recipes that maybe that I&#039 ; ve never...I didn&#039 ; t get a chance to learn. I only had maybe once in my childhood or like at a party that, you know, my family friends are holding or something of that nature. And I even have resistance from my siblings because they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Well, let&#039 ; s not change. Everyone&#039 ; s used to this, let&#039 ; s not change this too much.&quot ; But I don&#039 ; t think...I think now that we&#039 ; re getting older and having more autonomy, it&#039 ; s like we can do whatever we want. But, yeah, let&#039 ; s be smart about it. |00:20:35| Brody Right. Especially because, you know, as you said, you&#039 ; ve got the existing customer base that that keeps coming back for what they&#039 ; re coming back for. |00:20:43| Chuskul Right. Yeah. |00:20:46| Brody I&#039 ; m just wondering, do you know if your parents or or yourself experienced any any discrimination or racism in the course of running the restaurant? |00:20:58| Chuskul Yeah, I think it was especially hard for my parents at that time. I don&#039 ; t know any...I mean, I&#039 ; m sure I&#039 ; ve heard specific stories from when I was younger. But overall, I just felt there was a lot of distrust, especially on my dad&#039 ; s end. He was always like, don&#039 ; t trust anybody. Do everything on your own. And as I&#039 ; ve grown older to think about it, I&#039 ; m wondering if I mean, that must have come from somewhere, right? And so he he must have had to experience discrimination and and getting, I don&#039 ; t know. Just like having hate, you know, towards him. I remember growing up younger and one time he had an argument with someone in the parking lot. And I don&#039 ; t know, I think especially at that time, people weren&#039 ; t as open to other cultures in general. So, yeah, I think he felt a definite mistrust of a lot of people. |00:22:23| Brody Since the time that your parents came to Dallas and started the restaurant, the Thai community certainly and the Asian community in general have grown dramatically as there started to be more and more Asians in Dallas. And also, as you know, people started to explore eating food from other countries. Did you, do you recall anything about competition, other restaurants, Thai restaurants starting and discussions of that within your family? |00:22:56| Chuskul I think it was just kind of understood. I think everybody was, all the probably first families that were coming into the area, that was what they were doing. So I think that competition was just... I mean, I don&#039 ; t know, if it was ingrained, but it was just...They were used to it. So it wasn&#039 ; t. It didn&#039 ; t feel very competitive. It was just like, okay, this family has this restaurant, this family has this, everybody has a restaurant. |00:23:26| Brody Did those families all become sort of a community in and of themselves, the restaurant families? |00:23:32| Chuskul You know, maybe that&#039 ; s where one of, most of the competition came from because, yeah, there wasn&#039 ; t that much of a interconnected &quot ; let&#039 ; s help each other out.&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, okay, we&#039 ; re all doing the same thing. But it was pretty isolated. |00:23:50| Brody Was it hard to get food, the you know, the raw materials for the restaurant? |00:23:57| Chuskul I mean, for me, now it&#039 ; s not. Gosh, yeah. That&#039 ; s such a good question. I wonder how they managed that. At the very beginning. But for me and the time I&#039 ; ve grown up, we&#039 ; ve always been in very close proximity to Hong Kong Market. So we always run. Are there just, wow, this is opening up all these memories of going to all these small, you know, little Thai grocers and some of them are...don&#039 ; t exist anymore. But yeah, that&#039 ; s very interesting. I guess at the same time, and I know that part of your project, you&#039 ; re interviewing Asian grocers as well, but yeah, there were a bunch of smaller shops that just only did mainly Thai that my parents went to. But, you know, in the later years, now we have like bigger Asian supermarkets. So now I do more of my inventory at like Hong Kong Market and like we do have one small vendor. His place is called Thai Oriental and he&#039 ; s right off of Lower Greenville, off Sears and Greenville. And he&#039 ; s kind of one of the last independent, like groces that we still use, now that I think about it. |00:25:38| Brody Because they&#039 ; re the larger supermarkets? |00:25:40| Chuskul So yeah yeah. So we go... I&#039 ; ll just to go ahead and tell y&#039 ; all all my places, right? So I&#039 ; ll go to Hong Kong Market and Restaurant Depot and then we&#039 ; ll get a shipment from Southern Star, which is like a bigger Asian food distributor. And then I&#039 ; ll also still get stuff from Thai Oriental. And it&#039 ; s funny because I don&#039 ; t even know if that&#039 ; s the most economical choice. I mean, I think it&#039 ; s fine. I don&#039 ; t think I&#039 ; m really losing money or having to pay so much more. Still being in business with I think his name is Roy. His Thai name or I forgot his Thai name. But yeah, he&#039 ; s just been in business with my family for so long that it never occurred to me not to buy from him, even if it&#039 ; s kind of a small order. And he really appreciates it and he still has his connections with like a lot of Thai restaurants around in the areas and all over, but. Does that answer your question? What was the question, now? |00:26:58| Brody Those relationships are important and, you know, being able to get what you need. That&#039 ; s really interesting. Do you know of any challenges that your family faced in in running the restaurant over the years? |00:27:15| Chuskul Let&#039 ; s see. Well, we did have two locations and we had a bigger, much bigger location more north on Greenville, closer to Park Lane. And that was a fun restaurant. I remember being a kid and playing around. We had a walk in cooler and my brother and I would play in there. And yeah, it was. It was huge. I wonder, I don&#039 ; t even know what the max capacity was, but at some point I think the rent got so high that we lost that restaurant. But before that happened, my dad, and I was very young when all of this happened. My dad decided to do a different concept. And he changed the restaurant into an Italian concept because he really loved Italian food. And he had an old friend in Baltimore who just cooked a lot of Italian cuisine, an Italian chef, I guess. And he brought him over and they opened the rest...or they changed the restaurant into Italian concept. And that was not well-received. I think a lot of people could see like, why are these Asian people now serving, you know, spaghetti and stuff? And so that didn&#039 ; t go well. And I know my parents had to file for bankruptcy, but I also was so young that I don&#039 ; t know how all that went. Gosh, I wonder what year that was. But probably somewhere in the mid-nineties. And so now we just still only have our original first location. |00:29:17| Brody When did this second location come into being? |00:29:21| Chuskul Yeah. I don&#039 ; t know. I wonder if it was. Maybe. I don&#039 ; t know. That&#039 ; s a good question because I was like, it could have been just a couple of years after they opened the first one. |00:29:36| Brody And that was that location that he tried, the Italian? |00:29:40| Chuskul The bigger, the bigger, the bigger restaurant. Yeah. So that&#039 ; s what we would call it. When it was Ran Hiy and Ran Lek and so Ran Hiy is...&quot ; Hiy&quot ; is big in Thai. So the big restaurant or Ran Lek, like the little restaurant. |00:29:57| Brody In either location. Did you have neighbors, other restaurants or other stores that you had relationships with? |00:30:06| Chuskul Ran Lek, the little original spot, the one I run, there was a laundromat on at the other end of the block. So where the restaurant sits is in like a little, I almost don&#039 ; t want to call it a shopping center because it&#039 ; s so small, but it&#039 ; s kind of, you know, like it has a shared parking lot with a few other businesses. So on the corner there&#039 ; s a garden shop or a dentist that&#039 ; s been there, I guess, for as long as I remember. I wonder if they pre-date us even. And then there was a laundromat and in between the so the business in the space between our restaurant and the laundromat has changed over the years. I think it was a hair salon when I was young and then a yoga studio or an art consignment place and a yoga studio. And now it&#039 ; s like a DIY craft studio. But yeah, it was...But the laundromat in particular was the one that I had the most connection to. And there was this black woman who managed it named Peaches, and she adored me and I adored her. And I guess would kind of babysit me while my mom was working and I remember sitting, she would have a chair outside and I would sit like on her lap and she would like sing hymns to me. And I was like, &quot ; Aunt Peaches,&quot ; like. |00:31:46| Brody That&#039 ; s a great story. |00:31:46| Chuskul And that laundromat in particular, I think, was just like a staple for the neighborhood. When they closed down, it was quite a loss because a lot of people were doing their laundry there and there&#039 ; s a lot of smaller apartments and older apartments and duplexes that I guess didn&#039 ; t have that and, you know, washer and dryer included. So I think that really tied in to like kind of our community neighborhood vibe of like, &quot ; Oh, this is where I&#039 ; m going to do my laundry and then I&#039 ; ll eat or pick up food from the Thai restaurant.&quot ; And it&#039 ; s just part of their everyday regular lifestyle. |00:32:35| Brody Right. It sounds like the restaurant was just woven into the fabric of that neighborhood. |00:32:42| Chuskul Right. Yeah. |00:32:44| Brody That&#039 ; s that&#039 ; s really nice. So... |00:32:48| Chuskul And then for the bigger restaurant, it was kind of in a little bit of a funky little business shopping center. And there&#039 ; s like a a quite a steep hill that you go down and the main businesses that I knew that were there was our restaurant and then across it was a hamburger place called Joe Willy&#039 ; s. And I would...Me and my brother would always go across the street and I think they had a couple of arcade games. So we would play games and get some money from my parents. You know, a couple of dollars to play games. I think my brother was tricking me and using my money and I was only operating the computer one. But so then whenever he would die, he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; You died, put in your quarters.&quot ; But I was too young to recognize I wasn&#039 ; t actually controlling the other character. |00:33:55| Brody Very tricky of your brother. Your brother and sister and you are now together running the restaurant. |00:34:02| Chuskul Yeah. So right now at current it&#039 ; s just me and my sister, but, yeah, my brother just stepped away about a year or two ago. But yeah, so it&#039 ; s me and my sister and we have one cook, so we run a very tight and small ship. |00:34:23| Brody Are you using the same recipes and basically the same menu as your parents used? |00:34:29| Chuskul Yeah. Yeah. |00:34:30| Brody Yeah. What are the biggest sellers? |00:34:34| Chuskul Yeah, I think our Pad Thai is really popular. I think there&#039 ; s definitely a cult following behind our peanut chicken. So the peanut sauce that my parents or mom created tastes very unique and different from peanut sauces I&#039 ; ve had anywhere else. And yeah, there&#039 ; s a big following. |00:35:04| Brody That&#039 ; s great. Earlier you talked about that one article that featured your mom kind of early on. Over the years, I&#039 ; m sure there have been other reviews and things like that. What are your thoughts about the, you know, professional restaurant reviewers and sort of the impact on your restaurant when when you get reviewed? |00:35:28| Chuskul Yeah. So, I mean, we&#039 ; ve been a couple of times awarded through The Dallas Observer when they did, do their big food and entertainment &quot ; best of&quot ; of the year. And. Yeah. We&#039 ; ll get things here and there. But I think right now some of the more innovative, buzzy or on trend are getting a lot of the attention as opposed to, you know, some of the hole in the wall. I mean, I think the, what am I thinking of? Just the whole scene has changed now. And so for these smaller, &quot ; mom and pop,&quot ; they&#039 ; re kind of that&#039 ; s become standard. Like they&#039 ; re used to it now and they&#039 ; re wanting to expand further from that. And so I think from the start of the restaurant, when there was only like three. My parents, we&#039 ; re running one of three Thai restaurants, you know, in Dallas, and now there&#039 ; s countless restaurants. And who&#039 ; s doing something to actually stand out and be above the crowd. And when I tell people that I run a Thai restaurant, the most frequent answer I hear is &quot ; Thai is my favorite food.&quot ; When, you know, when my parents opened, people didn&#039 ; t know about Thai food. So yeah, I don&#039 ; t know. It&#039 ; s interesting to see going forward how I&#039 ; m going to kind of pivot things in a way that will have us stand out. But I&#039 ; m really thankful for the community and support that we have had for all these decades. |00:37:33| Brody Yeah, for sure. And, that&#039 ; s an interesting point that you&#039 ; re making about, you know, as there are more and more Thai restaurants or, you know, Asian restaurants in general, the ways that people try to differentiate themselves and you, you know, used the phrase &quot ; hole in the wall&quot ; and &quot ; mom and pop.&quot ; What do you see as the sort of distinguishing characteristic of a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant? You know what, what does a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant need to do or have to do to be successful? |00:38:08| Chuskul Like now in this day and age? Yeah, I think a lot of it is about visibility and social media, and that&#039 ; s something I&#039 ; m very new to approaching even, you know, being 32. Like I&#039 ; m still young and I grew up with all of that stuff. But I feel like I&#039 ; m a little bit of a late adopter. I didn&#039 ; t get a smartphone until, I think, 2017, which I&#039 ; m glad I did, because I could tell it was impeding me into operating normal business and just getting around in the world without a smartphone. But yeah, a lot of my friends were surprised. I was kind of known to be the friend that was still using a flip phone or a dumb phone. So, yeah, I think social media is, is huge now and we talked a little bit before the interview about the Facebook group, the D- GrubHub, DFW, Asian, Asian Grub-DFDub, something like that. And it&#039 ; s a huge group. And I feel like that&#039 ; s really if you can make it on that Facebook group, you&#039 ; ll do well because people are traveling all over just to try these recommendations. And I even, you know, got a pretty big buzz from just doing one post for my mom&#039 ; s 75th birthday. We just had a little I just told them about the restaurant and my mom and that she was turning 75 and if you come by and wish her happy birthday, you could get a little discount or something. Birthday discount. And yeah, that got shared I think 700, 800 times or had that much interaction. |00:40:20| Brody Did that translate into lots of people coming? |00:40:22| Chuskul Oh, yeah. It was definitely a busy week. |00:40:26| Brody That&#039 ; s great. So that makes me think about not the professional reviewers, but sort of the social media side of restaurant critique. |00:40:35| Chuskul Yeah, the branding and all that stuff. I even see now when I post on our Instagram, the ones that I post myself get a lot more engagement than just a picture of my food. So people want to, they want to eat stories. They want to, you know, have a full experience and know the story behind the food. |00:41:07| Brody Sure. And what about like Yelp and those types of review sites? Do those impact you and your operations? |00:41:17| Chuskul Yeah, sure. And I think luckily for us, just being so longstanding, we have quite a bit reviews on Google and Yelp and those kind of platforms. And I think that just comes from our huge client base and just been operating for so long. So I&#039 ; m thankful for that because I don&#039 ; t know how if I was starting fresh today, how I&#039 ; d have to build all those reviews and get that kind of good rank and standing. |00:41:55| Brody That&#039 ; s a, I mean, an entirely different enterprise than just making delicious food and serving it. |00:42:01| Chuskul Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people, I mean, it&#039 ; s become a full time job. People will hire companies. We even did for a little bit. I think there&#039 ; s Main Street Hub. They will manage all of the reviews and all of those different platforms and create content for you. And so that was fun. And honestly, a lot of customers enjoyed it. But I think times were tough at that particular time, and that was an expense that we ended up cutting. And it was fun content, but it was also kind of, I don&#039 ; t know, it wasn&#039 ; t coming from me. And so some of it felt like very disingenuous. I mean, I remember one time they posted some kind of graphic or meme or whatever about like &quot ; an egg roll a day will..&quot ; something, you know, whatever, something cheesy like that. And it seemed kind of generic, you know. But I mean, any kind of engagement, if you&#039 ; re catching someone&#039 ; s eye, that&#039 ; s fine, you know? So I think it was effective inand some way, but. |00:43:22| Brody I think a lot of what you&#039 ; re saying, it seems like it keeps coming back to that sort of feeling of authenticity. Right? You know, you mentioned that the the look of your mom&#039 ; s Pad Thai is, you know, is different than what a lot of other restaurants are serving because of the way that it&#039 ; s made. You mentioned that when you post something yourself, you know that that gets a lot more engagement. |00:43:45| Chuskul Yeah. Like people like seeing a selfie over a whole room, just, you know, a lonely plate of food. |00:43:54| Brody So how do you, as a restaurant owner, how are you going to, going forward, sort of try to strike that balance of maintaining the authenticity of the restaurant that you&#039 ; re, that you&#039 ; re carrying on the legacy of and also kind of moving into the future. |00:44:15| Chuskul Yeah, I mean, that&#039 ; s a big and very new challenge for me, and I think I was feeling kind of held back with my parents and even some of my siblings&#039 ; attitudes towards the restaurant. And I think my brother was also wanting to like expand, but we weren&#039 ; t always on the same page about how to do that and, with my parents both passed now and my mom recently passed this past December and for the last about eight years I had been a caregiver and caring for her. She had Alzheimer&#039 ; s, and that was another full time job I was doing with running the restaurant. So I think for a lot of those years, I was just kind of like, let&#039 ; s just keep things going, status quo. But now that I&#039 ; ve been relieved of my caregiving duties, I&#039 ; m starting to think about how to creatively expand. And I think in 2020, my friends and I held a Thai brunch that was quite successful. And we did a buffet style brunch. We&#039 ; re a BYOB restaurant, so everybody could bring their own champagne or beverage of choice. But I made...I brought some, like, orange juice, and I made some tamarind juice so people could do tamarind mimosas. And the buffet consisted of some menu items, but then a couple of dishes that I came up with myself. I did a laab omelet. So laab is like that Thai salad that has the fish sauce and citrus and rice powder. And I saw a video that, like, you could make laab with a egg omelet, like you do a solid omelet scramble and cut it into squares, and then you can toss it in the laab dressing and sauce and do fresh herbs, mint and basil and cilantro. And it really brightens up that. And so I wanted to take a, do a take of that with egg and potato because I thought a fried potato kind of goes well with the fish sauce and vinegar where the citrus acidity. It was quite good. That&#039 ; s probably one of the best things I&#039 ; ve come up with in a while. But, yeah, that was fun to showcase. And then I did these...And this one&#039 ; s a fun story there. I forget the...I never knew what the name was. I looked it up and I guess it&#039 ; s translated into like &quot ; son in law eggs.&quot ; But they&#039 ; re these fried, hard boiled eggs that have a tamarind based sauce over them, and they&#039 ; re great. And that was one of my favorite things that, my parents would rarely make when I was young and it wasn&#039 ; t on the menu or anything. So I had to kind of reverse engineer it in my memory. And I was like, &quot ; What do I remember how she made that?&quot ; And I think I also used the knowledge of how they just make the food at the restaurant, too. Like my dad would always say, &quot ; You want your food to have three-a balance of three components, sweet, salty and savory. And so using that mindset, I was like, &quot ; Okay, I think I know what&#039 ; s in the sauce.&quot ; |00:48:41| Brody Figured it out. |00:48:41| Chuskul And figured it out. Yeah. So that was a fun thing to eat. And I&#039 ; ve been thinking about doing that one maybe on a special or regular because a lot of my friends are fans of those eggs. |00:48:57| Brody Sounds great. And that really reminds me some of the people that I&#039 ; ve interviewed, again, you know, started talking about creating a menu, have talked about, you know, and I mentioned this earlier, that balance of trying to push people&#039 ; s palates forward and introduce new things while also keeping the familiar and the accessible... |00:49:18| Chuskul Mm hmm. |00:49:18| Brody On the menu. And it sounds like some of these recipes that you&#039 ; re reverse engineering from your childhood are an attempt to do just that. If you were thinking about how to, you know, describe Thai food and sort of the essence or the spirit of Thai food as as you serve it at your restaurant, what would you what would you say to people? |00:49:47| Chuskul Yeah. I mean, I feel like what I said earlier, that&#039 ; s kind of the philosophy, the balance of the the sweet and salty and savory. And so there&#039 ; s going to be a sweet, like just even just sugar or tamarind. And then...wait, no! I&#039 ; m misquoting this and I was like, I knew the third one sounded off and it&#039 ; s sweet, salty and sour. I was like, &quot ; Okay, sorry about that, everybody. And sorry about that, dad.&quot ; Okay. So sweet, salty and sour. So there&#039 ; s always that tamarind or the sugar and then the fish sauce and then either vinegar or lime juice or lemon juice. And so it&#039 ; s kind of a vibrant and bright palette, just trying to have all of those, you know, working together. And that&#039 ; s Thai food, I guess. |00:50:52| Brody And your vision of your own restaurant and sort of the spirit of what you&#039 ; re trying to to provide for your customers. What do you think about that? |00:51:03| Chuskul Yeah, I feel like because. You know, I&#039 ; m first generation Asian-American and, eating out, I&#039 ; m just a big lover of food and all kinds of food. And so what&#039 ; s authentic to me is different. It&#039 ; s kind of going to be a little bit of a hodgepodge. And I know, people&#039 ; s stance on...I don&#039 ; t...I&#039 ; m not really sure what people&#039 ; s stance on fusion these days are, but that&#039 ; s kind of who I am. You know, I&#039 ; m a fusion because I&#039 ; m a Thai woman, first generation in America, so I have both of these cultures that have influenced me throughout the years and, trying to be creative or modernize, what I&#039 ; ve gotten really into now is like watching a lot of YouTube content or chef food creators on YouTube. And it kind of came from a boredom from my food actually, because I, I work all the time and I wouldn&#039 ; t really want to eat what was on the menu, especially if I was making it myself. Like there was some kind of trick when my friend would order it and they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Do you want to have some?&quot ; And when I, whenever I was sharing the food with them, it tasted good, you know? But then when I was just making it for myself or having to choose, it was kind of boring. So I started watching all these YouTube videos of different Thai foods, and I got really into making Korean food. I was like, &quot ; How do I make...How do I use the great ingredients we have at the restaurant and just make something that tastes kind of fresh or different to me?&quot ; And maybe I have to buy, like one extra ingredient, but nothing too elaborate. Like I want to try to work with mostly what we have. And so that&#039 ; s what kind of a new, my new menu or new vision is building off of these ideas that I had just because I got bored, you know, eating our food. |00:53:36| Brody Well, necessity is the mother of invention, right? |00:53:39| Chuskul Right. |00:53:41| Brody So you mentioned earlier that the restaurant is BYOB. Is that a conscious choice and or, you know, just sort of because it always was? |00:53:53| Chuskul Right, yeah. So it&#039 ; s a little bit. So we&#039 ; ve been, I don&#039 ; t know if you&#039 ; ve gathered we&#039 ; ve been a little bit stuck in our ways for a while now. And I know just from school that beverage sales will make up at least sixty percent of your profits because it just has a higher, oh, man, I feel like a bad student now. I can&#039 ; t remember the word, but like higher profitability, the cost to buy and the markup on beverage is really what makes a lot of restaurants money. And I&#039 ; ve always kind of disregarded that idea because I liked the idea of us being BYOB. I like the keeping that homey neighborhood spot, like when you bring a bottle and have a good time and and sit and you know have the family I trust make my food. Right? So it&#039 ; s something I, in my heart, I want to keep, but in my brain, I&#039 ; m not really sure if it&#039 ; s, like, the most smart decision financially. So I haven&#039 ; t...I&#039 ; ve had a lot of resistance to explore what that...because friends ask me, like, &quot ; Why don&#039 ; t you serve beer and wine?&quot ; And I was like, &quot ; Oh, you know, you have to pay the liquor license or beer and wine license. And no, that&#039 ; s always so much.&quot ; And kind of just disregarded it without actually like looking at the numbers and seeing, okay, what would be more sustainable for us? So yeah, I don&#039 ; t know. We&#039 ; ll see where that goes, but I do have, like, an emotional connection to being BYOB, for sure. |00:55:53| Brody Yeah, I&#039 ; ve heard that from several people that sort of the the decision or choice to stay BYOB is as important to the customer experience and sort of the energy in the restaurant itself. And that&#039 ; s super interesting. You mentioned school. So you studied at UNT. Tell me about that and how that studying hospitality has impacted your running of the restaurant. |00:56:24| Chuskul Yeah, so I think I enjoyed my degree and I liked that a lot of what I was learning was very tangible and I was actually going to use, practical for what I was doing, but at the same time it felt like I could probably learn this on the job, you know, working at other places. But I got to have like a college experience, so I don&#039 ; t know. It was great. And, you know, at the end of the day, what was funny was, you know, I graduated 2012 and I haveall this, you know, textbook knowledge of how to run a restaurant and how to do a cash flow statement and balance sheet and all these ways to...Depreciating your equipment and all this stuff. And so I&#039 ; m ready to, you know, take over. And I asked my dad, like, &quot ; Okay, you know, show me your books.&quot ; And he just hands me this binder of just our daily sales. And he was like, &quot ; All right, there you go.&quot ; And I was like, &quot ; Well, how do you track expenses or do any of that?&quot ; And he&#039 ; s just like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t know. It&#039 ; s just ingrained and intuitive to me.&quot ; To him, he wasn&#039 ; t actually making spreadsheets or balancing out or tracking all that stuff. And even at that time he was paying for a lot of the food on a credit card. So that really offsets the cash flow when you&#039 ; re just not when you&#039 ; re buying your inventory on a credit card, but only paying a set amount every month. But it really undercuts what you&#039 ; re actually making. So it felt like a big mess, coming into the restaurant. |00:58:32| Brody Did you make changes then at that time or kind of wait until you took over? |00:58:39| Chuskul Yeah. So we had some financial...We made some kind of intense financial decisions at that time, which I&#039 ; m not really sure if they were the best or what, but we took a reverse mortgage on our house to kind of clear out all the debt because I was like, &quot ; Let&#039 ; s just start from, you know, zero, because I was like, this is this is too funky for me.&quot ; And at that time, we were needing like some major repairs on the roof at the restaurant. So we had a new roof, but ended up doing a full remodel but kind of on the cheaper end. I&#039 ; m not really sure if that was the best decision now looking back, but...yeah, it&#039 ; s been a little bit tough trying to figure out how to keep up with the books and do create my own system. I still have trouble with it. And that whole managerial side without having someone who taught me how to do that. And I just think it&#039 ; s so funny how my dad just he, I think did it so, for so long was just very intuitive about it. Sometimes he would go to behind the counter and we still write... We don&#039 ; t even have, like, a POS system, that&#039 ; s how old school we are. So we&#039 ; re still writing our orders by hand. And so just from the stack of the little ticket or ticket bills or whatever, he would be like, &quot ; Okay, I think we made X amount of money.&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Dad, that doesn&#039 ; t mean anything. Like one ticket could be $100. One ticket can be like $5.&quot ; Like the weight of it is not supposed to tell you anything, but he would be pretty accurate. And I mean, he was there at the restaurant seeing, you know, what tables are coming through or whatever, but he would just kind of do that math intuitively, which is not teachable. |01:01:08| Brody That&#039 ; s really funny that he was pretty accurate. |01:01:12| Chuskul I know. Yeah. My brother and I would tease each other about that all the time. |01:01:17| Brody So when you were in school, were there many other students in your classes that had as much sort of on the ground experience as you had growing up in a restaurant? |01:01:28| Chuskul No, not particularly. But I think what I enjoyed about my peers were they were already working. So I think that was fun to have peers learning together and also working in the same industry already. And I think that was quite unique to the hospitality major because usually it&#039 ; s like, oh, you study the degree and then you look for your job later. But it was just like at the same time, we were doing both and they&#039 ; re the ones that were working students. And so I think what a big contrast of a lot of...Because UNT is a big art school, so a lot of my friends were in the art programs or RTVF and they were, had no money. But then when I would go out with my hospitality friends, they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Oh, I&#039 ; ll buy a round for everyone.&quot ; |01:02:33| Brody Big contrast. |01:02:34| Chuskul Yeah. But yeah, it was fun to have that real world and book knowledge and being able to share in each other&#039 ; s journeys. I don&#039 ; t think that a lot of my peers ended up pursuing hospitality long term like some of them are realtors. Some of them are maybe teaching. Yeah. I don&#039 ; t know. Or have just found other jobs, so I don&#039 ; t know. I feel like mine&#039 ; s a little more unique in that I actually stayed because it&#039 ; s a hard industry and I get it, you know. And you aren&#039 ; t going...It&#039 ; s not guaranteed that you&#039 ; re going to be making these high six figure income. So yeah, it&#039 ; s definitely grunty, scroungy work for not a lot of payoff, but I love it, so. |01:03:40| Brody That&#039 ; s...And you&#039 ; re carrying on a legacy as well. |01:03:42| Chuskul Yeah yeah. It&#039 ; s feels very close to me in a lot of ways. |01:03:48| Brody So if you were giving advice to someone who, like you, you know, grew up with a family business, a restaurant or, you know, even grocery store, food related. And that period of transitioning that you&#039 ; re describing- those conversations with your dad who, you know, kind of it was in his bones to know how things were going. What advice would you give someone who like you is being handed the baton on the family business? |01:04:24| Chuskul Gosh, I feel like I&#039 ; m still learning to even be giving that much advice, so I&#039 ; ll just speak for what I&#039 ; m working on within myself. I think getting your numbers down very clear is really important and I think finances is just hard for anyone, right? It&#039 ; s like, okay, I just check my bank account and see if I have money. And if I do, good. If I don&#039 ; t, oh, no. Right? So getting that down and, you know, getting- asking for help and asking for assistance or maybe getting someone that, you know, that&#039 ; s their skill set to help you. And I think that&#039 ; s a big shift in how I&#039 ; m trying to run the restaurant now because like I said, it was very isolating. Like all these other families have Thai restaurants, but I didn&#039 ; t grow up with them in a like connected way. I wasn&#039 ; t, I didn&#039 ; t, I wasn&#039 ; t friends with them and everybody was just doing their own thing. And that&#039 ; s kind of the culture of my family structure is just like everyone to do their own thing. But I am reaching a time that if I&#039 ; m going to keep doing this, I need help, I need community. I need to be able to ask for help in all kinds of ways, like, oh, I need the sink broke. Like, who do I call and how do I fix all these things and collaborating with people? So that&#039 ; s my big growing moment right now is asking for help. |01:06:27| Brody It&#039 ; s good advice. So we talked about earlier that the Asian community in Dallas has grown a lot since the time that your family started the restaurant. How would you characterize that community today? |01:06:43| Chuskul The Thai community? |01:06:44| Brody The Thai community and the larger Asian community in general. |01:06:49| Chuskul Oh, man. Well, I was like, I&#039 ; m not sure if I know how to answer this. I just think I mean, for me, I feel like the evolution of technology and Internet and information accessibility has really made things more dynamic and has really changed the atmosphere of culture. And so we havethis huge database system of connecting to, you know, friends and relatives and through social media or just looking up anything on Google. And I think that&#039 ; s what&#039 ; s really been expansive for people&#039 ; s minds and probably has influenced, where people decide to move because it&#039 ; s just, it feels less scary if you can do the research or if you already know people that are there and you can easily talk to them, you know, through like any kind of app like Line. Recently, my relatives from Thailand, after my parents, after my mom passed, were wanting a way to communicate with me and I had never communicated them, with them before and they probably had to ask through weird channels. Probably going back to the the doctor that birthed me who&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What&#039 ; s Daisy&#039 ; s phone number?&quot ; And reached out to me and like, &quot ; Hey, will you download Line so I can talk to you through this app?&quot ; And so I don&#039 ; t know if that was the best answer, but that&#039 ; s my answer. |01:08:51| Brody Sounds like a lot of building connections and maintaining those connections, and it&#039 ; s much more possible, as you said, with the different technologies that we have to do that. So in Dallas, we&#039 ; ve had a lot of not just COVID obviously has an impact on, has had an impact on everybody around the world. But we had the tornado a few years ago and then the big ice storm a couple of years ago. So were you impacted or the restaurant impacted in in any way by those incidents? |01:09:31| Chuskul Yeah, I mean, of course. Right? And so I think in terms of the pandemic, we were an easy fit. And so we had...Because we had such a take out base, we didn&#039 ; t have to pivot our food or restaurant or style or anything to cater to those communities. So I think at the beginning of the pandemic, when everybody was like &quot ; support local&quot ; and &quot ; order takeout,&quot ; it was, we were doing quite well. But then after a while that slowed down and we still have a big takeout base, but our dine in hasn&#039 ; t built to the level that it was before. And with my brother stepping out from the restaurant, we had, you know, we were down one more person. So the workload was, you know, quite heavy for me and my sister on top of caring for my mom. So we reduced our hours to just 3:00 to 10:00. And so now we don&#039 ; t really have lunch service. And for me, our lunch was so cheap that I was like, I don&#039 ; t even think we&#039 ; re making any money from it anyways. So that was kind of an easy thing to get rid of, but it&#039 ; s been a better work life balance for me if I&#039 ; m going to be working every day or six days a week to just like kind of focus on when we&#039 ; re making most of our money. So those are some changes we&#039 ; ve had. I think with the ice storm, it was kind of fun. Our restaurant, I think, is on the same great grid as the fire station. So we had power at the restaurant, but we didn&#039 ; t have power at home. And I was caring for my mom at the time too, and I was concerned about having her at the house without any heat. And so I just carefully made the trek to the restaurant and people were always so grateful that we were open and serving food and were walking over, carefully driving over. I also did some deliveries because I&#039 ; m wild like that, I guess. But I just really care, you know? And I really want to serve the community if I can. And so we did that. Unfortunately, we had an accident where I was being very careful having my mom, walking my mom into the restaurant. And so when we got inside, I kind of let her go and turned around and started, you know, doing my own thing. But I forgot that her feet were going to be slippery from the ice, so she had a fall and ended up fracturing her hip. So that was a very unfortunate thing from the storm. |01:12:55| Brody I&#039 ; m really sorry to hear that. And sorry also for the loss of your mom. |01:12:59| Chuskul Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, she was a wonderful lady and really hung in there for a long time. So I&#039 ; m very grateful for all the times that we&#039 ; ve had together. |01:13:10| Brody Yeah. And you- and you&#039 ; re carrying on her legacy with that recipe. |01:13:14| Chuskul Yeah, I&#039 ; m a little mini mom now. I am her. |01:13:21| Brody A lot of people that that I&#039 ; ve talked to who have had restaurants here in Dallas for a long time, have stories of celebrities and in Dallas Cowboys and things like that. Do you have any stories like that? |01:13:35| Chuskul Gosh, someone was just asking me about this. But I think one of our- I don&#039 ; t know their names, which I guess is fine, but I think that the head like medical doctor for the Dallas Mavericks, he&#039 ; s a regular and I think there is that also an ex-Mavericks player from a long time ago. He&#039 ; s quite tall, almost too tall for our restaurant, that has come over the years too. But yeah, aside from that, I don&#039 ; t know if there&#039 ; s been that big of a celebrity spotting at the Bangkok Inn. |01:14:17| Brody You might be...sometimes you don&#039 ; t know. |01:14:18| Chuskul Sometimes I don&#039 ; t know. Maybe I didn&#039 ; t catch them. |01:14:22| Brody So we&#039 ; ve talked a lot about, you know, food and sort of people&#039 ; s feelings around food and the role of food. What is your thinking about the ability of food to transmit culture or to communicate about culture? |01:14:44| Chuskul Um, gosh, I mean, maybe in so- there&#039 ; s so many ways, you know, even from the ingredients that are used and techniques and styles or just like the sauces. But what it really comes down to for me is family. What your mom was cooking you. You know, your favorite dishes that you had as a child at home? I feel like that&#039 ; s really the big tie for me culturally. So, you know, back to what I was saying, it&#039 ; s like, was it authentic or not? It just was home. It was our culture. And I&#039 ; ve been eating at one of my- we&#039 ; re not actually blood related, but she is my cousin. And I&#039 ; ve been watching what her mom makes for them. She works full time, but she still cooks for the family every day. And it&#039 ; s always some vegetable. The dish like prepared as simply as just like blanched or fresh or, you know, a stir fry and then a meat protein stir fry. And then there&#039 ; s always like a soup, and the soup is called chuet, which means bland. So it&#039 ; s very, not a strong, you know, bland flavor soup that you eat all of these things with rice together. And that&#039 ; s kind of a very typical like home meal. And then sometimes there&#039 ; s something I feel is more fun, like a sauce. There&#039 ; s one sauce that she makes and we call it fish salsa, but it&#039 ; s kind of like ground or like pulsed fish and some, gosh, I don&#039 ; t know the recipe yet. I&#039 ; m going to try to figure it out. But yeah, sometimes you&#039 ; ll have the fish salsa on the table. Or I think a big staple that my parents also made was I think it&#039 ; s called &quot ; Nam Prik Kapi&quot ; and it&#039 ; s the sauce I&#039 ; m still like working on reverse engineering this one. But the sauce, I think primarily has shrimp paste, fermented shrimp paste that&#039 ; s very salty, very strong in flavor and odor. So it&#039 ; s a very smelly sauce. I think that&#039 ; s why it&#039 ; s not served in a lot of restaurants because they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t want to scare off the customers&quot ; and it&#039 ; ll leave you with a funky smelling mouth. But I love that sauce. And we would eat it with the Thai omelet and and rice and it goes with everything. And then my dad did a Thai chili and fish sauce. And I would call it &quot ; Dad sauce.&quot ; He would eat it with everything. And I&#039 ; ve reverse engineered that sauce and have been having a lot of fun building upon that and making dishes based on that flavor profile. It&#039 ; s just basically a fish sauce and a chili and garlic and lemon juice and sugar. Or the palm sugar. And it&#039 ; s been, yeah, it&#039 ; s been fun to kind of explore. I feel like, did I answer that question? I don&#039 ; t know. |01:19:09| Brody Sounds wonderful. So finally, what are some lessons or reflections that you have on your life in the restaurant? |01:19:22| Chuskul Oh. Okay. Hmm. Well, I think as far as working goes, it&#039 ; s made me like kind of a, I guess a hard worker without asking for much. You know, I don&#039 ; t have a big expectation. Sometimes I hear about of what I&#039 ; m going to receive. So sometimes I hear about my friends who are like, &quot ; Oh, that&#039 ; s, you know, above my pay grade&quot ; or like &quot ; I&#039 ; m not if I&#039 ; m not getting paid for that, I&#039 ; m not going to do it.&quot ; But my mentality is like, &quot ; Oh, you do everything, whatever needs to be done, you do it.&quot ; And you don&#039 ; t think about, &quot ; Oh, is this going to reward me later?&quot ; And just like helping each other out and and working and getting things done. |01:20:34| Brody That&#039 ; s great. Well, thank you for that. And is there anything that I didn&#039 ; t ask you today that you&#039 ; d like to add to this interview? |01:20:42| Chuskul I think we covered a lot. So I&#039 ; m feeling pretty good about it. |01:20:47| Brody Thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your family&#039 ; s story and your own experiences for this project. Thank you so much. |01:20:55| Chuskul Thank you. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_015.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Daisy Chuskul, June 6, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_015 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Thai Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-06-06 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Don Lambert OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Don Lambert, May 30, 2022 2021oh002_di_014 01:29:43 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Community gardens Don Lambert Betsy Brody m4a oh_dig_audio_lambert_Don20220530.m4a 1:|12(15)|25(6)|41(3)|54(5)|64(10)|81(2)|91(5)|103(13)|125(8)|136(13)|145(12)|161(8)|174(7)|190(9)|200(2)|208(9)|224(5)|235(10)|245(7)|258(9)|268(13)|279(3)|289(8)|308(6)|316(6)|324(4)|332(12)|341(3)|350(6)|360(2)|371(1)|380(13)|391(9)|401(5)|411(3)|418(12)|427(9)|436(8)|448(6)|459(12)|468(5)|478(11)|493(12)|504(6)|515(5)|524(8)|533(4)|544(1)|556(7)|565(2)|579(3)|591(6)|602(1)|612(1)|622(2)|634(3)|654(2)|664(16)|674(6)|686(15)|697(8)|708(10)|720(11)|736(4)|745(8)|755(10)|769(13)|780(11)|791(11)|807(1)|816(12)|830(12)|845(6)|858(3)|869(1)|884(3)|893(10)|902(8)|914(2)|929(3)|939(4)|951(10)|964(2)|973(10)|984(4)|998(4)|1007(13)|1022(1)|1036(10) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/163104 Aviary audio At various points in the interview, Dr. Lambert said 1962, though he meant 1982. This was clarified in subsequent review of the transcript. 4 Introduction Asian Americans ; Community gardens ; Texas--History 29 Lambert's background in California and experience in the Peace Corps agriculture ; California ; farm ; farming ; fruits ; gardeners ; gardens ; Malaysia ; Peace Corps ; vegetables 328 Life after the Peace Corps/ Studying Anthropology anthropology ; Berkeley ; college ; farm ; farming ; marriage ; Peace Corps ; rice ; University of Hawaii 542 Joining the faculty at University of Texas at Dallas anthropology ; University of Texas at Dallas 822 Fulbright Fellowship to Malaysia/ Connecting with Southeast Asian refugees in Dallas Cambodia ; community garden ; East Dallas ; farming ; Fulbright Fellowship ; Laos ; Peace Corps ; refugees ; Thailand ; University of Texas at Dallas ; Vietnam ; Vietnamese 1049 Community gardens and Dallas commuity gardens ; community garden ; Dalla ; Dallas City Hall ; Dallas Civic Garden Center ; East Dallas Community Garden ; East Dallas Police Storefront ; English ; food ; food insecurity ; food pantries ; Gardeners in Development ; Joe Sewell ; language ; Paul Thai ; poverty ; refugees ; Save the Children ; South Dallas ; Texas Discovery Garden ; West Dallas 32.809939127161485, -96.77409666941585 17 https://greensourcedfw.org/articles/dallas-oldest-community-garden-still-helping-refugees 2386 Primary crops grown by Dallas community gardeners bitter melon ; bunching onion ; business ; community garden ; crops ; food ; food insecurity ; gardeners ; gourds ; herb ; Malabar spinach ; refugee ; water spinach 2900 Public-private partnerships supporting community gardening in Dallas community ; community garden ; community gardens ; Dallas ; East Dallas Community Garden ; East Dallas Police Storefront ; politics ; refugees 3101 Maintaining relationships with community gardeners over time business ; Christmas ; community garden ; community gareners ; communiy gardens ; East Dallas ; Filipinos ; food ; Garland ; refugees 3372 East Dallas Community Garden market business ; city ; Dallas ; East Dallas Community Garden ; market ; refugees 3821 Advantages and benefits of community gardens community garden ; community gardens ; community hub ; community organizing ; East Dallas Community Garden ; neigborhoods ; neighborhood 3966 Food insecurity and community gardens community garden ; food insecurity ; food pantries ; fruits ; poverty ; produce ; tomatoes ; vegetables 4154 Food deserts and community gardens community garden ; community gardens ; Dallas ; farmers markets ; food desert ; food deserts ; poverty 4533 Food and culture celebrations ; Chinese New Year ; culture ; food 4705 Changes in the Malaysian community in Dallas celebrations ; Dallas ; immigrants ; Malaysian 4867 Impact of COVID on community gardens in Dallas community garden ; community gardens ; COVID ; Dallas ; pandemic 4961 Impact of weather on community gardens in Dallas commuity garden ; commuity gardens ; East Dallas Community Garden ; ice storm ; tomatoes ; tornado ; water ; weather |00:00:04| Brody This is Betsy Brody. Today is May 30th, 2022. I am interviewing for the first time Dr. Don Lambert. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and is part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In: How Food, Culture and Class Shaped the Story of Asian Dallas.&quot ; Thank you so much for joining me for this interview. And let&#039 ; s start out with just where and when were you born? |00:00:36| Lambert Well, thank you for having me and I really appreciate this opportunity. I was born in Modesto, California in 1944 and...On a family farm, the same farm that my grandfather had started in 1904. And I went to the same high school my dad did and all his brothers did. I went to the same junior college he did, but then I joined the Peace Corps and went to Malaysia. I worked in agriculture for two and a half years there. |00:01:10| Brody Tell me where you were in Malaysia and what you were doing? |00:01:13| Lambert I was in the East Malaysia state of Sarawak and in the Sibu area of Sarawak. And I worked in agriculture with the Agriculture Department and I also worked with the medical services in health projects. But yeah, it was it was interesting. I worked mostly with people- upriver peoples- Iban in particular, but also had some urban projects. And mostly I was doing things kind of like what I grew up doing on the farm, working with people who were, who wanted to raise rabbits or chickens and people who had vegetable gardens and fruit orchards and things like that. And so it was, it was kind of using the skills that I&#039 ; d learned in my eighteen years of living on a farm, growing up. |00:02:09| Brody How how long were you there? |00:02:12| Lambert Two and a half years from, I guess, late 62 to 66. How many years is that? |00:02:22| Brody What do you think were some of the main lessons that you learned from being part of the Peace Corps and going to Malaysia? |00:02:32| Lambert I think the most important thing was it was my first opportunity to really get into another culture, to learn another language, to to see that there were really wonderful and different ways of living, you know, that, you know, you just in your imagination, you just can&#039 ; t tell. But being there and, you know, working with people, making friends and whatnot. And I learned a lot about the importance of people working together and communities, you know, collaborating on things because that&#039 ; s...That was part of the culture there. And it was a unique experience because I hadn&#039 ; t experienced that much, you know, sort of togetherness and, you know, people working just help each other solve their problems and whatnot in my experience growing up. You know, I mean, growing up in California was great, but it was so different and so unique. |00:03:31| Brody In the communities that you were working in, what were some concrete changes that the Peace Corps brought to those areas? |00:03:39| Lambert Well, the groups that I worked with were mostly extremely impoverished. They had, through a process of expanding agricultural projects and colonial projects and whatnot, lost, you know, access to the land that they had had farmed on traditionally. A lot of them had been relocated or pushed on to sort of marginal areas of land. And instead of having large areas of forest that they could exploit, they were they were hill rice farmers mostly, and they fished and hunted and things like that. They were forced to make do on a few acres. And so a lot of what we were doing was trying to introduce, you know, new technology, new techniques to like make- have productive, you know, commercial type gardens on small pieces of land. So there was a lot of interest in new crops, getting people to plant fruit trees. And I know it worked because I was able to visit ten years later and actually and twenty years later. And I could see these communities had been really transformed and they had become market gardeners. And the first time I visited, they weren&#039 ; t exactly thriving yet, but. By twenty years later, you know, people were going to college, they were going to school. You know, the whole society was transformed. And some small part of it was probably that, you know, I was able to be there and work with them for that couple of years. |00:05:19| Brody That&#039 ; s incredible that you were able to go back and see, in increments of time, the difference. |00:05:24| Lambert Yeah, that was that was really super to do that. |00:05:28| Brody So how did you end up in Texas? What happened after the Peace Corps? |00:05:33| Lambert Well, I got married in the Peace Corps to my wife, Tiah, and we, right after marriage, I managed to get a job for us both to work together in Hawaii at the Peace Corps Training Center in Hilo, which was part of the University of Hawaii program. And so she taught Malay language, which is her native tongue. And I taught, you know, the trainees things about, you know, how to work in other cultures and agricultural things and whatnot. And so after a couple of years of that, I wanted to go to school. I had no education, no higher education. I pretty much flunked out of my freshman year at Modesto, where I grew up, and that&#039 ; s one of the reasons I went in the Peace Corps. It was an escape, you know, and it changed my life to join the Peace Corps. So then I wanted to, I wanted to go to college, and I was so interested in other culture, I decided that if there&#039 ; s any field that I needed to go into, it was anthropology that had my name on it. And so I went to Maui Community College for two years. I went to University of Hawaii Manoa campus on Oahu for two years, and then went to Berkeley for almost ten to finish my doctorate degree, in which I went back to Malaysia and studied an agricultural village in West Malaysia in the state of Pahang. |00:07:13| Brody What was your dissertation called? |00:07:20| Lambert Well, the dissertation was called &quot ; Swamp Rice Farming.&quot ; It was about utilizing natural swamp land where you had minimal amount of irrigation control to grow traditional types of rice. And it was also then how they needed to integrate other ways to make money like rubber tapping. They had rubber tapping farms. They fished and sold fish from the river. You know, they exploited rattan from the forest and things like that. So they had a lot of other, you know, activities that are necessary to, you know, just to survive. |00:08:01| Brody So you went back and did field work? |00:08:03| Lambert Yes, I went back and did field work. |00:08:05| Brody How long were you there? |00:08:07| Lambert That was about 14 months. Yeah. |00:08:12| Brody So you were at Berkeley and after that? Well, before that, I want to go back and ask you, how did you meet your wife? |00:08:21| Lambert I was lucky and was housed in some in a government housing project. Well, they had a, at that time, the government had quarters, they call them, and they set up for all the different departments in government so that, you know, they had housing for the people who worked in Lands and Survey and for people who work in Forestry and whatnot. And so, you know, that little bungalow or whatever you call it was close to a part within the village, where she, where my wife was. And somehow I just kept running into her and she kept catching my eye. And it, you know, that&#039 ; s what happened? |00:08:59| Brody Well, that&#039 ; s wonderful. That&#039 ; s a great story. So you were together then at, in Berkeley and then what happened? |00:09:13| Lambert Towards the end of finishing my degree at Berkeley, we&#039 ; re talking now in the late seventies, it became really obvious that maybe career-wise, anthropology was not the best place to be because there were so many anthropology students at that time, especially at Berkeley. I mean, I think we were turning out twenty degrees a year. And when I&#039 ; d go to annual conferences of the American Anthropology Association, where most, you know, students and most jobs and whatnot, you know, came available to people through that conference. There were just long lines of people trying to be interviewed. And, you know, it&#039 ; s just a real scramble. And right before I was ready to apply, this was the first year that nobody seemed to get a job in our department that year. And so, yeah, it was it was almost impossible to get a job. So fortunately, I think it was in Chicago in about 1981 1961, there was a professor from University of Texas at Dallas that had come to Chicago looking for somebody to hire because they had an opening to teach anthropology. They&#039 ; d had a professor who had died, I believe, and they needed somebody. They had people were already signed up for spring classes. They needed somebody to come out right away. And I guess I was it. I was ripe for the plucking, you might say. So, you know, I, you know, so we moved out December and I was teaching in January. |00:11:00| Brody And this is 1981 1961. |00:11:03| Lambert Probably 1982 1962. |00:11:07| Brody What was UTD like at that time? |00:11:09| Lambert There was no undergraduates. It was only graduate level. And it was pretty small and undeveloped. Lots of construction, you know, lots of you know, it was not the most pleasant place to be because, you know, when you&#039 ; re in the middle of a construction site and there&#039 ; s erosion and dirt blowing everywhere and things like that and equipment and, you know, they- the trees hadn&#039 ; t grown up yet. They planted a lot of trees here and there. But, you know, it was... So it was pretty uncomfortable just to be on campus much. And people didn&#039 ; t hang out on campus. The students, you know, were mostly older, a lot of professionals, a lot of people who had, because they needed to upgrade their education in order to advance in their careers, you know, were getting, picking up a few courses at UTD. And it wasn&#039 ; t the kind of students I really was prepared to teach. And it wasn&#039 ; t the kind of students who really seemed to be interested in other cultures and, you know, what&#039 ; s going on in the rest of the world. They were interested in engineering and business and things like that. And so it was it was interesting, you know, but I had fairly small classes. I had a lot of people in class that were...Well, they they were overworked as it was. And to find out that they could only way they could get a grade in the class is to go to the library and study and write papers and things like that,... You know, they weren&#039 ; t really up for that. So I, I wish I had taught when I had undergraduates. That would have been great. |00:12:59| Brody Yeah, it&#039 ; s a different feel, I&#039 ; m sure. Why were they taking anthropology? |00:13:07| Lambert Because the way...what do you call it? Course curriculums were planned at that time, there was the idea that people should get some liberal arts, some, some balance. And it seemed to me that was disappearing in the four years that I taught there. It was just more and more, you know, geared towards, you know, not getting, not having a broad education, but being more specialized. |00:13:38| Brody I see. So you were there for four years? |00:13:40| Lambert Yeah. |00:13:41| Brody And then. Then what was your next step? |00:13:45| Lambert Well, I was there on a five year contract. And so I begin to realize that I needed to do something to up my game a little bit. And I wasn&#039 ; t sure that they were going to extend the contract. In fact, it began to look like there wasn&#039 ; t going to be any anthropology at all, you know, because they had been canceling other areas in the university, other disciplines. And so I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship and went to Malaysia, to Penang in Malaysia to teach at the University of Science in Penang for a year, thinking, you know, that that would say, well, because everybody who gets a grant and does important research or goes overseas and does some teaching or something like that is an important, you know, plum you might say to the university. It wasn&#039 ; t so for a discipline that they were thinking about, you know, not supporting, you know, so. So that didn&#039 ; t do me any good. I came back and taught off and on, you know, part time and that frustration of sort of not being able to continue in my chosen, you know, discipline and the fact that I had this background of working in Southeast Asia and Asian agriculture and whatnot, when refugees started showing up, you know, from Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, Thailand and whatnot, I was fascinated by this opportunity to sort of, you know, maybe apply some of what I had been doing in the Peace Corps and some of my background from farming that just and and I was just, I just was so interested, you might say, in how they were going to adjust and adapt and become part of American...the fabric of American life. And so I did everything I could to, you know, get involved with them. While I was still teaching, I sent my students down to East Dallas, where the main community was located, to do the little research projects. Students got involved in things like, you know, helping people find apartments and, you know, helping resettle people and things like that, volunteering at various agencies that work with the refugees. And then they wrote reports back to me. And so I got a really good feel of what was going on. So when I stopped teaching altogether and decided that maybe I should try to work in community gardens, you know, I had a lot of background, you know, already. And so it was a fairly easy transition. |00:16:45| Brody That&#039 ; s great. And you had a lot of information. |00:16:47| Lambert Yeah. |00:16:47| Brody What was Dallas like when you got here? |00:16:59| Lambert I don&#039 ; t know. It was certainly different from where I came from. Right? And I mean, I was struck of how big it was and and how it seemed to be divided in a lot of different areas that didn&#039 ; t interact a lot together with each other. |00:17:27| Brody That makes sense. And so back to the community gardens. So you had all this information and you were...You had all the right background pieces with your farming and agriculture background, your Peace Corps background, and your interest in Southeast Asia, and familiarity with Southeast Asia. So what made you think community gardens would be a good addition to the Dallas landscape? |00:17:59| Lambert One of the things that I got involved with while I was still teaching. Well, I was interested in the fact that there was poverty here, and I didn&#039 ; t experience much poverty growing up in California, just lucky from where I lived, I guess. But to see that there was poverty here and things like food pantries were struggling, you know, with huge numbers of people who needed food. I mean, my immediate thought was, &quot ; My gosh, food is so easy to grow. Why aren&#039 ; t people growing food here? You know, there&#039 ; s people who have large backyards, you know, why aren&#039 ; t they using them? There&#039 ; s vacant lots all over the place. If we could just put those, you know, into production, you know, if people some meaningful and you know, way to support themselves but it would also feed people.&quot ; I couldn&#039 ; t see any reason why the food pantries had to beg stores and farms and whatnot to donate produce when people could grow it themselves. And so I, I joined a couple of groups that were working on the food crisis here, and I can&#039 ; t remember their names right off. But what I found was that they did not think community gardens was a solution at all. |00:19:30| Brody Why not? |00:19:32| Lambert They thought that they were so...that the resources were so scarce. There was so little funding for for running food pantries and for...They had to buy a lot of foods that they would distribute and whatnot. They they just could not. You know, the lines were getting longer and longer at the pantries. And the idea of putting in any kind of resource or energy into something else just was beyond them. So I would talk about community gardens and they would look at...roll their eyes, you know, and it was like so it was. But one of the ladies on one of those groups, a man from the Agriculture Extension Service, who at that time was trying to start community gardens here and there and some school gardens and whatnot. He retired years and years ago, but he had come out and started a sort of a garden, you know, close to...in West Dallas with the Hispanic community there. And the garden wasn&#039 ; t going very well, you know, it just was not thriving. And so she called me up and said, &quot ; I&#039 ; ve got a garden project over here. Would you like to see it?&quot ; And I said, &quot ; Sure.&quot ; So I came out and, you know, it&#039 ; s almost immediately that I knew some things that they could do, which would help from my background. And so I sort of jumped in and took over the garden, you know, managing it for them and, you know, got them loads of compost and you know, helped them lay out beds and things like that. They basically just had a fenced in area that was on an old dump site where they didn&#039 ; t have good soil and you know, they tried to dig a hole here or there and plant things, but they just didn&#039 ; t have the the tools and the knowledge and whatnot they needed and so on. So that was my first big garden project here, you might say. And so that, that went on for at least six, seven years until they had a change of director and didn&#039 ; t think the garden fit their program anymore, you know? And that&#039 ; s... Several projects we started sort of ended that way, just a change in the staffing at the local level. But that garden sort of led to work at a number of church gardens, a couple school gardens and other things that just because I was out there doing that, people through the network, you know, learned there&#039 ; s some guy out there that&#039 ; s interested in helping with gardens. So yeah, that was sort of the early period. I think we had six or seven projects that I worked with and so there... for was like a two year period starting about then in which it was sort of I just created my own community garden program. My vision was that community gardens were not going to make it if they were just disconnected from each other. They needed to have some kind of connectivity, some way to share information, some way to work together. And so I spent a couple of years driving around to communities trying to find community gardens, calling up everybody I thought might know something about community gardens. I was just sure that I was going to discover community gardens out there that wanted to be part of something bigger. |00:23:09| Brody Did you? |00:23:11| Lambert No. |00:23:12| Brody Really. |00:23:14| Lambert What I discovered was that community, the community gardens were all projects that were just for us, our little group of people. There wasn&#039 ; t a notion that, you know, do some citywide program or whatnot. It was usually like, well, maybe a couple of gardens in West Dallas or maybe a couple of gardens over in East Dallas or somewhere like South Dallas. But I couldn&#039 ; t find people who were interested in a regional kind of thing. Just specific little areas. And usually it was a group of friends got together and for a few months the garden was a thing for them and then they sort of failed. So I started collecting data on all the projects I could come up with, and I ended up with a file drawer full of, you know, projects that lasted four or five years and became, you know, for that. That&#039 ; s obviously not the way to go. A big break came in around 91 when my work with community gardens, because of a newspaper article had been published about my work, attracted the interest of the Dallas Civic Garden Center, which is now called the Texas Discovery Garden. And they found out that there was a way they could get a grant to have a community garden program attached to that center. And they reached out and hired me. And that lasted for two, two plus years until their board and whatnot thought that it was not really compatible with the mission of there org, you know. I guess I took it in directions that not what they imagined it should be taken in there. During that time we had maybe seven or eight gardens that were doing pretty well, but they let me go. So we turned around and started, in 1994, Gardeners in Community Development and all the early members were the people from those gardens. And so we had no resources. We found it was almost impossible to raise funds as a, as a new nonprofit who didn&#039 ; t have a history. And so... And what we found was we had this group of gardens and every year or two another one of them would have to close down. We just didn&#039 ; t have the way to keep them going. And having volunteers come out, but we still didn&#039 ; t have the funds, you know, to put in working water systems and to build, you know, productive beds and buy compost and things like that. And from about 1991, so the East Dallas Community Garden was started...Let&#039 ; s go back up a little bit. East Dallas Community Garden was started in about 87, 88 by a civic group that came together called the East Dallas Community Garden Alliance. And it had two or three people who worked in City Hall that were part of that committee, a bunch of business leaders like from- I&#039 ; m trying to think of this... I can&#039 ; t. I can&#039 ; t remember his name. Maybe come up later. Sewell. Joe Sewell of Sewell automobile. Right. He was kind of the chair of this committee. We had some people from the from the police department, like Ron Cowart, from correction agencies, and it just- and then churches. The group was at least fifteen or twenty, you know, sort of community leaders who had been looking at this flood of Southeast Asian refugees coming into East Dallas, where, you know, there were so many needs and that the people had so much interest in getting access to food that was important to them. And, you know, there was no...There there was just nothing there to fulfill that need. And fairly quickly, mostly Vietnamese started the little grocery stores. So there were, gosh, six or eight little mom and pop grocery stores popped up in East Dallas. In fact, when when we came here in 82 62, my wife and I came in 82 62, there was no way to, where the only place you could buy Asian groceries was down off of Fitzhugh and Ross and, you know, in that neighborhood. And it got to be where almost every weekend, you know, we&#039 ; d make a trek down there to get, you know, rice and the various all the things we needed, you know. And, and it wasn&#039 ; t easy, it seemed like we always were looking for things we couldn&#039 ; t find. You know, the stores were so small. And anyway, the, the population of refugees were mostly rural, farming folk and they really could not understand why food was not being grown in Dallas. It didn&#039 ; t make sense. They came from communities where people did not plant shade trees. They planted fruit trees. The shade was nice, you know. But, you know, it was it was maybe mangoes and lychee and langsat and things like that. Trees were yard, the yard trees, you know, coconut trees, whatever. So you had food, you know, from the trees and they gardened intensively and every little piece of land they can get their hands on because there were food near to where they grew up and they had a culture that had learned how to survive, you know? And so apartment managers started complaining that they couldn&#039 ; t keep the refugees from digging up the flower beds and planting vegetables. Vacant lots would have little, you know, vegetable plots spring up. Then people would be carrying buckets of water down the stairs and across the street to water a few plants here and there. And as I would drive around in East Dallas, I would see just little, little patches of vegetables like everywhere. And this became a major conflict. And, you know that these people, their culture was different. They&#039 ; re doing things that we don&#039 ; t do in Dallas. In my community garden work, I began running into, if I go out and talk to groups, church groups and things like that, people would complain that it&#039 ; s it&#039 ; s unsightly for people to grow vegetables, you know, out in the front yard where they can be seen, things like that. And when we talked about community gardens, right, they they couldn&#039 ; t imagine a vacant lot that was now growing vegetables as not being something that was ugly or inappropriate for Dallas. And these people were breaking the rule right and left. So this East Dallas Community Garden Alliance, I don&#039 ; t know, I wasn&#039 ; t part part of when they got started. I don&#039 ; t know how they hit on the idea of community gardens because there wasn&#039 ; t a lot of information around about community gardens at that time. But they started a couple of garden projects and sort of settled on what&#039 ; s now become the East Dallas Community Garden on Fitzhugh Avenue as their main project. It was a dump site. It was a huge lot that was covered with trees where homeless people had lived forever, you might say, and where people abandoned cars and couches and, you know, all kinds of rubbish was everywhere. And so they, they fenced it off, cleaned it up, and it took them two or three years. And the biggest problem was getting all the junk, the broken concrete and things like that off the lot, which they actually never did. So once they were actually gardening, it took another almost ten years to get most of that stuff out because it would just keep coming to the surface. As people would dig in the garden, it would be more and more of it show up. And we when I was in charge of the garden later, it was like every year we did a major cleanup project to remove more of that stuff and improve the soil. But the East Dallas Community Garden Alliance really didn&#039 ; t have the vision, you might say the mission to have some ongoing project, because I don&#039 ; t think...they they didn&#039 ; t understand the necessity. They, their vision seemed to be that these were people who had farming experience and they would know what to do. And all they needed was somebody to have their back and give them a site where they could do it. And that turned out to be a really bad assumption because people who come here, who don&#039 ; t speak English, have no Western training or don&#039 ; t know how to how to operate within a Western society within Dallas, they didn&#039 ; t know how to get things. They didn&#039 ; t know how to ask for things. They didn&#039 ; t- they had no network to work from. And so, you know, they had opening day. They assigned plots to people and they pretty much- the gardens sort of tried to run on its own and it went to weed. The water system broke down and there was nobody to fix it. Half of the garden was flooded. They had a drainage problem. It wasn&#039 ; t, it didn&#039 ; t have the right slopes to start with and things. And sort of one by one, all these community people that had been on this organization decided that they&#039 ; d had enough of this project that was, you know, they were going to go on to other things. And it fell to two, possibly three organizations that sort of tried to keep the garden going because they realized how important it was to people. One of them was the police department through their East Dallas Police Storefront, and another one was the Save the Children East Dallas Project. They had a storefront that sold handicrafts made by refugee populations all over the world as a fundraising project. And they also worked with women and children in need in the community and maybe in East Dallas Counseling Center. There was the multicultural center was around for a while, too, so there was enough of them, but more and more, their ability or interest in the garden just seemed to wane. They just couldn&#039 ; t do anything. So I got a call from, at that time, I was working with the the community with the Texas Discovery Garden Project, and I got a call from I think it was from Margaret Koons, director of Save the Children there. And she said that they, they were having problems with the garden and they were worried that it might have to be closed, that, you know, half of the garden wasn&#039 ; t very productive anymore and it wasn&#039 ; t organized in any way. And they couldn&#039 ; t figure out a way to pay the bills, the water bills and things like that. So they had started at the beginning of all of these agencies that were somehow part of it, you know, sending in a small amount of money, you know, on a regular basis to cover the bills. And that got to be where that wasn&#039 ; t happening. And so I said, &quot ; Margaret, what we need to do is we need to make that garden so productive that paying the bills won&#039 ; t be a problem, that the people who garden there, you know, it&#039 ; ll be so worthwhile to them that they won&#039 ; t need, you know, money coming in from that site just to pay the water bill.&quot ; And so I was working at the Civic Garden Center and they had had a grant. So I was able to tap into some of that grant money. And I went I worked through Paul Thai, who was our main contact at the East Dallas storefront, and also really the main guy that was able to work with the gardeners out there. You know, there were several other people, but he was he was really, I would say, top. And so we drew up a plan to put in raised beds and mulch pathways and fix the water system and things like that. And we were able to go out and buy the lumber and the stuff and whatnot and get it done with volunteers, the gardeners themselves. So basically me and a fellow went out there and we built like five or six garden beds and we basically just had to shut down part of the garden, which upset the gardeners a lot. So we started building these garden beds and they would stand and watch us and shake their heads and they were really upset I think. That, you know, their garden was maybe being taken away from them. And then one day we came to the garden and overnight they had built three or four more beds themselves. And then they said, &quot ; You don&#039 ; t need to build any more beds, we&#039 ; ll do it.&quot ; You know? And they were so happy with, you know, beds that were sort of laid out, you know, in a regular pattern where the the walkways were well-defined because before people didn&#039 ; t quite knew where their boundaries were. And more a stronger garden would, and first thing you know, you start encroaching on somebody else and that would lead to kind of conflicts and all of that. So we really started there a system of gardening that was, you know, demonstrated dramatically, you know, that, you know, you could have pathways of a- of the proper size and beds of a proper size and everything laid out in a way so that it was efficient to move through and work in the garden. And we started bringing in huge loads of woodchips and mulching all the pathways deep. So we got the weeds under control. And anyway, so from 1994, the garden became the Gardeners in Development Project. |00:39:46| Brody What were people growing? |00:39:49| Lambert Oh, boy. I, it took me actually a couple of years to figure that out because even though I&#039 ; ve had an extensive, you know, experience in Southeast Asia, Cambodians and Laotians in particular, we didn&#039 ; t have any Vietnamese in the garden at that point. I think there might have been some earlier, but they went on to other things. So they weren&#039 ; t really, you know, gardening people at that point. But so they were growing bitter melon, wax gourd, winter melon, luffa, which are all gourd crops. Their main green crops were mustard greens and they grew long beans. They grew a bunching onion and I&#039 ; m trying to think, what else? Lots of different kinds of herbs. At one time I had a list of something like fifty different things that they were growing in the garden that I had identified, and another five or six that some of them I never did. But over, over time, that list narrowed down a lot. There was a huge change because there was really a food crisis and I don&#039 ; t know what year it was, but in which the amount of subsidy and support that people could get. Maybe this was just the funding they got that, you know, after they were here as refugees of a certain amount of time, money ran out, something like that. And suddenly it became more instead of being like a kitchen garden set up where everybody&#039 ; s growing all the things they can think of, the food plants, medicinal plants, herbs, whatever, you know that as much as possible that was like what they grew back home, suddenly became, we&#039 ; ve got to make more money. So they started focusing more on cash crops, the number one one being water spinach. And it actually- that almost created a crisis because there was such a demand for water spinach. It was so lucrative that it pretty much took over the garden for a while and it got to be where it was kind of a mono crop kind of system. And they started having disease and insect problems and whatnot that come along with not being diversified. |00:42:24| Brody Where was the demand coming from? |00:42:29| Lambert Other refugees, mostly of which, you know, the populations kept growing and growing. I mean, there were four thousand families there when I started, but it just, you know, every year there were more and more. And then we had large numbers coming in from Thailand and other places. And then all the other ethnic groups from that region of the world, you know, discovered that the garden was a source. And so people were selling vegetables from the very beginning in the garden pretty much, which was counted as an illegal activity, I guess by the city. We did have code enforcement people come out and issue warnings a few times and I would have to call up a few people and remind them that, you know, this is an agricultural state and that farmers are allowed to sell the stuff that they grow, look it up, you know? And so those never went anywhere. But we felt, I think they felt harassed off and on by the fact that they were growing stuff and selling it. And when we talked about community gardens in general, there was a lot of resistance out there to the idea that any community garden would be allowed to sell stuff. Right. So anyway, but they did it. And in some ways it was their insistence that they had this way of life, this thing they were going to do, because in their minds it was the right things to do that they kept on doing things even when other people didn&#039 ; t think it was the right thing to do, I might say. And there was really no way to stop them, you know, from doing what they they were doing in some ways, I guess. And so, yeah, they set up stalls at first. People just go from plot to plot and buy from folks. And since most of the community at that time lived close to the garden, so it was years before people had resettled to other places. So East Dallas was full of of Southeast Asians. And so, you know, there&#039 ; d be all these...the Vietnamese were some of the main buyers. They seemed to have more money than other people. And they also had a lot of influence. They would tell the gardeners what to grow. If, you know, if you grow a water spinach we&#039 ; ll buy it. If you grow Malabar spinach we&#039 ; ll buy it, you know, whatever. Grow more of this, grow more of that. And I, I was seeing crops changed to meet this demand and focusing on a few productive crops. So like a lot of the, the bitter melons, the gourd crops and whatnot kind of were forced out, become a minimal thing because they grew on trellises and they shaded the garden and they needed full sunshine to grow water spinach and things. They...I did some things to try to bring in some crops that were, perhaps would be lucrative and fit better at times because for many years they didn&#039 ; t have- they didn&#039 ; t know what to do with winter. It was too cold here for most of the things that they grow. I mean, tropical crops really don&#039 ; t do well below 60 degrees and a lot of them die at 50, you know. And so they had discovered the bunching onions on their own. And so I got interested in finding some other crops. They had some types of mustard. The early mustard seeds we could get our hands on, the Asian mustards were mostly from South China, warmer areas. I mean, they were mostly from the northern China. Yeah. And so. I got that mixed up anyway. It took them several years to find greens that would grow in the wintertime here. And lettuce, to me, was was really one of the best crops they could grow in terms of marketability. And you see, it does so well here. They had tried to grow lettuce. And failed on several occasions, and we&#039 ; re not interested anymore. And so I got a plot of my own for a while, and I just tried out things. So you plant lettuce in November, you know, or even October, and it comes up and grows and you can start harvesting it, you know? Well, we used to say what we with our lettuce should be harvestable by Thanksgiving if we do it right. But you can harvest lettuce all winter and all spring. It only stops when it gets too hot in the summertime. So you have several months of production, lettuce production. But if you start it in the summertime, like I think is what they did it, it just goes to seed. It took about three years. Suddenly, lettuce was the most, one of their most important winter crops. The lettuce and onions and mustard grow in the winter and then all those tropical crops in the summer. You know, once they figured things out a little bit, you know, our summertime was just about like South East Asia. They never thought it was too hot. Everybody else in Dallas is running for air conditioning, and they were just fine. You know, maybe it wasn&#039 ; t even as oppressive and humid and hot as it would have been where they grew up. I&#039 ; m not sure. But anyway, next? |00:48:18| Brody That&#039 ; s really interesting. I just am interested in going back a little bit to some of those groups that existed around community gardening, like the the alliance that you were talking about. It&#039 ; s interesting to me that there was a partnership between corporate people, the city, the police department, nonprofits. When-was that sort of started in the seventies and extended into sort of the nineties. Or what do you remember about the timing on that? |00:48:57| Lambert Yeah, it started. Let&#039 ; s see. It really had its heyday, I would say, in probably the late eighties and up to the mid-nineties. And then it kind of came to a close, it seemed like, fairly quickly. And there seemed to be a feeling by a lot of people that. When government entities and businesses and whatnot targeted certain groups to help that it was unfair to other groups maybe. I remember the police officers used to be a part of every community meeting and they knew everybody personally. And it was, that was really a close relationship between, you know, the East Dallas Police Storefront. You know, they had afterschool programs for the local kids. They had health and immunization things went on there. People came there to get all kinds of help. And police officers were seen in the evenings at the apartment buildings, visiting with families and stuff. It was a really close...And there were other groups that weren&#039 ; t getting that help that also needed help maybe. And I think there were complaints and it eventually came down to a notion that even like, oh, I won&#039 ; t go there. |00:50:34| Brody It was really interesting that there even was that, the impetus to to cooperate and collaborate between the public and private and especially the police department. I know in East Dallas during that time period was, you know, very much into community, you know, involvement in community policing. And you mentioned that the police officer was really the main person at the garden, you know, sort of on the scene. So that&#039 ; s... |00:51:01| Lambert Yeah. I remember we had a shed to move at the garden one point. It&#039 ; s back in the corner where the water was standing and we decided we had to move it to higher ground. And it&#039 ; s like a big old heavy thing, you know. And two of the officers brought their pickup trucks with the winches on the front, you know, on their time, you know, and and moved it, you know. But they&#039 ; d show up in uniform and, you know, help in the garden at times and stuff. So, you know, it was really different. But those people pretty much all got reassigned at some point because policy somewhere changed. And it&#039 ; s kind of, you know... |00:51:41| Brody I knew a lot of the people who lived in that area, you know, as refugees in the apartments that people were resettled to in a year, two years, five years, made enough money to be able to move to other parts of town, to Garland or, you know, further north. Did you maintain relationships with people who had been gardeners in the community garden? |00:52:07| Lambert Yeah, basically that relationship never ended. The people moved to other places. East Dallas became a place that wasn&#039 ; t- wasn&#039 ; t the best place to live. Right? And so when people were able to move, they moved. But they came back to East Dallas and continued to garden. And it, for a while it was a real problem because, you know, they&#039 ; d moved in with their children&#039 ; s families in Garland mostly. And that&#039 ; s a distance to travel, and there&#039 ; s no easy public transportation or whatnot. So they had to get rides from their kids to come to the garden. And what I noticed is when people had jobs and the household was doing well, it was hard for the seniors to come to the garden and grow vegetables. But when they were having difficulty, the kids were out there with them, helping them grow food because the family needed it. And the, even some of the...and the other thing that happened was that once they moved to a house in in Garland or somewhere, they had...Every house had enough land around it that you could grow stuff. And quite often they had stuff growing from the sidewalk all the way around the back side of the house. So every piece of thing, they put in a little greenhouses so they could start their seedlings and conserve stuff over winter from the cold. And so all of the gardeners that I visited and I visit almost everybody, you know, usually on a regular basis. We used to do a Christmas thing every year where we baked cookies and took a batch of cookies to everybody at the garden if if we could find them. And one of the highlights of every one of those tours was to go in their backyard and see their garden. And they had from fence to fence, they hadn&#039 ; t wasted a single spot on grass or ornamentals. It was all food plants and herbs and stuff. And, you know, they so...I begin to think, I have never had a way to find out, but I figured there must be a lot of people from other places who weren&#039 ; t grown up in this sort of culture that seem to restrict gardens or make gardens not a thing to do who were growing stuff. And I think it&#039 ; s probably true. You know, it could be Filipinos. They could be from India. They can be, you know, whatever Indonesians. Everybody I ran into seemed to have, you know, if they had an older person in their household, usually they also had a big at least, a kitchen garden for the family. But those gardens were growing a lot of food, more food than the household needed. And so a lot of them were selling food. They were, they were giving food to other members of their own families and whatnot. At one time, we sort of figured out that probably every community gardener in the East Dallas Garden was probably growing food for twenty other people, you know. And so yeah, so the community gardens&#039 ; you know, impact, you know, was multiplied dramatically by the fact that people took that technology, those ideas, whatever, and, and mixed it with their own, you know, and grew stuff all over the place. |00:55:59| Brody That&#039 ; s great. |00:56:01| Lambert And I had a Vietnamese neighbor and a lot of the crops I ended up growing, you know, I grew because he did so well and a lot of them escaped into my yard and I still have them. |00:56:12| Brody That&#039 ; s great. Did those families that were growing so much food beyond what their immediate family&#039 ; s need was, do they sell in some of their food? |00:56:21| Lambert Yeah. Yeah, they did. Some of them are trying to I mean, the market was so good at the East Dallas Garden while the apartments still had a lot of people close by, that they were basically selling pretty much all day long, every day of the week. There was just a constant little trickle of people. And on Saturdays it was like crowded in there. And some of the what they were selling there, they were bringing from their home gardens. |00:56:52| Brody Were there stalls set up there, or did people just sort of stand near their garden plot? |00:56:57| Lambert Yeah. Well, at one point it was a lot of standing near the garden plots kind of thing. People would garden and somebody came over and asked to buy this or that, point at something they wanted, but they eventually put up little table things and tried to put covers up and it was kind of disorganized. And we, at one point, I had to really take over the selling thing and arrange it, organize it, because people were controlling access. You know, somebody that had a garden close to the main gate felt like it wasn&#039 ; t right that anybody walked by their stall to get to somebody else&#039 ; s, right? It was kind of weird. So and so we actually took out two of the garden plots and set up an area and built a bunch of tables and whatnot. And they, after a while, sort of figured out that was maybe better. And, you know, the good thing about working with refugees was that, you know, it might be a little struggle to do something for a while, but they would very often take over and make the system work. We didn&#039 ; t know how to make it work either a lot of the time. But, you know, they were able to make it work satisfactorily, you know, after a while. So, you know, they. Yeah. The selling of things to restaurants and grocery stores and whatnot is something I really don&#039 ; t know a lot about because I was never able to get access to the information itself. I know that&#039 ; s where it was going. I recognized some of these people were regular. The big buyers, they would come to the garden and buy a whole truckload of stuff, sometimes on a regular basis. But they weren&#039 ; t open to talk to, you know, and the gardeners themselves were very secretive it seemed about, you know, their business thing. So I was never able to figure out how much money they were making, you know, or not. But I think it was significant. Still is. Yeah. And so we did some calculations a few times and come up with some numbers that nobody would believe. Right. But three quarters of an acre, you know, managed intensively, producing food every month of the year, you know, probably grows a lot more per acre than most farms. Right. |00:59:34| Brody About pricing, how did that you know, when this all kind of sounds like it evolved organically, how did people decide? Was there competition to under, you know, underprice things to get more sales or? |00:59:50| Lambert Their pricing was always ridiculously low, it seemed like. And I mean, that&#039 ; s one reason they did a lot of business. But they would sell maybe...Well, if you went to the Asian grocery store just a few years ago, I remember looking at the Asian grocery store and I&#039 ; d look at a bundle of, say, water spinach. And I would think, boy, you know, that&#039 ; s a third of the size of a bundle that they would sell for the same amount of money at the East Dallas Garden. And so people who were poor, shopped there a lot. I think it got, reached a point where, one, they lived too far to come to the garden, people are poor and also they couldn&#039 ; t compete with the fact that large buyers were buying up stuff. So it&#039 ; s gotten to be where now, almost all the sales are on Friday, late Friday and Saturday morning. And that&#039 ; s it. They sell out. They can sell, they can sell more than they can grow always, you know, because there&#039 ; s such a demand for these types of foods that they grow. |01:01:02| Brody Today, who are the gardeners? Is it still primarily refugees? |01:01:06| Lambert Yes, we, we&#039 ; ve had a few other people that had plots off and on and it never really lasted. They just didn&#039 ; t have this stick-to-it-iveness, is that what you call it? And, but the original families, we still have a small number of people who had plots way back in the late eighties, you know, who are really old, could hardly come in. Every year, we&#039 ; re losing people now because they&#039 ; re aging out on us and other family members are taking over. One thing that happened was the original garden plan was to have like 48 or something plots, which meant, you know, we&#039 ; re going have 48 maybe families. And the way the plots got assigned originally, I think that the people doing it, they didn&#039 ; t they didn&#039 ; t have any way to tell who was who, right? So somebody, everybody, I guess, was clever. They managed to get a plot for their daughter and for their you know, for their sister and things like that. So that it ended up that each family actually had control over three or four plots. And as time has gone on, that&#039 ; s expanded. So as various groups have had to drop out, now that their plots often got turned over to others. So we haven&#039 ; t brought in hardly any new gardeners. And we found that we weren&#039 ; t successful at actually incorporating somebody new into the garden that they could, but we couldn&#039 ; t. You know, maybe it&#039 ; s like, you know, we bring in somebody, it didn&#039 ; t work. But the next thing you know, there&#039 ; s a, there&#039 ; s a relative who&#039 ; s doing it, who&#039 ; s taking care of a plot. Then it&#039 ; s like &quot ; What happened to so-and-so?&quot ; &quot ; Oh, he&#039 ; s gone.&quot ; You know, so. So now, several of them control maybe six, seven, eight plots. Right. And we&#039 ; re down to sort of maybe ten. You know, I mean. |01:03:15| Brody There&#039 ; s still city involvement or? |01:03:18| Lambert No city involvement ever, really. I mean, other than that first committee time. Yeah. And yeah, I don&#039 ; t think the city, anybody in the city is aware that they ever had any relationship with the garden anymore. It wouldn&#039 ; t fit their idea of what the city is supposed to be doing, apparently. Yeah. |01:03:41| Brody Just zooming out a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about the advantages, the benefits of community gardens in general? |01:03:55| Lambert I was on the board of the American Community Gardening Association for six years and, of course, that&#039 ; s what we talked about a lot. You know, what&#039 ; s our purpose? Why do we have gardens? What can they do for people? And in that time, I visited community garden programs in at least a dozen cities across the country. And it really seems that the main thing that community gardens do is it, it brings people together, neighborhoods together. It becomes a place where people come together and who&#039 ; ve never worked together before. And they learn how to get things done as a group and they organize people. In fact, here our East Dallas Garden where we worked with Hispanics for the six or seven years. That group became such a strong group within a neighborhood that was not organized at all, that they virtually took over a literacy program in a local nonprofit there and managed that. And then they became the main board and staff members on a group that started building houses, building new homes for people. And so they went from being community gardeners to homeowners, you know, because they were able to, they were the only people organized in the neighborhood. But, you know, there&#039 ; s of course, the nutrition, the exercise aspects of gardening. It&#039 ; s greatly therapeutic in so many ways. As you pass, as we well know, when we get as old as my wife and I are, if it wasn&#039 ; t for the garden to get us out there, we would not be able to move. I don&#039 ; t know. You know, but, you know, a garden gets you excited to go out and be out there with nature, to meet other fellow gardeners and, and share with them and whatnot. I don&#039 ; t know. I used to have a good list. |01:06:06| Brody In terms of that, earlier you were talking about, you know, that you noticed when you came to Dallas that there was poverty that you hadn&#039 ; t really encountered in California and food insecurity and sort of the attitudes of the food pantries about gardens. Has any of that changed as people have gotten more involved and interested in dealing with food insecurity? |01:06:28| Lambert Yeah, well, as far as the food pantries go, most of them, I think, are pretty excited to get fresh, local produce now. And I mean, there&#039 ; s been a couple of things happen. One is over time they got better organized and better funded and most of them realized that there was food that they were totally missing that needed refrigeration. So almost every pantry that I know of now has some way to keep fresh vegetables, you know, and they&#039 ; re being donated fresh vegetables from stores and things like that. Stuff that sort of, you know, doesn&#039 ; t have any shelf life left, you know, and but they can keep it, you know, overnight or for a couple of days and hand it out when they&#039 ; re open. But at first, that was the main impediment that we were given this. If you give us fresh vegetables, where do we put them? You know, we don&#039 ; t have any place to store them. And that&#039 ; s true. You know, in this in this weather, you know, lettuce that was picked 3 hours ago and is not properly washed and stored or whatnot will just wilt and be unedible. So they upped their technology enough that they could handle it and they, the populations they serve, that every time I go to the pantry and talk to somebody there, they say, you know, you should see the people- eyes light up when they see that there&#039 ; s fresh produce here. That&#039 ; s the first thing they go for, and the stuff they get from the community gardens or somebody&#039 ; s backyard garden that&#039 ; s donated and whatnot is usually fresher, probably better quality and things like that. And like, I&#039 ; m interested in tomatoes, right? As most gardeners are, and I&#039 ; m not so interested in hybrid tomatoes. I&#039 ; m interested in heirloom tomatoes. And over twenty-five years or so of going through dozens of varieties and we&#039 ; ve come down with a small group of heirloom tomatoes which are so superior to any other tomato you can get your hands on. Right. Those are the ones we donate to the pantry. It&#039 ; s like, why shouldn&#039 ; t they have as good a food as anybody else? And we get the fun of growing it. We get the fun of sharing it. And it&#039 ; s educational to us because we learn, you know, what&#039 ; s adapted to here and what does well. So it helps our overall learning, you know, how to garden well to grow these things and have a surplus so we can give them away. |01:09:10| Brody So it sounds like a win win. |01:09:12| Lambert Yeah. Yeah. |01:09:14| Brody There&#039 ; s been a lot of talk in lots of cities, but in Dallas in particular about the concept of food deserts in some neighborhoods as a result of zoning or history, really not having access to fresh fruit and vegetables or, you know, or of healthy food in general. What role do you think community gardens can play in dealing with the problem of food deserts? |01:09:43| Lambert I&#039 ; m not sure for Dallas because we don&#039 ; t have sort of a well-organized, a well-organized program to support the needs that the garden has to thrive. And so if we, if we start gardens in impoverished neighborhoods say, we&#039 ; re dealing with people who have all kinds of other problems and they don&#039 ; t have the experience, the time, the resources, the money, whatever necessary to garden well. And if we don&#039 ; t have organizations that have their back, that that are interested in the gardens enough that they&#039 ; re going to be there to mentor them and to work with them no matter what. And so, I mean, our program has tried to do that, but it&#039 ; s just like it&#039 ; s just more than we can do. And so it takes a lot. Something bigger, but just a lot more organization and whatnot than we can muster here to make it so that I think community gardens could solve the food desert problem. And for example, with farmers markets now we sell produce at a market which goes for funds to support our program. But, you know, when we first started talking about starting neighborhood farmer&#039 ; s markets, you know, people were talking about &quot ; This is a great idea. We could put a market in a food desert. And that way people who are poor would have access to fresh produce.&quot ; Well, nobody can afford to buy, to buy the vegetables at the cost it takes to produce them in those neighborhoods. And we have programs like WIC and other buying programs where people are getting maybe $2 worth because it&#039 ; s subsidized and whatnot at our markets. But the market is still not in the neighborhood, in the location and whatnot where it&#039 ; s accessible. So, I don&#039 ; t know. |01:11:55| Brody Some structural problems. |01:11:56| Lambert There&#039 ; s some kind of more commercial type. I don&#039 ; t know if they&#039 ; re community gardens or not. They&#039 ; re like farm, they call themselves farms that are trying to work in those areas. It remains to be seen whether they&#039 ; ll have, you know, they&#039 ; re all new. And, you know, I&#039 ; m...I&#039 ; ve seen a lot of new things not last very long. So I don&#039 ; t know, you know, cross my fingers, it&#039 ; d be great if they work out. But having the impact, you know, being, having a broad enough reach, it&#039 ; s kind of hard to see. |01:12:33| Brody Yeah, that reminds me of earlier you were talking about when you first, early, when you were on the scene, were driving around and sort of visiting the different community gardens that existed already and kind of had in your mind that surely they&#039 ; d all want to kind of join together. It sounds like that&#039 ; s the same kind of thing that you&#039 ; re saying is still kind of missing. |01:12:55| Lambert Yeah. If anything, that sense of &quot ; let&#039 ; s do something with our group of people and you know, and not them, those others,&quot ; it seems to be as strong as ever. And I mean, like a let&#039 ; s say a church has a space and so they decide to start a garden for their youth group. Right. They usually limit themselves already to where they can&#039 ; t succeed because that youth, those people grow up pretty quick. Right? And new people don&#039 ; t like to take on projects that other people started before it seems like. You see that in schools all the time. You know that the PTA or somebody starts some project and as soon as you get another batch of parents, another batch of kids, you know, they want to do another. They want to do their new, their own project. So I don&#039 ; t know. |01:13:48| Brody Well, if you could wave a magic wand around this issue in this city, what are the main things that you would, that you would change? |01:14:01| Lambert I don&#039 ; t know. It&#039 ; s a systemic cultural thing. You know, there&#039 ; s there&#039 ; s not an orientation towards self-sufficiency and, you know, growing your own kind of things and whatnot, that is, seems to be a part of the culture in other cities that I&#039 ; ve visited. But the stories that I&#039 ; ve heard, you know, about somebody that had the idea to start a garden in some small town somewhere with some of the neighbors and whatnot, and within a matter of weeks they were planting and growing stuff because the land became available somehow or other and people showed up with stuff and whatnot. And next thing you knew, there were four gardens in their little town. And now I don&#039 ; t know whether those lasted because I haven&#039 ; t been able to keep touch with them. But that kind of eagerness, spontaneity of people coming together to do these kind of community projects, you know, just hasn&#039 ; t happened here. And, and I also think that there&#039 ; s a kind of a fear by people in positions of power that those folks that are maybe impoverished and whatnot, we don&#039 ; t want them too organized. You know, they might feel that it&#039 ; s a threat. You know, they might make demands that we don&#039 ; t want to carry out. You know? |01:15:24| Brody It does sound like it&#039 ; s a bunch of systemic problems. |01:15:27| Lambert Yeah, I think it is. I think it&#039 ; s a systemic thing. |01:15:34| Brody The story, especially of the garden in East Dallas that some people call the Asian Garden, you know, it seems like it is born out of the role that food plays in people&#039 ; s cultures. What are your thoughts around the role of food in communicating and transmitting culture? |01:16:02| Lambert It&#039 ; s really central. You know, it was central in the America of my youth with the community I grew up in. You know, it&#039 ; s like community picnics, you know, 4th of July celebrations, Thanksgiving and things like that, you know, it was all about food and bringing people together. And we had, I mean, my family had as many as seventy-five people come together for things to celebrate Thanksgiving with a huge, you know, all the spread, you know, fixins to, you know, that&#039 ; s kind of died out. But as I&#039 ; ve looked at other cultures, you know, that have come in, that moved here and set up communities, it seemed like every single one of them has these big food fests going on. And my wife and I are members of the Malaysian Family Club. And we find out that there&#039 ; s actually organizations just like that, there&#039 ; s, you know, and with many other groups. And but they come up with excuses to have a big, you know, feast, shared community feast with each other several times a year routinely. We&#039 ; ve been having a big Chinese New Year festival at a restaurant somewhere, which has been going on now for, oh, at least twenty years. And it kind of got shut down in COVID, you know? But, you know, it&#039 ; s coming back. But I mean, food is far more important than anything else it seems like. You know, it&#039 ; s our food, our dishes, our special national things that we celebrate, you know, who we are as people are just, you know. Sometimes it&#039 ; s the only thing we&#039 ; ve got. You know, we can sit down and eat food with the people we don&#039 ; t really sometimes know that well or agree with on a lot of things. And we can talk about the food and about back home and growing up and all those things. Sure. Just celebrating life as a people together around food is just that&#039 ; s what it&#039 ; s all about. |01:18:23| Brody It&#039 ; s really nice. So you&#039 ; ve seen the Asian communities in Dallas grow significantly in the time that you&#039 ; ve been here since 1982 1962. How would you characterize those communities and sort of the growth and the change that you&#039 ; ve seen over time? |01:18:52| Lambert Well, the biggest change for for our group, for the Malaysian group, which were some, a mixture of ethnic groups, but is, has been the family and children and things like that. It&#039 ; s been going on long enough that we&#039 ; ve matured a lot and there aren&#039 ; t as many young families joining. So we used to have- it was all about the kids and we would, you know, we&#039 ; d teach the kids, you know, traditional dances and things like that and all of that. And now they&#039 ; re teenagers or they&#039 ; ve gone off to college, you know, and younger people aren&#039 ; t joining in the same way. |01:19:36| Brody Why do you think? |01:19:38| Lambert I don&#039 ; t know. It&#039 ; s more, they&#039 ; re more professional. It&#039 ; s more about maybe just globalization. I don&#039 ; t know. They&#039 ; re you know, they&#039 ; re just connected to other things. And, you know, family, in that sense, is not as important. But they&#039 ; re also startign their own families, their own groups. I mean, just like I mean, just like in our culture, you know, it was aunts and uncles, the grandparents of my generation, you know, and they would, that brought this big group of people together. But every single one of those families now, you know, is doing their own celebrations. So once you get to be a senior, you know, most of the people you interacted with around food, you know, as when you were younger, you know, are off doing their own thing. I mean, it&#039 ; s that, I guess, is the way it has to be, but I don&#039 ; t know. The...So we went to, we would meet at households early on and it got to be where nobody&#039 ; s house was big enough. And then we went through a phase of renting a hall somewhere or a restaurant, you know. We got too big for that, you know. So once you get past three or four hundred people, you know, it gets really hard to get together an event around food. And so now it&#039 ; s splintering off into several of those littler groups. |01:21:06| Brody Interesting. In terms of the gardens and the organizations that you&#039 ; re involved in, what impact, if any, did COVID have on your operations? |01:21:20| Lambert You know, it didn&#039 ; t have that much of an impact because gardens are a safe place. Everybody saw them as a relatively safe place. And so there was very little fear about catching COVID when you&#039 ; re out in the open air, in the sunshine, and whatnot in the garden. And, you know, people in a garden can choose to work close together or they can find something, you know, far apart. And so people were more sensitive, masked up and avoided other people, but were still there. You know, you could still have conversations with friends. In some way, in some areas there was more intensity because the fact that, you know, being able to get out, you know, is really important and people couldn&#039 ; t find safe places to go, so now they maybe went to the garden much more often and they were much more conscientious about the importance of growing food for other people that needed it. So yeah, we, we felt we were really lucky in a way that we never felt I mean, if you have a yard, you can escape to your backyard. We have a big backyard garden. But we have three other gardens we can escape to with other groups of people, you know. So, yeah. |01:22:41| Brody How about the tornadoes or the ice storm? Were you impacted at all? |01:22:46| Lambert Yeah, well, the the weather itself has been really crummy, you might say, for gardening in the last couple of years. The episodes of colder than normal and warmer than normal, you know, droughts and then too much rain and things like that, as has done a lot to change, you know, kind of the ecology of the gardens, the populations of pests and things like that have been altered in ways sometimes very hard to control. Like this spring, we had what we call the aphid apocalypse in which, you know, everybody had aphids so bad in their garden because we probably lost a lot of the predators. And just the timing, the sequencing of hot and cold, it made it so that they flourished when other things didn&#039 ; t and there was nothing to control them. And I mean, at times it gets so hot. You can&#039 ; t I mean, we&#039 ; re limited here because it&#039 ; s too hot in the summer for a lot of the stuff that people want to grow. You can&#039 ; t grow tomatoes. Well, basically right now, the temperatures at night are close to 80, right? Once you get past 80 at night, there&#039 ; s no more tomatoes setting. Right. So you&#039 ; re liable to get maybe only six weeks when the weather&#039 ; s cool enough, you know, to set tomatoes. Well, that seems to be getting shorter. So it was too cold for too long and now it&#039 ; s getting too hot at night. It&#039 ; s like so yeah our weather, and but it changes so we never know how to what strategy to use. So usually what people do is they, they over plant, you know they, instead of planting once they&#039 ; ll plant something and they&#039 ; ll plant a little more of it a week later, you know, just in case things don&#039 ; t work out. So we&#039 ; ve had to adjust our strategy a lot. It takes more time, more energy, is more costly, takes more seed, everything you know, to keep up. But since we&#039 ; re really into food production and food is something that&#039 ; s needed every day of the year, basically, you know, we&#039 ; re not, we&#039 ; re not inclined to do that. But there&#039 ; s some people who garden as a hobby, you might say, and they go out and they plant and if that doesn&#039 ; t make it, that&#039 ; s sort of it. They don&#039 ; t have much garden this year. |01:25:23| Brody Right. The stakes are higher for you. |01:25:25| Lambert Yes. Yeah, the stakes are very high. And if our if our if like our East Dallas Community Garden and Live Oak Community Garden cannot grow enough food for those that population, then then being able to afford to help pay the water bill can&#039 ; t happen. We can&#039 ; t charge them enough to pay the water bill anyway. We cover that from our market takes. But the we&#039 ; ve had we had to raise the fee a couple of times, you know, because the water got so expensive because of the prolonged drought and the price of water has increased dramatically too. And, and I don&#039 ; t know, maybe the biggest impact that&#039 ; s coming about right now is things like the materials you need to build the gardens have gotten so expensive. Like we cannot afford lumber, right? We can&#039 ; t repair gardens. We certainly can&#039 ; t build a garden now. You know, it would be...You know, back in the nineties, I could build a garden for twenty people or twenty families for $4000. If we had a fence already, that might cost another couple. Right. But the idea of spending as much as $10,000, you know, to get fifteen or twenty people into a garden, you know, was ridiculous. Some people did that because they wasted money on things that, you know, they over overdid it, built things that were not efficient. |01:27:03| Brody It&#039 ; s gotten a lot more challenging. |01:27:08| Lambert When you garden a lot, you get cramps in your legs. |01:27:13| Brody Well, I want to say thank you. Is there anything that I have not asked you that you want to add to this interview? |01:27:24| Lambert Only that I think my wife and I have considered ourselves so fortunate to sort of just fall into this, you know, thing that we&#039 ; ve been doing for the last thrity-five years. It&#039 ; s just been a wonderful life. Well, that&#039 ; s a name of a...But it&#039 ; s just been so filling. And I mean, all the people that we&#039 ; ve met and all the people we&#039 ; ve been able to bring together and all of those people that have just found some happiness and whatnot and health through, you know, what they could grow and being able to stuff and, and the fact that we have so many people that we have something to talk to about, you know, that we know something about that other people are interested in. So, you know, you know, my wife is the garden lady and I&#039 ; m the garden guy, you know. |01:28:27| Brody And it sounds like a wonderful life and very fulfilling and that, you know, you&#039 ; ve definitely made and left a great legacy here in Dallas. |01:28:37| Lambert And I guess the other thing is, speaking of the COVID period, I mean, there&#039 ; s a lot of talk about this that people have started gardens and things, but it&#039 ; s like all of our friends who used to come to our backyard garden and ooh and ahh over it and get vegetables from us and stuff once in a while, almost all of them started gardens in the last couple of three years and it&#039 ; s gotten really fun. Now when we go to over, you know the thing go out in the backyard and see their gardens. People who didn&#039 ; t garden before, you know, maybe because they know us, but at least we were a source of plants and information and things like that. That&#039 ; s been useful to our closest friends. You know? |01:29:17| Brody That&#039 ; s great. And you can see that. |01:29:19| Lambert They thought we were just weird people at one point, I think. And now they&#039 ; re doing it, too. |01:29:24| Brody That&#039 ; s wonderful. Well, you get the last laugh as well. Thank you very much for sitting for this interview and for sharing all of your memories and experiences. I appreciate it a lot and I know that future scholars will as well. |01:29:39| Lambert It&#039 ; s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. |01:29:42| Brody You&#039 ; re welcome. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_014.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Don Lambert, May 30, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_014 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Community gardens Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-05-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/273214d855afc617b354c0158e402b94.jpg fdf24dda1db05949f5a34afa390e1126 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donny Sirisavath OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Donny Sirisavath, August 8, 2022 2021oh002_di_020 02:24:39 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, Lao Donny Sirisavath Betsy Brody mp3 oh_audio_dig_sirisavath_donny_20220808.mp3 1:|13(8)|35(5)|77(6)|90(4)|106(8)|121(3)|135(2)|196(8)|210(8)|258(3)|270(6)|285(1)|310(16)|322(10)|333(3)|347(8)|369(10)|406(2)|415(9)|426(14)|451(11)|461(9)|472(16)|512(16)|522(2)|534(1)|553(7)|565(3)|611(9)|623(12)|655(3)|666(5)|678(2)|690(5)|702(5)|710(11)|720(12)|733(1)|756(7)|797(6)|808(13)|846(9)|859(9)|907(8)|919(4)|939(11)|992(11)|1001(10)|1024(6)|1039(2)|1050(3)|1064(5)|1085(9)|1098(4)|1110(2)|1132(9)|1144(7)|1169(2)|1179(10)|1191(18)|1223(7)|1233(12)|1245(11)|1257(9)|1270(2)|1281(11)|1292(9)|1307(6)|1317(8)|1331(2)|1366(10)|1419(14)|1453(4)|1464(1)|1476(11)|1604(14)|1689(5) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/174325 Aviary audio 0 Introduction 33 Growing up in Amarillo Texas Amarillo ; immigrants ; immigration ; Laos ; refugees ; Texas 102 Refugee identity bartering ; cooking ; English ; food ; language ; Lao ; refugee ; Thai 214 Mom's background in Laos bartering ; cooking ; family 421 Moving to San Antonio/ Sirisavath's mom opens Rama Garden Restaurant business ; Chinese cooking ; Chinese restaurant ; cooking ; family ; restaurant ; San Antonio 575 Family names family ; names 725 Working at Rama Garden and Taste of the Orient Chinese cooking ; Chinese restaurant ; cooking ; family business ; restaurant ; wok 942 Sirisavath describes learning Lao home cooking from his mom cooking ; culture ; family ; food ; home cooking ; immigrant ; laab ; Lao food ; larb ; papaya salad ; recipes ; refugee 1043 Balancing Lao culture and American culture Asian flavors ; bullying ; culture ; discrimination ; food ; immigrant ; racism ; sandwich 1331 How food bridges a gap in culture authentic ; authenticity ; Chinese food ; cooking ; culture ; food ; identity ; Laos ; restaurants ; Thai food 1660 Lao cooking and flavors fermentation ; fish sauce ; Lao cooking ; Laos 2099 Sirisavath describes his late teenage years Asian restaurant ; Bai Bua ; cookng ; culture ; identity ; Mexican food ; restaurant ; Thai food 2366 Working various jobs after leaving high school/Moving to Dallas Benihana ; Dallas ; employment 2833 Starting pop-ups/Opening Khao Noodle Shop Asian food ; culture ; food ; house parties ; Lao food ; pop-up ; recipes ; restaurants 3852 Finding a location for Khao Noodle Shop Asian restaurant ; Dallas ; East Dallas ; Khao Noodle Shop ; Lao restaurant ; real estate 4091 Khao Noodle Shop recognized by Bon Appetit magazine Bon Appetit ; business ; Khao Noodle Shop ; Lao food ; Laos 4801 Sirisavath recognized by Food + Wine Magazine and James Beard Foundation COVID ; flu ; Food + Wine Magazine ; James Beard Award ; Lao food ; Lao Food Movement ; Laos ; pandemic 5148 Food and storytelling at Khao Noodle Shop authentic ; bridge ; cookng ; food ; Khao Noodle Shop ; storytelling 5560 Authenticity, identity, and cooking adaptation ; Asian American ; authentic ; authenticity ; cooking ; home cooking ; identity ; recipe 6055 Impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on Khao Noodle Shop COVID ; Food + Wine ; Khao Noodle Shop ; pandemic 6439 Opening Darkoo's Chicken Shack Asian American ; Asian flavors ; bridge ; food ; fried chicken ; recipes ; restaurant 7016 Yelp/Social media reviews restaurant reviews ; reviews ; social media ; Yelp 7863 Sirisavath discusses the concept of &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurants Asian restaurant ; business ; Khao Noodle Shop ; mom and pop ; restaurant 8072 Sirisavath discusses his mentors Food + Wine ; Lao food ; mentors “Digging In” explores how the growth of the Asian community coincided with the rise of “foodie culture” in Dallas, leading to unique opportunities for economic and social engagement between and among different Asian immigrant groups as well as with the larger Dallas community. |00:00:07| Brody This is Betsy Brody. Today is August 8th, 2022. I am interviewing for the first time Mr. Donny Sirisavath. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and is part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In: How Food, Culture and Class Shape the Story of Asian Dallas.&quot ; Donny, thank you for joining me for this interview. |00:00:37| Sirisavath Well, thank you for having me. |00:00:38| Brody Let&#039 ; s start out. Just where and when were you born? |00:00:42| Sirisavath My name is Donny, of course, you know. I was I was born in Amarillo, Texas, right after my parents were sponsored to Texas. To the United States where 1980 of August 13th. I grew up in Amarillo for a couple of years and then moved to San Antonio, Texas. |00:01:03| Brody Where did your parents come from? |00:01:05| Sirisavath From Laos. |00:01:06| Brody Where were they? Who were who were they sponsored by? |00:01:08| Sirisavath They were sponsored by a Baptist church in Amarillo, Texas. That church also sponsored a lot of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. At the time when my parents came was 1978, and when my parents came to Amarillo, Texas, it was just my mom and dad and I believe my grandma at the time. And then eventually, the rest of the family came here after. |00:01:37| Brody So you&#039 ; re a born native Texan? |00:01:39| Sirisavath Yes, native Texan. |00:01:41| Sirisavath But, you know, growing up in Amarillo, Texas, we have a lot of refugees. I felt like I was part of being a refugee myself, even though I didn&#039 ; t escape you know, Laos or Vietnam or Thailand. But I&#039 ; ve just felt like around, the people around me were all refugees and immigrants of different Southeast Asian countries. So I just felt like I was an immigrant. |00:02:01| Brody What parts of the refugee experience sort of struck you or resonated with you? |00:02:08| Sirisavath I think the, you know, growing up in a household that did not speak English. I mean, for me as a young child and, that&#039 ; s... That was my first language was Lao and then Thai eventually and English and, seeing my mom, my dad, just really struggling to make ends meet. So where my mom stayed at home, taking care of me, cooking at home, cooking to sell her food so she can have money to support the family as well, too. And also too, for me. But I think it&#039 ; s partly because she enjoyed cooking. You know, that&#039 ; s where, that was her language of love. It was through food. And I think a lot of people around the community knew that she knew how to cook and that she can help feed the community as well. And, you know, the whole refugee mentality is, you kind of barter with people. So my mom would cook and would get a vegetable from one of her friends or go to a friend&#039 ; s farm to get eggs. So it&#039 ; s like, it&#039 ; s that&#039 ; s what I knew what a refugee was, you know, being about immigrant. That you kind of help each other out, being part of a community that you don&#039 ; t know the language, you don&#039 ; t know the land of, the new land that you are living in. A new country. So I think that&#039 ; s part of where I kind of figured like, &quot ; I am. I think I&#039 ; m an immigrant.&quot ; But really, I wasn&#039 ; t. It&#039 ; s my parents were. |00:03:27| Brody What were the most popular items that your mom cooked and bartered with? |00:03:33| Sirisavath I mean, there was many things that she used to make. She usually...She was known for all her like sauces or dipping sauces and then also her desserts. I mean she was not trained as a chef or as a cook. She just learned a lot of stuff from her great, great grandma. And then, of course, her mom and, you know, for a lot of people that didn&#039 ; t know, and I didn&#039 ; t know myself, my mom was actually kind of privileged in Laos, apparently. I didn&#039 ; t know this. But so she learned some other cooking from her, I guess her nannies at the time in Laos. Her father was a well-educated person in Laos and so was my grandma. So she was, you know, went to private school kind of thing. And but she would come home and my grandma, great grandma would, you know, teach her how to cook and the nanny as well, too. But I think at a young age, that&#039 ; s what she grew up doing, cooking for all her siblings, which was twelve siblings, including her. So thirteen. So, yes, she was the oldest of her siblings. So being that way, the oldest usually always take care of the younger and I think that&#039 ; s part of the reason why she had to learn how to cook as well, too. |00:04:51| Brody How old was she when, in 78, when they came? |00:04:55| Sirisavath I believe she was and do my math. So she was 60 when she passed away, which was 2011. She came when she was, I believe, 28. 28. Yes. I know my math might be wrong, but I believe she was in her late twenties, early thirties when she came. But yeah, it was just her, my dad and my grandma and her sister and brother. And then after that, I was born two years later. In Amarillo. But yeah, her food was just phenomenal from what I&#039 ; ve heard when I was growing up. And, you know, I ate her food all the time at home, so I&#039 ; m very biased. And but, yeah. I would just always remember going with her to different people&#039 ; s houses and dropping off food. And also at like the Asian grocery stores, convenience stores, just dropping her weekly production of her food. And that was my childhood with her, you know. And sometimes at home, I was trying to mimic her, you know, pounding garlic or peppers in a pestle and mortar. And she was like, &quot ; What are you doing?&quot ; And I was like, &quot ; I&#039 ; m trying to help you, Mom.&quot ; I didn&#039 ; t know what I was doing. But, you know, that&#039 ; s our relationship, growing up, was in a kitchen. |00:06:13| Brody Yeah. So did you end up learning a lot about cooking? |00:06:17| Sirisavath Yes and no. I think as a young age, I think it was more like a like a playground. You know, I didn&#039 ; t have much toys. So, you know, my toy was kitchen toys. A pot, pan, a steamer, rice basket steamer, pestle, mortar. And I think that&#039 ; s because I would see my mom in the kitchen and she tries to keep me in the kitchen, so she keeps an eye on me because I was very mischievous and I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I want to see everything, touch everything.&quot ; So I think that&#039 ; s part of the reason why I stayed in the kitchen with her a lot. And yeah, as a younger child, you know, I didn&#039 ; t understand what I was doing until I grew up as a teenager moving to San Antonio and then seeing my mom running an actual restaurant. |00:07:00| Brody Yeah. Tell me about that move to San Antonio. How old were you and what kind of restaurant? |00:07:06| Sirisavath I was eight years old when we left Amarillo, Texas, to San Antonio. But at the time, every other summer, we would usually travel from Amarillo to San Antonio to help because my dad was involved in a Buddhist temple in San Antonio, and he actually was the main person that actually built the temple. I didn&#039 ; t know my dad was very good with his hands or like that. He was super handyman, building things without using designs. I was just kind of baffled by that. So I mean, that was our summers. And then finally the monk at the time in San Antonio was like, &quot ; Hey, why don&#039 ; t you just go ahead and move to San Antonio? Might be a better life for you and your family, especially kids.&quot ; And then, yeah, we left. And then my mom got the opportunity to open her own restaurant, knowing that everyone knows her. You know, she cooks phenomenal food. And there was a Chinese restaurant for sale at the time. And, you know, with all their savings, they went ahead and bought the restaurant. It was called Rama Garden if you ever look it up. It&#039 ; s off of, I believe, 281 and Callahan Road? I forget. I have to go back and remember that. But yeah, it was a Chinese restaurant. Not a Thai or Lao Restaurant. It was a Chinese restaurant. |00:08:32| Brody So, I mean, did she have to learn how to cook Chinese food? |00:08:35| Sirisavath Yes. So luckily, I believe there was a couple of recipes that was left behind from a previous owner, but a lot of stuff my mom was...That&#039 ; s when I knew my mom was not just a cook, she was a chef. You know, she&#039 ; d kind of look at a recipe and just make anything and everything. And it was just phenomenal. Just seeing how her mind and the skills that she had just making dishes she&#039 ; s barely read a recipe on. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh.&quot ; |00:09:02| Brody Maybe things she&#039 ; d never eaten. |00:09:04| Sirisavath Yes. And as well, too you know, Chinese American food was, you know, everywhere. But some Chinese foods are a little different than others. But so for her, it was more of understanding the culture and understanding where ingredients come from. I think that&#039 ; s where she...her food shined more than just your regular Chinese American food. And of course, she just put a lot of love and care into the food that she makes. |00:09:29| Brody Tell me your parents&#039 ; names. |00:09:31| Sirisavath My mom&#039 ; s name is Phaysane Sirisavath. My dad&#039 ; s name was ________ &quot ; Sam&quot ; Sirisavath. Their American name is &quot ; Sam.&quot ; My mom&#039 ; s American name was &quot ; Susan.&quot ; But then later after my mom passed away, I found out that that wasn&#039 ; t her real name. |00:09:47| Brody What do you mean? |00:09:48| Sirisavath So Phaysane was not her real name. That was a given name from my dad to get the sponsorship from Laos to America. Apparently. I don&#039 ; t know why, but I think I know why, but I maybe not need to say it at the time. But her real name was Vieng Sai. That&#039 ; s her real given birth name. Phaysane was my dad&#039 ; s ex-girlfriend&#039 ; s name. |00:10:13| Brody Oh boy. |00:10:14| Sirisavath So, yeah, this is something that I just learned after my mom passed away, and I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; All this time, I been calling my mom by a different name. My dad&#039 ; s ex-girlfriend&#039 ; s name.&quot ; |00:10:26| Brody It sounds like everybody was. |00:10:28| Sirisavath Yeah, I think it&#039 ; s in part because of leaving a Communist country. And, you know, part of reason why the change of names as well. |00:10:36| Brody Speaking of names, a lot of people who come from non-American cultures adopt an Americanized name. Is Donny your Americanized name? |00:10:48| Sirisavath Yeah. So and this is a funny story and true story. I don&#039 ; t have a Lao last name or a Thai last name or Asian name. My name is Donny from Donny and Marie, the singers. My mom came from a country where they loved American music. And listening and singing Donny and Marie, you know, that&#039 ; s one of the names that my mom, you know, one of the singers that my mom loved. So she was like, &quot ; If I have a boy, it will be Donny. If I have Marie. I mean, if I have a girl, it&#039 ; ll be Marie.&quot ; So. And it became a boy. |00:11:27| Brody Do you have a sister? |00:11:28| Sirisavath No. But my mom wanted me to be a girl, so they didn&#039 ; t want to hear about the sex. So they bought girl&#039 ; s clothing for me and everything. And I came out, &quot ; Oh, we have another boy.&quot ; Like, uh. So, there&#039 ; s some old pictures of me wearing some girl&#039 ; s sandals and shirts, I think. |00:11:46| Brody That&#039 ; s pretty funny. |00:11:47| Sirisavath And then there&#039 ; s a...I mean there&#039 ; s a saying, my mom always called me ____. _____ means like girl and ____, is like, my nickname. Instead of _____ because ____is a boy. And it&#039 ; s like, yeah. |00:12:00| Brody That&#039 ; s really funny. So how long was the restaurant open? The Rama Garden. |00:12:05| Sirisavath Rama Garden was open for I believe only a few years. It was a big, massive restaurant. That restaurant, I believe, was like 2500 square foot. It was, you know, it&#039 ; s an old Chinese restaurant. So you just imagine a Chinese restaurant that had your regular dining space. Then you go down the little stairs and like the little fountain in the middle, when you walk in, and you go downstairs to the smoking section. So, you know, hey, back in the day we had smoking section, non-smoking section. So that&#039 ; s one, the two parts of the restaurant. And then you go back underneath from the smoking section, there was a party room like a big, massive party room. So that restaurant&#039 ; s humongous, I think. And I think the location really was the cause of why my mom closed. It was facing the backside of 281. And so I think that&#039 ; s part of the reason why that restaurant didn&#039 ; t succeed. But, you know, like the food was amazing. I think, because and also finding workers at the time. You know, having a family business is not always the greatest thing. Because, you know, with me being young, I have experienced a lot of things through that restaurant from family business, you know, brothers and sisters arguing, aunts, uncles, you know, arguing, parents arguing. I saw all of that. And I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Whoa, what&#039 ; s going on here?&quot ; And you know that, it breaks the family apart. But, you know, at the end of the day, my mom&#039 ; s like, &quot ; You know what? It&#039 ; s just too much stress on the family and myself. Let&#039 ; s go ahead and close this and I&#039 ; ll figure things out after that.&quot ; |00:13:36| Brody What did she do after that? |00:13:37| Sirisavath So after that, she just kind of just went around and consulting different restaurants in San Antonio and she partnered up with a friend of hers doing &quot ; Taste of the Orient.&quot ; And this was the pretty much the Panda Express Chinese restaurants in shopping malls. She ran two stores. One was in Windsor Park Mall, which was the one I always helped her out. This was when I was in middle school, actually, I&#039 ; m sorry, starting middle school into high school. So I would, you know, after I get off of school, she would pick me up and now I&#039 ; d go to the restaurant and help out. You know, ring customers up, serving customers. And then there&#039 ; s sometimes where we&#039 ; ll switch, my mom goes in the front, and I&#039 ; ll go in the back and start cooking. And I think that&#039 ; s where I started more of cooking in the restaurant. Because that Rama Garden, I was just, I was just a child running around, busing tables, giving customers water. And, you know, I&#039 ; ll get tipped, I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Okay, I like this.&quot ; You know, I was like looking for customers to fill water. I would do that. But yeah, &quot ; Taste of Orient&quot ; was where I really got my hands dirty, inside the kitchen, learning how to work the wok, cooking fried rice. You know, Sweet and Sour Chicken, General Tso&#039 ; s chicken. You know, it&#039 ; s just a basic common Chinese American food. But I learned a lot, you know. |00:15:01| Brody Now, what did you learn? |00:15:04| Sirisavath Patience and cooking and temperature control. And that&#039 ; s the thing I&#039 ; ve learned about, like, wok. And you know, wok, it&#039 ; s where you have to really understand the fire, the movement of when you&#039 ; re using a wok. And you can leave stuff there, it&#039 ; ll burn. There are some things you can leave there and it won&#039 ; t burn. So oil temperature, you know, it&#039 ; s very scientific of cooking, but at the end of the day, it was just kind of the feel of cooking. If you understand your temperature, your motions, you kind of understand the way of cooking. And I think wok cooking that&#039 ; s the way of &quot ; the wok of life.&quot ; |00:15:41| Brody At that point also were you and your mom cooking together at home? |00:15:44| Sirisavath Yeah. You know, and part of it was learning in the kitchen when we would go home, my mom would always cook our home cooked meals, which was Lao food, Thai food. You know, and sometimes, some Chinese food and French foods and Italian food that she loved. But, at home was more about the home cooked meals. So sit down dining with family. You know, me, my brothers, my dad, my mom. You know she&#039 ; ll just...And there are sometimes where she was busy, so she&#039 ; ll cook before she leaves to work for us like every refugee immigrant parents. They always do that because they have to work and sometimes, they can&#039 ; t take us to school. So my mom taught me how to cook eggs and rice at home. So then she&#039 ; d be like, &quot ; Hey. I already washed the rice for you. You all have to cook and cook your eggs.&quot ; Or sometimes noodles. Something very basic. At the time. And then eventually she started showing me how to make sauces, like, you know, making like laab, which is like meat salad, chicken salad as well too. And like doing Tum Mak Hoon, which is like papaya salad because that&#039 ; s a technique that you... It takes years to learn and master it. I&#039 ; m still trying to master it. But it was one of those things that she kind of taught me. But the real things that she taught me was that you have to be in tune of your own culture to understand the ingredients and involvement when you make the food. I think at a young age, I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t understand, Mom, I just want to eat.&quot ; Yeah, I don&#039 ; t need this culture, life lessons. You know, being a teenager, stubborn teenager, don&#039 ; t want to listen to your parents. So that&#039 ; s where I was at. |00:17:21| Brody Yeah. I mean, it&#039 ; s a common thing with immigrant kids, and the children of refugees who are growing up American. It&#039 ; s hard to find that balance of figuring out your American self and leaning into learning about your culture. |00:17:37| Sirisavath So yeah, I think every immigrant child goes through that. I think part of it, you know, you see a lot of these movies now where you see the immigrant child bringing lunch to school. I was those immigrant child where they have whoa, we bring something that&#039 ; s ethnic for us that we eat at home to school, and we get looked at weird. Or &quot ; What&#039 ; s that smell like?&quot ; It&#039 ; s fish sauce. Like, &quot ; Why are you eating fish sauce? Why is there that sauce that&#039 ; s made from fish and all this stuff?&quot ; And, you know, I&#039 ; ve...You feel like you get bullied when you&#039 ; re in school and especially in that something that you grew up eating. And coming from Amarillo, it&#039 ; s very immigrant driven, refugee driven to a city that&#039 ; s not the same immigrants or different immigrants than where you&#039 ; re used to. So I was just in the school was predominantly Whites, Hispanics, Black. Hardly any Asians. So for me I had to feel like I need to fit in. So I was always telling my mom, &quot ; Mom, can I get sandwiches instead for lunch?&quot ; She said, &quot ; Why do you need sandwich? Like you eat the food that we have left over for dinner.&quot ; That&#039 ; s the way of immigrant families, refugee families to save money. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; No. I don&#039 ; t want to take my leftovers to school, mom, I want sandwiches and chips and stuff like that because all my friends.&quot ; And then my mom says OK. So she made me a sandwich one day, I took it to school. My friends, like &quot ; Your sandwich looks different.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like &quot ; Why? Like it&#039 ; s the same sandwich as you guys.&quot ; So the ham that my mom made for me was a Vietnamese ham, Cha Lua. It&#039 ; s like, you know, the pork ham that you put in banh mis. So my mom...That was the ham that-- she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; It&#039 ; s ham. This is ham I&#039 ; m used to.&quot ; You know, it was just with mayo, cheese, and Vietnamese ham and, you know, Mrs. Baird&#039 ; s bread. Like it&#039 ; s a sandwich. She got it, right? Well, yeah. |00:19:45| Brody Was it good? |00:19:45| Sirisavath It was for me. It, for me it was good. But for me, eating that sandwich in front of my friends, it didn&#039 ; t feel good because I would still get picked on. But I would let my friend try, like, &quot ; Well this is pretty good. Like, what&#039 ; s this?&quot ; And this has fish sauce in it. But yeah. So that transitional phase from San Antonio, I kind of lost my identity a little bit, so I can adapt to my environment. Now, I think that&#039 ; s part where a lot of immigrants&#039 ; child that grows up as immigrant but then lives in an environment that&#039 ; s not predominantly westernized. So yet we have to fit in. I think that&#039 ; s where I kind of lost, you know, my culture, lost myself, wanted to be more White, Hispanic, Black versus Asian. You know, a lot my friends, when I&#039 ; m growing up and are like, &quot ; What are you? Laos, Thai...Like, what&#039 ; s that?&quot ; Like, &quot ; I&#039 ; m Asian.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Okay, but where&#039 ; s it at?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Laos is next to Thailand, Vietnam.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Okay, all right.&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Did you guys learn in geography class?&quot ; So I was tired of explaining myself for a little bit at the time. So me growing up, a lot of people thought I was Hispanic. I look Hispanic, especially growing up in San Antonio. So I just kind of like, &quot ; Yeah. I&#039 ; m Mexican.&quot ; For much of my middle school years until like, until some of my friends came to my house and they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; What do you got to eat?&quot ; We&#039 ; ve got like, oh, &quot ; You know, I have chips, but they&#039 ; re shrimp chips. You know, I have a jerky, but it&#039 ; s Asian jerky or pork floss. And I have rice, you know, rice cake that&#039 ; s been dehydrated and fried. And then our Vietnamese ham and the sausage, cured sausage my mom makes. You know, pork sausage.&quot ; And they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; This is not. This is not Hispanic food. So, you&#039 ; re not Hispanic?&quot ; Like, &quot ; You know, Asian. I keep on telling you guys.&quot ; So, yeah. So it was a loss. Loss in identity for a little bit. But I think growing up, more and more around my mom and being, seeing her struggle to open her different, you know, restaurants and working out like, &quot ; You know what? Yeah, I&#039 ; m Asian. I&#039 ; m Asian.&quot ; . |00:22:09| Brody Yeah. I mean, that&#039 ; s a thing that comes up a lot in these conversations that I&#039 ; m having is the role that food plays in communicating culture. What are your thoughts around the power or role of food to tell people or teach people about your culture? |00:22:27| Sirisavath I think. You know, food is, literally, the bridge, you know, to bridge a gap in culture, I think everyone can resonate with someone through food. I think that&#039 ; s part of my mom&#039 ; s teaching was when she opened, finally opened, her third and last restaurant was which was Bai Bua. She did Thai food, and she did Thai food her way. And I think a lot of times, you know, she got...In a way, she can kind of like, &quot ; Well, you&#039 ; re not Thai, you&#039 ; re Lao, you&#039 ; re making Thai food.&quot ; But, you know, there are a lot of people making different kind of food. But for her, at the time, in order for people to understand what the food was, she had to make Thai food. It&#039 ; s like every culture, right? Well, we start off, a lot of Chinese restaurants were well known in America, and not people know, not much people know our food. So what do you have to cook first? You have to cook something that&#039 ; s prevalent and common in your community. So that&#039 ; s what my mom did was cook Thai food because we grew up in a Thai community in San Antonio. So, but that&#039 ; s how my mom is. She creates Thai food but creates her own way. But the way, that&#039 ; s...magnificent way. But that&#039 ; s her way of showcasing that you can&#039 ; t just be one ethnic group to make a different ethnic group food. You can be any type of ethnic food as long you take your time, effort to, you know, immerse yourself in a culture. I think that&#039 ; s what it was with her. So with her making Thai food and letting people know like this is part of Lao culture as well too, because Lao and Thai has a close, close, close identity within each other. And a lot of food to this day, a lot of Lao food, are immersed into Thai food, but Thai food is only known for Pad Thai, Pad See Ew, Pad Kee Mow, these basic dishes. But then, like when you say &quot ; laab.&quot ; Laab is actually a dish that was created from a lot of immigrants that lived in Nong Khai or like east of Thailand, which is the Isan province, right? So those foods started to trickle into Thailand and eventually now it&#039 ; s called Thai food. But for me, I think Lao food needs to be showcased a little bit more. I think that&#039 ; s where we&#039 ; re having a conversation now, is that in order for us to have an identity, we have to showcase our food to the masses and to the world. Because if we don&#039 ; t have an identity, you know, someone else can take our identity from us. So I think that&#039 ; s where food resonates for people like and then it becomes a storytelling, it becomes a conversational piece versus just, &quot ; Hey, this is good food.&quot ; Where is it from? Like it&#039 ; s from Laos and a Lao person makes it now versus a Thai person or Chinese or whatever. But the thing is now, I think that&#039 ; s part of why I&#039 ; ve created Khao Noodle Shop was that I wanted to represent my culture, my upbringing, also, mainly my mom, my inspiration for cooking to this day. I think she was before her time. She, you know, she was creating dishes. I mean, Thai dishes, Chinese dishes, Lao dishes, French dishes. Magnificent in her own kind of way. I think at the time there&#039 ; s no worldwide web where you can just &quot ; Hey...this person&#039 ; s the best chef.&quot ; And like other times, she was the best chef. I think her restaurant was nominated best Thai food in San Antonio for, I think, two or three consecutive years. And, you know, that tells you that she knew what she was doing. But also a Lao person making that type of food was some like, you know, like no one heard of what a Lao person is. And then eventually she started making Lao dishes on her menu. Part of it because I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Mom, like, why? Why do you not make stuff you make at home?&quot ; You know, I was like. A part of it because, yeah, we&#039 ; re in a Thai community. We go to a Thai temple, but a lot of Thai. You know, a lot of Lao people go to the Thai Temple, too, because, you know, our religion is the same, Buddhism. So we have a Buddhist temple. They all come together. I think that&#039 ; s what the community should be versus, you know, your Indian, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, you know, we&#039 ; re all Asian. So no matter who we are, we always can be, you know, immersed within our own cultures through food. I think that&#039 ; s where the ultimate reflection and history is behind cooking, because we use a lot of spices from India that, you know, migrated from India, like literally trading spice and trading recipes. I think that&#039 ; s what our community is about. You know, we don&#039 ; t take from each other, we share with each other. I think that&#039 ; s where our growth comes from, from a community of food and a language of food. |00:27:32| Brody That&#039 ; s great. Can you describe to me Lao food for someone who never had it? How would you describe Lao food? |00:27:43| Sirisavath So a lot of people ask me these questions. Like Lao food is very bright and vibrant because the flavors. The flavors are very bold. Very bold and funky, right? That everyone knows that we use a lot of fish sauce, fermented fish sauce as well. Shrimp paste, fermented crab. I think the reason why our food is a lot on the funkier side because preserving. Preservation. A lot of villagers are you know, there&#039 ; s no refrigerator in the village, there&#039 ; s no electricity in a village. So a lot of that stuff becomes fermentation curing to preserve what you have for the season. And that&#039 ; s the old school kind of way of teaching of how you keep your gathering from fall for summer, so on, so forth. It&#039 ; s the old teaching, right? And I think this day, everyone&#039 ; s doing this fermentation and curing and pickling, but that&#039 ; s the old way of saving food for the family. I think for a lot of food wise, we just kind of have it where it&#039 ; s you can cure or ferment everything right. If you want to sun dry some tomatoes, that&#039 ; s what we do. And like seaweed, but not seaweed, but river weed. We like to you know, sun dry, river weed so we can use it in different ingredients. Because, you know, being a landlocked island or land where we don&#039 ; t have that much accessibility to seafood, but we have a lot of rivers. Mekong River, to be an example, one, the biggest river in Southeast Asia, you know, a lot of fishermen fish off the Mekong River. So in order for them to make dishes better or have that umami was create fish sauce. I think that&#039 ; s where our food is about...It&#039 ; s gathered, you know, foraging off the land, fermenting, preserving off the land because villages are small in Laos. There&#039 ; s, you know, maybe a hundred members in a village, two hundred, three hundred members in a village at a time. So every province, every north, southern, central of Laos, every different type of cuisine and type of way of making Lao food. It&#039 ; s like you have Hmong food, which is more northern end of Lao and you know, there are more ____ on the Chinese side. So a lot of fermentations are, you know, driven from Chinese, southern Chinese, fermentation or curing. Like the tofu, you know, tofu or bean. That&#039 ; s kind of like something that&#039 ; s brought from Hmong culture because, you know, you have to preserve things. And I think that&#039 ; s what Lao food was about- preserving your food, preserving your history, preserving your culture. And so when people ask, &quot ; Well, why do you guys use a lot of fish sauce?&quot ; I think that that&#039 ; s the reason why, because that&#039 ; s part of our preservation of our culture and we use that for everything. Fish sauce is love of life. And then of course, sticky rice. Sticky rice is our starch, you know, our bread. That we use as often as much as everything else. It&#039 ; s our bread to Americans, right? It&#039 ; s cheap and it&#039 ; s easy to be grown. So that&#039 ; s why you hear a lot about sticky rice in Lao food. And we use that as a vessel to like dip and scoop our meals and our food that we eat with. And we eat with our hands quite a bit. And you know, the transition from that, you know, from the village foods that are known for villagers, eating you know I&#039 ; ll call it &quot ; farm raised&quot ; but &quot ; village raised&quot ; chicken or pork, is that that&#039 ; s what they&#039 ; d have for maybe the week or a month whatever. So, you know, that&#039 ; s why we some of the chicken that we use are younger chicken or a younger hen, so it&#039 ; s called the ____ Gai it&#039 ; s like chewy meat, but it&#039 ; s stewed down. So there&#039 ; s different types of variation of meats that we use for different things. I mean Lao food is a little complicated to explain, but I think for us it&#039 ; s more about utilizing what&#039 ; s around us. Same as us, right? As my mom being an immigrant from Laos, she didn&#039 ; t have the ingredients that she had from in Laos. So she had to adapt, adapt to her environments, where I don&#039 ; t have the fish sauce that I had at home, so then I&#039 ; ll have to ferment my own here. And the type of fish is different from what I have in Laos. Different ingredients. Basil, mint has different breeds of mints and basils here. Peppers same thing. So she had to adapt to her surrounding environment to make the Lao dishes that she craved or made at home back in Laos. So the word &quot ; authenticity&quot ; right? That&#039 ; s where everyone talks about this. So it&#039 ; s like, oh, when they come to my restaurant to Khao Noodle Shop, &quot ; That&#039 ; s not the Lao food. It&#039 ; s not authentic.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; It&#039 ; s authentic to me.&quot ; And then I think to my upbringing to where I can showcase my individuality in the dish versus making a homemade meal of like Mok Pa or laab, which is like a steamed fish or chicken salad, right. Or like the Tam Mak Hoong is because every household makes things differently. And I have this argument every time with my friends or people of my ethnic background, telling me that this is not true Lao food or not true Thai food. It&#039 ; s everything is like an art piece, right? It&#039 ; s subject to your interpretation. Food is art, right? So that&#039 ; s the thing that I need to let people understand. Like this is my individuality, making my masterpiece and making my art piece. You can think what you need to think, but in essence and true essence for myself, this is what I believe is the best for me and best for my business. And I think that&#039 ; s what needs to be the language of the culture is through the food. If it is through food, you make, if it&#039 ; s honest within yourself and authentic within yourself, then the food is authentic for yourself, and it doesn&#039 ; t need to be authentic for anyone else. But as long you stay true to yourself and about the food you make, the culture, the love for your culture, I think that&#039 ; s authentic enough for me. |00:34:11| Brody Yeah. I mean, it sounds like even what you were saying about the sort of the cultural context of Lao food, a lot of the food traditions, it sounds like, came out of necessity of preservation. And you also mentioned regional differences depending on what grows or what you can get. So, and also your mom, you know, when your mom&#039 ; s cooking, she was putting her own spin on it based on the ingredients that she could find. So, I mean, I will come back to the question of authenticity. But it does sound like, especially in a tradition where there&#039 ; s a lot of home cooking that is being transformed into restaurant meals, that that would be an area of controversy. |00:34:57| Sirisavath Yeah. Most definitely. |00:34:59| Brody So after you finished high school in San Antonio and then what happened next? |00:35:08| Sirisavath So after...I actually dropped out of high school. So I dropped out of high school, met a girl at the time. I don&#039 ; t want to go into details. Anyways. So I mean, at the time my mom was running operating Bai Bua, which was her Thai restaurant. So &quot ; bai bua&quot ; is the lotus leaf. So it&#039 ; s like you know where the lotus leaf blossoms and becomes a lotus. So that&#039 ; s Bai Bua. So I&#039 ; ve always helped my mom at the restaurant after school when I can or when I feel felt like it. You know, being a teenager and don&#039 ; t really want to work. And you know, I have some regrets about not helping my mom each and every single day that I could, because I&#039 ; m going through that struggle because it&#039 ; s hard to find help, hard to find staff right now. So my mom, same way it was hard to find workers that can deal with her first of all because she&#039 ; s a very perfectionist person and she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; This is my dish, don&#039 ; t mess it up&quot ; kind of thing. So she&#039 ; s very...I wouldn&#039 ; t call her a dictator, but when it comes to food, she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; This is my food, don&#039 ; t mess it up.&quot ; But yeah, so I help my mom for, for a little bit. At the time, I was still in high school, about to finish high school, and I decided to drop out. My mom wanted to know why I was dropping out of school. She was like, &quot ; You&#039 ; re like our...not our last hope. But you know, you were born here. There is no reason why you should not finish school.&quot ; But I think part of part of the reason why I didn&#039 ; t finish school was, you know, I kept on moving from, you know, Amarillo, learning English a late age, got held back in first grade, not speaking English as much as I should because my mom was an immigrant. She didn&#039 ; t know English. So for her, it was hard for her to teach me English at home. So I think part of why I grew up, when I grew up, I felt like again, I felt like I was a refugee because I did not have the proper education of most kids. Home schooling, you know, from my mom and moving from Amarillo to San Antonio that was a, I want to say I felt like I was uprooted from my country. That&#039 ; s what it felt like because I moved to a city that I had no friends, very different from my upbringing in Amarillo, Texas. So a lot more Hispanic nationalities and not many immigrants. And culture wise, I was kind of culture shocked. Where am I at? You know, San Antonio is very, you know, Hispanic culture, Mexican culture. I loved it, though, but it was it was to where I didn&#039 ; t know the language as well because, you know, all my friends spoke Spanish. I&#039 ; ll go to my friend&#039 ; s house ; their parents will speak Spanish to me. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Si.&quot ; You know, like and actually this is kind of going off subject, but one day I was eating at my friend&#039 ; s house, and I forgot what dish she made for us but just was so amazing. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Ms. ___, what dish is this?&quot ; Like, &quot ; You&#039 ; ve never had that before? Like, your parents don&#039 ; t cook their home for you?&quot ; Like, &quot ; No.&quot ; So, like &quot ; What do they cook for you?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Lao food.&quot ; &quot ; Lao food? Like what do you mean Lao food?&quot ; Like, &quot ; Yeah, I&#039 ; m Lao. I&#039 ; m Thai.&quot ; . She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; No, no, it&#039 ; s Chino. What? I thought all this time you&#039 ; re Mexican.&quot ; Like, no, you know, no I&#039 ; m Asian. |00:38:51| Brody That&#039 ; s funny. |00:38:52| Sirisavath Well, yeah, so, I mean, that was. It was funny, but she still loved it. |00:38:56| Brody What dish was it? |00:38:57| Sirisavath I forgot what it was. Like literally, it&#039 ; s kind of...Because I never had it, you know? I never had it. And I only had it at my friend&#039 ; s house. It was just like a stew. It was not pozole. It was similar. But it was like green, like stewy dish. Like it was so good and ever since then we&#039 ; re like I thought...It felt like I just like broke her heart. But she was funny about it. But yeah. So going back to, you know, leaving school after dropping out, my mom gave me an opportunity. It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Well, since you&#039 ; re not going to go to school, at least you can work. So here&#039 ; s the keys to the restaurant.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Huh? What?&quot ; &quot ; Happy birthday.&quot ; And like, it was my birthday too at the time. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What do I with this?&quot ; Mom&#039 ; s like, &quot ; I want you take over the restaurant.&quot ; Like how? Like, I was like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t know, Mom.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, I literally was speechless at the time. Not just that, because it was just a flattering gift. It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Wow. You trust me to run a restaurant for you, Mom?&quot ; Wow. But then again, like, I felt guilty because I didn&#039 ; t help her at the restaurant as much I should. So I think that more of the guilt kind I gave the key back to her. You know? So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Yeah, I don&#039 ; t think can do this, mom. It&#039 ; s a lot of stress, a lot of work that goes into it. You know, I just want to experience life for myself. I want to find myself.&quot ; And she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Well, hopefully you can find yourself because, you know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; I understand.&quot ; But I needed something for myself. And that time, I have a girlfriend. And I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I want to spend time with her.&quot ; And so my mom&#039 ; s like, &quot ; I guess I have to sell the restaurant then.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Yeah, I guess you have to. I&#039 ; m sorry.&quot ; So she sold the restaurant. I kind of just kind of, trying to experience life for myself, worked at, you know, Jack in the Box for a little bit, worked at a carwash, and then worked at Benihanas. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Ok. Well, I&#039 ; m good at working in the restaurant,&quot ; so went to work at Benihana for a little bit. Experienced learning how to, you know, do teppanyaki, hibachi chef and then worked there for a little bit in Austin. I wasn&#039 ; t... Because at the time they were about to open a location in San Antonio, so I&#039 ; ll drive to Austin to train. They had an apartment building for us to stay in, but there was like ten people were staying at that apartment. It was like a two- or three-bedroom apartment. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I&#039 ; m not going to sleep on the sofa.&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Ughhh.&quot ; So I decided to sleep on my car. Yeah. So I was living in my car for probably close to a month. But I would go into the apartment to, like, take a shower or use restroom before our shifts. Sometimes I just go to a gym. I would sign up for like a week&#039 ; s free trial just so I can take a shower, wash my face, and stuff like that. So because I mean, San Antonio is not that far from Austin and it&#039 ; s a good for me, at the time where I was living at, it was a good hour drive. So instead of driving back home an hour, sometimes I just, &quot ; I&#039 ; ll sleep in my car. It makes more sense.&quot ; Plus, I had no gas money to go back and forth all the time. And save money for just living my car. So I did that for a little bit and just got burnt out, tired and where for me, I felt like it wasn&#039 ; t worth it because, you know, losing sleep from sleeping in my car. Plus my car broke down on me. So, like alright, time to go back to San Antonio. So I went back to San Antonio. My brother&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What are you going to do with your life?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t know.&quot ; So he said, &quot ; Well, come work with me.&quot ; So then that&#039 ; s when I had a job with him working on airplanes. I didn&#039 ; t know anything about airplanes. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What? Do I need school this? You know, like a degree?&quot ; Like, &quot ; No. I got you.&quot ; Okay. And so then I worked at Performance Aviation, doing a field service technician. So my job was primarily fixing fuel tanks. Anything on planes that involves fuel, which is the wings, the belly, we take care of that stuff. So structure leaks, any kind of fastener leaks, we have to seal up the tanks to make sure there&#039 ; s no fuel leaks. So I did that for a couple of years. Travelled a lot, experienced life for myself at a young age at 17, yeah, 17. Worked there for about two years and then came back to San Antonio, left that job, or almost got fired from that job. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; No. I&#039 ; m not getting fired. I quit. Y&#039 ; all worked me too much.&quot ; But yeah, I worked a lot at that job and then I didn&#039 ; t know what to do with life. Came back. I felt like I was lost. At nineteen, twenty years old, I didn&#039 ; t know what to do. Went to spend time with my brother in Florida, stayed with him for a little bit. At the time, I was online surfing the net when dialup was a thing, and then met a person on Asian Avenue, which was a like a Facebook for Asians. And then I met my girlfriend at time, Noy and she lived in Dallas. She was Lao. I was like, &quot ; I met a Lao person. Awesome.&quot ; So then kind of communicated, talked for about six, seven months. And then I was like, &quot ; You know what? I&#039 ; m going to move to Dallas. I need to get away from San Antonio. Experience something different.&quot ; Then, yeah, moved to Dallas, met up and never left. I&#039 ; m here in Dallas, but I think Dallas was something I missed from far as I grew up in Amarillo, in San Antonio, because Dallas was a city, especially Garland, a lot of Lao immigrants, and I think that&#039 ; s something I felt like I was missing as well, too. So I met so many Lao people when in Garland still to this day. So now I call Garland my hometown. |00:45:05| Brody What was the community like? The Asian community, the Lao community in particular at that time that you came? |00:45:11| Sirisavath It was...Literally was something I missed. I think growing up in San Antonio was an identity crisis because I didn&#039 ; t have much Lao friends. My Lao friends are more Thai, Isan so more Thai. And you know, the closest culture or ethnic group closest to Lao is Thai. And I&#039 ; m part Thai, but I feel like the Lao community is more my background, my culture, my people. And it was very received. Like I kid you not. When I first moved to Dallas, I met my girlfriend and then went to a house party. And later when I went to the house party, her brother gives me a beer. He&#039 ; s like...that&#039 ; s a sign of welcoming, right? And especially in the Asian community, Lao community because you know, we love to drink and party. That&#039 ; s what Lao culture is, and a lot of Lao culture is because we come together to celebrate life. I think that&#039 ; s where I miss because in San Antonio, it&#039 ; s like I&#039 ; m just trying to find myself. I think that was really my moment of like, I felt home. Like I never felt home in any other place than in Garland and Dallas. And the people I was surrounded with, you know, friends and people I&#039 ; d never met were so friendly, so friendly. Like, they made me feel welcome, made me feel like one of their boys that they grew up all, you know, for years. You know, I didn&#039 ; t go to high school here, or middle school here, but I felt like I did. And so now it&#039 ; s like that feeling of, &quot ; Oh, I&#039 ; m one you guys.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Yeah, you are, man. Like you&#039 ; re one of our boys.&quot ; To this day, you know, one of my good friends, you know, he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Man, you&#039 ; re a Garland boy, man. You know, you even though you didn&#039 ; t, wasn&#039 ; t in, you know and didn&#039 ; t go to school with us and whatnot,&quot ; this guy, he was like, &quot ; Yeah, man, you&#039 ; re a Garland boy. It&#039 ; s like you&#039 ; re part of us.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Thank you. I&#039 ; m in?&quot ; |00:47:10| Brody You fit in. |00:47:11| Sirisavath Yeah. |00:47:12| Brody So then what was the turning point for you to get back into the food business? |00:47:17| Sirisavath Yeah. So the turning point when I worked in Dallas for much different odd jobs and then, you know, eating at the house and was always at house parties all the time. So, eating at everyone&#039 ; s house meant eating that Lao food. I was like, &quot ; Wow. This...I miss this food.&quot ; It reminded so much of my mom&#039 ; s food as well too because after I dropped out of high school, I literally moved out of the house. So, I moved out when I was 17 years old and never looked back and never moved back. So then it kind of brought me home like, you know, when you&#039 ; re missing something, food is where it&#039 ; s home for you. That&#039 ; s what I tell people too, it&#039 ; s like, no matter where you are in the world, if you have that homecooked style meal, it makes you feel comfort and it gives you that hug in your stomach and eventually in your heart. Right? I tell people all the time, that&#039 ; s what my food&#039 ; s is trying to be. So yeah...So I felt like, you know, Lao food. I found my place. I found Lao food again. So then I started to experiment, cook at home again. I haven&#039 ; t cooked in a long time, so I start cooking and my mom came to visit me one time. She&#039 ; s like &quot ; Why&#039 ; d you move to Dallas?&quot ; Oh yeah. &quot ; Here is my girlfriend and stuff.&quot ; And I cooked a meal for her. It was Khao Poon which is vermicelli noodles, but it&#039 ; s with red curry, coconut stewed down with chicken, like chicken feet, pork blood. And I didn&#039 ; t have any chicken that time, I had canned tuna. Like &quot ; I got tuna. Here.&quot ; So I made it for her, and she looked at me. She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Who taught you to make this.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You did.&quot ; She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; I did not teach you how to make this.&quot ; I was like, well, &quot ; I watched you make it from afar, and I remember it when you made it. The smell, the taste. Figured that you put this in, put that in, and bam.&quot ; And she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Boy, you have something. Don&#039 ; t let it go to waste. You know how to cook. I&#039 ; m glad you&#039 ; re cooking again.&quot ; And she left it at that. And then a couple of years later, you know, also visits me and she&#039 ; s always cooking at home when she comes to visit us. And she&#039 ; s always dragging me in the kitchen, like, I was boy again. Like, &quot ; Come help me.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; No, Mom. Now, that I&#039 ; m a grown adult, I won&#039 ; t help you.&quot ; But I would watch her, help her wash vegetables. You know, she would tell me how to cook this, how to watch for this temperature on this, you know, put your finger on it in the rice to make sure you have enough water, kind of, you know, the old school teaching of like I missed that as a child. And I think part of it, I think she knew she had a limited time left on this world. Backtrack because when she was back in Laos, she had a fortuneteller to read her fortune. And the fortune told her that she would die at a young age. Not young age, but at least at a certain time in her life. And I think that&#039 ; s what&#039 ; s always been in her mind. And eventually, I think that&#039 ; s part of the reason why she came to visit us so often. She lived in San Antonio and would drive every weekend, come visit us, stay a week or two and drive back. And I think that&#039 ; s, now that I think of it, I didn&#039 ; t know until she told us afterwards. So, her last trip was when she went to Thailand, came back- Thailand, Laos- came back and then we went to my best friend&#039 ; s wedding. Jack&#039 ; s wedding in Tennessee, and we had a good time, celebrating life. Saw my mom and dad dancing together. Hadn&#039 ; t seen them dance together in forever and the dance floor. It was a magical moment. And to this day, I never will ever forget that moment. And she came back home., starting to have jaundice. Like her eye was like yellow, bloodshot yellow. Skin was starting to turn yellow. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What&#039 ; s going on, Mom?&quot ; Took her to a hospital. You know, questions, the typical questions. &quot ; Where have you travelled?&quot ; So &quot ; Just came from Thailand, Laos.&quot ; Oh. Every time, &quot ; Hepatitis.&quot ; You know, like, that&#039 ; s like the number one thing that comes to doctors. &quot ; Oh, you went to Asia?&quot ; &quot ; Yeah, Hepatitis C or something.&quot ; And then they ran two tests it&#039 ; s like, &quot ; No, it&#039 ; s not hepatitis. Okay. We had to do in endoscopic surgery to see some maybe mass or something.&quot ; And they did something and found a blockage in her bile duct, and it was cancerous. And so I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; How do you get a tumor in a bile duct.&quot ; And it connects your bowel, your gall bladder, to your liver. So can&#039 ; t just remove it. Apparently, it&#039 ; s a surgery that&#039 ; s never done or is not...And there&#039 ; s only a few cases in America, like 1200, 1500 cases. So is a very rare, very rare cancer. And a doctor told us, like, &quot ; Oh, well, your mom has about a year and a half to two years to live. It&#039 ; s terminal.&quot ; Oh, it was heartbreaking. I think my mom kind of knew it, but she didn&#039 ; t know it was like going to be like this. And she stayed with us in Dallas. We took her to do chemotherapy each and every single day. She stayed with it with me and my brother at our house. So we always cooking, involving, talking, arguing. Most of the time, more than anything else, is more bickering then having a civil conversation. But yeah. Eventually she wanted to go back to San Antonio because, she knows, she&#039 ; s going to pass. She wants pass at home. And while cooking at home with my mom, she was telling me, you know, &quot ; I&#039 ; ll miss you. You know, I miss, I miss you, you know, cooking for me because I know that I won&#039 ; t have one of your meals ever again, because this would be my last time to cook with you. So come down and cook with me.&quot ; And she has a simple dish. Simple dish. It&#039 ; s one of her favorite dish was a bitter melon. She loves bitter melon. And she just, she does it different from everyone else. And she loved to cook it in eggs. She would put scrambled eggs and with the bitter melon. And she&#039 ; s sitting there teaching me and my brother, like &quot ; This how you do it.&quot ; Over and over every morning. Wake up. She would like two or three mornings, she would teach us this dish. And then one of her last dish that she taught me to make was sukiyaki. It&#039 ; s a sukiyaki sauce that she makes, and everyone loves her sukiyaki sauce. It&#039 ; s one of the best sauce, like she makes this... It&#039 ; s the essence of what kind of Lao culture is, but also influenced from Japanese, because sukiyaki is a Japanese word. But it was brought by the soldiers, Japanese soldiers in Laos, but it became something else. But my mom taught me how to make that sukiyaki, and that day was just about patience. I understood now, like when you cook, you have to have time and patience. You can&#039 ; t rush things because sukiyaki is a dish where you have to sit there and stir and stir and stir. I&#039 ; m talking about maybe an hour, hour, and a half at most. And my mom was like, &quot ; No, you got to. You can&#039 ; t walk away. You walk away, you&#039 ; re going to burn the peanuts and dry shrimp in there.&quot ; So you have to keep on stirring until it...to where your coconut milk reduces, so separates from the oil, the coconut oil. So that&#039 ; s when you know your dish is ready and done. And so that&#039 ; s when the whole cooking, my feel for cooking came back again, was cooking that last dish for my mom. And to this day, I&#039 ; ve not perfected that dish, but I&#039 ; m close to it. And so I told myself and my mom&#039 ; s like, &quot ; I want you to cook. I want you to do something that&#039 ; s more meaningful to have purpose versus you just try to collect a paycheck and trying to find yourself. I think you found yourself just not looking hard enough.&quot ; And I think that was what it really started my cooking voyage to this day. So when she passed, I kind of dedicated my time to tell her story. And I know, at the time, even though I left all my jobs, and I landed a good job, which with HP being a field service engineer, even though I have no degree, but I have a lot of experience on computers and do a lot of computer jobs. I landed at that job. It was like a dream job, you know, work at home, have a company car, cell phone, laptops, you know, everything, you know, gas card and AMEX, like you name it. It was a dream job. But I felt still a void. And I just hear my mom&#039 ; s voice in my back of my head, it&#039 ; s like &quot ; Start cooking, you know, you&#039 ; ll find purpose.&quot ; And I think that&#039 ; s what happened. I started cooking more at home. And then eventually cooked for my friends. Had my friends come over you know, just have a meal. And they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Man, I didn&#039 ; t know you know how to cook. &quot ; Like, &quot ; I&#039 ; ve been cooking all my life. I just haven&#039 ; t cooked for you guys.&quot ; I think that&#039 ; s when the awakening happened was when my friends told me the dishes I was making was phenomenal. It was something as comforting. It was Lao, but in your own way. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Thank you. All right.&quot ; And then one of my buddies, Tang he&#039 ; s, like, &quot ; Man, why don&#039 ; t you just like do pop ups.&quot ; &quot ; What&#039 ; s pop ups?&quot ; You know, he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; A lot of chefs does that in, like, L.A., New York, underground food scene where they just get yourself noticed and their food noticed.&quot ; And this is where the food voyage comes from. It&#039 ; s cook at home, gather some friends together, have a conversation. And this is stuff...The point of our culture is within the food you serve and with our friends coming, having conversation, gathering, and understanding that Lao food can be something else. And that&#039 ; s where I&#039 ; m like the light bulb went out and went up, right? I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh, yeah. You know what? Maybe I just needed to do Lao food my way.&quot ; Have it where it&#039 ; s more creative, but also tells people who I am. I&#039 ; m Asian, Lao, Texan, American. So I can put myself in these dishes and showcase myself to the world and to what my mom taught me and what she inspired me to be. And that&#039 ; s where five became fifteen. Fifteen became twenty. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Alright. This condo is getting too small.&quot ; So that&#039 ; s when I started doing pop-up at my friend&#039 ; s bar. People&#039 ; s Last Stand. They had a bar and a small kitchen. Kind of made sense, like &quot ; You can make money off the bar. I can make money off the food and showcase my food.&quot ; So that&#039 ; s where it happened and it just kind of blew up. And I&#039 ; m just doing small dishes here and there. And I love, you know, Lao food has so much dishes that no one knows of. And also it tells a story of my upbringing and being Lao, Asian-American, Thai as well. So a lot of these dishes became my story and pop-ups lasted for about four years. And then one of my friends that helped me start up the pop-up was |00:59:22|Kai. He&#039 ; s actually Vietnamese, but he loves to cook, and we connect through food. And I think that&#039 ; s what another lesson is. You know, you build friendship through food as well, too. I think that&#039 ; s where our connection happened was through our, the food that we&#039 ; re making. And he started with me and then had another friend. So we never...We met, but not, physically. You know, we have mutual friends, but we haven&#039 ; t met physically. But, you know, he saw what I was doing. His name is Tex. And Tex was like, &quot ; Hey, man, I love what you&#039 ; re doing, dude. You let me know when you need help. I&#039 ; ll come and I&#039 ; ll help you on your pop-ups.&quot ; Okay. &quot ; Well, I&#039 ; m going to do pop-ups every other week, weekend, so come out.&quot ; So we did pop-up there around different friends&#039 ; bars. And then I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what? I need to open a restaurant.&quot ; So I went back to Laos and Thailand, Cambodia. You know, just there, Southeast Asian like food trip. But it&#039 ; s just trying to explore what Southeast Asian food is, not just Lao food. And what, you know, type of chefs are doing and what type of foods are cooking. Because I don&#039 ; t have someone that I can rely on now because I don&#039 ; t have my mom. You know, I have my grandmom, but with her having dementia, her and her palate changed quite a bit. When she makes something, it&#039 ; s like overly salted, like, &quot ; Grandma, food&#039 ; s too salty.&quot ; But yeah, so for me it was go back home to my mom&#039 ; s, my homeland, motherland to experience for myself what Lao food, Thai food was about. And so then that&#039 ; s when I got the idea. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Okay, I know what I&#039 ; m doing.&quot ; I wanted to open a restaurant where it&#039 ; s communal space. Because that&#039 ; s what brings people together. Communal eating, which is the same thing my mom does. Brings the family together through communal eating. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Know what? Yeah. It makes sense.&quot ; To have a conversation with a stranger that&#039 ; s sitting next to you. Share a piece of rice or share a piece of this dish with the person next to you. And my mom was all that type of person. She&#039 ; s all sharing, regardless of if she&#039 ; d get money or not. So you know what? That&#039 ; s where I need to be. So I told Tex like, &quot ; I have idea for a restaurant. This is my idea. Listen.&quot ; He&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Okay, what&#039 ; s the idea?&quot ; So we&#039 ; re going to do noodles. A noodle shop. But going to be Lao inspired noodles and then small dishes like tapas style. He&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Okay, let me try and envision this. Alright, let&#039 ; s go to Thailand.&quot ; So we went to Thailand and like, you know, this is...The planning had happened already. The name happened. And you know like I had to have him to experience for himself. He hasn&#039 ; t been back to Thailand for like fifteen years. Immersed into the Thai foods and street foods and went to the suburbs because you know, suburb food&#039 ; s more like Isan food, which is the essence of Lao food. So he ate all this food and is like, &quot ; Okay, what&#039 ; s your plan?&quot ; &quot ; Like you see all these small bowls that they serve in? Like, this is my idea: to serve noodles in these small bowls so they can eat multiple noodles, different type of noodles, as much or as little as they want. So they can experience the menu, experience the culture, and experience the livelihood of street food in Asia, you know, primarily in Laos and Thailand.&quot ; He&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Man that&#039 ; s a great idea.&quot ; And so Khao happened. And we came back and forth on the name, so I mentioned &quot ; Khao,&quot ; but we went away from it and came up with a couple of names and &quot ; Khao&quot ; just resonated with me. And people ask me, &quot ; Why you came with Khao?&quot ; First off, &quot ; khao&quot ; is- it means &quot ; rice&quot ; in Laos and Thai. So that&#039 ; s the whole saying of &quot ; We&#039 ; re cheering on the rice farm instead of cheering on the corn farm.&quot ; Fields. So, rice is our life. We thrive and survive on off of rice. That&#039 ; s one thing, but also &quot ; khao&quot ; means like food. And then when you tell people to |01:03:40|______ gin khao, it&#039 ; s like &quot ; we come together to eat.&quot ; So it makes so much sense. &quot ; Khao.&quot ; That&#039 ; s the word for khao, bringing everyone together to enjoy a meal and have a conversational with a person that you might not know and becomes your friend, or so on and so forth. Like our journey as when we build a pop-up. You know, I didn&#039 ; t know, you didn&#039 ; t really know me, but we resonated with each other through the food we made. So that that&#039 ; s where Khao happened. |01:04:11| Brody That&#039 ; s really nice. Where was the restaurant located? |01:04:14| Sirisavath So we were going back and forth on looking location for Khao. My idea was a &quot ; hole in the wall&quot ; you know, like off the beaten path. And we&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Yeah, you know, maybe. Maybe a shopping strip somewhere with foot traffic.&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Nah, let&#039 ; s make it fun. Let&#039 ; s make a destination and find it.&quot ; And then Tex is like, &quot ; Well, let me reach out to one of our landlords and see if they know anything.&quot ; And then we reached out to a broker, but the broker doesn&#039 ; t work for them, works for another group. It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Well, what are you looking for?&quot ; Like, &quot ; We&#039 ; re look for a tiny, small space. Something that, you know, we&#039 ; re going to make this noodle shop, blah, blah, blah.&quot ; He goes, &quot ; Okay. I have a couple locations. One was in Bishop Arts, one of off of Walnut Hill off of 75, and then East Dallas.&quot ; It was the second location and we looked at. Like &quot ; East Dallas, like this looks so familiar.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Wait a minute. I know this neighborhood, like this neighborhood. I&#039 ; ve been through this neighborhood multiple times when I first moved to Dallas. You know, there used to be a lot of Cambodian refugees, Lao refugees, and Vietnamese here.&quot ; And Mai&#039 ; s...Iike, &quot ; Yeah. I remember Mai&#039 ; s.&quot ; And then I saw Jade Garden. &quot ; Oh Jade Garden! Like one of our friends had a wedding here, like, a long time ago.&quot ; And that neighborhood changed so much, I didn&#039 ; t recognize it. And so, I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what?&quot ; Then we looked at the space. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; That space is so tiny.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t know.&quot ; And it was right next to Mai&#039 ; s. Mai&#039 ; s is a staple of East Dallas, been there, you know, almost 30 years. So, like, you know, &quot ; It&#039 ; s a lot of work. We&#039 ; ll have to turn this place down.&quot ; And, and so we, like, went back and forth, talked to my wife. She&#039 ; s like &quot ; Where is this location at?&quot ; &quot ; It&#039 ; s in East Dallas, it&#039 ; s right next to Mai&#039 ; s.&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Oh yeah, that was the first neighborhood that we were growing up in after we were sponsored from the International Rescue Committee and the Parkwood Baptist church where a lot of Southeast Asian groups were immigrant to.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What? Really?&quot ; And it&#039 ; s like kind, &quot ; There&#039 ; s some gardens there, too.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Yeah, that&#039 ; s the garden my brother was in Boy Scout. They helped build those gardens too.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Oh wait. No way.&quot ; So something just like, you know, butterflies in my stomach and I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what? This is right. The right place. You know, it&#039 ; s an immigrant neighborhood that&#039 ; s been gentrifying. But let&#039 ; s be that new growth of this neighborhood, a full circle.&quot ; And so we decided to sign the lease and we signed a lease in February of 2017 and went to Thailand right afterwards to buy our supplies. Went to Laos, Thailand, bought our supplies. Our bowls, our equipment. Oh, yeah. It was crazy. And funny story, we have friends...His girlfriend had friends that went for a bachelor trip. So we had the girls ...like used them as mules, I&#039 ; m sorry to say that, to bring equipment back for us. So we didn&#039 ; t have to pay for shipping because you had two bags, you know, luggage. So yeah, it was a whole experience to open that shop. And, you know, it&#039 ; s East Dallas next to Mai&#039 ; s. Catty-corner from Jimmy&#039 ; s Deli. Jimmy&#039 ; s Deli&#039 ; s been there for 50 years. And my wife was telling me, &quot ; I think I remember going to Jimmy&#039 ; s, and I think I stole some bubblegum from the store.&quot ; Like, &quot ; What?&quot ; So yeah. So that&#039 ; s that was the idea of what Khao could, you know, should have been. And we didn&#039 ; t anticipate the growth. You know, we&#039 ; re like, &quot ; You know, hopefully we&#039 ; ll be here for like, you know, two or three years and maybe we&#039 ; ll have people come and it&#039 ; ll be a line.&quot ; You know, we were just joking like, &quot ; Yeah, you know, we&#039 ; ll be that restaurant three years from now. People will be waiting outside two hours, three hours.&quot ; It happened the first year. |01:08:10| Brody Tell me how the restaurant was received. |01:08:13| Sirisavath Oh, yeah, that&#039 ; s how I mean...That restaurant, I mean, it blew up more than I expected. I reached out to a mutual friend at the time that runs Wabi House, Dien Nguyen. And he&#039 ; s been in the industry for a long time and especially in Dallas. And I&#039 ; m like asking him for mentorship pretty much. Like, &quot ; Where should I do? How should I do this? How can I get my name out?&quot ; And then he gave me a contact to his PR person, Teresa Nguyen. I reached out to her and talked to her, and she experienced the food that we made. &quot ; So your food&#039 ; s phenomenal. What can I do to help?&quot ; Yeah. So she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What can I do to help you guys?&quot ; We&#039 ; re like, well, &quot ; This is our game plan. We&#039 ; re going to open a noodle shop, and it&#039 ; s going to be tapas style, small portions, but it&#039 ; s going to be Lao style.&quot ; And she said, &quot ; Okay.&quot ; So, you know, I pretty much pitched her the idea. Two dudes, you know, have somewhat a background in restaurants. Tex runs his parents&#039 ; restaurants, Chicken Rice. It&#039 ; s more like a Chinese fried chicken and fried rice kind of thing. But his parents established that business for 30 years. So we kind of have I mean, background of restaurants from our parents&#039 ; restaurant to us running a real restaurant by ourselves. So we don&#039 ; t really have real restaurant experience. But, you know, she believed in our vision and dream that we have and then kind of set a path for the growth for Khao. You know, we invited... We had an intimate, about the size of this table, like eight press that came in to introduce what we&#039 ; re doing to, you know, get feedback as well too. Mainly get the feedback, not &quot ; Hey, here&#039 ; s... This is going to be the number one restaurant in the world&quot ; kind of thing. It was like &quot ; This is an introduction to Chef Donny. This is who he is, where he&#039 ; s coming from, where he&#039 ; s about.&quot ; So this is more, you know, it&#039 ; s storytelling than anything else. And just to get feedback. We made our handmade, fresh noodles that we always do for our pop ups. And then boat noodles which me personally, it feels like it&#039 ; s in my identity as growing up as a child, going back to Laos or Thailand, eating this noodle and off the boat with the ladies scooping it up. So it makes sense to have this dish. So we made this dish, made a couple other dishes. Sakoo, which is a tapioca dumpling, hand-rolled, with peanuts, pickled radish. And then everyone&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What the heck is this?&quot ; I was, like, it&#039 ; s tapioca, radish, and peanuts.&quot ; Like, &quot ; How? It&#039 ; s so sweet and savory at the same time.&quot ; And then I made one of my mom&#039 ; s favorite dessert, which is like a--if you ever go to dim sum--that ginger or tofu? Yeah. So it was like one of her favorite things to eat, that I made in my own interpretation, my way. And I made it cold instead of hot. So I made dessert and it was very well received, good feedback, met at the time Eve, she was a D Magazine food writer, and she just talked to me, was like, &quot ; I&#039 ; ve never eaten a meal like this before. I feel like there&#039 ; s a lot of love and care into this. So I can&#039 ; t wait to, for you to open this restaurant.&quot ; And then planned everything, opened the restaurant, and did a friends and family soft opening. It was, you know, pretty well-received. A lot of feedback. A lot of negative feedback. Of course, you know, &quot ; You&#039 ; re not doing Laos food. You&#039 ; re not...This is not traditional and whatnot.&quot ; But yeah, I mean, we didn&#039 ; t anticipate it and then Eve wrote a nice article for us and, then everything from there kind of went up. From Eater, one of the best new restaurants of2019 and then to the big one, Bon Appetit. Like, you know...And then at the time I was talking to my chef mentor, I call her my &quot ; chef mom&quot ; which is Chef Seng and she&#039 ; s the pioneer for like Lao food to be progressive in this modern day. And you know she opened her Lao restaurant in the capital, DC. So I looked at her as, you know, a mentor and also getting feedback from her about what I&#039 ; m doing, how things. And when I told her about Bon Appetit, she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; You better get ready.&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Why?&quot ; Because they usually announce their first, you know, fifty best restaurants and then their ten best new restaurants. I was like, &quot ; Wow, really? Okay.&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, I didn&#039 ; t know. I don&#039 ; t you know, I&#039 ; m not in the food industry like that. You know, I grew up in a restaurant, but not just in this big stage like that. And she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Just get ready.&quot ; So okay, for me, I&#039 ; m thinking, &quot ; Okay, we&#039 ; ll be part of the fifty. I think I&#039 ; m fine with that.&quot ; You know. Okay. Fifty came up. &quot ; Where are we at? Okay, maybe we didn&#039 ; t make it.&quot ; Okay then a ten came out. Like, &quot ; We&#039 ; re not part it. Wait, no, wait. There&#039 ; s only seven. Oh, there&#039 ; s a top three, too. Like what? Well, wait, wait, hold on.&quot ; There&#039 ; s fifty, ten. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; So you&#039 ; re telling me we could be part of this top three?&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Oh my God.&quot ; And, like, I kid you not. Like, they did an interview. I didn&#039 ; t know what that interview was for. Now I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh, maybe this is just what it was for.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Why you guys didn&#039 ; t tell me?&quot ; They had been, you know, very secretive. And when the announcement came up, you know, top three restaurant in the United States, you know, number three, number two. &quot ; What? We&#039 ; re the number two restaurant in a country?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh my God.&quot ; I lost it. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Wow.&quot ; |01:14:26| Brody What was your reaction? |01:14:27| Sirisavath I just, I couldn&#039 ; t believe it. I just couldn&#039 ; t believe it. Like number two restaurant. Lao food. Lao restaurant. Like, how is that possible? Konbi is a Japanese sandwich shop. We were number two. Lao restaurant. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; How the heck? How?&quot ; |01:14:44| Brody That&#039 ; s incredible. Congratulations on that. You mentioned not having come into the food industry through culinary school and all of that and, you know, but rather growing up in a restaurant. How did that make you feel to win a big chef award? |01:15:09| Sirisavath For me, I was speechless. And also, I mean, I was proud at the moment, but also, I felt like I&#039 ; ve done justice for our culture and especially for Lao culture, right? And then I left at that for that moment. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what? I&#039 ; m doing it just for all of us, for all Southeast Asian, not just Lao culture, but all Southeast Asian culture. Because we always get overlooked and, you know, we always get Japanese food, Korean food, Chinese food. But never Southeast Asian, no Indian, no Cambodian, no Lao, no Vietnamese. You know, Vietnamese are getting their moment. You know, Philippines getting their moment. But Lao food, Cambodian food, no one knows. So that&#039 ; s the thing for me was like, it&#039 ; s for all of us. And you know, we didn&#039 ; t expect even to be on the top ten and top three and like and then we got invited to New York. I was like, &quot ; What?&quot ; It just...It was just like ; it was just amazing. You know, I have never envisioned that to happen even the first year. And I&#039 ; m like maybe ten years from now, but never the first year and, you know, I was...had a speech for my team and my crew at the time. It was that I&#039 ; m doing this for all of us, not for just me. And I want everyone to grow within us as Khao. If we can&#039 ; t grow together, we&#039 ; re going to grow apart. But that&#039 ; s okay because that&#039 ; s something that you can grow apart because you need to find your own way. I&#039 ; m okay with that. And that&#039 ; s part of the reason why when I have a gathering, I take a team with us. You know, not every team member got to go, but majority of them got to go to New York with us. And it was an experience that, you know, I wish, and I hope they still to this day, you know have are blessed about that experience because I don&#039 ; t think ever, ever have that kind of experience ever again. So it was mainly for my team, for to win number two restaurant in the nation. It wasn&#039 ; t for me. It was for my culture, for my team, for the people that supported me through all this effort and new pop ups. So I never thought it was for myself and then, you know, coming back and lines, like lines and lines. You know, when we first came back opening at...I couldn&#039 ; t grasp how much our vision came to fruition. Like we talked about this. Having this dream, you know, people coming, waiting in line and all this stuff. And it, it&#039 ; s right outside our door. And it wasn&#039 ; t just outside our door, it was around the building. Like, you know, people were waiting three hours out there. It was so amazing, though. Well received. I had to hire so many people just to make sure that we can, you know, keep up with the masses, keep up with the glamor and so on, so forth. You know, labor costs were through a roof. We knew that. But we had to keep on moving forward to showcase the food we created within our home, you know, through our parents and now to the masses. And for us to...And I tell this all the time, like, &quot ; We&#039 ; re number two. Sucks, but we&#039 ; re number one in your heart.&quot ; Remember that. We&#039 ; re number one in your heart and stomach. But to this day, I still can&#039 ; t believe how much people well received from all around the world because we had customers... And this is when I was able to really greet customers, talk to customers. And that&#039 ; s something my mom did at her restaurant. You know, her teaching was always customers and employees comes first. Take care of your customers, take care of your employees, because those are the ones that will continue to support you. And I always do that with my team, i always support my team regardless of who they are. And some might not ever think that I care for them. I always care for every single member of my team regardless of if they work there for one day, two days, three days, whatever. I saw they put effort into believing what we did there. And I met so many customers from out of the country. Iceland, Switzerland, England, Brazil. You know, Spain. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What? How the heck do you guys know?&quot ; They&#039 ; re like, &quot ; You&#039 ; re number two restaurant in the United States...You&#039 ; re in Conde Nast Magazine, which is international. You&#039 ; re understand that, right?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh, wow.&quot ; So it was it was literally, I felt like I was in a dream. Seriously a dream. And then that dream came crashing in 2020. |01:19:59| Brody Oh, well, but before that, you had more even more accolades, right? You personally got recognized by the James Beard? |01:20:06| Sirisavath Yes. I mean, that was part of when I was in Thailand. Because we went to my business partner, Tex&#039 ; s wedding, him and Annie. Annie was our front of the house manager, and we went for the wedding. And it was hard because, you know, we went through that whole year of working your butt off and it&#039 ; s our occasion. And the same thing, you know, we were able to take a couple of our team members with us. I told them, &quot ; Just pay your plane ticket. You know, pretty much you&#039 ; re on paid vacation. You&#039 ; re going to get paid vacation.&quot ; And that&#039 ; s what it was. Like three, four of our team was able to go. And at the time I was there, and we came back, that&#039 ; s when COVID happened, right before COVID happened. So we went there, had a good time, had a vacation, had a break. Came back, you know, getting rested up and then I had to fly out again in three weeks to do a Lao food retreat for Lao Food Movement and you know to bring Lao chefs together all around the world to our organization. Channapha, she was the leader for Legacies of War, so she was coming up with this idea, &quot ; Hey, let&#039 ; s bring Lao chefs together.&quot ; So I was like, &quot ; Okay, cool.&quot ; And literally, the week before I was supposed to depart, I caught the flu. It was pretty bad. I almost had to cancel my whole trip. But instead I postponed my trip like a week later. So then I kind of recuperated. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; This flu is getting bad.&quot ; And here comes the news... COVID, you know, coronavirus. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t think I caught it.&quot ; So I went in and got tested to make sure. This was very new. So then my result came back as Influenza B instead A. So it&#039 ; s more in the swine flu. So it&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Okay, maybe I don&#039 ; t have it.&quot ; Anyway, I go back to Thailand, I&#039 ; m still kind of feeling out of it. I was like, &quot ; Man, they&#039 ; re doing this temperature check.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t know if going to get accepted.&quot ; You know, like, I&#039 ; m not hot, but, you know, I just feel like I&#039 ; m still sick. But I have to go to this event and plus I have to meet my dad in Thailand. Went there and that&#039 ; s when I got the news. And everyone&#039 ; s like blowing up my phone, like, &quot ; Did you hear?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like &quot ; What you mean?&quot ; &quot ; Congratulations.&quot ; &quot ; What are we talking about?&quot ; James Beard Semifinalist. Like, &quot ; What? You&#039 ; ve got to be kidding me.&quot ; Like, no way. You know, the time difference. I was, you know, falling asleep, my phone&#039 ; s blowing up. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; No way.&quot ; I thought, &quot ; Okay. All right.&quot ; So my plan was when I come back, we&#039 ; re going to hit it hard. We&#039 ; re going to, you know, continue our growth, and make amazing food. Continues telling a story, inspiring other chefs, other home cooks whoever to become someone they know that they can be. Come back and then...Not just came back. So before...Right before I came back, I also found out that I was part of Food &amp ; Wine &quot ; Best Ten New Chefs.&quot ; Like, no, like, come on. |01:23:09| Brody Amazing. Congratulations. |01:23:11| Sirisavath I&#039 ; m like &quot ; What?&quot ; I like, &quot ; No, this is not real. This is not real.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, this is definitely a dream. Definitely a dream.&quot ; You know, one thing is Bon Appétit. James Beard. But Food &amp ; Wine &quot ; Best New Chefs.&quot ; Like, &quot ; No. You guys you guys have this wrong. You guys. No.&quot ; I come back and they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; No. You&#039 ; re a part of the new &quot ; Best New Chefs&quot ; for 2020, class of 2020.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Oh my God. This is where I felt like, you know, winning Bon Appetit, winning James Beard, or not even winning, but nominated for James Beard, that was for my team. That was for the culture, for us, to put us on the map. But to win Food &amp ; Wine was like I felt like, you know what? I had to be selfish. This is for me. I can hear my mom in the back of my head like, &quot ; This is for you. You understand that. You know, you did everything that you could do, but accept this one because this is for you. It&#039 ; s &#039 ; Best New Chef.&#039 ; You are the chef. You are a chef.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Damn. I am a chef now. I&#039 ; m not a home cook or mama&#039 ; s boy cook, learn from...I&#039 ; m like I&#039 ; m a chef. Like, wow.&quot ; Like it&#039 ; s a title that I know that rarely people use. I mean people use &quot ; chef&quot ; quite a bit and for me to learn the meaning of &quot ; chef&quot ; is involvement in the food you make, the experience you create for the diners, the food that you source, the dishes that you create artistically and emotionally, and also to your way of conveying a message. That&#039 ; s what &quot ; chef&quot ; is about. It&#039 ; s doing everything. It&#039 ; s not just cooking one dish. It&#039 ; s breaking down the protein, picking leaves, cleaning bathrooms, cleaning dishes. That&#039 ; s what a chef is, and I literally saw that in my mom, but no one ever gave her that recognition as a chef because she did everything and she immersed herself into the business to the point where it drove her crazy, almost to a point where she stressed herself out. And now I&#039 ; m going through those motions. But you know. It builds character, right? Food builds character. Business builds character. Involvement in your own culture builds character because you know more about yourself than you thought you knew. And that&#039 ; s what food does to people. |01:25:49| Brody You mentioned the storytelling aspect of what you&#039 ; re trying to do with your menu and your cooking. I wondered if you could talk about, as you decide what goes on the menu, how much are you thinking about educating or storytelling and how much about specifically food? |01:26:15| Sirisavath So for me, like Khao Noodle Shop...like I said, to this day, Khao Noodle Shop will be a passion project. I understand passion projects sometimes don&#039 ; t make you money. I understand that now. But passion is also through grit and grind. You have to be able to put in your work and time into making something beautiful. And even a passion project, you can&#039 ; t just say &quot ; I have passion, I have drive. I can make a dish.&quot ; No. It gets you there. But it doesn&#039 ; t it get you a hundred percent there? The other part of it is that storytelling. When you have passion, you have stories. Dishes that you create is the journey and the story through your life. I think that&#039 ; s part of why Khao is so special, because every dish that I make at Khao is a story behind it. Like the boat noodles. Boat noodles was a dish that when I first went to Thailand as a young child, eating that dish, was so amazing and so fun because I was eating off a boat and this old lady pouring it out and giving it to me. And same thing. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Mom, what&#039 ; s this dish that&#039 ; s so good?&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, so rich and hearty and flavorful and it&#039 ; s like, &quot ; It&#039 ; s the pork blood they put in.&quot ; And I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What the heck? Pork blood.&quot ; As a young child, like, &quot ; No.&quot ; But then I asked her, like, &quot ; Can you make this dish at home?&quot ; Like, &quot ; Well, yeah, I&#039 ; ll make it for you.&quot ; So as a child, to remember that essence of me going to Southeast Asia, that for the very first time as a child, that was my first dish that I remember eating. And then everything else follows through, like making like Khao Poon, Khao Poon noodles. That was that dish I made for my mom that she said she didn&#039 ; t teach me how to make, but she did. I mean, she didn&#039 ; t physically taught me how to make that dish. But, you know, it was more of a... what&#039 ; s that word I&#039 ; m looking for...osmosis kind of way of teaching. So I kind of absorbed that from her, from her movement of and her smell and just kind of... she was a artist like. And so she&#039 ; s like a conductor of, you know, these dishes, of these ingredients when she&#039 ; s putting food in, an ingredient into the soup or whatever and grabbing a little pinch of salt here, eyeballing everything. It&#039 ; s like she&#039 ; s the conductor of her dish and everything comes out and it&#039 ; s just a beautiful dish like, you know, composing a beautiful music and a symphony. So that&#039 ; s why her symphony is the dish she makes. And I think that&#039 ; s where I saw her. That&#039 ; s why to this day, I always give her inspiration. I mean, she is my inspiration in everything, but yeah. So that&#039 ; s part of that storytelling of what my dishes are. You know, my upbringing, my roots. Like tripe chicharrones. People are like, &quot ; Chicharrones. That&#039 ; s a Mexican dish.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Yeah. And tripe, too. But we use tripe in different ways and whatnot.&quot ; That was my upbringing in San Antonio, being around a lot of Hispanic Mexican culture. The food I&#039 ; ve eaten in San Antonio remind me of that. So I was like, how can I pay tribute to that upbringing and my childhood? This is the dish. This is the storytelling of this dish, is through the loss of identity for a little bit. But became a loss I needed to find my true identity, living here in Dallas. And that&#039 ; s my storytelling through the food I make. Another dish is Moutsayhang. Moutsayhang is a dish that I just randomly came up with. Oh, musubi. You know, like everyone understands musubi. Spam, rice, makes sense. So, I was like how can I make that something that&#039 ; s more relatable to Lao culture and to myself? Like, growing up Asian-American, like we know musubi, Spam, rice. That&#039 ; s how we grew up. You know, Spam was a cheap meat product for immigrants. You know, it&#039 ; s like the so cheap for everything. And it&#039 ; s flavorful. It&#039 ; s like, okay, I grew up eating that. How could I make that my own? And that&#039 ; s part of what Moutsayhang came up. But then the word &quot ; mutayang&quot ; means &quot ; everything.&quot ; So I changed the word. The word for our Moutsayhang before was like &quot ; Lao musubi.&quot ; One of my childhood friends. Chris, he came in. He brought his mom in, actually. They were actually neighbors of mine in Amarillo, Texas. So he walks in. I saw him. I saw his mom. I like, had kind of like took a second glance because I hadn&#039 ; t seen her in a very long time as well, probably over 15 years. And I saw her, but then also her stature, she looks like my mom, like almost like, &quot ; Wait.&quot ; And she was wearing, you know, they&#039 ; d dress alike too, and were good friends. So she comes in and I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh my God. Man, like, I haven&#039 ; t seen you forever.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Yeah, how you doing?&quot ; &quot ; I heard you doing good. I&#039 ; m glad Chris has brought me to your restaurant.&quot ; And then I was just sitting there, you know, she&#039 ; s ordering stuff and she orders the Lao Musubi. She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What is this?&quot ; I was like &quot ; It&#039 ; s, I guess, like, you know, khao.&quot ; And like, you know, and then I put like an eggplant dipping sauce. Because usually like I said, Lao food, it&#039 ; s finger food. So you dip your sticky rice into your dipping sauce and then you have your protein and you kind of put your protein on top and eat it like that. Instead, I was like, I made a whole musubi a vessel. So you just put it in your hand and eat it. She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Oh, like |01:31:58|&#039 ; mutayang&#039 ; meaning &quot ; everything.&quot ; So I kind of twist a word on musubi. And so I call it &quot ; moutsayhang&quot ; and he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Oh.&quot ; I was like, it clicked in my head like, &quot ; moutsayhang.&quot ; It&#039 ; s everything in one bite. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh my God. So I changed the name to &quot ; moutsayhang&quot ; after what she told me. It is everything in one bite. I think that was like my mom as well too like being there and having that moment. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Okay, I feel like she&#039 ; s still around me, helping me, guiding me through this whole restaurant ownership and food culture.&quot ; |01:32:35| Brody And the and the huge success as well. You talked about- before we get to the effects of the pandemic- You talked about initially that, you know, the really great feedback that you got from the restaurant reviewers and critics and so on. And then also you mentioned some negative feedback about it being too progressive or not traditional enough. Where do you come down on that issue? |01:33:02| Sirisavath I mean, for me personally, first, I mean, I took it to heart and to this day, there&#039 ; s some things I take to heart. Because the thing is...I take it to heart because it is a lot of it, it&#039 ; s my mom&#039 ; s recipe, right? A lot of it is my grandparents&#039 ; , grandma&#039 ; s recipes. Well, my aunt&#039 ; s recipe. It&#039 ; s been passed down the lineage. For me it&#039 ; s like, this is our identity. This is who we are. And then not just that, our identity is who we are to this day. We are Asian-American. You know, we grew up Asian-American throughout our life and to this day. So why can&#039 ; t we adapt to our environment like our parents did and have something that we can say is our own? And so I think what it is, is we are also locked into our own heads, saying that &quot ; Identity is what I eat at home. This true Lao food. What I eat at home is true Lao food.&quot ; It&#039 ; s not because it&#039 ; s an adaptation of what Lao food is because it&#039 ; s a product of your parents and environment to them, adapting to the ingredients around them. That&#039 ; s what true... And you know, we have identity crisis. But the thing is, that&#039 ; s the authenticity is within the person making that dish. If they feel like this is authentic to them, authentic to their palate, it should be authentic to you. Regardless if your palate is different from them. Every person here has a different palate. Salty, sweet, sour, savory, you know, funky, whoever. But I think the essence of what traditional cuisine is, as long as it touches your soul. If it brings you to a moment in your life, especially your childhood, then that dish is authentic. I had a lot, I have to this day, still a lot of customers that eat the food at Darkoo&#039 ; s now Chicken Shack. Not. Not formerly Khao. I don&#039 ; t take the essence away of what Lao food is. I change it a little bit differently. Like I said, it&#039 ; s evolved. It&#039 ; s the evolution of who I am of Asian-American, Lao- American, Texan to where I can put my heart and soul into a dish and have it represent who I am. Not the person next to me, because the person next to me can be different from who I am. So this is my own individuality. So a gentleman comes in, he orders the Lao Gai, Lao cucumbers, sticky rice. And I heard from one of our servers like, &quot ; This reminds me so much of my mom&#039 ; s cooking. I haven&#039 ; t had my mom&#039 ; s cooking in a while, and I miss that. I don&#039 ; t know what it is. It&#039 ; s not traditional. It&#039 ; s not what my mom makes but makes me feel at home&quot ; . And that&#039 ; s the true authenticity of a cuisine, not just a cuisine, but any kind of art form that we do. You know, you have to be authentic to yourself, authentic to your culture to represent your identity. A lot of people try to fake it to make it. And that&#039 ; s where &quot ; lost in translation&quot ; is because a lot of people try to mimic this or mimic that. I&#039 ; m not trying to mimic anything. I&#039 ; m just trying to utilize the recipe that was given to me and put myself into that recipe. So where people of my culture, my generation can understand that, you know what, we can evolve, we can progress in a good way, a good manner to where we don&#039 ; t lose our own identity, because I think that&#039 ; s part of it, too. Identity crisis where like for myself, I lost my own identity for a moment in time. But what brought me back was food. Genuinely, it was food. To this day, nothing else, probably. But the one thing that brought me back was food and my mom. And the love that she created in those dishes. That was it. That was. That&#039 ; s. That&#039 ; s the secret. There&#039 ; s no other Asian secret. That&#039 ; s the secret. |01:37:24| Brody As far as you mentioned, you know, your mom was cooking Chinese American food. And, you know, even though she wasn&#039 ; t Thai herself, she had a Thai restaurant. And you mentioned when we were talking about that, you know, that she kind of thought as long as you learn how to do it and you have respect for it...How do you feel about, in terms of other chefs learning about Lao food and Lao flavors and the profile and incorporating it into their own, you know, putting their own spin on that, what are your feelings around that? |01:38:01| Sirisavath You know. At first, I like I had hate for it. I mean, the thing is, you&#039 ; re stealing our identity, first of all. For me, that&#039 ; s the just straight, honest truth because, you know, no one knows our food better than ourselves. Seriously, I mean, we grew up on this stuff, so you try and tell me that you can make Lao food better than me or as good as me? If you can, it&#039 ; s probably because you learned from someone that grew up in Laos or in a Lao family. Or you went to in the country, evolve yourself into ingredients and see the struggles that the immigrants went through. I think that&#039 ; s mainly for me, that&#039 ; s the reason when I do hear other, you know, non-Lao chefs or non-Asian chefs making Laotian cuisine or Asian cuisine, it&#039 ; s always kind of like, &quot ; Where did you learn that from? Do you pay homage and pay tribute to that culture and not just being a culture vulture and making money off of that?&quot ; And it&#039 ; s a battle that we have to this day, right? Self-gratifying is always something that I&#039 ; ll give myself and the people that actually are making good, honest food. You know, I congratulate them on that. But for those that are, you know, literally stealing our identity, it shouldn&#039 ; t be that way unless you really immerse yourself in the culture. And not just immerse yourself in the culture, but also represent the culture, being involved in that community as well, too, because anyone can make Pad Thai, right? Anyone can make laab, but it lacks soul, it lacks experience, and lacks culture, it lacks the upbringing of that dish, you know, because we grew up eating that dish, everyone that makes, you know Tikka masala, you know, like to this day, like, you know, that&#039 ; s not your dish. You didn&#039 ; t eat that as a child. You know, we&#039 ; ve eaten these dishes as a child, so we should know what it tastes like or what goes into it. It&#039 ; s not just the ingredients that goes into it, it&#039 ; s the care that goes into it, it&#039 ; s the struggles that go into it, it&#039 ; s the uprooting of a family that goes into it. You know, that&#039 ; s the essence of our dish. That&#039 ; s reason why I kind of get upset on that aspect, because it&#039 ; s not something that you just can take from us. We can share it, you know, and then give us representation on it. As like, &quot ; Hey, this was inspired from Chef Donny from Khao Noodle Shop. You know, I&#039 ; ve spent time with him. I&#039 ; ve learned what he learned as much as I could. So I&#039 ; m paying tribute to this dish because of him.&quot ; You know, that&#039 ; s fair. But when a Chipotle will open up, you know, Asian Khao wherever and they don&#039 ; t pay homage or tribute and it&#039 ; s making money off our culture. It&#039 ; s not right, you know. |01:40:56| Brody Do you see...Well, first, tell me what happened with the pandemic and what were the effects for you? |01:41:03| Sirisavath Oh, yeah. Here we go. This is the sad side, right? And this is the side that everyone wants to know. I mean Khao was so special, so unique, so filled with life. You know, that was taken away from the pandemic. Hearing me being &quot ; Best New Chef&quot ; with Food &amp ; Wine, that was a &quot ; pat on the back&quot ; kind of moment, but also a moment where I have to figure out things and pivot to survive because, you know, usually Food &amp ; Wine has their Aspen Food &amp ; Wine big, elaborate showcase. Biggest platform here in the United States for chefs. We weren&#039 ; t able to partake in that, you know, and that&#039 ; s where our level of cooking will be showcased bigger than what we where we are here. So we didn&#039 ; t we didn&#039 ; t have that. So then and of course, you know, Khao Noodle Shop was more a dining experience, education of what the dishes. You know, my servers are educating each and every customer that comes in that door involving, talking, an introduction to what this ingredient is, what&#039 ; s that, how I do this, how I do that, the story behind the dish. You can&#039 ; t do that on takeout. So it was hard. We pivoted to doing take out for Khao Noodle Shop. It&#039 ; s just that noodles...everybody knows noodles does not travel well, doesn&#039 ; t warm up as well as you cook at home. You know, we are not using instant noodles, so it was like it&#039 ; s not that way. Yeah. I mean we&#039 ; ve, we tried everything, and I even was delivering food to my customers. Like it had gotten to a point where, you know, we had to make sure that we&#039 ; re surviving. One of my customers, it was funny... just ordered to go. I didn&#039 ; t know the, I didn&#039 ; t recognize the name and whatnot. And sometimes I don&#039 ; t remember my customers&#039 ; name. I mean, I&#039 ; m very bad with name. So I go ring the doorbell, drop off the food. They&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Just leave it at the door.&quot ; &quot ; Okay.&quot ; And it was a Ring camera and they&#039 ; re like, I just hear his wife, &quot ; Chef?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Yeah.&quot ; Like &quot ; You&#039 ; re delivering the food?&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Yeah, yeah. I mean it&#039 ; s tough. You know, we got to make sure we thrive and survive.&quot ; And then I mean, it wasn&#039 ; t getting anywhere. And then we decided to &quot ; Hey, we&#039 ; re going to close our dining room because, you know, we can&#039 ; t open our dining room.&quot ; So we were just doing take out. And it was like a moment where like, &quot ; Hey, we got a little life back&quot ; because everyone &quot ; Oh, no, no, no, we got to get Khao because then we won&#039 ; t get Khao anymore.&quot ; We had tickets for days. It was a good moment. And then it&#039 ; s short lived. And then with the transition to Khao Gang, which was a concept that we were creating. With gang... We called it a &quot ; Khao Gang&quot ; because we&#039 ; re Khao. And then we&#039 ; re the gang of Khao, but gang means stews, soups. And so that makes sense that our next business venture was more of inducing different dishes than just noodles. So Khao Gang was more comfort food. Where you&#039 ; re eating stews and soups with rice, porridge, so on and so forth. Because, you know, in the pandemic, everyone wanted something that&#039 ; s feeling home. Feeling home, something comforting, right? So that&#039 ; s our comfort food that we created and that was short lived. And then now, you know, we&#039 ; re able to kind of somewhat trickle Khao Noodle Shop back with patio dining so we did that, but still same you know it wasn&#039 ; t received the same as the whole Khao experience. So then we just, you know, we decided to do a kind of &quot ; Noodles for All&quot ; kind of thing to at the time because it was just initially friends were getting laid off and, you know, a lot of restaurants were closing. Bars were not able to open up at the time. So we did this fundraising where you can buy a meal for industry, friends or family. So just to kind of help the community out as well. And, and we created a T-shirt for the community as well- Dallas Proper. So Dallas Proper was a, based on Dallas Proper restaurants and bars where we can give back to the community so we can, you know, help out each and every one of us. We did that for a minute, just kind of, you know, bring that love and care back into the food industry in Dallas. It was a struggle. It was hard. I mean, our restaurant&#039 ; s only three tables, right? And then communal tables. And so that&#039 ; s what really hindered us on- as far as that whole dining experience. You can&#039 ; t have a community table with COVID. So we decided to just not do a dining room, only patio. And we just, I mean, we couldn&#039 ; t stop the bleeding. Bleeding was pretty bad. You know, it was kind of like putting a Band-Aid over a knife wound, right? It&#039 ; s not going to stop the bleeding. So we decided just to go ahead and end Khao Noodle Shop. And I mean, me and Tex and my wife kind of went our separate ways. But, you know, we&#039 ; re still thinking about bringing Khao back. But then one of my good friends, Jimmy Niwa, reached out to me like, &quot ; I know you&#039 ; re struggling, man.&quot ; He&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What can I help?&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Oh. I need to come up with a concept where it&#039 ; s going to be something easy, fast, casual.&quot ; And he was like, &quot ; What do you want to do?&quot ; I was like, &quot ; I don&#039 ; t know, man. Like, everyone does chicken.&quot ; Like, &quot ; What kind of chicken you talking about here?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Let&#039 ; s do Asian fried chicken.&quot ; So Asian fried chicken happened, Darkoo&#039 ; s happened, we closed Khao. We closed Khao Noodle Shop on the third-year anniversary, which was December 12th. It was our last service, kind of quietly did it. And then we announced that. And then January, we announced it at the beginning year that were Khao Noodle Shop would no longer open and transition to a new concept which was Darkoo&#039 ; s. |01:47:19| Brody Tell me about Darkoo&#039 ; s. |01:47:20| Sirisavath So Darkoo&#039 ; s...Darkoo is, in a way, it really is a fun project first and foremost, but it doesn&#039 ; t sacrifice on the essence of what good food is. And it&#039 ; s not going to mimic Khao Noodle Shop. Everyone....That&#039 ; s part of some of the reviews right now. Just like, &quot ; Oh, it&#039 ; s not Khao Noodle Shop.&quot ; Like, &quot ; You don&#039 ; t understand. Here we go again.&quot ; Khao Noodle Shop was very special. It&#039 ; s very unique and very honest and true to what it is about. It&#039 ; s the storytelling. It&#039 ; s the love, the inspiration from a passing mother that passed on her cooking abilities to her son. Darkoo&#039 ; s is just a sort of fun project that I created to showcase my Asian-American roots. This is the most Asian-American thing you can do-fried chicken, especially in Texas and in southern states. Right? Fried chicken is king. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what? Let&#039 ; s do Asian fried chicken. But Lao style and Japanese style and Cambodian style, Vietnamese style.&quot ; Just overall Asian fried chicken to commemorate the love for our Asian community to represent our next chapter in us being Asian-American. This is what we can look like. We can look like the guy next to us, the person down the street from you. We are everybody. Darkoo&#039 ; s is everybody that&#039 ; s Asian-American. And the thing with Darkoo, the name came about because going back and forth, you know, we up came with &quot ; Chick N Gai.&quot ; The &quot ; gai&quot ; means chicken in Lao and Thai. So like &quot ; chick n Gai.&quot ; So it makes sense a Chick N Gai...okay kind of. But then we find out Guy Fieri as a &quot ; Chicken Guy!&quot ; Because &quot ; Guy&quot ; Fieri. So then we went back and forth, and Jimmy said, &quot ; How about Darkoo&#039 ; s?&quot ; Like, &quot ; Oh yeah.&quot ; Because that&#039 ; s one of my nicknames from Donnie Darko, the movie. But then I add extra, &quot ; o&quot ; so &quot ; darkoo.&quot ; And everyone knew me as Darkoo. And then we&#039 ; re just &quot ; Yeah, let&#039 ; s go with it.&quot ; And then my wife is like, &quot ; Remember? That was one of your pop-up names?&quot ; Like, &quot ; Oh, yeah, I forgot.&quot ; So I did a chicken pop up. I forgot about this fried chicken pop up. It was &quot ; Darkoo&#039 ; s Chicken.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like &quot ; Oh my God.&quot ; It was full circle. Full circle. Not even I&#039 ; m like, I did not remember this until my wife told me and it just came about. And then Darkoo&#039 ; s Fried Chicken Shack came out and just introducing people to Asian, another version of Asian fried chicken and creating dishes, still paying homage to our culture, of course, using the ingredients that that our ancestors have used before us and just represent us in American fashion. |01:50:19| Brody That&#039 ; s great. Do you feel like that&#039 ; s a uniquely Asian-American niche? |01:50:28| Sirisavath Yeah. You know, it&#039 ; s the essence of the identity crisis, right? And then also coming through a pandemic. It&#039 ; s something like, you know, my mom taught me about perseverance and grit and drive and just continuing to do what I need to do. I think, you know, with...there&#039 ; s some darkness in the transition from Khao to Darkoo&#039 ; s. Part of the name &quot ; Darkoo&#039 ; s&quot ; too because it came from a dark place. We all know the pandemic had a hard hit on the food industry. Mainly the food industry, hospitality industry. So this was something like, you know what, we need to create something that will bring us out from the dark as well. So then we can continue to voyage and introducing people to Lao cuisine, Asian cuisine, the immigrant refugee foods that&#039 ; s seen in a lot of restaurants that are created by other nationalities besides their own nationalities. So let&#039 ; s not stop with just Lao food. You know, that&#039 ; s part of reason why I wanted to do this spinoff with Darkoo&#039 ; s, food, where we can have a translation of what Japanese chicken can be, Thai chicken can be, so and so forth. And then and so then it doesn&#039 ; t have to be your basic American style with fusion of Asian spices, kind of, you know, like. So I think that&#039 ; s where the evolvement and evolution of what my chef life is about is where you can do something that&#039 ; s passion driven and have purpose. But also sometimes you have to do these other concepts in order to survive. And I think Darkoo&#039 ; s is what is going to help us survive to get through this big hump in our road, which is the pandemic. And, you know, we&#039 ; re still going through it--now we get the Monkeypox. So maybe there will be a ____ restaurant that comes after monkey pox. Who knows? But I think the whole message and the whole story here is that we learn from our ancestors. Our ancestors came from struggles, came from nothing, came from poverty. Some maybe not came from poverty. Apparently, my mom was kind of privileged, apparently, but then she lost everything. And, you know, leaving a Communist country to uproot her family to live in a land that she has no knowledge of, not knowing the language, not knowing anything. And for her to open her own restaurant, that tells you a lot. And that tells me that I can do as well, if not better than what my mom could have done. So that&#039 ; s reason why my legacy is not...It&#039 ; s on pause as far as, like bringing back Khao and the artisan of what my cuisine is. Same time, Darkoo&#039 ; s is...It&#039 ; s just love and fun? It&#039 ; s just...We need that in this day and age where complexity gets ahold of us and overthinking things, getting stressed out. This is a place where you don&#039 ; t have to think. It&#039 ; s fried chicken. Everyone can enjoy fried chicken, right? Regardless. And if you&#039 ; re vegetarian, we have vegan chicken as well, too. So we don&#039 ; t discriminate here. But, you know, it&#039 ; s just, it&#039 ; s fun. You know, the guy the Lao guy is...He&#039 ; s a fun guy. Yeah. And we just have fun with being silly because I think that&#039 ; s what we need in life for now is having a little moment to be silly, have fun not being so serious and stressed out. And I think that&#039 ; s where I came from my darkness of Khao, stressing through where I have to struggle to survive to make sure my staff members can have a paycheck. And then, you know, a lot of them have gone through to other jobs. I&#039 ; m on a brand-new whole team on Darkoo&#039 ; s. But wherever I teach at Darkoo&#039 ; s, and the next spot is always going to be what I teach at every restaurant. It&#039 ; s about individuality, about art, your art, your artistic self, and also at the end of the day, about yourself, who you are, stay genuine who you are. Your blood is always going to be from a blood from your ancestor no matter what. You know, it&#039 ; s going we bleed the same, you know. And not just our ancestors, but every human being bleeds the same regardless of who we are. You know, I think that&#039 ; s a true identity of us as the human race, is that we are human guys, regardless of we make this dish or that dish, we always have something awesome, always to fall back on is food. We have to eat to survive. We have to eat to have a conversational moments. We have to eat to get the nutrition we need in life to survive. And also, we have to feed people that are hungry, you know, and can&#039 ; t feed for themselves. And that&#039 ; s part of what food is about, too, as well. You know, we try to make sure that anyone that comes up for us to a homeless person to, you know, we also want to feed everybody regardless of who, where they&#039 ; re from. And there&#039 ; s no there&#039 ; s no discrimination on who comes up as well too. You know, I try not to be that guy. Like, just, you know, there is sometimes you have to, you know, we have to run a business. But if someone comes up and needs food, we always...I tell my staff, just make sure we give them something, feed them. You know, they&#039 ; re just as hungry as the next person, even though that they can&#039 ; t pay for food, got to make sure to get food. And I think that&#039 ; s also part of like people telling me like, &quot ; Your food&#039 ; s too expensive.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh. Here we go.&quot ; There&#039 ; s always the negative. But I always think there&#039 ; s always negative, but there&#039 ; s more positive out of it from all the negative comments and spills and reviews, you know. Now, my team&#039 ; s like &quot ; Chef, you you&#039 ; re not reading reviews. No more.&quot ; |01:56:56| Brody Yeah, that&#039 ; s a that&#039 ; s a good segue. You know, what do you as a restaurant owner and a chef think about the advent of social media reviews, things like Yelp and things like that? And how do you contrast them with the professional reviewers? |01:57:18| Sirisavath I think a lot of times, you know, on the reviews, it&#039 ; s, you know, everyone&#039 ; s subject for their own opinion, right? Everyone has their own opinion. But most of those opinions that are...There&#039 ; s a lot of trolls out there, as we know. There are people that try to get you to pull the trigger because there are you know, there are some times where I read comments like, &quot ; You know what, let me pull back.&quot ; I need to pull back because, you know, because I am a passionate person. I&#039 ; m very passionate about what I do. And my art that I do is...It&#039 ; s my art. You know, for someone to criticize my art, I... that&#039 ; s how I make my living. And I think that&#039 ; s the hardest part of when people give me a negative review. It&#039 ; s like negative reviews doesn&#039 ; t really hurt me. It hurts my business and my employees. You know, that&#039 ; s the way I look at it now. Because if those negative comments become more negative comments, how am I going to survive with my business? How am I going to pay my employees? How am I going to pay for my product and pay my vendors? And I think that&#039 ; s where it&#039 ; s at. It&#039 ; s not about me. You know, you can hurt me all you want now, you know, words... Words doesn&#039 ; t mean nothing to me now. I try not to take it to heart. I try not to. And that&#039 ; s part of reason why like my team is like, &quot ; No, Chef. You&#039 ; re not reading.&quot ; And then there are some times where I read it, I sit there now, I take a deep breath and you know. And going back to a lot of my mentors and they say, &quot ; You know, just don&#039 ; t bother with them. You know, they don&#039 ; t know what you go through each and every single day. You know what you have to do to survive and make money and continue to thrive.&quot ; And that&#039 ; s what it has to be like. I need to take care of myself. I don&#039 ; t need to worry about this one person, one reviewer, because the next ten is going to be positive. Next twenty. Next thirty. But that one person is not going to affect me. |01:59:18| Brody Is that mostly in the realm of the social media type reviews or.... |01:59:23| Sirisavath Yeah, mostly. And I understand you have some...And you know, we&#039 ; re going down this road. Right? And so there&#039 ; s always going to be negative social reviewers because a lot of them won&#039 ; t tell you in your face because they know they can type on a keyboard, and you don&#039 ; t have to ever see them ever again. I think those are people they need to experience work in a restaurant for themselves first. First and foremost to how to run a business, and especially a restaurant. Restaurant runs on a thin, thin margin of profit. We don&#039 ; t make profit. We&#039 ; re not making money for ourselves. We&#039 ; re not trying to get rich off of making restaurant. We&#039 ; re trying to showcase our heritage, our culture, our stories. We&#039 ; re not trying to...I would love to make money. Don&#039 ; t get me wrong, everyone loves to make money. But at the same time, like for me, right now, I&#039 ; m just I&#039 ; m just trying to make sure I have...I can make payroll next month. I can make sure I can pay my bills the next month, keep the lights on next month. So negative reviews hurt business far as the upfront and personal reviews, I&#039 ; ve gotten those. Overhearing some comments. One of the last comments from my server and I was outside actually as well too talking to her friend. The worst critics are your own critics, your own, your own kind. And that&#039 ; s where it&#039 ; s the hardest because this is where we go back on authenticity. Right? My own kind will come in and thrash me and tear me apart. Saying, &quot ; This is not Lao food. This is whitewashed American food. American style. You&#039 ; re catering to white palates.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what? I&#039 ; m not.&quot ; If you taste the food, that food is tasteful. It may be plated differently. It may be not your mom&#039 ; s cooking. It&#039 ; s not. You can&#039 ; t say it&#039 ; s not Lao food or Asian food or whatever. Just because you&#039 ; re so narrow-minded and locked into your own mind, saying that &quot ; This is only what Lao food should be.&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; No. Lao food can be bigger than what it is.&quot ; That&#039 ; s what I tell my own kind. It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; We need to stop bickering and pushing ourselves in this whole circle. We need to branch out of the circle and be better and bigger than what we are now.&quot ; That&#039 ; s how a lot of cultures progress forward, not backward. And that&#039 ; s where it started with- with food. Same thing with movements. You know, every movement starts with food. And if we can&#039 ; t appreciate our own food from a fellow chef or fellow Lao, Indian, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese person, we are oppressing ourselves. You know, that&#039 ; s where it happens. It happens within ourselves. So stop doing that. And his comment was, &quot ; No, I&#039 ; m not paying no more for this food. Let&#039 ; s leave.&quot ; And his wife was like, &quot ; No. I want to order more. The food&#039 ; s good.&quot ; And the kids like, &quot ; I&#039 ; m hungry, Daddy.&quot ; And later on, you know, I heard. Kind of, you know, my server overheard him, and she came and told me because they kind of felt like there was something going on and then they left. Probably two hours later, my phone goes off. Google Review. One star. From my own kind. One of my last customers of Khao Noodle Shop. So that&#039 ; s a lasting impression. You know, like a customer, they came about. And then readers read that as like, &quot ; You know what? He&#039 ; s a Lao person, giving a Lao restaurant a one-star review, so we can&#039 ; t trust that restaurant.&quot ; So that&#039 ; s where it hurts us the most from our own kind. It does. I&#039 ; m like, I tell you, that&#039 ; s the whole gist of it. Any restaurant that we go to we always ask, &quot ; Who&#039 ; s eating at that restaurant? Is there Indian person eating at that Indian restaurant? Or is there a Chinese person eating at that Chinese restaurant?&quot ; Because you want to know if it&#039 ; s good enough for their own kind. If it&#039 ; s good enough for their own kind, then guess what? It&#039 ; s good enough for us? So that&#039 ; s the same thing goes for reviews. If our own kinds are giving us negative reviews. How&#039 ; s that&#039 ; s going to look for other ethnic that wants to eat our food? They&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Well, if his own kind is not appreciating his food, then that&#039 ; s not something that we need to eat.&quot ; Y. |02:03:50| Brody Yeah, that has a big impact for sure. You mentioned in one of the articles that I read that, you know, that you saw that some of your, that your dishes were like elevating Lao food. Right? Like, is that...What does that mean to you? Like in light of all of these, tricky, you know, tricky things, hard to please everybody. |02:04:12| Sirisavath I mean yes and no. I have you know...It&#039 ; s that meme of like, it&#039 ; s in between. I get it. I don&#039 ; t like it. I like it. It&#039 ; s not quite elevated. Right? For me, it&#039 ; s more of like I go back to it. You know, it&#039 ; s my own artisan. It&#039 ; s my own individuality in a piece that I created for the masses. I create this dish because I felt like it needs a voice for ourself. Because every home cook cooks the same dish. Everything that mimics home cooked meals is made in every other home. I&#039 ; m not going to take a mom&#039 ; s cooking and take that recipe from her. That&#039 ; s the reason, other reason why I didn&#039 ; t take my mom&#039 ; s recipes. All my recipes from my mom was all through memory. All my family member was like, &quot ; Why do you not take Mom&#039 ; s recipe book? Why? Her recipes are to die for. You know, if you make Mom&#039 ; s recipe, you know, the food&#039 ; s gonna be amazing.&quot ; Guess what? That&#039 ; s Mom&#039 ; s recipe. She created those recipe on her own from the inspiration she had from her grandmother and her mom. Let her die with that. I told my family about this and same thing for me. That&#039 ; s the reason why for me making Lao food, this is my own recipe that was inspired from my mom&#039 ; s, my grandma, my aunts, uncles, my whole family. It&#039 ; s where I create my own identity and create my own recipe. This is what my dish is. It&#039 ; s not elevated, it&#039 ; s my own interpretation of what Lao food can be or become or to become. It&#039 ; s an evolution of our environment. You know, what we adapt to is the dish that we create a Khao or at Darkoo&#039 ; s or wherever restaurant I do. Because anything that I create, as long as I pay homage to my culture, pay tribute to my ancestors, is that&#039 ; s all I need. That&#039 ; s the dish I create. It&#039 ; s not because I elevated Lao cuisine. I didn&#039 ; t elevate it. I just created my own in my own culinary space of my own culture. Like everyone in our culture...have their own identity. So, you know, one person can sing better than the next person. One person can do art better than next person. So on and so forth. It&#039 ; s not a battle. It&#039 ; s not a competition. I&#039 ; m not trying to compete with my own kind. And I always my own kind also compete for themselves. And for me it&#039 ; s more about supporting each other. Grabbing a hold of our community and supporting each other regardless of who we are and what we&#039 ; re making. And I&#039 ; ve, back in the past, I was that person to where, like, &quot ; Well, I can do that better. I can do this better.&quot ; I was that person. But I was very naive and young. But then once I created my own dishes, created my own restaurant, and now I understand the heart and soul, the grit, the grind, the work that you have to make a successful business. I understand now it&#039 ; s like I commend anyone that makes a home cooked meal to the masses. It&#039 ; s hard too. And that&#039 ; s why I&#039 ; m telling people, &quot ; You think my dishes are expensive? Then you should be paying your mom because your mom spent that much time making that dish for you. Hours upon hours. Days upon days. Sometimes if she&#039 ; s carrying, fermenting, why are you not paying your mom? Why are you not paying homage to your mom or tribute to your mom? And you&#039 ; re here complaining that you&#039 ; re paying $12 for my dish? Really?&quot ; And also, why can&#039 ; t you make yourself and you say you can make it better myself. Open a restaurant. Then talk to me.&quot ; And then you&#039 ; re like, &quot ; You know what? I&#039 ; m sorry, man. I feel you.&quot ; Because I&#039 ; m going back to restaurant. Restaurants are marginal. I&#039 ; m making profit. We are slim to none to make profit. You know, our food costs have inflated so much to past years from the pandemic. We&#039 ; re making dollars -three, four or five dollars from a dish versus we can make from. And that&#039 ; s why like I am not against fine dining, but when a fine dining experience make elevated Asian food and paying you know, $60, $30, $100. And they&#039 ; re just using cheap product or product that&#039 ; s expensive to get I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I get it. I get it.&quot ; But the thing is, there&#039 ; s also that soulness that you&#039 ; re losing from that dish. So that&#039 ; s for me when I create fine dining dishes, when people call it that. I never sacrifice the soul that goes in a dish. It may be plated pretty, using high quality ingredients, but it never lacks soul. That&#039 ; s my cooking, my way of fine dining. It needs to have soul. Needs to have purpose and soul to where you eat that and it brings a warmth inside your heart and stomach to like, &quot ; I feel great. You know, after that meal. I don&#039 ; t feel hungry. I mean, I don&#039 ; t feel hungry.&quot ; Because there&#039 ; s small bites, but...And a lot of people say that to me, about Khao Noodle Shop. It was like small portions, small bites. It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; What are you feeding, kids?&quot ; No one. That&#039 ; s all my comments. Like, &quot ; Are these kids&#039 ; size?&quot ; Like, we grow in America. We&#039 ; re adapted to American way of eating, which is overeating. And that&#039 ; s what my teaching as well too where you go to Southeast Asia, you see the plates are tiny. And at home, we eat tiny dishes. You know, we don&#039 ; t eat one big dish. We eat like multiple small dishes, and then we have rice. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Guys, it&#039 ; s nothing different from what we eat at home or in from our motherland.&quot ; It&#039 ; s because we&#039 ; re so used to the American way of eating, which is overindulging on food. And that&#039 ; s part of why my food is so different than most Asian food, because there&#039 ; s a lot of Thai restaurants, Chinese restaurants now. It&#039 ; s serving big portions because they had to adapt to American way, which is bang for your buck, you know, and my mom had to do that, and I knew that. For me was taking it back. You know, this is a full circle, taking it back to where we what we eat at home from Lao or Thailand. Small portions, eat enough to satisfy your hunger, but also eat to enjoy what you&#039 ; re eating. |02:11:02| Brody That sounds great. What a lot of the people that I&#039 ; m talking to are, you know, &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; you know, owners of restaurants that are characterized as &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurants. Do you see, you know, either Khao Noodle or Darkoo as &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; or how do you what category? Where do you where do you fit in? |02:11:25| Sirisavath I mean, a lot of people...This is this is the misconception on Khao. Because, you know, Khao is so glamorous, I guess people say now and so well-received and, you know, of a restaurant, a home, homemade cook can never receive. But for me personally, we are a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; shop because we don&#039 ; t have any investors. All the money we put in is ourselves. That&#039 ; s what people are going, &quot ; I mean, you guys probably have money in the bank and investors.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; No.&quot ; There&#039 ; s no investors. The person that put money into Khao Noodle Shop was me, my wife, and Tex. Our three partners. We put all our money into this restaurant. We have no outside influence. No outside silent investors, so on and so forth. We&#039 ; re a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; driven restaurant. We own this restaurant. Our name&#039 ; s on the lease. You know, it&#039 ; s this is our mom pop restaurant. The back end is run the same way like a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant. It&#039 ; s just presentation and everything it seems like you know we have a backer is backing this restaurant making this amazing food but no. So to say, even Darkoo&#039 ; s. Jimmy Niwa is my business partner. It&#039 ; s his money and my money into Darkoo&#039 ; s. Is no outside investors. So we still run like &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; shop. The people that work for us we treat them like family. You like we call them you like tribe members of Khao. You know Khao tribe members were part of the family. You know, we treat everyone like a family member. You&#039 ; re in a sticky situation. We get you out, you&#039 ; re sick. You need help? Need, you know, whatever bills? Where we help each and everybody out. Don&#039 ; t tell me your mom...And that&#039 ; s like the true essence of &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurants, right? Who&#039 ; s washing dishes? The owner&#039 ; s washing dishes. Who&#039 ; s cleaning the restroom? The owner&#039 ; s cleaning the restroom. I&#039 ; m cleaning the restroom. I&#039 ; m cleaning dishes. I&#039 ; m closing. I&#039 ; m opening up. You know, I&#039 ; m taking out of trash. That&#039 ; s the true essence of a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant. And people to this day would argue me with that like, &quot ; It&#039 ; s not a &#039 ; mom and pop&#039 ; restaurant.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Yeah, you can say that. You can say whatever you want to say, but we are a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant. We&#039 ; re funded by ourselves. We struggle like a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant, you know, with nickel and diming everything because everything&#039 ; s inflation. You know, I have my nephew helping me out once a weekend in summer break. It&#039 ; s a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; establishment, a family establishment like exactly what I had with my mom&#039 ; s restaurant. It&#039 ; s just that not as much family members was working at my restaurant. But yeah, but the family member our industry family members. None of my workers are our family of mine, but they are my industry family, you know, our inner circle family where we take care of each other no matter what. |02:14:31| Brody That&#039 ; s really nice. You mentioned a couple of mentors earlier, too. Can you talk a little bit about who those mentors are? |02:14:41| Sirisavath So the first mentor is, of course, Chef Seng. She&#039 ; s like I said, she&#039 ; s...she reminds my mom. That&#039 ; s part of reason I wanted to first. So she started creating her Lao food almost identical as my mom&#039 ; s. She took over a Thai restaurant. Bangkok. Bangkok? Yes, Bangkok. So it was a Thai restaurant that she wanted to take over and then slowly trickling Lao food. And then because, you know, people only received Thai food, not Lao food. What is Lao food? And I think the same situation. I think her son was telling her like, &quot ; Why you don&#039 ; t cook food, Mom?&quot ; And then she started cooking Lao food at that restaurant. And then she was running that restaurant for about five to ten years. And then she decided to open a full-blown Lao restaurant in DC in the heart of the capital. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; What? Who thinks like this, right? This is craziness.&quot ; Because no one knows Lao food. No one&#039 ; s going to go eat that at that restaurant because no one knows what it is. But she had faith in herself and believed in her craft that she can do something and will get well-received from. You know, of course, everything else...It is a slow start at times. She was you know, she was a little older, right. She was in her forties, mid-forties or early forties when she opened her Hanuman and then know competing with these younger chefs, networking at, you know, Michelin star restaurants, you know James Beard nominees. It&#039 ; s like she&#039 ; s competing with these guys and then like she&#039 ; s hitting these awards, you know, semi-finalist back-to-back, years after years. You know, Food &amp ; Wine. A Michelin Guide. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; This lady is like super star.&quot ; And she is. And still to this day, she is. And then me and my brother at the time, when I was doing my pop up. Me and my brother was doing a side project, we were doing beef jerky. So my brother wanted to do beef jerky, you know, to make just some, you know, some income on side, you know, and he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; You want to go in with me?&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; I guess, you know?&quot ; At that time, his wife just came from Lao, and he needed something for her to do. And they were doing it and like the jerky was okay, you know, and then my brother&#039 ; s like, &quot ; You remember mom&#039 ; s recipe?&quot ; And like, I mean, you know, &quot ; It&#039 ; s all up here and in here, so I can mimic it, you know, give me, give me a couple tries on and there&#039 ; s a couple of runs made a jerky.&quot ; It&#039 ; s just like, &quot ; Man, this is good.&quot ; And my brother&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Yeah, it&#039 ; s like Mom&#039 ; s.&quot ; Like, yeah, I was like, &quot ; If you want to do this, we can go forward on this.&quot ; So we started that business, literally just make it from home. And then my brother&#039 ; s like, we need to spread this word. And we, you know, social media was the thing. So we got on social media and ____ So _____ means like, come in like also sound like &quot ; mother.&quot ; So _____ means like, &quot ; come, come, come.&quot ; Enjoy some eat or a moment with us to enjoy our culture. So we started it and at the same time, Chef Seng started Lao Food Movement to showcase Lao food and, you know, uplifting our community, introducing people to what Lao food is. And she&#039 ; s the _____ of that movement. And that&#039 ; s part of the reason that why I was like, &quot ; I need to meet this lady.&quot ; And she actually reached out to us while we were doing _______. It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Hey, you know, this is, you know, Chef Seng. We&#039 ; re doing Lao Food Movement and we want to showcase you guys on our page. Take over our page.&quot ; And so we did. We never met in person. And it was just through messaging, social media. And then one day I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You know what? Let&#039 ; s go to DC.&quot ; And I told my wife, &quot ; Let&#039 ; s go to DC. I want to meet Chef Seng.&quot ; And we messaged. She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Actually, I&#039 ; m coming here.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Oh, what? Okay.&quot ; She&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Yeah, I&#039 ; m coming down. You know, I just want to...I heard there&#039 ; s a lot of Lao restaurants, apparently in Texas.&quot ; Like, &quot ; Yeah, you know, Texas is the second largest Lao community, you know, outside of Laos.&quot ; So she came and we met, took her around different Lao restaurants and we just got to talking, talking. And at the time I was doing the pop up, kind of went away from doing the jerky, doing more of the pop ups. So and I just happened to ask her like, you know, guidance and it&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Yeah.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Try the food.&quot ; She&#039 ; s like &quot ; Your food&#039 ; s pretty amazing. You know, I&#039 ; m not trying to make your head swollen.&quot ; But yeah, I was like, &quot ; Okay, good. That&#039 ; s over with.&quot ; And so then I was like, &quot ; I&#039 ; m thinking about owning a restaurant.&quot ; She said, &quot ; You are?&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Okay.&quot ; And we&#039 ; re in the process of building out. And she gave me some guidance of how to run the kitchen, what to look for first hiring and product building. And so then we went to DC as well, met her up in DC, looked at the restaurant like, &quot ; Oh my gosh. The restaurant&#039 ; s phenomenal.&quot ; Saw how she ran a kitchen, saw how she ran her business, doing more recipe building with her, kind of seeing what she does on her recipe, how I can use the meals like that for my restaurant. And it just went from there. And then, literally, we just connected so much because like I said, I needed a mother figure, and she was. I&#039 ; m like to this day, I mean, she&#039 ; s probably ten years older than I am, but she felt, I feel like she&#039 ; s a mother figure. Because she has that the essence of like how my mom is. Very passionate and wanted to share her culture with everyone and anyone and also giving guidance and my mom&#039 ; s always that person to give guidance. So yeah, that&#039 ; s my main mentor. And then, you know, a friend, a buddy Dien Nguyen, he owns Wabi House. At a time, we did a pop up together and he&#039 ; s just like, &quot ; Every food is phenomenal too.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; You need to open a restaurant and whatever you need guidance on to open a restaurant I&#039 ; m there for you.&quot ; And he was down the street so convenient too. So I&#039 ; m like asking him every question impossible like to do like and he&#039 ; s always...And the thing with him, he always put me in my place where like you need to listen to yourself, don&#039 ; t listen to anyone else. Don&#039 ; t compare to yourself or anyone else. Don&#039 ; t let negative feedback get to you. And I&#039 ; m that person like I let negative feedback, get to me all the time and he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; No, I&#039 ; ve been through this. It&#039 ; s like, you going to go through a lot, and I know you&#039 ; re gonna take it to heart on some things, but you need to literally don&#039 ; t listen to the noise. Seriously and just concentrate, move forward, and go straight forward.&quot ; And so, &quot ; Okay, cool.&quot ; Then I met Jimmy Niwa, one mentor/friend/business owner now partner. Like he has so many years&#039 ; experience in restaurant, twenty years&#039 ; experience in hotel, corporate teaching, so on and so forth. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; That guy, he knows everything.&quot ; And I just happened to connect with him because we have the same PR person and we&#039 ; ve gone through this, you know, same situation of like, no, our business not going...Because you know, Niwa, same thing- communal cooking. You&#039 ; re like you can&#039 ; t do communal cooking in a space like that and especially inside like, &quot ; Oh my God.&quot ; So we were both going through the same situation. So I looked for him for guidance and we helped each other, you know, uplift ourselves through the pandemic. You know, he&#039 ; s doing a lot better than me, apparently, but I&#039 ; m getting there because, you know, for me personally, I&#039 ; m still young. For us being in this industry, you know, even though my age is older, but I&#039 ; m still new to the industry and still learning a lot. So my mentors is, you know, the group of people I have in my group, in my corner is the people that I need in my life. And also, you know, I have friends that are from my Food &amp ; Wine group. You know, I feed off of their energy too, I&#039 ; ll just reach out to them, same as the writers. You know, they always reach out to me. Bon Appetit as well. So it&#039 ; s kind of like checking in. &quot ; Hey, how are you? You good?&quot ; It&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Thank you. I appreciate that.&quot ; I think, you know, winning awards, you don&#039 ; t, you know, anticipate like editors calling you or emailing you, checking up on you, making sure you&#039 ; re okay. I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh damn. Wow. Thank you, guys.&quot ; I thought &quot ; I win this award and that&#039 ; s it!&quot ; |02:23:38| Brody Part of a community. |02:23:40| Sirisavath Yeah. And the food community is a community. And the industry is...It&#039 ; s a big family. Because, you know, for me, like, I have not experienced enough. So many chefs have experienced more than I have, so I look for them for guidance as well too. So I mean, at the end of the day, food does bring people together and connects people together from the hardest and darkest time, food does help you find your way. And that&#039 ; s what I&#039 ; m doing with food. Food is helping me find my way again. And that&#039 ; s where we&#039 ; re at right now. |02:24:16| Brody Oh, I&#039 ; m so happy to hear that. And I&#039 ; m really, really honored to have had the chance to talk to you. Thank you so much for sitting for this interview. Is there anything that I didn&#039 ; t ask that we might want to include? |02:24:29| Sirisavath I don&#039 ; t know. Maybe after listening to this and we have a round two. |02:24:34| Brody Okay. Thank you again. It&#039 ; s an honor. |02:24:36| Sirisavath Betsy, appreciate you. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_020.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donny Sirisavath, August 8, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_020 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, Lao Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-08-08 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/1306b77f18cf40c114cefe3024cdc7ed.jpg 7d08cd05f28b2ebc7aaf0d2b46272d68 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed George Kao April Kao OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with George and April Kao, September 28, 2021 2021oh001_di_001 02:04:29 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. 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Miller ; interior design ; landlord ; lease ; menu ; real estate ; remodel ; Shanghai style ; sweet and sour chicken ; Szechuan 2173 Chefs and labor challenges challenges ; chefs ; hiring ; labor ; labor shortage ; staffing 2539 Connection to the Jewish community celebrations ; Chinese restaurant ; Christmas ; Jewish ; neighborhood 2953 Atmosphere at Royal China on a busy night atmosphere ; Chinese restaurant ; food ; hospitality ; Royal China 3118 Sourcing ingredients Asian grocery ; local ingredients ; sourcing ; suppliers ; vegetables 3274 Relationship with neighboring businesses in plaza business ; neighbors ; plaza 3425 Buck Kao's legacy Buck Kao ; connection 3553 Chinese New Year Chinese New Year ; staff 3620 Experience with the 2019 tornado in Dallas Dallas Cowboys ; Royal China ; tornado 3845 Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on Royal China COVID ; pandemic ; shutdown ; takeout 4053 Celebrities at Royal China celebrities ; Dallas ; Dallas Cowboys ; neigborhood ; President Bush 4342 Photography and art in Royal China culture ; interior design ; photography ; Safari 4577 Lessons and reflections from running a Chinese restaurant in Dallas celebrations ; Chinese restaurant ; connect ; connection ; culture ; Dallas ; food ; labor shortage ; neigborhood ; relationship 5527 Relationships with other Chinese restaurants in Dallas Chinese restaurants ; mentor |00:21:30| BRODY This is Betsy Brody. Today is September 28th, 2021. I am interviewing for the first time Ms. April Kao and Mr. George Kao. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and is part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In How Food, Culture and Class Shaped the Story of Dallas.&quot ; All right. Thank you so much to both of you for joining me. I&#039 ; m really looking forward to hearing your stories and the story of your family. First of all, could you just tell me where and when you were born? |00:22:09| APRIL KAO You go first. |00:22:10| GEORGE KAO No. |00:22:11| APRIL KAO OK. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1955. |00:22:19| BRODY How about you? |00:22:20| GEORGE KAO Same...Taiwan 52 in 1952. |00:22:24| BRODY Well, what brought you to Texas? What brought you to Texas? |00:22:28| GEORGE KAO Because my father moved here first, so we just followed the parents |00:22:32| BRODY Tell me about your father. |00:22:34| GEORGE KAO A career military man turned to diplomat. Now, after he retired, he decided to move family to the United States. For, you know, better future for the kids. For our generation. |00:22:50| BRODY Absolutely. What was his name? |00:22:51| GEORGE KAO Buck. |00:22:52| BRODY His name was Buck. |00:22:54| GEORGE KAO Buck Kao. |00:22:55| BRODY Yes. And so he was a diplomat. Where from? |00:23:01| GEORGE KAO Nationalist Government. |00:23:01| BRODY OK. Yes. |00:23:03| APRIL KAO He was stationed in many different countries, Switzerland, England, France, Germany, Korea. |00:23:14| GEORGE KAO Korea is during the Korean War. At that time, he was still on the military side. |00:23:19| APRIL KAO And he was helping the American side. |00:23:22| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |00:23:22| BRODY That&#039 ; s right. So is that what that made him think that he would like to come to the United States? |00:23:28| APRIL KAO Yep. |00:23:29| GEORGE KAO I think yes. Probably he had some friends during that period. So they still connect. So after he retired, he decided to move to United States. |00:23:41| APRIL KAO He actually was here in D.C., living in D.C. in 1952 when he (George Kao) was born. He was three months old. George was three months old, lived in D.C. for three years. And they moved back to Taiwan, you know, and then after he retired, he decided to move the whole family here. |00:24:03| BRODY Well, did he have a sponsor or he just was able to immigrate at that time? |00:24:08| GEORGE KAO Yeah, just able to, yeah. |00:24:10| BRODY And so how did the family end up in Texas? |00:24:14| GEORGE KAO That&#039 ; s an interesting question. I always joke and say. Because Dallas Cowboys. |00:24:22| BRODY Because of the Dallas Cowboys? |00:24:23| APRIL KAO No. They landed in San Francisco and tried to look for a place to maybe have some sort of business or a restaurant, and then later they came with two chefs to scout locations and they told him, maybe you should try Dallas. You know, it&#039 ; s such a booming place. So they came. |00:24:51| BRODY They came. So all along, he was intending to be in the restaurant business? Had he been in the restaurant business before? |00:24:59| GEORGE KAO No, never. |00:25:01| BRODY What drew him to that? |00:25:04| GEORGE KAO I think what it is...This is type business nobody can compete with you, right? Chinese food, right? Absolutely. Your only competition is your own people. So at that time, Dallas is still kind of not like the East Coast and West Coast. That&#039 ; s a really big, big Chinese community. Right? Dallas is still kind of new at the 70s. So they decided, &quot ; OK, it&#039 ; s coming. A new market.&quot ; So they decided to move to Dallas. |00:25:42| BRODY Fantastic. So how big was the community, the Chinese community at the time? |00:25:47| GEORGE KAO At that time? |00:25:48| BRODY Yeah. |00:25:48| APRIL KAO Very small, very pretty small. Very, very few Chinese people. That- when we came in 1977, still a small community. |00:25:58| BRODY Right. So the restaurant started in 1974. Tell me about the restaurant. We haven&#039 ; t even talked about that yet. Tell me the name and how it all- how it got started. How did your dad start the restaurant? |00:26:11| APRIL KAO Well, they came in to look for any opportunities, so they ended up working for a restaurant called Shanghai Restaurant and then for some time in 72, I think. And then when 74, the current location of Royal China, it was called Safari. It was a steakhouse. And that location, I mean, became available. So they acquired that space and made it into Royal China. I guess, you know, because it&#039 ; s on Royal Lane. |00:26:54| BRODY That&#039 ; s right. It is on Royal Lane. |00:26:56| APRIL KAO Right. |00:26:57| BRODY So they took over the old Safari space and that had been a pretty popular restaurant. |00:27:05| GEORGE KAO At that time. Safari was very successful. |00:27:09| BRODY So they took over that that space and renamed it Royal China. How did, what were the first days of the business like in the family story? |00:27:19| GEORGE KAO Just before we move here. So when the restaurant opened, |00:27:23| APRIL KAO We heard it was packed, lined with people because it&#039 ; s such a new restaurant, new concept, not too many Chinese restaurants around at the time. And they had, we had, chefs from Taiwan and the newspaper write-up. It was a very popular for some time. |00:27:48| BRODY A big splash. |00:27:49| APRIL KAO Big splash. |00:27:49| BRODY Right. So the community, you said was small, the Chinese community at the time. So the clientele at the beginning must have been. |00:28:00| APRIL KAO Caucasian. Yeah. Not Chinese at the time. |00:28:04| BRODY So was there anything special that your family did in the early days to sort of, you know, to bring in business, to attract business to, you know, or, you know, were people just lining up because they were interested in trying Chinese food? |00:28:24| GEORGE KAO I think that at that time, it&#039 ; s only a few Chinese restaurants. Basically it&#039 ; s only Cantonese immigrant. So all the Chinese food at that time in Dallas, I think pretty much everyone is Cantonese style. So just so-called like |00:28:41| APRIL KAO Mandarin |00:28:42| GEORGE KAO Chop suey, at that time, right? Like Cantonese style. Famous by egg foo yung, chop suey, fried rice. And I think we are, based on my understanding we are probably one of the few early to serve at that time so-called Mandarin style. |00:29:05| BRODY Tell me about Mandarin style. What is it like? What are the main aspects of Mandarin style cooking? |00:29:11| APRIL KAO We have Peking Duck at the time. We still have that. And then like moo shu pork, stir fry. And then we have dry stir beef was starting from that time until now it&#039 ; s still... |00:29:28| BRODY Tell me about that. |00:29:30| APRIL KAO Dry stir beef? It&#039 ; s a little sweet, little spicy, crispy fried beef, you know, with all this seasoning. |00:29:39| BRODY And would you say that&#039 ; s the specialty of the house? |00:29:41| APRIL KAO Yes. Yes, yes, yes. |00:29:44| GEORGE KAO From the day one! |00:29:45| BRODY Who developed that recipe? Is that a traditional recipe? |00:29:48| GEORGE KAO You know, kind of- we modify it. We tried. In general, American people love kind of little bit sweet and sour. Everybody loves fried food. Right? So we just try to say, &quot ; OK, we do this beef. We fry a little bit, so it becomes crispy outside, then stir-fry in the wok with the sauce, it becomes a little bit spicy and little bit sweet.&quot ; It&#039 ; s become instant success, you know, kind of like General Kao&#039 ; s chicken. |00:30:22| BRODY Yes. |00:30:23| GEORGE KAO It&#039 ; s just a version. Just one is a beef version, one is a chicken version. That&#039 ; s, you know, nowadays orange chicken, General Kao Chicken, all those become universal. |00:30:35| BRODY Right. |00:30:37| GEORGE KAO Even some American chain stores, they carry like orange chicken. |00:30:43| BRODY They do, they do. So those dishes are...They took off from the beginning, did you have a sort of regular clientele or, you know, lots of regulars? Tell me about that... |00:30:57| GEORGE KAO Lots of regulars. Even till now that we have a probably customers for four generation. |00:31:04| BRODY Amazing. |00:31:05| GEORGE KAO They still come to a restaurant. |00:31:07| BRODY That&#039 ; s amazing. |00:31:07| GEORGE KAO Some of the older one already passed away, but they still keep on coming. |00:31:13| BRODY So you&#039 ; ve really gotten to build relationships with families over time. Well, that&#039 ; s really interesting. So it sounds like your dad picked the spot based on it was a popular spot that people were accustomed to going out to eat. And then also, though, do you remember any stories or have any experiences about, about fitting in. Fitting in in the restaurant scene or fitting in just in general in Dallas at that time, what was it like? |00:31:47| GEORGE KAO At that time? |00:31:48| BRODY Yes. |00:31:50| GEORGE KAO You mean in the seventies. Well, I need to think about it. |00:31:57| BRODY Yeah, absolutely. Take a, take a minute. |00:32:02| APRIL KAO Yeah, well, I was working in the back of the house. I started washing dishes, cutting vegetables. So not much of the time to deal with front of the house. It&#039 ; s always my father-in-law and George was working the front. So, yeah, you know, a little bit. But fitting in? Well, language is my big problem. |00:32:32| BRODY Yes. |00:32:33| APRIL KAO OK, and it&#039 ; s not easy at the time. I felt like I was in the black hole. |00:32:44| BRODY Oh, that sounds difficult. |00:32:48| APRIL KAO Yeah. For a while until I started to learn to speak and to communicate |00:32:53| BRODY Did you go back to school or was it just sort of an immersion? |00:32:59| APRIL KAO I did. I when my children was going to school and my sister came and I was helping her in enrolling in school and I thought, &quot ; Hey, I can go to school, too!&quot ; So I started to take ESL classes and horticulture classes and photography classes. |00:33:24| BRODY Where did you go to school? |00:33:26| APRIL KAO I went to Richland and then Collin County and then I took some classes at Texas Woman&#039 ; s University. |00:33:36| BRODY Great. Well, and you obviously learned English very, very well. |00:33:43| APRIL KAO Yeah. |00:33:44| GEORGE KAO We&#039 ; re still learning. Always room to improve. Yeah, absolutely. We try our best. |00:33:49| BRODY You&#039 ; re doing great. |00:33:53| GEORGE KAO You&#039 ; re very kind. |00:33:54| BRODY In the 70s when you both actually did arrive here. Were you already married at that time? And then...Yes? And so did you move into a house, apartment at that time? How did...you know...Tell me about your process and what your life was like during that early time. |00:34:17| GEORGE KAO First, when she (April Kao) moved to here, we just stay with, like, I think, most traditional Asian stay together. |00:34:26| APRIL KAO We stayed with his parents. |00:34:28| GEORGE KAO Yeah. All my brother, sister, us- we stayed where this one in Richardson. |00:34:35| BRODY in Richardson? |00:34:36| APRIL KAO Richardson |00:34:37| GEORGE KAO The house is facing Berkner High School. |00:34:40| BRODY Oh OK. |00:34:41| GEORGE KAO Berkner Drive. We used to live there. And then after maybe... |00:34:47| APRIL KAO A year or something, and then we moved. |00:34:50| GEORGE KAO To an apartment. We moved to an apartment. |00:34:51| BRODY OK. |00:34:52| GEORGE KAO We moved into an apartment |00:34:52| BRODY And all the while you were working at the restaurant. |00:34:55| GEORGE KAO We were all working in the restaurant. Then we saved some money. After one year we bought a first house. |00:35:03| BRODY Great. Where was your... |00:35:05| GEORGE KAO Also in Richardson. Also in Richardson. Yeah. It&#039 ; s only here. |00:35:10| BRODY Yeah. At this at that point the Asian community must have been growing in Richardson especially. |00:35:16| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Yeah. At that time, majority, at that time, pretty much is Taiwan immigrant or students. |00:35:27| BRODY Or students. |00:35:29| GEORGE KAO They come to UTD or UTA. Pretty much. Then probably after Vietnam fall, they got lots of Vietnamese refugees. |00:35:41| BRODY Right in 1975. 1976 |00:35:44| APRIL KAO Yeah |00:35:46| GEORGE KAO Then start to, I think eighty or mid-eighties. Tiananmen Square is 89, right? You know, |00:36:00| APRIL KAO After that, it started to... |00:36:01| GEORGE KAO It starts, pretty much like mid-eighties and then you&#039 ; ve got student from China at the time, really gradually open up. |00:36:11| BRODY Right. |00:36:12| GEORGE KAO So they let lots of students come to United States to study. So UTD is a pretty popular place. |00:36:18| BRODY Yes. |00:36:19| GEORGE KAO Lots of foreign students. |00:36:21| BRODY So that how did that impact the growing Asian population, you know, not just Vietnamese, but also, you know, Chinese and other Asian countries. |00:36:33| GEORGE KAO Indians. A huge population, right? |00:36:34| BRODY Yes. So during that time, Indians as well came. How did that change things at the restaurant where previously, when you first opened in 1974, the clientele had been mostly Caucasian, as you said. So did it change? |00:36:47| GEORGE KAO Totally...The dynamic of the restaurant business. Absolutely. |00:36:51| BRODY Tell me about that. |00:36:52| GEORGE KAO Yeah. And also there&#039 ; s lots of from Asia, right? It doesn&#039 ; t matter if it&#039 ; s Korea or India or Hong Kong, or Taiwan, or mainland China. They start to have their own culture to serve their own people. |00:37:11| BRODY Right. |00:37:13| GEORGE KAO Right. Get it. Just like for example, like in Richardson or Plano, there&#039 ; s so many Chinese are now there that the majority clientèle is Chinese people, very small percentage is American. Yes. Its just total...very authentic. |00:37:35| BRODY Right. |00:37:36| GEORGE KAO And like the Korean- big population. Korean probably has the most. I think probably Korean has the most population ratio. I&#039 ; m not sure. |00:37:48| BRODY Right. |00:37:49| GEORGE KAO Either Korea or India...So we talk about dynamics. |00:37:55| BRODY Yeah, no...So did you have more Asians coming to your restaurant at that time? What was that like? |00:38:02| GEORGE KAO Probably after our major remodel in 2008. |00:38:10| BRODY OK, fast forwarding to 2008. |00:38:12| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Now know that our restaurant started to be |upward hand motion indicating taking off|, there&#039 ; s lots of publicity. The newspaper writing review. People interview us. So we&#039 ; ve got a lot of Asian community come to our restaurant. |00:38:34| BRODY That&#039 ; s great. Well, I want to go back to that question of authenticity, because I think that&#039 ; s a really interesting aspect of studying Asian restaurants, is that there&#039 ; s that- what you&#039 ; re talking about the very quote unquote, authentic places where the people within that community go to eat. But then there are other places that are more popular among the sort of mainstream American...Do you feel? So that&#039 ; s what I was going to ask. Where would you put your restaurant, Royal China? |00:39:10| APRIL KAO We have a very authentic cuisine. And then we also cater to a lot of Caucasians because of the area we are in. We have to modify to, according to the tastes of the majority of the population. |00:39:28| BRODY Right. Right. So you have both the authentic and also the things that, you know, the people in the neighborhood that are your customers also enjoy. So you&#039 ; ve kind of created a dual aspect to your menu? |00:39:44| GEORGE KAO It&#039 ; s kind of like we also can like educate Americans. |00:39:49| BRODY Yeah, tell me about that. What do you mean by that? |00:39:51| GEORGE KAO Yeah. For example, I think that&#039 ; s her specialty (|points to April Kao). She&#039 ; ll bring, like, dumplings, soup dumplings, all those kind of, kind of like small plates like a tapas like the so-called dimsum type small plates. |00:40:06| BRODY Right. |00:40:07| GEORGE KAO She bring a lot of this and put it on the menu. In the authentic Taiwanese style, like a bao. So we add it on and we introduce to the neighborhood, to the community, so that we&#039 ; ve got a great response. And then pretty much like, since we started in 2008, right now, it&#039 ; s kind of like almost every Chinese restaurant is following in our footsteps. Everybody doing the same type of food. |00:40:41| BRODY So that&#039 ; s I mean, that&#039 ; s really interesting because how does that conversation happen? Like when you think, &quot ; Oh, I want to introduce something new,&quot ; what are you drawing on and what are you trying to accomplish? |00:40:56| APRIL KAO There are other Chinese restaurants, they so-called authentic Chinese food. They do also have stuff that cater to American people and they have two sets of menu. When Chinese walk in, they give you the authentic so-called menu. |00:41:19| GEORGE KAO All Chinese character. |00:41:20| APRIL KAO And I don&#039 ; t want to do that because that&#039 ; s, to me, we shouldn&#039 ; t discriminate anybody. All you know, regardless you&#039 ; re Asian or you&#039 ; re American, you can also try different food. I want everybody to accept the food we serve. And some people know what to order. Some majority, they would just stick to whatever they&#039 ; re used to, you know, General Chicken always. |00:41:51| GEORGE KAO Their comfort food. |00:41:54| APRIL KAO So we do have Chinese people that love our food. You know, they will come and have big parties and all their families come and told us &quot ; Wow. This is the best.&quot ; So that&#039 ; s really, really rewarding. And we have American people that know that we do serve authentic food. |00:42:21| BRODY You struck a balance there between those two things. So. Well, that&#039 ; s really nice. And I like the education piece of it that, you know, that you can have the authentic foods.. |00:42:34| APRIL KAO Like the meatball...Pearl Rice meatball that...I make that. I used to make that all the time for my kids, for my own family&#039 ; s, you know, all kinds of special gathering. I made that and I thought, &quot ; Wow, this everybody loves it. Why don&#039 ; t we serve this at the restaurant?&quot ; So I started to put in things that that I think people would like. And, yes, that became quite popular. |00:43:05| BRODY That&#039 ; s really interesting. Did you run into in or your family, in the course of running the restaurant, any racism, or, you know, issues like that that were more challenging? |00:43:20| APRIL KAO Yeah. |00:43:20| GEORGE KAO From time to time. And I think that that&#039 ; s a pretty universally every race, you will...You will run into some people. Just not kind. Not nice. Biased. |00:43:38| BRODY Did you feel that there were in particular stereotypes about Chinese food that that you were up against, that people had a maybe an idea about Chinese food being this or that? How did you deal with things like that? |00:43:57| GEORGE KAO You mean how we...or their perception? |00:44:04| APRIL KAO And people have their you know, they are used to wherever they go, you know, like a restaurant, certain tastes, you know, they used to that. And when you go, when they come to our restaurant, it&#039 ; s not what they normally, you know, not their normal flavor, you know, to their liking, we try to fix it. We try to make it the way they like it. And then if they don&#039 ; t like it, we can&#039 ; t help it. |00:44:40| BRODY That is true. Back to the starting of the business, and I know neither one of you was necessarily right there when it started, but what do you know about the sort of the nuts and bolts of that process? Like, obviously they decided on- your dad decided on the location. Did he- was he renting? Or did he buy it outright or? |00:45:04| GEORGE KAO It is leased. |00:45:05| BRODY It is leased. OK, and so was that? |00:45:08| GEORGE KAO Until nowadays it&#039 ; s still leased. |00:45:10| BRODY Tell me about that. That piece of it, the sort of the real estate decisions that go into running a restaurant. |00:45:21| GEORGE KAO Landlord side or our side? |00:45:22| BRODY Just your own your experiences of sort of the business side of it, the, you know, renting the space, leasing the space also on the city side, getting permits and things like that. What is that like, what has that been like for you? |00:45:38| APRIL KAO We, we were not here, so however our father went through, we have no idea. But I know that he and the landlord, Mr. |00:45:52| GEORGE KAO Henry S. Miller |00:45:53| APRIL KAO Henry S. Miller III had a very good relationship. He was, Mr. Miller, was really generous, very kind man. So the relationship between the two lasted a long time. I know every time the new lease is |00:46:15| GEORGE KAO New lease |00:46:18| APRIL KAO Needs a renew, they would send us the lease and Buck would sign it and send it back. |00:46:26| GEORGE KAO That&#039 ; s it |00:46:27| APRIL KAO Very simple. They&#039 ; re so easy. I know the last lease that I was there was like ten dollars per square foot and he every time would increase a little, OK and, |00:46:45| GEORGE KAO Which is understandable. |00:46:45| APRIL KAO Yeah. Ten dollars and then he&#039 ; d sign it and then send it back. It was just so easy until 2006. That&#039 ; s a different story. |00:46:54| BRODY What happened in 2006? |00:46:55| GEORGE KAO That was the most dramatic event in our restaurant. |00:46:58| BRODY Really what happened? |00:47:00| GEORGE KAO Most dramatic, most theatrical. |00:47:04| APRIL KAO 2006. I mean at the time all other restaurants like Vietnamese restaurant, Thai, Korean foods all came to Dallas and Chinese was starting to go downhill because too much, too many restaurants are too saturated and, you know, too many, too many buffet places. And it was really difficult. |00:47:35| GEORGE KAO Nothing exciting. It&#039 ; s just the same. Every restaurant is the same- Chinese restaurant. |00:47:39| APRIL KAO So the Mr. Miller&#039 ; s daughter took over managing the property. She decided to change the concept. No more Chinese in her property. She wanted other Vietnamese or Thai restaurant for our location. So she didn&#039 ; t want to renew the lease. |00:48:07| BRODY Oh, that must have been difficult. |00:48:10| GEORGE KAO Yeah, they wanted more sales. So they want a new business to generate more sales. So they said, based on your sales, it&#039 ; s not meet our standard. |00:48:25| BRODY So how did you respond to that? |00:48:27| APRIL KAO So we tried to talk her, you know, negotiate and she said no, we-you know. |00:48:33| GEORGE KAO You are... |00:48:34| APRIL KAO Yeah. No more. So we were ready to move. I actually found other locations and then I hired a team of three restaurant consultants. And the consultants...One of the consultants came to Royal China at the time and they said, &quot ; No, you should stay here.&quot ; I said, &quot ; No, the landlord didn&#039 ; t want us to stay, so how can we you know?&quot ; He said, &quot ; Let me talk to her. I know the brothers.&quot ; So, so he made a phone call and said, &quot ; Don&#039 ; t sign any lease with anybody for a month, give us a month.&quot ; So I work with the...All three of them. One was the architect. He started to do the design and then I worked with the other two on the menu side. I came up with the menu and they helped me kind of go into that and added to the menu. And by the end of the month, we presented the plan to Jackie and the team. So later she called and say, &quot ; OK, it&#039 ; s green light!&quot ; You know, so w? Got the 10 year lease. |00:50:02| BRODY That&#039 ; s great. So tell me about what the changes were. What was the new plan? And what was different about it from the old. |00:50:11| GEORGE KAO Revolutionized! |George Kao laughs| |00:50:15| APRIL KAO We knocked down everything, the wall, every, every wall, everything. |00:50:21| BRODY Had it been pretty much the same since the old, the old Safari days. |00:50:26| APRIL KAO No. Totally. |00:50:26| BRODY OK, so, you had changed it in between? |00:50:29| APRIL KAO We totally changed the whole look. |00:50:35| GEORGE KAO And to move the whole dumpling bar. That&#039 ; s her idea. |00:50:40| APRIL KAO We put, we put a dumpling bar, I mean the kitchen right in the dining room so people can see it. And later we have the hand-pulled noodles. So the open kitchen in Chinese food with cooks that are making handmade dumplings there, it was the first concept in Dallas. So that that was a very... became a really big hit. |00:51:10| BRODY And that was your idea. |00:51:11| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Absolutely. |00:51:12| BRODY This is had so you had this team of... |00:51:15| GEORGE KAO I&#039 ; m a very lucky man. |George Kao laughs| |00:51:17| BRODY Absolutely. So... And then the menu. Tell me about the other changes in the menu that were part of that proposal. |00:51:24| APRIL KAO I mean, we&#039 ; re tried not to have this huge menu like every Chinese restaurant has. You know, we tried to simplify but diversify. So we had dumplings. We have noodles and different kinds of noodles. And we add in a little bit of the curries and a little bit of the little small plates that kind of cater to all different you know... |00:51:54| GEORGE KAO And we have kind of start to emphasize on the Shanghai style cooking and Sichuan style to balance out. |00:52:04| BRODY So you made sure that both of those were incorporated as well. So were there things that were removed from the menu that people still wanted? |00:52:14| GEORGE KAO Oh, yes. Of course. |George Kao laughs| |00:52:17| APRIL KAO I mean, almost every restaurant has Broccoli Beef, Sweet and Sour Chicken. And we kind of not have that on our menu because there&#039 ; s just too many items. But we can still make those items if people ask for it. |00:52:35| BRODY So do people ask for them still? |00:52:37| GEORGE KAO Everyday. And they don&#039 ; t even check the menu. They just come &quot ; Sweet and Sour Chicken. It&#039 ; s not on the menu.&quot ; I say, &quot ; We know that. We still make it OK.&quot ; |Recording stops briefly here| |00:52:51| BRODY I&#039 ; m restarting the recording and we were talking about the changes in the menu that happened in 2006 and the reaction to those changes. So let&#039 ; s pick up where we left off. So you&#039 ; ve been happy with the reception of the new floor plan. And what do you think people like the most about the new? What do you think people like the most about the new set up? |00:53:21| APRIL KAO OK, we started in 2006, but the restaurant didn&#039 ; t finish the renovation until 2008. And most people, when they come in, they&#039 ; re shocked to see this totally new restaurant. All new. I mean, we had marble, beautiful marble countertop, you know, some stainless steel. |00:53:53| GEORGE KAO More contemporary. |00:53:55| APRIL KAO And mixed in with the old. So it&#039 ; s really contemporary and nice and clean restaurant at the time. So. People kind of went crazy about it. |00:54:08| GEORGE KAO And many they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Wow!&quot ; |00:54:11| APRIL KAO Everything was new. |00:54:12| BRODY Yeah, well, especially if you&#039 ; ve had four generations of families coming to the old place. Tell me about some of the you know, just if you can imagine that the first time that some of those older families, established families came back, what was, what were the main comments you got? What was their reaction? |00:54:30| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Like, you know, basically speechless. So totally, in awe. |00:54:35| APRIL KAO Wow. That wow factor. |00:54:39| BRODY Is it, now is it more crowded now than it used to be? |00:54:43| APRIL KAO Yes. |00:54:44| GEORGE KAO Well, you know, from 2008, |00:54:48| APRIL KAO The business increased. |00:54:50| GEORGE KAO We had almost like swing |makes upward movement with hands|. |00:54:54| BRODY That&#039 ; s amazing. |00:54:55| APRIL KAO Double, triple of the business. |00:54:58| BRODY That&#039 ; s amazing. And is that partly because of increasing the capacity? |00:55:02| GEORGE KAO No. |00:55:03| BRODY No? |00:55:04| APRIL KAO No. The restaurant&#039 ; s still the same size, but more popular, became more popular. The business. And we&#039 ; re packed almost like every, every night. There&#039 ; s a line. Forty five minutes wait, an hour wait, you know. Never before. |00:55:19| BRODY That wasn&#039 ; t how it was before. So that sounds like that 2006 decision... |00:55:26| GEORGE KAO 2008. |00:55:26| BRODY Yeah. 2006 and 2008. |00:55:29| GEORGE KAO Start the process. |00:55:29| BRODY .That was a real turning point for the restaurant, wasn&#039 ; t it? What would you say your biggest sellers are today? |00:55:37| APRIL KAO Well, General Chicken, still the biggest seller |00:55:40| GEORGE KAO We should put it in a different category. |00:55:43| APRIL KAO OK, dumplings, dumplings are almost like every... |00:55:46| GEORGE KAO Soup dumpling. |00:55:49| APRIL KAO Soup dumplings. |00:55:49| BRODY Yeah. Was that the ... |00:55:52| GEORGE KAO Actually is General Kao&#039 ; s Chicken. No doubt. You know, the universal number one! |00:55:57| APRIL KAO General Chicken, Dry Stirred Beef, and Lo Mein is still very popular. Yeah. |00:56:02| BRODY Yeah. So have people cultivated new favorites? |00:56:10| GEORGE KAO Oh, yes. |00:56:11| APRIL KAO So those dumplings where they eat them, something that you had served before? |00:56:15| APRIL KAO We ha we had dumplings, but very simple. It&#039 ; s just like pork dumpling, that&#039 ; s all. |00:56:21| BRODY So tell me about the change. |00:56:22| APRIL KAO And then we added four different kinds of dumplings...Soup dumplings we added. And then we added shrimp, chicken, and vegetable dumplings with the pork we already had. And then I colorized the dough so each one has its own colors. We use vegetable to dye the dough. |00:56:49| GEORGE KAO Natural ingredients. |00:56:51| APRIL KAO Yeah. Like, we use spinach for the... |00:56:57| GEORGE KAO Spinach puree,. |00:56:58| APRIL KAO Vegetable dumplings. Chicken, we use carrots and then we use beet, you know, red colors for the shrimp dumplings. So it was very colorful. People would see that this dumpling sampler and go, &quot ; Wow!&quot ; You know, it&#039 ; s not, not just tastes good, they look pretty too. |00:57:16| BRODY Sounds very pretty. And it&#039 ; s an open kitchen so they can see the dumplings being made as well. How do you serve those dumplings? Are they in a steamer? |00:57:26| APRIL KAO Steamer. |00:57:26| BRODY Yeah, it&#039 ; s a little dramatic as well. |00:57:28| APRIL KAO We steam them so they can see all the other stack of the dumpling baskets there being steamed and also making the dumplings right in front of them. |00:57:41| BRODY So tell me about the chefs. I know when your dad came first, he had, you said the two Taiwanese chefs. |00:57:51| GEORGE KAO Ancient now. Yeah. |00:57:51| BRODY Oh, so how about now? What are your...How do you? |00:57:55| GEORGE KAO You mean chefs nowadays. |00:57:57| BRODY Yes. Did the same. I mean, not the same people, of course. |00:58:02| GEORGE KAO No, I say maybe. That, when the restaurant opened, that chef probably, probably already gone. They pretty much the same age as my dad. So my dad already passed away. Twenty years. So I am assuming that generation probably really fade away. |00:58:20| BRODY Right. So how did you keep finding chefs that were authentic to the types of food that you wanted to serve and also flexible enough to adapt to the clientele? |00:58:32| APRIL KAO We try to find them locally, you know, by word of mouth, say so and so working somewhere. And then you know, we put out a search and I did, we did bring in from China, one from China, two from China and one from Taiwan. You know, that we got them green card and then work permits and then green card to work here. |00:59:04| BRODY Right. So that&#039 ; s an interaction with the government. We were talking earlier about permits for the restaurant itself. And here you&#039 ; re interacting with, you know, immigration and so on. |00:59:14| APRIL KAO It was easier. |00:59:16| GEORGE KAO And the some is a local talent. So we get them. |00:59:18| APRIL KAO It was easier back then. But now it&#039 ; s getting harder and harder to find people, especially nowadays. |00:59:24| BRODY Right. |00:59:25| APRIL KAO Just so hard. And people change professions. This is not profession that people wanted to continue. So, it&#039 ; s getting really hard. |00:59:39| BRODY So how are you meeting those challenges? What are what are your strategies? Still working on it? |00:59:44| GEORGE KAO The only solution in any business right now. Like service, retail? One solution- pay more. |00:59:54| APRIL KAO Yes. |00:59:57| GEORGE KAO All those small businesses, even at retail. Right? Especially Christmas just around corner. All the retail stores want to hire extra people, they just can&#039 ; t find them. One of the main factor is all the big block stores like Amazon and Walmart. I think you know that, right? They hire tens of thousand people. To start with...minimum wage plus benefits plus. So small business .is just very, very difficult. |01:00:32| BRODY It&#039 ; s been challenging |01:00:33| GEORGE KAO Very challenging. |01:00:35| APRIL KAO We even tried to hire unskilled cook to train. It&#039 ; s actually nowhere to be found. So the only solution is to, to offer more money. You know, it just can&#039 ; t increase pay enough, fast enough. It&#039 ; s just really hard to keep people. |01:00:59| BRODY Right. That makes me think about the kind of what we&#039 ; re talking about before. When you first opened the restaurant, there wasn&#039 ; t you know, there weren&#039 ; t any other Chinese restaurants here. And now, you know, at some point there was, as you said, a saturation. And so where are we now in terms of competition for Chinese restaurants? Is it at a a peak level? |01:01:24| APRIL KAO So many people still opening the restaurant. We don&#039 ; t know why and it&#039 ; s so difficult to find skilled worker and, you know, right now, but they are still opening. |01:01:38| BRODY Why do you think that is? |01:01:42| APRIL KAO Not sure why I, you know... |01:01:48| GEORGE KAO People just want to be their own boss. |01:01:50| APRIL KAO They want to own their own business and not knowing other things to do? They think owning a restaurant, opening a restaurant. It&#039 ; s the easy solution, but it&#039 ; s really not easy. |01:02:05| GEORGE KAO And also, especially after a pandemic. Right. The businesses start to come back- the restaurant business, the hospitality business. So it makes lots of people interested. OK, this is a good time to invest in the restaurant business. OK, but at the same time, everybody just right now start to find out, most challenging part is the labor shortage. You can have money, you might have a similar skill, you don&#039 ; t have enough labor to fill in every position. |01:02:46| BRODY And there are many positions to fill in a restaurant. In the early days, I know... Right now there&#039 ; s a labor shortage. In the early days of the restaurant, were those positions filled primarily by family in your case or did you hire people? |01:03:05| APRIL KAO We hired people and it was easy at the time to find who were people willing to work in the restaurant. Majority are immigrants. You know, we, as the immigrant ourself, we&#039 ; d give other immigrants the opportunities. And to this day, we still hire immigrants and a lot of refugees. You know, by giving them an opportunity, I feel like we&#039 ; re taking care of them and giving them their first start. |01:03:48| BRODY That&#039 ; s great. And building connections within the community. So on the subject of connecting with communities, how connected do you feel that your restaurant is to the larger Chinese community in Dallas? And how has that been over time? Do you feel that there&#039 ; s a strong connection there? |01:04:13| APRIL KAO Our restaurant, actually, it&#039 ; s away from the majority of the Chinese communities. We&#039 ; re in the majority of the Caucasian populations. So I, you know, from time to time, we have Asian come to our restaurants and probably that&#039 ; s the only connection we have with them. |01:04:39| GEORGE KAO So pretty much they say, strongest connection, neighborhood and the Jewish community. |01:04:47| BRODY Oh, yeah tell me about that. |01:04:48| GEORGE KAO It&#039 ; s our big supporter. |01:04:51| BRODY Yeah, that was going to be one of my questions I&#039 ; ve got written down. What are your connections with other groups within Dallas, the Jewish community, the African-American community, the Latino community or any others? |01:05:06| GEORGE KAO Probably our strongest connection is the Jewish community? |01:05:10| APRIL KAO We&#039 ; re in the neighborhood. |01:05:11| GEORGE KAO Yeah...demographic-wise the North Dallas is lot of Jewish concentrate. Lots of synagogues. Lots of business there. And also is some historical reason, Jewish people love Chinese food. |01:05:30| BRODY Why do you think that is? |01:05:33| GEORGE KAO They say it&#039 ; s back to centuries ago? This is a back- old days. Before the OK, after the Russian Revolution, early start of the 20th century, lots of Jewishcommunities, they kind of run away from the Communists, they started to move to China. It all start from there. The majority, they moved to Shanghai, the largest city. |01:06:02| APRIL KAO Almost twenty thousand people at the time was allowed into China. And they lived in Shanghai for until after World War II, and they started to move back. I was just watching a program about it. |01:06:18| BRODY Really interesting. |01:06:20| APRIL KAO So that&#039 ; s how they learned to play Mah Jong. |01:06:23| GEORGE KAO Yeah, that&#039 ; s how the Jewish ladies learned to play Mah Jong. It all start from Shanghai. |01:06:30| BRODY It&#039 ; s really interesting. So tell me about your customers who are Jewish and the sort of the relationships that have built up between your restaurant, your family, and the Jewish community. |01:06:42| GEORGE KAO We&#039 ; re old. Like ancient culture, right? Like Indian ancient culture. So it&#039 ; s a mutual respect about like your country, your people, my people, Jewish group...It&#039 ; s mutual respect about for historic. |01:07:00| APRIL KAO All family-oriented |01:07:02| GEORGE KAO And also very family oriented. And Jewish people are also very loyal and very straightforward. They really connect with you. They let you know what they think. They&#039 ; re very honest, very honest opinion is just that, &quot ; Hey, George, you...I think you need to check it out. This is a little bit different.&quot ; We love this feedback. |01:07:38| BRODY So you appreciate that. |01:07:39| GEORGE KAO So we really appreciate that. ]They eat Chinese food on Christmas Day. |01:07:46| GEORGE KAO Oh, yes. |01:07:47| APRIL KAO That&#039 ; s the only restaurant that opened and everyone else is, you know, closed and have family gathering at Christmas. But Chinese restaurants are open. So that&#039 ; s the biggest day for the Jewish to go eat Chinese food and watch movie after. |01:08:06| BRODY So you&#039 ; re open on Christmas Day. |01:08:10| GEORGE KAO We used to close before remodel. OK, that&#039 ; s another top to add to that. Before we remodel, we always closed Christmas. We never think about opening because it&#039 ; s family time. Right? So after we remodel all the neighborhood was so impressed by it and all those neighborhood Jewish communities approach us. &quot ; Hey, George, you need to open on Christmas. We&#039 ; ll all show up. You will be surprised.&quot ; |01:08:45| BRODY And were you? |01:08:46| GEORGE KAO Yes. OK, so we said, &quot ; Ok, ok, well we&#039 ; ll start this year, we&#039 ; ll see.&quot ; I still remember that day I come to restaurant first, probably right after lunchtime, because we still closed at lunchtime on Christmas Day. We open for dinner, probably around to 2:00 or 3:00. I already see the line start to form outside. I&#039 ; ll call April. &quot ; Come here fast, already, start to line up outside!&quot ; |01:09:26| BRODY Oh, that&#039 ; s incredible. You were surprised. |01:09:29| GEORGE KAO That&#039 ; s been every since- our Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. The two most significant things...all the neighborhood, especially regular Jewish families, they all made the reservation sometimes, they make every year. |01:09:49| BRODY A standing reservation. |01:09:49| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Yeah. So later... So on that day, those two days, we basically stopped taking reservations about several months ago already. Already full. |01:10:00| APRIL KAO So it&#039 ; s really rewarding to see how people support us and how much they love us. And so regardless how tired we are, you know, when we see that kind of support, it&#039 ; s really I mean... |01:10:18| BRODY It sounds like you&#039 ; re a meaningful part of a lot of people&#039 ; s lives. A lot of families lives over all these years. |01:10:27| APRIL KAO Generations. |01:10:27| GEORGE KAO Very rewarding, you know, you see that Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, all the neighborhood people show up, they all know each other. And you really feel... |01:10:36| APRIL KAO The, like, whole neighborhood of the Jewish there. |01:10:41| BRODY That&#039 ; s great. Yeah. Can you can we just talk for a second about the atmosphere in the restaurant? What is it like the spirit in there when it&#039 ; s when it&#039 ; s a busy night. What are you both doing and how does it feel in there? Maybe if you could paint a picture with words. |01:11:03| APRIL KAO It&#039 ; s lively. |01:11:04| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |claps| |01:11:06| APRIL KAO So, you know, when you when you see these people that&#039 ; s smiling, happy face. You know, we, I usually go around the table and check how&#039 ; s everything going. And, you know, they tell you it&#039 ; s great and so and so to your server. This is great. |01:11:24| GEORGE KAO So it is a fun environment, especially in the front of the bar. Our bar is so popular, even just a several seat bar, probably eight. We only have eight seats. No more than eight. When a busy time, customers politely fighting for the seat. It&#039 ; s not like really, you know, sort of a punch. But, you know... |01:11:59| BRODY There&#039 ; s a big demand. |01:12:00| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Then they calling, just &quot ; Hey...save two seats for me.&quot ; I say, &quot ; Ok,ok,ok,ok.&quot ; This is what I remember, hospitality business and you need to have a certain kind of personality and character. |01:12:23| BRODY And what do you think that what are the main gifts that you have that you&#039 ; re bringing to your time in the restaurant? Both of you. |01:12:35| GEORGE KAO Oh, to me, you know, it is my personality. I&#039 ; m a...I love people. I love to connect with people. To make everybody walk into the door, you feel that you are satisfied. We do our best to accommodate. We want to have a great experience. |01:12:59| BRODY What does hospitality mean to you? |01:13:02| GEORGE KAO Yeah, absolutely. Totally. It just does the hospitality. As it&#039 ; s also hospitality. |01:13:09| APRIL KAO And as a cook, you know, you love to see people enjoying your food. So I go around and make sure that you enjoy your food, everything good, you know? |01:13:21| BRODY And making sure people are satisfied and like you said, getting feedback that you find useful. What about the...Sort of the again, back to the nuts and bolts sourcing of ingredients and so on. It sounds like back in the 70s that might have been a little bit challenging. How did they do it? How did you do it? Back in the early days, how did you get the ingredients that you needed and so on? Was it difficult? |01:13:52| APRIL KAO There was a supplier. There was probably only the one or two supplier that would supply imported goods-cans and meat. But these days, the imports are getting so difficult and so expensive. And plus, I try to get away from using canned food imported. Not only they&#039 ; re expensive and they&#039 ; re you know, people don&#039 ; t like the idea of canned foods. So we try to use fresh, local food, local ingredients. |01:14:35| BRODY So do you source them? Do you go to the farmer&#039 ; s market or is it more Asian grocery stores or suppliers? |01:14:43| APRIL KAO I go to Asian grocery stores and try to look for local beef. There&#039 ; s a smaller farm that would have local beef. Vegetables just wherever we can get them. There&#039 ; s a local farmer and he grows vegetables, but just not enough for our demand. |01:15:09| BRODY Right. How much do you go through in a week of typical of meat, vegetables, things like that? |01:15:16| APRIL KAO We go. Every day, there&#039 ; s like cases of- three or four cases of chicken. Couple of cases of beef. And broccoli, every day is like three or four cases. Mushrooms, a couple of cases a day. We have produce and meat come in every day. Nothing frozen. Try not to use canned food. Right now, I probably don&#039 ; t have any canned food. |01:15:48| BRODY It&#039 ; s really interesting and it sounds very challenging to keep up. |01:15:51| APRIL KAO But now we have three or four, four suppliers. So, you know, if this one doesn&#039 ; t have it, I&#039 ; ll go to the next one. Yeah, luckily. |01:16:03| BRODY OK, OK, you&#039 ; ve been in the same location for, you know, the whole time physically, so you&#039 ; ve lots of neighbors have come and gone. What is the sort of their relationship with the plaza that Royal China is in? |01:16:19| GEORGE KAO Oh, you mean the businesses. |01:16:20| BRODY Yeah, the other- your neighbors. |01:16:22| GEORGE KAO The other businesses. We always have very good relationship with our neighbors, but their business, you know, sometimes they just, for example, they don&#039 ; t make money, so they not resign the contract. some just leave. |01:16:46| BRODY Yeah. There&#039 ; s been a lot of turn around. |01:16:49| GEORGE KAO Lot of turnaround.Yeah. Yeah, yeah. |01:16:49| BRODY In that plaza. |01:16:51| GEORGE KAO In our corner, only oldest tenant- I think only us |01:16:59| APRIL KAO and Ken&#039 ; s Mens Shop. Two of the oldest ones. |01:17:03| BRODY Two originals. |01:17:04| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |01:17:05| APRIL KAO Our neighbor store Toy Maven. The week, after we closed. We closed one week in July for vacation and when we reopened, Candice is the owner, came to us and said &quot ; You have no idea. After six o&#039 ; clock, this whole shopping center almost empty because you guys are closed. The parking lot empty because you were not open.&quot ; |01:17:39| BRODY That&#039 ; s really interesting. And you would never know. |01:17:42| APRIL KAO So she said the landlord better know that. How much contribution you brought to the center. |01:17:50| BRODY Yeah. That&#039 ; s a good way to measure that for sure. Do you advertise at all? |01:17:58| APRIL KAO Not really. |01:17:59| BRODY Word of mouth, primarily. |01:18:02| APRIL KAO Word of mouth, primarily. |01:18:03| GEORGE KAO Word of mouth. And also, we have a lot of personal friends. They own a newspaper. They are our loyal customers. It&#039 ; s more like personal friend. |01:18:18| BRODY Right. |01:18:19| GEORGE KAO So they&#039 ; ll say, &quot ; Come on I, I want to write something.&quot ; Yeah. We say, &quot ; No, no, no.&quot ; They just love to tell the story. |01:18:30| BRODY Well it&#039 ; s a great story. |01:18:32| GEORGE KAO Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. |01:18:34| BRODY Tell me about your dad. What was he like? His personality. Because I know that he was really the spirit behind the restaurant when he was running it. Tell me what he was like. |01:18:46| GEORGE KAO Yeah, he&#039 ; s pretty much kind of like me, but he&#039 ; s more traditional. More- a little bit more old fashioned, but, he actually is probably, out of his generation, he probably is more Westernized because he&#039 ; s been studying the English and he&#039 ; s being stationed on the Washington, and so he&#039 ; s a very open minded and have a great people skills. Loved to connect with people. Very outgoing. And also he&#039 ; s a very knowledgeable person, very knowledgeable person. even write a book. Write the poems. |01:19:43| BRODY Did he come up with the original menu? |01:19:46| GEORGE KAO No, I don&#039 ; t think he did. |laughs| |01:19:50| BRODY The chef did. |01:19:52| APRIL KAO The chef did. Yeah. |01:19:53| GEORGE KAO And chef, and my mom. And everybody contribute, everybody will give their... |01:20:01| BRODY their input. |01:20:02| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |01:20:02| BRODY Well, he sounds like a fun man. |01:20:07| APRIL KAO They call him Buck. His name is Shu Chang Kao. But somehow they call him Buck and they call the restaurant &quot ; Buck.&quot ; &quot ; Let&#039 ; s go to Buck&#039 ; s place.&quot ; |01:20:18| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |01:20:18| BRODY That&#039 ; s what his original customers. |01:20:21| APRIL KAO Yeah, right. His original customers. |01:20:22| GEORGE KAO Right. And now people &quot ; Go to George&#039 ; s.&quot ; &quot ; Go to Aprils.&quot ; |Laughs|. |01:20:24| BRODY Do people say that? |01:20:25| GEORGE KAO Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. |01:20:27| APRIL KAO Now &quot ; George&#039 ; s Place.&quot ; |01:20:27| GEORGE KAO We love that connection. |01:20:32| BRODY It sounds like exactly that. The connection that you&#039 ; ve built with the, with the community. And so we kind of touched on this earlier. But on cultural holidays and special events, do you do or historically, have you done special events for Chinese New Year, for example? |01:20:54| GEORGE KAO Mmmm. OK, we used to, but now that we still do, it&#039 ; s our own celebration for Chinese New Year for employees. |01:21:06| BRODY OK, tell me about that. How is that? |01:21:09| GEORGE KAO We cook a, you know... |01:21:12| APRIL KAO Feast. |01:21:12| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Big feast for everybody. And the Chinese tradition is also so-called &quot ; red envelope.&quot ; So that&#039 ; s pretty much every business sends out that extra bonus to all the employees who work for you. |01:21:29| BRODY So you have the feast. And so the restaurant&#039 ; s closed and the employees all...And then you do the red envelopes. |01:21:38| GEORGE KAO Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. |01:21:41| BRODY That&#039 ; s really nice. There must be something that your longtime employees are looking forward to. |01:21:46| GEORGE KAO |Laughs| And you know, absolutely. |01:21:49| BRODY Well. The past few years have been a difficult time, definitely with Covid and everything. But even before that, here in Dallas, we were hit with a tornado. So tell me about what- how you all fared at Royal China with the tornado. |01:22:10| APRIL KAO Well, Royal China was kind of lucky. We didn&#039 ; t have really too much of the damage except just out of power and some AC units here and there. So we closed for nine days. Our neighbors in stores across the street, like Central Market was not lucky. Like they had to close for a long time and rebuild. And fortunately, they reopened. So, I mean, for nine days we feel really, really lucky. |01:22:55| BRODY So that tornado was in October 2019. |01:22:58| GEORGE KAO October 20th. |01:22:58| APRIL KAO 20, 2019 20, 2019. |01:23:02| GEORGE KAO October 20. |01:23:03| APRIL KAO 20 of 2019. Yes. |01:23:07| GEORGE KAO Cowboys played Philadelphia. Sunday Night Football game. |01:23:11| APRIL KAO OK. |01:23:12| BRODY I mean, it&#039 ; s a good way to remember. Who was playing? |01:23:15| GEORGE KAO Philadelphia,. |01:23:15| BRODY Philadelphia and the Cowboys. |01:23:18| GEORGE KAO And Cowboys. Play at home. |01:23:21| BRODY That&#039 ; s right. |01:23:21| APRIL KAO That was really scary. We were all at the restaurant. |01:23:25| BRODY How was that evening for you? You were at the restaurant? |01:23:28| APRIL KAO We were at the restaurant. Our daughter call us and say, &quot ; Mom! Tornado&#039 ; s coming your way.&quot ; I go, &quot ; OK?&quot ; |01:23:36| GEORGE KAO We have no idea. |01:23:37| APRIL KAO You know, tornado never came, never really touched down for all this year. I mean, OK. And then she called again a few minutes later. &quot ; The tornado was really coming your way!&quot ; She was crying. You know, I, I go. So I came out of my office and it&#039 ; s &quot ; OK, what should we do?&quot ; And then at the time, it was really windy. The wind was howling and they tried to get the door closed. And then people was standing at the big window and trying to look out. I say, &quot ; Stay away, get away from the...&quot ; |01:24:12| GEORGE KAO Customers. |01:24:13| APRIL KAO &quot ; Get away from the door!&quot ; And we have no idea what to do. We had no place to hide. |01:24:19| GEORGE KAO We just had...Most of our customers- very calm. |01:24:22| APRIL KAO But we had half of the customers you know, half of the store was with customer in it. And luckily, it was, it was quickly really very, very quick. |01:24:35| GEORGE KAO Probably thirty seconds. Yeah. |01:24:37| BRODY So no damage other than no power. No power. |01:24:40| GEORGE KAO No, electricity. That&#039 ; s it. The electricity, the power come back exact one week. Sunday through following Sunday. Rght? |01:24:52| APRIL KAO We closed one night. |01:24:53| BRODY So you were closed. |01:24:54| GEORGE KAO The access we need is a gas company. ATMOS. They came to check every business one by one... |01:25:04| BRODY And there a lot. |01:25:05| GEORGE KAO And make sure no gas leaking. Then they give you a green tag. |01:25:08| BRODY To open again. |01:25:09| GEORGE KAO To open. |01:25:09| APRIL KAO And our house got hit too. |01:25:12| BRODY Oh your house got hit. I&#039 ; m sorry. |01:25:15| GEORGE KAO Not too bad, all things considered. Our garage. Greenhouse. Boom. |01:25:26| APRIL KAO Compared to our neighbor, we still consider we are lucky. |01:25:30| BRODY There was so much damage in such a short time. |01:25:33| GEORGE KAO Yeah, but know this tornado is no compared to pandemic. That&#039 ; s totally...Yeah, absolutely. Nobody ever experienced that before. |01:25:46| BRODY Yeah. That was my next question. How...how... |01:25:49| GEORGE KAO It was crazy. |01:25:50| BRODY Let&#039 ; s go back to January, February, March. 2020. |01:25:55| GEORGE KAO Oh, when it started? |01:25:56| BRODY When it&#039 ; s starting... How did? |01:25:59| GEORGE KAO When they started it&#039 ; s ok. Not about...You don&#039 ; t really feel that much different. |01:26:04| APRIL KAO January or February, were still very busy. |01:26:07| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |01:26:08| APRIL KAO Up till March before we closed...Before the governor closed the restaurant on the seventeenth or eighteenth. So we...that we were only allowed to take out. So we started to have the take out business and take out actually grew. You know, people needed a place to eat. So we only open at night doing takeout. |01:26:40| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |01:26:41| BRODY So takeout only. So how did that change your employees&#039 ; situation, their hours, your workflow? Because if everybody was doing takeout, that&#039 ; s a whole different way of doing business, right? So how did you- what was it like and how did you handle it? |01:27:00| APRIL KAO We closed during the day and then...well...server? We have to stop them, hold their job. And then the front of the house, everybody is working. And we have, we had a couple of the server came and help us, answering phone, packing take out order, and take out actually was very busy. It was enough to sustain our regular pay and we pay everybody all the kitchen staff the same. They all keep the same pay. |01:27:40| GEORGE KAO Only wait staff because you&#039 ; re not open for business, you can&#039 ; t hire. |01:27:43| APRIL KAO Right. So it was not too bad for us. |01:27:47| BRODY That&#039 ; s good. Is takeout still booming? |01:27:50| APRIL KAO No, not at this point. |01:27:52| GEORGE KAO Right now is pretty much coming back. |01:27:54| APRIL KAO People came to eat. |01:27:55| GEORGE KAO Like in 19. |01:27:56| BRODY Right. |01:27:57| GEORGE KAO On the last year, it&#039 ; s reverse of the business. Normally, or just the same like. 70 dining, 30 take out to-go. Pandemic reverse. Seventy percent pickup. Dining, when you&#039 ; re open, you only can seat 50 percent, remember? First, when this started to 25 percent, we&#039 ; re not open. Because 25 percent, it makes no sense. You open 25 percent. It doesn&#039 ; t translate to anything. So just concentrate, you do the pick-up to-go. Pick-up to-go is so easy. Oh, that&#039 ; s crazy. |laughs| |01:28:56| BRODY Well, and now you&#039 ; re back to 100 percent. |01:28:59| GEORGE KAO Yeah, yeah, yeah. |01:29:02| BRODY You mentioned the Cowboys earlier because the tornado hit on the day of the Cowboys game. Do you have a lot of celebrities in your restaurant? |01:29:14| APRIL KAO Oh, yes. |01:29:15| GEORGE KAO I should consider in Dallas, considering we&#039 ; re in Dallas, not on East Coast, West Coast. In Chinese, restaurant, of course, we&#039 ; re not a steakhouse, right? But I think we can...Pretty good shape of celebrities. |01:29:31| BRODY Do you have any stories you want to share? |01:29:35| GEORGE KAO For example, like President Bush? Mr. and Mrs. Bush, they used, but they&#039 ; re still living now very close to us. The GW been here one time. Mrs. Bush has been there several times. And we have what- lots of people, I can&#039 ; t remember. |01:29:57| APRIL KAO We have I mean, we had, old Cowboy team, after they practice, they came to the restaurant. |01:30:05| BRODY So when was this... Back? |01:30:08| GEORGE KAO Back to in seventies. But we still some Cowboys come. |01:30:12| APRIL KAO Cowboys. Yeah the old... |01:30:14| GEORGE KAO We got the, um, Oscar winning director! |01:30:20| APRIL KAO Ang Lee. |01:30:23| BRODY Yeah. |01:30:24| APRIL KAO Ang Lee came to the restaurant. |01:30:26| GEORGE KAO At the restaurant |01:30:27| APRIL KAO John Travolta |01:30:27| GEORGE KAO John Travolta, come to the restaurant. Kathy Bates, come to the restaurant. Who else? From town, we have so many. Can&#039 ; t remember. |Claps| Jerry Jones come too. |Laughs| |01:30:41| BRODY That must be fun to talk to all these people in addition to your regular, your normal customers. |01:30:49| GEORGE KAO Oh...Don Henley of The Eagles. |01:30:51| BRODY Don Henley. Yeah, yeah. |01:30:52| GEORGE KAO Don Henley lives here in the neighborhood. But, Don Henley is very private. Very, very strict. He walks in first, gives you the sign. |Makes motion of zipping his lips| |01:31:07| BRODY That crosses...Zip your lip. |01:31:11| GEORGE KAO Then bring his family to a certain table. Not facing to anyone. He doesn&#039 ; t want people to know. Everybody has a little bit their different style. Yeah, some is very friendly. Most friendly, of course, is GW Bush. That&#039 ; s a politician. Yes, of course. Reason, you just like, you know that. The nicest person. I mean, I guess it&#039 ; s a nice surprise, but of course we know. He, he&#039 ; s a career politician, right? He got a lot of staff following him. The day they come, show up. He walked in...called my name. So, &quot ; Hey, George!&quot ; OK? |01:32:05| BRODY You have the same name. |01:32:05| GEORGE KAO Hats off, after all, they did some homework. They know each one. |01:32:11| BRODY That&#039 ; s impressive. |01:32:12| APRIL KAO We try to respect their privacy. So we don&#039 ; t we don&#039 ; t go to them and ask for autographs or taking a pictures. We said we have pictures with President Bush. |01:32:27| GEORGE KAO Yeah. That President Bush was there, once he finished the dinner, the whole restaurant, standing ovation. |01:32:36| BRODY Oh, really? |01:32:37| APRIL KAO Yeah. Everybody was paused. Yeah. |01:32:39| BRODY When was this? Was this back when he was president or since he finished... |01:32:43| GEORGE KAO Way after presidency. Then all the families start to line up and take a picture with him. |01:32:50| BRODY Oh yeah. Right there in your restaurant. |01:32:54| GEORGE KAO Yeah. The Secret Service people just like, &quot ; OK. The President loves to take a picture with them, but just one by one. |01:33:02| BRODY One by one, I&#039 ; m glad you got one, too. |01:33:05| GEORGE KAO Oh, yes, absolutely. |01:33:09| APRIL KAO That&#039 ; s the only picture we have with celebrity. |01:33:13| BRODY Well, that I mean, this respecting the privacy, what you were just saying of celebrities, that just goes back to what you were saying about hospitality, you know, and, you know, making people feel comfortable and feel at home. |01:33:26| GEORGE KAO And also, I kind of see it as why- it&#039 ; s the neighborhood. They have to common understanding. So they respect all of those celebrities&#039 ; privacy, you know. I think this also contributes. |01:33:47| BRODY This is the sort of the vibe in the neighborhood. |01:33:49| GEORGE KAO Yeah. |01:33:51| BRODY So we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, the way that the restaurant has been renovated and decorated. Tell me about the art that makes up the restaurant, that&#039 ; s decorating the restaurant, both the woodwork and the photographs. |01:34:07| APRIL KAO The woodwork is from the original, steakhouse. It was decorated like an Indian. You know, the woodwork was from India. So we kind of refinished it and to make it look a little more modernized and then we refinished the tabletop. It has the copper imprint of postmodern design on it. It&#039 ; s really priceless. And all the chairs are really comfortable. And then I used to have a flower arrangement, putting on it on the wall. And then later we put photographs, black and white photographs, and people seem to like them. |01:35:05| BRODY So who took those photographs? |01:35:09| GEORGE KAO Of course! It&#039 ; s her! |Laughs|. |01:35:09| APRIL KAO Oh, it&#039 ; s my work. I am. |01:35:12| BRODY So are they photos of... |01:35:16| APRIL KAO Family. |01:35:17| BRODY Family and travel? |01:35:19| APRIL KAO I have some family photos there, and then I have some travel when I went to Tibet and Mongolia and all over places. And I don&#039 ; t have money to collect other people&#039 ; s art. So I guess the cheapest way to decorate is it&#039 ; s use what I have. |01:35:42| BRODY Use your own art. You&#039 ; re an accomplished photographer, so that&#039 ; s a good use of your talents. |01:35:50| APRIL KAO And I used to exhibit friends of mine, colleagues and their work, but it&#039 ; s been so busy I haven&#039 ; t been keeping up with it. |01:36:03| BRODY Yeah, that&#039 ; s another thing. A lot of the restaurants and grocery stores that were representing sort of Asian cultures and Asian foods have turned out to also be, you know, hubs for people to gather, you know, cultural information or, you know, in your case, art and so forth. Could you tell me a little bit about where you see your own restaurant&#039 ; s role in sort of spreading the culture and the education about aspects of Chinese culture? |01:36:42| APRIL KAO I think I haven&#039 ; t done enough for that. |01:36:45| BRODY What would you like to do? |01:36:47| APRIL KAO I would... |01:36:50| GEORGE KAO We start with food. That, every culture, the food is most direct. People can connect. Human nature...People love to eat, so we show the culture. Introduce a culture basically through the food. |01:37:10| APRIL KAO And through photographs and people would love to talk about and ask, &quot ; Hey, where is this and where did you go?&quot ; And, you know, that sort of connections kind of help explain. |01:37:24| BRODY Absolutely. You&#039 ; re right. You know, your philosophy of food, you know, bringing people together and you&#039 ; re... |01:37:31| GEORGE KAO Always, almost always the culture, your introduction- food. To connect. Then it starts to touch the other area. |01:37:49| BRODY What lessons or reflections do you have from your experience over all these years running a restaurant here in Dallas? What are the- your takeaways or what words would you use to describe your experience when you look back on it? |01:38:13| GEORGE KAO Very enjoyable to me. |Laughs| Yeah, it&#039 ; s a very demanding, hard work, but it can connection with neighborhood, with people. I think that is most rewarding aspect of this business. You make people happy. Right? To people come to your place to celebrate anniversary, graduation, birthday, whatever occasion. It just feels...yes. |01:38:46| APRIL KAO It is very rewarding. You know, through people&#039 ; s satisfaction of their experience in our restaurant and also very difficult, very hard business. But, you know, those hard work, compared with the reward. It&#039 ; s really... |01:39:22| GEORGE KAO No business is easy business. A restaurant is very challenging business. That&#039 ; s for sure. |01:39:29| BRODY So what are the most challenging parts about being a restaurant owner? |01:39:35| GEORGE KAO Oh, I think, for example, this year, this year, particularly, post-pandemic, this year most times it&#039 ; s the labor. Hiring. Normally, it&#039 ; s about running your business, it&#039 ; s about inventory. Cost cutting. You have to basically, it&#039 ; s managing your financial things, but this year&#039 ; s additional. |01:40:06| BRODY Sure. How about the issue of waste, you know, is it you know, that kind of jumping off of what you said about, you know, cost cutting and trying to be efficient, how, in in your line of work and, you know, and cooking Chinese food in particular, are there tricks that you&#039 ; ve had to sort of be able to manage and be more efficient and reduce waste of, you know, of ingredients and so on? |01:40:35| GEORGE KAO You know the point is you have to train your people right. So cut out the waste. So that&#039 ; s...They have to develop a certain kind of skill- your employee. And how process, how they prep. For example, even like to save the energy, they have to develop certain common good habits. So that&#039 ; s not in one day. You have to train very diligently. |01:41:06| BRODY What are some examples of what you&#039 ; re talking about? |01:41:10| GEORGE KAO Yeah, for example, you call cost-cutting, right? For example, like, you prep...You cut vegetable, you cut chicken, and some can be very absent-minded, they will waste a lot of stuff. So some can be, you have a good training. They will save you a lot of, save you a lot of money. |01:41:33| BRODY Right. |01:41:33| APRIL KAO For instance, we sell a lot of duck, so when the prep take off the meat that... |01:41:47| GEORGE KAO De-bone. |01:41:48| APRIL KAO To serve and there&#039 ; s still a lot of meat on the bone, and our chef will develop a dish, so he will take off all the leftover meat that he can use and to use it on another dish. |01:42:05| BRODY What is the other dish |01:42:06| APRIL KAO That that is stir fry duck. |01:42:08| BRODY With the smaller pieces. |01:42:09| APRIL KAO Yeah, with the smaller pieces. That was leek actually that that was, that is very, very popular. |01:42:16| BRODY Still on the menu? |01:42:17| APRIL KAO So it is on the menu. So that that&#039 ; s a way to not waste. |01:42:24| BRODY A great example. |01:42:28| BRODY So you have two daughters and did they grow up in the restaurant? |01:42:32| APRIL KAO Yes. |01:42:32| BRODY Yeah. Tell me about what it was like having young children and running a very popular restaurant. |01:42:39| APRIL KAO They, when they are growing up, the restaurant wasn&#039 ; t as popular, but they would come to the restaurant from time to time. And the younger one actually loved to cook when she was little, probably four or five years old. She would try to make pancakes, cherry juice, even she would add cherry juice in the pancake, and make cherry pancakes and, you know, with flours over her face and say, &quot ; Mom, try this.&quot ; |01:43:14| BRODY That&#039 ; s really cute. At the restaurant kitchen? |01:43:14| APRIL KAO At the restaurant kitchen. |01:43:17| BRODY How were they? How were the cherry pancakes? |01:43:20| APRIL KAO They were good. And she- actually really friendly. She would go to tables and say hi to the customers. And we have one lady in particular. She had her granddaughters with her and she would take my daughters with her granddaughter to have ice cream. |01:43:50| BRODY Oh. |01:43:50| APRIL KAO So cute. |01:43:51| BRODY That is very cute. Well, it just reflects that neighborhood feel that you all cultivated in the hospitality and the family, the family aspect of that. Do you feel like, you know, that you would do it all over again? |01:44:13| APRIL KAO With this year, make me think, &quot ; OK, probably I won&#039 ; t be doing it all again,&quot ; because the labor issue, it&#039 ; s really hard to find people willing to work in the restaurant, especially in the kitchen. Not regardless how high the costs are going to be. But before that, it it&#039 ; s really...I love to see people eat. I love to see people enjoying their food. I would do it again last year. But this year it&#039 ; s just too hard. |01:44:51| BRODY Right. It has been very challenging. |01:44:53| APRIL KAO It&#039 ; s very challenging. Never, never this... For the 40 some years in the restaurant business. This is the hardest year. Last year was... |01:45:06| GEORGE KAO And all the people we know from the restaurant business, everybody say that. |01:45:08| BRODY Right. Yeah. Well, going forward. What, what lessons have you learned from this year? And, you know, and from, your whole experience prior that you think that that would be helpful for people in the future who are listening to this and trying to understand how you survived and how you connected with people here in the you know, in the middle of north Texas. |01:45:41| GEORGE KAO Oh, I think basically just try to try to adapt the situation, home environment. Whatever come to you, you try to, try to find a way, you know, it&#039 ; s a still on the process, still on the middle of the come out, we said, I don&#039 ; t know, you said the crisis or what. It&#039 ; s just lots of people that everybody is still trying to figure out how to manage the situation. |01:46:18| APRIL KAO Like we have to simplify the menu. We, we used to have three guys working at the deep fryer. Now we only have two. So I have to simplify the menu so they won&#039 ; t be too crazy, too busy. And some of the menu items, we have to take it off, you know, more complicated one to simplify it for the... |01:46:48| BRODY It&#039 ; s been hard. |01:46:49| GEORGE KAO And some, like Chinese restaurant, some Chinese in Plano. Right now, they close half day. They don&#039 ; t have enough labor. So they have to only sacrifice for lunch time. Concentrate on the dinner time. |01:47:10| BRODY You have to work with what you have. |01:47:13| GEORGE KAO Yeah. Absolutely. |01:47:15| BRODY So it sounds like your demand is high and the you know, and then you&#039 ; re just challenged by meeting the demand here under these circumstances. |01:47:27| GEORGE KAO For this, you have to try to adapt to the situation. |01:47:30| BRODY Yeah, I just asked April this as well. But George, if you could do it all over again, would you do it again? |01:47:37| GEORGE KAO Hmm? |01:47:38| BRODY Would you would you do, do this again? If you were doing your life over again, would you choose to go into the restaurant business? |01:47:45| GEORGE KAO Oh, absolutely. Yes. |01:47:50| BRODY It&#039 ; s been really rewarding for you it sounds like. |01:47:52| GEORGE KAO Yeah, and also... I love people. That&#039 ; s basic, right? When I come to the United States, I very honestly, I think we both never think we will do the restaurant and the restaurant was going to be our what we do for a lifetime. We all try to pursue it on art. So, I want to be a movie director. She want to be a photographer and a painter. And of course, she&#039 ; s here, already achieved a lot. But I&#039 ; m coming out first couple of years, I didn&#039 ; t adapt very well because I&#039 ; m still kind like |claps| &quot ; No. This is...I&#039 ; m not ...I&#039 ; m not willing to do this for the rest of my life.&quot ; Then starting to develop like, &quot ; Well, actually. It&#039 ; s a fun business. It suits my personality.&quot ; |01:49:07| BRODY So at first, when you were working in the...in the restaurant, it was just a, you know, in your mind, a temporary thing? |01:49:16| GEORGE KAO I kind of say it&#039 ; s a temporary thing. I want to go to school. I want to continue. You know, I want to be able to learn something to be a director, at that age. |01:49:32| BRODY What do you think you&#039 ; ve learned from your customers and from your staff and from, you know, from feeding people all these years? |01:49:44| GEORGE KAO OK, it&#039 ; s funny. Can you say it again? |01:49:47| BRODY What do you think you&#039 ; ve learned from your experience, from your customers, from your staff and from from feeding people over all these years? |01:49:56| GEORGE KAO What I learned from that, you know actually, I learn a lot from just for the for the people-side, the personality-side that. You know, I&#039 ; m always trying to connect with people, so it just...I always think that everybody have something to inspire. It&#039 ; s just like that. So I always try to pick up even some small stuff from different person, or customer, or employee or, something to enrich my life, use my knowledge to enrich my present. Yeah, it&#039 ; s just me. |01:50:51| BRODY How about you, April? |01:50:53| APRIL KAO I always tell our server, &quot ; Restaurant business. It&#039 ; s maybe, it&#039 ; s your stepping stone, but it&#039 ; s the best place you can learn from people how...How you treat people and how people treat you. It&#039 ; s- it can teach you a lot. A lot of skill and. |01:51:18| GEORGE KAO Humanity. |01:51:19| APRIL KAO Humanity. That&#039 ; s true. That&#039 ; s how I told them, you know, be patient and learn. Be observant. You know, you learn a lot from this business from day to day, you know, daily interact with people. |01:51:39| BRODY That sounds like you both have a wealth of experiences with interacting with all different kinds of people have and I&#039 ; m sure running a restaurant, you have some wild stories or interesting stories too. Can you think of the, I guess, other than the tornado and the pandemic, what are the most or that we were willing to share wildest restaurant story that you have experienced? |01:52:13| GEORGE KAO Something I really...It&#039 ; s a lot of small stuff, I just, you know... |01:52:21| BRODY Most memorable, maybe? |01:52:25| GEORGE KAO Most memorable is tornado. |Laughs| Pandemic! |01:52:32| APRIL KAO Well, we have one family they lived in...They live in Oklahoma. So from time to time, they will fly in in their.. |01:52:44| GEORGE KAO Private jet. |01:52:45| APRIL KAO Private jet to come and dine in our restaurant. Not so often after pandemic, but before that theywill come sometimes, 10, 13 people, and they will order like 17 or 20, you know, orders of soup dumpling. They love soup dumplings. And then after the dinner, they would take another 10 or 13 soup dumpling to go home. |01:53:18| BRODY Back home to Oklahoma. |01:53:19| APRIL KAO Oh, yes. And they tip very, very well. |01:53:23| GEORGE KAO Very, super generous. |01:53:26| BRODY They sound like. They love the restaurant. |01:53:29| APRIL KAO Oh, so that&#039 ; s one, you know, really, |01:53:32| BRODY That is very memorable. Thank you for sharing that. One thing I forgot to ask you earlier, you know, there have been so many restaurants that, you know, have developed after you guys were already established at Royal China. Have you had much of a mentoring type relationship with other Chinese restaurant owners that came after you? Have you do you have you know, did you show them the ropes or, you know, help out with different restaurants that were? |01:54:04| GEORGE KAO She helped out with several restaurants.... |01:54:10| APRIL KAO There are there are restaurants in. |George Kao excuses himself for an appointment| You got to go OK |to George Kao|. |01:54:17| GEORGE KAO My apologies. |01:54:18| APRIL KAO OK, so I thought, OK, we used to go one restaurant. We used...We used to go to one restaurant in Richardson because my mother in law lived in Richardson at the time and...and almost every week we would eat lunch with her. And that restaurant, they used to only take cash. So every time we go, and we&#039 ; ll talk to the owners and George will share with them and oh, he would tell them, &quot ; Maybe you should start taking credit cards.&quot ; So, so they did. And that kind of helped them bring in a lot of non-Asian customers. And we see the business grow. And every time we go and we talk and there&#039 ; s something, you know, more suggestion. |01:55:30| BRODY Because you had developed so much experience over time. With the credit cards, had had you taken credit cards at Royal China that the whole time. |01:55:39| APRIL KAO The whole time, yes. |01:55:40| BRODY Were there other things like that that were small things that you adapted that really helped business like. I know... |01:55:49| APRIL KAO Our business. |01:55:49| BRODY Yeah. Helped yours. |01:55:51| APRIL KAO Last year we did online order... |01:55:57| BRODY First time? |01:55:58| APRIL KAO First time with a company and it really took off really, really helped, helped the takeout business that was like crazy booming. |01:56:11| BRODY Yeah. And did it make it easier for you in the restaurant because someone didn&#039 ; t have to answer that phone call? |01:56:17| APRIL KAO Yes. That that took over. I mean, with all the takeout business, there was like 90 almost, no, 70 percent of the online order. And then we still have 30 percent of call in last year. We&#039 ; re still with that company. |01:56:35| BRODY Well, that&#039 ; s good that it was a... |01:56:36| APRIL KAO I would tell other restaurants, we have a lot of customers that that&#039 ; s in the restaurant business. And particularly, there&#039 ; s one in Trinity Grove that we love...the Mexican restaurant. I told them, &quot ; You need to take Chow Now! You need to take that!&quot ; |01:56:56| BRODY Yeah, that&#039 ; s I mean, you learn as you&#039 ; re doing it. |01:56:58| APRIL KAO And, then, you know, I&#039 ; m excited. You know, it works for us. So I would tell them... |01:57:04| BRODY Yeah. |01:57:05| APRIL KAO &quot ; Do that!&quot ; Help them too. So they will come back and say, &quot ; Hey, that was the best thing!&quot ; |01:57:10| BRODY Yeah, that&#039 ; s true. You have customers who are also in the restaurant business, though probably not necessarily your competition, but. |01:57:16| APRIL KAO We share. |01:57:17| BRODY You share. Yeah. So that&#039 ; s a more collaborative approach to to being in business. Well, I wanted to ask you if there is anything that I didn&#039 ; t ask you that or a topic that, you know, that that comes to mind that would be valuable to add to this recording. |01:57:41| APRIL KAO We probably covered everything. |01:57:44| BRODY OK, well, thank you so much both to you and George for sitting for this interview. And I&#039 ; m really happy to share your story. |01:57:54| APRIL KAO Well, thank you so much for doing this project. And, you know, later, people can go and do research and know there were once Royal China or there&#039 ; s a history of Royal China. |01:58:08| BRODY Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh001_di_001.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with George and April Kao, September 28, 2021 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh001_di_001 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Chinese Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-09-21 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/483f41916d6fcae9e1e5a7e324e756ca.jpg 143bde2a84672728521f19fc6ab87295 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jack Kang OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Jack Kang, May 18, 2022 2021oh002_di_013 01:30:13 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. 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Today is May 18th, 2022. I&#039 ; m interviewing for the first time Mr. Jack Kang. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and is part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In: How Food, Culture and Class Shape the Story of Asian Dallas.&quot ; All right, Jack, thank you so much for coming and to start out with. Why don&#039 ; t you tell me where and when you were born? |00:00:36| Kang So I was born in 1978 in Taipei, Taiwan. |00:00:44| Brody What brought you to Texas? |00:00:47| Kang Well, we first immigrated to America in 1981, and our first stop was Nashville, of all places. One of my parents friends owned a restaurant there, a Polynesian restaurant, and he sponsored my parents as his employees. So that&#039 ; s how we were able to come to the States. And so we stayed there for about a year. And my aunt was living here in Plano at the time with her three kids. And so she convinced us to move to Plano from Nashville, which Nashville was a big culture shock to my parents, right? I mean, growing up in Taipei and, you know, they spent all their lives there and then they moved to Nashville. And this was back in the early eighties before it was hip and trendy as it is now. So they, so we made the move to Plano in 81. I think we just missed, like, the hottest summer. I think, I think it was 80 the year before. So we started in Plano and I&#039 ; ve been here ever since. No one, none of my family or extended family is here. They are eventually all moved on. |00:02:14| Brody You stayed? |00:02:15| Kang Yeah. And I stayed? |00:02:16| Brody Yeah. What were your parents&#039 ; names? |00:02:19| Kang My dad&#039 ; s name&#039 ; s R.C. R dot C, and my mom&#039 ; s name was Ann. A-N-N. |00:02:28| Brody So was Plano less of a culture shock for them than Nashville? |00:02:33| Kang I think so, yeah. |00:02:36| Brody What did they like about it? |00:02:39| Kang They...They definitely liked the schools. They liked the, the school district. I remember...My parents driving us up to Plano East Senior High School not long after it just opened. I think it opened 82. And we, they probably took us up there either that year or the year after and, well, for whatever reason, we went up there like 9 p.m. and they were driving around. I think they were driving around on the sidewalk where they&#039 ; re not supposed to, but they were, we were all blown away. I mean, it was to them it was like a college campus, right? I mean, you know, four, five, multiple buildings, and and it still is. I mean, I think they just celebrated or yeah, this year is their 40th year. So I was up there last week with my son. I took him to a Jazz Band concert and I was showing him around, you know, daddy&#039 ; s school and everything. And yeah, it was it was still quite impressive, you know, how large it is for a senior high that&#039 ; s just 11th and 12th graders. So. |00:03:52| Brody So education was important to them? |00:03:54| Kang Yes, yes, yeah. Education was important to them. And that&#039 ; s why we moved here from Taiwan. So they could give us a better life. Not, not to say that the education in Taiwan is lacking, because it certainly isn&#039 ; t. But I think they just wanted us to grow up in America. |00:04:17| Brody Do you have siblings? |00:04:19| Kang I do. I have an older brother, David. He&#039 ; s in Raleigh, North Carolina. |00:04:31| Brody So what did your parents do for work once they got here? |00:04:35| Kang So yeah, so in a Nashville they, they worked for their family friend, at that Polynesian restaurant and I still remember that restaurant was cool because all the drinks had the little tiki, whatever you call that thing, umbrellas, right. It was all tropical and so they were working there. And I think my dad was a dishwasher there and my mom was front of the house, and then once they moved here to Dallas, to Plano, my dad was working for Uncle Tai, this Chinese restaurant that was on the third floor of the Galleria, I believe. And so he worked there for a few years and then and then worked at Rice Bowl and Plano off and 75 because it was much closer to the house. And during that time, my mom was you know, she was staying at home raising us, and then she was working at Burger King part time to gain cashier experience there. |00:05:51| Brody So back in in Taiwan, had they been involved in food related businesses at all? |00:05:57| Kang They were not. No, they were not. My dad was an executive at a tire company. My mom was in radio for the Army there. Well, my dad was somewhat, I mean, he got his masters in Yokohama, Japan, so he lived there for three or four years. But during that time, his, because his uncle in law had a Chinese restaurant in Yokohama, and so, you know, being a college student, he was working there part time. |00:06:36| Brody So he did have some experience. |00:06:37| Kang So he did. Yeah. Yeah. But he didn&#039 ; t know. At that time, he had no clue that he was going to ever be in the restaurant business. |00:06:45| Brody So how did that happen? |00:06:49| Kang Well, so, after my dad was working at Rice Bowl, he, him and his sister, my aunt, they opened up, Nakamoto&#039 ; s sushi restaurant in Plano off Parker. And so that opened in 85 I believe. And then so they, they were doing that together for about four years. And then my dad branched out and he opened Mr. Wok in 89. And so he was the chef there and he trained all the other employees and staff how to cook and the rest is history. |00:07:37| Brody Yeah. Yeah. Just going back for a second. So your aunt and your dad opened up Nakamoto. So they were the owners? |00:07:46| Kang Yes. |00:07:46| Brody Okay. And so, how did they find like sushi chefs and all of, you know, how did that all go? |00:07:55| Kang Yeah. So both of them spoke Japanese. My dad and my aunt speak Japanese. And so that helped in their search for a sushi chef. I think it was probably a friend of a friend that introduced them to him. And, and actually that was actually Soda. So Soda that owns Sushi Sake started off at, at Nakamoto&#039 ; s. So I&#039 ; ve seen, I&#039 ; ve known Soda since the eighties and I&#039 ; ve seen his kid, you know, grow up. What&#039 ; s his kid&#039 ; s name? T.J., is this kid? Yeah. Yeah. So I&#039 ; ve known Soda, and then after Soda left and opened up Sushi Sake, then Simon Chen, who was the assistant head sushi chef got promoted to sushi chef. And he was the sushi chef for a number of years. And he opened his own restaurant. Simon Sushi right off Plano Parkway there. So, yeah, so I grew up eating really good sushi. I was spoiled. |00:09:08| Brody That&#039 ; s amazing. |00:09:09| Kang It hasn&#039 ; t changed. Eating wonderful sushi. So. Well, that&#039 ; s. |00:09:13| Brody Really interesting then that you have...You&#039 ; re kind of bridging to different types of Asian food just in your own family and, and so then they left Nakamoto, but the restaurant continued to exist. |00:09:29| Kang Yes. Yes. So my aunt continued to own that. And then her daughter, my cousin Phina, was involved in the business as well and for a number of years. And then she opened up her own Pan-Asian restaurant in, off Knox Henderson called, what was the like? Anzu. So she was kind of a pioneer in the pan-Asian cuisine here in Dallas. She was I think she was probably about five or ten years too early for that. But nonetheless, you know, she did good and then she moved on and my cousins all live in New York City, you know? Yeah. |00:10:17| Brody Like you said, you&#039 ; re the only one. |00:10:18| Kang Yeah. I&#039 ; m the only one. |00:10:20| Brody So, so, back to Mr. Wok. So your parents decided to start Mr. Wok in 1989. Tell me about the restaurant. Tell me about what the goals were and the mission, I guess the vision for Mr. Wok. |00:10:35| Kang The vision was just to make a living, a decent living. The first few...the first couple of years, it was it was hard work, of course. You know, as any restaurant goes, you don&#039 ; t make any money, you don&#039 ; t even break even the first two years, you know, that&#039 ; s, you kind of figure out if you&#039 ; re going to make it or not. And so after that, they did well enough and then my dad had a vision of opening a second restaurant in the Las Colinas-Irving area. That catered more towards the Japanese clientele. There was, at that time, the early nineties, there were a lot of Japanese corporations that were based out in Las Colinas. NEC was a really big one and so, the first years at Mr. Wok he had, he had built up his Japanese following as well. You know because he spoke Japanese and he cooked Chinese food that was kind of catered towards the Japanese community because again, going back to him, living in Yokohama, which is the largest Chinatown in Japan. He- that restaurant that he worked at, his uncle&#039 ; s restaurant, you know, a lot of their Chinese food was catered towards to Japanese clientele. So he actually did, I guess, pick up some of the recipes from there and, you know, started serving those dishes at Mr. Wok and then built up the following and then went to open Kang&#039 ; s Cafe in 93 out in Irving. And so he had a very large Japanese clientele, you know, businessmen, large corporate functions, private parties and whatnot. It was a much larger space than Mr. Wok. And so... |00:12:47| Brody So Mr. Wok served both sort of Japanese-ish... |00:12:51| Kang Yeah. So. So, yeah. So we kind of, at that time, we had three different menus. We had kind of our western menu, and then we had a Chinese menu that was that catered towards the Chinese clientele, and then we had a Japanese menu. And so that was kind of overwhelming at times. |00:13:16| Brody Tell me about that. What was the thinking behind doing that and how did it actually pan out for you? What was, what was overwhelming? How did, how was it received? |00:13:27| Kang Oh, it was it was overwhelming, just in terms of the number of items on on the menu. In terms of training new employees in order to get them up to speed on either, you know, order taking or recognizing the dishes or teaching them how to cook the dishes and just stocking, you know, all the inventory and whatnot. It was it was quite a bit of inventory and items that we had to stock. And so how did that pan out? That...Yeah, we went along with that for a number of years and it worked out once he opened his restaurant, the other restaurant, Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, he combined the Chinese and the Japanese menu into one. So at that point we just had two menus, the English menu and then the Asian menu. |00:14:28| Brody At both restaurants? |00:14:30| Kang At Kang&#039 ; s Cafe. |00:14:33| Brody Okay. |00:14:33| So. Mr. Wok, we had all three. So we had sold Mr. Wok, the business. We kept the building. So we sold our business in 96, and then we took it back in 99. And then I started running it in 2000. |00:14:53| Brody Okay. |00:14:57| Kang And so from 2000 to 2006, nothing much was changed. I added a few items here and there, but the overall look of the menu and the interior, I didn&#039 ; t really do anything with that. And in 2006, I decided to revamp and kind of updated the menu to make it more modern. You know, did a website. Then I combined the Japanese and the Chinese menu into one and then we started serving a lot of Peking Ducks around that time because going back to Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, so we had that from 93 to 2005. My dad wanted to retire, so he didn&#039 ; t want to run that anymore. So 2005. And then so he was doing, he was serving Peking Duck out of that restaurant. We weren&#039 ; t serving any duck at Mr. Wok at the time. And then so once he closed down Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, then we moved the duck operations to Mr. Wok and then it just grew exponentially from there. |00:16:08| Brody Yes. So tell me all about that duck and from sort of start to finish, like sourcing, cooking and ordering and serving. |00:16:20| Kang Sure. Yeah. It&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s a whole process. So we get our ducks in. They&#039 ; re Grade A from Long Island. So they&#039 ; re, they&#039 ; re very lean. And then we marinate the ducks the night before, and then we got to pump the ducks with air. And that separates the skin and the meat. |00:16:40| Brody So pump them with air. How? |00:16:43| Kang With an air compressor. So you tie up the, the bottom of the duck and then you insert the air compressor around the neck and then that will separate the skin and the meat. That way when you go to cook the duck, it crisps up the skin a lot more than if we didn&#039 ; t do that process. So, so it&#039 ; s a 24 hour process that, that goes into it, and it&#039 ; s served with your steamed pancakes or steamed buns, some green onion and some hoisin sauce. And then we take the bones back to the kitchen and we&#039 ; ll chop it up and either, cook a soup from that or stir fry the bones, which is actually very popular as well. |00:17:35| Brody And on the customer side, do they need to order ahead or? |00:17:41| Kang Both? So we recommend them order ahead, but we do prepare extras every day and it&#039 ; s first come, first serve. |00:17:51| Brody And then so on, also on the customer side, what is the experience when your duck comes to the table? |00:17:56| Kang Yeah, so we, so we carve the duck tableside, which is really neat. You know, that&#039 ; s always a big presentation and we&#039 ; ll bring it out and either me or one of my staff will carve the duck right there, and, you know, you&#039 ; re getting all the meat off of it and the skin and, you know, and then, then we take the bones back to the kitchen. And so people like to, you know, bring their friends and kind of show them the whole experience, give them the whole duck experience. And, and that&#039 ; s really cool. You know, we&#039 ; ve gotten lots of great, you know, feedback and awards and whatnot from our duck and other dishes as well. Beggar&#039 ; s Chicken is another dish that we&#039 ; re known for as well. And that, that&#039 ; s very rare now. It&#039 ; s hard to find because it takes a lot of time to cook and labor. And so it&#039 ; s very labor and time intensive. And so what that is, is it&#039 ; s a...We start with a whole chicken, roasting chicken and then we&#039 ; ll stuff the inside cavity with Chinese sticky rice that&#039 ; s been blended with some Cantonese sausage, some shitake mushrooms, some shallots. So that goes inside of the chicken. And then we wrap the entire chicken in lotus and bamboo leaves. And then finally we encase the chicken in a bread dough. And so that cooks for 22 hours in the oven. So it basically it slow roasts. It basically cooks in its own, in that shell, right? So when it comes out of the oven that, that bread shell has hardened, and it&#039 ; s about an inch and a half thick. And then we bring it to the table and the guest of honor or whoever wants to do it, they come up and they, and they try to crack it open with a mallet. And that&#039 ; s always fun because then the whole restaurant&#039 ; s, you know, looking and staring at like, &quot ; What is that?&quot ; And they&#039 ; ve never seen anything like that before. So. So then we proceeded to cut into it and then cut away the leaves and all that, and then they just basically take a spoon and just spoon out the chicken. It is really tender at that point. |00:20:17| Brody That sounds really good. So both of those dishes that you&#039 ; re describing are kind of a spectacle. Was that kind of part of the goal of the type of restaurant that your parents and you wanted to run where you could have this kind of experience? |00:20:34| Kang No, no. Funny thing is, that wasn&#039 ; t ever, you know, the initial goal of the restaurant. It was just, you know, going back, it was just a &quot ; Let&#039 ; s cook some good food, let&#039 ; s see what happens.&quot ; And then, you know, let&#039 ; s see what works and what doesn&#039 ; t work. And so, fortunately, you know, Peking Duck is one of those dishes that did work. |00:21:01| Brody Yeah. So who are your typical customers? Or even was there a typical at Mr. Wok? |00:21:11| Kang Everyone, really. We had a whole spectrum of customers, you know, young, old, minorities, Asian, you know. You know, people from traveling from as far away as Frisco, Lewisville. You know, we&#039 ; re in east Plano, so we&#039 ; re not exactly...Well, during the week we&#039 ; re kind of the, the neighborhood restaurant, right, where we have a lot of the locals within a three mile, five mile radius of us come and visit us. But then on Fridays and Saturdays, on the weekends, we have a lot of customers that travel from farther away, right? We&#039 ; ve got a lot from the north Dallas area, Highland Park, University Park. So yeah, it becomes a destination restaurant on the weekends. And it helps that we&#039 ; re BYOB too. So you&#039 ; re welcome to bring your own wine and beer and, you know, that&#039 ; s really kind of, that&#039 ; s helped quite a bit as well. Being BYOB, you get a lot of foodies, right? So people that enjoy their own, their own selection of wine, right? And so, you know, they come in and, you know, we provide the glasses, we open it up, open up the bottle for them. And, you know, they proceed to enjoy their meal. And at the end, they&#039 ; re always shocked. They&#039 ; re always shocked at how low the total bill is because, you know, if they were to dine out somewhere else and have to order that bottle of wine, it would be obviously three x that price. So they&#039 ; re always, yeah, so people really enjoy coming in and it&#039 ; s a really fun atmosphere and the people just have a great time. It&#039 ; s a small 80 seat restaurant and, by the end of the night, everyone&#039 ; s sharing wine with the other tables. And so, yeah, it&#039 ; s...Yeah, it&#039 ; s fun. |00:23:18| Brody Tell me about at its peak, what the inside of the restaurant looked like. What was the decor? What was the sort of the vibe? |00:23:27| Kang Yeah. So, at the peak, it was, not much was changed from Pizza Hut. Oh. So, yeah, it used to be a Pizza Hut. It used to be a Pizza Hut from 75 to 88. And then, and I&#039 ; ll go into that story in a bit, but...So it was low ceilings. It was eight feet ceilings. You know, we actually used the booths and the tables, but the shape of the windows, it&#039 ; s very distinctively Pizza Hut, right? What is that shape called? A trapezoid? Trapezoidal windows? Which made trying to buy blinds a major issue because you&#039 ; d have to go with custom blinds at that point. But anyway, so it was, it was very cozy. We had nine booths and then we had three round tables in the middle. And so, you know, each round table sat between 12 and 16 people. And so we would have a lot of large parties come in and, yeah, a lot of birthday parties, a lot of celebrations. People made fond memories there. And then we had a fire in 2019. And so I took that opportunity to remodel the interior of it. We basically gutted the entire thing except the four walls. So the four walls were the same, but everything on up, a completely new roof, a completely new ceiling. We opened it up. We&#039 ; ve got exposed trusses now and exposed ductwork. And so it looks a lot more up to date. Let&#039 ; s see. Yeah. Everything&#039 ; s is just new. Got rid of the carpet. It&#039 ; s tile now. It&#039 ; s, you know, updated the bathrooms as well. Kind of...I don&#039 ; t know, kind of that modern, mid-century modern farmhousey look, I guess, that&#039 ; s trending everywhere these days. |00:25:47| Brody So how did the Pizza Hut end up being the Mr. Wok? |00:25:54| Kang So around that time, 1988, 89, my parents were looking to open a Chinese restaurant, and we had gone out as far as Corsicana to look at a restaurant that was for sale. And my parents knew that they wanted a freestanding building, and so it wasn&#039 ; t until...So, I was in fifth grade and we had a reading club. So if you read X amount of books, you would get a free pizza from Pizza Hut. Of course, I wasn&#039 ; t a big reader, so I never got the pizza, but one day one of my classmates, she asked the teacher in front of the class. She said, &quot ; Hey, um, the Pizza Hut&#039 ; s closed, so, you know, where do we go to get our pizzas now?&quot ; And, you know, little ten year old me, like this light bulb went off in my head. And so that afternoon I went back home, got off from school, you know, went back home, and I told my dad I was like, &quot ; Hey, Dad, there&#039 ; s a Pizza Hut somewhere around here that&#039 ; s closed.&quot ; And so we found out where it was, and we drove up there that afternoon, and he, he walked around the inside of the building. Of course, it was locked but he, you know, he peered inside the windows and really liked the layout and everything. And I think the next week, he, they signed the lease. So thank you, Delta Perez, wherever, wherever you are out there. She&#039 ; s the one that asked the teacher about the Pizza Hut. |00:27:33| Brody Did your parents give you a finding fee? |00:27:35| Kang No. No, they, they should have. I need to get with him on that. Yeah. |00:27:40| Brody That&#039 ; s funny. So how did people find you? |00:27:45| Kang Well, the first few years, and as a family, we would walk around the local neighborhoods and pass out fliers and hang fliers on doors. You know, my brother and I...We, you know, I said I was in fifth grade, sixth grade, he was eighth grade at the time. We&#039 ; d roll up fliers and hang them on doors. And it was, it was a lot of word of mouth and even now we don&#039 ; t advertise anywhere. It&#039 ; s just, you know, we grow organically and people just bring other people. And, so, yeah, we&#039 ; re extremely fortunate that it&#039 ; s, that it&#039 ; s worked out that way. |00:28:27| Brody Now, your dad had already, you know, worked at several restaurants as well as owned a restaurant in Nakamoto. So he had some experience in dealing with the city and the health inspectors and things like that. But can you tell me a little bit more about what that was like for him in opening Mr. Wok and Kang&#039 ; s Cafe? |00:28:49| Kang Honestly, I don&#039 ; t know much about that part of it, of him dealing with the city and doing all that. I do know a little bit about what he had to go through in terms of, you know, finding a general contractor for Kang&#039 ; s Cafe. And because he, he had a particular vision in his mind of how he wanted it to look. He was, he was, he&#039 ; s extremely good at that aspect of, of... Just of the interior design aspect of it, where he&#039 ; ll go somewhere and maybe see something at another restaurant or a hotel or something and he&#039 ; ll make a mental note or a sketch of it and then, he&#039 ; ll use that or incorporate that into the design. So, yeah, it was, Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, it had the, the painted wispy cloud ceiling, which I think was the first in the Dallas area. And it was, it was, it turned out really great. I mean, it, you know, if you&#039 ; re looking at it for more than 20 seconds, you could zone out and you would imagine yourself in the clouds there. So it that was, I think, the the one defining feature of Kang&#039 ; s Cafe. And he... I don&#039 ; t know where he saw that at, but he knew that he wanted that when he saw it. |00:30:27| Brody Right. In either one of those locations was, did you have neighbors that were other restaurants or other businesses that you had interactions with? |00:30:39| Kang So Mr. Wok is a freestanding building, so we did not have any interactions with, our neighbor is a car wash. Oh, we don&#039 ; t have any interaction with them. Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, that was in a retail strip center where there&#039 ; s a very popular and, I&#039 ; m not sure if they&#039 ; re still there or not, it&#039 ; s a Louisiana restaurant called Po Melvin&#039 ; s, and they were always really busy. And so their staff and the owner would come by, like on their break on a random, you know, Friday night at 5:00 and then, have some beverages and then go back to work. And so we, we got to know them, quite well. There were, there weren&#039 ; t any other restaurants in that shopping strip at that time. It was just Kang&#039 ; s Cafe and Po Melvin&#039 ; s. And there was a Thai restaurant across the street called Pad Thai. Don&#039 ; t know if that&#039 ; s still there or not, but I think they were a fairly popular Thai joint. |00:31:58| Brody During that time period, you mentioned that your clientele ran the whole spectrum, they&#039 ; re all different types of people. And, you know, and you also had the different, three different menus, right? The Chinese menu and Japanese menu and the Western style menu. So did you have a large Asian population that were your customers? |00:32:21| Kang Yeah. Yeah, we did. You know, Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, probably, I don&#039 ; t know the breakdown of it. I couldn&#039 ; t even guess. Probably more than 50%. |00:32:35| Brody So in designing the menu, what were, what were the goals, I guess? Like some people that I&#039 ; ve talked to, talk about that, when they were designing the menu of their restaurant, one part of it is obviously- and a large part of it- is obviously trying to think of things that people will actually buy. And, you know, it&#039 ; s a business decision, but it sounds like for many people there&#039 ; s also an education piece of it. That wanting to introduce and project the culture so other people can learn about it. |00:33:04| Kang Right. |00:33:05| Brody Where do you stand on those issues? |00:33:08| Kang Yeah. So, you know, absolutely. I agree. It&#039 ; s you know, we had sections of it or certain items that were more popular that were, I would say approachable, that wasn&#039 ; t too foreign. And then we had some items that were, a little bit, you know, like jelly fish and stuff on there. And, you know, that&#039 ; s something that non-Asians don&#039 ; t really eat or haven&#039 ; t come across. And so we, we put it on there in the hopes that maybe they&#039 ; ll, you know, try it and, you know, expand their palate on that. But, for the most part, I mean, most of. Probably half to three quarters of the Asian menu are items that are authentic to the Chinese culture. And the Chinese/Japanese culture. So, then we did introduce a few items to to the non-native, non-Asian clientele. So yeah. So absolutely, you know, you got to have items on there that, you know, people are going to order and you have to have a few items that you think, &quot ; Hey, this might work and this&#039 ; ll, you know, expand people&#039 ; s palate to other tastes and flavors&quot ; and give it a shot and if it doesn&#039 ; t work. Just take it off. |00:34:44| Brody So, I mean, even just in light of your dad&#039 ; s background and in Japanese culture and Japanese food, and the food that that they were serving was kind of a fusion in a way, way before people were using the term fusion. Was- when talking about authenticity, did you run into any questions or people trying to have difficulty maybe understanding where the Japanese piece of it was coming into the Chinese menu? |00:35:17| Kang Yeah. So we, we have a lot of ramen on our menu at one point, at Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, I believe my dad had probably had over 30 different types of ramen and by ramen it&#039 ; s not, I don&#039 ; t mean the ramen that is trending now. Right? It&#039 ; s not like the, the sliced pork belly and, uh, the soft boiled egg and the seaweed and the corn. It&#039 ; s...So this is where the Chinese aspect of ramen comes in, in that all of our toppings are stir fried in the wok first. So the meats and the veggies and whatnot, you know, they&#039 ; re, they&#039 ; re, they&#039 ; re sliced, they&#039 ; re cut up, they&#039 ; re stir fried in the wok, and then they&#039 ; re, they&#039 ; re laid on top of the noodles and the broth. Whereas a traditional Japanese ramen, right, the pork, the pork belly, that&#039 ; s cooked ahead of time, the eggs cooked ahead of time. And then, you know, once the order comes in, they cook the noodles and then put it in, put it in the broth, and then take the slices of toppings and put it on top of that. So ours was, you know, we incorporate, incorporated that Chinese part of it, right, where we stir fried everything in the wok first and then laid that on top of the noodles and the soup. The broth was very similar, you know we had our, our pork broth. We had a shoyu broth, the soy broth and so broth were, were similar, but the toppings were not. So it was, it was a different experience. |00:37:01| Brody That&#039 ; s really interesting. So when talking to people about Asian food and you mentioned earlier that a lot of your customers are foodies. One thing that seems to have happened in Dallas is that just at the time that the Asian population grew, people in general started getting more interested in eating things from other countries and cooking with things from other countries. So did you find that your customers were pretty, either curious or educated about the types of foods that you were serving? |00:37:40| Kang Yeah. So they would, you know, every often they would venture and order something off of the Asian menu. So they, they wanted to try something different. But I think in the restaurant business, in, probably in the majority of restaurants, you know, you&#039 ; ll have regulars that will always just order between one to two or three different items that they know, that they&#039 ; re comfortable with, that they&#039 ; re familiar with. I think as a, I think just in general human nature, we just like something that&#039 ; s, you know, within our comfort zone, I think the majority of people don&#039 ; t want to step out of their comfort zone and try something different. And if they don&#039 ; t like it, then, you know, &quot ; Oh, man, I should have ordered whatever, Sesame Chicken.&quot ; So that, that I did notice that quite a bit. I mean, that&#039 ; s, you know, that&#039 ; s just the nature of things. You know, when I go out to eat, I tend to always order the same items as well, unless I&#039 ; m really feeling adventurous that day. But generally I&#039 ; m not. You know, people want comfort, right? People want something that they&#039 ; re familiar with. You know, it&#039 ; s like an old friend. It&#039 ; s like going and seeing an old friend. |00:39:02| Brody So what does authenticity mean to you? The concept of authenticity when it comes to food. |00:39:11| Kang In general or are you talking about, like, Chinese food, like authenticity? |00:39:18| Brody Yeah. Either. Either way. In general. |00:39:20| Kang I think authenticity is using authentic ingredients. I try not to either dumb down flavors or overemphasize certain flavors. For example, I don&#039 ; t know, let&#039 ; s just say Sweet and Sour Chicken. You know, there is, there is a traditional Sweet and Sour Chicken version, and it&#039 ; s not red. And it&#039 ; s not red and it&#039 ; s not as sweet. It&#039 ; s actually a bit more sour than the Sweet and Sour Chicken you&#039 ; ll find in a typical Chinese restaurant. But somewhere along the way, probably back in the mid 1900s when the Cantonese moved to New York, that&#039 ; s when they brought over a lot of the recipes and, for some reason it turned really bright red through the use of food coloring and it became very sweet and just a heavy batter. And I think that that&#039 ; s probably a result of their clientele...Their clientele at that time was kind of what they wanted or that&#039 ; s what the restaurant owners thought they wanted, you know, like a heavy batter, like a fried chicken type batter. Right? As opposed to, like, a lighter batter. And so, yeah, I think, I think, you know, in the past ten years, with the explosion of different cultures in Dallas and ethnicities, you definitely see more restaurants are kind of sticking to their, you know, the, the traditional flavors and ingredients and then just not really, not really trying to accommodate and through no fault of their own, but not just, &quot ; Hey, like, this is what we serve,&quot ; and because I think they know that they have the clientele to support that, you know, for example, Szechuan cuisine has exploded in Dallas in the past ten years. And so they, they still keep it really spicy and all the chili peppers. And because there&#039 ; s been an explosion of Asians that have immigrated to Dallas, you know, starting from all the students that have studied at UTD, just a ton of exchange students, and which they eventually stay here and, you know, expand their family and whatnot. So it was around, I would say probably the around the 2010s or just a little bit before that, when you really saw a large influx of of Asians. |00:42:29| Brody So that&#039 ; s interesting. You mentioned, you know, that &quot ; authentic&quot ; to you means, in a way, not dumbing down certain flavors. And that example you just gave of, you know, restaurants sort of sticking to, you know, whether it be really spicy...What, when you say &quot ; not dumbed down&quot ; like, do you think that there&#039 ; s a flip side to that of sort of, you know, the word you used earlier was &quot ; approachable,&quot ; that there are some items on your menu that are more approachable. Is there a sort of, in your thinking about the food that you&#039 ; re serving, a gradual introduction that you&#039 ; re trying to do to to get people to to move towards more adventurous eating by trying things that are more approachable to start with and then venturing forward or out. |00:43:23| Kang Oh, you mean like starting with one dish first and, you know, running that as a special and... Yeah, we&#039 ; ve done that in the past when we&#039 ; re you know, introducing a new item. For example, like years ago we introduced Singapore rice noodles and so that, that did really well. I didn&#039 ; t know how people would take that because of the, the curry in it. But that did really well. And then I introduced a Thai Basil Noodle and that did really well as well. And then Thai Coconut Curry, which was one of our most popular dishes now. And, you know, just, you know, not and not certainly, certainly not just limited to Chinese dishes, of course. You know, got just a few Thai dishes and stuff. So just kind of giving them a variety of, of Asian, of Asian items on the menu. |00:44:39| Brody That&#039 ; s interesting. Do you...You mentioned that your, the restaurant was really convivial, really, you know, sort of vibrant at its peak, with people celebrating birthdays and things like that. Were there things that you did like special events for cultural holidays or things like that? |00:44:59| Kang We did not. We did not only for the fact that around the holiday time, whether it be Chinese New Year or Western New Year or Christmas, we were always jam-packed. Always jam-packed. And so, there was no need in order to bring in extra business that we couldn&#039 ; t handle. Right? We were at max capacity at that, you know, around the holidays. So it was just, you know, serving a bunch of ducks. Think our record for a day serving in the restaurant was we served, like gosh, nine...almost 90 Peking Ducks in a day. |00:45:55| Brody That&#039 ; s a lot of ducks. |00:45:56| Kang That&#039 ; s a lot of ducks and that&#039 ; s a lot of carpal tunnel in the wrist at the end of the day. But it was worth it, though. It was fun. And, you know, it&#039 ; s just yeah, it was, it was great. |00:46:09| Brody Back to the ducks. You mentioned that they were Grade A Long Island ducks. How did you decide on that sourcing and what is it the suppliers that you... |00:46:18| Kang So when my dad was in the process of sourcing ducks back when he had Kang&#039 ; s Cafe, he had went through six or seven different brands and grades and not varieties, but just different grades, different brands of duck. And, you know, most of them were quite fatty. They were on the cheaper side as well. And so he came across this particular duck and really liked how it tasted, really liked how the fat, most of the fat would render during the cooking process and just leave the skin crispy and the meat nice and, nice and juicy. Yeah. Because I do hear comments from our customers and, you know, they&#039 ; ll say, &quot ; Oh, you know, we tried duck at such and such place. And it was just, it was too fat and it was really greasy. And, you know, yours isn&#039 ; t like that.&quot ; And yeah. So, yeah, we do, you know, it costs us more for, for the ducks, but you know, the duck, at the end of the day, the customers do notice that and they appreciate that. |00:47:33| Brody Have you been using the same supplier for the whole time or has it changed and varied just so you can keep track of I mean, keep getting those kind of ducks. |00:47:40| Kang Oh yeah. I&#039 ; ve added, I&#039 ; ve added a few suppliers over the years. Because there...Well, I learned my lesson when my main supplier was out of ducks one time and I was like, &quot ; What?&quot ; That was a stressful moment. And so... |00:47:59| Brody I&#039 ; m sure. |00:48:00| Kang So yeah. So then I had to start shopping around other, other suppliers and they, they had to get those ducks specially in for us because like I said, it was, it was a higher cost item and none of the other restaurants were using that, that brand or that quality of a duck. |00:48:17| Brody So your dad retired in 2005. Did you take over everything at that point? |00:48:23| Kang No. So he had sold Kang&#039 ; s Cafe in 2005, which was a great call because that was out in Irving and I was living in Plano at the time and I had just moved to Plano. So the for the first four years of running Mr. Wok, I was living out in Coppell, and that was a painful drive every day. But so anyway, so I had just moved, I moved back to Plano and then he decided to sell Kang&#039 ; s Cafe and I said, &quot ; Yeah, go for it. You know, you&#039 ; ve been doing this for over 20 years. You know, it&#039 ; s time to retire.&quot ; And, you know, I didn&#039 ; t want to run both of the restaurants, and I wanted to solely focus on Mr. Wok. And that property is ours. It&#039 ; s, you know, a freestanding building. So, you know, a little, a little less stress in terms of, you know, don&#039 ; t have to deal with a landlord or, you know, rent or...So a little lower overhead. |00:49:25| Brody So at that point, your family owned that building? Initially, it was a lease. Correct? |00:49:31| Kang Yeah. Yes. So they leased it from Pizza Hut for the first few years and then they purchased the building. |00:49:42| Brody Great. So you took over and so did you, had you studied or other than being in the restaurant growing up, had you, did you feel experienced and ready? |00:49:59| Kang No. I mean, you&#039 ; re never really ready for...You&#039 ; re never really ready for any job, I would say. But no, I majored in HR down at UT-Austin. And that was just corporate HR, so it wasn&#039 ; t, it wasn&#039 ; t a restaurant management program. So, no, I mean, I was, you know, I came, came into the restaurant, after I graduated and was kind of learning the ropes from my parents at the time. For about a year, about six months to a year, and then one day they just threw the keys at me. No they, they, yeah. So they, they wanted it to truly get out of the business then, and so I took over and, and, you know, I learned a lot, along the way as well. |00:50:52| Brody Yeah. What were some turning points for you? |00:50:57| Kang Turning points. So our biggest turning point was in 2006 when we had an excellent write up in the Dallas Morning News. And so that kind of trip started everything. You know, I said up until that point we hadn&#039 ; t really advertised or anything. It was just all word of mouth. So that exposed a lot of people. So that was a big turning point. The other turning point was bringing in, bringing back the Peking Ducks, back from Kang&#039 ; s Cafe. You know, moving the duck operations to Mr. Wok and that single handedly did...It was, I don&#039 ; t know, what&#039 ; s the word? Tremendous for us. So, so that definitely. Yeah. So those two turning points, I would say are the biggest turning points of Mr. Wok 2.0. 2.0 being when I came in and started managing the restaurant. |00:52:06| Brody Speaking of the Dallas Morning News and reviews and write ups, what...That one was notable. Were, do you have any stories or any memories related to reviews and reviewers in your restaurant? |00:52:26| Kang I mean, I always had a hunch who the reviewers were because, you know, it&#039 ; d be, let&#039 ; s say two of them, two people would come in, they, you know, ask to see the Chinese menu, they&#039 ; d order ten, ten items. Ten dishes. You&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Wait, wait, hang on, that&#039 ; s like way too much food.&quot ; And they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; No, no, no. You know, it&#039 ; s fine. We can take it home.&quot ; So that&#039 ; s very rare, right? So that sticks out. And they would and, you know, I would, I would chat with them and, just, you know, get to know them. And...But no, I never had a, I was never positive that they were the reviewers until that the review came out and I said, &quot ; Oh, okay, that, that&#039 ; s the dishes that they had.&quot ; You know, then I put two and two together and yeah. |00:53:17| Brody So, so the good reviews really did bring more customers in. |00:53:20| Kang Yeah, absolutely. The good reviews. We were in the Top 100 in D Magazine. We won best Chinese restaurant in The Observer one year. Of course, Dallas Morning News, the top ten Chinese restaurants. So I&#039 ; d like to say we did the trifecta, the trifecta of print media in Dallas. |00:53:45| Brody That&#039 ; s great. So that&#039 ; s the official, you know, the official media. What about with the advent of social media and review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor and things like that? What is your, what are your thoughts about that development? |00:53:58| Kang Yeah. So that definitely helps as well. Of course, that&#039 ; s a double edged sword, right? If you don&#039 ; t do well, if you don&#039 ; t, you know, if you&#039 ; re, if you&#039 ; re lacking in service or food or atmosphere, whatever, and people are going to write about it on the social media sites. But if you do you know, do a good job and people recognize that and people see that you&#039 ; re you genuinely enjoy what you&#039 ; re doing and you&#039 ; re trying your best...You know, I mean, every restaurant is going to have an off night or two, right? And so, you know, if they visit the restaurant on those off nights and they write a negative review, then, you know, most of time I&#039 ; ll go on there and you know, try and explain what happened you know, offer them a second chance to dine in with us. But, yeah, social media that&#039 ; s been huge, right? I mean, that again, that&#039 ; s free advertising, that&#039 ; s word of mouth, that&#039 ; s just getting your name out there. Of course, you know, we dodged the whole COVID bullet because we were closed due to the fire. And, and so during that time, there&#039 ; s that Facebook group, Asian Grub in DFDub, that&#039 ; s I don&#039 ; t know how many members now there are probably over 50,000 members, I don&#039 ; t know. But that grew exponentially. And so and I know that&#039 ; s helped quite a bit of, of Asian owned businesses and restaurants in general. And so, yeah, if I do decide to reopen, that will be a big part of getting our word out that, &quot ; Hey, we&#039 ; re back in business.&quot ; |00:55:44| Brody So, if you feel comfortable, tell me about the fire and sort of the aftermath of that for you as a restaurant owner. |00:55:55| Kang Yeah. So the fire happened on a Satur...Sunday night, overnight on a Sunday night in the morning, into Monday morning. We&#039 ; re closed on Sundays, so I didn&#039 ; t step foot in the restaurant all day Sunday. I got a phone call from my alarm company four am Monday morning. And, you know, they were saying, &quot ; Oh, the alarms going off.&quot ; And, and we get some false alarms every once in a while, like once a month, once or twice a month would get just a random false alarm. And then so I assumed it was a false alarm. Plus I was...I had gone to a concert the night before, so I probably wasn&#039 ; t in any shape to drive anyway. So, and then, so I just told them to cancel the alarm and then, the next morning, you know, I got up around ten and, and my, and my food supplier, the rep, the food rep calls me and she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Oh, the driver, the delivery driver is trying to drop off your order, but he said you had a fire,&quot ; and I was like, &quot ; Huh? Okay.&quot ; And so in my mind, I had no idea what the extent of the fire was. I...No, no, no...Like, I didn&#039 ; t hear anything from anyone besides that phone call from the alarm company. And so I was like, &quot ; Oh, well, just go ahead and tell the driver to, to, to drop it off. Right?&quot ; And then she calls back a minute later, she&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Uh, no. There the fires and it&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s a serious, you got some serious damage.&quot ; I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Oh my God.&quot ; So, I&#039 ; m freaking out. So in my mind, you know, like, to me, like, the whole building has just, like, been, you know, just leveled to, to, to rubble. But, so then around that time, I, you know, I&#039 ; m getting myself dressed, I&#039 ; m running out the door. My, my staff calls me because they, they get there around that time and they&#039 ; re, you know, they&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Oh, yeah, there was a fire, you know?&quot ; And I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Yeah, I&#039 ; m on the way, you know?&quot ; Luckily, I live really close by. So I get there. I pull up, pull into the parking lot and don&#039 ; t really see any damage. I was, that was not what I was expecting. You know, it looked fine from the front of that the street, from the front of the parking lot. Everything looked good till you pulled around and then, yeah, once we went inside the back door to the kitchen it was, it was. Yeah, it was all burnt. So, turned out it was an electrical fire. And so, yeah, that was...It was, it was shocking. Yeah, I, I, I&#039 ; ve never been through anything like that before. So, you know, we got through it. It took almost two years to remodel. And, you know, but I wanted, I had a certain look that I wanted, and so it was actually a blessing in disguise that we were able to, build it back better than what it was. |00:59:09| Brody Yeah. That must have been really stressful and scary, though. |00:59:12| Kang Yeah. |00:59:14| Brody So the, the, the new look that you&#039 ; re talking about, the remodel that came as a result of the fire damage. What are the, like what is the vision that you have for the restaurant going forward? You know, you have a loyal clientele, you have, you know, regulars and so forth. But with this new look and this feel, what are your hopes? |00:59:42| Kang I just want everyone to, you know, come back in and be able to experience what they, you know, what they experienced back in the past, but in a more updated modern environment. And, just that&#039 ; s all I can ask for. |01:00:00| Brody Are you making changes to the menu? |01:00:04| Kang I plan on taking some items off, that weren&#039 ; t big sellers. And so it just makes it easier to, to get into to streamlined training and because, as you know now, there&#039 ; s a labor shortage in the restaurant industry. And so, you just kind of want to make things easier and faster for the employees to be able to learn and pick up. |01:00:41| Brody Yeah. During its peak, did you have among your clientele any celebrities or any any sort of really notable stories that happened in the restaurant? |01:00:51| Kang Yeah. So we, we did have some Dallas Cowboys that would come in and they tried, they tried cracking open that Beggar&#039 ; s Chicken. And for us, you know, it was the 320 pound center back in the day, Phil Costa. He was one of the five cowboys that came in and, you know, I hand him the mallet, and he&#039 ; s sitting there beating it and you can&#039 ; t crack it open. And, like, the whole restaurant is just cheering him on, and he couldn&#039 ; t do it, through no fault of his own. It&#039 ; s, it doesn&#039 ; t actually crack like, like an egg, like you would think it would just crack and all fall apart. But it&#039 ; s like the outermost shell is, is, what&#039 ; s the word? Is not crisp, not crunchy but I don&#039 ; t know...the word escapes me. But, because it&#039 ; s so thick, like beyond that first quarter inch, it&#039 ; s somewhat pliable. So, so it doesn&#039 ; t really all just crack. But anyway, so that was a fun experience. We had a one night one of our regulars brought in four of the Dallas Stars and they ordered four Peking Ducks between the five of them. They ordered four Peking Ducks. And they almost finished all of them. They ended up having to bring about one, on the plane on their, their road game the next day. They brought a duck and they had that on the plane. |01:02:29| Brody Wow. That&#039 ; s impressive. |01:02:30| Kang Yeah. Yeah, we have Ichiro Suzuki, who was a wonderful player for the Mariners. He, he came in. Of course he ordered Chinese-Japanese items and, just a really nice guy that&#039 ; s really down to earth. And, you know, just a lot of like local, famous celebrities, chefs and whatnot. So yeah. |01:03:06| Brody Did you ever run into any discrimination or racism in running these restaurants? |01:03:15| Kang No. No. We were very fortunate. Of course, you know, we&#039 ; re by nature, we&#039 ; re open to every custom, nationality, ethnicity. So there was never anything that I can think of off the top of my head. Of course, you know, it helped that I speak perfect English or I hope I speak perfect English. And so people wouldn&#039 ; t have, you know, I don&#039 ; t know. They wouldn&#039 ; t have a reason to discriminate or I don&#039 ; t know if my parents ever experienced that or not. They...I never heard any stories or anything like that. And we&#039 ; re very hospitable restaurant owners, right? Being the owner myself, I was down in the trenches helping out staff or if they were ever in the weeds, I&#039 ; d help them out. And I always make sure to, to greet most, if not all of my customers and then, you know, get to know them and get to know their names and their families. And so we that also helped grow our clientele quite a bit, just that personal touch. And that&#039 ; s not something that...I think that&#039 ; s something that you&#039 ; re either born with or you&#039 ; re not. You know, you, you either enjoy meeting people and talking to people and being quote unquote servant. You know, you&#039 ; ve got to have that servant mentality to, to, to be in this business, right? It&#039 ; s a, it&#039 ; s a people business first and foremost. It&#039 ; s, a second...It&#039 ; s a food business, right? You just happen to be serving food, but it&#039 ; s a people business at the end of the day. |01:05:13| Brody And you&#039 ; re...This is sort of the same type of thing you&#039 ; re talking about, but I wanted to ask you about what your philosophy around hospitality is. |01:05:24| Kang Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you&#039 ; ve just got to be, you just got to respect people. You have to want to please people. You have to want to be able to go out of your way to do what you have to do to make sure that they&#039 ; re taken care of and that they want to come back. And just getting to know them. Yeah. Just getting, getting to know the customers. That&#039 ; s, that&#039 ; s a big deal to them. You know, customers like to be recognized when they come in, right? And they&#039 ; ll bring their friends and they&#039 ; ll be like, &quot ; Oh, hey, hey, Jack.&quot ; You know? And so it makes them look good when they know the owner, right? But I don&#039 ; t do that. I don&#039 ; t get to know them because of that fact. Right. It&#039 ; s just. It&#039 ; s just who I am. I just love talking to random people and meeting them, and, hey, you know what? At the end of the day, they probably drove by ten other Chinese restaurants to come to ours. So we&#039 ; re extremely fortunate and honored that they would, that they would do that. Right. So, you got to pay it back. |01:06:49| Brody When you&#039 ; re thinking about your employees, right? When you talked earlier about training and, you know, sort of trying to streamline the menu a little bit to help with training. What are the main things that you&#039 ; re looking for when you&#039 ; re bringing someone on board to be to be part of your restaurant family? |01:07:14| Kang Yeah. So first and foremost, you want them to have an outgoing personality. Of course, you know, you can&#039 ; t be a server if you&#039 ; re always in a bad mood or you&#039 ; re, you know, if you&#039 ; re not comfortable speaking in public or speaking in front of strangers. So you want to look for that. Essentially, you want them to be an extension of yourself, right? You know, you can&#039 ; t be at every table at all times. But you want them to understand what your culture is, the restaurant culture. And you just want them to, to be as respectful to customers as you are. And, you know, there&#039 ; s a famous Maya Angelou quote and you&#039 ; ve probably heard this and let&#039 ; s see if I can remember it very well, but it&#039 ; s, so it goes something like, you know, ten years from now, people won&#039 ; t remember what you said or what you did, but they&#039 ; ll remember how you made them feel, right? And so that, like, imprinted me, imprinted on me, when I first started at the business because that&#039 ; s how people might not know what, might not remember what they ordered, or might not remember what your Sesame Chicken, what your Sesame Chicken tasted like, but they remember how, how nice you were to them and how and how well taken care of they were. So... |01:09:01| Brody Yeah. That&#039 ; s really. That&#039 ; s, that&#039 ; s nice and true. People remember how you made them feel. So what are the next ten years like for you in your business? |01:09:17| Kang Well, currently we&#039 ; re kind of in limbo in terms of reopening. There&#039 ; s some litigation that we&#039 ; re having to work through. Once we get that done, I&#039 ; ll be able to have a better understanding of where we are in terms of reopening. I got commitments from my back of the house that they&#039 ; re going to come back. I mean, it&#039 ; s been over three years. So I&#039 ; m really grateful that they&#039 ; re, that they want to come back and work. Front of the house, the majority of them have moved on, which I, you know, I don&#039 ; t blame them. They&#039 ; ve all actually, they&#039 ; ve all gone on to bigger and better things, you know, I&#039 ; m extremely proud of them. My assistant- no, she wasn&#039 ; t- I didn&#039 ; t have an assistant manager, she was kind of my lead server and she kind of ran things when I wasn&#039 ; t there- but she is planning on going to, going to law school and some of my other employees, they&#039 ; ve, we&#039 ; ve had a lot of our younger employees, some kids in high school, you know, they&#039 ; ve since graduated high school and they&#039 ; re either in college or working at an office type job or I think one person&#039 ; s in the fire academy going to be a firefighter. And so yeah, they&#039 ; ve all even one which I won&#039 ; t name, even certain ones that I didn&#039 ; t really think were going to do anything in the next five years, they&#039 ; ve, they&#039 ; ve really stepped up and changed their lives, so I&#039 ; m extremely proud of them. |01:11:04| Brody That&#039 ; s great. |01:11:05| Kang Yeah. And that&#039 ; s all I can hope for. So when I do reopen, it&#039 ; ll probably be a completely new brand, front of the house staff, which will be challenging at first. But hopefully, people will understand and so they won&#039 ; t be able to see the other familiar faces that they&#039 ; re used to out front. Except me, but we&#039 ; ll get through it. |01:11:29| Brody That&#039 ; s great. In the remodel, did you change anything about, like, open kitchen or anything like that? |01:11:36| Kang The layout. We- no, it&#039 ; s not an open kitchen. We did change the layout within the kitchen itself. Just kind of where the dishwashing area is. Changed that. I added a seating bar where there used to be a waiting bench, but I&#039 ; ve since added a little bar with, like, four bar stools, so customers would come in and they can, while they&#039 ; re waiting to be sat, they can go and open up their wine and start enjoying. |01:12:12| Brody So you&#039 ; re going to stay BYOB? |01:12:14| Kang Oh, yeah. Yeah, BYOB has really, really helped us. You know, you know, getting the word out, you know, people seek out BYOB. There was a time, actually...So for the longest time, the building in the area was not zoned for alcohol. But back in the mid 2000s, the city of Plano had rezoned that area, and so I was actually up at the TABC office, filling out the application because in my mind I wanted to get a beer and wine license and then I forgot to bring a certain paperwork or something so I couldn&#039 ; t hand it in there. So I brought it back home and then just kind of slept on it and then never went back and never turned in that, the application. And you know, looking back on it, I, that was the right decision, I think because, on any given weekend, I don&#039 ; t know, 80, 90% of our tables bring their own wine in, bring their own alcohol. So it&#039 ; s. Yeah. |01:13:44| Brody Did, do you have much competition? I know you&#039 ; ve been sort of in a limbo for a little while between the fire and everything else. But in the meantime, have other places that you would consider competition sprung up? |01:13:56| Kang Oh, yeah. Yeah, I&#039 ; ve, I mean, I&#039 ; ve seen at least two or three other restaurants that serve Peking Duck. They&#039 ; ve popped up. I&#039 ; ve never, I haven&#039 ; t tried them, so I don&#039 ; t know how they&#039 ; re, they&#039 ; re quality of duck, you know, compared to ours. Compared to ours. So, I can&#039 ; t speak to that, but yeah, there&#039 ; s just there&#039 ; s been a lot of other restaurants and not just ducks, not just restaurants that serve Peking Duck, but just other Chinese restaurants in general. And those are your direct competitors. And then you have indirect competitors that are just restaurants in general. Right? If we&#039 ; re not going to have Chinese tonight, we&#039 ; ll have Mexican. We&#039 ; re not having Mexican, we&#039 ; ll have Indian, you know, that&#039 ; s a direct competitor. Right? Because they&#039 ; re choosing somewhere else over your restaurant. So, yeah, just a lot of new restaurants have popping up. |01:14:51| Brody Do you have, is there a strong community among Asian restaurant owners in Plano or in Dallas? |01:15:06| Kang I&#039 ; m sure there is. I know a few Chinese restaurants and Chinese restaurant owners, but those are the ones that have been in Dallas for as long as we have. And so the new ones, no, I don&#039 ; t really know a bunch of the new ones. Of course, when I was in, when I was running the restaurant, I never had time outside of the restaurant to, to socialize with other restaurant owners much. You know, we were fortunate that we were closed on Sundays, but that was family day for us. That was spending time with the wife and the kid. And so, yeah, I mean, during the week it was just restaurant. |01:15:55| Brody Yeah. It&#039 ; s a lot of work. |01:15:56| Kang It is a lot of work. The restaurant business is extremely time consuming and labor intensive. Yeah. If you do it right, if you enjoy what you&#039 ; re doing, it&#039 ; s, quite rewarding. You know, you get, you get instant feedback. Right? You serve a dish. You can see and tell right away if, if the customer enjoys it or not. You get to meet new people all the time. And like in our case, they, a lot of their customers became friends and family of ours. And, I do miss that. I, I tremendously miss that aspect of, of the business. |01:16:47| Brody So. So would you characterize your restaurant as a &quot ; mom and pop,&quot ; or do you think about it in a different way? Or what does a &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; restaurant entail to you? |01:16:59| Kang It&#039 ; s still a &quot ; mom and pop.&quot ; You know, to me, it&#039 ; s still a &quot ; mom and pop.&quot ; You know, it&#039 ; s, we&#039 ; re independently owned. The owner, me, I&#039 ; m there every day, all the time. You know, when and if I do reopen, I will try to hire a manager because to take off a lot of my load, a lot of load off of me, and I&#039 ; ll be able to at least take more than just Sunday off, since the kid is at the age where he&#039 ; s, you know, got a lot of activities going on. So, but yeah, no, absolutely. We&#039 ; re still, we&#039 ; re still a &quot ; mom and pop.&quot ; I don&#039 ; t ever want to expand. This is not something that I&#039 ; m looking to do. You know, it&#039 ; s, you do lose some quality in an expansion. You do lose some of the personal touch. Yeah. And I&#039 ; m not, you know, if people, people that have expanded and they&#039 ; ve done well and I mean, that&#039 ; s great to figure out the formula, you know, where you&#039 ; re not as involved in the day to day as I am. But yeah, so it&#039 ; s kind of, it&#039 ; s kind of a double edged sword. You know, me being inside the restaurant 70 hours a week, that&#039 ; s obviously been able to keep an eye on the quality of the food coming out of the kitchen and, building up the relationships. But at the same time, I don&#039 ; t want to expand because you do lose that, that part of it. |01:18:48| Brody In a nutshell, what would you, how would you characterize your brand? |01:18:55| Kang That&#039 ; s a good question. It&#039 ; s, you know, I think our brand is a...It&#039 ; s a independently owned restaurant that enjoys serving great food and has a fun time serving great food. That our guests and customers come in and they have a wonderful time, and it&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s just, it&#039 ; s not...I don&#039 ; t know. It&#039 ; s not like any other Chinese restaurant that I&#039 ; ve been to, you know, it&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s just people just come in and have a, they end up partying with us. It&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s just, you know, it&#039 ; s like Cheers. Like the show Cheers, right? You know, like, everyone knows your name. You know, they come in and, hey, we call them by their names, and, it&#039 ; s comfortable. It&#039 ; s, after a long day of work for them, they come in and they, it&#039 ; s like their second home. And so that&#039 ; s, we&#039 ; re a laid back restaurant that provides good food and great hospitality. |01:20:26| Brody You&#039 ; re right. That&#039 ; s so...That is different that people are partying with other tables. |01:20:29| Kang Yeah. |01:20:30| Brody What? Why do you think that happens? |01:20:34| Kang Well, for one thing, because we&#039 ; re able to seat around 80 people inside the restaurant and with the three round tables and then the surrounding booths, the proximity of a table to the next table is a lot closer I think than, than other restaurants. So just naturally, if a large party of 12 is celebrating a birthday and they&#039 ; re, you know, taking shots or whatever the full extent, they&#039 ; ll ask the table next to them, &quot ; Hey, do you want to take some shots or try some wine?&quot ; and so they ended up, they end up just sharing their alcohol. And that&#039 ; s where the BYOB aspect really comes into play and that people I think are more willing to share their wine that way. No, that&#039 ; s my, that&#039 ; s my take on it. |01:21:42| Brody Do you think the duck has something to do with it? Sort of the way that that&#039 ; s served and eaten? |01:21:47| Kang Oh, yeah. I mean, everything is family style, right? And especially with the duck. That&#039 ; s not served for a party of one. The duck itself, as one entree, among others, it basically counts as three, three entrees. So, yeah, a party of four ordered one duck, a party of eight will order two. And then, so everything&#039 ; s served family style. We got the big lazy Susans, around the round table and stuff, so people just...Yeah. No, you bring up a good point. Yeah, I didn&#039 ; t think about, remember the lazy Susans. But. yes, yes, absolutely. People...it&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s very, it&#039 ; s a communal experience. Yeah. |01:22:44| Brody Were you all affected by any of the weather incidents in the last few years, the tornado or the ice storm? |01:22:51| Kang No. Luckily, we dodged those bullets. We that was all after 2019. So. No. Yeah. No, we were we were fortunate to dodge that. And then we dodged COVID as well. |01:23:09| Brody Yeah. That. I mean a silver lining. |01:23:12| Kang Yeah, I can&#039 ; t imagine. And, I can&#039 ; t imagine if I was still in business during COVID and, having to pivot to, all takeout and delivery and, and all that. So it was, hats off to the other restaurant owners that have to deal with that and, you know, had to go through that and lay off their employees and all that. I mean, that&#039 ; s hard. So, I guess the silver lining in that fire that, you know, that&#039 ; s the bright side of the fire. |01:23:48| Brody And the remodel was facilitated. |01:23:50| Kang Yeah. And the remodel and exactly. You know, the remodel happened right before the whole you know, happened towards the start of COVID. But we&#039 ; ve dodged the supply chain issues, too, and the rising cost of the materials and labor. So, yeah, thank God that that was, that we got all that over and done with too, before, before what&#039 ; s going on now. So. |01:24:19| Brody Yeah...A lot of silver linings there. |01:24:22| Kang Yeah. |01:24:23| Brody Well looking back at your time in your parents&#039 ; restaurants and also running your own, what are some lessons or reflections that, that you might have? |01:24:39| Kang You really got to enjoy what you do. You, you really ought to be able to sacrifice a lot of your time and a lot of your family&#039 ; s time if you&#039 ; re married. It&#039 ; s not, you know, the restaurant business isn&#039 ; t one of those that you just open from day one and you hire someone and you&#039 ; re an absentee owner because, you know, without going into any stories what those tend to be, tend to fail faster, quicker. You know, it&#039 ; s not as glamorous as it seems. You know, you&#039 ; ve got obviously you&#039 ; ve got all these cooking shows and restaurant shows and they&#039 ; ve, those have become increasingly popular in the last 10 to 15 years. And, obviously what you see on TV is a lot different than what happens day to day. Yeah, you just, you&#039 ; re just gonna have to sacrifice. It&#039 ; s not, it&#039 ; s not normal hours. You know, when people are eating, you&#039 ; re working. When people are asleep, you&#039 ; re just getting off of work. But, at the end of the day, I wouldn&#039 ; t, I wouldn&#039 ; t trade it for anything else, you know, you got to be, you got to have that passion for it. And when you don&#039 ; t is when you got to get out of the business and do something else. |01:26:11| Brody That&#039 ; s great. Thank you for that. Is there anything that I did not ask you today that you wanted to add to this interview? |01:26:28| Kang No, I think I think what I touched on just a minute ago, I think that&#039 ; s probably the most important thing. I mean, I see these up and coming restaurant owners, and they&#039 ; re, they have the passion and have they drive, and that&#039 ; s great. You know, there are obviously using a lot of social media to their benefit, which is great. I mean, that&#039 ; s what it&#039 ; s for. But I just hope they don&#039 ; t get burnt out too soon. Right? And they know how to kind of sit back and take a breather every once in a while, because burnout in this industry is extremely common. And it&#039 ; s...Well, as with any job but the restaurant industry in particular, it&#039 ; s not just physically demanding, but it&#039 ; s mentally demanding. Right? You know, physically you&#039 ; re on your feet the whole day, right? You sit down and eat, try to scarf down your food and five, ten minutes, then you&#039 ; re back on your feet, you know, doing your job. You know, mentally you&#039 ; ve got to deal with a number of not only inside factors, but outside factors, right? And you got to deal with the licensing part of it. You got to deal with the city part of it, the health department part of it. You know, doing all your payroll, unless you have an accountant. But, it&#039 ; s like running any small business, right? You&#039 ; ve got to wear many hats, you&#039 ; ve got to be a jack of all trades. So I&#039 ; ve actually learned quite a bit of handiwork. A lot of plumbing, some electrical, just being things will go out on a Friday night. Your AC will go up and you&#039 ; ve got a house full of, full of guests. And what are you going to do? So it is a lot of thinking on your feet. It is tremendous. It is a lot of thinking on your feet. It is a lot of putting out fires instantaneously. A lot of deadlines that pop up that need to be solved in the next 5 minutes. So, it does teach you quite a bit of problem solving. |01:28:58| Brody Yeah, that&#039 ; s really interesting. People don&#039 ; t think about all the different pieces of it. |01:29:03| Kang Yeah. You know, 2014 I think was when we had that really hot summer. You have like over like 70 days of 100 degrees. And so, kitchen coolant was going out. Refrigeration. I had to replace our AC, had to replace the compressor on our walk in cooler, had to get a new freezer...It was that was a costly summer, but I wasn&#039 ; t the only one dealing with that. There were other restaurants that were dealing with that. There were homeowners that had to replace their ACs too. So that was just that was a brutal, that was a brutal summer. But, yeah. At least I dodged the snowmageddon, the freezeageddon two years ago. So. |01:29:48| Brody That&#039 ; s lucky. |01:29:48| Kang Yeah. But yeah, you just got, just got to have a passion for it. |01:29:57| Brody Well, thank you so much. This has been so interesting, and I&#039 ; m really happy to learn about your family&#039 ; s story and hear about your thoughts about what&#039 ; s been going on the last few years in your restaurant. |01:30:09| Kang Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Happy to be here. |01:30:12| Brody Thank you so much. |01:30:12| Kang You&#039 ; re welcome. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_013.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jack Kang, May 18, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_013 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Chinese Cooking, Japanese Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-05-18 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/b90b2501c37669ff8ca5ca4c8b966e22.jpg 3c2644e7f58eb36233e8f67230ca1d63 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jimmy Niwa OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Jimmy Niwa, June 9, 2022 2021oh002_di_016 00:49:35 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Japanese Jimmy Niwa Betsy Brody wav oh_dig_audio_niwa_jimmy_20220609.wav 1:|14(12)|32(5)|51(3)|69(7)|87(12)|101(11)|113(8)|130(3)|144(8)|157(14)|173(17)|189(4)|202(2)|213(5)|223(9)|233(3)|243(4)|251(7)|261(6)|273(6)|285(13)|299(3)|307(4)|319(2)|330(7)|340(12)|353(4)|365(3)|377(2)|386(7)|399(4)|411(5)|425(3)|436(13)|447(2)|458(11)|468(12)|480(2)|489(9)|502(7)|513(1)|520(11)|529(12)|542(3)|554(1)|565(9)|578(6)|588(4)|598(10) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/164386 Aviary audio 0 Introduction Asian Americans ; Cooking, American ; Cooking, Japanese ; Texas--History 32 Moving from California to Texas 117 Culinary school in California and teaching in Japan culinary school ; Japan ; yaki niku 170 Growing up in Orange County, California/Japanese comfort foods California ; comfort foods 265 Opening Niwa's Japanese Barbecue Deep Ellum ; Japanese ; Niwa Japanese Barbecue ; restaurants ; yaki niku 32.78907311570053, -96.78091741964128 17 https://niwabbq.com/ 375 Technical aspects of setting up a yakiniku restaurant permit ; yaki niku 516 Customer experience at Niwa Japanese Barbecue customers ; yaki niku 568 Changes in Dallas Dallas ; Deep Ellum ; Japanese ; Japanese restaurants ; Niwa Japanese Barbecue 698 Flavors at Niwa Japanese Barbecue Asian flavors ; barbecue ; flavor ; fried chicken ; fusion ; Niwa Japanese Barbecue ; pickles ; sushi ; trends ; Wagyu ; yaki niku 829 Thoughts on authenticity Americanized ; authentic ; authenticity ; burrito ; California roll ; crab ; Japanese ; pizza ; Wagyu ; western palate 1198 Impact of local sourcing on evolution of foods California roll ; educate ; education ; pizza ; sushi 1308 Reflections on impact of French culinary training French ; technique ; techniques 1413 Fusion cuisine and culture cultures ; fusion 1492 Role of food in transmitting culture culture ; diversity ; ethnic food ; food ; immigrant ; Japanese ; Japanese food 1622 Decision to go to culinary school cooking ; culinary school 1705 Asian food in DFW Asian restaurant ; Dallas ; Deep Ellum ; Monkey King ; noodles ; poke ; trends ; western palate 1801 Learning about barbecue and Asian food in DFW Asian flavors ; Asian food ; Asian restaurant ; barbecue ; flavor ; palate ; photography ; Yelp 1921 Customers customers ; Deep Ellum ; diversity 1968 Yelp reviews/Social Media negative reviews ; reviews ; social media ; star ; Yelp 2124 Thoughts about professional restaurant reviewers educate ; negative reviews ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; Yelp 2379 Expansion and growth COVID ; expansion ; growth ; Plano 2424 Asian food community in Dallas Asian community ; Asian Grub in DFDub ; Asian Night Market ; Asian restaurant ; Bomb Factory 2616 Impact of weather and COVID on business challenge ; challenges ; cooking kits ; COVID ; Deep Ellum ; electricity ; ice storm ; neighborhood ; pivot ; power outages ; shutdown ; Texas grid ; tornado ; weather 2750 Celebrities celebrities 2797 Relationships with neighbors in Deep Ellum Deep Ellum ; neighborhood ; neighbors 2850 Reflections and lessons on the food industry appreciation ; chefs ; food ; industry |00:00:04| Brody This is Betsy Brody. Today is June 9th, 2022. I am interviewing for the first time Mr. Jimmy Niwa. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and is part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In: How Food, Culture, and Class Shape the Story of Asian Dallas.&quot ; Thank you so much for sitting for this interview. Let&#039 ; s start out just by talking about where and when were you born? |00:00:36| Niwa Absolutely. I was born in Michigan, small city Cassidy in 1981. |00:00:47| Brody What brought you to Texas? |00:00:50| Niwa I was living in Los Angeles most of my life. And I moved to Japan for a couple of years, over two years. And upon returning to California, my business partner and I decided to open a restaurant. And Texas was one of the three choices. |00:01:11| Brody What were the other two? |00:01:12| Niwa Colorado. The Denver, Colorado area. And then Portland/Seattle area. |00:01:17| Brody What drew you to Texas? |00:01:20| Niwa Oh, I guess quite a few things. One was the business, small business benefits here. California is a very difficult state to do small business in. And then also the diversity, the growing diversity I think in Texas. But also at that time, we felt like there was a lot of missing food that we would love to bring out here. And yaki niku or Japanese barbecue was one of them. |00:01:57| Brody Tell me about your time in Japan. What were you doing there? |00:02:00| Niwa I was teaching at a culinary school in Yokkaichi which is kind of a smaller city in Mie ken, which Mie as the prefecture. I was teaching at a culinary school there doing mostly Western style cooking for about two years. |00:02:23| Brody So you already had a culinary background at that point? |00:02:27| Niwa Yes. And I did go to culinary school in California, at Le Cordon Bleu. |00:02:34| Brody What did you specialize in? |00:02:36| Niwa The program is French cooking. |00:02:41| Brody But you wanted to...You wanted to do Japanese barbecue? |00:02:45| Niwa Yeah. Just because of my background. My upbringing. |00:02:50| Brody Yeah. Tell me about your upbringing. |00:02:53| Niwa Well, both parents are Japanese, born in Japan, so I&#039 ; m second generation Japanese. You know, when we grew up, it was a lot of...I grew up with a very diverse community in school all the way from elementary through high school. I think Asians were still less than ten to fifteen percent. But it was a very diverse school. |00:03:19| Brody In Los Angeles? |00:03:20| Niwa Yeah, I was actually in Orange County. |00:03:27| Brody So did you eat a lot of barbecue when you were growing up? |00:03:30| Niwa Not a whole lot. I did eat a lot of Japanese comfort foods, which is what I got me into cooking. But Japanese barbecue was, you know, even then, a treat to go have and there would be quite a drive. At that time, I think there was only a couple in Orange County and then a few in Los Angeles as well. |00:03:53| Brody So how did you learn the ins and outs of doing it? |00:03:57| Niwa By eating it. No. From culinary school, I kind of cooked everything I could, worked wherever I could. I worked in the hotels, I worked at restaurants, kind of wanted to learn it all. My first job in the industry was in an Italian pizza restaurant, so from there, I just wanted to learn as much as I could. |00:04:25| Brody Great. So tell me about your business. |00:04:28| Niwa It&#039 ; s a Japanese barbecue. It&#039 ; s also known as &quot ; yaki niku.&quot ; &quot ; Yaki&quot ; in Japanese translates to grilled and &quot ; niku&quot ; translates to meat. So it&#039 ; s kind of just a literal translation of &quot ; grilled meats.&quot ; . |00:04:43| Brody You mentioned a business partner earlier. Do you? Did that business partner carry over into the current restaurant? |00:04:49| Niwa Yes. Yeah. |00:04:50| Brody Yeah. So what is the name of the restaurant? Where is it located? |00:04:54| Niwa It&#039 ; s Niwa Japanese Barbecue. We&#039 ; re down in Deep Ellum. It&#039 ; s about a 4000, little over 4000 square foot restaurant, about 120 seats. |00:05:07| Brody How did you decide on that location? |00:05:10| Niwa It actually kind of came about...Funny because we were, we were searching all over the place with ta yaki niku style restaurant, there&#039 ; s a lot of penetrations in the ceilings and there&#039 ; s a lot of saw cutting in the ground. And most second generation spaces, there&#039 ; s very little benefit to us. And if anything, it&#039 ; s more of a hassle or a workaround. So we typically want to find a first generation space that also doesn&#039 ; t have anything above us because we need a lot of air conditioning or ventilation. So we had been searching around for quite some time and we got a call from our current landlord, Madison Partners. And Jon Hetzel called us and said, &quot ; We got some information saying you&#039 ; re looking for a space and we think we might have the perfect one for you.&quot ; And that was previously a auto glass repair store. So it wasn&#039 ; t typical for that to turn into a restaurant, but it was perfect because it was just a cold, dark shell. |00:06:15| Brody So walk me through the ins and outs of how you, you know, how you set up a yaki niku restaurant. |00:06:23| Niwa There&#039 ; s a lot of cutting. All the tables, what we use is what&#039 ; s called a downdraft system. Excuse me. So all the tables are, all the grills are built into the table and the downdraft system sucks the air down, and then it drafts up and outside the building. So every table has to connect through this kind of chain of mechanical ducting that goes out of the building. So it&#039 ; s a tedious project. Our general contractor, Southlake, were great. Definitely had some challenges that they had to come across. And, you know, first time building something like that is pretty difficult. |00:07:09| Brody It sounds like it. Were there any challenges, particularly about sourcing the grills and so forth or permits for building that? |00:07:19| Niwa This is pre-COVID, so sourcing the grills was no problem. It did take about three months to get here, but we obviously were building. So it actually came a little bit earlier than we had expected. So we had to store it offsite. Other than that, yeah, it was just more or less finding the right materials. But these systems are kind of complete packages in general. |00:07:46| Brody Great. What about with the city permits and things like that? |00:07:50| Niwa Yeah, we were fine all the way up until our final inspection with the fire inspector, and at the last minute, he thought he might want us to have a what&#039 ; s called the kind of an Ansul system which extinguishes fire with foam. And he thought he may want us to put one into the table that would have kind of a like a hose that looks like a faucet for your kitchen and obviously a huge eyesore for us. So fortunately, we were able to show some documentation for restaurants across the nation that did that that did not need that. There&#039 ; s extinguishing from above through the fire sprinklers and then each unit has their own Ansul system built in. So we&#039 ; re very lucky they didn&#039 ; t require that. |00:08:36| Brody So from a customer perspective, walk me through the customer&#039 ; s experience when they get to your restaurant. |00:08:42| Niwa Sure. For some, it may be a little daunting at first. There&#039 ; s a grill in the middle. Of the table. And half the food that we make comes out from the kitchen. The other half is going to come out raw and ready to cook at the grills. We do provide some times and tags there so everyone knows what kind of meat they&#039 ; re eating and how long it takes to cook. But it&#039 ; s a very interactive process. It&#039 ; s a very fun one. You can kind of eat what you like and it kind of breaks up the monotony of traditional steak, potatoes and a veggie kind of dining. Not that there&#039 ; s anything wrong with it, but this just gets a little more fun and you can really kind of create your own meal. |00:09:28| Brody That sounds fun. What was Dallas like when you got here and when you were trying to establish this restaurant? |00:09:35| Niwa Oh, well it&#039 ; s definitely changed since now. I was one of the few Californians at the time that now I complain about as well. But yeah, I mean traffic was not as bad. The construction was really booming at the time, and it still is, but not as apparent as it was then. Deep Ellum was kind of a risk for us. We had looked through the history of it and it had gone through many ups and downs. But at that time we thought, well, it does look like there&#039 ; s quite a bit of resources being put into this and some efforts. And since then we&#039 ; ve had some challenges, but overall, it&#039 ; s been a very great location for us. |00:10:22| Brody What year was this? |00:10:23| Niwa This was 2015 to 2016. We opened in late 2016. |00:10:31| Brody In terms of other Japanese restaurants or other yaki niku restaurants, or did you have much competition when you got here? |00:10:39| Niwa No, we were the only ones in Dallas. We found out right as we moved here that another big chain out of Japan was franchising a restaurant out here, too. But they were in Addison. So at that time, there was only the two of us. Now there is one more in Dallas, and I think a couple more in the suburbs. |00:11:01| Brody And the other Japanese restaurants that already existed. It&#039 ; s a totally different thing or did you perceive them as being competition? |00:11:10| Niwa Actually, one of them is a company that I used to work with. Before and very popular in Japan. They have, I think, maybe 600 plus locations, maybe 30 or so in the States. Very well run machine, but just a little bit different. We thought we could do a little better as far as quality goes and some of the flavors as well. |00:11:38| Brody Yeah, tell me about the flavors. |00:11:41| Niwa So we you know, we wanted to have as much of the true to nature yaki niku style items, but we also wanted to do a little bit of a twist on some of them. So a few of our dishes are kind of fusion style dishes. We have a Wagyu deviled egg, for example, which we use shiso, which is a mint leaf instead of typically like a parsley in the deviled eggs. And then we top it with a little bit of Wagyu beef and some nori, which is Japanese seaweed, and then shichimi with or togarashi, which is a chili powder. So just kind of our take on a classic deviled egg. |00:12:23| Brody Yeah. That is something that comes up a lot in a lot of the conversations that I&#039 ; m having for this project, the challenge of sort of staying true to the traditional recipes or techniques, but also of adapting to, you know, to the time and place that you&#039 ; re in or the desire to to push the, you know, the recipe forward. What are your thoughts about those balances? |00:12:52| Niwa You know, I think food will and always has been a work in progress and will remain that way forever. I think there&#039 ; s always a surge in certain styles or types of dishes. We see fried chicken here in Dallas. That&#039 ; s that&#039 ; s got a huge revitalization, I guess you can say. You know, sushi has gone through the same kind of cycles. Pickles are another one I think that kind of keep coming about just in different ways, and I think that&#039 ; s going to continue to happen forever because we&#039 ; re also dealing with the same foods and, you know, typically the same ingredients and we just had to find different ways to make them work. So I think we&#039 ; ll see that continuously. |00:13:50| Brody What about that concept of authenticity? Where where do you stand on that? I mean, what you&#039 ; re doing is very, you know, something that&#039 ; s a very traditional Japanese method. What do you think about that? |00:14:03| Niwa The word authenticity is a tough one. I think everyone has a very strong opinion on what that word means. For me, it can go so many different directions. I think what I try to live by is should anyone be offended by this? For example, a burrito was not created in South America. You know, I believe the history of it is from San Diego. So who has the claim to right for that is very questionable. You know, what&#039 ; s an authentic burrito is also a very hard thing to come about. And what&#039 ; s the difference between a burrito and a wrap? You know, these are conversations that I think chefs always have, quite often, mostly out of curiosity. But at the same time, we don&#039 ; t want to necessarily offend anyone. If you say it&#039 ; s authentic, then I think it needs to be very true to nature. Once you take away the key components to what made that dish what it is or you take away from the history of it, I think that&#039 ; s where it can become offensive. Pizza may be another example. Pizza. You don&#039 ; t really...Who really gets the claim to fame for it? It&#039 ; s Italian? I think by nature. But you rarely will see pizza in Italy. And if you do, it&#039 ; s very different than what&#039 ; s here. And if you go to New York, you see New York style pizza. And there&#039 ; s...You know which one&#039 ; s authentic when two of them on the same street next door to each other may be entirely different. So I think it&#039 ; s really a question of what makes us authentic or inauthentic. California rolls are not typically what any Japanese person would call sushi. And that developed from, you know, local ingredients or what was on hand. So should it be considered sushi? I think that&#039 ; s really just, you know, a question of who you&#039 ; re asking. I think the point where it becomes offensive is, you know, typically a California roll will be rice with seaweed and then crab, avocado and cucumber. I think as it developed, masago, which is the small eggs were wrapped on the outside or sesame seed. But I think if you were to take the cucumber and use zucchini and take the crab and use shrimp and call it a California roll, then I think it could be considered offensive. Who would be offended by it? I&#039 ; m not sure, because I don&#039 ; t think many people claim the California roll as theirs. But I think that&#039 ; s really kind of an example of when it becomes offensive, you know, when you&#039 ; re talking about traditional style dishes. Then I think you should really stick to what it is. For example, the deviled eggs, we very clearly wanted to make a Wagyu deviled eggs because we don&#039 ; t want it...Someone to expect something entirely different. And I think that&#039 ; s really what it is is the expectations. We deal with us a lot with Wagyu beef, too. I see the term used everywhere incorrectly. &quot ; Wagyu&quot ; translates literally into &quot ; Japanese cow.&quot ; So if it&#039 ; s not from Japan, it really should not be considered Wagyu. It&#039 ; s kind of semantics, but once it&#039 ; s, once the cattle is no longer in Japan, then it would be an imported Wagyu. So for me, being a second generation Japanese, you know, I&#039 ; m American born. So if someone asked me if I&#039 ; m Japanese, then yes, my ethnicity is Japanese, but I&#039 ; m American. And I kind of think of it on the same lines with beef as well. So there are a lot of American Wagyu or domestic Wagyu products that are being made, which were from the genetics of Japanese Wagyu. But when comparing them side by side, there&#039 ; s really no comparison and really there shouldn&#039 ; t be. Australian Wagyu is getting to the point where it&#039 ; s incredible, very similar to Japanese beef and the beef marbling scale or the grading systems. But even at that point. I think it still should be called Australian Wagyu. And not because Japanese Wagyu is better, but more because that&#039 ; s just what it is. So everyone should be educated in that way and be able to make the comparisons on their own. I think the problem with claiming authenticity when you divert from it so far is that now the expectations are that. So somebody who may have never had or have had Wagyu beef here in the States, that was not true Japanese Wagyu was American Wagyu, if they were to go to Japan and eat Wagyu or have real Japanese Wagyu, they may be genuinely confused. And I think that happens quite often, you know, as foods become Americanized. There&#039 ; s a reason for it because that&#039 ; s where the tastes levels are, those are the sources we have. But I think to claim authenticity is where it becomes a little bit offensive or misleading, I should say. |00:19:58| Brody Thank you. Several people have mentioned that in devising their menu, they&#039 ; re, you know, approaching it, you know, as you just said, from you know, let&#039 ; s call it an accessibility, you know, perspective, what people&#039 ; s palates are, you know, prepared for, ready for. But also, you know, with an idea toward educating customers through the menu about, you know, different things that aren&#039 ; t, you know, aren&#039 ; t the ones that that everybody&#039 ; s heard of. Is that something that you&#039 ; ve considered? |00:20:36| Niwa Yeah. I think it&#039 ; s very difficult to source a 100% ingredients from anywhere outside of the US. So naturally, there&#039 ; s going to be a difference from here to there. The New York pizza again, for example, everyone believes that the pizza dough tastes the way it does because of the water in New York. And I&#039 ; ve seen stories of chefs that are bringing water from New York to make sure that they create the right kind of dough. In any case, I think, yes, sourcing is part of part of the natural evolution of these foods. Going back to California roll, I think it&#039 ; s fair because it was called a &quot ; California roll.&quot ; It didn&#039 ; t, it wasn&#039 ; t, you know, claimed that this is the new sushi or there was nothing offensive I think in that nature. I think when people get offended and say &quot ; California roll is not sushi&quot ; I think the question that has to be asked of &quot ; who said it was?&quot ; you know? And I think that&#039 ; s just the problem there is the education level is that&#039 ; s not sushi by any means. But there&#039 ; s nothing wrong with the California roll. |00:21:49| Brody Your training as a chef and going to culinary school and learning French techniques. How has that informed the rest of your life as a restaurateur? |00:22:02| Niwa Well, this comment might get me hated by many. I think that&#039 ; s actually a perfect example, is... French food typically is very true to nature. The five mother sauces they&#039 ; ve created are still commonly used. Many of the techniques are exactly the same as they have been for hundreds of years. And I think that&#039 ; s something to be appreciated on its own. I think this is also why a lot of French food is either it becomes a fusion style or needs some kind of huge change in it to make it different. You know, we talk about some of the things like a paté or terrines or some of those you typically don&#039 ; t see too much swing away from the original. Like a coq au vin is just... I&#039 ; ve rarely seen a fusion style that&#039 ; s better than the original. But it also makes French food, I think, a little bit stale in that aspect is there is not a whole lot of evolution from there. So I feel as if, you know, what you&#039 ; re getting into when you walk into a good French restaurant is you should know exactly what you&#039 ; re getting. |00:23:34| Brody That concept of fusion is one that&#039 ; s also kind of slippery or controversial. What do you think? What does that word mean to you and how do you think it&#039 ; s best done? |00:23:46| Niwa I think fusion is, can be a great thing and can be a terrible thing. I think if you can understand and you have a history or a clear understanding of both cultures and both foods that you&#039 ; re infusing, or fusing, I should say, not infusing would make it okay and better. I think a lot of times we see that&#039 ; s very controversial is people that have no clue or understanding of the original dishes and then fusing them because there are some similarities and calling it a fusion dish. There are some fusion dishes that are incredible and there&#039 ; s a lot that are terrible. So I don&#039 ; t necessarily think it&#039 ; s about whether fusion food is good or not. I think it&#039 ; s just about the food. |00:24:51| Brody Speaking of food, what role do you think food plays in transmitting culture? |00:24:59| Niwa I think a huge amount. You know, growing up in such a diverse community, I went through a lot of, a lot of what I&#039 ; m sure children of immigrants went through is &quot ; Do I hide this food from my friends and enjoy it on my own time? Or do I bring them in and share this with them? Will they like it? Will they not like it? You know, will they think I&#039 ; m weird?&quot ; You know, Japanese food, I think, is less intense than many other foods out there, but I think that&#039 ; s something that really is something that, you know, is huge into the culture of food and how we how we view it. You know, growing up, many of my friends were very open to it and tried a lot of it. And some of them absolutely hated some things and some of them were absolutely loved it. And I could never gauge why or how it just you know, I think it just happened. |00:26:03| Brody The other way around. Did you growing up in such a diverse area, did you get a chance to try food from other cultures? |00:26:10| Niwa Yes. I had a very terrible relationship with food when I was very young. The dinner table was something I hated because I was always in trouble. I didn&#039 ; t care much about food and I just wanted to play. So I was always in trouble for either not eating all my food or for eating too fast or eating too slow or making a mess or whatnot. So it wasn&#039 ; t until I was probably in high school where I really started to appreciate food and really had an interest for it. And that&#039 ; s where I started cooking a little bit. But I did get the opportunity to eat all kinds of foods, you know, because a lot of my friends were from different areas. |00:27:03| Brody How did you decide to go to culinary school? |00:27:06| Niwa I went to school for mechanical engineering and I did a part time kind of internship. And just a couple of weeks into the internship, I realized, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. I don&#039 ; t think I could sit still. I don&#039 ; t think I could sit at a desk for, you know, eight to ten hours a day. It&#039 ; s just not in my nature. So I decided...At the time I was working at that Italian restaurant while going to school, and so I just focused a little more time and energy there and I kind of moved up very quickly. And, at the time, the owner of the business, we had some issues with some staff that didn&#039 ; t come in and were unable to come in. And so we ended up closing one of the restaurants for a day, and that&#039 ; s where kind of a light bulb hit my mind, thinking if I were to ever own a restaurant, I can&#039 ; t allow that to happen. So I need to understand all of it, every aspect of a restaurant. So that&#039 ; s when I decided to enroll in culinary school. |00:28:25| Brody Interesting. About Asian food in particular, when you arrived in DFW, what was the landscape like as far as Asian restaurants? |00:28:38| Niwa There was a lot of, oh, geez, I&#039 ; m going to say it. There wasn&#039 ; t a whole lot of authentic Japanese restaurants. You know, I think Dallas in general can be a few years behind Los Angeles in the food industry especially. So some of the trends that we were, that I saw when I got here were things that were already happened in Los Angeles. Poke was one of them, I think at the time there was only one. And in Los Angeles, there is, you know, a ton. And so I think it was it was a little bit scarce. The reason why we chose Deep Ellum, too, is actually Monkey King. You know, he was doing Taiwanese beef noodles and he was busy. He was extremely busy. So, in my mind, I thought, well, you know, our food is not that out there. There&#039 ; s nothing that will make people kind of scratch their head. It&#039 ; s just meat grilled on a table in general. So I thought, well, if he has that much success, I don&#039 ; t think ours is a far shot for giving it a chance here in Deep Ellum. |00:30:02| Brody You know, yaki niku is a variant of barbecue. And you came to Texas, which is a barbecue capital. Did you find yourself exploring the barbecue world or the Asian scene or both? |00:30:20| Niwa Both. I ate at every barbecue place I could for about a month. And Asian food wise, I tried as many as I could. But I think really, you know, nowadays photos can tell a lot. So, you know, through Google Earth or Yelp, we were able to kind of see, okay, is this a place that we should try and see if there&#039 ; s, you know, that this is competition or at least what the direction is or what the taste profiles are? |00:31:00| Brody Yeah. Were you trying, in visiting all those restaurants, trying to sort of see, gauge the palate of the diner? |00:31:07| Niwa Yeah. And still to this day, I think, well, now you know, I think of myself as being very Texan as far as taste wise goes. But when I first came out here, my initial reaction was that everything was very salty and still, when we get people from New York or California or from Japan, especially, that come here to eat, that&#039 ; s typically the first response is how&#039 ; s the food is &quot ; Well, and everything here is a little bit salty,&quot ; but for me I don&#039 ; t see that anymore. Maybe because I&#039 ; ve been here for so long, but yeah, that was definitely something that I had to learn really quickly was, you know, I think Texans love flavor so if the flavor is not there and right in your face, it may be considered a little bit bland. |00:32:02| Brody Who are your customers and how do they find you? |00:32:06| Niwa I like to say our customers are ones that like good food. Kidding, but I think our diversity is pretty big in the restaurant as well. We have you know, people that drive from quite a ways and we have a lot of locals that dine quite often, even locals from the Deep Ellum neighborhood itself. But honestly, I don&#039 ; t think I can say that there&#039 ; s an overwhelming majority of any category, age wise, ethnicity, anything. The demographics are really spread out I think. |00:32:48| Brody You mentioned Yelp a minute ago. And in talking to people we&#039 ; ve been, I&#039 ; ve been hearing a lot about, you know, the relationship between both professional reviewers coming to restaurants and the impact of social media and sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor and things like that. What are your experiences in that area? |00:33:11| Niwa Well, Yelp, I think, is a love-hate relationship. It&#039 ; s done an incredible job as far as putting dining on the map and how we can approach it. There are a lot of drawbacks to Yelp. One being that there&#039 ; s no confirmation there. So anyone can write a review about any place for any reason. There&#039 ; s other sites like Open Table. That platform that you have to have a reservation, the restaurant has to see to do before you make a review. So they&#039 ; re a little bit more genuine then because also that&#039 ; s your profile. As far as Yelp goes, I think that&#039 ; s given a lot of people who just want to voice their opinions, a platform to do so. For many people, I think it&#039 ; s just a place to be angry and very, you know, you can see people who only write bad reviews. And there&#039 ; s also people who when we write good reviews, when we discuss in our pre-shift meetings or manager meetings about Yelp reviews and all of that, we typically focus on the four stars and two star reviews. The five stars are great to know how we&#039 ; re doing and we feel appreciated. The four stars, there&#039 ; s a reason why someone left a four star and we need to pay attention to that. Sometimes it&#039 ; s not even in the Yelp review because it may be a petty reason or they feel it&#039 ; s a petty reason, so they don&#039 ; t want to voice it. And then the same thing goes for a two is, I think instead of leaving a one star review, I think the reason why people leave a two is because there&#039 ; s some kind of element there where they feel like, okay, they don&#039 ; t, they didn&#039 ; t deserve a one or zero, so they might give them a two and then follows the rant or the reason why. But I think those are the ones that we really have to pay attention to because they tell us that there&#039 ; s more to it than what&#039 ; s actually being written. |00:35:24| Brody That&#039 ; s interesting. The difference between a Yelp review or something like that and a professional reviewer is that, you know, that their professional reviewer has sort of context in which they&#039 ; re trying to to write their review. They&#039 ; re educated about, you know, restaurants in general, about the type of food and so on. Whereas a Yelp reviewer is based on their feelings that day and not necessarily grounded in research or knowledge. Where, you know, what are your experiences? What impact have professional reviews had on your restaurant? |00:36:09| Niwa I think professional reviewers have more of an obligation. They have an obligation to their readers to do the right thing, to write an honest and genuine article. But more than that, they have an obligation to their publication or to their supervisors to write something that&#039 ; s read worthy. So in doing so, I think a lot of professional writers feel the need to find an interesting story to tell. It would be boring to just read &quot ; This restaurant was okay, you should try it.&quot ; So naturally they&#039 ; re going to find things that they can really kind of put a spotlight onto. My restaurant has not had great interactions with a few writers. I&#039 ; m a strong believer in educating people and, you know, in the foods that we have and giving them all the information we can. I think there&#039 ; s a few writers that were in Dallas that did not do that, and I did voice my opinions to them. I think it was built partially out of laziness, and I think another part of it was really just trying to show off when there was no need to. So we did have a little bit of a going back and forth with one of the writers in Dallas. |00:37:50| Brody Did any of that have an impact on your business? |00:37:55| Niwa We did get a lot of support from the community, especially chefs and owners that also feared this lady because, you know, at the time she could make or break your restaurant. She&#039 ; s no longer a writer in Dallas. And it&#039 ; s a terrible thing I think, for any restaurant owner or chef to have to feel is that that pressure, you know? I think even in the Michelin level, many chefs are trying to go away from that because that amount of pressure for one person&#039 ; s opinion is just too much. You know, and I know very well that there&#039 ; s tons of restaurants that I love that are not hugely popular and vice versa. I see a lot of restaurants that there&#039 ; s a line out the door and I can&#039 ; t understand why. And I think as a writer, that&#039 ; s kind of their obligation is to just write the simple truth and the facts. There&#039 ; s a lot of writers, you know, that write about the food and because they understand, some of them were chefs or some of them are in the food industry, and they understand the efforts that go behind making these dishes. They understand the cultural aspect of it. And those are great writers to me. And those are the ones that I think, you know, we should continue to read from. But I think also, as our attention span shortens, you know, we tend to focus on just the good and the bad and want that information as quickly as possible. |00:39:35| Brody Right. Less nuance. Are you thinking at any point of expanding or are you involved in other restaurant ventures? |00:39:44| Niwa Yeah, we have still a few plans. We&#039 ; re hoping to open up one more in the DFW area. We&#039 ; re also looking out in other areas as well to expand and even a couple of different concepts. But one concept that we had planned for Plano was kind of rail...derailed because of COVID. So now we&#039 ; re kind of picking up the pieces and going from there. But hopefully in the next couple of years we will have expanded it quite a bit. |00:40:21| Brody Great. When you think about the Asian community in Dallas, if you and especially the sort of dining aspects of that, you know, how would you characterize the the Asian community in Dallas? |00:40:47| Niwa You know, I don&#039 ; t...I can&#039 ; t say as well as many others. I&#039 ; ve only been here for seven years now. And my exposure to the Asian community has been just through the people that I have met. So I definitely am not the one that can give most of the information for...We did the Asian night markets. I think that started in 2018. And our goal for that was to get that exposure out there and especially for restaurants that did not have the budget for a huge PR or marketing agency. Actually, my partner in that was Teresa who had a PR, has a PR agency. So our goal on that was not to make money, it was to get exposure out there. Our first big event was at the Bomb Factory and the purpose in doing that was to get, you know, 14 restaurateurs that we felt need the exposure. They have excellent food. They are the kind of people that were in their shops every day. And that was the point of doing it. Bomb Factory at the time, the owners there were very, very kind and said, &quot ; Let&#039 ; s just do it. Let&#039 ; s worry about the cost later. If it makes money, we all make money. If not, then we all suffer together.&quot ; So we did it and fortunately did not lose money, did not make much money because that was not our goal. But following that, there was quite a few events that popped up that I think kind of piggybacked off of our success. But it also hurt us from being able to do it continuously because the rest of these funds, I think, were mostly for profit. And so it became harder and harder and we stopped doing it. So my, my, but the support there from the Asian community was amazing. You know, people would come out and support and want to try new foods. So I think there is a strong, strong Asian community here. I think tying it all together is a challenge, you know, but I think it&#039 ; s it&#039 ; s a good it&#039 ; s great. I mean, the Asian Grub page is huge, you know, and they&#039 ; re doing a really good thing for the most part for Dallas, DFW. |00:43:35| Brody Great. In Dallas, in the last few years, during the time that you&#039 ; ve been here, we&#039 ; ve had quite a few weather related issues- the tornado, the ice storm, and then, of course, not weather, but COVID and all the things that came from that. How has your operation and your business been affected by any of those? |00:44:00| Niwa Yes, by all of them. The weather continuously plays a role in general actually. When we have any drop of rain, we lose about 50% of our reservations. But as far as shutdowns, I can&#039 ; t even count the many times now we&#039 ; ve had power outages. We had a couple of roof leaks. Yeah, I think kind of everything has definitely played a role. |00:44:35| Brody And COVID. |00:44:36| Niwa COVID, we were shut down for quite some time. I think a better part of about six months, during which time we tried to pivot and we did a little supermarket there for the Deep Ellum area. We had the space so we could do kind of a social distancing shopping there with some fresh produce and, you know, the essentials, especially at a time when toilet paper and gloves were very difficult to come by. We also had made some masks during that time, and then we also did what we call the shelter boxes. There were Styrofoam boxes that we filled with some of our meats and dishes that were marinated, but you would have to cook at home. Some days was great. Some days we didn&#039 ; t sell many. But, you know, it was, it was a challenge. But, you know, it wasn&#039 ; t the worst thing. You know, we survived it and we built a lot of a team ethic and we finished our patio deck during that time. So. |00:45:49| Brody Right. A lot of the people I&#039 ; ve spoken to have stories of celebrities and sort of memorable events happening in their restaurant. Do you have any stories like that you&#039 ; d like to share? |00:46:05| Niwa Yeah, nothing crazy. We get a lot of celebrities in there. You know, we try not to bother them much because they&#039 ; re there to eat. As far as any crazy events, nothing super crazy, but I guess I&#039 ; ve been in this industry for quite a while. |00:46:33| Brody That&#039 ; s true. How about your relationship with the neighbors? It sounds like you&#039 ; re pretty involved in Deep Ellum and the community there. How would you characterize how that&#039 ; s been? |00:46:49| Niwa Yeah, Deep Ellum&#039 ; s a great neighborhood. Everyone watches out for each other for the most part. There&#039 ; s always someone who&#039 ; s upset with someone, but it&#039 ; s kind of neighborly. We you know, it&#039 ; s difficult to stay up, keep up with everything because there&#039 ; s just so much happening in Deep Ellum. And it&#039 ; s a lot of what happens in Deep Ellum are not at the same time frames as us. And also we&#039 ; re kind of down at the end of the street. So we usually hear the news last. But Deep Ellum&#039 ; s been a really great neighborhood for the most part. |00:47:29| Brody That&#039 ; s great. So as we wind this interview down, I just want to ask you, are there any lessons or reflections that you&#039 ; d like to share? |00:47:41| Niwa Oh. I mean I guess as lessons maybe for all of us is to just be better towards each other. You know, I think there&#039 ; s a lot of criticism towards everyone in the industry. And naturally it&#039 ; s, could be on a competitive level in some aspect and some of it because of what we talked about, the authenticity and someone&#039 ; s offended. But I think the bottom line is it comes down to food and people just trying to make a living. So, you know, I think. I think chefs, especially and restaurateurs and people who are working twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, five, six, seven days a week, I think there needs to be a better appreciation towards each other. And that and, you know, we do a service industry on Monday nights and admittedly it&#039 ; s kind of swayed away from its original purpose. Original purpose was for those people who, you know, are working six days a week, mostly, usually off on Mondays. You know, we offer a huge discount for them to come in and dine on Mondays. But I wish there was a little bit more of that and I wish there was a little bit more of, you know, that professional courtesy towards each other. |00:49:13| Brody Yeah, that would be nice. So I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your memories and your experiences. Is there anything that I didn&#039 ; t ask you that you&#039 ; d like to add to this interview? |00:49:28| Niwa No. No. Well, thank you for taking the time. |00:49:30| Brody Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_016.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jimmy Niwa, June 9, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_016 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Cooking, Japanese Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-06-09 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/3ce9a31676ecbf8c87a8cb8524faafcb.jpg a79f80bedd6e63c67bcba294db147048 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Khanh Nguyen OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_022.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Khanh Nguyen, March 3, 2023 2021oh002_di_022 01:50:41 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Khanh Nguyen Betsy Brody mp3 oh_audio_dig_Nguyen_khanh_20230303.mp3 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/187928 Aviary audio 0 Introduction 33 Arriving in the United States from Vietnam Boston;Boston University;Catholic University;Houston;Law School;Northeastern;refugees;sponsor;Texas;UT Austin;Vietnam;Virginia 157 Going to school in Boston/Language learning Boston;Camp Pendleton;Dalat;English;Fort Chaffee;French;language;refugee;sponsor;war 453 Going to law school at UT Austin ADHD;education;law;law school;Locke Lord;Locke Purnell Rain Harris;University of Texas;UT 646 Becoming an entrepreneur/Opening first restaurant ADD;ADHD;business;cooking;entrepreneur;law;software;technology 991 Creating the menu at Dalat cooking;Dalat;Doritos;food;fusion;pho;recipes;soup;Superbowl 1290 Dalat as a neighborhood restaurant/Connecting through food connection;customers;demographic;food;neighborhood restaurant;regulars 1512 Challenges of location Dalat;Dallas;Fitzhugh;Herrera's;Knox-Henderson;location;restaurant 1706 Advertising/Relationship to food media in Dallas advertising;Dalat;Dallas;food media;pizza;restaurant reviewer;reviews;sales;social media;Zalat 2187 Opening Zalat Pizza business model;cheese;crust;Dalat;gang;Papa John's;pepperoni;pho;pizza;sauce;Zalat 3226 Growth of Zalat Pizza/Stock options for employees benefits;business model;consistency;growth;labor;pizza;profit;quality;scale;stock options 3639 Balancing growth and consistency at Zalat Pizza business model;consistency;French Laundry;growth;pizza;pizza box;Pizza Sheriff;quality;Thomas keller 4452 Philosophy of building wealth for front line workers benefits;frontline;growth;labor;pizza;wealth;workers;Zalat 4819 Developing Uber Rush for delivery business model;delivery;logistics;pizza;Uber;Uber Rush 5342 Thoughts about " authenticity " Asian American;authenticity;culture;Doritos;food;foodies;pizza;social media;tradition;Vietnam;Vietnamese;Yelp 6174 " Mom and pop " restaurants/Lessons about growth and staffing chain;growth;labor;mom and pop;skills;staffing No transcript. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Khanh Nguyen, March 3, 2023 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-03-03 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_022 https://diggingindallas.org/files/original/6b6543f511593fc07ad080d989b77de2.jpg 0a4a7a6da623fd7509f2e560bbf7fd0b Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Betsy Brody Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Kim Pierce OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Interview with Kim Pierce, April 5, 2022 2021oh002_di_007 01:29:13 ohdi Digging In di001 How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped Asian Dallas Becoming Texans, Becoming Americans This project is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Food writing Kim Pierce Betsy Brody m4a oh_audio_dig_pierce_kim20220405.m4a 1:|16(5)|41(11)|54(7)|67(2)|76(13)|86(1)|99(5)|108(10)|116(12)|129(1)|137(14)|147(13)|156(13)|167(1)|174(13)|186(16)|203(1)|216(8)|225(2)|236(3)|251(8)|263(13)|276(5)|289(2)|308(4)|317(3)|333(6)|340(9)|351(6)|366(4)|375(12)|385(1)|394(8)|403(5)|412(10)|427(13)|436(5)|444(12)|451(4)|459(14)|475(7)|492(3)|504(9)|514(13)|527(3)|541(11)|552(9)|567(2)|578(4)|586(8)|601(12)|615(1)|628(2)|637(12)|652(1)|670(3)|682(14)|692(2)|703(9)|716(11)|725(2)|734(3)|747(6)|756(10)|766(2)|774(6)|785(9)|796(8)|805(9)|820(6)|834(9)|845(7)|854(4)|863(4)|874(15)|886(16)|903(7)|911(10)|928(7)|944(11)|954(15)|967(2)|980(8)|998(8)|1007(5)|1015(1)|1030(7)|1045(8)|1055(15) 0 https://betsybrody.aviaryplatform.com/embed/media/162894 Aviary audio 0 Introduction Asian Americans ; Cooking, ; Cooking, American ; Food writing ; Texas--History 32 Moving to Texas from California assassination ; California ; Dallas ; IBM ; JFK ; Texas 110 Career as a writer for the Dallas Morning News Dallas Morning News ; Derro Evans ; fine dining ; food ; food writing ; Guide ; health ; nutrition ; Old Warsaw ; olive oil ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; Routh Street Cafe ; Stephan Pyles ; Tex-Mex ; Victor Wdowiak ; wine ; writing 572 Routh Street Cafe and cooking with Texas ingredients Agnew's ; Alice Waters ; American ; California cuisine ; celebrity chef ; Chez Panisse ; Dean Fearing ; educate ; education ; fine dining ; flavor ; French ; local ingredients ; Mansion on Turtle Creek ; menu ; nouvelle cuisine ; Routh Street Cafe ; service ; Stephan Pyles 1029 Memories of the Dallas restaurant scene in the 1970s barbecue ; Brink's ; Campisis ; Chateaubriand ; China Clipper ; Chinese restaurant ; Dallas ; Dickey's Barbecue ; fried rice ; Hong Kong Cafe ; Lakewood ; Lim Yee ; noodles ; Old Warsaw ; pizza ; Steak and Ale 1227 Getting started in food writing Brian Reinhart ; bridge ; D Magazine ; Dallas ; Dallas Morning News ; Dallas Times Herald ; El Centro ; ethnic food ; ethnic markets ; food landscape ; Food Section ; food writing ; grocery stores ; Guide ; middle class ; Nancy Nichols ; negative reviews ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; restaurants ; reviews 1578 Qualities that make a good restaurant critic/ Thoughts about &quot ; authenticity&quot ; in food Americanized ; authentic ; authenticity ; bridge ; culture ; curiousity ; dumb down ; education ; food ; palate ; respect ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; Southern cooking ; Taco Bell ; tomatoes ; western palate 2147 Asian food landscape in Dallas Arlington ; Asian community ; Asian grocery ; Asian restaurant ; Chinese community ; crab ; East Dallas Community Garden ; gardens ; immigration ; Indian community ; Indian food ; ingredients ; IT ; Korean community ; Muslim ; Ramadan ; rice ; Richardson ; Taj Mahal Imports ; telecom corridor ; Vietnamese 2533 Food as door into other cultures culture ; dashi ; food ; Japanese ; PBS ; sake ; soy sauce ; television ; tofu ; wine 2785 Dallas as a restaurant city brunch ; Dallas ; food ; restaurants 3098 Restaurant reviewing and the impact of social media dumb down ; restaurant reviewer ; restaurant reviews ; reviews ; social media ; star ; Yelp 3409 Asian food businesses communicating Asian culture Asian community ; Asian Mint ; Buddhist Temple ; business ; Central Market ; cooking classes ; culture ; curiousity ; fried rice ; Hare Krishnas ; Kalachandji ; Nikky Phinyawatana 3757 Challenges faced by Dallas restaurants COVID ; crab ; expensive ; fast casual ; Jon Alexis ; labor shortage ; supply chain ; Taiwan ; tornado ; Wu Wei Din 4058 Future of high end dining in Dallas expensive ; fine dining 4583 Changes in the Dallas diner Anatole ; Cafe Royal ; celebrity chef ; Chez Panisse ; Dallas ; Dean Fearing ; Fairmont ; fine dining ; Gus Katsigris ; hospitality ; hotels ; Mansion on Turtle Creek ; nouvelle cuisine ; Plum Blossom ; Pyramid Room ; Ritz Carlton ; Routh Street Cafe ; sophisticated ; Stephan Pyles |00:00:00| BRODY This is Betsy Brody. Today is April 5th, 2022. I am interviewing for the first time Ms. Kim Pierce. This interview is taking place in my home office in Richardson, Texas. This interview is possible thanks to the support of a Mellon/ ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship and as part of the project entitled &quot ; Digging In: How Food, Culture, and Class Shaped the Story of Asian Dallas.&quot ; Hi Kim, thank you so much for joining me. |00:00:28| PIERCE Hello. |00:00:30| BRODY I&#039 ; ve been looking forward to this. Well, just to start out, let&#039 ; s get a little bit of background on you. Where and when were you born? |00:00:38| PIERCE I was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1950. I grew up there. And in- when I was 18, I moved with my young husband back to Texas. We were looking for job opportunities. In a way, it was also a return to my roots because I am descended from the whole Hill Country German community that we know so much about in this state. So even though I grew up in Southern California, I also had these very deep Texas roots. |00:01:13| BRODY Where did you come when you first came back to Texas? |00:01:17| PIERCE We came to Dallas. |00:01:17| BRODY To Dallas. |00:01:18| PIERCE Yes, we moved in with my sister and her husband in Garland. |00:01:23| BRODY Were you working at that time? |00:01:24| PIERCE No, I did not. It was my. My husband was working. He came. He was hired at IBM, which again, it was a, it was a great time for coming here for commerce. We don&#039 ; t, we weren&#039 ; t even thinking about things like the assassination and the associations with the city. We just wanted to get our little family going. |00:01:48| BRODY What is your current position? |00:01:52| PIERCE I am retired. Happily retired. |00:01:53| BRODY What did you retire from? |00:01:56| PIERCE I retired from writing, from basically from writing. I&#039 ; ve been at the Dallas Morning News for...I had been at the Dallas Morning News probably 35 years before I went freelance and still continued to write for the news. Gosh, I mean, I could...If I had an idea tomorrow, I could sit down and write a story because I have that kind of currency with the editors, but I&#039 ; m glad to not be doing it. So I am retired from food journalism primarily. |00:02:30| BRODY So were you writing exclusively food related articles or were there other areas that you wrote about as well? |00:02:39| PIERCE I wrote about health and food and health. I was always very interested in nutrition, and so food and nutrition was sort of a natural pairing. And from that, I evolved into doing more of the restaurant writing. It&#039 ; s, it...It was not a straight line by any means, but I really enjoyed writing about food. |00:03:07| BRODY What is it that you liked the most about, about focusing on food and nutrition and those types of things? |00:03:14| PIERCE I really loved being able, on the one hand to tell people to clarify information as best we could within the scientific context of the times. And I say that because- it&#039 ; s ever-changing. The information is ever changing. When I began writing about health and food, people who are heart patients were discouraged from using olive oil because it was a fat. And it was because the research had not yet caught up to breaking down the facts to the point of understanding that monounsaturated fats were different in the body than the than the polyunsaturated fats. So there was always this evolution of information, and I really enjoyed being able to clarify when changes came, when information changed, when we started using food labels, how to read them, what they said. One time we did a page...I was so proud of this. It was a whole newspaper page and it was simply called &quot ; The Bone Clock&quot ; . And it showed you the development of your bones and what happens to them over the course of a lifetime. And it was an easy to- forgive me- easy to digest form of information where people could go, &quot ; Oh, OK, so that&#039 ; s why this is important.&quot ; And from that, we segued into restaurants because the executive editor, I&#039 ; ll never forget, I got a... I was the editor of the Guide at the time and I got a note. I actually did the health and nutrition writing a little later than that. But while I was editor of the Guide, the executive editor sent me a note with a single star drawn on it. And because I&#039 ; m a very linear thinker and I&#039 ; m like going, &quot ; What does he want?&quot ; And he said, &quot ; We think we need to do a star rating system for our restaurants. Tell us how we would go about doing that.&quot ; And this was when Dallas had a much more manageable number of restaurants. So we developed a system. My staff and I and our food critic, our restaurant critic at the time, his name was Derro Evans. D-E-R-R-O Evans. He has passed. He took us to, I want to say, five different styles, types of restaurants like Tex-Mex, fine dining, a couple of others where to just sort of introduce us to the genre and what you look for and how things are different in the different areas of concentration. And then we also took a wine course. In fact, what&#039 ; s interesting is in the whole telling of Old Warsaw&#039 ; s story at our conference, and I can&#039 ; t. What was the name of our conference? (Reference to the Legacies Dallas History Conference in 2022) |00:06:29| BRODY Legacies Dallas. |00:06:30| PIERCE Legacies Dallas conference. Thank you. They left out Victor Wdowiak, who was and will have to spell that for you. But we left out Victor Wdowiak, who was one of those Polish merchant marines who went to work at Old Warsaw, and he was one of the, you might say, founding fathers of wine education in Dallas. And he really took it upon himself to help again to help people understand the difference between Chablis and Burgundy from California and the real Chablis and the real Burgundy. And essentially the wines of the world. So armed with that, Derro would do the main restaurant reviews, and then we and the staff would do the smaller ones that you saw the mini reviews. Where we would go, we would evaluate the restaurant, we would write it up, and that was that. And then he was he was followed by another great restaurant reviewer, and that was Liz Logan. She is still about, but she keeps very much to herself. She, I think she&#039 ; s up in New York at this point and this this just became a very popular thing. And there was a short period of time in the early 80s when I did the main restaurant review for a while and I...My greatest claim to fame, if there were any is that I was the first critic to review Routh Street Cafe, Stephan Pyles&#039 ; first restaurant. Stephan Pyles, who was essentially a nobody on the Dallas food scene, even though he had some very good background working with, I want to say, the Mondavi Winery. Oh, he-you should ask him because I&#039 ; m not going to get this right. But he was not unknowledgeable, but he had no fine dining credentials we&#039 ; ll say up to that point. And Routh Street Cafe, which opened in 1983...What I lacked in knowledge, I made up for in having pretty good instincts about what was happening. And I knew that that restaurant was- I say I knew, and then I&#039 ; m going to say &quot ; was probably&quot ; - a game changer. And I, and I it&#039 ; s the one and only time that the News has ever given five stars on the first review. And I at the time, I&#039 ; ve shared this with Stephan many years since I said, &quot ; You know, we were just either going to sink or swim together.&quot ; If the restaurant closed in a month, well, you know, my reputation was diminished too. |00:09:31| BRODY What was it that you saw in the restaurant that that made you get that special feeling? |00:09:38| PIERCE Well, the first thing was the warmth of the setting. It was up until that time most fine dining was very formalized. I won&#039 ; t say everybody. All the waiters wore tuxedos and bow ties, but it was that sort of rigid, upscale, very accommodating service. But yet there was an evolution to it at Routh Street. You had the same level of service, the same cosseting we&#039 ; ll say. But it was very warm. It was very personal. It was like the waiter might lean down a little, literally next to the table and talk to you at this level about something about the food that was very good. So it was a, it was a different feel. So there was that and the other piece was the food was following on a trend that had begun earlier, first with nouvelle French cuisine and then with what we like to call the California cuisine movement of using fresh local ingredients. And it&#039 ; s funny we...You could look back at one of these menus now and you&#039 ; d go, &quot ; Whoa, what was the big deal?&quot ; And it was a big deal because it was using...there were things like cilantro on the menu, which, which, as Stephan will even tell you, we, he said, &quot ; We had to ask our Mexican cooks in the kitchen how to use it because we didn&#039 ; t understand that the flavor was in the stems.&quot ; It was a whole new frontier of dining, and Stephan had an extraordinary sense of putting flavors together. And so you had the ambiance, you had the relaxed approach to the service. And yet and you also had this really simple but elegant food, and it felt like it was a game-changer right out of the gate. |00:11:55| BRODY Good instinct, since it was. How much of the success of, of Stephan Pyles&#039 ; empire was also, you know, tied in to the time period and celebrity chefs and sort of the personality of the, of the person... do you think ?|00:12:15| PIERCE It was all, it was all of the time and of a movement. What Alice Waters and, now she wasn&#039 ; t the only one, but she almost certainly gets credit, a credit deserved. This, the French nouvelle cuisine movement was about using fresh local French ingredients and absurdly- you talk about your airport story- Dallas restaurants, the finest, the ones that were doing French nouvelle, would fly the fresh ingredients over from France. And it was- I know we laugh now, but this is what you did because all fine dining emanated from Europe. So it, in the context of the times, that wasn&#039 ; t absurd. Well, then you have Alice Waters and Chez Panisse coming on the scene and going, &quot ; You know what? We have this incredible agricultural richness in California, Northern California. Why don&#039 ; t we start using these fresh ingredients?&quot ; Because the flavors pop, there&#039 ; s so many things you can do with fresh ingredients that you can&#039 ; t do with ones that you know, fly over on a jet. Plus the expense. So there was that. And so there began to be and I&#039 ; m getting...I know we don&#039 ; t want to make this the whole interview. But I&#039 ; m going to take you back to- this is a- and you may take a picture of this when the time comes, when you need it. This is a menu from Dean Fearing&#039 ; s, one of his dinners at Agnew&#039 ; s, which is where he was prior to The Mansion on Turtle Creek. And it (the menu) was positively innovative because it had all these local, this is American, not Southwestern, but it was all of these. There was an all U.S.-product menu coupled with an all-California wine list. Yeah, and this was it. I won&#039 ; t say it was heresy, but it was really revolutionary. And this actually precedes by about a year. I think I&#039 ; ve got the date on here. Well, we&#039 ; ll take a look real quick. We&#039 ; ll take a look. Yes, this was this was 1982, and Stephan&#039 ; s restaurant opened in 1983, and it very...This whole idea of using the fresh ingredients very quickly caught on. We called it. And over the course of my career, this is probably the most important development in food. Not...The celebrity chef trend, we&#039 ; ll call it, calling out the personalities, coupled with &quot ; what can we do with local indigenous ingredients?&quot ; Which was actually a lot more complicated than it sounds because you&#039 ; ve got to find somebody to grow them. So that that was the revolution in dining, and it really swept Dallas up at the time. |00:15:38| BRODY And you can really see that, you know, to tie together a lot of what we&#039 ; ve talked about already, you know, in, you know, in your interest in talking about health and nutrition and science, that you&#039 ; re-what you were doing- and food, what you were doing was really translating science on a practical level for people who are going to eat and try, you know, try to live right and live more healthy. And in the case of, you know, sort of the transformation of fine dining. Right? To not have it be about just French techniques and French ingredients... |00:16:18| PIERCE Very much in French, Italian, Continental. Correct. |00:16:22| BRODY Right. To translate that into an American context and, and even more localized a California or a Texas context, depending on what grows. |00:16:33| PIERCE And it was happening everywhere. It was happening in New York. It was happening in Minnesota. I mean, these each of these areas was doing it with their own products. |00:16:44| BRODY With what they could grow or farm or fish. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, so it&#039 ; s it&#039 ; s really a lot of your enterprise is, and what you&#039 ; ve been doing is educating people and translating things, it seems. So just to sort of jump off of looking at this fascinating menu from what looks to be a very fancy dinner... |00:17:07| PIERCE It was! |00:17:09| BRODY What was the restaurant scene like in Dallas- when- before you arrived? What did you know about it or what was it like when you got here? |00:17:18| PIERCE Zip. Nothing. I mean, not literally. There were... There were there were some very, very high end restaurants like Old Warsaw, like Chateaubriand was another one. But those were not places that I was going to in 1968. My most memorable restaurant experience was eating barbecue at one of the original Dickey&#039 ; s satellites. It&#039 ; s, it is not the same food today that it was then, but it was quite eye-opening how good it was. There were I think three Chinese restaurants was the extent of the Asian scene. There was Hong Kong Cafe on Garland Road, which everybody misses. It&#039 ; s still in business. It&#039 ; s the only continuously operating Chinese restaurant that I know of in this area. Dreadful menu. Because much of it is some of it is still the same food, you know, with three you get pork fried rice with four you get noodles, whatever. And then the other one was, let&#039 ; s see, there was another one, I think it was called the China Clipper. And then there was Lim Yee in Lakewood. That was Chinese. I knew I was in trouble. I had...I grew up in a neighborhood in Southern California, where there were some interesting restaurants, good restaurants, like a very good Jewish deli, a very good Italian pizza spaghetti restaurant that I would only later come to understand that these actually were good places to learn about food. But where was I going with this? I was going somewhere, the train was going somewhere. Oh well, shoot. We&#039 ; ll just have to pick it up. |00:19:26| BRODY Well, we were talking about what Dallas was like when you got here. |00:19:30| PIERCE Oh, I know what it was. I knew I was in trouble when I got here, and I think Shakey&#039 ; s was the predominant pizza restaurant. And oh, and Campisi&#039 ; s. And I mean, this was... God forgive me, Campisi fans, but this was like pizza hell compared to what I had been eating. So it was...There were some home cooking restaurants, but I tell you, it was pretty slim pickings. |00:20:04| BRODY So you have that fine dining and then, you know, some Shakey&#039 ; s, maybe a handful of Chinese restaurants and... |00:20:12| PIERCE There was Steak and Ale. There was Brink&#039 ; s, which was a coffee shop. But just not much of a restaurant scene. |00:20:27| BRODY Had you already known that you wanted to write about food? How did you how did you get into it in the first place? |00:20:35| PIERCE Well, I wanted to. I can&#039 ; t take too long with these stories. I...I wanted to go to school and get a degree, which I did. I was working at one of the community colleges, El Centro, at the time in the Admissions Office, and I missed a job promotion for not having a degree. So I made it my first of all, made it my goal to get a degree. And then when I was, I was at University of Texas at Arlington. My final semester, I had a choice to make between taking a course that would put me on track for graduate sociology or take a journalism course to try and see what my writing was like. Well, I took the latter. Out of four classes, I did more, I produced more inches than any other student. I loved it. It came, writing came so naturally to me and had all my life. And I published my first freelance story the following fall in the Chicago Sun-Times. |00:21:41| BRODY That&#039 ; s incredible. |00:21:42| PIERCE So it was a very well. It was- it was a bumpier road after that. But then I sort of fell into the food writing. First, I was the editor of the Guide, which meant a lot of discovery of places for people. I, it was our...We really saw it as our job to tell people what was out there in their world that they could do. And of course, restaurants and shopping at, we called them &quot ; ethnic markets&quot ; because our...I finally realized that we did this because we were writing to our readership, which was a predominantly white upper middle class readership. And so that was where we fell into using that terminology, which is almost politically incorrect today. |00:22:39| BRODY But at the time, it seemed like it was descriptive. |00:22:42| PIERCE Yes. Yes. Because this was unusual to our readership. So from there, of course, we trans... We, we moved toward doing the restaurants. And eventually, when I left the Guide, I went to the Food Section, which is why I started writing more food stories. But I never stopped writing restaurant reviews all through that time. In fact, I was I was writing them even in the, probably as recently as five or ten years ago. I was still writing restaurant reviews because they wanted me to, so... |00:23:17| BRODY That&#039 ; s great. What is your philosophy around food writing? |00:23:23| PIERCE You know, I consider it. I started out as a rock and roll critic for a year at the Dallas Times Herald, and I consider the mission somewhat the same in that you want, you want to tell people. You want to bring people to the experience, you want them to taste the food you- just like, you want them to hear the music- you want them to taste the food based on what your words say and then you, you do want to use that space to educate them about what it is they&#039 ; re eating. And you know, you bring up the sticky point of authenticity, which we&#039 ; ll get into later. But we... but you really just want them to know more about what they&#039 ; re eating. Whose, whose restaurant is this? What&#039 ; s, what is the, what is the food like? How reflective is it of their culture or system? And then does it taste good? Does it work? Does it not work? |00:24:32| BRODY Right? How does it feel? Kind of what you were saying about the ambiance that Routh Street and so on, how does it feel to be there? |00:24:38| PIERCE I want to take them there. I want them to... And I think Brian does this too. We&#039 ; re talking Brian. |00:24:45| BRODY Reinhart. |00:24:45| PIERCE Reinhart. I think he does that as well. He takes you into the experience. So I think that&#039 ; s all part and parcel of what you do. |00:24:55| BRODY What would you say the main goals of a restaurant review are? |00:24:59| PIERCE To tell people what&#039 ; s out there in their community. We used to- it was funny- at one point the only time we ever did negative reviews. I use those terms and I use that advisedly, that&#039 ; s kind of a hot point word. The only time we did those (negative reviews) was when we were reviewing a restaurant that was associated with a well-known chef. And you had to continue the story. But most of the time, the prevailing philosophy was if there is no reason to send people here, we probably shouldn&#039 ; t take the space, the precious space we have, to write about that. Even if why you send them, there is something very small. But if it&#039 ; s going to be a straight pan, this is and we had those. We had God awful experiences. |00:26:02| BRODY And just chose to not go to print with it. |00:26:04| PIERCE Well, we just we didn&#039 ; t write the review. We came back. We expensed it. We talked about it and said &quot ; Nah. This one&#039 ; s probably not one.&quot ; Or, &quot ; Let&#039 ; s give him six months and see if anything changes.&quot ; |00:26:16| BRODY Revisit. What qualities make a good restaurant critic, in your opinion? |00:26:21| PIERCE Well, you have to love to eat. You have to have a very good digestive system. And I say that&#039 ; s not a joke. Both Nancy Nichols and I, Nancy, being the former D Magazine reviewer, she and I both have intestinal issues at this point in our lives and we can&#039 ; t eat that way anymore. I can&#039 ; t eat anything that you put in front of me. I got to be fairly...I have to be fairly careful about just what I eat. So maybe that&#039 ; s the karma for me. But you do have to have a pretty strong gut. I think you have to have an intellectual curiosity about what you&#039 ; re eating. I think it&#039 ; s great if you have education in the cuisine. There&#039 ; s a fine line there because I&#039 ; d rather read a review by somebody who is enthusiastic and interested than somebody who knows the cuisine chapter and verse and talks down to me about it. To me, that&#039 ; s not enticing. And boy, the whole- tell me, when do you want to go down the rabbit hole of authenticity? But because there were times when we would get into a cuisine that was new to us. Let&#039 ; s say, Ethiopian...because we didn&#039 ; t have Ethiopian restaurants in this city for many, many years. So what we would try to do is hook up with somebody from that community who would go with us and help us understand what we were eating. That was that was the only way to, I think, be fair, because some of these cuisines were strictly for the community. They weren&#039 ; t for- just, just as the very first the Mexican food in the early 20th century, in Mexican kitchens, kitchens was different from what was served in the Mexican restaurants for an Anglo audience. So you got into authenticity issues right away? |00:28:48| BRODY Yeah. I mean, what do you think about that? I mean, it is a tricky, sticky kind of topic when you&#039 ; re talking about food. And I would imagine in particular when you&#039 ; re reviewing restaurants and, and, as you say, trying food that you may never have tried before and be very unfamiliar with, |00:29:09| PIERCE You have no benchmark. |00:29:11| BRODY Yeah. So but yet, you know, it comes up more often than you would think. Whether a particular restaurant is &quot ; authentic&quot ; to whatever its purported roots are right, whether even if it&#039 ; s a, you know, Southern style, you know, restaurant, you know, making chicken-fried steak, is it authentic? Even, you know, going into our later topic of, you know, of Asian restaurants, you know what is authentic? What does, what does that term sort of mean to you or, you know, how is it, how does it play out when you&#039 ; re doing the work that you do? |00:29:53| PIERCE Well, you&#039 ; ll notice that I just grimaced. It&#039 ; s because there have been whole conferences in, around the world, on the concept of authenticity. And you know, my favorite thing to sort of illustrate what a rabbit hole this is, is to talk about tomatoes in Italian cuisine. You know, before there was trade with the free world, I mean, the Western world. What am I saying? The New World, before there was trade with the Americas, there were no tomatoes in Italy. And so are they Italian? Are they authentic Italian food ingredients? One would certainly say so now, but five hundred years ago you would not. So I think there&#039 ; s a real balance between authenticity and evolution. There&#039 ; s, there&#039 ; s evolution in fine dining where you have an authentic foundation and you try to just like a chef does in any cuisine, where you try to push the boundaries and do things that are exciting and innovative. And then there&#039 ; s the cultural appropriation or of dumbing down concepts like Taco Bell. We shouldn&#039 ; t always pick on Taco Bell, but any of these restaurants like that where they&#039 ; ve sort of co-opted a concept and taken it to its lowest common denominator. |00:31:37| BRODY Yeah, that&#039 ; s really interesting, I mean, it&#039 ; s just. There&#039 ; s so many layers to that that whole topic, right? I mean, like you talked earlier about fine dining and there&#039 ; s, you know, that whole area can be fraught as well, like if especially when we&#039 ; re talking about fine dining restaurants using and learning from the techniques of other cultures. Yes. Where, I mean, what are some of your observations there? Sort of that nexus between learning from other cultures,... Adopting the techniques, whether they be French or Japanese or whatever? And also, you know, creating something new, like you said, pushing the envelope on the types of food that you&#039 ; re serving. |00:32:29| PIERCE I think when a chef sets out to do something like that, I...I don&#039 ; t look at it as so much as cultural appropriation as I do....This is...It&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s like a color palette in art. This is the palette that the chef is chosen, and if he wants to do things creatively with that cuisine, I don&#039 ; t have an objection to that because this is what he stated. He didn&#039 ; t come in and say, &quot ; I&#039 ; m going to do an authentic such and such restaurant.&quot ; He said, &quot ; I am...I&#039 ; m a Brazilian chef and I&#039 ; m going to take my Brazilian cuisine and now I&#039 ; m going to put my creative mark on it.&quot ; I&#039 ; m fine with that. The ones, the ones that grate are the ones that say they are authentic, but then they&#039 ; re basically Americanized. I think this happens nowhere more frequently than Italian. If you&#039 ; ve ever been to Italy and eaten Italian food in Italy, you know that there&#039 ; s a certain, I use the French &quot ; je ne sais quoi&quot ; that makes it so delicious, so simple, so fresh. It, it, it&#039 ; s very hard to replicate that in America. I can&#039 ; t really think of anyone right now who does. And you. Would you? Let&#039 ; s see, what am I going off on here? You also have American expectations, and I&#039 ; m going to come to the Asian in just a moment. You, if you remember the movie, &quot ; The Big Night?&quot ; The great scene where the couple ordered risotto and then the wife wanted to know if she could have a side of spaghetti because that&#039 ; s what other Italian restaurants gave you. And the waiter and the chef who were brothers had this big fight back in the kitchen and he says, you know, the chef is going, &quot ; You don&#039 ; t, you don&#039 ; t put pasta with risotto, can&#039 ; t you tell her that?&quot ; And the poor waiter is going, &quot ; But this is what she wants. She&#039 ; s paying for the meal.&quot ; And that particular conundrum is one I think Asian restaurants definitely come up against. All I have to do is, say, &quot ; Pad Thai&quot ; or &quot ; Tandoori chicken.&quot ; And it&#039 ; s like if you&#039 ; re a Thai restaurant without Pad Thai or you&#039 ; re an Indian restaurant without tandoori chicken, you know you&#039 ; ve just canceled probably 25 percent of your profits because that&#039 ; s what your American audience wants. So what do you do? |00:35:36| BRODY Right? It&#039 ; s a business. |00:35:37| PIERCE It&#039 ; s a business. And if you want to make money, you&#039 ; re going to have those on the menu. But hopefully you can have other things as well that are more representative of your culture. |00:35:47| BRODY Yeah. So it sounds like when you first got here, there weren&#039 ; t that many Asian restaurants, but that obviously changed. Can you tell me about your observations of, not just in terms of Asian restaurants, but the changes in the Dallas food scene over the time that you were involved in paying attention and writing about it? |00:36:09| PIERCE It was many, many years. And, I think there has been an uptick in interest in cooking that has helped to fuel this, an ability to get ingredients, which I think was brought on by the immigration of people to the area. I mean, it&#039 ; s not one thing. I remember when in the post-Saigon era, in the late &#039 ; 70s, while you were still in kindergarten, I remember the little Asian stores in East Dallas. And if you wanted certain ingredients, you could go there to get them. I would get black rice to make black rice pudding because I love that. People...I remember there were live blue crabs, you know, in a little pan that people could buy. I remember the gardens where you could go and, well, I don&#039 ; t know if you could buy things from the garden. But anyway, I remember the little stores. And then you did the story on Taj Mahal, which was part of the Indian influx. Now I get a little hazy on dates, but what I remember is the real flourishing of Indian food came with the advent of the telecom corridor in Richardson, where you, you drew and you began to have a population that could support a grocery store. You saw that. I don&#039 ; t know what the jobs were that drew Koreans to Dallas, but you saw the whole Koreatown develop at Royal and I-35. There were, I remember there being communities, of course. Richardson, then the Greenville-Beltline area was very early, primarily Chinese, but also other groups. There was South Arlington was another community. They were, there were just slowly began to be clusters of shops. I think, for example, in the Royal-35 corridor, that&#039 ; s stayed fairly Korean. But then you go somewhere like Richardson. And within a few blocks, you&#039 ; ve got Mediterranean cultures. You know, it&#039 ; s so funny. We went to a restaurant last Saturday. My, my partner and I. It was a Mediterranean buffet that we&#039 ; ve been to before that we really liked and we walked in and they had all their pastries in the pastry case. But the buffet was closed, and I looked around and I thought, &quot ; Oh, this is the first day of Ramadan.&quot ; And so this was a Muslim-run buffet. But then we could go up the road to Afrah, which is Lebanese, same, similar food culture, but different. And we could, and we had a wonderful meal there. And then that same little area there, Sara&#039 ; s which... |00:40:04| BRODY Grocery store? |00:40:05| PIERCE Pardon me. |00:40:05| BRODY The grocery store. |00:40:06| PIERCE The grocery store. And you can go in there and you can find, oh, you could find zaatar the spice. Let me get this right, the spice. But you could find the Lebanese version. Yeah, the Persian version. I mean, you just you get, you get it down to very fine levels in the store. And again, this is all within probably a square mile. So it&#039 ; s odd the way things have landed, but I and then you go...The other big development that I saw was the movement to the supermarkets, not just grocery stores, of which we had so many, but then we suddenly had Super H-Mart, which is Korean-owned but really caters....I mean, they definitely have. You definitely see that with the kimchi and the different various products. But then it was so much more. And it also the signs were in English as well as other languages, so they were clearly looking for an American audience. And then up on Legacy, you have Mitsui, which I think is Japanese, and then you&#039 ; ve got another really big store. |00:41:33| BRODY Ranch 99. |00:41:34| PIERCE Well, there&#039 ; s Ranch 99. I haven&#039 ; t even been in Ranch 99. We go straight to Mitsui where we buy everything for our sashimi. We make sashimi at home and... |00:41:45| BRODY I&#039 ; ll be right over. |00:41:46| PIERCE You know, it&#039 ; s wonderful. So, you know and again, but Super H-Mart came first and it it was just a revelation of products and the availability of what you could get. Now we didn&#039 ; t always...I don&#039 ; t think Americans necessarily know what to do with some of those things. We would probably make them cringe if they... |00:42:13| BRODY But on the other hand, I mean, that&#039 ; s sort of what we&#039 ; re talking about here in, you know, in all these different ways, the, the way that food can educate people about other cultures. And serve as sort of a, you know, a point of entry. |00:42:33| PIERCE It&#039 ; s a door. Absolutely. It&#039 ; s because once you have the food. I don&#039 ; t know. I just, there&#039 ; s something so primal about sharing food. And it does create a door like you. And a very tiny example is...I, I have a lot of wine knowledge in my background. And out of that, as we got more Japanese restaurants, I became more interested in sake and then began, and again, this is on a very small scale, but it&#039 ; s, but it&#039 ; s how food leads you in to I, I I. There was a wonderful documentary a few years ago and it&#039 ; s got the word &quot ; sake&quot ; in it. But it was just such a beautiful story of how this drink is made, the love, the care that goes into it, and you relate to it because it&#039 ; s an artisan product. And what we know artisan from this food over here are this food that we make. And so, yes, I think it&#039 ; s absolutely a door. A door, a window, an entry point, whatever you want to call it. And it leads to more understanding. |00:43:57| BRODY And it kind of what you said earlier that people were during this time period and the sort of the 80s especially starting to be, I guess, quote unquote adventurous with their own cooking, you know, exploring different cultures, learning about different cultures from the food section of the newspaper or from television, you know, various chefs on, you know, and PBS channels and things like that, introducing them to different ways of cooking things from other parts of the world. |00:44:32| PIERCE So, you know, we still get that today. I don&#039 ; t know if you ever watch Christopher Kimball&#039 ; s &quot ; Milk Street&quot ; but &quot ; Milk Street&quot ; and &quot ; America&#039 ; s Test Kitchen&quot ; was really a split in philosophies where Jack Bishop with &quot ; America&#039 ; s Test Kitchen&quot ; wanted to keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into what is the very best version of lemon meringue pie that you can make versus Christopher Kimball, who wanted to push those international boundaries in international cuisines. And we still, we, we still watch the shows. It&#039 ; s, I think it&#039 ; s on (channel) thirteen point three in our market today. We watch the shows and we still get the recipes and we still make those foods. I&#039 ; m, I&#039 ; m....One of my favorite things to do is I make a mushroom stock, a pork mushroom stock and I do fried tofu. You do a little bit of dashi in it (the stock), a little bit of soy sauce, and I hope that doesn&#039 ; t offend anybody. But we do that, then we throw in our fried tofu, and it&#039 ; s just, it&#039 ; s a fabulous comfort soup. |00:45:46| BRODY Sounds wonderful. And again, you know, you have access to all of those ingredients. |00:45:52| PIERCE Yes, and they&#039 ; re good. They&#039 ; re good ingredients. They haven&#039 ; t suffered in transit. And you can, you know, you can buy the artisan soy sauces, you can buy the artisan sakes, you can buy all of that now, where it was not available, I&#039 ; m going to say even 20 years ago. This this has really been an explosion of interest, but you know, at home, at restaurants. And I mean, I think it&#039 ; s great. |00:46:25| BRODY Well, Dallas is really known now as a restaurant city, a place where there&#039 ; s a culture of eating out and plentiful choices at this point of, you know, as you said, all different types of foods, you know, Middle Eastern, fine dining, all different types of Asian foods, African foods and so on. What would you say are some of the characteristics of, of Dallas that, you know, that sort of made it possible for it to become this? I mean, it was at the time that you came, not something you would have predicted. Right? So how did it happen? What were the factors that led to Dallas just sort of bursting out as a food town? |00:47:18| PIERCE Brunch. |00:47:19| BRODY Really? |00:47:23| PIERCE That&#039 ; s not the only thing, but I think Dallas has definitely become a brunch-crazy city and brunches were always...I mean, I remember we would review brunches back then because people again, people wanted this. People like to go out to eat in this city. What? I don&#039 ; t know for sure what goes into that. Maybe it&#039 ; s not wanting to cook so much. Well, it&#039 ; s both. Some people love to cook at home. People like to go out. There&#039 ; s a certain convivialness when you go out. I, you know, I don&#039 ; t know other than we&#039 ; ve just had so many people come into the area and they like to go out to eat. |00:48:15| BRODY How would you characterize in a, in a few words, in a few words, how would you characterize the food landscape in Dallas today if you were, you know, representing Dallas at a convention or something like that and had to tell someone who&#039 ; d never been here? What&#039 ; s the what&#039 ; s the food scene here? |00:48:34| PIERCE Wonderful variety. Depth in some cuisines. Not so much in others. If you want to eat Tex-Mex or Mexican...Because of our proximity to Mexico and the commingling of the cultures, you know, that is a cuisine that you can go very deep. I was sitting here, I was thinking of Mexican regional cooking, some of the some of the things that I know Brian has written about. And then even more of beyond Mexican, Central American, you even a little bit of South American? Not very much yet, though. And then really good fine dining. We do have good fine dining in this city. You don&#039 ; t have to have a lot of those restaurants. One of the weakest links in the chain continues to be Italian. If I want great Italian food, I&#039 ; m probably going to go to Houston. Or but more specifically, I probably (would) more likely go to San Francisco or New York or Providence, Rhode Island. There are places where Italian food is...This is the wrong way to use the word....Where it&#039 ; s more, indigenous, the development. But here in Dallas, you have a lot of variety, a few gaps. And there&#039 ; s, I mean, I could take you to...I could take you somewhere like. Oh, and I&#039 ; m I just had that memory thing happen. I&#039 ; ll think of it. The young female chef who has the little place down east of Dallas, it&#039 ; s very quirky. Oh, why can&#039 ; t I think of it? I know it, I know it will, but I can&#039 ; t remember... |00:50:47| BRODY Not York Street? |00:50:48| PIERCE What? |00:50:48| BRODY York Street that closed a while back, but |00:50:51| PIERCE No...this is the little...She&#039 ; s a young chef. She puts crazy things together and they&#039 ; re so good. But it&#039 ; s a, it&#039 ; s very...I know we&#039 ; ll think of it. In fact, I should look it up on my phone right now. But from something like that experience to the fine dining, super fine dining for something like Monarch to the exciting, the one that&#039 ; s the Brazilian chef. I can where does my mind go? There&#039 ; s just a lot there&#039 ; s a lot of places to go and enjoy good food. Yeah. |00:51:39| BRODY So just going back to the restaurant reviewing. |00:51:43| PIERCE Yes. |00:51:43| BRODY I don&#039 ; t know if this was as big of a factor at the point that you&#039 ; re retired, but with the internet and a lot of these crowd sourcing and, you know, customer created review sites like Yelp and so on, did those have an impact on your work? |00:52:01| PIERCE Hate them. |00:52:04| BRODY Tell me about your feelings there. |00:52:08| PIERCE Yeah, I hate them because they have cheapened the value. My...You know, the review by my next-door neighbor does not have the weight of experience and understanding that a professional restaurant reviewer has. And I&#039 ; m sorry that those (professional)reviews have become harder to find, even though they&#039 ; re probably going to be a lot more accurate, detailed, written. They&#039 ; re not going to just be, &quot ; Wow, this was so good.&quot ; And it&#039 ; s like, that doesn&#039 ; t really tell anybody what they&#039 ; re about to eat. So I think it&#039 ; s really cheapened and made it harder to get, and that&#039 ; s true. It&#039 ; s not just true of restaurant reviews. It&#039 ; s true of photography. For example, it&#039 ; s you know, &quot ; Oh, look, I can do this with my, my phone. Look what a good picture I took?&quot ; And it&#039 ; s like, it&#039 ; s not nearly as good as what a professional would have done. And you can see the difference if they&#039 ; re side by side. And I think you get that same thing with the restaurant review as I am just now. I am obsessed with figuring out what this restaurant is. OK, so I&#039 ; m going to do East Dallas. Restaurant. I do like that I can look things up on my phone like this... Petra and the Beast! That&#039 ; s the one I was thinking of. Super quirky, super quirky place, super quirky food. You could go all the way from that to something very formal. I. OK. In defense of the internet, now that I&#039 ; ve slammed the reviews, I love that I can walk into an Asian restaurant where I don&#039 ; t know the food, where the menu descriptions are usually not...They don&#039 ; t really tell you a lot like, you know, green curry, bell pepper dot dot dot dot dot. Just like doesn&#039 ; t tell me a lot so I can go up and I can look at my phone and I can very quickly access a recipe and see, &quot ; OK, here&#039 ; s what this dish has in it.&quot ; And I can surmise from that how it&#039 ; ll probably taste. So kind of a good news, bad news tool. |00:54:44| BRODY The internet, anyway empowers all of us customers and reviewers alike. But yes, those the reviews themselves sound like they are, in your view... |00:54:54| PIERCE Dumbed down. |00:54:55| BRODY Yeah. And kind of take away the role of expertise. Because when you were describing your early, you know, the early days of the, the star reviews in the Dallas Morning News, I mean, it sounded like you all underwent a certain amount of training to sort of create a benchmark of, you know, what are you expecting, what you know, what is a good restaurant, what makes a good experience and so on. |00:55:23| PIERCE At that period of time, I also I traveled to New York and New Orleans to go to key restaurants again just to have the perspective. |00:55:33| BRODY Was that part of the onboarding in the Food Section? |00:55:37| PIERCE Definitely. |00:55:39| BRODY And what restaurants in New York do you remember? |00:55:43| PIERCE I knew you would (ask me that). It&#039 ; s not. It&#039 ; s OK. It&#039 ; s not open anymore. But of course, Commander&#039 ; s Palace in New Orleans and in the, you know, the mind goes, I can&#039 ; t remember the...Lutece was one of the important ones in New York. We went to one of the Italians in New York that wasn&#039 ; t that great. Maybe the original El Molino and...Oh, I just I can&#039 ; t quite remember the others in New Orleans. I just remember, though, one of the things I had for the very first time and this was probably 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it was a salad made with tomato and watermelon, which we see on menus today. But at the time, it was like, &quot ; How can you put these things together?&quot ; And it was fabulous. |00:56:41| BRODY Bottom line. It tasted good. |00:56:43| PIERCE Yes. Yes. |00:56:45| BRODY Interesting. Well. Just kind of thinking about specifically, Dallas has now after, you know, after the immigration law changed in 1965, after the so many Vietnamese refugees resettled in Dallas, after the Vietnam War, a very large Asian population and that, you know, population is reflected, as we talked about earlier in a lot of the stores, grocery stores, markets as well as restaurants, both, you know, &quot ; mom and pop&quot ; and, and more, you know, mid-market and then even some high-end or upscale Asian dining. Right? What role do you see those types of businesses playing in communicating culture to, you know, not just sort of native Texans, but all of us who now live here in the Metroplex? |00:57:54| PIERCE That&#039 ; s a good question, and I&#039 ; m not sure. I&#039 ; m not sure I know the answer. Other than, you almost have to rely on people&#039 ; s natural curiosity because you can&#039 ; t really take the culture to them. They&#039 ; ve got to be adventurous enough. What popped in my brain was the outdoor food fair every Sunday at the Buddhist temple, which is all...Is it all Thai street food? |00:58:33| BRODY I think it&#039 ; s all Thai. |00:58:34| PIERCE Yeah, that&#039 ; s...Which is just a fabulous way to sort of eat your way through the cuisine in a very friendly way. You know, I can take the stick and I can chew the meat off of it. But you have to be willing. You have to know about it. You have to get up and you have to go to the Buddhist temple. You have to be open to the to the different experience. The same thing is true with Kalachandji, which I don&#039 ; t...Have you been to Kalachandji? |00:59:09| BRODY Long time ago? Yes. |00:59:10| PIERCE If I don&#039 ; t, if you go back, you&#039 ; ll find at least I think it&#039 ; s still there. But they&#039 ; ve got a whole wall of all the reviews that have ever been done. So you sort of see this history of Dallas dining, but they, they would have been there since 1984, but you had to be willing to go to the temple and you know, &quot ; Who knows, who knows what these people really do?&quot ; And there&#039 ; s a certain little bit of fear level there. But once you get over that, well, because people are thinking of, &quot ; Oh my god, am I going to have Hare Krishnas dancing at my table?&quot ; Well, no, you&#039 ; re not. That&#039 ; s only at the airport. But I, you know, I think there has to be that natural curiosity, which I think a lot of people do have. And then you have to have venues where they can shop, where they can learn. You know, it&#039 ; s what&#039 ; s been interesting with COVID is that we&#039 ; ve lost a lot of the cooking classes, which I think were an important bridge. I went to so many cooking classes of every stripe. I&#039 ; ll never forget one at The Mansion on Turtle Creek, which was Jacques Pepin who I loved. And it was where he went through and deboned an entire chicken without ever, you know, cutting it apart. And you watch him do it and you think, &quot ; Well, that looks easy!&quot ; And then you go home and it&#039 ; s like, all you have are thumbs and you can&#039 ; t do it. But then I&#039 ; ve seen other chefs like the woman that has Asian Mint, Nikky, whose name I can&#039 ; t pronounce. I went to one of her classes and learned how to make Vietnamese fried rice. And it&#039 ; s different from Chinese fried rice, what we&#039 ; re so used to. So the classes, I think, are a really important link. I think Central Market still has some classes, but boy, you don&#039 ; t have the number of venues that you used to have. I hope someone will fill in that gap eventually, because I guess in some ways you&#039 ; ve got videos which people go to. You&#039 ; ve got the TV shows, which are great. I mean, they really are a good distillation of techniques and how you make all this work. Everything that we&#039 ; ve made from the TV recipes has turned out like... Because we&#039 ; ve watched it. So maybe that&#039 ; s what&#039 ; s taking the place. |01:02:07| BRODY Do you think there&#039 ; s something lost in not being physically together and seeing it in person? The hands-on piece? |01:02:16| PIERCE There is, there absolutely is, because usually you get... I mean, you still get story, but yeah, you don&#039 ; t have the communal aspect, which maybe that will come back to us in some way. I&#039 ; m not sure what that&#039 ; s going to be. |01:02:35| BRODY Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of COVID. Here in Dallas, restaurants have been hit especially hard by COVID, obviously the labor issues that happened after and a lot of them by the tornado that came just before COVID. Do you have any, any stories or any observations or reflections on those challenges to the restaurants? |01:03:06| PIERCE My partner, Alfonso Cevola, I&#039 ; ll give him credit for this. He was retired from the wine industry and he said, and I think he&#039 ; s right, &quot ; I think we&#039 ; re going to see a lot more fast casual dining where you have where you order at the counter and the food is brought out to you.&quot ; I think we&#039 ; re going to see fewer full-service restaurants because. It&#039 ; s a, it&#039 ; s a, the confluence is not only with the help, but for so long, restaurant workers have been underpaid. Without question, you know, a tip can only go so far when you&#039 ; re making $2.25 an hour, which is what some servers make, which is crazy. So you had this burst of paying. All of a sudden there were, the help needed... The &quot ; help&quot ; that&#039 ; s a terrible way to say it. But servers, cooks, people on the line were demanding more money and should be making more money. So there was that increase in costs. There&#039 ; s the supply-chain issues in agriculture. I don&#039 ; t know if you saw the news in the paper this morning, but Jon Alexis, who owns TJ&#039 ; s Seafood, says the price of lobster right now has just doubled and it&#039 ; s, it&#039 ; s because of a series of problems in that supply chain, unique to that supply chain. I remember not so long ago for weeks he couldn&#039 ; t, you know, I love his crabcakes because he really uses...It&#039 ; s almost all crab meat. Jumbo crab meat, which is a specific high end type. And he had to stop selling those because the price of crab was just off the charts and people finally convinced him and said, &quot ; Look, we&#039 ; ll pay that.&quot ; And, and, and we do- raising my hand- because when I want a crabcake, I want the very best crabcake money can buy. And that tends to be one of his. But there&#039 ; s, so there&#039 ; s been an uptick in the price of the commodities. Part of that is a labor issue. Part of that is a climate issue. And it all has sort of dovetailed around, but people still want...There&#039 ; s that, definitely that pent up demand of people wanting to go to restaurants. So, I suppose what I see is that there&#039 ; s going to be a gradual division where you sort of hollow out the middle and you have the, the higher, not very high end, but even medium high end like TJ&#039 ; s. That&#039 ; s a medium, high end restaurant as far as dining there. It&#039 ; s, you know, it&#039 ; s not unusual to spend $100 for two for just a modest meal. And then there&#039 ; s the fast casual where you can get pretty darn good food, but then you get the, the a little what am I trying...Not... |01:06:38| BRODY Different service. |01:06:40| PIERCE Well, no, no, almost no service and less ambiance. I&#039 ; m trying to think...To me a perfect example of that is Wu Wei Din. I don&#039 ; t know. That&#039 ; s a Chinese restaurant. I think it&#039 ; s Taiwanese- that they- street food they specialize in. You know, God, strike me if I got that wrong. But, but Wu Wei Din is. They even though it is a full service restaurant, it&#039 ; s...Not it is, it is not mid-range, it&#039 ; s not fine dining. But I but I think there&#039 ; s going to be this hollowing out in the middle. There will be the Wu Wei Dins and then there will be the TJ&#039 ; s. There&#039 ; s a lot of others in there. |01:07:38| BRODY And do you think there&#039 ; s still a persistent role for the very high end in Dallas? |01:07:48| PIERCE Only for expense account dining. There&#039 ; s a portion of a one, 0.1 percent who... And the thing is, those very high-end restaurants are all competing for that diner&#039 ; s dollar. And there&#039 ; s a limit to how many of those restaurants can be supported. They&#039 ; re just, you know, somebody that has a 200-page wine list and the cheapest wine is 50 bucks. It&#039 ; s like, give me a break. And I&#039 ; ve been on the expense account. I totally get that. But for most of us, I know where to get just as good of food and very good wine, maybe even bring my own, and I can still have a great experience. Do I need to go to those places? I really don&#039 ; t. Which is a terrible thing to say, but I think we&#039 ; re going to see fewer and fewer of those places. We had a couple of new ones open. I give them a year at the most. And then there&#039 ; s those crazy people who come down from New York and think they&#039 ; re going to show us how to do it. And I tell you, this is a, this is a trap. It&#039 ; s got a body count from here to the end of your patio of New York restaurateurs who were going to show us how to do it. And they got surprised. |01:09:24| BRODY Yeah. Tell me about that. In going through the archives of the Food Section there, there&#039 ; s definitely evidence of, you know, of some, I don&#039 ; t know, if hard feelings is the right word, but just sort of |01:09:39| PIERCE You mean the lawsuit? |01:09:41| BRODY Yeah. Well, I wasn&#039 ; t thinking of that. But the, you know, just some articles that refer to, you know, and also in D Magazine of especially in the mid &#039 ; 80s, sort of the influx of people who came from up north and, you know, had ideas. Yeah. Had ideas about what Dallas would be like, what food would be like. |01:10:04| PIERCE &quot ; We&#039 ; re going to show you how to do it.&quot ; |01:10:06| BRODY Yeah. So tell me about that time and sort of the what were some of the tensions that were happening in real time? |01:10:14| PIERCE Well, The Mansion on Turtle Creek, when it first opened, the restaurant was managed by the...And I don&#039 ; t know quite the inner workings, but it was the 21 Club in New York that came down and, you know, did the menu and managed it. And boy. Very quickly, that that did not go over, there&#039 ; s a certain, you know, Dallasites at that time might have been ignorant and I&#039 ; m using my little air quotes, but don&#039 ; t you dare tell them they are? That&#039 ; s the easiest way to lose a customer is to kind of lord over them at the table and talk down to them about what they want. It doesn&#039 ; t work. And like I said, there&#039 ; s a trail of bodies. I was thinking of not, like there&#039 ; s a building on the tollway that was Smith and Wollensky&#039 ; s, which remains shuttered to this day. What a decade more? Il Molino was another one who came down and was going to show us how to do Italian, and it just, it doesn&#039 ; t work. |01:11:39| BRODY Do you think that it came from a sense of sort of that Texas or Dallas in particular might have been too provincial or inexperienced? Where was that coming from? |01:11:54| PIERCE Inexperienced? Yes, the, the way you deal with that as a restaurateur is with velvet gloves. Not the...I am so reminded. Let&#039 ; s see, where does the story begin? This is a story of The Mansion on Turtle Creek and Michael Flynn, who was at one time the sommelier from there, and he had come from Washington, D.C.. Michael is a is a very, very humble guy. He&#039 ; s not a snooty wine steward. He really is a people pleaser. And the locals would come in to The Mansion and the guy, the big man at the table would be, &quot ; Uh, Screaming Eagle all around.&quot ; Well, if you&#039 ; re- that&#039 ; s a wine. And if you&#039 ; re composing a meal and matching it to wines, you don&#039 ; t start with the Screaming Eagle. You, you start with something a lot softer and you work up to that with the with the entree, which he knew. But you could never, you would never say that. You would never want to embarrass your, your customer. And so what Michael would do, would be to very, it would be to talk. I can&#039 ; t remember the approach he said he took, but it was to say, &quot ; Well, maybe we would...How would you like to start with a celebratory champagne?&quot ; And he would sort of gently move to a little lighter side and then gradually he would build trust and build up to where the Screaming Eagle matched the food? I&#039 ; m not saying....Whoever starts a restaurant here, you&#039 ; ve got to be sensitive to what we&#039 ; ll call some of the eccentricities of the people who live here and dine here, and some of them are quite ignorant. |01:14:07| BRODY What do you think those eccentricities are? |01:14:10| PIERCE Well, this belief that big red, you know, big red wine. A big red wine is not the be all end all, but it&#039 ; s, some people feel like they have to order that to impress. How you know, how big can the steak get, how big can the Tomahawk get? It&#039 ; s...But you do that if you&#039 ; re really going to do that and be successful, you understand the sensibility of the audience. And oh, I&#039 ; ve got to look up because I just lost another name on who does this well. There&#039 ; s a restaurant called Town Hearth. Are you familiar with that? It&#039 ; s a steak house, and I&#039 ; ve tried to remember the name of, I&#039 ; m so sorry, I forgot your name, the guy who started it. Help me out here, help me out here. Oh, come on. I don&#039 ; t want, you know, I don&#039 ; t want Yelp. I want to know. Let&#039 ; s, let&#039 ; s let me go here, to &quot ; About&quot ; for just one moment. Nick Badovinus, Nick Badovinus is a chef who understands his audience and Town Hearth is so much fun. Have you been? |01:15:30| BRODY No, I have not. |01:15:30| PIERCE It is. It&#039 ; s like he&#039 ; s got an aquarium with a Yellow Submarine in it, and he&#039 ; s got really wild, funky chandeliers. And there&#039 ; s a sports car over here,(French) and it&#039 ; s just it&#039 ; s like, it&#039 ; s fun. And then he&#039 ; s got really good food. And some of it is big and outlandish, but it matches the market. He didn&#039 ; t. I mean, he understands who his diner is, and I know that&#039 ; s a long way from your question. But I do think that&#039 ; s what&#039 ; s made it so hard for these out-of-towners. These carpetbaggers, restaurant carpetbaggers, they do not know better. If, if you don&#039 ; t understand this market, you&#039 ; re not going to succeed in this market. |01:16:23| BRODY Do you think the since you know, those times in the mid 80s or so, do you think that the people of Dallas and the eaters of Dallas have changed? |01:16:35| PIERCE Yes. |01:16:36| BRODY And how so? |01:16:41| PIERCE Well, they&#039 ; ve become more sophisticated. You know, the other thing I wanted to add, because this is an important part of the history. Two things back in the 80s. One is, at that time, the best fine dining restaurants in Dallas were usually part of hotels, which was quite unusual in this country. I mean, the whole country. But you had Cafe Royal at...Oh, I can&#039 ; t remember the name of the hotel now, but it was it was our first really good nouvelle (French) cuisine restaurant and it was part of a hotel. The Mansion on Turtle Creek, part of a hotel, the restaurants of the Anatole, all part of a hotel. This was, this was true that that was where you found some of the best fine dining in the 80s. The other thing was once the celebrity chef craze hit, people really followed the chefs. They loved the chefs. You know, Dean Fearing could do no wrong. Stephan Pyles could do no wrong. I mean, he could, but that there was always looking for that, that personality, because usually even today with Dean&#039 ; s restaurant at the Ritz Carlton, the Ritz Carlton, you know, you walk in there and you sit down to eat and chances are good, Dean&#039 ; s going to make the rounds and you&#039 ; re going to get to say &quot ; hi&quot ; to the chef. That&#039 ; s who- I think that touchy-feely experience really started with the 80s and people, people loved it. |01:18:32| PIERCE Yeah. So I mean, that, kind of a lot of what we&#039 ; ve been talking about revolves around sort of really the idea of hospitality. And early on, when you were talking about the ambiance at Routh Street, it was the warmth, that really sounds like it struck you initially. |01:18:46| PIERCE Yes. |01:18:47| PIERCE Is that unique to Dallas or is it a development that you know, that sort of nationwide that you know that, that people are seeking that sort of hospitality? |01:19:00| PIERCE I think you can find that anywhere. And in fact, depending here, if I were to go to San Francisco, we could find restaurants like that or if I were to go to Seattle, we could find them. I thought immediately when you said that of Chez Panisse. It very much is reflective. And I don&#039 ; t know, we should ask Stephen some time...He would sit down and talk with you, by the way. |01:19:23| BRODY That would be lovely. |01:19:25| PIERCE But he could tell you whether or not he was influenced by Chez Panisse. He might have been. But it definitely had that cozy, warm feeling. And yet you never felt the service lag. All the elements of the best fine dining service were there. But without the stuffiness. |01:19:50| BRODY Do you think the stuffiness is, was tied to sort of the rigidity of the French, you know, the French tradition? |01:19:59| PIERCE What we imported? Yeah, I think you&#039 ; re right. Absolutely, that...because that was the definition of fine dining: French, French and continental. And I, you know, I also brought you something which you can keep for a while and look at which gives you...This is another snapshot in time in Dallas of...Let me get you a...Oh, and then there&#039 ; s the Pyramid Room at the Fairmont. Oh my gosh, that was again a hotel restaurant. That was absolutely the pinnacle of fine dining in its day. This book is from 1979. It&#039 ; s called &quot ; Dining in Dallas.&quot ; And you know, it&#039 ; s one of those things where you paid to be a part of it. Nevertheless, there was there were a lot of people that paid to be a part of it and some of the ones, to some of the fine dining ones. We had the Pyramid Room. Then over at the Anatole, we had the Plum Blossom. That was a very upscale Asian Chinese restaurant. Chinese. You had L&#039 ; Entrecote, which was also in the Anatole. You had Jean Claude. That was one of the early earliest French restaurants in Dallas. And he did classes. He did classes like a mad man. In fact, I&#039 ; ve still got one of his recipe books. And then you have it, you have a few more. But this, this will give you an interesting snapshot of, of what people were eating. There&#039 ; s not much left. |01:21:40| BRODY Thank you. Thank you. |01:21:42| PIERCE You know, and the other person that you might enjoy talking to is Gus Katsigris. Do you know Gus? Go talk to him soon, because he&#039 ; s an old guy, but he&#039 ; s hanging on. Gus started the hospitality program at El Centro and this was back in the late &#039 ; 60s when I actually when I was working there. He has many, many stories and a great perspective on everything in the scene. Now, he may not be able to add as much light on Asian. Again, that&#039 ; s that was such...I&#039 ; m going to use that word. That was so organic. And arose out of the populations that moved here versus being here and the scene sort of developing. |01:22:38| BRODY Right. Absolutely. And continues to grow so that. |01:22:44| PIERCE It does so. |01:22:45| BRODY And I mean, it is interesting and I don&#039 ; t know if you have any observations on this that, that first generation of Asian restaurants. You know, we had the few Chinese restaurants that you mentioned, the ones that came after then, you know, a handful of Indian restaurants and then since then the rapid growth northward and, you know, just booming. |01:23:09| PIERCE Plano and Frisco. |01:23:11| BRODY Yeah. So I mean, the even the idea of Dallas has spread so much further. What are your, you know, your observations of that in terms of the restaurant scene that there&#039 ; s you know, that small square footage, you know, that was considered Dallas, you know, downtown or even uptown, you know, back then where now you might need to drive 30, 40 minutes to find the restaurant that&#039 ; s being written about in the in the Morning News? |01:23:42| PIERCE Well, it&#039 ; s like it&#039 ; s like we drive from Lake Highlands to Wu Wei Din for the dandan noodles. And for us, that&#039 ; s about it. That&#039 ; s about a 15- mile drive. |01:23:55| BRODY It must be good. |01:23:56| PIERCE Oh my God, they&#039 ; re good. But. It is hard to know. It is hard to predict where things are going to go, because I don&#039 ; t know how, again, because of the whole economic shift. I don&#039 ; t know how, excuse me, how far fine dining can push. Again, you have to be. We have some friends who eat out fairly often, and they just they went out for dinner the other night and it was 650 bucks. And you know, they can afford that. But we don&#039 ; t go out and spend, and most of us don&#039 ; t go out and spend that much for a meal. So there&#039 ; s a very limited strata that that serves. Then you have people like the Petra and the Beast, where she&#039 ; s doing really innovative stuff, but you know you&#039 ; re eating it out of a little paper plates. You&#039 ; re not...you&#039 ; re not getting the fine dining experience. The thing that I would like to see, and I think it&#039 ; s starting to happen with Mexican, but I would like to see a more of a gradual specialization, if you will, for instance, either. I&#039 ; m thinking of Indian, you know, southern Indian, northern Indian. Very, very different. OK, that&#039 ; s about my extent of understanding. What happens if you start getting people who could talk more about the cuisines that have the Portuguese influence and specializing in that? Getting down to some of the finer divisions. Just like we talk about African cuisine. You know, Africa&#039 ; s big continent. I know we get Ethiopian. I occasion...I don&#039 ; t know whether I&#039 ; ve seen a Nigerian restaurant or not. But I would I would think that we would begin to get more specialization, as Brian pointed out with the Mexican. Well, or even the latest issue of D Magazine, which talks about the different ways that quote authentic Mexican is being expressed here in Dallas. It seems like that&#039 ; s the way to go, because otherwise you have people sort of up here treading water at a...Without much true immersion in the cuisine. |01:26:51| BRODY So more depth and more education? |01:26:55| PIERCE Yes. |01:26:58| BRODY That&#039 ; s really, really interesting. |01:26:59| PIERCE And I could be 100% wrong. I mean, that might not be what happens at all. |01:27:05| BRODY Well, we&#039 ; ll wait and see. Well, this has been really, really interesting. Is there anything that I didn&#039 ; t ask you or a story that you&#039 ; d like to share as we finish up? |01:27:18| PIERCE I think you have covered most of it. I got in my &quot ; Big Night&quot ; story. There&#039 ; s also...The one thing I would like to point out is that we had a pretty darn authentic Italian restaurant in this city for years and years with Il Sorrento, which opened in 1950. And I, I will confess that we missed it on our radar at the Dallas Morning News. |01:27:54| BRODY Why do you think? |01:27:55| PIERCE Because we were ignorant. It&#039 ; s...We just were. Mario Messina who owned that was doing his own, he was making his own pasta from the beginning. And it&#039 ; s like all, &quot ; we&quot ; in our little restaurant review group were seeing was a festive, celebratory, you know, entertaining night out. But, but in reality, he was doing the real food. It took the city a long time to catch up to him. Is there anything else? I don&#039 ; t know. I don&#039 ; t know, I guess it&#039 ; s amazing we&#039 ; ve covered an amazing territory. |01:28:48| BRODY Well, it&#039 ; s been really interesting to learn about your life and your work and also hear from someone that&#039 ; s been really paying attention to what&#039 ; s been happening in the food scene in Dallas for a long time. So I appreciate you taking the time and and sharing these amazing artifacts as well. So thanks. Thank you very much. |01:29:10| PIERCE You&#039 ; re welcome. It&#039 ; s a pleasure. All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. audio Interviews may be reproduced with permission from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. 0 OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://diggingindallas.org/education/render.php?cachefile=2021oh002_di_007.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Kim Pierce, April 5, 2022 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2021oh002_di_007 Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans Texas--History Cooking, American Food writing Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-05 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio