the beginning

a backstory

Illustration by Nick Hensley for TASTE

What I’ve been up to

As part of the research process for my first cookbook, The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, I moved to China to attend culinary school in Guangzhou. After graduating, the pandemic hit, and I ended up living a year in Taipei, Taiwan. Those two years were my first foray into professional cooking and I wanted to get more industry experience.

I moved back to Portland, Oregon after I turned in my manuscript, and while waiting for the book to come out, I started working in restaurant kitchens. My first job was as a line cook at Din Tai Fung in the Washington Square Mall, slinging thousands of orders of garlic green beans, noodles and fried rice six days a week for four months. (Later I learned I was the first woman wok chef hired in Din Tai Fung’s company history). I moved onto various line cook jobs, then decided to stick around in SE Portland at a fantastic little restaurant called Malka, which became my family until they closed.

In 2021, I began a series of Chinese pop-ups called Surong. The food struck a chord with Portland eaters and my team and I were doing events of 80-100+ covers per night. It was fun to experience that nascent thrill of success and finally feel a sense of community and belonging in Portland’s food scene, especially with other Asian and Asian-American chefs in the city. It was a year of highs: I was invited to do a Surong pop-up in Manhattan, and later that month attended the James Beard Awards in Chicago, where I won for The Vegan Chinese Kitchen.

But I soon felt the burnout of production with running a temporary pop-up restaurant. I hated doing the same things, over and over again. I felt the limitations of the menu and expectations. In 2023, I made the choice to put my pop-up on hold and go back to working as a cook. I took a full-time chef de partie job in fine-dining and moved out to wine country to work at ōkta. In the fall, I did a few trails at Michelin-starred restaurants including SingleThread, Eleven Madison Park, Atomix, and Alinea, and during service one night I finally had a moment of clarity. I’ve made it here to these legendary kitchens. Is this what I want to do for the foreseeable future? Do I even want to have a restaurant? What else am I trying to prove?

I’ve always loved the energy and camaraderie of the industry, of cooking at the highest level, but there were also downsides. Relationships suffered, as did my mental health, and I barely had time to do anything other than my job. Time was marked by shifts in the restaurant, exhaustion, and recovery before the next shift. I felt I needed to assess my life and reprioritize.

In November I booked a flight to Singapore. I got to work with Chef Zor Tan at Born, and while deciding whether or not to take another restaurant job, I headed to China, my first time back to the country since the pandemic. I spent a few months just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Sitting in train cars, watching landscapes blur between provinces, I wrote about the foods I’d tried for the first time: rice tofu, pea porridge, burnt chiles, zhe-er-gen or “fishy mint,” fermented rice griddle cakes, sangguo (mulberry) wine, and charcoal-rubbed tofu. I went to Nanjing, Guiyang, Chengdu, Beijing, Dali, and Shanghai and found community.

Now that I live in Yunnan Province, for the foreseeable future, I’m going back to what I loved the most: writing. Long-form writing is my preferred form of communication. I’ve always loved newsletters— they’re a cozy, quiet corner of the internet, away from the hyperactivity and algorithm pressures and distraction of social media. I’m excited for this next phase in my work, and I’m grateful that you’re following me along this journey.

What’s in the newsletter:

Dispatches on regional Chinese cooking and culture, and new recipes. I’m excited to delve into:

• Vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms of Yunnan province

• Tofu and all transformations of the soybean. Thus the name of the newsletter!

• An exploration of plant-based traditions in regional cuisines (Guizhou and Yunnan are particularly fascinating to me)

• Chinese fermentation

Little Soybean is also a personal missive. I’ll be writing about things I’m cooking and eating, reflections on family, Chinese identity, and culture, and a glimpse into the current food and restaurant scene in China.

• Where else can I find you?

  I’m on Instagram @hannah.che, or you can email me at hannahche@substack.com.

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