Finding the Right Fit

It's been a December and almost half of January since my last post.

And I've been doing almost everything and anything other than make meals. But don't worry—we're so back in 2026. It's been a busy holiday season with a 10-day December family holiday in Hawaii and another 10-day January friends holiday in Japan. Oh, the joys of funemployment.

In my travels, I was lucky enough to spend extended time with friends from college and explore lesser-known areas of Tokyo, like Hayama.

Traveling with old friends is one of life's greatest pleasures because not only do you get to visit cool places and have interesting experiences, you get to have all those mini conversations you've been missing in the years you haven't seen them. All that time waiting for a delayed flight at the airport due to inclement weather gets filled with conversations about how you saw the world then and how you see it now. It might seem meaningless, but honestly, those conversations are what make a trip the trip.

It was the real-life scenario of the classic "airport test" from consulting interviews: "Would I want to be stuck at an airport with this candidate for hours?" If you can have fun at an airport with nothing to do but wait and chug some Hokkaido strawberry chūhai, you can have fun anywhere.

And what did I learn between all those chūhai? The importance of putting together an outfit.

My friend Justin has great style—and I mean that not in the sense of designer bags or clout-chasing brands, but when he walks into a room in an outfit he's put together, you can definitely tell: this man has thought about how each one part fits together, the sum greater than its parts.

We did a lot of shopping on this trip, and a lot of vintage clothes thrifting. Myself, I'm not a big thrifter, but part of being on vacation is doing something you normally wouldn't do. So accompanying my friends to these thrift shops was illuminating—honestly, they're places I would never go to on my own. But seeing what's there and trying to figure out how to piece together an outfit makes you consider things like: Will this go with what I already have in my closet? Where could I wear this? On what occasion?

If you're looking through a rack of clothes and something hits you—that gut reaction of "oh, that's cool"—those are probably good instincts to follow. Then you build an outfit around that.

When we went shopping in Sapporo, Hokkaido, I hit the North Face outlet trying to figure out what type of puffer jacket would shield me from the cold. I landed on this olive green puffer, and as I put it on, it looked exactly right. It fit with what I came into the store wearing—a shoulder bag in olive green with tannish orange accents and khaki fleece pants. The puffer just worked with everything else I had in my closet, so price be damned, yes, I am buying this. Plus, tax-free. Great.

As important as it is to hone in on your passions and do one thing well—for me, obviously, it's food and cooking—it's actually equally important to do something adjacent, like vintage thrifting. Because what I learned about putting together an outfit is also relevant to what I want to do with Backyard Izakaya.

I want to put together experiences that fit into this online publication, where it's about curation. I never intended this to just be an online newsletter, but a brand—about taking disparate topics and finding a thread among them. It's about taking things that you would think normally wouldn't fit together at first, but somehow when you lay it all out and the focus becomes just right, it eventually fits in frame perfectly.

So that is the "fit" I'm trying to put together in my head these past couple months —what would make sense, what would be congruent with what I've been building here for the past year. I came down to two main tenets so far:

Similar to selecting each piece of clothing to see if it fits together, curation is the thing that's lost today in an algorithm-driven world. Having a good eye and varied experiences is what makes the curator interesting. And the belief is that if I'm interested in something, probably you'll find it interesting too.

You can't truly understand the weight of fabric, the cut of a jacket, the way something moves with your body through a screen. Just like you can't taste the char on char siu or smell the steam from a dai pai dong stall through an app, I always believed in-person experiences are what make things stick. Digital content is as abundant as always, but having a meal with someone, that memory lasts a lot longer than any podcast could.

Which is a very long way of saying: I'm happy to announce that I'm planning to start food tours in Hong Kong this year.

The first few will probably be with family and friends (which you all are), so I'm trying to figure out how to put together an in-person food tour that actually fits—like that olive green jacket—with everything else Backyard Izakaya stands for.

Feel free to fill out the following link so I can let you know more plans. Dates are still TBD and might even be catered to specific people based on what they're passionate about and what they want to experience in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has many attractions, but one thing everyone always says about Hong Kong is that the food is great. So let me curate for you. Let me bring you on an experience that's curated, that's in-person, and also fun. I think fun is missing in the world these days. Let's bring that back.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L