Subtle Asian food groups let foodies live their dreams

Another food creator whose career was launched during the pandemic is Randy Lau, the man behind the popular YouTube channel, Made with Lau. The channel features Lau’s father Chung Sun Lau, also known as “Daddy Lau,” who has more than 50 years of experience cooking professionally in China and the United States and shares classic Cantonese cooking techniques and recipes.

When COVID-19 shut down his digital marketing business in 2020 and his family was stuck in the house, with his first child on the way and his parents not getting any younger, Randy decided it was a sign to start documenting his own family legacy. “It would’ve made sense to get a job, but the child in me wanted to preserve my dad’s recipes. The dad in me wanted to have something to pass down to my kids,” Randy tells me.

A longtime fan of cooking channels himself, Randy spotted a void in the YouTube landscape for an older figurehead teaching younger generations how to cook Chinese food in an English-friendly way. Randy quickly put his years of experience working in digital marketing to use, and spent the next six months developing and producing content for the channel. Their first video features Daddy Lau walking viewers step-by-step through making a Cantonese version of the classic mapo tofu. The video established Made With Lau’s signature production, which spotlights the history of the dish and includes a segment answering audience questions. Randy’s father proved a natural in front of the camera and they had a blast. “So it’s like, ‘I think there’s something here, and even if it doesn’t go anywhere, then I’ll at least have spent all this time with my family and have something to pass down,’” Randy says.

Randy and Chung Sun Lau.

Courtesy of Made With Lau

Along with the support of his personal network of friends and family, Randy began posting diligently on Facebook groups like SAC, Cantonese Cooking, and Cantonese Parents to promote his channel. SAC, which was created in 2019, has a particularly broad reach with more than 353,000 current members. It’s a diverse forum; activity varies from home cooks seeking tips and posting pictures of meals to creators like Randy who share cookbook launches and career updates.

“The group is full of Asian diaspora, and I think a lot of it in some ways relate to the yearning to connect with our culture,” says Randy.

Most groups don’t allow links to anything outside of Facebook to discourage spammers, though SAC allows for judicial promotion of AA+PI channels. Randy posted about his channel on SAC “to announce our mission” five days after the first video dropped. The post racked up more than 1,000 likes within days. “I got like a hundred views on the video the first week, so being able to expose this to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people was pretty critical. It was a great kickstart,” says Randy.