#1487 - Janet Zuccarini & Evan Funke

[0] And we're rolling.

[1] Janet, Evan, what's up?

[2] Joe.

[3] How are you guys?

[4] Good to see you.

[5] Good to see you.

[6] Strange times.

[7] The weirdest times ever.

[8] Yes, but Felix is still intact.

[9] The restaurants there.

[10] We were talking about restaurants that have been destroyed over the rioting and the looting and the chaos.

[11] And you guys, you got lucky.

[12] You dodged a bullet.

[13] We did.

[14] Very happy to hear that.

[15] Well, I think Abakini got a bit of warning and all of Abakini boarded up.

[16] So we boarded up.

[17] The National Guard is still there today.

[18] What the fuck?

[19] It's so strange.

[20] It doesn't make any sense.

[21] If you told me that something happened in L .A. and people were rioting, I'd be like, well, if it happened in L .A. It kind of makes sense that people are upset.

[22] And then you said, but they're smashing businesses and destroying restaurants and destroying small stores and family -owned business.

[23] I'd be like, well, wait, why?

[24] Why are they doing that?

[25] There's no rhyme or reason to this.

[26] It doesn't make any sense.

[27] I understand why people.

[28] People are pissed.

[29] Pull that fucker up there.

[30] Evan, come on.

[31] We're just talking about it.

[32] How's my level?

[33] You're good.

[34] Better?

[35] Yeah, it's, I mean, it is what it is.

[36] There's nothing we can do about it now, right?

[37] Well, but I also think there's been, you know, thousands and thousands of peaceful protesters out there.

[38] So, and the press is really not focusing on all the peaceful protests, which is our right to protest.

[39] And there's going to be, you know, a bad apple everywhere.

[40] And then you're going to get, you know, hundreds of people.

[41] people that, and I think you were saying, you know, on your last podcast, it's a bunch of young people that don't know where, yeah, where is your iPhone made?

[42] Where are you going to get your shoes made from?

[43] And they're not thinking about that.

[44] They're just thinking free running shoes.

[45] And this is fun.

[46] And we've been locked up and like, let's get out there.

[47] Yeah.

[48] They've been in their house.

[49] It's the perfect storm of craziness, right?

[50] A disease we thought it's going to kill everybody.

[51] And then, so everybody shuts down.

[52] And it turns out it doesn't really kill nearly as many people as we thought, but we still have to be shut down, and then like, when do we get to go back to work?

[53] And then all of a sudden, hey, you guys can open up.

[54] Like, you guys got no warning.

[55] No warning.

[56] No warning.

[57] I mean, I called Janet up when it happened.

[58] And I was like, what?

[59] You just, you get to open?

[60] Like, but it takes 10 days to get staff ready.

[61] That's what you said, right?

[62] Yeah, I just had a friend send me a text message.

[63] Hey, so are you open?

[64] I hear you can be open now.

[65] And I mean, it was just dropped in the news before, you know, any, we could have any time to prepare and you know we don't have the staffing you need you need we need at least 10 days to be able to open our doors that's really our biggest challenges is getting our staff back into the restaurant and feeling comfortable in the restaurant with all these new regulations and you have state regulations you have L .A. County regulations you have a city of Los Angeles regulations and each one of the documents are like novel length so I'm sitting there at home reading all three cross -referencing and we basically have to abide by the most stringent rules.

[66] So I'm like picking apart each one.

[67] Okay, trying to decipher what we can actually do.

[68] And then on top of that, we're trying to get people out of their houses because they're scared shitless to come back.

[69] Are they though?

[70] Well, the wild card is the clientele coming in.

[71] I think people are going to come back in droves.

[72] I think if you were open full capacity, you'd be fucking sold out instantly.

[73] I really don't think there's any issue at all.

[74] I think there's so much fear -mongering going on, but I think the actual attitude of people, way more people are interested in going out than are interested in being locked up for longer.

[75] Well, I think it's like different, you know, groups of people.

[76] So you have young people who want to go out and they don't care and they'll, you know, be seated at full capacity.

[77] But if you have any kind of health risks or you're older, you're not going to feel safe to go out.

[78] And, you know, the restaurant business, when you're even allowed to be seated at 100 % is a really, really difficult business.

[79] And I think the pandemic really showed the inherent weakness of this industry that we run on razor -thin profit margins.

[80] Now, we're allowed to be seated at 60%.

[81] So do we pay 60 % rent then at that point?

[82] Our costs don't go down, you know, 40%.

[83] We're still paying 100 % of our costs, 100 % of our labor, 100 % of our rent.

[84] You know, the cost of food, doesn't go down, so we're forced to become extremely creative.

[85] And there's one thing that I know about the restaurant industry where we're highly adaptable.

[86] You know, we have to kind of play within this game where we have to be unwavering on all of our standards and then be completely adaptable minute to minute from everyone's demands and everybody literally expects perfection.

[87] There's also this extreme lack of communication as to like what what the time timeline they're looking at and what will be the standards for you to be open 100 % the same thing with the comedy store the comedy store is no idea when they're going to be able to be open because restaurants are open and they're saying well aren't we kind of like a restaurant we serve food and they're like yeah but no one goes to you specifically for food even though they're sitting down you can't be open and they're like but it's not a nightclub meaning like a bar where everybody just mingles their seats like isn't that okay and they're like no we don't think so we don't know well but nobody knows but nobody knows anything you know that's what we have a complete lack of trust, you know, and everything in, you know, politics and how the pandemic has been handled and also handling the businesses, mandating, you know, overnight that we close our doors and go to zero revenue, but there's no mandates on how we operate with zero revenue, you know, moving forward, how do we, what do we say to our landlords who deserve to be paid?

[88] So, but nobody knows anything.

[89] And right now with opening, you know, the, the health department, it's a 17 -page document on how you are supposed to, you to open in a safe way.

[90] What do they tell you have to do?

[91] Oh, my aunt.

[92] Well, 17 pages.

[93] Page one.

[94] Let's start.

[95] We'll start a page one.

[96] At the very basis of it, you know, there's got to be an employee log.

[97] We have to take the temperature of all of our employees when they actually enter the premises.

[98] So we have to have a log on that.

[99] Anyone who has direct contact with customers have to wear a face mask and a face shield.

[100] A shield?

[101] 100%.

[102] And then on the.

[103] the client side, you have to wear a mask when you're not eating.

[104] So that means if you get up to go to the bathroom in the restaurant, you have to put your mask on.

[105] Oh, God.

[106] And then take it off when you get back to the table.

[107] That's so dumb.

[108] It doesn't make any sense.

[109] It doesn't make sense.

[110] And a lot of it is like completely ambiguous.

[111] Well, why would you have to wear a face mask if you already have a shield over your face?

[112] Right?

[113] Well, I think there's been some reports.

[114] I have so many questions.

[115] You can get it through your eyes.

[116] But there's been reports that you get it from touching things, and now they say you can't.

[117] I know, but they're just, you know, they're saying everything.

[118] They're saying anything.

[119] And, you know, it's really, it's on the honor system.

[120] You don't have to do anything in a restaurant.

[121] Really?

[122] They're not policing.

[123] The wording is like, consider training your employees to do this.

[124] How about consider this?

[125] Consider that.

[126] Let people take chances.

[127] Let them, if they want to come, let them, people want to be able to go to a restaurant, just sit down and actually eat.

[128] I have friends who drove to.

[129] to Santa Barbara to go sit down in the restaurant.

[130] Yeah, I would do it.

[131] You know?

[132] Yeah, it'd be exciting.

[133] Look, we flew to Texas last weekend to look at houses and stuff, but we went to eat.

[134] We had this place called a Lonesome Dove.

[135] Oh, it's fantastic.

[136] We ate like regular people.

[137] Sat down.

[138] What did wine?

[139] The whole deal.

[140] It was amazing.

[141] But were you, like, were the tables separated?

[142] Yes.

[143] They were less than full capacity.

[144] The waiters all wore face shields.

[145] The people that greeted you at the door wore, not face shields.

[146] They wore masks.

[147] The people that greeted you at the door wore masks.

[148] masks as well, you know, but it wasn't that bad.

[149] It was great.

[150] It was just nice to be able to go to a restaurant.

[151] Yeah, I think, you know, people are dying to get out and we're going to see a lot of people that are going to just, you know, run to restaurants, sit down in restaurants, but, you know, there was a poll taken.

[152] I know you love polls.

[153] Love them.

[154] I know you're like, who who answers polls.

[155] You get the opinions of morons.

[156] That's what polls are.

[157] Most morons think.

[158] Most morons think that six out of ten Americans will not feel comfortable, you know, sitting in a I don't know.

[159] I'm not sure how comfortable I would even feel sitting indoors where you come in with a mask.

[160] But then you're going to eat.

[161] You take your mask off.

[162] And then, you know, Joe Blow two tables over coughs and then you're sitting indoors.

[163] Whenever you're inside, you feel like you're in a petri dish.

[164] Yeah.

[165] Well, it's been that way forever and ever.

[166] I mean, just think about my dishwashers.

[167] Okay.

[168] In the guidelines, those guys basically have to be in hazmat suits.

[169] They have to have full protection, face shields and mask.

[170] And then.

[171] have like, you know, what, what, uh, the equivalent of like a painter suit, essentially.

[172] Because I get it.

[173] Those guys are spraying down people spit.

[174] Right.

[175] Like all day, eight hours a day.

[176] So I get it for them.

[177] But it's always been a disgusting job.

[178] 70 % of being a chef is cleaning, cleaning.

[179] Yeah.

[180] It's cleaning vegetables or cleaning up after people or whatever.

[181] Like, it's cleaning.

[182] So this, this business has always been disgusting.

[183] And if you don't love them, this business to the core it's fucking terrible well let's talk nice things let's talk let's talk about what you guys have put together is pretty remarkable because thank you the food there is so good it's kind it's kind of ridiculous like your pasta's got voodoo in it i don't know what you're doing and i i guess it's because it's handmade right because uh one the first time my wife and i ate there we sat right next to that open area where you can watch yeah you guys make the pasta and it's such a painstaking process.

[184] And you realize you really truly appreciate that it's an art form, you know, that like making stuff like that, like cutting no corners, making it as good as it could possibly taste.

[185] Well, I mean, that's the ultimate goal is to create that connection between pasta maker and someone who's eating the pasta.

[186] Like if you look through the glass and you see a pastaio or pasta in there banging out.

[187] What's the difference of pastio?

[188] Pastio is male.

[189] Gender neutral.

[190] So, you know, they're banging out Trofier, which is like a coil from Luguria.

[191] And you look down on your plate and there's like 160 to 180 pieces in your plate.

[192] You're like, fuck.

[193] This guy's wrapping.

[194] Yeah, he's got pictures.

[195] This guy's doing 180 reps just for me. That's a connection.

[196] And once you get it, sometimes a bowl of pasta is a bowl of pasta.

[197] I get it.

[198] But this is something different.

[199] This is, this is craft.

[200] This is tradition.

[201] This is continuing this.

[202] conversation of that's been passed down from generation to generation and all I'm doing all we're doing at Felix is just a small spoke and a in a massive wheel of Italian culinary tradition well you know just exactly how long to cook it too which is amazing like that because I'm fucking maniacal Joe I get it man you must be because the just the way your teeth sink into it it's like everything is amazing I like to call toothsome That's what al dente means, to the tooth.

[203] Is that what it means?

[204] Al dente.

[205] Oh, oh, okay.

[206] Toothsome.

[207] Toothsome.

[208] So that's part of the experience, right?

[209] It's the right amount of chew.

[210] Right amount of chew.

[211] And each pasta is cooked region specific because they cook pasta very different in Naples versus Rome versus bologna.

[212] What is the difference?

[213] It's just preference.

[214] It's based on tradition.

[215] And the thing is this, authenticity is very different.

[216] personal, right?

[217] Your mom makes macaroni and cheese with Velvita.

[218] My mom makes macaroni and cheese with Tillamook cheddar.

[219] That shit's authentic to me. It may not be authentic to you.

[220] Italy's no different.

[221] But the differences and the diversity are so specific, not only per region, but town and then house to house.

[222] And it's been that way for thousands of years.

[223] That's why I think Italian food, next to Chinese food, is the most diverse there is.

[224] And you could literally study your whole life and not even scratch the surface.

[225] Wow.

[226] Now, you guys have been open for what?

[227] Two years?

[228] Three years.

[229] Three years?

[230] In April, yeah.

[231] How much prep time is there before you open?

[232] Like when you have a plan and Janet, you've opened up, how many restaurants?

[233] You're a ton.

[234] Nine restaurants and four under construction.

[235] Great time to be under construction in the restaurant business.

[236] So crazy.

[237] My life sucks.

[238] It could be a lot worse.

[239] No. Right.

[240] Right.

[241] When you are about to open up a place like Felix, and how do you get started?

[242] Did you know Evan in advance?

[243] Did you guys talk before?

[244] Like, how do you put together a restaurant like that?

[245] Well, each restaurant that I've opened definitely has a different story.

[246] So I have a few Italian restaurants.

[247] I have Thai restaurants.

[248] I have a Jamaican restaurant in Toronto.

[249] So, you know, all very different stories.

[250] But I wanted to basically expand outside of Toronto.

[251] And I came to L .A. for lifestyle reasons to get out of the Toronto winters and decided, you know, this will be my first place that I opened a restaurant outside of Toronto.

[252] And I had a dream of being on Abakini.

[253] I just love Abakini.

[254] It feels like one of the only streets in Los Angeles where it's, you know, like a neighborhood and a street that you can walk down.

[255] So luckily I, you know, found this location on Abakini, and it's a long story, but I was working with another chef for about nine months.

[256] And then at the 11th hour, I had the location.

[257] We were all set to begin construction, and he just said, I'm going to, I've decided to go work with another restaurant group.

[258] And I was like, overnight just, like, left without a chef.

[259] And I only had one other name of another chef in L .A. And it was Evan Funky.

[260] And a food writer just sent me an email because I was just out meeting people saying, hey, I'm looking for a chef that has a following, a super talented chef and this one Kevin West, shout out to Kevin West, sent me an email and said, Evan Funky is an amazingly talented chef and he's available.

[261] And so when this other chef bailed on me and I was on vacation at that time, I was in Morocco of all places and I, you know, I asked for a week off to go off the grid for a week and then the president of my company contacted me. She said, you've got to get on the phone.

[262] We don't have a chef.

[263] And, uh, And so I go, I have one name in my Rolodex.

[264] It's Evan Funky.

[265] And I sent Evan, I felt that I had to send him a compelling email so that I could get his attention because I had no other, you know, options.

[266] And I said, you know, Evan, I hear, you know, Kevin West says, you're an amazingly talented chef.

[267] I have a location on Abokinney, which is great.

[268] Like, you know, chefs love Avicinney.

[269] You know, it's a great street.

[270] It's big leagues.

[271] And I said, you know, time is of the essence.

[272] If you're interested, you know, here's, you know, check me out.

[273] I'm legitimate a restaurateur.

[274] Check me out.

[275] And, you know, we were on a FaceTime call that dropped a thousand times because of the bad reception.

[276] I'm like, bear with me. Get back on a FaceTime call with Evan.

[277] And I flew Evan to Toronto.

[278] I think it was Skype, actually.

[279] Oh, is it Skype?

[280] Yeah.

[281] But I flew Evan to Toronto to cook for myself and my team immediately after this vacation that I had.

[282] And Evan did just very few items.

[283] A lot of times chefs want to just like, wow you, I'm doing 22 dishes.

[284] because I want to show you who I am.

[285] Evan did just, you know, he just did his cacho etpepe pasta.

[286] He did his focacha bread.

[287] He just did very few items because he's confident and he knows.

[288] And I ate his food.

[289] My team ate his food.

[290] I said to Evan, food cannot taste better.

[291] And I also described his food as Casalinga.

[292] So I lived in Italy for eight years.

[293] My background, I'm half Italian.

[294] I lived in Italy for eight years.

[295] My father basically was at the level of a chef, his cooking.

[296] And so I said to Evan, I said, you're cooking.

[297] is Casalinga, which means like the housewife's cooking, like the mama's cooking.

[298] And Evan always described his cooking like that Casalinga, but not many people describe cooking in that way.

[299] And so basically, I think Evan felt that I got him.

[300] And then he just turned to me and he said, you've got a deal.

[301] We're partners.

[302] Wow.

[303] I was in Chicago at the time consulting for Rich Melman, Let Us Entertain You.

[304] And I was kind of like on hiatus, re -learning.

[305] the business we'll probably get into that later but uh yeah i got an email from janet and i was like all right let's go do this and that was it i cooked i think i cooked four pastas so for you like that's a is it a rare thing to get an offer to run a restaurant or did is there offers that you get that you turn down i mean at the time it was rare um now i get offers all the time once felix opened yes yeah yeah yeah well you guys nailed it it's it's crazy you know i you know i I learned from Bourdain from watching his show, No Reservations, the first show.

[306] I was like, oh, okay, I have a wrong idea of what food is.

[307] Like, I had this idea that food just tastes good.

[308] Like, you go someplace, food tastes good.

[309] But then watching his love of food and watching his deep respect for chefs and the preparation and all that's involved in making a dish, I was like, oh, it's art. I didn't, of course it's art. I didn't think of it as art. I thought of it as just food.

[310] You know, and then watching his show completely changed my perception in what food is.

[311] Yeah, not every chef operates from being an artist, and there's different levels of food.

[312] I do have to say, you know, Evan is an absolute master.

[313] You know, Evan's obviously not Italian, but has studied all over Italy, and it's really the dying art of handmade pasta, and Evan is a custodian of keeping this art alive.

[314] Like, he's a maestro.

[315] He's unbelievable.

[316] Is there a specific type of fly?

[317] lower that you use?

[318] We import six different types from four different regions.

[319] And now is the the word about pasta and about bread and wheat in general is that American wheat is a different kind of wheat.

[320] It's a different kind of wheat.

[321] It's also processed completely different.

[322] I don't, I don't use a lot of American wheat just because it's, it's just been manipulated so much.

[323] And a lot of the digestibility of, in my opinion, people are going to freak out, but in my opinion, the amount of work that goes into denaturing pasta in order to get it flat via machine has a lot to do with its digestibility, just like sourdough bread is more digestible because it's broken down in a different way.

[324] So handmade pasta is less manipulated than machined pasta, in my opinion.

[325] So also the types of wheat, the amount of wheat germ that's in it, the nutritional value, it all has to do with those elements within the flour.

[326] And to be honest, like, I've developed a gluten intolerance because I've been breathing raw flour for the past, you know, 12 years.

[327] Oh, really?

[328] As soon as I step foot in the lab and I start rolling a spolia, my stomach just start, it's acid straight up.

[329] That's crazy.

[330] Just from the powder.

[331] Because it's like talcum, you know, double zero flour is extremely fine.

[332] So we have to throw it in order to, you know, put some on the table to roll it out.

[333] So you breathe it in all day long.

[334] Then we've got extractors.

[335] We've got, you know, humidity control and air conditioning and all that, but still.

[336] But so you've developed an intolerance because of that?

[337] Yeah, it's called white lung or baker's lung.

[338] Baker's lung.

[339] So do you wear a mask?

[340] I do not.

[341] Why don't you wear a mask?

[342] I don't know.

[343] suck about like like what i don't know it seems like that would be a good thing to do sure but you don't want that baker's lung right i don't know i just i don't like masks oh okay this whole experience is very this whole experience is very is been very enlightening wearing a mask right yeah it's gross i have another friend who also has a kosooku kawomaro who is uh instrumental in my kind of understanding of uh of modern pasta i met him in bologna's uh Japanese guy who has a lab in Tokyo called a base and he has the same thing.

[344] He wears a mask all the time because he's just breathing in raw flour all day.

[345] I never would have thought of that, but it makes total sense.

[346] I never thought, oh, yeah.

[347] Yeah, I mean, fucking flour.

[348] It's like a guy works at a paint shop.

[349] Like, you're going to get sick.

[350] You got to get one of the painter things.

[351] The big tubes.

[352] That'd be so weird.

[353] People are like, I'm not eating that fucking pasta.

[354] I don't know.

[355] For me, it's a mask on.

[356] It's crazy.

[357] What's in there?

[358] It's preservatives.

[359] man well whatever you're doing keep doing it whether it's the white lung whatever you got to clean that shit out I don't know what you do to get that can't stop won't stop flour out of you just keep going yeah it's just the pasta's insane it's so good it's and it's such a when you have really good pasta and then you have pasta that maybe you enjoyed before you had the really good pasta it's like it's like having water in your ear it fucks people up yeah it fucks people up it does sure I've like I cannot tell you how many people DM me or come to me into the restaurant they say you've completely fucking ruined me thank you so much now I can't eat pasta anywhere else and I don't eat pasta in North America whatsoever I don't eat fresh pasta in North America I only eat pasta in Italy I dried pasta in America but I don't eat fresh pasta.

[360] Why not?

[361] Most people don't know what they're doing but there's got to be some people other than you guys certainly absolutely like what are good spots like if you're in L. Robbins is exceptional.

[362] Where's that?

[363] It's in New York.

[364] Oh, Brooklyn.

[365] Oh, okay.

[366] Nussie's great.

[367] Damn, you got to go all the way to Brooklyn?

[368] You know, Rob Gentile in Toronto is great.

[369] So this is a very small amount of people that are doing it right?

[370] I mean, there's a handful of people who make pasta by hand, period.

[371] And there's even fewer people who know how to make pasta with the mozzarella, which is the long rolling pin, even fewer.

[372] And when I started, I started doing this 11 years ago, there was nobody.

[373] there was nobody i checked you know i moved to bologna in 2007 tail in 2007 and started this journey with my maestro alessandro spizny at a levy school of bolognese and she kind of opened up the door for me to start seeking out other pasta makers throughout italy and when i came back in o eight i ran a restaurant called rusta cany for about four years and you know not a lot of people were serving this style of pasta that I wanted to serve.

[374] So I started giving it away like a gateway drug.

[375] I was just like send it to tables for free.

[376] And they were like, what the fuck?

[377] And it just started gaining momentum and gaining momentum.

[378] Wow.

[379] So when you moved to Italy to learn how to do it, like what is it apprenticeship like in, you know, learning how to make pasta?

[380] I mean, it's an apprenticeship.

[381] You have to put yourself in the student's chair and be a sponge.

[382] I didn't speak any, not a lick of Italian.

[383] But the Italians are very expressive.

[384] So you're able to communicate through just being Italian, I guess.

[385] And I spent three months, you know, six days a week, 10 hours a day, just making pasta.

[386] Wow.

[387] Period.

[388] See, this is what's fascinating to me. Things you just take for granted.

[389] Oh, here is a plate of pasta.

[390] But what is involved in learning how to make it that good?

[391] It's not just ingredients.

[392] When people sit down at a restaurant, people aren't just paying for.

[393] for the experience of sitting there and the cost of food, they're paying for the experience of the people that are making the food.

[394] That's a big part of it.

[395] That's the way that I look at it.

[396] And 11 years of making pasta by hand, there's a lot of depth that some of the younger guys just aren't willing to pay the time cost.

[397] And a lot of the younger cooks out there, they bounce around from job to job, six months here, three months here, and they think that they've mastered it.

[398] But there's just no depth.

[399] There's no depth.

[400] You know, you have to also consider how labor intensive it is to, you know, hand roll out the pasta.

[401] And, you know, what Evan was saying before, like, each one rolled by hand.

[402] You know, when you eat a bowl of pasta, you're not thinking that each one was, like, pressed out by hand.

[403] So it's, like, extremely labor intensive.

[404] And a lot of people, when we were opening, Evan did have his own restaurant, Bucato before, which was also basically focused around pasta.

[405] as well.

[406] That's a whole other story.

[407] But when we were going to open up this restaurant and we put in the middle of the restaurant the temperature controlled pasta lab, which is taking up tables.

[408] So if you're a business person, a restaurateur, you say, how many tables could fit in there?

[409] How much is each table worth to your bottom line?

[410] You're using up that space to put in, you're using that space to put in a pasta lab.

[411] Are you crazy?

[412] Also, you know, when you're thinking about, you know, training the people and how labor intense.

[413] it is people were saying like we're crazy doing doing this again they didn't think we can make money yeah well it is a lot of space that pasta lab is a big space but it's so cool to be sitting right there it's a showstopper yeah it really it's it's something special and it's worked out we're making money I mean we were making money there's always like pre -covid and you know and there's no thought there's no guidelines in terms of like when you'll be able to operate at 100 % capacity No, I mean, in the documents, it says they're going to reassess in 21 days.

[414] So I don't know when that's going to be in a couple weeks.

[415] It might even be quicker than that, right?

[416] I think the economic pressures are probably what forced them to open without letting anybody know.

[417] They're out of money.

[418] Everyone's out of money.

[419] Well, they can't just say, you know, there is a balance between people's health and the economy and they can't just shut everything down and say, well, we're just going to print a bunch of money.

[420] We're all going to be paying for this in the end.

[421] Right now it's been $2 trillion because of COVID, they have to get us back up and running and working.

[422] And I've said from the very beginning, get your young and you're healthy back out and working.

[423] And if you're over the age of 65 or if you have underlying health conditions and you should definitely stay at home and you have to wait for either a treatment or the vaccine.

[424] But, you know, they have to open up the economy and it's been ridiculous how it's been handled.

[425] Yeah, that's what should have been done.

[426] It should have been, they should have, I mean, instead of taking this blanket approach.

[427] But I think there was a lot of misconceptions.

[428] They thought it was going to be something different than it was.

[429] Even at 60 percent, though, at least at 60 percent.

[430] I'm like happy you're going to be able to be.

[431] And when are you guys going to open up Monday?

[432] Have you figured it out?

[433] Well, then we were before the riots.

[434] Well, the protests and we had to board up.

[435] And, you know, I think we're probably another week or so away.

[436] At least.

[437] It's really about getting staff back in.

[438] That's our kind of.

[439] So once the protests die down, then a week?

[440] Maybe a little more.

[441] Maybe a little more.

[442] But even with the 60 % capacity, it's, we will see if we'll be able to maintain, you know, and actually not necessarily make a profit, just break even.

[443] Yeah, I think the goal has always been when this first started was, you know, your goal is to survive and to get to the other side of this.

[444] You're not thinking about making money.

[445] And when you see these, like, iconic, legendary, restaurateurs like Daniel Hume with 11 Madison Park, which last year was the number one restaurant in the world, and he does not think that he will be reopening.

[446] So he might be closing permanently.

[447] Or David Chang closing two restaurants, one in New York City, one in D .C., and then he's moving another restaurant, consolidating his company, essentially.

[448] And so when you see these iconic restaurateurs that are struggling to make it to the other side, it's like extremely sobering.

[449] And, you know, some experts will say they think 50 % of restaurants, will not make it to the other side.

[450] I don't agree, but I think 25 % won't make it.

[451] And even in L .A., one of my last dinners was at Bon Ton in downtown, L .A., Lincoln Carson, an amazing chef.

[452] I was blown away by the restaurant, and he's closed permanently.

[453] Like all that time to open, all that capital to open, you know, you train, whatever, you're training, 50, 75 people to open, and he's closed permanently.

[454] Or Auburn, another restaurant that was getting, you know, great.

[455] accolades closed also permanently.

[456] They just got a finalist in the Global Design Awards.

[457] So they're getting these awards and they're closed permanently.

[458] And, you know, so, you know, it's really survival of the fittest right now.

[459] So new restaurants, because it's so hard this business, you're very vulnerable when you're a new restaurant and you just have debt.

[460] You're just looking at a bunch of debt.

[461] And then you're closed permanently, you know, you're not going to make it to the other side.

[462] And if a business was not making that much money, so when you see a restaurant in New York City like Lucky Strike that's been there for 31 years, closed permanently because, you know, it just wasn't doing that well.

[463] So all the businesses that were just kind of teetering on not doing very well, they're going to close.

[464] It's survival of the fittest, even with the pandemic and hitting older people.

[465] It's kind of like all around in business, it's survival of the fittest.

[466] It seems like it's so hard to believe that if you don't make money for three months, it goes under.

[467] You would think like, oh, this is a successful business.

[468] Like, it's exposed people to the realities of running a business and how incredibly difficult it is just to stay open.

[469] It's a juggling act.

[470] Especially for restaurants, right?

[471] Especially.

[472] No, this is what I was saying before is the pandemic really exposed the restaurant business.

[473] And the restaurant business probably has been hit the hardest.

[474] And then next, all small businesses and retail.

[475] And then we're going to see commercial real estate really be affected right now.

[476] But the restaurant business, the national average of the profit margin is 4%.

[477] That's a national average.

[478] We don't operate that way.

[479] We operate at 14 % essentially.

[480] But 20 years ago in the U .S., most restaurants would make 20, 25%.

[481] You know, the net profit margin, but it's gone down, it's gone down.

[482] And really, the business is broken.

[483] The restaurant business is broken.

[484] We should be charging a lot higher prices, but then you're not going to get the customers.

[485] So what you do is you just accept a lower and a lower profit margin.

[486] That's why this business is so difficult.

[487] And even 10 years ago, you might have a runway in your bank account to survive a few months.

[488] But most restaurants, you know, they have a month and then they're done.

[489] They've got nothing in the bank account.

[490] It's a horrible business.

[491] Nobody should be in a restaurant.

[492] Unless you're crazy and you're so passionate about it.

[493] That's you.

[494] That's me. It's both of us.

[495] But I will.

[496] It's all of us.

[497] 11 million of us.

[498] Yeah.

[499] Well, 11 million of us, and then you think, you know, and when you look at the supply chain, so we, the restaurants employ 11 million people in the United States, but then when you add in the supply chain of the farmers and the winemakers and the linen cleaners and, you know, we employ 20 million people and we're the second largest employer in the United States next to the Pentagon.

[500] So, you know, right now we have to think.

[501] Wow.

[502] That's crazy.

[503] restaurants are the second largest employer in the Pentagon's the first yeah how creepy is it the Pentagon's the first Jamie Jamie look it up I don't think like Amazon would be ahead of the pentagon fuck no that's that's a nutty number but it makes -panagon number one employer restaurants number two that's so insane that Pentagon's number one I would have never guessed that in a million years if you gave me a multiple choice I'd be like fucking Pentagon no way Jamie's typing away I'm sure it's Right.

[504] I mean, you don't have to even look it up, Jamie.

[505] I believe her.

[506] Who knows?

[507] I just read things, but, you know, that's what we're talking about in the Independent Restaurant Coalition.

[508] And, you know, we're working together with the government to ask for a certain amount of help, right?

[509] We need the right.

[510] When people think, you know, screw you restaurants, like we're all in trouble, right?

[511] With 40 million plus, now it's like, I think, 42 million filed for unemployment.

[512] A lot of people are hurting.

[513] right now.

[514] So it's hard to say, you know, romanticize restaurants right now, come back and support your local restaurants when a lot of people are hurting.

[515] But I think if we think about the economic domino effect right now of essentially 20 million people, we like we've got, we need help to stay in business and not close down permanently.

[516] I think the, the economic effect right now will be staggering.

[517] Yeah, no, it's it's something to consider when you think about what you said about the people to clean the linen, the people that make the wine, all the various people that rely on restaurants.

[518] You don't, you know, it's not just restaurants.

[519] You know, most people like myself don't really consider that.

[520] You go, wow, they probably employ 10 people or 20 people or 50 people, whatever it is.

[521] But then you don't think of all the trickle down.

[522] That's a massive web.

[523] A massive web.

[524] Do you see like the farmers obviously dumping, you know, tons of food and 36 million gallons of milk.

[525] And nobody knew that restaurants are the number one purchasers from farmers, that and institutions, schools, institutions, and restaurants.

[526] And they process a food in a different way for restaurants than they do.

[527] You can't just say, like, get the food, you know, out there.

[528] They process food differently for individuals and grocery stores as they do institutions and restaurants.

[529] So they have to dump all this food.

[530] Now, when you guys get up and running, how do you calculate how much food you buy.

[531] Like, that's always, I've always been like, how do they know?

[532] Like, how do they know how many people are coming in?

[533] Voodoo.

[534] The one good thing about restaurant business is that the metrics, the metrics, whether you have five tables or 100 tables are the same.

[535] It's all math.

[536] And if I knew how much fucking math that I'd be doing right now, I'm 40 years old, if I knew when I was like a kid, I would have studied the fuck out of math.

[537] Because I had to learn on the fly so you as a chef are not just responsible for putting together the meals but you also not enough no you got to be a businessman you have to be a marketer you've got to be a diplomat you have to be a father you have to give advice you know like that I'm not having kids but I have 60 kids because I exercise my fatherly duties on a daily fucking basis I've bailed guys out of jail I've given you know beer money to guys like it is a true true family and you spend you know the majority of your day with these people you feel that when you go into your restaurant though there's something about that place like there's you when the waiters deliver your food you know that they know it's special like there's a feeling like when they put that down like hey go look at that and you're like whoa you know what I mean like you can tell you could tell the the the fish stinks from the head down.

[538] Oh, yeah.

[539] We know that.

[540] It's a Jamaican saying the fish rots from the head down.

[541] So, Janet, we were talking on the phone about what it's like for you to have all these restaurants under construction and you were this unstoppable machine.

[542] You're a restaurant machine.

[543] Everything was kicking ass.

[544] Yeah.

[545] And then all of a sudden, eh.

[546] Yeah.

[547] Well, you know, the only thing I've ever done has been in the restaurant business and out of university.

[548] I came from Italy and I opened my first restaurant in Toronto and slowly got.

[549] Right out of school.

[550] Well, I was older.

[551] I took my time in school too.

[552] I started when I was, I started university when I was 22.

[553] So I took my time.

[554] But when I opened my first restaurant, I definitely connected to a passion.

[555] And I had the slow route of growing this company.

[556] So that restaurant opened 24 years ago and is still running, you know, still running today.

[557] That's incredible.

[558] What are the odds of that?

[559] Well, the average, you know, after you pass a year, you know, you have a lifespan.

[560] most restaurants of seven years.

[561] So I've had a few lifetimes with that restaurant.

[562] And then I slowly saved my money and wanted to buy the real estate where that restaurant is.

[563] It's in Yorkville.

[564] Do you know Toronto?

[565] You know Toronto.

[566] Do you know Yorkville?

[567] No, I don't.

[568] It's a nice little neighborhood in Toronto and I wanted to buy this real estate.

[569] So I saved my money to buy the real estate.

[570] So I was very cautious growing the company and building a foundation.

[571] And then I bought one piece of real estate.

[572] Then I bought another building.

[573] and then I put another restaurant twice as big as my first restaurant, and then I bought another building.

[574] So I've been buying these buildings and putting restaurants inside the buildings until I felt that my foundation was so strong that nothing could happen to me. So I could only put through the lens back then in the, you know, before the pandemic, to say in an economic upturn, people will eat pizza.

[575] On an economic downturn, people will eat pizza.

[576] I'm untouchable.

[577] That's how I felt.

[578] I felt nothing could touch me. And then we opened up Felix, and Felix has gotten, you know, incredible accolades, you know, in the press, and rightfully so, and Evans cooking is off the charts.

[579] And I thought, you know, we're ready to really grow.

[580] So let's do this.

[581] And I built a company where, you know, I have a head office.

[582] It's a proper company.

[583] And I have an incredible team of people.

[584] And I felt very ready and very stable and with an incredibly strong foundation that I said, we're ready to.

[585] to do this.

[586] And so 2020 was my big year to open five restaurants in one year.

[587] Wow.

[588] So I just, I just, just before the pandemic, flew to Toronto to open a 9 ,000 square foot restaurant to immediately close it.

[589] And that cost $9 million to open this 9 ,000 square foot restaurant that opened one day, trained 100 people for two months and then immediately shut that down, shut down all restaurants, so shut down eight operations, and I also have a catering company, so shut down eight operations in Toronto and a catering company, furloughed 700 people, and then I have four other projects under construction, and personally all of the money in the company out on construction sites, plus I personally loaned all of my money to build the restaurants, because that's what I do.

[590] What I do is I buy buildings, and then I get mortgages on the buildings, then I use all the cash that I have anywhere that I can find it to open restaurants.

[591] So I might have a temporary you know, lack of cash, but then, you know, backed by a very strong revenue.

[592] So I'm funding all the construction sites by all these restaurants that have extremely strong streams of revenue.

[593] So once again, I didn't feel like I was taking a big risk opening five restaurants in 2020.

[594] So I swear to you that the day the pandemic happened, I had to shut.

[595] down.

[596] It was literally the day before, I loaned out, I wrote a massive check for one construction site, like all of my money in my bank account, you know, out to one construction site.

[597] Then we shut everything down.

[598] And it was like I was, I was kicked in the teeth.

[599] Like, I was brought to my knees.

[600] And I had never felt stress like that because of how conservative I am and how fiscally responsible that I've always been and feeling that I was untouchable, I just thought, you know, nothing could ever happen to me in this, you know, I could never risk any.

[601] but I woke up one day when I had to close everything down.

[602] And first of all, the feeling of laying off 700 people when you know the majority of your staff live paycheck to paycheck was absolutely heartbreaking and that I ran the real risk of losing everything, not only all the restaurants, but all the buildings because the bank, you know, owns my buildings.

[603] I don't own the buildings.

[604] And, you know, this pandemic caught me with my financial pants down.

[605] Like I just was like, oh my God, this is really bad timing for me. Do you think if there's a second wave, they're going to try to do this again?

[606] shut you down?

[607] No, I think we're going to...

[608] Look, the protest, do you think we're going to have a second wave now?

[609] We very well could.

[610] I mean, these people are not social distancing.

[611] They're on top of each other.

[612] If anybody's got it, everybody's got it.

[613] No, I actually don't think so, and I think that we're going to be living with this virus.

[614] And I've said this from day one.

[615] When this happened, I said to my team, give me the two -year plan.

[616] What's going on for two years?

[617] We have to live with this for the next two years.

[618] And I think that we just have to live in a safe way.

[619] And, yeah, wear the masks out.

[620] and we're going to go to restaurants and people are going to be wearing gloves and masks and maybe take your temperature and we're going to be seated six feet apart.

[621] I think this is, we're going to just find a safe way to live.

[622] But of course there's going to be, there's going to be a second wave and a third wave.

[623] It's going to keep going until the vaccine comes.

[624] You have to, you have to inoculate, you know, between 60 and 80 percent of the world.

[625] How long is that going to take?

[626] We're living with this.

[627] Yeah, the vaccine's a weird vaccine, too.

[628] Do you understand what it is?

[629] M -R -N -A vaccine.

[630] Well, that's one vaccine that Moderna's making, but there's different types of vaccines that they're making.

[631] There's multiple trials that are going on right now, right?

[632] A hundred different vaccines.

[633] Everybody's trying to get after.

[634] Health officials.

[635] No new COVID -19 cases from Missouri parties.

[636] No additional new...

[637] Well, you know, what's interesting is what we were talking about before the podcast, when you guys were getting tested for the COVID, we were talking about Italy.

[638] How Italy has the, detectable levels are so small.

[639] They're so minuscule.

[640] Infantissimo.

[641] I just learned that word.

[642] There was a struggle earlier.

[643] Yeah, I know.

[644] The viral load is infinitesimal.

[645] Well, sometimes when you read things and you don't say it out loud, and all of a sudden you say it out loud for the first time, you're like, I don't know how to say that word.

[646] Yeah, there's a lot of words like that that I never used.

[647] But, yeah, in San Rafael Hospital in Milan, you know, they're saying that the virus no longer exists in Italy.

[648] That's so crazy.

[649] So it just burned through the population.

[650] Well, hopefully, that's what's happening here.

[651] Hopefully.

[652] And, you know, we're going to see in two weeks, right?

[653] Two weeks are going to see what happened from all this protesting and everybody being on top of each other.

[654] Also, the stress of it all has got to be terrible for people's immune system as well.

[655] Yeah.

[656] I mean, like, are you feeling, we were talking about it earlier, if you're, if you're a human being and you have any feelings at all, you're going to feel the stress of humanity right now.

[657] It was a stress of the world because in our lifetimes, we've never seen one of these events.

[658] But it's like we have the Spanish flu and the Great Depression and the 1968 riots happening all at the same time.

[659] Yeah.

[660] I think bigger than the 68 riots.

[661] I don't think any riots have ever been this widespread through the entire country and the looting.

[662] Well, the Rodney King, I think they had a lot of deaths, right?

[663] I think they had 68 deaths.

[664] They had a lot of deaths in Los Angeles, but they didn't protest to Rodney King riots in Boston.

[665] And, you know, I mean.

[666] This is worldwide.

[667] This is worldwide.

[668] The looting, though, seems to be only here.

[669] And the looting is just insane.

[670] Well, in Toronto today, it's actually quite peaceful.

[671] They have looting in Toronto?

[672] Well, they've supposedly tomorrow, there's some organized looting happening.

[673] Organized looting.

[674] June the 6th.

[675] And these piles of bricks are showing up around the city as well.

[676] Yeah, we were talking about that.

[677] Like, that's so weird.

[678] Like, big pallets of bricks.

[679] that are dropped off on areas like and no one really has any understanding of why there's been a bunch of articles written on it and they're trying to sort it out and some of them are just coincidence they were at construction sites and the bricks happen to be there and some of them there's no reason whatsoever for the bricks being there wouldn't you think as much as as every single building has a camera on it wouldn't you be able to see who's dropping this shit off yeah it's like here's some writing supplies right have at it.

[680] Yeah.

[681] the real fear is that it's the police.

[682] People are worried that the police are doing it, encouraging people to throw rocks.

[683] So if those people throw rocks, then the police can come in and break up what would have been a peaceful protest.

[684] That's through the actions of agent provocateurs or just giving people rocks and encouraging them, you know, just by virtue of the fact the rocks are there.

[685] There was another thing that we talked about the other day.

[686] We should probably correct that now.

[687] There was stacks of bricks in front of this synagogue, and we thought those steps.

[688] stacks of bricks were also the same thing, sort of left there because people were protesting.

[689] But it's actually even grosser.

[690] The stacks of bricks are there to keep people from driving their car through the synagogue.

[691] Oh, my God.

[692] So the synagogue set it up that way just to keep people from smashing through their windows, you know, after some of these hate crimes.

[693] So it's like, I almost, it's a fucking crazy time.

[694] I am, I am an internal optimist.

[695] And my feeling is that this is a terrible moment for us, but a good one because I think it's big enough that we're going to change.

[696] I agree.

[697] 100%.

[698] There's a real chance, a real chance, a real chance that people are going to change.

[699] Yes, I really think that.

[700] And you're seeing, like, there was a video I was watching today of a girl having an argument with a racist father, and she filmed it.

[701] Do you see that?

[702] Yeah.

[703] That kind of stuff gives me hope.

[704] Like a kid who's raised by someone who's got some racial.

[705] prejudice and the kid doesn't you know and the the the attitude of kids today the attitude of young people today it's so much more tolerant than any other generation before and it's so enforced it's our culturally enforced tolerance and I hope it's for everything I hope it's for all races all genders all sexual orientations all everything just we can be better we can be better and like it takes something like this to make everybody realize like there's some fucked up aspects of our society they need to be corrected and there needs to be some serious refocusing of what it takes to be a police officer and what police officers can and can't do and what the punishment is and who's responsible and then if you're a cop and you see someone do something horrible that's also a cop you got to step up you got to do something we can't we can't do this anymore did you see chris rocks post from three days ago there's some there's some vocations you can't have a bad apple he's like police officers police officers are one you can't have a bad apple just like you can't have a bad apple as a pilot.

[706] You can't, like some of our pilots like to land.

[707] Others like to go into mountains.

[708] We can't have this.

[709] Yeah, that's a great.

[710] I mean, you know, I feel I'm also extremely hopeful, even if I feel, you know, like I've been brought to my knees and I'm seeing other small businesses and friends of mine getting looted right now.

[711] And I'm like, it's all so senseless.

[712] And I feel for Black Lives Matters right now is like the most important thing.

[713] I didn't think anything could knock off the pandemic, but, you know, it has.

[714] We're all thinking about this, but I do feel that it's been an awakening.

[715] And I think that it's in our face like it's never been before.

[716] And I think what you were saying, to witness a man essentially be tortured is something we can't unsee.

[717] And I think it changes you forever.

[718] And what you were also saying is for this one man, you know, to reverberate like all over the world, really, to see the protests all over the world is really something.

[719] And I think we have to be super uncomfortable for change.

[720] And I think this is a moment.

[721] And I think that cop has been doing that shit since the beginning.

[722] He's been charged with multiple times, multiple complaints since like 2006.

[723] And how crazy is it that one kid, a 17 -year -old girl, films this, puts it out on the internet, and it changes the world.

[724] This one time, imagine if he knew, imagine if he had any inkling that leaning on that man's neck with his knee for eight and a half minutes or more even, almost nine minutes, that that was literally going to be.

[725] change the world i know it's it's unbelievable it's a strange it shows the the the absolute fundamental core of law enforcement across the board is absolutely fucking rotten and you just need better training and we need people who are not fucking assholes not racist pieces of shit going into law enforcement it's also the job i think is almost impossible um just from a um just just for your mind i don't think people are supposed to be inundated with that kind of violence.

[726] No, man, they for sure have PTSD.

[727] I mean, just think about it, being on edge all day long, not knowing whether or not someone you're going to pull over is going to fucking kill you.

[728] Yep.

[729] And vice versa.

[730] Dead people they see, the amount of bullet wounds.

[731] And, you know, I have friends that are cops and they tell you horror stories every day.

[732] It's a shotgun blast.

[733] But so can the surgeon in, you know, the surgeon.

[734] Same thing.

[735] It's really the same thing.

[736] so maybe maybe you know the reform has to be that mental health has to be looked after but there needs to be there needs to be a different way there needs to be reform there needs to be a different training yeah it's not a job like you know you could be a garbage man okay I'll show you how to do the garbage no it's like who are you let's let's sit down Mike why do you want to be a cop you know like it should be a really difficult thing to get a license to be a most difficult thing to do You know, it should be the most difficult job to get.

[737] And it should be paid really well.

[738] Yeah.

[739] We have, you know, you just look at all the systems and it's all broken.

[740] Like when we look at the restaurant business, it's actually a broken business.

[741] Our society is broken and that we pay teachers hardly anything for doing such an important job and police officers and people who are working, you know, on the front lines.

[742] And you're mentioning that, you know, the kid that's stalking the shelves and he's putting himself in harm's away, making minimum wage, it's all just doesn't make sense.

[743] Yeah.

[744] Well, before it used to be just a job.

[745] Now you're risking your life.

[746] You know, if you're working in a supermarket, it used to be, oh, you know, I got a good job stocking the shelves.

[747] Now it's like, oh, I could die from this.

[748] That wasn't on the menu when I first signed up for this.

[749] Yeah.

[750] Restaurant business is the same now.

[751] Yeah, right?

[752] Now it really is because if people are serving people and people are coughing on them, hmm.

[753] Vitamin D, kids, get your vitamin D. Vitamin C, make sure you take your zinc.

[754] Get your body healthy.

[755] But they don't, again, I'll say they don't know, they still don't know enough about this virus and, you know, every day you wake up and you're like, oh, you know, your blood type, so I have blood type A and that supposedly you'll have a rough time.

[756] You know, you have a higher chance of having a rough time needing oxygen.

[757] If you have type blood, you know, blood type A, we're just, we don't know enough about the virus.

[758] That's been like the most frustrating, and for me at least, the most frustrating and the most depressing thing is that, literal like hour to hour changes of everything and making long -term decisions is literally impossible and in this business you have to make long -term decisions you have to project in order to be successful and that's what's been so difficult is that you know just the other day there was curfew was at six I was in the grocery store it was curfews at six and then all of a sudden oh we change it to five and then all of a sudden everybody in the grocery store was working there is like fuck we have to close in 30 minutes and they're like letting everybody who's in line outside in all of a sudden it's packed so all the social distancing for people waiting they just gave it up it's not really that important what's really important is get your food quick it's just it's been bananas now when you when you when you're like so you have to do all these calculations when you're you're figuring out how many meals you're going to serve how much food you're going to order and you have to kind of guess like how do you do you guess like how do you guess like how many people are going to order fish, how many people are going to order steak?

[759] It's kind of you get of, you have pars, obviously, but you get into this rhythm.

[760] And Felix, I'm a student of consistency.

[761] And I always have been.

[762] I learned it at Spago.

[763] Spago is probably one of the most consistent restaurants in the entire country.

[764] And my mentor, Lee Hefter, kind of instilled in me those principles that define the way that I run restaurants now.

[765] So you have obviously have PARs, but you have to look at P -Mex.

[766] You've got to look at what you're selling.

[767] You have to look at what people are enjoying, what people aren't buying.

[768] And you really ultimately have to know your clientele.

[769] You have to get to know them very much so.

[770] And I think that that's a lot of what hospitality professionals are really missing is that connection to the people.

[771] Because that's the reason why we do this shit is to see you, Joe Roken, eat the steak at table 30.

[772] and say, fuck, that was the fucking best steak I ever had in my fucking life.

[773] It was the best steak I've ever had.

[774] Really was.

[775] Yeah, all this talk about pasta, but really when you came, you're on the carnivore diet.

[776] Well, that was the second or third time.

[777] That you had come.

[778] Okay.

[779] When we had dinner together with Brian Callis and my buddy, Alex Anchin, the four of us had dinner, and you were on the carnivore diet.

[780] Yeah, it was then, yeah.

[781] But even then, I mean, the steak was fantastic.

[782] All the food was fantastic.

[783] But the second, the time I went after that, right before you guys got shut down, my wife and I ate there.

[784] That was the last service, no?

[785] I think so.

[786] I saw you there that night.

[787] I had just flown in from Toronto, and that was my last time out.

[788] I think that was your last time out.

[789] That was March 13th.

[790] Did you hear it?

[791] You outed.

[792] I outed.

[793] I outed myself.

[794] You Canadian right there.

[795] Yeah, I had pasta that time.

[796] It's sensational.

[797] But that's till this day, it's the best take I've ever had.

[798] are you doing different what are you doing how do you cook and steak salt talk to me don't salt black pepper what's the voodoo hot fire that's it but it's where it's where it's where the meat comes from really i mean you have to you know in my opinion 90 % of cooking is ingredients 10 % technique yeah that's it so just buy the best you possibly can and try not to fuck it up you need some some you know instruction you need some technique but a lot of people I think the biggest ingredient that is missing in a lot of cooking today is restraint.

[799] Restraint.

[800] Don't fucking manipulate it.

[801] Just let it do what it does.

[802] The farmers have taken great pains.

[803] The ranchers have taken great pains to get this product to where it is, to where it's ultimate.

[804] It's peak of perfection.

[805] It's peak of ripeness.

[806] It's peak of marbling or whatever.

[807] Just put some salt and some black pepper on it and apply heat.

[808] And then watch it.

[809] And you kind of have to have a little bit of an internal calibration to understand what's going on.

[810] Do you use a timer?

[811] No. All by feel.

[812] Why are you laughing?

[813] All feel.

[814] Wow.

[815] You can mock me. You can.

[816] I mean, listen, we use scales, we use timers.

[817] But to cook meat, you have to do it a lot.

[818] Repetition is the mother of all skill, whether that's pasta making or cooking on the grill.

[819] Do you use an internal, do you use any sort of a thermometer?

[820] At the beginning, I did, yeah.

[821] But now it's by feel.

[822] so it's just you just how it gives when you touch it yeah there's things you can learn by touching you know yeah like that's medium rare here so if you use your pinky your ring finger and middle finger like this so this this this is rare this is mid rare this is mid rare this is medium and that's well so this is what we're doing for people just listening squeezing different parts of your hand where it's more firm yeah right between the thumb and the index finger what do you do if someone asks for a well done steak do you to go fuck themselves?

[823] Probably should, huh?

[824] No, listen, if that's what they want out of the experience, listen, sometimes people just want to yell at you, and that's what they want out of the experience at the restaurant, so you've got to give it to them.

[825] That's part of hospitality.

[826] They want to take it.

[827] They want to complain, do you think?

[828] Some people are just incorrigible.

[829] Yeah.

[830] And you just have to say, I hear you.

[831] Thank you so much for your feedback.

[832] Ugh.

[833] Do you really?

[834] I mean, internally, I'm fucking screaming.

[835] Right.

[836] Like, can I, I love Catchoe Pepe.

[837] but I hate black pepper say what like black pepper pasta pecorino romano that's those are the three ingredients in it is it the pasta is a vessel for the black pepper yeah how could you say that yeah people do all the time all the time and they have to talk you have to talk to these people they say i'd like to speak to the chef oh no i have people to buffer me from that oh god i can only imagine but still in hospitality i mean you know you know we train our our team to Just like not make anything about you and, you know, you just look at someone and say maybe their mother died today.

[838] And if you just, it's so easy to diffuse and it's really a lot of psychology being applied to people where, you know, you people need to be heard and understood.

[839] And so you just let people vent.

[840] And, you know, there's ways to kind of mimic people's, you know, bodily movements and stuff to show that you've heard them.

[841] And so it's just really powerful to diffuse that.

[842] And so in hospitality, you can't take anything personally.

[843] It's never about you.

[844] Nothing's ever about you.

[845] I do.

[846] I could only imagine.

[847] Why could?

[848] I used to honestly, like when I first started cooking professionally as a chef, I used to read like the Yelp reviews and whatnot.

[849] Oh, no. I haven't read a Yelp review since 2006.

[850] Joe's a big fan of reading all comments.

[851] Yeah, super important.

[852] No. Hear everybody.

[853] When you, like, I don't have kids.

[854] but so these restaurants, and I feel like I do have a lot of kids that work for me, but my restaurants feel like my babies.

[855] And then in the early days, I would read reviews, and it would be like somebody saying, your baby's ugly, so ugly.

[856] And you'd be like - It's crushing.

[857] No, yeah, it's crushing.

[858] You can't read.

[859] Especially for chefs.

[860] Like, chefs put their heart and soul onto the plate.

[861] You know, everything that I have inside of me goes under that plate.

[862] My history, my family, my heart, my soul, my emotion.

[863] Cooking is emotion.

[864] If you don't have emotion when you cook, then you're not doing it right.

[865] And when you put it out there on the public stage and people says, this sucks.

[866] Fuck you.

[867] This sucks.

[868] This isn't authentic, blah, blah, blah.

[869] Cooking food is so personal to the person who's receiving it.

[870] And like we said, authenticity is very personal.

[871] So sometimes I just have to say, you know what, Felix is just not the restaurant for you, my friend.

[872] And we've fired customers before.

[873] So you don't let them come back?

[874] Yeah.

[875] Do you have a photo of them?

[876] Like a band list?

[877] Or I think it's just, you know, I think if you're in the business of pleasing everybody, you please nobody.

[878] Yes.

[879] And sometimes you just, you know, this is how it is, and we're not going to change it.

[880] If somebody asks for the Kachua Pepe with less pepper, this is not the place where you should be having Kachua Pepe.

[881] Sometimes we just also do that to respect the art of Evans cooking.

[882] Yeah, well, I think it's, what I was saying earlier is that it took me, watching Bourdain's love for cuisine to understand what food really is, what being a chef really is.

[883] I miss that fucking guy.

[884] I miss that fucking guy too.

[885] But I think many people don't ever have that experience where they do make that switch in their head like, oh, this is art. This isn't just food.

[886] You know, and I think there's a lot of people that it's like everything else.

[887] If you don't do it, you don't really have an appreciation for it.

[888] If you don't study it or really deeply try to understand it, you don't have an appreciation for it.

[889] That's like everything else, like how kids treat society in general, how a lot of people just take things for granted.

[890] I think people take food for granted.

[891] But I think there's been a lot of focus on food over the last, you know, maybe call it 10 years, where you have the chef's table and people really appreciating the art of cooking.

[892] When I started cooking, that shit was a blue -collar job, man. Yeah.

[893] There were very, very few celebrity chefs.

[894] There was like Emeril and Mario when I started cooking and like overnight it became like the hot shit to do.

[895] And all these culinary schools start opening and just meat grinder just churning out these ill prepared entitled kids.

[896] And you know, they sell them a bill of goods when they go to culinary school.

[897] You're like you graduate from here.

[898] You're going to be a chef.

[899] What I didn't know, as soon as I got a culinary school, I was making $7 a fucking hour.

[900] $7 an hour, you know, peeling fucking carrots and potatoes and picking parsley and shit.

[901] And, like, you've really got to love it to get to that point.

[902] And you've got to do it for 10 years to get good at it.

[903] And then you've got to do it another 10 years to start making money from it.

[904] And that's it.

[905] And a lot of the younger kids, they're just not willing to pay the fucking cost.

[906] And they want to skip rungs in the ladder.

[907] That's the case with every art form.

[908] We find that with comedy, with stand -up comedy.

[909] There's a lot of kids that they want to do stand -up and they develop a YouTube channel and they get a following for making funny YouTube videos and then they think they're a stand -up comic and you're like, hold the fuck on.

[910] They're like, where's my Netflix special?

[911] Yeah, exactly.

[912] I demand it.

[913] Yeah, it takes.

[914] With comedy and food, the proof is in the end result.

[915] It's either good or it's bad.

[916] You might be able to make one dish perfectly one time, but can you do that shit 10 ,000 times with 98 % accuracy?

[917] Right.

[918] That's where, that's the rub.

[919] There's also a thing in, I think, in being a chef where, like you were talking about, making $7 an hour, peeling and stuff, that's real similar to comedy in that you've got to do the road.

[920] You've got to work these shittles.

[921] You've got to make your bones, man. And you might hate it while you're doing it, but one day you look back and go, oh, that was really important for my development.

[922] It's pure and simple.

[923] It's foundation.

[924] Yeah.

[925] Just you can't build anything without a strong foundation.

[926] Now, when you create your menu, how often do you change it?

[927] At Felix, I think we cook specifically with seasonality.

[928] So if the market changes, we change.

[929] And that's really how the Italians have cooked for thousands and thousands of years.

[930] You know, seasonality is a real buzzword in the U .S. But Italian's been cooking that way out of necessity for thousands of years.

[931] And so have many other cultures.

[932] But I really take, you know, my inspiration from tradition and try to pay homage to those culinary traditions in Italy.

[933] And I try to put as a minimal amount of ego and a minimal amount of manipulation towards the traditional product.

[934] And all I want to do is present whatever it is, whether it's cassiopepe or Talia della Bolognese, the truest form that you can possibly get in the U .S., that's what I want to put forth.

[935] And if you take my Bolognaese, the inspiration from that, do you have the Bolo at Felix?

[936] I'm sure I've had it.

[937] Yeah.

[938] That shit should taste like the streets of Bologna, the diesel fuel, cigarette smoke, the melting pork fat, like that.

[939] Italy, Italian food is so, Italian food is so environmentally driven.

[940] Italian food is so environmentally driven.

[941] And it's hard to accomplish that if you're in the ass end of fucking Culver City.

[942] So you have to coax out these nuances from products that are born in the place that you're trying to evoke.

[943] you know like prosciutto di parma mortadillo de bologna so like it needs the taste of that place if you're sitting on the island of capri and you're eating a capraise salad drinking a glass wine with the person that you love and the ocean breezes on your face and then you eat a capraise salad at joe schmo's place and fucking inglewood it doesn't read the same way and that's that's really where the difference between good restaurants bad restaurants and great restaurants really lives and what about the wine like how do you know what wine to buy that's going to go with the meals that you're serving again it goes down to regionality and someone who has a great palette you know our wine director matt rogill has done an exceptional job at choosing uh wines that are specific to the regions that we're inspired by and you got to taste it and that's what i mean that's the fun part but like you just have to taste everything taste it and there's a lot of shit wine out there but there's a lot of shit wine out there but there's a lot of of exceptional wine that is made by very small family farms that that uh or sorry vintners uh that this the allocation is so small that they barely have enough to send to the u .s. So does the wine director look at your menu and then say, you know, this is going to require a hundred percent.

[944] It's totally, it has to be collaborative, you know.

[945] So you'll show him the menu and then you, you have a dialogue about.

[946] like what kind of wine and then do you try it do you like make a dish and try the the wine with that dish and uh we'll taste multiple wines multiple wines what could possibly go with whatever you're making what if it if it's a new a new dish or a new wine or it's the same menu and an old wine a different vintage a different area of the region where the wine is grown like there's so many different elements to to choosing wine and then on top of it training the staff to make suggestions to clientele, like, hey, what do you really like?

[947] And that gets back to that conversation between us and the clientele.

[948] And knowing more about our clientele and who likes to come to Felix gives us a better standpoint.

[949] How many people do you think are return customers?

[950] I would say at least 75 to 80%.

[951] Wow.

[952] Absolutely.

[953] That's crazy.

[954] So you recognize people?

[955] Of course.

[956] Wow.

[957] Wow.

[958] I mean, you saw me. I stand at the pass.

[959] I'm in the dining room.

[960] Yeah.

[961] And I check every single plate coming out of the kitchen.

[962] Wow.

[963] Your bread and butter is really your returning customers in any restaurant.

[964] You're going to have an element of people that come in because they're traveling from other parts of the world and they want to check out your restaurant.

[965] But imagine right now where traveling is really hit.

[966] So if you don't have your local customer base built up, then you're in trouble.

[967] Now, for someone like you that has so many restaurants, and you have some.

[968] so many plate spinning, how do you not go crazy?

[969] Like, how do you manage all that?

[970] I can't imagine the stress that's on your head, the weight that you're carrying on your shoulders running that many restaurants.

[971] Well, I have an amazing team, so it's not, I'm definitely not alone in this, and I have amazing people, and we're in this together, and I think I had a moment where I was brought to my knees.

[972] I felt stressed like I had never felt before.

[973] I was thinking that, could I have an aneurysm right now?

[974] I was just feeling uncontrollable stress.

[975] you know, with the thought of just losing everything that I had built up.

[976] And my personality being so conservative, I just couldn't believe it was overwhelming.

[977] And then I gave myself, I just gave myself a few days to be that way and have, you know, that reaction.

[978] And, you know, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm gritty.

[979] And I just gave myself essentially a few days.

[980] And then I picked myself up and I said, well, what are we going to do?

[981] And I'm not alone in this.

[982] Everybody in my industry, the industry has been decimated.

[983] And to know that we're in this together.

[984] and to look at solutions where you have to adapt and innovate and renegotiate.

[985] So, you know, how are we going to create these other new revenue streams?

[986] And so I got back into working mode, working around the clock with my team.

[987] And a lot of my restaurants in Toronto, you can buy all of your groceries and essentials and just looking for other revenue streams to survive.

[988] Have any of them opened up in Toronto yet?

[989] Not for a sit -down and we're behind the U .S. Really?

[990] Yeah.

[991] Why is that?

[992] well because the the virus lagged in you know in the spread it started here started spreading in New York City before Toronto so we were just I think about three weeks behind everything happening here so and I think we're a little bit more conservative with reopening and we like you know it's all everyone's telling me they can't get the even the antibody test anywhere in Canada so we're we're behind on these kind of things so we don't know know when we're going to be allowed to be open for seated, to be seated.

[993] You know, and I think the one good news, we're going into summer.

[994] A lot of my restaurants have a lot of patio space, and we know that you're safe for outdoors, for obvious reasons.

[995] And with Felix, we went to the landlord to ask if we could use the back area space.

[996] There's like a little park at, so we're going to use outdoor space behind the restaurants.

[997] And it's all about making people feel safe.

[998] People will come out if they feel safe.

[999] There's going to be your young customer base that doesn't care.

[1000] But as more and more restaurants open, there's just going to be spread amongst fewer restaurants.

[1001] So we're not out of the woods here.

[1002] We're not going to be, you know, and again, our goal is to survive this.

[1003] Now, do you look at these new restaurants you're about to open?

[1004] Do you put them on pause?

[1005] Do you just continue ahead once you get the green light and just say, let's make it happen?

[1006] Well, each project, again, is, you know, is very different.

[1007] And I have different amounts of money invested in each project.

[1008] So what we're doing is negotiating around the clock with, for example, if we have landlords in certain places, we're renegotiating the leases right now, and we're asking to put it on pause, put the entire project on pause until we come out of this, and I can start building the company again and have some revenue to put back into the projects.

[1009] So some landlords have been unwilling in the beginning, but now they're more willing as they realize who can take my place.

[1010] If somebody who I've got a very strong record, I've never closed a restaurant, and...

[1011] That's amazing.

[1012] That's really amazing.

[1013] Thank you.

[1014] Isn't it like...

[1015] It's pretty amazing.

[1016] It's an unicorn.

[1017] What is the average restaurant, like, what percentage of...

[1018] 80 % close.

[1019] Failure.

[1020] Yeah.

[1021] Yeah, high failure rate.

[1022] Very tough business.

[1023] Don't go in it.

[1024] Nobody.

[1025] Nobody.

[1026] Yeah, you thrive.

[1027] No, I love it.

[1028] It's a passion for us, and so we do it.

[1029] But, you know, landlords maybe initially were saying, just you got to pay your rent.

[1030] Even on construction sites, my rent was kicking in.

[1031] I'm like, I'm not even open and I got to pay rent.

[1032] I said, I can't do that.

[1033] So take the keys.

[1034] And so some of them were like, why would you want to waste your investment?

[1035] And I'd be like, I'm like in triage and I've got to save the restaurants that are open.

[1036] I can't be like building a worse time to be building a restaurant.

[1037] So I have to be willing to walk away.

[1038] And in negotiations, your strongest position is being willing to walk away.

[1039] So I'm like, just take the keys.

[1040] I can't even be concerned about this.

[1041] Even if I've got millions of dollars out on construction sites, I'm like, take the keys.

[1042] And then they come back and they say, well, I guess we don't have anyone else to come in our place.

[1043] When, you know, restaurants have been decimated.

[1044] Retail, like are you going to get, you know, Neiman Marcus in there, you know, J .Crew?

[1045] Who's coming in my place?

[1046] So once they start to realize that, they're saying, okay, let's sit down at the negotiation table and work this out.

[1047] So I'm working through every project.

[1048] So I don't have the answers right now, but I'm willing to walk away if I can't, you know, negotiate to be something that I can actually, you know, survive in the end and not just pour more money into something that I'll just lose my shirt.

[1049] I want to pause on the construction sites.

[1050] It seems like there's going to be a long period of time before anybody considers opening up a new restaurant after this.

[1051] Oh, my God.

[1052] Well, who...

[1053] You'd be surprised.

[1054] You think so?

[1055] Really?

[1056] People are going to just jump in?

[1057] Some gangsters.

[1058] Fuck it.

[1059] Well, the thing is this is there is no restaurant life without restaurant death, and this is a revolving door.

[1060] Dude, you just got philosophical as fuck right there.

[1061] Evans deep.

[1062] I mean, it's just, it's the way of this game.

[1063] And it's the unfortunate fact that from extraordinary, these extraordinary circumstances, there's going to be a lot of leases that are available.

[1064] and there are a lot of people who want to open restaurants because it's the hot thing to do.

[1065] I 100 % agree.

[1066] I just think that there's going to be a lot of young people coming now because commercial real estate is going to be very affordable and they can come in.

[1067] So I think a little bit there's going to be a changing of the guard.

[1068] Well, restaurants in L .A. have very unique personalities too.

[1069] There's like celebrity spots, which I'm always like super wary of.

[1070] And they always seem really gross, you know.

[1071] but like I've eaten it catch before and there's like paparazzi waiting for you as you're walking in you're like what those places are done like but by design yeah they're flashing and whatever but um we've always tried to create a safe haven like a sanctuary for the celebrity clientele you know if you need to go out the back door and you know because there's paparazzi outside absolutely let's go through the kitchen whatever you need and and and I think think that's a lot of the reason why celebrities are attracted to Felix is that I'm just here to feed you and make sure you have a good time and then if you need anything further on top of that we're willing to supply that whatever it is and on top of that the food's pretty good but yeah the food's amazing but it's like scenes they're those are weird like those are engineered they're engineered so they probably tell the paparazzi come hang out here they probably have some sort of a weird deal with celebrities bring your celebrity friends and celebrities do go there to be photographed and it happens it happens all over the place but LA LA this is LA yeah I was listening to these dummies talk and they were like we went to catch there was no one famous there like they went there just to see famous people it's bizarre it's fucking weird it's fucking weird yeah um when you look at all the the restaurants in LA is a really good place for restaurants would you agree with that I think L .A. is the best place to cook right now.

[1072] Really?

[1073] In all of the United States.

[1074] Absolutely.

[1075] Why so?

[1076] Just because, you know, for a very long time, L .A. wasn't really respected as a bona fide place for people to cook.

[1077] Why was that?

[1078] Just no respect.

[1079] Just no respect.

[1080] And it was always San Francisco.

[1081] It was always New York.

[1082] And they pulled the Michelin Guide out of L .A. The Michelin Guide existed here, and then they pulled it out, and they just brought it back last year.

[1083] Why?

[1084] Why did they pull it out?

[1085] They didn't think it was good enough.

[1086] What?

[1087] Really?

[1088] For real.

[1089] Because we just have a different style and approach to dining.

[1090] Fine dining has its place in Los Angeles, but there's literally a handful of fine dining restaurants.

[1091] And that's what Michelin is really geared towards rating is fine dining restaurants.

[1092] You have to do certain things, a certain criteria that you have to hit to get a Michel's Star.

[1093] That's all there is.

[1094] And they focus a lot on French and Japanese style.

[1095] restaurants, which is big in New York.

[1096] It's big in San Francisco.

[1097] It's big in Chicago.

[1098] So they focused on that.

[1099] So they pulled it.

[1100] I think it was 2009.

[1101] They pulled the guide.

[1102] Wow.

[1103] They just didn't take a serious.

[1104] Not good enough, L .A., but they came back last year.

[1105] Yeah, it was a lot of backlash when they came back, okay, we think you're good enough now.

[1106] A lot of people in L .A. are like, this is not going to hold water.

[1107] How does one get a Michelin Star?

[1108] Like, how does that work?

[1109] They come down and they just decide.

[1110] The tire company sends people out.

[1111] How weird is that too?

[1112] These people go out late.

[1113] A French tire company.

[1114] Is it?

[1115] Yeah.

[1116] Michelin's from France.

[1117] Yeah, man. But it's a strange thing that a tire company is the most respected.

[1118] Yeah.

[1119] They send inspectors.

[1120] They're supposed to be, you know, anonymous.

[1121] There's certain criteria that they also dine, you know, they, it's always a two -top.

[1122] They always, like, do special requests.

[1123] What's a two -top?

[1124] Two -tops, two people.

[1125] Okay.

[1126] Or a deuce.

[1127] You're talking restaurant -talk.

[1128] And, you know, they ask for birthday candles.

[1129] They ask for special adjustments to their meal.

[1130] They always order a bottle of wine or two glasses.

[1131] It's just there's a lot of hidden kind of things that they do that give you the heads up that they're there.

[1132] But in my opinion, I don't think Michelin actually came to Felix.

[1133] And that's why we were left off because they couldn't get a reservation.

[1134] Really?

[1135] Yeah, man. We're booked out 28 days in a day.

[1136] advance at Felix and for every day of that month we have over 500 people on the wait list for that day so does it matter if you're on a Michelin start does that mean anything to you no yeah I don't do it for them I don't do it for accolades it too for the people who show up to cook there and work there for my team and I show and and we do it for the people who come to eat well just as a client or a customer if you're not on that list that list is bullshit it really You said it, Joe.

[1137] That list is bullshit.

[1138] If you're telling me the best restaurants in L .A. is and your restaurant's not on it, nonsense.

[1139] You have a nonsense list.

[1140] Like, you better get a reservation, son.

[1141] I just think the criteria is a little bit archaic.

[1142] Yeah.

[1143] It's a little bit archaic.

[1144] And they had an exceptional chance to really create some, you know, some support for the list in Los Angeles.

[1145] And they really created animosity through, like.

[1146] throughout the city.

[1147] Is there any other established methods of judging restaurants?

[1148] Everyone who sits down.

[1149] Right.

[1150] It's immediate.

[1151] Word of mouth.

[1152] Word of mouth.

[1153] The real.

[1154] Yeah.

[1155] And that's, I just say scoreboard, man. Scoreboard.

[1156] I'm busy every night.

[1157] I crank every night.

[1158] Your best work is within your four walls and people walking out and word of mouth, right?

[1159] Do you like, you know, we're not going to take out advertisements to say, come to Felix.

[1160] You're going to have a great plate of pasta.

[1161] It's going to be your friends telling you.

[1162] How did you come to Felix the first time?

[1163] Callan.

[1164] Okay, he looks in the neighborhood.

[1165] Listen to me. Listen to me. The best.

[1166] The best restaurant on Earth, Felix in Venice.

[1167] It's on Abakini.

[1168] You're going with me. The best.

[1169] Trust me. I'm like, really?

[1170] The best.

[1171] This is Brian.

[1172] The best.

[1173] I'm like, okay.

[1174] Like, Brian is a real foodie.

[1175] When Callan tells me something's amazing.

[1176] I saw him the other day picking up to go.

[1177] Yeah.

[1178] When he says the best.

[1179] I'm like, really?

[1180] Okay?

[1181] Like, you literally calls me. You must.

[1182] You must eat there.

[1183] You must.

[1184] It's the best.

[1185] He's right.

[1186] It's called favorite.

[1187] That's the best, that's the best, word of mouth.

[1188] It's the best compliment.

[1189] People show up every day.

[1190] And that's all that, you know, that's all that I need.

[1191] Yeah, it's like Kevin Costner and Field of Dreams, build it and they will come.

[1192] They will come.

[1193] Yeah.

[1194] I mean, it is a beautiful thing when things get out purely by word of mouth, you know.

[1195] It has more.

[1196] staying power that way.

[1197] I mean, we, just after we opened, we had an incredible accolade in Esquire magazine, which named us the number one new restaurant in America.

[1198] That helps.

[1199] That helps.

[1200] Best new restaurant in America, Esquire.

[1201] Wow.

[1202] Sick.

[1203] Esquire knows what the fuck they're talking about.

[1204] Fuck you, Michelin.

[1205] Yeah, certain accolades like that.

[1206] You know, that's why we have a, you know, people will say about Felix.

[1207] The complaint is they can't get in because we've had certain accolades.

[1208] So anyone traveling to L .A., they're like, Esquare magazine.

[1209] the number one new restaurant they want to they want to check out felix so have you guys thought about making a larger version of felix or do you like the fact that it's all manageable it's small it's exclusive you know i like to keep my eye on everything and that restaurant's just big enough uh that we can be busy we can employ a good amount of staff members and we can serve a significant amount of people per night and anything over that is just you know i think it's loses some of the specialness of their restaurant.

[1210] You know, that restaurant is, it's a jewel.

[1211] It's a total jewel.

[1212] And there's an adage in business if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[1213] Mm. Yeah.

[1214] Open another restaurant.

[1215] Do something else.

[1216] But there's only one Felix on Ibeckinney and that's how it's going to stay.

[1217] Now when you create a dish, so if you, is this something like, whether it's a pasta dish or anything, is it something that you've already cooked before or do you experiment?

[1218] Do you create things based on like what you already know about food and you have an idea um that's a good question i mean honestly i i i try not to create obviously i'm putting my my own not a spin but my own fingerprint on it but i'm really just drawing from thousands of years of tradition and just trying not to fuck it up and pay homage to the people who created it and anything on the felix on the Felix menu I've learned from someone in Italy like I don't make pasta shapes that I saw on YouTube because for me that's cheap it's cheap there's more value to me to learn it from a grandmother in Italy in their region in their house and pass that knowledge on to me so that I can authentically present it in the best way possible so when you were learning and you were in Italy doing this.

[1219] Did you have this understanding that all this would eventually play out like that and that you would become a great chef and that this is the idea that you're putting in the work?

[1220] Or were you just enamored by the passion of making the food?

[1221] I absolutely fell in love with the Italian approach to cooking, the Italian approach to living, their reverence for land and tradition.

[1222] And when I got, you know, I classically trained French, you know, French food.

[1223] I went to the little cordon blue, whatever.

[1224] I cooked for seven years, French and Asian techniques at Spahgo and Beverly Hills.

[1225] And as soon as I went to Italy, all of that went out the window.

[1226] And I adopted this approach because I just absolutely fell in love with the country.

[1227] And I've, you know, that love, you know, it burns hot.

[1228] What about that?

[1229] Why does that resonate more than, say, French cuisine or?

[1230] Why would you want to fucking puree it and then jellify it and put it into it, you know, like why?

[1231] I just don't get it.

[1232] So I just left it all behind.

[1233] All those manipulative techniques that are very, very popular in a lot of a lot of the world, a lot of the restaurants in the world.

[1234] I just, it doesn't excite me. That's just personal preference.

[1235] Personal.

[1236] Because some people love French cuisine.

[1237] Absolutely.

[1238] They love all the weird little details.

[1239] But for me, that's like how many times could you go to Abouille, you know?

[1240] How many times can you go to?

[1241] El Buiz's friend, Adria's now closed restaurant and essentially the godfather and molecular gastronomy.

[1242] And, you know, how many times can you go there and have the experience and say, fuck, I want to go back to that place because this was so good.

[1243] It hits you in a different way.

[1244] when you make food that people crave on a daily basis it just hits different it gets inside of you you'll never forget that steak that you had at felix never and once it's in there once it's in your mind you're like fuck i'm going to have that again and that's really my goal as a pasta maker as a chef is to create dishes that hit different you know and and and to ultimately like evoke memory.

[1245] Do you have the Castro Pepe at Felix?

[1246] Yes.

[1247] Okay.

[1248] Yeah.

[1249] So my goal is like if you have the Catrapepe at Felix and you've been to Rome and eaten Cacro Pepepe, I want you to be like, fuck, this is better than Rome.

[1250] Or remember that time we were in Rome you had Cacropepepe?

[1251] This is better or this is worse or whatever.

[1252] You evoke memories and you make them.

[1253] And that's really the ultimate goal is to get inside people's heads so that they come back it's a weird thing food it's the mouth pleasure it's a very strange thing like the flavors like you're you're playing games with the inside of people's mouths you know that's a fucked -up way to say but it's really what it is when those flavors come together you like you savor the bite you're like ah like and for that brief moment while it's in your mouth and you're chewing it you get this really amazing pleasure But it's also a drug in a lot of chemicals, changing your chemical.

[1254] There's nothing like it in the world.

[1255] No, it's so important.

[1256] And God, I appreciate it so much.

[1257] I appreciate going out to a restaurant so much because of this pandemic.

[1258] And I always appreciated it.

[1259] It was always a wonderful treat to be able to go to a nice restaurant.

[1260] But, God, I appreciate it so much now when you don't have it.

[1261] And I like cooking.

[1262] I cook all the time.

[1263] I enjoy it.

[1264] But there's something about not having it that makes you go, oh, I'm going to appreciate this so much when you get to do it again.

[1265] Yeah, that's great.

[1266] Well, that gives us hope.

[1267] Yeah.

[1268] So from here, it's just waiting out the protests and then putting it all together again with the staff.

[1269] And do you bring this, is everybody available?

[1270] Are you going to be able to have the same crew?

[1271] Some are, some are not.

[1272] Some are not comfortable coming back, but they're not ready.

[1273] And that's okay.

[1274] Because of the disease?

[1275] Yeah.

[1276] Are they getting unemployment?

[1277] I think a lot of them are.

[1278] Yeah.

[1279] I mean, the CARES Act really up to the unemployment, you know, when you're making 600 net a week and your, you know, decision is, do I, you know, to keep taking this money or do I put my life at risk?

[1280] And it's going to be a certain percentage that they don't want to come back to work.

[1281] I don't blame them.

[1282] Yeah, I know what you're saying.

[1283] I wish there was more emphasis by the government put on having you use, take strategies to strengthen your immune system and explain to people how important.

[1284] It is.

[1285] Stop eating so much sugar.

[1286] Stop drinking so much.

[1287] Get some exercise.

[1288] All these things have a real measurable effect on your immune system.

[1289] But yet it's all fear.

[1290] It's all cover your face.

[1291] Wear a shield.

[1292] Don't touch this.

[1293] Hand sanitizer.

[1294] It's like there's weakening the system.

[1295] Exactly.

[1296] Well, I don't know if your immune system gets weakened because of non -contact or it gets strengthened because of contact.

[1297] If it really does get weakened because of non -contact, you're dealing with, a bunch of people with severely compromised immune systems going out marching together, stacking on top of each other.

[1298] It's a really kind of a crazy experiment to see where COVID is right now because of these marches.

[1299] That's for sure.

[1300] Yeah.

[1301] That's for sure.

[1302] So are you guys optimistic?

[1303] Always.

[1304] Always, always, always.

[1305] A hundred percent optimistic.

[1306] Assault forward.

[1307] Assault forward.

[1308] We have to move forward.

[1309] We have to go.

[1310] We don't have a choice.

[1311] we must move forward if we don't we die once you stop moving you die and that's it it's like we just have to push and you have to be working at it like you know there's a lot of restaurants that are closing and a lot of great restaurants that are closing to no fault of their own because you know again for so many reasons right if you're a little bit weak if you're a new restaurant you're going to have a hard time if you're an old restaurant and your sales are kind of weak you're going to close but right now if you sit down and just kind of wait it out and you're going to die.

[1312] But if you, you know, Felix in 48 hours became a takeout and delivery restaurant, there was no takeout in delivery.

[1313] We weren't set up raw.

[1314] We didn't even have containers, dude.

[1315] But in 48 hours, you know, here are your pasta kits and you can have a perfect experience at home.

[1316] You know, just boil your water in three minutes.

[1317] You have a Felix dinner.

[1318] But that was created by the team at Felix in 48 hours.

[1319] A lot of restaurants, they just, like, they're sitting around and they're not, you know, not being proactive.

[1320] And it's also about renegotiating with the banks and renegotiating with your landlords and looking for new revenue streams.

[1321] So you have to be doing, you have to be doing all of that work right now, or you will not survive.

[1322] I thought it was remarkably flexible that a lot of restaurants were putting together these kits, that that became a thing.

[1323] It's really very interesting.

[1324] They just adapted and said, okay, can we give these people instructions and then put together this food and then.

[1325] Basically what we did.

[1326] We created the kits specifically geared towards shelter at home so that you could get restaurant quality pasta and just literally boil water and you're there.

[1327] So you continue to make the pasta basically the same way and then do you send it to them with like very specific instructions?

[1328] Absolutely.

[1329] Do put salt in the water?

[1330] Do this?

[1331] The whole bit.

[1332] The whole bit is basically heat up the sauce, boil the water, add this amount of salt, boil it for three minutes, add it to the sauce, boom, add the cheese, you're good to go.

[1333] It's been successful, and I think a lot of restaurants took, you know, notes from us and started doing the same thing because it's really kept us alive.

[1334] And obviously, people fucking love pizza.

[1335] Yeah.

[1336] And I think, you know, one upside to this is we weren't necessarily known for how good the pizza is at Felix, but now people fucking know how good the fucking pizza is at Felix.

[1337] So you guys make good everything, man. But, like, so if someone orders a steak, are you cooking steak or are you sending them steak to cook?

[1338] No, I'm sending them pre -packaged cryovac steaks with instructions.

[1339] You know, everybody likes their steak cooked differently.

[1340] So we give general guidelines and pro tips of how to rest and, you know, we send them salsa verde and we send them, you know, steak salt and whatnot.

[1341] So.

[1342] Are you telling them to cook on a frying pan?

[1343] Like, how are you getting them to cook it?

[1344] High heat, either the grill or in the frying pan.

[1345] Just high heat is your thing?

[1346] High heat, man. High heat, and then just intervals.

[1347] High heat, take it off, let it rest.

[1348] High heat, take it off.

[1349] So you cook more, like...

[1350] Especially the T -bones.

[1351] So when you do that, so you're not doing it in one shot?

[1352] No. You're kicking it a little bit and then letting it rest and cook?

[1353] I'll take up to an hour to cook like a 35 -ounce T -bone.

[1354] Really?

[1355] Absolutely.

[1356] So you bring up the temperature very slow and gradual increas.

[1357] But you're doing it with high heat in these – why high heat?

[1358] Because that's all you got in restaurants, high heat.

[1359] Low and slow is typically for brazing.

[1360] But if you're dealing with dry heat, it should be violent, it should be quick, and then let it rest.

[1361] Especially the T -bone.

[1362] You've got to start the T -bone on the actual bone, right?

[1363] So vertical.

[1364] Start it on your trigger, right?

[1365] That's what you do it?

[1366] You start a vertical?

[1367] the bone so that the heat can radiate gently through the bone and out towards the meat.

[1368] So if you just throw the T -bone on side and then sign it, you have a part that's connected to that actual T -bone, the separation bone, it's going to be raw, and everything else is going to be medium or medium -rare.

[1369] But if you start it on the bone, the heat is gently radiated through the meat.

[1370] And then halfway through, we take the filet mignon off and cook the New York side a little longer and then throw it back on.

[1371] So how long do you make it sit on the bone?

[1372] How long do you have it stacked vertically like that?

[1373] Probably like 10 to 12 minutes.

[1374] Oh, wow.

[1375] Yeah.

[1376] I never even thought of that.

[1377] Yeah, man. Besteca Fiorentina.

[1378] The master is Dario.

[1379] Who's that?

[1380] Dari Chikini.

[1381] He's like the most famous, you should look him up.

[1382] He's one of the most famous butchers in all of Italy.

[1383] He quotes Dante.

[1384] He's a fucking maniac.

[1385] But I went to his restaurant, I think two years.

[1386] ago.

[1387] Is that in Florence?

[1388] It's in, I want to say, I can't remember that.

[1389] Yeah.

[1390] Oh, there he is.

[1391] There is.

[1392] What's good, Dario.

[1393] Look at him.

[1394] Yeah.

[1395] Amazing.

[1396] Look at him.

[1397] Yeah.

[1398] Amazing.

[1399] So happy.

[1400] Well, yeah, he's a wild man. He's a wild man. But he starts the T -bone on the bone.

[1401] So he's, oh, Jesus Christ.

[1402] He's my size of that fucking steak.

[1403] Absolute master.

[1404] That's preposterous.

[1405] Absolutely master.

[1406] And so you learn from him so what i did not learn from him i you know i've been we've been cooking you know i've been cooking for 20 years so you pick things up along the way cooking is just like like uh anything else like a practice okay you got a doctor you got a lawyer right you learn the fundamentals and then throughout your career you upgrade those fundamentals with new and relevant techniques or laws or whatever cooking is the same thing you get a foundation and then you upgrade new and relevant techniques and so are you using a grill that uses wood?

[1407] Are you cooking on wood?

[1408] Yeah, we're cooking on California almond and white oak.

[1409] Almond?

[1410] Almond for the smoke because it'll go to fire like that because it's so saturated with almond oil and then oak for long and slow cooking.

[1411] So it burns super hot.

[1412] So the almond burns really quick and the oak burns very slow.

[1413] And so you put different woods in for different times?

[1414] Like, yeah.

[1415] So you started off with the We start with almond, and then we add oak, and then we add almond, and then we add oak, and it's just kind of fire maintenance is 90 % of wood fire cooking.

[1416] So it's just about how hot it burns and the distance, how high the coals are?

[1417] And how deep the coal bed is and how, you know, evenly dispersed the heat is.

[1418] We'll have a cool side and a hot side and then a fire side all within like a, you know, two square feet.

[1419] Is there images of your grill set up online?

[1420] I don't think so.

[1421] Evan, your 10 % technique right now is not sounding like 10%.

[1422] of your cooking it sounds like a lot right yeah I'm like hold on a second that's how could that be 10 % you're rotating the food it's a fatty 10 % so did you set up this grill this way because like you that's the only way you cook steak you prefer to cook it over wood or the design of Felix the actual shoebox of the kitchen that we have is really you know the design was based on the restrictions of the size so we've crammed a hell of a lot into I I think it's just under 220 square feet, something like that.

[1423] There's a fucking pizza oven in there.

[1424] There's a wood -fired grill.

[1425] There's 10 burners.

[1426] It's a fryer.

[1427] And you cook it 500 meals a night in that?

[1428] I think top end is like 350, 350 people.

[1429] So a few times that by three or four different plates per person.

[1430] Wow.

[1431] So more than that.

[1432] It's built for speed.

[1433] I build restaurants for speed.

[1434] And I know some restaurants, they have those crazy.

[1435] like it's it's like a gas broiler yeah you know and then some of them have like gasoline does it I can't stand it's like a Boston broiler top and bottom what's a Boston broiler it's like it's like a drawer you pull it out you can steak on a lot of like mastros and and old school steakhouses have them because it cooks with crazy intense heat from top and bottom at the same time yeah but you don't no don't like it not the way to do it It's analog.

[1436] I like to do as many things analog as possible.

[1437] I still write with pencil.

[1438] Really?

[1439] Yeah.

[1440] But it's interesting because all this attention to detail, like it's kind of shocking, I don't say shocking, but surprising like, oh, okay.

[1441] Oh, almond and then oak, huh, huh, huh.

[1442] But it makes sense if you eat there, you go, okay, someone has to put an insane amount of attention to detail to make dishes that are that satisfying.

[1443] Well, the simplicity kind of belies the background of the dish.

[1444] You know, it looks really fucking simple, but there's 20 years of experience behind it.

[1445] And that's like the ultimate goal.

[1446] It should look simple.

[1447] It should be delicious.

[1448] But, you know, do you necessarily need to know about the wizard behind the curtain?

[1449] No. I do.

[1450] I want to know.

[1451] But it's also, Evan procures absolutely the best product from everywhere and has the best relationships with the best farmers.

[1452] and he's like, when you go to the farmer's market with Evan, he's like, he's like the king of the farmer's market.

[1453] They call me the mayor.

[1454] Oh, the mayor of the farmer's market.

[1455] It's kind of funny.

[1456] And they're like, we've saved you these, you know, fiddleheads.

[1457] Everything is handpicked.

[1458] I go Wednesdays and Saturdays, not recently obviously, but everything is handpicked.

[1459] We don't do pre -orders.

[1460] I go there.

[1461] And that's the very basis of cooking Italian.

[1462] So you get all your ingredients in the farmer's market?

[1463] I would say 90 to 92 % of all the vegetables that we use.

[1464] It's local farms, nothing outside of 500 miles.

[1465] So you have these longstanding relationships with these farms?

[1466] Absolutely.

[1467] And do you talk to them in advance and they say, okay, we've got great this?

[1468] We talk about weather.

[1469] We talk about soil content.

[1470] We talk about water content.

[1471] We talk about if it's going to rain, what's coming up, what do you have in the ground?

[1472] What are you planning for three months from now?

[1473] I've smuggled seeds back from Italy so that they can like plant stuff that.

[1474] You had to smuggle them?

[1475] Yeah, man. Don't tell them for you.

[1476] People are listening.

[1477] So is it illegal?

[1478] Things are allowed, but, like, I've brought certain species of, you know, bitter greens and different types of peppers.

[1479] No, I give them the farmers equally distributed to different, like, microclimates.

[1480] Because California is great, right?

[1481] They have a ton of microclimates.

[1482] So, say, for instance, we buy broccoli, sprouting broccoli.

[1483] I'll buy broccoli from three different farms and three different microclimates with three different soil contents, right?

[1484] So I'll buy broccoli from Kong, Thao, and Fresno.

[1485] And then I'll buy broccoli from James Birch and Florebella, which is three rivers.

[1486] And then I'll buy broccoli from Romeo Coleman.

[1487] And all three of them have different soil contents.

[1488] So all of James's water in three rivers comes from melting snow caps.

[1489] So it has this huge amount of mineral content in the soil.

[1490] And then you buy Kong's broccoli in Fresno.

[1491] It's super hot with cold nights, complex sugar.

[1492] So it's very sweet.

[1493] And then you buy Romeo's broccoli, which is less than, I think, a mile and a half, half from the ocean high salinity content in the broccoli and you mix all the broccoli together and it's like broccoli on fucking steroids could you tell if i gave you a piece of broccoli from each place where it came from i'm not that crazy but like a somaliers can tell you they can sip wine and a really good one can tell you where it's coming from it's i think so it's a little easier to do with wine is it really yeah i think so so you can't you but you know there is a difference if you taste specific yeah it's terroir it's terroir just like wine has terroir?

[1494] What does that mean?

[1495] It means the territory, the ground, what's in the ground?

[1496] The terroir is specific to where that thing is grown.

[1497] And terroir exists not only in wine, but in fruits and vegetables.

[1498] All of it.

[1499] And is the same approach to meat?

[1500] Like what kind of...

[1501] 100%.

[1502] If you're raising steers in Colorado versus Utah versus California, California has very, very little grass.

[1503] And all the grass that's down tastes like dry ass.

[1504] fucking grass because there's no water.

[1505] So the beef tastes of that place.

[1506] And if you're finishing cattle on corn or feeding it 100 % corn, it's going to taste completely different.

[1507] The marbling is going to be completely different.

[1508] The stakes I brought you today are 80 -20.

[1509] So 80 % of the steers life is grass.

[1510] And then they're finished on corn because America is literally in love with corn -fed flavor and that mouth feel from the fat.

[1511] So it's 80 -20.

[1512] But corn makes cattle sick.

[1513] That's why they pump them full of antibiotics.

[1514] So, you know, the good ranchers who practice animal husbandry, they do it in a way that it doesn't make the, you know, the animal sick.

[1515] So they're just doing it in the last stages of their life?

[1516] Correct.

[1517] Is that what you prefer?

[1518] Have you tried different kinds, like all 100 % grass fed, grass finished?

[1519] I try it.

[1520] grass -fed beef or just 100 % grass diet.

[1521] Typically shanks working muscles because working muscles have way more flavor than non -working muscles like filet mignon.

[1522] Filet mignon doesn't taste like fucking anything to me right?

[1523] Because it's a non -working muscle versus a shank is working all the time.

[1524] That's why it's tough.

[1525] Right?

[1526] So if I was to eat you, Joe Rogan, right?

[1527] If I was to break you down like an animal I would choose the working muscles and then braise them because they're stronger versus your filet mignon I don't even know where the fuck that would be on a human but like it would taste different and it would have a different texture cattle is the same way non -working muscles versus working muscles.

[1528] Have you ever gotten a hold of any wild boar?

[1529] 100%.

[1530] Wild boar is huge in Italy.

[1531] Do you cook any of that?

[1532] It's a hard sell on Avikini.

[1533] Is it really?

[1534] Yeah, man. How so?

[1535] Some people don't enjoy the nuances.

[1536] People would call it gamey, but I don't find a gamey if you treat it and apply certain, if you apply certain herbs and certain, I wouldn't call them spices, but apply certain ingredients to it, it takes the gaminess all the way.

[1537] So for me, if I cook wild boar, I think Tuscany.

[1538] I think of Abruzzo, I think of, you know, wild country.

[1539] And for me, the hills of Tuscany smell like wild fennel.

[1540] and rosemary and dirt, and you want to bring out those, again, back to the terroir and give those types of elements to the wild boar.

[1541] And it makes it sing, man. It makes it sing.

[1542] I brought that up because of the whole idea of the working muscles.

[1543] Like, that's a working animal.

[1544] It's a tough animal.

[1545] And most pork that's on the market, they don't really do anything.

[1546] Right.

[1547] Yeah, they just sit around and eat.

[1548] You just sit around and eat.

[1549] They get fat.

[1550] And that's what people are really looking for when it comes to pork.

[1551] But wild boar ragu has been pretty trendy for the last, I'd say, a few years.

[1552] It's a weird thing to call it boar, too, because boar just means a male pig.

[1553] I'm sure there's a lot of female pigs in there, too.

[1554] For sure.

[1555] It's wild pigs, but they really should call it.

[1556] But for whatever reason, people like the word boar.

[1557] It's a weird one, right?

[1558] It's a weird one.

[1559] Now, what about game?

[1560] Do you serve venison or any elk or anything like that?

[1561] Again, hard sell.

[1562] Is it?

[1563] Hard sell on that bikini.

[1564] I love venison.

[1565] I love elk.

[1566] I've cooked it in the past, but yeah, it's a hard sell.

[1567] And it goes back to knowing your clientele, you know, just because I want to put some ego into the menu doesn't mean that, you know.

[1568] Right, you don't want anything that's a hard sell.

[1569] You want anything.

[1570] This is something that's going to be just.

[1571] I want people to spend money.

[1572] Well, it's also the menu at Felix, the entree is a secondi.

[1573] It's a very small section because our kitchen is very small.

[1574] So there's only going to be usually about two proteins on the menu.

[1575] So you don't want to, if you have a much larger menu, you can be a little bit more creative or put on those cuts that aren't as popular.

[1576] But when your menu's that short, you have to look at, you know, sales.

[1577] And also meat of any kind, whether that's fish or whatever, is extremely expensive.

[1578] And, you know, going back to the conversation of charging an accurate amount of money for a dish, It's hard.

[1579] You know, take a look at lamb.

[1580] Lamb wholesale is like fucking $18 a pound.

[1581] For me, that's wholesale cost.

[1582] Wow.

[1583] That means I need to charge you $65 for three bones of a rack of lamb.

[1584] 65 bucks.

[1585] That's for me to cover the cost of running my kitchen out of that one dish.

[1586] That's so crazy.

[1587] And every single item on the menu is costed in that way.

[1588] We have a cost.

[1589] Then we have to figure out how much labor it costs to make that.

[1590] dish.

[1591] And then we have to figure out our lights and our utilities and our rent and all that other shit.

[1592] And then we got to put a price on it.

[1593] So when you go out to eat, you're not just paying for the ingredients.

[1594] You can do that at home.

[1595] You're paying for the experience, the staff, the lights, the water, all of that.

[1596] I hope people take that in consideration when they eat at a fine restaurant.

[1597] I really do.

[1598] Well, I think it's, you know, I think people just, people don't know, but right now people are talking about the restaurant industry because, you know, we've been hit so hard and to understand that 90 % of all of our revenue goes back out into the economy so you're taking your money and you're paying your staff and you're paying your rent and you're paying your food costs so a lot of it goes right back out most of it the majority 90 % god it's such a crazy business just hearing you guys talk about it sounds like such a balancing act and then to be hit over the head with something like this pandemic and everything getting locked down it's You know, restaurants are so valuable to me. And it's one of the things that I worried most about this pandemic other than the lives was like businesses that I enjoy and then restaurants specifically because it's such a great way to spend time with someone.

[1599] I mean, it's one of the great pleasures of life to be able to go to a place and have a fantastic chef sit, you know, sit you down and cook an amazing food.

[1600] and you enjoy it, and if that goes away.

[1601] Well, you know, I think over the last few years, restaurants in general have really, in North America, I will say, have really reached a pinnacle of cultural revelance right now.

[1602] And but it has to be reimagined.

[1603] We're not going to go back to that for the next little while.

[1604] And, you know, there's going to be, you know, there's one restaurant in the Netherlands who has a robot.

[1605] Did you see that with a little robot?

[1606] In some town, Mastricht in the Netherlands, a little robot that comes and is the bus person cleaning the tables and also bringing your food.

[1607] Look it up.

[1608] The robot?

[1609] Robot, Netherlands restaurant.

[1610] It cleans the table?

[1611] Cleans the table, brings your food.

[1612] Yeah.

[1613] A reopened Dutch restaurant is using robots to implement social distancing by serving and seating customers.

[1614] That's fucking creepy.

[1615] Look at that face.

[1616] Look at that face.

[1617] Look at those weird, murderous eyes.

[1618] But they say they can be customized.

[1619] I don't know.

[1620] I do have faith.

[1621] I do have faith in our community.

[1622] I have faith in our industry that we are creative enough to get through this.

[1623] And we're just fucking stubborn as fuck.

[1624] We're all so stubborn.

[1625] We do this for the love of doing it, for the love of making people happy.

[1626] work so hard.

[1627] And anybody who knows anybody that works in the restaurant business understands that it is a long grind.

[1628] I have faith in you guys.

[1629] I just don't have faith in the government.

[1630] I don't have faith in the way they've handled this.

[1631] Why should we?

[1632] I just, listen.

[1633] There's a complete lack of leadership at the top.

[1634] Complete fucking lack of leadership.

[1635] And it's fucking depressing, man. Yeah.

[1636] It's fucking depressing.

[1637] And again, the fish stinks from the head down.

[1638] But listen, I'm in your corner.

[1639] I know you are and we appreciate you and I know that you've mentioned Felix a couple of times on the podcast and you know it's really appreciated and we all need help.

[1640] Restaurants in general all need help right now.

[1641] I just love when someone does anything with the kind of passion that you guys display at your restaurant.

[1642] Whatever it is, whether you're making music or you're writing books or you're making food, I just love when someone does something like that because it makes me excited about all the things that I do.

[1643] I think we, you know, as human beings, as we interact with each other and we explore each other's lives and what other people do for a living, what their passions are, you get energized by that.

[1644] You get energized by other people's work by their enthusiasm.

[1645] Their enthusiasm is really contagious, you know, and that's one thing that I've really got out of your restaurant.

[1646] It's very contagious.

[1647] It's very obvious that you guys take extreme pride in what you do and you do it so well.

[1648] Yeah, thank you.

[1649] No, it's what keeps me going is the, like you said, it's the enthusiasm of our staff and the people that come back to our restaurant again and again.

[1650] It's what keeps it going.

[1651] You know, that's our reward.

[1652] And we're so used to that immediate reward of sending the food to the table and seeing people enjoy it, that's like the drug to us is making people have.

[1653] happy.

[1654] It's immediate.

[1655] And the camaraderie of everybody working together to provide that.

[1656] Yeah.

[1657] And the good news is we're not going anywhere.

[1658] And we know now that we are going to make it to the other side.

[1659] Beautiful.

[1660] I'll be there.

[1661] We can't wait.

[1662] I hope so.

[1663] I'll hold you to it.

[1664] Thank you.

[1665] Thank you.

[1666] Thank you.

[1667] Thank you.

[1668] My pleasure.

[1669] I can't wait to eat there again.

[1670] Can't wait to have you.

[1671] We did it.

[1672] Thank you.

[1673] Bye.

[1674] Bye.

[1675] Thank you.