Two Things Towards Which Being Half-Asian Predisposes Me To Have An Attitude of Skepticism
(This is my J’accuse! face. I was making it as an infant and I am making it now.)
1. New York street food
Street food–let me tell you about street food. In Southeast Asia, street food comes with street tables and street chairs. Or else it’s pierced with a stick, tucked into some edible wrapper, or otherwise configured for convenient, on-the-go eating. It is not some hipster in some truck who hands you a plate that you then have to carry upstairs to your office to eat, by which point there is nothing, not even the savings you might expect from an eatery that has avoided Manhattan rents, to distinguish the dish from anything you could have procured from an establishment with walls. I can understand why someone who works in some kind of industrial-park food wasteland in the suburbs might be excited if new and different food trucks arrived from time to time, bringing respite from Applebee’s and the Olive Garden, but this is New York City–we’re already surrounded by restaurants of every kind! (See also: Felix Salmon on the “manufactured scarcity” of pop-ups.)
2. Your small business’s “story” (read: “creation myth”)
If I have to read one more essay-length CEO bio that recounts how the Yale-educated securities analyst gave it all up to make gluten-free cupcakes (for a customer base composed primarily of fatuous individuals with nothing remotely resembling celiac disease), I’ll…well, I’ll keep not eating them, I guess. Following your bliss, indeed! This is a story. This is also a story. Your thing is just artisanal smugness, and your bliss is my spleen.