we opened a 5-star restaurant in our college home

Honey boy is community. It's a foundation, and it's intentional in the way it brings people together through food.

I'm Foy, I'm Ware, and this is Honeypoi.

What we're kind of doing right now is we have the set menu and we've talked about what flavors and what story we kind of want to tell through the flavors. But it's actually time for recipe testing.

So we started off by testing our main idea, which was a marinated chicken on top of Thai sticky rice. But as we continued working, we decided to deviate from this idea.

I'm low key freestyling because I read the recipe and I did stuff out of order, but, like, it's fine. So we just want to get it that brown color.

Our initial testing helped us to create two separate dishes.

The Thai tea infused sticky rice.

And this allowed us to be more flexible and creative in what flavors we presented to people and how exactly they experienced it.

Mash collard greens, chicken, cilantro, lime. And that's what we're thinking as a good entree. Day two of testing, we're making crispy.

Arborio rice with mushrooms on top and.

Limoncello blueberry tiramisu roasted.

Grab a few things. Right now, we're making a blueberry compote. For the tiramisu, I mix blueberries, lemon, vanilla extract, and maple syrup. And we're just putting it on over low heat. Then we're going to let it reduce in between. Yeah. Okay. This is a rough rendition of the blueberry tiramisu. On this side, you can see there's plain whipping cream in the blueberry compote layers, and then two layers of lady fingers in between. Lemon zest on top. The right side is blueberry whipped cream, so we're gonna taste at the end to see which one tastes better. Cheers.

Too much cream. I like this one way better. Lucy, try the other half way better. We're in the car with Vincent. We're meeting Jorge and Harrison at Holy's. We had to make a stop because Vincent had some supplies he wanted to drop off. We have the list. I'm gonna distribute. Boy, grocery shopping. Welcome to holies. Harrison are sourcing our main dish, which are chicken thighs. Yeah. Holy's has the best price in Pittsburgh.

We're really looking for equally sized producer. Really trying to estimate, like, how much could one squash feed? How many people? How much food will people be eating across all the different courses that we're serving?

Thank you so much.

Oh, this is perfect.

The strip is strip Was perfect because it had all these ethnic grocery stores that could cater to a lot of the specific ingredients and small little things that we needed in each one of our dishes.

We're ready to check out.

I think the hall is going to cost $200. 150.

193.

26.

We're done.

We're done. I've always loved to cook, and I love building community. So this is the most organic way for it to manifest.

I enjoy cooking because I feel like it brings people together. I remember growing up, my mom would always cook my favorite dishes, and then we would have a bunch of people come over for, like, lunar New Year Christmas, and it would be everyone gathering over food. So I think I've always associated food with people, community, and the people I love.

I'm head chef, so I help with menu planning out, menu, ingredient shopping.

I'm co chef and branding, so I help a lot in the kitchen with ingredient prep, cooking, baking, everything.

I'm the line chef. I just do everything around the kitchen. Yeah, that's it. Use candy and the lemon peel for the tiramisuk lady. We also have to do the meringue. I just realized over here, we have a La Loma brown sugar breadcrumb. The inspiration for this menu was definitely the season. It's spring, and Pittsburgh hasn't had that good of weather recently. So it's kind of a way to, I don't know, bring the colors of spring or the colors that we're supposed to see during the season. Here, the menu items and the dishes kind of just naturally formed through conversation, and then it ended up being this, like, Italian Asian, Mediterranean fusion that is super sick.

Everyone's hands, bodies, minds were tired, but it was necessary, and we were ready. Someone was detected with her coat leading up to the event. I was more curious than excited. I really wanted to see if we could pull it off.

But we were lucky. We have a village of people that continually support us.

We had a jazz band shout out to Audrey. The actual prep process for the main wasn't difficult. It was quite easy. And that's what made day of service super hard. Everything had to be made on site because we wanted it to be as fresh as possible.

Everything's going great. We're on the dessert now. I think people are really enjoying the food. I just had a plate because we hadn't eaten all day. Pretty good. We're gonna go talk to the guests.

Dinner one just finished. One out of three. 33% on the way. Done. Hey, guys.

We just wanted to say thank you for coming. We had so much fun attending this event. Big thank you to Har and Vincent.

Big shout out to Floyd for making all of this possible. And stay tuned for future events. So good he did. So.

I felt happy that the first session was over. I felt a little bit of accomplishment, but I didn't want to speak too soon.

Welcome. It's day two. It's currently 3:30pm so one and a half hours until we start serving. I think we're on track to get there.

After yesterday's session, we learned so much on how to work efficiently and work towards implementing it.

30 more minutes. We got this.

So we're much more organized today compared to yesterday, which is good. Appetizers are about to go out. The first one is Rainbow beats Lap It. It was probably one of the best meals I had last summer in Seattle when I first landed. And we're excited to take you, to take you all on a journey tonight through flavors, cultures, and stories. So enjoy.

This was a braised mushroom methi on top of crispy fried rice. It was definitely inspired by the Japanese dishes that we've had before. This was a handmade laminated spinach ravioli with Yukon and sweet potatoes.

Okay, so for this next dish, we have an acorn mash with chicken on top. And then for the vegetarian options, this is same thing, but we've braised a.

Big mushroom umami translates to pleasant, savory taste. And that's exactly what this dish was. It was a savory take on your typical sweet rice. This was a limoncello tiramisu layered with mascarpone and blueberry compote.

First round, successful.

We absolutely rocked the second session, definitely.

From the day before.

We took all these notes, we internalized them, and we delivered. It went so smooth, and at this point, I was having a lot of fun.

It's going great.

We just yummy.

All the food.

Everything's done. I feel very accomplished.

Thank you for coming.

Lucy, what.