Joan Brasher
Before COVID-19 hit, celebrity chef Arnold Myint was in a constant state of motion. Besides having ownership in three Nashville restaurants—Suzy Wong’s House of Yum, PM and BLVD— he was juggling multiple projects, including producing a documentary and a cookbook in honor of his late mother, the beloved restaurateur Patti Myint. He also was performing drag (as Suzy Wong, naturally), and ping-ponging between Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles. When the pandemic stopped him in his tracks, Myint quietly closed his restaurants and retreated to a small desert town in Southern California to wait it out with a friend. With weeks on end to lose himself in cooking, he discovered an unexpected and welcome reprieve from the life he’d always known. “I grew up in a restaurant, so it’s always been about the hustle,” Myint said. “Suddenly I had all this time, and I was cooking for two, not 400. I was making everything from scratch. It felt very new. Not rushed. I’ve never had the chance to approach cooking in such a pared down, personal way.” Myint’s culinary point of view reflects his mother’s roots in Thailand. She passed away in October 2018, and her restaurant International Market, a Nashville landmark for 45 years, closed the following July. But her influence lives on as Myint finds comfort in recreating the recipes he learned at his mother’s knee.
“I’m cooking by myself in silence with her spirit on my shoulder guiding me,” he said. “Not thinking about feeding thousands of people, but thinking only about what’s in my mind and in my hands and on my plate.” LETTING LOOSE Myint is no stranger to the limelight. He’s already appeared in two cooking reality shows, which helped catapult him to national renown, but neither produced an offer for a cooking show of his own. Despite his hustle, that goal seemed to evade him before the pandemic. “Every time I’d go in to meet with a network I felt like they wanted me to fill a role—the drag chef or the flamboyant gay chef or the Queer Eye guy,” Myint said. “I felt like I was only showing them one small piece of what I have to offer.” Then, Myint received some encouragement from a longtime friend, film producer and videographer Stan Okumura. “Stan said, ‘Why don’t you forget the pressure, let loose and just be the Arnold we know? Put out some videos on Instagram and see what happens.’ And literally when he said that, the lightbulb went on and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I can actually be me. I can just be Arnold,’” he said. “I started making these videos and having fun and it was very liberating.” Arnold’s videos on IGTV chronicle his quarantine life, ranging from an instructional cooking video on how to make Pad See Ew (traditional Thai rice noodles) to a day of rock climbing in the California desert looking for a lost water bottle, to a slick music video in full drag. “At some point I literally said to myself, f--k all this. I’m going to do me,” Myint said. “I’m just going to put myself out there. If I want to hike in a wig, hike in a wig. If I want to wear lashes and a gown to chop wood, why not?”
6
July 2020
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