Eddie Huang is a Taiwanese-American multi-hyphenate who has made his cultural mark as an author, chef, restaurateur and director. A former attorney, he later turned to cooking and opened BaoHaus, a Taiwanese bun shop in New York City. He is widely known for his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, which was adapted into a popular ABC sitcom in 2015. Huang also hosted the Viceland show Huang’s World, which explored cultural identities through the lens of food. In 2016, he published his second book, Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China. In 2024, he directed, produced and starred in the documentary Vice is Broke.
In late January I wrote a piece on Canal Street Dreams titled When Survive Til’ 2025 Became a Yard Sale, a piece inspired by the feelings I had conducting a yard sale in post-fire LA. After two years of gritting my teeth trying to grind it out post-strike, I could no longer keep up appearances and let my friends know that I was moving and needed help.
They came in droves to the yard sale with stories of their own struggles. Some bought things, others came bearing hugs and handshakes, while others were in significantly worse shape after losing their homes so I just loaded up their cars with anything they found useful. For once, I felt like I had community in LA and the irony was that I would be leaving the next day.
Hours after landing in New Jersey to stay at a friend’s house, I got a DM from my friend, Daniel. He let me know that he too had similar feelings around hardship, friendship, and loneliness so we decided to keep in touch and link when he got to New York. A few weeks later, I had secured an apartment in Murray Hill, was welcomed by a screaming neighbor with an unleashed dog, and almost ended up in jail after picking up my family in Boston driving a car without registration that I rented through Touro.
The one bright spot was this dinner I had on the books with Daniel at Cosme in a couple weeks. On the day, the weather cooperated and I was able to walk the 20+ blocks downtown passing through Curry Hill, Gramercy, and Flatiron admiring this part of New York I rarely ever walked through in my previous 16 years living here.
I hadn’t been to Flatiron or a tweezer restaurant in quite some time, but it was nice and conducive to conversation. We spilled our guts, one thing led to another, and I was officially on one of those epic man dates that spans hours and eras of your life. Dessert came, dinner ended, but somehow I ended up walking another 20+ blocks back to Daniel’s apartment and ended up sitting in his nook where he showed me the inspirations for what he was working on for the Places app.
Most of the time when you talk to a tech entrepreneur, you’re talking to some guy who did DMT for the first time at Burning Man which triggered some childhood desire for belonging except his version of rosebud is a fucking Bearbrick collection and chunky Balenciaga shoes from a very regrettable era of human history. It’s painful talking to these people who never lived life but have a giant war chest to pay your whole crew to relive adolescence and play G.I. Joe with them through a vanity project.
Daniel is different.
He put me on to a few incredible Russian Artists, showed me the songs he’d play on a loop to get inspired just like I did to write, and the app he was building didn’t seem optimized for commerce or scale which I really appreciated. It was artful. It was intentional and I started laying on the floor of my living room looking at it like a coffee table book of restaurants on my phone.
We spoke about what we loved about restaurants, hotels, but most importantly places and spaces. I told him that the two places I went the most during this iteration of life in New York were the Russian & Turkish Baths and the dog run on the East River. Both places were intense, but oddly quiet or at least quieting for my psyche. They were the two places where I could hear myself in that exact moment of life and feel as opposed to waking up and banging through the tasks on my gcal like meaningless plot points. I realized that for the last 2 years, life had become too much and I emotionally detached just to get through each day and pass out before the next one.
It’d also been a very long time since I watched the big homie, Tony Bourdain, who seems to hang over a lot of my thoughts and feelings. While making the Vice doc, I went through old photos and emails, but resisted watching No Reservations. I hadn’t watched since he passed and just didn’t want to do it to myself. When we had to pull archival clips of his show, I pointed the archival producer to scan the episodes where I knew the footage was and simply signed off.
But after hanging with Daniel and talking about starting The Places Review, I went back to see him. I started with the Greece episode because I’ve become obsessed with Greece since meeting my wife, Natashia, whose family is from Hios. We laid in bed, smiled, laughed, cuddled, and I could feel Natashia watching me watching Tony or perhaps I could feel myself watching me watching Tony.
These are the mysteries I never seem to solve.
Regardless it felt meta and odd, but I kept watching.
After Greece it was Spain, Sardinia, and I ended up watching multiple seasons oblivious to anyone’s or my own watching me watching Tony because I was feeling shit again. Around that time, our son, Senna, got sick of watching Beauty and the Beast so it was time for a different movie. Of course, I put on Ratatouille, and thats when the floodgates opened.
When the ratatouille hit the table, a spell was lifted and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to cook again. I wanted to write about food again and I wanted to do it with other people. Around this time, I also linked up with Sean Thor Conroe at Ootoya for a 2 hour lunch and we started to plot the revival of the literary male rom com as well. We became homies shvitzing in the sauna talking through ideas, complaining about editors, and I’d go home after to call Daniel with sauna induced hallucinatory visions for a literary travel journal on Substack.
That’s how The Places Review was born.
Besides watching my family grow, it was the most meaningful thing I did this year. I’d never edited anything in my life and despise being edited myself, so I was guided simply by how I’d like to be edited. I picked writers I found interesting, rebellious, iconoclastic, but more than anything honest about how god damn lonely they were. Every writer taught me something and each week felt like an opportunity to live in someone else’s head with their case of loneliness and find our way out of it together.
Today, we end Volume One.
If there’s one thing I learned writing, editing, and talking to other writers about places it’s that the plot points don’t matter. The setting honestly doesn’t either. It’s about intention and feeling; it’s about the decision.
Every writer who shared a story for The Places Review made an intentional decision to do something, to go somewhere, and to fight loneliness.
It’s hard.
Loneliness is haunting and it takes hold without much notice. Sometimes when it hits, you wonder if its easier to bust through a suicide window and jump.
Fuck it.
And as corny as I may sound writing at a Substack Literary Journal paid for by a travel app, I gotta tell you the people who wrote these stories made a choice to do something about what they were or weren’t feeling in life.
There is a lot of talk in the world today about the problems we face. Every thing is a new syndrome or ailment or epidemic and I don’t discount any of it, but when something is a phenomenon, all we’re saying is that many many people are feeling the same thing or that something is going on in the world that is ailing people in a similar manner. There are countless medications, remedies, and know-it-alls on TikTok here to solve your problems.
I don’t know shit about shit but I know this.
Whatever you’re fucking feeling, walk to a corner of your home, a hole in a wall with post no bills signs, and say it. Just say it into the ether, then say it to a person, and then do something about it. If you can’t figure it out where you’re at, go somewhere. Walk, run, fly, it doesn’t matter, but go!
Sometimes I just take a cold shower, brush my teeth, and walk to the New York Public Library before it opens to wait in line with the unhoused people waiting to go in and use the bathroom so I don’t feel alone because misery loves company. That might not be your way to find community, but whatever it is, do it because the sooner you acknowledge and stand up to loneliness, the faster it disappears back into the ether where it belongs.