Spice Up Your Small Business with Wong Fu Productions | Squarespace Next Chapter (Ep. 5)

Hey everyone! So in case you didn't know by now, I opened a cafe. Um, it's one of the most challenging things I've ever done in my life, and I wanted to take you through part of that process through this short series. Special thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and supporting this journey. For anyone who's been thinking about starting a cafe like me, launching a new business venture, or making a big transition, Squarespace can help you as you embark on your next chapter and help you grow your online presence. I hope you guys enjoy this look at how Popomofo Cafe came to be. So Bopomofo Cafe is a brand new cafe here in the San Gabriel Valley, and it's been a passion project between Eric and myself for like at least like 3-some years. Bopomofo is actually the first 4 symbols of like the Mandarin phonetic alphabet. It's basically like saying ABCD in Chinese. That's kind of like the whole theme of our cafe and menu and the vibe, like a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of appreciating the culture that we came from and mixing it with, like, our American heritage as well.

Yeah, we had zero food experience. I think my love for food and hospitality is kind of like what I count as food experience. Yeah, I know how to, like, make a steak.

That's not food experience. That's like— everyone has food experience. Other than working at cafes like ourselves, like, in college, it was just a strong enthusiasm for food ideas. And also, for me, like looking at other cafes or restaurants and literally thinking, I could do this, or I could do this better than other places that I went to.

We believed in ourselves and each other, right?

Right, right.

Yeah, and that's actually what carried us through.

Right, right.

So back in January, I would say a week before we soft opened, our tables were not in yet. Plumbing was still an issue.

If you're gonna list all the things out, this is gonna be a very long video. Basically nothing was ready. There's a lot of things that have yet to be completed in this cafe, but I think we'll get there in time. We'll get there in time, right?

We will.

Okay. We did a lot of the hard labor ourselves. We had to like, you know, move a lot of the drywall out. There was just a lot of cleaning that had to be done that I personally feel like I didn't sign up for.

We took it upon ourselves to do as much as we can just to get the place ready for soft opening. We were already over budget because we were paying 3 months of rent.

And so Eric was like, okay, we can't go another month, you know, not earning any money. We have to open in January. A lot of things weren't fully set and ready yet, even our menu. But we just had no choice because we were losing money literally every minute that we weren't, you know, open to the public.

Prior to soft opening, we were working on items such as our Taiwanese fried chicken sandwich. We knew we wanted to do a popcorn chicken because it's like a Taiwanese-Chinese cafe staple. There's this really unique combination of mapo tofu with tater tots. That's something that before soft opening, we're like, dude, we need to put that on the menu.

I like to kind of say our menu is ABC food. So ABC, you know, in our community stands for American-born Chinese. And I feel like it's like the stuff that we grew up eating, which was, you know, our mom or dad's home cooking. But then we also ate tater tots at the school cafeteria. As first, second-generation kids, that's kind of how we grew up experiencing food. So even before the soft open, we had a bunch of, like, test kitchens. So today is a very special day at Bopomofo Cafe. We're having a large friends and family gathering here, and we're going to be giving them like our launch menu. And those are the nights actually that I did feel actually the most scared. If we can't even handle our friends and family, you know, 20 people coming in, we're fucked. I'll do the cucumber salad. Order up! Eric, I thought you were running the tickets. Order up! Wait, why is it smoking?

Wait.

This is the first time that Andrew's cooking in our kitchen, 'cause it's the first time that our kitchen's been cleaned. Order of— all right, okay, okay. We are getting owned right now. So as a first time doing this, learning a lot. Okay, okay. I remember cleaning up that night and just thinking, what did I get myself into? I was like, we're so not ready. You should have seen my watch on Sunday's Test Kitchen.

I was like, my heart rate was like 110 the whole time. So Andrew Park is our head chef. At first, we didn't know what we needed a head chef for, but we knew we needed someone to MacGyver our food.

Yeah, we know that, cool, we want mapo tofu on top of tater tots, right? But he was the one that was able to say, okay, what type of mapo tofu, and here are the different variations. This is what you guys can do to create it on scale. I think things kind of maybe got a little bit more difficult when we all started disagreeing on what we thought was best. Wait, is this the original? I didn't know that there was a problem with the spice. Eric said it tasted too much like this.

It tasted too much like not spicy sauce.

That's not what it tasted like. We had different preferences on spice level. It tastes like green frosting. It's too spicy. I don't think it's too spicy. We had different preferences on texture, even how soft the tofu was. Right, right, right.

Yeah.

It's a little too congealy. What is it? What even is this?

Cornstarch.

How do we reduce that?

I think it's just too salty.

I wanted more spice. How do we make it less spicy?

It should be like on the spicier side.

We agreed that it was— we kept— we keep it the normal spice and then they can add their spice if they wanted to. To some people, that's, that's super spicy. To us, it's fine. Yeah. I'll try one of the jasmine. We're not trying to be a typical boba cafe. Our food is not just popcorn chicken, sausage rice, whatever. Like, we're trying to like make actual, you know, unique new items that people haven't had or tried before, and I just hope that people in this area want to actually try it. Well, let me wash this down with some jasmine milk tea.

We knew we also wanted to do a different approach on drinks because I think the San Gabriel Valley has been saturated with a lot of boba establishments. To stand out amongst all of them, we wanted to do a fresh take. You know, that means no artificial sweeteners, Fresh toppings, fresh fruits, fresh juices.

No powdered creamer.

No powdered creamer.

It's 2%. Can you do 2% with full sweetness?

Yeah.

We knew that we were going to be judged pretty hard. You know, like everyone grew up in this area with so many boba options and what we were offering was very different. And I think, you know, we just wanted to make sure that our first impression was really good. I was really nervous about that. And to be honest, a lot of it was education. And just letting people know why our drinks are different, you know, and why they're even more expensive than other places. And that's a big hurdle considering, you know, people are used to, you know, they don't like change. If we just opened up a normal boba shop like everyone else, then we would just be like everyone else, you know, like, and then it's like, why are we even doing this? You know, so we really wanted to try to offer something different. I think this is good. This is good. Hey, did you guys try this yet already? Perfect, perfect, perfect. Hear that? That's perfect. All right, so today I'm meeting with our web designer Chris. He wears a lot of hats. He's part of the Wong Fu family. So we've been working on the website for on and off like a couple weeks now. We also decided to use Squarespace for our official site because we actually had a really good experience Making the Wong Fu website was Squarespace, so it was kind of like a no-brainer. So for a while, actually, Eric and I debated if we even wanted a website to begin with since we already had all of our other social media platforms and channels. But we decided that there's actually something really, really special about having an official site. We actually bought the URL pretty early on, around the same time that we got our social media handles, just in case because we're like you never know. We were actually debating between bopomofola.com and bopomofocafe.com. We eventually went with Cafe because, you know, who knows, maybe there won't just be one in LA, maybe there'll be multiple, maybe there will be other cities. But yeah, we ultimately decided that a website actually is really important. You know, it's like your storefront or actually like your flagship store. With other social media platforms, it's like whatever's right there on your feed, the most current thing, that's what is gonna be most front-facing and what most people coming by are gonna see. But with a website, that's where people are, you know, looking for the most important information all aggregated, well laid out, beautiful, and well designed. In the same way, you wouldn't want your storefront, you know, or your window display to just be random stuff from just that one day. You wanna make your storefront, you know, your window display really nice, and that's kinda how I see a website these days. So with our webpage, what's most important to me is that it captures our aesthetic and clearly and concisely presents our mission and most important messages. Launching our website is actually a really big deal. It's almost like its own grand opening. It's actually kind of nerve-wracking because we're basically pronouncing to the world, we are here, this is official, this is actually happening. We can't turn around and go backwards now. As we hopefully grow and expand within this industry, this website is what people are going to be looking for, and it's going to be our first impression to future partners and customers. So, no pressure.

Okay.

Marketing is a huge part of starting a business, but even with that, we didn't want to do it in the traditional sense. We definitely wanted to utilize social media. It was really cool to see people, you know, follow our journey of, you know, building the shop from the ground up.

Due to the hype that we had, you know, with social media and such, there was a lot of pressure on our backs.

A lot of pressure.

We knew we had to just get the product down, like, down.

Oh, went up early today. Wong Fu YouTube star gets into boba game with San Gabriel shop. Bobo Mofo Cafe brings tea, coffee, and Chinese-American culinary mashups. Phil Wang, one half of Wong Fu Productions, along with business partner Eric Wang, are taking over a 20-year-old Chinese restaurant in San Gabriel and converting it Into Bopomofu Cafe to open mid-February. Look for a soft opening later this month with limited hours and menu. Hey! Yeah!

Our first—

that's a— this is mainstream LA food. LA food. Yeah. This is— this is it. This is it.

Yeah.

You got published already? Wait, what? What the fuck? You said soon. I didn't think— like today, later. I was gonna mark this up like to a P. Like, 1, 2, 3, start. And Eric. Yeah, you should.

Despite the triumphs that we had with the article and some of the feedback we got from our friends, there was still a lot to do before our soft opening.

Some of the biggest challenges were right around the corner, and it was about to get pretty bad. Tomorrow's a big day. After all the big stuff's in, then we need to go do all these little things, and then after that, we'll clean. After that, we'll hire everyone. We'll have a big team meeting. We'll start training, and we open on Wednesday. No, Thursday. Thursday.

Wednesday. Wednesday?

So if you're like us and you're starting a new cafe or business or starting a new brand, whatever, do it with Squarespace. You can actually use the code WONGFU at checkout or go to squarespace.com/wongfu for 10% off your first purchase. Yeah, so last time we talked, Eric said that he liked more complicated— more complicated website, and you liked like more of like a scrolling, like a linear single page format. Well, Eric's not here right now, so