Just Start, Do Your Best and Keep Going

During the past decade, I owned and operated a fast-casual restaurant. The food was customizable Asian noodle boxes, basically like Subway or Chipotle but for noodles. Customers chose their fresh ingredients and watched as they were cooked in front of them in a wok. When the pandemic hit, I had to lay off most of the staff, leaving only my main cook, Macario.

Throughout 2020 and early 2021, we were only open for curbside pickup. I took charge of assembling the orders before cooking them, washing the woks, and packaging the orders after they were cooked. Meanwhile, Macario was responsible for cooking using four woks simultaneously!

Even though we didn't have to serve people in-store, the rush of orders still arrived all at the same time, as if customers had conspired to place them in synchronicity. Dozens at the same time. On top of the incoming orders, I had all the problems of running a restaurant that was burning cash on my mind, so I tended to get stressed sometimes.