the story of otr

One month before my 11th anniversary of living in China, and with four successful restaurants open in Shenzhen and a half dozen others spread across the country, I found myself on a plane with my life packed in a few suitcases, my kitchen gear and winter clothes boxed up in storage, and my dogs waiting for their own flight to join Daria and I in our new home country. We didn't choose our destination. We didn't plan to come here. It's just the only place that would take us- the list of countries that would accept an American, a Russian, and two dogs on no notice in the middle of a pandemic was...Thailand. 

My first impressions of Bangkok as a tourist and later on a few short consulting trips had been underwhelming. Like so many others, I'd only known the tourist areas around Nana and Khao San Road, and assumed that was all our new home had to offer. 

Settling into life in Thailand- especially without the burdens of work (as both of our business lives were hundreds of miles away, in China), we quickly realized we'd found ourselves in a country vastly more complex and fascinating than we'd imagined. Every day, we'd wake up, pick a destination on the map that we'd never been to before, then just start exploring. It wasn't unusual for us to walk ten kilometers and eat ten meals in a single day- and we started making the contacts and connections and gathering the stories that would eventually form the foundation of the first episodes of OTR.

The other thing that happened around this time was that our best friends from China- Chris & Steph from the wildly successful YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified- moved down to Bangkok, too, and spent a month staying at our house while they got their bearings. The combination of nonstop exploration with the expertise and encouragement of professional food-video-makers- added to my own background pre-China as a reporter and journalist with American television and radio networks- hatched the idea of putting aside my restaurant ambitions and starting to unravel the mystery of the wild and amazing stuff we kept finding, to understand where we were, and maybe to make it truly feel like home.

OTR began filming in July, 2022.

The name "OTR" came from being completely indecisive about the scope of the project- at first, the idea was to produce videos to paint a picture of life, culture, and history in Thailand, with food being only one element. So we wanted a name that would be flexible regardless of the topic or host. Someone proposed "on the road", another idea was "off the rails," and another one was "on the record." So OTR came from the abbreviation of all three of those names- without actually officially having to choose one.

We uploaded our first video to YouTube on August 15, 2022, and since then, it's been the journey of a lifetime.