Freakonomics Radio - Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant (Update)

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

Kenji Lopez-Alt became a rock star of the food world by bringing science into the kitchen in a way that everyday cooks can appreciate. Then he dared to start his own restaurant — and discovered problems that even science can’t solve.

Hey there, it's Stephen Dovner. This week we're playing an updated episode number 347, Why You Should Not Open a Restaurant. It features the best-selling food writer Kenji Lopez-Alt telling us all about his adventures as a first-time restaurateur. And then at the end of the original episode, you'll hear a recent follow-up interview that'll give you even more reasons to never, ever open a restaurant. One quick thing before we start,

we are bringing Freakonomics Radio Live to Philadelphia on June 6th and London on September 7th. For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com slash live. You'll also find information there for our upcoming shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Again, Freakonomics.com slash live. And now, here's why you shouldn't open a restaurant. Some people just can't leave well enough alone. Consider, for instance, the case of the famous food writer, the one who used the scientific method to take apart everything we know about cooking and put it back together. If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust,

you end up with a dough that is much flakier and much lighter. He investigated whether the key ingredient in New York pizza really is the water. So I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water, starting with perfectly distilled water, and then up to various levels of dissolved solids inside the water. What we basically ended up finding was that the water makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough. He found that the secret to General Tso's chicken lay in geometry.

The geometry of food is important because one of the big things is surface area to volume ratio. And he explored the relationship between meat and salt. He proved why it's important to salt a hamburger at the last minute on the surface of the meat. We rented a baseball pitching machine that would throw hamburgers at the wall at 45 miles per hour. And you'll see that the salted hamburger kind of bounces off the wall like a rubber ball, whereas the burger that has salt only on the outside kind of splatters. This was the man who finally brought science into the kitchen in a way that non-scientists could appreciate. It helped that his work was fun, not preachy, and delicious.

We interviewed him a while back for an episode called Food Plus Science Equals Victory. I think a lot of people think of science as sort of the opposite of tradition or the opposite of natural. And really, it's not. He just published his first cookbook, a massive thing called The Food Lab, which went on to win a James Beard Award. His reputation and reach only grew. But then, something else beckoned. Was it opportunity or a trap? It's that temptation you can't resist. Today on Freakonomics Radio,

the food writer who flew too close to the flame. My name is James Kenji Lopez-Altz. I am a food writer who also happens to run a restaurant right now. And everything's been going just great, hasn't it? These problems are insurmountable. Like, how the f*** are we going to fix this? From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Kenji Lopez-Alt grew up in New York in a family of scientists, and he went off to MIT to study biology. He got a little bored, maybe burnout, and during the summers started working in restaurant kitchens

in Boston. After college, he worked in an architecture firm for a bit. For a few months, yeah, like half a year, maybe. And then back to restaurant kitchens. My very first restaurant job was at a place called Fire and Ice. It's a Mongolian grill, so I was a knight of the round grill. I stood in the middle of a giant cast iron grill and cooked stir-fried food for people and flipped asparagus tips into the air and stuff. Over the next several years, he worked in a series of higher-end restaurants in Boston. You know, after that, that was the end of my culinary career, or my cooking career. He began building a career as a food writer at Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. Then on the food site Serious Eats, he started a column called The Food Lab. He wasn't

expecting to turn into a food writing rock star. I absolutely wasn't expecting it. You know, I was a freelance writer living in a one bedroom apartment with no windows in Brooklyn at the time. Now, after doing all that and having that platform and enjoying it, what made you think it was a good idea to not only get back into the restaurant business, but open your own restaurant? Oh, I mean, it's, you know, it's that temptation you can't resist. It's like, oh, what if I just went back into cooking for a little while? Would I be able to do this? So I had a daughter. She's 17 months old now. Congratulations. Thank you. And when she was born, my wife and I decided that she would continue to work and I would be the at-home parent. So I've been a stay-at-home dad for the last

17 months. About six months into that, I was approached by some friends of friends who owned a bar in San Mateo, near where we live, and they were interested in opening up a beer hall and they were looking for a chef partner. And so I thought, oh, you know, this might be something fun I could do in my spare time, which, you know, you don't have too much spare time with a baby on your hands. But I thought this could be something fun and this is a good opportunity, relatively low risk. Mainly it was because my wife and I sort of longed for a place like this in San Mateo, family-friendly, casual, upscale place. And that was the concept that they were working on. So it seems sort of perfect for me.

And initially I thought my involvement would be relatively minimal. I would work on some menus. I would lend my name to the menu. You know, what was actually really surprising to me was that when I first signed on with them, I sent a short little tweet saying, hey, like, this is happening. Like, so I'm opening a restaurant, something like that. Eater picked it up. A bunch of other publications picked it up.

And then all of a sudden it became not Kenji Lopez-Alt is partnering with these two guys who are opening a restaurant. It became Kenji Lopez-Alt is opening a restaurant. And then I was like, oh, man, I guess I'm really going to get sucked into this. Okay, so the restaurant is called Wurst Hall, W-U-R-S-T. So first of all, for those who haven't been to San Mateo, California, just give us a quick sense of the vibe of the place, and then we'll get into the restaurant and why the choices were made to have a German beer hall with sausages. Yeah, well, San Mateo is a city that's basically dead center between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. My wife works at Google, and so she works down in Silicon Valley. We initially moved up into

the city and her commute was crazy. So we're like, all right, we'll move down to San Mateo. And, you know, if you look at sort of the real estate curve, very expensive in San, well, very expensive everywhere, but extremely expensive in San Francisco, extremely expensive in Silicon Valley and San Mateo and a couple of the surrounding cities are like, there's a small dip. So we're like, all right, we can, that's where we can afford to live. And that's where, you know, my wife's commute will be all right. And so I think there's actually a lot of people in our situation there right now. Why a German beer hall? Why was that the right concept? Or why was that the concept they wanted? It's two factors. One of them is the space itself. We're located in a really nice old historic building, lots of nice light. So it seemed very conducive to this beer hall atmosphere. The other thing is that my partner, Adam Simpson, he is really into beer. You know,

and finally, beer halls are kind of just popular right now. So it seemed like a concept that worked in the space, that worked with Adam's knowledge base, and it seemed to be something that was hot and kind of lacking in the San Mateo area. So far, so good, right? So for everyone out there who's thinking, hey, maybe I should open a restaurant, we asked Kenji Lopez-Alt, what's the first step? So the first step to opening a restaurant is don't. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. Even once you're open, it's still a series of putting out fires. Step one, don't.

Okay, so can you walk us through the opening process? What kind of work goes into those preparatory weeks, months, I assume? So the first step is you have to have a reason for people to believe that you're going to succeed and to give you money to do it because it's not cheap to open a restaurant. And then from there, it's, you know, working with the architects and designers and doing all the build out, which inevitably takes way more time than you expect. And for us, we had this extra problem because we're in this really old building and the previous tenants and the landlord, they didn't take the best care of the space. You know, but working back from my side, from the kitchen perspective, initially, a lot of it was conceptualizing, like, how German do we want to be? How California do

we want to be? Because we knew we sort of wanted to do both. Figuring out what the service style was going to be and how customers are going to order. And really thinking to ourselves, all right, like, when people come in here, what are they coming in to do? Initially, you know, when Adam and my other partner, Tyson Mao, when they were thinking beer hall, they thought, all right, this is going to be essentially a bar. Some people may become to have like a nice meal, but most people will be coming to drink and have some food on the side. And that's sort of what the initial menu was designed around.

A selection of sausages, a couple of sandwiches, some appetizers to share. So now he got to work creating a menu. I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I'm pretty methodical, so I had a recipe booklet written out, everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate. Part of the idea was because it's going to be relatively low-priced and high-volume, the kitchen has to be able to run itself, even without very, very minute oversight. What about the sausage making itself?

I mean, that's a big component. Can you just talk about how involved you were in the design and execution and maybe experimentation in figuring out how to not only make the sausages that you wanted, but how they were going to be prepared? Yeah, from the start, you know, we knew that we weren't going to be able to make the sausages in-house because we didn't have the facilities. So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything. Because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you're forming it, it doesn't bind properly and your sausages end up kind of crumbly and dry. So it

was literally like physically impossible for us to make sausages in-house. So very early on, we decided, all right, we're going to have to find some partners to work with who can execute our ideas at a level of quality and volume that we're happy with. Is that an easy thing to find someone who can handle that kind of quality and especially volume? No. I mean, the sausage part was mainly me going to every single sausage maker I could find in the Bay Area. You know, we did want to keep it local. We've visited many, many butchers and sausage makers, and there are many, many bad sausages around. You know, sausage making is a non-trivial skill. You think, okay, it's just meat and fat spiced, ground up, stuffed into a casing, like how hard could it be? But it's one of these things where like the minutiae of the technique can make a huge difference in the quality of the final product.

You know, it mainly comes down to the binding element, like making sure that you have the right level of salt and that the meat has been salted long enough that the proteins start to dissolve before you mix it, making sure that you mix it right and that you have the right ratio of fat to lean, and then also making sure that it stays chilled through the entire process. And if any one of those things is off, your sausage doesn't bind properly. And that's what you find is the problem with most sort of mediocre sausages. Like they could be flavored very well. They could be crazy and interesting, but if they're not mixed properly, they kind of crumble instead of having that sort of nice, juicy, snappy texture that I look for in a sausage. And so finding someone who can do that was hard. There was also the consideration of creating a sausage restaurant that could be

vegan-friendly. So one of my goals from the beginning was like vegan items on the menu that are not vegan by omission. They're just vegan by default. And they're delicious, you know. So we have a number of things like that. But the one that I was really excited about is a vegan doner kebab. And for that, I worked with a company called Impossible Meats. They make a vegan ground meat blend, mostly out of wheat protein, but they add heme, which is a, it's a lot of what gives red meat. It's sort of irony, bloody flavor, but it can also be derived from plant sources. And so it's like by far the best sort of faux meat available. And so it's by far the best sort of faux meat available. And so what we do is we spice it with Turkish spices. So cumin, Urfa Bieber chilies, sumac. And then we serve it as a...

Well, initially what we were doing was we were forming it into a cylinder and doing it in front of one of those donut kebab spits that sort of spins around and you shave it off. But the fat in this stuff is coconut oil. And coconut oil just melts at a slightly lower temperature than animal fat does. So the fat would end up kind of melting out of it and it would just eventually just crumble off the spit. So that didn't end up working. It would have been so cool if we could get that to work. Now we're just forming it straight into like sort of

hamburger style patties. So all the flavors there. Okay. So you talked about the food and the building, et cetera. What about the people? How involved were you in hiring and training up kitchen and front of house? I was, I mean, very involved in back of the house. And finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So when you're living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people, even before we opened when we were

training staff, we must have lost probably 50% turnover over the course of a few weeks. Wow. Which is not abnormal, you know? And luckily, you know, it's like one day we're there and like two of our cooks don't show up. What do we do? You know, one of them was on a bender and the other one just was just a no-show. Luckily, the restaurant down the street, all the cooks there showed up that morning and the manager said, we're closing, like you don't have a job anymore. So suddenly we had like 12 cooks just walk up to our front door saying, hey, can we have a job? So there's never really a shortage of resumes and applicants. It was finding reliable people that's hard. What I've

discovered in my years as a cook, and you played out exactly as expected here was that it's much better to hire people like who give a shit, even if they have no previous experience or skills than to hire someone who has a great resume, who doesn't really understand the concept. You know, our, our number one kitchen hire, I think is, um, this, this guy, um, Eric Droby, who is a career changer. He was in his forties. Um, he worked at an office job, always loved cooking on the side, was a Food Lab follower. He stopped by my house once to give me some sausages and some sauerkraut he made because he was proud of them. And they were great. I thought they were great. And then he said, hey, like, I think I've decided I want to be a cook. Would you give me a shot? I'm like,

absolutely. Finding people who really care, that's the key because you can always teach people skills, but you can't teach people to give a ****. And what about front of the house? Front of the house is also, it's actually probably even a little bit harder at the start because you have to really dangle this carrot in front of them because during training and during the first month that we were doing friends and family meals, people are working and they're getting paid, but they're not getting the same tips that they would. And so they have to realize, okay, like I'm putting in this work now. So in a month, I'll be making much more money. But it's hard to find people who are willing to think about that.

So shortly before opening, you tweeted in all caps, by the way, opening a restaurant is insane. And I don't know why anyone in their right mind would choose to do it. So what's going on in the weeks and days just before opening? Yeah, restaurant is a harsh mistress. During those three months I was in there, I would wake up, take my daughter to daycare, go to the restaurant from 9am till 4, go pick up my daughter from daycare, bring her home, put her to bed and then go back to the restaurant from 8pm till 1am. It had been like two and a half months where I had been basically never at home. You know, I saw my daughter for a few hours a day, but I basically never saw my wife. We lost the chance to sit down and talk together. The only time I ever saw her was when we were with our daughter. So we never really had any alone time. It's very difficult when you're raising a child, like to not be able to talk to your partner, not even have the time to talk about things related to raising the child. And the worst part of it was that no matter how well you plan and you think to yourself, all right, this is the amount of work I'm going to have to put into this restaurant. And I'm just going to say no after that. It's really hard to say no

when there's like 40 people whose jobs rely on you making this a success. Finally, Worst Hall was ready for its soft opening. Investors, friends, and family. About 100 people. And everything was great. We had completely gutted the old bathrooms, retiled them in this beautiful blue tile, really nice wallpaper with these sort of pen and ink drawn animals and stuff. It was a really nice bathroom. And the first night we had 100 people in, the toilets backed up, stopped working,

and we had to shut down the bathrooms. And as it turns out, the waste line leaving one of the toilets had never been repaired or replaced in probably decades and decades and had a huge sag in it. And so we had to close for two weeks so that they could rip out all the tile we had just put in, dig into the foundation, replace that. All of a sudden, we thought we were going to be ready to open the next week. And now it's like, all right, another two weeks and another 30 grand to fix the bathroom that we had never even considered might be a problem. Coming up after the break, the busted bathroom wasn't the only problem.

It was a disaster, major, major disaster. Some people were waiting over an hour for their food. Some people never got their food. And how does a new restaurant deal with bad reviews when literally everyone's a critic? Basic user 12345 says, This restaurant was terrible. The potatoes sucked. Well, I don't know what you define as good potatoes, so how is that helpful to me? That's next, right after this.

If you want to hear more Freakonomics Radio, you can find every episode going all the way back to 2010 on the Stitcher app and at Freakonomics.com. And you can always listen to the most recent three months worth of episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. Kenji Lopez-Alt, rock star of the food writing world, decided after years on the sidelines to get back into the restaurant business with a place called Worst Hall in San Mateo, which started out as a simple concept, a German beer hall serving nouveau-ish sausages. I was always one of these, I'd rather have influence and bring joy to people than have a lot of money type of career people, you know? And if the money comes along

with it, then that's great as well, but I'd rather just be doing something I love. Okay, so walk us through opening night, and I'm sure everything went exactly as it was planned and everybody was thrilled and it was perfect. Yes. Yeah. We had a sizable number of people in there and that we were cooking food. People were ordering food. Tickets were coming in. We were firing it. It was, I mean, it was a disaster, like major, major disaster. Some people were waiting over an hour for their food. Some people never got their food. It's those kinds of, it was a kind of night where we were like, these problems are insurmountable. Like how the are we going to fix this? But, you know, we, we decided like, all right, we'll focus on like a

couple of the big problems first. When I tell them to you, they're going to seem like stupid, small things. It's like, well, why couldn't you just do that? You know, it's like, so one of them was that we have sausages and you get your choice of topping. So one of the problems was communicating to the cooks on the line. So in case you're not aware of how a restaurant kitchen works, there's a, there's a line, which is a, you know, where all the stoves are, where the counters with the little cutting boards are, it's where the cooks, the guys and the girls are actually making the food. And then there's a station called Expo, the expediter. And the expediter's job is to, first of all, act as the liaison between the front of the house and the back of the house. But more importantly, their expediter's job is to coordinate everybody in the back of the house so that dishes come out at the same time,

so that everyone in the back of the house sort of knows what they're doing. So essentially, they're sort of the general managing the army back there. On opening night, we had all the toppings back on the line. And the expediter was, I was expediting, and I was just calling out, saying like, all right, like one hot Italian with speck and cherry pepper relish, one bratwurst with sauerkraut. And it's a lot of information to take in when you have a full restaurant and there's 100 people there

and you're cooking, say, like 25, 30 sausages at a time and each one has their own designated topping. It's a lot of information for the person on the line actually cooking it and plating it to take in. And so every single sausage had this huge delay where, you know, maybe they put the wrong topping on it and we'd have to refire it. They would, you know, yell out and everything is really noisy and we can't hear each other and once you have these tiny little problems that can lead to huge huge backups because the customers they don't care what problems you have back there

once they're seated they want to start ordering food and they don't care that you already have a full board of tickets and that the grill is completely full they don't care that you screwed up one order and you have to refire it. Those tickets are just going to keep coming and coming and coming. So you have this ticket printer machine that's spitting out these tickets constantly,

and you're constantly struggling to try and catch up with it. And that puts more and more stress on you, so you make more mistakes, the people on the line make more mistakes, and it can be these tiny little things that add to the likelihood of making a mistake that can throw a wrench in the entire operation. And that's essentially what happened that first night. So the second night, what we did was we took those toppings. We took them off the line and put them next to the expediter station. So next to my station so that all they had to remember was which sausages they were cooking.

Then they would pass the sausages to me right before I handed it to a server. I would put the topping on. I had the ticket right in front of me. It was easy for me to read. And that, I mean, it smoothed things over, like, unbelievably so. It's like a couple seconds of extra work on the cook's part. You know, it translated from a sausage taking over an hour to get to a customer, because there was, like, this huge backlog of tickets,

to customers getting their sausages in about eight minutes. There was another major problem they discovered only on opening night. And it's one that we didn't resolve until relatively recently. It had to do with the pretzels. So I'm also a partner at a bakery called Bockhaus, and they make all of our pretzels and all of our bread. Really wonderful pretzels, but we serve them hot so we were trying to figure out how do we get these pretzels that were baked that morning and delivered to us how do we serve them hot and fresh. And you know the the obvious thing is

alright well when someone orders a pretzel put it in the oven let it get hot and then we serve it. This was a problem in a couple different ways. One of them was that Bockhaus, they were salting their pretzels before they came to us. What happens with pretzel salt is that it draws out moisture from the pretzels. So after eight hours or so, some of the moisture from the pretzels beads up on the surface of the pretzels, and then it leaves these kind of splotchy, wet marks, which is not good. And the salt is all gone.

So we're like, okay, so we have to salt our pretzelszel sorter. That's adding another layer of stuff we have to do. And the only oven that we have back on the line is next to the fryer station, and the fry guy is extremely busy with the potatoes, and we also do a chicken schnitzel sandwich. And so adding pretzels on top of that to him became very difficult. So for the early nights, we were firing pretzels to order

in the oven, and that was another one of those things that seemed like it's a thing that takes two seconds, but it just piled on to the likelihood that we were going to screw something up. So what was the pretzel salting solution? Well, we found a much more efficient way of salting them. So one of the cooks had this idea to take a squeeze bottle, cut off the top until it was big enough that pretzel salt could flow through it. And now what we do is we just spray the pretzels

and draw a line, you know, trace the outline with the squeeze bottle, and that clears up all the space. So what you just described, plainly these are things that most people who eat in restaurants would never, ever, ever think about. And they shouldn't have to think about. But you have to think about it. But as you're describing it, it strikes me that you being who

you are and the way that you like to work and the way that you do take an empirical and scientific approach to food and cooking and so on, that you were driven to solve these problems and get it right. Is that often the difference between a restaurant that works and one that doesn't, which is that you have to be driven to constantly adjust, solve problems like that that are going to come up? Do most restaurants really try as hard as you just described? Most restaurants really try as hard. Any good chef cares deeply about the quality and any good restaurant owner cares deeply about the quality of what they're putting out. So I don't think I'm unique in that regard at all. I think maybe we tend to, me and my partners, Tyson and Adam, we have a lot of

sit down meetings where we analyze problems and try and solve them. So maybe we do that a little bit more than other restaurants. But you know, that's my skill. I've worked for chefs that seem to have an innate skill to just be able to figure things out on the fly, you know, or be able to work harder and faster to be able to solve those problems. You know, people attack those problems in different ways, but any good restaurant owner is going to recognize those problems and try and solve it in their own way. I'm curious how much you pay attention to, I guess, reviews of any sort. I mean, if you'd open a restaurant 10, certainly 20 years ago, there's so much less feedback then.

And now some people feel swamped by it. Some people feel a lot of it is disingenuous. I know you've said in the past that Yelp, let's see, in fact, this is from a tweet of yours. Yelp is and has always been the worst place to look for decent reviews. Shady business practices and reviews by people who I know nothing about and have no reason to trust their opinion, even on the off chance they actually dined at the restaurant you're rating. So talk about that for a minute, your experience with Yelp and or other online reviews. So it's difficult to gain value from them for me. You mean as a consumer or a producer?

As a consumer. I mean, to some degree, you know, as a producer, there is a little bit of value to it. But especially if you start looking at trends and see, all right, the people are complaining. What are they complaining about? You know, at the beginning when we opened, it was service. And that was, you know, some very legitimate feedback on that. You didn't need online reviews to know that was a problem, I gather, right? We did not need online reviews.

There's very little that I've read, I've seen in Yelp that we didn't already realize was a problem. You know, as a consumer of Yelp, I find Yelp useful as a map of what restaurants are around. But it's hard to trust opinions. A very good professional review, like you don't necessarily have to agree with the reviewer's point of view on what is good and what's not. But if you have an idea of what they think is good, then they tell you whether this restaurant met those expectations. And then you can sort of gauge, all right, well, do I agree with whether that's good or not? And that's what a good restaurant review will do. Whereas on Yelp, it's like someone, basic user 12345 says, this restaurant was terrible, the potatoes sucked. It's like, well, I don't know what you define as good potatoes. So how

is that helpful to me? You know? The problem is that everybody eats, right? So everybody considers themselves, I guess, a legitimate critic. Yeah. And I mean, you can't totally discount that fact, can you? No, no, you can't, you know, but but at the end of the day, it's like, you know, I'm involved in this project, because I want to be I want I want to have my name on it. I want I want to be proud of what we're putting out. And so at some point, you just have to sort of stick to your guns and say, this is what I believe is good. And I'm not going to change that just because some people say they disagree that it's good. And if your idea of what is good is so far off from what most people think is good, then maybe you're in trouble and you're going to go out of business. But I'm of the mind that I'd rather lose a little business and stick to what I

believe is true than to just pander to everybody to try and make the most money or, you know, which is hard to explain to partners and investors. But at the end of the day, you know, like as a food writer, I think I do have a pretty good pulse of what people think is good. Right. So overall on Yelp, Worstall is doing pretty well, averaging about three and a half out of five stars. So let me read you one Yelp review and hear your response. Okay. I honestly haven't looked at Yelp reviews since like the second month after we opened, so we'll see. This is from just over a month ago. This is from Andrew R. He writes, I was really disappointed. I expected more. Not that I had high expectations.

They were modest, honestly, but it fell below that bar as well. For one, the service was not that great. For two, the food just isn't that good. It's okay, like you would eat it if you were hungry, but another sausage would probably satisfy you more. And I like a split top bun because you can grill both sides like they do here, But when it's split only halfway down, there's a lot of bread with no meat at the bottom. And that's terrible. Cut that bun all the way down. It'll be better. Trust me. So that's Andrew R. What does Kenji L say? Well, I'll start from the end of it and work back. Believe it or not, we tested how far to cut the bun extensively before opening. And trust me when I say it's not better to cut it too far because the buns end up falling apart.

It doesn't stand right. I mean, that sounds all fair. You know, like those seem like legitimate concerns. If I was at the restaurant, I would definitely have loved to talk to him and gotten a little more details about exactly what they were disappointed with. You know, what is it about the sausage that you didn't like? And to his point about, you know, sausages being not great, you know, yeah, like I fully admit, sometimes, like any restaurant or any business, we have consistency issues now and then, and we work our best to make sure that those don't happen. And every day gets better.

Okay, here's a professional review. This is Peter Lawrence Kane in SF Weekly. He writes, the quality of the food is high and it is consistent. The thing is, considering Lopez-Alt's eminently well-deserved reputation for being a demystifier of culinary techniques, Wursthal feels a little short of the gosh-wow factor longtime fans might clamor for. Maybe that's not entirely fair. After all, it's exactly what it claims to be.

What's your take on that, Kenji? So I fully agree with that. This is, again, one of those things where it's like, what happened to the restaurant between the initial concept and what customers expect? And initial concept was like, right, we're going to serve some damn good sausages. We're going to make our own sauerkraut. It's going to be good sauerkraut, but it's still sausages and sauerkraut, you know, and there's only so far that can go, you know, as far as like, gosh, darn, wow factor. This is one of those things where the concept of the restaurant on paper turned out very different from what the restaurant is now. Once my name got attached to it and there started being this sort of media attention to it,

it turns out people are coming there for dinner. They're not coming there to drink. We started as a beer hall, but we're not really a beer hall anymore. We're a restaurant. You know, that's been one of the challenges since opening is like coming to terms with that and realizing, you know what, like some of the stuff we initially thought isn't going to work because customers are coming in with different expectations. Any restaurant takes a while to find its legs. I think for us, maybe it's taken a little bit longer just because it was such a big shift from what we had initially planned compared to what customers perceive. I see that maybe yesterday or within the last little while, you tweeted a new menu item that's starting soon. Maybe it's already started by now. It started today. Okay, congratulations.

So I was at the restaurant all morning, you know, training the staff and making sure that the cooks knew how it worked. So this is tomato mayo toast with grilled corn vinaigrette and a corn soup with paprika oil and shishito peppers. So that's not what I think of as beer hall food. Was it the clientele who drove it primarily? In other words, were people confused when they came originally because they know your name and they think it was going to be more of a sit down knife and fork situation? You know, I think that's part of it. I definitely saw comments saying, like, I expected the menu to be a little more Kenji than what it is, you know, because it's like sausages, like, you know, I don't write that much about sausages.

I don't eat that many sausages. I like them and we cook them well, but it doesn't exactly like scream Kenji or Food Lab or whatever. So, yeah, so part of, you know, part of this revamping process has been like, all right, how do we make this menu more me? So from what I've read, you own 12% of the restaurant and 20% of any new venture with these partners? It's something like that. Yeah, that's ballpark correct. Would you have had the same share of ownership had you just acted as a sort of consulting founding chef as opposed to roll up your sleeves fully involved? No, my partners are actually very understanding

of the entire situation and the fact that I'm now what got more involved than I was planning on. And so actually, initially, it was going to be basically just a fee plus a smaller percentage of ownership. The big question I have then really is so far, do you feel overall that it's worth it? And I guess another way of putting that is, you know, if I came to you tomorrow, Kenji, with an idea that you liked, an idea for a restaurant, maybe a site for a restaurant and a potentially worthwhile partnership, what do you do? Do you succumb or do you refrain this time?

I would say the restaurant on its own in a bubble, like detached from every other part of my life, absolutely worth it. I don't mind putting in hours and hours and hours of work, even for little to no place. You know, like I haven't made any money off this restaurant yet. And I don't plan on making any money for a while until until we pay off all our investors. But you know, we don't live in a vacuum. So if someone if someone came to me right now and asked me if I want to do this restaurant again, I would probably say no, only because it cost me three months of being with my daughter. And that was, you know, a price that I wasn't expecting to

have to pay at the beginning and one that made me deeply sad as it was happening and also in retrospect. So I don't regret anything I did with the restaurant. I do regret how it affected my personal life and my family. But we learned those lessons. Okay, final question. Let's say that maybe this is when your daughter is in school. Maybe this is when your daughter's in college even. But let's say I come to you and I want you to work with me to open a new restaurant. What is the dream concept, whether it's cuisine or style or location? What is the restaurant that you absolutely would sacrifice again almost your entire life to do? It would be something much smaller than Worst Halls.

So we're opening a couple more Worst Halls in the coming years, but we've talked about other restaurant concepts as well. And I think if we were to work on something together again, it would be something much smaller. The idea I've been throwing out at them is a Korean fried chicken sandwich place, which is a recipe that I've done at a number of pop-ups. I think it's extremely delicious, but it's essentially, you know, chicken brined in kimchi juice and then done sort of like a Nashville hot chicken style. But instead of the Nashville hot chicken oil that goes on there, we make like a sauce with Korean chili flakes and a bunch of different Korean flavors. And it's super delicious. And the kind of thing that I think would do well is a fast casual thing. You know,

that would basically be it for me. Like, I want to feed a lot of people and make them happy. You know, I don't want to open, like, an ego restaurant. I don't want people to come to, you know, worship at the altar of Kenji Lopez all come for this experience. I want a place that, you know, people say, hey, that's a good sandwich.

I'm going to have that once a week. We had that conversation with Kenji Lopez-Alt back in July, and we caught up with him again a few weeks ago for an update. So first of all, I'm just curious, how's life? I mean, life is great now. Yeah, at home, I found a much better balance between restaurant and home life after that sort of craziness of opening. You know, we've hired some more people in to help fill some management voids in the restaurant, which means that I do get to spend a lot more time with my daughter and working on my other projects without having to freak out about what's going on at the restaurant. Did your marriage recover from the stress of opening? Yeah, you know, it's definitely in much better shape. And I have a much better understanding of what it means to overcommit myself to things. And so, yes, everything on that front is going much better.

Okay. And then importantly, how's Worst Hall going? Worst Hall is going well. I think the last time we talked, we were sort of in this position where it was having a little bit of an identity crisis because we had planned for it one way at the beginning, and then people were coming in expecting something differently. So we've been slowly trying to push it in that direction, and we'll have completely transitioned our menu into a more sit-down experience, fork and knife, all that. But things are going well. We've never had trouble getting people in the door. We've never had trouble with revenue per se. The trouble has always been with profit, as maybe is true with most businesses. So, you know, that's been our concern for the last six months or so. It's like, all right, we're making this money. We get people in the door. How do we actually turn that into

profit so we can actually start breaking even and making money and paying back our investors and all that? So a lot of economists would say, well, the first and probably second and third and fourth steps toward bridging the revenue profit gap would be is very, very, very, very simple, especially since you said that the demand is really strong, right? You're not having any trouble filling it, just raise prices. So why not do that? Well, part of it is our goal is to make sure that families and neighborhood people can come in and feel good about coming in. And as it is right now, you know, I would say among our top three complaints is price already. And so part of our goal, especially with these new menu changes, is how do we give people an experience that they are willing to pay a little bit more for that they still see value in? And

originally with the menu, the problem was everything came on a bun. And there is a limit to what people will pay for a sandwich and what people feel comfortable paying for a sandwich, despite the quality of the ingredients inside, despite the amount of labor that goes into all that. Like there's a certain amount you can charge for a sandwich and people will not pay any more. That's not the case with fork and knife plates. People, you know, they see more value in a fork and knife plate. You know, we do this chicken schnitzel sandwich. We could just take off the bun and serve the exact same plate and charge four bucks more for it and people wouldn't bat an eye. The restaurant's original concept, you will recall, was German Beer Hall goes to California.

I mean, it's still California Beer Hall. You know, we still have sausages and German themed things. But customers who were fans of Kenji Lopez-Alt's food writing were expecting a menu a menu that was more Kenjified. And so it has become more Kenjified. They're serving cacio e pepe. It's like a quick Roman version of macaroni and cheese. But with Germanic noodles rather than Italian. So it's our house spetzel that we pan fry in brown butter, which is sort of the traditional way to do spetzel. Also, smash burgers and Korean-style fried chicken. Yeah, it was something we resisted at the beginning. Like, should we put a burger? Like, people know me for a burger. Do we need another place to serve a burger? And then we just decided, yeah, people want a burger. Like, it's good. People are going to order it. Let's just do it.

I mean, that and the fried chicken are probably our two top sellers. Once we got past that mental hurdle of being like, we don't have to be strictly German, like, it was a pretty easy call at that point. It's like, you know, fried chicken, burgers, people love making them. They're easy to prep. You know, they'll help with this profit problem because both of them are high profit dishes compared to sausage, which are among our lowest profit dishes because they take, you know, so much more work. So you mentioned that one of the biggest problems is just personnel and turnover, both in the kitchen and front of the house. And I'm curious to hear how you're doing on that front with retention.

So, you know, we have a number of people who have been around since the very beginning. There was a bit of turnover when we changed executive chef. So I recently hired a new executive chef. And, you know, so when that management change happened, there was turnover. But, you know, we were expecting it because, you know, people are loyal to their bosses. But things seem to be settling down again. Why did you need a new one? It's not that our previous chef was bad at his job. It's just that the needs that we had in terms of efficiency and really managing like the volume that we were doing was just something that he didn't have quite enough experience at. Oh, you know, one thing I should mention that actually

really helped with our staff morale when these changes were happening is that we hired a translator, which I think is good advice for any business that has a lot of employees that aren't very, very fluent in English. So we hired someone to come in for an entire day, and then we scheduled every Spanish-speaking employee to come in to sit down. So it was really about communication to understand the flow of work and so on? No, it was less about the flow of work and more about the management change, the new chef, and the transition in menu. But a lot of it was also to get their feedback and to find out what they needed from us in order to be happy in their work. Okay, really important question. How are the toilets holding up now?

Toilet situation's fine. You know, we put in the money to do the big fix and it's all fine. So I understand that you've also, in the midst of all this, put yourself and the restaurant in the middle of a MAGA controversy. You tweeted in response to public events in D.C., you tweeted, it hasn't happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren't getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate. So that's what you tweeted. What happened next? What happened next was, well, nothing for a few days. And then I got picked up by some newspapers and then went around national news. And that's when trouble happened. It was a mistake on a number of fronts for me to say that. The first one and the one that I was really concerned about was

it was a mistake the way I treated my staff and my partners, because that's my personal Twitter account. It was something I said kind of off the cuff and I never talked to my partners about it. And, you know, I realized afterwards that, you know, I just put my my partners and especially my staff in a really tough position because now there's all this anger being directed at them and they had nothing to do with it. It was just me shooting off my mouth. The other thing I want to say is that people very fairly read that as an attack on individuals and as an attack on maybe on themselves after reading it, an attack on Republicans. And I can understand why it was read that way. And all I can say is that in my head, it was really not about individuals. It was about the symbol, the symbol

of the hat. You know, I very admittedly live in a liberal bubble, you know, like I live in the Bay Area. I obviously get exposed to a lot of people from around the country, you know, including my family. And if you go just outside the Bay Area, of course, there's lots of right-wing people, lots of Republicans, and I get along fine with everyone. But, you know, when you see that hat at rallies where there's hateful things being said, or you see that hat being worn by people who are doing hateful things, it comes on to take a specific meaning that makes me uncomfortable. I guess my big regret is it came out in a way that closed down discussion as opposed to open discussion. You said it caused a lot of anger. Were people in your restaurant, whether partners or employees, were they angry because it endangered their livelihood or were they angry because it endangered their livelihood

or were they angry on a level beyond that? I mean, to be honest, I don't really want to talk about my partners or my staff because, yeah, I don't want to bring any of that up again because I've already sort of put them in an uncomfortable position. It's been tough, you know, I've kind of been realizing that, you know, I'm in this position where I kind of, I want to have my cake and eat it too, where it's like, I'm a normal guy. Like I feel like just any other schlub on the internet. I spend my days doing normal people things like puttering around the house and fixing things and repairing the furnace. And so it's like, yeah, I'll just talk the way I talk on the internet. But then, yeah, especially in the last couple of years, it's like, I have this platform

and it's sort of my responsibility to use it. And that's sort of an impulse control thing. And that's something, you know, my wife tells me all the time, like, you can't, you can't do this because like, whether you want it or not, you're well known. And you can't just talk like this because it's going to get us in trouble. It's not, it's not just about getting you in trouble. It's going to get our family in trouble. It's, it is something that I very consciously have been thinking about. You know, like this year, I sort of made a New Year's resolution that if I make any kind of political comments that I won't respond back to commenters. How are you doing with that resolution? Good, actually. I've pretty much dropped to zero in terms of responding back. I also promised I wouldn't make any more ad hominem attacks on social media, which the one time I broke that was when I made an ad hominem attack against everybody who wears a MAGA hat, and that got me into trouble. Soon enough, Lopez-Alt will be taking a break from America and its politics. I'm actually planning with my wife and my daughter, we're going to be taking three months in Colombia. The idea is researching a book on Colombian cuisine written for an American audience, which doesn't really exist right now. And where does your passion for that cuisine come

from? Well, my wife is Colombian, and we spend a lot of time down there. And it's a huge country, hugely varied in terms of geography and culture and cuisine. There's the Andes, there's coastal regions, there's plains, there's rainforest, there's deserts with a widely varied cuisine as well that I think is kind of underrepresented. And I feel like I have a good sort of inside track on that. What happens if or when the next time you open a restaurant, how do you come into it thinking differently, knowing now what you know? I take less on myself. I delegate more. Yeah, I think I spend more time figuring out the personnel issue as opposed to the fun concept issue and figuring out, you know, how do we make this happen where I don't have to upturn my life and give up everything else to do it. And if I can't

do it, then that just means I won't do it. You know, like, I've sort of come to this place where it's like, all right, when the when the first restaurant, when the opportunity came to me, it's like, I don't want to die thinking what if like, this is an opportunity to do something I've always thought about doing. It wasn't a lifelong dream. But like, I thought about doing it, I should do it. And at this point, it's like, you know what, like, I don't need to do it again. Like if the opportunity comes up, and I can find a way to ensure that I don't have to upend my life again to do it, then I would. But I'm perfectly content saying no.

Coming up next time, a special live episode of Freakonomics Radio. The new head of New York City's underperforming subway system tells us what he's doing about it. It's about fixing leaks. It's about renewing components. It's about unblocking drains. We also hear about one of the biggest problems with street traffic. The politics of parking has been certainly for me one of the most eye-opening parts of my job. We learn about the politics of disgust. The more easily disgusted people say they are, the more likely they are to be toward the right of the job. We learn about the politics of disgust. The more easily disgusted people say they are, the more likely they are to be toward the right of the scale. And an intriguing new carbon capture

technology. So yes, I was on a team at a national lab from the DOE that invented and kind of studied this technology. Energy, traffic, disgust. Don't miss it. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Zach Lipinski, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. Thank you. ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, go to stitcherpremium.com slash Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or via email at radio at Freakonomics.com.

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