The Rich Roll Podcast - Crafting The Future of Food With Matthew Kenney

Episode Date: March 28, 2016

He's written twelve cookbooks. He's opened dozens of restaurants. And he's teaching a new generation of culinary talent across the globe. But Matthew Kenney isn't just another celebrity chef. Matthew Kenney is crafting the future of food. Beyond the kitchen, Matthew is a public speaker, educator, and entrepreneur specializing in plant-based food. He has authored 12 cookbooks and is the founder of Matthew Kenney Cuisine, an integrated lifestyle company as well as the Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy, a series of state-of-the-art education centers offering vegan culinary courses both online and in person that emphasize the use of whole, organic, unprocessed, plant-based foods to achieve healthy, aesthetically refined and flavorful cuisine. Over the years, Matthew has launched a panoply of eating establishments ranging from the hautest of haute cuisine to take-out casual — everything from Santa Monica's M.A.K.E. and New York's Pure Food & Wine (both now closed), to Plant Food & Wine in both Venice and Miami,Make Out in Culver City, California and the recently opened and utterly amazing 00 + Co. plant-based pizzeria in New York City's East Village. When in Belfast, Maine visit The Gothic.Plant Café is coming to Bahrain this fall and Matthew has something brewing for summer in Montecito, California. It's one thing to cook great food. It's another thing to cook great plant-based food. But it's astonishing to please the masses with incredibly delicious and nutritious plant-based meals without cooking anything at all. However, what most impresses me most about Matthew is not his culinary talent. It's his commitment to changing the cultural conversation around food. And in turn, change the world. Today I sit down with Matthew in the wine room behind Plant Food & Wine Venice to get to the bottom of everything except the wine (don't worry I didn't drink any). Specific topics explored include: * misconceptions of the raw food lifestyle * the benefits of the raw food lifestyle * Matthew's journey to embracing the raw food lifestyle * what Matthew learned working in NYC's best kitchens * the challenge of preparing raw cuisine for modern clientele * the practicality of eating raw; and  * how to increase plant-based awareness through better education But at its core, this is a conversation about the future of food — and the incredible influence a high profile chef has on forging public opinion and taste when it comes to cuisine, culture and health. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

For me, it's always been about the chefs. It's another reason I opened a school. And I'm doing everything possible, and a lot of people in my circle are doing everything possible to make sure that chefs really see themselves as responsible for delivering not just taste, but health. And I think chefs can be drug dealers, but some of the food they're putting out there is worse than drugs. Or they can be healers. That's Matthew Kenney, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey, what do you guys know? What's going on? What is happening? It's Rich Roll here. I am your host. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, the show where do you guys know? What's going on? What is happening? It's Rich Roll here. I am your host. Welcome to The Rich Roll Podcast, the show where each week I sit down with a thought leader, paradigm-breaking minds and personalities across all categories of health, wellness, diet, nutrition, fitness, entrepreneurship, creativity, spirituality, meditation, mindfulness.

You get the picture. And I do this with one goal in mind, to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So, sorry, I got a little bit of a sniffle here. I appreciate everybody tuning in today. If you're new, thank you so much for taking a flyer on the show. If you've been with me for a while,

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I just got back from New York City late last night. As you could tell from my sniffle, I'm not 100% today. I'm a little bit fatigued. I didn't get in until, well, New York time. It was like 3 a.m., but had an incredible five days there. Unbelievably productive. I gave two talks. I did a panel at NYU, which was amazing. And then I gave a sort of keynote presentation at Deloitte at 30 Rock in Manhattan, which was really fun and super amazing. I did three podcast interviews. I did a ton of meetings

and I just get so energized from New York City. It's just go, go, go. I go from one thing to the next. And I sort of, people say, doesn't that drain you? Don't you feel exhausted? But I actually get energy from it, but perhaps maybe I overdid it a little bit because I do feel a little bit of a cold coming on, which is not great. In any event, I am at the same time spiritually and emotionally and mentally rejuvenated and glad to be back with you guys today with another amazing guest. I got Matthew Kenny on the show. He is a celebrity chef, a restaurateur, an author, a public speaker, an entrepreneur, and a guy who basically specializes in everything plant-based cuisine. I got a few more things I want to say about Matthew in a second, but first. All right, so who is this Matthew Kenny guy?

Well, he is a bright, shining star in this growing, exploding world of plant-based cuisine. He's a raw vegan himself. He is the author of 12 cookbooks, if you can believe that. He's the founder of Matthew Kenny Cuisine, which is a lifestyle company, as well as Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy, which offers raw food education both in person and online at their centers in Venice, Belfast, Maine, Miami, and Thailand. Matthew is the guy behind heaps of restaurants you might know or have known, including Pure Food and Wine in New York City, which was one of my favorite restaurants. It's now closed. Plant Food and Wine in Venice, and also the newest one, which just opened in Miami. We talk about that today on the podcast. Another new restaurant he recently opened in New York

City's East Village called Double O and Company, which is a plant-based pizzeria. It's phenomenal. At the time we taped this conversation, Double O had not quite yet opened, but I went there with John Joseph about a month ago. It was absolutely insane. Matthew is also in the process of opening Plant Cafe in Bahrain in the fall. And the guy's got new places seemingly rolling out like all the time. He's an interesting guy who has created something really unique and I think extraordinary in this healthy vegan movement. And this conversation took place in the wine tasting room on the back patio of Plant Food and Wine in Venice. It's a great talk.

We talk about everything from the misconceptions and the benefits of a raw food lifestyle and Matthew's personal raw food journey, what it's like to work in and run a Michelin star kitchen, the challenge of preparing raw cuisine for modern clientele, the emergence of raw in vegan restaurants around the world, the practicality of eating raw. But really, this conversation is about crafting the future of food. So enough from me. Let's talk to matt thanks for doing this man my pleasure i appreciate it uh it was good to see you in miami i guess that

was a month ago six weeks ago or something like that it feels like a couple years but yeah just around the corner yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just to set the stage for the listeners, we're sitting in, is this the wine cellar? The wine room? Wine tasting room? Yeah, we call it the wine room. We do private dinners out here, but we also happen to store all our wine out here as well because it stays cool.

Right. Yeah, it's nice and cool in here. And we're in the back patio garden of Plant Food and Wine, which is your beautiful restaurant here in Venice. So thanks for hosting me, man. Pleasure. It's a great setting to have this conversation that I've been wanting to have with you for a long time. Pretty chilled out back here on a Monday.

It's nice. Yeah, it's cool. So many things I want to talk to you about, so many points of intersection that we can explore, but why don't we just kind of kick it off with the basics, right? So you're this entrepreneur, you're this plant-based raw chef. So before we get into any of the details in your background, why don't we just qualify what raw is? Like if somebody's listening to this and they don't even, they kind of know what that is, but they're not quite sure what we're talking about. At least we can kind of define that.

Sure. Well, when I first got into it, there was a lot of attention paid to cooking temperature, 108 degrees or 115 or 118, whatever the particular person deciding where these enzymes would become destroyed, which number they used. But it's really about, for me today, it's not about a temperature. It's about minimally processed food, food in its most natural state. So we use various forms of heat. And we're not entirely raw as a company either.

It's just that raw food defines a lot of the work we do. So it's really just about not, you know, if you you think about 110 degrees it's not much warmer than body temperature so really just minimally processed minimal heat and what is the idea behind raw like the idea of not applying heat to food is a way of preserving the nutrients like sort of quality of the food or what is it specifically preserving the nutrients and enzymes but if you about it, when you're cooking at low temperatures, you're also preserving all the natural, you know, the natural moisture. And, you know, you can cook out. Actually, you know, people think cooking adds flavor.

But if you cook something long enough, you're removing the flavor. Think about boiling a head of broccoli for a few minutes. So it's really... It all tastes like nothing. So to me, it also preserves taste, it preserves color preserves nutrients, it's, you know, it's a much cleaner product. And for me, once I started to eat this way, as a chef, I lost track of the reason I was introduced to it in the first place, which was for more scientific health reasons, and realize that this is a better way of

eating is the texture is better, the color is better. It's just a lot more interesting and complex. I would imagine as a chef, too, it presents its own, as somebody who's classically trained, and we're going to get into that, it presents its own unique set of kind of challenges and how do I want to say it? I'm at a loss for words. But it's different than normal cooking

in the sense that it provides you an opportunity to do things uniquely and differently that other people aren't doing, I suppose. Is that accurate? Yeah, initially it was very hard. I tried to apply the techniques that I learned from my classical training. And aside from knife skills and certain standards that are used for, you know, proper cooking and proper food handling, I had to start over. So, yeah, a whole unique set of skills, a unique set of tools, and a unique set of ideas, really.

Unlearning what you had learned? In a way. In a way, it was like learning a new craft. Right. Well, let's go back to the beginning, right? Like you grew up in Maine, hunting and fishing like kids do there. I mean, set the stage a little bit. Grew up in Maine, loved the outdoors. My dad had grown up on a farm, so we would partake in all the seasonal things. We had our own honeybees and tap trees for maple syrup,

went fiddleheading and foraging. What's fiddleheading? Harvesting the fiddleheads, the wild, the edible ferns that grow in the spring in Maine. Always had a garden and, you know, fished. And yeah, I was good at hunting. I loved it. But I also loved animals.

And by the time I was 20, I guess, I had just started to not feel like I wanted to hunt anymore. I hadn't made that complete connection that I would make later. But that was the first thing I let go of. And also, by then, I had become very into health and fitness and various forms of exercise and sports, and had started eating what I considered a very clean diet at that time, not vegetarian, but not a lot of red meat and relatively clean and almost really plain food, like a 20-year-old college kid doesn't make anything too exciting.

So my food was super bland, things that nobody else would want to eat. Brown rice and so forth. When I moved to New York City, planning to go to law school after college, I discovered the New York City restaurant scene, and that just caught my attention like nothing else ever had. I was just fascinated by it. What brought you to New York in the first place? One of my best friends in college was from New York City, and he used to take me there on

holiday breaks. So I'd spend a week down in New York at Christmas break or spring break, and I couldn't get enough that it was such a contrast to the town of 1500 that I grew up in. And you went to college in Maine too, right? I did, yeah. What did your folks do? Now they they at now they have real estate my dad started a construction business and developed some waterfront property and then he put up apartment buildings and um and so he was an entrepreneur as well right right right all right so you land in new york city when when is this like mid 1980s late 1980s i moved to new york um well i took a six-month hiatus in Hawaii,

did some hiking, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and it kept going back to New York. So yeah, I was in New York, I think, delaying the law school experience. Yeah, 89, I guess. January 89, I moved to New York. That's when I moved to New York.

Oh, wow. Yeah, it was freezing, and I was just coming off six months of kawaii, so it wasn't easy. Harsh reality. And did you have a job there, or you were just going to go and plant a flag and see what was what?

I got, my girlfriend and I rented an apartment, and we had enough money for a couple of days, and I walked next door to Christie's East, which was an annex of Christie's, the auction house. It was next door to uh Christie's East which was an annex of Christie's the auction house it was next door to the apartment I rented and they sent me over to Park Avenue and I got a job there that was my first job in New York just hit the street just like that yeah I just I just hit the street yeah uh-huh and so and and so in the art world basically yeah which I I did for a few months, and they offered me,

actually not quite a year, but they offered me a permanent job in one of the departments. And these are jobs that people from really high-end education backgrounds aspire to these jobs. I mean, it's very competitive. You need a connection to get in. And here I was with this potential job at christie's and i i was uh asked in my interview um what what i wanted what my goals were and i said i want to

open a restaurant because by then i had just been dining out a little bit with whenever somebody would invite me out and i just i couldn't get that out of my head so that that that that seed was planted but it wasn't planted before going to new york and kind of like your eyes opening up to this amazing culinary scene that was going on there? Not really, no. I just happened to see what was going on with food. But it was more than that. It was seeing, there was one particular restaurant where the owner was, it was sitting at the bar.

I saw him keep dialing the mute, playing the music a little bit. The lighting was perfect. The food was great. He was sipping a glass of wine. And I just thought, you know, that's, that job has all the creative elements that you could hope for. Do you remember what restaurant that was? Yeah, it's still there. It's called Elio's on the Upper East Side. I've been there now a couple hundred times, but yeah, it just happened to be one of my first experiences. And it's probably one of the most successful restaurants

in the city, long-running. And how do you do that as a starving young person in New York with not much money sort of tapping into the restaurant scene? How do you go out? Yeah, how do you do that on a budget when you're a young person on a budget? Well, my girlfriend who became my fiancé, her father would invite us out or my friend would invite us out. And we had our jobs. And whatever we did make, we'd spend on restaurants.

Right. And it stayed that way for a couple of years. And so where does the idea of going to culinary school start to creep in? So I was walking on my lunch break at christie's the auction house every day i'd go for a walk during break and um because i'd still you know wanted to be outside and there was one restaurant a block from christie's that i could see it coming together it was under construction and the menu was exactly the kind of food that I like. It was Sicilian-inspired, really beautiful design. I didn't know anything about restaurants or architects,

but I kept looking in, and one day, around the time I had this interview at Christie's for a permanent job, the general manager of this about-to-open restaurant saw me out there, and he said, like, I've seen you here a few times. Do you want a job? Just basically offered me a job, and took it gave my notice and and i went to this restaurant and started working in the dining room um a couple weeks later and it turned out that the architect was one of the most well-known restaurant designers in the city at that time

and this chef was this hot chef from lippery off the coast of sicily and it ended ended up, you know, all the food critics and all the people who mattered in the food world ended up coming into this place, and I was there for that. Oh, that's interesting. Well, I also only lasted two weeks in the dining room. The chef asked me why, after college, I was working in a restaurant. He said, that was a stupid decision. I should never be in the restaurant business. Here he was in the restaurant business.

And he said, well, if you really want to do this, you need to learn about the food. So he brought me into the kitchen, and I started cooking. They just threw me on the line, basically. And then one of the only American in the kitchen, they were all Italian, and this American was the pastry chef, and she told me that I needed, if I was serious about this, I needed some classical training.

So I went to the French Culinary Institute at the same time I was working. Interesting. It's almost like this bizarre fated thing, right? Like the stars aligned, you just happened to be, there was this gravitational pull to this restaurant that you didn't know at that time had a certain center of gravity that would then kind of launch you into this career path. It's really interesting. It's, it's almost like a, you know, it's a New York story.

You show up in New York, not sure what you want to do and, and, you know, find this dream and pursue it. It's very cool. Yeah. The whole, my whole career has been like that series of weirdness. Yeah. So, so I'm gathering like, well, it's amazing because sitting here now with you and kind of looking across the garden and what you've built here with the culinary school upstairs and understanding a little bit about, you know, the expanse of the Matthew Kenny cuisine mini empire that you've been building and all the restaurants that you've been involved with, I would presume, or one would presume, that you're a person who is very goal-oriented and very methodical in your sort of approach towards being an entrepreneur or building a business.

But I also get this, you also seem to be someone who's kind of feeling your way through it. Yeah, I mean, I'm a yogi and and take everything you know that way um but yeah it's it's a balance i mean you have to remain open to whatever's going to appear i mean some incredible things just appear you can't plan for that right but we do set goals i don't set five year ten well i have a big you broad, long-term goals, but most of my goals are shorter term, you know, three months, six months, a year. Right. Do you actually sit down and write that out and map it out? I do. We had our leadership team meeting last week. I have a team of nine people that are my

core team and, you know, not only map out what our goals are for the next few months, we also map out our bigger, much more bold targets that, you know, that are kind of our wish list. And then I set goals for every single person on the team as well. Right. All right, so back in your first kitchen experience working with this chef, I mean, is that, you know, what is it like to work in the kitchen with a sort of revered chef in New York City? Because my impression of that is informed entirely by, you know, reality television shows and, you know, what I see in the movies.

Is that what it's like? Or, you know, what is that experience all about? This kitchen in particular um it was interesting they um you know his food was incredible but it wasn't it wasn't fancy like what i was working in french in the french restaurants there were some really just talented italian cooks um putting out you know really pretty straightforward Sicilian cuisine. But it wasn't fancy. I mean, the kitchen, the hood wasn't working half the time I was there,

so it was 100 degrees. It's intense. You're feeding 120, 130 people, just three cooks on the line. So it's hot. It's intense. The chef's yelling in Italian, throwing things back at you if they don't look right it's intense, you get burns on your arms you get a couple cuts, people are yelling at you and it's hot

and that's part of what I loved about it right, you loved it so you're going to school at the same time that you're working in this kitchen and I take it that the idea was always that you wanted to have your own restaurant. Like you, one of the things you just mentioned a moment ago was your attention to kind of design, right? Like you were able to notice the architecture of this restaurant. And I feel like you have like an affection and an appreciation for that aspect of this business that you're in.

It is the design. my first sort of the first time my radar turned toward restaurants it wasn't because I wanted to be a chef it was because I I really respected the whole package like the space you could bring it all together the food and the wine and the ambience and the hiring the right staff then it becomes like a musical performance, a good one or a bad one, depending on how you execute. So yeah, the design is really important to me. And how long is the Culinary Institute experience? How long does that go on for?

The one I did in New York was six months. It was full-time, Monday through Friday. Some of the longer ones will go a year or two years, but this was more, it's one of the most respected culinary programs. It was called the French Culinary Institute at the time, and some other well-known chefs had gone there. They'd only been open six years when I went, but it was six months, Monday through Friday, you know, seven or eight hours a day. And when you finish there, do you get a job at a different restaurant, or what happens next?

They encourage you to get a job at a New York Times-starred restaurant. So after about a year, the chef at the Italian restaurant actually told me I should go and work somewhere more professional, more upscale. His restaurant was a one-star New York Times restaurant, so I went to a three-star French

restaurant called La Caravelle one of the most well-known classic French restaurants in New York so I went there shortly after graduating from school so all of this is very you know that this we're not even anywhere close to you know plant-based raw cuisine at this point it's all about traditional fare like very gour gourmet, traditional cooking approaches. Well, at least the Sicilian cuisine was based on olive oil and there was a lot of citrus and a lot of fresh seasonal vegetables. When you get into the French, I mean, of course now, a lot of modern French restaurants are doing brilliant, clean food.

But in the late 80s in New York, gourmet French was escargot, tons of butter, wine reduction, cream, and just not a whole lot of fresh food, really. I mean, it was, you know, it was, I didn't care for the cuisine at all. What were the big, I'm trying to think what were the big restaurants at the time, like Le Bernardin? It was lutece uh la caravel le cirque which is still there le bernardin was there then i don't know maybe it was yeah it was it was um and yeah la caravel was one of one of them one of the oldest ones actually right and uh and so then what happens like so i'm trying to get a get a glimpse of like kind of where you were at career-wise and mentally like on the precipice of you having this kind of raw discovery well i went to culinary

school planning to open my own restaurant and i i had started writing menus before i even got out of school you know kind of what what i would do in my own restaurant but of course they encourage you to work in other people's kitchens for 10 years or 12 years before you even think about doing your own. So I'd only been out of school about maybe a year. And I got a phone call from the manager who hired me outside the Italian restaurant one day. He left that place to open, to go to another, there was another Italian restaurant around the corner very flashy place it had uh originally been built by dino de larentis and it was owned by a brazilian entrepreneur and um i only knew it from walking by looking in thinking how fashionable it looked

it was hard to even imagine going in when i was first moved to new york and i got a call from the manager who hired me on the street, uh, a year earlier or so. And he said, they brought me over to this place because it's starting to fail and they want to turn it around. And I told him I would only do it if I could hire a new chef. So he said,

I want to offer you the job. And I talked to Gennaro, the Italian chef who had become a mentor. And he said, no way you're not ready. That's crazy. I talked to my chef at the French restaurant. Everybody told me I was too young, I'd never been a manager,

I didn't even know how to order food. But I took the job. And so that was my first executive chef job. That must have been slightly terrifying. I was so naive that I did. Like what what you don't know you can't be scared of right i wasn't afraid at all i mean you know looking back it was insane i didn't know how to order food i didn't know how to make a schedule nothing um but you made it work though yeah walked into the kitchen i pretty much had to throw everything away because they were pre-plating

dishes for like two days. I mean, it was terrible. They weren't making stocks. And I really had to clean house. I was very, yeah. I don't know why. I was just extremely focused on making this kitchen professional. And I was fresh from learning all this professional sort of attitude.

And I knew I wanted to go back to the cleaner, Sicilian-inspired food, so I brought in a little bit of Mediterranean influence. And I developed my own style. Within a few months, I had somehow, somebody told Gail Green, the New York Magazine food critic, that I was doing some interesting work, and she came in and gave us this huge, incredible review, and my career started. This was just within a few months.

How old were you at that time? 91, 25, 26. Wow, that's really young, yeah. So I just saw that movie not that long ago. I saw that movie Burnt. Oh, I haven't seen it yet. Have you seen it yet? Well, it's similar to a lot of other movies Not that long ago, I saw that movie Burnt. Oh, I haven't seen it yet.

It's similar to a lot of other movies that are about chefs in high-end kitchens where it's this 24-7 thing, like high stress, and they're getting in there super early and it's super late, and it becomes this all-consuming, hyper-anxiety-oking, but thrilling experience. I mean, is that what it was like for you? Is that reality? Yeah, there were a lot of things that propelled me at this time. It was the first time I had a chance to do my own menu, and it was all so fresh that I really, you know.

On the one hand, I understand working eight, nine, 10 years, but it's extremely hard work. And a lot of people after that much work, maybe start to get a little tired. I was really fresh and green. So I was able to do my own food. It was the first time I'd ever had to lead people in the kitchen like that. I'd had to do that in sports or in other organizations, but never in a kitchen. But, yeah, now I forgot the question exactly, but it was a pretty interesting experience. I felt very motivated. I was all in every day, seven days a week.

I remember the first Easter, I'd been there a few months, and I stayed in there all day, Easter tiling the walls in the kitchen. It was every day. Right, right, right. And you get this amazing review so I would imagine that has a pretty dramatic impact on your life and your career trajectory from that point forward. It's a pretty big deal and you see people

flooding in the door of this restaurant that may have been going out of business to begin with. And then all the others. She was such a big critic that several other critics started to come in. And then it just kept going. And so this is like 91, maybe? 91, yeah. So for people that are listening that aren't familiar

with kind of New York City restaurant culture, I mean, this is a big thing. Like restaurant culture in New York City, it's all about like what's the great restaurant's the great restaurant to go to who you know who should we go check out like it's almost like movies in hollywood you know the way that people talk about restaurants yeah it's a smaller circle although new york's pretty big but it it definitely feels that that way when you're in it uh-huh and so And so how long are you at this restaurant? Until a cab came through the window.

So the owners were really happy. Wait, hold on a second. What? Well, the owners were really happy. It was kind of a write-off for them. They didn't expect it to turn around, especially when this manager said he's going to hire a 25 year old chef who's been cooking for about a year right like this is just expedite running this thing into the ground and closing the doors and it was you know this was a not a low profile you know it was on the corner of 61st and 3rd it was a it was on a trump. It was a very high profile, probably a couple million dollar

restaurant to build. So the owners had another place under construction downtown, a Brazilian inspired restaurant, and they wanted me to be the chef of both. They were really happy with what was going on up there. So they flew me to Brazil and I learned about their cuisine a little bit. And I opened this other place downtown, which was a very, very, very trendy, huge party place. What was that called? Banana Cafe. And it was named after the one he had in Rio, which was where all the Rio society people went. He was a big nightclub entrepreneur, Ricardo Amaral. Really interesting guy.

It was fun to watch. He was just a good promoter. But he was also really into food. So I was, anyway, running both restaurants. I was doing the new place. It was open maybe six or eight months, nine months. And it was about midnight one night. We just finished a very busy dinner service and I got a call from the restaurant uptown. It was called Alo Alo. And that was the one where I was

the first chef. And somebody, the manager called and said, the taxi cab came through the window. Everybody's okay. But it went through the window everybody's okay but it went through the window where the bar is fortunately nobody was in the bar but the dining room was still full and so we jumped in a cab and went up there and um the owners from brazil happened to be in town and um and we were all looking around what to do and i i guess i just blurted out maybe this is a good time to change the concept because even though even though i had done pretty well there it was still the restaurant wasn't your place it wasn't quite right for the food i was doing it was more of a modern italian society cafe it didn't fit the food i wanted to do and they said um ricardo

he said, well, what do you have in mind? And I said, I'll tell you Monday. And bear in mind, this is before, you know, before the internet, before we had our computers, so I used a word processor, or a typewriter, actually, probably, that weekend and typed up a one-page sheet

of what I wanted to do, kind of a really beautiful Mediterranean restaurant, all white. I had it kind of in my head. And so the following, this was a Friday, and I gave that to him on Monday, and he said, no problem. We'll do it as long as you put your name on it.

So they gave me a percentage of the restaurant, 25% of the restaurant, named it after me, Matthews, and we opened nine months later. Wow. And what was the location? That was 61st and 3rd. Oh, the same place.

I got you. Okay. I'm curious about the actual nuts and bolts of how it works. If you're a well-known named chef and you partner with these financiers to create a restaurant as you kind of see this happening all the time like how does that work like the money guys come in and you you split the equity and and the profits like what is the actual kind of like brass tacks of how the business aspect of restaurants at that level function i mean there's so many different ways to to do it it's a little more common now too too, for chefs to have ownership.

It wasn't quite as common then. Even the best restaurants, La Caravelle, La Cirque, La Bernadette, the owner was a chef, but 50-50, half the best restaurants in New York, the chefs were not even partners. They're just salaried employees. This was pretty exciting um for me but in in that case it was they were going to put up all the capital i mean i had just started working as a chef and i wasn't i was on the lower end of the pay scale right but

you had a little juice a little little leverage yeah a little um and they gave me or they said they would give me 25% of the business. So I had to get 25% of the profits and my salary. Um, it's kind of common. I mean, sometimes the chef will get 50%. Sometimes it's 10,

you know, it depends on the place. Right. Gotcha. But, um, so I, I,

I put everything into building this place, kind of let the brazilian place run on its own and i i did everything i mean did the logo with somebody i met downtown and every detail of the place was it was the first time in my life or probably the last time in my life actually when i could put a thousand percent of my energy into one thing and this place was just stunning it was beautiful um and um and we we opened strong and it it was just uh it changed my career instantly right and so this was we're talking about like 92 now maybe this was uh 93 93 okay and so how long did that run go for well that restaurant would last until it had a fire um and uh and between the the cab uh going through the window and the fire which destroyed it um i think it lasted almost 10 years oh wow nine years yeah and but

many things would happen in between armed robberies and floods and um really seriously yeah is it like a cursed location for that or something or this is just this just happens when you're in the restaurant business yeah these kinds of things go on right yeah all right so so let's fast forward to this kind of defining moment where you have the light bulb goes off on on raw cuisine well over the next um eight years i would open 10 more restaurants or so um how many restaurants have you had 20 it's like unbelievable at least i mean i i've had some that I opened and sold, and some that changed other concepts. We're involved now in maybe six or seven.

They're not all open. And some of them you're partners in, and some of them you consult on. There's different relationships with different things, right? Well, those 20, I was probably at least a 50% owner or more. Wow. For the most part. I mean, I actually, and within a year of opening that restaurant, my first restaurant, I was able to convince the Brazilians to sell the restaurant to me. So I became 100% owner.

Oh, wow. And that's, you know, just, so that was my first taste of being an entrepreneur. And over the next few years, I would open several more restaurants. So I built a pretty big company. Did you have a vision at that time that you wanted to be somebody who, that you wanted to be more than a chef and you wanted to be an entrepreneur and like, you know, sort of build equity through multiple endeavors? You know, it was a creative outlet for me at that time it's it's a lot different my approach now is a lot different it was more about um just you just want to create you know if an artist just

wants to keep painting and i and for me it wasn't enough at that time to just change my menu. That was one element of creativity, but that didn't allow me to design a new space and do construction and create a whole new environment for people. So I ended up opening some restaurants. Were you there in the 90s? On and off. There were a couple of places that I opened. One was called Canteen in Soho.

I remember that place and another was called Commune and 22nd Street and these were some of the busiest biggest restaurants in New York at the time so I gravitated toward these big places that were much about as much about the society and the scene as they were about the food and that's where I kind of that's I took a wrong turn it looked like a right turn because they were packed and they were doing very well on a commercial level but I wasn't happy it was more about contemporary

comfort food so in my personal life I'm doing more and more yoga leaning more and more toward vegetarian even telling friends I think I could be a vegetarian because I could just feel it but none of my restaurants were vegetarian so even telling friends I think I could be a vegetarian because I could just feel it. But none of my restaurants were vegetarian.

So 9-11, I had seven restaurants, two or three under construction. I was very exposed because of all these huge financial obligations to get these new places built. Massive staff of 300 or 400 people. And business just fell through the floor after that. Especially with these trendy places. Neighborhood places would do okay, but the places that relied on Wall Street and parties.

We had a catering business. 100% of our Christmas parties canceled. So I found myself starting to have to sell things. And it took about a year and a half, but I either sold or closed everything. And by 2000, it was 2001, by 2000, middle of 2002, I was back where I started. Wow. I had nothing.

Except a lot of people offering me to start over and do a new place. But I had been doing yoga every day and really focusing on my health. And during that time... Where were you doing yoga? Jivamukti. Was the cafe open at that time? Uh-uh. I ended up opening the cafe.

Oh, you opened the cafe there? I did originally, yeah. Wow. That's pretty much where i eat lunch yeah it's great when i'm in new york i love it it's it's perfect uh-huh um so i was i was just doing a lot of that and that was a lot to go through you know building up these things some of these restaurants were like family to me so um i was pretty i was pretty beat up and um a friend friend a good friend of mine um wanted to have dinner during this time and i made a reservation at a trendy restaurant downtown

and i was happy to get a reservation and he called and he said i'm not uh very comfortable going there i'm only eating raw food and i'm like thinking this guy's losing it a little bit. And I said, but okay. If you're, if you're going to Jiva Mukti all the time, this is not like, it can't be that far left of field.

Well, they do. You're hanging out with the hippies there, right? Yeah. And, and they, but I,

I just went in and did my thing and left. I listened to, you know, I listened to very closely to listened very closely to the animal, speaking about non-harm to all beings and so forth, and I was very much into that. Was Shannon and David around at that time? Were you taking classes from them?

No, I'd see them once in a while, but I usually went in the daytime. I didn't see much of them. I hadn yet met them i would meet them later um but a friend took me i lived on 10th street in university and a friend uh invited me to this restaurant on 10th street between a and b a raw food restaurant i'd never even heard of it. It was two blocks from my house. But I was still wearing both hats, the wellness side and the gourmand side. And so he took me there and I thought the place was pretty funny. No music to speak of, no wine. But it was a rainy Monday night and it was full of these glowing faces. I mean, these people were just not beautiful in the fashion sense,

just glowing with health. You could see it right away. And the food also was kind of weird. It had weird, they had named every dish and it was kind of funny flavors I'd never really tasted. I got it, but you know, talked a whole night, two or three hours, listening about enzymes and how you feel. I was used to a couple glasses of wine, have a really good meal. I didn't eat bad, but I ate what everybody else eats in New York City restaurants, probably more salt than they realize, more oil than they realize. And so I was used to being kind of tired and sluggish. I finished this meal, and I was just on fire. I just walked around the city for two or three hours.

And it stayed in my head. And a couple of days later, I ordered takeout from them. And then I said, well, I'm going to try it for a week because my friend keeps talking about how he feels so good. And it was just like a rocket ship invaded my body. I mean, I couldn't believe the way I felt. And so I just decided that, you know, and so I saw what they were doing,

and I thought, well, if somebody can apply this modern approach, you know, modern culinary approach, and create a cool environment, and serve this food that has all the components of health like this, but make it a little sexier, then it's probably going to be the next nobu that that's that was my thought right right right and um so i convinced um like take it out of

woodstock yeah you know what i mean like and put a put a modern veneer on it yeah and and dial up the cuisine aspect of it so i spent a year um I had an investor who had bought one of my restaurants and he basically in exchange for that restaurant agreed to fund my next place. And I told him I wanted to do a raw food place and he said okay, but basically the budget he gave me was like, I'd never had a budget this small.

So I hired a, I found a space with a garden um in new york my girlfriend and i spent a year um developing the menu at home we had dehydrators going and blenders going and i'd go to every weird place i could find to to taste nut milks and i went to these potlucks and i just devoured every piece of information I could get my hands on. And about a year later, we opened Pure Food of Mine in New York. And it was the first of its kind in New York. There had been a restaurant in California for a while called Roxanne's. I'd never gotten to it. So we opened that, and it, uh...

That opened, what year was that, then? I think it was 2004. Mm-hmm. Which, for people that are listening, I mean, it's a, it's just a stellar restaurant. I mean, it's still my favorite restaurant in New York City. It's gone now. Uh, well, it was,

didn't it close, and then it reopened? Is it gone again? There's a whole thing there that we don't have to get into but uh there's all kinds of no the space is it's permanently closed i know because i i know because i went to look at it oh you did oh wow yeah i went last time i was in new york like last summer it was open yeah they stumbled and there's right i don't know what was going. I hadn't been there for years. But the first time I went there was probably 2008, I think. Yeah. And I remember it vividly because I'd never been to a restaurant like that before, and it was quite remarkable in its time.

And you accomplished that very thing, which is taking this incredible new way of preparing cuisine and putting it into a setting that a modern New Yorker could access mentally. Well, to me, it took the passion I had when I opened my first restaurant, it took that to a whole new level because I was able to finally die I love food and and wine and ambiance and restaurants I still love restaurants but I I didn't love the byproduct which is that you don't feel good it's not promoting health and and also as I was becoming more and more concerned with animals and the environment and this brought everything

together everything that i cared about was was possible within um you know within one sort of concept so at the time did you consider it to be like a risky career maneuver or did you just feel like this this is a fresh this is where it's all going like this is going to work i should have considered it risky because i had basically you know crashed from my first the first round of my career and it was in new york they love to build you up and tear you down and they press beat me up when i you know i was a hot young chef getting more all these awards and then crash and they jump on that and i should have been like wow i to make sure my next move works. So doing raw food in an expensive space like that

probably wasn't the smartest or safest bet, but I really didn't pay attention to that. I mean, just like when I opened my first restaurant, never having been a manager, I just followed my passion. And I mean, with a certain degree of belief that that I could do it well enough that people would embrace it. Right. And it's was it a success right out right out of the gate? It wasn't it wasn't we opened and it was packed. We there was no precedent for running high end raw food restaurants. So the labor to operate this place was massive. The cost of operating it was expensive.

The food cost, the labor cost. And by the time we started to figure it out, winter came. So it was hot for about three or four months, but losing money because it was just too expensive to operate. And by the time we started to figure out how to streamline that,

because I don't think we, I just never run that kind of kitchen, people stopped coming. The cold weather came and raw food, I guess, wasn't what. I don't want a raw dinner in February. So we had nights in, we opened in the summer, but we had nights in November, December of that first year where six people would come in or eight people. And the rent's $20,000 a month.

We're losing so much money that the owner is saying, you know, you got to put some sushi on the menu or do this or do that. Getting pressure. I know for a fact he was talking to other people about taking it over. So we were on the ropes for a while. people about taking it over so we were on our on the ropes for a while um and all of a sudden january came and people started to come little by little we just it was just a little uptick and we just kept doing our thing and just kept pushing off the sushi idea and and um by the next summer it was finally profitable took a year but it was it a stressful, really stressful year. Yeah, but I would imagine quite gratifying in kind of seeing that this new idea that no one else was doing was actually working, right? Like a foundation for kind of a new way of pursuing your career.

It was gratifying. I mean, it was stressful on a personal level. It was stressful. I opened it with a girlfriend, and we split up during that first year. And this guy who funded it was kind of shady. So it was never really able to relax and enjoy it as much as I can look back and enjoy it. And from there, what's next? And from there, what's next?

I mean, I'm trying to get a sense of like, okay, so you have this sort of foundational first restaurant that's raw. And where does the kind of empire building start to begin? Like, where do you get the idea to, you know, begin a culinary school? And, you know, you've done so many things since then. I mean, you have this, you know, to school that you're like, you did, or you, I don't know if it's still going on, like stuff in Oklahoma, and then coming out to Venice, and you've got restaurants, you got a restaurant opening in Miami soon, like all over the place, right? So how do you like, I'm trying to put those pieces together? Well, I, I had a pretty clear vision from the beginning, I kind of understood what it was like to build a company, and I really liked that. I like having, from my first company,

I like that, having that group of really talented people and having a number of businesses that can trade ideas and resources and marketing departments and so forth. I quickly realized with raw food that it was only going to work even for my own business if we educated people because I couldn't go out and hire a cook. You can hire a cook who knows how to saute a scallop or peel an onion, but you can't hire someone who knows how to make an heirloom tomato raw lasagna to start teaching classes. And to me, I just saw that there was so much need in the market for people to understand how to prepare this saw that there was so much need in the market

for people to understand how to prepare this food. There was so much opportunity for an entrepreneur, and I always like to do a lot of things, so this was eight, nine years ago. I really just took a long, hard look at what I wanted out of life and business, and I decided to create a brand that could encapsulate all of it. And it was a lifestyle company that would be in hospitality, meaning restaurants, education, media,

because I'd written books at that time, still write books. You've written, like, 200 cookbooks. I think 13 or 12. cookbooks i think 13 or 12 um uh services um like chef placement and consulting and and and products eventually right and so um yeah the school started in oklahoma it was the first state licensed plant based school at the time and um so now now it's know, now we're multiple restaurants. I think six restaurants at the end of this year, seven and five schools. Right. So the restaurants are, you have Plant Food and Wine here.

You're opening Plant Food and Wine in Wynwood in Miami, right? That's soon. It's got to be coming up. It's supposed to be this, everyone is so excited about it. It's this incredible space, right? Yeah, it's almost done. I thought it might open the end of this month, but we? Yeah, it's almost done. I thought it might open the end of this month, but we have a restaurant opening

in New York the first 10 days of February. This is the raw pizzeria. It's not raw, but it's a vegan pizza concept. It's going to be really cool. We have a wood-burning oven, and I'm excited about that. So that's opening in Miami,

Plant Food & Wine. We have the Gothic in Maine. It's a seasonal restaurant. We have Makeout in Culver City. We're managing the opening of a restaurant. It's not named yet, in Montecito this summer. We have a partnership in Mexico. And we actually just did a deal to open a restaurant in

the middle east a vegan restaurant the middle east wow where in the middle east in bahrain amazing so um i was in bahrain like two years ago wow yeah yeah we uh we have a really interesting project over there that will probably expand to some other areas and that's cool and so and the the culinary institute aspect of it, I mean, I just saw the teaching kitchen that you have here upstairs, and I know that you have one in Thailand as well, right? We have two classrooms in Thailand,

a cooked and a raw classroom. Yeah, that's at a resort in Wahin. We have Miami, which is operating already. Is that in the same location as the restaurant? It is, but we're running in a temporary location until the restaurant opens. We own a building in Maine and we have a school on the ground floor in the seasonal. That's really amazing. The students go foraging to the market every day. And then we have an online school with about

12 or 15 different classes and are you still doing like for a while it it appeared that you were doing a lot like with sort of online education and video stuff are you still putting focus into that yeah our online school is as big as um a lot of the sometimes we'll have 100 students in our online school and their month-long classes um and they're all video there have there's a lot of the sometimes we'll have 100 students in our online school and their month-long classes um and they're all video they're have there's a lot of content in these these schools that they're all video driven right well it has to be very gratifying for you to kind of see this explosion of interest in plant-based eating plant-based lifestyle kind of you know mushrooming

blossoming over the last you know even just last just last four years, four or five years, right? To be sitting where you are as somebody who kind of, you know, blazed this path a little bit, a little bit ahead of the curve. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I definitely, um, it's, it's great to see people finally realizing that, that plant-based food. I mean, we all know the benefits. Nobody can deny the benefits, but for people to realize also that it can taste great and it can be served in an environment that's just as good or better. Yeah, even the last year has been a tremendous change.

Right, and I think you really answered that question. The biggest thing that comes up with the people that I talk to, and I'm sure you hear this all the time, is just, oh, I'm interested in it, but like, you know, what about when I go out with my friends and like, I just don't want to, you know, what am I going to eat at a restaurant and to be able to have this place, multiple locations of saying you can come here and, and, and really kind of end that argument about sacrificing taste, flavor, and being sated.

No. And I, I mean, our students are doing that too we have students all over the world that are opening you know i'm speaking at an event in milan next month and um one of our graduates has a really successful raw food restaurant there called mantra so i mean wherever i travel anywhere i travel we have graduates how many graduates of your programs have opened restaurants i mean we have about 3 many graduates of your programs have opened restaurants I mean we have about 3,000 graduates now and I think probably there must be 20 or 30 restaurants out there I don't know for sure I mean every time I turn around there's there's a student doing a juice bar in Hamburg and student writing a book doing a product it's incredible and so you know

that makes me as happy as it does to open my own place because it's it's just it's reaching so many people so quickly that way uh-huh yeah yeah it's very cool i um i was in new york i think it was like a year ago and i had a chef named seamus mullen on the podcast you know seamus i i haven't met him but he's a cool guy he's not plant-based he's plant curious but uh but he's all about real food you know uh and uh and we're friends and i and he said come to tertulia and i'll make you i'll make you dinner so i went there and it's like you know you can kind of smell the pork because he's cooking all different kinds of things there. But he whipped up an amazing plant-based meal for myself and my friend, John Joseph. And I have to say, it was one of the best plant-based meals I've ever had.

And I was like, you should have a vegan restaurant. He's like, I'm like, how did you do that? You're not even in this space. And he said something very interesting, which was most of the plant-based restaurants that you go to vegan restaurants exist because whoever owns it or whoever the chef is is somebody who uh lives the lifestyle and wants to promote the lifestyle but they're not a properly trained chef right whereas Seamus is, you are as well. So they lack that kind of culinary skill set that you have that allows you to kind of take it to the next level.

Yeah, that's true. That's why we started our school, because I didn't think that plant-based would ever have a chance if we didn't create a platform for people to learn it properly. Yeah, yeah, which is cool, and now it's all happening. So what's interesting, too, about your story is that you had this moment when you made your transition, it was really kind of immediate, right? Like over a period of a few weeks, you just changed your lifestyle completely,

and you've never looked back? Changed it completely. I mean, for the first two years i was 100 raw vegan never never tried anything wouldn't eat a piece of gum um i eventually would start to to dabble and try you know a little not meat but i would try you know if i was in peru i tried ceviche i was in you know somewhere else and and then but i ended up always coming back to plant-based. But yeah, as a lifestyle, I've always stayed this way. In my company, in the early years, a few years ago, we had two restaurants that were not vegan,

even though they served food I wouldn't personally eat because somebody in my company had an idea, and we decided to back it. But now we've converted. We're 100% plant-based and we always will be. I wouldn't characterize myself as being, you know, quote unquote raw. I would say, you know, the majority of the food that I eat, perhaps the large majority of the food that I eat is raw.

I do eat some cooked food. But for somebody who's listening who's interested, the kind of refrain is, well, it's so severe. Like, how do you do that? Like, it's intimidating, I think, for the average person. So when somebody says to you, like, oh, you know, you look great. I mean, honestly, you look like 20 years younger than you are. You look amazing. You're clearly an example of vitality and health.

But for the average human being, they're like, yeah, but I can't do that myself. How do you hold the hand of somebody who's in that position? Well, that's a very common question that comes up with, I mean, I had a long common question that comes up with, I mean, I had a long letter from somebody in Italy this morning saying she knows it's better for her and her daughter and they need this, but they don't know how to do it. And I think the biggest misconception is that we have to make food that looks like what we see on our instagram or in cookbooks

and it's really i don't eat that way at home i'll open an avocado and take some sheets of nori and little sauerkraut and i don't know a couple other ingredients some olives and that's a meal it takes me five minutes and the problem is no publisher is interested in publishing a book with that stuff but that some they should be and i'm actually writing a diet book, which is more of about how to get into it in a practical way. Um, but I'd say just keep it simple. It's really not that complicated. You know, people just eat seasonally and a lot of fruits. I mean, a lot of liquids and smoothies and juices. It's, it's not that hard, but the problem is we see books and everything and we just think that our food has to look like that. But the problem is we see books and everything, and we just think that our food has to look like that.

Right. It has to look absolutely perfect and pristine. Yeah. What are a couple of the things that you would say are sort of the essentials if somebody wants to dip their toe in this? In terms of equipment? Equipment and just basic foods. Like if you're going to go to the farmer's market or whatever, the supermarket, and just stock up on a few things and maybe give it a try. I mean, I think for anyone starting out, they're going to miss that feeling of maybe being full.

And you don't want to overcompensate by just eating too many nuts or something. So I think liquids are really important. That's what people do, right? They kind of overdose on the nuts. Yeah. And I think creating a really big filling smoothie, it's a good way to get a lot of good calories. You can get some greens and some fruits.

And I just feel like green smoothies are a great way to begin. It's a really good transition. It makes people feel like they're doing something edgy, but it's not quite as edgy as some of the stuff. And start with a meal a day and then try another meal a day or try another one of those meals. But big salads are great with avocado and hemp seeds and some sea vegetables. And, I mean, I lived that way for the first six months. I didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't know how to use a dehydrator. Right, right, right. And I think the biggest thing is just paying attention to how you feel and making note of that you know always it sounds like that was really the main thing for you when you had you connected those dots that really solved that equation for you everything digestion and sleep and all of that right and and so now it's been how many years you've been doing this? About 12, 13, yeah, 12, something like that. Yeah, you just came from playing tennis? I did play tennis.

Yeah. In the middle of a work day? I'm not going to tell anyone. No one's listening. No, it's okay. I do work seven days a week, and I probably put in nine to your 100 hours, but I definitely take time for, yeah, I play tennis, and I go to yoga, and I go to the gym, and I ride my bike everywhere, and I went to a movie yesterday. I try to have a normal life. Well, yeah, I mean, that was kind of the next sort of line of inquiry I wanted to get into.

As this entrepreneur, you're juggling so many things. I mean, you have so many projects going on at any given time, like just hearing about it, like my personal anxiety level goes up. Take your blood pressure from when we started. How do you, yeah, like, how do you gracefully navigate this and make sure, I mean, you got into this because you had an interest in wellness. And it's that irony of like, the thing that, you know, the sort of wellness motivation is the thing that falls by the wayside when, you know, I'm dealing with this myself. Like as I kind of try to grow what I'm doing, you know, what got me into it to begin with starts to get eroded. And I have to pay attention to that to make sure that, you know, I keep all of that in check.

So how do you make sure that you're, you know, you're attending to your well-being as a priority? Well, there were a couple of years, and I'm still on the tail end of that, where I knew I had to make a sacrifice if I wanted to build a company of this size. But my perverted logic is that when the company gets big enough, we have about 21 different entities right now, but my logic was when the company gets to a certain size, it will be able to have built a team of really strong professionals so that individual projects don't rely on me so heavily,

and it creates a little opening for me to take care of my health and my sleep and all of that. But that's in the future. That's some imagined future time, right? And it's starting. I mean, six months ago, I never would have been able to play tennis in the middle of the day. Right.

Well, I have this sense that you're a pretty exceptional team builder because you have a lot of people here. You seem to understand how to properly delegate and build. Maybe that's something you learned early on working in kitchens, but you have a lot of people here who are very dedicated, who are looking out for you. I think the most important decisions I make are the people that I try to build a team with.

Yeah, it's definitely number one. And I encourage them to also put in that time. But one of the things at our leadership meeting last week that I asked that they consider as a goal is also take more initiative with their health regimen, whether it's exercise or meditation or whatever it is. We're definitely, you know, a high growth company and things are moving fast and it's very intense but i it makes you really appreciate those moments that hour of tennis like i really savor it it's beautiful right and you still keep your

yoga practice up oh yeah almost every day um you know probably five days a week i i'd like to go at seven in the morning or if i can get it get up i like going early and how have you been enjoying living in venice oh it's great yeah it feels like home i mean you're here to stay or are you gonna go back to new york you think no we're we're opening business in new york and we're actually doing some additional things there but no this is this is home i can't imagine being anywhere else i love it here cool so i'm interested in i mean conventional wisdom is that you know getting into the restaurant business is crazy most most restaurants fail um and it's a super risky proposition as someone who has 20 restaurants over the years you know what is like, what do you think is, are the keys to a restaurant

being successful? It's, you know, location is the thing you always hear that's important. But having the right concept in the right location, the ambience has to be spot on. And you really just have to look at every single detail and it's not glamorous. I mean, I talk about the owner that I saw in New York sitting at the bar sipping wine and changing the music, but the reality is, you know, Saturday night I went home and wrote a, you know, one page list of things I thought we could do better and they weren't, you know, it was like, let's not use this plastic tray or anything. It's not glamorous stuff at all. It's details and you have to have an eye and a willingness

to always be better and focus on these details. I mean, there's just so many little things that guests won't necessarily see it, but they'll feel it. So being fanatical about being excellent is critical. But I would imagine you have to buffer your design aesthetic against the pure economics of making it work, right? Like every penny counts, and you have to buffer your design aesthetic against the pure economics of making it work, right? Like every penny counts, and you have to understand where every dollar is being spent

and how that's going to get recouped. You do. I mean, in a higher-end restaurant like Plant Food & Wine, it becomes more about making sure you do the volume. But yeah, there is a lot of that. But certain corners, and that's more challenging in a restaurant like this because we want to use organic ingredients we're not going to use plastic we're not going to use a lot of things that you know in a traditional restaurant

you would see so as much as we might want to cut some corners from a financial perspective we don't and can't um so it is maybe even more challenging with this kind of a restaurant to make it work. If you're going to be sort of on the high end, like sort of best of best of everything, how do you create that and not price yourself completely out of the market so that you can continue to do what you do? Yeah, and still still today if you walk down this street abit kinney our most expensive entree is still less expensive than probably the least expensive entree and every other restaurant just happens that their entree is

their entree would be salmon or whatever and the funny thing is like i'd rather pay much more for good plants than i would you know not very good non plants so but it's that that's a shift that hasn't quite happened yet right and how much how much time do you spend sourcing the the actual food like and where you get it and do you have to go and visit these farmers or how does that work it's a committed effort with all of our businesses. Here, as you can see, in the garden, we've got all sorts of things growing. We have fig trees and olive trees, and we grow edible flowers. So there's a garden right in the middle of the patio where everyone's eating, right? Yes, but we're also working on signing a deal with the landlord of the building next door.

There's about a a half acre space between our building and his and i've almost gotten him to agree to letting us plant there so we'll actually have the largest um private restaurant garden that i know of in la um we can probably supply about half of our own produce that's amazing and um i hope to have that ready by spring. But we also go to the market. Our chefs are at the market every Wednesday, every Friday. We work with companies that actually shop at the market for us. We work directly with a lot of specialty suppliers. So it's a very important part of what we do,

whether it's in here or in Maine or wherever we go. To have that space next door would be incredible. Yeah, we've almost gotten him to agree. He just decided at the last minute he wants to charge us a fee, but it would be worth it. Are there any other restaurants that have that? Literally on the site, basically growing the food next door to the restaurant? Like in Napa Valley, you have restaurants, but in LA proper, none that I know of.

Right. Not that big. I think it will be the largest private restaurant garden in the city. That would be amazing. And it really fits what we're trying to do here. Right, right. So in kind of taking a bird's eye view on everything that you're doing, you've really curated this, you know, kind of exceptional,

extraordinary experience around cuisine in general, and specifically raw cuisine. And I think that that has its own ripple effect across the culture as there's more and more momentum and interest in eating raw and eating plant-based. But how do we do a better job of creating a way for this to kind of trickle down and impact people who are on a different socioeconomic, you know, living in a different reality? You know what I mean? How do we make this kind of food more accessible for the mainstream or just the average you know american who's just you know trying to pay the bills and you know get to next week well there there are things we can all do on a daily basis um with our you know sharing

information i think you know we try to share recipes and share content. And with our new online platform, there is a public part of that where instead of people enrolling in schools, we're just giving information. We try to do that. But on a more macro level, we have to really start to influence some of the major food producers and food service arenas. So, for example, I've got a half dozen different initiatives I'm working on like that that may or may not happen.

I've had a couple of interactions with Kraft, for example, one of the largest food producers in the world, if you call that food. But they recognize that plant-based is something they need to embrace. And we've had meetings with some of the largest dairy producers in Europe and also talking to hospitals and schools about developing food service programs for them.

So I think the way we can reach a lot of people is through institutional food service, through mainstream food corporations. And we really have to knock on a lot of doors and be bold and confident about it. But it will happen eventually and I'm just trying to do my part to make sure it happens sooner than when it will happen naturally. Right. Well, at the same time, by training all of these new chefs,

that's the equivalent of instead of giving a man a fish, teaching him how to fish. You're empowering all these people to go out in the world and then they share their information either through, you know, opening up their own restaurants or just sharing the knowledge that they've learned that creates its own kind of, you know, domino effect. I'd like to increase the supply and the demand at the same time. Yeah. So it's cool. It's very inspiring to see what you've built here. And kind of a moniker that I think encapsulates your message, and I think it was the title of your TED Talk, is really thinking about the future of food. Like how can we change the future of food?

So when you look at the future of food, looking forward, what do you see? What do you envision in your preferred universe? Well, yeah, that talk was crafting the future of food because it really is something we have to work hard at and create. I think that plant-based, the evolution of discussing plant-based food, everybody described it as vegan, and I think plant-based food, you know, everybody described it as vegan, and I think plant-based is actually even better, not because I have anything against the word vegan.

I actually love the word vegan. I think it's become very cool. But plant-based is excellent because it's really where food, I think, is already going. And what I mean by that is if you go to a meat-based restaurant or a fish-based restaurant, you can still get broccoli or a salad. And I think plant-based, it's just impossible that everybody in the universe is going to

eat all vegan. Some places don't even have a choice. But if we can base our diet, everybody's diet, on plants, and anything beyond that is simply beyond that, it's in addition to that, then it's a tremendous shift, bigger than I think anybody can possibly imagine. And so I think finding ways to show how people can live on a plant-based diet by just simply creating content and tools for them to be able to do it,

awareness and interest from the media and showing the benefits. it by, you know, just simply creating content and tools for them to be able to do it. Awareness and interest from the media and showing the benefits. There's so many things happening at once, but that's really my goal to see the world become, you know, to see plant-based become the norm, not the exception. Right. And what do you think are the biggest barriers to that right now um well i've always believed uh that chefs are one of the biggest barriers and also um have the most potential to change the world and i guess that's where i'm a little different a lot of people have felt like telling the consumer about the benefits and and all the you know i support you know a lot of my friends are in mercy for animals and pete and i love all the work that everybody's doing but we're pleasure seekers as humans and

the way i think to change habit is to give them something that tastes better and looks better right feels better um than the non-plant-based counterpart. And that will drive the change. And I think chefs have the ability to do that because they know how to make anything taste good and look good. And Wolfgang Puck has, what, 20, 30, 40 restaurants. If he decided tomorrow that he was going entirely plant-based, he'd probably lose a little business, but he would change the world with that.

Alain Ducasse in Paris is... I know you were just in Paris, right? Right, well, we ate at L'Arpège. He does amazing vegan tasting. It was incredible. Alain Passard, right? He was incredible. I saw him last year.

And Ducasse just took red meat off his menu. And John George of Bongricton in New York is doing a vegetarian restaurant. So for me, it's always been about the chefs. It's another reason I opened a school. And I'm doing everything possible, and a lot of people in my circle are doing everything possible to make sure that chefs really see themselves as responsible for delivering not just taste but health.

And I think chefs, because chefs can be drug dealers but you know some of the food they're putting out there is worse than than drugs or they can be healers and um and so that's really where our focus is that's why we're in education and that's kind of where i'm i'm coming from yeah it's really interesting i never really thought of it in that regard but that's so true i mean you're basically setting the bar you're saying this is you know this is where the culture is right and they're going to eat what you serve them and the responsibility that you carry with that is something i never really thought about well chefs have a huge reach look at there are more food shows than any other type of show right now you know imagine if 20 of the world's top chefs did what i did, and five or six of them also have TV shows,

and they're just like, look, we're only going to do this if it's plant-based. It would change the world in a matter of minutes. And that's our tipping point, and we're inching toward that. You're starting to see a lot of chefs acknowledge that they know that plant-based is better and that they're eating plant-based is better and that that they're eating that way at home and you have seen uh i mean jamie oliver seems to be slowly inching himself in that direction a little bit a lot of them are chained to the economic tie that they have because like jamie's got a barbecue concept right you know and if I hadn't lost my entire business in 2002, I probably would have held on to it too.

Maybe, maybe not. It is changing. The culture is shifting, though. I mean, just a couple days ago, that article came out about Tom Brady's chef, and he's basically eating, like, he's not entirely plant-based, but, you know, pretty close to eating, like, 80% plant-based. You know it's pretty you know close to eating like 80 percent plant-based you know and it caused big you know stir he was yeah he was our first private chef client oh he was yeah we gave him a graduate of our school um and yeah there are we see a lot of that with a lot of

athletes are going that way yeah and you've done plenty of stuff with brendan over the years as well right are you guys still working on stuff with Brendan over the years as well, right? Are you guys still working on stuff together? Well, Brendan's one of our members here at the restaurant, and we do an online course with Brendan, Sports Nutrition and Elite Sports Nutrition. It's one of our most popular online courses, actually. Very cool.

If you could speak to your 20-year-old self and give a young Matthew a little bit of advice, what would that be based on what you've learned? Well, you know, I would say the one thing I let go of when I was young because I was into health and healthy food and wellness before I was into the culinary arts. And I sacrificed that by getting into food. I would say, you know, try to hold on to all your passions,

combine them into your life's work. On the other hand, if I hadn't let go of that, I wouldn't have become a chef. So, you know, it's tough. I mean, I think I've made every mistake somebody can make, or hopefully most of them. So, you know. Those mistakes have made you who you are, Matthew.

Yeah, we all do, right? But being able to embrace that is a good thing, you know? It's that weird thing. Like, yeah, I would say don't do this, don't do that. But had you not stumbled in those ways, you wouldn't be sitting here where you are. Yeah, I'm pretty happy where it all ended up. Exactly. I don't really look back with any regrets.

What have you not done yet that you still would be excited to do or that's on the horizon for you? Products, right? How come you don't have all kinds of products out there? We had them ready to go last year. We had an arrangement with Whole Foods, and I decided to wait because I wanted to have our own production facility instead of doing it on a small scale. So we're working on collaboration. We're actually going to, I think, launch our products first in Europe. But we'll see.

It's part of, you know, really that's what I have left is just to fill out the vision for the company. But my vision has been consistent for many years and now it's just about completing the things that we've thought about doing. What kind of products would those be? Well, we'll do two product lines. One will be a licensed product, which will be more equipment. We're working with a company now that's developing a thermal immersion

for the home and a blender and some other things, and that's more of a licensing product for equipment. And then we'll probably do our cheeses and our ice cream and a couple other things to start. And then we'll probably do our cheeses and our ice cream and um a couple other things to start and then you know we'll see we'll see where it goes from from there um but yeah we have quite a few quite a few new projects we're right we're working on and what would be like the ultimate restaurant like if you could have everything if you could check every box on everything you ever wanted for your like dream restaurant what would that look like well we're we're close to signing

a deal for that to happen it's in asia uh on an island we haven't done it yet but if it happens it's it's with a partner who really just wants one of the best restaurants in the world happens to be plant that happens to be plant that happens to be plant-based we'd have our own gardens and a climate that would allow you to dine outside pretty much all year round um not have the pressures of um you know of it having to be profitable and it would just be an opportunity to really show the world you know the ultimate potential for this kind of cuisine um and that's kind of the on the high end but on the other hand it's it would be just as satisfying to to have a vegan

you know mcdonald's where that feeds thousands of people a day and seeing that reach that i like that just as much so you know they're both are you working on that kind of a concept as well um no we're plant food and wine is our our kind of high end that would be a one-off that project in asia um our pizza concept is something that we do intend to do in multiple locations um and where um our restaurant the gothic in maine will be a prototype this season for something that may be on the lower end but no i don't have anything at the at the mcdonald's level right now somebody else will do that but well veggie grill is kind of that right i mean your version would be very different i would imagine but yeah our bandwidth

just doesn't uh i think you know that's a full-time job and the guys at veggie grill they put a lot of energy into that and um no i think we'll expand through additional locations of the concepts we already have and what do you think the plant-based kind of universe will look like you know five years from now like where what's the next thing that's coming down the pike or where do you where do you see this evolving to in the near future um i think it's there's going to be a lot of um uh a lot of growth within the current market. So like Bahrain, for example, places like that all over the world will start to develop and offer plant-based. But also then it fills in around that.

Once you have a high-end restaurant, then you have stores that sell the product so people can make that kind of food at home. And that kind of fills itself out but i think the institutions schools and hospitals embracing plant-based is um as a logical next step and i know there are people in those institutions fighting to make it happen and once that does um then you know i think it's going to be so much better i i'm still i'm still amazed that um you know we we learn how to build a cutting board and how to sew and how to make crepes and all these other things in school and how to memorize the capital of every city or every state, but we don't learn how to properly feed ourselves. So that is also a matter of time but you know those are those are next steps too yeah i mean the food in hospitals and schools is insane and you know i don't believe that it

i don't believe that it has to be certainly not in hospitals it doesn't have to be it'll be interesting to see how that pans out there are a lot of people who are working really hard to change that and it's going to be exciting to see that fall into place, and I believe it will as well. All right, well, we've got to wrap it up here, but I want to kind of close it down with a final question, which is what do you think are the biggest misconceptions that people have about eating raw, the raw lifestyle?

Well, I think there's a, I mean, people in LA probably don't have that misconception as much, but where I grew up in Maine, if they hear about raw food, they're imagining, you know, someone barefoot on an island, you know, climbing a tree and eating fruit, and that it's dysfunctional and not practical. And it is a misconception because you actually become more functional and more effective in your day-to-day life when you're not getting sick. So I just think that people see it as something that's not sustainable, and the opposite is actually true.

It really makes your life sustainable. Well, I'm going to start eating more raw. You think you're doing pretty well. No, I could always do better. Believe me, this is still an evolving learning curve for me, man. So this has been great. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Of the 200 cookbooks that you've written, what do you think is a good kind of introductory one for somebody if they're gonna go to amazon and kind of peruse your all your titles everyday raw express is a good book because it doesn't require dehydrators any you know doesn't you don't have to open coconuts yeah that's a good book to start with um the the latest book we did was Plant Food, which is a beautiful book, but a little more artsy.

And the next one I'm doing is the working title is The 90-Day Raw Food Diet, which is really to help people. How do you get into this? How do you stay in this? It's a little more practical. How do you come out with cookbooks like every other year while opening multiple you know, multiple restaurants and running existing restaurants and running that? I mean, how do you, on a pure like time management level, like, I don't even, how do you get it done? How do you get it all done? I have a lot of entrepreneur friends and mentors, and we just, you know, support each other and we just sit down and just grind it out. Those are

the trends, the term we use, we just do it. And, you know, it's, to me, not just myself, but our whole company, we devote a lot of time to creating new content. The number one thing, the first thing at the top of the page

when I have a meeting is innovation. That's always number one. We don't ever, we're not just trying to take these dishes we've created and put them in 50 restaurants.

That's not our first goal. Our first goal is do better food tomorrow than we did yesterday. We have a test kitchen in Maine. We're building a test kitchen here in L.A. called Plant Lab. And so, you know, writing these books, developing new ideas, that's a good, you know, 10%, 15% of the time. And, you know, I'm a pretty fast writer at this point, too.

Right. Well, it's inspiring. Your output is extraordinary. And what you've built here is really something special. And I'm proud to know you. And it'll be exciting to see how these new projects pan out. And I'm just excited for seeing how this movement is going to develop over the last couple of years.

And it's cool to be a small part of it and helping forge cultural change. So there's a lot more work to be done, but I'm glad that you're out there doing it. I think we're going to see an interesting couple of years ahead. It's going to be really globally with what everyone's doing, all our colleagues and friends. There's an amazing group around us. Yeah, it's very, very cool.

So awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you. If people want to check you out, the best place to online, the best place to do that is MatthewKennyCuisine.com. Correct. And Twitter is MKLifestyle. What's the best way to do it? It is, yeah.

We have a lot of content on Facebook, MatthewKenny on Facebook. Correct. And Twitter is MK lifestyle. What's the best way to do it? It is. Yeah. We, we have a lot of content on Facebook. Matthew Kenny on Facebook, our business page and Instagram. Those are all Matthew Kenny cuisine. So everything is except Instagram, but I,

I mean Twitter, but I can't figure out how to change the, I mean, some, for some reason we're locked in. We can't change it. Yeah. That's the way it works. All right, man. Thanks. All right. Thank you. Take care. Peace. Blitz. I mean for some reason we're locked in we can't change it yeah that's the way it works alright man thanks

alright thank you take care peace all right I hope you guys enjoyed that be sure to check out Matthew online and find out where all his restaurants are drop in pay him a visit enjoy his delicious food and don't forget to check out the

show notes at richroll.com lots of links and resources to take your edification to the next level plant power tuscany this is our retreat in italy uh it was officially sold out a couple people dropped out and a couple spots opened up so if you're super keen on attending but didn't kind of get your act together soon enough or whatever the reason was, you can contact Mel, our producer, through the retreat website, which is ourplantpowerworld.com. I think there's two or three spots still open. Once again, we're going to be doing the retreat again in October. So if those dates didn't work out, the dates in May, I'm going to be announcing specific dates in October. And we're taking submissions for the wait list for that now.

So, again, go to OurPlantPowerWorld.com. You can contact Mel through that website and let her know that you're interested. Secondly, Julie and I just launched a new online video course with MindBodyGreen. It's called The Ultimate Guide to Conscious Relationships, all about cultivating your best relationship really proud of this course go to mindbodygreen.com click on video courses on the upper left hand side of the home page it'll take you right there and you'll see my other courses there as well the ultimate guide to plant-based nutrition self-explanatory and the art of living with purpose which is all about setting and achieving goals. Subscribe to my YouTube channel at youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll.

I'm also doing a lot on Snapchat. My name there is IamRichRoll, I-A-M Rich Roll. It's been super fun kind of sharing my perspective using that app. Let's look at the calendar. Let's see, the NYU Vegan Athletes event, that already happened. The Austin Health Hoopla, that's off the calendar. Let's see the NYU vegan athletes event that already happened. The Austin health hoopla that's off the calendar. They had to cancel that event. So right now it looks like the only thing coming up is Cleveland, the veg fest, May 7th.

I will see you there for all your plant power and RRP swag and merch needs. Go to richroll.com. What do we got there? We got nutrition products. We got t-shirts. We've got sticker packs. We got nutrition products. We got t-shirts. We got sticker packs. We got tech tees. We got fine art prints.

All kinds of cool stuff to take your health and wellness to the next level. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. If you happen to be in the Los Angeles vicinity, please make a point of venturing out to Westlake to have a meal at Joy Cafe. That's the restaurant that Julie and I are partnered in. It's J-O-I Cafe. It's in Westlake Village. It's really great to use this podcast and all the travel and the public speaking engagements that I do to share my message on kind of a global or virtual level. But it's also really nice to spread the message locally in my community.

That's what joy cafe is all about as well as karma Baker, which is the vegan gluten-free baked goods company that Julie and I are also partners in. You can find out more, go to joy cafe.com or karma baker.com to find out more about those products. Big shout out to Sean Patterson for all his help on the graphics for today's episode, Chris Swan for production assistance, and our theme music was done by Anna Lemma.

Thanks for all the support, you guys. I will see you back here in a couple days. Big love. Be well. Take care of yourselves. Peace. Plants. Thank you.