Podcast: The Ride - The Buca di Pepcast: Episode 99- Bake Ziti with Claire Jayne and Pethy Squires

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Claire Jayne (Stylist) and Pethy Squires (Carrion blog) join me to discuss the classic dish Baked Ziti. And in a shocking development, find out which other items were extremely dry! A rare miss for Bucca di Peppo?! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forever! Dog! Audience, audience, when we last left the good boys, they were ripped apart from each other and scattered into different corners of the multiverse. The only way they can fix the dimensional rift and reunite is to record separate solo podcasts about stuff at malls next to theme parks. We take you now to Jason's End of the Multiverse. Preview. Free view. Free view. Free view. Wee-wee. Wee-wee.

Wee-wee. Thank you. Welcome to the Pepcast, the number one Buca di Peppo fancast. I'm your host, the Baron of Breadstickssticks the maestro of marinara jason sheridan today we're talking baked cd and i've got two great guests my first guest she's a writer for the blog carrion a part of unork magazine pethy squires is here pethy how are you it's great to be here i'm full of pep oh thanks great that's what we want here at the pep cast and my other guest you know her she's a stylist she's also my love my girlfriend claire jane how are you clary i'm good i'm doing good i'm also happy to be here i put our cat od in the bedroom just so like, you know, he wouldn't escape.

Yeah. Odie is a real handful. So how are you all doing a couple of days after our lovely Buka meal? I'm feeling pretty good. Pretty level. Yeah. It was a nice time. You know, it was a time.

It was a time. Oh, it was quite a time. All right. Now, I'm learning that next to Buka, not only is there a theme park, there's this outdoor shopping and dining destination called City Walk. And I had you both on because I figured maybe you could educate me. You both spent a lot of time up there at City Walk, correct? Yeah, definitely. I've hit some of the shops there,

some of the, I guess you could call it food establishments up there. You don't know anything about it, okay. I don't know anything. Yeah, you used to work at the theme park. Now, how did you hide this in our relationship for so long? Well, I'm an actor, and that's why I worked at Universal Studios so long well i'm an actor and that's why i worked at universal studios hollywood because i'm an actor like i don't want to you know at the first time guest long time listener jason you talk about buka to pepo a lot and i think maybe it just

you're so focused on the pepo that some details of other people's lives don't come through well yeah that's true and you know i usually get out of a taxi in front of buka i go right in to the pepo and i come right out and i i've often asked myself like what's all that racket over there all that sound and light but i i had never really investigated until we went up there bright lights big city baby oh yes good uh pethy you said you were wearing some items from this location yeah i know it's weird but i like theme parks i i mean i'm just weird like that, I guess. And yeah, I go there a lot. I'm an annual pass holder. And I do, I just happen to be wearing my old hard rock pendant from when there used to

be a hard rock there. It's, of course, now a Wonka's Emporium. And then I have socks on from the Los Angeles Sock Exchange. They have a store there that's just socks. It's great. Oh, wow. You should go. Yeah, I can't say i've ever heard anything like that but uh enough of talking about other establishments let's get into our pepo meal now we we had kind of a mix of stuff you know we we tried a variety of items pethethy, you had a martini?

I see vodka on the receipt. Yeah, I had an espresso martini. How was that? It was fine when it got there. I don't, look, I know this restaurant means a lot to you, and I don't want to come in hot. Oh, please be honest. Don't hold anything back.

We are no holds barred here. Okay, I worry that Buca de pepo is a dark nexus in the american culture okay interesting take have not heard that one before please go on um so the the special martini it took a long time to get there because we were sat upstairs and uh it seems like maybe the people who have to work upstairs don't like it because as i was walking up the stairs i heard a server stomping down and said i'm not running shit up there and then see me and a deer in the headlights fear in her eyes and just she just zoomed past me okay uh that's the first time i've ever heard anyone uh talk negative about the area that i

call the bird's nest um and so uh yeah we uh claire and i took the elevator because i you know have a little difficulty getting around sometimes what did you think about that elevator clary well it was interesting because it was very small windowless and as you were using it and going up or down there were boo boo it's okay it's pepo it's it's it's called buka to pepo yeah yeah that's okay um it's called bucca to pepo and there were there were bucca ads we were laughing about that like we're already here in the restaurant robert earl you don't have to sell the restaurant to us to um entice us i guess to get to our table upstairs um and it kind of smelled but it also took a long time, so it was pretty fun. It was a long elevator.

It almost seemed like a large dumbwaiter that we were told to go into. We also could not operate it ourselves. Someone had to begrudgingly get us in and out of it. Yeah, and then meanwhile, the stairs just has the ugliest murals you've seen in your life just faces that are so close to looking like human faces okay uh all right well this is again this is a unique episode 99 and we're finally getting some criticism so um that's great that's great like the the people on the reddit will be happy about the pepo reddit and check that out everyone also please check out

our drip page that's the crowdfunding website started by kickstarter it's a big hit our drip keeps growing and growing soon it'll be what's bigger than a drip anyone I don't know drizzle. Soon it'll be, what's bigger than a drip, anyone?

I don't know. Drizzle? Oh, soon it'll be a drizzle. I like that a lot. Well, I'm going to have to say that more often. So keep giving to that drip account. And as you know, I don't even have to keep saying it. It's a website we all visit on a daily basis. It's a huge hit uh so let's get

into our meal uh we started off with a small mixed green salad what did you both think about this i thought it was it was fine a lot of iceberg lettuce i got really excited about the olives and realized um there were only like two and then the one i got also had a piece of a pit in it which was a surprise but um yeah you know nice little little starter white salad yeah you know normal normal salad olive garden-esque i don't know if we can't mention other italian chains here but it's about this only thing i mean that's okay that's okay don't worry about it um i you know uh fine we did say fine a lot this meal um in for a mixed green salad it did have an awful lot of iceberg lettuce yeah one green

one green salad well yeah that's pretty funny yeah it is a one green salad One green salad. Well, yeah, that's pretty funny. Yeah, it is a one green salad. It wasn't really mixed at all. And yeah, there wasn't a lot of olives. I ate one of the two. I do not like olives. I kind of didn't realize I was eating it. You took a precious olive away and you didn't mean to or you didn't enjoy it and you took it away that's a slap in the freaking face man why did you do that it's a salad for three people and there's unpatriole

okay exactly and you took one look that's fine i was look at the meal kind of it kind of threw me off my game honestly i pevy you you had said like oh we have to try the giant meatballs we have to try this kind of a signature there and um if i can get in on the criticism game a little these were the driest meatballs i've ever eaten in my uh in my life um uh but it was very fun and you took one home to your husband uh how did they feel about it uh i think they felt it was fine you know we had to cut it in half to get it into the container because i didn't have a container big enough for the giant meatballs yeah it was a little surprising to not get a custom meatball container because it's kind of a signature there

like you could use a, like those boxes corsages come in and then everyone could see the beautiful meatball. I think that would really elevate the take-home presentation. I mean, I can put that in my next letter to Robert Earl. He hasn't answered any of the other ones, but I can certainly try.

Also looking at our bill at the end, I've got the receipt here to go in my scrapbook of Bucca receipts. Those three giant meatballs worth $30, which breaks down to roughly $10 a meatball, and I'm not quite sure about the economics of that. Yeah, I wanted to get the meatballs because some of my favorite pictures ever taken are of sophia vagara holding giant meatballs at buca di beppo and that's why i wanted to show

these to you i mean i'm sure as an old hand you've probably seen them before but uh specifically this one of her doing a sort of uh what i think of as Larry David in Whatever Works hand gesture. Oh, my God. She's got a whole table full of giant meatballs. Hundreds of dollars of meatballs. It was a fundraiser that she would do there called Meatballs for Ninos. I'm not sure what it raised money for. Okay.

She did it a couple of times. I look celebrity fundraisers. That money doesn't just disappear or anything. So I'm assuming it probably went to the ninos. The ninos. Shit out of luck. I'm guessing. Ripped to the ninos.

It's such a man's world. Women can't have anything. I swear to fuck. But is this a good time for me to bring up the other pictures of celebrities at bucca di peppo yes please uh so uh at my work at carrion i have access to like a big getty database and so one day i just searched bucca di peppo and there's I think 47 pages of people getting their picture taken at 47 pictures no 47 pages wow 50 pictures per page what this is my dream of people getting their their picture taken at the Times Square Bucca di Peppo uh and it's okay here is a woman who I'm told is famous oh it's is this angie from jersey shore

or gina or something whatever i don't know but that's um quite a picture she's holding um she's holding meatballs in her hands over her boobs like on them oh as if they were breasts i see simulacrum yeah um and then here's snooki and jay wow and they they do the thing that uh a lot of people do there where so when you're a celebrity and you go to buca di pepo hopefully this will happen for you someday uh they present a bowl of marinara and you dip your hands in it like grauman's chinese theater and then you put it on the wall you you put your hands on a piece of paper and then they frame just rotting tomato sauce with your signature on it and that's just up there now i mean i've done this recreationally and um they don't seem to like it anytime i do it and there's three types of people who seem to go

get do the handprint thing at the buca di pepo time square it's miss universe or miss usa wait sorry i have something to add to that later uh professional poker like world series of poker champion and underage disney stars and that's it no the trifecta of fame oh my god well sorry i had interrupted you but um i did like two pageants when i was younger in florida like in my 20s not like baby but i remember like the girl who won they would often do like events at the the bucca and i just thought it was like oh that's just where like in town they like whenever i feel like there is like a legit like maybe corporation something kind of time because it's not the first time i've heard about like pageantry and bucca i'm not kidding you no that tracks right because i think robert earl has

his hands in a lot of pizza pies. Got it. Is this a good time to bring up the housewives of it all? Yes, you also mentioned housewife connection. Yeah, Robert Earl shows up on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Vanderpump rules like some, like more than I would assume a chain restaurateur would. I mean, he's a star after miss universe world series of poker players and child actors robert earl's like number four or number one like above all those

people in terms of the fame game at least my fame game sure uh and so he the first time i noticed him was i was watching old an episode of vanderpump rules and he goes with lisa vanderpump to check out what will eventually become pump restaurant in weho which has since closed during scandival uh but he's just like it's going to be fabulous here and lisa vanderpump of course makes some joke that like the gay waiters are going to blow him and he's like oh you and it's very like that lisa always has and then in an episode of real house as a beverly hills there was a whole arc where he had dorit uh decorate a room in the encino Bucatepepo oh I've always wanted to go there yeah my dream okay we're gonna talk about the other thing that the Encino Bucatepepo is famous for near the end let's get through some happiness first okay okay we can't wait but yeah so there's a there was a huge fight at the encino buca de pepo uh in the capri room uh

when it was this whole thing where where brandy glanville said that she had slept with denise richards and denise richards said that they didn't even really know each other and blah blah blah blah but if you've ever wanted to see a woman having like full body sobs claiming that she ate somebody out uh in a book in a pepo uh season 10 finale of real housewives of beverly hills well it wouldn't be the first time i experienced something like that but you know you do a podcast long enough you've seen everything and i mean restaurants it's this you know it's a very event heavy restaurant and you know tensions are running high people are stressed out about whether the party is going to happen while we were there there was a book publishing okay so i from what i could gather it was like maybe also a birthday party but it was

also like very clearly very like you know a group of religious people they did all do a mass prayer together and this was a pretty big long table and then at one point it was just us in there with them so i caught a uh woman going okay jeremy this is why i'm grateful for you i never really had a brother like you because my real brothers didn't do it and i believe god brought you to me and i was like we gotta get the fuck out of here and i was scooting out of a very the very tight booth we were sitting in and i'm like oh someone is giving a very heartfelt toast i should get out of here and uh then we got around the corner and uh claire here was like those people were very religious and i was like, those people were very religious.

And I was like, this is probably not the best time to bring up. I bought two copies of those books. But one for each of us, Stuart. Oh, thank you. You got to commemorate every Pepo event. There you go. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. That makes more sense.

Thank you so much for being so thoughtful. So, just kind of off my game now i almost said buka to beppo earlier like i know you said it's okay it's very kind it's very common um mistake but bdp that doesn't even make sense as an abbreviation let's get to the big citi the reason we're all here today yeah yeah it's fine yeah it was it was fine i liked the the rosa sauce which i think they just mix the red sauce and the white sauce together like in a pitcher and then pour it over the ziti the sauce pitcher yeah okay so you that's like a known thing the sauce well you know you walk through the kitchen and that you can see a little bit of how it's being made um i i did

realize that the i guess chef's table you might call it when we were leaving was actually just the workers eating their food at that table it was just the workers table so i thought that was interesting because i thought it was like a, you know, a special experience. It's more just like a little break room that's invisible to everybody. Yeah,

I was kind of disappointed by that. That's supposed to be a whole experience and appeared to be two men all in black having their like family meal. Yeah, their shift meal. Yeah. What a shift meal to have.

Yeah. Dorit spoke lovingly of eating at the chef's table at the encino buca di pepo oh man we must go i that capri room makes you feel like you're on the island of capri and i don't know how they manage that with just a bunch of false lemons and white enamel hey very good oh wow white enamel nice fall fake lemons and white enamel. Hey. Very good. Oh, wow. White enamel. Nice. Fake lemons and white enamel. I will say the chef's table at the CityWalk pep is very close to the bathrooms and also, obviously, like kitchen adjacent. So, while we were leaving, it was getting closer to close time.

And so, I think they were breaking down the kitchen and that whole area just smelled like bleach. So, maybe, like, so, so you know good on them for staying sanitary you know keep that a rating love it work it girl uh but not the most pleasurable eating experience if they just douse the whole place in bleach i agree with that i i didn't love that the but just me personally sound a little bit of a germaphobe i didn't love that the but just me personally sound a little bit of a germaphobe i didn't love that the bathrooms were like literally like right basically like in the kitchen like i don't know it just kind of weirded me out because it also a little bit felt like maybe it was like the employee restroom like you're in the back of the kitchen this might

just be a me thing i do have bathroom like ocd but i also didn't love in our area there was like an upstairs like chef or not just like waiter's station and it was like adjoining our room because you know like all all bucatipepos have sort of like warrens of little intimate dining rooms oh yes uh ours was next to like their prep area which also meant it was next to their like throwaway trash area so near the end of the night also i did get a whiff of just the trash from that room coming into our dining area. Yikes. Yeah, I think we're starting to see like a good 30 plus years of this place being open. Maybe they should knock some walls down.

Maybe they've taken the intimate italian restaurant thing as far as one can take it but you don't enjoy being in a really nice intimate room with um multiple screaming toddlers running around as well and having meltdowns i mean i think it built though to the ambience it certainly adds to the ambience of every wall surface being covered in pictures um and uh going from that to um a very loud uh prayer uh gatherings was was a bit of a shock but um you know uh hey let's let's go to something else positive every time i go to buka to pep i gotta order the buddy v's cake slices? And we did two. We restrained ourselves. We didn't get three.

So this time we did the rainbow cake and the black and white cake. What did you all think of these cakes? They were very pretty. But the second you like put a fork near them, the levels just all kind of split apart. But the contrast of the colors was really nice it was it was you know it was cake and um the fudge frosting on the chocolate one like in between the layers that was pretty good it tasted like chocolate the cake didn't really taste a lot like chocolate but

the fudge in between i will say that icing was quite good i don't want to be like a weird conspiracy theorist or anything but i kind of got i, but I kind of got the sense that maybe they added extra oil to the cake to make it seem moist for longer. I don't want to be like insane here, but it did seem a little oily. Oh, that's a really good point. That's interesting because the parts I got like the meatballs were very dry well the icing i mean hey something positive uh you always want to hear the chocolate icing tastes like chocolate uh that's a positive it was the in between the layers because the top there was still white icing right am i yeah yeah there was the white icing and like the little little jimmies on the

end and that tastes like nothing yeah it really didn't taste like anything it barely tasted like sugar you know sometimes you can taste frosting and it's like oh this is just clearly sugar it kind of just tastes like paste like it just was like paste so i think i said that night that it kind of had the feeling of eating food in a dream where your brain kind of knows you're not tasting anything i still don't know if if we really eat that cake i agree with you i i totally get what you're saying i i you buddy velestro like robert earl i'm shocked with let something be seemingly less than stellar quality you know you know what you're

probably right you're probably right just you know i mean but speaking of buddy lester robert earl and 30 years of bucca i know you try to focus on the food and stay out of the politics okay on the show you don't like bringing up you know dark stuff randomly no i'm scared of it i'm scared of most things on topic 100 that's the jason sheridan promise yes uh but i i do feel like i have to talk a little bit about the history of buca di pepo okay um so it was founded uh by not robert earl but a different guy who's oh phil roberts different robert phil roberts who uh not italian in the slightest okay he said that he wanted to make a restaurant that people could look down on that's a direct quote oh my god we don't i like i i kind of reword that quote sometimes of something people could look up on.

Okay. He wouldn't love that, but that's okay. Okay. So, his idea was he wanted to do, like, a parody of Italian red sauce joints and put all of the trashiest, like, Italian stereotyping he could find on the walls. Oh, my God. But he hired a Milanese chef to make the food. So, the food was not a joke, but the walls and he wanted but he hired a milanese chef to make the food so the food was not

a joke but the walls and he wanted in the wine list he wanted to make sure that people uh felt superior while they were dining there he said that he knew that he had uh he had done a good job when he was walking by a couple and a couple pointed to a statue said, I would never have that thing in my house. And he was like, yes, I did it. Oh, my God. So that it starts becoming a larger chain and they hire a new CEO who's actually Italian-American, Joseph Micotrato from Cleveland, who he goes, he starts saying that Bucata beppo is named after i'm so sorry i did it again bucata peppo is named after peppo like you got some pep in your step after eating a couple pounds of pasta the story just doesn't make me feel peppy he says that his his uh that the place is named after his grandpa peppoo, and that all of the recipes that the

Melanie's chef had created were his grandmother's recipe book. Okay. Yeah, I didn't know a lot of this story. I did know about grandpa, Pepo. Yeah, I mean, grandpa, Pepo becomes like a huge part of the mythology, even after this guy later leaves because he was charged with stealing more than two hundred thousand dollars from the company to buy an italian villa okay well that's all of our dreams you know i've been working uh pretty diligently my day job of course at the los angeles hazardous waste disposal

site and i've been trying to save up money for years now to get that villa you know i'm very passionate my two passions in life buca de pepo and proper hazardous waste disposal it's more important now than ever don't throw out your batteries certainly don't throw out your lithium-ion batteries properly dispose of them, folks. So then it's bought by Robert Earl, who combines it with Planet Hollywood. The Buca di Peppo in New York is also Planet Hollywood. And that's why all of those Disney stars were there, I guess.

I hope. Yeah, that makes a little more sense. But like, yeah, that's still okay all right continue continue and then the the last thing and then we can we can wrap up on a nice note i just have to get this out there because it's my first thought anytime i see a buca di pepo is the encino buca di pepo the one with doritos capri room was also where phil hartman's wife had her last meal before you know oh my god okay this is uh i know i'm sorry i know you don't like bummers yeah like no weird history and i'm really sorry to do this to you that's that's like that viteitello Studio City Italian restaurant

that I don't even want to set foot in because last meal where Robert Blake and his wife shared a meal before the murder. Yeah, I don't know. Did she get to finish that meal? Anyway, let's talk about the dessert. Hey, let's talk about the dessert. So not the best Buddy V cakes I've ever had, but that's okay.

Because, hey, we bought the picture. You know, I got to get the picture. We went for the black and white one, which, you know, as we're in a criticism mood today, does make us look like we all died in a plane crash. But that's okay. It's in a frame. And it was like a flat picture frame like you know thick paper but then i opened the back so you can actually make it like look propped up and it does really kind of look like that but also it's really cute it is a pretty cute picture and we

all kind of work work together to choose a lovely photographer actually got to us before our food uh so we are seated at an uh largely empty table we have some waters and an iced tea bethany have my martini excuse me i almost called you bethany bethany yeah you didn't even have your martini yet um so uh but hey great picture quality and they gave us three to choose from. And I guess they just, you know, I was wondering this. So do they just throw those ones away? I mean, I guess maybe obviously, but also that is so many pictures to waste. And like, you know, do they maybe go somewhere else?

Is it at some restaurant somewhere in another place where they're just like we'll give you pictures of people you know like i don't know where these maybe robert earl has a large surveillance network and this is a record of everyone who's been there and they're doing they're doing training uh face recognition ai on all of our discarded booker pics look i spent 99 episodes trying to figure out where all the other photos go. And, you know, Occam's razor, the simplest solution is likely the right one. So they probably just end up in a garbage dump. But also they could be training AI. Who knows?

Where do the pictures go, Robert? What's going on? Oh, man, this really gives me a lot to think about that. Hey, let's let's get to our rating. Of course, every episode we rate our meal on a scale from Robert Earl to Robert Earl. Clary, what do you think? Let's start with you. You know, I think I'm going to split the difference and just give it a Robert. Great. Great. Middle of the road pethy yeah i would i would go with just a across the board robert yeah like a

yeah a robert e one more than that okay slightly above okay yeah okay and i'm gonna give it a robert ea because i just can't bring myself to call it anything lower um this was a hard one um okay now let's you know head for the pasta portal. Who's got some plugs? The pasta plug portal. Yeah. I have a zine that I just finished making called Girlzine. It's about all the girl stuff from last year. For some reason, it's under Bethysquires, not Pethysquires.

That's also my Twitter is at BethyBSQU and Instagram Bethysquires uh that's also my twitter is at bethybsqu and instagram bethy squires and um you know you can always find me at carrie and blog at unork mag great great claire anything you want to talk about or plug i just want to say i think pethy is like so cool and like genuinely i just want to give her like props because um she rocks but um i am a stylist so if you have any events coming up or you just want a closet refresh or you just want a little consultation you can hit me up um i'm at jane claire styling because at claire jane styling was taken so i had to like do the stupid swap thing. So you can find me there and say hi.

Great, great. As for me, folks, next episode, very exciting, episode 100. We're finally tackling spaghetti and meatballs. Little meatball talk today to get everyone fired up. And our guest, we had to get a big guest for this episode. And folks, it's a big get. It's like a big, giant meatball-sized get. It's the totally epic former Vice President Tim Kaine.

That's right. Tim Kaine in the membrane. Tim Kaine in the brain. We're going to talk about a totally epic term as VP under President Clinton, a term that happened just before the event. But we're not here to talk about sad stuff like the event. We're here to talk pepo, buka de pepo, to be precise. None of that pepo nonsense. No, it's buka talk pepo. Booga to pepo, to be precise. None of that pepo nonsense.

No, it's booga to pepo. I've been your host, Jason Sheridan. Thank you so much for joining me, and we'll see you next week on the Pepcast. Forever Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production. Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com

and subscribe to our shows on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keep up with the latest Forever Dog news by following us on Twitter and Instagram at Forever Dog Team and liking our page on Facebook.