The Tim Ferriss Show - #545: Marco Canora — The Art of Food, Eating, Nutrition, and Life

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, friends. Just a quick preface. There is a delicious section of the interview that we moved to the very end of the episode about how Marco taught me and my girlfriend how to make the perfect gnocchi. So if you want to learn the secrets behind making delicious, world-class, and very simple gnocchi, be sure to listen to the whole thing. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back

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Starting point is 00:06:07 What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls. Oh, my God. One of my 12. My voice is cracking. People, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. That

Starting point is 00:06:29 is how excited I am today to bring to you my guest for this conversation, Chef Marco Canora. Let me get into this. After years working with and training under Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio, you may know those names, at Gramercy Tavern and Craft. Chef Marco Canora, old friend of mine, on Instagram, you can find him at Marco Canora. Opened Hearth, that's H-E-A-R-T-H, in the East Village in 2003, before the neighborhood was a culinary destination. In 2014, Marco helped kick off America's Embrace of Bone Broth with Brodo, B-R-O-D-O, serving bone broth and coffee cups out of a side window at Hearth. Over the years, Brodo has been recognized consistently as a bone broth pioneer in outlets such as the New York Times, Time, and Good Morning America. You can visit

Starting point is 00:07:14 brodo.com to try some of their famous bone broth for yourself. I've had many gallons of it of every possible variety, or visit one of their several locations in New York City. Marco's first cookbook, Salt to Taste, subtitled The Key to Confident Delicious Cooking, was nominated for a James Beard Award. That's like the Oscars of the cooking and culinary world. He is also the author of A Good Food Day and Brodo, subtitled A Bone Broth Cookbook. Marco has been profiled in the New York Times, Serious Eats, and Food & Wine. He was a finalist on The Next Iron Chef, a judge on Chopped and Top Chef, and he has appeared on Today, The Chew, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, and Nightline. In May 2017, Marco won the James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York City.

Starting point is 00:07:57 He lives, cooks, and gardens with his wife and two children in Yonkers, New York. You can find him, as I mentioned, on Instagram at Marco Canora, online, restauranthearth.com and brodo.com. I will warn people in advance. I know that this is family programming. We will likely have a font of obscenities from both of us in this conversation. So just strap in and be prepared for that. Marco, welcome to the show, my friend. Tim, it's so great to be here. I'm absolutely thrilled to be a part of this amazing cast that you've done. You know, a little nervous, but more excited than nervous. Well, you sexy son of a bitch, let's just get right into it. I had an opportunity to go and look back at some of our early interactions as documented in The 4-H the very first conversations we had went like this. It's really assy, right? Grassy, I asked. No, assy, Marco repeated loudly over the bustle of the bar. So could you provide some context for what we were talking about? And if you can't

Starting point is 00:09:18 remember, I can certainly refresh the memory. I can't remember the producer of the bottle of wine that we were referring to. At Hearth Restaurant, there's what we call the kitchen pass. So you could sit right on our kitchen and watch everything going on. And it's very loud. And the restaurant was full. So there was a lot of noise. And I poured you a sip of a red wine. I don't remember the grape variety.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Maybe you do. It was a Cabernet Franc. Cab Franc. Oh, okay. A Cab Franc. And we were just talking about the wine and I was smelling it and tasting it as were you. And it's one of my favorite wine descriptors because there's this barnyard horse's ass kind of thing in some wines that I really love. So yeah, I used assy and your eyebrows went up. And I don't know if you've ever heard that as a wine descriptor before. I had not. And so the sentence that I put in the book was, this excited me for three reasons. Now, you're going to have to correct my French. I'm not going to get this right. But the Chinon,

Starting point is 00:10:24 which is a Bernard Baudry, 2010 Loire Valley, was the best Cabernet Franc I'd ever had. I'd found a wine descriptor I could understand, and I'm very fond of as in general. Now, my writing style may have changed a little bit since, but suffice to say, in this conversation, I just want to say this up front for folks, we're not going to be talking just about cooking. We're going to be talking about living. We're going to be talking about senses. We're going to be talking about eating. And for most of you out there, regardless of how trendy fasting is, and I'm a big fan of fasting, you can't do it forever. And you likely eat at least a few times a day or a few times a week. So we're going to be covering a lot of texture around sort of the art of living and nourishment, and that can take a lot of form.

Starting point is 00:11:13 So I just want to say that because part of the reason I enjoy spending so much time with you is that I feel like a lot of the philosophies and principles that you have formed to kind of guide your life overlap a lot with some of mine. And that's in part because I've adopted quite a few of yours. So I'm going to jump to a section right after this introduction to Hearth and The 4-Hour Chef in the professional section. There's the domestic, the wild, the scientist, and then the professional. And this section is called the mantra. The mantra. And here it goes. Quote, cooking is not hard. Cooking is not hard. End quote. Marco repeated this five times during our evening together. Quote, I feel like I've pulled the wool over everyone's eyes as a

Starting point is 00:12:01 successful chef in New York City. Anyone could do this, end quote. Come on, I said, as I pointed to my vegetable salad, which was ethereal and juicy, not an adjective I use for salads and parenthetical, easily one of the best salads of my life. He laughed and waved a hand dismissively. People say, oh my God, this is amazing. Just dress it while the vegetables are warm. It all soaks in. Pour the oil on after the red wine vinegar and add salt and pepper. Anyone could do this. Oil after the vinegar? Why? Marco explained. If you put on the oil first after the red wine vinegar and add salt and pepper, anyone could do this. Oil after the vinegar, why? Marco explained, if you put on the oil first, it deflects the vinegar into the bottom of the dish where it pools. So this is, as best as I could recall it, and I'm sure I passed this by you, an example of simplicity, but like powerful simplicity. And we're going to get to more crazy stories and hilarious stories,

Starting point is 00:12:47 because I have to bring our friend Jay-Z, not the media and hip-hop icon, but Jeffrey Zurofsky. Easily mix up. He goes by the initials. So he'll have to make an appearance at some point, since he was my coach. He introduced us, and he was very much a brother in arms for the potential suicide mission that was The 4-Hour Chef. You never went to culinary school. Is that right? I did not. That is correct. Okay. Now I've heard you, well, I've read rather, you say in interviews like, yeah, I'm not that impressed by culinary school grads. I'd rather take someone who's done a year of staging or something along those lines. Could you elaborate on that?

Starting point is 00:13:35 You know, cooking is such a trade. And to think that you can get good at butchering a salmon by taking a semester of fish butchery courses is just kind of absurd. I mean, of course, there's like basic techniques that you could learn, but it's like playing a musical instrument, being adept in a kitchen and being efficient with a knife and being able to fillet or butcher meat or fish or cut vegetables. It's an act of engaging with your senses. So in my opinion, it's just one of those things that can't be taught. And it's through repetition you get great. And my first job at Dean and DeLuca in New York City in the early 90s, I made soup for them at their big shop on Broadway and Prince. And they would go through 50 gallons of soup a day. I had to cut all the

Starting point is 00:14:26 vegetables for that soup. You know how I got my knife skills from cutting those vegetables every day for a couple of years? I mean, it's incredible. So I don't want to put down places like the Culinary Institute of America. I mean, they do great work. And I think the kids that come out of there are prepared and they have a good foundation. But ultimately, I just think it's a better proposition to get paid for school. And that's what going to work young is. You work really hard and you might not make a ton of money, but you're getting paid for the knowledge that you're acquiring. And that just seems like a better ROI to me than going in debt for 100 grand and coming out and then starting that process. What does it mean to stage?

Starting point is 00:15:16 People may not recognize that term. I'm not sure you could even do that anymore in the current world. I mean, certainly not in New York and probably this country at large. I mean, maybe in Europe, it still goes on, but it's this idea of, okay, I don't have a lot of experience. You're a great restaurant. I'm super into cooking and I want to devote my life to it. So I want to stage at your restaurant. I'm going to go there and I'm going to watch at first and then little by little, maybe I'll help with menial tasks and then maybe that will grow. But it's basically allow me to be present in your kitchen

Starting point is 00:15:51 so I could learn and maybe you'll allow me to help too for free. Yeah. So the apprenticing of a sort, right? The S-T-A-G-E, I'm imagining that's French. So that's basically sort of a lost practice right? The S-T-A-G-E, I'm imagining that's French. So that's basically sort of a lost practice at this point. How did you first get into cooking? When did you know, this is what I want to do? It was from growing up in a household with a mom who cared about cooking and was a great cook. And we had a garden in upstate New York. One of my earliest memories is my mom picking zucchini flowers out of the garden and then dipping them in a simple pastela, which is just a flour and water batter, and pan frying them in

Starting point is 00:16:40 olive oil, and then putting a little bit of salt on them and eating them while they're hot. So it was like from the earth to the pan to the plate to my mouth in a matter of an hour and a half, that shit resonated with me. It's still with me today. So the very quick and simple answer is from growing up in a home with a mom who cared and knew how to cook and believed in the power of cooking. So for those you've worked with, what would they say your superpowers are? What are you good at? I'm good at being demanding without being an asshole about it. Everybody wants to respect a chef or a leader who's demanding and holds you accountable. And I think the tricky part for anybody trying to drive a kitchen or drive any project is to be disciplined and to be demanding, but to be able to do it in a way that garners support instead of the opposite of

Starting point is 00:17:47 support, which is I've worked for some really demanding guys and I respected the fact that they wanted it to be great, but they were total assholes about it and it didn't motivate me to want to be part of their success. And I think a nugget of what has helped me through my career is I've been able to find that balance of being a total obsessive, perfectionist, demanding, hard knocks guy, but at the same time, balance that out with making sure they understand it's from a good place and from a kind place and for the common good of being really proud of the hard work that we're doing. How do you do that? You don't have to name names, but how might the language look? And it's like every day you're going to have a chance to correct.

Starting point is 00:18:43 Well, that's what I wanted to say. Tim, it's not so much about language, it's about actions. And that's the beauty of work. And that's the beauty of kitchens, in my opinion, is that happens through being alongside and showing everybody that there's not really a hierarchy and that you're willing to do whatever it takes. And you're willing to bend over backwards to support and help people achieve things and have successes on their stations. And there's been many, many kitchens and times and days that I was running the kitchen and a cook would have a really bad night and they would go down and it would not be pretty. And I probably-

Starting point is 00:19:33 Go down, you mean like go down in flames? Yeah, go down in flames. And it's high pressure. And I'm sure at the time I freaked out and screamed probably too much. But the thing that I made sure I did was that at the end of the night, we would talk about it. And the next day, I would show up early so that when that person showed up, I was right there with that person. We would go over the prep list and we together would make sure that we wouldn't have a night like that again. It's not good for anybody. I was invested in their success. And I think that that's one nugget of what I would say to answer your question. What were or are some of the most common reasons for someone crumbling under pressure, right? When they have a bad night and they just collapse psychologically or

Starting point is 00:20:23 otherwise, what are the most common reasons for that? Mostly it's their inability to control their thinking, this notion of getting flustered. You come in at one and you prep as hard as you can to be ready at six. And then you're like, I got through the first part of the day. And then the tickets start rolling in, come 7, 7.30, it really shit starts happening. And I think people lose their composure and they get flustered. And then it's just like a landslide. And then you just go down. And that's the most common thing, I think, in my opinion. Obviously, sometimes people just aren't ready and they don't have the skills required, but more often it's a mind game, I think. So it's just panic, basically.

Starting point is 00:21:12 They panic and then they lose the ability to execute on the skills they actually do have. Yes, exactly. It's an exercise in focus. Maybe you could tell me a story from your experience. Let's say you're a line cook. So you're not top dog. And you're in a situation where, oh shit, you know, Sarah, Tony called in sick last minute. This is a Tuesday night.

Starting point is 00:21:41 It's not supposed to be big. We've got like 50 menus up at the same time. Ah, fuck. And like everybody ordered the roast chicken or whatever, right? And you're like, this is going to be a fucking 12 car pileup. And things start going sideways. Can you tell a story of pulling out of a tailspin? Or like what you do in a situation like that when in own head, right? What your self-talk is when that stuff is starting to unfold. Yeah. You know what's wild, Tim, is that scenario that you paint,

Starting point is 00:22:15 it's kind of like an every single night scenario when you're running a busy restaurant in New York City. So it's not like an outlier of a situation because every night in a really busy restaurant, I mean, I'll speak to my experience in New York City, you get punched in the face every single night because you serve 220, people want to eat between 7.30 and 8.45 or nine, and that happens every single night. So it's not much of an outlying experience, but I'll tell you, you've heard the word mise en place, right? Yes. So to win the battle, more than half of it is to make sure you're listed out early,

Starting point is 00:22:57 you get in, and you win the prep half of the game. The world of cooks and kitchens are two halves of the game. There's the first half. I was just going to say for people who don't, so mise en place or mise is, correct me if I'm wrong, is basically having everything prepped and in its proper place so that you can execute when it comes time to actually cook. Is that accurate? Correct. Yeah. Every bit of everything that you need needs to be in the right place. And that's not just the food ingredients, but it's like the pots and the pans and the plates and the spoons. It's the tools in addition to all the foodstuffs. It's like a holistic picture of everything. I mean, one could even say your cup of water that you

Starting point is 00:23:43 need is part of your mise en place. Yeah. And I interrupted you, though. You were saying the first half of the game is... Yeah, there's two halves. In the restaurant world, there's two halves of the game. There's the prep half that you have to get ready for when the curtain goes up. And then guests are coming through the door.

Starting point is 00:23:59 And that's the beginning of the second half. And inevitably, because people have their habits and you can't change it, I've been wishing that people would eat at six o'clock for like 15 years of my life, but they don't. So yeah, and the second half is service. And inevitably, you get pummeled in the middle and you need to be able to get to the other side of that and not get overwhelmed by the stacking up of tickets, it might sound basic and you'll probably squeeze some more detail out of me, but it's just, there's no better time than in the shits to step back and take this approach of one ticket at a time. Because you will get to

Starting point is 00:24:41 the other side of it. I kind of always love those moments. You go into this state of focus, and it really does become, I don't want to over-dramatize it, but it really does become sort of a dance. You're in your head, and you're just doing this stuff, and you're putting up this beautiful food. It always resonated with me. I love it. And you got to get into the zone, you know?

Starting point is 00:25:16 What type of mentorship or boss have you most flourished under? It doesn't have to be a specific name. It could, certainly. But one thing I certainly wonder about, and this may be a whole separate topic, but if the kind of demanding sort of chef culture can exist today in some form, right? It just seems like there must be so many landmines. And I'm not saying, look, there's also a lot of bad behavior all over the place. So we don't have to get into that. But it makes me think of, for instance, Jeffrey, our friend. Jeffrey Zarofsky told me a story. I don't think he would mind me telling it, where he was working for some French chef and very demanding guy, but very gifted,

Starting point is 00:25:59 very good at teaching. And Jeffrey was always in always in the way right he was like he was he just like could not figure out where to put himself where he wasn't fucking everything up and so this guy would say to me go jeffrey you are like my dick always between my legs and i thought that was the funniest thing i'd ever heard like you can't you can't really heard. You can't really do that. You probably can't really do that now. Not saying you should, but it is pretty funny. And so I'm curious, though, for you personally, because different people thrive under different styles. What type of styles have you thrived under, would you say? It's interesting in my case, Tim, because I spent most of my career as kind of like chef in charge, if you will. There was very few years at Gramercy Tavern where I was under people. And Tom Colicchio, who's a mentor of mine, he was very hands-off. He gave me all the space I needed and carte blanche to do kind of whatever I want.

Starting point is 00:27:05 And the way he infused himself was very, very in the shadows. It wasn't aggressive. So I think for me, I respond best to people that show me confidence and faith. I did as well as I did at Gramercy Tavern because the hires up there allowed me the room to grow and shine. In the process of doing some homework for this conversation, which I always enjoy doing with friends because it'd be super creepy and weird if I was like, hey, I spent like five hours doing internet research on you, but I have the excuse when we have these conversations. So I read that when you were starting out, now I don't know if starting out is quite the right way to put it, but you made a list of say five restaurants in New York City that you wanted to work for or at, and you kind of started knocking on doors with a suit and the

Starting point is 00:28:00 whole nine yards and that you ended up at Gramercy Tavern. So how did you end up not only at Gramercy Tavern? So I want to hear the story of like selection. How did you choose those restaurants? And then this can wait until later, but separately, once you landed there, how did you have free reign? Why would anyone give you free reign in such a situation? So there you go. I started as a line cook on Gramercy Tavern with no free reign, but I got to a sous chef position in like a year. The first year I had to kind of prove my merit. And I was very nervous because I hadn't worked in any great

Starting point is 00:28:45 kitchens, but I was very determined. And it took me a year to get to that place where I got some freedom. Is that fast? Yes. Okay. So how did you... We're going to come back to the restaurant selection, but let's focus on this for a second. Now, I will accept hard work, but the fact of the matter is a lot of people work hard. A lot of people put in a lot of time. That can't be the only explanation. Why were you able to do that within a year? How did you approach it differently? Or what did you do that other people didn't do? It was like every waking hour, I was thinking about it. And I tell cooks this today. It's like, part of your success is not only during the hours you walk through this door. I was obsessed and I was determined to not fail. And that drove me to read and think and make lists outside of the restaurant so that when I walked into the

Starting point is 00:29:47 restaurant, I had not only a list of what to do, but I had it plotted on a timeline so that I would be really efficient with the four or five hours I had leading up into showtime. Got it. You never showed up and then figured out what you were going to do. You showed up with like a schedule. Yeah, a timeline schedule and like, yeah. And it's like, you know, downstairs is where you prep and where the walk-in boxes are and upstairs where the kitchen is. And like, I would watch cooks go up and down the stairs because they forgot this and that

Starting point is 00:30:23 and the other thing. And I was like, poor time management, buddy. You're failing because you're not doing the work free and you're going up and down the stairs all fucking day. That's why you're always not ready at six o'clock. This attention to detail around not only the list of things, but also plotted on a timeline really served me well. Yeah. I feel like that going up and down the stairs all fucking day is a great metaphor for people to use. I wrote it down for myself. I'm thinking to myself, where am I running up and down the stairs all day? Am I going between six tabs constantly all the fucking time like if so why am i doing that you know like what am i doing am i like opening and closing my laptop 17 times a day if so like

Starting point is 00:31:15 what what's happening there it's uh very good question you said lists you said you read does reading mean and i imagine a part of it is getting familiar obviously with the menu for that evening so that you have everything that you need. Any other types of reading when you say reading? It was just immersing myself in food culture and like food magazines at the time. I mean, it was kind of before the crazy digital world we live in today. So it was like, I was so in love with the dining scene, the restaurant scene, the food scene, plating food, seasonal ingredients. It was just like deeply embedded in my soul. It was singularly focused.

Starting point is 00:32:02 I was singularly focused. And to this day, I kind of commiserate with my wife. You know, I'm the opposite of a Renaissance man. I have been embedded in the world of restaurants and food and cooking for my entirety of my adult life. And it hasn't really afforded me the ability to dive into other, especially deeply dive into other pursuits. And that's fine with me. I'm not begrudging it. It's just, I think one of the keys to success in the world of restaurants and cooking and chefing is this all-in type attitude. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take

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Starting point is 00:33:41 travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. One thing that's always impressed me about you, and honestly, there's part of me that's really envious of this. Covet sounds too weird,

Starting point is 00:34:36 but I do have this kind of pang of envy when we're texting or talking because god you know it's got to be coming up on 10 years if not just past 10 years now that we've you know first met which is fucking bonkers to think about yeah it is way it's definitely more than 10 for sure and yeah when i ask you what you're up to what you you're excited about, very often, I mean, there are other things, of course, but very often you're like, yeah, I'm super stoked about cooking this and I'm doing this and have this garden. And you are as excited as I have ever seen you about good food and making good food when you're home, right? I mean, it's so refreshing to see, in a sense, because what I am used to very often is someone who is, this includes many people who

Starting point is 00:35:36 are successful in whatever given field, is they have their thing they do for work, and when they are not working, the last thing they would ever want to do is more of what they consider their work, right? But that's not you. That definitely does not seem to be you. You know, in my later years, it's like I'm on this mission to spread the gospel of cooking. I think that it's one of the most valuable things one can teach themselves. And I do more cooking at home today than I do in the restaurant. And yeah, the wonderful thing about food and cooking and the reason why it could become all-encompassing, it's that act that we all do. So it's like, my daughters need to eat every day. I need to eat every day. Everyone needs to eat. Well, not every day. Some people have fasting

Starting point is 00:36:25 practices, but you get the idea. And it's ever-changing, and it's constantly dynamic, and it just never ceases to feed my soul. It never does. It's incredible. So Bookmark, coming back to Bookmarkmark i promised i would cover this with people and i want to know selecting those five or so restaurants where you put on your god god knows what i would love to see a photo of that suit back in the day so you put on your suit and you go you go to knock on some doors and smile just for the record i also had hair to my ass i didn't know what to do with it because I was like, what am I going to do with my hair going into these interviews? So my girlfriend at the

Starting point is 00:37:10 time convinced me that the best approach would just do a single braid down the back of my head. So I was in a suit with a single braid to the back of my waist. So yeah, it was quite something. And the list was formed in my apartment in San Francisco because I was living in San Francisco at the time. And my girlfriend had gotten accepted to NYU film school. So we both decided to come back together. I was in my late 20s and I was like, okay, well, up until now, cooking, I loved it and I was good at it, but I never thought seriously about what a career would look like. So that was a big moment, moving back to New York and deciding that this was going to be my career.

Starting point is 00:37:59 And the list was really, at the time, Gourmet Magazine did restaurant reviews, and I had a stack of them because I subscribed to it. So basically, I looked at the restaurant reviews over the last nine months and took notes, looked at the New York Times reviews, took some notes. And then based on my own, what I was excited about, that drove the list. So I wanted it to be kind of Italian-ish. I wasn't super interested in the old school French restaurants. I was interested in kind of fresher vegetable type. So Diane Forley had a restaurant called Verbina and she got a lot of play for working with botanicals and vegetables. And that was her big shtick. And I was really turned on by that.

Starting point is 00:38:48 Lydia Bastianich had her fancy Italian restaurant, Falidia. And that spoke to me. And I was excited about that. And then Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio partnered. And Danny just did Union Square. And Tom had an Italian bent. So that kind of appealed to me. So yeah, I kind of got to the city with this list and hit the streets old school style with my resume and my suit and my single

Starting point is 00:39:14 braid to my ass. What was your pitch? I mean... Yeah, it was tough because I didn't have a whole lot to go on. I had worked at a few restaurants here and there. I had a business degree from Pace University, and I worked in a handful of restaurants that nobody ever heard of. My pitch was, I'm ready to commit to this as my life, and I want to find the right place that I could really learn and really dive into. And the pitch was this idea of selling these folks on the level of commitment I would have if they were to hire me. Okay. That's super interesting, right? Because I'm imagining you're going through

Starting point is 00:39:59 these reviews, right? In Gourmet Magazine you know at the time this is the probably 2000 2010 2011 and i know covid may have affected things but you know i wrote i'm just saying this to provide some context for folks right all right sure so in the in the four-hour chef you know wrote all about my first real inebriated five and a half hour orgy of gastronomic delights. And at the end of that section, I said, by the end of the evening, I concluded what many others had. Hearth is the most underrated restaurant in all of New York City. This is saying a lot in a city of 24,000 restaurants. So there are, no matter how you slice it, we could debate the number, but there are a lot of restaurants in New York City. And you have just

Starting point is 00:40:51 picked a couple of the hottest restaurants. You can't be the only person knocking on doors, right? And so I'm thinking to myself, well, wait a second now. You're going to sort of, if we're thinking of it almost like college now. You're going to sort of, if we're thinking of it almost like college admissions, you're going to like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, you're like, hey, let me in. Okay. The percentage of the time they say yes has got to be pretty low because it's not like they're going to have 70 people working as line cooks. And so if I were in their shoes and you offered that, I would have to, I would think, I would have to have a high degree of confidence that you could at least handle the work that I

Starting point is 00:41:30 would be throwing at you. But I understand the commitment was kind of first and foremost, right? This is the commitment that I plan to give if you were to hire me. What else was there to the pitch that would help them say yes? The beauty about that world at that time is you come in and you do what they call a trail. So it's very easy. A trail, T-R-A-I-L? Yeah, a trail. So they say, and this happened pretty much everywhere. They were kind of like, well, your resume is not that impressive. And why don't

Starting point is 00:42:05 you come in and suit up and just hang out and watch? And that's common practice. I mean, not so much today. You come in and you spend a full day in the kitchen, you suit up. The cooks and the sous chefs and the chefs, they get a sense of your vibe and your energy and your ability to just kind of navigate a kitchen you know it's kind of like when you said jeffrey zarofsky was always in the way of the chef right yeah like part of what you need to do on your trail is you need to be adept to the movements of a kitchen and show them that you're not like a deer in headlights not knowing where to fucking stand so what do you know now are you just like playing tag where you're like avoiding anyone touching you? Or do

Starting point is 00:42:48 you have responsibilities? Are you just sort of the ghost? They're like, we don't want to hear you. We don't want to see you like be a ninja. That's the thing. Like you need to have a good EQ and you need to go in there and you need to figure out when it's okay to poke and try to work and can I lend a hand or when it's time to be quiet and be in the corner. And so a lot of it is nuance and you need to be able to read the situations because maybe the first two hours of the prep day is very different than the first hour of when the hits the fan, right? So you need to have sense about you. And that helps kind of guide whether they're going to make a decision to hire you or not, right? So I've had trails who are like

Starting point is 00:43:32 absolutely useless and they didn't know where to stand. They didn't know when it was the right time to help or not help. And at the end of that, the cooks are, who is that freakazoid? Please don't hire him. Or the cooks and the sous chefs are like, wow, that guy was really helpful or that girl that was really helpful and he really helped out. So that's what it's about during a trail. And I did well during my trail because I was offered a job. And they don't give you, do they give you any direction beforehand or they're just like, hey, come trail, wink, wink. And the understanding is like, I want to see if you can figure out when and how to help.

Starting point is 00:44:11 It's kind of like unsaid, but like there's a little, of course, there's a little bit of guidance. Like they got to show you where the chef whites are and change in there. And like, we'll start your day here. So there's some guide rails for sure. But generally, I mean, I know my approach is to say less because it's a better test. Oh, say less to the person who asks you for a trail. Yeah. Like when a trail comes into our kitchen, it's kind of like I try to not

Starting point is 00:44:40 set up too much of a framework because I think it speaks to their level of adaptability and ability to follow cues, if you will. As I think about my future, Tim, and the fact that I'm in my early 50s and through my 60s, it's like I really want to figure out a way to teach people to cook because I believe in the power of cooking so much. And it's the thing that I know how to do best. And I love the process of teaching. I love what it does for somebody when they learn how to cook. There's implications to being a good cook, wide implications,

Starting point is 00:45:27 to one's own health and to one's ability to connect with the people under their roof or the people they love. There's just so much to be gained from devoting some time and energy into learning how to cook. I want that kind of my next phase mission in life. I endorse that. I endorse that wholeheartedly. And you think a lot about nutrition. I mean, this is, I think in part, how Jeffrey initially connected us is because of kind of four-hour body, slow-carb diet, and so on. I see a bullet here in front of me in my prep notes that I want to ask you about. And we're going to move all over the place, obviously, but that is the way my brain functions or dysfunctions, malfunctions. Recent 45-day CGM, that's continuous glucose monitor

Starting point is 00:46:20 experience. Why did you decide to use a continuous glucose monitor and what did you learn from that experience? Why? Because I'm kind of a bit obsessed over the physiology of my own body and what are the things that drive that physiology, whether it be sleep or cold plunging or fasting or diet. And having the ability to test and learn around my dietary choices was so intriguing to me. And once it was available and I knew it was out there, I reached out to Frank Littman, who's a friend and a doctor that I go to see in New York, and he figured out a way to get a CGM on my arm. So I did it just out of sheer curiosity and a desire to just kind of, it's so cliche to say this, but just kind of optimize my diet a bit and understanding blood sugar. I totally buy into keeping blood sugar levels steady, I think, is hugely critical to all kinds

Starting point is 00:47:31 of health. So what did you learn? What were the biggest takeaways? I'll tell you the craziest, biggest takeaway that I feel like should be on that billboard you might ask me about. It won't, but take a walk after you eat. It is astonishing. How can it be that I've never heard that in my whole life? That should be taught in first grade because the effect of it is insane. I saw it firsthand, and I think that the folks at Levels are seeing it more and more and more because this message is getting out as they accumulate data. But the power of a 14-minute walk to reduce the spike of your blood sugar regardless of what you eat is extraordinary. Wow. No kidding. And so you used levels in this experiment?

Starting point is 00:48:25 I did. That's incredible. Why 14 minutes? Is that the length of your favorite Guns N' Roses A-side? No, I'm just, did I say 14 or 15? Just like a short, a short, you know, just a little walk. Okay. You know, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, maybe five minutes. I didn't really test the length of the walk. It was nothing severe. So it's not exercise. It's not like going to the gym or doing pushups. It's just going for a walk around the block a few times. Yes. Totally chill, walk around the block. And I couldn't believe it. It's amazing to me. So highly, highly recommend that. It should be taught everywhere because it's incredibly effective. That's wild, man. You know, I haven't thought, you just prompted something to come to my mind, which I haven't thought of in a few decades. And I'm going to apologize to anyone

Starting point is 00:49:17 who hears this and understands what I'm saying, because I'm going to probably butcher it because my tones are off these days. But there's a, I want to say, well, maybe it's not so much a proverb, it's an expression in Mandarin Chinese, which is something like, which is, if you walk a hundred steps after you eat, you will live to be 99 that's literally the expression and that's amazing yeah and it's just like huh turns out a few thousand years of trial and error how did you come across how did you find that expression uh i was i mean i was living in china and i this is a long time ago. I mean, this is 1996. So this was back when Beijing was like people's liberation, green army jackets in the winter, these green jackets and bicycles. So Beijing is a different city now.

Starting point is 00:50:16 And I was there for six months at two universities. And I mean, that was kind of the last time I studied Chinese was around that time. But you just saying that prompted that to pop up in my brain, which is wild. So we're telling you there's a lot, there's a lot there for sure. I mean, that was my experience and many others. And it's just, I find it fascinating and sitting here in 2021. And I've been kind of embedding myself and trying to learn about nutrition and health. And we have some mutual friends and people we follow. And it's just amazing to me that I've never come across that.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Yeah. Yeah. How wild. Any other insights that you gleaned from your trip? Yeah, for sure. The other big one was to combine the macronutrients. If you just eat a complex carb or a simple carb by itself, as opposed to eating it alongside fat and protein, so this idea of a well-rounded plate, that made a huge difference as well. One night in particular, it was a fun game too, having this thing on my arm, by the way. So one night I went and I had a business dinner at Hearth. I approached it with this idea of like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to eat everything and I'm going to eat a lot of it, right? So I went kind of nuts and I just ate all the things like garlic breads and wine and cocktails and desserts. I probably consumed

Starting point is 00:51:47 3000 calories, right? And I was like, I want to see if I could make my levels like blow up, you know, my levels that blow up. And the astounding thing was, because it was a lot of fiber and a lot of protein and a lot of fat, in addition to all the bad simple carbs, and sugars, and wines, and all that, I didn't spike that high. And I think it's because having fiber, and having fat, and having protein alongside these bad players of simple carbs and sugar helps mitigate that spike. Did you exercise earlier in the day by any chance? Do you know? I'm a exercise first thing kind of guy.

Starting point is 00:52:30 Yep. Although my lifestyle is active because I live in New York. I'm always on my feet and I'm walking a lot. That must play into things as well. Fascinating. Yeah. It was. I loved having that thing on my arm arm i kind of want to do it again

Starting point is 00:52:46 there's so much cool testing and learning you can do yeah you can do some cool stuff i'm gonna do another cgm experiment soon because the last time i did a continuous glucose monitor experiment was in 2008 or 9 for the four-hour body with the version one Dexcom, which you had to implant in your abdomen, which I had to, I had to basically get off the back of a truck, meaning through gray area means, because it was only intended for type one diabetics and you couldn't get it

Starting point is 00:53:20 otherwise. And there was an external screen slash device that you would hang on your belt like a beeper. There was no iPhone. And it was very much Gen 1. And it'll be much more interesting to do now with the vastly improved technology. And I'm so curious to see

Starting point is 00:53:46 my takeaways because the tools are just so much better. And I have more tools, right? Because I have the aura ring, which I wear for sleep. I have eight sleep, which I use to cool my bed typically. And I noticed something just in this last week and I was like, wow, that's really wild. I still need to replicate it. But A, I've noticed, and I knew this already, but that the most obvious takeaway from the aura ring is if you drink certain types of booze past a certain point, your sleep is just garbage. It's so clear, especially deep sleep. However, what I noticed when looking at my recovery and sleep scores on the Aura as an experiment recently, I had two large glasses of wine, rosé in this case. And that is usually enough to completely destroy my sleep. But what I decided to do was to decrease the temperature of my bed more than usual, to turn down the temperature. Because one of the symptoms of drinking too much alcohol is my resting body temperature goes up at night. So I did that.

Starting point is 00:54:57 For those who haven't ate sleep, I went from like a negative three in the beginning to a negative four. And that would usually kind of ascend up to waking. So I lowered it, let's just call it 33% or an additional kind of 33%. And what I found was I woke up feeling much more refreshed and my numbers on the aura ring look totally different. So I need to replicate it, but it's super interesting as a hypothesis to be like, okay, if I suppress some of the symptoms of alcohol consumption, some of the symptoms would include lower heart rate variability, right? So normally I'd be like 33 to 40, I guess it's milliseconds. MS is the sort of increment. Not sure actually what the unit is, but so the 33 to 40 on the Oura Ring, if I drink, it drops down to like low to mid 20s.

Starting point is 00:55:56 So that would be one symptom. Another symptom would be the higher temperature, higher resting heart rate. And it's hard to know if all of these symptoms happen simultaneously or if some of those phenomena cause the others. So for instance, does the elevated temperature then result in the lower heart rate variability? At the very least, I mean, it's kind of an interesting idea because I don't drink a lot these days because I feel it much more as I've grown older, but I enjoy it. I'm not going to lie. I know it it's kind of an interesting idea because I don't drink a lot these days because I feel it much more as I've grown older, but I enjoy it. I'm not going to lie. I know it's very out of vogue and it's like, you know, all the hip kids are like, oh, I just do ketamine.

Starting point is 00:56:34 I'm like, well, I don't know. And, you know, maybe a time and a place, but I still like my wine with friends. You know, I don't want to be a truffle pig snorting ketamine at the dinner table so the idea that you have these tools and if you're able to form a hypothesis and then try to replicate it which is super important right because it's easy to fool yourself yeah super exciting and like the take a walk after you eat, right? Because I could look at, okay, because I have noticed that like if I'm going to drink, if I give my body four or five hours to metabolize before I go to bed, my sleep is much improved, right?

Starting point is 00:57:13 So if I'm going to have three glasses of wine, if I have it at an early dinner at 530, I am going to be much better off all my markers than if I have it at an eight o'clock dinner. So then there's a question of like, well, what happens if I still have the eight o'clock dinner, but then I go for, let's say I make it, could be a 10 minute walk, but it could be like a 30 minute walk, right? See how that affects things. And it's super tricky because like you're sort of an amateur. Obviously we're all amateur if we're doing it this way, scientists in a sense, and there are a million variables, but you can start to play with these things. Absolutely. One of the other things I noticed that I found intriguing was this idea of metabolizing alcohol. And every time I drank, I would see a blood sugar spike that would come at

Starting point is 00:58:02 like 3.30 in the morning. Yeah. You hear about the fact that it takes a while for your liver to metabolize liquor. And the reason why you wake up, you spoke about overheating and stuff, but it's also because that's when your liver finally metabolizes it and you have a blood sugar spike. Yeah. And it happens like five hours later. Yeah. it and you have a blood sugar spike. And it happens like five hours later. All kinds of cool stuff around that Levels app or any CGM app. And yeah, I'm dying to do it again. And funny,

Starting point is 00:58:33 I know that you're into sauna. I actually bought a barrel sauna after I saw yours in Austin. I had to figure out a way to not stop my sauna. So I had a huge wool felt thing that I would put over my sensor and then I would wrap it with string so that I would protect the sensor because it doesn't like 208 degrees. So you put like a Russian banya wool hat on your arm. That's exactly what it was. Yeah. And then I wrapped it. That's pretty gangster.

Starting point is 00:59:12 You looked like some kind of, I don't know. Yeah, badass. Yeah, badass, like warrior from Last of the Mohicans or something. That's amazing. Great book, by the way. I've recently read, but very dated for those people who are sensitive to such things, but beautifully written. Let's jump into some nutrition stuff. And this is going to be a segue into talking about Broto, which I want to ask you about. So one thing we chatted about in your kitchen when we were bullshitting over tea and waiting for the oven to heat up was, I think you actually brought it up,

Starting point is 00:59:49 this book, Metabolical, and a quote, which it's not what's in the food, it's what's been done to the food. And I think the example you gave was some snack food made out of chickpeas. And I would love for you to sort of replay or just speak to that because it highlights something that's super, super important that I also need to think more about, honestly, which is that the ingredient panels and nutrition facts panels are just not enough if you're trying to assess the health value of your food. So could you speak to that? And maybe you could just use an example. This has been on my mind for a while, especially since I've been trying to build and grow the broth business.

Starting point is 01:00:32 Because the more I learned about the consumer packaged goods space, the more this came obvious. And chickpeas are a good example because through the years, I've spoken to a lot of people trying to commercialize a packaged food product. And the perfect metaphor is hummus because you could read an ingredient

Starting point is 01:00:52 panel and it could say organic chickpeas and organic lemon juice and organic whatever, whatever. And it has all the buttons and the nutritional facts panels has what it has, but there's no way of a consumer to know whether the person who made that hummus boiled beans or just got powdered chickpea and added water. There's no transparency around process in so much of the foods that we consume. Another easy one is seed oils, right? It's like the process you have to put rapeseed through to get the oil out. It's like they're washing it with chemicals, hexane, and then they're putting it through a high heat process that oxidizes the fat. And what comes out the other end is an oil that has residue of chemicals and that has been oxidized

Starting point is 01:01:45 by the heat. Where do you know that as a consumer? If you're in the aisle reading the back label of the organic canola oil or the organic chickpea that has all the right buttons and all the right marketing on it, that's what's been driving me for six years. I want to get a traditionally made broth out to the masses. And that's really hard to do. The food system we live in today, there's a lot of room for improvement. And it's going to be a long, hard battle. But it's like, I'm not afraid of long, hard anything. So it's like, I'm willing to go after it. To put it in a little bullet, it's like, there is no transparency around the process. And that's a big problem as we navigate the food world.

Starting point is 01:02:47 To build on that, there are cases where you can sort of deduce that A does not equal A in quotation marks in the sense that if you buy hummus from the farmer's market with a certain set of ingredients and then you go to the sort of hipster grocery store and you find chickpea crisps that are completely different texture, completely different form factor, are shelf stable for 175 years. Not to say that's true for all crisps. I'm just making up an arbitrary example. You can safely assume that something has been done to the ingredients that was not done at the farmer's market. And it's just unclear what has been done. But there has been some level of manipulation for it to take a different form. That's just unclear what has been done, but there has been some level of manipulation for it to take a different form. That's just how it has to be. Now in notes here,

Starting point is 01:03:33 I wasn't aware of this, but apparently there's a NOVA classification. Do you want to describe what this is? The NOVA classification system developed by researchers at University of Sao Paulo? Yeah. And I'd like to believe that this is the future for us as well, because I think consumers, we're getting smarter and smarter, and we're caring more and more about the things that really drive health. And I think it's unquestionable that the choices we make daily about what we eat and drink is the biggest driver of health. I'd like to believe there will be a time where the big food companies will have to be more transparent around the process. And the Nova system is happening in South America. And it basically sets four categories of ultra-processed, processed, I can't remember the other two names, but basically it provides

Starting point is 01:04:27 a framework to define what foods are ultra-processed as opposed to processed, as opposed to culinary ingredients that are minimally processed. Yeah, it looks like, so to summarize, that the NOVA classification system, is developed in brazil by researchers separates out food into four groups based on the level of processing so the first level is unprocessed the second is processed culinary ingredients right do you say culinary or culinary what do you say i say culinary god damn it all right so processed culinary ingredients the third is processed and then the fourth is ultra processed right and yeah this is so important and there are you know a lot of questions that unfortunately seem to add a lot of complexity to the lives of end consumers,

Starting point is 01:05:29 right? Because they're like, good God, can't I just know that a fucking banana is a banana, for God's sake? But there are certain questions that I think are worth asking, right? How processed, if you had to put it, I don't actually, I'm not totally clear on unprocessed and then processed culinary ingredients versus processed. Maybe you can tell me what the difference is between processed culinary ingredients and processed. I don't know. Do you have any idea what that means? Culinary ingredients are things that you would find in a kitchen pantry as opposed to a food scientist pantry in a food manufacturing plant. When I cook at home, I don't have a pantry full of emulsifiers or stabilizers. This notion of culinary ingredients

Starting point is 01:06:12 is the things that you would imagine, spices and herbs and dried tomato and flour, things like that. Yeah. Got it, okay. There's a lot of ambiguity around a word like processed, right? Yeah, for sure. Because everything is somewhat processed. And I think that's what Nova's trying to parse that a bit. Yeah, to define it. Right. Well, it's just like,

Starting point is 01:06:33 people say our food is all natural. It's like, okay, let's take a look at what that means. Right. And I'm by no means an expert in the Nova system. I wanted to bring it up because I believe it's where we're going in the space and I believe it's needed. And I haven't really vetted or done a lot of reading around Nova, but I like it conceptually because it's a huge gap. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean i think the the processing question is a huge blind spot yeah for people another blind spot which we don't have to dwell on but it's something i think about a lot is thinking about what you eat ate if that makes any sense so people say you know like you are what you eat and it's like well you got to go a step further like the food you are what you eat. And it's like, well, you got to go a step further. Like the food that you are eating, what nourished that, right?

Starting point is 01:07:30 Because if you're like, hey, I'm eating fish and that is so much healthier than beef, you got to double click on that and take a look. Because if it's some like really disgusting industrial level farming operation where they're just dumping food and antibiotics and so on into the water, they've basically taken the worst practices of terrestrial agriculture and just poured it into the water. So you have to look a lot. And then if you compare that to just say grass-fed, grass finished beef, putting aside environmental concerns for the moment, because I think both can be degrading. But if we're just looking at individual health, those are very different from, say, industrial-level cattle farming versus

Starting point is 01:08:20 different source of salmon, right? And by the way, this isn't just limited to animals. It's also true of plant matter. So yeah, fertilizers and like how much, yeah, the nutrient density of the soil that the vegetables were grown in. Yeah, exactly right. I mean, are we dealing with like a few inches of topsoil with like tons of fertilizer poured on top of it? Or are we talking about something else?

Starting point is 01:08:46 I happen to be fascinated by this stuff, so I don't mind digging into it. But it's really unfortunate that it's so complex in part because there's so many incentives to hide this kind of shit. You know what I mean? Exactly. There's so many incentives because if a company can get you something bigger, faster, cheaper, and leave the details off of the packaging, of course, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to take that. Let's talk about Brodo. So you, unlike many restaurants, you were open throughout the entire pandemic, is my understanding. And I didn't know that until we just recently spent time together. It's kind of afraid to ask, honestly, because of so many horror stories that I've heard.

Starting point is 01:09:30 And love you, love the restaurant. And I'm ashamed of that. So I'm sorry that I didn't ask. But I was just like, oh, God, I can only imagine how hard it must be. And I was afraid to ask. But the fact of the matter is, you kept the Brodo window open. You sold frozen foods. You also, I don't want to say liquidated, maybe you did, but you realized that you had all of this valuable inventory of wine and so sold wine. And you were able to kind of figure it out.

Starting point is 01:10:00 So I think that's, it's just incredible and inspiring. I don't know if you'd like to add anything to that. I just wanted to sort of preface the discussion of Brodo with that. That is sort of a great metaphor in a way also. That window ended up being like the portal and the lifeline. Yeah. It's what allowed us to stay open because we were mandated by the city that if you were a sit-down restaurant, you couldn't stay open if you wanted. You had to close. And that's what Hearth was. And it was the fact that I had a Broto window selling these hot cups of broth out of a little window. It was like a little lifeline that allowed the entire restaurant to kind of stay open.

Starting point is 01:10:43 COVID, as hard as it was, Tim, it was an incredible 16, 18, I mean, we're still in it, but it was an incredible time for the restaurant and the team, the small group of us that came together to keep that place alive. It was like everybody thought outside of the box. Everybody did things and learned things that they didn't know before. And the fact that we all came together and did all of these fun, creative things to stay relevant and to find some revenue, we all thrived on it. As hard as it was, it was like it really engaged us all in a way that we hadn't been after, because the restaurant's 17 years old. So it was like a really nice swift kick in the ass that got us thinking in a way that we wouldn't have, because as you know, something that's 16 years old, you're like kind of, you're in the groove,

Starting point is 01:11:35 you know? And then COVID came and turned everything upside down and it was kind of thrilling. Well, long and hard. You're not afraid of long and hard. Yeah. You're surfing. You're very accustomed to surfing, paddling out and surfing 100-foot waves, which is just wild. And why don't we take a step back, and I would love for you to tell the story of how Brodo came to be. And Brodo has turned into one of those things I look forward to when I visit New York City. And I remember some very early, super early taste tests where I had like... Just FYI, you're one of the first people I called when I realized that the launch of the Broto window out of the side door of Hearth, I got a sense after about two months that I was onto

Starting point is 01:12:35 something. And I poked at you, I don't know, seeking advice or something. And I think you said something to the effect of like, well, Marco, it's more about you needing to ask yourself what you want, which I thought was great advice. But you've kind of been part of this since the beginning. You were at our first shop in the West Village. I hosted you and that's when I gave you the full broth tasting of that whole world of hot beverages around broth. So yeah, you've been right there alongside me and I really appreciate that. It's been fun to see its evolution. I mean, I think that on one level, the experiment with

Starting point is 01:13:20 the window is a beautiful case study of low-risk entrepreneurial experimentation. It's not like you found another retail shop. It's not like you pushed all your chips in on broth. You're like, hey, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're like, what can we do with these amazing ingredients that we already have i understand broth we have this location open a window see how it does and you're like you know if we cover our costs or maybe make a little bit of money we're in great shape so the downside risk is super low and you got to test it right you got to test it and uh and then develop it and kind of start with the basics but with really really good

Starting point is 01:14:05 ingredients again like for people listening i think of the gnocchi there's yes okay flour and potato okay anybody can go out and get flour potato but many different types of flour process many different types of potatoes many different types of preparation and then when we did the taste test in the West Village, I still remember that because I love bone broth. And even I got to a point where I was like, maybe I need to slow down on today's intake of bone broth because I had like a gallon of bone broth. And it was amazing. I couldn't stop myself. But what were the flavors that we tested that day? Do you remember? We had Tom Ka,

Starting point is 01:14:46 that was one. I forced the entire menu down your gullet. So the top five are the deeply rooted, which is fresh turmeric and ginger. We have four different broths. So I probably gave you these combos in a variety of different base broths. But definitely you got the deeply rooted. You got the spicy Nona, which is some Calabrian chili and roasted garlic puree buzzed in the Tom yum, which is coconut and lime and chili and a little bit of curry powder. You definitely got that. You got my favorite one,

Starting point is 01:15:21 which is the Oishi Oishi, which you know better than I do what that means, but that's tasty, right? Oishi oishi. Yeah, oishi oishi, yeah. Oishi. And that is a little bit of shiitake tea and grass-fed butter and garlic buzzed into broth. You had them all. I probably made you at the time what I called the flu fighter, because I'm a bit obsessed with mortar and pestles. And the flu fighter is basically fresh ginger, fresh turmeric, peppercorns, some fresh oregano, all pounded to a paste. And then I add a little grass-fed butter, pound it into the butter.

Starting point is 01:15:59 And then you take that mixture and you burr mix it into really hot broth. Also some chili in there for heat and a big squeeze of lemon. But anyway, it's an incredibly restorative beverage, that Flu Fighter. And just broth in general. The thing about Brodo for me, Tim, is it's the perfect distillation of the simplicity that I've been seeking my whole life. And I felt like Brodo is the perfect thing to try to bring to the masses because it really, in a way, is like the simplicity I've been grasping for throughout my whole career. So to that point, and I'm excited about this,

Starting point is 01:16:46 obviously I got a preview when we were making the gnocchi or before we started making the gnocchi. Let's have more coffee. I got to see a preview because you can't serve the world through a window in New York City. So what is the latest and greatest? I know this is sort of a big, big step. So what is going on with Brodo? Well, Brodo is what they call right now,

Starting point is 01:17:20 much to the chagrin of many people I get in front of as I try to raise money, but we're an omni-channel business. So we have shops that I really love and I'm really proud of. COVID kind of pressed pause on the shops for a bit, but I do believe that we could have a shop for every 50 Starbucks in the world because broth as a hot beverage is incredible. There's a lot to it and I would put it up against coffee any day of the week. So I'm very excited at pursuing shops. That's one piece of our business. And then the other part of the business, which I think what you're alluding to is our new product launch that we're really excited about, which is we finally figured out a way to get these shop drinks, i.e. the Deeply Rooted, the Spicy Nona, the Tuscan Sun, Tom Yum, et cetera, into a single serve format,

Starting point is 01:18:08 full strength in frozen. You're going to be able to get eight ounces of these combo drinks that we've been serving in New York City on the shelves of 456 Whole Foods. And it's been a beast to get into Whole Foods and get the manufacturing and, and, and, and I won't bore people with that stuff unless you want more. Anyway, we finally, after six years, are getting these combo broth beverages out into the world in a real way. And we're super stoked. Yeah, I saw the packaging, which is gorgeous. And what can people find on Broto.com currently? So if they're more inclined to go to a website, what are their options on Broto.com? Well, at the moment of this recording, we have 22-ounce tubs of four base broths. And we have a grass-fed beef broth. We have a chicken broth. We have a vegan shiitake and seaweed broth. And then we have

Starting point is 01:19:16 my favorite, which is what I call hearth broth. And that's made with turkey, beef, and chicken. It's like a combo broth. So up until now, that's what we've been... We've been selling those four SKUs on brodo.com. But hopefully by the time this drops to the world, we've been working on our website and we're going to have the new format, which is the eight ounce single serve available in these super flavorful combo drinks. And when you get the single serve, how many single serves are in a case or a box? Yeah, we do eight to a box, but in grocery, you'll be able to buy them individually.

Starting point is 01:19:54 Nice. Yeah. Let me ask a couple of those closing questions and see where we go. I'll start with one that I know you've heard before, which is the billboard question. So if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a quote, comment, question, image, anything out to billions of people, what might that be? I think it would be cook your own food. I think our obsession with convenience

Starting point is 01:20:26 and our belief that we could outsource something as important as cooking has been one of the main drivers in the ill health of this country. Cook your own food. Yep. Dig it. Next question, which is most or frequently given books.

Starting point is 01:20:45 So what books have you gifted often to other people besides your own? You know, at work every year, I kind of give my line cooks and my management team books as gifts around the holidays. So, you know, This is Water by David Foster Wallace is one I commonly give because it's just, it's so short and the message is so perfect in my opinion. So I've given that a lot. And then for cookbooks, I got to say the Marcella Hazan Essentials is just, I adore that woman. I adore her simple approach. It is like she's the OG of like Italian grandma cooking. So those are the two books.

Starting point is 01:21:28 Yeah, Marcella Hazan. I remember Roasted Chicken. I think she has. I mean, she has got a lot, obviously. Oh my God, a ton. Yeah, I remember just being so impressed with her Roasted Chicken. Especially for young cooks that come through my kitchen. It's just like, I always ask them, I'm like, do you have this book? And if they say no, then I get them that book. Favorite failures. Any favorite failures come to mind? Things that set you up for later success or that you wouldn't trade in?

Starting point is 01:22:02 Favorites is a tough way to frame it, but the failure of my... When I opened Hearth in 2003, I had a partner, a business partner, and at year 10, that thing got dissolved. So I would say that first business partnership failure, I don't know if I would call it a favorite thing. It wasn't a fun process, but it was a very valuable one.

Starting point is 01:22:26 What did you take away from that? What did you learn from that? Just to do a little bit more inquiry and vetting around common. We were so caught up in the romantic vision and dream of what it would mean to open our own restaurant, that we forgot to step back and do some work around defining things that we should have. It got in the way and it ended poorly, but now I know better. So what more can you ask for from learning? When you said define things, certain things that weren't defined, are there certain things that you would encourage people to define that you didn't that they could consider if they're looking at a potential partnership? One of the pet peeves I had, like a minor thing, but I think I'll mention it just for the hell of it, is my partner was obsessed with Riesling wine

Starting point is 01:23:20 and I was obsessed with simple Italian cooking. And so my food and his wine didn't really go well together because he was obsessed with Riesling and I wanted assy Chianti's on the menu. And it sounds minor, right? But that's the thing to learn about these kinds of partnerships, whether it's romantic partnerships or business partnerships. Don't underestimate those little minor nags because over time they become big things. Yeah. That's super, super important. Well, Mr. Marco, I think we are coming to a close. We're not going to talk about our sauna?

Starting point is 01:23:59 We could talk about sauna. We could talk about- I'm kidding. We could. What have you learned about your your your sauna experiments what have you what is your best practices now and why because you go you you are a hard charger when it comes to saunas i mean i do sauna as well i just did one yesterday i'm impressed by how much of a hard charger you are i'm super obsessed with sauna lately. I love this idea of pushing the boundaries of what you think you're capable of. And hot and cold is a great way to do that. And I think it just builds mental capacity to deal with hardship. And I feel like being resilient is something that I love the idea that I could do something that helps me practice resilience. And maybe some people get that through exercise or whatever,

Starting point is 01:24:54 but the fact that I could sit in my sauna at 210 degrees for 20 minutes is like something that I get excited about. And then plunging into 48-degree water after that and sitting in that water for four minutes, it's just a good mindfuck of a game. And I've been obsessed with it lately. And what do I get out of it other than the mental exercise of overcoming the cold and the hot? I don't know this because I don't have an aura ring, but it really helps my sleep. And it really helps me calm down at the end of a stressful day. What time do you usually do the hot cold? I usually do it after an early dinner.

Starting point is 01:25:38 Yeah. Too late and it's tough. Too late and it's tough. But exactly. On the earlier side, i usually do it before dinner but i'm uh i've tossed my cookies from too much heat before but so number one for everyone listening we're not giving medical advice these are two wackadoodle guys talking about what they do so get proper medical clearance before you do any extremes in hot or cold. However, I will note, just for people who can't put it in context, those are hot and

Starting point is 01:26:10 cold temperatures. Also, I have a cold plunge about 100 feet from where I'm sitting, which is just a- How cold does it get? I'm not really sure. I mean, it's a chest freezer full of water and ice that is unplugged. It's unplugged at the moment. My guess is that it's mid to- High 30s. Yeah, high 30s, low 40s. And I will say to anyone wondering, at least in my experience and the

Starting point is 01:26:34 experience of many friends on the cold side, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, Marco, but there isn't a linear incremental perception to cold. In other words, it's not like going from 65 to 55 is the same as going from 55 to 45. Once you get into the forties, it is a different game. It is so like the perception of cold is so different. And just be aware of that before you get in.

Starting point is 01:27:09 It is chilly. And I'm a fan. I'm also a fan of both. And I know that you like pushing. You like pushing the edges. And you like preserving the essence, right? I mean, I think that from my exposure to you, like one thing you're not a fan of

Starting point is 01:27:26 is faddish new ingredients or the quest for kind of magic bullet, PT Barnum components of food, but you are all about experimentation with whole food ingredients. I mean, I see you conducting experiments constantly, right? So it's not as though you're saying like, hey, this is the way spaghetti is made. This is the only way spaghetti should ever be made.

Starting point is 01:27:54 You're constantly running experiments, but it's with the integrity of whole food as the base of your elements that you are allowing yourself to work with, which I admire because I think the conceit that we would possibly understand everything that is going on multifactorially when you eat foods in combinations is just, at this point, given our technology and ability to assess these things, pretty ridiculous. Yeah, we need some humility around that for sure. I mean, it's like there's so much we don't know in that space. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Tim.

Starting point is 01:28:31 We're learning every day and we all have to acknowledge that there's a lot left to learn, right? And one of the reasons why I love Peter Attia is because he really, that's like a fundamental point that he launches off of, is this idea of, I might believe this today, but I might not believe it next week. We all need to get comfortable with that. Yeah, for sure. It makes me think of this story, coming back to that Chinese proverb, right?

Starting point is 01:28:57 And how much, and who knows, very easily could just be coincidence. And maybe it's just some bored Chinese guy came up with a saying that rhymed really nicely. But it does coincide very well with your experience as validated through the latest and greatest continuous glucose monitor. A few thousand years separated. That's interesting. At least it raises questions like, is that just chance? Or have humans figured out a lot by trial and error?

Starting point is 01:29:31 And in fact, even our primate predecessors figured out because we're not the only animals who use, say, plants as medicine. And I was reading this book recently called Medicine Quest by an ethnobotanist named Mark Plotkin. And I'm hoping to excerpt some of it on the blog because there are a few chapters that are really just incredible. He tells this story of a number of supposedly ethnobotanists who might have actually been at a research institution. They weren't doing this for commercial development, but there was some type of concoction that a medicine man, in this case, some type of healer, which is much more than psychedelics and psychotropics, which bothers me when the assumption is like all these people do is dose people with hallucinogens. And they're basically

Starting point is 01:30:19 pharmacists who use the, in this case, the jungle to treat ailments of all different types, including fungal infections, parasites, et cetera. And if I remember correctly, these researchers were able to observe with glucose measurements that this concoction, which included three plants, reliably lowered blood glucose in type 2 diabetics. And they'd never seen these plants, never ID'd this type of concoction. And they asked this medicine man which plants he used. And he said, no problem. You're welcome to take them back and analyze them. He gave them these three plants. They took them back. They looked for what could be active molecules, ran all sorts of tests on these three plants. Negative, negative, negative, nothing. All three together, negative.

Starting point is 01:31:16 And then they went back because they discarded one step and they forgot they discarded one step. And they're like, we need to watch you prepare this. Oh, they said, your concoction doesn't work. And he goes, what do you mean my concoction doesn't work? You measured the results in patients taking it. How do you conclude it doesn't work? And they go, well, we tested them all separately. We need to watch you make it again. And so they're watching him make it. He's doing what he's doing with the three plants. And then at the very end, he drops a crab in. And they're like, what was that? And he's like, it's the crab. And they go, what? And they go,

Starting point is 01:31:57 we asked you what was in your concoction. He goes, no, you didn't. You asked me which plants were in my concoction. And for some bizarre reason, it's It's like plant, plant, plant, crab, and all of it together. Somehow that was figured out to have this effect. Now, putting aside, this is not randomized controlled trials. I understand that. Could a huge part of it be placebo effect? Maybe. Could it be contextual based on the culture? Yes.

Starting point is 01:32:25 But there's so many phenomena that we cannot explain at this point in time. It's just the pinnacle of hubris to think that we have a full understanding of food. When we've demonstrated throughout our history, including recent history, how piss poor we are at deconstructing these things. So that's, I'll get off my soapbox, but I really- Dude, I couldn't, thank you for saying that because I couldn't have said it better myself. And it's like, it's so at the core. It's really at the core of my belief system too. And I look

Starting point is 01:32:57 backwards to help guide my nutritional path forward because I believe that as well. The best trial is looking through the history of man, not the current state of research science in this world because it's like a mess. Yeah. And you can look at both, but make sure to look at both. I mean, there's another story. I think this was actually told to me. If you don't mind, I'm now on a roll just because I get so spun up about this stuff. Yes, there's a lot of superstition and bullshit, to me if you don't mind i'm now i'm like on a roll just because i get so i love i mean i love i get so spun up about this stuff there's yes there's a lot of superstition and bullshit there's a lot of nonsense and dross that humankind has accumulated yes and right now like the scientific method is the best way we have consistently of asking questions of nature and trying to sort answers out without fooling

Starting point is 01:33:46 ourselves. I mean, I fund a lot of science, so I believe that. But a lot of that funding is bogus. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Tim, because you're on a thing. But it's worth noting that it's important to follow the money of the funding. And one of the things I respect and admire about you and the things that you fund and Peter Attia and the way he goes through world and life around research is you have to ask those really hard questions. You read the studies, but it's hard to follow and analyze and understand who did the studies and where the money's coming from. And it's a big red flag a lot of times. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:28 And so 100% agree with that. And for-profit companies will establish foundations and institutes and all sorts of weird stuff to hide sources of funding for sponsored research or studies. Yes, there's a lot of bad behavior, right? You'll have people fund 20 studies and 18 of them will say, this stuff is terrible for you. Two will say it's good for you. They'll be like, great. We'll take those two. Thanks very much. There's a lot of bad behavior. You should always look at the conflicts of interest sections and so on. With all of those

Starting point is 01:34:57 warts, science and the scientific method is still very important. However, we assume we know more than we do. This is true of humans for as long as we've called ourselves humans. And one story that I remember a friend told me, who did a lot of work in, I believe it was South America, but it may have been Africa. And he said, we went with this NGO to help this local group, and they had really low yield, well, like moderate yield on a crop and they always put it way up on the hillside. And we asked them why they put it way up on the hillside. I'm paraphrasing this, but it's something like this. And they said, well, that's because that's the way our grandparents did it. And then why did they do it that way? Well, that's the way their grandparents did it. And so these bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 20 and 30-somethings in this NGO were like, oh, well,

Starting point is 01:35:50 we have some news for you. You'd have much better yield if you did it down in the valley and did it this way and that way based on modern agriculture and what we know about A, B, C, D, and E. And let us show you how this is done. These villagers were like, fantastic, we'll try it. And so they put them all down in the valley. First winter storm, so it must have been more central, maybe, probably not Africa, or it was at altitude, I think. And there was this frost that came through and wiped out everything in the valley. And they're like, yep, turns out you shouldn't plant shit there. So don't assume the past is the path forward, but I think it is safe to assume that hidden amongst the false positives and false negatives, there's also a lot of signal in the past.

Starting point is 01:36:39 And that's been made clear in my adventures and conversations with you, that's been made also super clear in reading about and experiencing firsthand a lot of the traditions in Italy, which is it's a great cuisine to study because there is complexity or there are nuances, right? But you're not dealing with dishes, at least in the central and south, that have 27 ingredients, generally. You're able to actually look at the variables, and it's so much fun. Well, we could go for hours. I'm getting all spun up. So I'm going to try to land this plane. So Marco, people can go and should go to brodo.com, B-R-O-D-O.com. I recommend everyone try it. They can find the restaurant at restaurantharth.com, certainly in New York City. If you're in NYC, give a visit. They can find you on Instagram

Starting point is 01:37:37 at Marco Canora. That's M-A-R-C-O-C-A-N-O-R-A. Is there anything else you would like to say? Any closing comments, requests of the audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap this up? Well, two things, and I'll be quick because we've been going on and on. But one is I want to just thank you for the incredible work that you do. And I found you many years ago, and I've been following you ever since. And you're incredibly generous and so thoughtful in your work. I am one of many who really, really appreciates it. So I want to say thank you to you. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:38:16 Yeah. And then, no, again, I just want to put a point on the cooking thing. It's like cooking is an incredible process that engages all of your senses, that gives you a high reward from health to flavor, to community, to connectivity, to other people. It's really a path to so many of the things that I think we need to be better humans. So I just want to encourage anybody who's fearful of cooking or is like, I don't know if I want to do it or not. Please, please do it and you will grow to love it and it will reward you forever. Here, here, brother. As you're saying that, I'm like, I need to go thaw out some venison, go to the farmer's stand, get some food'm gonna cook dinner i'm gonna cook i'm gonna cook dinner

Starting point is 01:39:05 on sunday night i'm so fired up it's fucking great man uh marco you're a mensch i look forward to spending more time together it's so nice to see you and you too and everybody i can't wait to visit you up in uh wherever the hell you are yeah Yeah. Wherever I will be, wherever I am, for sure. Can't wait. And keep going, man. Keep going. And I recommend everybody check out again, brodo.com, B-R-O-D-O dot com. Check it out. Do a taste

Starting point is 01:39:36 test. You'll thank me later. And to everybody listening, we'll have show notes, links to everything, as per usual at tim.blog slash podcast and until next time thank you for tuning in and now we bring to you the affair of the oven that wasn't on other mysteries and how to make delicious gnocchi enjoy let's talk about the affair of the oven that wasn't on.

Starting point is 01:40:09 You're jumping ahead. I love it. I'm jumping ahead. I'm jumping back. We're going to go all over the place. I love it. I sent you a voice memo not too, too long ago. I mean, this is a few months ago. And it was a question about Gnocchi, G-N-O-C-C-H-I for people who don't know the spelling. And we should probably describe what Gnocchi are for people who don't know. But the reason I sent you a voice memo is I was trying to think up a birthday gift for my girlfriend. My girlfriend is half Italian, and she and her mom have been trying to recreate

Starting point is 01:40:49 this family recipe for gnocchi for a decade, or something like this, maybe more. And there was always something missing, or something they weren't getting right, because the gnocchi would just not turn out. And so I asked you if you might know how to make gnocchi. And if so, if you would be open to it. Now I said it, I mean, I wasn't quite that stupid about it,

Starting point is 01:41:12 but I asked you if you might be open to teaching my girlfriend and her mom via Zoom how to make gnocchi properly. And I really wish I had that voice memo, your response to put into this podcast. It was great. But it was basically like, yes, I have made 10,000 plus rounds of gnocchi and it's been featured in these following outlets and actually quite famous for the gnocchi. And so, yes, I do know how to make gnocchi. And then you very graciously offered to teach. And so I think the gnocchi is a great jumping off point because it offers some fertile ground for, I think, a pretty hilarious story. And it also shows how simplicity and elegance can be the

Starting point is 01:42:08 byproduct of trial and error, if that makes any sense. Absolutely. So before we get into the stories and the affair of the oven that was not on, what are gnocchi, just so people know what we're talking about? It's a potato dumpling. It's like a version of pasta, if you will, but it's made with potato. And some people use egg, I don't. What I'm really proud of about my approach is there's only two ingredients, and that is potato and flour. Okay. So just so we don't kind of bury the punchline here.

Starting point is 01:42:42 Yeah. What are some of the keys, either the keys to making gnocchi that are delicious and fluffy and amazing, like the ones that we made, and by we, I mean 90% you, but we participated, or what are the common mistakes? If you could just kind of walk us through maybe a few of the things that make great gnocchi great and why so many gnocchi are not great. Gnocchi has a bad reputation of being super heavy. So you eat them and they end up being gummy and they're like lead in your belly. And that's the biggest complaint I hear most about a lot of gnocchi out in the world. So getting them to be very light and airy is something

Starting point is 01:43:25 anybody making gnocchi should try to get to. And then the flavor of the potato should come through, and that means not adding too much stuff to it. I mean, I think a lot of home chefs and even professional chefs, they always try to infuse other things in the sweet potato gnocchi or butternut squash gnocchi. And it's, again, back to this simplicity idea. It's no, gnocchi are made with potato. Sorry. I think keeping it simple and keeping it light is the goal. And some of the pitfalls is people add a lot of egg.

Starting point is 01:43:58 And I don't think egg is necessary. I mean, as an amateur, you might want to add egg because it'll protect you a bit and keep it together, but you're making a dough and that dough should not be overworked because you're using flour. You got to think of it like a pie crust or a biscuit crust, and you don't want to work the gluten too much or else they become what I said, which is sticky and dense. So there were a few things that hopped out at me. And there are many things that are kind of counterintuitive, right? So one of the first was, don't get your sort of hipster $10 a potato potatoes that are as fresh as possible. That

Starting point is 01:44:40 is a mistake, right? And in fact, you kind of want the opposite. So I'd love to hear you speak to why that's the case. And then I want to clarify, and please fact check me, one thing that you said, which was related to, I think I would imagine a common error, which is people are kneading with their hands, kneading with a K, the flour into the potato. But by doing so, you're kind of creating this elastic, gummy, glutinous response, right? And instead, what I saw you do, and we did some of this too, is to use a pie scraper to kind of chop the flour into the potato, right? Which is very counterintuitive for someone who has not made gnocchi before. So first, what types of potatoes are the ideal

Starting point is 01:45:36 potatoes to use and why? I like a classic Idaho potato because there's a high starch content and you can cook the water out of them and then there's less moisture. So then you end up with a dough that has less flour and then ultimately a dough that ends up being lighter on the palate. And should they be, you like older potatoes? I often point to fresh peas. I don't know if you've ever gotten fresh peas that are in a pod. The thing about peas is you want to pick them and you want to keep ice on them so that they keep their sugar because that's a sweet pea. But when a pea loses its sugar, the pea goes to starch. And that process happens with a lot of vegetables. And with an Idaho potato, you don't want a fresh potato because it's holding onto the sugar and it's the starch

Starting point is 01:46:26 that's going to help you create a lighter dough. We used to literally buy cases of potatoes and put them in the cellar and let them, I mean, we kind of aged the potatoes, if you will, because we found that a potato that's kind of aged, that almost is starting to sprout, ends up being less water and less sugar and more starch. And that always lent itself to a better gnocchi. And just, you know, I know you always reference things in the show notes. I was on the Dave Chang show and we talked, you know, we talked about gnocchi quite a bit on that show because he was at Kraft when I was doing all of these things. Two old dogs talking about kitchen stories, but we went on and on about the Gnocchi on that podcast

Starting point is 01:47:11 if anybody wants to hear more about the origins. And you came to this, it sounds like largely through trial and error. And part of what impressed me is the detail in the simplicity, if that makes any sense. For instance, if you're trying to, in the process of cutting the potatoes, evaporate as much moisture as possible, cutting them lengthwise in a particular way so that you have the maximum amount of surface area exposed, right? Where the inclination for anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time in the kitchen would be like, all right, let me just take the potato, cut it kind of right down the middle, the way you would think of cutting a tomato down the middle, where you just have the kind of ends of the cigars, so to speak, exposed to air, but that's not going to actually accomplish the job. So even though technically both are easy, right? You're making one cut, like the direction matters a lot to the outcome. I love the simplicity, but the thought behind the simplicity, there's a lot that goes into it. When my girlfriend and I were in New York City, before we move on to other questions, because I mentioned in somewhat cryptic phrasing the affair of the oven that was not turned on. I wanted to make it sound like a Sherlock Holmes novel or something. to see what a delivery of bad news slash discipline looks like without yelling and screaming,

Starting point is 01:48:49 which I thought was very fascinating. And I'm just going to kind of bookend this story, and then I'll let you tell it. So the only part that I heard that I then asked you about was you said pretty calmly, you said, I heard you say around the corner to a bunch of staff, you're like, this isn't going to be fun for anyone. So we met up, I want to say the plan, it was either 10 or 11am. And why don't you tell the story of kind of what the plan was and then what happened. So, you know, first I got to say, I was really thrilled when you reached out to me and were like, do you know how to make gnocchi? And would you do this? I love teaching. And to get a ping from you and ask that question, I was overjoyed and fully invested in this notion

Starting point is 01:49:46 of teaching your girlfriend and your girlfriend's mom how to make gnocchi. It made my day to get that text. It took us a while to schedule it and plan it, but it's like, oh, you're going to be in New York this weekend. So I had it all planned out and I thought really hard about it. And you, you know, if you remember, we had a lot of back and forth leading up to it because we were doing this via Zoom and her mom was going to be far away. So she needed to know what equipment to have. Yep. So it was like, you know, you need a potato ricer and you need a bench scraper. And as I was alluding to earlier, it's like, it's all in the mise en place, right? Yeah. to earlier, it's like it's all in the mise en place, right? So we did a fair amount of work

Starting point is 01:50:26 around what's required. You guys showed up and I had everything laid out and we had our little food mill to pass the potatoes. It was like a little mini cooking class on a Saturday morning. I had aprons and towels and here's some tea. And it was so fun. And I was so excited. It was plotted out because we open for brunch at Hearth. So the kitchen is a functioning kitchen. So we only had a certain window to do this like our lesson. And furthermore, everything we were doing was happening in parallel. So it's like, I don't want to say it was pressure, but this idea of somebody else is going to do what we're doing too, kind of added on to the need for, we had to run in parallel, but that's all cool. And like

Starting point is 01:51:18 the potatoes take an hour and 10 minutes to cook in the oven that I have in my basement because we do it every day. So I knew how long. And so you showed up on time and I had put the potatoes in. That's the only thing you have to time is the cooking of the potato, the forming of the dough and the rolling and then the cooking of the gnocchi. That's pretty easy and pretty fast. But the big thing is the hour and 10 minutes. So it was great. You showed up and we had our niceties and we had some coffee and our hugs and all that stuff and then it was like okay here's your apron and we got all the tech figured out and everybody's on and it's go time and i go downstairs and i open the oven and the oven was not on and the fucking, the potatoes were rock hard and, and, and, and the oven was cold. And I swear I had a mental breakdown

Starting point is 01:52:16 because I didn't quite register and fathom the fact that that was an hour and 10 minutes lost and we have to start over. And yeah, there was a lot of moving parts because the mom, now that's all messed up. I don't know what your day is like. And our brunch service starts. So yeah, that was where this is not going to be fun for anybody because now I'm going to be teaching. I wasn't going to not teach you how to make gnocchi. So now I'm going to be like taking up a big part of the pass during brunch. So those that were responsible for brunch had to basically work in a corner of a kitchen. And that's what I meant by this will not be fun. And yet it all came together are it was fun and you are an incredible teacher and the gnocchi were spectacular and if i remember correctly sage and butter and yeah and parmesan parmesan uh yeah reggiano Parmesan and salt and pepper, and that's it. Oh, so good.

Starting point is 01:53:26 So, so good. And we went to Italy, my girlfriend and I, for the first time. Yeah, Umbria, right? Yeah, that's right. We went all over. We were in Rome, then went to Umbria, then went through a couple of smaller places like Gubbio. I wanted to go to Gubbio because there's this story of St. Francis of Assisi brokering a truce with this huge wolf story I'm fascinated by.

Starting point is 01:53:50 And supposedly it was thought a myth because how could it not be? And then there was a huge wolf skeleton discovered right next to a church at some point in history, not within the last hundred years. And then that was put within the church. There's this whole story. And I found the whole thing really interesting. And it turned out that Gubbio was going to be on the way to our next spot. And so we stopped, relatively so. And then we went to Pompeii and then drove down and spent time on the coast and went to a few spots there. And we had gnocchi a few times and they were good. They were really, really good. They were not as good as the ones that we made in your kitchen, in my opinion.

Starting point is 01:54:36 And I got to say, man, that is saying a lot because as a friend of mine put it, who's Italian, he said, in Italy, he's like, it's all going to be good. You just have to find the excellent restaurants. Like, it's going to be really hard to find a terrible restaurant. Your job is just to find the excellent spots. And we did find some excellent spots and took a cooking class with his grandma, who was hilarious. It was all outstanding. But those gnocchi that we made in that kitchen that day, before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday.

Starting point is 01:55:31 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on

Starting point is 01:55:52 that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

Starting point is 01:56:06 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with

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Starting point is 01:59:11 for about a year. I think I found them at REI. First for my partner, t-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted there. Stylish enough I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga, running, loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #545: Marco Canora — The Art of Food, Eating, Nutrition, and Life

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #545: Marco Canora — The Art of Food, Eating, Nutrition, and Life

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.