The Table is the Story.

There’s a moment before a dinner begins when the world feels suspended. The house is humming quietly—the soft percussion of a simmering pot, the citrus of a freshly polished glass (shoutout to Windex), the sharp exhale of a candle being lit. The table stands ready, immaculate but alive, holding its breath for the first sound of laughter, the first pour of wine. That pause—just before life rushes in—is one of my favorite feelings in the world.

I’ve always been a host in the fullest sense. I don’t “have people over.” I host. I design evenings the way some people compose music: course by course, color by color, scent by scent. Friends joke I should open a restaurant. The table is the stage, the food the narrative, the lighting the tone. It’s theater, but it’s not performance. It’s affection. It’s language. It’s the purest way I know to say I love you. Stay longer.

The food itself is never the same twice. Some nights lean French—rich and deliberate, all butter and intention and heart attacks waiting to happen. Others borrow from Mexican kitchens, full of warmth and brightness and the kind of generosity that fills a room. Sometimes I reach for the spices of Malaysia when I’m homesick or the slow, layered comfort of Indian dishes when it’s cold and rainy out. Occasionally something German or Greek, simply because it feels right that day. The only constants are the desserts—always unapologetically extravagant—and the cocktails, which I treat like tiny experiments in mood. The table changes, the flavors shift, but the throughline is always the same: I’m feeding people I love.

That impulse runs deep. I learned it long before I ever had my own table, in a country where the air was thick with humidity, and the days seemed to move to the rhythm of preparation. I grew up in Malaysia, in a small Portuguese-Creole community called the Papiah Kristang in the Portuguese Settlement of Malacca. There, the calendar revolved around December—our true season, our collective heartbeat.

Every year, like clockwork, everyone came home. It didn’t matter where you’d gone—to the U.S., to Perth, to the next town over—you returned. Coming home wasn’t a suggestion; it was ceremony. The kind that begins long before the guests arrive. We cooked for weeks, starting with the sweets: trays of sugee cake and fruitcake and pineapple tarts lined up in neat, powdered rows, cooling on every available surface. Cakes soaked in brandy, dough rising under damp towels, the smell of cinnamon clinging to the curtains. Then came the savory—Devil curries and seybak and pangsusi and pies whose recipes were older than our names. Someone was always stirring something. Someone else was always tasting. The ovens ran around the clock. Dean Martin sang Christmas songs from sunup to sundown on the record player.

We cleaned from top to bottom, replaced curtains, scrubbed silver until it reflected the light. We repainted every wall and metal fence, dug out weeds, polished leather, and did so much laundry that I thought the washing machine would give up on us. There was choreography in it—a rhythm that everyone seemed to know instinctively. It wasn’t just preparation; it was language. The act of readying was love in motion.

And then, when the food was finally made, the doors stayed open for weeks. Guests came in waves—family, neighbors, strangers who somehow became both. The house was never quiet. Laughter layered over music, over the sound of rain, over the low murmur of people retelling the same stories they told every year. I’ve found so many younger cousins asleep in my bed after they gave up on their parents calling it a night. Weddings, Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays that had been missed while someone was away—all of it blurred together into one long, glittering month of belonging. It was exhausting and euphoric, and it felt like home.

That rhythm never left me. When I moved across the ocean, I carried it like a recipe written from memory—measuring by instinct, substituting what I couldn’t find, holding on to what mattered most. In Mexico, I began rebuilding it piece by piece: the noise, the generosity, the sense of abundance that says you belong here. My kitchen smells different now—more smoke, more lime, more mezcal—but the impulse is the same. To make a home that hums with life year-round.

Hosting, for me, is translation. It’s how I turn nostalgia into nourishment, how I make sense of distance. When I cook, I’m stitching continents together—Kristang curries next to mole from Oaxaca, a French dessert reimagined with local chocolate. Every dish is a small act of remembering, every gathering a way to prove that love can travel, that culture can stretch without breaking.

Sometimes, when everyone’s gone and the candles have burned to the bottom, I think about my father. He’s the one who taught me how to cook—how to season by instinct, how to taste for balance instead of measurement. His family taught me how to bake, how to wait for batter to rise as though it were alive, how to know when something is ready just by scent.

We haven’t spoken in more than a decade. I don’t know if he’d recognize me now—the way I host, the way I build a home—but I think he’d recognize this: the kitchen light still on long after everyone’s left, the plates stacked in the sink, the quiet satisfaction that comes from having fed people well. I carry that inheritance with me every day. It’s in my hands, in the way I move through a kitchen, in the small, instinctive gestures that no one else would notice—the way I press a fingertip into a steak to check doneness, or reach for salt before I even taste. It’s an old language I still speak fluently, even after distance and silence.

But what I inherited wasn’t just skill. It was a way of being—a philosophy that love doesn’t always sound like words, that care can be something you make with your hands. Food was never about grand gestures; it was about attention, about time, about remembering what someone likes without being told. It’s the same rhythm I bring to every table I set now.

When I host, I’m not just cooking—I’m continuing that language. The table becomes the grammar, the meal the punctuation. Each course a way of saying I’m still here. I’m still loving the way I was taught to love. Even if the characters have changed, the story continues.

That’s the thing about inheritance—it doesn’t end when contact does. It reshapes itself. It evolves. It’s in the laughter that fills my kitchen, in the new traditions I’m writing with my husband, in the way my home smells before people arrive. The same impulse that kept my father tending a pot on the stove now keeps me setting the table just so, making sure everyone has enough, refilling glasses before anyone has to ask.

For me, the table is the bridge between past and present—the tangible link between who I was and who I’m becoming. It’s how I honor the culture and chaos I came from, and how I root myself in this new life I’m building. Every table is a story, and every story begins with the same truth: this is how I love.

Because that’s what it comes down to. Not recipes or aesthetics or even tradition, but continuity—the act of gathering, feeding, tending, creating beauty out of care. That’s the inheritance I choose to keep—the one that keeps me whole.

And it always leads back here: to the table. To the hum of conversation rising over clinking glasses. To the low light that softens everyone’s faces. To the small, wordless choreography of passing plates and pouring seconds. Hosting is how I build family in real time. It’s how I translate memory into matter, how I turn all that lineage and longing into something you can touch, taste, and sit inside of.

Every table I set tells a story. Of where I’ve been. Of who I’ve loved. Of what I’m still learning to say. Some chapters smell like cinnamon and brandy, others like mezcal and lime and jamaica. Some are loud and crowded, others quiet and domestic. But every one of them begins with the same intention: to make something fleeting feel eternal, even if only for an evening.

That’s the power of a table—it holds history without needing to explain it. It absorbs the chaos, the culture, the inheritance, and transforms it into something beautiful. A place where distance collapses. Where old love languages find new dialects. Where the story continues in laughter, in crumbs, in the wine spilled across linen.

And when the night ends, when the chairs are pushed back and the room returns to stillness, I look at what’s left—the plates, the flowers, the mess—and I feel it again: that small, quiet awe that this is mine. This life, this home, this continuation of something older than I am.

Because the table isn’t just where the story happens.

It is the story.

And I’ll keep setting it—again and again—until the story feels complete.