“Restaurants are a hard business, and I just need to step away from restaurants as a whole to get my brain cleared and get a reset,” Lin told Eater in a candid conversation last week. She wants to “focus on doing my own thing.”
Lin says Daybird, a now Instagram-viral chicken sandwich shop (with occasional fried fish cameos), and her reimagined Chinese diasporic Beverly Hills restaurant 88 Club, operated by former partner Francis Miranda, will stay open; chef David Hernandez will take over at the latter.
For her next project, whenever that may be, Lin says she wants to lean into the subject of modern Chinese cuisine. She cites chef Vicky Cheng’s Wing, a restaurant in Central, Hong Kong, as one inspiration. While Lin says she would not do anything as ambitious or expensive, she does like what Wing has done to raise the profile of Chinese cuisine, especially coming from someone like Cheng, who was not classically trained in Chinese food.
“I think it’s really important to showcase who you are and how you’ve grown. These trips I’ve been taking to China and Hong Kong have brought out a lot of curiosity,” says Lin. “I want to be a champion of Chinese food.”