The Joe Rogan Experience - #1487 - Janet Zuccarini & Evan Funke

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

Janet Zuccarini is the CEO & owner of Gusto 54 Restaurant Group. Evan Funke is a master pasta maker and the chef-owner of Felix Trattoria in Venice, CA.

And we're rolling. Janet, Evan, what's up? Joe. How are you guys? Good to see you. Good to see you. Strange times. The weirdest times ever.

Yes, but Felix is still intact. The restaurant's there. We're still here. We will survive. We were talking about restaurants that have been destroyed over the rioting and the looting and the chaos. And you guys, you got lucky. You dodged a bullet. We did.

Very happy to hear that. Well, I think Abba Kinney got a bit of warning, and all of Abba Kinney boarded up, and so we boarded up, and the National Guard is still there today. What the fuck? It's so strange. It's so wild. It doesn't make any sense. Like, if you told me that something happened in L.A. and people were rioting,

I'd be like, well, if it happened in L in LA, it kind of makes sense that people are upset. And then you said, but they're smashing businesses and destroying restaurants and destroying small stores and family owned business. I'd be like, well, wait, why? Why are they doing that? There's no rhyme or reason to this. It doesn't make any sense. Well, I understand why people are pissed.

Put that fucker up there. Evan, come on. We're just talking about it. How's my level? You're good. Put that fucker up there. Evan, come on. We're just talking about you. How's my level? You're good. Good? Better? Yeah, it's, I mean, it is what it is. There's nothing we can do about it now, right? Well, but I also

think there's been, you know, thousands and thousands of peaceful protesters out there. And the press is really not focusing on all the peaceful protests, which is our right to protest. And there's going to be, you know, a bad apple everywhere. And then you're going to get, you know, hundreds of people that and I think you were saying, you know, on your last podcast, it's a bunch of young people that don't know where.

Yeah. Where's your iPhone made? Where are you going to get your shoes made from? And they're not thinking about that. They're just thinking free running shoes. And this is fun. And we've been locked up. And like, let's get out there. For 10 weeks. Yeah. They've been in their house.

It's the perfect storm of craziness, right? A disease we thought was going to kill everybody. And then so everybody shuts down. And it turns out it doesn't really kill nearly as many people as we thought. But we still have to be shut down. And then like, when do we get to go back to work? And then all of a sudden, hey, you guys can open up. Like you guys got no warning.

No warning. No warning. I mean, I called Janet up when it happened and I was like, what? You just, you get to open? Like, but it takes 10 days to get staff ready. That's what you said, right? Yeah. I just had a friend send me a text message.

Hey, so are you open? I hear you can be open now. And I mean, it was just dropped in the news before, you know, we could have any time to prepare. And, you know, we don't have the staffing. We need at least 10 days to be able to open our doors. I mean, that's really our biggest challenge is getting our staff back into the restaurant and feeling comfortable in the restaurant with all these new regulations. And you have state regulations. You have L County regulations, you have a city of Los Angeles regulations, and each one of the documents are like novel length.

So I'm sitting there at home reading all three cross-referencing and we basically have to abide by the most stringent rules. So I'm like picking apart each one, okay. Trying to decipher what we can actually do. And then on top of that, we're trying to get people out of their houses because they're scared shitless to come back. Are they though? Well, the wild card is the clientele coming in. I think people are going to come back in droves.

I think if you were open full capacity, you'd be fucking sold out instantly. I really don't think there's any issue at all. I think there's so much fear-mongering going on, but I think the actual attitude of people, way more people are interested in going out than are interested in being locked up for longer. Well, I think it's like different groups of people. So you have young people who want to go out and they don't care, and they'll, you know, be seated at full capacity. But if you have any kind of health risks, or you're older, you're not going to feel safe to go out. And you know, the restaurant business, when you're even allowed to be seated at 100% is a really, really difficult business. And I think

the pandemic really showed the inherent weakness of this industry that we run on razor thin profit margins. Now we're allowed to be seated at 60%. So do we pay 60% rent then at that point? Our costs don't go down, you know, 40%. We're still paying 100% of our costs, 100% of our labor, 100% of our rent. You know, the cost of food doesn't go down. So we're forced to become extremely creative. And there's one thing that I know about the restaurant industry where we're highly adaptable. We have to kind of play within this game where we have to be unwavering on all of our standards and then be completely adaptable minute to minute from everyone's demands and everybody literally expects perfection there's also this extreme lack of communication as to like what what the timeline they're looking at and what what will be the standards for you to

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

But nobody knows anything. And right now with opening, you know, the health department, it's a 17-page document on how you are supposed to open in a safe way. What do they tell you have to do? Oh, man. Well, 17 pages. Page one. Let's start. We'll start at page one.

At the very basis of it, you know, there's got to be an employee log. We have to take the temperature of all of our employees when they actually enter the premises. So we have to have a log on that. Anyone who has direct contact with customers have to wear a face mask and a face shield. A shield? 100%. And then on the client side, you have to wear a mask when you're not eating. So that means if you

get up to go to the bathroom in the restaurant, you have to put your mask on. And then take it off when you get back to the table. That's so dumb. It doesn't make any sense. And a lot of it is completely ambiguous. Well, why would you have to wear a face

mask if you already have a shield over your face? Right? Well, I think there's been some reports. I have so many questions. You can get it through your eyes. But there's been reports that you get it from touching things, and now they say you can't. I know, but they're saying everything. They're saying anything.

And it's on the honor system. You don't have to do anything in a restaurant. Really? They're not anything. And, you know, it's really it's on the honor system. You don't have to do anything in a restaurant. Really? They're not policing us. The wording is like, consider training your employees to do this. Consider this. Consider that. Let people take chances.

If they want to come, let them. People want to be able to go to a restaurant, just sit down and actually eat. I have friends who drove to Santa Barbara to go sit down at a restaurant. Yeah, I would do it. You know? Yeah, it'd be exciting. Look, we flew to Texas last weekend to look at houses and stuff, but we went to eat. We ate at this place called The Lonesome Dove.

Oh, it was fantastic. We ate like regular people. Sat down. What a wine. The whole deal. It was amazing. But were the tables separated? Yes.

They were less than full capacity. The waiters all wore face shields. The people that greeted you at the door wore – not face shields. They wore masks. The people that greeted you at the door wore masks as well. But it wasn't that bad. It was great. It was just nice to be able to go to a restaurant.

Yeah. I think people are dying to get out, and we're going to see a lot of people that are going to just run to restaurants, sit down in restaurants. But there was a poll taken. I know you love polls. Love them. I know. You're like, who the fuck takes polls? You get the opinions of morons.

That's what polls are. Most morons think. Most morons think that 6 out of 10 Americans will not feel comfortable sitting in a restaurant. I don't know. will not feel comfortable, you know, sitting in a restaurant. I don't know. I'm not sure how comfortable I would even feel sitting indoors where you come in with a mask, but then you're going to eat, you take your mask off, and then, you know,

Joe Blow two tables over coughs, and then you're sitting indoors. Whenever you're inside, you feel like you're in a Petri dish. Well, it's been that way forever and ever. I mean, just think about my dishwashers, okay? In in the guidelines those guys basically have to be in hazmat suits they have to have full protection face shields and mask and then have like you know what what uh the equivalent of like a painter suit essentially because i get it those guys are spraying down people's spit right like all day eight hours a day so i get it for them but it's always been a disgusting job 70 of being a chef is cleaning cleaning you know it's cleaning vegetables or cleaning up after people or whatever like it's cleaning so this this business has

always been disgusting and if you don't love this business to the core, it's fucking terrible. Well, let's talk nice things. Let's talk about what you guys have put together is pretty remarkable. The food there is so good. It's kind of ridiculous. Like, your pasta's got voodoo in it. I don't know what you're doing.

I guess it's because it's handmade. Right? Because the first time my wife and I ate there, we sat right next to that open area where you can watch you guys make the pasta. And it's such a painstaking process. And you realize, you really, truly appreciate that it's an art form. You know, that like making stuff like that, like cutting no corners and making it as good as it could possibly taste. stuff like that, like cutting no corners and making it as good as it could possibly taste. Well, I mean, that's the ultimate goal is to create that connection between pasta maker and someone who's eating the pasta.

Like if you look through the glass and you see a pastallo or pastalle in there. What's the difference? A pastallo? Pastallo is male. Gender neutral? So, you know, they're banging out trofie, which is like a coil from Liguria. And you look down at your plate and there's like 160 to 180 pieces in your plate. You're like, fuck.

This guy is repping. He's got pictures. This guy is doing 180 reps just for me. That's a connection. And once you get it, sometimes a bowl of pasta is a bowl of pasta. I get it. But this is something different. This is craft.

This is tradition. This is continuing this conversation that's been passed down from generation to generation. And all I'm doing, all we're doing at Felix is just a small spoke and a massive wheel of Italian culinary tradition. Well, you know just exactly how long to cook it to, which is amazing. Because I'm fucking maniacal, Joe. I get it, man. You must be. Because just the way your teeth sink into it, it's like everything is amazing.

I like to call it toothsome. Al dente. That's what al dente means, to the tooth. Is that what it means? Al dente. Al dente. Dental. Oh, okay. dente means, to the tooth. Is that what it means? Al dente. Dental. Oh, okay.

Toothsome. Toothsome. So that's part of the experience, right, is the right amount of chew. Right amount of chew. And each pasta is cooked region specific because they cook pasta very different in Naples versus Rome versus Bologna versus Sardinia. It's just preference. It's based on tradition. And the thing is this.

Authenticity is very personal, right? Your mom makes macaroni and cheese with Velveeta. My mom makes macaroni and cheese with Tillamook cheddar. That shit's authentic to me. It may not be authentic to you. Italy is no different. But the differences and the diversity are so specific, not only per region, but town and then house to house. And it's been that way for thousands of years. That's why I think Italian food next to Chinese food is the most diverse there is.

And you can literally study your whole life and not even scratch the surface. Wow. Now, you guys have been open for what, two years? Three years. Three years? In April, yeah. How much prep time is there before you open? Like when you have a plan, and Janet, you've opened up how many restaurants?

A ton. Nine restaurants and four under construction. Great time to be under construction in the restaurant business. So crazy. My life sucks. Hashtag. It could be My life sucks. Hashtag. It could be a lot worse. No.

Right. When you are about to open up a place like Felix, how do you get started? Did you know Evan in advance? Did you guys talk before? How do you put together a restaurant like that? Well, each restaurant that I've opened definitely has a different story. So I have a few Italian restaurants. I have Thai restaurants.

I have a Jamaican restaurant in Toronto. So, you know, all very different stories. But I wanted to basically expand outside of Toronto. And I came to L.A. for lifestyle reasons to get out of the Toronto winters and decided, you know, this will be my first place that I open a restaurant outside of Toronto. And I had a dream of being on Abbot Kinney. I just love Abbot Kinney. It feels like one of the only streets in Los Angeles where it's, you know, like a neighborhood and a street that you can walk down. So luckily, I, you know, found this location on Abbot Kinney. And it's a long story, but I was working with another chef for about nine months. And then at the 11th hour, I had the location.

We were all set to begin construction. And he just said, I've decided to go work with another restaurant group. And I was like overnight just like left without a chef. And I only had one other name of another chef in L.A. And it was Evan Funke. And a food writer just sent me an email because I was just out meeting people saying, Hey, I'm looking for a chef that has a following, a super talented chef. And this one, Kevin West, shout out to Kevin West, sent me an email and said,

Evan Funke is an amazingly talented chef, and he's available. And so when this other chef bailed on me, and I was on vacation at that time, I was in Morocco of all places. And I, you know, I asked for a week off to not to go off the grid for a week. And then the president of my company contacted me, she said, you got to get on the phone, we don't have a chef. And, and so I go, I have one name in my Rolodex, it's Evan Funky. And so I go, I have one name in my Rolodex. It's Evan Funky. And I sent Evan, I felt that I had to send him a compelling email so that I could get his attention because I had no other options. And I said, Evan, I hear Kevin West says you're an amazingly talented chef.

I have a location on Abakini, which is great. Like, you know, chefs love Abakini. You know, it's a great street. It's big leagues. And I said, you know, time is of the essence. If you're interested, you know, here's, you know, check me out. I'm legitimate, a restaurateur. Check me out. And, you know, we were on a FaceTime call that dropped a thousand times

because of the bad reception. I'm like, bear with me. Get back on a FaceTime call with Evan. And I flew Evan to Toronto. I think it was Skype, actually. Oh, was it Skype? Yeah. But I flew Evan to Toronto to cook for myself and my team immediately after this vacation that I had.

And Evan did just very few items. A lot of times chefs want to just like wow you. I'm doing 22 dishes because I want to show you who I am. Evan did just, you know, he just did his cacio e pepe pasta. He did his focaccia bread. He just did very few items because he's confident and he knows. And I ate his food. My team ate his food. I said to Evan, food cannot taste better. And I also described his food as casalinga. So I lived in Italy for eight years. My background, I'm half Italian. I lived in Italy for eight years. My father basically was at the level of a chef, his cooking.

And so I said to Evan, I said, your cooking is casalinga, which means like the housewife's cooking, like the mama's cooking. And Evan always described his cooking like that, casalinga, but not many people describe cooking in that way. And so basically, I think Evan felt that I got him. And then he just turned to me and he said, you've got a deal. We're partners. Wow. I was in Chicago at the time consulting for Rich Melman of Let Us Entertain You. And I was kind of like on hiatus relearning the business.

We'll probably get into that later. But yeah, I got an email from Janet and I was like, alright, let's go do this. And that was it. I cooked, I think I cooked four pastas. So for you, like, that's a, is it a rare thing to get an offer to run a restaurant or is there offers that you get that you turn down?

I mean, at the time it was rare. Now I get offers all the time. Once Felix opened. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Now I get offers all the time. Once Felix opened. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, you guys nailed it.

It's crazy. You know, I learned from Bourdain from watching his show, No Reservations, the first show. I was like, oh, okay. I have a wrong idea of what food is. Like, I had this idea that food just tastes good. Like, you go someplace, food tastes good. is. Like I had this idea that food just tastes good. Like you go someplace, food tastes good. But then watching his love of food and watching his deep respect for chefs and the preparation and all that's involved in making a dish, I was like, oh, it's art. I didn't, of course it's art.

I didn't think of it as art. I thought of it as just food, you know, and then watching his show completely changed my perception of what food is. Yeah, not every chef operates from being an artist, and there's different levels of food. I do have to say, Evan is an absolute master. Evan's obviously not Italian, but has studied all over Italy, and it's really the dying art of handmade pasta. And Evan is a custodian of keeping this art alive. Like he's a maestro. He's unbelievable. Is there a specific type of flour that you use? We import six different types from four different regions. And now is the word about pasta and about bread and wheat in general is that American wheat is a different kind of wheat. It's a different kind of wheat.

It's also processed completely different. I don't use a lot of American wheat just because it's just been manipulated so much. And a lot of the digestibility of, in my opinion, people are going to freak out, but in my opinion, the amount of work that goes into denaturing pasta in order to get it flat via machine has a lot to do with its digestibility, just like sourdough bread is more digestible because it's broken down in a different way. So handmade pasta is less manipulated than machine-made pasta, in my so um also the the types of wheat the amount of wheat germ it's in it the nutritional value it all has to do uh with those elements within the in the flour

and to be honest like i've developed a uh a gluten intolerance because i've been breathing raw flour for the past you know 12 years so really as soon as I step in step foot in the lab and I start rolling us folio my stomach's just start it's acid straight up that's crazy just from the breathing rock yeah Wow it's like talcum you know double zero flour is extremely fine so we have to throw it in order to you know put some on the table to roll it out so you breathe it in all day long then And we've got extractors. We've got humidity control and air conditioning and all that, but still.

So you've developed an intolerance because of that? Yeah, it's called white lung or baker's lung. Baker's lung. Yeah. So do you wear a mask? I do not. Why don't you wear a mask? I don't know.

Suck it. I don't know. Seems like that would be a good thing to do. Sure. You don't want that baker's lung, right? I don't like masks. Oh, okay. This whole experience has been very enlightening, wearing a mask.

Right. Yeah, it's gross. I have another friend who also has a Kozuku Kawamura who is instrumental in my kind of understanding of modern pasta. I met him in Bologna. He's a Japanese guy who has a lab in Tokyo called BASE. And he has the same thing. He wears a mask all the time because he's just breathing in raw flour all day. I never would have thought of that, but it makes total sense.

I never thought, oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, fucking flour. It's like a guy works at a paint shop. Like, you're gonna get sick. You gotta get one of the painter things. The big tubes. That'd be so weird. People would be like, I'm not eating that fucking pasta. I don't know, for me it's part of

the experience. It's crazy. What's in there? It's preservatives, man. Well, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. Whether it's the white man well whatever you're doing keep doing it whether it's the white lung whatever you gotta clean that shit out whatever it takes you do to get that stop won't stop just keep going yeah it's just the pasta it's insane it's so good it's and it's such a when you have really good pasta and then you have pasta that maybe you enjoyed before you had the really good pasta it's like it's really it's like having water in your ear like it fucks people up yeah it fucks people up it does sure i've

like i cannot tell you how many people dm me or come to me in the restaurant they say you've completely fucking ruined me thank you so much now i can't eat pasta anywhere else and i don't eat pasta in north america whatsoever i don't eat fresh pasta in North America. I only eat pasta in Italy. I eat dried pasta in America, but I don't eat fresh pasta. Why not? Most people don't know what they're doing. But there's got to be some people other than you guys. No, certainly.

Absolutely. Like what are good spots? I think Missy Robbins is exceptional. Where's that? It's in New York. New York City. Oh, Brooklyn. Oh, okay. Oh, okay.

Damn, you got to go all the way to Brooklyn? You know, Rob Gentile in Toronto is great. So this is a very small amount of people that are doing it right. I mean, there's a handful of people who make pasta by hand, period. And even fewer people who know how to make pasta with the mozzarella, which is the long rolling pin. Even fewer. And when I started, I started doing this 11 years ago. There was nobody.

There was nobody. I checked. You know, I moved to Bologna in 2007, Thailand in 2007, and started this journey with my maestra, Alessandra Spisni, of the Vecchio Scuola Bolognese. And she kind of opened up the door for me to start seeking out other pasta makers throughout italy and when i came back in 08 i ran a restaurant called rustic canyon for about four years and you know not a lot of people were serving the style of pasta that i wanted to serve so i started giving it away like a gateway drug i was just like send it to tables for free and they're like what the fuck and it just started this style of pasta that I wanted to serve. So I started giving it away like a gateway drug.

I would just send it to tables for free. And they were like, what the fuck? And it just started gaining momentum and gaining momentum. Wow. So when you moved to Italy to learn how to do it, what is an apprenticeship like in learning how to make pasta? I mean, it's an apprenticeship. You have to put yourself in the student's chair and be a sponge. I didn't speak any, not a lick of Italian, but the Italians are very expressive.

So you're able to communicate through just being Italian, I guess. And I spent three months, you know, six days a week, 10 hours a day, just making pasta. Wow. Period. See, this is pasta. Wow. Period. See, this is what's fascinating to me. Things you just take for granted. Oh, here is a plate of pasta. But what is involved in learning how to make it that good?

It's not just ingredients. When people sit down at a restaurant, people aren't just paying for the experience of sitting there and the cost of food. They're paying for the experience of the people that are making the food. That's a big part of it. That's the way that I look at it. And 11 years of making pasta by hand, there's a lot of depth that some of the younger guys just aren't willing to pay the time cost. And a lot of the younger cooks out there, they bounce around from job to job six months here, three months here, and they think that they've mastered it. But there's just no depth. There's no depth. You know, you have to also consider how labor intensive it is to, you know, hand roll out the pasta. And you know, what Evan was saying before, like each one rolled by hand to you know hand roll out the pasta and you know what Evan was saying before like each one rolled by hand you know when you eat a bowl of

pasta you're not thinking that each one was like pressed out by hand so it's like extremely labor-intensive and a lot of people when we were opening Evan did have his own restaurant buccato before which was also basically it focused around pasta as well that's a whole other story. But when we were going to open up this restaurant and we put in the middle of the restaurant the temperature-controlled pasta lab, which is taking up tables. So if you're a business person, a restaurateur, you say, how many tables could fit in there? How much is each table worth to your bottom line? You're using up that space to put in, you're using that space to put in a pasta lab.

Are you crazy? Also, you know, when you're thinking about, you know, training the people and how labor intensive it is, people were saying like, we're crazy doing this again. Yeah, they didn't think we could make money. Yeah.

Well, it is a lot of space. That pasta lab is a big space, but it's so cool to be sitting right there. It's a showstopper. Yeah. Really, it's something special. And it's worked out. We're making money.

I mean, we were making money. There's always like pre-COVID and, you know. And there's no guidelines in terms of like when you'll be able to operate at 100% capacity? No. I mean, in the documents, it says they're going to reassess in 21 days so i don't know when that's going to be in a couple weeks they might it might even be quicker than that right i think the economic pressures are probably what forced them to open without letting anybody they're out of money everyone's out of money yeah they can't just say you know

there is a balance between people's health and the economy, and they can't just shut everything down and say, well, we're just going to print a bunch of money. We're all going to be paying for this in the end, right? Right now it's been $2 trillion, you know, because of COVID. They have to get us back up and running and working. And I've said from the very beginning, get your young and your healthy back out and working. And if you're over the age of 65 or if you have underlying health conditions, and you should definitely stay at home, you have to wait for either a treatment or the vaccine. But you know, they have to open up the

economy. And it's been ridiculous how it's been handled. Yeah, that's what should have been done. It should have been they should have, I mean, instead of taking this blanket approach, but I think there was a lot of misconceptions. They thought it was going to be something different than it was. Even at 60%, though, at least at 60%. I'm, like, happy you're going to be able to. And when are you guys going to open up? Monday? Have you figured it out?

Well, then the protests and we had to board up. And, you know, I think we're probably another week or so away. At least. It's really about getting staff back in. That's our kind of biggest hurdle. So once the protests die down, then a week? Maybe a little more. Maybe a little more.

Maybe a little more. But even with the 60% capacity, we will see if we'll be able to maintain, you know, and actually not necessarily make a profit, just break even. Yeah, I think the goal has always been when this first started was your goal is to survive and to get to the other side of this. You're not thinking about making money. And when you see these iconic, legendary restaurateurs like Daniel Hume with Eleven Madison Park, which last year was the number one restaurant in the world, and he does not think that he will be reopening. So he might be closing permanently. Or David Chang closing two restaurants, one in New York City, one in D.C.,

and then he's moving another restaurant, consolidating his company essentially. So when you see these iconic restaurateurs that are struggling to make it to the other side, it's like extremely sobering. And some experts will say they think 50% of restaurants will not make it to the other side. I don't agree. But I think 25% won't make it. And even in LA, one of my last dinners was at Bon Temps in downtown LA, Lincoln Carson, an amazing chef. I was blown away by the restaurant and he's closed permanently. Like all that time to open, all that capital to open, you know, you train whatever you're training, 50, 75 people to open and he's closed permanently. They just got a finalist in the Global Design Awards.

So they're getting these awards and they're closed permanently. And, you know, so, you know, it's really survival of the fittest right now. So new restaurants, because it's so hard, this business, you're very vulnerable when you're a new restaurant and you just have debt. You're just looking at a bunch of debt

and then you're closed permanently. You know, you're not going to make it to the other side. And if a business was not making that much money. So when you see a restaurant in New York city, like lucky strike, that's been there for 31 years closed permanently because you know, it just wasn't doing that well. So all the businesses that were just kind of teetering on not doing very well, they're going to close. So It's survival of the fittest, even with the pandemic and hitting older people. It's kind of like all around in business, it's survival of the fittest. It seems like it's so hard to believe that if you don't make money for three months, it goes under. You would think like, oh, this is a successful business. It's exposed people to the realities of running a business and how incredibly difficult it is just to stay open.

It's a juggling act. Especially for restaurants, right? Especially. No, this is what I was saying before is the pandemic really exposed the restaurant business. And the restaurant business probably has been hit the hardest. And then next, all small businesses and retail. And then we're going to see commercial real estate really be affected right now. But the restaurant business, the national average of the profit margin is 4%. That's the national average. We don't operate that way.

We operate at 14% essentially. But 20 years ago in the US, most restaurants would make 20, 25%. You know, the net profit margin, but it's gone down, it's gone down. And really, the business is broken. The restaurant business is broken, we should be charging a lot higher prices, but then you're not going to get the customers. So what you do is you just accept a lower and a lower profit margin. That's why this business is so difficult. And even 10 years ago, you might have a runway in your bank account to survive a few months. But most restaurants, you know, without they have a month, and then they're done, they've got nothing in the bank account. It's a horrible business, nobody should be in a restaurant,

unless you're crazy, and you're so passionate about it. That's you. That's me. But I will all of us, but a million of us. Yeah, well, 1111 million of us. It's all of us. 11 million of us. Yeah. Well, 11 million of us. And then you think, you know, when you look at the supply chain, so restaurants employ 11 million people in the United States. But then when you add in the supply chain of the farmers and the winemakers and the linen cleaners and, you know, we employ 20 million people. And we're the second largest employer in the United States next to the Pentagon. So, you know, right now we have to think. Wow, that's crazy. Restaurants are the second largest employer in the Pentagon's the first?

Yeah. How creepy is it? The Pentagon's the first? Jamie, Jamie, look it up. I would think like Amazon would be ahead of the Pentagon. Fuck. No, that's a nutty number. Pentagon, number one employer. Restaurants, number two.

That's so insane that Pentagon's number one. I would have never guessed that in a million years. If you gave me a multiple choice, I'd be like, fucking Pentagon. No way. Jamie's typing away. Oh, I'm sure it's right. I mean, you don't have to even look it up, Jamie. I believe her.

Who knows? I just read things, but that's what we're talking about in the Independent Restaurant Coalition. You know, we're working together with the government to ask for a certain amount of help, right? We need the right help. Or, you know, when people think, you know, screw you, restaurants,, we're all in trouble, right? With 40 million plus, now it's I think 42 million filed for unemployment. A lot of people are hurting right now. So it's hard to say, romanticize restaurants right now. Come back and support your local restaurants when a lot of people are hurting. But I think if we think about the economic domino effect right now of essentially 20 million people, we need help to stay in business and not close down permanently.

I think the economic effect right now will be staggering. Yeah, no, it's something to consider when you think about what you said about the people that clean the linen, the people that make the wine, all the various people that rely on restaurants. It's not just restaurants. Most people like myself don't really consider that. You go, wow, they probably employ 10 people or 20 people or 50 people, whatever it is. But then you don't think of all the trickle down. It's a massive web, a massive web. Do you see like the farmers obviously dumping tons of food and 36 million gallons of milk?

And nobody knew that restaurants are the number one purchasers from farmers, that and institutions, schools, institutions and restaurants. And they process the food in a different way for restaurants than they do. You can't just say like get the food, you know, out there. You can't just say, like, get the food out there. They process food differently for individuals and grocery stores as they do institutions and restaurants. So they have to dump all this food. Now, when you guys get up and running, how do you calculate how much food you buy? Like, that's always – I've always been like, how do they know? Like, how do they know how many people are coming in?

Voodoo. No. Like how do they know how many people are coming in? Voodoo. The one good thing about restaurant business is that the metrics, whether you have five tables or 100 tables, are the same. It's all math. And if I knew how much fucking math that I'd be doing right now, I'm 40 years old, if I knew when I was like a kid, I would have studied the fuck out of math because I had to learn on the fly. So you as a chef are not just responsible for putting together the meals, but you also That's not enough anymore.

Not enough. No. You got to be a businessman. You have to be a marketer. You've got to be a diplomat. You have to be a father. You have to give advice, you know, like that. I'm not having kids, but I have 60 kids because I exercise my fatherly duties on a daily fucking basis.

I've bailed guys out of jail. I've given, you know, beer money to guys like it is a true, true, true family. And you spend, you know, the majority of your day with these people. You feel that when you go into your restaurant, though. There's something about that place. Like there's you, when the waiters deliver your food, you know that they know it's special. Like there's a feeling like when they put that down, like, hey, look at that.

And you're like, whoa. And they're like, uh-huh. Yeah, it's by design. You know what I mean? It's by design. You can tell. You can tell. By design.

The fish stinks from the head down. Oh, yeah. That's a Jamaican saying, the fish rots from the head down. So, Janet, we were talking on the phone about what it's like for you to have all these restaurants under construction, and you were this unstoppable machine. You were a restaurant machine. Everything was kicking ass. Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, ah! Yeah. Well, you know, the only thing I've ever done has been in the restaurant business and out of university. I came from Italy and I opened my first restaurant in Toronto and slowly got. Right out of school. Well, I was older. I took my time in school too. I started when I was, I started university when I was 22.

So I took my time. But when I opened my first restaurant, I definitely connected to a passion. And I had this slow route of growing this company. So that restaurant opened 24 years ago and is still running today. That's incredible. What are the odds of that? Well, the average, after you pass a year, you have a lifespan. Most restaurants have seven years.

Yeah. So I've had a few lifetimes with that restaurant. And then I slowly saved my money and wanted to buy the real estate where that restaurant is. It's in Yorkville. Do you know Toronto? You know Toronto. Yeah. Do you know Yorkville?

No, I don't. It's a nice little neighborhood in Toronto, and I wanted to buy this real estate. So I saved my money to buy the real estate. So I was very cautious growing the company and building a foundation. And then I bought one piece of real estate, then I bought another building, and then I put another restaurant twice as big as my first restaurant. And then I bought another building, so I've been buying these buildings and putting restaurants inside the buildings until I felt that my foundation was so strong that nothing could happen to me. So I could only put through the lens back then in the, you know, before the

pandemic to say, in an economic upturn, people will eat pizza. On an economic downturn, people will eat pizza. I'm untouchable. That's how I felt. I felt nothing could touch me. And then we opened up Felix and Felix has gotten, you know, incredible accolades, you know, in the press and rightfully so and Evans cooking is off the charts. And I thought, you know, we're ready to really grow. So let's let's do this. And I built a company where you know, I have a head office, it's a proper company. And I have an incredible team of people. And I felt very ready and very stable and with an incredible, incredibly strong foundation that I said, we're ready to do this. And so 2020 was my big year to open five restaurants in one year. Wow. So I just, I just, just before the

pandemic flew to Toronto to open a 9000000-square-foot restaurant to immediately close it. And that cost $9 million to open this 9,000-square-foot restaurant that opened one day, trained 100 people for two months, and then immediately shut that down. Shut down all restaurants. So shut down eight operations. And I also have a catering company so shut down eight eight operations in toronto and a catering company furloughed 700 people and then i have four other projects under construction and personally all of the money in the company out on construction sites plus i personally loaned all of my money

to build the restaurants because because that's what I do. What I do is I buy buildings, and then I get mortgages on the buildings, then I use all the cash that I have anywhere that I can find it to open restaurants. So I might have a temporary, you know, lack of cash, but then, you know, backed by a very strong revenue. So I'm funding all the construction sites by all these restaurants that have extremely a very strong revenue. So I'm funding all the construction sites by all these restaurants that have extremely strong streams of revenue. So once again, I didn't feel like I was taking a big risk opening five restaurants in 2020. So I swear to you that the day the pandemic happened, I had to shut down. It was literally the day before I loaned out,

I wrote a massive check for one construction site, like all of my money in my bank account, you know, out to one construction site, then we shut everything down. And it was like I was I was kicked in the teeth, like I was brought to my knees. And I had never felt stressed like that, because of how conservative I am, and how fiscally responsible that I've always been, and feeling that I was untouchable. I just thought, you know, nothing could ever happen to me in this, you know, I could never risk anything. But I woke up one day when I had to close everything down. And first of all, the feeling of laying off 700 people when you know the majority of your staff live paycheck to paycheck was absolutely heartbreaking. And that I ran the real risk of losing everything, not only all the restaurants, but all the buildings.

Because the bank, you know, owns my buildings. I don't own the buildings. And, you know, this pandemic caught me with my financial pants down. Like I just was like, oh, my God, this is really bad timing for me. Do you think if there's a second wave, they're going to try to do this again? Shut you down? No, I think we're going to look the protest. Do you think we're going to have a second wave now? We very well could. I mean, we are people are not social

distancing. They're on top of each other. If anybody's got it, everybody's got it. I don't, I actually don't think so. And I think that we have, we're going to be living with this virus. And I've said this from day one, when this happened, I said to my team, give me the two year plan. What's going on for two years. We have to live with this for the next two years. And I think that we just have to live in a safe way. And yeah, wear the masks out. And we're going to go to restaurants, and people are going to be wearing gloves and masks and maybe take your temperature and we're going to sit, you know, be seated six feet apart. I think this is we're going to just find a safe way to live. But of course, there's going to be there's going to be a second wave and a third wave.

It's going to keep going until the vaccine. But also when a vaccine comes, you have to inoculate between 60% and 80% of the world. How long is that going to take? We're living with this. Yeah, the vaccine is a weird vaccine too. Do you understand what it is? An mRNA vaccine? Well, that's one vaccine that Moderna is making,

but there's different types of vaccines that they're making. There's multiple trials that are going on right now, right? A hundred different vaccines. Everybody's trying to get after it. Health officials, no new COVID-19 cases from Missouri parties. No additional new... Well, you know, what's interesting is what we were talking about before the podcast, when you guys were getting tested for the COVID, we were talking about Italy, how Italy

has the detectable levels are so small. They're so minuscule. Infantissimal. I just learned that word. You nailed it. There was a struggle earlier. The viral load is infinitesimal. Well, sometimes when you read things and you don't say it out loud and all of a sudden you say it out loud for the first time, you're like, I don't know how to say that word.

Yeah, there's a lot of words like that that I never use. But, yeah, in San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, you know, they're saying that the virus no longer exists in Italy. That's so crazy. So it just burned through the population. Well, hopefully that's what's happening here. Hopefully. Hopefully. Hopefully.

And we're going to see in two weeks, right? Two weeks you're going to see what happened from all this protesting and everybody being on top of each other. Also, the stress of it all has got to be terrible for people's immune system as well. Yeah. For sure. We were talking about it earlier. If you're a human being and you have any feelings at all, you're going to feel the stress of humanity right now. You know, the stress of the world.

Because in our lifetimes, we've never seen one of these events. But it's like we have the Spanish flu and the Great Depression and the 1968 riots happening all at the same time. Yeah. I think bigger than the 68 riots. I don't think any riots have ever been this widespread through the entire country and the looting. Well, the Rodney King, I think they had a lot of deaths, right? I think they had 68 deaths.

They had a lot of deaths in Los Angeles, but they didn't protest the Rodney King riots in Boston. You know what I mean? This is worldwide. This is worldwide. Yeah. It's worldwide. The looting though seems to be only here and

the looting is just insane well in toronto today it's actually quite peaceful but uh you know well they've um supposedly tomorrow there's some organized looting happening organized looting june the 6th and you know and these piles of bricks are showing up around the city as well yeah we were talking about that like that's that's so weird like big pall piles of bricks are showing up around the city as well. Yeah, we were talking about that. That's so weird. Big pallets of bricks that are dropped off on areas. And no one really has any understanding of why. There's been a bunch of articles written on it, and they're trying to sort it out.

And some of them are just coincidence. They were at construction sites, and the bricks happened to be there. And some of them, there's no reason whatsoever for the bricks being there. Wouldn't you think as much as every single building has a camera on it, wouldn't you be able to see who's dropping this shit off? Yeah. It's like here's some rioting supplies. Right. Have at it.

Yeah. Well, the real fear is that it's the police. People are worried that the police are doing it, encouraging people to throw rocks. So if those people throw rocks, then the police can come in and break up what would have been a peaceful protest. That's through the actions of agent provocateurs or just giving people rocks and encouraging them, you know, just by virtue of the fact the rocks are there. There was another thing that we talked about the other day. We should probably correct that now. There was stacks of bricks in front of

this synagogue and we thought those stacks of bricks were also the same thing, sort of left there because people were protesting. But it's actually even grosser. The stacks of bricks were there to keep people from driving their car through the synagogue. So the synagogue set it up that way

just to keep people from smashing through their windows after some of these hate crimes. This is a world in pain. It's a fucking crazy time. I am an eternal optimist. And my feeling is that this is a terrible moment for us, but a good one because I think it's big enough that we're going to change. I agree 100%.

There's a real chance, a real chance that people are going to change. Yes, I really think that. And you're seeing, like there was a video I was watching today of a girl having an argument with her racist father and she filmed it. Did you see that? Yeah.

That kind of stuff gives me hope. Like a kid who's raised by someone who's got some racial prejudice and the kid doesn't. The attitude of kids today, the attitude of young people today is so much more tolerant than any other generation before

and it's so enforced. It's a culturally enforced tolerance. And I hope it's for everything. I hope it's for all races, all genders, all sexual orientations, everything. Just we can be better. We can be better. And, like, it takes something like this to make everybody realize, like,

there's some fucked up aspects of our society. They need to be corrected. And there needs to be some serious refocusing of what it takes to be a police officer and what police officers can and can't do and what the punishment is and who's responsible. And then if you're a cop and you see someone do something horrible that's also a cop, you got to step up. You got to do something. We can't do this anymore. Did you see Chris Rock's post from three days ago? There's some vocations. You can't have a bad apple. He's like, police officers are one. You can't have a bad apple. He's like police officers. Police officers are one.

You can't have a bad apple. Just like you can't have a bad apple as a pilot. Some of our pilots like to land. Others like to go into mountains. We can't have this. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I feel I'm also extremely hopeful even if I feel like I've been brought to my knees and I'm seeing other small businesses and friends of mine getting looted right now.

And I'm like, it's all so senseless. And I feel for Black Lives Matters right now is like the most important thing. I didn't think anything could knock off the pandemic, but, you know, it has. We're all thinking about this, but I do feel that it's been an awakening. And I think that it's in our face like it's never been before. an awakening. And I think that it's in our face like it's never been before. And I think what you were saying to witness a man essentially be tortured is something we can't unsee. And I think it changes you forever. And what you were also saying is for this one man, you know, to reverberate like all over the world, really to see the protests all over the world is really something.

But and I think we have to be super uncomfortable for change. And I think this is the moment. And I think that cop has been doing that shit since the beginning. He's been charged with multiple times, multiple complaints since like 2006. And how crazy is it that one kid, a 17-year-old girl, films this, puts it out on the internet, and it changes the world. This one time. Imagine if he knew. Imagine if he had any inkling that leaning on that man's neck with his knee for eight and a half minutes or more even, almost nine minutes, that that was literally going to change the world.

I know. It's unbelievable. It's a strange title. It shows the absolute fundamental core of law enforcement across the board is absolutely fucking rotten. And you just need better training and we need people who are not fucking assholes, not racist pieces of shit going into law enforcement. It's also the job I think is almost impossible. Just from a, just for your mind.

I don't think people are supposed to be inundated with that kind of violence. No, man. They for sure have PTSD. I mean, just think about it. Being on edge all day long, not knowing whether or not someone you're going to pull over is going to fucking kill you.

Yep. And vice versa. And just the amount of dead people they see, the amount of bullet wounds. And I have friends that are cops, and they tell you horror stories every day. It's a shotgun blast. But so can the surgeon. Yep. Same thing. Absolutely. It's really the same thing.

Yeah. In a lot of ways. Maybe, you know, the reform has to be that mental health has to be looked after. But there needs to be a different way. There needs to be reform. There has to be a different way. There needs to be reform. There has to be. There needs to be different training. It's not a job like, you know, you could be a garbage man. Okay, I'll show you how to do the garbage. No. It's like, who are you? Let's sit down.

Mike, why do you want to be a cop? It should be a really difficult thing to get a license to be a police officer. It should be the most difficult thing to do. You know, it should be the most difficult job to get. And it should be paid really well. Yeah. Yeah.

We have, you know, you just look at all the systems and it's all broken. Like when we look at the restaurant business, it's actually a broken business. Our society is broken and that we pay teachers hardly anything for doing such an important job and police officers and people who are working, you know, on the front lines.

And you're mentioning that, you know, the kid that's stocking the shelves and he's putting himself in harm's way, making minimum wage. It's all just doesn't make sense. Yeah. Well, before it used to be just a job. Now you're risking your life. You know, if you're working in a supermarket, it used to be, oh, you know, I got a good job stocking the shelves.

Now it's like, oh, I could die from this. Like that wasn't on the menu when I first signed up for this. Yeah. Restaurant business is the same now. Yeah, right? Now it really is because if people are serving people and people are coughing on them, hmm. Vitamin D, kids. Get your vitamin D.

Vitamin C. Make sure you take your zinc. 5,000 IUs, yeah. Get your body healthy. But they don't, again, I'll say they still don't know enough about this virus. And, you know, every day you wake up and you're like, oh, you know, you're blood type. So I have blood type A and that supposedly you'll have a rough time. You know, you have a higher chance of having a rough time needing oxygen if you have blood type A.

We don't know enough about the virus. That's been like the most frustrating. And for me, at least the most frustrating and the most depressing thing is the literal like hour to hour changes of everything. And making long term decisions is literally impossible. And in this business, you have to make long term decisions, you have to project in order to be successful. And in this business, you have to make long-term decisions. You have to project in order to be successful. And that's, what's been so difficult is that, you know, just the other day, there was a curfew. It was at six. I was in the grocery store. It was curfews at six. And then all of a sudden, oh, we changed it to five. And then all of a sudden everybody in the grocery

store was working. There was like, fuck, we have to close in 30 minutes. And they're like letting everybody who's in line outside in. Oh, God. And all of a sudden it's packed. So all the social distancing for people waiting, they just gave it up. It's not really that important. What's really important is get your food quick. It's just, it's been bananas. Now, when you, like, so you have to do all these calculations

when you're figuring out how many meals you're going to serve, how much food you're going to order. And you have to kind of guess. Like how do you guess like how many people are going to order fish, how many people are going to order steak? It's kind of you get a – you have pars obviously. But you get into this rhythm. And Felix, I'm a student of consistency. And I always have been. I learned it at Spago. Spago is probably one of the most consistent restaurants in the entire country.

And my mentor, Lee Hefter, kind of instilled in me those principles that define the way that I run restaurants now. So you have obviously have pars, but you have to look at P-Mix. You've got to look at what you're selling. You have to look at what people are enjoying, what people aren't buying. And you really ultimately have to know your clientele. You have to get to know them very much so. And I think that that's a lot of what hospitality professionals are really missing is that connection to the people. hospitality professionals are really missing is that connection to the people.

Because that's the reason why we do this shit is to see you, Joe Rogan, eat the steak at table 33 and say, fuck, that was the fucking best steak I ever had in my life. It was the best steak I've ever had. It really was. Yeah, all this talk about pasta, but really when you came, you were on the carnivore diet. I was surprised you ordered pasta, dude. That you had come. Okay. We had dinner together with Brian Cowan

and my buddy Alex Enchin, the four of us had dinner and you were on the carnivore diet. Yeah, I was then, yeah. But even then, I mean, the steak was fantastic. All the food was fantastic. But the second,

the time I went after that, right before you guys got shut down, my wife and I ate there. That was the last service, no? I think there. That was the last service, no? I think so. That was the last service. I saw you there that night. I had just flown in from Toronto, and that was my last time out.

I think that was your last time out. You snuck out at 13. Did you hear it? I out. You outed. I can't. You Canadian. I outed myself.

You Canadian right there. Yeah, I had pasta that time. It's sensational. But that's, till this day, it's the best steak I've ever had. What are you doing different? What are you doing? How do you cook in steak? Salt.

Talk to me. Don't lie. Salt, black pepper. What's the voodoo? Hot fire. That's it? Violent fire. But it's where the meat comes from.

And then rest. Really? I mean, you have to, you know, in my opinion, 90 percent of cooking is ingredients, 10 percent technique. That's it. So just buy the best that you possibly can and try not to fuck it up. You need some instruction. You need some technique. But a lot of people – I think the biggest ingredient that is missing in a lot of cooking today is restraint.

Restraint. Don't fucking manipulate it. Just let it do what it does. The farmers have taken great pains. The ranchers have taken great pains to get this product to where it is, to where it's ultimate. It's peak of perfection. It's peak of ripeness. It's peak of marbling, whatever.

Just put some salt and some black pepper on it and apply heat and then watch it. And you kind of have to have a little bit of an internal calibration to understand what's going on. Do you use a timer? No. All by feel. Why are you laughing? All feel. Wow. You can mock me. Go ahead. No. I mean, listen, we use scales. We use timers. But to cook meat, you have to do it a lot. Repetition is the mother of all skill, whether that's pasta making or cooking on the grill. Do you use an internal – do you use any sort of a thermometer? At the beginning, I did, yeah. But now it's by feel.

So it's just how it gives when you touch it? Yeah. And there's things you can learn by touching, you know? Like that's medium rare. So if you use your pinky, your ring finger, your middle finger like this. So this, this, this, this. So this is rare.

This is mid-rare. This is medium. And that's well. So this is what we're doing for people just listening, squeezing different parts of your hand where it's more firm. Yeah, right between the thumb and the index finger. What do you do if someone asks for a well-done steak? Do you tell them to go fuck themselves?

Probably should, huh? No, listen. If that's what they want out of the experience, listen, sometimes people just want to yell at you, and that's what they want out of the experience at the restaurant, so you've got to give it to them. That's part of hospitality. They want to complain, you think?

Some people are just incorrigible. And you just have to say, I hear you. Thank you so much for your feedback. Do you really? I mean, internally, I'm fucking screaming. I love cacio e pepe, but I hate black pepper.

Say what? Like, black pepper, pasta, pecorino romano. Those are the three ingredients in it. The pasta is a vessel for the black pepper. Yeah, how could you say that? People do all the time. All the time.

And you have to talk to these people? They say, I'd like to speak to the chef? Oh, no, I have people to buffer me from that. Oh, God, I can only imagine. But still in hospitality, I you know you know we train our our team to just like not make anything about you and you know you just look at someone and say maybe their mother died today and if you just it's so easy to diffuse and it's really a lot of psychology being applied to people where you know you people need to be heard and understood. And so you just let people vent.

And, you know, there's ways to kind of mimic people's bodily movements and stuff to show that you've heard them. And it's just really powerful to diffuse that. And so in hospitality, you can't take anything personally. It's never about you. Nothing's ever about you. I could only imagine. I do. Nothing's ever about you.

I could only imagine. I used to, honestly, like when I first started cooking professionally as a chef, I used to read like the Yelp reviews and whatnot. Oh, no. I haven't read a Yelp review since 2006. Joe's a big fan of reading all comments. Yeah, super important. No. Hear everybody. When you, like, I don't have kids, but so these restaurants, and I feel like I do have a lot of kids that work for me, but my restaurants feel like my babies.

And then in the early days, I would read reviews, and it would be like somebody saying, your baby's ugly, so ugly. And you'd be like. It's crushing. No, yeah, it's crushing. You can't read. Especially for chefs. Like, chefs put their heart and soul onto the plate. You know, everything that I have inside of me goes under that plate.

My history, my family, my heart, my soul, my emotion. Cooking is emotion. If you don't have emotion when you cook, then you're not doing it right. And when you put it out there on the public stage and people says, this sucks. Fuck you. This sucks. This isn't authentic. Blah, blah, blah.

Cooking food is so personal to the person who's receiving it. And like we said, authenticity is very personal. So sometimes I just have to say, you know what? Felix is just not the restaurant for you, my friend. And we've fired customers before. So you don't let them come back? Yeah. Do you have a photo of them? Like a band list? Or I think it's just, you know, I think if you're in the business of pleasing everybody, you please nobody. And sometimes you

just, you know, this is how it is and we're not going to change it. If somebody asks for the cacio e pepe with less pepper, this is not the place where you should be having cacio e pepe. pepe with less pepper this is not the catch this is not the place where you should be having cachoy pepe sometimes we just also do that and to respect the art of evan's cooking yeah well i think it's what i was saying earlier is that it took me watching bourdain's love for cuisine to understand what what food really is what being a chef really is that fucking guy i miss that fucking guy too but but i think many people don't ever have that experience where they do make that switch in their head. Like, oh, this is art. This isn't just food.

You know, I think there's a lot of people that it's like everything else. If you don't do it, you don't really have an appreciation for it. If you don't study it or really deeply try to understand it, you don't have an appreciation for it. That's like everything else, like how kids treat society in general, how a lot of people just take things for granted. I think people take food for granted. But I think there's been a lot of focus on food over the last, maybe call it 10 years, where you have the chef's table

and people really appreciating the art of cooking. When I started cooking, that shit was a blue-collar job, man. Yeah. There were very, very few celebrity chefs. There was Emeril and Mario when I started cooking. And overnight, it became the hot shit to do. And all these culinary schools start opening and just meat grinder, just churning out these ill-prepared, entitled kids.

And they sell them a bill of goods when they go to culinary school. You graduate from here, you're going to be a chef. What I didn't know, as soon as I got out of culinary school, I was making $7 a fucking hour. $7 an hour peeling fucking carrots and potatoes and picking parsley and shit. And like you really got to love it to get to that point. And you got to do it for 10 years to get good at it. And then you got to do it another 10 years to start making money from it. And that's it.

And a lot of the younger kids, they're just not willing to pay the fucking cost. And they want to skip rungs in the ladder. That's the case with every art form. We find that with comedy, with standup comedy. There's a lot of kids that they, they want to do standup and they develop a YouTube channel and then they get a following for making funny YouTube videos. And then they think they're a standup comic and you're like,

hold the fuck on. They're like, where's my Netflix special? Yeah. Like exactly. I demand it. Yeah. It takes with comedy and food.

The proof is in the end result. It's either good or it's bad. You might be able to make one dish perfectly one time, but can you do that shit 10,000 times? Right. With 98% accuracy? Right. That's where, that's the rub.

There's also a thing in, I think in being a chef where, like you were talking about making $7 an hour peeling onions and stuff that, that's real similar to comedy in that you got to do the road you don't you got to work these shitholes and you might hate it while you're doing it but one day you look back and go oh that was really important for my development it's it's pure and simple it's foundation yeah just you can't build anything without a strong foundation now when you your menu, how often do you change it? At Felix, I think we cook specifically with seasonality. So if the market changes, we change. And that's really how the Italians have cooked for thousands and thousands of years.

You know, seasonality is a real buzzword in the U.S., but the Italians have been cooking that way out of necessity for thousands of years, and so have many other cultures. But I really take my inspiration from tradition and try to pay homage to those culinary traditions in Italy. And I try to put as a minimal amount of ego and a minimal amount of manipulation towards the traditional product and all i want to do is present whatever it is whether it's cacio pepe or tagliatelle bolognese the truest form that you can possibly get in the u.s that's what i want to put forth and if you take my bolognese the inspiration from that do you have the bolo at Felix? I'm sure I've had it, yeah.

That shit should taste like the streets of Bologna, the diesel fuel, cigarette smoke. Really? The melting pork fat. Wait a minute. Like that. Italy, Italian food is so environmentally driven. Italian food is so environmentally driven. And it's hard to accomplish that if you're in the ass end of fucking Culver City.

So you have to coax out these nuances from products that are born in the place that you're trying to evoke. You know, like prosciutto di Parma or mortadella di Bologna. So like it needs the taste of that place. If you're sitting on the island of Capri and you're eating a caprese salad, drinking a glass of wine with the person that you love and the ocean breeze is on your face and then you eat a caprese salad at Joe Schmoe's place in fucking Inglewood, it doesn't read the same way. And that's really where the difference between good restaurants, bad restaurants and great restaurants really lives. And what about the wine? Like how do you know what wine to buy that's going to go with the meals that you're serving? Again, it goes down to regionality

and someone who has a great palate. You know, our wine director, Matt Rogel, has done an exceptional job at choosing wines that are specific to the regions that we're inspired by. And you got to taste it. And that's what, I mean, that's the fun part. But like, you you got to taste it and that's what i mean that's the fun part but like you just have to taste everything taste it and there's a lot of shit wine out there but there's a lot of exceptional wine that is made uh by very small family farms that that uh

or sorry vintners uh that this the allocation is so small that they barely have enough to send to the U.S. So does the wine director look at your menu and then say, you know, this is going to require wine? A hundred percent. It has to be collaborative, you know. So you'll show him the menu and then you have a dialogue about like what kind of wine. Exactly. And then do you try it? Do you like make a dish and try the wine with that dish? We'll taste multiple wines, multiple wines, what could possibly go with whatever you're making.

If it's a new dish or a new wine or it's the same menu in an old wine, a different vintage, a different area of the region where the wine is grown. Like there's so many different elements to choosing wine. And then on top of it, training the staff to make suggestions to clientele. Like, hey, what do you really like? And that gets back to that conversation between us and the clientele. And knowing more about our clientele and who likes to come to Felix gives us better, you know, a better standpoint. How many people do you think are return customers?

I would say at least 75 to 80 percent. Wow. Absolutely. That's crazy. So you recognize people? Of course. Wow. I never thought of that.

And I mean, you saw me. I stand at the pass. I'm in the dining room. Yeah. And I check every single plate coming out of the kitchen. Wow. I never thought of that. I mean, you saw me. I stand at the pasta. I'm in the dining room. Yeah. And I check every single plate coming out of the kitchen. Wow. Your bread and butter is really your returning customers in any restaurant. You're going to have an element of people that come in because they're traveling from other parts of the world and they want to check out your restaurant.

But, you know, imagine right now where traveling is really hit. So if you don't have your local customer base built up, then you're in trouble. Now, for someone like you that has so many restaurants and you have so many plates spinning, how do you not go crazy? Like, how do you manage all that? I can't imagine the stress that's on your head, the weight you're carrying on your shoulders running that many restaurants. Well, I have an amazing team. So I'm definitely not alone in this. And I have amazing people. And we're in this together. And I think I had a moment where I was brought to my knees, I felt stressed, like I had never felt before. I was thinking that could I have an aneurysm right

now, I was just feeling uncontrollable stress, you know, with the thought of just losing everything that I had built up. And my personality being so conservative, I just couldn't, I couldn't believe it was overwhelming. And then I gave myself, I just gave myself a few days to be that way and have, you know, that, that reaction. And, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm gritty. And I just gave myself, essentially a few days, and then I picked myself up. And I said, Well, what are we going to do? And I'm not alone in this. Everybody in my industry, the industry has been decimated. And to know that we're in this together and to look at solutions where you have to adapt and innovate and renegotiate. So, you know, how are we going to create these other new revenue streams?

And so I got back into working mode, working around the clock with my team. And a lot of my restaurants in Toronto, you can buy all of your groceries and essentials and just looking for other revenue streams to survive. Have any of them opened up in Toronto yet? Not for a sit down and we're behind the U.S. Really? Yeah. Why is that? Well, because the virus lagged in the spread.

It started here. It started spreading in New York City before Toronto. So we were just, I think, about three weeks behind everything happening here. And I think we're a little bit more conservative with reopening. Everyone's telling me they can't get even the antibody test anywhere in Canada. So we're behind on these kind of things. So we don't know when we're going to be allowed to be open for seated, to be seated. You know, and I think the one good news, we're going into summer.

A lot of my restaurants have a lot of patio space. And we know that you're safer outdoors for obvious reasons. And with Felix, we went to the landlord to ask if we could use the back area space. There's like a little parkette. So we're going to use outdoor space behind the restaurant. And it's all about making people feel safe. People will come out if they feel safe. There's going to be your young customer base that doesn't care. But as more and more restaurants open, it's going to be spread amongst fewer restaurants. So we're not out of the woods here. We're not going to be, you know, and again, our goal is to survive this.

Now, do you look at these new restaurants you're about to open? Do you put them on pause? Do you just continue ahead once you get the green light and just say, let's make it happen? Well, each project, again, is, you know, is very different. And I have different amounts of money invested in each project. So what we're doing is negotiating around the clock with, for example, if we have landlords in certain places, we're renegotiating the leases right now, and we're asking to put it on pause, put the entire project on pause until we come out of this, and I can start building the company again and have some revenue to put back into the projects. and have some revenue to put back into the projects. So some landlords have been unwilling in the beginning,

but now they're more willing as they realize who can take my place. If somebody who I've got a very strong record, I've never closed a restaurant. That's amazing. That's really amazing. Thank you. Isn't it like? It's pretty amazing. It's a unicorn. What is the average restaurant?

Like what percentage of- 80%. 80% close. Failure. Yeah. Yeah. High failure rate. Very tough business.

Don't go in it. Nobody. Nobody. Don't do it, Joe. Yeah, you thrive. No, I love it. I love it. It's passion for us.

And so we do it. But landlords maybe initially were saying, you got to pay your rent. Even on construction sites, my rent was kicking in. I'm like, I'm not saying, just you got to pay your rent. Even on construction sites, my rent was kicking in. I'm like, I'm not even open and I got to pay rent. I said, I can't do that. So take the keys. And so some of them were like, why would you want to waste your investment? And I'd be like, I'm like in triage and I got to save the restaurants that are open.

I can't be like building a restaurant. Worst time to be building a restaurant. So I had to be willing to walk away. And in negotiations, your strongest position is being willing to walk away. So I'm like, just take the keys. I can't even be concerned about this. Even if I've got millions of dollars out on construction sites, I'm like, take the keys. And then they come back and they say, well, I guess we don't have anyone else to come in our place when, you know, restaurants have been decimated. Retail, like, are you going to get, you know, Neiman Marcus in there that, you know, J. Crew, who's coming in my place. So once they

start to realize that they're saying, okay, let's sit down at the negotiation table and work this out. So we're, I'm working through every project. So I don't have the answers right now. But I'm willing to walk away if I can't, you know, negotiate to be something that I can actually, you know, survive in the end, and not just pour more money into something that I'll just lose my shirt. I want to pause on the construction sites. It seems like there's going to be a long period of time before anybody considers opening up a new restaurant. Oh, my God. Well, you'd be surprised.

You think so? People are going to just jump in? Some gangsters? Fuck it. The thing is this. There is no restaurant life without restaurant death. And this is a revolving door. Dude, you just got philosophical as fuck right there.

Heaven's deep. I mean, it's just the way of this game. And it's the unfortunate fact that from extraordinary, these extraordinary circumstances, there's going to be a lot of leases that are available. And there are a lot of people who want to open restaurants because it's the hot thing to do. I 100% agree. I just think that there's going to be a lot of young people coming now because commercial real estate is going to be very affordable and they can come in. So I think a little bit there's going to be a lot of young people coming now because commercial real estate is going to be very affordable and they can come in. So I think a little bit there's going to be a changing of the guard. Well, restaurants in L.A. have very unique personalities, too.

There's like celebrity spots, which I'm always like super wary of. And they always seem really gross, you know, like I've eaten at Catch before. And there's like paparazzi waiting for you as you're walking in you're like what those places are done like but by design yeah they're flashy and whatever but um we've always tried to create a safe haven like a sanctuary for the celebrity clientele you know if you need to go out the back door and because there's paparazzi outside, absolutely, let's go through the kitchen. Whatever you need.

And I think that's a lot of the reason why celebrities are attracted to Felix is that I'm just here to feed you and make sure you have a good time. And then if you need anything further on top of that, we're willing to supply that, whatever it is. And on top of that, the food's pretty good. But, yeah, the food's amazing.

But it's like scenes. Those are weird. Like those are engineered. They're super weird. They're engineered that way. Absolutely. So they probably tell the paparazzi, come hang out here. They probably have some sort of a weird deal with celebrities. Bring your celebrity friends.

And celebrities do go there to be photographed. And it happens all over the place. But LA, this is LA. Yeah. I was listening to these dummies talk. And they were like, we went to catch, there was no one famous there. Like they went there just to see famous people. What's the thing?

It's bizarre. It's fucking weird. It's bizarre. It's fucking weird. Yeah. When you look at all the restaurants, and L.A. is a really good place for restaurants. Would you

agree with that? I think L.A. is the best place to cook right now. Really? In all of the United States. Absolutely. Why so? Just because you know, for very for a very long time, L.A. wasn't really respected as a bona fide place for people to cook.

Why was that? Just no respect. Just no respect. And it was always San Francisco. It was always New York. And they pulled the Michelin Guide out of L.A. The Michelin Guide existed here, and then they pulled it out, and they just brought it back last year. Why?

Why'd they pull it out? Because they don't take it seriously. What? Really? For real. Yeah. Because we just have a different style and approach to dining. Fine dining has its place in Los Angeles, but there's literally a handful of fine dining restaurants.

And that's what Michelin is really geared towards rating is fine dining restaurants. You have to do certain things, a certain criteria that you have to hit to get a Michelin star. That's all there is. And they focus a lot on French and Japanese style restaurants. Which is big in New York. It's big in San Francisco. It's big in Chicago. So they focus on that. So they pulled it

I think it was 2009. They pulled the guide. Wow. They just didn't take us seriously. Not good enough LA. But they came back last year. Yeah, it was a lot of backlash when they came back. Okay, we think you're good enough now. A lot of people in LA were like, this is not going to hold water. How does one get a Michelin star?

Like, how does that work? They come down and they just decide? The tire company sends people out. How weird is that, too? These people go out late. A French tire company. Is it? Yeah. Michelin's like – A French tire company. Is it? Yeah.

Michelin's from France, right? Yeah, man. But it's a strange thing that a tire company is the most respected – Yeah. They send inspectors. They're supposed to be anonymous. There's certain criteria that they also dine. It's always a two-top.

They always do special requests. What's a two-top? Two-tops, two people. Okay. Or a deuce. You're talking restaurant talk here. And, you know, they ask for birthday candles. They ask for special adjustments to their meal.

They always order a bottle of wine or two glasses. It's just there's a lot of hidden kind of things that they do that give you the heads up that they're there. In my opinion, I don't think Michelin actually came to Felix. And that's why we were left off because they couldn't get a reservation. Really? Yeah, man. We're booked out 28 days in advance at Felix. And for every day of that month, we have over 500 people on the waitlist for that day so does it matter if you're on a Michelin star does

that mean anything to you no yeah I don't do it for them I don't do it for accolades it too for the people who show up to cook there and work there for my team and I show and and we do it for the people who come to eat. Well, just as a client or a customer, if you're not on that list, that list is bullshit. It really is. You said it, Joe. That list is bullshit. Like if you're telling me the best restaurants in LA is and your restaurant's not on it, nonsense. You have a nonsense list.

Like you better get a reservation, son. I just think the criteria is a little bit archaic yeah it's a little bit archaic and they had an exceptional chance to really uh create some you know some support for the list in los angeles and they really created animosity through like throughout the city is there any other established methods of judging restaurants? Everyone who sits down. Right. It's immediate.

Word of mouth. Word of mouth. The real. Yeah. And that's, I just say scoreboard, man. Scoreboard. I'm busy every night. I crank every night.

Your best work is within your four walls and people walking out and word of mouth, right? Right. We're not going to take out advertisements and say, come to Felix. You're going to have a great plate of pasta. work is within your four walls and people walking out and word of mouth, right? Do you like, you know, we're not going to take out advertisements and say, come to Felix, you're going to have a great plate of pasta. It's going to be your friends telling you. How did you come to Felix the first time? Callen. Brian Callen called me up. Listen to me. Listen to me.

The best, the best restaurant on earth, Felix, in Venice. It's on Abbot Kinney. You're going with me. The best restaurant Trust me Mike really the best the best this is Brian the best I'm like okay like Brian is a real foodie when Callan tells me something's amazing I found the other day picking up to go yeah when he says the best like really Okay, like you literally calls me you You must. You must eat there.

You must. It's the best. He's right. It's called favorite. That's the best word of mouth. It's the best compliment. People show up every day. And that's all that I need.

Yeah, it's like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. Build it and they will come. They will come. Yeah, I mean, it is a beautiful thing when things get out purely by word of mouth, you know? It has more staying power that way. Sure. I mean, just after we opened, we had an incredible accolade in Esquire magazine, which named us the number one new restaurant in America. That helps.

Best new restaurant in America, Esquire. Wow. See? Esquire knows what the fuck they're talking about. Fuck you, Michelin. Yeah, certain accolades like that. You know, that's why we have a, you know, people will say about Felix, the complaint is they can't get in because we've had certain accolades.

So anyone traveling to LA, they're like, Esquire Magazine, number one new restaurant. They want to check out Felix. Have you guys thought about making a larger version of Felix or do you like the fact that it's all manageable? It's the number one new restaurant. They want to check out Felix. Have you guys thought about making a larger version of Felix, or do you like the fact that it's all manageable? It's small. It's exclusive. I like to keep my eye on everything. And that restaurant's just big enough that we can be busy, we can employ a good amount of staff members, and we can serve a significant amount of people per night. And anything over that is just, you know, I think it loses some of the specialness of

that restaurant. You know, that restaurant is, it's a jewel. It's a total jewel. And there's an adage in business, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You can open another restaurant, do something else there's only there's only one felix on abakini and that's how it's going to stay now when you create a dish say if you is this something like if whether it's a pasta dish or anything is it something that you've already cooked before or do you experiment do you create things based on like what you already know about food and you have an idea um that's a good question i mean honestly i i try not to create obviously i'm putting my my own not a spin but my own fingerprint on it but i'm really just drawing from thousands of years of tradition

and just trying not to fuck it up and pay homage to the people who created it and anything on the felix uh on the felix menu i've learned from someone in italy like i don't make pasta shapes that i saw on youtube because for me that's cheap it's cheap there's more value to me to learn it from a grandmother in italy in their region in their house and pass that knowledge on to me so that i can authentically present it in the in the best way possible so when you were learning and you were you were in italy doing this did you have this understanding that all this would eventually play out like that and that you would become a great chef and that this is the idea that you're you're putting in the work um or were you just enamored by the the passion of making i absolutely fell in love with the

italian approach to cooking the italian approach to living um their their reverence for land and tradition. And when I got – I classically trained French, French food. I went to Le Cordon Bleu, whatever. I cooked for seven years, French and Asian techniques at Spago and Beverly Hills. And as soon as I went to Italy, all of that went out the window. And I adopted this approach because I just absolutely fell in love with the country. And I've, you know, that, that love, you know, it burns hot. What about that? Why, why does that resonate more than say French cuisine or? Because French food manipulates, they manipulate, manipulate,

manipulate, you know, sous vide and, and turning, you know, a tomato into something else to look like something else or taste like something else. I just don't – I don't get that. So much goes into growing something that's already naturally perfect. Why wouldn't you just slice it open, put some sea salt on it and drizzle it with fine olive oil and eat it? Like that's fucking perfect. it and drizzle it with fine olive oil and eat it like that's fucking perfect why would you want to fucking puree it and then put jellify it and put it into it you know like why i just don't get it so um i just left it all behind all those manipulative techniques that are very very popular in a lot of a lot of the worlds a lot of of the restaurants in the world. I just – it doesn't excite me.

That's just personal preference. Personal. Because some people love French cuisine. Absolutely. They love all the weird little details. But for me, that's like how many times could you go to El Buy? How many times could you go to El Buy's friend, Adria's, now closed restaurant and essentially the godfather of molecular gastronomy.

And how many times can you go there and have the experience and say, fuck, I want to go back to that place because this was so good? It hits you in a different way. When you make food that people crave on a daily basis, it just hits different. It gets inside of you. You'll never forget that steak that you had on a daily basis. It just hits different. It gets inside of you. You'll never forget that steak that you had at Felix. Never. And once it's in there, once it's in your mind, you're like, fuck, I'm going to have that again. And that's really my goal as a pasta maker, as a chef, is to create dishes that hit different.

You know? And to ultimately, like like evoke memory. Do you have the cacio e pepe at Felix? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So my goal is like if you have the cacio e pepe at Felix and you've been to Rome and eaten cacio e pepe, I want you to be like, fuck, this is better than Rome.

Or remember that time we were in Rome, we had cacio e pepe? This is better. Or this is worse or whatever. You evoke memories and you make them. And that's really the ultimate goal is to get inside people's heads so that they come back. It's a weird thing, food. Mouth pleasure is a very strange thing. Like the flavors.

Like you're playing games with the inside of people's mouths you know that's a fucked up way to say it but it's really what it is but yeah when those flavors come together you like you savor the bite you're like ah like and for that brief moment while it's in your mouth and you're chewing it you get this really amazing pleasure it's also it's also a drug and a lot of chemicals changing your chemicals there's nothing like it in the world no it's so important and god i appreciate of chemicals, changing your chemicals. There's nothing like it in the world. No, it's so important. And God, I appreciate it so much. I appreciate going out to a restaurant so much because of this pandemic.

And I always appreciated it. It was always a wonderful treat to be able to go to a nice restaurant. But God, I appreciate it so much now when you don't have it. And I like cooking. I cook all the time. I enjoy it. But there's something about not having it that makes you go, oh, I'm going to appreciate this so much when you get to do it again. Yeah.

That's great. Well, that gives us hope. Yeah. So from here, it's just waiting out the protests and then putting it all together again with the staff. Yeah. And do you bring this? Is everybody available? Are you going to be able to have the same crew? Some are.

Some are not. Some are not comfortable coming back. They're not ready. And that's because of the disease. Yeah. Are they getting unemployment? I think a lot of them are. Yeah.

I mean, the CARES Act really upped the unemployment. You know, when you're making 600 net a week and your decision is, do I keep taking this money or do I put my life at risk? There's going to be a certain percentage that they don't want to come back to work. I don't blame them. Yeah, I know what you're saying. I wish there was more emphasis by the government put on having you use, take strategies to strengthen your immune system and explain to people how important it is. Stop eating so much sugar, stop drinking so much,

get some exercise. All these things have a real measurable effect on your immune system. But yet it's all fear. It's all cover your face, wear a shield, don't touch this, hand sanitizer. It's like there's face, wear a shield, don't touch this, hand sanitizer. It's like there's- That's weakening the immune system. Yeah, exactly. Well, I don't know if your immune system gets weakened because of non-contact or gets strengthened because of contact. If it really does get weakened because of non-contact, you're dealing with a bunch of people with severely compromised immune systems going out marching together, stacking on top of each other.

You know, it's really kind of a crazy experiment to see where COVID is right now because of these marches. That's for sure. Yeah. That's for sure. So are you guys optimistic? Always. Always? Always.

100% optimistic. Assault forward. Assault. Assault forward. We have to move forward. We have to Assault forward. We have to move forward. We have to go. Yeah. We don't have a choice.

We must move forward. If we don't, we die. Once you stop moving, you die. And that's it. It's like we just have to push. And you have to be working at it. There's a lot of restaurants that are closing and a lot of great restaurants that are closing to no fault of their own. that are closing and a lot of great restaurants that are closing to no fault of their own.

Because, you know, again, for so many reasons, right? If you're a little bit weak, if you're a new restaurant, you're going to have a hard time. If you're an old restaurant and your sales are kind of weak, you're going to close. But right now, if you sit down and just kind of wait it out and you're going to die. But if you, you know, Felix in 48 Hours became a takeout and delivery restaurant, there was no takeout and delivery. We weren't set up at all. We didn't even have containers, dude. But in 48 hours, you know, here are your pasta kits and you can have a perfect experience at home.

You know, just boil your water. In three minutes, you have a Felix dinner. But that was created by the team at Felix in 48 hours. A lot of restaurants, they just like they're sitting around and they're not, you know, they're not being proactive. And it's also about renegotiating with the banks and renegotiating with your landlords and looking for new revenue streams. So you have to be doing you have to be doing all of that work right now or you will not survive. I thought it was remarkably flexible that a lot of restaurants were putting together these kits

that that that became a thing. It's really very interesting. They just adapted and said, okay, can we give these people instructions and then put together this food? Basically what we did. We created the kits specifically geared towards shelter at home so that you could get restaurant quality pasta and just literally boil water and you're there. So you continue to make the pasta basically the same way. And then do you send it to them with like very specific instructions?

Absolutely. Do you put salt in the water? Do this? Absolutely. The whole bit. Yeah. The whole bit is basically heat up the sauce, boil the water, add this amount of salt, boil it for three minutes, add it to the sauce, boom, add the cheese, you're good to go. It's been successful and I think a lot of restaurants took notes from us and started doing the same thing because it's really kept us alive.

And obviously people fucking love pizza. Yeah. It's really kept us alive. And obviously people fucking love pizza. Yeah. And I think one upside to this is we weren't necessarily known for how good the pizza is at Felix. But now people fucking know how good the fucking pizza is at Felix. You guys make good everything, man.

But like so if someone orders a steak, are you cooking steak or are you sending them steak to cook? We're sending them prepackaged cryovac steaks with instructions. Everybody likes their steak cooked differently. So we give general guidelines and pro tips of how to rest. And we send them salsa verde and we send them steak salt and whatnot. Are you telling them to cook on a frying pan? Like how are you getting them to cook it? High heat, either the grill or in the frying pan. Just high heat is are you getting them to cook it um high heat either the grill or in the frying pan just high heat is your thing high heat man high heat and then uh just intervals

high heat take it off let it rest high heat take it off so you cook more like especially the t-bones so when you do that so you're you're not doing it in one shot you're you're kicking it a little bit and then letting it rest up to an hour to cook like a 35 ounce t-bone really absolutely wow you bring up the temperature very slow and gradual but you're doing it with high heat yeah in these why high heat because you that's all you got in restaurants high heat low and slow is typically for braising but if you're dealing with dry heat, it should be violent. It should be quick and then let it rest, especially the T-bone. You got to start the T-bone on the actual bone, right?

So vertical. Start it on your – Oh, yeah? Your straggler, yeah? That's how you do it? You start it vertical? Start it on the bone so that the heat can radiate gently through the bone and out towards the meat. the bone and out towards the meat.

So if you just throw the T-bone on side and then side it, you have a part that's connected to that actual T-bone, the separation bone. It's going to be raw and everything else is going to be medium or medium rare. But if you start it on the bone, the heat is gently radiated through the meat. So halfway through, we take the filet mignon off and cook the New York side a little longer and then throw it back on. So how long do you make it sit on the bone? How long do you have it stacked vertically like that? Probably like 10 to 12 minutes. Oh, wow.

Yeah. I never even thought of that. Yeah, man. Huh. Bistecca Fiorentina. The master is Dario. Who's that? Dario Cecchini.

Oh, no worries. He's like the most famous. You should who that is. He's one of, he's like the most famous, you should look him up. He's one of the most famous butchers in all of Italy. He quotes Dante. He's a fucking maniac.

But I went to his restaurant I think two years ago. Is that in Florence? It's in, I want to say, I can't remember. Yeah, look that up. Oh, there he is.

There he is. What's good, Dario? Look at him. Yeah. Amazing. Look at that face. Amazing. So happy.

Well, yeah, he's a wild man. He's a wild man. But he starts the T-bone on the bone. So he's, oh, Jesus Christ. He's a maestro. He's the size of that fucking steak. Absolute master. That's preposterous.

Absolute master. And so you learned from him? I did not learn from him. We've been cooking. I've been cooking for 20 years. So you pick things up along the way. Cooking is just like a practice. You've got a doctor.

You've got a lawyer. You learn the fundamentals. And then throughout your career, you upgrade those fundamentals with new and relevant techniques or laws or whatever. Cooking is the same thing. You get a foundation and then you upgrade new and relevant techniques. And so are you using a grill that uses wood? Are you cooking on wood? Yeah, we're cooking on California almond and white oak. Almond? Almond. Almond for the smoke because it'll go to fire like that because it's so saturated with almond oil.

And then oak for long and slow cooking. So it burns super hot. So the almond burns really quick and the oak burns very slow. And so you put different woods in for different times? Yeah. So you start it off with the almond? We start with almond and then we add oak and then we add almond and then we add oak and it's just kind of fire maintenance is 90 of wood fire cooking

so it's just about how hot it burns and the distance how deep the coal bed is and how you know evenly dispersed the heat is we'll have a cool side and a hot side and then a fire side all within like a, you know, two square feet. Is there images of your grill set up online? I don't think so. Evan, your 10% technique right now is not sounding like 10% of your cooking. That sounds a lot, right?

I'm like, hold on a second. How could that be 10%? You're rotating the food. It's a fatty 10%. So did you set up this grill this way because that's the only way you cook steak? You prefer to cook it over wood? The design of Felix, the actual shoebox of the kitchen that we have, the design was based on the restrictions of the size. So we've crammed a hell of a lot into, I think it's just under 220 square feet,

something like that. There's a fucking pizza oven in there. There's a wood-fired grill. Oh, wow. There's 10 burners. There's a fryer. And you're cooking 500 meals a night in that? I think top end is like 350 people.

So if you times that by three or four different plates per person. Wow. So more than that. Yeah. It's built for speed. I build restaurants for speed. And I know some restaurants, they have those crazy, it's like a gas broiler. Yeah.

You know? Sure. And then some of them have those. That shit tastes like gasoline. Does it? I can't stand them. It's like a Boston broiler, top and bottom. What's a Boston broiler? It's like a drawer broiler, top and bottom. What's a Boston broiler?

It's like a drawer. You pull it out. You put steak on it. A lot of like Mastro's and old school steakhouses have them because it cooks with crazy intense heat from top and bottom at the same time. Yeah, but you don't – no. Don't like it. Not the way to do it. It's analog.

I like to do as many things analog as possible. I still write with pencil. Really? Yeah. But it's interesting because all this attention to detail, like it's kind of shocking. I don't want to say shocking, but surprising. Like, oh, okay. Wow.

Almond and then oak. But it makes sense if you eat there. You go, okay, someone has to put an insane amount of attention to detail to make dishes that are that satisfying well the the simplicity kind of belies the the background of the dish you know it looks really fucking simple but there's 20 years of experience behind it and that's that's that's like the ultimate goal it It should look simple. It should be delicious. But, you know, do you necessarily need to know about the wizard behind the curtain? No. I do.

I want to know. But it's also Evan procures absolutely the best product from everywhere and has the best relationships with the best farmers. And he's like when you go to the farmer's market with Evan, he's like the king of the farmer's market. They call me the mayor. Oh, the mayor of the farmer's market. Evan! It's kind of funny. And they're like, we've saved you these fiddleheads.

Everything is handpicked. I go Wednesdays and Saturdays, not recently, obviously, but everything is handpicked. We don't do pre-orders. I go there. And that's the very basis of cooking Italian. You go to the market. So you get all your ingredients from the farmer's market? I would say 90 to 92% of all the vegetables that we use. Wow. Nothing outside of 500 miles. So you have these longstanding relationships with these farms. Absolutely. And do you talk to them in advance and they say, okay, we've got great. We talk about weather. We talk about soil content. We talk about water content. We talk about if it's going to rain, what's coming up.

What do you have in the ground? What are you planning for three months from now? I've smuggled seeds back from Italy so that they can like plant stuff. You had to smuggle them? Yeah, man. Don't tell anybody. People are listening. So is it illegal?

Some things are allowed. But like I brought certain species of, you know, bitter greens and different types of peppers. And you grow these yourself? of, you know, bitter greens and different types of peppers. And you grow these yourself? No, I give them to farmers equally distributed to different, like, microclimates. Because California is great, right? They have a ton of microclimates. So say, for instance, we buy broccoli, sprouting broccoli.

I'll buy broccoli from three different farms and three different microclimates with three different soil contents, right? So I'll buy broccoli from Cong Thao in Fresno. And then I'll buy broccoli from Kong Tao in Fresno, and then I'll buy broccoli from James Birch in Floribela, which is three rivers. And then I'll buy broccoli from Romeo Coleman. And all three of them have different soil contents. So James, all of James's water in three rivers

comes from melting snow caps. So it has this huge amount of mineral content in the soil. And then you buy Kong's broccoli in Fresno. It's super hot with cold nights, complex sugar. So it's very sweet. And then you buy Romeo's broccoli, which is less than, I think, a mile and a half from the ocean. High salinity content in the broccoli. And you mix all the broccolis together, and it's like broccoli on fucking steroids.

Could you tell if I gave you a piece of broccoli from each place where it came from? No, man, I'm not that crazy. Like a sommelier. Like sommeliers can tell you. They can sip wine and a really good one can tell you where it's coming from. It's a little easier to do with wine. Is it really?

Yeah, I think so. So you can't, but you know there is a difference. If you tasted them, you could tell. It's terroir. It's terroir, just like wine has terroir. What does that mean? It means the territory, the ground, what's in the ground. The terroir is specific to where that thing is grown.

And terroir exists not only in wine, but in fruits and vegetables. All of it. And is it the same approach to meat? Like what kind of? A hundred percent. Is it the same approach to meat? Like what kind of – 100%. If you're raising steers in Colorado versus Utah versus California, California has very, very little grass.

And all the grass that's down tastes like dry-ass fucking grass because there's no water. So the beef tastes of that place. And if you're finishing cattle on corn or feeding it 100% corn, it's going to taste completely different. The marbling is going to be completely different. The steaks I brought you today are 80-20. So 80% of the steer's life is grass. And then they're finished on corn because America is literally in love with corn-fed flavor and that mouthfeel from the fat. So it's 80-20.

But corn makes cattle sick. Right. That's why they pump them full of antibiotics. Right. So the good ranchers who practice animal husbandry, they do it in a way that doesn't make the animal sick. So they're just doing it in the last stages of their life. Correct.

Is that what you prefer? Have you tried different kinds, like all 100% grass-fed, grass-finished? There are certain cuts of this deer that benefit from grass-fed beef or just 100% grass diet. Like what cuts? Typically shanks, working muscles, because working muscles have way more flavor than non-working muscles like filet mignon. Filet mignon doesn't taste like fucking anything to me because it's a non-working muscle versus a shank is working all the time. That's why it's tough. Joe Rogan, right?

If I was to break you down like an animal, I would choose the working muscles and then braise them because they're stronger versus your filet mignon. I don't even know where the fuck that would be on a human. But like it would taste different and it would have a different texture. Cattle is the same way. Non-working muscles versus working muscles. Have you ever gotten a hold of any wild boar? 100%. Yeah. Wild boar is huge in Italy.

Do you cook any of that? It's a hard sell on Avocini. Is it really? Yeah, man. How so? Some people don't enjoy the nuances. People would call it gamey, but I don't find it gamey if you treat it and apply certain if you apply certain herbs and certain I wouldn't call them spices but apply certain ingredients to it it takes the gaminess

all the way so for me if I cook wild boar I think Tuscany I think of Abruzzo I think of you know wild country and for me the the hills of Tuscany smell like wild fennel and rosemary and dirt. And you want to bring out those, again, back to the terroir and give those types of elements to the wild boar. And it makes it sing, man. It makes it sing. I brought that up because of the whole idea of the working muscles. Like that's a working animal. It's a tough animal.

Yeah. It's a tough animal. And most pork that's on the market, they don't really do anything. Right. Yeah, they just sit around and eat. They just sit around and eat and get fat. And that's what people are really looking for when it comes to pork. But wild boar ragu has been pretty trendy for the last, I'd say, few years.

It's a weird thing to call it boar, too, because boar just means a male pig. I'm sure there's a lot of female pigs in there, too. For sure. It's wild pigs, but they really should call it. But for whatever reason, people like the word boar. It's a weird pig. I'm sure there's a lot of female pigs in there too. For sure. It's wild pigs, what they really should call it. But for whatever reason, people like the word boar. It's a weird one, right? It's a weird one. Now, what about game?

Do you serve venison or any elk or anything like that? Again, hard sell. Is it? Hard sell on that bikini. I love venison. I love elk. I've cooked it in the past. But, yeah, it's a hard sell.

And it goes back to knowing your clientele. You know, just because I want to put some ego into the menu doesn't mean that, you know. Right. You don't want anything that's a hard sell. You want anything that's something that's going to be just gravitate towards it. Well, it's also the menu at Felix, the entrees, the secondi, it's a very small section

because our kitchen is very small. So there's only going to be usually about two proteins on the menu. So you don't want to, if you have a much larger menu, you can be a little bit more creative or put on those cuts that aren't as popular. But when your menu's that short, you have to look at, you know, sales.

And also meat of any kind, whether that's fish or whatever, is extremely expensive. And, you know, going back to the conversation of charging an accurate amount of money for a dish, it's hard. You know, take a look at lamb. Lamb wholesale is like fucking $18 a pound. For me, that's wholesale cost. That means I need to charge you 65 bucks for three bones of a rack of lamb. 65 bucks.

That's for me to cover the cost of running my kitchen out of that one dish. That's so crazy. And every single item on the menu is costed in that way. We have a cost. Then we have to figure out how much labor it costs to make that dish. And then we have to figure out our lights and our utilities and our rent and all that other shit.

And then we got to put a price on it. So when you go out to eat, you're not just paying for the ingredients. You do that at home. You're paying for the experience, the staff, the lights, the water, all of that. I hope people take that into consideration when they eat at a fine restaurant. I really do. Well, I think it's, you know, I think people just, people don't know. But right now people are talking about the restaurant industry because, you know, we've been hit so hard.

And to understand that 90% of all of our revenue goes back out into the economy. So you're taking your money and you're paying your staff and you're paying your rent and you're paying your food costs. So a lot of it goes right back out. Most of it. The majority. 90%. God, it's such a crazy business just hearing you guys talk about it. It sounds like such a balancing act.

hearing you guys talk about it sounds like such a balancing act and then to be hit over the head with something like this pandemic and everything getting locked down it's you know restaurants are so valuable to me and it's uh it's one of the things that i worried most about this pandemic other than the lives was like businesses that i enjoy and then restaurants specifically because it's such a great way to spend time with someone i mean uh it's one of the great pleasures of life to be able to go to a place and have a fantastic chef sit you know sit you down and cook an amazing food and you enjoy it and that if that goes away well you know i think over the last few years, restaurants in general have really, in North America, I would say, have really reached a pinnacle of cultural revelance right now. But it has to be reimagined.

We're not going to go back to that for the next little while. And, you know, there's going to be, you know, there's one restaurant netherlands who has a robot did you see that with a little robot in the robot delivers your food mastric mastric in the netherlands a little robot that comes and is the the bus person cleaning uh the tables and also bringing your food look it up robot the robot robot Netherlands restaurant it cleans the table cleans the table brings your food yeah

and a reopened Dutch restaurant is using robots to implement social distancing by serving and seating customers that's fucking creepy look at that face look at that face

look at that those weird murderous eyes just staring at you they can be customized and you know I don't know I do have faith Look at those weird murderous eyes just staring at you from the abyss. But they say they can be customized. I don't know. I do have faith. I do have faith in our community.

I have faith in our industry that we are creative enough to get through this. And we're just fucking stubborn as fuck. We're all so stubborn. We do this for the love of doing it. For the love of making people happy. You work so hard. And anybody who knows anybody that works in the restaurant business understands that it is a long grind. I have faith in you guys.

I just don't have faith in the government. I don't have faith in the way they've handled this. Why should we? Yeah. There's just a complete lack of leadership at the top. Complete fucking lack of leadership.

It's fucking depressing, man. It's fucking depressing. And again, the fish stinks from the head down. But listen, I'm in your corner. I know you are, and we appreciate you. And I know that you've mentioned Felix a couple of times on the podcast.

And, you know, it's really appreciated, and we all need help. Restaurants in general all need help right now. I just love when someone does anything with the kind of passion that you guys display at your restaurant. Whatever it is, whether you're making music or you're writing books or you're making food, I just love when someone does something like that because it makes me excited about all the things that I do. I think we, as human beings, as we interact with each other and we explore each other's lives

and what other people do for a living, what their passions are, you get energized by that. You get energized by other people's work, by their enthusiasm. Their enthusiasm is really contagious. And that's one thing that I've really got out of your restaurant. It's very contagious. It's very obvious that you guys take extreme pride in what you do, and you do it so well. Yeah, thank you.

No, it's what keeps me going is is the like you said it's the enthusiasm of our staff and the people that come back to our restaurant again and again and it's what keeps us going you know that's our reward and we're so used to that immediate reward of sending the food to the table and seeing people enjoy it that's like the drug to us is making people happy it's it's immediate and drug to us is making people happy. It's immediate. And the camaraderie of everybody working together to provide that. Yeah. And the good news is we're not going anywhere.

And we know now that we are going to make it to the other side. Beautiful. I'll be there. We can't wait. I hope so. I'll hold you to it. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

Thanks for being here. Thank you, Joe. My pleasure. I can't wait to eat there again. Can't wait to have you. We did it. Thank you. Joe. My pleasure. I can't wait to eat there again. Can't wait to have you. We did it. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye. Ow. Oh, that's a relief to take those off. Woo. That was more than two hours.