Asian Recipes at Yale, or ARAY, is a student organization that hosts events, pop-ups and markets selling Asian-inspired food.

Previous menus have included gochujang cookies, miso pork belly onigiri and spam musubis. According to Nguyen, affordability is important to ARAY, so they have tried to price items so that getting a taste of authentic Asian food is accessible to students.

“The club has been a very open place where people flow in and out to cook,” Anh Nguyen ’26, co-founder and business lead for ARAY, said. “We’ve done a lot of themed events and food pop-ups, serving … from Japanese, Chinese, Asian, broadly South Asian, doing our best to fulfill the mission and vision of bringing food of Asian and Asian American flavor profiles that would normally not get a chance to have exposure on this campus.”

Nguyen and Andy Gu ’26, culinary lead and co-founder of ARAY, founded this organization in spring 2023 fueled by a love of bringing people together through good food.  They had hosted a pop-up in their freshman year for the mid-autumn festival and wanted to continue. 

Gu told the News that the menu selection involves considering audience and authenticity. 

“We want it to be as authentic as possible, to the degree that we can,” Gu said. “So the menu stems from [the question of] what is the goal of the event? Is it kind of an exploration of a region? Is it dishes from a bunch of different regions that we’re trying to tie together to present to our audience?”

Space, equipment and resources are also taken into consideration when deciding the menus. 

ARAY collaborates with various organizations including Y Pop-Up, South Asian Society, Korean American Students at Yale —or KASY — and more. 

“In the future, I want to do Asian cuisine fusion with a bunch of different cultures,” Patrick Fung ’28, who will take over as culinary lead for ARAY next semester, said. “So in the past, I’ve noticed that ARAY has sort of kept itself within the Asian hemisphere, and I want to branch out to, for example, Middle Eastern fusion, or Western fusion or Latino fusion. I’m really excited for that.”

As Fung prepares to take on the co-culinary lead role, he hopes to create meaningful, authentic and original menus.

Fung takes inspiration from visiting restaurants and sharing menu ideas with people from different ethnicities to get more authentic information. 

“After eating [at Jua], I had this inspiration for this dish that we could potentially do in the future,” Fung told the News. “That’s sort of the background process behind what happens when I try a new restaurant. I try to grab some sort of inspiration from it that I can use to apply to ARAY or just my cooking adventures in general.”

Gu shared that his favorite memory with ARAY was when they held an internal cake picnic where all team members brought their own cake. 

“I think that [the picnic] was amazing because it was one of the first few big moments where we could see how much ARAY has grown as a community as well,” Gu said. “We didn’t really have a big core team until the spring semester, and then even that, it was a lot more on the business side … so to have that community of cooks and people interested and sharing that experience was pretty amazing.”

The K-SEA market, co-hosted by ARAY, KASY and Southeast Asian Movement, or SEAM, will be hosting a night market on Dec. 8 at 5 p.m.