We know the holidays — from the lead-up to Thanksgiving, all the way through New Year’s — is a busy time for anyone who loves to cook and cooks a lot. It's especially busy for restaurant chefs and their families.

So, how do high-end chefs, with fully-booked restaurants and specials on the menu, deal with all that pressure? How do they balance the expectations of delivering a stellar restaurant experience, and meeting their own expectations for family time, and family feasting?

To find out, I grabbed some quality time with a Portland, Oregon, food scene power-couple, slipping into a booth at the back of their two-time Beard-Award-nominated restaurant. It’s in an urban mini-mall, with a covered patio outside and warm lighting and a heady aroma of spices inside. Tropical fruit and seafood prints cover the tables and walls.

Thomas Pisha-Duffly is head chef and Mariah Pisha-Duffly is house manager at Gado Gado. Originally from the Boston area, Mariah has decades of experience running restaurants and managing hospitality staff; Tom is classically trained in French and Italian cuisine. And about a decade ago, the couple started traveling to Indonesia.

Tom’s family is Dutch and Indonesian, and he grew up eating Indonesian food. “They have a rich shared history, for good and for worse, and there’s a lot of Dutch influence in parts of Indonesia,” he said.

“When there was family around we’d either be doing lobster boil or — when my grandmother came to visit — having gado gado,” Tom said. “It means ‘mix-mix.’” It’s a classic Indonesian street-food: a messy pile of vegetables, shrimp crackers and eggs, topped with spicy peanut sauce.

Through multiple trips to Jakarta, the couple became street-food connoisseurs. Mariah said she was blown away by the intense smells and “having the steam from it all over my face.” Tom loved the direct connection between food-stall cook and customer, packed together on a hot sidewalk: “Your goal is to create this delicious thing and get it into my mouth … there’s not the server, finding a table. It becomes distilled down to that one experience.”

The Pisha-Dufflys moved to Portland in 2016 and began planning their new restaurant, inspired by Jakarta street food, but with a higher-concept menu featuring Indonesian-Dutch-Pacific-Northwest cuisine.

Gado Gado opened in 2019, and was an instant hit — a national finalist for the 2020 James Beard Foundation New Restaurant Award. Tom was twice a semifinalist for the foundation’s Pacific Northwest Best Chef award. Mariah was named a member of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership cohort in 2023.

As we talk, a waiter delivers our sampling menu: “We’ve got our beef rendang, candied anchovies … our Malaysian flatbread turmeric pickled veggies … our clove-scented rice has pandan, turmeric, topped with crispy shallots.”

And as we dig in, Tom describes a house specialty, a sauce called gula jawa: “Palm sugar, sweet soy and we steep it with chilis, lime leaf, ginger, lemon grass. But the constant grilling and dipping of the chicken imbues it with this, like smokey, little bit of the original sauce that we made however-many years ago. We keep it, so it just builds in depth and flavor. It’s almost like a sauce mother.”

Mothers come up a lot with Tom. In fact, the Pisha-Dufflys’ second Portland restaurant, Oma’s Hideaway, which specializes in Malaysian-Singaporean street food, is named for Tom’s grandmother, Kiong Tien “Tina” Vandenberg.

“My oma — my mom’s mom, and my mom’s grandmom, who all lived in the same house in Oxnard, California — they were these big figures in my life growing up. Cooking. They made the rules.”

Mariah picked up the thread: “Your family is very matriarchal. You have some powerful mother figures.”

“My mother was the cook. She did the shopping and the planning,” said Tom. “And all this while she juggled a job — she was a Supreme Court justice in Massachusetts, the first Asian woman judge. But she would always come home and make us dinner: Fresh pasta lasagna with artichokes and mushrooms.”

One might think that running two restaurants open seven nights a week, the Pisha-Dufflys wouldn’t have time for a lot of the home-cooked meals Tom grew up with. But this is where Tom and Mariah buck the restaurant-world trend of extreme work-life imbalance, as depicted in the culinary press and “Top Chef”-type reality TV.

With a 5-year-old daughter, they’ve prioritized home cooking and dining as a core family value. They’ve got a particular division of labor, Mariah explained: “Tom’s the chef. I do the other stuff — strategic business decisions.”

“You’re being a little modest,” Tom added. “I mean, Mariah runs the show, and I just warm things up in a pan, basically.”

To find out what Tom “warms up in a pan” when he’s working as a home chef, we met a few days later at the Pisha-Dufflys’ modest 2-bedroom house in a leafy section of Portland next to a small creek. Their 5-year-old daughter, Loretta, was at school, and Tom was setting up family dinner in the kitchen, chopping peaches and fresh herbs for a spicy salad, and prepping his own version of Thai-Indonesian chicken.

“I’m going to fry it, and then I’m going to smash it a little bit, the fried chicken, in that mortar and pestle with some sambal and then fry it again,” he said as he moved back and forth between a cutting surface and a very hot cast-iron frying pan, sizzling with oil. “And this is my grandmother’s Indonesian mortar and pestle. For making spiced pastes, you’re expressing out the flavors and the juices.”

Tom was frying up a piece without the spicy Indonesian sauce for Loretta — who’s a picky eater.

Watching him, this home-cooked family meal Tom was prepping seemed pretty fancy — like, restaurant-fancy. But Tom said they’ve actually gone a lot more down-market than this. “There have been times — we opened two restaurants, had a kid — when we were ordering takeout a lot,” he said, like pizza or Chinese. It was nice to not cook sometimes, but then, he said, “It kind of sucked, because it removed cooking for somebody, sitting down to eat, doing the dishes.”

And gradually, something shifted in their family life: “As Loretta got a little bit older, we realized the importance of sitting down to eat,” Tom recalled. “And we were like ‘No no no, OK, we’re going to cook, at home.’ It doesn’t have to be fancy. It often is very not-fancy. I can get behind a really well-done hotdog.”

“Sometimes we buy frozen meatballs,” said Mariah. “This week you were like, ‘I’m going to make meatballs with Loretta, I’m gonna show her you can use a little honey and a little cheese in your meatballs.’ And then as we’re serving them she’s like, ‘Mama, I made these, these are the juiciest meatballs you’ve ever had.’”

The couple has reassessed their priorities around holiday meals as well. “I cook a lot, I cook for a living, I cook at home,’ said Tom. “Sometimes it’s hard to dig up the energy, especially around the holidays when the restaurants are busy, to want to commit to cooking 10 things on my day off.”

So no more turkey-three-ways, a dozen mains and sides, breads and pies from mom’s original recipe pouring out of a hot, crowded kitchen — like Tom’s family did for decades.

“Recently, we’ve kind of done a big about-face, at least at Thanksgiving,” said Tom. “My sister lives here in town, will host us. And we just — we don’t cook. We get takeout. And what that has done for us is, much more time with the kids playing, playing cards, hanging out. Much more face time and less time in the kitchen.”

The first time they did takeout Thanksgiving, a few years ago, Tom said it felt like a let-down, like they were committing holiday-family-feast “sacrilege.”

But not anymore. “I feel like especially food media is just stuffing down your throat — no pun intended, but good pun — ‘roast the perfect chicken, 12 sides for your family holiday, what to bring.’ That is what we’ve been taught we have to do,” he said.

Instead, he said, cut yourself a break. Do taco night on Thanksgiving, hot dogs with all the fixin’s for Christmas dinner or a New Year’s bash.

Whatever keeps your family eating, together.