BERKELEY, CA – Stephen New is halfway through his customary lap around the aisles of Berkeley Bowl, an organic grocery store locals obsess over. He reaches for a four dollar GT’s Synergy kombucha, like always, before arriving at his favorite destination: bulk and fresh produce.
He tosses all kinds of mushrooms into the cart: maitake, oyster, portobello, shiitake and cremini. He has an unopened three-pound package of chickpeas at home, but he grabs another for good measure. And he can’t forget to snag some Valencia peanut butter, his roommate’s favorite. Stephen reminds himself to pick up the pace. He needs to get home to prep for his biggest event yet, an authentic Mediterranean picnic for more than 40 people.
Back at his two-bedroom, one-bath rental off of Martin Luther King Junior Way, the team assembles in a narrow kitchen. Stephen and his two sous chefs begin the mise en place, a French term he favors for having all his ingredients prepared before cooking. The 23-year-old pulls his long, jet-black hair into a messy bun and slips on a pair of Latex gloves. All the hand washing makes his skin dry. Next he consults a Notion Project Management Doc on his laptop for the following afternoon’s menu, writing tasks on pieces of tape for everyone to execute. Tickets, as they’re called in the tech industry.
He hands his sous chefs – his roommate and me – a ticket each and takes one for himself. Soon enough, the kitchen is a symphony of chaos and excitement. Thirty garlic cloves are peeled and minced for whenever Stephen will need them. The faint smell of charred eggplant lingers as they roast at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for smoky baba ganoush. The white linoleum counters tint green from heaping cups of chopped parsley and cilantro. Four burners are on high heating saute pans and woks, each with a small portion of mushrooms and a loving portion of salt. You can’t crowd the pan, he explains. The mushrooms will never brown.
The stress is high, the kitchen hot. Stephen feels a rush. His job as a software engineer affords him a life of fun and affluence, but all he wants is something that will feed his soul. On this early fall day in 2021, what Stephen really wants is to be a chef.
To begin that journey, he’d need to cut ties with his mother’s vision of what career success looks like to become part of The Great Resignation, a national phenomenon the Covid-19 pandemic set into motion. More than 47 million Americans quit their job in 2021. Some of Silicon Valley’s, and therefore the world’s, best engineers are leaving the Bay Area, their companies, and even the industry altogether, to pursue work they find more purposeful. Rarely is this contrast as stark as going from computer science to culinary arts. And, for Stephen, it comes with a puzzle he has yet to solve: What happens when the thing you love the most comes with so much fear?
Growing Up
Stephen’s love for food is deeply rooted in his childhood. But his early memories also associate it with shame. Growing up in Fort Collins, Colorado as a Singaporean-Malaysian American, very few people looked like him. The ones who did were in a tight-knit, uber-religious Christian clique, he says, and they weren’t exactly looking for any agnostic additions. Close friends in elementary school were few and far between, and food was a point of contention. His mom would prepare elaborate meals from her native China for his school lunches, but the kids in the cafeteria would make fun of him for the smell of steamed egg and dry curry noodles.
On the particularly fragrant days of Zongzi, steamed rice triangles wrapped in banana leaves with filling, he’d leave his lunchbox open in his locker all morning so the strong scent would diffuse before lunchtime. On the days of pork potstickers, filled with pungent steamed cabbage, he would just wait until he got home. He wanted to enjoy the dumplings in peace. His first watershed moment came in fourth or fifth grade, he says. He was two grades ahead in math, but his mother pushed him to be better. He had to land three grades ahead if he was to truly make it in engineering. While his dad was working as an engineer, his mom was hard at work roadmapping the perfect life in tech for Stephen and his older sister Stephanie. “Growing up, we didn’t really have that choice,” Stephanie recalls. “[Computer science] was picked for us.”
Stephen would rise to meet his mother’s demands time after time. In sixth grade, he and his friend Megan (who was often mistaken as his sister) medaled at a Science Olympiad competition. His favorite was the Crime Busters competition. Using fingerprints, ink splotches and various chemicals, the two would have to uncover a fictitious perpetrator. He would spend a couple weeks every summer at math camp. He scored a 34 out of 36 on the ACT, and even held a paid internship before college. But his successes would hardly spare him from his parents’ disappointment.
Food was the one thing that would provide his family moments of solace. Stephen recalls cooking Sunday dinners with his dad, Hack, as a teenager. He would slice chicken and pork with a meat cleaver and chop scallions and other vegetables as his dad’s sous chef. There was never any pressure to hold a meaningful conversation. The boiling water or sizzling vegetables would supply the audio, followed by brief interludes of his dad offering up the next instruction. They could enjoy each other’s company while Stephen learned a new activity. He looked forward to every Sunday.
On special holidays like Chinese New Year or Christmas, the News did their best to remain civil at the dinner table. Those nights, Stephen’s mom, Tiffany, would lavish her family with a hearty hot pot celebration. They’d pick up fresh vegetables and meats from the local Chinese butcher and then cook the food together at the table, enjoying each other’s company. There would be slurping. There would be bubbling. And best of all, there would only be minimal arguing.
By the time he was old enough to travel on his own, he’d spend holidays and school breaks with Stephanie, five years his senior, at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’d relish the buffet of Next Dining Hall, which offered unlimited servings of chicken fingers and french fries. Stephanie would even use her internship money to treat Stephen to fancy dinners in Boston: sushi boats on Newbury Street and a trip to that molecular gastronomy restaurant in Kendall square. They’d end their night with a rolling chair race through the underground tunnels of her campus.
Their mother always envisioned Stephen attending MIT, or a similarly elite institution. And she devised a foolproof plan to secure his acceptance: He would just copy and paste Stephanie’s exact college essay submission. It didn’t matter that the things she wrote would not be true in his case. If it worked once, it would work again. After a tumultuous back and forth, Stephen succumbed to his mother’s plan. At this point, he was mostly resigned from the process. As long as he could get out of Colorado, it didn’t matter where he’d end up.
Around college acceptance time, Stephen and his mother opened the decision emails together. One by one, they read the eleven rejections. A part of him felt vindicated that this mother’s scheme had failed, as he predicted, but all of that was overtaken by guilt. He turned to see his sobbing mother. “I’m sorry.” she murmured. A single acceptance appeared in his inbox, and in the fall of 2017 Stephen would enroll in the Colorado School of Mines. He couldn’t even get out of the state. He also left unfulfilled every wish his mother had for him.
New beginnings
He graduated summa cum laude in December 2019, completing a degree in computer science in two and a half years. He soon followed his sister to the Bay Area and was hired as a level 1 back-end engineer for Deliverr, the same e-commerce shipping company where she works as an engineering manager. Stephen had spent the summer before his senior year interning at Thumbtack, where he became friends with one of the start-up’s in-house chef, Agatha. Agatha was a Chef de Partie at Quince, a three-star Michelin restaurant in San Francisco’s Jackson Square. When Stephen got bored of pushing code, he’d go pick Agatha’s brain. Agatha would prepare the company snacks every Wednesday, and sometimes Stephen would join to help. He’d sprinkle cotija cheese and mayo on corn to perfect her Elote. He’d fire up the big immersion blender to emulsify the date milkshakes. Stephen found himself wanting to spend more time with Agatha than with any of his other colleagues. Once his internship ended, he would still come back to help her on Wednesdays.
But it was when California went into lockdown in March 2020 due to Covid-19 that Stephen finally had the chance to be the chef de cuisine, albeit in his apartment’s narrow kitchen. Some nights, he would make kimchi or tortillas from scratch. When he wanted comfort food that reminded him of home, he’d prepare Bak Kut Teh, or pork bone soup. On a special occasion, he’d make Hainanese chicken. He’d poach a chicken on a low simmer heat for hours with onion and garlic. Then, he’d prepare the rice in the chicken fat and broth, infusing each and every grain with flavor. He started to volunteer at the Berkeley Food Network, an organization that works with wholesale distributors and donors to deliver meals to hungry people. Stephen worked in the warehouse, where he got to operate the forklift. It was then that Stephen realized how vast the power of food was, he says. It’s nourishing, it builds community, it’s a window into one’s culture, and it’s tasty.
All the while, his engineering job was getting more and more frustrating. He felt undervalued by his teammates. When something would break, they’d look to Stephen to fix it, even if it wasn’t within his scope. When a new hire with an atypical coding background came onboard, it was Stephen who spent hours mentoring her. All of this could feel manageable, yet his work seemed to go unnoticed. He felt like a paralyzed bystander as co-workers soared through the ranks for their myopic contributions. The pain of dissatisfaction within him swelled. What if software engineering just isn’t his life’s calling? So, Stephen made a promise to himself. He’s got to quit Deliverr.
An unexpected surprise
A software engineer turned chef? There isn’t exactly a pipeline for a career transition like that. Stephen is keenly aware that the dream sounds a little surreal. Not to mention there’s a deluge of reasons why he shouldn’t do it. It’s certainly not the life his parents envisioned for him. He might even be defying his sister’s wishes. He remembers a conversation they had when he was weighing his post-grad job prospects. Stephen asked Stephanie point blank whether she liked software engineering. “I don’t necessarily love the role,” he recalls that she conceded. “But I like the lifestyle it affords me.”
Contrary to the stereotypical coder hacking away into the early hours of the morning, Stephen works 30 to 35 hours a week. In the pandemic work-from-home culture, he can push his code and take his meetings camera-off, from the comfort of his couch or bed. He even got the green light to move to New York and work completely remotely to explore life in a new city and rekindle old friendships. Working in a restaurant’s kitchen, in-person presence is not only required, but exhausting. It’s hours of standing on your feet with little to no breaks. He would have to pull late nights, spending god knows how long in a windowless, loud room surrounded by burning flames and sharp knives. His chill manager at Deliverr, whom he admires, would likely be replaced by an all-controlling chef de cuisine who would watch his every move.
Then, there are the financial considerations. Stephen would be going from an incredibly affluent lifestyle to a job with a starting salary in minimum-wage territory. When asked about this, he jokingly brushes it off and says, “Well, I have slept on the floor for over a year. I can slum it a bit more.” But this is still a man who has never had to have a budget once since he started working full time. He has paid for two gym memberships so he could rock climb and swim at the pool whenever he wanted. He orders over 10 bagels on the menu at Boychick Bagels in Berkeley, $3 each, to taste-test every one with a couple friends. Stephen worries about his parents too. Before they hang up at the end of a phone call, his dad will ask when Stephen plans to send him money. Stephen feels a cultural duty to eventually support his parents financially once he has enough saved up as his dad is nearing retirement. He feels indebted to them as they financed his education, he says.
Hell, there is even the question of whether he can actually pull this off. No prominent culinary artist has ever told Stephen he’s got chops. He’s only received excitement from Agatha that he may one day follow in her footsteps. Sure, all of his friends and family love his cooking. And many people misook that Mediterranean picnic for a catered meal from a restaurant. But is that enough? And yet, Stephen has imagined this pursuit for far too long to not give it a go.
Stephen thinks of Joann Chang, one of his heroes, who graduated with honors from Harvard in 1991 with a degree in applied mathematics and economics. Falling prisoner to the management consulting track, she ended up at the Monitor Group. She quickly realized the life of PowerPoint slides wasn’t for her. Chang is now a professional baker and owner of the highly successful Boston chain Flour Bakery + Cafe. Stephen can’t help but wonder: If Joann could do it, why couldn’t he? But, like his early memories of food, he sometimes associates this dream of his with shame and guilt. He even worries that his friends and sister will lose respect for him, or think of him as less than. He keeps his dirty little secret to himself.
In early May of this year, Stephen finds a peculiar email in his inbox, with an official letterhead from the CEO of Deliverr. The company is to be acquired by the e-commerce giant Shopify. The valuation? $2.1 billion. He calls up Stephanie late in the night to make sense of everything. She confirms it’s real, and even admits that she had helped work on the acquisition but was forced to keep the news under wraps. Acquisitions can boost stock options substantially. Early employees can strike big. As employee number 54, Stephen can vest his shares for around $200,000. The two get to chatting about life and the future. Stephen asks Stephanie if she will stay at Deliverr. Being a manager has been stressful beyond belief, she tells him. She’ll likely head to another shop sometime next year to return to pure technical-based work since that’s what she’s good at. Stephanie then flips the conversation to Stephen: “So, what about you?”
He gathers his courage. He starts the conversation with “Yeah” really slowly to buy time, something he inadvertently does when he’s contemplating his delivery. And in that moment, for the first time, he confesses his secret of wanting to be a chef. He had rehearsed his talking points. I’m pretty sick of software engineering, he tells her. I really want to try something new. Now that I’ve got this extra security, I figured I’d give it a year and see what I think.
He is about to pause and wait for Stephanie’s reply, but he doesn’t have to. Within the same beat, she quickly responds with something along the lines of “that makes a lot of sense. Go for it!” Stephanie had been suspecting of Stephen’s potential plan for months. She knew how unhappy he had been at Deliverr, but was relieved to hear he wanted to do something about it. “I’m just really proud that he will hopefully go through with it and that he’s got the courage to go through with that career transition, or at least try,” she says later in an interview. And try he will.
As summer turns to fall, Stephen has expedited his plunge into cooking a bit. With the extra financial runway, he is taking plant-based culinary classes 12 hours a week at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. The hope, he says, is that by the time he graduates from school in a year, he will be skilled enough to work in a professional kitchen. And he will be able to quit his coding job. But a feeling of fear still looms over Stephen. He has his sister’s blessing, but can he ever win over the favor of his parents? He walks through how he would tell them. He has to field their every question beforehand and address those in his delivery.
He will do it a year from now, once he’s officially quit. That way he’ll spare himself from months of screaming matches,tears, and lectures on carved-out futures. But this time, he will drive his own narrative. And he might even get the chance to show off his skill and share what he’s learned in culinary school. But inevitably, they will still be upset. They’re Asian, he says!
How will he soften the blow? He has a plan for that too: a check in their name for $100,000 (or something like that, per IRS gift limits), courtesy of the Deliverr Shopify acquisition.
