We’re following along as Saturday Dumpling Co. launches their first restaurant in the former Glam Dolls Donuts space in Northeast Minneapolis. Last time, we looked at how they’ve had to refine their dreams and ask for help.
For this installment, we’re talking about how Peter Bian and Linda Cao have dealt with the mental health challenges that go with launching a small, self-funded business.
The Mental Health Component
So this is October. First, let’s talk about construction updates. Are we getting closer?
Linda Cao: We are six weeks out!
Peter Bian: It’s insane. We just looked at the Gantt chart and November 6th is our final inspection with the city.
LC: I think that’s a Wednesday. If all goes as planned, we’d then have to move all of our stuff from Dots over to the new restaurant. So we’re also trying to figure out how to back into that timeline: When is our last drop at Dots? Is it the last weekend in October or do we keep going until we can’t anymore? It’s really tricky with moving an existing business and timing the start with all of your employees. We can’t just take two weeks off to do admin stuff because we have responsibilities and people that are on the payroll that need to get paid. It would be great if we could just take one last break and just relax for 24 hours before we’re in it for the next six months. But we can’t. So we think that we’re going to keep running production, doing all the things that we’re currently doing. When we get approved, the following weekend will be our last back at Dots. Then we’ll use that whole week with our new team and move into the new space. So we all get familiar with everything together.
PB: So everything is moving forward. No major hiccups, we have a hood. It looks like a kitchen.
LC: The front door got put in, we have steps. Oh, and then last night, the biggest thing we did not account for or realize is that there’s a major holiday happening in China right now.
PB: The Mid-Autumn Festival
LC: Kind of a big thing. The whole country is shut down for 10 days, and it really messed up our schedule for deliveries, for all our furniture, our packaging, disposables boxes. They’re estimating the earliest we would receive it is November 15th, which is not ideal, because it’s the day before we’re supposed to have the Grand Opening. So with a 13-hour difference time difference, Peter was on the phone very late last night, trying to operationally figure out logistics.
PB: And there’s no rush shipping, because it’s all just sitting on a container. In the ocean. But we’re figuring it out. We reached out to restaurant friends, we have tables and chairs we can use. Might look a little kind of hodgepodge, but you know.
So you’ve got your timeline mapped out and you’re working the plan, hoping that nothing else like an international holiday pops up. Are you close enough to think about hiring?
PB: We do have like a really small team and when we open up, the restaurant production is going to increase it. We need line cooks. We need more production people, we need a GM, and we need a kitchen manager. Right now we’re just reaching out to people in our network to get candidates. But we don’t want to hire too early because we don’t have the hours to give, and it’s not fair to just put them on standby mode. At the same time if somebody’s really good you don’t want them to go away, right? You know you want to retain them. So It’s a little cat and mouse right now, but we’ve got a pretty good list of people for opening.
It sounds like there are still uncertainties, but that it’s getting more real, like you’re coming closer to the reality of it all. Perfect time to talk about mental health, yeah?
LC: We did have a quick check-in this morning on the way here to just to talk about how much do we talk about this? I have so many thoughts about mental health in the industry in general, right? It could be all over the place, but anything we do talk about, we hope that it’s really good for people to understand how tough it is to do all of this, in any business, but especially in this industry.
PB: A little background for me, I kind of thrive off of stress. I like a deadline. That’s been my MO since high school for projects and whatnot. So cooking and setting a menu, it’s always kind of 11th hour for me, that’s just been my speed. But lately, with opening up the restaurant, there has been too many things that require my attention and I physically just don’t have enough time. But I didn’t realize that until we actually had a little bit of a break.
It was the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago earlier this year. We took a flight down to Chicago and met up with a couple of restaurant friends. It was a good time to take a break because we had just signed the lease, we were still figuring things out with our architect. We hadn’t really nailed down the design, yet, and we were kind of in flux with things not looking the way we wanted them to look. It felt like we weren’t capturing what SDC was, what it really needed to look like. So that was in the back of our minds the whole time.
The stress had been piling up from the beginning of the year, and I thought it was going to help to have this small work vacation. But it clearly didn’t. On the way back home I literally had a panic attack. On the plane. To the point where we were taxiing and about to take off, and I had to flag down the flight attendant and say, “I am freaking out, I’m not gonna freak out 10,000 feet in the air. You gotta take me back to the gate.” I looked at Linda and said we’re gonna have to drive home.
LC: He’d had a mini panic attack the day before, where we were in an Uber, and we had to pull off over at the next exit, off the highway so he could just walk it off. He had one on the way to the show, but all day at the show was completely fine. So I thought, okay, let’s just go to the airport extra early. We were there eight hours before our flight time.
PB: And there was a wall of tornadoes happening between Chicago and Minneapolis so it was delay, delay delay.
LC: Peter and I love to travel, we fly all the time but for whatever reason, the past five flights that we’d taken had major turbulence due to weather issues. So it didn’t help that this was happening, and our flight was delayed, and he was already in the state of mind. We walked around. We went to the lounge, we Googled all the things to prevent or to stop a panic attack we researched it all. But we finally got on and thought, it’s just 45 minutes we can do this.
PB: The wheels started moving and I knew I had to get off.
What does it feel like?
PB: Cold sweat. Shortness of breath. It feels like the world is crushing in on you. It feels like you’re gonna pass out without really passing out. It would be easier if I just did! But you feel trapped, like there’s no escape. So they had to go back to the gate and we got off.
LC: So by this time it’s 11pm, and we decided to just rent a car and drive because we had an event booked the next day that we had to get back for. But of course, because of the restaurant show, all the cars were gone. After midnight we finally found a car, we drove to Milwaukee and slept for a few hours at Peter’s brother’s place. We got up at 5am, drove home and right to our event.
And I’m sure you were wondering, was this just a perfect storm of timing and stress, or is this the new normal?
PB: It’s kind of the new normal.
LC: Yeah, sad to report.
PB: I’ve been sitting up at night and wondering why this is going on, without any professional intervention yet (which is something that I’m gonna go seek out) I’ve kind of just come down to: I’ve never opened up a restaurant before. Or anything like a project this big and all-consuming that is very capital intensive. You know, we have our life savings on the line, everything that we’ve saved up, and we’re playing with our friends and families money. And there are a lot of people looking to us, we’re responsible for a lot of people, like our employees. And so all of that stress just kind of compounded and it just feels like something I can’t get out of. There’s no back door.
And so now, I know when I get into situations like a slow elevator or even like getting trapped in traffic, it feels like I’m a mouse looking for like an escape and there just isn’t any. And that’s when this panic starts setting in. It does happen a lot more, but now that I’ve nailed down my triggers, I can kind of control the situation a little bit better. Maybe I’ll stay a little bit after traffic dies down and then I’ll go home.
Man, that’s hard. Linda, how are you coping with that?
LC: It’s tricky. I think that it’s so complex navigating through not only being business partners, but also life partners. This is a whole new thing. Both of us have a laundry list of things that we’re scared, worried, or anxious about, but I don’t necessarily want to dump those things onto Peter. But I also need an outlet. How do we not spiral? But we both need to be able to talk to other people and make it work for there to be balance. So that’s really hard. But one thing that has been really helpful to witness is when people in the industry talk to each other. Someone says they used to get panic attacks and everyone’s like, that’s so normal, when I opened my first restaurant, I had these exact same things happen. I was on a plane and I had to go hang out in the back where like the flight attendants usually sit. It’s great to be able to commiserate, but also, it’s not healthy, this isn’t normal. It shouldn’t be normalized. It shouldn’t be, oh that’s just how it is.
So that’s tough for me, and it’s also just tough in general to see your partner suffer so much and not have the ability to just fix it. It’s scary because I really need my partner in this. We started this together, we wanted to get into this together. I need him here.
PB: It’s just been eye-opening to be in the industry for three years and getting to know restaurateurs, seeing what it takes to open a restaurant. I mean, from the outside as a consumer, it seems pretty magical, right? Some chefs are elevated to the status now where you’re like local celebrities right? But you don’t see the hardships and the ugliness of the day-to-day. It’s super stressful, and the margins are really, really thin, the work is hard, it’s hot, you have a lot of people to be responsible for, and it is really, really stressful. There’s no way to foresee all that can happen.
You can’t really know it until you’re in it. But what you’re saying is really interesting, because I think you have to project the cool kid life, you have to make it fun and awesome so that people will pay attention and come eat some dumplings. But the hard stuff faces inward. And I know some restaurant people don’t want to talk about it in case it turns people off. So I want to thank you for being so honest about it all.
LC: It was always talked about around the periphery, where you knew chefs who would leave the industry because it just got to be too much. There was a lot of pressure and toxic kitchen culture in the past that has come to light, but we knew those things only on a high level, not nearly like the intimate details and intricacies that we do know now going through this process. And we know that burnout is real. You see people who leave the industry, or even just find a different path in the food world, and they look so much healthier. They look like they’re getting better sleep, they have more normalized hours.
It’s crazy, right?
LC: Even at lunch yesterday we were feeling like it was a good day, up until we got the news about the shipping issues. And Peter said, maybe it’s like a bad breakup where you look back on it fondly years later, and you’re like, it wasn’t that bad.
Well, it’s birth. So there you go, you’re birthing your restaurant. Like that is not always fun. But the end result can be really great. And then, down the road you think: I want to open another restaurant!
PB: We’ll see!
Stay tuned as we ramp this up and go to weekly installments. Next week we’ll talk about all the external work they’ve had to do to get their dumplings out there, from pop-ups to the membership do’s and don’ts.