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| Last year's Anniversary Buffet |
Here's the story of how Thai Orchid Cafe came to be.
GROWING UP AT THE SMILE OF SIAM
It started when I was 7 years old and my parents decided to open a business of their own. The business was the Smile of Siam Restaurant, the first Thai restaurant in Frankfort. After a couple of years of hiring help and the headaches that go along with it, they decided to run the restaurant themselves, just the two of them. That's right, it became a truly family-run business, which means whenever my sister and I weren't in school, we were at the restaurant.
My first job in the restaurant was refilling water. I remember I wasn't strong enough to pour the pitcher one-handed so I used two hands to slow pour water for our customers. Only a year or so after, I started manning the cash register. After school, my mom would pick us up and then we'd do our homework at the restaurant while my mom and dad continued to work and get ready for the dinner shift. Even at the cash register, I would do my homework, while checking customers out. Sometimes people would ask if I needed to get my Dad to run the credit card (this is when we had the manual sliding credit card contraption). I would raise an eyebrow, give them a snarky look and proceed to run their card. I liked showing people that I was perfectly capable of processing their payments, even calculating all their change in my head.
As I grew into my teenage years, I felt more and more like there were bigger, more exciting things for me to be doing than working at the restaurant. Everyone else was out having fun and I was stuck working all Friday nights and all summer. I grew weary of the monotony of work and the intense labor that was involved. On top of that, I was expected to maintain a 4.0+ GPA in school.
My parents sold the restaurant in 2000 during my senior year of high school. After 10 years in the business, mostly doing the work all themselves, the restaurant life was wearing on them mentally and physically. To be honest, at the time, I was somewhat relieved. I had felt that the restaurant had held me back in so many ways, that I had missed out on so much. Now, 10 years later, I couldn't have been more grateful for my years of working in the restaurant. I have my parents to thank for everything.
COLLEGE DAYS
As I entered college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I swore that I wouldn't get a restaurant job. I was done with that life. I wanted to move on.
Throughout college, I had jobs in the music department, the Study Abroad Office, and a medical company selling special plastic surgery sutures (random). Although each place was fun, it lacked something that I craved. I wasn't sure what it was. My academic interests were all over the place too. Upon graduation, my degree was in Journalism and Public Relations, only after shifting from Biology/Pre-Med to Business to Undecided to Graphic design.
My real interest in opening a restaurant sparked when I became involved with the campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity. One of our fundraisers for a work trip to Thailand was a 'Thai Night" event. People would pay $10 to have dinner and a Thai Fashion & Culture show. It was a big hit and I put myself in charge to cooking Thai food for over 100 people with a crew of college kids. The whole process, from planning to shopping to cooking to serving, was all so maddening, chaotic and exhausting. I LOVED IT! The feeling I had at the end of that night, I wanted to replicate all the times. I figured a restaurant would do that for me.
The idea of opening a restaurant stayed with me even after I got my first REAL job upon graduating from UNC-CH. I moved back to Lexington with my sister and her husband and got a job working for Lexington Habitat for Humanity. The marketing job I had was a good starting point, but I still felt that the 9-5 office job, just wasn't for me. I quit my job a little after a year there and went to India for a month for a tsunami relief Habitat building project. While there, I feel like I found my true self...along with finding a husband (another volunteer)!
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| Mike and I having a 'quick meal' in India |
Upon returning, I had no job, no money, no place of my own to live---but I did have a big dream. The restaurant! I wasn't sure where it would be or how it would happen, but I knew I had to take action to get there.
We found a place we liked in a shopping center near UK and downtown. And so the dream began coming together. Building Thai Orchid Cafe from scratch is hands down one of the hardest, most difficult challenges of my life, but we did it! My parents were the foundation of the whole project, and I was a sponge soaking up everything they knew about the business. And here we are today, still working hard together to make the restaurant a success. Four years feels so long, yet like no time at all. Happy Birthday, TOC!
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