What Eddie Huang (Still) Can’t Live Without

The Scotch bonnet pepper is still in the kitchen. Our tropical tripe crudo atBaohausbegan with Scotch bonnet pepper. The genesis of that dish and a lot of my dishes featuring pepper begin with Scotch bonnet. It’s the spice level I like. It is unique and incomparable with any other pepper.

Thisspoonis perfect. When you hold this spoon, it is like Thor’s hammer. It is a lightning rod. There’s immense gravity to this thing. It has a different weight than any other spoon. A lot of spoons are quite flimsy in your hand. This spoon is so heavy that I think it awakens something subconscious in this human mind, body, and spirit. And you grip it because you know that if you do not grip this spoon, if you do not hold it with the force it requires, that spoon is gonna hold you. It’s also slightly longer than a regular spoon. And the surface that you pick things up with is wider. It’s perfect for sauces. Many times in a recipe or in a kitchen, people write things out by grams. When the cooks are on the line, I will say in our pickup guides, “whole Kunz spoon,” “half Kunz spoon,” because you are not measuring with the scale when you’re cooking on the line. You just gotta go. This spoon is the measure I base everything off of.

During the pandemic, the things that you needed on your person, like hand sanitizer, exceeded the space in my pockets. And even though I’m a shants guy — I wear huge oversize vintage Comme des Garçons shants — my pants couldn’t hold what I needed to carry, so I started to wear a crossbody bag. I started to wear murses in L.A. because you’re driving so you can have a much more intricate outfit. It makes sense going from car to restaurant to your agency’s valet to wear a purse. In New York, I was wearing my purse for three days and I was like, this is completely incorrect. It doesn’t feel right. In L.A., if you’re in the business, you’re unfortunately blind and shielded to other socioeconomic levels of society, so a man like myself can carry a Goyard bag and be like,It’s fine, what a wonderful day!

When I’m on the train in New York or walking around, you interact with multiple layers of society, and you see in people’s faces the pressure and the toil, and people are walking around with things in the “Thank you very much” bodega bag. In New York, for me, it is inappropriate and gauche to carry a purse. Stone Island is still a very, very, very nice brand, but it makes sense. It’s utilitarian, the fabric is technical. This bag, you just smush it on the train, you can smush it past people, you can sweat in the kitchen with it. I can fly into the kitchen, make a sauce, keep my bag on, and then go sit down. I forget it’s on me. Sometimes I’ll have a Kunz spoon and a small knife in there. If I don’t wanna carry my whole knife roll, I’ll put half the knife roll into the bag. Being in New York and being a chef, you just need a bag like this that works.

This is my ideal shoe. It’s a Y2K shoe, like early techno, early rave kind of style. It’s meant for walking. I like it a lot because it’s just versatile. It can get dirty and it still looks good. It’s wide, it’s balanced. You can stand in it for a long time. I change outfits a lot. I go to the gym during the day. I shower, I go cook in the restaurant, I may have date night. I need a shoe that I can wear for all three outfits. It blends with Japanese menswear, it blends with my workout clothes, and it blends with work pants, a jacket, and a T-shirt in the kitchen. You can go to the club, you can go to dinner, you can go to work, you can go to the gym, and you don’t have to flip everything else. Sometimes if you have a very contemporary menswear-y shoe on, you’re gonna look very silly at work or in the gym. The ones I wear now are gray and white and black, and they’re like $89 from Foot Locker. I have seven pairs, different colors.

The Gatorade Mashup is great. It’s Glacier Cherry and Glacier Freeze. I saw Karl-Anthony Towns drinking it postgame during the playoffs, and he madethis reaction, like, “Ooh, that’s good.” People were curious if he had been paid to do it because Anthony Edwards did the same thing. I was like, look, Kat is my guy. He is my son’s favorite Knick. So I went to the bodega with our chef de cuisine, Ray, and we were like, “Let’s check this out.” And literally one sip, our face was the same. We were just like, “This might be the greatest beverage ever created.” So then we made a shochu cocktail at work based on it. It is hands-down my favorite nonalcoholic beverage of all time. I drink it all day. It’s become a problem.

[Editor’s note: This variety pack includes six bottles of the Glacier Cherry–Glacier Freeze flavor.]

I’m at the baths all the time, probably three to five times a week, and I always see guys wearing the hat. Then a few weeks ago, I was shooting a pilot for A24 in the sauna, and we were doing a scene with my wife, who wanted a hat because she thought it was cute. The owner of the baths, Dmitry, gave her one and then I was like, “Let me try the hat too.” It’s a fun look. It was at first a fashion thing. Then we went into the Russian room, where it’s like 200 degrees, and usually I’m in there with no hat and I don’t mind it. But then I was like,Wait, the top of your head doesn’t burn, but also, because heat is escaping through your head and your feet at all times, it insulates everything. It kept all the heat in like a lampshade, and it was a nice steadier heat and significantly more intense but in a consistent, comforting way. And I was like,I don’t totally understand the science behind this, but this hat completely changed my shvitz.

This is my favorite wine to serve with our food at Baohaus. If you’re going to eat Sichuan food, Thai food, Vietnamese food, Taiwanese food, any Asian food that is fresh, hot, and perhaps slightly sweet, this wine is gonna bang with it. This wine totally cuts across it. High acid, high sugar, but not much else. It’s just off the charts. What this winemaker’s done is he took one element and turned it all the way to 10,000 and then left the rest of the wine just right in the middle or even below what you usually would expect. You don’t really notice the fruit notes. You don’t notice minerality. It’s just extremely high acid and a sugar that registers negative space everywhere else around and then your food pairs really well.

Sometimes wine will fight food. With French and Japanese food, it’s very easy to pair wine because French and Japanese food want to accent each ingredient. The dishes are very composed and you can see each part many times and that is the goal of that cuisine, besides Burgundian food. I tend to like Burgundian French country food more because the philosophy behind it is much more akin to Chinese food, Indian food, Thai food, Korean food, where I don’t want you to sit down and be like,Oh, those are ramps, those are spring leaks. I want you to be like,Oh, that is big-plate chicken. That is one completely new flavor that belongs to this dish. You should not notice each single ingredient in the sound. In that way, I would say French and Japanese food is jazz, and I would say Chinese, Indian, Korean food, it’s orchestra.

Jing Gao of Fly By Jing is amazing. I met Jing on the Shanghai episode ofHuang’s Worldyears ago, and we stayed friends. She’s one of those people you can just tell is genuinely curious about things. If you’re friends with Jing, you will be surprised over the years by all of her interests and how deep it goes and how astute her knowledge is. Then randomly I got a post sent to me by the algorithm about Chinese Bazi, which is our astrological system. It’s something I studied a lot as a child. I found it very, very interesting as a child because there was a famous Chinese daoist face reader who came to my Chinese school and picked me out and predicted some things in my life. So from a young age I realized that there are things we do not understand about the world, and I liked exploring it through the system of Bazi. As I got older and began dating, everyone wanted to see each other’s charts. I got much more into western astrology because that’s what the people I dated understood and that’s the prism through which they view spirituality. I know a lot about Bazi, but I kept it to myself because I had nobody to talk to or share it with.

And then I see this post, and I’m like,Wait a second, this is Jing’s account, and it didn’t register because usually her account is all Fly By Jing spices. I tried the reading and I have to tell you, this is the most accurate astrological reading I have ever had. It is extremely thorough. I’ve had readings done by very famous astrologers that everybody knows. Hands down, Jing is the absolute No. 1. I highly encourage people to get a reading now because she’s gonna get big.

Every day starts with this machine. I drink espresso and my wife drinks cappuccino. It takes a full three hours to figure out at first. I remember the first night we set it up, it was 6 p.m., but I was so excited to have a new thing. I drank probably 17 espressos that night. I was completely cracked out. But it becomes a meditative thing. It’s very special. I truly, truly, even on my worst days, enjoy waking up and making espresso. I would say I’m slightly an addictive personality. I have friends that are full-on addicts and they go from drugs to jiujitsu, then the sauna, then tennis. I wish that they would just get a La Marzocco Linea Mini because I do think the repetitive exercise ritual with the sound of the beans grinding and the humming of the machine — if you’re in any way a neurotic, anxious person or an addict or have had anger-management issues, this thing is a great way to regulate emotion in the morning. Or if you just like coffee. But for me, it’s the ritual. I really get in the zone. Even when I’m really frustrated with my relationship at home, I go make coffee, I watch the beans, and I’m like,If you’re still angry after making coffee, say something, but if not, you’re fine.

This is my first work of fiction. With nonfiction, I dive in and I have instincts but I have to kind of like short-circuit and curb those instincts and really think about how other people are going to feel. I think a lot of times my emotions and revelations are compromised, and the truth actually has to be molded, shaped, and sanded down a lot more in nonfiction. When I write fiction, it’s informed by the life that I’ve lived. It’s informed by the emotions I’ve felt and the things I’ve experienced. I only write about things I know. But then there is this unlimited, incredible freedom to go where the character wants to go. And when I write fiction, I very much put myself in the head of the character. I lock myself up for 12 to 16 hours on end, and I go. I have no idea where it’s gonna go, but I follow what the character does in situations, and there isn’t anyone over my shoulder that’s like, “That’s not what happened.” And I’m like,This is what’s gonna happen, and I think you get closer to the truth. There’s so many things I’ve never said to my mother in real life outside of an argument, but I was able to say it in this novel.

The book is really everything. It’s really me with my pants down being like, “This is why I am the way I am.” This is how I feel about family. These are my beliefs about love. All of my feelings are there. All of my insecurities, all of the things I battled, it’s there, but then I let it go and I let it bring this character to life. The crazy thing with writing is literally, once you say it out loud, even standing behind a character, you feel like you can finally shed that skin and become a new person. I think everyone has something that they can pull from this book. It’s fun, it’s honest, and I think in the end it’s very truthful. It’s a very truthful telling of what it feels like to fall in love and then what you have to do to stay in love.