EastBar is built on a simple belief: Flavor Belongs.
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Our grandfather was fourteen years old in wartime Shanghai when his mother sent him into a professional kitchen.
He cooked his way through Hong Kong. He crossed the Pacific alone in 1967 to take a restaurant job in Washington, D.C. He ran restaurants in St. Louis for nearly twenty years.
He retired to Northern Virginia in 1988 and kept cooking anyway, because cooking was how he said he loved you. He didn't say it any other way. 
He raised our family on the flavors of every kitchen he had ever stepped into: Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and beyond.
To our grandfather, "Asian food" was never one thing.
It was a family of flavors, a generosity that crossed borders the way he had.
When our mother opened her own restaurant in 2006, he came out of retirement to help her launch it. And then he did something we didn't fully understand until much later: he sat down with our father, a white man from California with no previous connection to Asian food, and taught him everything.
Every recipe. Every technique. Every reason behind every step.
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We’re Michael and Chris.
We’re two brothers who grew up working in that restaurant, eating at that table, and mostly taking all of it for granted.
One night, after training hard and tired of reaching for the same beige, predictable protein bars, we asked ourselves an obvious question we'd somehow never asked before: why doesn't any of this taste like the food we actually grew up eating?
The matcha. The Vietnamese coffee. The mango, and coconut, ginger, pandan, five-spice. The flavors that had filled every room of our childhood still loved at family tables and in restaurants, but they hadn't made it into the gym bag. They hadn't made it into everyday life.
