Latest / Chef's PSA Podcast / Most Chefs Shouldn’t Be Owners: James Trees Episode 193

Transcript

Most Chefs Shouldn’t Be Owners: James Trees Episode 193 · Chef's PSA Podcast

• 0:00
  Someone that's coming to you and say, hey, I want to open up my
• 0:01
  first restaurant, cool. Don't, don't.
• 0:04
  For my first thing is like, if you can think of any other way
• 0:06
  to make money in life, don't. Hello chefs.
• 0:08
  This is Chef's PSA and I'm your host Andre Natera.
• 0:11
  Today I'm joined by James Trees, chef, restaurateur and operator
• 0:15
  behind some of Las Vegas most respected off strip restaurants
• 0:19
  including Esther's Kitchen, Ada's High Stakes and also Lita
• 0:23
  Posta, a long time Las Vegas chef with deep fine dining roots
• 0:27
  and national recognition. This episode is a master class
• 0:30
  on the restaurant business. If you're opening up a
• 0:32
  restaurant or already running one, this is required listening.
• 0:48
  And I mean, half the stuff that we said I should have said.
• 0:54
  So I'm like, you know, like you said, you know why you cancel
• 0:57
  doing shit like this. But it's like, it's important
• 0:59
  that, you know, you also tell the truth.
• 1:01
  Because I think like a lot of a lot of chefs just like have this
• 1:05
  really dial back, really like corporate thought process when
• 1:09
  they think about going on these things.
• 1:10
  And I'm like, no, let's talk about the let's get into the
• 1:14
  shit. That's why I had a, you know, my
• 1:16
  first 100 episodes with Chef's PSA.
• 1:18
  The reason I didn't have guests is because when I had a podcast
• 1:22
  before Chef's PSA was called Run the Pass.
• 1:24
  And one of the things that I noticed, I'm not trying to pick
• 1:26
  on anyone that was my guest on that show, but I noticed a lot
• 1:29
  of the people that I spoke with were behind a, a PR filter.
• 1:34
  You know, what can I say? Here are the talking notes.
• 1:36
  Here's the script. Make sure you ask me this.
• 1:37
  I was like, that's. Just not fun.
• 1:39
  It's not fun. It's not a real conversation.
• 1:40
  And you know, I ever no one's going to get something out of it
• 1:43
  that they couldn't figure out on their own.
• 1:44
  Yeah, yes. So the reason I did 100
• 1:46
  episodes, by the time I was ready to talk to guests, I was
• 1:49
  like, I figured out how to pull it out now, Right, Right.
• 1:53
  And even then, like if you go listen into some of my my early
• 1:55
  guest episodes, I was still struggling.
• 1:57
  Like how do I, how do I get them to open up?
• 1:59
  Yeah, I think now I'm I'm better at it, but especially with
• 2:02
  chefs, it's hard to, it's hard to, I'm not worried about you
• 2:05
  though. It's easy.
• 2:05
  Because I'm an open book and I know I need to shut up as hard
• 2:08
  enough as it is. I know I'm not worried about
• 2:10
  you, but some chefs, you gotta, you gotta pull it out of them.
• 2:12
  Yeah, no, I I get it. Because a lot of people are like
• 2:14
  thinking about like their reputation.
• 2:15
  I'm like, I could not give a fuck less about my reputation.
• 2:18
  Well. And part of the problem is, is a
• 2:19
  lot of them, there's this unspoken wizard behind the
• 2:24
  curtain where we're not allowed to talk about the business side.
• 2:27
  If we say, hey, I'm doing this for money, like, hey, this is a
• 2:30
  good business decision. And the reason I put truffle
• 2:32
  fries on the menus because they fucking sell, doesn't mean I
• 2:34
  love truffle fries, right? Yeah.
• 2:36
  No. But if if you say that, they're
• 2:37
  like, oh, you can't say you got it's about the magic, it's about
• 2:40
  the craft. It's like, no.
• 2:41
  No, no. You need the economic engine
• 2:43
  that allows you the freedom to do all the other things you want
• 2:45
  to do, right? So it's exactly the way you do
• 2:47
  it. Yeah.
• 2:47
  A restaurant, like all Salinos. Because it's for the people,
• 2:50
  it's for the community, and that's it.
• 2:51
  Done. Done.
• 2:54
  I know one of the things that you're, you're really big on is
• 2:56
  mentorship. Yeah.
• 2:58
  What does the mentorship look like?
• 3:00
  Like, you know, I know Philip Franklin Lee worked for you.
• 3:02
  Yeah. He's been on my show a couple of
• 3:03
  times. A great chef.
• 3:04
  He's a great guy. Man, yeah, we we talked about
• 3:06
  you. He used to hate me and now he
• 3:08
  loves me. Isn't that crazy?
• 3:09
  Well, isn't, isn't it crazy? You know, it's funny.
• 3:12
  I look back to the relationship I've had with a lot of chefs
• 3:15
  right around the time that they're getting ready to leave.
• 3:17
  Like maybe they're the exact zoo or, you know, high level suit.
• 3:20
  Normally there's tension right before they leave.
• 3:22
  Yeah. And then later on and we all
• 3:24
  come back together. And I think it's because they're
• 3:26
  like that teenager that's ready to like, fuck you, dad, I could
• 3:29
  beat you up now. Yeah, man.
• 3:31
  And then they and then they try and I'm like, good for you.
• 3:34
  Yeah. You know, like I just had two of
• 3:36
  my sous chefs leave and open a a sandwich shop.
• 3:39
  Yeah. And whether or not they think
• 3:43
  I'm there for them or not, I'm there for them no matter what.
• 3:45
  Like you know what I look for, like these guys, I love them.
• 3:48
  I want to see them be successful.
• 3:49
  And this business is hard enough without people telling you you
• 3:53
  can't do something. So rather than walk in and say,
• 3:56
  oh wow, you guys have 5 sandwiches on the menu.
• 3:58
  That's really great. Good start.
• 3:59
  Now what's next? I was like, let me call my buddy
• 4:02
  who's an influencer, get him in here.
• 4:04
  And now they got a six. They they they're their six
• 4:07
  month line. Like they're, they're killing
• 4:08
  it, you know, and like, if you can help people like that,
• 4:11
  that's awesome. Doesn't cost you nothing does.
• 4:13
  All you have to do is be like, I'm going to be good to my guys,
• 4:17
  see them grow, see them accomplish.
• 4:19
  That's what you want to do. And, you know, we probably don't
• 4:21
  have the best relationship right now, but in a few years, I'm
• 4:23
  sure they're going to realize that, you know, that what I was
• 4:27
  doing for them was tell build them up so that way they can go
• 4:30
  off on their own. I think one of the biggest
• 4:32
  things with mentorship that people don't talk about is it's
• 4:35
  not about being nice to people. It's not about being kind.
• 4:40
  It's about teaching them the things that they're going to
• 4:42
  need to know in five years, right?
• 4:44
  It's like downloading information into them.
• 4:48
  Like the way the my mentor Steven Frets did, like he was
• 4:51
  like, you have to come to every PNL meeting.
• 4:54
  And I'm like, why? I'm like, I don't, I want to
• 4:57
  cook, you know, like we're creating great food here.
• 4:59
  You know, we had Jordan Khan and our pastry chef, you know, we're
• 5:03
  rocking and rolling. We're crushing the sour, doing
• 5:05
  some really cool stuff. And then that restaurant closes
• 5:08
  because the finances don't work. And I'm like, oh, well, I guess
• 5:11
  it's not about, it's not about that, right?
• 5:14
  It's about understanding that he was trying to teach me something
• 5:17
  that even to this day, I now teach people, which is how to
• 5:20
  run AP and L, how to run a business, knowing what prime
• 5:24
  cost is, knowing that you don't cost food off of food cost,
• 5:28
  right? All of these things that chefs
• 5:31
  are told and not taught. Wow.
• 5:36
  You said something very interesting.
• 5:38
  And that's like, I want to go down this mentorship
• 5:40
  conversation, but you said something that is so true.
• 5:43
  You don't cost food off of food cost, correct?
• 5:47
  Can you break that down for because I think I like, it's one
• 5:50
  of these things that you know, when you're an operator, right?
• 5:52
  But when you're in school, it's like cost divided by cells.
• 5:55
  And a lot of people will come to me and say, hey, can you teach
• 5:58
  me about food costs? It's like, I could teach you the
• 6:00
  formula, but food cost is a philosophy.
• 6:03
  There's a lot to it that's not just cost divided by sales.
• 6:05
  Exactly. I think one of the things that
• 6:07
  people don't really think about when they think about food costs
• 6:10
  is something called velocity, right?
• 6:12
  So the theory of velocity is basically if you can create the
• 6:15
  top five items on your menu being the lowest food cost, that
• 6:21
  is the way to create the velocity of those items to lower
• 6:24
  the other items like we have to like I have a steakhouse called
• 6:27
  High Stakes at the Rio Great Steakhouse.
• 6:30
  We have a prime Creek stone rib eye from Colorado.
• 6:33
  The natural program thing cost me $45.00 to put on a plate,
• 6:39
  right? How do you sell that for $97.00
• 6:42
  at a 50% food cost? The way you do that is you have
• 6:45
  other items that you know we're going to sell more that ever
• 6:49
  much, much lower food cost. Things are like 9-10, eight
• 6:52
  percent food cost because when you're making pasta and doing
• 6:55
  all these things, you can create those items.
• 6:57
  And if you make those items awesome and things that people
• 7:01
  are going to want to order more than that rib eye, then all of a
• 7:03
  sudden your food cost goes down overall.
• 7:06
  So it's creating velocity. So what I do is I, I have a
• 7:10
  spreadsheet that basically you put in all your items, you put
• 7:14
  in the theoretical food cost, then you put in the number of
• 7:17
  sales. And what it does is it creates a
• 7:19
  velocity report. And basically it'll tell you
• 7:22
  what your real theoretical food cost is.
• 7:24
  Because when people do food cost item by item by item, it's not
• 7:29
  really telling you what your number is going to be, right?
• 7:32
  You have to add in the velocity. You also have to add in the idea
• 7:35
  that the higher something costs, the less it's going to be
• 7:39
  ordered. So understanding how to create
• 7:41
  pars on those names so you don't have any waste.
• 7:43
  And then also creating items that also use that at a lower
• 7:47
  cost. So that way you're able to use
• 7:48
  that product. You could lay it to all my
• 7:51
  chefs. You can use any product you want
• 7:53
  as long as we build it in so that way it doesn't ruin the
• 7:57
  food cost and then the labor cost goes off.
• 7:59
  Or if something is so labor intensive that you have to
• 8:02
  double, triple, quadruple, quintuple the cost of it, like
• 8:06
  those are things that we don't talk about as chefs, like
• 8:09
  understanding how to manage that top part of your PNL, right?
• 8:14
  You have you have all your sales and then you have all your
• 8:16
  costs. That's the first part of it.
• 8:19
  The thing that is in this business that has changed in the
• 8:22
  last five years is labor cost. Labor cost is more of like more
• 8:30
  of a kind of like noose than people realize because you want
• 8:35
  to have about 12% back of the house labor, right?
• 8:40
  That's really where you're going for.
• 8:41
  You really want to have it dialed in where your prime cost
• 8:46
  is about 65%. If you can do that, then you're
• 8:49
  going to be in a good spot because you can't really not
• 8:53
  make money if you're getting a 65% prime cost, right?
• 8:56
  And this is stuff that we don't talk about as as operate.
• 8:59
  We talk about as operators because like when you get around
• 9:01
  chefs, they're like, oh man, my food cost is 19%.
• 9:03
  You get around chefs, they're like, I'm using this great
• 9:05
  product. This is bad ass like, right.
• 9:07
  You get around operators and they're like hit a prime cost of
• 9:10
  67. We're killing it.
• 9:11
  Right. And for people that don't
• 9:12
  understand what, because we always talk labor costs, we
• 9:15
  always talk food costs, can you explain what prime costs are for
• 9:17
  people? That so, So prime cost is sales
• 9:21
  divided by sales divided by the combination of food cost and
• 9:26
  labor cost and benefits and manager salaries.
• 9:30
  So all of that in one column, you hit that number, which is
• 9:34
  considered also the percentage or it's considered gross profit
• 9:38
  because then you take out operating supplies that you take
• 9:40
  out rent and occupancy and all that stuff.
• 9:44
  And so that comes off and then you end up with an EBITDA, you
• 9:47
  know, which is, you know, theoretically where you want to
• 9:50
  be in the positive. And one of the things I've
• 9:53
  learned about chefs is chefs do not write budgets to make money.
• 9:57
  They write like when when we write ideas for restaurants or
• 10:00
  was like, man, we're going to break even.
• 10:03
  Like that's a terrible business model.
• 10:05
  Like this is the thing about restaurants is they are a
• 10:06
  terrible business model and we need to do better.
• 10:10
  So how do we do that? So by the way, you, everything
• 10:14
  that you're speaking right now speaks to my soul.
• 10:16
  Sometimes, sometimes when I'm on chefs PSA and I got to talk
• 10:18
  about, you know, like, oh, let's talk.
• 10:19
  But this is like, this is the nitty gritty that people need to
• 10:24
  learn. And sometimes it's like, Hey, we
• 10:26
  got to this is what you have to understand if you want to be a
• 10:29
  successful restaurant operator, restaurateur, successful chef,
• 10:33
  because a lot of people are really good at cooking.
• 10:35
  They open their first restaurant and they they close their first
• 10:38
  restaurant shortly after that. When you're talking about the
• 10:41
  $45.00 steak that you're selling for $90.00, what people don't
• 10:45
  understand is every time you sell one of those, you're
• 10:49
  bringing a lot of dollars to the bank.
• 10:51
  And a lot of times people will look at that and say we can't
• 10:54
  have a 50% food cost item on the menus like, well, you can when
• 10:57
  it's bringing because that Caesar salad that's at 11
• 11:01
  percent is only bringing $6 to the bank, correct?
• 11:03
  Yeah, but your velocity on that is going to be 20X what you do
• 11:06
  on that rib eye. So all of a sudden that's where
• 11:09
  the velocity, you know, theory comes into play is because I've,
• 11:14
  I've seen a lot of places that are like, Oh yeah, we have great
• 11:17
  steaks on the menu this side. And the other thing for us, it's
• 11:19
  in the wild game at I think. So we have venison boar, we did
• 11:23
  a borchetta, We're doing the elk.
• 11:27
  We also have like, we call it lion, but it's like a lion's
• 11:29
  vein mushroom. So we have all these different
• 11:32
  things on the menu. We're adding antelope, we're
• 11:33
  adding, you know, rackaland, those kind of things as we're
• 11:36
  kind of developing and moving this concept forward.
• 11:39
  And what I'm noticing about the game is we have to price the
• 11:43
  game at 6X to make it compete with the beef or else it'll seem
• 11:48
  too cheap, right? And people don't really
• 11:51
  understand that. And I'm like, OK, we have to
• 11:54
  make this, this cost. So we have an 18% cost on it
• 11:57
  because when you add in all the steaks that we're selling, all
• 12:00
  of a sudden now we're getting a 2728% food cost, which
• 12:05
  theoretically in a, in a steakhouse setting in Vegas is
• 12:09
  low. But we're using better product
• 12:12
  than they're using on the strip. We're using better sourced
• 12:15
  items. We're not, you know, we don't
• 12:17
  have the buying power of MGM or Caesars, right?
• 12:19
  But we're also not serving you the same stake at Prime as
• 12:21
  you're serving it in a room service.
• 12:24
  So it's like, you know, those are the things that we're able
• 12:26
  to do, but it's all about understanding cost.
• 12:29
  It's all about understanding flow through.
• 12:31
  It's all about understanding all of these things that as an
• 12:35
  operator you have to understand. This is a high level
• 12:38
  conversation for a lot of people right now because you know, the
• 12:41
  audience is, it's a mix of of cooks that are just starting and
• 12:44
  then and then chefs that are operators and everything in
• 12:46
  between. So I mean, you're saying flow
• 12:49
  through and everyone like what? What the fuck is flow through?
• 12:51
  What the fuck is EBITDA? So.
• 12:54
  So if you had to explain that for someone that's never heard
• 12:58
  either of those two terms, can you explain?
• 13:00
  Let's let's start with EBITDA. Kitchens are brutal right now.
• 13:02
  Everyone knows it. Fewer people on the line,
• 13:05
  margins tighter than ever, and somehow the expectations keep
• 13:08
  going up. There's just no room to miss
• 13:10
  anymore. I was talking to a chef recently
• 13:12
  who said the biggest stress wasn't the volume, it was the
• 13:15
  mental load. Babysitting, food, timing
• 13:18
  everything perfectly, trying to be everywhere at once.
• 13:21
  And that's where equipment matters more than people want to
• 13:23
  admit. Rationals technology comes up a
• 13:26
  lot in those conversations. The Icon B Pro, the Ivario Pro
• 13:30
  overnight roast that don't need to be checked, custom programs
• 13:33
  for all your recipes, consistency without hovering,
• 13:36
  completely automated cleaning, monitoring everything from your
• 13:39
  phone. The list goes on.
• 13:41
  And what really buys you the headspace?
• 13:43
  Less standing over pans and more time to leave the kitchen
• 13:46
  instead of constantly putting out tiny fires.
• 13:48
  When you're down to cook, when the prep list is rough, when the
• 13:52
  production ramps up. Think rational.
• 13:54
  OK. So EBITDA is basically the line
• 13:56
  before, you know debt and amortization, which those are
• 13:59
  some other terms that look them up.
• 14:02
  At the end of the day it's basically you're depreciating
• 14:04
  the value of the items in the business, the chairs, the
• 14:08
  tables, all that stuff. So as you're able to do that,
• 14:10
  it's a tax breaks instead of that's all that is when it comes
• 14:13
  to amortization and debt is what you're carrying as far as like
• 14:17
  what you need to do to pay off any kind of loans and stuff.
• 14:19
  But basically EBITDA is prime cost minus those two things.
• 14:23
  So then flow through is a theory that when you have your
• 14:29
  restaurants rocking, right, people are happy, things are
• 14:32
  going, let's take esters for example, right?
• 14:35
  I can't have any more cooks online.
• 14:37
  I can't have any more servers on on the floor.
• 14:41
  I can't have any more hoses. I can't have any more runners.
• 14:43
  I can't have any more dishwashers.
• 14:45
  I can't really bring in any more product, right?
• 14:50
  Theoretically, basically what happens is if you're operating
• 14:55
  at 50% of your capacity, you're basically not able to create
• 15:00
  flow through. When you start getting to
• 15:01
  8090100105 percent of your Max capacity, AKA you're turning
• 15:06
  tables two and three and four times per service, all of a
• 15:10
  sudden you're getting more value out of that labor.
• 15:15
  By doing that, you're creating flow through because you don't
• 15:18
  have to have more cooks. You don't have to have more, you
• 15:20
  know, people. The economy is the scale, right?
• 15:22
  So. And that only happens in really
• 15:25
  busy restaurants that are creating large amounts of
• 15:29
  profit. What is a healthy flow through
• 15:31
  percent? What do you, what do you go for
• 15:32
  that 50%? Yeah, so so.
• 15:34
  Here's this crazy like, you know, a good restaurant is doing
• 15:36
  10% profit, right? That same restaurant with 50
• 15:40
  more covers a night creates 15% profit.
• 15:43
  That's what flow through is, right?
• 15:45
  So, so like as you're looking for it, if you can see it and if
• 15:47
  you can get there, what ends up happening that 10% naturally
• 15:51
  becomes 17/20/22 percent like, and that's when you hit that
• 15:56
  kind of restaurant margin. It takes years because you've
• 16:02
  got to really know your PNL inside now, you got to really
• 16:05
  monitor your operating supplies and all the bullshit that people
• 16:07
  throw in there, right? Because people like can't see
• 16:10
  napkins and people like this and people like that and they like
• 16:12
  to over order on those things because they're just sitting
• 16:15
  there and they don't have to think about them.
• 16:16
  But when you really optimize and you've been teaching your team
• 16:19
  for years and years and years to optimize using, all of a sudden
• 16:22
  that 12% profit turns into 17 and that five points is just you
• 16:28
  understanding flow through and being able to create that.
• 16:30
  It's not luck. That's the other thing people
• 16:32
  have to realize. It's not luck.
• 16:34
  You're you're pushing your team to a certain level without
• 16:38
  having them stress out or break, but it's also about making sure
• 16:41
  that you're getting the most out of them to create that flow
• 16:44
  through. And that really is, you know,
• 16:47
  10% profit is what everybody kind of like strives for.
• 16:49
  And that's a great restaurant. When you start seeing those
• 16:52
  bigger numbers, that is a restaurant that is kind of like
• 16:55
  taking on its own, its own voice and its own kind of like
• 16:59
  legitimacy, right? So, so, so the best 1 is a
• 17:04
  cocktail bar. Those cocktail bars get
• 17:07
  extraordinary flow through very quickly because when you can
• 17:11
  create a buzz and you can fill up a cocktail bar and people are
• 17:14
  saying they're having two and three drinks and you're like 5
• 17:17
  to 10 minutes back on cocktails because you're cranking them out
• 17:20
  so much. You can't have any more
• 17:22
  bartenders because you're not any more.
• 17:23
  Well, you can't have any more people in the body.
• 17:24
  That's where you can see flow through of like 50-60.
• 17:28
  Percent right. And that's why a lot of people
• 17:30
  are, you know, I talked to a lot of private chefs lately and you
• 17:34
  know what they say on the podcast and then, you know,
• 17:36
  conversations outside with other friends that I have, like they
• 17:38
  are so profitable because they have a three man team that could
• 17:42
  do 5 covers, 10 covers, 50 covers, 200 covers.
• 17:46
  It's they don't change their their amount of cooks in the
• 17:49
  kitchen. And when they scale beyond
• 17:51
  what's the norm, it's like, Hey, we're extremely profitable once
• 17:55
  we get those big ticket items for 100 people.
• 17:59
  And, and, and I say the hardest thing in this business to do is
• 18:04
  to open a low check average, high volume space, like a
• 18:07
  sandwich shop, like a burger shop, like a, you know, like all
• 18:12
  of these things that people, fried chicken shops, all these
• 18:14
  things that people are trying to do, they're trying to do the one
• 18:16
  offs they're trying to do, they're trying to create a
• 18:18
  brand, right? Those are the hardest things to
• 18:21
  do. And QSR is the hardest game to
• 18:24
  play because your packaging costs are super high.
• 18:27
  If you're working with third party deliveries, that's high.
• 18:29
  All of these are extra expenses that people don't really
• 18:32
  understand until they start seeing that the more DoorDash
• 18:35
  that they do, the less money they make.
• 18:37
  The like that 30% that they're taking is more than the profit
• 18:42
  then they would actually be making on that.
• 18:44
  And people like, oh, well, if you're busy, it doesn't matter.
• 18:45
  Like, well, that's not how you create flow through because
• 18:47
  you're literally taking all that flow through and paying it to a
• 18:50
  third party to create more work and lowering the quality of your
• 18:53
  profit. And I'm like, that's the reason
• 18:55
  why I don't mess with DoorDash. That's the reason why I don't
• 18:57
  mess with, you know, Uber Eats or anything like that.
• 19:00
  I just don't play that game at all.
• 19:02
  It's not worth it. It's like, why give away all
• 19:05
  that hard work to a third party? And, and not only that, but also
• 19:08
  it does create a little bit of chaos in the kitchen.
• 19:11
  Absolutely. Like I I I haven't been a chef
• 19:14
  since DoorDash and Uber Eats have really been active because
• 19:17
  I I left cooking four years ago and it was starting, but it
• 19:20
  wasn't everywhere. Great timing by the.
• 19:22
  Way right. And now I could imagine like
• 19:24
  you're you're a cook on the line and you have a rail full of
• 19:26
  tickets like all that's to go that those 15 orders right there
• 19:30
  are all to go and you're like, fuck yeah, where are the boxes?
• 19:32
  Pass me the boxes. Yeah, no, no, we have a, we have
• 19:36
  a role in Ester is that we don't do to go for people we don't
• 19:38
  know. Because I'm like #1 it's fresh
• 19:40
  pasta. I'm like, it does not travel
• 19:42
  well. Like that's not like if you have
• 19:44
  to wait 10 minutes on it, it's not 5 minutes after it hits the
• 19:47
  table. It's different.
• 19:48
  Let alone 10 minutes in a box or 20 minutes in a box, right?
• 19:53
  Just not a good product to be selling that way.
• 19:56
  So they have to be regular people that we know and they
• 20:00
  know they have to call right at 5:00.
• 20:03
  And we have to like, set it up for them because we do not
• 20:06
  because when we open the doors, we see 28 seats at the bar
• 20:10
  immediately, plus about 50. So we do about 80 covers and 80
• 20:15
  to 100 covers in the first hour at esters every single day at
• 20:18
  5:00. What's your strategy around that
• 20:22
  that you find successful when it comes to a beverage program?
• 20:25
  Are you more wine heavy? Are you more cocktail heavy?
• 20:27
  Cocktails. Yeah, cocktails are so much more
• 20:29
  fun. Pardon me?
• 20:34
  Wine is interesting, and you can make a huge margin online.
• 20:38
  You can put dollars in the bank with wine, right?
• 20:41
  Wine is not expressive of you as a chef or of your restaurant,
• 20:46
  right? Even all French wine list at the
• 20:48
  French restaurant, Sure. You have an Italian wine list or
• 20:50
  a blended wine list. Sure.
• 20:52
  That's not really what it is. Cocktails are the people in the
• 20:56
  business seeing the seasonality, allowing themselves to use the
• 21:01
  classics as the basis, and then building a program that actually
• 21:06
  means something to people. And it takes a lot of time, it
• 21:09
  takes a lot of investment, and you got to learn what to do and
• 21:12
  what not to do. But the overall gross margin on
• 21:15
  cocktails is like insane. Like if you're running a good
• 21:18
  program, you're running 17% cost, right?
• 21:21
  If you're at 17% cost, then it's four of every $5 is profit,
• 21:26
  which is exactly where you need to be to pay for all of your
• 21:29
  labor in the front of the house, right.
• 21:31
  So at Ester's, what we do is we have all the cut.
• 21:34
  We assign a spirit and a style to every bartender and then
• 21:39
  they're allowed to then take that and create cocktails.
• 21:42
  So then we all get together. It's like it's, it's not fun
• 21:46
  because it's at they do a bar meeting at 8:00 in the morning.
• 21:49
  We start tasting at 9:00. We open at 11:00.
• 21:51
  They have to go in the well with their products in front of us,
• 21:54
  make the drink. We all taste it, we critique it.
• 21:57
  We say, why are you using that gin?
• 22:00
  What is the cost on this product?
• 22:01
  How many ingredients are in that, you know, tidature that
• 22:04
  you're making and how long does it take to make and what volume
• 22:06
  do you have to make it in? We ask all those hard questions
• 22:10
  and then we line up all the cocktails and we take the 10
• 22:12
  best and that becomes the cocktail menu at Esters for like
• 22:15
  the next two to three months and then every two to three months
• 22:18
  we kind of redo it. How do you this is by the way,
• 22:23
  thank you for dropping some, you know, you just did a master
• 22:26
  class for, for, for business owners, for a lot of chefs that,
• 22:29
  you know, don't look at it the way that you look at it.
• 22:32
  I want to ask because I, I think a lot of times you're like, I'm
• 22:35
  going to open up my, my first restaurant.
• 22:37
  You're a young chef or you're, you're just maybe a hobbyist and
• 22:41
  you're like, I make a great lasagna, right?
• 22:44
  Those are two very different people.
• 22:46
  And I've gotten in trouble for calling people a hobbyist
• 22:48
  before. Like I actually called one of my
• 22:51
  old boss, Paul Hibbler, like when we were doing Superbi.
• 22:54
  And it was, it was a tough one. And let me tell you, people with
• 22:58
  a lot of money don't like that name, don't like that label.
• 23:02
  But how do you you could open up restaurants and and really,
• 23:06
  well, there's a lot of different buckets, but let's just use
• 23:08
  these two as an example. There's the chef driven I want,
• 23:13
  I don't wanna call it ego cooking, but it is a lot of look
• 23:15
  at me cooking, right? It's look at what I could do,
• 23:17
  look at my skills, look at what I've learned throughout my
• 23:19
  career. And I'm gonna show you something
• 23:21
  that's unique to my identity. And here's the food.
• 23:23
  And maybe it's a tasting menu or maybe it's not.
• 23:25
  But either way, these are original dishes or expressions
• 23:29
  of my travels. Yeah, Right.
• 23:32
  And then on the other hand, it's like, Nope, we're going to open
• 23:34
  up an Evergreen concept that stays busy.
• 23:37
  I don't want to say it's for the people, but it's it's it's not
• 23:40
  for other chefs. It's for everybody.
• 23:41
  It's a little bit more inclusive, Right?
• 23:43
  It's. For the community.
• 23:44
  It's for the community. Yeah.
• 23:46
  Those are two very different business models.
• 23:48
  I have both. So can you talk about what are
• 23:52
  some of the pros and cons of each and and why you would do
• 23:57
  this one and why you would do the other one well?
• 23:58
  The first thing is that a lot of high end chefs who've worked at
• 24:02
  like Michelin level restaurants, 2, three stars, they only know
• 24:05
  how to do one thing right. And because of that, they go off
• 24:09
  and they open a car like a copy of what they used to work at.
• 24:14
  They will 95% of the time fail because what they really need to
• 24:18
  understand is the reason why they got to work at that place.
• 24:21
  Like if you open the French Laundry today, right, you would
• 24:25
  fail miserably unless you had $50,000,000 to lose first,
• 24:29
  right? You'd have to have that kind of
• 24:30
  money behind you in order to be successful.
• 24:34
  Because you the time it takes to build a reputation, to build the
• 24:37
  clientele, to do all that takes years and years and years.
• 24:40
  And if your quality level is super high and your technique
• 24:44
  level is super high, you end up with a ton of trim and waste.
• 24:46
  And you know, like how you do that is you buy it once, sell 10
• 24:49
  times, whatever you got to do. That being said, people know
• 24:52
  that those canapes are from different dishes.
• 24:54
  You know, we're still building and like growing off those
• 24:57
  things and they can be cool so that we can get that perfect
• 25:00
  little piece of, you know, salmon or or beef or whatever it
• 25:03
  is. You have to know what to do with
• 25:04
  all the rest of it. And you learn that at two and
• 25:06
  three Michelin star restaurants by opening the community based
• 25:10
  restaurant 1st. What you do is you create an
• 25:11
  economic engine for the rest of your businesses for the rest of
• 25:14
  your life. And that's what I did, right?
• 25:16
  I could have gone and opened up a fancy, you know, restaurant
• 25:19
  with a tasty menu. We don't even do specials during
• 25:21
  Valentine's Day at Esther's. We run the same service as we
• 25:25
  always do Why? Because most of our people who
• 25:28
  are coming that day only go out three times a year.
• 25:31
  They go out for their girl's birthday, their anniversary and
• 25:34
  Valentine's Day. That's it.
• 25:36
  So you get super amateur nights, a lot of Caccio Pepe, a lot of
• 25:40
  pasta pomodoro with meatballs, a lot of Diavola pizzas.
• 25:43
  And if you can, you know, but let's just say at Ester's, we
• 25:47
  did 980 covers that day, right? Like that's a serious number,
• 25:53
  right? When you build that community
• 25:54
  restaurant and you know, Ester's isn't special.
• 25:57
  It's Bestia, it's a 16. It's the Frannie's in Brooklyn,
• 26:02
  It's all, it's Rolo's. It's like all these different
• 26:05
  places, you know, it's like flour and water.
• 26:08
  Like that's what this restaurant is for Vegas, because Vegas
• 26:12
  didn't have that restaurant. So identifying, I think the most
• 26:14
  important thing that a chef can do.
• 26:16
  Once you have all the skills and you've cooked all the food and
• 26:19
  you've gotten that all out of your system, you've done the
• 26:20
  dots and the and you want to run a business because it's the only
• 26:25
  way you get off your feet as a chef.
• 26:27
  It's the only way that you save your body, which trust me, I
• 26:29
  didn't do because I chained myself to a stove for 20 years.
• 26:32
  The only way you do that is by creating the community
• 26:34
  restaurant. I think the smartest person in
• 26:36
  the world is Jonathan Waxman with Barbudo.
• 26:39
  Fancy, fancy chef known for 20 years.
• 26:42
  Was he known for forever Roast chicken done.
• 26:45
  Game over. As long as you do that, you're
• 26:47
  good to go. Everywhere he goes, that
• 26:49
  chicken's on the menu. That's super smart.
• 26:51
  That's a great winner. It's a food cost winner.
• 26:54
  It makes people feel like they're at home.
• 26:56
  And so that's super important. So creating that base is then
• 27:01
  the economic engine that allows you to do the fancy restaurant.
• 27:04
  And that's like for me is bar BLM, right?
• 27:06
  At BLM, we started out as a brasserie.
• 27:09
  Like we're year in and we're pivoting towards prefix menu,
• 27:12
  tasting menu, bar menu, right? The reason why we're doing that
• 27:16
  is because we realized that people go to Estrus for, you
• 27:20
  know, their everyday kind of meals, that kind of vibe.
• 27:23
  You know, people who dine out really love it.
• 27:25
  We changed the menu all the time and then they were expecting
• 27:29
  Estrus to be or sorry, they're expecting Barb one to be kind of
• 27:33
  like in that vein. But then they start using as a
• 27:36
  special occasion restaurant. A special occasion restaurant is
• 27:39
  much different than a community restaurant.
• 27:41
  The margins are different, the needs are different, the costs
• 27:45
  are different, the PNL looks different.
• 27:48
  And everyone has to know what that looks like because you're
• 27:51
  going to take some LS over here and if you don't have the
• 27:53
  economic engine over here to pay for it, you're going out of
• 27:56
  business, right? And that's a lot of what people
• 27:59
  don't understand, like the margins in a fine dining
• 28:02
  restaurant and high end tasty menu restaurants is 3 to 5%.
• 28:06
  And over here we have 20%. But then you also think about
• 28:09
  the velocity. This restaurant does 14,000,000
• 28:11
  a year and this restaurant does 4 million a year, right?
• 28:14
  So even if you're making 3 to 5%, it's pays for a new pan,
• 28:19
  pays for a couple new plates. It doesn't pay for the things
• 28:22
  you need to put into it that are going to give you the ROI,
• 28:26
  right? So you got to be able to take
• 28:27
  the L over here and understand that this is going to run a loss
• 28:29
  of 20 to $40,000 a month for years.
• 28:32
  And if you're not willing to do that, or if your financial
• 28:35
  backers aren't willing to do that, don't do that restaurant.
• 28:39
  So you. Well, I mean, this is like, this
• 28:41
  is the, I feel like you're giving everyone the talk right
• 28:44
  now. I've had to do it for a lot of
• 28:46
  my friends, like a lot of my people, my peers.
• 28:48
  I did it to Phil, right? Yeah.
• 28:50
  Like, you know, I like when Phil came to me and he was like, you
• 28:52
  know, as a mentor. And he's like, why don't you
• 28:54
  treat me like everybody else? And I was like, do you want to
• 28:56
  be like everyone else? You want to be a line cook for
• 28:59
  the next 25 years? Dude, you're 23 years old,
• 29:02
  you're awesome. You're learning stuff.
• 29:04
  You want to go places, you want to see things you know about
• 29:07
  food. I'm like, I'm going to tell you
• 29:08
  right now, I'm not going to treat you like everybody else
• 29:11
  because if I do, I'll dull you out of the profession because
• 29:16
  like they're you need both kinds of people.
• 29:19
  You need people that you can mentor and put pressure on and
• 29:23
  push to grow and do all that. And then you also need that guy
• 29:27
  who wants to be a dishwasher for 20 years.
• 29:29
  You need that guy, right? Like if if you don't have that
• 29:32
  guy, then you then this guy can't perform.
• 29:35
  There there's a lot of extremely talented chefs on the level, you
• 29:40
  know, the Michelin, whatever, just they're, they're talented.
• 29:43
  They have closed a lot of restaurants.
• 29:45
  Yes. And I think what people really
• 29:47
  don't think about often, if I was just making this number up,
• 29:50
  if you took the top chefs in the US, you know, whether that's
• 29:52
  Thomas Keller, Daniel Belude, No Jean George, Eric Repair.
• 29:55
  Let's just let's just use them. And they have hundreds and
• 29:59
  thousands of people going through their kitchens with the
• 30:02
  aspiration of I'm going to go work at one of these three
• 30:05
  Michelin star temples to eventually do my own.
• 30:09
  Who do we got after that? Exactly you.
• 30:11
  Know thousands of people that are going through the system and
• 30:14
  there's only very few that come out of it that that actually can
• 30:18
  compete. You know, there's there's the
• 30:20
  the the the Corey Lee's and the grand hackets that do make it
• 30:23
  out of those systems, but I think it's more so the exception
• 30:26
  to the rule. And I think a lot of people go
• 30:29
  in and they come out and they're like, now I'm going to do my
• 30:30
  food and it's like close six months later are.
• 30:35
  You sure or not? Because because that what they
• 30:38
  they miss is like, I don't want to eat your food.
• 30:40
  I want to eat Thomas's food. I've, I've never met this guy,
• 30:43
  but I see that he's kind of like gone down that road and I don't
• 30:47
  know if we want to like call. And no, no, not by name.
• 30:49
  OK, but there's an amazing chef. Like he opened up a restaurant,
• 30:52
  it got to Michelin stars and closed the same year, and then
• 30:55
  he moved 100 miles north, open the exact same restaurant, and
• 30:59
  it closed in six months. And then he moved 200 miles
• 31:02
  north and guess what? You close in three months.
• 31:05
  Like literally learn your lessons, man.
• 31:07
  Take the LS, put your ego aside, suck it up and figure out how to
• 31:10
  like create profit or create a different concept because maybe
• 31:14
  people don't want that concept from you.
• 31:16
  Yeah, right. Like, I mean, like that's the
• 31:18
  thing that and, and a lot of chefs are like, I want to
• 31:21
  express myself because in theory we're artists, but you know, I
• 31:25
  always think that we're craftspeople first, like in
• 31:28
  learning our craft and learning the craft involves putting down
• 31:31
  the knife and picking up the pencil.
• 31:33
  Like so many chefs need to learn this.
• 31:36
  Like if you don't know what's in your operating supplies, but
• 31:38
  your operating supplies are 13% of your overall cost, get out of
• 31:42
  GL and do some work. Figure out where people are
• 31:45
  wasting money, right? Are you really getting a good
• 31:47
  deal on chemicals? Because that's a big part of
• 31:50
  like what you're spending it on, right?
• 31:52
  Paper goods. Like dude, we make I make my
• 31:55
  chefs open up multiple screens when they're doing ordering and
• 31:58
  side by side ordered paper goods because a couple of bucks per
• 32:02
  case adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end
• 32:05
  of the year. And for people that don't know,
• 32:06
  that's the general Ledger, the GL.
• 32:08
  Yeah, the GL. So, all right, so you have the,
• 32:10
  you know, the P&L is like your report card.
• 32:12
  Yeah, the GL is all the tests you took to get there, right?
• 32:16
  So like you can go through there and you can look line by line,
• 32:19
  code by code. And here's the other thing.
• 32:21
  It's like making sure that, you know, your AI software guys who
• 32:25
  are doing your accounting are coding things to the correct
• 32:28
  place, right, Giving you the right amount of leniency on
• 32:32
  certain things. Like, you know, if the bar is
• 32:34
  using like an esters, we used five to seven cases of citrus a
• 32:38
  day. If we don't get the bar, yeah,
• 32:40
  if we don't get that money back for.
• 32:42
  And that's just for juice, right.
• 32:43
  So if we don't get that money back from them and then put that
• 32:46
  into their cost, all of a sudden they look like they're, you
• 32:49
  know, running 8% cocktails. And then all of a sudden the the
• 32:52
  kitchen's running 35% food cost. And you're like, wait a second.
• 32:56
  So it's about getting people to understand what the GLS need to
• 32:59
  be, where they need to go. So that way you as a chef are
• 33:02
  actually in control of like what you think you're in control of.
• 33:05
  Because if the bar manager is dumping a bunch of like wine on
• 33:08
  you, that should have been, it isn't for cooking, but it's
• 33:12
  going in the reserve wine. And all of a sudden, then you
• 33:13
  have, you know, this explosion in cost.
• 33:16
  All of a sudden, if you're not educated as a chef, you become
• 33:20
  the scapegoat for the restaurant.
• 33:22
  Right. Right.
• 33:23
  And, and we've all been there, right?
• 33:24
  Like, like, I believe you're in hotels, right?
• 33:28
  Hotels are notorious like every banana they put in a room or
• 33:33
  every like, you know, chocolate they order and then put on a
• 33:36
  pillow. They're trying to put that in
• 33:38
  your food cost. And if you don't know that this
• 33:40
  is important for chefs in a hotel to know, if you don't know
• 33:43
  how things are coded in a hotel, you can get royally screwed.
• 33:48
  And then you become this crazy scapegoat for all of this, like
• 33:50
  mismanagement on the hotel side. Right?
• 33:53
  Right. Isn't that wild?
• 33:54
  Yeah, and they and they don't. And what's the problem in a
• 33:56
  hotel is you find out that the bananas have been charged to
• 34:01
  food costs. And I, you say, I didn't even
• 34:03
  know we were giving away bananas.
• 34:05
  Why is that being put on my food cost?
• 34:07
  Then you go push back and you say, well, that's the way we've
• 34:09
  always coded it. So we're going to keep it that
• 34:11
  way. And then you're, you're fucked
• 34:13
  because now you have to explain, right?
• 34:15
  Every month like you can't, your food cost is up 2%.
• 34:18
  Well, you can't say it's 2% of bananas, but we've been doing it
• 34:20
  the last 10 years that way. So you can't.
• 34:22
  You can't say that. Right.
• 34:23
  And in those ten years, did anyone ever hit their food cost
• 34:25
  bonus right? Did anyone ever like, like I, I
• 34:28
  bonus out my chefs extremely heavily for the industry, right?
• 34:32
  Like I, I pay them well and on top of that, I bonus them
• 34:35
  because I want them to hit their food costs.
• 34:37
  I want them to hit their labor costs.
• 34:39
  I want them to hit their prime cost.
• 34:40
  If they can do that, then I'm like, dude, here's the money.
• 34:43
  It ain't mine. You guys went and earned it.
• 34:45
  All yours. So being in Vegas, you know,
• 34:48
  talking about the culinary scene there, honestly, I was talking,
• 34:51
  I don't know who I was talking to the other day, but it was
• 34:53
  like, man, for a for a for a period of time, Vegas, arguably,
• 34:59
  yeah, you have New York and you have San Francisco.
• 35:00
  But arguably, you know, you had everyone in Vegas.
• 35:03
  You had Joel Robichon, you had Alon Ducasse, you had Guise Vois
• 35:08
  fill in the blank. When the Michelin Guide came
• 35:11
  through here, you started noticing, OK, we got a three
• 35:14
  star here, you got a two star there.
• 35:16
  And all of a sudden, like you had this flock of young
• 35:19
  culinarians all going to Vegas. And I think when the Michelin
• 35:22
  Guide left and the news outlet media, so they stopped writing
• 35:28
  about it as much. And Vegas still has a strong
• 35:31
  culinary scene. But now they're talking about
• 35:33
  this city and that city and this city Vegas hasn't talked about
• 35:36
  so much. Being that you're from Vegas and
• 35:39
  you have all your restaurants there, did you notice a shift in
• 35:43
  the culinary talent before and after that?
• 35:46
  I mean, obviously, yeah. So I I started cooking
• 35:48
  professionally and like being paid in 1997, a year before
• 35:54
  Bellagio opened. So I got to work with some
• 35:58
  really great people at The Mirage, which has the time was
• 36:01
  the best hotel you could ever want to work at.
• 36:04
  Gustav Mohler, CMC was the head of food and beverage.
• 36:07
  His number 2 is Bart Mahoney. Just an amazing person and
• 36:10
  mentored to me as well. But they let me start cooking
• 36:13
  when I was 15th in that hotel. I did the internship that the
• 36:16
  CIA guys did when I was 15, right?
• 36:19
  I got an opportunity to work with Luke Palladino, Elizondo
• 36:23
  Estrada, like right there before they opened Renoir, before they
• 36:27
  opened, you know, you know all their big name restaurants and.
• 36:32
  Just try to have two at the win. So he had he had Alex at the
• 36:36
  win, which I helped open, which I win join that team later on
• 36:40
  left Bradley Alden to go there. And which by the way, was not a
• 36:44
  good fit for me, which I mean, we also should talk about like
• 36:47
  some things are not a good fit for people and like some systems
• 36:50
  don't work for people. And then, you know, and then he
• 36:53
  had strata, which is more casual, which is more like
• 36:56
  Italian, like kind of like thing.
• 36:58
  It was right across from the from the poker room there.
• 37:01
  But I remember just being packed all the time and you know.
• 37:05
  And by the way, if I could interject here for for a minute,
• 37:07
  a lot of today's chefs need to know that name.
• 37:10
  They do like, he was Iron Chef Italy for a while, right?
• 37:13
  Yeah. I mean, he's a legend.
• 37:14
  He's he's a legend. And I think greatly to do their
• 37:17
  culinary history, like learn who some of these chefs that you
• 37:20
  know aren't on Instagram are. Yeah, man, like knowing your
• 37:23
  history and you're probably call that Providence, right?
• 37:25
  Like, I mean, like, you know, Michael Simriski has an amazing
• 37:28
  restaurant, just about three stars called Providence.
• 37:31
  I got to stage with him for a couple days at the Water Grill
• 37:34
  when he was the chef of the Water Grill.
• 37:36
  And back then if you got a DUI, you got 30 days in jail in LA.
• 37:41
  And so I walk in, he's like, well, my roast cook is on a 30
• 37:46
  day vacation, so you're going to come over here and cook with me.
• 37:48
  And I got to work with him on a station and we're literally
• 37:51
  breaking down lobsters to order cooking and breaking down
• 37:54
  lobsters to order for plated items in this restaurant.
• 37:57
  And that's when, you know, Water Girl was comparable with La
• 38:00
  Bernadine, right? And I had worked at La Bernadine
• 38:02
  and I've seen this and I was like, I never saw Eric cook like
• 38:06
  Michael did. Michael Samarowski is probably
• 38:09
  one of the greatest cooks I've ever seen like work.
• 38:13
  And he does it just so calmly. I hate it because it's
• 38:16
  nonchalant how good he is at it, right.
• 38:18
  And so those are the people that like him, Alessandro Estrada,
• 38:21
  his whole entire team. I mean, I still in touch with a
• 38:24
  lot of those guys. One of them that I worked with
• 38:26
  that Alex is now my one of my corporate chefs.
• 38:28
  I mean like these are the guys that I looked up to and now I'm
• 38:32
  hiring them. Like I got, I had Bradley Ogden
• 38:35
  work with me for about 6 months at Ester's and let me tell you
• 38:39
  man. It's also legend, legend,
• 38:41
  legend. He's the best, you know, and,
• 38:43
  and, and he's a total sweetheart and he has his ways and he does
• 38:45
  his thing, you know, to bring him into the restaurant.
• 38:47
  I was like, all I want you to do is train my CEO chefs, be nice
• 38:51
  to my sous chefs, treat them the way you treated the guys at
• 38:54
  Bradley's and show them the way. And that's all I asked him to
• 38:57
  do. And when he completed the thing,
• 38:58
  we were like, we're like, hey, man, you did the thing.
• 38:59
  Thank you so much. You know, and that's where, you
• 39:03
  know, giving those and and they might not even know it, but just
• 39:06
  being around somebody like that will affect them for the rest of
• 39:09
  their lives. They will learn lessons that
• 39:13
  they will take forever. Yeah, when you're it's funny
• 39:15
  when you're around greatness. And I've, and I've been around
• 39:18
  it several times in, in my life and career, even on this
• 39:20
  podcast. But when you're around
• 39:23
  greatness, it affects you and you, you start to realize like
• 39:27
  just sometimes they worked together.
• 39:29
  Like no wonder they're good. It's like it rubs off.
• 39:33
  The reverse is also true. Absolutely.
• 39:36
  I think what you said earlier and you know, I, I, I kind of
• 39:39
  want to go back to this Vegas topic, but what you said earlier
• 39:41
  was like, not every kitchen is for you.
• 39:43
  Right. Like, no, like I was thriving
• 39:46
  and really enjoying my time at Bradley Alden in 2003.
• 39:50
  We had just won best new restaurant in America from James
• 39:52
  Beard. This is the first time that any
• 39:54
  restaurant outside of New York City had won that award.
• 39:56
  We won that award, and I think it was probably the last award
• 40:00
  from James Beard that Vegas won. And I left there to go open.
• 40:04
  Alex. And I got into that system and
• 40:07
  into that, you know, into that place.
• 40:09
  You know, I went from working, you know, 16 hours a day and
• 40:13
  hanging out with my friends. And we would sleep and like, we
• 40:16
  would sleep in the restaurant at Bradley Ogden.
• 40:18
  Like literally pull out things from the pull out, like roll out
• 40:22
  pillows and sleep on the floor in the chef's room, in the
• 40:24
  chef's dining room and then go back to work and get ready for
• 40:27
  lunch. That's the way that restaurant
• 40:29
  was. We were all 2223.
• 40:30
  We are all hardcore. We all wanted to go do the
• 40:32
  thing. And the people in that kitchen
• 40:34
  were amazing. And then I went over to to Alex
• 40:38
  and it was just a totally different system.
• 40:40
  And it was like my thought process had changed so much that
• 40:44
  I didn't want to work in that way anymore.
• 40:47
  I was like this, the way people talk to each other, the way, you
• 40:51
  know, it was competitive in that kitchen, which is good for
• 40:54
  certain things and certain people versus collaborative,
• 40:59
  right? So we're from a very
• 41:00
  collaborative kitchen where we were able to write the menu
• 41:03
  everyday, change products. We're getting crazy things from
• 41:05
  the from the market every single week.
• 41:07
  We were using that for the ability to create and grow.
• 41:12
  And that's when we were feeding Joel Robichon, geese of war,
• 41:17
  right? That's the reason why they came
• 41:19
  to Vegas because they saw those kind of cooks actually existed
• 41:22
  there. They brought Joel Robichon to
• 41:26
  dinner and we cooked, think, 24 courses for him, right?
• 41:32
  Bradley didn't write the menu. We wrote the menu.
• 41:34
  Adam Sober wrote the menu. Gerald Shin wrote the menu.
• 41:37
  I had a dish on there. Sven had a dish on there.
• 41:39
  Jeffrey Morrow had a menu. Ralphie Perazzi had a couple of
• 41:42
  dishes on there. He like, he was our pastry chef.
• 41:45
  I mean, like, this is the team that was able to do that.
• 41:48
  And we were doing it at such a high level and we were doing it
• 41:51
  and we were actually having fun. And then you go over there and
• 41:53
  it's like, no, this is the way we do this dish is the way
• 41:55
  Danielle did it, and this way we're going to do it.
• 41:57
  I'm like, oh shit, that's a different thing.
• 41:59
  And I was like, at that point I was like, I'm out.
• 42:01
  I'm done. I quit that job and took a $13
• 42:04
  an hour job at Alizee to work with Jacques von Stotten, who
• 42:07
  worked for Jean Luis. Great.
• 42:08
  Restaurant One of the best meals I had when I was in Vegas.
• 42:10
  Yeah. And like, and that's The thing
• 42:12
  is like in that time, like when we won that Michelin star, it
• 42:15
  meant more. Yeah.
• 42:16
  Because it wasn't just a hotel on the Strip, right?
• 42:20
  It was weird because like when I was at Nob Hill.
• 42:21
  You have to go like an elevator to get there something.
• 42:23
  Right. 5050 floors up. Yeah.
• 42:25
  Just like, it's so crazy because I have 50 floors there and now
• 42:27
  I've a 54 steakhouse at high stakes across the street.
• 42:31
  I can literally look at my old, my old, you know, boss's spot
• 42:34
  and be like, ma'am, I was there and I and you're right.
• 42:37
  Vegas was a certain thing for a certain while.
• 42:39
  And then when Michelin left. But here's the other thing is
• 42:44
  Vegas was the only place in America where a cook could buy a
• 42:47
  house. OK, Think about that.
• 42:50
  Yeah. Is that a reality here?
• 42:52
  No. Is that a reality anywhere in
• 42:54
  America anymore? A chef can't buy a house, right?
• 42:57
  Yeah. And that's something that like
• 42:59
  in 2000. The owner has a really cool
• 43:00
  apartment. Right.
• 43:02
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been up to Eric Repair's
• 43:05
  apartment and see him. He has a whole floor.
• 43:07
  It must be nice. Yeah, right.
• 43:09
  But here's The thing is like, you look at it and you're like,
• 43:13
  oh, wait, you can learn your craft.
• 43:15
  You work for the best chefs in the world and you can buy a
• 43:17
  house and actually build something and be able to do
• 43:19
  something. And 20 years after that, now you
• 43:22
  have chefs who are opening their own restaurants off off strip.
• 43:26
  I would say Oscar Amador and Brian Howard are two of my great
• 43:29
  friends. And to see them.
• 43:31
  Shout out to those guys. Yeah, he's, he's they're doing
• 43:33
  great, right? Yeah, a lot of recognition for
• 43:36
  those guys. But but like seeing that kind of
• 43:38
  like thing happen off the strip, I think Vegas is now a better
• 43:41
  restaurant town than it ever has been.
• 43:44
  Because what's happening is people are seeing the difference
• 43:46
  between a restaurant on the strip, which is just, I mean,
• 43:50
  like, I'll be 100% honest, they're 1000% accountant driven.
• 43:54
  Like if you can't hit this number, like they close the
• 43:58
  restaurant. Like I mean this.
• 43:59
  You're talking about the ones in the in the casinos.
• 44:02
  Places that like outside of the wind, I would say, I would say
• 44:05
  things that MGM and Caesars for the most part are very, very
• 44:09
  accountant focused, not guest focused.
• 44:13
  So are they still giving out those big licensing deals?
• 44:15
  I mean, is like, yeah, who's still there?
• 44:18
  I mean, well, I mean, obviously Mario Carbone just opened up.
• 44:21
  We call it Carbone Boat, and I think they call it Carbone
• 44:24
  Riviera. It took the place of Picasso,
• 44:27
  right? So that was one that he just
• 44:28
  did. Does Paragonair still have his?
• 44:31
  No, no, I I love that room too. It's up.
• 44:33
  It's up and Oriental. Yeah, yeah, that's AI mean.
• 44:36
  Like that's a guy who was 100% never supposed to open a
• 44:40
  restaurant in Vegas because you're going to do 14 covers a
• 44:43
  night out there and 10 of them are going to be comps.
• 44:46
  And you can only hold on to that kind of comp level for so long
• 44:51
  before you have to close it, right.
• 44:54
  And even. And that's The thing is like
• 44:56
  when they make the decision to bring in like a high end
• 45:01
  restaurant like Joel Robichon, Joel Robichon back in the day,
• 45:06
  you still lose $1,000,000 a month.
• 45:09
  That's an amenity that's But you want 3 Michelin stars, that's
• 45:12
  what you got to do, right? Right, right.
• 45:14
  And then you have someone that's working at that restaurant and
• 45:16
  say, oh, I want to open up my own like you, you don't want to
• 45:19
  lose $1,000,000 a month. They can't, but The thing is
• 45:21
  like they're, they think that their cooking is going to get in
• 45:24
  there and they just have no clue because they think that's the
• 45:27
  best. They think that's the only way
• 45:29
  to do this is the way Robeshawn did them.
• 45:30
  I'm like, one of the things that I noticed, especially when it
• 45:33
  comes to mentorship in in Vegas, is everybody comes with these
• 45:36
  crazy resumes and then you get them in there and you're like,
• 45:39
  can you manage people? Do you know how to do food
• 45:41
  costs? No, You know how to run a
• 45:42
  section. Cool.
• 45:44
  Just run a section. You're ACDP.
• 45:46
  You're not ready for a sous chef job.
• 45:47
  Well, I was a sous chef at Robeshawn.
• 45:49
  You're a pasta cook, dude. Good luck.
• 45:52
  You know, like figure it out. Like, can you do this right?
• 45:55
  Can you learn our way? Because I'll promise you this is
• 45:58
  going to be more valuable to you than everything you learned at
• 46:01
  Robichon in fucking five years, right?
• 46:03
  Because you go over there and there's people picking micro
• 46:06
  greens for hours and hours and hours on end.
• 46:08
  They're building little bundles of like, you know, salads for
• 46:12
  one component of a dish. And that's like their whole day.
• 46:15
  And you look at these people and you're like, man, reality is
• 46:19
  going to slap you in the face one day.
• 46:21
  You know, it really is. And you see it over and over and
• 46:23
  over again. These people come out, they have
• 46:25
  these ideas for restaurants and then they, you know, they lose
• 46:28
  their money and they keep moving on.
• 46:31
  What's, what's the sweet spot? So.
• 46:33
  You know, this, this this podcast in general is is to give
• 46:35
  advice. So what's the sweet spot?
• 46:37
  Someone that's coming to you and saying, Hey, I want to open up
• 46:39
  my first restaurant. Cool.
• 46:40
  Don't don't. My first.
• 46:42
  Thing is like. If you can think of any.
• 46:44
  Other way to make money in life? Don't.
• 46:45
  Yeah, don't. I mean, if you enjoy cooking,
• 46:48
  don't open a restaurant. But why do you say that?
• 46:50
  Because. Because.
• 46:51
  If you just love the. You say that if someone who owns
• 46:53
  like what? How many?
• 46:54
  Restaurants. My restaurant.
• 46:55
  Exactly right. Do you know how much I get to?
• 46:57
  Cook none. I get to cook all of the none I
• 47:00
  want. And let me tell you, like if I
• 47:02
  if I get to, you know, if I get to slice some FAW or plate
• 47:05
  something nice or do something like that's like the highlight
• 47:08
  of my day, right? Like dealing with people and
• 47:13
  their problems and leadership and mentorship and doing that is
• 47:17
  all the stuff I was never good at.
• 47:20
  But it's a learned skill. Just like torning, like just
• 47:24
  like perfect dicing things perfect, you know, cuisine on a
• 47:27
  fish, like everything is a skill that's learned.
• 47:32
  You know how to cook That's. Not the problem, the problem.
• 47:34
  Is getting your team to do what you want when you want it.
• 47:37
  That's leadership. My book Culinary Leadership
• 47:40
  Fundamentals breaks down exactly how to run a kitchen without
• 47:42
  losing your mind. Stop yelling, start leading.
• 47:45
  Get the book at chefs psa.com. Mentorship is a skill that's
• 47:48
  learned, and you got to be. Bad at it too.
• 47:50
  This is one thing I love is I talk to my my chefs all the time
• 47:53
  about is like be prepared to fail every day and fail better.
• 47:57
  Like if you feel better every day, eventually you'll win
• 47:59
  right? So, OK, you come in, you open
• 48:02
  your restaurant and you know, you look at your PNL and you're
• 48:05
  failing. Well, next month you get another
• 48:08
  report card. And what are you doing to
• 48:10
  actively change that? And if and can you make the
• 48:13
  decisions that you really need to make to make that profitable,
• 48:16
  which kind of leads back to that old philosophy.
• 48:19
  Like, I would rather live for one year like no one else would
• 48:23
  live so I can live the rest of my life free, right?
• 48:25
  Like having the freedom, like are you willing to break all
• 48:28
  your, your ideas of what success looks like to actually be
• 48:32
  successful? And that's something that a lot
• 48:35
  of chefs need to learn straight out of the gate.
• 48:37
  It's like you are going to be the best sous chef and then
• 48:41
  you're the worst executive sous chef, and then you're the best
• 48:43
  executive sous chef, Then you're the worst executive chef, then
• 48:46
  you're the best executive chef, then you're the worst corporate
• 48:49
  chef, then you're the worst corporate chef, Then you're then
• 48:51
  you get into ownership, right? Because there's levels of this
• 48:54
  shit and then you're the worst owner ever.
• 48:56
  Like when I opened esters 8 years ago I was the worst owner
• 49:01
  ever. Why?
• 49:03
  Because I didn't. Know what I didn't know?
• 49:05
  I was a. Momo, right?
• 49:07
  A momo is just a guy who doesn't know what he doesn't know.
• 49:09
  Like, oh, I can run a food class, I can do this.
• 49:11
  I've run restaurants, I've run groups before.
• 49:13
  This should be easy, right? It's not because you don't think
• 49:16
  about all the things you don't know.
• 49:17
  Like now you're the plumber, Now you're the electrician.
• 49:19
  Now you're the IT guy. Now you're the guy who has to
• 49:22
  pay for everything, everything. Like every screw in a wall,
• 49:27
  every every half rack of dishes that gets run that isn't full,
• 49:31
  you're paying for that. And then you really realize how
• 49:35
  this game is played. Like people usually lose the
• 49:39
  game before they ever open the restaurant because they don't
• 49:44
  know how to read a lease. That's.
• 49:48
  That's it. Let's start there.
• 49:49
  All right. Cool.
• 49:50
  All right. Leases.
• 49:52
  Leases are a negotiation. If you take what they're giving
• 49:56
  you, you're out of business. End of story.
• 50:00
  Because they already know what your.
• 50:01
  Break even is to to. To make money there because
• 50:04
  they're already modeling what you're not modeling five years
• 50:07
  out, right? They're already winning.
• 50:09
  So getting a favorable lease, especially when it comes to
• 50:13
  these like large corporations who have like the best real
• 50:16
  estate is so important because they're on top of a pile of debt
• 50:20
  which they have to pay down. And then they're using your
• 50:23
  lease as a security, right? So the, you have to realize
• 50:27
  this. So our first lease at, at
• 50:29
  Ester's, I was afraid to take the bigger space that was 3600
• 50:34
  square feet. So I put this into 2200 square
• 50:37
  feet at $1.30 a square foot, which sounds insane, but like if
• 50:41
  you'd seen like where I was looking, no one else was looking
• 50:44
  there, right? So by having a favorable lease
• 50:47
  at Ester's created profitability right out of the gate.
• 50:50
  That's super, super important. The second part is in that
• 50:55
  lease. Just know things are what do you
• 50:58
  need to get a lease? What do you need to get an SBA
• 51:00
  loan? People don't understand that.
• 51:01
  People don't know you have to own a piece of property to get
• 51:03
  an SBA loan. Or if you're in my crazy world,
• 51:07
  my mom signed her house over as collateral for a $250,000 loan
• 51:13
  that let me get to the finish line.
• 51:15
  Now when your mom's house is on the line and you're under all
• 51:17
  that pressure, you're not going to be nice to people, right?
• 51:21
  You're not like everyone cost you money.
• 51:24
  Everything is hard. You're under a ton of pressure.
• 51:27
  You know, if you lose, your mom loses her house.
• 51:30
  Can't lose. Fuck, here we go.
• 51:32
  That's really the truth. Like you can't, you can't allow
• 51:36
  yourself to lose. So you have to cook for people,
• 51:38
  right? So that's where having the least
• 51:40
  understanding what goes into it, understand that if you close
• 51:43
  your restaurant, they own every stove, every chair, every table,
• 51:48
  every bowl of alcohol, everything.
• 51:50
  They own it because you're defaulting on 20 years of
• 51:54
  payments. Now they have to look, go back
• 51:56
  to the bank and say, hey, I have this asset that's worth this
• 51:59
  amount of money, right? People don't know that.
• 52:02
  Can you talk about like and again?
• 52:04
  Just educating people triple net TI What?
• 52:06
  What are we looking for? All right, cool.
• 52:08
  So what does? It cost to build out a
• 52:11
  restaurant my. Purpose built from scratch is 6.
• 52:16
  $100 a square foot, if you think you can do it for less, you
• 52:20
  can't. You're going to be cutting
• 52:21
  corners. You're going to end up with a
• 52:23
  lot of holes. My T is, are tenant
• 52:26
  improvements. That's like the money the
• 52:27
  landlord gives you. And a lot of times they're not
• 52:30
  giving you money. What they really are doing is
• 52:31
  giving you free rent, which means you still have to have
• 52:34
  that money in order to get it done.
• 52:36
  Unless they're also your builder, right?
• 52:38
  So knowing is your landlord a construction guy or is your
• 52:41
  landlord a Realty group? Those are two different kinds of
• 52:44
  landlords, right? So understanding what it is, are
• 52:47
  they building it out for you, right.
• 52:49
  If they're building it out for you, well, that's debt and you
• 52:53
  have to know that, right? So like realize that ahead of
• 52:55
  time, your SBA loan, your SBA loan is important.
• 52:58
  Your T is are important. Your triple Nets, triple Nets
• 53:02
  are insurance, right, Cams and what's the other one?
• 53:07
  Net, net net. But the other third one, I mean,
• 53:09
  like really it's about like making sure that you have
• 53:12
  insurance on your business. So that way if some of some
• 53:15
  falls and they sue you, you have coverage for that because that's
• 53:18
  could easily close a restaurant if you don't, right, Then you
• 53:22
  have insurance. So it's insurance and then cams
• 53:25
  common area maintenance. This is the biggest scam in all
• 53:30
  of Realty, right? They charge you 25.
• 53:34
  Cents a square. Foot to $0.50 a square foot,
• 53:37
  depending on where you're at for what for, to water the plants
• 53:41
  outside to power wash. And then they don't do it.
• 53:46
  And then so like what I like to do is I, I like, yeah, I'll pay
• 53:49
  you $0.25 in Cams, but I want to audit the Cams at the end of the
• 53:53
  year because Cams are not supposed to be a source of
• 53:56
  profit for your landlord. And you're like, and you can get
• 54:00
  them to agree to that. And if you can get them to agree
• 54:02
  to that, guess what? You can hold them back to it and
• 54:04
  you can get a refund every year from them, but it only if you
• 54:08
  know to negotiate that. So negotiating cams on a 4000
• 54:12
  square foot restaurant is $12,000 a year.
• 54:15
  OK, cool. So that $12,000 if you only
• 54:19
  spent $4000 on the common area maintenance in my portion of it,
• 54:22
  I want $8000 back. That's a rent payment.
• 54:25
  That's that's a big deal. That's profit.
• 54:28
  That's that's being a, a business person.
• 54:31
  And you can't be a chef, own your restaurant and not be a
• 54:35
  business person. It just doesn't work, you know,
• 54:38
  and these are the things like no one knows about that stuff
• 54:41
  because no one teaches us about it.
• 54:43
  No and and and unfortunately you get to a.
• 54:46
  Point usually in your career, you say I'm a fantastic cook.
• 54:49
  Now I need to spread my my, my food to the world and share it
• 54:54
  with everyone under my own under my own business.
• 54:56
  And then you get there and you realize I don't know anything
• 54:58
  about business and no one taught me because the owner, I mean, I
• 55:02
  hate to say it, the owners are typically pretty busy with
• 55:04
  owning shit. They don't have time to, oh, let
• 55:06
  me just sit down and mentor you about the business, which I
• 55:09
  think you do a good job with that.
• 55:10
  You're talking about that, But a lot of people don't.
• 55:11
  They just, they're just really good at being an employee.
• 55:14
  And some people want that and and a.
• 55:16
  Lot of chefs want that. A lot of chefs just want to be
• 55:20
  creative. Like we always, I always say
• 55:22
  this, you always have to have a sous chef that's pushing your
• 55:25
  buttons and pushing your boundaries, right?
• 55:28
  Because if without them, you're not moving your cuisine forward.
• 55:32
  Now when you get someone special like Dylan, who's been with me
• 55:36
  for over 11 years, who it's funny enough, we started working
• 55:40
  together. We did an outstanding in the
• 55:41
  field dinner at Coachella in the Rose Garden.
• 55:44
  And he was working with Jason full of love.
• 55:47
  And I kind of brought one person with me, right?
• 55:51
  And he had like an army of these 11, like 23 year old crazy
• 55:54
  people. And one of them was Dylan.
• 55:56
  I was like, man, yeah. He's like, oh, I'd like to work
• 55:58
  with you one day. I'm like, sure.
• 55:59
  Well, maybe one day we ended up working together at Superba.
• 56:01
  And then that was, you know, 20/13/2014 and he's been with me
• 56:06
  kind of ever since. And he was like when I brought
• 56:09
  him on at esters, I brought him at $13.50 line cook.
• 56:13
  He's $130,000 a year employee, employee now, right?
• 56:17
  And that's, that's it. Like I he runs esters.
• 56:20
  He's the man. And now he's been the creative
• 56:23
  chef. He's done that thing.
• 56:24
  Now I'm trying to get him to take his Sri Lankan background
• 56:28
  and to put that into an Italian restaurant.
• 56:33
  And then to make. His own like marks on the the
• 56:36
  menu, right? Like that's like, how do we do
• 56:38
  that? How do we bridge that gap?
• 56:41
  Right? There's a certain things that we
• 56:42
  can't do, certain things we can't do.
• 56:43
  Like we don't put chicken on pizzas and shit like that.
• 56:46
  You know, because he wanted to do the Sri Lankan Curry chicken
• 56:48
  pizzas, like brought some BBQ chicken pizza, but we're not
• 56:51
  doing it. And he's like, so figure out a
• 56:53
  new Ave. for that, right? And then like he does this
• 56:55
  amazing Sri Lankan Curry that we did with Jimenez farm goats and
• 57:00
  now we're doing it with like lamb, right?
• 57:01
  So we put that on the menu. People responded to so well,
• 57:05
  'cause like I was like, just take your shirwanken Curry and
• 57:08
  take 90% of the chilies out of it.
• 57:10
  And you're right there, right? And so he, we create a
• 57:13
  mallaritas pasta with like the Curry flavor inside of it.
• 57:17
  And then we built that beautiful coconut based Curry over the top
• 57:19
  of it. Finish it with right to admit.
• 57:21
  And all of a sudden it's like it's an ester's dish now.
• 57:24
  I'm like, that's so cool. Now he's starting to do that and
• 57:26
  now he's starting to influence those things on the menu and
• 57:29
  starting to create new food that is really special.
• 57:33
  But he's also doing it while running 17% profit.
• 57:38
  That's a that's a good story. So makes.
• 57:39
  Me think about the current generation of chefs and cooks
• 57:42
  that are coming out of culinary school or or just now navigating
• 57:45
  into the industry. What advice do you give them?
• 57:48
  Because times are obviously different.
• 57:50
  I mean, you know, the worst part is you can't be in a.
• 57:52
  Hurry, because like everything in this world tells you to be in
• 57:55
  a hurry, right? Everything.
• 57:59
  I want to be a sous chef by the time I'm. 25 I want to be.
• 58:01
  Executive chef by I'm 30. I want to you're like the
• 58:04
  biggest piece of advice I can say.
• 58:07
  Is you're not running. Someone else's race.
• 58:09
  You're not running the race of the guy across from you.
• 58:12
  You're not running the race of the person you're on the station
• 58:15
  with. You're running your own race.
• 58:17
  You're not going to win because I, I, I was the ultimate fucking
• 58:21
  hater back in the day because I would like, why is this guy
• 58:24
  who's less hard working than me getting ahead?
• 58:28
  Why is this? And now, you know, it was, it
• 58:29
  was like I was too much of AI was an asshole, right?
• 58:33
  And I had to work my way out of that.
• 58:35
  No one else was going to do that for me, right?
• 58:38
  And I'm still, you know, an asshole pretty much right.
• 58:40
  That being said, I have different levels of it now,
• 58:45
  right? Like where you used to just be
• 58:48
  very in your face, like I'm going to show you how wrong you
• 58:51
  are and why I'm like, now I'm like, figure it out yourself,
• 58:55
  you know? But but I had to learn that.
• 58:57
  And I watch all those guys and where they went and how them not
• 59:01
  working super hard has affected them over the years.
• 59:06
  Like their race is completely different than mine.
• 59:09
  Some of them are corporate chefs.
• 59:10
  Some of them are going out on their own now.
• 59:11
  Some of them have their own restaurants.
• 59:13
  Some of them have 42 restaurants, like Phil, Right.
• 59:16
  And I'm just like, you learn that everyone else, like you've
• 59:20
  met Phil. Like no one's going to tell him
• 59:22
  no. Yeah, no, he, he he won't.
• 59:23
  He won't take no as an answer. He's he's a.
• 59:25
  Really inspirational chef. Because when you talk to him,
• 59:29
  you realize like he's got something special about him That
• 59:33
  and, and it's this confidence and belief in.
• 59:37
  Himself. Have you ever played poker?
• 59:38
  Against Phil, No. We used to play poker.
• 59:42
  At his apartment. When when him and Margarita
• 59:44
  first where they had the pop up, which by the way, I went to that
• 59:47
  pop up and in their in their house, which I thought was
• 59:51
  amazing and I thought they're out of their mind.
• 59:53
  I seem like doing like, I don't want to say celebrity poker,
• 59:55
  but. He does a lot of that, but no.
• 59:56
  But he's. But here's The thing.
• 59:57
  Is the thing you got to? Know about Phil Phil's always
• 1:00:00
  all in no matter what 2 cards he has.
• 1:00:03
  He's always willing to put it on the line.
• 1:00:06
  And that is something as an entrepreneur that he definitely
• 1:00:09
  has in spades. And you know what, it's been him
• 1:00:12
  in the butt a couple of times, but it's led to so much of his
• 1:00:15
  growth. But it's who he is as a person,
• 1:00:18
  right? And the way he runs his race is
• 1:00:20
  not how I'm running my race. It's not how, you know, other
• 1:00:24
  people in our industry are running their race, right?
• 1:00:27
  So when you, when you get that person, that is undeniable,
• 1:00:32
  you're not going to tell them no, what you can do is you can
• 1:00:36
  tell them, hey man, think about these three things before you go
• 1:00:39
  make that decision. Think about what are you
• 1:00:43
  building? Think about why you're doing it
• 1:00:45
  and think about how you're going to be successful.
• 1:00:48
  And if you can think about those three things and be critical of
• 1:00:51
  it. And here's The thing is like
• 1:00:52
  talk to yourself about it. Hold yourself accountable for
• 1:00:55
  it, right? If you can do the, if you can do
• 1:00:57
  those three things, go for it. The worst case scenario is that
• 1:01:02
  you have to go back and start over, right?
• 1:01:05
  And, and here's the thing about Phil.
• 1:01:06
  Phil is always rebuying. When we played poker, I would
• 1:01:09
  just wait, beat him and then he'd rebuy.
• 1:01:13
  I'd wait. I'd beat him and he'd rebuy.
• 1:01:16
  I'd wait and beat him and rebuy. That was just the way it went.
• 1:01:20
  At the end of the night, he had all the chips because he would
• 1:01:22
  never stop reloading. He would never give up on
• 1:01:25
  himself. He believed he was good.
• 1:01:28
  And that is something that like, you see that in somebody, you're
• 1:01:31
  like, man, this guy's going to go far.
• 1:01:33
  Where he's going to go, I have no idea.
• 1:01:34
  But he's going to go far. Well, he's doing.
• 1:01:36
  He's doing well for himself. Yeah.
• 1:01:38
  And you see that? In hooks too, you see that in
• 1:01:39
  chefs in this new. Generation, like just take the
• 1:01:43
  time to learn the foundation of cooking and realize that dots on
• 1:01:49
  plate and smears and all that stuff are all great and all and
• 1:01:51
  having that technique and understanding how to build those
• 1:01:54
  things. I mean, like it takes six
• 1:01:56
  months, right? Then you have to learn to craft
• 1:02:00
  your cooking for 10 years, and then you have an opportunity to
• 1:02:04
  start building a career out of this thing.
• 1:02:06
  And, and I came out of school with a bunch of debt and I had
• 1:02:10
  to pay it down, which is great because I had to live within my
• 1:02:12
  means. I had to take jobs I didn't want
• 1:02:14
  to take because of that situation.
• 1:02:18
  A lot of people are in that situation.
• 1:02:19
  They don't have to get out of it.
• 1:02:20
  So they quit. There's a lot of chefs who are
• 1:02:23
  real estate agents in Vegas, right?
• 1:02:25
  There's a lot of chefs who, you know, go sell food, right?
• 1:02:28
  And sell, sell products like, you know, that's an easier life.
• 1:02:32
  You get weekends off, you do a thing.
• 1:02:33
  And if that's their journey, man, by all means, cool, good
• 1:02:36
  for you. There's no, and that's things
• 1:02:38
  like I used to look at those people as sellouts and now I'm
• 1:02:41
  like, man, good decision for you, man.
• 1:02:43
  Like, you know, you don't want to go All in all the time.
• 1:02:47
  That's OK. And I think that's something we
• 1:02:49
  should really talk about is like the transition out of this
• 1:02:53
  business, right? Like you've made the transition
• 1:02:56
  out of kind of cooking day-to-day.
• 1:02:59
  That's a huge transition for people.
• 1:03:01
  And being supportive of that choice as a mentor is also
• 1:03:05
  really important because you're telling someone they didn't
• 1:03:08
  fail, they chose something else, right?
• 1:03:10
  And, and, and most likely it's healthier for them.
• 1:03:13
  It's more sustainable, it creates a better life for them.
• 1:03:17
  They might have kids, they might have a mortgage, they might have
• 1:03:20
  these things that are weighing against them.
• 1:03:22
  They're going to stop them from going all in.
• 1:03:25
  Like, I don't have kids, I don't have a wife.
• 1:03:27
  So guess what, I got 3 cats and nothing to lose.
• 1:03:31
  You know, All in all, in all the time, I'm going to ask you one
• 1:03:34
  last question. If this is my wrap up question,
• 1:03:37
  OK, if you had a Mount Rushmore of chefs up there, four of them
• 1:03:41
  that deserve to be on Mount Rushmore, who should they be?
• 1:03:45
  OK, Jean. Levi Paladin.
• 1:03:47
  Who was Eric Repairs mentor? I was lucky enough to be able to
• 1:03:52
  dine at his restaurant Napa, when I was very young.
• 1:03:56
  And that really influenced me to like, want to start getting into
• 1:03:59
  cooking. So Jean Le Paolo done.
• 1:04:03
  Let's see. Yana Colano.
• 1:04:06
  So Yana Colano, he was the chef of Le Maurice in Paris.
• 1:04:11
  And I got the stash in his kitchen.
• 1:04:13
  And his little tree is Cedric Gruyere was his pastry chef,
• 1:04:19
  right? So the way he cooks and what his
• 1:04:24
  three Michelin star food is, is what real food is.
• 1:04:29
  I think everyone else is kind of doing performance art.
• 1:04:32
  He's just like, this is the food that we cook and this is the way
• 1:04:35
  we cook it in and this is like how we do it.
• 1:04:39
  And he goes and he's open about how he does his vegetable
• 1:04:41
  cookery. There's no secrets with this
• 1:04:42
  guy. You know, he'll sit there and
• 1:04:44
  like pass mushrooms and fold them into a hollandaise and
• 1:04:47
  like, this is all we do. It's awesome.
• 1:04:49
  You should do that. And he shows that.
• 1:04:51
  So I'd say Yana Gallano is up there.
• 1:04:54
  And you got to think about people with like, giant, like,
• 1:04:57
  trees. Marco Pierre White, obviously is
• 1:04:59
  #3 I mean. Cooking with Marco is insane.
• 1:05:05
  You cook with them like one day. And let me tell you, I've never
• 1:05:09
  seen someone smoke that many cigarettes in one day, right?
• 1:05:13
  And but at the end of the day, he said, you're a good cook.
• 1:05:16
  And I was like, I'm good for the rest of my life.
• 1:05:19
  That's awesome. But you like you don't you call
• 1:05:21
  Marco or you call them boss and that's it.
• 1:05:22
  So I had to work with them for a day with Curtis Stone was really
• 1:05:25
  nice. And then I mean, I got to put
• 1:05:29
  Danielle up there, man, because Danielle is the guy that
• 1:05:34
  everybody. Should be like looking.
• 1:05:36
  At as being like this is what the ultimate of successes.
• 1:05:41
  All he does is open great restaurants empower his people
• 1:05:46
  and he doesn't care about any critics at all anymore.
• 1:05:49
  Like Danielle in New York City is definitely A2 Michelin star
• 1:05:53
  restaurant. 100% it is. And he got banged up by the New
• 1:05:57
  York Times and some BS about giving away a couple of wines to
• 1:06:02
  somebody he thought of. It was a critic.
• 1:06:04
  Doesn't take away your Michelin stars.
• 1:06:06
  Like, I mean, like, what he does and what he's built in America
• 1:06:11
  is legendary. So those are my 4 up on Mount
• 1:06:14
  Rushmore. Yeah.
• 1:06:16
  And that's kind of all the same. They're like the people I looked
• 1:06:20
  up to when I was coming up. And I'm sure that if you talk.
• 1:06:24
  To like younger people. That they have a totally
• 1:06:26
  different 4. But I think without those four
• 1:06:29
  people, the culinary world is not what it is today.
• 1:06:32
  Yeah, yes, it looks completely different.
• 1:06:34
  It does. Yeah.
• 1:06:36
  Well, chef, this was great. Thank you for dropping so much
• 1:06:39
  knowledge. This was.
• 1:06:40
  This is great. This is great.
• 1:06:42
  Where can people find you if they want to follow, if they
• 1:06:44
  want to eat? So Esther's Kitchen.
• 1:06:47
  Is the flagship. He does our wine bar Barbara
• 1:06:51
  Wham is our French tasty menu restaurant, high stakes in Vegas
• 1:06:54
  at the top of the Rio is our steakhouse and also Lito Posto
• 1:06:58
  is our Big East Coast Italian restaurant, which I mean, all of
• 1:07:01
  them are great and like kind of like whatever you're feeling
• 1:07:04
  because like as chefs, we can cook anything, right?
• 1:07:06
  So we get to I, I feel lucky that I can like wake up in the
• 1:07:09
  morning, be like, Oh, good, want to go over for Jackson on some
• 1:07:12
  new food at Ada's or like, Oh, I want to go see Sean over at Bo
• 1:07:15
  Wham and work on some really cool new playing techniques and
• 1:07:17
  some really cool food over there.
• 1:07:19
  Or like, Hey, Mel, I want to work with.
• 1:07:20
  And then we're going to go, you know, go to the market in Santa
• 1:07:23
  Monica, buy some really cool stuff, bring it back and play
• 1:07:25
  around with it and then set up some vendor stuff like that.
• 1:07:28
  And so we can do some cool stuff there Or, you know, I'm up in
• 1:07:30
  the Rio and we're working on, you know, a Borchetta because we
• 1:07:34
  like the idea of doing the board shop.
• 1:07:36
  However, we wanted to like add some like sexiness to it.
• 1:07:39
  So we want to work on that. So I'm up there with Joe and
• 1:07:41
  Adam and working on that. And like all the guys and gals
• 1:07:45
  who work in our kitchens are just awesome.
• 1:07:47
  We're so lucky to have them. But message me on Facebook, I'm
• 1:07:51
  easy. What's your Instagram handle,
• 1:07:54
  James Trees. Right.
• 1:07:56
  I mean like and direct message me.
• 1:07:58
  I'm easy, man. Like I just want to make sure
• 1:08:00
  that, you know, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about
• 1:08:03
  today is stuff that nobody talks about.
• 1:08:05
  And it's not about how much, you know, Agri percentage to put
• 1:08:10
  your fluid gels or how to stabilize, you know, things with
• 1:08:13
  xanthan gum. It's not about hydrocholoids.
• 1:08:16
  It's not about like nerdy chef stuff that we get into, you
• 1:08:20
  know, it's not about like understanding that, you know,
• 1:08:22
  you know, when you're poaching something in a rationale at 64°,
• 1:08:25
  it'll hit 60°, you know, like these kind of things.
• 1:08:29
  Like we all learn methodology and we all understand that these
• 1:08:32
  are concepts outside of that that are so much more important
• 1:08:37
  because you can have the best food in the world and if you
• 1:08:41
  can't run a business, you're might as well.
• 1:08:44
  Just like you're home, you're a hobbyist.
• 1:08:46
  You're a hobbyist. No, the hobby, the hobbyist is
• 1:08:48
  worse. Hobbyist is when hobbyist is
• 1:08:51
  when you think you know how to run a restaurant and you don't
• 1:08:55
  mind losing a bunch of money until you start to mind losing a
• 1:08:58
  bunch of money and then you put pressure on all the people that
• 1:09:01
  you've given horrible expectations to.
• 1:09:04
  That's a hobbyist. What's funny, I said this the
• 1:09:07
  other day. To to someone, I said it's not
• 1:09:09
  until you either feel physical, financial or emotional pain that
• 1:09:13
  you start to rethink your strategy.
• 1:09:16
  Yeah, I always say you're not an owner until you have to.
• 1:09:19
  Write your first payroll. Yeah.
• 1:09:20
  And like when that, when that, when that payroll comes out of
• 1:09:23
  your bank account and you have to make the decision between
• 1:09:26
  feeding somebody else or feeding your family, then you're an
• 1:09:29
  owner. Then, you know, like when we
• 1:09:31
  opened Extra's, I had $5700 in the bank.
• 1:09:35
  That's a recipe for massive failure.
• 1:09:38
  And I got so lucky. And that's the other thing that
• 1:09:41
  no one talks about in this business is like, oh, I worked
• 1:09:43
  at all these great restaurants. Of course I'm going to open.
• 1:09:45
  You have to have everything go right in this business in order
• 1:09:49
  for you to be successful. You, you, you cannot cook your
• 1:09:53
  way out of it. You cannot finance your way out
• 1:09:55
  of it because certain things you're just going to have to
• 1:09:56
  lose money on. Yep, Yep.
• 1:09:58
  And you have to be OK. With that and if.
• 1:10:00
  You're not OK with that or you've gone down to the wire?
• 1:10:03
  Are you making a decision for the business or you making a
• 1:10:05
  decision for your ego or what? I mean, that's really what it
• 1:10:07
  comes down to. Wow.
• 1:10:09
  Well, show, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 1:10:11
  I'd love to do Round 2. Yeah.
• 1:10:12
  Hopefully we'll get you back. Yeah, he'll say when.
• 1:10:14
  You know, Austin's beautiful. Yeah.
• 1:10:15
  Thank. You appreciate you.
• 1:10:18
  All right, that's the. Show if you liked it.
• 1:10:19
  Make sure you leave five stars. Nothing less than five stars.
• 1:10:22
  If you want more chef's PSA, go to chefspsa.com.
• 1:10:25
  Get yourself some books. Get yourself some merch,
• 1:10:27
  including Culinary Leadership Fundamentals and the Line Cook
• 1:10:30
  Survival Manual. If you want early access to
• 1:10:32
  episodes, you can get them on Spotify and Substack by becoming
• 1:10:35
  a paid member. The link is in the notes.
• 1:10:37
  We'll see you next week. Hit the porno music.
• 1:10:39
  No small address in the kitchen. Mixing.
• 1:10:41
  Drop the chef knowledge.