Why wkndr?

We are giving ourselves permission to experience more beauty and indulge our curiosities, we hope it helps you do the same. 

When I graduated high school I immediately bought a ticket to Hong Kong. My mom was horrified, but supported me because she knew that I had to figure out how my love of food and exploration could turn into a lifelong career. She and I talked about traveling and returning with journals of recipes. So off I went— eating, researching, and journaling one month in Hong Kong, then Beijing, then Vietnam, then Europe. I worked in restaurants between my trips, just long enough to save up money for my next destination. 

Eventually I enrolled in culinary school. When I stepped into my first kitchen as a professional cook, I was home. The next decade and a half were magical...and hard as fuck.  Suddenly I didn't have any time to travel or indulge my passions outside of work. Despite the pain, I fell more in love with the culinary world. But I also loved the pain; it felt like the price of admission, and I was all in. 

You’ve heard chefs say that if you look in their refrigerator, you’ll only find ketchup and pizza. It’s often true. That's the irony of cooking professionally. I love cooking so much and I love seeing the world through the lens of food. It's how we as chefs choose to spend our lives, yet so often there's no time for it. So our fridges remain empty, as do the pages of our passports.  

Then came a global pandemic. We began pouring our hearts into at-home meals and explored new ways of creating experiences. Guests emailed us with stories of how our kits added joy and delight to special moments in their lives, even during crisis. We began four day work weeks and focused a lot of the energy that previously went into the hustle of running a restaurant into reflection. We broke damaging habits that had been formed over decades of working in hospitality and found time to focus on intention and why we love what we do. 

From the early days of the pandemic on I knew I didn’t want to look at the people around me and ask them to go back to the old way. So we’re not going to. We are reinventing. Reverse engineering. We’re starting with our skills, passions, and curiosities and reimagining how to use them in order to contribute to this world. And we’re taking a pause after many years of being shaped by restaurant work. Yes, we still love restaurants and we will continue to do what we do best. Just in new ways and now layered with additional things that excite us, bring value to our lives, and allow us to indulge in our curiosity and passion to create meaningful experiences.  Join us in the JOY!