Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Milk Bar CEO Christina Tosi: How a Home Baker Built One of America's Most Beloved Brands | E165

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Christina Tosi didn’t have a clear five-year plan when she graduated from college. She tried different majors, worked odd jobs, and kept searching for the thing that felt like hers. Baking became the answer she could not ignore. With relentless persistence, she went from a hostess stand to New York restaurant kitchens, proving herself one dessert at a time. That same drive eventually turned a tiny laundromat space into Milk Bar, the dessert empire known for bold flavors, nostalgic treats, and joyful care packages shipped across the country. In this episode, Christina joins Ilana to share how experimentation leads to clarity, why failure is essential to mastery, and what it really takes to build a business rooted in creativity, community, and joy. Christina Tosi is the founder and CEO of Milk Bar, the iconic dessert brand known for its bold, nostalgic treats like the Compost Cookie and cereal milk soft serve. She is a two-time James Beard Award winner and New York Times bestselling author. In this episode, Ilana and Christina will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (05:53) How Childhood Baking Sparked a Career (10:04) Testing Different Paths Until One Felt Right (17:56) The Embarrassing Failure That Fueled Her (22:04) Finding Mentors and Moving to New York (28:10) The Simple Networking Move That Opened Doors (31:17) The Cookie That Put Milk Bar on the Map (38:00) Turning Failure Into Fuel for Growth (45:04) Building Milk Bar in a Tiny Laundromat (49:47) Pushing Through Criticism, Burnout, and COVID (1:03:10) The Shift from Pastry Chef to CEO (1:08:11) Why Discomfort Can Become Your Edge (1:16:43) Betting on Yourself Before You Feel Ready Christina Tosi is the founder and CEO of Milk Bar, a nationally beloved dessert brand with locations across the U.S. She is a two-time James Beard Award winner, TED speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of seven cookbooks. Christina also created Bake Club, a free online baking community launched during COVID that continues to bring bakers together around the world. Connect with Christina: Website: christinatosi.com/  Christina’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christina-tosi   Christina’s Instagram: instagram.com/christinatosi/  Christina’s YouTube: youtube.com/christinatosi  Resources Mentioned:Bake Club: bakeclub.com/  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW WAY for professionals to fast-track their careers and leap to bigger opportunities.  Check out our free training today at https://bit.ly/leap--free-training 📲 Connect with Ilana: Facebook ▶️ https://www.facebook.com/IlanaGolanLeapAcademy LinkedIn ▶️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanagolan/ Instagram ▶️ https://www.instagram.com/ilanagolanleap Website ▶️ https://www.leapacademy.com/

To be great at anything, you must be obsessed with failure. You must love it. You must let it fuel you. If you are not failing, you are not pushing. You are not reaching. You are not stretching. You are not taking chances. Our guest today took her passion from baking to start milk bar in a landromat called one of the most creative people by fast company.

She is two times James Beard Award winner and a New York Times bestselling author of seven cookbooks. There was a spot that came available next to one of the restaurants and said, you should take that space. Like, I'll give you the money. I believe in you. I know you're good for it. We'll figure it out. You should just do it. And this is literally a landromat that we're talking about.

It's a laundromat. And you want to know what, girl? Like 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. is our busiest time at milk bars. Oh my God, that's insane. Every piece of cake is the difference between us making our rent and not making our rent. making payroll and not making payroll. You are going to mess up, like my best advice for anyone in kitchen land, and honestly in any profession. Our guest today started from baking with her mother and grandmother and took her passion from baking to start Milkbar in a Landromat. Yes, it's crazy

story, so I can't wait to share that, but Milkbar has grown to a national dessert empire, known for its yummy care packages showing up on your Adir step. Hey, I would love that across the U.S. and literally put smiles on people's faces. Like, what an incredible way. So first of all, Christina Tosi, again, she's called one of the most creative people by fast company. She is two-time James Beard Award winner,

a TED speaker, actually, and a New York Times best-selling author of seven cookbooks. She's also invited bakers into her home kitchen weekly to bake club and it's like such a fun conversation. Hey Christina I'm so excited about this. Lana thank you for having me. I'm so excited to hang. So it's going to be so so fun and I'll just remind the listeners just one thing. Remember every single week we choose a question from a leap academy with Ilana Golan YouTube channel. So go there and today I've selected a question from Marina which is how can you decide what's next for you in the fastest way possible and it's such a great

question even for this conversation. I will give you my 555 rule right after this conversation, but stick around. It's going to be amazing because Christina is also going to talk about it. It's so fun. Christina, so fun to have you on the show. Oh, Lana, hello. How are you? It's going to be so fun. So I'm going to take you back in time. You know, as a kid, you were already baking with your mom and grandma. So you kind of loved this from the get-go, right? Did you know that this is going to be like a career for you? It was just kind of like a fun thing. No. baking was something that happened regularly in my home. My mom was a working mom,

which meant I spent a lot of time with my grandmas. They helped sort of like in the in-between when my mom's an accountant. So especially like January to April 15th, you know, we would see her very little, which was, you know, on some level as a parent now, I think, oh my gosh, that would be so hard and my kids and this and that. But what I found and what I find regularly is that, That modeling was far more productive.

I knew my mom loved me. And when she wasn't working, she was home and she was with me. But what she modeled to me is what it looked like to chase down something you were really passionate about professionally. Now, I spent a lot of time in the home kitchen growing up because my grandmas were like my babysitters. And my grandmas cooked and they baked. Nothing fancy, right? I'm talking like styrofoam plates of oatmeal cookies, some like boiled chicken, some corn bake, right?

just really down home Midwest roots. But I was raised to pay attention about the things that I was excited about. And I was raised to give the things that really drew me in everything I had, right? There was no middling in my family. My parents raised us to say, if you're going to do something, you make it worth your time, right? You go at it with all you've got. I think that they really hoped that I was going to be an incredible. passionate dentist or a very passionate lawyer, right? My dad was an agricultural economist,

so he had this love of economics and farmers, right? I think they really hoped that my application of passion would be something that was a little bit more, air quotes, professional, right? And so I was on that path, right? I grew up, I grew up really with the expectation that I would succeed in school, that I would get straight A's, that I would be yielding, that I would honor my elders, right, respect my teachers, follow the rules. And I did all of that. I went to college and I, my favorite subjects were math first and foremost. And so I thought, I'm going to be an engineer. And then I got into engineering school and started going out of my first year and thought, this science thing, I don't know, it's fine. It's fine. I'm not excited to go to my science classes.

I'm excited to go to my math classes. So I thought, I'll be a math major. And then I started taking language classes and I fell in love with the Italian language, which is part of my heritage. And I thought, I'll be an Italian major. And so I'm sprinting down the finish line of college with these majors. And I realize, almost as I'm walking across, you know, in my cape and robe to get my diploma, like the screeching of car wheels going, wait a second, what comes next is I do one of these things for a living, which is to say, I do them passionately for the rest of the rest of the next. And I'm of my life. My parents both had the same job their entire life. And I thought, I don't know who's going to pay me to do math problems in the corner of this room at that table my whole life.

Like, what is that? Or I couldn't, I couldn't imagine. I mean, I started doing a little research, right? I was, I interned at an actuary and I was like, these are not my, I mean, mathematically speaking, they're my people. But like, on a personal level, what I found in myself was, I want to cross my legs when I sit in a chair, like Indian stuff, you know, like. I knew that I had some sort of like informal rule breaking spirit in me that I really wanted to move around and to like witness the world to be on an adventure in my professional life. And I knew that it wasn't going to be through math or Italian. Oh my God.

So what was the first job? Like how did you like you finish school? You get the first job. And then what? Okay. Well, first of all, I had a few. I am a very big believer in like odd jobs along your way. Right?

So my mom's accounting firm was. always near our house. Now, my mom pushed us into all these jobs. I want to be clear. As a parent, don't like it. You could have self-starting children, but also sometimes you have to give people a little push. Push. So I was working like the mail room, the shredder, right? Like doing all the odds and ends, like sort of like assisting jobs-ish at her accounting firm. And I thought this is like kind of cool, but I don't know that this is for me all the time. I, over the summers in college, I would have different like temp jobs. So I was a receptionist. I was, and I would, a reception at different firms, like an actuary or a law firm.

I followed a vet one day thinking maybe I'll be a vet. And then I was like, nope, I don't, that blood part is not for me, right? I followed a lawyer at a courthouse one day. And I thought, I'm going to be a judge. This is going to be perfect. And I went and was like, this is definitely a lot different than I thought it was going to be. So I tried a lot of different things on for size. But when I got out of college, I had this inkling, like the one thing that I could imagine

doing every single day for the rest of my life and never getting sick of was making cookies. Like it was this very simple, it felt almost like an informal, non-serious answer, but it was the only answer that was really here, right? Like in the dead center, it was like making cookies. And I started doing some research and it was like, okay, if you make cookies, you're for professionally, you're a chef, you're a pastry chef. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll get a job at a restaurant in college or I convinced someone to let me run this bakery on an island off the coast of New Hampshire. Don't ask. I didn't lie.

I think somebody just like maybe said she makes good cook. You know what I mean? Like somebody said something nice about me that maybe posture that I had any level of professional experience. But Alana, I went to this conference center. I had to feed. My job was to run a bakery. I was used to like a stand mixer that you have in your own home.

And all of a sudden someone puts me in front of a hundred. 40-quart mixer. I mean, that's big enough for you to take a bubble bath in, right? And I'm like, okay, I'm going to figure. I was raised to figure it out, right? I'm left to my own devices. But I was tasked with baking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 600 to 800 people every single day. Oh, my God.

Wait, Christina, I have to stop you here. So first of all, I want the listeners to hear the level of experimentation, essentially, that went on here, right? Like, you tried a lot of different things. and it kept coming back to I love cookies, so, you know, and baking. But how did you from that to actually land a job to run a bakery? Like, what did you actually do to land this? What do you think?

Like, how did you create and say this is your zone of genius? Because you've done all the rest of the thing. Yeah. When I first said, I want to make cookies. I thought I should probably get some experience, right? One of my number one things when I think I want to do something, I sort of dip my toe in the water. I call my bluff, right? When I was like, okay, you're going to be a math major.

You got to go intern at this actuary firm. And I was like, nope, right? Like go and see, try it on. It's like going in a dressing room, right? Yeah. I think that looks cute. You put it on, not for me. You'll know.

You'll know when you find it, right? So I went to get a job at a restaurant, only surprised perhaps to no one. This was a different time, but not that long ago. No one would let me work in the kitchen. I had no kitchen experience, but they would let me work in the front of house as a hostess, the person that brings you to, treats you, brings you to your table. But I talked getting, I talked my way into the kitchen, essentially.

I worked at this restaurant for two years during college. And they wouldn't let me in, I mean, I was allowed in the kitchen to say, someone's at your table, right? But what I ended up doing, I started making friends with the chef and with the cooks. I would bake cookies in my little college apartment and bring it into the restaurant every day, just to let people know, like, I'm interested. I'm here. I'm engaged. I mean, we're talking like brownies, cookies, sandwich with frosting, right? Like nothing fancy, nothing outlandish, just sort of communicating to my peers.

I love food. I want to feed you. This is a place I want to be. This is a community that I want to be a part of. And little by little, right? I got a little bit better. I got a little better. I started feeding people. They started expecting when I came to work that they would be baked good. Eventually, that chef was like, I will let you work one prep shift. It starts at 6 a.m. on a Monday morning. And I was like, great. That's a foot in the door, right? So I went to that ship. So I built up this experience.

But my first thing was, it's like the dressing room analogy. Try it on for size. I loved working as a hostess in this restaurant. I mean, you couldn't be further from a kitchen job. You couldn't be further from, like, making cookies. But I was like, I'm going to make my job to make cookies for my job, right? If they won't pay me to make cookies, I'm going to make my cookies. I'm going to make my job to feed them cookies

until I get good enough where they give me a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. You got to bring people along your journey. But first, for me, it was the confirmation that what was in my heart and my head actually checked out with what made me feel alive in real life.

And I built from there. I thought, okay, this is it. I'm going to move to New York City. Like, the great pastry chef in my brain went to one of the most challenging culinary schools in the city that was the most demanding but the most rich and bright and vibrant from a culinary perspective. And so I decided I'm going to go to New York City. I'm going to move there. I'm going to go to culinary school by day and I'm going to work in restaurants by

night because I got to catch up. Like this is my destiny and I'm behind. I got to catch up. I got to go go go. So I moved to New York City. At that point, at that point, are you all in? Like, do you know that you want to do baking or cooking or whatever? the rest of it? Like, is that all in for you or not yet? No, I'm all in. Like, I'm a cannonballer. Quite frankly, like, I got this job on, on this island called Star Island because I got my foot in the door of this restaurant in college. Someone there knew someone there and said, hey, I know that, like, if you really want to try baking, let me see if I can make a call, right? Oh, so good. I didn't ask them for a favor. They extended me the favor because they thought this person is passionate and

they're worth my time. Like they're worth my energy. So they made the call. It was my first shift running this bakery on an island off the coast, New Hampshire. And to be clear, Alana, I mean, I crashed and burned. I made bread for 800 people in a giant mixing bowl. And it did not, I made bread before, but not for 800 people. The bread did not rise. And it was the most embarrassing day to record of my life. and I went to, I remember like climbing up the stairs to my like little rickety bedroom bed on this island and being both so embarrassed and so exhausted and so completely obsessed and invigorated. And I thought that is never going to happen to me again. And I am going to wake up in a few short hours and I am going to start to bake breakfast for

these people. And that for me. Take me there. Take me there. Just a second. Take me there for a second. second, Christina, because first of all, in a kitchen, you'll have a lot of mistakes, right? There's like a ton of mistakes and you need to recover. But take me there to a hard moment because it sounds

really hard. It sounds humiliating. It sounds embarrassing. It sounds like I disappointed myself. I disappointed others that trusted me. How do you decide to recover versus, you know, turn into a ball and say, this is not for me anymore? It's such a great question, Alana. I mean, I was raised by parents who pushed me. And so I was raised by a mom who embarrassed me all the time, either because she was like cheering embarrassingly loud on a cross-country field for me and every other person running, right, who would, you know, take embarrassing photos of us, who would do the things that loving, adoring parents do, right? So this idea of being embarrassed was something that I had already learned the skill of like, it's embarrassing.

And you want to know what? You survive. You survive every embarrassing moment. And the only thing that you can do to survive it is to just get on with it. The sooner you get on with it, the more you realize that, like, it is embarrassing and it's fleeting. Embarrassment is fleeting. I think this notion of I failed was a big one. It wasn't the first time I failed in life, right?

It wasn't the first time I didn't get an A. It wasn't the first time I tried something and it didn't go to plan. Now it felt more visible. There's 800 people. They thought I was like some incredible baker. They took a giant shot on me at me. But I don't, it's kind of like, it didn't occur to me at the time, right? But if you take me back there, right, these very negative traumatizing things were heavy.

But you want to know what they did not weigh? They didn't outweigh my enthusiasm. They didn't that way the like, holy smokes, this is what it feels like to work a day in a kitchen where you are baking for people and feeding people and making something out of nothing. And even though the something out of nothing that I made did not rise, it didn't taste bad. It didn't do what it was supposed to do, but it was a step. And as opposed to feeling like a step back, it felt like a step. And I think that's an, that's the interesting part of it. I mean, to your point, to be great at anything, this most certainly rings true in the kitchen. To be

grade at anything, you must be obsessed with failure. You must love it. You must let it fuel you. If you are not failing, you are not pushing, you are not reaching, you are not stretching, you are not taking chances. You are replicating something that is safe that has already existed before. In the kitchen, it is a very visible profession with your peers, right? You are going to mess up. like my best advice for anyone in kitchen land. And honestly, in any profession, work for someone else first. I know that everyone is so excited to run into the water and do their own thing first. I highly recommend whatever that, like, answer is burning in your belly that you are so

passionate about. Learn it from someone else. Make mistakes on someone else's dime before you start paying for your own mistakes out of pocket. it will teach you to be humble. It will teach you to be additive. It will teach you to pay attention so that your failures and someone else's failures next to you, you get to learn two times as quick. And you also get to succeed twice as quick because you're not just learning on your own. You're learning in the community of people that you are working with and alongside.

And that's what I found in a kitchen. I found a lot of humility. I also found a lot of humor. And I ultimately, over time, found. success. Right. And I think you also mentioned some really profound mentors, right? Because I think I absolutely agree with what you're saying. I think having some mentors or people to look up to initially is really, really, really important. And I do believe that you can kind of decide what kind of leader do you want to be or what kind of chef do you want to be. I mean, there's so much that you can learn from

watching and looking at others. So where is that like, so in the island, do you decide like, okay, though I'm like failing or from time of time things are not working well. I still love this. This is what I want to do. And I kind of want to just like how do you attest that to milk bark? Like what happened? Like why do this start your own? It was like the rest of the world melted away. Nothing else mattered except for time spent in this rickety old island kitchen. I mean, I was obsessed. Didn't take a day off, you know, 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. at night. Just go. Just love. I loved everything about it. I loved the hard work.

I loved the celebration. I loved the heartache. I loved everything about it. A lot of the things that I got from that island taught me a lot. It's an island. So you don't get ingredients every day. So you had to be really savvy about savvy and creative about ingredients. The compost cookie.

Like the cookie that put milk bar on the map is a cookie that I learned how to make at Star Islands because it was a running joke when there was a storm that came in. You still had to feed people. Everyone was on this island. And so the bakers that came before me would bake this cookie. And they would just go to the pantry, whatever random things they could find, put it in. It was called the compost cookie because we would compost on the island as well. That backpocket, right?

I learned so much about the sort of waste, not, whatnot, getting really creative with limitations. Limitations actually being the thing that breeds the highest form of creativity, learning how to problem solve learning how to get it done even when there's no backup plan those sorts of things but i i realized very quickly that this was it and so i started researching on the island right how do i get into this culinary school how do i find my way in how do i get someone to let me into this culinary school as quickly as possible how do i find a place to live and how do i find a place to work And the second that I was done working at Star Island, I was on my way to New York City. And I told my parents this, Alana, like a few days before I left.

And they were not happy. They were not happy because they were first generation college goers, right? Like they worked hard for me to make sensible, passionate decisions. Baking was something that they did, that grandmas did. We did that in our free time. We did not do that professionally. Why would you do that? that doesn't make any sense, but it made sense to me.

And so I just knew I didn't need it to make sense to them. It made sense here. And so I went. I went. I found an apartment in New York City by literally just pounding the pavement, figuring out how to get to a viewing before anyone else, how to. I actually found my apartment because I was waiting outside the building. Christina, what year are we roughly at this point?

We're 2003. Okay. Amazing. 2004. I found a listing in the newspaper for an apartment that would be in walking distance. I made friends with the culinary school admissions person, first and foremost, on an island. The only phone call I would ever make was to Elspeth. I can't remember what her last name is Elspeth at the French Culinary Institute,

which is now the International Culinary Center. I was like, we are going to figure this out together, Elspeth, right? Like, you tell me, someone's got to get sick, have an emergency, whatever it is. you tell me when that is and I will get on a get in a car and get to New York. I will get there. I'll get on a bus. I'll get on a plane. I'll get on a train. I'll do whatever it takes. And I got there and I thought, I don't know anybody and I need a place to live. So I found a listing for an apartment. The building number was right. The apartment number was wrong. But I got there an hour before the showing. And I realized when the real estate agent showed up

that the apartment number was wrong. And I was like, I'm not going to tell this person. This is, I'm pretty sure this is, the New York City story everyone talks about, right? Like, how do you get your leg up in the right way? Got an apartment. Found a roommate to help me pay the rent. It was in walking distance to culinary school. Then I started walking around to every restaurant that had any rating that I could be proud of to get a job. Guess what?

No one would hire me for a kitchen job, Alana. I didn't have New York City experience. How do you get New York City experience if you don't have New York City experience? I did the same thing. someone let me be the reservationist because I did have, I did have experience being a reservationist at these other firms back home and did the same thing. You know I did. Only this time I was in a New York City apartment, so I wasn't baking. I would just bring every single day from culinary school, whatever we made, I'd bring it to the restaurant and feed my peers. And I would make sure everyone

knew that I was a culinary school student and that this is what I wanted to do. And eventually the bartender, friend was the wine director at Boulay. Like best restaurant in New York City at the time in Tribeca, Bule. And he said, I know someone that works there that's high enough up. Do you want me to see if I can get you a job in the pastry department? Yeah. Guess what? They were going to give me a job.

I didn't have any New York City experience. But I said, I will come and work for you for free every free moment I have. And I did. I showed up every single day to work for free. And I want to stop here. for a second. So everybody listening, one of the things that we talk a lot in the show is about the hidden market, right? And this is the hidden market, right? It's not a post that somebody from a newspaper or internet or job, right? Like it just comes their way. Like this is about who knows you,

according to what you want to be known for, opens the door, lets you in, right? And it's also about the hustle, the volunteering. Like, I mean, you're going to need to make your own luck, right? So we, we we you know so I love all of this Christina. Okay so you're finding this. You're right though a lot of like you have to give people something to believe in like we're all humans. We all crave connection. I'm an introvert.

I don't those people, they didn't know my middle name. They don't know where I live. They don't know if I have siblings. They don't know anything about me. But they know that I'm the girl that brings dessert to work every single day. And that I and that's what I do. That's who I am.

That's what I do. That's the only thing that they. need to know. And more than anything, if you're willing to give, right, to give first, to show up, to be a person that is worth someone's time in getting to know or believe in, you don't have to, networking doesn't have to be icky or yucky or feel laborious. Stick to what you know and what you know how to do and figure out how to show up for other people. If you lead with that, I wasn't a leader at the time. I was literally at the bottom of the food chain.

But I led, right? I led with dessert. And I led by giving. And I created this tiny little microculture. And I wish I knew what I was doing at the time. Stepping back, I'm like, that was a great idea. That wasn't like my master plan. It's just the one, it's the card that I had.

It was the only card that I had. And it was the only thing that mattered to me. And that's what I did every single time, right? dessert also by the way alana it's a it's a pretty easy in dessert right like it's not part of the food pyramid you don't have to eat dessert breakfast lunch dinner there's no mention of dessert it's an opt-in course it's inherently joyful it inherently is like the thing we show up with in good times and bad and it there's an altruism but there's a social conduit about dessert that communicates like warmth and friendship and care thank goodness because

what would I do? Handsome on a math problem. You know what I mean? Otherwise, I'd be lost. So I got my first job at this New York City restaurant. And you better believe it was a job, but it was not paying, right? It was an unpaid internship. And it was going to be unpaid until they saw some sort of value in me enough, that they were like, okay, now you can be a paid employee. And that took about six months of working for free in every free moment.

moment possible before I got offered my first paid New York City gig as a pastry cook at Boulay. Even then, I worked my way up in this amazing fine dining restaurant that, I mean, it was intense. It's like cutting your teeth at one of those really big, well-known, renowned, resume building places, right? I went in there and I got my ticket freaking punched. And I knew that I was going to give every last bit of me to survive, to thrive. But when I was at Boulay for a year and a half, right, in restaurants, you stay a minimum of one year. That is, that's a minimum one year.

I realized, I really love this, but I started kind of wondering, like, is this right for me? And I think part of that was the curiosity about fine dining. because I had told myself professional pastry chef. That is what someone that makes cookies every day. That's what they do to be taken seriously. And so I was chasing this pastry chef career. And after I was done working at Belay,

what I started to do was go, I really loved that job. Was that neat? Right. Is that right for me? And I started finding all these other jobs within my industry, editorial assistant and a magazine, food stylist,

caterer, consulting pastry chef for a tiny, more like a cafe restaurant. Did you try them as well? Like, do you try different role? I worked in all of them. I actually used the job board of my school to try all these other things on because I thought, maybe I'm supposed to be a food writer. Maybe that's making cookies. Maybe I'm supposed to be a food stylist or a food photographer.

Maybe that's make cookies. Maybe I should go work in the front of house at a fine dining restaurant. Maybe it's that. I tried all these other little things on for size because Boulé was the right fit for me, but at some point I grew out of it and I was trying to figure out what that cue was for me. I tried all these other jobs on within my industry a little bit like the lost duckling going, are you my mother, are you my mother, right? Went back into the dressing room.

Okay. Yeah, try it on. I love it. Right for me, right? Are these, are these, are these, or these. and what I found getting out of the kitchen and trying all these other things on, I learned so much. I was challenged. I was stimulated. I did come back to the fact that my place really was in the kitchen. Maybe it just wasn't in that kitchen. And so I started working for other chefs that were doing things that were really interesting to me in food.

I worked at WD50, which was a really big, which was the molecular gastronomy restaurant in New York City, right? That combined delicious food with really clever food science. I worked at Momofuku, which was the democratization of really good food. There was no white tablecloth. There were no reservations. But you got the level of flavor and creativity and cuisine at a really accessible price. And it was there that I said, huh, run by chef David Chang, founded by chef David Chang, my brother from another mother, similar upbringing, wasn't supposed to be a chef, fell in love with food, worked for fine dining restaurants, and one day woke up and said, I want to cook on my terms. Like, I've done it on the fine dining level, but what about casual cuisine?

And it was working at Momofuku that I realized that my answer was still making cookies and that my real path and vision wasn't taking home cook Christina at professional pastry chef Christina and meeting them in the middle. And that is milk bar. That is the reason milk bar exists. It's how milk bar was formed. Dave knew I had pastry experience and eventually was like, this is crazy. You need to go and do your own thing.

Like he could see it in me. Take me there. So take me there because I vaguely know the story, but take me there. So again, it started in 2008, but I assume you were thinking about it for a little bit like, like what made you say, you know what? I'm going to leave the comfort. I mean, you're in New York. It's one of the most expensive places on Earth. And you're trying to do something that in general, you don't even know if the margins will hold. Like it's not easy. Like, I mean, we're, you know, I mean, so you need to be. bet and decide I'm not going to take a salary. I'm actually going to go all in and do this crazy things and take a loan and do it. Like take me there. Like where were like how was your thinking around it? And obviously David was a big part to help you out. But tell me a little bit how to work, Christina. I had been working with Dave for over a year. And I started working with Dave not in a pastry capacity. Also in my free time, I thought maybe I'll be a food safety consultant. because I like dorky things like math and food science. And I taught myself how to write these hazard analysis plans that we needed to use specific

cooking techniques in New York City. And I started working for Dave just to help him do that. I loved his food. I believed in what he was doing. I was very much drawn to his spirit and personality. He's a bull in a china shop. And I'm a bull in a china shop. We just do it differently.

And I was really drawn to him. and it was clear that he was on to something and that he needed help. By the way, that is like a tip for anyone. Work at the places that are understaffed in the right way, right? That are understaffed. They're onto something. They're on the precipice of something. They're doing something special and they don't yet have it figured out.

Because what it gives you the ability to do is get your hands in as many different pieces of helping solve that as possible. and that real life experience of building and learning and solving, it's irreplaceable. And I want to take you there. I want to take you there for a second, Christina, and I want the listeners to do, you know, to kind of add it up because what you need is like massive curiosity to understand what is actually needed. Sometimes we put people on some pedestal, oh, they're running this mega business or operations, like I'm just going to do my little thing.

and if you can actually stay really, really, really curious and very creative, Christina, we'll talk about it, right? Like, this is where you're going to find areas to grow into and create your own basic shoes from that. And it's just incredible. So I love that story, Christina. So I had to stop you here. But okay, so important. By the way, no one has it figured out, listeners, to be crystal clear. If that self-talk exists in your head, like highlight it and delete it, get rid of it.

No one has it figured out. Everyone is in the process of having it figured out. And the best people to work for are the people that are willing to say, I don't have it figured out. Can you help? Or I'm trying to figure it out. Let's go. And that is what Dave did.

What I saw and learned from him and alongside him, we built, I helped him build his restaurants out, right? He had noodle bar and sambar. We were about to open Momofuku Co. We needed to renovate sambar. Like I became the de facto person that was. helping put together the details and make decisions. I had trust because I was in it every day.

And so I watched how Dave built and made decisions and thought about things and looked at real estate and Dan, and I used that as my model. It's a little bit like the Wild Wild West because there weren't, we didn't have business plans. We needed, of course, we had to, you know, find money from the bank and Dan, Dan, the renovations, the rent, lease negotiations, they had to make sense and line up, but neither one of us had been to business school. It's not like, and also, by the way, the math isn't that hard to figure out. We were very much people that were like, we'll figure it out. We very much figured it out in the moment as we went, knowing round numbers back of napkin math, right?

We weren't taking down a lease that was $50,000 a month and charging $12 for a bowl of noodles, right? Like we had a sense of what we could do in a night from a dollar standpoint, how much labor cost, et cetera, et cetera. So when it was time to leave the roost of Momofuku and start this bakery, I mean, perhaps I'll hit pause on it and say, so while I was working at Momofuku with Dave, I would work there by day and by night, guess what I would do when I went home every night? I would bake and I would bring those baked goods in the next day. So Dave not only knew that I was a trained pastry person,

but he also tasted the baked goods that I would make day in and day out because that's what I would do. And he knew, he saw that I had this like passion for baking, that I had this burning thing. And he said there was a spot that came available next to one of the restaurants. And he said, you should take that space. Like, I'll give you the money. Like, I believe in you.

I know you're good for it. We'll figure it out. you should just do it. For us from a restaurant standpoint, if somebody else went into that space, it could be potentially problematic. So he's sort of masqueraded as like doing me, right? Like, you're doing us all a favor

because if we don't like our new, like, neighbors, it could be bad. So you go in, we'll find a one plus one equals three situation and go. And I use, very smartly used shared resources at Momofuku, whether it was, you know, wear washing or porters or receiving or accounting or human resources to prop up this idea of a quirky American-style bakery that was born from born out of the love of being a home cook and what power a cookie, a cake,

a pie, these really simple American formats can hold and wields, but bringing in flavor and reinvention and technique that I had learned for, you know, a decade. in kitchens. Right. And this is literally a laundromat that we're talking about. It's a laundromat. So you want to know what else I know, Alana? Because I'm in charge of now of like all of the restaurants when we're looking at new spaces, guess what a laundromat has? A ton of water, waste lines, and a lot of electricity coming in. So if I'm thinking like just brass tax does this space, what's this space is viability for a food service establishment, I've got to get it re zoned, but it has all the resources coming in that cost money and take time. And at the very

least, I know what the rent is. I know my neighbors are good. And I know my neighbors are pulling people in for lunch and dinner seven days a week from 11 a.m. until 2 a.m. And even though I'm trying to run a bakery and I think a bakery's hours are like 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. I mean, if I stay up until 2 a.m., I might be able to do business until 2 a.m. And you wouldn't know what girl? Like, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. is our busiest time at milk bars. Wow. Oh my God. That's insane. So you decide to take a loan. And again, you have this confidence that you can do this. And again, you also did with Dave a little bit of that. So you already start, right? Like you feel it. I know some of our subcontractors. And we opened things. What I loved about Dave's approach was he only spent money where it was absolutely necessary. If any of you ever, dined at Momofuku in the early 2000s, right? There were barely seats. There were no backs on the seats.

We made our own tables. We scrubbed our own walls and painted our own ceilings, right? Like, we did everything ourselves. And in a beautiful way, it made it really humble. But it made a difference. When you came in, it felt like it was someone's true expression, that it was everything that they had in it. And it was very cost savvy for us. It was very cost efficient. And it inspired in our organization a culture of solving problems and being, you know, financially efficient in decisions and not, you know, I'm a chef. So here's what I do.

I cook. And that's what I do. Right? Like you had to know your numbers. You had to know how to unclog a toilet. You had to know how to drop the stuff. healing, right? You had to know how to wire an outlet sometimes. Like you had to, you learned these things because every time you needed somebody else to help you solve a problem, it was going to cost

money. And that meant that some part of the experience would, would be sacrificed. I love it. So take me there, Christina, I think some people, you know, and it doesn't matter if it's a restaurant or a tech company or a startup or whatever. Like some people feel like the launch is all that matters, but actually the hardest thing is actually after you open. So talk to me a little bit about the early days because I think there's like so much myth around like, I have to launch this. And I'm like, no, you actually need to think what's going to happen in day one and day 10 and months one. So talk me.

Take me there. The opening day is literally just the starting line. It is just the starting line of a marathon, a marathon that will never end in like a very beautiful, joyful way. So opening day was November 15th, 2008. And I, much like many others, thought, opening day, great, got it done, check the box, rather than thinking, well, this is the first day of the rest of my life. And I mean that in an amazing way. And I mean that in the biggest challenge that I will ever take on. I remember showing up opening day at 4 a.m. as bakers do. And there was, there had already started a line out the door and around the block.

And I thought, cool, are these people waiting in line for it? They don't even know what we are. We don't, this is 2008, right? Like, there are, there's no social media. There's no blog, drops, whatever. Like, they read an article somewhere and they knew the Momo Fuku name enough to know this is going to be good, right? And I very quickly had to, you know, drink water through a fire hose, as they say, right? I had to, I was trained at this because I've been working in restaurants for a decade, right?

I had to learn trial by fire day in and day out. Everything from the simplest things, we went to go open the door and we didn't have, we had a printed menu, but we didn't have a menu hanging. All right, take the back off a stainless steel table, hang it from the ceiling, right, and dry erase marker, right? to, oh, I didn't think about the fact that we were going to need, like, the type, a different amount of cash than what we did at the restaurants. Because a bakery is doing high velocity, lower, you know, ticket, ticket average, right? Our ticket average is $20. At the restaurant, it's so much more than that.

And people pay with credit card there. Here it's cash, et cetera. Hiring, firing, training, how we ordered demand plan, how we, the technique of, how we made things. We were scooping every single cookie by hand. We were measuring the, everything down to the gram of cake soak that we would put on every layer of cake sponge before we built it up. We would take inventory every night and count every single thing. One, two, three, four, right? We had to scale our learning. We basically, AI did not exist then, but we basically had to import into our brain some level of that learning in the moment, our

artificial intelligence type of mindset. As we went to figure out, how do you run a bakery? How do you keep a bakery's doors open seven days a week? How do you market? What are our bottlenecks? Where are our opportunities? Where are we missing the mark? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, along the way.

And it is to be an entrepreneur, you have to have a Sisypian complex that, again, you're obsessed with, right? You have to love the idea of rolling a boulder up a hill every single day, only to know, that when you go home, the boulder's going to roll back down the hill. And the next day, you could not be more excited about getting in and being like, where's my boulder? I'm ready to go. What's my problem?

What's my challenge? What's, what, how am I keeping it real today? What am I celebrating? What are my highs? What are my lows? What did I learn? Did I leave this place better today than I found it? And being in love with this, it's a, it feels sometimes when you talk about it like a circular pursuit,

but every single day is different. It sometimes feels like the same action every day, but every single day is absolutely different. And I love that. It's humbling. It's humiliating. It's enthralling. It's captivating. Some days I'm starving because I've worked so hard.

And other days I am so full. I could not eat another piece of cake because we can't get, you know, the carrot crackle marshmallow cake formula just right. How are you so thin? I don't know. That's what it is. So tell me for a second, Christina, because I think sometimes, and this is really like, I want the listeners to get this. Like sometimes we put, we kind of look at this overnight success, right?

And we look at Christina like, you know, a couple decades like into the future almost, right? And it's like, oh my God, you're amazing. Like this is so cool, what you built. And we don't see the sleepless nights. We don't see the heartaches. We don't see the, you know, like the. the grind, right? So can you share like hard moment that you're like, what an earth have I put myself into, like a sleepless night or something that happened? So many of them. You're right,

Alana. We sensationalize, I don't think we do it intentionally as people. I don't think we do it intentionally from a media standpoint or otherwise, but we do sensationalize the highs in a way that doesn't leave a lot of room to talk about the day to day that you have to stack up one day. I mean, I'll give you a few little ones that are, you know, a long way. One day, we, it's a Sunday, and we were running low on chocolate chip passion fruit layer cake. And we needed to make some because, you know, every day, every piece of cake is the difference between us making our rent and not making our rent, making payroll and not making payroll. And those were always, to your point of the mentors that I've had along the way, you're going to have a lot of great bosses and you're going to have a lot of bad bosses too. and I learn from both sides, right?

You learn who you want to be from the good ones and you maybe learn who you don't want to be from the other ones and you thank them because how else would you know what it feels like otherwise. I knew always everyone gets paid on time, right? Like that no matter what, that's always what happens. So we have to make these cakes, but we, it's Sunday. You don't get any deliveries and no one ordered butter.

if you're a bakery and no one orders butter, girl, you got problems. You got problems. We needed butter to make this frosting, let alone the fact that we needed butter to then get the rest of the prep list done. And I'm looking at everything. I'm going where I'm going to every grocery store, et cetera, et cetera. The food cost is going to be out of, you know, we can't figure it out. There's not enough butter.

We can't figure it out. And I'm standing with my face in the refrigerator, the way you do when you're trying to decide what to make for dinner on like a Wednesday night, staring inside the refrigerator going, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? And all of a sudden, my eyes see that shopping mall nonsense. The eyes click and all of a sudden you can see what it is. And I look at the heavy cream and I go, how do you make butter? You churn cream into butter. This is how you make butter. And all of a sudden, I'm like, get all the butter, bring it upstairs. We're putting it in the mixing bowl. We're mixing it until we turn it into butter. We're going to drain off the

water. Then we're going to make the frosting. Then we're going to do this. Then we're going to do that. Right? Like resourceful. We are our big stand mixer one day stopped working and we couldn't get a repair person to come. And after trying to sweet talk these people and sweet talk these people, I was like, well, we are going to mix 140 ports of mixing dough with, of cookie dough with our hands. We're going to put saran wrap up, right? Because we're not going to say no. Someone's coming in for a cornflick, chocolate and marshmallow cookie or or a compost cookie. This is what we have to do to succeed. That's all there is to it. I do remember one day the food critic of the time, his name was Alan Richmond. He was the food writer

for, I think Esquire magazine. And he would come down from Connecticut. And Dave would be like, hey, sis, you got to meet this guy, right? He's going to love your cookies. He'll put you on the map, blah blah blah la nicest guy loved the cookies and then was like i live in connecticut i want to bring these cookies home to my neighbors to tell them all about it put a bunch of cookies in a bakery box send him on his way i get an email from him the next day and my heart i mean i nearly puked my heart just fell to the ground dear christina it's allan thank you know but i don't niceties i brought that glorious box of cookies home only to find them in absolute bits and pieces by the time I got home.

Basically, get your S-H-I-T together. You cannot run a business like this. This is embarrassing. I can't give any of these to my neighbors. Like, this is not what a bakery at your level should be doing. Like, you do not have it together. If you want anything close to my support, you need to figure it the freak out. And Alana, if I didn't sit there going.

of all the things I thought about, right? The amount of salt, the acid, that, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. I didn't think about the fact if you're not, if I'm not handing you a cookie to eat like this right now, I had never put the cookies in a bakery box and tried bringing them on a train somewhere. That wouldn't even occur to me. And that, I mean, now we ship care packages all over the U.S., etc., etc.

But it never occurred to me. I had put myself in my customer's shoes once they were in the door, but it never occurred to me what they did with it and how it got to where they wanted to go with it after the fact. And that revamped everything we did from how we mixed to how we scooped our cookies to how we packaged our cookies so that you could get them warm and fresh and out of the oven. But if you wanted to take them to go, that those were going to be two different experiences. But it was perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my career up until that point. I mean, this was my name on the door, right, on the proverbial door. And yet one of the most important ones, right?

Right. When you're up against it, are you going to cower and shame and back down? Or are you going to take a big gulp of air and say, you know what? He's right. And I missed it. And he's telling me, not to embarrass me, though it is embarrassing, telling me, because he's giving me a clue about what I need to do better if I want to make it tomorrow. Right?

And, man, to this day, I'm. I can still feel the energy in my body of what it felt like to be told off by the renowned food critic. And, you know, it felt like I had, I was like grounded and in trouble as a kid. You know, like it really, I could still feel the energy to this day. And yet it was the greatest thing that if he didn't say that, you know, where would we be? I don't know. And what I love about it. So first of all, I love this example because I think sometimes the most embarrassing mistakes or the,

most hardest, you know, critics are actually sharing something that could be the most profound opening for us. That did happen for me as well. So I just love this example. And I think also just knowing how you guys, and I'd love to take you there, how you kind of morphed yourself in COVID. I mean, that was so profound, right? Like if you didn't know how to ship cookies in a way that was intact, that would never work. So can you take me a little bit to COVID? because that was also, I mean, clearly that must be a hard one too. Yeah. So it's February.

It's January 2020. We know something's kind of happening globally. Is it going to happen in the U.S., etc.? February, it's getting closer. March, it's on. It's, we're locked down. We had, I can't remember, maybe 18 bakeries at the time nationwide. So we have a workforce.

We're still to this day, our bakery team is the biggest part. of our team makeup, right? They're the people that leave their houses, their apartments, their homes every day to go into work to show up for you all our customers. And all of a sudden, they're like, I don't, I'm told that I can't leave, right? Et cetera, et cetera. But we have this arm of our business that we built because we wanted to be able to show up for people that couldn't come and visit us in bakery. We knew we knew how to take our products and get them to people safely, to wrap them safely, to get them to people safely. And all of the, you know, we knew how to take them to people safely and all of a sudden we had to pivot our entire business to being you know single digit

percentages in person on demand delivery to you know 90% online care package delivery as quickly as humanly possible and what's interesting is I always built the team if you're on our team maybe you have like a steak and milk bar your bonus structure is based on the entire business's performance it's not just based on the department that you work in and i would always get pushed back on that and i said but it but it matters right like because if you only care about your right 20 square feet or 30 square feet of the business you're missing out on the team that you're a part of right and i thought how do we breed in that spirit of like everyone wants everyone once every Everyone needs to be a builder in here.

And everyone needs to really want to reach out and help each other. And so I didn't realize that I had this system already in place, right? To transfer people from being a physical in-person bakery business to being an on-demand delivery care package, almost entirely business. And day in, you know, day by day, our team would transfer some people over to be like, okay, you're going to be more in the background. You're going to be more in the background. And you're going to pack the boxes. Your job's going to change from this to this. But we had built an infrastructure enough and a culture of bearing and accountability that we were able to do that.

And then the other thing that we did during COVID, that was really big. We exist to make people happy with dessert. That is our mission at Milk Bar. We want to make people happy with dessert. We can ship you dessert and we hope that dessert makes you happy. But how do we really show up for you with that spirit? One day I just decided we can't bake for people. people that come and visit us, but how do we show up baking in people's homes? And one day I just

woke up and I said, we're going to let's just start doing it online. Let's just turn the camera around. Guess what I was doing all through COVID? Baking, right? And so I thought, what if I turn the camera around on myself? This is what I'm doing naturally. It's what I've been doing my entire life in between, in the margins. And I'm just going to welcome people into my home as I bake, right? Like that's, I'm going to open my door. No one can come to my house, but I'm going to open my door anyways because we can't open our physical doors, our bakery doors, etc. And so I started this thing called Bake Club. So we had already this huge online business that was happening from a finished baked good standpoint.

But what I missed was the spirit of being able to just be a human in the world. And so I started this online baking community called Bake Club. It still exists. It is free for anyone that wants to come. You can learn how to bake. you can hone your baking skills. You get new baked goods and baking recipes once a week. Some people just come because they like to watch baked goods come to lay.

And it's been, again, like, we don't just want to sell you a cookie. That's not why we exist. I don't exist. My profession isn't to make cookies to sell them to you. Like, I want to make you happy with dessert. And I found in COVID really like the deeper meaning of why I do what I do. And it is, it is. it is that baked goods are my conduit into the community, into world, into people's lives.

They do the talking when I can't. And that's been an incredibly wild ride. And it's, I think it's brought this incredible baking community. It's further, it's further enriched our community outright. We've always built milk bar thinking that our community should always be bigger than our customer base. Always. I think that that outright is a really important business model. You don't need to convert every member of your community into a customer immediately. You want them to know who you are and why you exist and what you care about and why you deserve a place in their lives long before there's any transaction that's happened. And that's been a really intentional part. And Bay Club has been really big for us in that way.

And that's my intention for the next, I guess, 18, we're almost 18 this year for the next 18 years of the milk bar is to keep leading with that humanity, humility, sense of humor and the spirit of just showing it. I love this. And yeah, community is such a big piece that you're doing a lot of and you're talking a lot about and you're bringing people into your home and you're doing all these creative things. And I want to talk about them a little bit, but I also want to talk about how is Christina morphing or morphed, if you will, from a baker to a CEO, essentially, because that takes

a big growth to look at yourself in a different light. How did that journey, like, what kind of growth did you find in yourself? It's a good question, Alana. I, you know, I don't self-identify as a CEO, funnily enough. I'm the type of person where I do best if I'm tricked into things, even if I have to trick my, I'm the one that's tricking myself into it. I think being, you know, being the CEO of Milk Bar has been an important part of Milk Bar being milk bar, of Milk Bar existing, of Milk Bar surviving, of Milk Bar thriving through the years. And for me, you know, learning how to read a P&L, building a P&L, the economics down to the T, right? Like I could build you a business model for any bakery, anywhere in the U.S. now.

But it's not because I went to school to do it. And it's not because someone sat me down and gave me a textbook to do it. It's been very much a learn as I go, street smart sort of thing. But very early on, it was easy to become that role because that was the mission critical piece. I knew how to make delicious cookies, cakes, and pies. It wasn't proving to the world that I knew how to do that. It was, I have to learn how to do everything. else needed in order to do the very thing that I want to do, right?

Like, I have to learn how to be the finance person. I have to learn how to be HR. I have to learn how to be the delivery person, the head of ops, etc., etc., I have to get up, packaging costs. I have to know how to buy a flow wrap machine and how to set it up. I have to know what a jewel date is, right? I have to know what a lot code is. I have to know how to demand plan out based on my last years of sales.

I need to know that we need to buy freeze, dried corn a year in advance if we want to put our corn cookies on the menu. They're just details. Like, they're not scary details. I think that for me, different people have different personalities. My personality is very much, I'm like a Clydesdale horse, right? That's my bull in a china shop. I put my blinders on. The only thing that matters to me is making people happy with dessert is going back to the spirit of making cookies. The other stuff that I have learned to do along the way, I'm proud that I've learned. They were just important steps that I stepped up to the plate and learned how to do in order

to get to a place where we get to make more cookies and more cake and more pie and show up in people's lives with them. And I think everything that we do in life as humans is about how we phrase it to ourselves, how we talk to ourselves when no one's listening, how we talk to ourselves when people are listening. And it's about how you approach yourself and what you tell yourself you are capable of. and if you try to tell yourself you're not capable of something, I challenge you to give it another go. I obviously have like this love of numbers and math and that makes sense in my head.

There's a lot of things I'm not great at, but I still do them because I know that they are an important part of the puzzle to being able to live out my dream every day. Listen, by the way, I feel like I'm talking as though I do it all. There is no eye at Milkbar. I have an incredible team of humans. Along the way, I've had to learn how to do almost every single job because how do you know how to hire for the job? If you don't know what the job looks like and feels like what kind of personality would it suit beyond the tactical things that would come across in someone's resume. And again, in that COVID example of being able to reach across, right, to say, I don't know how to do that. Can you teach me how to do it?

I want to know how to do it. I'm capable of learning how to do it. If I can be an electrician, a plumber, a general contractor, a drywall specialist, right? I definitely figure out how to do the other thing. So again, I think a lot of it is how we phrase things in our head, how we contextualize and the things we tell ourselves we are and aren't capable of, and then surrounding ourselves with other people that are both different in skill sets, but have a similar commonality in curiosity about what it takes to get the job done.

The CEO part is like what it takes to get the job done and doing it with curiosity and studying what makes a great CEO, but also being open-minded about blazing your own trail as to what it looks like in your organization. And that's incredible. And I love every piece of that answer, Christina. One thing that I want to tap into for a second, just, you know, because we do have a lot of people listening to this. They want to start a business maybe or they want to be.

come their own economy so they're not depending on this one ladder corporate ladder that is probably burning right now so so tell me a little bit like because from time to time there's going to be especially if you're bootstrapping if you don't have millions and millions and millions of spare what are some of i mean there's going to be some moments where you're like i don't know how to make salaries like take me a little bit to like what do you do how do you recover as a CEO or at least You know, like, but as a founder, what do you do? I don't, the make salaries like make payroll. Yeah.

It's such a great question. I mean, from that standpoint, it's dollars and cents, right? So you have to know what money you have coming in, what you think you can depend on coming in regularly, and then what money you have going out the door. And if you don't have enough money coming in, you can't afford what you want. And that's, quite frankly, that is something we deal with every. single day at Milk Bar, right? We would love to have more resources than we do, but that's just not our reality. That's not what running a profitable business looks like for us today. That's changed over 18 years in a way that's interesting and compelling. I mean, you have to eat your vegetables

is kind of the long and the short of it, right? It means that you are going to have to learn how to do more with less or how to do the same with less. And it means that you're going to be pushed out of your comfort zone or that other people are going to be pushed out of their comfort zone. I think it's going back to that spirit, that drive of what are you doing? Do you believe in it? Is it right for you? Do you believe in doing it every single day? Do you believe in doing it early in the morning before anyone else has woken up or late at night long after everyone else has gone to bed? Is it the thing you want to do when no one is looking and no one cares? And if your answer is still yes, then start going at the numbers and figure it out.

I think a lot of times as business people, as entrepreneurs, we get so excited about our vision that we decide that we need things because we can see into the future, right? Our fingers is on the pulse of what we're building. But sometimes the time isn't right. We don't have the dollars. And part of being an entrepreneur is being super passionate in our vision and also being super patient in our pursuit.

You can be pushy and patient at the same time. And I think the eating your vegetables is being really patient about what you get to have and when you get access to it. My personality is always like, if I can figure out how to do it myself, it's free. It's no added cost to the business. I have a limited, you know, number of hours in a day and damn, and. But I try to raise people at Milkbar. We have an incredible team of people that are like-minded in that way. of if you really believe in something, you will figure out how to get it done in a way that works.

And just because your first pass at it from a payroll standpoint doesn't add up, doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means it needs refining. A lot of times the answer is sitting right in front of you, whether you realize it or not, it's kind of like the compost cookie. Like you will be more creative. The second you limit your available resources and tools. That is true for you. kitchen and creativity. It is also true for how you learn to run a business. I see you're like, I know. I'm just like, yes, yes, yes, this is like so good because I think people don't realize when your back is against the wall, you're actually going to become a lot more creative. And I absolutely love that. And I also love your, like you talked about being relentless, but also patience.

And I think that's such a beautiful thing to say because I'm in general, just a very impatient creature. But in like when you find like when you start something or in anything in your career, really, you're going to have to have both. It doesn't mean that you're going to procrastinate. You're going to hustle, hustle, hustle. But you also need to understand some things will take time and will take some maturing to do. So I just love that. Like I was just like, yes, yes.

are important, right? Like discomfort and comfort. Like get comfortable being uncomfortable. This is the spirit of the last 18 years of milk bar. Love the discomfort. Like, love it. The tensions, you were on your path that feels like you're constantly up against two opposing forces. You're doing it right.

Christina, do you think there's something, just two more questions, do you think there's something that people maybe don't know about you that created the Christina that we see today. It's such a good question. I'm a very yielding, rule following person everywhere, but I'm not in the kitchen. Like,

that's something that in an early age I found was like my space and my comfort to break the rules. I'm trying to think maybe that's obvious. I'm trying to figure out, like, what the layers deeper on that are. I'm, like, I'm relentless. I'm an obsessive. I'm relentless.

I'm an obsessive. Like, I will, I have three different recipes happening just over here that you can't see. And I will go at them until the middle of the night tonight early into tomorrow until I get them done. Because I don't like not knowing. Like I don't like the unresolved and I'm relentless at it. I'm not, I'm impatient just like you, Alana. And when there are things specifically like food and the kitchen things that I need resolved,

I don't like something on my to-do list. I don't like something unresolved. I need to know. It's a little bit of like the mathematician in me. I need to know I can solve the problem in like the ratios of things, the time, the temperature, how long am I mixing, whatever it is. And I won't sleep at night. My husband will-

You know your why? Why? Why is it such a drive? Do you know? It's somewhere in between. I don't like things unresolved. I don't like things on the to-do list. I don't like feeling like someone is waiting for me to deliver.

I don't like feeling like I'm slowing someone down, but I think for me ultimately, because this is a recipe, I don't owe it to anyone. It's just, it's for me. I'm developing it for bait club. I need to know, I need to be able to solve the math problem and check my work. And that is, and this, the part of the intersection of eating is like, there is no key, right? Like X doesn't equal anything that I, I say what X equals, but until it's right, until I can bring the idea in my head of nostalgia, what I think it's going to taste like, the texture, the size, the shape, how I think it's all going to balance out until I know I can solve that formula in like a real bite, I will, it'll keep me up at night. Of all the things that will keep me up in it,

there's a few others in life, but that is a, that's a big one. I won't go to bed until I am done with a recipe, which is a dangerous thing. One, because I'm like, I'm not, I'll be there for dinner, but I'm just sitting at the dinner. dinner table waiting for everyone to get up so I can finish my recipe and I don't know how long it's going to be and there's a dangerous amount of failed baked goods you know failed baked goods on the counter I'm trying to think of what else I mean that's like I'm relentless I'm relentless I'm impatient if I if I don't have it solved I will go at it forever and yet like I'm the most optimistic and the most pessimistic person at the same time into the tensions point and I love that I wouldn't trade it for

anything. I don't know why that is. It's just how I'm built and I don't feel like I need to explain it to anyone. I just know that that's my process. It's you. This is you. And what would you wish somebody told you like if you like you or maybe you talk to your younger self, maybe when you're still lost or you're still trying to figure this out? What would you wish somebody told you or that you could go back to yourself and tell yourself? I think more than anything. I don't, I wouldn't want any answers. I think on like those dark days or those moments where I felt, you know, I don't know, uncertain or lost. I don't have memory really of that. But I think the number one thing when I talk about what it took to get to where I am is the it all makes sense in the end.

I'm not done. I'm not at the end. I'm to where I am in the marathon, right? But it all makes sense. It's not supposed to be a straight line. You don't have to make excuses or give a reason for what makes sense to you. And it will all add up. It all adds up.

Like when I think about we have whatever it is, seven, eight, nine cookbooks, I would not know how to write recipes, how to photograph recipes, right? Like if I didn't do all these other, you know, try these other things on for size, I wouldn't know how to run a business if I didn't fall in love with math and really give myself to like majoring in math. Like they all, every day I have these little brief little moments in life where I go, holy smokes, I've been training for this moment my entire life. And I can't wait to figure out what it is tomorrow that I learn that dots this sort of like crooked path from way back when.

It's the like if you follow what makes sense to you, doesn't need to make sense to anyone else. I would dare say it shouldn't make sense to anyone else. If you keep following what feels right to you, it will add up. And I think that's also to say, like, I think my best advice to myself and to anyone else is you don't have to have all the answers. You do not have to have all the answers. You are exactly where you're supposed to be. The thing that you owe to yourself is to pay attention, right? You have to start paying attention to the things that make you curious, that magnetize you, that draw you in, that make you feel alive.

Pay attention to those and start trying them on for size. Start going at them. Again, the only thing about them that makes sense is that they are true for you, that they make you feel something. Go at them. Pick them up. Maybe something doesn't work. Put it down.

Pick something else up. It's all going to make sense eventually. And the little moments make sense right now. So powerful, Christina. Oh, my God. I love this conversation. So where did they find milk bar and buy it to all their friends? and to themselves and, like, how did they find you?

You're the best. So, milkbarstore.com is where we will ship baked goods all across the country for you. You can also find where our stores are at milkbarstore.com. We're in New York, L.A., Las Vegas, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and more coming soon. And you can find us on all the socials at Milkbar Store. And Bake Club. Don't forget Bake Club. Come in, bake a match with me.

We'd love to have you. So fun. Christina, thanks for coming to the show. This was so fun. Like I was just like, I could probably grill you forever, but this is so fun. I love it. I love it. The way in which you just get it.

And thanks for happening. Oh, it's so fun. Thank you.