Apartment Café: Fortunes and Flat Whites

On a rainy day in February, my friend and I decided to host a very cozy apartment café.

The idea, like all my best misadventures, came from the internet. There's this New York-based foodfluencer who makes these ornate, absurdly delicious-looking pastries, bakes about eight of them, then invites seven other foodfluencers over for a potluck-style apartment café where everyone tries a little bit of what everyone else has made.

What a great idea. And what a wonderful way to eat more pastries, which is what life is all about.

I was not going to New York anytime soon, so the only way to get invited to one of these was to host one myself. And importantly, my place is tiny. So more importantly, I was going to host it at my friend Sara's place. Her apartment is gigantic — by Hong Kong standards, palatial. If my place is a single-family home in the California suburbs, hers is Hearst Castle. You get the idea.

Thus, a plan was hatched: Sara provides the vibes and the venue. I provide the food and drinks.

The thing about city living in Hong Kong is that it's really easy to just go buy something and bring it. But I genuinely miss that home-style energy of making something from scratch and showing up with it. So about 90% of what we served at the café was homemade. It was an undertaking. We had about fifteen people — close friends only — and we pulled it off.

Every hatched plan, for me, starts with a spreadsheet. People have given me shit for this but I am firmly Team Monica from Friends, because I believe people can have fun because it's organized.

Savory. Sweet. Tart. The thing about apartment cafés and baked goods — at least from what I saw on Ryan's Substack — is that they tend to skew overly sweet. And for Asians, that's just too much sugar. "Not too sweet, okay?" Without a spreadsheet, that balance of savory, sweet, and tart wouldn't have been obvious until it was too late. This wasn't a wu-wei moment — I wasn't going to "be like water" and make whatever the heck I wanted.

This was intentional. Thought out. Curated — shoutout to the this issue where I talked about curation. "Backyard Izakaya should have more of a curated vibe rather than just things thrown together," I muttered, as I vehemently defended my spreadsheets.

The prep itself ended up being a tad chaotic, mainly because it had been a busy week for both Sara and me.

We didn't finalize the plan until Thursday night. Friday, we started working at 5 PM and didn't stop until 2 AM. Saturday — the actual day of the event — we were back at it by 7 AM to do the final touches before everyone arrived at noon.

One of the reasons I wanted to do an apartment café in the first place is that most of the menu is baked. And if you've noticed with bakeries, they start early and end early — ovens on at 4 or 5 AM, doors open at 9AM, closed by 2PM (or even earlier if they sell out). My naïve idea was that we could do most of the work on Friday, wake up Saturday, bake a few final things, and coast into the afternoon. Oh how that did not pan out.

So many things went wrong. There was a broken glass. There was a foster puppy who was not potty trained and ended up making a bit of a mess on the premises.

And on top of all of that, we had to figure out how Sara's oven worked. Little did we know it was technically advanced — there's a difference between convection and conventional settings, among other modes we were not prepared for. (For the uninitiated: convection ovens circulate hot air with a fan, which means everything bakes faster and hotter. We were not uninitiated. We were just not paying attention.)

This resulted in some burnt batches that, hypothetically, if they'd worked the first time, wouldn't have required a second or third attempt. The costs added up. We ordered from foodpanda — basically the Uber Eats of Hong Kong — so many times for eggs, flour, butter, everything you can think of, that it became almost comical. Every time the doorbell rang, it was either a guest or another delivery.

It was a cold day, and people had nowhere else to go but inside. In a small, controlled environment — about fifteen people — it's easier to make real connections, friends bringing friends. Nowadays we've all felt the impact of in-person events becoming rarer, and meeting a friend of a friend is always a better connection than meeting someone online. It was cozy and warm and just over six hours of exactly what we needed.

We had a tarot card reader, though she was only available for three hours — she ended up staying for four. Every guest got their fortune read. Every guest, that is, except the hosts. So I'll have to go back and get mine next time.

Absolutely. I'd say this time was mainly a test run, and the test was worth it because it pushed my abilities. Baking for yourself — making a small batch of egg muffins for four, six — it's okay to mess up. Maybe they come out a little uneven, and that's fine, they're still perfectly good to eat. But when you're serving other people, you hold yourself to a higher standard. If you're taking it seriously, that bar goes up. My morning sticky buns can come out all shapes and sizes, and that's fine. But if I were doing this on a commercial basis? Too inconsistent.

I'd recommend it. I'd recommend anyone just invite people over. A friend of mine in the US mentioned that there aren't as many house parties anymore — people have decentered the living room. It's not as popular in the modern 2020s home design. But I've always liked them. I've always liked a dining room where you can have your friends over for a nice dinner. It can be casual. It's home cooking. Inviting someone into your space and feeding them — what's a better expression of love than that?

All of this happened right when unsolicited missiles were being launched. It’s mid-March now, and 2026 is getting more chaotic by the week. So for those six hours on a rainy, drizzly February Saturday — I’m thankful that people could come, enjoy themselves, and forget the weight of the world for a little while.

I don't think that's escapism. I think in a day and age where everything already demands so much of you — and then you open your phone and see everything happening in real time — you need pockets of refuge like an apartment café. Small ones. Warm ones. I just hope you can find yours, somewhere in your community, wherever that might be. And if you can't find one, make your own.

For those of you who want to emulate our apartment cafe goods, check out the recipes we used below: 

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L