Our last TSAI House event will be taking place later this month, on the evening of Friday, 6/21. We’ll be serving simple fare. Rice bowls, home-made sauces, and fresh vegetables. Live music and refreshing beverages too. Please check back in this week and next week for the menu, event details, and to RSVP.
As many of you have noted, we’ve been quieter than usual over the course of this year, hosting events with lesser frequency than we have in the past. It’s been a pleasure sharing our cooking with you all at our house events and at the OCH Art Market. But as we arrive at the two year anniversary of TSAI starting out at the Dragon’s Den in 2011, we’re transitioning out of doing business as a pop-up restaurant, so that we can take the time to evaluate where we are today, build upon what we’ve learned, and take a look at opportunities for a brick-and-mortar operation that allows us to retain TSAI’s best qualities, while providing better food, better service, more efficient operations, a chance to be part of a neighborhood, and the ability to bring into play some of our other interests. These include books, music, and art, and a fascination with how those pursuits relate to the changing role of restaurants, coffee shops, pop-ups, libraries, and bookstores as places where people can gather in public and semi-public realms in to dine with friends, to people watch or to meet new people, to buy a newspaper and to read for a morning, to browse magazines or to use free Wi-Fi, to study or to do work, to attend a reading, or take in a concert.
Finding out what this means for us may take a few months. It may take a few years. In that time, you may forget who we are, but you’ll at least have learned a word in Chinese. We’ll continue to post recipes on this website, and to share our approach to cooking and dining with you all. We’ll also be doing a little bit of catering, and have ideas for very small events we’d like to host here and there.
If you’re on our email list, we’ll be in touch about these events and with the new recipes, and possibly to run ideas by you as we work towards the next phase for TSAI.
If you’re not on our email list and would like to be, just let us know at tsainola@gmail.com.