Break Time
How break dancing helps build community and creativity in and out of the kitchen for a group of chefs in Portland, OR
ILLUSTRATION: AUSTIN ROSSBOROUGH
No matter the industry, it’s important to have hobbies; something that takes your mind off the stresses of work. For some people, it's hiking, knitting, or reading. But for a group of Portland chefs, that hobby is break dancing.
Richard Văn Lê, chef and co-owner of Matta, has been “breaking” since age 10. “I fell in love with [break dancing] since the day I saw it,” he says. In high school, Văn Lê joined the school’s hip-hop club, going on to join a crew after graduating and compete at national and international competitions. Now, along with running his Vietnamese-American food cart, Văn Lê represents the PNW crew The Hoodz. “I had a similar wavelength with them in how we view the dance. That and the fact that we are all creatives in other domains. It’s how we bond and influence the PNW scene.”
After opening his food cart in 2018, Văn Lê was happy to see that the breaking community showed up for him. “In the beginning, a lot of our support was through that community. After a Saturday event, everyone would show up and sell us out.” Văn Lê began popping up at breaking events and battles, where he eventually met Chef TJ Cruz of Sunrice.
Cruz has roots with the Rhythm Bandits crew, but nowadays he’s busy hosting pop-ups every week, preparing to move his Tex-Mex concept into its larger new location in late July. When asked about Portland’s breaking community, Cruz describes it as tight-knit. “It's funny because when you would throw dance battles, Portland is so small that you’d see the same people and start to really get to know everybody.”
Chef Ethan Leung, who co-owns Baon Kainan with his wife Geri Leung, says it was a shared interest of breaking that helped connect him with Văn Lê, and led him and his wife to move to Portland and start their business. “It wasn't until 2020 when I met Richard in Seattle. At that time I was doing a pop-up with my wife, cooking Filipino food. Just seeing [Richard] be a part of the breaking community and still doing his thing with food, it was like, ‘Okay, if he can do it, then I think that I can do it.’ If it wasn't for that common ground of breaking, I probably would never have thought of taking the jump to move to Portland to open the food cart.” Even though he’s not competing on the regular anymore, Leung says that breaking has helped him not only create a healthier work-life balance, but also find a way to expand his creative identity beyond the kitchen.
“Owning a business does take up most of my time and energy, so taking the time to break is tough, but what I am seeing and noticing is that there are cooks and chefs out there who have different hobbies outside of cooking,” says Leung.
Chef Richard Van Le | Photo: Will Blunt
Chef TJ Cruz | Photo: RaeAnn Serra
Chefs Ethan and Geri Leung | Photo: Will Blunt
Cruz agrees that balance is necessary when running a business. “If your profession is cooking, you're cooking all day and then you go home. And then you're most likely gonna cook again [the next day],” says Cruz. “Your whole world is just going to be filled with cooking. You need something to take your mind off it, or to fulfill something else.”
Văn Lê stresses that the kitchen lifestyle can be a marathon, and admits that self-care and mental health can fall to the wayside. “Mental health [struggles are] definitely something I find is [prevalent] within the chef world, so having something to help that stress disappear for a few hours is crucial to longevity,” he says. “Whatever we can do to allow space for us to continue is an important aspect to foster.”
“I believe it’s incredibly important to have extracurricular activities outside of careers, regardless of high-stress or not,” says Văn Lê. “I've found peace in being able to practice and hone other crafts that allow my brain to be creative in a whole aspect other than cooking. I don't just identify as a chef, but also as a creative person overall. I'm a b-boy, designer, and music enthusiast. These other aspects inspire and drive new creations within food...[I use] my breaking life to incorporate the feeling that I've felt in [dance] into the food—that euphoria and excitement that happens when I learn a new move or create a new movement. I look at streetwear and art as a means to adding final touches and micro details to my food. These all play a part in my identity as a creative.”
