Tsai, who grew up in a restaurant family and is herself a restaurateur and entrepreneur, handled most of the kitchen duties, while Chang, an actor best known for her portrayal of Nelly Yuki on the hit show Gossip Girl, would entertain guests in the dining room.
As a young couple, the two found comfort in bringing together strangers over a home-cooked meal—a communal experience they felt was lacking in their lives at the time.
“Elders like us, if we have any pain or don’t feel very well that day, we cannot go out to get anything.”
“Dinners can bring together people of all cultures and also [present] an opportunity to talk about who we are as people, our heritage, and our love stories,” Chang says. “When we were deciding on a name for our supper club, we were trying to figure out what was at the heart of dinner, and the name ‘Heart of Dinner’ became so fitting.”
Admission to these dinners was free, but guests were invited to leave donations in a large urn on the table, with proceeds going to No Kid Hungry, a child hunger campaign that supports school and community meal programs.
Heart of Dinner’s core mission took a dramatic turn during the pandemic. Chang and Tsai, who moved to New York City in 2018 to pursue career opportunities, were deeply troubled by the wave of Asian hate crimes and xenophobia that swept across the city in March 2020. After a period of feeling helpless, they sprang into action to mobilize support for the elderly Asian community. They partnered with local senior centers to hand-deliver bags of culturally appropriate groceries and ready-to-eat meals, prepared in their tiny home kitchen, to Asian elders isolated by the mandated quarantines. Within months, the couple were regularly delivering over 1,200 meals per week across New York City.
As threats to the Asian community lingered, Chang and Tsai formally established Heart of Dinner as a nonprofit in late 2020, garnering support from private donors; local, mostly Asian-owned businesses; corporate sponsorships; and foundation grants. Today, the organization continues to deliver over 700 care packages every week filled with fresh produce and hot meals to Asian seniors across four of New York City’s five boroughs. Later this year they plan to expand to Staten Island, with fundraising efforts already underway.
In April, Heart of Dinner celebrated its five-year anniversary. While volunteers from across New York City celebrated the milestone, Chang and Tsai were in Los Angeles, where they’ve lived intermittently since January, coordinating relief efforts for Asian seniors displaced by the catastrophic wildfires there (see sidebar below). They believe their experience in New York over the past five years helped them more quickly mobilize recovery efforts there.
Heart of Dinner volunteers at the Lower East Side site organize deliveries for the day. (Photo credit: Adam Reiner)
“We did not see this coming,” Chang says, “but if anything, it was kismet, and poetic in [the] way that it reminded us of the heart of the mission and how necessary this work is, anywhere in the country.”
Delivering Hope to Harlem
On a frigid Wednesday afternoon in February, about a dozen volunteers met at La Marqueta, a Latin food hall in East Harlem, to pack 75 gift bags with groceries like firm tofu, Japanese sweet potatoes, bok choy, and bananas, along with plastic to-go containers filled with stir-fried pork, purple eggplant, and white rice prepared by a partner restaurant in Chinatown. All meals included in Heart of Dinner care packages come from local Asian-owned restaurants.
Each bag, destined for Asian seniors living in nearby public housing, was festooned with colorful, uplifting artwork by volunteers from across the city: drawings and paintings of birds, lanterns, fruit, flowers, and other Asian-themed imagery. “Heart of Dinner” was written in Mandarin characters on the bags, with a personalized note stapled beneath the handle.
The notes included simple wishes for health and prosperity written in each recipient’s native language—in many cases, messages one would expect a grandparent to give, not receive: “Make sure you drink water” or “Please eat well today.” Two of the bags had notes written in Thai; other Heart of Dinner sites also prepare notes in Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.
