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"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nLeiti Hsu eats, drinks, and socializes for a living. Inspired by food legend Ruth Reichl, the 28-year-old California native moved to New York for a consulting job but quickly realized her love for wine outweighed any affection for spreadsheets. Now she's the quintessential freelance hustler, helping to launch new brands and consulting on food-related tech start-ups. Recently, she started hosting \"Word of Mouth,\" a food show on Heritage Radio. She talked to Cosmopolitan.com about falling in love through food, why she's not ashamed to be an influencer, and what it's like to have an octogenarian restaurateur compliment your legs. \n\nI was born in Taipei and came to the States when I was 2. I grew up in Southern California, in a suburb with lots of ethnic food \u2014 Mexican, Korean, Chinese. But there was no French food, nothing high-end. I remember as a little Asian kid, my mom kept me really well fed, but when I went to the supermarket, I loved the TV dinners. They were so great because they were foods my mom would never make, and they were what Americans ate.In high school I was eventually the editor of the school paper, but my first-ever article was a profile of the new school principal. The editor-in-chief wrote on the bottom of it, \"I'm envious of this piece. Great job, keep it up.\" I was like, \"Oh my god, am I good at this? Or maybe it's just all the subject.\" I was paralyzed with fear because I thought I couldn't do this again. But I did do it again and loved writing. I ended up doing a lot of student journalism.I went to UCLA and studied international economics. I was very aware that college would be the last time that I would get to learn for a living \u2014 of course as a journalist, I do learn for a living, but at the time I thought this was it. I also did an honors thesis in comparative literature with a writing professor who offered to mentor me. That professor gave me a book, Comfort Me With Apples, by Ruth Reichl. Reichl was the LA Times food critic and went to The New York Times to be the food critic there, which is the most important position in the food world, especially when blogs weren't around.At the time, I was falling in love with this guy from New York and I went there a lot to see him, and I saw how you start to fall in love with someone through food. He took me to Sushi Yasuda for our first not-really-a-date and I remember sitting there as a 21-year-old and I looked at the sushi, and I looked at him, and I looked at the sushi, and I was like, \"Oh god, I really like you,\" but the sushi is what did it.I ended up writing a second college thesis inspired by Reichl, and in it I looked at my own romantic life through food. It was a semi-autobiographical account of how I fell in love with this person as he showed me around the most delicious destinations in New York. I was being seduced by food and by this guy.I started out my career at finance and consulting in Merrill Lynch. I was that Asian kid who got the good grades, and when the career presenters and recruiters came on campus, they said if you want all the doors open to you in life, you should go be an investment banker. That's where all the smart, cool people are. And I was like, \"Hmm, OK, that's me!\" Sure, I like numbers. Numbers tell a story. \n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nI started out at Merrill Lynch as a summer intern in New York. There was one incident there that stands out, because before it happened, I didn't realize how much of an oddball I was \u2014 and still am. I wrote an email to Stanley O'Neill, who was then CEO and chairman of the board at Merrill, and asked him for a coffee. Within half an hour he wrote back and said, \"Sure, here's my assistant's info.\" So I had a coffee with him. My fellow interns were some combination of appalled, envious, and baffled. But I'll talk to anyone who will talk to me. I won't waste your time, but I'll talk to you. The next day I got a note from the HR lady. She pulled me aside and said I shouldn't have done that. I felt very small and stupid \u2014 in school I had never been reprimanded the same way, and of course I took it to heart. I didn't know that later that would become why I'm good at what I do now.After Merrill Lynch, while I was still in college, I was hired as a management consultant, to start after I graduated. When I finished at UCLA, I spent a summer in Buenos Aires, dancing tango and drinking wine, and came back to New York ready to start work.\n\nThen Oliver Wyman Financial Services, where I had an offer, delayed our start dates because of the economy. I had a stipend, so I decided to do what I thought would be a little vacation job. I sent my clips to the Village Voice and The New York Times blindly as a 21-year-old. Googling around, I found a phone number for Cond\u00E9 Nast and saw that Gourmet was part of their portfolio, and I knew Ruth Reichl was working there. The switchboard operator was like, \"Who do you want to speak with?\" I knew exactly zero people in the food world, so I was like, \"Uh \u2026 Ruth Reichl?\" I got to her voicemail, and thankfully as an investment banker you learn the art of the elevator pitch, so I said, \"Hey, my name's Leiti. I have an unexpected three months off. I would love to come work for you. I don't need to get paid. I just want to learn.\" Another thing I knew from I-banking is that there must be a standard email format for the company. I called the switchboard operator back and asked about the standard format. I sent Ruth some clips, and the next day her assistant called and I got the internship gig.I still had this panic of, \"My life isn't starting yet, so I'm going to get as much out of this delay as possible.\" I enrolled in culinary school at the French Culinary Institute to learn classic French techniques. It's great for knowing proportions because when I cook, I tend to put in more of the things I love and it fucks up the dish, but it also taught me how to enjoy French food \u2014 to know a souffl\u00E9 is really hard to make or to appreciate a great croissant and to realize that duck a l'orange is as good as a Peking duck.Then the consulting firm delayed our start dates again. They put us in the parent company, Marsh &amp;amp; McLennan Companies (MMC). We were there for a year because they didn't want a bunch of consultants just sitting on the beach. I worked in human capital as the right-hand man to the chief diversity officer at MMC before finally going to the consulting firm, where I worked for about a year.At MMC I worked with big brands and did a lot of traveling. It sounds really glamorous, but I knew I was more of start-up person or a salesperson. It is really painful to be a young person when you haven't tried out many jobs. Getting older is awesome for knowing what you want, personally and professionally. When people are still young, the classic thing they say is, \"I'm open to everything.\" And it's really hard to do r\u00E9sum\u00E9s for \"everything.\" So I had a lot of coffees. All of the people that you meet, all those really painful coffees and calls, when you need something, those people will still exist. Through all the flailing, floundering, and foundering, you're building your network. It starts with your very first job search and continues through the second and the third. The more struggle you have, the richer your world will be.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nThrough the process of forcing connections, I found Lot18, which was like Gilt but for wine. It was so perfect I was afraid to submit my application. Even though I liked wine, I knew nothing about it, but I got the job anyway, making me the fifth employee in New York, the 10th at the whole company. I started tasting, tasting, tasting, and learning about wine by being an uber-consumer, being around it every single day, and working to understand it. My job was to get the wine shipped out in time. I called people every day, talking to winemakers, talking to fulfillment staff, being like, \"Hey, where is that pallet of wine that's a bubbly? It needs to get to customers before New Year's.\"Lot18 got almost $50 million in funding in one year. It was a really amazing learning experience \u2014 you learn about egos, about the right order of operations in a business that is growing so fast, about the hubris of being the Cool Kid hot startup, and you learn what happens when that's over. The founder of Lot18 asked me to go to their sister company, Popdust, an online pop music magazine, to help build that e-commerce business.\n\nThen a lot of freelance opportunities hit all at once. I reached a critical mass of connection, where clients were just finding me and asking me to help them build, so I left Popdust. For the past two years I've been self-employed. I work with big brands and start-ups and chefs and sommeliers to get stuff done faster and better. The work includes marketing and social media and editorial. For example, I've worked with a start-up mobile app called Cover. You can pay without waiting for the check. I make sure the best restaurants know about Cover.My portfolio of clients is mostly food and drink, and only the people and the companies I truly believe in. I watch how they treat their partners, employees, and vendors. A lot of start-ups are run by fancy B-school grads, and they think, \"Whatever, you can just do food styling on Instagram and approximate recipe-testing.\" You can't.Within the last two years I also spent some time working as a wine server at Terroir on the Highline. I learned how to talk up Riesling to everybody. I learned how to boss people around better as a server. You think you have to be servile, like, \"What do you want, ma'am?\" But to be a really effective server, it's like, \"You're going to get this wine, you're going to love it, I'm going to pour you a taste, you're going to love the meatballs, I'm going to make sure you have a little bit more than you really need and you're going to feel happy and full,\" and you're going to think, \"The server took such good care of us. She bossed us into a really great Riesling to enjoy on a beautiful summer night.\"I also host a food and wine radio show. The executive director of Heritage Radio came to a food tech brunch I hosted at Internet Week, and we didn't get a chance to connect so I got in touch. I wasn't like, \"Hey, I want a show,\" I was like, \"Hey, my friend owns Aska and is having a shoot there and needs people. Do you want to come and have drinks for free?\" I met up with her and said I was interested in doing some radio work, and we decided that I would do a piece with  Shiraz Noor on the hipster dining phenomenon. That first piece that was just a two-minute thing, and the executive director was like, \"Would you like to have a show?\" I was shocked. For a long time I was like, \"Do they really mean it? I feel like I've been preparing my entire life to be talking about food.\"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nI had no radio experience, but I did have journalism experience and I loved talking to people who also love food. I realized one way you get to talk to pretty much whoever you want about whatever you want is to be a journalist.\n\nFor my pilot in September of last year, I had Paul Liebrandt  David Burke about his dream jobs if he weren't a famous chef. He said, \"I would love to be a ventriloquist or a glass blower.\" I asked  Anita Lo about her dating life. I'm like, \"I'm a straight single lady in New York City, and it's really hard for me, so as a lesbian chef and restaurant owner, who gets out of work at 1 in the morning, how do you do it?\" She was able to share a story about how she's dating someone in the industry and it's going really well.I got to interview Sirio Maccioni, the founder of Le Cirque, one of the most influential restaurants in New York history. We talked about stuff like the fear of death. We also talked about fashion \u2014 I said, \"Sirio, I was sure to wear my good shoes today because I know you Italians care about that.\" Then he compliments my legs on live radio. I'm like, \"Wow, 82 years old and still kicking.\" Sirio Maccioni even gave me dating advice. He goes, \"How many boyfriends you have?\" I'm like, \"None.\" He's like, \"You need to get three of them. An intelligent one so that you can talk to him. Another for the other thing \u2014 you know what I mean. And a third one as a spare just to have handy.\"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nWhen people ask me, \"What do you do?\" it used to really hard for me to explain. I would say, \"I eat and drink and connect people.\" Now I say, \"I host a food and wine radio show.\" It's easier for my parents, too, who used to be like, \"We don't really know what Leiti does.\" My mom will be like, \"Are you sure you don't need an advanced degree?\" or, \"Are you sure you're not drinking too much wine? Because that's all I see on your Twitter.\" Now my parents can say, \"She has a radio show,\" which is simpler for everybody.I balance my work carefully. I'm an extrovert who needs a whole lot of introvert quiet time to be happy. The radio show is every Tuesday at 10 a.m. I want to have enough time to make a big impact, so I only work with a maximum of three clients at a time. For me, weekdays and weekends are the same. I work from home, from coffee shops, at bars, or at client offices. I might be working at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night and then going to a 2 p.m. yoga class on a Wednesday.\n\nIt's also been important to me to give back, so I throw a benefit for a good cause instead of a birthday party. Last year, we raised $2,000, and more than 150 people came out on a Monday night for Wellness in the Schools to revamp school menus. I rented the space on my own, so I had to make sure I turned a profit. This year I was able to get the space donated by All'onda. We raised over $7,000. Sixty percent of the proceeds went to Heritage. The rest went to Rose Charities. They do great work in Southeast Asia emergency aid, like for the disaster in the Philippines, and in education and health care.I wake up every day, and I have this overwhelming love of what I do. Maybe I'm exhausted from a late-night industry party, or maybe I'm totally bright-eyed at 7 a.m. and so eager to get these emails out because everything I do is driven by my own urgency. I love working in teams and with clients, but when I'm not talking to people all the time, I love working from my home office. It's exhausting to eat and drink all the time. Sometimes it gets to be not really a joke anymore \u2014 you feel unwell. If I want to do serious business with you or a great interview or tell you I have a great idea for you, I can't not have eaten something at your restaurant or dropped by. That's the style of business I do.The dream dream dream thing? This may not happen \u2014 and countering it with \"This may not happen\" is such a girl thing \u2014 but this may not happen because I don't know if I'm compelling enough in this way, but the world needs an Anthony Bourdain-Gary Vaynerchuk-Oprah: a food and wine entrepreneur who is also an influencer and an impact-maker. It's less about the TV-ness of it. It's more that I feel the power of an audience. If you were kick-starting your own start-up or if someone, god forbid, if someone needed a transplant, I'd rather be able to tweet out to 5 million people than to 5,000. And 5,000 is better than five. Feeling impact is what connecting and all those dirty words like \"personal branding\" and \"networking\" and \"social media\" are all about. People are so allergic to that. When people are like, \"I don't need to be on Twitter,\" or, \"People are going to know my personal life,\" I say, \"The only person who really cares about you is your mother. And if people gave a shit about you as much as they care about Mario Batali, you'd be able to raise money for a good cause, with one tweet get your friend's start-up funded, you'd get the word out about #BringBackOurGirls.\"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nBeing self-employed, the money is up and down. But when you're not in midtown and you don't have to spend $20 every day for lunch because you hate your life and you want something delicious, you can have an egg on the days you aren't having an extravagant wine-industry lunch at Lafayette. When you're happy, you spend less money. I used to sign on to Gilt Groupe every single day and get so upset when something I wanted was gone. Now I just don't have time to shop because I'm always talking to someone really amazing.But I do make an effort to be pulled together. If you walk into an event wearing a bright red or a bright blue dress, you stand out. If you're not there to get stuff done and to stand out and if you're not \"the one gal over there, I don't know her name, but she's in the red,\" you might as well be at home having a nap.\n\nMy other piece of advice is to have a great headshot. If your headshot is grainy and weird, it doesn't inspire people to hire you or be your friend. You might pull yourself together to go into the office every day, but you run into more people online than you do offline. I get people adding me all the time who I admire and want to be friends with and have never met. My LinkedIn profile works for me in my sleep. How awesome is that? RELATED: Get That Life: How I Became a Correspondent for Good Morning America Get That Life: How I Became a First Amendment LawyerGet That Life: How I Became a Professional Cheese EaterGet That Life: How I Founded Jezebel and Became a New York Times ColumnistGet That Life: How I Used Social Media to Become a World-Famous Yoga InstructorGet That Life: How I Turned Bize-Size Cupcakes Into a Successful BusinessGet That Life: How I Opened My Own Clothing BoutiqueFollow Jill on Twitter.Photo credit: Kathleen Kamphausen for Cosmopolitan.com; Jorge Quinteros"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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