I had no plan. Now I'm cooking in fourteen countries.

For most of my life I've done things the same way. Less of a plan, more of just going for it. This trip is the biggest version of that yet.

For the last five or six years I built a name for myself as an entrepreneur. We went on Shark Tank. We built a cooking company and did a lot of loud, fun, occasionally crazy stuff. But the whole time, I wasn't building myself up as a chef. I want to change that. I want my name out there as a chef, and I want to learn directly from the people who make the food I love, khao soi, tacos, ramen, right where they make it.

The idea isn't new. As a kid I used to research currency exchange rates and read about how cheap it was to live in the Philippines. I always wondered what it would be like to be someone who lived all over the world. Then I got to the French Laundry, fell for truffles, and that pulled me toward France and Italy. I cooked in France for a while. I took a trip through Italy. The map kept getting bigger.

Two books really set this off. I read The 4-Hour Workweek while I was still at the French Laundry, and the idea of building something and then traveling for a year stuck in my head. The other was a little book about a guy at a big accounting firm who was over it, took his savings, invested half, and lived off only what that money made. I thought that was genius. Those two ideas never left me.

Polina and I met in France. She's Russian, I'm American, and she hasn't been able to get a visa to the States, so for years we've met in the in-between places. A month in Cuba. Two months in the Philippines. Two months in Thailand. Every one of those was cheaper and better than flying back and forth and keeping a whole life running back home. At some point it clicked: it would cost less to just travel full-time than to keep leaving and coming back.

Bangkok is where it actually started. The day I left my last company I had a flight to Bangkok already booked. I'd written Gaggan months earlier asking for a stage and heard nothing, then out of nowhere they said yes. One night I met a guy named Prasad at a bar. He runs a group that brings chefs around India, and he offered to open some doors. I'd be the first foreigner to do it.

I put a proposal together. In February the first place said yes, a hotel group called the Leela, which is about as close as India gets to the Ritz-Carlton, palaces and all. The second I could say the Leela had booked me, doors that had been silent swung open. Cap Karoso, a resort in Indonesia I'd been emailing with no reply, had a founder write back within a day. One yes unlocked the next.

Then I did the thing I always do. I told Prasad yes to more dinners, and ten minutes later Cap Karoso confirmed the exact same dates. I have a lot of ADHD, and my whole life I've had to be careful not to be cruel to myself when I trip over my own excitement. So I didn't spiral. I called Prasad, we moved the dates, and the double-booking turned into India part one, Indonesia, and India part two.

After that comes Japan, then Mexico, where Polina and I are getting married. The whole thing ends in 2027, when I open my restaurant, Elizabeth, named after my mom. I had no plan. I still kind of don't. But I'm finally taking the trip I've wanted to take since I was a kid, and I'm taking it with her.