Latest / Johnny's World / Episode 12-Robert St. John

Transcript

Episode 12-Robert St. John · Johnny's World

• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody, welcome back to the Johnny's World Podcast.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is BW here.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've got our co-host with us, John Clark Packer.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing today, Johnny?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Good, good.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a special guest with us today.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we've got, I'm gonna read this off.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is from his bio on his website.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: We've got uh, or it's close to it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: We've got chef, writer, and owner of some of Mississippi's best restaurants.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And really, my favorite description is world-class eater.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: We have Robert St.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: John.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing today, Robert?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm great, man.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Happy to be here.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh thanks for having me on the podcast.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's an honor.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks for coming on.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so you you grew up in Hattiesburg, and and I know you spent some time in Starkville and uh a little bit hung around with my cousin Jim.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: We we don't want to talk too bad about him, but if there's anything bad you want to share about him, totally fine.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you ended up leaving Starkville, going back to Hattiesburg, and it opened your restaurant.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: So um we would just kind of like to hear the story from there and and hear about how things started.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um, you know, I was born uh here in Hattiesburg.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm in my office right now is really uh across the street.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: We have uh, let's see, I think we have six restaurants and a bar now.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Crescent City Grill, uh the Mahogany Bar, a new restaurant, El Rayo, that we just opened, which is Tex-Mex, Ed's Burger Joint.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we have an Italian restaurant called Tabella, and then a breakfast-lunch place called the Midtowner.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um, they're all kind of grouped together, really, here in what we call Midtown Hattiesburg.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I grew up about four blocks south of here from where I'm sitting right now, excuse me, and currently live about eight blocks from here.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: So this is really kind of my world.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: And um, yeah, I was I was born here.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh my dad died when I was six.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, my mom was a school teacher.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: She raised my brother and me up uh on a school teacher's salary, uh, which meant I had to work uh right off the bat.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started working at 12 and got a got a real job paying Social Security taxes uh when I was 15, uh as a disc jockey as uh your dad was in Hattiesburg a little before that, Brandon.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh went off to Mississippi State uh when I was 17 uh as a freshman.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: And really uh I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: I was uh I majored in communications because I had been working in radio and I didn't really know anything else.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mainly just partied a lot.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: And um after I that's when uh the Jim Alvis stories would come in here, but I'm gonna skip those.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and you just tell your cousin he owes me one for skipping those stories.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, so after a couple of years, uh I flunked out of Mississippi State and and came home to Hattiesburg uh really uh kind of embarrassed and not really knowing you know what I was gonna do.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: All my other friends were, you know, getting close to graduating college, and I, you know, I was barely a freshman.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I got a job because I had to work uh with two ladies who were opening a delicatessen.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: They had no idea what they were doing, which is evident because they hired me as the manager.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um, it's one of those things that I'm talking about from from the first minute of the first hour of the first day.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's like something clicked, and I was like, oh, I love that.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: I knew it was like this is what I not only this is what I want to do, it's what I'm supposed to do.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: And and so I I managed the delicatessen during the day, and then I got a job waiting tables at night.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was just eat up with the I couldn't get enough of the restaurant business, and I kind of cleaned up my act and got clean and sober in May of 1983.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still clean and sober today.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh went back to school here at the University of Southern Mississippi and got a degree in what they now call hospitality management.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: Opened my first restaurant uh in 1987, and uh been kind of hitting the ground running since then.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: So uh we're here in Midtown Hattiesburg and you know, uh just kind of just got through a global pandemic, uh, which was uh probably the worst time in the history of the restaurant business to be in the restaurant business.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: But uh we're we're still alive.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: We closed a couple of our concepts.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but uh we're you know, we're we're we had 300 employees when the when the pandemic hit, and we're sitting here today with uh probably a little more than 300 employees.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: So wow things are going okay.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I saw that you you've been involved in some uh legislation and stuff like that to kind of help out the restaurant industry, haven't you?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um I got a call on March.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I actually got a text early in the morning on March 19th.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh a friend of mine, there were there was told me there were some people meeting that were trying to you know do whatever they could to help uh independent restaurants and help the restaurant industry survive this pandemic, and uh asked me to join.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so I hopped on a call uh for a Zoom call, which would end up being uh the second meeting ever of the independent restaurant coalition.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: 18 people had met the day before, and I think there were maybe 20 of us on this day, and and we just uh you know, we met twice a day for the seven days a week for the first month or two, just trying to figure out what we could do to help the restaurant there.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: There were people from all over the country, a lot of people, people you would know, like um, you know, uh Tom Calicchio and uh you know Thomas Keller, and then there were just average Joes like me, and just people from New York to California and everywhere in between uh as a part of this group.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: And um someone asked, and maybe it seems like it was the first meeting.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody said, if you know a senator or representative, you know, let us know.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm I told the person right there, I said, Well, I'm I'm friends with you know Senator Roger Wicker, who was at the time chairman of the Commerce Committee.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: And this guy texted me, hey, you're my new best friend, or kind of thing.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so his name was Harry Root, and uh he's a wine broker out of uh Charleston, South Carolina.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so he and I uh started meeting with Wicker's staff, and um first with Michelle, his chief of staff, and then with uh Rob Murray, who's his legislative director.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, it's it's one of the proud Mississippi moments for me.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Senator Wicker in the spring of last year, early into this thing, uh, authored uh what it what was came to be called as the Restaurants Act in the Senate.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: There was a congressman uh over in the House, uh Earl Blumenhauer from Oregon, who introduced the bill in the House and it passed the House eventually, and then Senator Wicker introduced the bill in the Senate.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, our home state senator basically drew up this thing that ended up uh a couple of weeks ago saving the restaurant industry.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was really, really proud moment.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: I loved working with him and Rob Murray.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, his ledge lave director is uh is a guy from the Gulf Coast, based St.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Louis.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and uh he was just a lion in this process.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, independent restaurant coalition was formed on, I think formally on March 18th, I joined, I was a founding member on the 19th.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: And just to give you kind of an idea of, I mean, it's rare that that any group, you know, after a, you know, sometimes people go a decade trying to get something passed.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: And within a year, we had a uh$28.6 billion bill passed that will uh end up saving uh independent restaurants.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not chain restaurants or franchisees, it's you know, it's independent restaurants.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, a lot of the chains and franchisees have a lot of access to capital and other things.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: And and we had uh over within a matter of months, you know, we had lost uh 15 percent of all of our restaurants.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: So there are uh 500,000 independent restaurants in America uh which employ about 11 million people, but there are also 5 million ancillary jobs that are farmers, fishermen, and and people like that.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, there were a lot of people kind of counting on us, and and uh by December, uh the restaurant industry, which actually is the number two industry in America, there's healthcare and then there's restaurants.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: And uh we had lost 2.4 million jobs.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was it was brutal.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: 2020 was brutal, but now uh this legislation got passed, and and the IRC, then the independent restaurant coalition.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, within two months, we were sitting in the White House uh having a meeting.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, you had there were there were about nine restaurateurs there.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh two were from the National Restaurant Association, which has been around over a hundred years, three were from the IRC, which had been around about eight weeks at that time.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, we're we're just talking about the plight and uh plight of the independent restaurants and and what the future looked like.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, I give a ton of credit to Senator Wicker for for writing that original bill.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: The bill that passed a few weeks ago, I think it had no Republican uh voted on that, but it, you know, the thing is it's it's a hundred percent based on what was written in the previous uh Congress.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and so, you know, he uh I was on a I was on a press conference with uh Senator uh Schumer, where he thanked Senator Wicker for authoring that original legislation that basically verbatim went into this thing that passed just a few weeks ago.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's that's great.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then that's just the great thing about Mississippi.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it it feels like everybody here, there's some degree of connection and accessibility.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if we need to get something done, then you know it's a phone call away sometimes.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's really great.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, yeah, well, Robert, uh, I've got I got one of your books one time.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I remember giving it to my mom for Christmas with you and uh with you and Wyatt Waters.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about that friendship, how that started, and uh it's really, really, really cool.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um, yeah, I've written 11 books and um four of those are with uh watercolor artists, uh my good friend Wyatt Waters.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um it really uh is most things in my life, I've kind of just fallen backwards into into into most things, I guess just been open to opportunity or whatever.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: But um, we had a customer.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: I had started writing a weekly column uh in newspapers in the late 90s.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I still write it today, I've never missed a week.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: I write about a thousand words a week, uh, 52 weeks a year, never missed a week.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was it was in its infancy then in the late 90s, early, maybe it's 2000, 2001.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a customer at the restaurants, uh Frances Carnes is her name, and she uh she ran the gifted studies program over at Southern Mist, and she was in every day.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and she she was one, she's one of these people that are always just energetic and you know, you ought to do this, you ought to do that, you ought to do.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: And she got on a kick, and and she every time I'd see her, every day, you know, Robert, you need to write a cookbook.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: You need to do a cookbook.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Francis, I don't have time, you know.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Next time I'd see her, Robert, what's up with your cookbook?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: When are you gonna write a cookbook?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this went on and on for weeks.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I begged out every time.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, she was sitting uh at table three in the purple pear cafe one day.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: She called me over to the table, said Robert, sit down.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: This is so-and-so.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: He's with this publishing company.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Tell him about your cookbook.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, well, I didn't have, you know, I didn't even thought about having a cookbook.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: So trying to think quickly on my feet, I said, Well, if I were to do a cookbook, I would have uh recipes I've developed here at the restaurant over the years.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: I would have um stories like in my column about the south and food in the south and things like that.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I would have watercolors by Wyatt Waters.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: And without missing a beat, this guy says, Well, if you get White Waters, you got a book deal.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is I didn't know White Waters at the time.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: I just had um, he had two books out.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and one book uh was called Painting Home, where he went all over Mississippi painting different towns and cities.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: And when he came to Hattiesburg, uh most people would paint the typical thing, maybe the administration building uh at USM with the dome, you know, it's a very iconic structure, something like that.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: When Wyatt came to town, he painted the um the California sandwich shop.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: This is a downtown little cafe, and he painted the old Beverly Drive-in south of town, which were two way better choices.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I went, as soon as I saw that book, I said, I get this, I get this guy.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so the next day I just uh drove up to Clinton to the White Waters Gallery, which he had just opened, uh, introduced myself and I said, Hey, man, I got an idea for a coffee table cookbook, and I and I got this guy who who wants to publish it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it'll have your art, my recipes, and some stories, and it'd be kind of a coffee table book.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, we probably talked about the book for 15 minutes, and then we talked about the Beatles for the next two hours.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the book came out, it was like way beyond anybody's dreams.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: This thing just sold like crazy, you know, and sold out within a matter of weeks, and second edition sold out in a bit.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: So it was one of those things that just, you know, and uh the friendship started there, and then we just kind of we didn't even plan on a second book.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: He did another project or two, I did another project or two, we did a second book, and then 2011, I took my wife and two kids.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, my daughter was 14, my son was 10, and we flew to Sweden and bought a Volvo and spent the next six months uh driving all through Europe and to 17 countries and 72 cities on two continents.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And um the the time, the 10 weeks we were in Italy, I flew wide over.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And and he and I, I'm talking about from the southernmost tip of Sicily to the Alps.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: He painted and I ate basically, and so we did a book, um, we did a book uh an Italian cookbook, then another Mississippi cookbook.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's been a blast working with him.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's one of my best friends.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Did I see something?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Are you you do tours also like food tours in in Europe?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that came again.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, just I never planned on that, but what happened is um while we were in Italy, the trip I was just talking about, um, I was writing columns every week and sending them back and why it was painting and putting it up on social media.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we were on the book tour for that book, traveling around doing book signings, you know, people kept saying, Man, I wish you'd take me to that restaurant you wrote about, or I'd love to go to that place you painted.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we kept hearing that, and you think it's just people making conversation, you know, while you sign their book or something.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: But we kept hearing it, kept hearing it, kept hearing it.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so I called White up one day.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Man, I think people want us to take them to Italy.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: I said, You want to do this?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, Yeah.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we figured, you know, we'll do it once.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: And um, so I made a Facebook post.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: Anybody wants to go to it?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: We'd love to take you and show you kind of the behind-the-scenes stuff we saw and learned, and and that thing filled up in like an afternoon or something.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we said, Okay, there's a waiting list.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we'll do it twice.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: Then the waiting list got a waiting list, and it just and then the people we took to Tuscany said, Hey, where are we going next?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we did Venice, Malonia, Milan.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Then they said, Hey, where are we going next?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and so we did Roma Moff in Naples last March 12th.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: We were scheduled to go to Spain.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, he and I have a TV show too called Palette to Palette, and we were gonna film season six of the TV show in Spain.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the interesting thing about that is that of the 25 people that were traveling, we had to cancel because of the you know pandemic, but of the 25 people that were traveling with us, only two hadn't traveled with us before, and probably more than half the group, it was gonna be their fifth trip with us.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: So this this you know, this whole second or third career or whatever just kind of I love it though.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: I love traveling um uh over there and and doing stuff.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: We've we've had to reschedule these groups about twice, but we're going back this fall, so we're feel good about going this fall.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I saw the one of the recent things you wrote that you're a carboholic and yeast rolls are one of your favorite things.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is there a favorite spot in Italy where just the bread is just off the charts or is it all good?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so uh we stay in a little town right outside of a small town called Barberino Valdelsa.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it's in the valley of the Elsa River.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's the the beautiful part about it, it's a small little town.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's next to another town called Tavernelli.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's I mean, it's remote.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: There are no tourists whatsoever.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's a small little town.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: We become friends with with a lot of the people in the town.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, the villa we stay in to the end of a dirt road with just nothing, nothing but 30 miles to the west of olives and grapes, and it's just beautiful rolling hills.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: But the great part about it is within 30 minutes we could be in the city center of Florence, 30 minutes we could be in the city or center of Siena.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's centrally located in the Chianti region.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: And um, the thing about their bread, which uh uh one thing, Tuscans don't salt their bread, they don't use salt in their bread at all.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and I'm a I'm a fan, you know, bread needs salt, in my opinion.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: But what I do is, you know, I do, and this is an American thing, you know, a lot of Italian restaurants, and at our Italian restaurant, we give you a little olive oil at the first of the meal, and you put it on a plate and you dip your bread in it.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: Really, if you know, I I do that over there, but it's a very American thing.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Most of them don't do that, they don't eat that much bread.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I can make a meal just out of the bread and the olive oil because the olive oil is so good.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: The absolute the best olive oil in the world comes out of Tuscany.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the Italy doesn't produce, uh, despite what people probably think, Italy doesn't produce a lot of olive oil.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: Way, way, way more olive oil comes out of Spain.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: But the stuff that comes out of Tuscany, it's got a little bite to it.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's it's strong, it's deep, deep neon green.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and I'll add a little salt to the olive oil and then dip my bread in there.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, really any place um in Tuscany that's that's serving bread, um, there's there's a little small uh section of Tuscany where they there's a cooperative of 25 olive growers and they produce this olive oil called laudamio, and the standards are really, really, really high on that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, my perfect meal really is just a little bread and some laudemio olive oil and um salt, you know, a little bit of salt.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the the doctor that I bought my practice from here in Memphis, his son lives in Italy.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he worked for FedEx doing he helped people kind of acclimate to Europe um that moved over there from America, and he lives on an olive farm somewhere, and he's converted it into this bed and breakfast uh Airbnb called Matato.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's in kind of northern Italy.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they they have an olive harvest there every year, and I've been trying to get some of that olive oil sent back to me, but it's just it's hard to do.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe one day when uh if you email me Robert at RobertSt John.com, I will uh I'll hook you up with some of this laudamio where to get it, and it's it's excellent.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: There's a count who owns a owns a castle over there, he has a lot of lot of olive trees, and we've had him, we've hosted him here at the restaurant uh a couple of years ago, and we can get his olive oil, it's it's just off the chain.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's really good.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, well, Robert, talk a little bit about uh your restaurants in Hattiesburg.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what, I was down in Hattiesburg a few years ago and and uh I just stumbled across, I had not heard about it, and I uh came up and and uh saw Ed's burger joint.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: I went in there, and I'll tell you what, uh the the moment I walked in there, I felt like I was like it felt like it was like a tourist attraction outside of the where place where the kid I love the the design of it.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: It just it was really cool.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like I like I said, I felt like I was on vacation.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about how that came about and who's Ed.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: I wondered who Ed was.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um So here's the thing.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: My first restaurant I opened was White Tablecloth restaurant called Purple Parrot.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: I opened it in 1987.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: And when I opened the Italian restaurant in 2011, without me marketing or advertising, everybody said, Oh, Robert's opening a fine dining Italian restaurant.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't fine dining Italian, it was casual Italian.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't want people to think because I mean you knock out a lot of the market if everybody thinks it's a fancy restaurant.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: So we took care of that real quick.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: So when we started working on the burger concept, the word got out, oh Robert's opening up a gourmet burger place, you know, and it's not, it's just blue-collar, just real.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so to combat that, I thought, you know, I just need a good blue-collar name.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Ed, you know, any any place called Ed's couldn't be too fancy or whatever.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so then a burger joint obviously tells you that it's not some, you know, gourmet burger place.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we we put a lot of stock in, you know, fresh beef and uh real ingredients.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: We make everything from scratch at all our restaurants.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: But um, yeah, the design of that that you were speaking to, uh, we worked with Wearburner uh out of Jackson, and uh they they they're great.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're working, still working with them.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're doing a project I'm doing now, and and we've got a thing going on in Fondrin up in Jackson as well.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they're the ones that did the new duty noble field.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: Great talented guys.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: And um I told them, I said, I want a beach bar, but I don't want anything nautical there.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so we kind of went from that premise.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why when you're talking about, you know, you felt like you're on vacation or something, that that makes me feel good because that's that's what I want.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's what you know we set out to do.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Is you know, that's the thing about a beach bar, is you, you know, families go in there and you you can have you know college kids at one table drinking beer, and you got families over here, you know, playing, you know, whatever giant jingle or ping pong or you know, um cornhole.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: There are all sorts of games out there, and and so it's really a family-oriented place, and it's fun to do.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then after that, the next restaurant I opened was a place uh called the Midtowner, which is breakfast and lunch.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and sure enough, people started while we were getting the bill, they said, Oh, he's opening a brunch place.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, No, it's not brunch, you know, it's just breakfast, just good solid eggs and bacon and pancakes and sausage from Heinz Grocery north of Yazoo City and stuff like that.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then you have another place I've seen on social media, you're you know it looks like you're adding on to the patio, and there's a there's a big tree in the back.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about that.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so what that is, uh, and it's it's funny today, which is what March 30th.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: I was looking back, uh looking for a photograph earlier today, and I looked at March 30th, 2020 last year, and actually uh it's the day I came up with that concept, was was 365 days ago.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: And and what it was Purple Parrot, my first restaurant that opened at 87 and branched the cocktail bar next to it, pandemic hit, and it was pretty obvious that that those business models weren't gonna work going forward.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I had been working on a Tex-Mex concept that I was gonna do on another piece of property here in town, and um with a large outdoor component to it.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And when I decided to close the parent and everything, I said, you know what, it may it makes more sense.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't I see if I can bring the Tex-Mex concept to this property, and we'll just go out in the parking lot and build this big patio area?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: And and so, yeah, so one year ago today, I was standing, all the restaurants were closed, the town was shut down.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, my family was at home.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: My son was home from Mississippi State, he was a freshman at the time.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: My daughter was there, you know, every every town was quiet.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I was standing out in the parking lot, kind of, you know, looking at can we could do this here and do this here?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I went and sketched it uh real quick.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and so today, right now, it's uh it's in process.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's we've got uh this patio uh the restaurant is open.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: El Rayo on the inside opened uh first of January.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the patio will open here by the end of May, so it's gonna be really, really cool.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm excited about it.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's got an outdoor bar and a rooftop bar.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: We've got an airstream like taco truck out there with I mean, it's gonna be really cool.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of plants, a lot of vegetation, very lush.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Nice, yeah.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you mentioned your son at Mississippi State.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: John Clark, didn't you say that y'all were maybe in the same movie together?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um in the same what I was in John Schneider's movie, uh Four to Go.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Me and John have been really good friends for the years.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Matter of fact, we had him on the podcast a few episodes ago, and I and I put two and two together, and your son Harrison was in that movie.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Am I correct?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, that's right.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was uh he was a sheriff's deputy.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I played his inbate.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: We were uh we were in at a prison.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: I remember seeing him.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us how you how'd you meet John, how'd that come about?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's a he's a great friend of mine.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: So we were uh well, I'm I'm a huge movie fan, and uh, we go to the movies all the time.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: And my wife and um and daughter, um I'm sorry, my wife and son and I were going to a movie one night, and I had heard that uh John Schneider was in town.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: He there was some kind of touring thing he was doing, going from theater to theater.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: And and we walk in the movie theater, and he's standing in the lobby, and he went, There he is.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and people in the restaurants had had been telling me that John Schneider had been coming in or whatever.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, There it is.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the three of us were walking in.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I thought I thought he was talking about me, actually.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: And he wasn't, he was talking about my son, who looks everybody had been telling him, there's this kid, you know, the guy that owns those restaurants, his son looks like you did when you were Bo Duke or whatever.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: And he did, you know, Harrison has some blonde curly hair, and he was tall and kind of statuesque, and and and so Harrison had no idea who my son had no idea what the Dukes of Hazard was or anything.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so Schneider's sitting there going through his phone, he said, Well, I mean, he was trying to find a picture from like 1979 or whatever, and he'd go, Oh no, well, that's what you're gonna look like when you're 30.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then he'll go, he was doing this, and he finally found one, and we we got a picture in that moment, and then just um kind of out of the blue, I got a well, I think we went to dinner with John and and his wife, and um uh a week or two after that, and just visited, and I got a text that that he asked Harrison to be in that movie, and and Harrison was still in high school, and so I went down with him, and we I think we were on that shoot for a couple of days, and uh it was it was it was a good experience for him.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't ask you to be in the movie though?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: No, I didn't I didn't make the cut.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: I got a face made for radio, man.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh well Robert, we're what we're doing here um with this podcast, we're really we're we're all about Mississippi, and you're you're a perfect, perfect candidate for this for us.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: We thought about you immediately because you're you have such good Mississippi ties and and you're just well known throughout the state.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what we're doing is we're we're we we have these glasses and uh sunglasses that Brandon has come up with, and and we're using it as a way to uh promote cystic fibrosis because I I am 40 years old now, I just turned 40 and I've dealt with CF my whole life.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a battle I deal with every day.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh and Brandon has has come up with this idea to to make glasses and sunglasses and and get and it's kind of a fundraiser deal, but we have the proceeds go to cystic fibrosis, and uh and so we we're incorporating small towns and with all the glasses are named after towns in Mississippi.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there's uh if you go to the website, there's a description description under each town, and just trying to make it uh a way to get Mississippians involved and and promote awareness of cystic fibrosis and what it is, and uh and wear glasses and look good.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so tell us a little bit about the Hattiesburg area that if someone who's listening to this is not familiar with Hattiesburg, that you might be able to tell.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and what a great cause, by the way.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: My um my son, um his good friend uh is a guy named Jake Summerall, uh, who they played football together and he has uh cystic, he and his brother both have cystic fibrosis.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: Both of them play football.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I know there were there were a lot of things those guys went through on a daily basis, you know, just to, you know, just kind of get up and get to school, much less go through football practice and wind sprints and and things like that.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm uh it's that's something that's a cause that's near and dear to me.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: So great job uh for to both of y'all for for doing that.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: Are there any sunglasses or glasses named after Hattysburg at all?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think we do have a pair.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty sure we do.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: All right, I'll I'll buy a pair of those whether we as long as they're not ladies, but hell, I may buy them if they're ladies anyway and just wear them.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, so I was born and I'm about a sixth or seventh uh generation uh pine belt citizen here.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: My um my great-grandfather was a guy named George Holliman, was the first sheriff of Lamar County, and his grandfather came to this area uh around Foxworth, Mississippi.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: And my great-grandmother was named Stella I own Foxworth.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: So this is kind of my this and Brooksville, uh, which uh the guy behind me on the bottom there uh is a guy named Thomas St.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: John.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: He was the oldest of seven brothers uh from Brooksville.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: He was born in 1888.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: There were seven St.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: John brothers.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh their dad, my great-grandfather, owned the general store there in Brooksville.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and so you know, uh my mom met my dad, and they uh they they moved back home to Hattiesburg.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I was born and raised here.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh Hattiesburg is a cool place.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's it's for a long time, it was one of the, especially in the restaurant business, one of the best kept secrets uh in the state, restaurant-wise.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 2008, uh Restaurant Business Magazine, uh, which is one of the trade magazines, published the top 500 ranked places uh to open a restaurant in America.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's from you know, Manhattan to Honolulu.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: And like number 11 on the maybe it was number eight on the list or something was Hattiesburg.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just, you know, then this it was a terrible day for me, by the way.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, oh no, the secret's out.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then the next year we moved to like number 21 or something.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: But um, a couple of years later, a lot of the national change started piling in.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, it's we're the beautiful thing about Hattiesburg, which is called the Hub City.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's the hub city for a reason.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and back when train travel was it, whether it was shipping or just passenger travel, Hattiesburg was a hub uh between uh Mobile, uh Gulfport, New Orleans, Natchez, Jackson, Birmingham, and all those trains came through Hattiesburg.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: At one point in time, there were 35 trains a day that came through town.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so this town was founded on uh rail travel and pine hardwood.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're in the heart of what's called the piney woods.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we're an hour due north of the Gulf of Mexico.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so the beautiful thing about me as a restaurateur is that we've got this great bounty of seafood from uh from which to choose.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I, you know, I told you earlier, I think when we started, my dad died when I was young.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: My mom, you know, knew she couldn't play football with my brother and me, and she she wasn't gonna hunt, but she figured she could learn how to fish.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so she bought a small fish camp down uh up on the Pascagoula River on that end of the coast, and we spent our summers down there, you know, fishing and crabbing and shrimping and doing all those great things.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: And and my love of seafood really came from there.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so here in Hattiesburg, you know, being only an hour away, we get six shipments of fresh seafood a week.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: We go through about uh at Crescent City Grill, we go through about eight tons of fillet fin fish a year and about 16 tons of shrimp.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we we do a lot of seafood, but also uh we're an hour and a half north uh east of New Orleans.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of the Creole uh flavor and uh sensibility kind of kind of comes into this area.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a little bit of a kind of a gumbo-like melting pot in this part of the state.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: You get kind of that, you know, the that coast culture and Louisiana culture, and then just kind of South Mississippi and all of that comes together, and you've got the university here, and so uh, you know, it becomes a progressive little uh small southern town that um has world-class medical facilities, and you know, that's one thing uh about the economy here today.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's still based in pine timber a good bit, but it's really health care and education.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: And the good thing about health care and education, those are you know two of the most recession proof uh industries out there, and um, you know, uh Hattiesburg is uh doing well.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: We we took a beating at uh Katrina, you know, being an hour no one.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: The thing about, you know, we didn't get water, but we were having 110 mile an hour winds, and you know, the taproot of the southern yellow pine doesn't hold up to a 110 mile an hour wind.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: So we lost about 40 percent of our forest land and uh trees, uh, half of which felt like they were in my yard.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: But we're uh you know, it's a this place is resilient.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: We bounce back pretty quick, and you know, uh I remember just talking about Mississippi.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, Morgan Freeman was once asked, you know, the the reporter said, you know, you could live anywhere in the world.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you live in Mississippi?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: And he said he replied pretty quickly, he said, I live in Mississippi because I could live anywhere in the world.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then he followed that up later with hell, I'd live here for the food alone.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, it's good enough for Morgan, it's good enough for me.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: I love it here, wouldn't be anywhere else.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the only other question I have is so we were digging through some of my grandmother's old stuff a long time ago.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that they used to live down there, and one of her recipes, it was a Forest General, uh, some kind of cake that they made down there.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I still have that recipe.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh is there something about the hospital that has good good food there, or is that just you know, uh uh I was born in that hospital in 1961.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: I don't ever remember the food being uh anything to write home about.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, maybe it was one of the like hospital auxiliary ladies or something that that uh knew how to be make that cake sometime and uh check it out.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Going to give me a call.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'll you don't you don't have to twist my arm to eat cake, man.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'll uh I'll give you my opinion on it.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm happy to do that.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we really appreciate you coming on, Robert.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: This has been great.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just a just another great voice of Mississippi on here that I think everybody's gonna really enjoy listening to.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we really appreciate it.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me, and and again, thanks for what you guys are doing for cystic fibrosis.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and John, uh be praying for you.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're a tough guy, man.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's good to see you and good to be here.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and um, what a great thing y'all are doing.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Happy to be a part of it.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right, well, I'm gonna close this out.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we appreciate it.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, y'all.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Robert.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: Bye.