Softies is for everyone
I really shouldn’t be writing this right now -
It’s 2am and we have six days to open this restaurant, I still have to finish the recipe book and revise our alcohol license and put the final touches on furnishing the space and figure out an inventory sheet and get on a call with Square tomorrow to fix an order ticket bug and plan for our last video shoot and prep for the first day of training with our new team tomorrow and purchase inventory for two friends & fam services - another 16 hour day ahead, which follows five more 16 hour days from last week,
but I poured myself a drink to sleep, only it’s not quieting my brain, it’s just making it louder, so I’ll dust off the old Substack, the gift that keeps on not giving.
Two years ago, as we were preparing to start our weekly residency at Smorgasburg, I wrote a piece about how Softies is for no one. It was a cheeky, half-clever way of saying that hospitality can’t be for ego - it has to be for the work itself, in order to be genuine. I wrote that I’d taken the pain of broken promises and disappointing relationships, chased them fully down their respective rabbit holes, and come out of them a reformed, healed person.
None of that was actually true, of course. I spent every week worrying about sales numbers and wondering if we were frauds and occasionally looking for a new tech job that I would still hate.
I dated, and then stopped dating; was a good friend, and then stopped being a good friend; made up my mind, and then changed it a million times over.
I still pursued meaning and purpose until I wore both of them thin - kinda like when you try to use a power tool without fitting the screw properly, and you wear out the grip (I recently learned how to use a power tool, if you ever use the bag hooks at the bar, that was me! but don’t look at the screws).
I chased and chased until I stopped remembering what I was chasing. Some call this burnout, and it certainly was, but it also felt deeply spiritual, to run in concentric circles that kept getting larger and further from their center.
And then, right when I hit my wall, when I couldn’t fathom going on longer:
We signed a restaurant lease.
This restaurant is a gift and a curse - the former, because I’ve done nothing to deserve the opportunity, and the latter, because I’ve done nothing to deserve the fucking mess of opening a restaurant.
It’s also the reward of my aimless search; the search that got me up at 6am every Sunday, to load hundreds of pounds of food into the car that I keep making late payments on, hoping to serve 200 people, rather than 190 the week prior. The search that made me ignore wedding invites and cancel birthday party RSVP’s last minute, because there’s a lot going on, which really meant that I needed to fucking sleep. The search that earned people’s respect for my “work ethic,” even though the reason behind my drive should be medically and psychiatrically treated.
Whatever, it doesn’t really matter - that search led me here, Sam and I now have a restaurant, we now have a new team of eighteen other humans to lead, and it’s my responsibility to take the blessings and the curses and turn them into something good, again.
So who is Softies really for?
Well, it’s hard to say.
The actual space is for USC students, a demographic that I’ve become acquainted with from my time at Dulce. They’re weird and awkward and eternally horny, but that’s exactly how they should be from ages 18-22, so I’m willing to accept the challenge of answering a pimply boy’s questions, because he will remind me of myself at age 27.
The mission is for our team. I tried to talk each and every one of our interviewees out of the job, telling them that they will hate us at some point, that we will be horrible leaders, and that they will wish they took the job at Panera Bread instead. But since they stuck around, we will pay them fair wages and hope to teach them a thing or two about what it means to serve people even when it kills you.
The potential is for Sam and Joyce and James and my mom and Lauren and all the friends who still believe in me. These people have put financial and emotional stakes in the ground, and even though they don’t explicitly pressure me, I feel an immense responsibility to make good on that trust. If I ever see Sam pull up in a Rivian, I’ll know that I did my part, and the day I take Lauren to Kato on a weeknight, I’ll feel like the juice was worth the anaconda squeeze.
And the food? Yes, it is for everyone. It’s a weird menu that still doesn’t make much sense to me. That’s kinda become our brand, to make things that no one can really put a finger on. Our menu has and will always explore cultural confusion - a representation of what it means to be an immigrant who wants to shed their past but reject their present. In other words: it’s food that is lost, intentionally, because to this day, I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t felt that way at some point in their lives. A restaurant isn’t meant to wow you - it’s meant to make you feel a little more at home, a little less lonely, a little less devastated about this long journey called living. So, we’ll make food and space so that you can feel all of the above.
In a week, I will be on expo, calling out orders, shaking hands and kissing babies, still on my search for everything while getting nothing done.
Only this time, it won’t be so selfish, because it can’t afford to be. Softies has to be for everyone. It was always supposed to be, but I never let it, because it was too scary to see people go. I’m tired of doing it alone though. With age and enough pop-ups under my belt, I know now that the circles won’t get any narrower, so I might as well let other people get in the car.
See you at the restaurant. I’ll be there, at my new home that I don’t deserve. It is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and I will do my best to take care of it and you, every single day.