Digital Social Hour - The Voltaggio Brothers: Taking Risks and Telling Stories through Food | Digital Social Hour #31

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Ladies and gentlemen, you are in for a once-in-a-lifetime auditory treat! Our latest podcast episode features the fascinating journey of the Voltaggio brothers, Michael and Bryan, acclaimed chefs and founders of Retro, a groundbreaking new restaurant in Las Vegas.In this captivating conversation, we dive deep into their inspiring background, from their humbling beginnings to the valuable life lessons they've learned throughout their culinary careers. Join us as we explore their creative process, from developing unique dishes inspired by nostalgia and childhood memories, to their delightful recreation of SpaghettiOs and a key lime pie that'll leave you craving more. But wait, there's more! The Voltaggio brothers don't shy away from taking risks in their dishes and are thrilled to share some utterly astonishing dining experiences they’ve had on their globetrotting culinary adventures. Trust us - you've never heard stories quite like these before! So, what are you waiting for? Hit that play button now to step into the fascinating world of the Voltaggio brothers, and witness their creative genius and drive for delivering unforgettable dining experiences for their guests. Your taste buds will thank you. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

all right sean kelly here welcome to the digital social hour podcast i'm here with my co-host wayne lewis what up what up and our guests today, Michael and Brian Voltaggio. What's up, guys? Rockstar chefs are in the building. First chefs. What do y'all have against chefs? Nothing. I love chefs. Me too.

I mean, they give us food. They nourish our bodies. I love them. Everyone needs a chef. Right, everybody. Now you have two, right? Yeah, but you guys are rock stars. That's a different level of art right there.

You've dedicated your lives to this, right? Yeah. We're just cooks. That's it. We cooks that's it we're just the cooks what age did you guys start cooking uh i mean i think what 14 15 years old 14 yeah he's two years older than me i had to work under him my first time that went kind of well or not 14 you guys wasn't playing kickball y'all were like whipping up in the kitchen we're straight up working because um you know we wanted to have things you know when you grow up you know really well off so you know we want to buy clothes have cars you know so we went to work at 14 years old

just start saving up and doing that and we found ourselves rolling into the kitchen because it was fun there's family um there's enough hours to work uh you know because we could work at night right in the restaurant industry so it's kind of but i think that work ethic you know, cause we can work at night in the restaurant industry. So it's kind of, but I think that work ethic that we have, like we were joking when we got here, we've been working like 120 hours a week. That's real. Like we've been doing that. But what's funny is we were working like that in high school. Like we'd go to school, then I played football. So I'd go to football practice. Then I get off football practice, go to work, work another like seven hour shift, go home, go to bed and get up and do it all over again to the point like by the time i was 16 i moved out of the house i had my own apartment i was in high school wow having my own place to live like it was wild it was like wow so i had

responsibilities when i was 16 years old and i think i've just we've had the same job ever since it's just different kitchens different menus and different different people and did your parents get you guys into cooking or how did that start i mean food was always a big part of our family like mom made sure we sat down every day 5 30 or so and had dinner together you know um you know so i think that that appreciation for food definitely carried through in our career i think we started cooking because money was a motivator at the time when we're teenagers but then became a passion like then then we got to a point where both michael and i decided we're going to make a career out of this um he went off and did an apprenticeship into greenbrier in west virginia and a pretty you know obviously an amazing resort and well-known

program and i went to the culinary steve of america in new york so we kind of like split off at that time that's when we both left. But then we still had, while doing that, had to find other ways to hustle, to like financially support ourselves. Like Brian was delivering Domino's pizza while he was at the most prestigious culinary school. I would hang out in the mountains and like butcher deer in like somebody's front yard to like make enough money to get through the winter, like stuff like that, like just the grind of – and I feel like that really our work ethic is – and I keep saying that, but hard work is what it takes.

I mean people are like, how did you get to do this? How did you get to do that? And it's like when everyone else was at the bar, we were at work. Right, right. So y'all had no social life coming up pretty much. I mean a little bit. It still fit in some time, but not the greatest. I mean definitely more in high school and stuff, as Michael was saying.

You know, on Saturday night, we were cooking in a kitchen until 10 o'clock at night. We weren't out, like, you know, at the party after the football game. Our social hour was between, like, midnight and 8 a.m. Right. So you had to, like, you had to fit it in. Midnight and 8 a.m. And nothing good happens between midnight and 8 a.m. That's late.

What's the difference between an apprenticeship and culinary school? Well, I think for me, I just didn't want to follow the same path as Brian. And so, and I, where he paid to go to school basically and did that, like I said, delivering pizzas. I got paid to do my apprenticeship. And so it was like, okay, I'm going to take this route. And so you go work at a hotel. They have this sort of mapped out education trajectory for you to learn every station but what was funny is i thought i knew a lot before i got there and i'm

like oh i'm going to this resort in the mountains in west virginia i'm gonna be great i'm gonna be a star i was like 19 years old and like on the first day like i was making like veal stock and i like moved the vegetables in this like wave of oil just went over my hand. And I burned my entire hand. And I remember like not being able to say anything because I didn't want them to send me home or I didn't want to get sent to like the emergency room or whatever. So I had to like hold a kitchen towel over my hand and it stuck into my burn. And by the end of the night, I had to like peel it out of my burn because I didn't want to go to my boss and be like, cause I was so arrogant and cocky at the time. And then I was like,

dang, I have so much to learn right now. And so my career really started there at that point, you know, it was like, okay, I don't know shit. So what actually broke you is at the moment that we had that breaking point

where a damn, I got to, I think when I was pulling kitchen towel out of my hand, I was like, okay, I have a lot to learn right now. Yeah. Yeah.

That's crazy. And do you think culinary school was the right move for you? I mean, I think it got me to where I am now. It opened up a door that I'd never thought that I would go to, which is New York City. Because I was upstate New York, I was able to go down on weekends and actually start to do what's called a stage where you go in and work in kitchens to get experience and also hopefully get a job. And I did my apprenticeship program at a restaurant called Oriole, ironically, it's a restaurant we took over here in Vegas,

where I got to meet Chef Charlie Palmer. And that's where I kind of got my start in New York. I don't think I would have ever thought as a young cook coming out of Maryland, Frederick, Maryland, to go to New York City and think that I had a resume to get in the door. That's like a dream, right? Yeah, it is i mean it's like felt like big leagues right but then at that point though i realized that after i've you know this this many years in really it's just the hard work dedication and being there and and willing to learn as a young cook you don't have to go to culinary school you don't have to an apprenticeship program you can if you have the means definitely it's going to open up more doors but if you're great at what you do and you want to

learn just come knock on our door so when when did you guys get to the point where you actually started to experiment and create your own styles and your own taste and like you know just kind of experiment with the food that you know you guys are making well i think early on in our careers we're definitely you know it's an ego- driven sort of thing. Yeah, chef, right? You're creating dishes, you know, sometimes for yourself versus your guests. And I think there's been a transformation in our careers to where we are now. And it would be in like our early 30s. You know, we both had our own restaurants. And like, you know, we're trying to make a name, right? Now, we, we take cues from our guests, you know, now we're like what what are our guests looking for we're

more of a guest driven experience versus being a chef driven but it's hard though because as creatives you you you want your creative process to inspire yourself right you have to do it in a way where you're going to inspire the people that you're doing it for right and i think as you mature through any creative industry like that's the you have to connect with your audience or if you leave them behind then that's a portion of the people that could have been coming in to experience whatever it is that you're trying to communicate to them and so i feel like once we got we started we tried to be too creative early on yeah and then what's being too creative well because i feel like you you're creative for creative sake and sometimes it doesn't translate

into what you're doing. And so you leave people out because you want to show them this one technique that you learned how to do. But if it doesn't taste good, you shouldn't be doing it. Or if it's not better than the original dish that you're sort of reinventing, then why did you reinvent it? And so like when we talk about like retro, we have a Caesar salad on our menu. And I just posted this on my IG the other day. It was like Caesar salad was created almost a hundred years ago in Tijuana, Mexico. And everyone thinks about Caesar salad. They're like, that's Italian food. Like it was

created in Mexico. I thought that was, and so we, we at retro, we're adding a little bag of Parmesan Reggiano churros to sort of bring those two dishes together or those two cultures together in the same dish and remind people like there is history behind the food you're eating there is a story behind it and so like a lot of the food we're cooking now we're trying to build the dishes off of a foundation so that we can tell those stories our way and so i mean for this project that we're doing here in vegas and the fact that that's the reason why we're sitting here is a couple of your your boys came in the other night and had it like that's what we want to happen we

want people to stumble in there and be like wait what is this oh wow this is great this is and and have fun and be engaged in how we sort of flip the space how we flip the menu and how we're telling our story right now yeah yeah he uh he cooked uh fried chicken and cornflakes. Really? And I was like, wow, I've never had that before. But it makes sense because you think about cereal has sugar in it. Not that I'm trying to promote sugar right now. For it, we used to make this cold fried chicken sandwich. And like when you fry chicken that's breaded in cornflakes and then you let it sit out and it gets cold, that sugar is caramelized now because you fried it so now all of a sudden you get that crunch and like this is what i'm talking about how you know our creative process is shifted from how do we make it obvious that we're being creative to like wait how did they how did they get it to just do that part yeah and that's that's more where our minds are at now that's awesome yeah i've heard great things about retro and you guys are partnering with mgm

how did that partnership happen? Well, our partnership started back in 2015 is when we started the conversation. There's a big resort that they were building in National Harbor area, which is just in Oxon Hill, just outside of Washington, D.C. Both Michael and I from Maryland, it was kind of a natural fit. They came to us and said, hey, we want to build a steakhouse. Michael and I then came back to them and said, said hey you know we want to build a steakhouse you know michael and i then came back to them and said wait a minute we want to build a steakhouse like rooms of the house like you're coming over to dinner at the voltaggio brothers house and having steak so um it's a lot nicer than any house we ever lived we were like steakhouse

and they're like yeah you guys have the steakhouse we're like no we want a steak house we want a house and they were like living room kitchen dining room library which i don't i've never had a library before it sounded like an important room to have in the house right right and we were like okay these this company gets it like they're gonna put the support behind us to like whatever we can dream up they'll bring it to life and then fast forward to how many years later we did a couple pop-ups at bellagio we tested some things to see how we would do here in las vegas and they were like how about a spot at mandalay bay and we'll do it as like a residency and you guys can sort of be here for as long as this concept should or could be here for and so we thought up retro which was you know it's kind

of a nod to like back to brian said earlier it was about the ritual of dining the ritual of sitting down at the dinner table and having all those like sort of conversations around food with our mom right she made casseroles she made mom food she made like frito pie and stuff like that and we were like how do we sort of go back to that moment when we did first start feeling like what food could make us feel like and why we were doing it and the people we were enjoying it with how do we create that vibe the origin and that yeah exactly and so we even found like those white casseroles with the blue flowers the corning wear like vintage ones from all around the country and we told the whole like mgm was like let us help you source stuff and then the conversation kept going. They were like, what about sporks?

What about like little boxes that you could serve? Like we wanted to make General Snails. Like we're making escargot in the flavor of General Tau's chicken. So we're like General Tau's chicken as snails. I would eat that. And then we're making like a whole seaweed rice with it. So everything just sort of like sometimes got inspired by the vessel or the idea. But the whole experience every single

dish is nostalgic and i think that we live in a time now where you have to sort of approach a situation with like inspiration not intimidation and so we're like trying to do it like some risk because that's a totally different menu because most like you said we go to most places and it's pretty much the same style like you know we order i mean i'm ordering salmon and mash everywhere i go and lobster mac you know but in this in this instance it's like a totally different menu it's you got to think about what you want or try everything on there well i mean we made cheese and you also want his lobster mac like come get our lobster thermidor and get our shells and cheese where we hand make all the shells individually and then we have a cloud of aerated cheese sauce that we

make that comes out of a siphon that like sit you got to come you got it and no one can deny growing up in childhood college whatever that you haven't had a can of spaghettios right yeah and so what we've done is we've recreated that you know sort of childhood experience we've had and i'm not saying i haven't not had one in a long time, too, because maybe I had one a few weeks ago. But ours is different. So we do is make these. Yeah. R&D.

Right. So we make this, you know, giant meatball that we place in the center of it made with veal pork and really great wagyu beef. And then at the table, what we do is we make all these O's and we hand make this pasta know, this pasta and then we put it in an Arabiata sauce, which is basically Pomodoro with just enriched with brown butter. And then we pour that table side out of the can. So you still get kind of that feeling that you had, like, you know, yeah. But then when you bite into it, it's like, this is the version, but it brings you right back to childhood.

How important is food presentation to you guys? I think with this concept, it was less about, it was more about like the vessels and like the reminders of where the dish came from than like – and then ironically enough, like Brian and I, we are – the architecture of the food that we do always has like some little nuance, some little texture, some little surprise on it that like makes it look different. Like our key lime pie, we're making them look like little limes on a plate. And we're spraying cocoa butter on the outside that's green. And so we've got like three little limes on a plate. And then we were like, well, when you eat key lime pie, you eat it at the beach. So let's make some sand out of coconut.

So the key limes are sitting in coconut sand. And then it's like coconut sorbet. And then we're like, what about the meringue part? But like whipped up egg whites sometimes don't taste good. So what if we make whipped up yuzu juice and stabilize it with a starch and dehydrate it so that you get the meringue but it's just something that disappears on your palate you know when you have that on the wheel in your brain that's like like this and sometimes you have to tell it to just slow down a little bit but how do you guys turn that off like at home like who cooks you or the wife

like are you guys gotta do chefs have to date chefs like how does this work i mean we definitely cook differently we're at home you know more like one two you know three ingredient dishes you know you know more on the simple side things you want to eat when you're you know comfortable at home so you guys do turn it off yeah yeah but well i mean just because we save a lot of for the restaurants you know back to like the techniques you know a lot of the technique early on our career we did it because the for the technique you know going back to that key lime pie that meringue you're just talking about yeah we know now how to put together textures and flavors that make sense like we're looking for inspiration going back looking at the dish and recreating it and yeah

we can pepper in these things because now we're good at what we do you know what i mean when it comes to that i'm not saying but you know what I mean? You know, and putting the dish together. And so we're able to, to use all of those tools we've learned over the last, like combined 50 years of experience that we have and make dishes make sense at home. Sometimes we have to like kind of turn that part. How do you guys actually, you guys even,

do you guys ever worry about, will this resonate with the consumer like is this going to be good to them how do you guys decipher like is this the play or is this not the place should we just keep it original like how do you i think that balance the risk is is the best question because i think being able to do that part is is what made us is it's what makes retro make a lot of sense right because we did ask those questions because we knew who our audience was sort of going to be when we came or who we were going to go after and it wasn't just a select group of people we wanted to get everybody we're like how do you create a concept that's going to leave no one behind right right whatever reason you're in las vegas whatever occasion it is whether you're with

your kids or you're a bachelor party or whatever it is how does this concept how do you make it attractive to everyone and accessible to everyone right and without breaking the bank too it's like maybe we make all these intricate things and we put them together in a way that's like where it's connecting to a dish or something they've had before but also put it in the middle of the table so everyone can share it so you're now not like committing to this one dish this is mine and everyone just like family style that's yeah it's family style but so then we were like well the vessels need to like lean into that part of the experience as well and so even the plate when you sit down in front of you is a ceramic paper plate looking like the like the

old flimsy white paper plates you would have at a backyard barbecue we're like these are the plates that you eat off of and the food's gonna hit the middle of the table and so we thought we tried to think about every single thing but we also turned the space around in two weeks time yeah yeah and the fact that the hotel i mean everyone from their creative team to their like techie digit like i don't know all the different departments but i would say it was all hands on deck even down to like sourcing the plates a lot of it came from dead stock that they took out of service from old hotels in vegas wow i mean there's there's a lot of planning leading up to it i mean we started really in march you know getting ready for this with you know countless meetings you know on zoom and you know teams and you know that part the fun

part about that was was seeing the enthusiasm of the team like it was it was a meeting that everybody wanted to log on to right right so yeah so every week it was just like there was something new there's a new idea there was a you know a biggest thing i think that we're worried about was how we're going to take an existing space and transform it make it ours the art team just did an incredible job because everybody knows that iconic wine tower that's there right it's been there for 20 years when it was a former space now what they've done is they've basically made it into a museum piece like it's a curated piece of like everything you would find like you know um inspiration of of you

know items like you know nintendos and skateboarding and things we kind of grew up with you know back in the 80s and the 90s and so there's four sides of this thing that you know you want to go in and see it and walk all the way around it and take photos of it and so um it's just it was just an incredible transformation so yeah there's a lot of planning but then when it when we hit the ground and the work had to start it was two weeks it was two. And we filled all of those hours of every day for sure. Why do you think a lot of restaurants fail? I mean a lot of it is obviously with what's happening with the economy in general now. When you think about it, you go to the grocery store. You see the cost of food has gone up, the cost of labor just for the home cook.

But now apply that to the restaurant and then add the occupancy costs, the labor costs, all the other things. And you're taking a bit you're talking about a business where if you had a 10 percent margin, you're celebrating. You're like, yeah, we put 10 percent to the bottom line. Well, now as things get more expensive, that 10 percent turns into 5 percent, turns into zero percent, turns into negative percent. And so all of a sudden it's like restaurant prices haven't really been able to increase in a way like everything else you go to the store and you're like oh this steak used to cost five dollars a pound now it's fifteen dollars a pound but if you go to a restaurant you're like this dish used to cost ten dollars now it's fifty dollars it's like that part of it people haven't really quite

wrapped their heads around yet but a lot of it has to do with the fact that like restaurant restaurants don't necessarily get to increase their prices as fast as everything else without their heads around yet but a lot of it has to do with the fact that like restaurant restaurants don't necessarily get to increase their prices as fast as everything else without losing their customer base but then you talk about real estate i mean that has gone through the roof we even noticed that after the pandemic we saw real estate just go i think a lot of real estate developers and hotels and i think you look at like mgGM right now, they really have the power to keep this industry alive because they have the infrastructure to support people that want to get into this industry. And I think if you're building a massive office building, what better attraction than have a great restaurant? Go find a young chef that doesn't have the means or the capital

to open their own restaurant and invest in them so that you're investing in your own building with another amenity for the building. And I think it's like to hit them with rent, hit them with labor, hit them with food, hit them with all the other additional costs. It's getting harder and harder for restaurants to not only survive, but to do it at a level that people expect you to do it at. Yeah. I was upset when Chipotle raised their prices. But back to that, I i mean i remember cooking in new york in late 90s early 2000s and you know the price of a three course menu like on average is like 90 right yeah it hasn't changed you even go back to new york city right now pretty few menus

are you know you see that more in that market i think you know where it's multi-course set price they maybe have increased 10 20 but it's not like it's gone up to 400 yeah so you know but so it's multi-course set price, they maybe have increased 10%, 20%. But it's not like it's gone up to $400. Yeah. So it's just like the threshold of what the consumer will absorb, which is quite not there for the rate of our costs going up. So how do you guys mitigate your losses when it comes to shifts in economic times?

I think you have to listen to your customer base and you have to react you know people are always like well do you read yelp or do you read these things do you read these platforms where people are talking about you you shouldn't read it because you'll get upset right but i think you have to because you have to look for consistencies in the threads and if you start to see things that are repeated you have a responsibility to react to that and correct that and i think you actually read the y react to that and correct that. You actually read the yogurt. I do it to look for those consistencies. If somebody's like the mashed potatoes are too salty over and over again, then it's my

job to go taste the mashed potatoes and talk to the person in charge of that and say, hey, we got to dial back the salt. Twelve people have said that the mashed potatoes are salty. And I think that you have to put your customer base in front of your own ego. And you have to listen to that. I wonder how many business owners actually do that, especially chefs. You're removing the ego completely and getting straight down to appeasing a consumer. Because back in the day, a server would bring a dish back to the kitchen and be like,

the guest didn't like this. And the chef, some angry person's back there and be like they're like, they don't know what they're talking about. But like if it happens four or five times with the same dish, then maybe you don't know what you're talking about. And you have to be able to ask yourself that question. Wow. Have you guys ever gotten a one star review? I think I've gotten like a I wish I could. One star is the least amount I can give.

I wish I could get zero. You know how far away I had to park? And I'm like, we had valet. We had it right out front. You didn't want to spend the $9. Right. And that was like my first restaurant in LA.

We would get some of the wildest stuff. He said, I wish I could give a zero. I had to park. Yeah. I'm sorry for that. That's fine. What was it like battling on iron chef

and tournament of champions i mean all that stuff that we do because we do a lot of food competition i mean brian and i did top chef um iron chef uh we had our own show together battle the brothers right now i'm filming a show with bobby flay called triple threat the competition part what's interesting about it is it keeps us fresh. You were asking about the creative process and those environments, it's almost like muscle memory. So when we do these food competitions, it's not like, this is my moment. It's more like, this is training my brain to be creative on the fly so that I can bring that back to my restaurants and my business. So it's almost like, it's like exercising. And so we do this not because like, I want to be on TV. It's more like, all right, this is a different discipline that we

can learn that we can then take back to work and apply to what our real job is, which is being chefs in our restaurants. Yeah. I actually watch one of the shows and you don't play like you watch your business for real. I like wow this is different fact well you're also working under a clock too so you have to you know obviously get really great with like timing right you know a dish and cooking and techniques and so that is very relevant in our world because then it applies to going back to the kitchen and realizing what we can do with our team and how we can build a dish and make it executable for service. So there's so many cues that we could take from the experience we have in competing. And also just knowing that you're going to be judged instantaneously

and you're getting that feedback. Like, oh, could you use a little bit more acid, a little bit more salt? You're like, no, okay, I agree. And then you continue to now hone your skills and your palate to make sure that you're appeasing those judges and those people who are basically picking apart your food. In our restaurants, I mean, the good thing about our relationship and how we work as partners is that there's definitely a lot of honesty between the two of us

when we're putting up a dish in front of each other. You know, when we're doing it with our team, our management team, or, you know, even cooks in our kitchen, and we're like, hey, you know, what do you guys think? A lot of times it's a little bit biased you know they're not going to like pick apart a dish for somebody you're kind of working for right you know i mean like it's it's harder to get that honesty you have to like really extract it out of them even though we're very involved by our team we want them to have a voice sometimes you're just not confident enough to raise our hand right yeah there's no bullshit's no bullshit here. You know what I mean? Like, when we're talking about it, it is, right.

Yeah, exactly. And so that makes it faster for us to get, you know, dishes to the finale. You know what I mean? Like, where we know it's good enough to hit the menu. What is the time limit? Yeah.

Yeah, what is the time limit? Like, if I go there to the restaurant, like, what's the, how fast should my dish be out? Like, what do you guys? We always try to get the food out. Well, the thing about this particular concept at Retro, it's the, how fast should my dish be out? Like, what do you guys? We always try to get the food out. Well, the thing about this particular concept at Retro, it's like, we want the food to always be hitting the table. So we're not coursing it out where it's like, if you order a dish and you order a dish, you're both getting served.

We don't want them to hit at the same time because we want you guys to be like, oh, I was going to get that. Okay. And we're sharing this now. And so every five to six minutes, like something else should be coming out or you should never be sitting without something in front of you. And so the plan was to always have food on the table. And that's, you know,

it's kind of like a good metaphor for life. Like always, you know, you got to have food on the table. And so we really like thought about it at that level but you know and even back to the competition stuff and all the tvs i mean they're all just extra full-time jobs that we keep adding to the roster like yeah some of the dishes for this restaurant were conceived at 2 a.m in the kitchen when no one else was around like the team would we would be the first ones in and the last ones out and that's kind of been our our schedule like that's in every

job that we've had it's like you don't leave until the job is done and the benefit of that style of service in a way that we handle the flow of food going to the table enables us to finish a dish like right at the moment and send it to the table when it's at you know it's perfect texture you know the the the temperatures of the dish are exactly where we want to be. You know, we're serving a tuna dish. It's a ceviche right now that has a coconut ice. It has a flavors of Tom Koss or Tom Kai soup.

And so we freeze that coconut ice, like at the moment using liquid nitrogen. And we don't want that waiting on another dish. You know, it hit the table. We want that dish going out. We're in texture. And plus we want that dish going out with texture. Plus, we created that dish at like 2 o'clock in the morning,

dead ass about to get a fist fight. We were in the kitchen like, we got to make a tuna dish right now. And we were like, all right. And so we went and grabbed a bunch of stuff, and we just stopped talking to each other. And like an hour later, this dish was born, and we were like, huh, this is one of the best dishes on the menu. And we've been thinking about this menu for like three months.

And we just did this right before we got into like, I mean, it was heated. Because we're like, we'll challenge each other in the moment. I'll be like, all right, we're making a tuna dish. What do you have? He's like, well, what about this? And like if our brains are going in two different directions, then we got to figure out how to find that intersection. Well, how do you find that intersection? Is it creative? That's the bulk of it. What what do you do it can happen in many different ways um you know we're working on an octopus dish the very next morning we got down there in the kitchen

before everybody else even though we're last you know night before what 2 30 3 in the morning back down at 8 30 again and we're like we we have to finish this octopus dish because we're going in a completely different direction than the original and then we had to stop and put the brakes on that for a lot of reasons and you know we just we kind of just dug our heels in and just like went for it that one i think was a little bit more collaborative you know that kind of anxiety where you feel it going through your veins and your fingertips and stuff and when you don't quite finish what you wanted to get done and you have to go to bed right and you can't sleep right if you don't figure out the plan then you're not going to be sleeping for days and so it's almost like your body's telling you like

yo figure this dish out or figure out this fix this problem so you can sleep through the night wow and it becomes like that you know scientist bro there's science of it yeah yeah and ironically the last dish that we completed to finish the menu is probably one of our top selling dishes which is this octopus dish that we did right now it's black octopus with uh an aioli made with squid ink and um you know saffron vinegar with lots of it looks angry though it looks like you can see the fight that we got into on the plate when you see it because it's like this black squid ink and this chart piece of octopus and like this little bit of color on top from this like saffron

pickled fennel and it's like all right they have a little bit of brightness left but then you taste it and you're like okay i get it like and what makes it retro is this is inspiration from pulper dome we created blackening spice back in the 90s or 80s and 90s and so you know that process of cooking we applied octopus which is very rare like i don't think we've ever seen a blackened octopus you know done in the way that we're doing it but yet all the familiarity of the flavors when you bite into it are there from the original you know but it's just done in a completely different way and yes there was you could see the tension in that dish you know because it came together because the way it's presented sometimes you just gotta color outside the line

what's like the oddest i would say animal or dish you guys never like had to put together was just like how do we even like from like either the ocean or land like what i used to have this show i used to travel around the world to conflict zones and like bring two opposing sides together around the dinner table people that had war with each other so i went to like wanda egypt israel sri lanka cambodia sarajevo all these different places when i was in i think it was cambodia there was this woman on the side of the road selling pig parts, but like this little boiling cauldron of pig parts. And she was like, first the eyeball. So I ate that and the juice like squirt in my mouth.

I was having like a moment. And then it was like, and then it was like pig roof of mouth is what she called it. So naturally you take your tongue and lick the roof of your mouth. Imagine someone handing that to you and being like, try this. And you put it in your mouth and you just think about that part of the animal pig roof. There was no other name for it. It was pig roof of mouth.

So that was, I think the weirdest thing that I'd ever eaten was pig roof of mouth. Oh, tarantulas too. Yeah. Yeah. Not me. Never again.

Never again. You haven't eaten anything. I mean, I've I've in Copenhagen, I had a dish that was, um, well, a couple of different dishes. I mean, one one was lamb eyeballs very done in the very same way but they're fritters chiclet of eyeball juice yeah and what they did was they served the pair of glasses so they were like so the glasses are there so you're staring at these two fried eyeballs and

you had to you know obviously pop into my mouth live live ants uh beaten live ants yeah live ants would actually taste they have the flavor of, live ants. But actually it tastes, they have the flavor of lemongrass, which is pretty incredible. Which is why we're serving pot roast at Retro. Exactly. Good pot roast. And pasta.

Yeah, so ant eaters apparently don't like the flavor of lemongrass. That's why ants have, you know, as a defense mechanism. But they're really good. They're tasty. Wow. Just make sure you get it in your mouth.

I could talk to you guys for hours. We've got to wrap up, but it's been a pleasure. Wow. Just make sure you get your mouth. I could talk to you guys for hours. We got to wrap up, but it's been a pleasure. Any closing thoughts? Just come to reg. I mean, we ended up here because you know, one of your homies came to the restaurant and put this together.

And I think that that's the story that, uh, we hope this restaurant helps us tell. And you guys should pull up. Like, that's it. He said it was a top five meal all time. Yeah.

Yeah. So he said they got 60% of the things that were on. I mean, you tried everything on there. And so that's why. I just think Las Vegas is, it's the most exciting food city there is right now

just because of the resources that we have here to do things the right way. And I think that there's going to be a lot more restaurants coming to Las Vegas today. I think it'll never stop here.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The people here keep these restaurants going and we appreciate that so much. I'm cool with that. I live here, so. I'm coming. Right, right, right.

Go all in. Guys can follow me on Instagram at The Creator. Sean Kelly, Digital Social Hour. Thanks for tuning in, guys. See you next week. Peace.