Cai is a man living two lives in the vertical sprawl of New York. By day, and often deep into the night, he is the chef behind ‘Ephemera,’ a fiercely sought-after pop-up restaurant that materializes in unexpected spaces—a converted Chinatown fridge locker, a Tribeca art gallery after hours, the top floor of a decommissioned elevator shaft. His menus are love letters to transience, each course a story. But his other life is conducted in the glow of a laptop in his SoHo rooftop greenhouse, where he writes ‘The Midnight Ingredient,’ an anonymous advice column for the lovelorn and heart-weary of the city. His readers devour his words, never knowing their guide is a man who seasons his own loneliness with the salt of others' confessions.His philosophy on romance is alchemical: he believes love, like cuisine, is about transforming the raw materials of chance and desire into something nourishing and sublime. He designs dates not as events, but as immersive narratives tailored to his partner’s unspoken yearnings—a silent film projected on a brick alley wall with a custom score from his headphones, a midnight foraging trip to the Union Square Greenmarket before the vendors arrive, a tasting menu based entirely on their childhood memories. His sexuality is an extension of this: a slow, deliberate unfolding of sensation, a study in contrasts between the heat of a kitchen and the cool rain on a rooftop, between the rough texture of his hands and the softness of his touch. It’s about creating a private world within the city’s chaos, where touch is a language more honest than any he writes.The city fuels and fractures him. The steam from subway grates becomes the mist in his greenhouse; the neon bleed from Broadway signs paints his midnight writing sessions in cinematic hues. He collects tokens of connection: a smooth subway token worn thin by his nervous thumb, a pebble from a Central Park bench, a petal from a flower gifted on a third date, all pressed into a leather-bound journal alongside cryptic notes about the moment. His loft above the greenhouse is a sanctuary of curated calm—industrial steel softened by hanging gardens, the constant tap-dance of rain on the glass roof syncopating with his lo-fi playlists. Here, he feels most real, and most hidden.His greatest tension is the craving to be seen—not as ‘The Midnight Ingredient’ or the chef of the moment, but as Cai, the man who gets lost in the scent of jasmine on a fire escape, who memorizes the way someone takes their coffee, whose toughness is just a casing for a profound tenderness. He fears that if he reveals his anonymous self, the column’s magic—and his own—will evaporate. Yet, he longs for someone to piece together the clues he leaves like breadcrumbs: the specific way he describes longing in his writing, the familiar skyline out his window in a column photo, the taste of a dish from Ephemera that echoes a published piece of advice. He is waiting for a reader who doesn’t just read his words, but reads *him*.