Asano's Birthday (Week In the Life)

ASANO turned one in the first week of June. So I decided the best way to mark the occasion was to run a different pastry pop-up every day, launch a birthday drink, and onboard an intern. So buckle up, a bit of a longer post this month.

MONDAY:

I’m usually up by 5:30am. Coffee, breakfast, a stretch of quiet before the day has any opinions about what it wants from me. I try to protect those early morning hours for anything that requires actual sustained thought, because once 9am hits, the day tends to become a contact sport.

This particular Monday started downtown at the West Village, where I was monitoring ops for our very first birthday week pop-up: Stephanie Cho of Chambers, whose pastries are so delicious and creative. Once things were running smoothly, I ran uptown to meet Alexis — my new summer intern doing a business sprint with me through August — who was getting her first proper taste of cafe life at our UES location at Sandro’s. (I’ve asked her to write a guest essay about her work with ASANO, so stay tuned!). The day flew by and before I knew it we were closing up shop. So I quickly did a loop around the UES dropping off catering information at nearby schools and museums before heading home to tackle what I affectionately think of as the Monday stack: invoices, payroll, shift scheduling, sales tax, monthly audits, restaurant reports for my two restaurant partners, marketing metrics. The stuff that isn’t particularly glamorous to write about but is, genuinely, the infrastructure that keeps this engine running and progressing. I ended the day with a walk in Prospect Park to decompress.

TUESDAY:

I ran our Sourmilk yogurt pop-up at Sandro’s early this morning— read my interview with their founder, Kiki — and I was doing the morning inventory check with my lead barista Dorsey before packing up cups for the transfer downtown. At some point in this process I spilled syrup all over myself and regretted wearing white for the 100th time.

Alexis and I gathered as many bags of cups as two people can physically carry, descended into the subway like we were moving apartments, and made it downtown in one piece. I got things sorted at the West Village, sat down, opened my laptop, and was greeted by the sight of a keyboard absolutely glazed in syrup.

I would like to say I handled this gracefully, but what actually happened was that I sprinted back and forth to the Apple Store (who actually remembers their iCloud account?) just to schedule a repair appointment. I walked back to the cafe feeling the kind of low-grade existential discomfort of not knowing what to do with myself. I spent the next few hours trying to answer emails on my phone, unable to even sticker cups because we’d run out, and making my baristas nervous with all my bopping around.

After getting a loaner laptop and feeling a bit like I failed at my to-do list, I ended with a lovely dinner at Laziza in Bed-Stuy…finally syrup free.

WEDNESDAY:

I spent the morning working from home, trying to get ahead of the list that had been growing all week. I met Alexis at a morning event at La Cabra with Kintow, a logistics startup I’ve been working with. We showed up to discover it was tech week, so the room was full of VCs and investors. But I latched on to the few cafe owners I found, peppering them with questions like, “Do people not read your signage either?” Meanwhile Erika, the Pancake Princess was running our pop-up that day and I saw virtually none of it.

We slipped out early to get to the West Village, where I had a long overdue catch-up with Tuan, who until recently ran Larry’s CaPhe in Brooklyn and is a wonderful sounding board. Then back-to-back meetings: providers, sales calls, a check-in with Jodi our GM at The Noortwyck about some operational things we want to tighten up. Somehow made it to the gym!

The evening ended at a friend’s home where a few artists talked about their work — both so interesting and a nice reminder that life and ideas do exist outside of cafe operations — and then somehow a group of us ended up watching the Knicks at a bar nearby. The energy in Soho was electric but I had genuinely no idea what was happening on the screen.

THURSDAY:

I spent the morning thinking through how we restructure our marketing and digital work going forward, what should be automated, what we’re actually tracking well versus just because. It sped by and pretty soon I headed to the West Village for our Canton Rodeo Hong Kong BBQ pop-up. I walked in mid-phone call to find a man harassing customers outside and refusing to leave. My lead barista Walter was doing everything right to de-escalate and two of my regulars had closed their laptops and were sitting with him — not aggressive, just planted, like a wall of remote working bouncers. While I was pretty nervous about him losing control, he did say some funny and insulting things…although unprintable here.

It was not my favorite moment of the week. But it kept bringing me back to reflect on our community of regulars who come every morning for coffee and a place to work. And when something happened, they just — stayed. I felt the most proud celebrating one year seeing this community we built.

I shifted gears immediately into my lunch meeting, helped cover a barista’s break, and spent the rest of the afternoon working through the marketing reset, analyzing food waste, and writing this very newsletter. The evening was dinner in the East Village with some of my favorite people — friends visiting from SF — which turned, as the best dinners do, into an impromptu slumber party at their hotel. I am starting to feel these late nights and wonder how I can enjoy NYC at night without highly regretting it early the next morning.

FRIDAY:

Uptown in the morning to check in at Sandro’s, see some regulars, and sit down with Alexis for a longer alignment meeting on her work for the summer. We covered a lot — automation projects, building out our small group events and catering offering (look, we soft launched!), and thinking through our food program.

I’ll be honest, by Friday I was exhausted. The rest of the day was spent closing as many loose ends as I could and building a list for next week. Bakes with Rach wrapped up birthday week at the West Village, a sweet ending to a chaotic one.

Everything this week was a little more unpolished than usual. That felt appropriate, honestly. ASANO itself is still a little unpolished, still becoming what it’s going to be, still figuring out its corners. Excited for year two!

Until next month,

Kate

1. To read: I’m a little behind on Flesh by David Szalay — this year’s Booker Prize winner — but it’s not one I’ll forget. It follows a Hungarian man from adolescence through old age, tracing the quiet accumulation of choices, trauma, and circumstance that shape a life. Stark and spare in the best way, and reading it from a male perspective made me want to go back and reread it; new details keep surfacing the more you sit with it.

   

   To eat: I’m biased, because they’re one of my restaurant partners — but Cedric and Chef Andy just opened Oriana on Mott Street and it is genuinely wonderful. Fire-grilled everything, beautiful ambience, the kind of room you want to linger in. Get the maitake. Do not sleep on the salmon or the bee sting cake. So proud of this team.