Behind Each Dish

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Portland is a very seasonal city. Winter is typically hard for food carts. I needed to figure out how I was going to survive in the winter. When I looked at different Asian carts, I realized that no one did wonton soup.

Back home [in San Francisco], my mom, who retired years ago, lived by herself. Then she had open heart surgery and she started living with me. She started wrapping and freezing wontons at home. When it was Monday night football, my friends would come over and see me cooking wontons for dinner. “Make me a bowl!” That was how it got started.

At some point, I thought to myself, “Wait, something is not exactly right here. They are coming over just for the wontons.” My mom is retired and spending a lot of her own money making this for us. It is a bit not fair to my mom. So I was like, “Mom, we are going to start selling these wontons”.

“Mom. You are going to wrap these and my friends are going to eat these, and we are going to charge them for it.” It is money coming out of her pocket. It also keep her busy. This is great because people say that if you are retired and you don’t stay busy, you slow down… this will give her something to do, something fun to stay somewhat busy.

So now mom has a little hustle at home wrapping wontons. She puts them in the freezer and sells them. At first, it was just my friends, then it was their friends. She couldn’t really keep up. Even today, she is still doing it. She is almost 80.

So when I was thinking about special things for the food cart, I thought about her and her wontons. I asked for her recipe, and now we serve wontons.
Photo taken by Studio Define - Photography and Katharine Chen

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I took a trip in May to explore Portland. I’d just finished the outline of my tattoo. I knew that the guy that does coloring at Optic Nerve Arts is great at shading so I scheduled a two hour appointment the day before I flew back to the Bay Area. An hour into the session, he had to go pick up his kid. He only did half of my tattoo so I rebooked for the end of July. For July, I scheduled my vacation for two weeks. This time, I really explored Portland and tried to explore every single food cart pod.

After my initial trip in May, things at work got worse. I didn’t like how I was being treated. I started taking leaves of absence just to collect myself. It got to the point that I was so stressed at work that I couldn’t find the strength to lift up a tray of food. I couldn’t even carry a glass or a tray. I honestly didn’t realize how much a job can impact you physically. So when I came back to Portland in July and visited the food carts, I thought to myself, “This is something that I can do. Let’s see what opportunities can happen from starting a food cart.”

To figure out how much it took to start, I sat in front of some of the busiest food carts in town. I would have lunch every single day at a different food cart. I would take 15 minute time intervals and count how many people were in line. If you are serving 10 customers every 15 minutes... that is 40 customers per hour. If I can serve at that rate for $8 per customer, I can make it happen. I can do this.

I had a trip planned for October to go to Brazil for my birthday. I had money saved up. I had saved up for a year. I didn’t board that flight. I took a flight to Portland instead.
Photo taken by Studio Define - Photography and Katharine Chen

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[Is it worth it?]

That is really great question… some days it’s rough and you wonder why you are doing it? Somedays you are excited because people love your food. You know? It gives you great joy to give joy to people.

Another thing that makes it easier for us, sometimes, is that we are doing this together. In the past, we might have been working fewer hours (or not), but we never really saw each other. There are definitely some challenges that come with being with your spouse 24/7 in a tiny little box, but on the flip side, [in the past] a big part of our life was to find time to say hi or have a meal together. It is nice to not have to worry about it anymore. Doing it together, for a large part, makes it worth it.

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Photo taken by Katharine Chen and Victoria Chen Photography