The Bonita Lesson

View from Shangri-La, Bangkok

Last week I spent four wonderful, sticky, days in the heart of Bangkok, trying to see if I could sweat through my sundress thoroughly enough to change it from cherry-red to a tight, wet, Harvard crimson. Yep, I’m a really cute traveler. People on the streets generally looked at me like I was some sort of sea monster and etched away, avoiding eye-contact. I suppose they want a “dry friend”. It is disheartening to see how much prejudice exists against overachieving glands. (I believe the word you’re looking for right now is anyways...).

Floating Market

Despite the humidity turning me into a walking Gatorade ad, I love that city. The thing I love most about Bangkok is that there is food everywhere. The city boasts over 6,000 restaurants and god-only-knows-how-many street vendors. Walking down the street is like walking through a food carnival. Carts and fold-up tables with faded rainbow umbrellas and homemade cardboard signs line the sidewalks. Everywhere you look people in mismatched Hawaiian shirts are busy frying up peanuts, grilling bananas with honey, stirring metal vats of noodle soups, and turning slimy skewered squids and fragrant rows of pork skewers glazed in a thick teriyaki marinade. Or they are busy with their fruit stands: dicing pineapple, watermelon, or dragon fruit; skinning fresh mango, coring a papaya so ripe and supple that the knife falls right through.

And of course my favorite are those women busy slapping large live fish against the pavement, and then, (while the fish is still twitching) macheteing their silver head and tailfins right off before rubbing them down with herbs and tossing them (literally) onto the coals. There must be some unwritten rule that if you can’t hear your dinner’s head being cracked out back, then it probably isn’t fresh enough.

In a city that lives to eat, it can be pretty overwhelming choosing a place to dine. Enter tripadvisor. A simple “Bangkok restaurants” search pulls up a list of what travelers rated as the best of the best. Since I’d been in Thailand for a while, I was tired of thai food (if I see one. more. noodle.) and ready to embrace the people’s recommendations. Ranked first was a very pricey Italian place, and since I’m already considering playing the trombone on the sidewalk for extra money, I skipped to #2 – Bonita Café and Social Club: Vegan Restaurant. One point for herbivores! Naturally, I had to try it. And try it I did – three times in four short days.

Here comes the hard part: being honest. The first night’s Japanese curry and brown rice was entirely forgettable. In a city with over 6,000 restaurants, how on earth does #2 get away with that? While the second and third day’s teriyaki burger and veggie pizza were redeemingly delicious, the truth is that, most carnivores would not go home and give these dishes a top-rating on tripadvisor. This begs the question: how did this restaurant make it to #2? Was this a vegan conspiracy? Was PITA behind it? And with so many other well-executed culinary treats around every corner, why did I—a person who never repeats restaurants when traveling—return?

This past January, I read Thomas Friedman’s acclaimed business book, The World is Flat, about globalization and the future of business in a changing and interconnected, “flattened” world. And yes, I know that I am about 7 years late with this ground-breaking work, but ever since I developed breasts and social skills, I’ve had a serious reading list backlog (and yes Kelly, these do count as breasts; and yes Sean these do count as social skills). In fact, I’m still reading my New Yorker magazines from 2010 –the Christmas gift that keeps on giving. Again: anyways…

In this book, Friedman asserts that as technological advances spread, the global competitive playing field evens; today, almost anyone on earth can compete over almost any job (with exceptions of course). For instance, 15 years ago we hired a local accountant to do our taxes, but now we can outsource part or all of that to either a computer program or a top-accounting graduate in New Delhi, for a fraction of the cost of the local sweater-vested, gray nose-haired CPA.

Front of Bonita Cafe,  Bangkok

Friedman argues that as more people from across the globe compete over finite jobs, it will be increasingly important for you to differentiate. To add whipped cream, sprinkles, and your own unique (in my case, sweaty) cherry on top. He tells an anecdote of a lemonade vendor on the lower deck at Camden Yards who does a little dance as he shakes up your lemonade. Even though he sells the same exact lemonade as the other vendors, everyone lines up for his stand to watch him shake what his momma gave him. His tail feathers. Like a Polaroid picture. This vendor differentiates through delivering a unique customer experience, and Friedman urges us to all try to find our own dance. 

Railway Market

This concept is precisely what Bonita Café understands and emobdies. The answer is that I went back because the owners forged a connection with me that made me feel special. And despite how pathetic and desperate I may sound on this blog, it’s not easy to win this sea-monster’s love.

The owner of Bonita is a lovely Japanese man – a runner, a vegan, and a passionate baker. He and his family run (no pun intended!!!) the place themselves and they are everything you’d want in a home-away-from-home: warm, attentive, thoughtful, and genuine. It was the small things that made me want to go back: there were no free outlets and when he saw me staring longingly at the floorboards he wordlessly ran into the back to bring me an extension cord; I was thirsty from all the lost body fluids permeating down my dress and he patiently refilled my water over 10 times with a smile; as I was leaving he and his wife asked if I had a water bottle they could fill for me to take on the road; when he discovered I liked to run he wrote down an area good for running and listed out how to get there in Thai so I could give it to a tuk tuk driver. As I was leaving his wife asked if she could get a picture with “the vegan runner from Boston” in front of her American quilt (and the next day when I came back in a less-sweaty dress she asked to take a new one because “today you different – today you beautiful!” …but I will let that slide, mostly because it did need to be retaken).

By the end of my three visits, I had two new friends. I knew all about their lives in the intimate and intermittent way that only travelers understand. They made me feel personally cared for and valued. On my last day they gave me a long speech about how if there is anything they can ever do for me I must not hesitate to ask them, and then handed me a card with their home phone number scrawled on the back in blue ink. Then they sent me off with a brown-bagged free vegan cupcake (so I would have something to eat on my upcoming 9 hr bus ride), and stood side-by-side to wave me off as if they were sending their eldest off to college.

Bonita Cafe Ownership

I’d eaten at many amazing places throughout my time in Bangkok, including one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. Food so good you'd have wet dreams about it. But throughout my travels I never felt compelled to actually grace the tripadvisor community with my own feedback. Yes, the food was orgasmic. But so what! I was still a selfish, review-reading, taker (those who know me are nodding, I hate you all). Until I met this family. This is the power of human connections.

In ancient Greece, friendship or “Xenia” was much more than someone to take fishing, confide in, or get drunk with; implicit in the friendship was a contractual financial obligation. Friendship was an economic institution with better repayment rates than modern banks!

Best. Soup. Ever.

Why am I saying all this? Because whether you are looking to develop a meaningful bond with someone or simply to differentiate your business and alter your career track, understanding how to develop friendships is an essential skill. This is not the same thing as getting along with others or getting people to like you. I met plenty of restaurant owners that were perfectly sweet and funny. We all "like" plenty of people. What the Bonita family and other successful individuals do is quite a few steps up from this. They forge a brief but poignant bond that hinges on some basic commonality of what it means to be human. A bond like a small bird that flies deep into another's heart and plants a tiny egg there to hatch, grow, and endure. This requires giving something of yourself in exchange for entry into such a private place. This is not easy to do. You must be, on a fundamental level, a wonderful person. (And no, this is not the MSG talking).

I realized as I wrote this that what Friedman argues and Bonita proves is that, as the world and the terms of commerce continue to mutate, we no longer need to believe that being a success in business means selling out or enslaving yourself to money and "the Man". In fact, the most successful people do just the opposite. Today, being ambitious can (and should) be synonymous with being a kind, generous, free-cupcake-and-water giving person. Because no matter how excellent (or average) the product or service you are delivering is, it is personal connections that compel others most, through an innate sense of loyalty, to go out of their way for you. To stick their necks out. To sweat pounds in the hellish humidity. To eat Japanese mush. To write a tripadvisor review. To baby sit for on their day off. To pretend they’re enjoying themselves for. To dress up and show up for. And I love that, despite all the pervasive cynicism in corporate environments, so much still depends upon one simple thing: being a good person.

And I think to myself, what a wooonnddeerrffulll wooorrrlldddd.