MY ROLE HAS EVOLVED OVER THE HISTORY OF STARRY KITCHEN, BUT LET ME MAKE THIS ABSOLUTELY CLEAR: MY WIFE IS THE TRUE FORCE BEHIND EVERYTHING CULINARY. I’M HER PARTNER IN CRIME, HER RIGHT-HAND MAN. YES, I CAN AND HAVE RUN THE KITCHEN (AND STARTED RUNNING IT FULL TIME AFTER OUR 2015 RESURRECTION), BUT THE HEART, SOUL, AND TASTE OF STARRY KITCHEN—THAT’S ALL MY SPECIAL LADY, OUR KITCHEN NINJA, THI TRAN. I CONSULT HER ON EVERYTHING WE MAKE, EVERYTHING WE TASTE, LITERALLY ANYTHING KITCHEN-RELATED.
Thi is the first girl I ever dated who could actually cook. But fuck that misogynistic nonsense coming out of my manly mouth. Thi might be the first person I knew in my own generation who could legitimately cook well. And if I have any talent in the kitchen, it’s all because of Thi, though I am definitely her worst protégé.
I figured out that Thi could cook amazing food right around the time she and I moved to California. We were living in Toluca Lake, a section of Burbank right across from the Warner Bros. movie studio. It’s movie magical . . . for about the first day, and then, like everyone else, we just took the studio for granted and got used it. The first thing Thi said when we moved in was, “This kitchen is tiny.” It was tiny, with questionably safe appliances as well. I wasn’t smart enough then to understand that what Thi really meant when she said that was, “Look, I know how to fucking cook, but I’m not cooking in this tiny kitchen!” Which is why I cooked most of the time, usually delicious Japanese curry packets and other braises I could figure out.
We lived in that place for six years, thanks to the deal my friend Chris Smith, whom I met at a failed dot.com before, gave us. Chris owned the apartment complex, and he generously included the apartment as part of a deal for me to relocate to LA to work with him to syndicate old television shows like Casper the Friendly Ghost and The Lone Ranger to local stations. Everything was fine until the crash of 2008. Chris was forced to look at his investments, which meant he had to start charging us market value for the apartment. So we started looking for a new place to live.
Most people in Los Angeles wouldn’t be caught dead in North Hollywood, but whenever Thi and I looked at places there, we kept saying the same thing: That was NIIIIIIICE! Sure, there were pockets that people might call “the hood,” but the places we looked at were brand spanking new. One particular space REALLY caught Thi’s eye, probably because of two main features: a washer and dryer (I do NOT miss hauling my clothes to the Laundromat and back) and, the most important feature relating to our story, an open and beautifully new kitchen!
Unlike in Toluca Lake, where she hardly ever cooked, Thi couldn’t not cook in our new place in NoHo, as the neighborhood is now called (a nickname seemingly willed into existence despite many people’s objections). Before we moved, I truly thought everyone knew that Thi was a great cook. But none of our guests—including her parents and our closest friends—knew she could cook at all, let alone be close to achieving her legendary Kitchen Ninja status. I was spoiled by her meals, which meant that whenever she cooked, it was usually just for me (a nice corollary to one of my favorite rules about serving food: If you don’t like it, there’s more for ME!).
Once we moved to NoHo, however, the secret was out. Everyone saw another side of Thi. She suddenly started cooking all the time, and we regularly started inviting people over for dinner, which we had hardly ever done before. It was like some bizarro world where I was a victim of a wife swap . . . but with the same wife, only with a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay different fire and passion for food.
At this time, I was deep working in the independent film scene, traveling all over the world to help sell and produce films. Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, Cannes—you name a major film festival and I most likely attended it (unless you name Telluride . . . and Fantastic Fest . . . I haven’t been to those. YET!). One of the many people I met, partied with, drank with, and, most importantly, karaoked with was my good friend June Lee, who used to work with Chan-wook Park (or Park Chan-wook, depending on how you google him), a very famous South Korean director who made some of my favorite movies, including the celebrated vengeance trilogy: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. June and I became such good friends that when she decided to branch off on her own to produce and adapt South Korean movies (aka “the Korean wave”) in the United States, she stayed with me and Thi in LA.
This was a huge turning point in the history and inception of Starry Kitchen. If June hadn’t stayed with us, we NEVER would have started Starry Kitchen. I’m sure of that. Because out of gratitude for letting her crash, and also to save money instead of going out to eat all the time, June made us traditional Korean dinners. Oh man, have I also mentioned that we LUUUUUUURVE Korean food, Koreatown . . . KOREANS?
Thi was thrilled. June introduced us to all sorts of dishes we were familiar with but had never seen prepared in our own home, like kimchi chigae (kimchi soup). We also learned about Koreans’ obsession with medium-grain rice (which is texturally amazing. Oh man, I could write a whole chapter about the different grains of rice. Okay, that’s not actually true, but they’re all different in your mouf—try ’em!) and . . . I can’t really remember, but there was a lot of Korean cooking happening, which, of course, led me to innocently suggest to Thi one night that she might consider cooking more than the go-tos of Chinese and Vietnamese food.
Thi almost flipped out on me because she immediately assumed that I liked June’s food better than hers. But that’s not what I (or most dumb-as-me husbands) was saying at all. What I was trying to say was that I KNEW Thi was talented at cooking, and I thought she should consider expanding her horizons to other cuisines because I wanted to try her version of other kinds of food.
This, as you might imagine, is a common conversation between us. Whenever we talk about food, Thi is always nice enough to ask what I want her to make. And, as you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m not always the most considerate man-child-like person and don’t always realize (1) that I’m incredibly lucky to have a partner in crime who can cook like a BOSS, and (2) that although she literally does ask me what I want her to make, she doesn’t want to hear a laundry list of things I think she could make. Most of the time, my requests evolve from reasonable to way beyond the scope of reason. When this happens, which is way more than I’m comfortable admitting, Thi always responds the same way: “Well, FUCKING MAKE IT YOURSELF, NGUYEN TRAN!” Which I always think is cute and a bit of a head-scratcher because, “Well, you DID ask!”
But the really funny part is knowing as much as Thi does that her reply obviously means I got under her skin—and got her thinking about how to pull off a new dish.
Anyway, when I rudely-yet-politely asked her to diversify her cooking rotation, Thi responded with the obligatory, “Why don’t you fucking make it yourself, Nguyen Tran!” because after eight years together, this was probably the 2,555th day in a row that we had some version of this conversation. (We still have these very same conversations today.)
But, you know, I just had a strange epiphany. Starry Kitchen Is the Ultimate Move by My Wife to Shut Me the Fuck Up!
Holy shit. This really just came to me as I was writing about and reflecting on this. Oh man, I MUST be annoying LOL. That’s really crazy to put it that way. The only problem is, I’m also like a kid when I get something I want—I want more, and I’m not afraid to ask for it, either (because who doesn’t want more of a good thing?).
Within days Thi started making everything June had made for us. She started “traveling” to all sorts of countries, making dishes she had never made before and going off the deep end of food creation for nearly forty straight days—a new dish every night—and she would post pictures of ALL of these new dishes on Facebook.
She didn’t post them because she aspired to be a food blogger. To understand Thi is to understand that she is mostly Asian, grew up with Chinese karaoke and Chinese films and television dramas, and is barely American. She’s Asian, and Asians love taking pictures of beautiful food, and they loved it long before the whole wide Internet world joined the Asian food-porn order!
And before we started Starry Kitchen, that’s how it all really started—so to June Lee, We LOVE you for cooking us Korean food in our home and for making me put your food (and my foot) in my mouth one too many times!