Would you work with your significant other?
For Yeshi, our working relationship is a perfectly normal arrangement: not working to support each other as a way of life would be strange.
When he was growing up in rural Tibet, the family home operated a bit like a modern-day office. Some people were on the road most of the time – in this case with their herd up on the Plateau – while others were better suited to the universal admin of daily life in the home. Each played to their own interests and strengths.
There were always jobs of one kind or another, and most of these had food at their centre: making butter and tsampa, sowing, harvesting and preserving crops, bagging up provisions, and preparing meals three times a day, to name a few.
To some extent, the family still operates like this today. Retirement has pushed Yeshi’s fathers, mum and auntie out of their day jobs (though in reality it’s hard to get them to actually stop), and members of the next generation have stepped into their vacant positions.
But a generation on from our own, and nobody seems to know what to do any more. Our nephews and nieces in Tibet do not see a future in the fields next to their home or up on the high pastures where the family have herded their yaks for hundreds of years. Most of them seek work in towns and cities elsewhere, but without experience or contacts they have limited success.
So they do a lot of hanging around the home. Everyone tries to make themselves useful, but there’s a level of frustration now that didn’t exist when everybody had their natural place.
This turns out to be the key: that everyone has their own clear role. And this must be how our marriage has survived the many years of Taste Tibet. Yeshi has always been chef and I am (more or less) everything else. I don’t try to make momos and he doesn’t need to touch the accounts.
We just wish we could offer work in our family business to some of those struggling nieces and nephews. Oh well, Taste Tibet cannot save Tibet. But we can do our bit. Thank you to everyone who eats with us and cooks from the book – we do everything we can to preserve traditional Tibetan ways of life, and you’re helping a lot along the way.
Lots of sunshine in the forecast this week. Come and make the most – and the last – of our outdoor dining for the year. The restaurant is open all the usual hours this week, as follows:
Weds – Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 12-3 / 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm
This week’s menu is up on the website. Drop by for dine in, take away or a wide range of freezer food.
Newsletter subscribers can enjoy a free chai with us this week (chocolate tsampa truffles are the perfect companion, just saying). Have you signed up? Click here to receive weekly news and offers direct to your inbox.
Looking forward to seeing you soon!
Julie and Yeshi
Opening hours this week:
Weds – Fri: 5-9.30pm
Saturday: 12-3pm 🥢 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3pm 🥢 5-9pm
☏ 01865 499318
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