[BU Today] Joanne Chang Serves Up Life Lessons at SHA Convocation
Flour and Myers + Chang chef-owner on the importance of listening to your inner voice
Joanne Chang is unlikely to offer this four-course menu at one of her Boston-area restaurants.
Fruit kebabs. Peaches. A bowl of cereal. Dumplings.
But the pastry chef and co-owner of the popular Flour Bakery + Cafe chain and award-winning local restaurant Myers + Chang turned a series of food fables into life lessons as the guest speaker at the School of Hospitality Administration Convocation on May 18.
“By fruit kebab, I mean listening,” Chang told the 127 temporarily mystified SHA graduates and several hundred guests gathered in the George Sherman Union Metcalf Ballroom.
Specifically, she meant listening to the inner voice that tells you who you are. “On paper I was not supposed to be a pastry chef,” Chang confided. She said that she came from a very traditional Taiwanese family, studied math and economics at Harvard, and became a management consultant. But she’d always liked making people happy with food, beginning with a gift of fruit kebabs for her teacher in third grade. Baking for her Harvard study group and hosting friends for weekend dinners after graduation, “all I thought about was food—how I loved to make it, eat it, and most of all, share it.” Finally, Chang said, she listened to her inner voice and embarked on a culinary career.
Get more coverage from SHA’s Convocation Ceremony and listen to the rest of her speech on BU Today.