Justin Pichetrungsi

Justin Pichetrungsi, chef and owner of Anajak Thai Cuisine, joins me to share his Five (Easy) Rules for Taking Over Your Parents’ Restaurant. We talk about burning yourself out—and knowing when not to—along with the importance of arguing with your parents, listening to them, and recognizing that old things are often cooler than new ones. Justin reflects on taking over his family’s restaurant, preserving its history, and finding a way to move the business forward without losing what made it special. Together, his rules offer an honest and thoughtful guide to inheriting not only a restaurant, but all the memories, relationships, and responsibilities that come with it.The beauty of this episode is Justin’s openness about how complicated it can be to carry on a family tradition. He does not romanticize the work or pretend the transition happened without disagreements, exhaustion, or doubt. Instead, he shows how listening, arguing, preserving, and changing can all be expressions of the same love. There is something deeply moving about watching a new generation build upon what came before while making sure the people, stories, and traditions that created it are never forgotten.IntroductionHello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. I’m always excited when I get to spend time with today’s guest, Justin Pichetrungsi who is the chef and owner of Anajak Thai Cuisine.He’s here to share his five easy rules to taking over your parents’ restaurant. He talks about the duality of both burning yourself out and taking care of yourself, the importance of arguing with your parents, and how everything old is cooler than everything new. It is an extremely insightful conversation from someone who has successfully transitioned his family’s restaurant from one generation to another.For anyone who has found themselves in the same situation or for anyone who wants to hear the story of how it is done well, this is the episode for you. So let’s get into the rules here on HRN. Justin, always a pleasure to see you.Thank you again for splashing us out the last time we were in. Welcome to Five Rules. Thank you, I like this.Taking Over the Family RestaurantIn many ways, the tradition of taking over a parent’s restaurant used to be common. Why do you think that went away and why do you think it’s back? Is it back? You tell me. Oh, why do I think it went away? I actually have thought about this quite a bit.You see this a lot in Europe. You see it a lot in Asia. You see a lot of the passing down of the torch to the next generation, whether or not it’s a restaurant.Why don’t we see it here in Los Angeles so much or in America rather? And I think it’s because we have this belief that we can become independently wealthy within one generation. So it’s not necessary to build upon the intergenerational wealth and knowledge that our parents passed down. I can charge ahead in my own career and live the fullest of my life in the way that I wanna do it.The second thing is that there’s a lot of parents of immigrants, a lot of parents of non-immigrants that are gonna say, no, I want you to live life better than I live. Don’t take over my shop. Pursue your dreams, pursue your life.I was always really afraid that I was gonna lose something if my parents closed the restaurant down. I was gonna lose a part of the family. I was gonna lose my living room where I’m sitting in right now. That fear of what was gonna happen to the recipes and to the memories was really what guided me into it.A Beautiful RenovationYou’re celebrating your 45th restaurant birthday and you recently did a beautiful renovation of Anna Jack. What did you wanna preserve? What did you wanna overhaul? I love the atmosphere that the old place became.It was hard to be able to explain that to my general contractor. In fact, I moved on to different contractors until I found someone who understood this idea that it wasn’t gonna be a change. We’re gonna take the little needle an