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Transcript

"Extra Table" with Robert St. John · The Weight

• 0:01
  Chris McAlilly: Hi. I'm Chris McAlilly.
• 0:02
  Eddie Rester: And I'm Eddie Rester. Welcome to The Weight.
• 0:04
  Eddie Rester: Today, our guest is Robert St.
• 0:04
  Eddie Rester: John. Robert St John is in the restaurant business in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but he's more than the owner of a restaurant. He has opened a string of restaurants. He's an entrepreneur. He's someone who cares deeply about the community, has started, started a nonprofit called Extra Table, and so just a great time to talk with him today about his approach to life, his recovery journey, and how he addresses failures and how he sees the state of Mississippi. So a great conversation today.
• 0:35
  Eddie Rester: Chris, as he talked about stepping in, originally, I thought about you when you tell the story that summer when you were working in a restaurant up in the national park and ended up cooking when you didn't know how to cook, but you didn't take the road that Robert St. John took.
• 0:50
  Chris McAlilly: No, it was a different road, and that was my one soiree into the kitchen, and everybody was glad when I left the kitchen. But yeah, the restaurant business is interesting. I've had friends that have started restaurants, that continue in restaurants, and it's just, it's a really interesting balance of creativity and kind of entrepreneurship, but also, like, you got to be good at business. You've got to manage things well for it to go well, and you've got to hit the moment correctly. You've got to meet a need within a market. All of those things have to happen just to have one successful restaurant. What's amazing about him is that he's been able to do it again and again and to, you know, ultimately create new opportunities for people to experience culture in south Mississippi, but also for his team members to have opportunities to grow in their life and their career.
• 1:46
  Chris McAlilly: I was fascinated by this dichotomy between food as something that's life giving and flourishing and something that we, you know, build memories around and the way in which it can also go sideways or bad. It can be one of the dimensions of our life that causes the most pain and the most self destruction. But I was, I've just had such a... It's such a great conversation, because you hear in his story the ways in which one person has navigated that and I think for the most part, well. He doesn't hold his failures too heavily, and he sees them as moments for him to grow. And the hat that he was wearing said "onward," which is kind of this personal mission statement of his, and keep going is kind of his mentality. And yeah, it was a great, great conversation. What's your takeaway?
• 2:35
  Eddie Rester: Yep, well, you know, I've known him since 1997 and what I've loved about his story is that he's continued to grow and change, mature in some ways. He's developed new perspectives on life and family and work, and he takes these great trips with people now so they can experience the world of food as well. So just a joy to get to talk to him today after knowing him for almost 30 years.
• 3:00
  Eddie Rester: And I think it's just an inspiration to say where you are now is not where you need to be in 10 years, and there's this journey that you can go on if you allow yourself to have experience of the successes, learn from the failures, and take advantage of the opportunities that get presented in front of you.
• 3:19
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, this is a good conversation if you're a leader of any, you know, kind of in any field, you can learn and gain inspiration from Robert. If you're kind of navigating trying to create team culture or trying to figure out, all right, how do I balance, like actually having to get things done, with my desire for creativity. All of that's in this conversation. And if you have somebody struggling with recovery, it will help. It will help them in their journey, too.
• 3:45
  Eddie Rester: So good stuff. Be sure to share this one with folks, particularly around recovery, or just friends who need some encouragement. I think this will be one that encourages them.
• 3:57
  Chris McAlilly: [INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
• 4:12
  Eddie Rester: As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy ,and the marketplace, we all carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
• 4:23
  Chris McAlilly: But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
• 4:33
  Eddie Rester: That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
• 4:42
  Chris McAlilly: Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition, and responsiveness to a changing world.
• 4:51
  Eddie Rester: So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a nonprofit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] We're here today with Robert St.
• 5:07
  Eddie Rester: John. Robert, welcome to The Weight.
• 5:10
  Robert St. John: Good to be here, guys. Happy, happy to be here.
• 5:13
  Eddie Rester: You know, I was just saying before we hit the record button, you know, I've known you, known of you since 1997 which is crazy to think about.
• 5:24
  Robert St. John: You were, like, in elementary school back then, No, my daughter would have been... My daughter Eddie.
• 5:26
  Eddie Rester: Something like that. Yeah, just, I was just out of seminary, green, and you were just a young restauranteur at that time. I think you had Crescent City and Purple Parrot was born in '97 so.
• 5:37
  Eddie Rester: back then. And so it's been amazing to watch you. And I think you didn't have any kids back then either.
• 5:42
  Eddie Rester: Okay.
• 5:44
  Robert St. John: '97, but I remember the very first contemporary service at any church I ever attended was when you were upstairs in the building. It used to be Michelle's Restaurant. It's now the Keg and Barrel.
• 6:02
  Eddie Rester: Yep, yeah.
• 6:03
  Robert St. John: And I thought, Man, this is so cool. We went for several meetings, and then I went, I'm a Methodist, member of Main Street Methodist down the street from where you were at Parkway, and tried to get a service. It took us a long time to get that started, but you were the spark there, Eddie.
• 6:24
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, well, thank you.
• 6:26
  Robert St. John: And I still go to our contemporary service
• 6:28
  Eddie Rester: Excellent. Well, tell Todd we said, hello down today.
• 6:32
  Eddie Rester: there. Yeah. So one of the reasons we wanted to talk with you is just, for me, watching you over the last almost three decades now, just this great journey of writing and business and helping the community in certain ways. And so help us understand just a little bit how you got into the restaurant world. It's very different from The Bear, right?
• 6:55
  Robert St. John: Oh, well, sometimes, sometimes a little bit, sometimes it's that hectic with a lot less cussing.
• 7:02
  Eddie Rester: Yeah.
• 7:03
  Robert St. John: We, so my dad died when I was six, and my mom was a public school art teacher.
• 7:08
  Robert St. John: She raised my brother and me up on a public school art teacher salary, so we didn't have any money. And so if I was going to do anything, and, you know, go out and have anything to spend, I needed a job. So, you know, I started working at 12 and mowing yards. And then I was a janitor at my school there for a little while, and ended up, I love music. And so in about, I think it was about '76. I was 15, I started working as a disc jockey at a local radio station. Loved it, and worked about 40 hours a week all through high school, and when it came time to go to college, I don't know what I wanted to do, no calling and no real mission in life. I was 17, Actually, that's okay by Chris.
• 7:58
  Robert St. John: went off to Mississippi State.
• 8:03
  Robert St. John: Okay, all right, good. And just majoring in communications, but really, what I mainly did was just party too much, and I wasn't serious about school. I was aimless. Sometime during that time, probably developed a pretty serious alcohol, drug addiction, and after about two years, Mississippi State decided that they no longer needed my services in Starkville, Mississippi, so I flunked out of college. I moved back to Hattiesburg. I was a little embarrassed. All my friends were doing well and getting through college pretty easily. I needed a job, and there were two ladies who were opening a delicatessen about a block from where I'm sitting in my office right now.
• 8:50
  Robert St. John: They knew nothing about the restaurant business, which is evident because they hired me as a 19-year-old college dropout, as the manager.
• 8:59
  Robert St. John: I had no idea what I was doing, but it was... I feel like it was the first shift of the first day, but it was probably sometime in the first week. I was like, This is it. This is exactly what, not what I want to do, but this is what I'm supposed to do. I mean, I just had that feeling right off. And at that point, at 19, I knew I want to open a restaurant one day. And I got tunnel vision, and I was totally focused on it.
• 9:28
  Robert St. John: And the problem was, this alcoholism and drug addiction was still there. I mean, I'd gone from drinking a Miller pony at 14 to sticking needles in my arms at 19. That was pretty And a couple of years after that, you know, I couldn't hardcore.
• 9:43
  Robert St. John: really hold a job. I was... May 25, 1983 at that point, basically homeless or living in a car, except for a loving grandmother who took me in. If you would have been on Forth Street in Hattiesburg at about 2am that night, you would have seen me in a car driving 90 miles an hour with my lights off, and three police cars behind me with their blue lights on. And I ended up, obviously in jail with a DUI. The next day, I ended up in a treatment center.
• 10:18
  Robert St. John: And you know, really, my life kind of started then.
• 10:25
  Robert St. John: I ended up in a halfway house in Omaha, Nebraska, where, really is where I really started grasping recovery and starting to develop a spiritual program.
• 10:38
  Robert St. John: And, you know, drinking had been such a big part of my life. And just really, everybody I knew drank, my mom, all her friends.
• 10:48
  Robert St. John: It was just the way it was. And so, you know, from my earliest memory, really was my parents having a cocktail party, and I was in bed, and people were having fun, and so that was just going to be a part of my life.
• 11:03
  Robert St. John: And I couldn't imagine life without it. "How do you have fun?" was my thought. And the truth is, the fun had been over a long time when I ended up in treatment.
• 11:15
  Robert St. John: And so, you know, I ended up coming back to Hattiesburg, plugging into a 12 Step program that I just left a meeting earlier, a few minutes ago. So I still go after 40, what is it, 42 years now. And so that's how I ended up. I came back. I went to Southern Miss, got a degree in Hospitality Management and opened the first restaurant December 27, 1987. Been blowing and going ever since.
• 11:46
  Chris McAlilly: One of the things that I see in friends of mine who've either started restaurants and been successful, started restaurants and it's kind of been a flash in the pan and then they move on to other things, is you kind of have two sides of folks that go into it.
• 12:00
  Chris McAlilly: One, there's kind of this creative, you know, lover of food, or lover of kind of entrepreneurship on the one hand, and then for it to be sustained through time, there is this kind of business management dimension. And those things are always maybe in a little bit of a little bit of a tension or a little bit of a balance. And the best restauranteurs that I know are pretty good at both sides of For you, you mentioned that moment when you had tunnel it.
• 12:31
  Chris McAlilly: vision. You knew I know what I want to do. I know what I'm supposed to do. I want to open a restaurant. Just take us back to that moment again, and talk what was going on at that moment for you.
• 12:45
  Robert St. John: Why it connected with me so much?
• 12:47
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah.
• 12:48
  Robert St. John: At that first job, there was something about the energy and the excitement of it. I was dealing with people.
• 12:56
  Robert St. John: There were peaks and valleys.
• 12:56
  Robert St. John: There was rush. It was just exciting. And it was, you know, there's something that I really can't describe. I need to work through it sometime. But it was just a connection that, I mean, truly, this sounds a little corny, but I feel like, you know, I found what I was made to do, what I was born to do. It was just the perfect fit. And to, really to address earlier what you were talking about in the restaurant business is, you know, bankers hate the restaurant business, and it's because the failure rate. Like 90% are closed before five years. But if you work through that, and you think about that, I mean, there's really not a lot of businesses you can get into that...
• 13:50
  Robert St. John: Here's what happens. A guy cooks a good steak in his backyard, and all his buddies say, "Oh, man, Joe, that's the best steak I've ever had. You ought to open up a restaurant." And Joe thinks, "Yeah, man." You know,"I see it on TV. Looks glamorous," you know, "I watch the Food Network. How hard can it be?"
• 14:06
  Eddie Rester: How hard can it be? Yeah.
• 14:07
  Robert St. John: "I cook a good steak." And so Joe cashes in his 401(k), borrows money from his father-in-law and his friends, and he opens up a restaurant, and he realizes real quick, you know, cooking a good steak is about 5% of what you need to know to open a restaurant. And you know, he had visions of sitting in the corner booth on Friday night, basking in the glow of his customers, and instead, the dish washer didn't show up, and he's taking greasy mats out at 1am in the morning.
• 14:36
  Robert St. John: And eventually people just go,"No." People like me who, like... The first four years, we fired our chef opening night, like, and so night number two, I was back there. The extent of my cooking experience at that point in time was that I had asked for and received an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas when I was six years old. That was it. But, you know, you do what you got to do. And so I had no experience whatsoever, but we were open.
• 15:05
  Robert St. John: My mom had tried to beg me,"Don't open a restaurant. You're going to ruin the family name, blah, blah, blah." And I said,"Mom..."
• 15:11
  Eddie Rester: That's the encouragement. Yeah.
• 15:13
  Robert St. John: Well, I had already done that. But, you know, I worked 90 hours a week, paid myself $12,000 a year before taxes, and loved every minute of it. Had I had any money, I would have paid somebody to let me do it, because I owned my own restaurant, and that's what I wanted. And it wasn't work. It was, you know, there's the old cliche, you know, if you do what you love for a living, you don't work a day in your life. I mean, that's true in my case. It's passion. And it's just... I'm in south Mississippi. I don't hunt.
• 15:48
  Robert St. John: I don't fish. I don't play golf.
• 15:48
  Robert St. John: I love restaurants. I love food, and I love travel and my family--not in that order, actually--but that's what I do.
• 15:55
  Robert St. John: So, you know.
• 16:00
  Chris McAlilly: I do think... So food, you know, I think for anyone listening, and certainly for, you know, Eddie, and I've talked about this on the podcast in some previous episodes, it's just one of those things that pulls people together. It's one of the best parts of life.
• 16:14
  Chris McAlilly: Feasting at the high, holy, sacred moments of life is what we do. But also our hunger and our passion for food is one of those things that... Food and drink as we've been talking about, can be the thing that kind of turns in on itself. It can lead to a deep, kind of self destructive behavior and things that can really mess you up, and not only mess you up, your family, the culture. "The Bear" is interesting, just this dysfunction around families and food. "The Bear" is the show on FX that's kind of popular at the time that we're recording the podcast. You know, how do you think about it? How do you think about the power of food, both positively and negatively? I mean, it's certainly a good thing that can be turned bad, it seems to me. How do you think about it?
• 17:06
  Robert St. John: Well, I think it's really the thing that connects us. Of all the things that connect us, it's one of the main ones, at least it has been in my life, from the time I was a kid having lunch at my grandmother's house after church. And those, you know, I still remember that and made an impact. If you think about it, there's really nothing more we do, unless you're a newlywed, then eat. We three times a day.
• 17:36
  Robert St. John: And I mean, it's this thing that... It's all through the Bible, you know, loaves and fishes, Last Supper. We sit And I bet, I always ask people, you know, I bet, if you go down.
• 17:47
  Robert St. John: through the best memories you have at the best times of your life, and you look deep, food somehow was connected. You were in a restaurant with friends celebrating a birthday. You were at your grandmother's house after church. You know, food is this thing that connects us, and we sit around a table and we gather, and so I think that that's a big part of it. I'm not sure if I answered your question or not. I kind of got off on a tangent.
• 18:17
  Chris McAlilly: No, I think I mean, it goes back to what you said earlier that got you into it, the energy, the people, the rush, the excitement, but you mentioned the word connection, and I do think you're right that food connects us. It's one of those things that connects us, but it can also, I think, just the other side of it is just that it can go bad, it can go sideways. Food and particularly drink can be a thing that's not only life giving and leads to flourishing and thriving, but it can be the thing that turns people in on themselves. It can be something that can destroy families. I'm in, you know, I'm a pastor in Oxford, Mississippi, and so you've got the Grove kind of at the center of the culture, which is both this wonderful, family oriented, food centric thing that happens tailgating, but also it's a source of a lot of pain for folks who find themselves in college with an alcohol or substance abuse problem, yeah, yeah. How do you think about it? Go ahead.
• 19:24
  Robert St. John: Me or Eddie?
• 19:26
  Eddie Rester: You. You, and I've got a thought on that, too. So, yeah.
• 19:29
  Robert St. John: I've been on both sides of that, you know, through addiction and the alcohol part. And, you know, with me, I'm a believer. Some people believe you're born alcoholic, or some people believe you become alcoholic over time. I don't take sides on anything. What I know is that I am one, and once you are one, they say in recovery,, you're like a man who's lost his legs.
• 19:55
  Robert St. John: You're never going to grow new ones. My brain process says alcohol differently than most people, and it develops a phenomenon of craving that once I have that first drink, boom, I just, you know, it's different.
• 20:09
  Robert St. John: It just doesn't work for me.
• 20:12
  Robert St. John: Food can be that way as well with me. So it's positive and negatives on both of them, you know. I'm not an advocate. I own two bars. I haven't had a drink in 43. I have 4,000 bottles of wine in my inventory that I've never tasted, ever. It put my kids through college, but it just doesn't work for me. And food on the other hand, I, without alcohol and drugs, I probably relied on sweets a lot more. I'm 100 pounds lighter than I was three or four years ago, and I'm healthier. I'm about to be 64 and I'm probably healthier than I've been since I was 30. And so food probably was a comfort through stress for me a lot of times. And you know...
• 21:02
  Eddie Rester: Let me... One of the things that, as I know a lot of people, particularly in Oxford, in the restaurant business and industry, and a lot of times what you see with some of the staff at restaurants is, you see addiction or alcohol abuse, drug abuse, at least in Oxford, sometimes, when I've encountered some of that. How does your recovery story, or does it help you in terms of how you deal with your staff and people and the culture that you want to build in your restaurants?
• 21:35
  Eddie Rester: drinking." "Yeah, I had a of beers," you know. "Go home."
• 21:35
  Robert St. John: Well, and yeah, the thing about the hospitality business, specifically restaurants and bars, is the hours tend to lend themselves to people who party a lot. And, you know, front of the house folks are making a good bit of cash, and then they get off and everybody hangs out. And so it's that culture, and I was part of it on that end, before I got clean and sober. Here's the thing, I think today, in 2025, when we're recording this, I think we've turned a corner a little bit. It's different than it was. I got in it and started working, I guess '81 maybe. 1981 in the restaurant, bar business is way different than 2025 and for the better.
• 22:27
  Robert St. John: Good.
• 22:29
  Robert St. John: If you look at the statistics, this generation that's coming up, that are in their 20s, are drinking less as well. It's not that we don't have problems, but I think overall, think, you know, in 1981 we didn't even know what Mothers Against Drunk Driving was. Nobody knew what a designated driver was. Back then, everybody drove, you know, after you've been drinking, you get pulled over and the would say, "You've
• 22:56
  Eddie Rester: And the age was 18.
• 22:59
  Robert St. John: Yeah, yeah. And if you looked old, like I did, you could buy it at 15. That's what I was doing. So I think what I try to do, just personally, is, you know, I try to put myself... I've never been anonymous, you know. Partly out of because when I ended up in rehab at 21 my mom was just so glad. She told everybody. And in 1983 nobody knew what that was, you know, nobody knew what rehab was. I'm not even sure Betty Ford Center had opened. So it wasn't a wasn't a thing, and so I've always been open about it.
• 23:34
  Robert St. John: It wasn't until... Do y'all know if Ole Miss has a campus recovery community up there?
• 23:41
  Chris McAlilly: It does.
• 23:42
  Eddie Rester: Huge one, yeah.
• 23:43
  Robert St. John: Great, great. I wish that would have been around, because I ended up going back to school sober. For those watching or listening, Campus Recovery Community is at universities across the south and really across the nation, pretty heavy in the south, and it's an organization on campus.
• 24:02
  Robert St. John: It's basically a fraternity or sorority for people in recovery, students in recovery. And so I was on the board here at the chapter University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.
• 24:15
  Robert St. John: We're getting started. I got the university donate a house. We're having a, maybe our first board meeting, and there was a man in there whose son had died of an overdose, and he's very vocal in the community about that.
• 24:28
  Robert St. John: And we were going around the room at the first meeting, people introducing themselves.
• 24:30
  Robert St. John: We knew each other, but I got to the point I said, Yeah, I was clean and sober. I don't know how many years at that time, he came up to me afterwards and said I didn't know you were clean and sober. What he said was, he said, you know, "maybe had my son known that, he wouldn't be dead now." And I was like, Whoa. You know, I didn't want to take on the responsibility of that. But it shook me a little bit enough to where I didn't want to just be open about my recovery, I thought maybe I should be out there a little bit.
• 25:04
  Robert St. John: And so once or twice, typically on my sobriety day, May 25, I'll get on social media and say,"This is what happened to me.
• 25:12
  Robert St. John: This is what life is like for me now. And if you're having trouble, or if you need to talk or a family member," and I put my cell phone out there, and, man, you wouldn't believe the calls I get. It's like, I wish I would have done that years ago.
• 25:29
  Robert St. John: It's, you know, people, "My son is going through this." "My husband," you know, personally,"I can't work out this in my life." You know, I get, two in the morning, and I get these calls, and I'm happy to talk with anybody. I don't know if I ever do any good, but it does good for me. It keeps me clean and sober and grounded as well.
• 25:53
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, let's push forward just a little bit, because if you had just founded a couple of really good restaurants, successful restaurants, that would have been a fine story. But you kept growing and changing. I remember you opened your Italian restaurant there in Hattiesburg, after you'd been in Italy, learning really Italian food from those who cooked Italian food in different kinds of restaurants. You didn't just keep repeating the same thing over and over. Ended up in the Fondren area in Jackson. What began, what in you said, there's more to this for me than just being okay with some great restaurants there in Hattiesburg?
• 26:35
  Robert St. John: It wasn't a money grab. It's never been about the money. And I think recovery has helped me, but I hate to keep going back to recovery.
• 26:40
  Eddie Rester: No, I think it's important.
• 26:42
  Robert St. John: I think it's a lot of my values and everything.
• 26:45
  Robert St. John: There's a lot of my life where I was very materialistic and monetary things, but a lot of it is the creative aspect. I love creating concepts. That's really what I do best, and I do it all the time. From the first time I started working in that first restaurant, you know, I would stay up till two and three in the morning, you know, coming up with concepts of different restaurants I wanted to do one day, menus and kitchen layouts and the whole thing. And so that's part of it.
• 27:16
  Robert St. John: Another part of it, a large part of it, is creating opportunities for people. I mean, if you have one restaurant and you've got all these great team members, then there's a point to where they can't advance anymore. And so I've been very... I've always had a philosophy that pigs get fat, hogs to get slaughtered.
• 27:36
  Robert St. John: And so I've given away a lot of you know, I'll open... Our Italian restaurant you were speaking about, Tabella, you know, I gave a third of it to one of my managers, who's my partner there. The Jackson, I've sold the Fondren... I've sold my interest in the Fondren restaurant, but I gave half of my interest in that to my Chief Operating Officer.
• 27:58
  Robert St. John: So I like creating opportunities for other people. You know, that's it's just fun for me.
• 28:04
  Robert St. John: We're making a big push right now in the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where we've got a restaurant opening sometime in a few months called the Downtowner, which is a version of a restaurant we have in Harrisburg called the Midtown which is breakfast, and then a kind of a meat-and-three lunch.
• 28:22
  Robert St. John: For Oxford people, it's basically Big Bad Breakfast and Ajax.
• 28:27
  Eddie Rester: Yeah.
• 28:27
  Robert St. John: In one building.
• 28:28
  Eddie Rester: In one building, yeah.
• 28:29
  Robert St. John: Yeah. So. And then we've got a couple other things going down in the Gulf Coast, and so we're creating opportunities for people working together. And, you know, I've never used a lot of scientific research data to open. I'm from here, and so I know this market well. And when I thought, you know, Hattiesburg needed a legit bakery, we opened a bakery here.
• 28:56
  Robert St. John: I thought it needed a full service breakfast place that wasn't a national chain. So I've just kind of gone on hunches.
• 29:04
  Robert St. John: Sometimes they work. You know, I've had failures over the years, and it doesn't stop me.
• 29:07
  Robert St. John: That's why this hat says onward.
• 29:12
  Robert St. John: And that started on this long trip I did with my family in 2011 and I write a newspaper column that I've done since, I guess, 26 years, 1,000 words a week, every week, never missed a week. That's 1300 and something columns, I guess 1,300,000 words over the thing.
• 29:33
  Eddie Rester: That's almost preacher work, right there.
• 29:35
  Robert St. John: Hah. Yeah.
• 29:35
  Robert St. John: Well, y'all's is much more noble and meaningful than my column.
• 29:39
  Robert St. John: But in 2011 I took my wife, and at the time, my 10-year-old son and my 14-year-old daughter, we flew to Sweden, bought a Volvo, and spent the next six months in 72 cities and 17 countries on two continents, and I still wrote the column over there. And I just started because. We were pushing through. And, you know, it was grueling sometimes, and you kind of get this bunker mentality with the family. And so I started in the column with this word "onward" every time.
• 30:12
  Robert St. John: And then when we came back, just kept doing it. And then a few years ago, that word, really, it came to light that, you know, subconsciously, that's kind of what I've done business-wise.
• 30:26
  Robert St. John: You've had failures, and it's like, I'm not going to quit. I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna keep pushing forward. And, you know, I'm not necessarily a winner.
• 30:36
  Robert St. John: Maybe I'm a loser that just never gave up.
• 30:43
  Eddie Rester: I want to push a little bit more into that, because I actually had written that down here to talk about some of your failures, because there have been some restaurants, concepts that just didn't make it. And you've shared a little bit about the attitude towards it. That first time that something didn't work.
• 30:57
  Eddie Rester: Maybe it was even a menu that didn't work at one of the restaurants. I mean, how did you flip that from being defeating or want to crawl in a hole to"Okay, let's take the next step." Because I think a lot of folks in life, that's where they struggle. They hit a wall, they put themselves out there. It doesn't work out. And they they don't feel like they can go onward. They can't figure out how to take that next step. What kind of sets you up to overcome some of those?
• 31:28
  Robert St. John: Yeah, I've never minded talking about my failures. When I speak to hospitality students in college, most of the time I talk about my failures, because that's where I've learned the most. I've never... I think the only way...
• 31:41
  Robert St. John: If you have your ego attached to it then that's when you either feel like a failure or you're worried about what other people think about it, and whatever.
• 31:51
  Robert St. John: And the people that... I don't, honestly I don't worry about that. I mean, it's not that I don't care what people think. I probably care too much about what people think in a lot of ways. I would make a terrible politician, because I just want everybody to be happy.
• 32:07
  Robert St. John: But restaurant wise, somebody, you just don't know enough about business if you would criticize somebody who put themselves out there and risked and hired people and did their best and then it just didn't work. And sometimes... Maybe it's definitely because my ego is not attached to it. Not that I don't have ego, man, I probably have a over inflated sense of self worth and a massive ego, but I don't want to attach it to my business. My worth isn't attached to the business. And so if one of them fails and they have, then I just move on.
• 32:41
  Robert St. John: But we did an Italian restaurant Jackson that was called Enzo, named after a good friend of mine in Italy. It was probably the best business deal I ever made. I mean, it was everything about the components of the deal we structured was like, man, this is great. There's no way it fails. But it was the best business deal I ever made. It was probably also the worst business decision I ever made.
• 33:07
  Robert St. John: It was post-Covid, and so it's hard to hire in Jackson, Mississippi in normal times. It was almost impossible in the years after Covid. And so my thought was, let's just... We took over a restaurant that was existing that was closing, and then we had this set bit of time to get it open and change it over just a few weeks. And so my thought was, let's just keep the people that are there, and we'll train them to our culture. We have culture that's, you know, three, four decades, almost four decades old, and it works.
• 33:50
  Robert St. John: And that was my decision, and it was the wrong decision, because what I learned real quick is you can bring people in, but they're going to bring their culture with you. There was no leader there. They had gone without a general manager for about three years, and we just never could turn the corner in that place, and just never got it right. And finally, we just said, you know, we can't. This isn't working.
• 34:15
  Robert St. John: And it didn't bother me at all, man, we took a beat. It bothered me that we couldn't execute properly is the only thing that bothered me. And we couldn't figure it out. Couldn't figure it out. We kept trying and trying and trying, and, you know what? It's just not working.
• 34:34
  Robert St. John: Let's move on.
• 34:35
  Chris McAlilly: But would you talk about your culture? Just what are the components that go into a staff culture that works that's four decades old? What are the things?
• 34:45
  Robert St. John: I would say, so culture is top down in any organization, and so it's my responsibility. Buck stops with me on culture. And so when we have lacked, when our culture I try to thank everybody all the time, and it's a genuine thing, because I'm sitting here talking to you, but while I'm talking to has taken a hit and it did, in all of them, after covid. I'm you, we have 400 and some people working in this company doing something to make the wheels turn. I learned that early on, early in that first restaurant.
• 35:58
  Robert St. John: And back in, it's probably 1988 at this point, and we started getting a lot of positive press.
• 36:07
  Robert St. John: And, you know, my ego started getting involved, and I was like, Look at what I'm doing.
• 36:10
  Robert St. John: This place, people are loving not blaming it on covid, I'm just blaming it on I was ill us, and, man, I'm awesome, and I'm doing this and I'm doing that.
• 36:19
  Robert St. John: And one day back then I was working in the kitchen, I told you, like that 90 hours a week, you know, hardcore, just restaurant dog kind of guy. And one day, as this freak thing happened. I was opening it up, and we were prepping for lunch, equipped to deal with everything we were dealing with at the and, like, one of the prep cooks called in sick because somebody had a flat tire, and then somebody else called in. Their grandmother had, you know, gotten sick for the 90th time or whatever, and then a dishwasher didn't. It was like, out of the 10 people that need to be working in the kitchen, there was me and maybe one other and it hit me right then. You know time. But culture for us is living up to our core values of what? It's not me, man. It takes a team, and it made me appreciate. It was a hard lesson.
• 37:05
  Robert St. John: This is one thing I talk to young people about a lot, and it's because I learned, I wouldn't say I learned the hard way. The times in my life where it seemed like the worst when I hospitality, quality, consistency, cleanliness and had an opportunity to lose hope, where it seemed like things were crashing down, and the worst things that could happen to me, in retrospect, and given time, those things turned out to be blessings I couldn't see at the time. You think about it, I flunked out of school, which at the time, other than my dad community, and just preaching that from day one and living it.
• 37:43
  Robert St. John: dying, yeah, it was the worst thing happened, embarrassing.
• 37:46
  Robert St. John: What got me in the restaurant business, which is where I needed to be. I don't know what I'd be doing had I not gotten in the restaurant. Two I got that DUI that night, ended up in jail, ended up in rehab. Had I not done that, I wouldn't have got clean sober.
• 38:03
  Robert St. John: And so at the time I was 21. I was just old enough to drink And not just this thing we say.
• 38:05
  Robert St. John: It's really what we believe. And when I had to stop drinking, as hard, how hardcore I was, I had resigned myself at that point in time that I wasn't gonna make it to 30, but the truth is, I probably wouldn't have made it to 25 the way I was going. So that happening, second worst thing that ever happened to me, got me clean and sober and has me here today. Um, firing our chef, opening at night after, I mean, it's a hospitality business, so that certainly you know, I had nothing, I sold a little piece of land my grandfather had left me for$25,000 that was my stake and opening that first restaurant.
• 38:38
  Robert St. John: And, you know, I've been warned, don't do this, all this stuff.
• 38:42
  Robert St. John: We fired a chef opening night.
• 38:46
  Robert St. John: Seems like one of the worst things ever, but it forced me to get back in the kitchen. And, you know, everything kind of comes first. And then I think gratitude is a huge part of that.
• 38:54
  Robert St. John: happened from there. I learned how to cook in a professional kitchen. So, you know, sometimes the things that are worse, if you can just push through, onward, keep going, they turn out to be, in time, something...
• 39:06
  Robert St. John: Mistakes, all the mistakes I made, we were talking about that earlier, especially the expensive ones, are the best lessons I've learned.
• 39:16
  Eddie Rester: You know, you talk about time in retrospect. And I think what our culture is right now, just because you show everything on social media, you get to see everyone else's success on social media. You don't want to give yourself time to see things in the rear view mirror. You don't want to give yourself time. You feel like you should always be going upward and to the right instead of what life really is, is this... You know, and maybe that's just the advantage of being older now, but you know, you don't want to think about, well, it's going to be two or three years before you can understand how good this was for you, how important that was for you.
• 39:58
  Eddie Rester: I tell a young couple all the time when doing their premarital counseling. If you go talk to somebody that's been married 40 or 50 years, and you ask them, what's the most important event in your marriage, or what are the two or three most important events in marriage, I guarantee you they're going to talk about something that didn't go right.
• 40:15
  Robert St. John: Yeah.
• 40:16
  Eddie Rester: A moment of defeat in their marriage, a moment of brokenness in their marriage, and how important that is. But we just were afraid to give ourselves time.
• 40:24
  Robert St. John: Or bringing tem back together.
• 40:26
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, exactly. So.
• 40:28
  Chris McAlilly: What about, just a quick question to jump in, if you don't mind. I think you know, Mississippi is a place where a lot of young people are leaving, going, seeking opportunities in other places, and I am so grateful for anybody who spends their life invested in the state and trying to create opportunities and culture like, literally, culture building. And restaurants are certainly part of that, and you've been a big part of that in South Mississippi. For someone who's young, who's kind of, who is ambitious, who's thinking about, all right, I could go off and do X, Y or Z thing here or there, yonder, you know. What would you say to a person like that? How would you instruct them or, kind of, what encouragement would you give them to stick around and try to make Mississippi better?
• 41:18
  Robert St. John: Number one, I love Mississippi. I mean, like, Texas, Eddie, aren't you in Texas now?
• 41:22
  Eddie Rester: I'm in Dallas, yeah.
• 41:23
  Robert St. John: So what you see Texans are the ones who are known to love and be proud of Texas. So whatever, whatever that is, I have that like 10x for Mississippi. I mean, I love this. I love Hattiesburg. I love Mississippi. What I would say to that is the place where it's needed most is where the most is where the most opportunity is.
• 41:42
  Robert St. John: And it's not being the big fish in a little pond, it's just where the opportunity is. And I think I've kind of always maybe looked at it that way.
• 41:54
  Robert St. John: One, it was just, I knew this market well. But two, I'll tell you this kind of in the macro, if I were running for governor in Mississippi--and I won't, and I never would, I don't want that job--but if I, if I was, I would talk about the opportunity we have in Mississippi with the junior college system and trades. And I read something the other day that over the next, like, three to five years or something, we're going to need 500,000 electricians, 300,000 welders for all these data centers, all this stuff, and then 100,000... I don't remember what it was.
• 42:33
  Robert St. John: In Mississippi, so I looked it up, we're like, third in the nation with a junior college system. It's California and Texas who we're behind. But you look at the population of California and Texas, massive.
• 42:45
  Robert St. John: So if you look at it by population, with 2.9 million people here, we're by far number one. The problem with our junior colleges, I believe, is that we've tried to make them colleges instead of trade schools. And what we need right now are trade schools, you know.
• 43:05
  Robert St. John: With AI and everything, people went into marketing, man, right think we've beaten ourselves up so much over now, these days, it's going to be tough for business owners like me. We can do our own stuff, all of these things that AI is about to change. It's not changing those trades, and I don't even know why I got off on that...
• 44:08
  Robert St. John: the years for our past. And the sins of our fathers, or really great, great, great grandfather, whoever you know, but that's not 2025 Mississippi at all. Even though there's probably a lot of people around the country that still view us that way, I think those of us who live here know better.
• 44:27
  Robert St. John: And I used to reel off all the... You know, I had a laundry list if I was in New York or California, wherever I was. And, you know, people, "Oh, you're from Mississippi. I'm sorry." That's the kind of stuff you hear. And for a long time I would, you know, I would reel off, well, William Faulkner, BB King, Oprah Winfrey, reel off all the stuff. And, you know, all the stats, and more African American elected officials than any place in the nation, not per capita, just period, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 44:58
  Robert St. John: And then I got to the point one day and I had an epiphany. I was like, Man, why am I trying to win this person over? You know, they may move down here. We're okay with keeping the jerks out.
• 45:11
  Robert St. John: And, you know...
• 45:15
  Eddie Rester: I remember my first time flying to, in college, I was flying somewhere up north. And the guy on the plane beside me when we found out I was from Mississippi, just made a jerk of a remark.
• 45:25
  Robert St. John: Yes.
• 45:26
  Eddie Rester: You know, and there's this perspective, but Mississippi is full of amazing people, and it exports them.
• 45:32
  Eddie Rester: That's, I think that's part of the problem right now. But you know, you remind me of a guy from, who lives in Oxford, but is from down that way, Bill Rayburn, who is bully on Mississippi and bully on what can be accomplished in the state. And I just think we need, I say "we," I'm still a Mississippian at heart, even though I'm a few hours away, a couple states over.
• 45:53
  Robert St. John: We still claim you.
• 45:54
  Eddie Rester: Thank you, Chris sometimes doesn't but thank you.
• 45:57
  Eddie Rester: Appreciate that.
• 45:58
  Chris McAlilly: No, I claim you.
• 45:58
  Chris McAlilly: Grateful for you.
• 45:59
  Eddie Rester: Just those voices that can speak to what Mississippi can be going forward. Like you say, it's the forward that matters, and you've invested a lot in that. We didn't get to talk about about Extra Table. But you've made sure, not only in your business, that you provide opportunities for people to have meaningful work and work that pays, but you've worked to make sure in our communities that people have
• 46:25
  Robert St. John: Yeah, so you know Extra Table is, and I know the food that they need to eat as well. And that's one of the things I want to thank you for.
• 46:37
  Robert St. John: we're running out of time, but thanks for bringing it up. It's a nonprofit I started back 15 years ago, I guess, and today, you know, just started with a phone call from Edward Street Fellowship Center that you know, well, Eddie, that your, our church has supplied for a long time. They were completely out of food and panicking, and called me and said, "Can you help?" And so from that grew this idea that, you know, what if every business and home had an extra table where they could feed those in need?
• 47:06
  Robert St. John: And I was really kind of skeptical America even had, Mississippi even had a hunger problem. You know, I could see maybe a third world, Central American country, having trouble. But I went on a fact finding mission, just kind of a search to these places and learned quickly it was a huge problem. Out of the 2.9 million Mississippians, over 670,000 are food insecure. Over 250,000 are kids who eat a school breakfast and a school lunch and don't eat it again until the next day.
• 47:37
  Robert St. John: Over 125,000 are seniors who right now trying to figure out, can they pay the light bill, or can they go to medication or go to the grocery store? And so, you know, we formed this thing.
• 47:50
  Robert St. John: It's grown. Right now we're in 63 food pantries across the state. We ship over 300,000 pounds of food free to all of those agencies every month, at no cost to those agencies. So it's one of those things, again, that, you know, there's something that kind of, it came to me, and I think there's something I was supposed to do, that I was just kind of a vessel that got some started.
• 48:18
  Eddie Rester: Well, thank you for starting that. And thank you... Chris, you've got?
• 48:22
  Chris McAlilly: No, I was just gonna say, I was just, I pulled up the website for Extra Table, extratable.org and just kind of flipping through it. It's, it's extraordinary. It's an amazing ministry in its own right. And, you know, I think it's one of the things that I sometimes think for folks who are young or ambitious, who are starting businesses and whatnot there can be this zero sum game mentality that sets in. I've got to focus on me and all the things that I'm doing. I can build up this thing for myself, or build wealth for myself, or whatever.
• 48:52
  Chris McAlilly: And I think, you know, an example like this, of I want to build a business, but also create opportunity for other people, and then, you know, a nonprofit on the other side, it's just not as... It's more of an infinite game mentality that, I don't know. It seems like an opportunity to help not only build for-profit businesses that do great work, but also a nonprofit that can help extend and meet some of the needs and challenges of the state. So I appreciate the example and the inspiration and the conversation. Really grateful for your time today.
• 49:27
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, thanks, Robert.
• 49:28
  Robert St. John: You guys call me anytime. Y'all keep up the good work.
• 49:31
  Eddie Rester: Excellent. I'll let you know when I'm in Hattiesburg. We'll eat a meal.
• 49:35
  Robert St. John: We'll tie the feed bags on.
• 49:37
  Eddie Rester: That's right.
• 49:38
  Chris McAlilly: There you go.
• 49:38
  Chris McAlilly: Take care.
• 49:39
  Robert St. John: Bye, guys.
• 49:40
  Eddie Rester: [OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
• 49:50
  Chris McAlilly: If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]