Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick.
Hi Patrick, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up around restaurants all my life, My grandparents had a restaurant, I have had aunts had restaurants, my cousins have a few restaurants, and my mother has a restaurant. Thai food has been pretty prominent in my upbringing. Watching food get made was like alchemy to me!
My arrival into working in a kitchen actually wasn’t immediate. I generally was stuck working the front of the house at my mother’s restaurant and my mother really didn’t really teach me much, she doesn’t quite have the patience or ability to teach well. I started to learn how to cook rather late, probably in my mid to late twenties. This was actually a consequence because I had a girlfriend at the time that loved to go out to eat and I really didn’t have the money to keep going to restaurants so I figured I better start learning how to cook as well as a restaurant could.
I eventually left my mother’s restaurant to become a technical recruiter for a better income but I found myself sharing my love for food everywhere I went. However, to fit into the corporate world, I found myself sweeping a lots of parts of my Thai identity underneath a rug to fit in. I rarely made Thai food I but definitely was still judging it at restaurants.
Then, COVID happened. Being isolated at home with my wife eventually led us to watching lots of Thai dramas and me making a lot more Thai food at home. I was starting to feel like I was reclaiming the “Thai” in Thai-American.
In 2022, after about a decade of being a recruiter and getting burnt out from working different jobs in one position, I received my layoff notice and was getting yelled out of the figurative door in a video meeting by my soon-to-be-former manager on the way out. There was something in that experience that made me rethink if I wanted to be a recruiter still. But, if I wasn’t a recruiter, what can I do?
After A LOT of therapy sessions and a heavy dose of encouragement from my wife, I found myself wanting to make Thai food for a living. After all, why hide something that makes me so unique? However, I didn’t want to work in a typical restaurant as I generally am not a fan of the abuse in the industry so I had to ask the question, “what would make me be okay with working in this field?”
The answer that eventually came to me was that I should become a pop-up chef so I was in much more control about my input, output, and my boundaries. Did it mean a lot more work? Absolutely, but at least it was all mine.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I would say it’s smoother now than before. When I started, I made a insane mistake of trying to open up a stall in East Atlanta that didn’t pan out due to my own naivety and inexperience. To rephrase what coffee guru James Hoffman once said, “There is the food business and then there is the business of business.”
In order to be successful in this, I learned quickly after failure that knowing how to cook wasn’t enough. You have to understand all of the business aspect outside of your product or service, how to operate it, how to build systems, how to read the numbers, learn constantly about your customers, learn how to pivot (everywhere) and learn from your peers.
I joke that I die after every event that I do like I am in a roguelike game. Good or bad, you always can learn something that you can use to carry forward to keep you from failure the next time.
As you know, we’re big fans of Orange Lion. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
I am a solo pop-up chef that specializes in Thai food! When I do events, I don’t typically run the same menu over and over so there is a high probability that no two experiences will be the same. A lot of my customers really enjoy my Pad See Ew (Thai soy sauce noodles) and my different variations of fried rice, such as pork crackling fried rice or yellow curry fried rice. I also am a fried chicken fiend so I love making Thai style fried chicken.
What sets me a part from others is my capability to do outdoor wok stir fries with powerful burners that give my stir fries that classic smoky char that you don’t get with other cooking methods.
I also am happy to do private dinners, private events, pop-up events, catering, corporate events. I can be found at https://www.instagram.com/orangelionpat/
What does success mean to you?
Business wise I would say steady growth and hopefully a chef residency somewhere where I can also work with my friends.
For my personal life, success is being present with my loved ones and friends.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orangelionpat/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094782253333
Image Credits
For 1st profile picture, please credit Leftie Lee’s
