When I first moved to New York City I ran a secret desserts-only restaurant out of my tiny Market Street apartment called the Chinatown Cake Club.
At the time I was taking a break from working in fashion and somehow found myself employed as the pastry chef for a downtown restaurant, where I had been interning until the head pastry chef abruptly quit and I was given her job. While I enjoyed the rush of working in a busy Manhattan kitchen, the constraints of traditional dining and back-of-house bureaucracy soon became frustrating and I wanted to explore an alternative, more artful way of making and presenting pastries using the familiar Asian ingredients I grew up with and could still find at the small, eclectic supermarkets that filled my beloved neighborhood. I started the Chinatown Cake Club with that in mind and opened one night in December with a single-page website, photocopied invitation (sent by mail to a small group of friends), and a phone number you had to text for final address details. Word spread and it quickly blew up, 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.
What began as a simple culinary distraction eventually became something much more, and after half a year serving literally hundreds of people and meeting nearly as many friends (and freaks), I hung up my apron and called it quits.
