Latest / Chef's PSA Podcast / Philip Frankland Lee: Michelin Systems, Omakase Economics & The Reality of TV Fame Ep. 184

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Philip Frankland Lee: Michelin Systems, Omakase Economics & The Reality of TV Fame Ep. 184 · Chef's PSA Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello chefs, this is Chef's PSA and I'm your host Andre Natera.
• 0:03
  Today I'm welcoming back Chef Philip Franklin Lee, Michelin
• 0:05
  star chef with multiple restaurants, owner of Sushi by
• 0:08
  Scratch Pasta Bar and ADC Burger, and a regular on
• 0:12
  culinary TV, including Knife Edge.
• 0:14
  Chasing Michelin stars on Apple TV right now.
• 0:17
  In this episode, we dive into building multiple restaurant
• 0:19
  concepts, his approach to sushi and pasta, the impact of media
• 0:23
  and social media, and what he's creating next.
• 0:25
  Let's get into it. Chef Works is the gold standard
• 0:39
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• 1:14
  Just enter Chef's PSA 20 at Checkup Chef, What were you here
• 1:19
  at the summer right? Yeah, I don't remember.
• 1:22
  Do you remember what month? Maybe in June.
• 1:25
  So since June, how many restaurants have you opened?
• 1:31
  Well, definitely NADC, Charlotte, definitely Shokunin
• 1:38
  because that's a month old since June.
• 1:47
  Did I have NADC in Vegas? I don't know.
• 1:51
  I don't remember. I didn't do a lot this summer.
• 1:54
  Well, I did a lot this summer. I haven't opened a lot of
• 1:56
  restaurants this summer, which I think guess is funny.
• 1:58
  I just counted to three. Anyone else didn't?
• 2:02
  But I had a lot of restaurants at 3:00.
• 2:04
  All of our restaurants are 10 seats.
• 2:06
  Actually that's not true. Shogun has 20.
• 2:08
  Shogun is our first non tasting menu restaurant.
• 2:13
  So we're doing a la carte 22 seats or something like that.
• 2:18
  And then the the 2 NADCS, 1 is like, you know, just counter.
• 2:24
  Well, they're both counter service.
• 2:25
  One's in a in a casino in Vegas and 1 is in Charlotte.
• 2:31
  So for people that don't know that are listening, NADC and
• 2:35
  your other restaurants are around the corner from here.
• 2:37
  Yeah. So a lot of times when I have
• 2:39
  podcast guests are post podcast Oh really is to go to NADC and
• 2:42
  get some burgers. We know Shokunin shares a wall.
• 2:45
  I do that literally next door now, yeah.
• 2:47
  Yeah, the burgers, by the way, just we could talk about the
• 2:50
  other restaurants, but the burgers themselves, great.
• 2:52
  It's like, so my order obviously is the burger, but I always take
• 2:55
  the price. A lot of people go, what should
• 2:57
  I get when I go there? I'm like, get the only thing on
• 2:58
  the menu. That's what I recommend.
• 3:00
  I think I get a liquid death, a burger and then the they're not
• 3:04
  loaded fries, but what do you? Call it beast mode.
• 3:06
  The Beast mode fries, Yeah. And I split those with usually
• 3:09
  the guests. I'm like, yeah, And every single
• 3:11
  person that goes like this, fucking great.
• 3:13
  The fuck? Maybe I should be a sponsor.
• 3:14
  I'll just every time you can, you can have an ADC on the
• 3:17
  podcast. Yeah, yeah.
• 3:18
  I tell everyone, hey, go to NADC afterwards, let's go grab some
• 3:20
  lunch. And everyone fucking loves it.
• 3:22
  They're like, oh, this is really fucking good.
• 3:24
  But what I think is interesting about what you do.
• 3:27
  So obviously you have the the burger concepts, but you also do
• 3:29
  the sushi restaurants and then you have pasta bar, which is
• 3:32
  tasty menu, fine dining for a lot of people.
• 3:36
  They confuse omakase, tasting menus, counter service and I
• 3:43
  think they just throw around the term loosely, not fully
• 3:46
  understand. What it is America has changed
• 3:48
  what omakase means. What does it mean?
• 3:50
  So tell us what it means. So, and, and my job, I've always
• 3:54
  felt like my job is to actively not be an ambassador for Japan.
• 3:59
  I, I'm not, I'm, I'm obsessed with sushi and I've been
• 4:02
  obsessed with sushi since I was like 7.
• 4:05
  So I've got, you know, 30 years of obsession and 20, probably 25
• 4:09
  years since I bought my first book about sushi.
• 4:13
  But I've never wanted to or like, I like, I don't like when,
• 4:18
  if I have a Japanese chef, of course speak Japanese.
• 4:21
  I don't like when my other chefs try to speak Japanese on the
• 4:26
  line or try to explain the culture of Japan to our guests
• 4:30
  because that's not our job. Our job is just to like make
• 4:33
  yummy food. Sushi happens to be the, the,
• 4:35
  the vehicle that we want to serve yummy food with.
• 4:40
  But omakase So in, in, in, in Japanese, there's many words
• 4:46
  that have like in English, a word has a meaning in, sometimes
• 4:50
  in Japanese, a word has is like a phrase, you know.
• 4:55
  So like omakase effectively means like, I place myself in
• 5:00
  your hands. I trust you, something along
• 5:03
  those lines. And so, you know, back, I guess
• 5:09
  rewind like 10 years ago, eight years ago, omakase did not mean
• 5:13
  tasting menu. Kaisecki was was the Japanese
• 5:16
  tasting menu. It followed a very Kaisecki
• 5:18
  specific. It follows a very rigorous, you
• 5:20
  know, structure. But omakase meant like, for
• 5:24
  example, if we go to Red Ash tonight, right?
• 5:28
  We grab a couple buddies and the six of us are sitting there,
• 5:31
  server comes over and goes, all right, you guys ready to order.
• 5:33
  And we're like, you know what? Can you just, can you just
• 5:37
  choose for us? The term would be omakase.
• 5:42
  Omakase did not mean I will. I am signing up for a tasting
• 5:47
  menu with a through line. It meant can you just choose for
• 5:51
  me, basically. So when you sat at a sushi
• 5:53
  counter, so like I, I fell in love with sushi at 5:00 and it's
• 5:57
  by 7. I was unwilling.
• 5:59
  I've always been headstrong. I was unwilling to eat sushi if
• 6:02
  I wasn't at the counter and it wasn't omakase.
• 6:06
  And back then it was omakase meant, you know, you'd look,
• 6:09
  you'd see the all the fish there.
• 6:11
  You would talk with the chef. You know, you'd look at the menu
• 6:14
  and you could either choose what you wanted or you could, the
• 6:16
  chef would say, what, what can I get for you?
• 6:18
  And you say, Oh my God, say chef, please.
• 6:20
  And that meant you, you choose. It didn't mean, oh, I have
• 6:24
  prepared a 20 course tasting menu for you.
• 6:26
  It meant I'd like you to choose for me.
• 6:29
  Surprise me. But we in America, we like to do
• 6:33
  this thing where we take things and we change the meaning of
• 6:36
  them and we've changed the meaning to become synonymous
• 6:39
  with the word tasting menu, which is why I call what we do
• 6:43
  an omakase inspired tasting menu.
• 6:47
  And for an omakase inspired tasting menu, what does that
• 6:51
  typically look like in your mind?
• 6:54
  So when we first opened Sushi bar, which is now called Sushi
• 6:59
  by Scratch Restaurants, the original one that's changed the
• 7:02
  name after I sold the one in in Austin and I think January of 22
• 7:08
  when I first opened, I thought what should I do with like how
• 7:15
  can I contribute to sushi? Where we opened in LA, there was
• 7:20
  11 sushi restaurants on our block.
• 7:23
  On our city block, there was 11, so I didn't feel like, nor was I
• 7:27
  ever interested in like, let's just have a place that has spicy
• 7:30
  tuna hand rolls and California rolls and Jessica albacore rolls
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  and all the things that are on the menu at the other 11
• 7:37
  restaurants on this block. I thought, you know, I want to
• 7:42
  do a restaurant tasting menus is what I'd fall in love with.
• 7:45
  And so I wanted to take my proficiency and tasting menus
• 7:49
  and marry it with my passion for sushi.
• 7:52
  And so I thought about it as when you're writing a tasting
• 7:55
  menu, write a proper tasting menu in my mind is not when you
• 7:58
  go to a restaurant and it's an A la carte restaurant, but then
• 8:04
  you can choose like for like to have a six course of like all
• 8:08
  the things that are on the menu. It's not a tasting menu to me.
• 8:11
  Tasting menu to me is when you have actually like it's like
• 8:14
  writing a concept album versus making a playlist when you've
• 8:17
  actually written an entire menu start to finish.
• 8:20
  And so at Scratch Bar, which was our 25 course tasting menu
• 8:25
  restaurant, we changed all 25 courses every month.
• 8:28
  We would basically the way I designed my dishes at 25
• 8:33
  courses, they got to be small sushi small.
• 8:35
  So each course would be the menu would read as one word and it
• 8:39
  would be whatever the star ingredient was on that plate.
• 8:43
  And that star ingredient would have something along the lines
• 8:46
  of a garnish, A flavor, a texture, a color.
• 8:53
  Right Now, that could all be one thing, and some have more and
• 8:55
  some have less, but that's kind of how you would build it.
• 8:58
  And So what you would do is you would take like whatever that
• 9:00
  piece of meat or vegetable is for that course.
• 9:03
  You would try to not cover it up or mask it, but add things like,
• 9:09
  think of it like an ensemble cast.
• 9:11
  This is your star, but you surround him with a bunch of
• 9:13
  costars that make him shine. And so I thought, what if I just
• 9:19
  do that with sushi? So like, you know, Hamachi is,
• 9:23
  is inherently sweet. You can often times pair things
• 9:26
  that are already inherently sweet with things that are also
• 9:30
  inherently sweet to bring out the natural sweetness.
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  So I thought corn, you know, Hamachi is so soft and so
• 9:36
  supple. What if I had a little bit of
• 9:38
  texture, you know, make some bread crumbs out of my wife's
• 9:41
  sourdough, you know, and then for me, the flavor of sushi is
• 9:46
  soy sauce and wasabi in the same way that like I think that the
• 9:50
  flavor of pizza is tomato and mozzarella.
• 9:53
  That's the flavor of pizza. Once you start getting into like
• 9:56
  bacon and clams and bechamel, it doesn't taste like pizza to me.
• 10:00
  So my thought, you know, my, my thing became like, the more you
• 10:07
  know, the more you kind of go to the left.
• 10:09
  Remember the Alinea book where it like the bubbles went left to
• 10:12
  right. You got to, you got to
• 10:14
  compensate as you go left, you got to go right also.
• 10:16
  So when you start going like Hamachi with corn and sourdough,
• 10:19
  you've got to add soy sauce and wasabi.
• 10:22
  So it's still tastes like sushi. And so as you write the menu, or
• 10:26
  as I wrote the menu, I wrote it to be a complete thought from
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  first course to 17th course, it would take you on an entire
• 10:34
  journey of flavors, textures, temperatures.
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  Like most people in in the traditional tasting menu, you're
• 10:41
  going to start light, you're going to start with raw, then
• 10:44
  you're going to go to veggie, then you're going to go to
• 10:48
  seafood, then you're going to go to poultry, then you're going to
• 10:51
  go to, you know, game and or meat, and then you go into
• 10:54
  desserts. And so that's kind of why at
• 10:56
  the, you know, the last line at Sushi by Scratch restaurants,
• 11:00
  there's many meat courses because we're actually writing a
• 11:02
  tasting menu as opposed to just doing an omakase, which would be
• 11:08
  here's a bunch of food that I've chosen off of the existing menu.
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  So how does that tie in then to like a restaurant like pasta bar
• 11:18
  which is doing a tasting menu also?
• 11:19
  Yes, but it's it's completely different style.
• 11:23
  Yeah, So I mean, pasta bar came about as a pandemic pop up
• 11:30
  Scratch Bar, which was our flagship was too small of a
• 11:35
  space to reopen in California in like April of April or May of
• 11:40
  2020. We didn't meet the social
• 11:43
  distancing. Now hidden behind that was the
• 11:47
  first sushi by Scratch restaurants.
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  And next door to that was Woodley proper at like a pretty
• 11:51
  big cocktail lounge because both those restaurants we after a
• 11:57
  while of like guests would come, they'd wait for 45 minutes, they
• 12:00
  would go somewhere else, have drinks.
• 12:01
  So we, we took the space next door and turned it into a
• 12:03
  cocktail lounge. So on a Sunday night, when faced
• 12:07
  with lay everyone off or come up with something else, we thought,
• 12:13
  let's come up with something else.
• 12:14
  At first we were like, let's just move Scratch bar next door
• 12:16
  into the cocktail lounge. But scratch bar was like a 16
• 12:19
  foot fireplace, a chef's counter.
• 12:22
  It was so idiosyncratic that if you couldn't take it out of that
• 12:25
  space and just put it into a cocktail lounge.
• 12:28
  So I thought, no, let's come up with something new.
• 12:30
  So we took the staff from there, moved them over, and we had to
• 12:34
  figure out what are we going to do by Wednesday.
• 12:36
  So we just thought, well, there's no good pasta around
• 12:39
  here and no one's really doing a pasta chef's counter tasting
• 12:43
  menu restaurant. Let's do that.
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  And Pasta Bar was born. Wednesday night we were sold out
• 12:49
  and six months later we got our first Michelin star.
• 12:51
  And that's why Pasta Bar is still there five years later.
• 12:55
  So how do you structure the the tasty menu and and pasta bar?
• 12:58
  How is it different from what you're doing in in the in the
• 13:01
  sushi? Restaurants, well, it's not so
• 13:04
  different in terms of like progression.
• 13:08
  It is different. And we're not giving you 16
• 13:11
  pieces of pasta, right? So like sushi, you're getting 16
• 13:18
  pieces of nigiri, right? I hate when I go to a quote on
• 13:22
  quote omakase and I don't get any nigiri.
• 13:25
  I get a whole bunch of cooked food.
• 13:27
  Like you go to a place that's called something sushi
• 13:29
  something, and then you get very little sushi.
• 13:33
  I love Japanese food, but sushi is what I'm passionate about.
• 13:37
  So when I go for sushi, I want to eat sushi.
• 13:39
  And I get disappointed when I go spend 300 bucks and I get very
• 13:41
  little sushi. So we built a restaurant that
• 13:44
  was sushi. And when it comes to pasta,
• 13:49
  pasta is much heavier than than one piece of nigiri, right?
• 13:54
  So we could not give you 16. So we tend to give you between
• 13:57
  5:00 and 6:00 courses of pasta, but they're not bowls of pasta.
• 14:01
  In the same way that we're not a Japanese restaurant, we're not
• 14:04
  a, we're not an Italian restaurant.
• 14:06
  We use Italian techniques, Italian sensibilities, we use
• 14:11
  Japanese techniques at Japanese sensibilities.
• 14:13
  But in both regions of cooking, both the Japanese and the
• 14:20
  Italians, they are very regional.
• 14:23
  What you find in Okinawa is not what you find in Hokkaido,
• 14:26
  right? The style of sushi, you know, if
• 14:29
  if you go to Nara in Japan, you're going to get cooked
• 14:32
  sushi. Steamed is going to come in a
• 14:34
  like, in a like a like a bow bun style like steamer and you're
• 14:38
  going to get hot sushi with steam coming out of it.
• 14:41
  We don't know about that over here in America, but every
• 14:43
  region has their own style of sushi, just like every region of
• 14:47
  of Italy has its own style of food.
• 14:50
  And So what makes it Italian and what makes it Japanese beyond
• 14:54
  the techniques and the sensibilities is locality.
• 14:58
  So with both those restaurants with sushi, I thought it would
• 15:03
  not be traditional for me to tell the story with the flavors
• 15:08
  of someone who grew up in Japan. It'd be traditional, very
• 15:11
  traditional of me to tell the stories of the flavors where I
• 15:13
  grew up, which happened to be Los Angeles.
• 15:16
  So I treat Los Angeles as a prefecture of Japan.
• 15:19
  And at Pasta Bar, we, we treat Los Angeles as a region of
• 15:23
  Italy. And here in Austin, we treat
• 15:26
  Austin as a region of Italy. So in both LA and Austin's
• 15:31
  locations of pasta, very different menus, very different
• 15:33
  ingredients, very different sensibilities, because it's LA
• 15:36
  versus Austin. Interesting, you know, I, I talk
• 15:41
  about tasting menus a lot and sometimes, you know, I have AI
• 15:43
  have very strong opinions when it comes to tasting menus
• 15:45
  because I think I think there's sometimes a little bit out of
• 15:48
  control a little bit. My hot take is they I don't know
• 15:52
  when we went from the traditional tasting menu of like
• 15:55
  you said, about 7 courses, 8 courses to 30 courses.
• 16:01
  Some restaurants, right, they have, they have too much.
• 16:03
  And I don't know if anyone goes to a restaurant says, you know,
• 16:07
  that was only 15 courses. It would have been better if it
• 16:09
  was 60. So hold on.
• 16:12
  At what point is it diminishing returns?
• 16:14
  At what point is it, you know what more is not necessarily
• 16:18
  better? There's a certain sweet spot for
• 16:20
  a tasting. Menu as soon as it stops getting
• 16:21
  better, there is no number. I have had three course dinners
• 16:28
  that I thought were as good as 25 course dinners and I've had
• 16:31
  20 course dinners that I thought were far superior to 12 course
• 16:34
  dinners and I've had 15 course dinners that were my favorite it
• 16:39
  in the AI think we touched on this last time, but in the age
• 16:42
  of Instagram where you no longer have to go, you know France and
• 16:46
  puts out Noma puts out a book, everyone's food looks like Noma
• 16:49
  France and puts out a book. Everyone's food looks like
• 16:51
  France. And in the age of Instagram, you
• 16:56
  no longer need to go and train to do a style of cuisine.
• 17:00
  Now you just need to look at what it looks like online and
• 17:02
  then try to recreate it. And so it's kind of like in
• 17:07
  music, the the, the what, how do you, how do you, how do I say
• 17:14
  it? It's like the cream rises to the
• 17:15
  top, right? There are bands that write, you
• 17:20
  know the traditional song is 3 minutes long.
• 17:23
  Then there's bands like Tool that have 567 minute songs, and
• 17:27
  there's punk bands that have 45 seconds songs.
• 17:30
  Right now if you do a 3 minute song, you are more likely to
• 17:33
  have radio success than if you do a 3045 seconds song or a 7
• 17:38
  minute song. However, those are niche
• 17:42
  categories. In those categories, if you're
• 17:45
  not good, you don't sell records.
• 17:47
  You know, it's a great, sorry, you know it's a great song.
• 17:49
  That to me is exactly what you're talking about.
• 17:52
  Jimi Hendrix. Little Wing starts out, I think
• 17:55
  it's like a minute and 1/2. It's like one of his best songs
• 17:58
  and it's like 1 of it's perfect at a minute and 1/2 or however
• 18:02
  long it is 2 minutes. But that's exactly the point.
• 18:04
  It's not that a minute and 1/2 is the perfect amount for a
• 18:06
  song, it's that a minute and 1/2 is the perfect amount for that
• 18:09
  song. And so I have had 7 hour meals
• 18:13
  that flew by and I was like, man, that it's over.
• 18:18
  And I've had three hour meals that I'm looking at my watch
• 18:21
  going, Jesus fucking Christ. So I don't think there is.
• 18:24
  I think it's, it comes down to, to your ability to, to produce
• 18:28
  it. And, and also, you know, are you
• 18:31
  doing a 25 course tasting menu because 25 sounds cool?
• 18:35
  Or are you doing 25 courses because you believe that it
• 18:39
  takes 25 courses to tell the story?
• 18:41
  Right. Well, and that, and that's kind
• 18:42
  of the point is I think a lot of people aren't thinking about it
• 18:46
  the way you're thinking about it.
• 18:47
  They're thinking about, you know, it's better than 18.
• 18:49
  Courses 19. Courses, right?
• 18:52
  And, and they're not sitting down and experiencing it as the
• 18:54
  guest and they're not experiencing it as like, hey, do
• 18:57
  I can I sit here for 2 1/2 hours and not look at my phone and get
• 19:00
  bored? The courses is also an
• 19:02
  interesting word. Some people, some chefs refer to
• 19:05
  them as impressions or as servings or because The thing is
• 19:10
  like a traditional course is like we bring out a plate, we
• 19:13
  clear the plate in utensils, we bring new utensils and we bring
• 19:17
  another plate. I have like when I say 25
• 19:20
  courses, there was often times when we would bring you
• 19:22
  something, a plate and then we would time that as you were
• 19:26
  taking that 2/3 the way through, we bring something else that
• 19:31
  would accent the end of that dish.
• 19:32
  And as you were about to bite into that, we'd bring you
• 19:34
  another one and you would get 25 things delivered to your table,
• 19:38
  but it wasn't 25 clear and resets.
• 19:41
  Right. OK.
• 19:42
  And I think that's a very fairpoint, what you're saying.
• 19:46
  I think where a lot of young chefs go wrong is they don't
• 19:50
  understand food at that level yet.
• 19:52
  The only thing they understand is I want to make 19 courses,
• 19:56
  and I want to make them as beautiful as Del Mar Franzen
• 20:00
  because I got the book. And what they're missing
• 20:01
  sometimes is that they got a lot of leaves on it and some, you
• 20:06
  know, some forged ingredients. They can make it look really
• 20:08
  beautiful with some shaved vegetables.
• 20:12
  It's like they haven't graduated from the garbage station where
• 20:14
  you got to cook a little bit too.
• 20:15
  You got to have some sauce on there, and it's got to taste
• 20:17
  good. And for me, the ultimate
• 20:21
  question is, yeah, that's beautiful, but does it taste
• 20:23
  good? So that's what I call under
• 20:25
  promising and over delivering or vice versa.
• 20:28
  So when any of my chefs or anyone brings a dish to the
• 20:32
  table first, the first thing you do is you look at it, right?
• 20:36
  Then you take a bite and I explained to them be careful
• 20:39
  about how good you make it look or how interesting you make it
• 20:42
  appear to be. It has to taste better than it
• 20:45
  looks or feels if it like because the promise is the
• 20:51
  presentation right? The delivery is what goes inside
• 20:56
  of your mouth. And so when you get chefs who
• 21:00
  maybe aren't thinking about it that way, who's like, that's
• 21:03
  dope. It'd be really cool to have an
• 21:04
  all blue dish. And I went through the phase of
• 21:06
  having an all white dish and, you know, all those things, but
• 21:10
  I was still thinking about it like what makes sense on an all
• 21:14
  white dish and how does it still eat And all of the, you know.
• 21:17
  Well, this is the benefit of shows like this one and yours
• 21:19
  and and having conversations with chefs is that a young chef
• 21:24
  might not come to that conclusion until they're 1520
• 21:27
  years into their career. But they could hear you say it
• 21:29
  now. Yeah.
• 21:30
  And expedite their learning. Well, to give to give everyone
• 21:33
  at home an idea. So I'm this is your 20 for me,
• 21:37
  right. And when I opened scratch bar in
• 21:42
  in 2013. So if this is your 20, that was
• 21:46
  12 years. So eight years after I had
• 21:48
  started, which I was admittedly, I mean, eight years in, to have
• 21:53
  your own restaurant, that's fast, that's really fast.
• 21:57
  And in 2015 I got reviewed by LA Weekly and got just a scathing
• 22:04
  torn apart review which famously I replied to.
• 22:09
  Wait. I don't know the story.
• 22:11
  Tell me please. Well, Besher Rodell was the the
• 22:17
  the anonymous critic. She had taken over for Jonathan
• 22:19
  Gold. She was the only person who was
• 22:20
  giving out stars in Los Angeles. And I think we got two stars,
• 22:24
  something like that. It was.
• 22:25
  It was scathing. What's What's the rating system
• 22:27
  for? I don't remember, I don't think
• 22:29
  it was 3 because I wouldn't have been that mad about two, but I
• 22:33
  remember being very upset about it.
• 22:36
  And turns out I think she had some incorrect information.
• 22:42
  One of the things she lit me up about was not having spent
• 22:47
  enough time training. And I thought and, and you know,
• 22:52
  if, if, if, if 10 years working in one stars, 2 stars, three
• 22:58
  stars isn't enough training, You know what I mean, Then looking
• 23:03
  on Instagram for half an hour definitely is not enough
• 23:05
  training. Right, right.
• 23:08
  Yeah, fair. I mean spent, I mean, I spent,
• 23:12
  you know, 8 months in the kitchen with, with Michael
• 23:15
  Summer Resty of Providence, which now has three stars.
• 23:17
  Had two at the time. Want to be very clear, unpaid as
• 23:21
  a back then, you were allowed to do that.
• 23:23
  It wasn't breaking while I was there by choice, you know, but
• 23:28
  you know, held a sous chef position at a one star, you
• 23:31
  know, and, and, and worked at other twos and other threes and
• 23:35
  then went and opened my first thing and had at this point, 2
• 23:38
  1/2 years of experience doing my own restaurant.
• 23:41
  And still people will look at that that resume and say, yeah,
• 23:47
  you haven't trained enough to to come up with your own food yet.
• 23:51
  Yeah, says who, Right. Well, that's kind of what, you
• 23:54
  know, my, my public response was, was how?
• 23:58
  And I'll let anyone at home who wants to go look it up, look it
• 24:01
  up. And my public response was like
• 24:03
  most of your information. I know where you got this
• 24:05
  information from someone I have a restraining order against.
• 24:09
  It's not true. And you haven't mentioned on how
• 24:12
  my food tastes. You have a lot of opinions about
• 24:15
  me as a person, but no opinions about the food.
• 24:18
  How come you didn't mention that?
• 24:19
  Like, because I know who you are, I know you're anonymous,
• 24:22
  but I, I, I, I figured out who you were.
• 24:24
  I, I waited, I, I personally pulled the chair out for you,
• 24:27
  pushed it in. I personally pulled, poured your
• 24:30
  wine. I brought an extra dish to your
• 24:32
  husband with sea urchin on it because he seemed overheard he
• 24:34
  liked sea urchin. How come none of that got
• 24:36
  mentioned in your thing? Yeah, it's funny, the game that
• 24:40
  the games we play, right, When the when the critics were
• 24:42
  anonymous. I don't know if critics hold the
• 24:45
  same weight as they used to, but I remember, I remember, you
• 24:48
  know, the food critic coming in and you know, we all had the
• 24:53
  photos in our wallets, right? We all knew who the critics
• 24:55
  were. It was fucking post.
• 24:55
  Because we didn't have cell phones back then.
• 24:57
  Yeah, we had him in our walls. It was posted at the Hostess
• 24:59
  station. And I remember in this
• 25:02
  particular restaurant was I was at them coming back and saying,
• 25:05
  hey, the food critics in and I'm like, OK, so we're all on, We're
• 25:09
  all on our A game and I'm delivering souffle to a
• 25:14
  different table hoping they'd see it.
• 25:16
  Like, oh, look at the souffle. Oh, are you the chef?
• 25:18
  Oh, yeah, who are you? And giving them a tour.
• 25:20
  And yeah, I remember I gave them a tour of the garden and whatnot
• 25:23
  and thinking like, I know who you are, you know, I know who
• 25:26
  you are, but we're going to pretend it's this name.
• 25:29
  See, I don't think they that she knew that I knew who she was
• 25:31
  because the thing was like when I say I pulled out the chair, it
• 25:33
  might sound like that's out of the ordinary.
• 25:35
  This restaurant had 12 seats up to the counter and we did not
• 25:39
  employ servers. So like the one of the chefs
• 25:43
  would bring you your bill at the end of the night, like we would
• 25:46
  come out and pull out your chair for you.
• 25:48
  And so I make sure, and I made sure, especially if I thought
• 25:53
  somebody was somebody, I would almost chat up the guests next
• 25:57
  to them more than them so that they didn't think they were
• 26:00
  getting special treatment. I you know what?
• 26:02
  I used to. I used to plant once we
• 26:03
  identified the critic. Yeah, the table next to them
• 26:07
  would like, no one's allowed to sit there.
• 26:09
  I'd put a plant there. So a friend or whoever and, you
• 26:12
  know, text us, play by play. What are they eating?
• 26:15
  And so there's one time the the food critic.
• 26:17
  So this is the Dallas Morning News food critic at the time,
• 26:19
  Leslie Brenner. She's sitting down and she
• 26:23
  orders AI don't remember what it was some sort of beef dish was a
• 26:26
  protein. And she sends it back.
• 26:28
  So I, as it's coming back from the server, I pull it off and
• 26:31
  say, hey, let me see it. How was the steak cooked?
• 26:33
  Let me, I'm fucking with it and I'm cutting into it this, that
• 26:36
  and the other and then the server comes back.
• 26:39
  The main server comes back, right?
• 26:41
  It's like she wants that to go. I've already fucking hacked it
• 26:44
  up and pulled it apart just to see what it looked like and I'm
• 26:48
  like, oh shit. And I have like seconds to
• 26:51
  react. But you know, we were slicked
• 26:52
  back then. We always cooked 2 portions.
• 26:54
  Yeah, just in case for the critic.
• 26:56
  So I was like, get that one. I cut it.
• 26:58
  Try to make it look. Mash it.
• 26:59
  Yeah. Make it look like the one that
• 27:00
  she had eaten, but we got a bad review.
• 27:03
  She was like something went wrong with my doggy bag.
• 27:07
  I remember she wrote in that particular article, we had a
• 27:10
  duck dish on there. She said the duck had the taste
• 27:12
  and texture of a hot dog. Yeah like it's one of those
• 27:16
  things that I'll never forget cuz like how the fuck did it
• 27:18
  taste like a hot dog? Maybe it's out on the brine too
• 27:21
  long. I don't.
• 27:21
  Know well, the thing about being a critic is I mean, and I, and
• 27:24
  I'll say this as as with the most respect possible.
• 27:28
  So Jonathan Gold was one of our first, like my first champions,
• 27:31
  like really championed us and to this day is still, you know,
• 27:36
  said the nicest things that any critic has ever said about, you
• 27:40
  know, margarine and my my cooking.
• 27:44
  And but even he was reviewing bans and then something happened
• 27:50
  to the food critic and they were like, Hey, do you want to start
• 27:54
  writing about food? So like, there's no like all
• 27:59
  that you need to be a food critic like in like in a paper
• 28:03
  give out stars is experience in journalism, but you don't need a
• 28:07
  lick of experience in cuisine. You don't need to have worked in
• 28:11
  a restaurant. You do not need to be a fan of
• 28:14
  restaurants. And I have yet to ever see a
• 28:17
  critic preface an article by saying I'm not a fan of fill in
• 28:23
  the blank cuisine. With that said, here's what I
• 28:26
  think. You know what I mean.
• 28:28
  So like, if you hate horror movies, I don't like horror
• 28:31
  movies, right? So I might not give, I might not
• 28:35
  be the best guy to review horror movies, but they don't have food
• 28:39
  critics where they're like, oh, well, this is our critic for
• 28:43
  Indian cuisine and this is our critic for Japanese cuisine, and
• 28:45
  this is our critic for tasting menus.
• 28:47
  So you get some of these critics who are like who just don't like
• 28:50
  tasting menus and then they bash you or they just don't like, you
• 28:56
  know, nowadays, unfortunately, they don't like it's become the
• 28:59
  anti racism. They don't like the color of
• 29:00
  your skin. They don't like that your, you
• 29:03
  know, your sexual preference. They don't like who you're
• 29:07
  friends with. They don't like your political
• 29:09
  leanings and therefore they don't like your food.
• 29:11
  You know, all of those things. Now sometimes I see play into it
• 29:14
  more often than was the fucking food taste good?
• 29:18
  Like was it yummy? Like we've had people who are
• 29:21
  like, you know, well, I don't like anything on top of my
• 29:25
  sushi. This is untraditional.
• 29:26
  I'm like, do that. You don't understand the
• 29:28
  tradition of sushi. I'm not the first person to ever
• 29:30
  do that. It's it's been going on, You
• 29:33
  know, sushi's 2000 fucking years old.
• 29:34
  Like there's a bit of history there.
• 29:37
  But also, just because you don't prefer it doesn't mean it's not
• 29:42
  good. It just means that you don't
• 29:44
  prefer it. And the idea of, of, of the, of
• 29:48
  the critics now, because you, you could argue anyone's a
• 29:50
  critic, right, everyone? 'S every.
• 29:51
  Yeah, not anyone, everyone. Everyone's a critic, but there's
• 29:56
  influence now attached to that criticism where you know, I, I
• 29:59
  have 100,000 followers. So what I say about your food
• 30:03
  can influence more than what the newspaper said about your food
• 30:06
  now. Well, the people who have
• 30:08
  100,000 followers on Instagram or whatever are eating out a
• 30:13
  lot. They are by all accounts.
• 30:16
  If you were going to dedicate your life to making food reviews
• 30:19
  on Instagram, I'm going to put money on the fact that you care
• 30:23
  about food and you're a big fucking fan of food.
• 30:26
  If you are in the music department or in the business
• 30:30
  finance department and the food critic gets fired and then they
• 30:35
  transfer you over to there, that does not mean doesn't mean
• 30:38
  you're not a foodie, but it doesn't require you to be a
• 30:41
  foodie. It effectively requires you to
• 30:44
  be a foodie. And actually, and again, if you
• 30:48
  are getting into this, you're not getting into it just for
• 30:51
  free dinners nowadays. There's influencers who ask for
• 30:53
  free dinners. There's influencers who get free
• 30:55
  dinners, There's influencers who don't.
• 30:57
  There's influencers who don't ask for free dinners.
• 30:59
  But if you're going to go dedicate your time and energy
• 31:02
  into into reviewing food without a paycheck, then clearly you
• 31:07
  actually like it. And if you garner 100,000 people
• 31:10
  to actually follow you on your journey through eating food, you
• 31:15
  clearly are doing it in a way that's honest.
• 31:17
  Or I want to say clearly I'm, I'm, I'm being general here in
• 31:20
  every aspect there's. There's dishonest people
• 31:22
  everywhere. But I would but I would trust
• 31:26
  the person who I see is eating everywhere and I'm I'm looking
• 31:29
  at their face while they're reviewing it.
• 31:31
  I'm not reading it in in an article that's like I don't
• 31:35
  understand half the words because they're trying to win a
• 31:37
  fucking award. Right.
• 31:38
  But there's also a certain point with with an influencer, I would
• 31:41
  say is are they ever critical or are they, is it just everywhere
• 31:44
  they go as positive? But the thing, well, you see
• 31:47
  some. Yeah, but also I like that you
• 31:50
  shouldn't. Now are they are they hyping
• 31:52
  restaurants? They shouldn't.
• 31:53
  That's probably not good. But I know personally many, many
• 31:56
  food influencers who if they eat somewhere they don't like, they
• 32:00
  just don't post the review. Yeah, it's as.
• 32:03
  It's as simple as that. They're not going to hurt the
• 32:08
  business. Correct.
• 32:10
  I mean, back in our days, the most revered critics were the
• 32:13
  ones who were known for putting restaurants out of business.
• 32:16
  Fuck, and that was a. Thing that was a thing, and that
• 32:18
  was a that was a power that was wielded.
• 32:21
  It's literally what Ratatouille's written about.
• 32:23
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they could close
• 32:24
  restaurants. Yes.
• 32:26
  Yeah, it's fucking wild that that that exists.
• 32:28
  And then now you have and and switched subjects a little bit
• 32:31
  with the Michelin Guide has expanded.
• 32:34
  Michelin's kind of funny, right? Because, you know, they need to
• 32:36
  get they need to do a better job with their press releases.
• 32:39
  I'll say that. And the timing of them?
• 32:42
  Oh, you're talking about like when when sometimes they get
• 32:45
  leaked? Yeah, they get leaked and it's
• 32:46
  like, fuck, I guess you know, and you're out the awards and
• 32:48
  then you find out that, oh, I guess I'm not winning today.
• 32:50
  Like like we were talking. But it's, it's funny with
• 32:54
  Michelin because, well, it's interesting that they remove
• 32:57
  stars. And I don't, I don't really want
• 32:58
  to get into that because I don't have a comment on that.
• 33:02
  I truly don't, You know, I've never eaten at the Little
• 33:05
  Washington or Elena. I haven't eaten at any of them.
• 33:07
  So I can't, I can't sit here and comment on them.
• 33:10
  And I also don't think it's my place.
• 33:12
  I'm a chef. I respect the hard work that
• 33:13
  goes into that. Yeah.
• 33:15
  And but what I do find interesting with Michelin is as
• 33:18
  they have expanded to all these cities, does it dilute it a
• 33:25
  little bit? Maybe.
• 33:25
  And I had a conversation with someone the other day that said,
• 33:28
  you know, but don't forget it's a guide.
• 33:29
  And if Texas is giving you $1,000,000 to come put some some
• 33:37
  restaurants in your guide, are you going to come and say, hey,
• 33:39
  thanks for the $1,000,000? There's nowhere to eat in Texas.
• 33:41
  So there is an argument to be made that they do need to hand
• 33:44
  out more stars. Yeah.
• 33:46
  I mean, if you look at history, I believe it was the Nordic
• 33:49
  region that for the first three years there were no stars, none.
• 33:53
  Now I believe that was prior to the pay to play model that
• 33:57
  they're currently using, but I don't, I really can't comment on
• 34:04
  are they giving away stars. If they were giving away stars,
• 34:07
  then they should have just given us a *.
• 34:09
  No, I don't think they're giving away.
• 34:11
  Yeah, I just think I gotta be. Careful.
• 34:15
  Are you saying like there's a quota like in the way that we
• 34:17
  would think a cop has to pull over a certain amount of?
• 34:19
  People right, right. So if we're gonna give you X
• 34:21
  amount of dollars. We want to.
• 34:22
  We want to see some. Yeah, I'm not gonna give you
• 34:24
  those. I'm not gonna give you
• 34:26
  $1,000,000 next year. Yeah, right.
• 34:27
  What was the point? You didn't drive any business.
• 34:29
  There is an incentive to the state.
• 34:32
  Or to, but I also, I mean, I also think there are restaurants
• 34:35
  in Texas that are worthy of a star.
• 34:37
  And you know, stars have always, I mean, stars didn't get
• 34:40
  introduced until I think 20 or 30 years into the guide.
• 34:42
  The guide was always just about what's recommended.
• 34:45
  Then they brought in the stars, you know, 20-30 years later.
• 34:48
  So, you know, everyone thinks that Michelin is just stars.
• 34:54
  Here I go generalizing again, everyone, most people think that
• 34:57
  that that that Michelin is just, you know, stars.
• 35:00
  But there's so much more in the guide than just the stars are
• 35:04
  very like, are like the smallest portion of the guide.
• 35:08
  I I find it interesting that regardless of my opinion, these
• 35:14
  are some of the opinions out there.
• 35:16
  Yeah, in the chef community, the the opinions are a star in one
• 35:21
  city is not the same as a star in a AA1, star in A1.
• 35:24
  Star in New York is not the same as a one star and you know,
• 35:28
  named the other. City.
• 35:29
  So I go back and forth on this because clearly I have no
• 35:31
  fucking idea how this works and nobody does, right?
• 35:34
  But if you go just if you want to break it down, just like the
• 35:37
  most straightforward one star is worth a stop, two stars is worth
• 35:43
  a detour, and three stars is worth a journey, right?
• 35:46
  So if you're in a city with a ridiculous amount of two and
• 35:50
  three stars, you have to be worth a stop, a detour, or a
• 35:56
  journey amongst your peers in that city.
• 35:59
  Now, if you're going through a rural part of America where
• 36:02
  there's no competition, then what's worth a stop, what's
• 36:06
  worth a detour, and what's worth a journey?
• 36:08
  The criteria I believe is a bell curve, and I think it's fair.
• 36:12
  I don't think it would be unfair to say that.
• 36:16
  Look, would would any barbecue in New York City get a * Well,
• 36:21
  first of all, I think you can't even argue that that any
• 36:24
  barbecue in New York is as good as Austin, right?
• 36:26
  But it's a really, it'd be a very interesting thought to
• 36:30
  think would LA BBQ get a star in New York City?
• 36:35
  I don't know. And if they if it's solely based
• 36:39
  on the food you put in your mouth, then clearly they would.
• 36:42
  But if it's. But if it's more based on I'm
• 36:45
  trying to tell you where to dine in this city and you have to
• 36:47
  stand out amongst the city, then what it I don't know.
• 36:50
  Right. And to that point, when someone
• 36:53
  is coming from overseas and they're visiting Austin, TX and
• 36:56
  they say where should I eat? They're going to want to know
• 37:00
  where to eat BBQ, yes? And which is why it makes total
• 37:03
  sense. It makes total sense for for BBQ
• 37:06
  to have stars. It doesn't make any sense for
• 37:07
  Franklin to not have a star. But it makes total sense for
• 37:10
  barbecue in general to have a *. Yeah, yeah.
• 37:13
  And I and I and I think that's where I think that's where
• 37:16
  people need to understand that Michelin doesn't belong to us,
• 37:21
  it belongs to Michelin. And and the reason I say it like
• 37:24
  this because what Michelin means to the chef that never won a
• 37:26
  star, to the chef that won a star, to the chef that chased 3
• 37:30
  and never got it, to the chef that was in the city, that never
• 37:33
  even got Michelin to come visit. Yeah.
• 37:36
  And to the person that eats at Michelin, it means something
• 37:38
  completely different to all these people.
• 37:41
  It also means something different to the CEO, Yeah, who
• 37:44
  is like, OK, I got to make some money here.
• 37:46
  And I think ultimately the CEO has to consider all these other
• 37:49
  people that how it affects them, but ultimately the CEO has a
• 37:54
  responsibility to make money for the company.
• 37:56
  Well, you know what they should do, and I've thought about this
• 37:58
  for a long time. They need to be more
• 37:59
  transparent. I'll say that Forbes, I like
• 38:03
  Forbes because Forbes is very clear.
• 38:04
  This is what we're looking for. Well, here's what nobody does
• 38:07
  that I'm aware of. Any listing, any ranking, any
• 38:11
  definitive ranking should list the restaurants that were not
• 38:15
  visited. So like the 101 best restaurants
• 38:21
  in in Los Angeles, LA Times One O 1 best restaurants.
• 38:26
  I know for 100% certainty that the person who does that, that
• 38:29
  list has not been to my restaurants.
• 38:32
  We were on the list when Jonathan Gold was alive and
• 38:36
  doing it. And as soon as a new person
• 38:38
  moved to LA and took over, we fell off the list and have never
• 38:42
  returned. And that person has never been
• 38:44
  there. So when you remove someone from
• 38:47
  a list or you don't put them on the list of top 100, the reader
• 38:50
  assumes that it's not the the top 100 restaurants you've been
• 38:54
  to, it's top 100 restaurants in Los Angeles because it's not
• 38:57
  called the top 100 restaurants I've eaten at, it's called top
• 39:00
  one restaurants Los Angeles. The same with Michelin, the same
• 39:04
  with World's Fifty, the same with, well, I guess World's 50
• 39:07
  is different because the way that they vote.
• 39:09
  But any of those ranking systems, you know, you should
• 39:14
  very clearly state, here's the restaurants that we have not
• 39:18
  visited so far. And that's why they may, they
• 39:21
  could be on this list if we ate there because there's first of
• 39:24
  all, there's too many restaurants to eat at.
• 39:26
  But second of all, if you haven't eaten there and you just
• 39:29
  leave them off the list. There are some restaurants that
• 39:31
  are striving for top 100 and there are some restaurants that
• 39:35
  are not. And if you got a restaurant
• 39:36
  that's striving for fucking top ten and they're not on the list
• 39:40
  because you haven't eaten there should probably put that you
• 39:43
  should That should be a like mentioned.
• 39:45
  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a great point.
• 39:48
  The award system is so, so weird because a conversation I had
• 39:51
  with a chef group of friends of mine the other day is like, we
• 39:57
  want to open up a restaurant. Yeah, they're talking.
• 39:58
  We want to open up a restaurant, but they're like.
• 40:03
  We want to be in the category of let's make a lot of money.
• 40:06
  Yeah, not necessarily in the category of of eaters best new.
• 40:09
  Like you can keep the eaters best new.
• 40:11
  Yeah. I'll take the, to paraphrase
• 40:13
  Kanye West. I'll I'll take that.
• 40:14
  I got a lot of cheese award. It that's back to the influencer
• 40:18
  versus the critic. The most important person to
• 40:21
  impress every single day in your restaurant is the person paying
• 40:24
  full price. They're going to keep you in
• 40:26
  business or they're not. I've had bad reviews, stayed in
• 40:29
  business because people like our food.
• 40:30
  I've had great reviews, stayed in business because people like
• 40:33
  our food. At the end of the day, if people
• 40:36
  stop coming and spending their money, you go out of business.
• 40:39
  And so with most of these influencers, you don't know
• 40:42
  whether that's paid for or whatever, but like, at least in
• 40:45
  the beginning, they were having to spend their own money.
• 40:47
  Do you? Are you, Where do you fall?
• 40:50
  Do you assume they're paid or they got a free meal when you
• 40:53
  see an influencer doing something?
• 40:55
  I don't know of many restaurants that pay.
• 40:59
  I think the restaurants that pay are the restaurants that are
• 41:02
  like. But they comp.
• 41:04
  Comps are are are normal. Comps are definitely normal.
• 41:09
  And it's, it's there's no quid pro quo when it comes to comps,
• 41:14
  or at least there's no quid pro pro quo that I've ever been a
• 41:17
  part of when it comes to comps. But nowadays, in the same way
• 41:21
  that you would you open a new restaurant, you're going to
• 41:23
  invite in all of the media, right?
• 41:26
  They're not critics, but the media.
• 41:28
  The media. The media dinners.
• 41:29
  Yes. And you're going to comp them
• 41:31
  Nowadays, there's no media anymore.
• 41:34
  There is Instagram influencers, just people like that.
• 41:37
  So the people who actually move the needle are those people.
• 41:40
  So you invite those people? You know, it's funny, I was
• 41:43
  talking with someone who's doing, you know, a restaurant
• 41:45
  launch and so they're talking about the media dinners and
• 41:48
  influencer dinners that they got to host as they're building up
• 41:50
  to new menu change or whatever. And I'm like, it's funny because
• 41:55
  they're like, yeah, we can't have them all at the same time.
• 41:57
  They they got to come on their own because a lot of them don't
• 41:59
  like each other. They don't want to sit at the
• 42:01
  same table at the big communal tables.
• 42:02
  Like I hate that bitch over there.
• 42:03
  I don't want to sit there. So it's like even the even the
• 42:07
  media dinners back in the day, I used to do 2 different styles of
• 42:11
  media dinner. Sometimes I would do the big,
• 42:13
  the big media table. It's like everyone hears the
• 42:15
  menu, try it and sometimes be like, Nope, no one likes that
• 42:18
  one person. So they they could come in on a
• 42:20
  different. Day I always liked just
• 42:23
  peppering in because I could experience it.
• 42:26
  Well, not only can they experience it, they can see if
• 42:30
  you got 10 people who are all critics, then they're all being
• 42:33
  critical next to each other. But if you put a critic or a
• 42:38
  media or whatever you want to call them in the in the wild
• 42:41
  with a bunch of people who are paying their own money and
• 42:43
  everyone around them is like, Oh my God, Oh babe, try this right
• 42:47
  there is a you know, if you're in a restaurant where everyone
• 42:49
  hates the food, you can feel it and if you're in a restaurant
• 42:51
  where everyone loves the food, you can feel it, you know, and
• 42:54
  so hopefully your restaurant, everyone loves the food.
• 42:57
  That's what we strive for. And so, you know, you, you want
• 43:00
  to put them around the actual experience.
• 43:04
  I want to ask what was what was up with Gordon Ramsay?
• 43:08
  You were you over there cooking recently?
• 43:10
  Yeah. How did you, how did that come
• 43:11
  come to be? So Gordon Ramsay is the
• 43:16
  executive producer on Knife Edge new show on Apple.
• 43:20
  Which is great by the way. I haven't finished seen it.
• 43:23
  I I think I finished there in London right now and and not in
• 43:29
  the show, but where I'm at, I'm in London still.
• 43:31
  So I haven't got to LA yet. Pasta Bar is the season finale,
• 43:34
  OK, and I'll we can talk about that after you see it if you
• 43:40
  want or I can comment on it if you want now whatever, but.
• 43:43
  You could be a spoiler for me that's.
• 43:46
  Fine, How do I? Well, there was some spoilers
• 43:47
  for me when I watched it. Oh, was there?
• 43:50
  There was some things I was surprised by, But he was the
• 43:53
  executive producer and they did a kind of like a red carpet sort
• 44:00
  of premiere party. We didn't watch the whole thing,
• 44:03
  but it was like, you know, the first time they were going to
• 44:05
  like, show like 15 minutes of like, you know, of the whole,
• 44:09
  you know, like a sizzle of the entire series.
• 44:11
  And so they sent an e-mail out to, I assume everyone who
• 44:15
  participated and said Chef Ramsay is would like to invite
• 44:21
  you to London to his rest, his, you know, restaurant.
• 44:24
  He's going to be hosting this big gala, this party for the
• 44:27
  release, but because there's so many of you, we don't
• 44:32
  necessarily have a budget to fly everyone out.
• 44:34
  So I replied and I'm like, we really, really want to come.
• 44:39
  I would be happy to do like a pop up or something like I'm
• 44:43
  trying to trying to work out like, could we, you know,
• 44:46
  through the apple, like maybe get some, you know, figure out
• 44:49
  some way to, to, you know, help cover, you know, room and board
• 44:53
  type of situation. And they wrote back and they're
• 44:58
  like, we, we spoke with Chef Ramsey and he would love to host
• 45:01
  you at one of his restaurants and do a like a collaborative,
• 45:06
  you know, tasting menu. And I was like, yes, please,
• 45:10
  yes, please. How cool is that?
• 45:11
  I mean, it was amazing. And so, yeah, I mean, we flew
• 45:14
  out there, we did the thing and we, we put on a 5 course tasting
• 45:20
  menu from pasta bar at one of his restaurants.
• 45:24
  So you could go in and just order the pasta bar tasting menu
• 45:27
  and it was on the menu for like 3 weeks.
• 45:29
  And it did so well. They, they hit me up, you're
• 45:31
  like, hey, can we run it for another three weeks?
• 45:32
  Because I wasn't, I wasn't there the whole time.
• 45:34
  And I was like, yeah, go ahead, run it.
• 45:37
  So it stayed on the menu for like over a month that you were
• 45:40
  able to go and get it. So were you able to build
• 45:42
  somewhat of a good relationship with Gordon through the?
• 45:45
  He, yeah, he was the kindest person ever.
• 45:49
  And he had this fatherly sort of like aura to him.
• 45:57
  He kept telling me how proud he was of, of me and kept telling
• 46:01
  Margarita how proud he was of her.
• 46:04
  I mean, he had, you know, he was familiar with us because the
• 46:06
  show had taped and he had seen it.
• 46:08
  And, you know, he had, you know, he was very impressed that like
• 46:12
  our age, how many stars we have, how many restaurants we have,
• 46:17
  how we don't have investors, you know, how we've basically done
• 46:20
  this on our own. And he just, he treated us so
• 46:24
  well. And yeah, I'm super.
• 46:27
  Grateful you didn't get him on NADC.
• 46:30
  I would love to. I heard he doesn't really like
• 46:33
  to do podcasts. Really.
• 46:34
  Yeah. But, you know, it was the first
• 46:37
  time I, like, met him. I've shaken his hand in, like,
• 46:39
  in passing in the past. But now I have a report, like I
• 46:42
  have his phone number, you know, And so like, I would love to
• 46:46
  have him on, had Jamie Oliver on.
• 46:49
  I really want to have Thomas Keller on.
• 46:51
  I mean, there's some chefs that I really want to have on, but I
• 46:54
  feel like it needs to come more naturally in time.
• 46:56
  You know, next time he comes to the states, one of our cities,
• 46:59
  he's like, I really want to go and eat at the restaurant.
• 47:02
  And maybe once he sits there for a couple hours and we, you know.
• 47:05
  Do you have so just if you could give me your bucket list of
• 47:09
  chefs you'd want to have on on the show and then a bucket list
• 47:12
  of people, not necessarily chefs that you'd want to have in the
• 47:14
  show, like a couple of eat in each category.
• 47:19
  I mean, for chefs on the show, I mean, I just listed a couple of
• 47:23
  them. I would love to have Gordon
• 47:24
  Ramsay. I'd love to have Thomas Keller.
• 47:28
  I would love to have Jose Andreas.
• 47:30
  I'd love to have David Chang. I'd love to have Gran Hacketts.
• 47:36
  I think Gran Hacketts might be the most because of the the
• 47:40
  cancer and everything the most like there's not a damn chance,
• 47:44
  you know, mindset. So I would love to have that
• 47:46
  conversation. I mean, there's I mean, there's
• 47:50
  dozens of chefs that I would love to have on some for the
• 47:54
  purpose of I'd love to talk to them and some for like the dude,
• 47:58
  how did you not give up? You know, as far as just people,
• 48:03
  I'd love to have on. I'd love to have Leonardo
• 48:07
  DiCaprio on. I would love to know what what
• 48:10
  that life was like. I'd love to have Shia LaBeouf
• 48:13
  on. I'd love to know just like that.
• 48:16
  Like, you know, just people who have like, very interesting ways
• 48:19
  of working at the world, whether it be just by nature or out of
• 48:24
  necessity of like, how do I survive in such a foreign
• 48:27
  environment where nobody can relate to anything I go through
• 48:30
  ever? Yeah, yeah.
• 48:33
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 48:34
  If I had three chefs that I'd love to have on this show, I
• 48:38
  have Guy Fieri I don't think anyone could relate to.
• 48:41
  Him. I do want Guy Fieri.
• 48:43
  I, I, I, I. He said he would do my, my, he
• 48:45
  said. I asked him.
• 48:46
  He said he would do it next time he's in town.
• 48:48
  Yeah, he just seems like, and I know a lot of people would
• 48:52
  question why I would want guides because I don't think anyone
• 48:55
  truly understands the genius that he is.
• 48:57
  Yeah, like he forget what you think.
• 48:59
  You forget what you see. There's a genius behind him.
• 49:03
  Yeah, and I see it. Renee would be the other one.
• 49:05
  Yeah. And then Gordon.
• 49:06
  That's why I like Yeah 3 Renee, because I think he's funny.
• 49:11
  He he would be a great conversation.
• 49:14
  Yeah, I think, I think he's funny.
• 49:15
  And I think he does a lot of things that like are jokes for
• 49:18
  one, like jokes for him. Yeah.
• 49:20
  And that are over a lot of people's heads.
• 49:21
  But I'm like, OK, I'm a little bit of a troll, too.
• 49:23
  I see it. I see what you're doing.
• 49:24
  I think that's funny, too. And then Gordon, because I think
• 49:27
  he is the GOAT. Yeah.
• 49:29
  He's the complete package, three stars.
• 49:31
  You know TV in every aspect of of of success a chef can have.
• 49:39
  He's attained. It and he still has the street
• 49:41
  cred. He's held three stars for I
• 49:42
  think 26 years, right. So it's very hard to find
• 49:47
  someone who is at the top of the celebrity game and still has is
• 49:52
  at the top of the street cred game.
• 49:54
  That is very uncommon. What's interesting about that?
• 49:59
  I'm going to put you in a little bit of a Unicorn bucket, OK?
• 50:02
  For people that don't know everything that you do, how many
• 50:05
  30 restaurants? I think we're at 28 restaurants
• 50:08
  now. And working service.
• 50:10
  So the reason you're here today is because you're working
• 50:11
  service up the street tonight. Yeah.
• 50:14
  So we don't have any investors in our restaurant group.
• 50:18
  Neen Williams is my partner in NADC, but otherwise, no
• 50:22
  partners. And you know, we started our
• 50:25
  first restaurant, my wife and I, in our one bedroom apartment in
• 50:28
  2013. And we now are at 2728
• 50:34
  restaurants. And yeah, I mean, I still, you
• 50:37
  know, Margaret is still working in the kitchen.
• 50:41
  I'm, you know, when I open a new restaurant, I'm not working in
• 50:43
  the kitchen every single day. That would be a lie.
• 50:45
  But like, I haven't missed it a shift yet in the first month of
• 50:49
  Shogun and opening. It's also a new concept.
• 50:52
  So like I'm really having to like train, but like I work in a
• 50:56
  station. And The thing is, I love it.
• 50:58
  I want to work a station. But you're working a station.
• 51:01
  Yeah. You also have Not Again Chance
• 51:04
  podcast, which is successful and great show.
• 51:06
  Thank you. You have 30 restaurants.
• 51:10
  You're also on TV in multiple channels.
• 51:13
  I mean, you've done everything from Top Chef to Knife's Edge to
• 51:17
  the show with Morimoto. And I'm sure I'm probably
• 51:19
  missing some and being involved in all of those things.
• 51:24
  What what's interesting is you're involved in all of them
• 51:26
  at a high level. You're not, you're not like
• 51:31
  you're not, you're not just taking any show on.
• 51:33
  You're taking on Knife's Edge. Like it's probably the biggest
• 51:35
  culinary show right now, right, that that people are talking
• 51:38
  about. I mean, you're on Rogan.
• 51:43
  So the reason I bring this up is because in today's day and age,
• 51:48
  if we were going to give advice for for the young up and coming
• 51:51
  culinary talent that's out there, and a lot of them are,
• 51:54
  they're reclusive. They don't even jump on social
• 51:56
  media to promote what they're doing.
• 51:57
  They're business. So a lot of times they're a
• 51:58
  ghost. No one knows they exist from a,
• 52:03
  from a chef to chef standpoint. If you were going to give advice
• 52:06
  to people that are listening right now, where do they get
• 52:10
  started and how do they balance media from from traditional
• 52:16
  media like TV to the new media, which is like social media, but
• 52:19
  then even to taking that a step further to podcasting and how
• 52:22
  does all that affect the the machine that is the restaurant
• 52:26
  business? So it depends.
• 52:29
  I would tell someone who has their first executive chef job
• 52:33
  or even a second executive chef job to not fucking do any
• 52:37
  social. Like, don't worry about any of
• 52:39
  that. Just cook.
• 52:41
  Just make sure your food is fucking great.
• 52:43
  That's all that matters. I got into this sort of media
• 52:47
  game out of necessity to survive.
• 52:50
  So we opened in 2013. We got our first.
• 52:53
  My wife and I did not get a paycheck until January of maybe
• 52:57
  March of 2016. We survived.
• 53:03
  We lived off of money. I want on Food Network.
• 53:08
  So I at that point, you know, I was 2526 years old.
• 53:15
  I had I owned a restaurant and if we didn't sell enough food,
• 53:22
  we didn't have payroll and we never had enough pay enough
• 53:26
  money leftover to give ourselves any money.
• 53:29
  And so I never wanted to do TVI never.
• 53:33
  Now I've become accustomed to it.
• 53:34
  It's been, you know, it's been 13 years or whatever, but like a
• 53:39
  buddy of mine went on Chopped and he's like, dude, it's a
• 53:43
  fucking, it's fishing with dynamite.
• 53:45
  You can't lose 10 grand. Another buddy goes on, dude, you
• 53:48
  should do it. I'm like, no, no, no, no.
• 53:50
  Then the, the producer start hitting me up because if you win
• 53:52
  chopped, they're like, do you have any friends that you think
• 53:54
  would also win? And so the producer calls me and
• 53:57
  goes, we've had about 11 people this season who have all said
• 53:59
  you need to be on the show that you will win.
• 54:01
  I'm like, no, no. And then I'm thinking about Taco
• 54:03
  Margarita. I'm like, fuck, $10,000 a lot of
• 54:06
  money. So go there when 10,000 boom.
• 54:12
  It's funny. The very next day I land back in
• 54:14
  LA, turn my phone on. Hey, I'm the producer of a new
• 54:17
  show called Guys Grocery Games. We're shooting on episode 2 I
• 54:22
  think. Had you already been on Top
• 54:23
  Chef? No, no, no.
• 54:24
  This is pre Top Chef. Yeah, yeah.
• 54:26
  Chop was the first thing I did. And then guys, Grocery Games
• 54:29
  hits me up. Hey, brand new show with Guy
• 54:33
  Fieri. You can win up to $20,000.
• 54:35
  I'm on the tarmac. I'm riding high from winning 10
• 54:37
  grand last night. They're like it shoots tomorrow
• 54:41
  in LA And I'm like, OK, because they're like we got your, we
• 54:45
  heard you one chopped. We think you'd be good for the
• 54:48
  show. So go into that next day, win
• 54:51
  that. And I think I won 16 grand on
• 54:54
  that. So boom, $26,000 for a chef who
• 54:59
  hasn't, doesn't have a paycheck, and now I'm fucking hooked.
• 55:03
  Right. So then it's like you then once
• 55:05
  you start winning these things, they start calling you, Hey,
• 55:08
  will you come jump on what's I'm forgetting it the one we're
• 55:13
  like, you get to sabotage each other.
• 55:15
  Cut throat. Cut throat.
• 55:16
  Yeah, you want to come on, cut throat.
• 55:17
  OK, so go do that. I win that.
• 55:19
  Then they're like, hey, come back on, guys.
• 55:21
  Grocery games, win 20 grand again.
• 55:23
  OK, good. And so like I was making like
• 55:25
  30-40 grand a year. And you're becoming a regular
• 55:27
  now they know you. Yeah, I think at at some, at one
• 55:30
  point I held the, I'm sure it's been destroyed at this point,
• 55:33
  but I want I held the record for most consecutive wins across the
• 55:37
  network. Wow.
• 55:39
  And that's not counting, you know, you know, one of the Iron
• 55:42
  Chefs or whatever, but consecutive meaning I won like 5
• 55:46
  different shows in a row without, you know, without any,
• 55:49
  without any losses or second place show.
• 55:52
  I did not do Bobby beat Bobby Flay.
• 55:54
  I, I judged on beat Bobby Flay. Yeah, at a certain point I was
• 55:58
  like, I'm done as after my experience with Top Chef that I
• 56:01
  was like, I'm done competing. Didn't beat fancy chef.
• 56:06
  Shout out to Fancy Chef. I think that that went down
• 56:10
  exactly as it was supposed to. Rematch.
• 56:13
  It's funny, I still love fancy Chef.
• 56:15
  What did I see him do the other day?
• 56:18
  It was a video on Instagram of Will Godera.
• 56:21
  It was either Will Godera or I think it was Will Godera or
• 56:25
  yeah, had to been Will Goderi's podcast interview clip.
• 56:29
  And then on the bottom in the comments, it's like, book me
• 56:33
  now, put it in the comments of a video that's going viral.
• 56:37
  Yeah, fancy. Fancy is the best.
• 56:41
  But yeah, I mean, I started doing TV because two things.
• 56:47
  If you're on television, you're going to get butts in seats.
• 56:52
  So it was job security for my team.
• 56:54
  Second, I did it so that I could survive and my family could
• 56:58
  survive without the necessity of those two things.
• 57:02
  I think it took away a lot of time that I could have spent
• 57:07
  getting better at restaurants. So if you want to go the route
• 57:12
  of the buck stops with you and you are personally guaranteeing
• 57:17
  your fish vendor and you are going to get the IRS to put a
• 57:21
  lien on your, you know, on your bank account and levy your bank
• 57:24
  account. If you don't make payroll taxes,
• 57:27
  then mother fucker, go out there and, and, and hustle.
• 57:30
  But if you're working somewhere and you've got a paycheck,
• 57:33
  don't. It's not, it's, it takes up too
• 57:36
  much time. And I never, I, I only recently
• 57:40
  got into the to like the kind of social media posting and stuff
• 57:44
  like that 'cause now it's necessary.
• 57:46
  It didn't used to be necessary. You used to be able to like, get
• 57:48
  a, you know, a spread in Conde Nast or in the Times or whatever
• 57:53
  and boom, you're full for three months.
• 57:55
  Now you get a A spread in any magazine and it's crickets.
• 57:59
  Yeah, yeah. And when you look at the bump
• 58:06
  that you get, whether it's butts in seats or, or maybe it's just
• 58:11
  sometimes, you know, boost in social media, sometimes you do
• 58:14
  something that goes viral, boom, you get a little boost on social
• 58:16
  media. And then there's discovery.
• 58:20
  Which one has had the greatest impact?
• 58:23
  So if you're, if you're advising chefs right now, is it the
• 58:26
  podcast? Is it the TV or is it what
• 58:30
  you're doing on social media? Or is it, is it something that
• 58:33
  we're not even talking about? The biggest bumps that I've
• 58:37
  gotten, the biggest bump I've ever gotten was from Joe Rogan
• 58:41
  when he first posted about us in January of 2021.
• 58:48
  We sold out and had 20 something thousand people on the wait list
• 58:52
  in 24 hours. That's the biggest bump I've
• 58:54
  ever gotten. Positive bump.
• 58:57
  Top Chef gave us a really negative bump, but but that's
• 59:01
  the biggest positive bump. So you know Jack's dining room?
• 59:04
  Yeah, I do. Yeah.
• 59:04
  He does a great job. So he does he really.
• 59:07
  He's one of those influencers that I was talking about where
• 59:09
  it's like he cares about the food.
• 59:11
  He doesn't talk shit like but but like, like I even as like, I
• 59:17
  even trust what he he likes. But like for him, you know, I've
• 59:20
  told him this. I'm like, other than Rogan, you
• 59:24
  are the biggest needle mover anywhere.
• 59:28
  Because Forbes will write a thing.
• 59:31
  Food and wine will write a thing.
• 59:33
  The Times will write a thing. I'll host a show.
• 59:38
  I'll, you know, be the head judge on a show.
• 59:41
  I'll star on a show and none of them put butts in seats.
• 59:45
  You know, when he, when he wrote it, when he put a review of
• 59:48
  sushi by Scratch in, in New York within within 24 hours with 3000
• 59:53
  new reservations. You know, when Knife Edge came
• 59:55
  out, I don't know that we got a single new reservation from
• 59:58
  that, you know. So, you know, I I think you do
• 1:00:03
  see more butts in seats, believe it or not, from like the cute
• 1:00:08
  couple sitting at table 4. That's taking pictures of their,
• 1:00:12
  their food and they're going to post it on their Instagram to
• 1:00:14
  their 3000 friends. You're going to see 6 new people
• 1:00:18
  come in from them. You know what I mean?
• 1:00:20
  And now so, so really it's, I feel like just be undeniably
• 1:00:25
  great. Just try to do really, really
• 1:00:26
  well and try to treat everyone really, really well and not just
• 1:00:30
  be nice to them. Like, well, I'll go off my
• 1:00:32
  tangent about a lot of restaurants forget that to be in
• 1:00:39
  the hospitality business, you should be hospitable.
• 1:00:42
  Yeah, we, we forget there's a lot of restaurants that are
• 1:00:45
  that. Yeah, we've, we've lost
• 1:00:47
  hospitality. And hospitality is about making
• 1:00:50
  people feel warm and welcomed and wanted, you know, and so
• 1:00:56
  many rest. There's restaurants I won't
• 1:00:57
  name, but there's a restaurant in LA that I won't go back to.
• 1:01:04
  It's fucking so good. But they're so mean.
• 1:01:08
  They're so mean because like I feel like 8 or 9 years ago, the
• 1:01:13
  like the that sort of Brooklyn swagger caught on in LA in a, in
• 1:01:21
  a way where just like, why are you being mean to me?
• 1:01:24
  I just want, I just want a bagel.
• 1:01:26
  Like, why are you being mean to me?
• 1:01:27
  I don't understand this. Yeah, well, it's, it's funny
• 1:01:30
  because I think I may have told you this last time you were
• 1:01:32
  here, I ate at this restaurant and the guy was like, the food
• 1:01:36
  was, the food was bad, but the guy was like the best host and
• 1:01:39
  fucking hugging us at the table and wanting our phone number so
• 1:01:42
  we could stay in touch. And I was like, I haven't felt
• 1:01:45
  that good in a restaurant. Regardless, the food was not
• 1:01:47
  good. And I'll and I'll.
• 1:01:48
  That's why I don't say where it was, because the food was not
• 1:01:50
  good. Tell me off camera.
• 1:01:51
  But but I've been there several times since because of how like
• 1:01:56
  I want to support his business. He's like a genuine, genuinely
• 1:01:59
  good Italian man that just wants to welcome people.
• 1:02:03
  It's like you're going to some a friend's house.
• 1:02:04
  Yeah. It's like he's cooking for you
• 1:02:05
  and his wife's cooking for you. It's like, yeah, it's great.
• 1:02:08
  And the hospitality for me. And that in those moments, if
• 1:02:11
  they can make you feel a certain way, if you can nail that, like
• 1:02:16
  people will go back. I never really understood until
• 1:02:19
  I until I did, when people would say the service will impact more
• 1:02:25
  than the food. I was like, the hell, that's not
• 1:02:26
  fucking true because I'm a chef. And trust me, you know, it's,
• 1:02:28
  it's I'm, I'm the one that they're coming for.
• 1:02:30
  But as time has gone on, I, I, and not that there are
• 1:02:34
  exceptions to the rule where the food does, but I would say in
• 1:02:38
  general, 80% of the restaurants that have amazing service will
• 1:02:43
  win. Yeah.
• 1:02:44
  An amazing how it is a sliding scale because like, like the
• 1:02:49
  place that I don't go back to, there's still fucking packed
• 1:02:52
  lying around the block, you know, So it is a sliding scale
• 1:02:55
  of like if you have the best food in the world, you can get
• 1:02:57
  away with so much more. And if you have the worst food
• 1:03:00
  in the world, you have to be the most amazing hospitality, you
• 1:03:05
  know, in the world. And so really, I always feel
• 1:03:09
  like to become a chef, you have to pass cooking.
• 1:03:13
  It's a prerequisite to becoming a chef because, yeah, because
• 1:03:17
  you have to be so good at cooking that it's not on your
• 1:03:21
  mind. You know, you have to be able to
• 1:03:24
  be having a conversation with your GM while your phone is is
• 1:03:29
  ringing because your accountant is saying, you know, whatever
• 1:03:32
  your vendors calling and you're on the other, you're on hold on
• 1:03:36
  the other line with the plumber because he's walking you through
• 1:03:38
  how to plunge the toilet. And while that's happening, you
• 1:03:41
  go, whoa, whoa, turn off that blender.
• 1:03:42
  There's too much. You've overfilled that blender
• 1:03:45
  because you just know what a blender sounds like when it's
• 1:03:48
  too full because of how many times you have used a blender in
• 1:03:52
  your career that you can be doing 10 different things, but
• 1:03:55
  still go or you go, yo, that's done.
• 1:03:58
  Whatever's in that oven, pull it out.
• 1:03:59
  It's done, it's done. You know you have to be.
• 1:04:02
  Able to chef force. It's just a prerequisite.
• 1:04:05
  You know, at this point, like I can get like almost blackout
• 1:04:07
  drunk. Never done it blackout, but
• 1:04:09
  almost blackout drunk. Have a bunch of friends over
• 1:04:12
  cook a bunch of meat on the grill, be be not even paying
• 1:04:15
  attention and it all is perfectly cooked because I've
• 1:04:18
  just done it so many times. You know, you don't have to pay
• 1:04:20
  attention to it because the prerequisite.
• 1:04:22
  Once you have that prerequisite, you've, you've aced that you're
• 1:04:25
  the valedictorian in cooking, then you start worrying about
• 1:04:31
  the hospitality. But up until that point, as a
• 1:04:33
  young chef, your job isn't to worry about the hospitality.
• 1:04:36
  That's the GM's job. That's the front of house job,
• 1:04:39
  unless you decide to go the route that I did, which is have
• 1:04:41
  a restaurant with no front of the house.
• 1:04:43
  I'm do, I have servers now at Shokan and this is my first time
• 1:04:45
  having servers in over a decade. And it's a learning curve.
• 1:04:48
  Learning curve for me because I'm used to showing someone once
• 1:04:52
  and having them do it correctly and I'm on showing it like
• 1:04:55
  13141516 times and we're still, yeah, we're still getting there,
• 1:05:01
  you know, But I don't know what I'm ranting about now.
• 1:05:04
  I want to, I want to go back to something that you said.
• 1:05:07
  You said Top Chef had the negative effect.
• 1:05:10
  Yeah. Why was that?
• 1:05:11
  Well, they made me a villain, OK?
• 1:05:14
  They turned me into like the pessimist.
• 1:05:17
  Like there's a scene where, like, I'm cooking and they play
• 1:05:20
  like, like stuff like that, yeah.
• 1:05:24
  And you and you can't even fucking control that right
• 1:05:26
  That's. No, not only can you can't
• 1:05:28
  control that you're you're not allowed to protest it, but like
• 1:05:36
  it did like the thing was when people would come to the
• 1:05:38
  restaurant and eat there, they'd be like, and they would meet me
• 1:05:40
  because I was at the restaurant. They'd be like, your food's good
• 1:05:44
  and you're nothing like what they did on TV.
• 1:05:47
  And I'm like, well, it is the same network that makes, you
• 1:05:52
  know, the housewives. You know, I've done a lot of
• 1:05:55
  cooking shows. And some of them, when I watch
• 1:05:58
  them, it's exactly as I remember.
• 1:06:01
  And some of them, when I watch them, I'm like, I could have
• 1:06:04
  swore I won that round. Does my memory wrong?
• 1:06:10
  I'm like, I could have swore that the dish, that one that
• 1:06:15
  that that guy cooked is on my menu.
• 1:06:19
  I thought I cooked that dish. Did I not?
• 1:06:22
  You know, like I've I've I've been on enough shows where it's
• 1:06:24
  like sometimes you're just very confused.
• 1:06:27
  You're on the edge of your seat when you watch the show and
• 1:06:29
  you're like, ah, man, you start to ask yourself like, who's
• 1:06:35
  which producers, little brother did I beat up in high school?
• 1:06:37
  You know, movie. Magic, right?
• 1:06:39
  Yeah, Movie magic. What?
• 1:06:40
  But you can't. But you can't say any of that,
• 1:06:42
  you know? I, I talked to someone, actually
• 1:06:48
  I'm not even going to. There's no point in telling that
• 1:06:50
  story because I can't tell it without incriminating people.
• 1:06:52
  Sure, but I want to ask you about Knife Edge.
• 1:06:55
  So again, I'm on the London episode right now, so I don't
• 1:06:59
  know what's next. Maybe Mexico or something.
• 1:07:01
  Go ahead and spoil it for me. So for people that are, for
• 1:07:04
  people that are listening, spoilers ahead.
• 1:07:06
  Well, it's not so much spoiling as there was some stuff that I.
• 1:07:11
  So who were the LA chefs? It was you, Dave Barron.
• 1:07:13
  Dave and I were the LA chefs and then Harbour House, so those are
• 1:07:19
  the three restaurants that are profiled.
• 1:07:22
  I found it it very interesting that the way that we were
• 1:07:30
  portrayed now it's the restaurant looks awesome, but
• 1:07:36
  they introduced me as a businessman restauranteur who
• 1:07:42
  has past experience working in Michelin kitchens and they don't
• 1:07:48
  at all position me as the a chef or a chef who's one Michelin
• 1:07:56
  stars or anything like that. I thought that was very that was
• 1:08:00
  an interesting approach to interesting spin to put on the
• 1:08:05
  narrative. I also found it very interesting
• 1:08:08
  that they chose to not include Margarita, who's the owner of
• 1:08:15
  the restaurant and the pastry chef who's won multiple Michelin
• 1:08:19
  stars for half a decade. She's in one, she's in one scene
• 1:08:25
  and they don't even give her a title card.
• 1:08:27
  I thought that was very that was an interesting choice in terms
• 1:08:31
  of a narrative. How long were they in the
• 1:08:36
  restaurant with you all? Quite a while.
• 1:08:40
  I mean, it was over the course. An hour.
• 1:08:44
  Yeah, no, it was over the course of like, I mean, they shot it
• 1:08:46
  for over the course of a year and there's a ton of stuff
• 1:08:49
  obviously that doesn't make the cut.
• 1:08:50
  You know, there's there's a ton of stuff that got cut out.
• 1:08:54
  But yeah, those were the two things that I was like really
• 1:08:56
  like that's an interesting angle to kind of, you know, put.
• 1:09:03
  But at the end of the day, DJ, who's my chef there who was my
• 1:09:09
  sous chef and then CDC pre pandemic went back home and then
• 1:09:14
  he got tapped after the third time we got a star to come in
• 1:09:18
  and and take over pasta bar. He looks fucking awesome.
• 1:09:23
  The restaurant looks fucking awesome.
• 1:09:26
  So not much to complain about. Just thought it was, you know,
• 1:09:30
  surprising. Which which year for Michelin
• 1:09:33
  was this? I think it was 2023.
• 1:09:36
  It might have been 3 or 4. Was it the year that you and
• 1:09:38
  your brother won? No, no, Lennon got his star in
• 1:09:43
  25. That was this most recent one.
• 1:09:45
  So this was even either the 20. OK, so we got a star in
• 1:09:48
  2122232425. I want to say this is 2122.
• 1:09:51
  I want to say this is 23's Michelin ceremony, and it was
• 1:09:57
  the first year we were going for two stars, so maybe it's 24.
• 1:10:03
  We were going for two stars. Like actively, like our episode
• 1:10:08
  is like one star chasing 2. You know how it says like
• 1:10:11
  underneath, like with their current standings and what
• 1:10:13
  they're going for? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:15
  New restaurant chasing one star. So it's not much of A spoiler.
• 1:10:19
  You know it, in 2025 we have one star so.
• 1:10:23
  Got it. OK.
• 1:10:24
  Yeah. As a matter of fact, it's it's a
• 1:10:26
  great show I've enjoyed. I like the Chicago episode.
• 1:10:31
  The New York episode was great, so I was hooked.
• 1:10:35
  I was like, OK, I feel like it's a, it's a serious show.
• 1:10:38
  It is. Yeah, it is.
• 1:10:40
  I just wish that, you know, to be profiled as such a, as such
• 1:10:44
  a, you know, on such a big platform like the story of
• 1:10:47
  Margaret and I and how we got there and you know her, I mean,
• 1:10:52
  she makes up 30% of the menu, 5 desserts.
• 1:10:55
  The first thing you get is her fresh, fresh break, baked bread
• 1:10:58
  out of the oven, her butter. There's so much on the menu that
• 1:11:01
  so. Tell people a little bit that
• 1:11:03
  might not know the story that she's your pastry chef and you
• 1:11:06
  guys work together and how did how did you guys meet?
• 1:11:09
  We met in middle school. I'm a couple years older than
• 1:11:13
  her, so she was 6th grade, I was eighth grade.
• 1:11:16
  We hung out in the same group in the quad, you know, the skater,
• 1:11:20
  punk rocker, you know, group. Her and her friends used to come
• 1:11:24
  and see my band play. And then we lost.
• 1:11:28
  We lost touch for, you know, I want to say 789 years.
• 1:11:32
  And then it must have been Myspace, maybe Friendster that
• 1:11:39
  she posted like, you know, something about wanting to go to
• 1:11:41
  culinary school. And I think I had just got my
• 1:11:44
  first sous chef job. So I was 2021 and I was like,
• 1:11:50
  don't go to culinary school like you should.
• 1:11:52
  It's a waste of your time. I'd already dropped out of
• 1:11:54
  culinary school. I was like, don't go to culinary
• 1:11:55
  school. You should, you know, just go
• 1:11:56
  work in a restaurant. And that started a now we start,
• 1:11:59
  hit her up on AIM. And now we're, you know, now
• 1:12:01
  we're, we're, we're we're talking.
• 1:12:03
  And then we run into each other at a party, like a house party,
• 1:12:07
  because that's what you did in LA.
• 1:12:08
  And we moved in together three days later.
• 1:12:11
  And that was like 17 years ago. Something like that.
• 1:12:13
  Wow. Yeah.
• 1:12:14
  And in 2012, I got my first executive chef job at a
• 1:12:20
  restaurant called Decache. I've been there for like 40
• 1:12:23
  years and revamped the menu, did everything.
• 1:12:26
  And I needed basically what what happened was there was no pastry
• 1:12:31
  chef. So I went and wrote a dessert
• 1:12:34
  menu and she talked a bunch of shit.
• 1:12:37
  And I was like, well, if you can do better, like you fucking do
• 1:12:39
  it. And she went in and she did
• 1:12:42
  better. And I went to the owner and I
• 1:12:44
  was like, we have to hire her. And he's like, there's no
• 1:12:48
  budget. We can't hire her.
• 1:12:50
  And so I make a decision, I'm just going to, we already live
• 1:12:52
  together. I'm just going to split my
• 1:12:53
  salary, my salary of like 27,000 a year as executive chef.
• 1:12:57
  We're just going to split. And from there we broke off and
• 1:13:03
  open scratch bar, which now was, you know, almost 13 years ago.
• 1:13:10
  Yeah. And so we we've been married for
• 1:13:11
  13 years and she's done all the desserts for every menu I've
• 1:13:16
  ever written for 13 for 1415 years.
• 1:13:20
  How different is the creative process for you both?
• 1:13:23
  Obviously, I'm sure you have a process to write menus.
• 1:13:25
  And yeah, this is we're very different.
• 1:13:27
  Yeah, what? What is yours like?
• 1:13:28
  And then I'm curious what hers is like.
• 1:13:30
  I'm a musician, so I like to jam.
• 1:13:33
  I don't like like, I like to roll shit out on the menu.
• 1:13:37
  Yeah, I don't like to R&D for six months she nothing hits her
• 1:13:42
  menu. It's probably why her food's
• 1:13:43
  better than mine. Nothing hits the fucking table
• 1:13:46
  with her that she has not. It's not like pinpoint precision
• 1:13:54
  on every single thing. You could not have.
• 1:13:57
  You could not try it and be like fuck, you know what you should
• 1:13:59
  do now? You taste it and you go Jesus
• 1:14:01
  Christ, I should fucking quit. You know, now I don't like over
• 1:14:06
  produced music. I like punk.
• 1:14:09
  I like it to be a little raw. I like it to I like there to be
• 1:14:12
  the flavor of the of the edge, you know, which works really
• 1:14:17
  well when you yourself and your small band of of you know,
• 1:14:21
  pirates are working together and slang in the food out.
• 1:14:25
  Once you start having multiple restaurants and you have a much
• 1:14:28
  larger team, can't really do that.
• 1:14:30
  You have to start making things like.
• 1:14:33
  I was very against recipes for a very long time.
• 1:14:38
  Still. I can't be, I don't use recipes,
• 1:14:41
  but if you're going to have 13 restaurants that all have to
• 1:14:45
  make the same rice, you have to have fucking recipe because I
• 1:14:48
  But the reason I was against it is I thought recipes made you a
• 1:14:53
  worse cook. I felt that fine dining and like
• 1:14:57
  high, high level fine dining in culinary school was killing
• 1:15:01
  young cooks because they were learning how to replicate.
• 1:15:06
  They were just learning how to tweeze stuff on the plates.
• 1:15:09
  They were just learning how to put stuff into dehydrators.
• 1:15:11
  They were just learning like when you go to colony school,
• 1:15:13
  it's just a cooking class, but you weren't learning how and
• 1:15:18
  why. So I always taught philosophy
• 1:15:20
  and approach. If you have, if you're making a
• 1:15:23
  beet puree or a beet sauce, it's going to need a different amount
• 1:15:29
  of acid every single time you make it.
• 1:15:31
  It's going to need a different amount of sugar or whatever you
• 1:15:33
  need to sweeten every single time you make it.
• 1:15:35
  It's going to need a different amount because the beet is not
• 1:15:40
  printed in a factory. It's going to be have differing
• 1:15:43
  levels of, of sweetness, earthiness, roundness, all of
• 1:15:47
  those things. And so if you teach someone how
• 1:15:49
  to just follow a recipe, it won't be great every time.
• 1:15:54
  But if you teach someone how to cook, then it will be great
• 1:15:58
  every single time it's. Very Musashi like like master
• 1:16:01
  the one thing you master the 10,000 variations.
• 1:16:04
  Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons that scratch bar had a
• 1:16:07
  fireplace and no, no gas in the kitchen is I didn't.
• 1:16:12
  I wanted a restaurant where you had to learn how to cook.
• 1:16:15
  I wanted you to like understand the heat and how to cook by
• 1:16:20
  moving things closer and further away from the heat.
• 1:16:24
  If you let your fire go out, you cannot boil your water for the
• 1:16:27
  pasta course. So guess what?
• 1:16:30
  You don't fucking let your water go out.
• 1:16:32
  So like there's it just keeps you so much more engaged, so
• 1:16:35
  much more tactile. And just for me, I, I learned
• 1:16:39
  how to cook. I learned how to cook in like,
• 1:16:42
  you know, Hatfields is actually the restaurant I, I credit the
• 1:16:45
  most for learning how to cook. We had, we had one star as a
• 1:16:48
  sous chef. I was 22.
• 1:16:52
  What year were you? Were you at Hatfields?
• 1:16:54
  2910 so it must have been 22 because I was born in 87.
• 1:17:00
  Maybe. Did you work with someone by the
• 1:17:02
  name of Jordan Sanchez? He also cut his teeth there.
• 1:17:05
  Jordan Sanchez at. Hatfield.
• 1:17:07
  He was my CDC at 1:00. Point.
• 1:17:09
  It doesn't sound familiar. You guys may have maybe?
• 1:17:12
  Do you know Russell Victorioso from Love Supreme?
• 1:17:15
  No, you know Love Supreme here in town.
• 1:17:17
  He's the chef there. Him and I were station partners
• 1:17:21
  in again 2009, 2010, and we were both brought into the end of the
• 1:17:26
  office the same time. We thought we were going to get
• 1:17:29
  fucking reamed and we were both made sous chef at the same time.
• 1:17:33
  Oh nice. And then I left there to go work
• 1:17:35
  at L2O in Chicago. And six months later.
• 1:17:39
  Is that under Gras? I got hired by him, but he was
• 1:17:42
  gone. I put in, I gave a 90 day notice
• 1:17:44
  because that's what you did back kids.
• 1:17:45
  You gave a 90 day notice back in the day.
• 1:17:48
  By the time I got there, he had left.
• 1:17:50
  So it was Kirkley. It was during a period where Let
• 1:17:58
  Us Entertain You was bringing a different chef.
• 1:18:00
  So like, Doug Saltis was there, Walter Mansky was there.
• 1:18:06
  Doug Saltis is a legend. Yeah, so I, I got to meet like a
• 1:18:09
  lot of, but there was, it was like substitute teachers in a,
• 1:18:12
  in a class. That's a beautiful kitchen,
• 1:18:16
  Yeah. We would spend more time
• 1:18:18
  cleaning that kitchen than service every single day.
• 1:18:21
  And part of one of the hazing things was So what you would do
• 1:18:24
  is the whole kitchen was stainless steel.
• 1:18:26
  You would take a scouring pad. You had to start at the bottom
• 1:18:28
  left of your station and you had to mirror Polish all the way in
• 1:18:32
  equal strokes. I'm talking like 3-3 hours of
• 1:18:36
  service, 4 hours of cleaning every night.
• 1:18:38
  And yeah, yeah, no, circles had to be back and forth.
• 1:18:41
  You could not, because if you had to be the right amount of
• 1:18:44
  pressure and as part of the hazing, they would come over and
• 1:18:48
  you have to go back and do it again.
• 1:18:50
  But that was, you know, I mean, that was, that's what it was
• 1:18:53
  like back then. And that was fun.
• 1:18:55
  But anyway, what I was what I was talking about Hatfields is,
• 1:18:59
  you know, we're doing 150 tasting menus a night.
• 1:19:02
  They're all six pan picks, no oil on the line.
• 1:19:05
  We cooked with butter and you could not let your butter spec
• 1:19:09
  and we're pan frying in butter to order.
• 1:19:11
  We are sauteing in butter to order.
• 1:19:14
  And if your butter broke while you are pan frying pon de MI for
• 1:19:20
  the croque Madame, you had to throw it away.
• 1:19:23
  And so like you had to learn how to control the temperature of
• 1:19:26
  your butter, you had to learn to control it through salt, through
• 1:19:30
  water, through heat management. You had to make sure that you
• 1:19:34
  had other pans pulled down because you knew what was what
• 1:19:37
  you're on deck with. And every pan is a six pan pick,
• 1:19:41
  you know, And it's like that's where you, that's how you learn
• 1:19:44
  how to cook. Well, and I think that's
• 1:19:45
  something that's lost you're, you're talking about this
• 1:19:48
  repetitive sometimes in these fine dining settings.
• 1:19:51
  It's like, I'm just going to make tweels all day or whatever
• 1:19:53
  the case may be. It's like you got to understand
• 1:19:55
  temperature control. You got to understand how to
• 1:19:58
  control temperatures at different volume levels of
• 1:20:00
  business. And it's it's thing or salinity
• 1:20:03
  levels are tasting things. And I tasted it multiple times.
• 1:20:06
  It reduced too far. I used to keep a little squeeze
• 1:20:09
  bottle of water to add to, you know, the sauce might have got a
• 1:20:12
  little too, too, too far down. We just need to hydrate it a
• 1:20:15
  little bit more or something broke a little squeeze of water.
• 1:20:18
  But you don't know those things. When you become an automaton and
• 1:20:22
  you're just not thinking. About Well, I'll give you an
• 1:20:24
  example. I left Hatfields and went to
• 1:20:28
  work at L2O and I got put on the fish station and I'm a seafood
• 1:20:32
  guy. So I'm like, this is fucking so
• 1:20:33
  cool. And I took a step.
• 1:20:34
  When I I I took a step, I was a sous chef before Hatfields went
• 1:20:37
  back to being a chef de partee because I went from zero star to
• 1:20:40
  one star. Then I became a sous chef at a
• 1:20:42
  one star. Then I took a step back to
• 1:20:43
  become a chef de partee at a three star.
• 1:20:46
  And there was a day when and now every station on L2O and I
• 1:20:52
  learned to shit load there. So don't get me wrong, but
• 1:20:54
  every, every station had like 2 blenders, 3 dehydrators.
• 1:20:57
  Like it was, it wasn't quite cooking the way that I had, you
• 1:21:02
  know, anticipated. It was very, very, very
• 1:21:04
  different. And we had to make a like a
• 1:21:07
  brown DoD and I was getting trained and we have the recipes
• 1:21:12
  down to the gram. And I think this is one of the
• 1:21:14
  one of the moments for me where I was that that helped inform
• 1:21:17
  that when I had my first restaurant fuck recipes.
• 1:21:21
  Because here you've got these cooks who got three stars and
• 1:21:25
  they're teaching me how to make a Brundin.
• 1:21:27
  And we get all the way to the end of the recipe and I'm told,
• 1:21:32
  OK, go ahead and put it away. And I'm like, can I, can I taste
• 1:21:35
  it? Like we haven't tasted this yet.
• 1:21:37
  We're putting it away, but we haven't tasted it yet.
• 1:21:39
  And I'm like, Hey, go ahead and taste it.
• 1:21:41
  So I taste it and it's it's a salt lick.
• 1:21:44
  It's just so salty. And I go and I'm the I'm the new
• 1:21:49
  guy in a three star. I'm I'm as quiet as a fucking
• 1:21:53
  mouse, but I'm also, but so I'm like, I haven't, I haven't tried
• 1:21:59
  it here. Does this taste a little salty
• 1:22:01
  to you? And so the cook I was one of the
• 1:22:04
  cooks who was doing to training me tastes it and goes, it's a
• 1:22:09
  little salty. And I see him like thinking and
• 1:22:12
  I'm like, you want me to grab some cream butter?
• 1:22:16
  Like, no, grab some xanthan water.
• 1:22:20
  I'm like xanthan water. Like, yeah, we'll stretch it.
• 1:22:22
  And so we stretched it with xanthan water until it wasn't
• 1:22:26
  too salty to taste. But now it tasted like water.
• 1:22:30
  And I just remember going home that night being like, I don't
• 1:22:34
  under like, why are where's it like?
• 1:22:37
  That's not how you cook, you know?
• 1:22:39
  Yeah. Now again, if you want to cook
• 1:22:41
  at that level, there's a precision and I'm sure that's
• 1:22:44
  not how Laurent would have wanted something done.
• 1:22:48
  It's fucking salty. But I also came into a into a
• 1:22:51
  classroom where the teacher had been out for for for six weeks
• 1:22:54
  or whatever. Yeah, I had a guy on on the
• 1:22:57
  show, Andrew Turner recently and he worked at Lui Khan's when
• 1:23:01
  Laurent was CDC, Ducasse's first restaurant, when he only had
• 1:23:07
  that restaurant. And so Ducasse is still.
• 1:23:08
  In the kitchen. Technically right, but Laurent
• 1:23:11
  is. Laurent's the chef and he has
• 1:23:15
  Jean Francois Piage and Mauro Cola Greco.
• 1:23:19
  Yeah. Are like CDPS and it's like
• 1:23:23
  little firepower. Yeah, it's like a holy shit,
• 1:23:25
  these guys are your CDPS. And you know, Ducasse is still
• 1:23:28
  hanging out and Laurent is running the pass and, and, and
• 1:23:31
  he mentioned a couple of other people.
• 1:23:32
  That one guy ended up becoming the chef at Le Cirque.
• 1:23:34
  And it's like, you have these moments in time.
• 1:23:37
  I know I've experienced it maybe once or twice in my career.
• 1:23:40
  Not at that level, yeah. But where you have a team, it's
• 1:23:44
  like all these people are going to be great.
• 1:23:46
  Yeah. And you recognize it in that
• 1:23:47
  moment. And you have a certain level of,
• 1:23:49
  of success at that at that moment, but it's short lived
• 1:23:53
  because everyone eventually they go out and they, they do their
• 1:23:55
  things. And then it might be 10 years
• 1:23:57
  before you ever catch that lightning in a bottle again.
• 1:24:00
  Yeah, I had that back in the day when I was like, I mean, again,
• 1:24:06
  it's it's been a while since I by a while, I mean like years
• 1:24:10
  since I had only one restaurant and I worked that restaurant
• 1:24:13
  with that team and LED that team.
• 1:24:14
  And I'm getting like, I looked at my wife a couple weeks ago at
• 1:24:18
  Shokun and I was like, I'm so happy I'm a chef again.
• 1:24:22
  Because also Shogunen is a completely new concept.
• 1:24:25
  So we're not just running the playbook in a new location,
• 1:24:29
  which is what we do at Sushi by Scratch restaurants now.
• 1:24:31
  Don't it's not cookie cutter by any stretch.
• 1:24:34
  We are, you know, we're we're constantly improving and we're
• 1:24:37
  constantly like each restaurant has its own dishes, etcetera.
• 1:24:40
  But like we're basically running the playbook like, you know what
• 1:24:43
  I mean? And but with this, it was like,
• 1:24:46
  there's no system. There's no system for what time
• 1:24:48
  family meal is. There's no system for when we're
• 1:24:50
  going to scrub down. There's no system for how we're
• 1:24:52
  cleaning up or organizing the, the, the, the regions where
• 1:24:55
  those all have systems already. And so it was so refreshing for
• 1:25:00
  me. But like, I guess for me, I've
• 1:25:01
  had that a little bit in sushi. Like if you look around Austin,
• 1:25:03
  at least you can see our family tree, you know, falling, you
• 1:25:09
  know, the, the, the leaves are falling pretty close.
• 1:25:13
  But my goal with the in at Crumley Ranch Rd. that I told
• 1:25:16
  you about last time, that will be the restaurant that I hope to
• 1:25:22
  produce, you know, in. My hope is that in 20-30 years
• 1:25:26
  they'll be like, man, those four dudes were like, that was the
• 1:25:30
  line at that time, you know, because that's every chef's like
• 1:25:35
  we're the only art form that dies with the artist.
• 1:25:39
  And so the only thing you have is legacy, and it's your family
• 1:25:43
  tree. Once Thomas Keller passes there,
• 1:25:47
  he will forever have a family tree that started with him,
• 1:25:50
  right? But his food won't be there,
• 1:25:53
  right? Right.
• 1:25:54
  You know, maybe his restaurants will stay.
• 1:25:56
  You know, Joel Robichon's restaurants are still there.
• 1:25:58
  But like, your art typically dies with you.
• 1:26:01
  It's the only one we're still listening to Nirvana, you know?
• 1:26:06
  It's, it's funny, you know, you look at what Thomas did with the
• 1:26:09
  French Laundry, is he created, you know, David Breeden on here
• 1:26:13
  a couple of times, you know, he's talking about how Thomas
• 1:26:16
  created an environment for excellence to, to percolate.
• 1:26:20
  And I, and I think when you could, when you could do that
• 1:26:24
  and then you get the right talent coming through the
• 1:26:26
  kitchen and you know, because they, they're attracted to a
• 1:26:28
  talent, attracts talent and you're able to just kind of sit
• 1:26:32
  back and just kind of watch these people flourish.
• 1:26:34
  It's it's pretty impressive. I want to ask specifically for
• 1:26:38
  people that are listening that want to make better tasting
• 1:26:42
  food. Yeah, if let's just start at the
• 1:26:45
  basics, how can we make better sushi rice?
• 1:26:47
  How do you fix the world's problems just with rice at a
• 1:26:51
  general level? That's tough because that's
• 1:26:54
  something I probably should not touch with a fucking 100 foot
• 1:26:56
  pole. Is trying to tell the world how
• 1:26:57
  to make better sushi rice. Well, but can we talk about what
• 1:27:00
  kind of rice should we be using? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:27:02
  So I mean, I'm going to give you the, if you're at home and
• 1:27:05
  you're a beginner and you just want to make good sushi rice,
• 1:27:08
  I'll, I'll teach you how to do that.
• 1:27:10
  I feel comfortable doing that. But there are plenty of legends
• 1:27:13
  in Japan who've been making, you know, rice longer than me.
• 1:27:18
  So here's a couple of things that I do with sushi rice. 1,
• 1:27:22
  you want to use koshikari. That is a specific type of type
• 1:27:27
  of rice. Just like there's basmati and
• 1:27:30
  Jasmine, there's koshikari each, you know, in Japan there are
• 1:27:34
  many different varietals of rice, each one used for
• 1:27:37
  different applications. For whatever reason, we have
• 1:27:40
  decided that koshikari will be the one we use for for sushi.
• 1:27:45
  And so you get that and you're going to want to wash your sushi
• 1:27:49
  rice. Now one of the things that I do
• 1:27:51
  that actually my brother taught me about.
• 1:27:54
  So my brother worked for me for 9 years and now he holds a
• 1:27:58
  Michelin star for making sushi. And he was the first person I
• 1:28:03
  ever heard of who would bring in brown rice and mill it himself
• 1:28:08
  every day. And I tried as rice.
• 1:28:11
  Blown away. Every one of my restaurants now
• 1:28:14
  brings in brown rice, mills it ourself every day.
• 1:28:18
  It truly is the difference between buying pre ground coffee
• 1:28:22
  and grinding it yourself. It is that different.
• 1:28:25
  I now believe that if you buy white rice, you're essentially
• 1:28:28
  buying dead rice at home. It's maybe not necessary, but
• 1:28:32
  hey, get brown rice. You can buy a machine that that
• 1:28:35
  that mills your rice on, you know, I think only you get on
• 1:28:38
  Amazon. But if you put in, you know,
• 1:28:39
  rice milling machine, they're not cheap, but they work.
• 1:28:43
  They break a lot, but they work, yeah.
• 1:28:46
  So you do that for all your restaurants?
• 1:28:47
  Yeah, wow. And then from there you'll wash
• 1:28:53
  your rice. Now I wash my rice in ice water,
• 1:28:56
  not tap water. I learned when I opened opened
• 1:28:59
  in Miami, coming from LA, all of a sudden my rice was just like
• 1:29:02
  gummy and overcooked and I couldn't understand why.
• 1:29:05
  And then I go and I look, they're washing it in the sink
• 1:29:08
  and the sink is fucking 85° water.
• 1:29:12
  LA has colder water. So I was like, oh, I need to
• 1:29:15
  control the water temperature. So I use ice water in all the
• 1:29:20
  restaurants. So just like when you, you,
• 1:29:22
  you're going to soak rice before you cook rice, how long you soak
• 1:29:27
  it is very important. You can over soak it.
• 1:29:29
  You can under soak it every second that your rice is in
• 1:29:33
  water, you are getting closer to the point of no return, meaning
• 1:29:37
  you can go over right. The colder your rice is, the
• 1:29:42
  more it combats and slows that down.
• 1:29:45
  So I if you're if, if it's comfortable, you don't have
• 1:29:48
  enough ice in your in your in your water.
• 1:29:50
  You need a lot of ice. I'm going through a cambro of
• 1:29:53
  ice when I'm when I'm cleaning my rice and I'm cleaning my rice
• 1:29:58
  and I'm doing it until you can fill up the water and you can
• 1:30:02
  still see the, and you can see the rice.
• 1:30:03
  So basically it's clear enough to see through it.
• 1:30:06
  From there. What I do is I, I, I strain it
• 1:30:12
  and then I put them in masu boxes, which are like Japanese
• 1:30:14
  cedar wood boxes and I put those in the fridge again, keep it
• 1:30:18
  cold and the, and the masu box is going to pull out moisture.
• 1:30:22
  I want to be as dry as possible as quick as possible.
• 1:30:25
  Then when I go and I do my soak, I soak in the fridge, keep my,
• 1:30:31
  my, the, the, the clock, keep it as slow as possible.
• 1:30:35
  And then so I, I, I, so you basically want to clean the
• 1:30:40
  rice. I soak it for 30 minutes and
• 1:30:44
  then I cook it. I use a rice cooker.
• 1:30:47
  I use a Soji Rushi. You can buy one at home and it
• 1:30:51
  will, it will pop when it's done.
• 1:30:53
  And what I do is as soon as it pops a second, it pops.
• 1:30:56
  I unplug it, I open up the lid and I drape the cord over it and
• 1:31:02
  I crack the lid and I let it steam for 20 minutes with the
• 1:31:05
  with the top cracked. From there I go into a Hungidi,
• 1:31:09
  which is a big wooden bowl. You can do it in a mixing bowl.
• 1:31:12
  You don't need this, but you're basically going to make a
• 1:31:16
  vinegar. You can buy vinegar, but you
• 1:31:18
  probably want to doctor it a little bit.
• 1:31:21
  You want your vinegar? Well, I don't want to say you
• 1:31:24
  want. I want my vinegar to be
• 1:31:25
  balanced. I want sweet and sour.
• 1:31:28
  I'm not a big fan of when it's too sour.
• 1:31:31
  A lot of New York sushi is very sour rice.
• 1:31:35
  I don't love that with my fish. I love more of a balanced sweet
• 1:31:39
  and sour, which is more LA style.
• 1:31:42
  So I'll take, you know, for example, at home, buy some rice
• 1:31:45
  vinegar, add a little bit of salt, a little bit of sugar,
• 1:31:48
  touch of water. I throw some chili flakes in
• 1:31:50
  there just for a little bit of salivation.
• 1:31:54
  And then you basically take your your, your vinegar.
• 1:31:57
  And this needs to be weighed out, you know, So at home, just
• 1:32:01
  add in vinegar until you think it's too much and you'll learn.
• 1:32:05
  But you just you, you mix it really good until the vinegar,
• 1:32:09
  basically until the rice absorbs all the vinegar and you're
• 1:32:11
  basically doing, at least the way I do it, it's like a quick
• 1:32:14
  pickle. So sushi rice used to be
• 1:32:18
  effectively pickled because the lactic acid from the fish would
• 1:32:23
  actually ferment and it would turn it into like the fish would
• 1:32:27
  cook in the rice in the way the ceviche does.
• 1:32:29
  Instead of 10 minutes, it would take a year.
• 1:32:32
  But so that's where the vinegar sour flavor came from.
• 1:32:35
  Once they didn't have to do that anymore, which is only a couple,
• 1:32:37
  100 years ago, they miss the flavor of sourness.
• 1:32:42
  That's when they started vinegaring the rice.
• 1:32:45
  So you just want to have a nice, you know, sort of like, think of
• 1:32:48
  it like you're, you're, you're dressing a salad.
• 1:32:50
  You don't want to be wet and sloppy, but it needs to be, you
• 1:32:54
  know, aggressively dressed. Taking a completely different
• 1:33:00
  side of the world, I guess we could say we're talking pasta
• 1:33:03
  now. What are some of the keys that
• 1:33:05
  you think that make good pasta? Good pasta is so subjective,
• 1:33:09
  right? I like a denser egg yolk forward
• 1:33:14
  pasta. There are.
• 1:33:17
  I don't care for pastas that are like melt in your mouth.
• 1:33:22
  Now there's a time and a place, I guess.
• 1:33:26
  But like I want a pasta that fights back.
• 1:33:30
  That doesn't mean undercooked. That means very, very elastic.
• 1:33:36
  That's what I like. I like to have to fight my
• 1:33:38
  pasta. And so you can typically achieve
• 1:33:42
  that with more egg yolk. You know my like my go to, if
• 1:33:48
  you're like, yo make me the best pasta you can make, it's going
• 1:33:51
  to be egg yolks and flour. Double 00.
• 1:33:53
  Yeah, that's it. That's it.
• 1:33:55
  Those are the only two ingredients, and it'll be a lot
• 1:33:58
  of it. It'll be a bright.
• 1:34:00
  I'm looking for a yellow in here.
• 1:34:01
  There isn't one. It'll be a bright yellow, like
• 1:34:03
  school bus yellow pasta. And it will fight back at you.
• 1:34:07
  Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to think if
• 1:34:12
  there was any. I would ask like, is there
• 1:34:15
  something that you do that I don't want to say it's unique to
• 1:34:18
  you because no one else does it, but is there something that that
• 1:34:21
  you do that you think people could learn?
• 1:34:23
  The audience that's listening to impact flavor significantly.
• 1:34:27
  That's like a lot more people should do this because you're
• 1:34:31
  you're, you're missing out on flavor points.
• 1:34:33
  So here's SO For home cooks, use more salt.
• 1:34:38
  For restaurant cooks, here's my approach to salt.
• 1:34:43
  Salt is not a flavor. Salt is an enhancer.
• 1:34:49
  OK, let me give you an example. If you slice a tomato and you
• 1:34:53
  eat it plain, it's going to be pretty good.
• 1:34:56
  If you put just a little bit of salt on it, it's going to taste
• 1:34:59
  sweet. Why?
• 1:35:01
  It's not because salt is sweet. It's because salt.
• 1:35:05
  What it does is it actually activates your taste buds.
• 1:35:07
  So your taste buds live dormant, right?
• 1:35:10
  You can activate your taste buds a couple different ways by
• 1:35:13
  actually using an ingredient that will, as it passes over,
• 1:35:17
  will make you start to salivate. Or there's even like like the
• 1:35:21
  idea of umami, right? If you think about beef jerky,
• 1:35:24
  you'll start to salivate, right? There are things so when you put
• 1:35:27
  you want just enough salt that you can't taste the flavor of
• 1:35:32
  salt. Salt will bring out the
• 1:35:34
  sweetness in anything, the natural sweetness.
• 1:35:36
  All it's doing is it's meant for opening up your taste buds so
• 1:35:41
  that you can taste the sweetness in that tomato.
• 1:35:44
  Think of it like listening to music with earplugs in, right?
• 1:35:48
  Put your fingers in your ears. Now take your fingers out and
• 1:35:50
  you can hear clearly. That's what salt is meant for.
• 1:35:53
  It's funny that you're the only other person I've heard explain
• 1:35:56
  it that way with music, because I often say with salt.
• 1:35:59
  It's like the the volume dial on a stereo Too much, the music
• 1:36:02
  sounds too loud, not enough, you can't hear the music you.
• 1:36:05
  It's about finding that sweet spot.
• 1:36:07
  So that's a good thing. You bring up, I think of
• 1:36:09
  seasoning like EQ. So as a musician, EQ is very
• 1:36:13
  important. You cannot listen to the Dead
• 1:36:17
  Kennedys on the same EQ as N.W.A, right?
• 1:36:22
  One is going to require a much higher treble and one's going to
• 1:36:25
  require a much higher base. So treble is your salt, fat is
• 1:36:31
  your base, and acid is your mids.
• 1:36:35
  So it's always the like the way that we we call it, they call it
• 1:36:40
  house seasoning, olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt, in that
• 1:36:43
  order. You put the fat on there to
• 1:36:47
  round what you have. You put the acid on there to
• 1:36:50
  enhance to to to brighten the rounded thing, and you put salt
• 1:36:55
  on at the end to be able to actually hear it clearly.
• 1:37:01
  I love how you explained that. That's great.
• 1:37:03
  Last question that I have for you because I I asked you, you
• 1:37:06
  know the closers last time but I have a new one.
• 1:37:09
  If you had one chef living or not, that would be your bucket
• 1:37:16
  list for them to cook for you. Who would it?
• 1:37:17
  Be cook for me, yeah. Whose food you want to eat?
• 1:37:29
  Only one name is coming into my head hard and I'm trying to put
• 1:37:31
  other names in there just to just to give it a fair shake,
• 1:37:36
  but Escoffier is the only name that I can like come up with
• 1:37:40
  right now. I feel like in my where I am in
• 1:37:46
  my career, I've I've gone all the way around and I'm going
• 1:37:50
  back to the beginning. I think that's why it's Shogun.
• 1:37:53
  And like there's no garnish. That restaurant is an homage to
• 1:37:58
  what sushi was like in the San Fernando Valley along Ventura
• 1:38:02
  Blvd. in the late 80s, early 90s.
• 1:38:05
  Everything is directly from that place in time.
• 1:38:08
  It's the sushi that it's the sushi that inspired me.
• 1:38:11
  It's a sushi that made me fall in love with the cuisine.
• 1:38:16
  And unfortunately, no one's opening new restaurants like
• 1:38:19
  that anymore. And it's a dying.
• 1:38:21
  It's a dying style, unfortunately in America.
• 1:38:24
  Because now if you want good fish, you have to go to the $300
• 1:38:30
  omakase that's going to have colors and flavors and textures
• 1:38:33
  and all of those things. And I kind of felt like, you
• 1:38:39
  know, a bit of a responsibility to beyond the fact that like,
• 1:38:45
  it's just what I, I like eating sushi that way.
• 1:38:48
  I kind of felt a bit of a responsibility to like do that
• 1:38:52
  because that's where I got all of my inspiration from.
• 1:38:57
  Yet I went off in this other direction.
• 1:39:00
  And now that other direction has become the industry standard now
• 1:39:04
  is you don't open a fucking sushi place without some garnish
• 1:39:06
  and some micro greens and, and colors and texture.
• 1:39:09
  You just don't. So I'm hoping to sort of bring
• 1:39:11
  that back. And it brings me to, sorry, I
• 1:39:14
  guess such long answers. No, it's OK.
• 1:39:18
  I think people enjoy see the thought process.
• 1:39:21
  I do think a lot in real. Time.
• 1:39:22
  Yeah, yeah. And I'm with.
• 1:39:23
  You the inn at crumley ranch Rd. I want to really explore what
• 1:39:29
  American cuisine can be by growing and hunting and cooking
• 1:39:35
  over live fire. All things that I've done, but
• 1:39:38
  never really at all together at the same time.
• 1:39:42
  And like, I have this book that's got like sauces from like
• 1:39:46
  the 14 hundreds, 1600s. I've never read a cookbook in my
• 1:39:49
  life. I bought them all.
• 1:39:50
  I look at the pictures. But I had this idea that, like,
• 1:39:52
  if I read the cookbook, then I would just RIP people off.
• 1:39:55
  So like, I have no desire. Like, I'm like, fuck that.
• 1:39:57
  I'm not going to do that. I'm going to come with my own
• 1:39:59
  ideas. And then, like, if I do
• 1:40:00
  something that anyone else does starts doing, I stopped doing
• 1:40:04
  it. Like Jonathan Gold said that in
• 1:40:06
  a city of city full of idiosyncratic chefs, I was
• 1:40:09
  perhaps the most idiosyncratic. This is all to say, I'm getting
• 1:40:14
  really inspired by going all the way back to the beginning and
• 1:40:18
  Escoffier's food might be what I'm looking for right now.
• 1:40:22
  Like I was just in in Europe, I was spent a month in Latvia
• 1:40:24
  where margaritas from and I wanted to find the old cookbooks
• 1:40:30
  from like, you know, what were they?
• 1:40:32
  Because they are masters of cuisine there.
• 1:40:34
  But it's all so old and it's just like the roasts and the
• 1:40:40
  sauce work and 0 fancy zero fancy it the I.
• 1:40:46
  I think the best way the best restaurant in the world will
• 1:40:51
  will be plated by a young chef and cooked by his grandmother.
• 1:40:57
  Food needs to taste like grandma cooked it.
• 1:40:59
  But it should be interesting and thoughtful and presented like
• 1:41:05
  the grandson or granddaughter. That's that's a brilliant way to
• 1:41:08
  phrase it. I've been on a big, big kick
• 1:41:13
  lately about we've lost the saucier.
• 1:41:17
  We've lost the ability to cook meat.
• 1:41:20
  Not that we can't cook meat or fish or anything like that, but
• 1:41:22
  we don't cook meat the way we used to, you know, the big
• 1:41:24
  roasts and you know, with a farce and you know, it's wrapped
• 1:41:28
  in a caul fat or some sort of pastry or whatever.
• 1:41:31
  And I think we've lost that we, what we traded it for was the
• 1:41:37
  aesthetics of plating and the Instagram food.
• 1:41:39
  And I, and I think there's a, there needs to be a return or,
• 1:41:42
  or there needs to be a little bit more balance.
• 1:41:44
  I don't, I shouldn't say return. There needs to be more.
• 1:41:45
  Balance. All everyone has to do breaks is
• 1:41:48
  way over promise under deliver. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:52
  What? You're saying over deliver,
• 1:41:53
  That's great because anytime you're let down by a dish, it's
• 1:41:57
  because it under delivered. Yeah, and it over promised.
• 1:42:01
  I I keep going back and forth between having the like a
• 1:42:05
  traditional like I may have a saucier at this restaurant.
• 1:42:08
  I'm really considering having. I keep going back and forth
• 1:42:10
  between a couple different things.
• 1:42:11
  One, I have this idea. I think you'll get a kick out of
• 1:42:14
  this so fucking hard to pull off.
• 1:42:16
  So I don't know how I'm going to do it.
• 1:42:17
  But like each chef will be responsible for three dishes on
• 1:42:22
  the menu. My job will become at this point
• 1:42:26
  the conductor and each chef you like, you come over.
• 1:42:30
  You're right. So hi, I'm, I'm, I'm chef so and
• 1:42:33
  so and I shot this pig last summer.
• 1:42:39
  The next three courses are going to showcase this pig.
• 1:42:42
  Your job was to design the entire D of your three.
• 1:42:45
  You do everything for your three dishes.
• 1:42:47
  You come over and go. I was in charge of the, you
• 1:42:49
  know, whatever section of the garden.
• 1:42:52
  My neck, my three courses are this and each chef just has
• 1:42:56
  their own 3. And now I work with the whole
• 1:42:58
  thing to put the whole thing together.
• 1:43:01
  I keep going back and forth between something interesting
• 1:43:03
  like that. I mean that I think that's, I
• 1:43:05
  think that's a brilliant idea and I think that's what needs to
• 1:43:08
  happen. Is it all feels the same or it's
• 1:43:10
  all derivative. I hate to say it's all
• 1:43:12
  derivative of like Renee or Thomas or Ferran, and then it's
• 1:43:16
  variations of that. But something truly original I
• 1:43:19
  think needs to be done. That's the.
• 1:43:22
  Thing that's going to be cool about this restaurant, 'cause
• 1:43:23
  I'm going to have, I'm going to own the land and I'm going to
• 1:43:26
  own the like I like we can. I'm going to really try to do
• 1:43:32
  this will be our masterpiece. Yeah.
• 1:43:35
  But then I even go back and forth with lectures, fucking
• 1:43:37
  make it a la carte and make it like, I don't know, I keep
• 1:43:39
  going. I have time.
• 1:43:40
  I have time to consider everything.
• 1:43:42
  What are you? What are you thinking?
• 1:43:44
  Probably about a year from now. Yeah, Yeah, it's, it's going to
• 1:43:48
  take a minute. Well, chef, this is fun.
• 1:43:49
  It's always good to have you on for people that where can they
• 1:43:53
  listen to the podcast, where can they eat your food and where can
• 1:43:55
  they follow along. So Nina and I have a podcast
• 1:43:59
  called the Not a Damn Chance podcast.
• 1:44:01
  You can find it at NADC podcast. It's on the YMH network.
• 1:44:07
  Your mom's house. We have restaurants in 13
• 1:44:11
  cities. So if half of the major cities
• 1:44:15
  or 1/4 of the major cities, look us up.
• 1:44:18
  Sushi by Scratch restaurants, pasta bar, Not a Damn chance,
• 1:44:22
  NADC Burger and our newest venture, Shokunin.
• 1:44:28
  And if you want to keep up with like what's going on and what
• 1:44:32
  we're doing next, you can follow my Instagram, which is Philip
• 1:44:35
  Franklin Lee because I'm I post about all of them.
• 1:44:38
  And then on the bio you can get links to.
• 1:44:40
  Instead of having to remember 7 different links, you can just,
• 1:44:43
  you know, do that one. And if you happen to come on the
• 1:44:46
  Chef's PSA podcast, I'm going to take you to lunch at NADC.
• 1:44:49
  I guess I'm I'm the new sponsor so I hope you all enjoy.
• 1:44:52
  Awesome brother. Thank you.
• 1:44:53
  Thanks for having me. Well, I hope you enjoyed the
• 1:44:55
  show. If you want to support the show,
• 1:44:57
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• 1:45:01
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• 1:45:05
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• 1:45:06
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