The Story of How we Got to Meet Chef Roy Choi

 Transcript from the audio:Hello fam. And welcome to Monday Musings with Kissa, where I share what the heck happened last week, what I have planned for this week, and a story time, not in that particular order. This is the audio companion to my Substack newsletter that I send out every Thursday. So if you’re not already subscribed, there’s a button somewhere here on the app or on the website where you can do so, and content as of this recording is currently free. So y’all. Let’s debrief. Let’s go through what happened this past week. Girl, last week was another wild week, but when is it ever not? I keep, I feel like I’m in this season of like, oh, this week was another crazy week, was another packed week, was another wild week. So it wasn’t any different, but there was a lot going on. Our wedding anniversary was on Wednesday. We had a huge wholesale order that went out on Friday and sneak peak - we are going to be in the Bay Area! We have a store that picked up our pancake mix called Andronico’s. So make sure you stay tuned for that. And then to cap the end of the week, we had a big event in Downtown LA. It was Filled Market collaborating with Smorgasburg LA to celebrate Filipino American History month and more on this during story time, but let’s just say it was a perfect way to cap off a really big week. All right. Now this week, what’s on the calendar? Well on the business side, I think my small goal for this week is just to get ahead of production. And I know it’s really early or you know, to most people’s mind, it’s really early to think about the holiday shopping and Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But when you are in the retail world and you sell a product direct to consumer or wholesale, you are thinking of these things way in advance. We have been thinking about Black Friday, cyber Monday ever since like August, and so that is the goal for this particular week is to just get ahead of production, chip away instead of trying to go crazy right before the rush. So we wanna do this smart. We don’t wanna overexert ourselves. That is the goal for this week, for the business. And then on the personal side, honestly, the goal is just simply to drink more water. It’s been off and on where, you know, especially during the weekday, I’m so busy in the mornings going into the afternoons that by like 12:00 or 1:00 PM I realized a lot of times I haven’t had a drop of water, which is not good at all.Another thing that I wanted to add to this podcast is what my business coach would call the “Bricks in my Backpack.” What are the things that are kind of weighing on me this week and what can I do about them? So the first thing is exhaustion From the things that happened last week, like I said, it has been a wild week and I am tired. To be honest with you, I’m tired physically from all the events and production, but I’m also mentally and emotionally tired. Not necessarily because of things, bad things that happened, but more of just like overstimulation of all the things that were happening back to back. So the brick in my backpack this week is definitely exhaustion and my goal for this week is just to listen to myself. Not feel guilty about wanting to rest and actually making time to do so, because as a mom, as an entrepreneur, I feel this pressure of just wanting to constantly and consistently produce, I want to execute. And when I’m not doing that, I feel this sense of guilt. Allowing myself to not feel guilty and listen to my own intuition saying, “Girl, you gotta chill because if you don’t, you’re gonna burn out at some point.” So that is one of the bricks in my backpack that I wanna work on this week.Now let’s go into our story time. Going back to the Filled Market x Smorgasburg event for Filipino American History Month. The TLDR of the story is Roy Choi ate our food at that event! Ahhhhh! Oh my gosh. Okay, so let’s dial back, let’s, let’s go back on how we even got to this point. So if you follow Roy Choi on Instagram, he does food vlogs on there. And in one of the videos that he posted, he visited an onigiri shop here in Los Angeles and I follow him on Instagram. So does Charlie and I happened to see it, so I sent Charlie the vlog that Roy Choi posted and I told him, “Hey. You should comment on his video and invite him to Smog to try your Filipino onigiri. We knew it was a long shot, but Charlie did it. He just commented very quickly and just said, “Chef, come try my Filipino onigiri. I’ll be at Smorgasburg this Sunday. Hope to see you.” Something like that. Well, the day was already amazing. The turnout was huge. There were lots of people. Our line was long, it was going for days, and the event organizers kept checking in on us and kept asking, are you guys okay? Do you guys need anything but y’all, we came prepared this time around.Anyway, the event organizer comes to the back part of our booth and she comes back and she was like, I wanted it to be a surprise. And I am like, what are you talking about? She said, “Roy Choi is here. He saw your post. We asked him to come and he’s here! I know you guys got a long line, I wanted it to be a surprise, but you probably will need to mentally prepare for when he comes and wants to chat up with you.”We were so excited. We hadn’t even seen him yet. Charlie was just beside himself that Roy Choy actually showed up. Well, when he came, he was just so gracious. We got to chat with him for a little while. We gave him some food to try and we got a chance to take a picture with him, but oh my gosh, we were so busy, so we didn’t get to chat it up with him very long. But to just talk to him and be able to share our story with him was just such a bucket list thing. We were so incredibly grateful. It was like the thing to cap off an amazing week Now. Roy Choi is one of our most inspirational chefs. He took a concept and ran with it and made it his own. And I think that he just made such an impact, especially here in Los Angeles with fusion food. And to see another Asian American be able to execute that in a way where it had changed the landscape of a food scene, especially here in Los Angeles, he was just such, he is just such an inspiration to us. So to be able to feed one of the chefs that we look up to and find a source of inspiration from has just been icing on the cake, and we are so grateful that we had the chance to do that.Well, that’s it for today, y’all. I want to thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this audio edition, please share it with a friend. For the full Monday Musings experience, subscribe to my substack at thenotionmama.substack.com. Until next time, know that you are blessed and I am so grateful that you’re here. Bye friends. Get full access to Kissa - the Notion Mama at justkissa.substack.com/subscribe