When I first moved to New York City I ran a secret desserts-only restaurant out of my apartment off East Broadway and I named it the Chinatown Cake Club.
At the time I was taking a break from working in fashion and had somehow gotten hired as the pastry chef for a hot new downtown restaurant. I had always enjoyed making desserts but never worked in a commercial restaurant kitchen before, much less in NYC. Through a friend I got an interview for a position as an assistant, and when they asked if I had experience I lied and said, ‘of course!’. I was quickly hired and had only been there a few weeks when the head pastry chef abruptly quit and I was given her job.
Suddenly I was working everyday in a very busy Manhattan kitchen. I really had no clue what I had gotten myself into, but luckily I ended up learning quickly. At first it was a rush; I loved having my own pastry station and the potential to create my own desserts for hundreds of people each night. But the constraints of traditional dining and back-of-house bureaucracy – not to mention the near-constant sexual harassment, exhaustion, and low pay – soon became frustrating and I thought I could do better. The desserts at the restaurant tasted fine, but they were predictable, boring, not special. I wanted to keep baking, but I also wanted to explore an alternative, more artful way of making and presenting food using the familiar Asian ingredients I grew up with and still shopped for during my walks to and from work every morning up Canal Street.
With that in mind I started the Chinatown Cake Club and opened one night in December with a single-page website, photocopied invitation (sent by snail mail to a group of friends), and a phone number you had to text for final address details. For a small charge guests were welcome to stay as long as they liked and eat as much as they wanted. Word spread and it quickly blew up – there were blog write-ups, TV show and book offers, and for a time my apartment was rated on Yelp – but for the next six months I continued to open my very small 5th floor walk-up to the public, serving a rotating menu of cakes, pastries, and ice creams (the kind of desserts I had always fantasized about making) using mostly my own recipes.
In half a year I literally served hundreds of strangers and welcomed them into my home. I’m still friends with some of the people I met then. Eventually, though, I got tired of being covered in flour all the time and regularly bicycling home with 20 pounds of melting butter in my backpack. What began as a fun culinary distraction/social experiment started to become something else, and after publishing a small cookbook zine, I hung up my apron and called it quits. R.I.P. Chinatown Cake Club!