In this episode, the boys talk about their favorite foods and the weird things they like and don't like about them. This episode is a little different than the normal episode, but it's a good change of pace! We talk about a lot of different things, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about this episode of Sushi and Burger King! If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron patron and leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts, and tell us what you thought of the episode in the comments section below! Cheers, and Happy Thanksgiving! -The Guys in the Booth Featuring: , , and . Thanks to our sponsor, Sushi & Burger Bar ATX for sponsoring this episode! Thank you so much to our sponsors, and thank you to our patron(s) for making this podcast possible! We really appreciate it and are looking forward to seeing you in the next episode. . . . We hope you all enjoy the next one, and stay tuned for the rest of our upcoming episodes! Stay tuned for more episodes. - The Guys in The Booth Podcast! P.S. We are working on a new episode next week, so don't forget to leave us a review! , we'll be looking out for us! and we'll send you a review of our work! on Anchor.fm/ and the next week! . , . Thank you for listening to us in our social media! ! -Your support us on Insta: ! . . , and we appreciate you guys are amazing & we'll give us a shoutout! & much more! :D -P :P - Thank you, <3 Thankyou, P.E. -Sushi & Coffee - P - P. & P.B. - -P.A. , P. & B. Thank You, -AJ & P ( ) , Sushi - , etc. -J. -A. ( ) -JUICY -JACOB -T. (A.J. ( ) -R. & K. (Sushi
00:00:12.000So, Phillip, my friend Phillip here, who's the head chef of the greatest sushi place on planet Earth, I say to young Jamie, young Jamie, have you had sushi at Sushi Bar ATX yet?
00:04:09.000It says the Yamakaze Single Malt Japanese Whiskey, and you said that this is a...
00:04:15.000Yeah, so the Yamazaki Sherry Cask, 2016. This bottle won, I can't remember which, you know, Whiskey World Awards or whatever, but it did win gold.
00:04:27.000And so this became, like, I don't want to call it the Holy Grail, but it became one of the most sought-after bottles of whiskey in modern times.
00:04:35.000And mainly not just because of the fact that it won gold, but they only made enough to produce 5,000 bottles.
00:04:43.000And so the bottles have been gone for quite some time.
00:06:14.000What they did is they said, first of all, you're not getting a star this year, just so you know.
00:06:21.000But we want to send someone to the restaurant in Los Angeles, and we have some interview questions we want to ask you about how it was to operate during COVID. And I said, well, I'm in Austin, but I can fly back.
00:07:44.000I was just reading on the history of the Michelin star and that it was really back in the early days of travel.
00:07:53.000They had a book that would show you where you can get your car repaired, where you could refuel, and then where you can get something to eat.
00:08:01.000And then people got really obsessed with the where to get something to eat part, and then it became a separate entity.
00:08:08.000I don't think they ever set out to become the world standard on cuisine.
00:08:16.000I don't think that was ever the point.
00:08:17.000The point was, we have to give you a reason to buy tires, and that reason is to drive, and so here's some things to drive to.
00:08:25.000And so that's what the one star, two star, three star delineations have to do with.
00:08:31.000Is this one is worth, you know, a stop, this one's worth a detour, and this one's worth a journey.
00:08:37.000And so that's how you get one star, two star, three star.
00:08:40.000So one star means if it's on your way, stop.
00:09:42.000Yeah, but that's part of sort of the allure of, and not to say they wouldn't be a three-star restaurant without, you know, having that part of traveling, but three stars is when you're worth the journey.
00:09:54.000So you could be in, like, the Himalayas or some shit.
00:09:56.000Yeah, I mean, a lot of some of the three-star restaurants around the world are not in, you know, they're not in strip malls.
00:10:35.000Really brought what became known as molecular gastronomy, all the food that, you know, Jamie would probably look at and say, this is, what am I looking at?
00:10:45.000This looks like interesting abstract art.
00:10:48.000But, you know, today you have restaurants where, you know, you'll get literally a balloon that's brought out to the table and you eat the, suck the helium out and eat the balloon and that's, you know, one of the courses.
00:12:15.000So it's partially my grandma's recipe.
00:12:18.000So basically I make a cheese sauce separately with Gruyere, sharp cheddar, and then I'll boil the macaroni, cool it down, and then I'll take a bunch of shredded cheese as well and kind of layer it almost like you would be layering a lasagna a little bit,
00:12:40.000and then cover the entire top with melted cheese as well.
00:12:44.000And then, kind of the secret to that is, in the cheese sauce, smoked paprika.
00:12:52.000And so when you eat it, it's got a little bit of the, you know, Kraft mac and cheese of like the, like the, what is it, like the sauciness.
00:13:02.000But you have layers, and you build it when it's cold, so you have layers of just shredded cheese all through it, so you still have that pull of the cheese like a nice pizza.
00:13:11.000And then you have a crispy cheese crust.
00:13:37.000Yeah, I think it's got to be something like psychological.
00:13:42.000It's got to be something about like watching somebody nourish, like creating nourishment maybe, in some sort of like, you know, abstract way that you haven't really...
00:14:32.000But I think back to what you were saying about...
00:14:35.000Like, why are people attracted to that?
00:14:37.000I mean, you can go on and watch, you know, people blow dry their hair or apply makeup, and that, you know, is probably attracting some people, but only people who care about, you know, makeup.
00:14:49.000Where it feels like even people who aren't into food, who aren't like, you know, self-acclaimed foodies, they still like watching food.
00:14:58.000And I think it has to be something deeper than just a craft that is interesting to look at.
00:15:02.000Yeah, though that's one of the things that's fascinating about it, is that it is a craft, but it's also, like you said, it's nourishment.
00:15:08.000I mean, everybody needs food, and it's also, it looks fucking amazing.
00:15:14.000It's one of the only things where the artist, if you call him an artist, or craftsman, have to take enough responsibility and have enough integrity to understand that the art they're creating is going to be ingested by the audience.
00:15:31.000It took me a while to figure out that it is art.
00:15:35.000It really was Bourdain that showed me from his first show, from No Reservations.
00:15:39.000I remember watching that show and one of the beautiful things about No Reservations and then also Parts Unknown was that his narration was all his writing.
00:15:51.000And it was all so very specific to his writing.
00:15:55.000In fact, his voice is so specific that, you know, he got obsessed with jujitsu and started posting on a Reddit jujitsu subthread.
00:16:06.000And eventually people figured out that it was him.
00:17:22.000But for someone like me who plays, I see someone like Earl Strickland, like a great pool player, I watch him play like, God damn it, that's amazing.
00:20:22.000If I brought five or six people over to your house, and I got them to work together to make you the best meal you've ever had, that would make me a chef.
00:20:32.000So, saying that, like, you know, my wife cooks great food, so she's a fantastic chef.
00:20:41.000It's more like saying that a conductor of an orchestra, you wouldn't call the conductor a great violinist.
00:20:47.000Now, the conductor probably needs to not just know how to play the violin, but also, you know, be very good at it.
00:20:54.000Okay, so a chef can cook, but they really coordinate all these people that are cooking together in a restaurant.
00:21:13.000That sounds a lot better than a private cook, but what is the job function of that person?
00:21:18.000Well, I guess in that scenario, if you just have a—because there's some households that have, you know, a team, right?
00:21:24.000And some households would have a single individual who's cooking.
00:21:27.000So you can be the chef who also cooks.
00:21:31.000It's not to say that if you cook, you are therefore not a chef.
00:21:34.000It's just that the difference—and we're talking more about in the industry— Being a chef is to be someone who brings others together to cook, as opposed to someone who just cooks.
00:21:45.000So you would call, like if you're working in a restaurant, a steak restaurant, the chef would be the main guy that tells everybody what to do.
00:21:51.000That's the person who's typically writing the menu, who's handling all the ordering.
00:21:55.000That's typically the person who's dealing with the broken dishwasher.
00:22:25.000S-O-U-S? S-O-U-S. So you have chef de parties, which are basically station cooks, and then they report to a sous chef who reports to, in some cases, a chef de cuisine who reports to a chef.
00:22:36.000Okay, so sous vide means underwater then.
00:23:04.000And so the idea is, you know, the picture over here on the right is what you would most associate sous vide with is one of these immersion circulators.
00:23:13.000But you also can take that bag and you can put it into a steamer, which I guess does have water, but it's not underwater.
00:23:20.000I've seen people cook sous vide in a Ziploc bag, though.
00:23:26.000Well, you've taken out—I mean, you didn't use a vacuum machine, per se, but you could do what we call ghetto vac.
00:23:32.000And so if you actually take—let's say you take a steak, you put it in a Ziploc bag.
00:23:36.000If you take a bowl of ice water and you submerge the steak into the ice water, it's going to push and force all the oxygen out the top, and you slowly put it in there until you just have the zip at the top, and then you Ziploc and you pull it out, and it's a ghetto vac.
00:24:05.000So the less of an environment that is there, the more accurate you're going to have to cook.
00:24:11.000So if you have a bunch of oxygen in that bag, then that oxygen is going to react at a different temperature or a different rate than if there's no oxygen.
00:24:19.000Now, when you first started cooking, did you go to culinary school?
00:24:23.000Were you cooking actively before you went to culinary school?
00:26:02.000And they had this really strict rule of if you miss two classes in any semester, whatever, you fail the class.
00:26:09.000And this was like a breakfast egg cookery class.
00:26:14.000And I said, well, I used to work at a restaurant called BLD in Los Angeles.
00:26:19.000And I worked both the plancha and sometimes I worked the egg station and we did 400 cover brunches.
00:26:28.000I know that we're going to boil one egg at a time next week, but this is a fantastic opportunity for me as a young cook to go and have dinner with these chefs at the French Laundry.
00:26:41.000And they said, sorry, if you're not here for this, then you're going to fail.
00:27:48.000I don't think culinary school's not worth it.
00:27:51.000I just think that, like if you were to come to me, you know, 30, 40 years ago and said, I want to be a cook, I would say, don't go to culinary school.
00:28:03.000Because if you go to culinary school, you come out with debt.
00:28:06.000And if you come out of culinary school and we hire you at one of our restaurants, we're going to end up saying to you, great, everything you just learned, okay, don't do any of that because now we want you to do it exactly how we do it.
00:28:17.000And we're going to show you how we do it.
00:28:19.000You're also going to start out at the bottom of the totem pole.
00:28:22.000So you're going to start out, you're going to be, you know, peeling onions.
00:28:25.000So cooking, is it safe to say or fair to say that it's essentially it's a craft that is best learned on the job?
00:28:34.000Yeah, I mean, think about, like, you've been around, like, tattoo shops enough.
00:28:48.000You could imagine if they went to school to learn how to tattoo and then went to the tattoo shop, they'd still have to go through that hazing.
00:28:57.000Not that there's hazing in the kitchen, but you still have to sort of earn your stripes.
00:29:01.000And one of the things was, when I enrolled in culinary school, they had said, when you graduate, you will be eligible to be a chef de cuisine.
00:29:12.000And I think that's where they got in trouble.
00:29:14.000I could be wrong, but when you get out of culinary school, you're going to work either for free—well, you can't do that anymore—but you still have to work for free, or you're just going to come in at the minimum, minimum wage because,
00:29:30.000yes, you have a degree from culinary school, but that doesn't mean that you're going to know anything that we need for this restaurant.
00:31:30.000You know, one of my sisters would set the table, the other one would clear the table, my brother would do the dishes, whatever that it was.
00:31:36.000I was the only one who could see above the counter at a certain point, and so I was always the one who would help cook.
00:33:09.000Not like professionally, but I have won money.
00:33:12.000So when you go to Vegas, do you get real serious and take dootropics and fucking sit down and calm your mind?
00:33:19.000I took tournament poker serious for a long time, but that's something I would go to Vegas for because in LA we've got fantastic tournament poker there.
00:33:28.000But I would study and I would listen to podcasts and I would review hands and things like that.
00:33:35.000Yeah, my friend Ari, Ari Shafir, when he was coming up in LA, he was making most of his money playing poker.
00:33:44.000It's a fantastic discipline that creates a very difficult...
00:34:03.000I tried playing professionally when I was 18. There were Indian casinos you could play at and I would go there and spend, you know, four or five days and I'd play for three days straight.
00:34:20.000And then I started, one day I woke up and I was like, you know, I was playing for a lot of money at the time for being 18 years old.
00:34:30.000And, you know, I'd sit down with a couple thousand in front of me.
00:34:33.000And then I would, you know, question whether or not I wanted to add extra cheese at my Taco Bell order because it was 27 cents.
00:34:40.000And it was like, the world just became so skewed to me that I was like, okay, I need to stop.
00:34:46.000Because you were looking at money so fucked up because you were making so much money and playing for so much money when you were playing poker?
00:34:53.000Yeah, it wasn't even that I was making it because I was, you know, it was that I was playing with the money.
00:34:58.000And so you start looking at the world in terms of big blinds.
00:35:04.000So when you're playing Hold'em, to the left of the dealer button you have a small blind, and then to the left of him you have a big blind, which is basically your minimum bet.
00:35:13.000And so if you're playing a 2-5 game, and that's what I was playing back then.
00:35:18.000So $5 is the minimum bet to join the hand.
00:35:23.000And so it's forced action to the left of the dealer button.
00:35:26.000You're required to put $2 in if you're the small blind, and you're required to put $5 in just to start the action.
00:35:33.000So then you look at your cards and if you're not in one of the blinds, you can fold for free.
00:35:38.000Or you can raise more money or you can put in five dollars just to stay.
00:35:43.000And when you start looking at the world in terms of big blinds, it's time to either make that the only thing you do forever or do something else.
00:35:53.000And were you thinking about only playing poker at one point in time?
00:37:13.000So I... We would play, you know, locally back then, and then we'd start doing, like, weekend tours, and then when it was time to, like, okay, I'm gonna stop going to school, the only deal I had to make was that whenever I wasn't on tour,
00:37:42.000And what led you to not keep pursuing the music?
00:37:48.000At a certain point, so while I was playing cards, sorry, while I was playing music, actually, I turned the studio certain nights a week into a little poker room.
00:37:58.000So I'd have friends over and we'd play cards at the house.
00:38:02.000But while I was touring, I eventually decided, because when I decided to stop going to school, I said to myself, if the music doesn't work, I'm going to go to sushi school.
00:38:15.000So the music thing did work and a couple years went by and actually my godmother owned a catering company.
00:38:25.000And so in between tours, I didn't really want to keep working at like Jamba Juice or Starbucks or anything like that.
00:38:32.000And so I asked her if I could work for her.
00:38:36.000And so I invited her over to the house.
00:38:39.000I cooked dinner for her and she said, well, I'll introduce you to my chef.
00:38:42.000And if my chef wants to hire you, then you'll be hired.
00:38:46.000And so I went to her catering company, met the chef.
00:38:52.000The first thing was like, okay, you're making family meal today.
00:38:54.000And so I cooked for the whole staff and she said, I'll hire you as a dishwasher.
00:39:04.000Was that because that was the only job they had available?
00:39:08.000Looking back at it, I was offended and angry, but I didn't care because of what she said after that, which is you don't get to start being a cook.
00:39:18.000You have to start as a dishwasher so you can have respect for what it is that the dishwashers do.
00:39:33.000So whenever that dish pits clean, you come and find me and I'll give you a task.
00:39:37.000But if there's ever any dishes, that's what you're doing.
00:39:41.000So it kind of gave me that bit of work ethic of like, alright, I'm going to work my way into that next position.
00:39:48.000That seems to be a theme with great restaurants.
00:39:52.000And when you talk to chefs, this work ethic theme, because it seems like when you talk to people that have worked in restaurants, one of the things that they will almost unanimously discuss is the amount of hours and the grind and how difficult it is.
00:41:18.000I mean, it's one of those things where if you really want to take food seriously and cooking seriously, you're going to have to, you know, make a lot of sacrifices.
00:42:36.000That's the other thing that I learned from Bourdain.
00:42:38.000I didn't know how hard people partied.
00:42:42.000Yeah, I mean, when I was younger, there was a lot of nights you just don't go to sleep.
00:42:45.000You just get out of the restaurant at 1.30 in the morning, you go to the bar, then you go somewhere else, then you go back and open the restaurant the next day.
00:43:00.000Well, no, I quit Red Bull earlier than that, but thankfully I never got into drugs, so it wasn't that, but I would drink a lot, and I actually had one time where I finished service, took two steps and just collapsed, just hit the ground.
00:43:33.000But, yeah, I mean, my first sous chef job, I was on the schedule.
00:43:38.000It said, next to my name, all seven days said OP-CL. Open to close.
00:43:46.000We did breakfast, and we did dinner service.
00:43:49.000So, I would open the restaurant at about 7 a.m., and I would leave around 1.30, too.
00:43:55.000So when you opened the restaurant at 7 a.m., what time were you actually arriving?
00:43:58.000Uh, man, this was a long time ago, but I probably was getting there.
00:44:04.000I was probably getting there around 7, 6.45, 7. When I say open, I mean I would get to the restaurant and open the door, not that we were open in public.
00:44:11.000So there was someone there that was already prepping.
00:44:16.000Because we were at this, in this sort of like, the restaurant was a lunch and dinner restaurant, but we served breakfast as like a commissary to like, it was like in a building complex.
00:44:28.000So I really wasn't responsible for breakfast.
00:44:32.000I think there was people there before I would get there.
00:45:48.000I mean, like, I do appreciate, like, long, hard work days.
00:45:53.000There's something to that, because, like, I hear that, and I know you got through it, and you became very successful, so I'm like, see, it works.
00:45:59.000Look, when I think Margarita and my first date was at that restaurant, and it was, I mean, people ask me all the time, how did you get her?
00:46:47.000And I sat her in the dining room that, like, overlooked the kitchen, and I would make a course, bring it out to her, sit down with her, have a sip of wine, and then go back in the kitchen, make the next course.
00:47:01.000What did you think she did during the time we were in there cooking?
00:47:04.000Well, I told her to bring a friend with her, because I told her that I'm going to, you know, otherwise she's there for 20 minutes in between each course.
00:47:11.000That's, well, listen, man, that's a clever move.
00:49:19.000And it's very cool that it works and you guys still get along so great even though you're in this like highly stressful like very strenuous sort of an environment.
00:49:30.000Well, I think, again, it's because we have boundaries and we have rules for, like, this is where...
00:49:36.000So, like, if we're sitting at home having dinner or if we're at a restaurant, you know, for her birthday, and there's a call from one of our restaurants or we have something, like, that always comes first.
00:49:47.000And so there's never really been an issue where it's like jealousy because one of us has to do what we have to do because that's what we do.
00:49:57.000How hard is it for you to go to restaurants?
00:51:52.000So the only difference, like, if you're gonna ask me what's the difference between an In-N-Out burger and a Smashburger, an In-N-Out burger starts as a thin patty, and a Smashburger ends up as a thin patty.
00:52:06.000But I think just that style of like backyard pool party barbecue California I mean that's like the burgers that we make right now for these smash burgers it just I'm trying to make like a backyard dad burger mmm they're delicious Yeah,
00:55:13.000I mean, Doughboys is in the back of Meanwhile Brewery, so they've got some great beers, and that's a cool place to just go kind of hang out on a picnic bench.
00:55:21.000I'm sorry, what's the name of the place?
00:58:15.000When someone has not worked out at all before, I always say, listen, all you have to do is go walk around the block and do some push-ups and some jumping jacks and then build from there.
00:59:22.000I'm on my feet all day, but I'm not sweating all day.
00:59:27.000You're not exerting a high heart rate.
00:59:29.000And so I was having trouble sleeping and...
00:59:34.000Actually, a buddy of mine got me onto the Whoop, and then I had a couple conversations with you about just, like, trying to feel better, and I really started, like, I started off really slow, and I sort of got into it, and then I went to the doctor just to get a physical,
00:59:53.000and I found out that I have, like, Or I had scary high cholesterol.
00:59:59.000They told me I'm pre-diabetic and I'm at risk of having a heart attack within the next couple of years and I need to do something.
01:00:10.000And so I did a little bit of research on my own and one of the things was getting yourself into, I think it's 70-80% of your max heart rate for over 30 minutes.
01:01:28.000So I always eat a ton of sushi, but eating a lot of fish, I never really ate a lot of like, I don't eat candies, I don't eat a lot of sugars, I don't drink soda, so I didn't have to change any of that.
01:01:43.000How much do you attribute what the change is to your diet, and how much do you attribute it to the increase in exercise?
01:01:50.000I think that hitting it from both ends, like when I went back for my first checkup with the doctor, she was expecting to see like maybe 20 points drop off and I dropped off 70. So I think it was hitting it from both ends.
01:02:05.000Yeah, I got my blood work done and my doctor asked me if I'm on medication, low cholesterol medication.
01:02:25.000And then I'm like, I definitely plan on returning to eating steak.
01:02:28.000Well, what I was going to get to is I think it's literally a matter of what, you know, we all want to think of this one-size-fits-all dietary approach.
01:02:37.000We want to think about that with everything, really.
01:02:52.000And I think that a person that is on their feet all day, like you are, working as a chef, there's a requirement.
01:03:01.000It's probably pretty high, like a caloric requirement, but there's also not an exertion.
01:03:08.000So you have this steady, you're using up calories all day long, but you're never ramping up your heart rate, you're never pushing your body.
01:04:17.000I mean by supplements, I mean vitamins.
01:04:18.000Just normal stuff, like multivitamins, fish oil?
01:04:23.000Yeah, so my morning regimen is I take probably about one ounce of apple cider vinegar in a tall glass of water, and then a little shot of elderberry syrup, and then a multivitamin,
01:07:44.000By the way, I'm just getting this from doctors too.
01:07:47.000It's not like, you know, I didn't know all this.
01:07:49.000No, but I appreciate it because that's the thing is this whole little journey for me has been, you know, kind of a little bit of trial and error.
01:07:55.000And how long has this been going on now?
01:07:59.000I mean, finding out the cholesterol thing was really a big motivator.
01:08:05.000So probably about three months, three and a half months.
01:08:41.000That's how I started first, is, like, I was walking around.
01:08:43.000We have this little loop by our house, so I would walk it, and then after a couple weeks, I was like, you know, I'm going to walk it twice.
01:08:49.000And then it was like, I'm going to jog it.
01:08:50.000And then I tried running it, and then my knees and my back and everything just hurt so bad.
01:08:57.000And then I was like, but I really want to.
01:09:18.000I tried to do the full hour at six and a half miles, and my neck and my shoulders and my upper back were in excruciating pain, and I... Googled, you know, what that's from and it's just from literally running with like your shoulders up.
01:09:37.000So when I was like trying to run faster, my shoulders would slowly creep up.
01:09:40.000And what it explained is that each run is a single rep.
01:09:45.000So you're doing thousands and thousands of reps with bad form and you're just wrecking yourself.
01:10:22.000It's really a fascinating thing that happened.
01:10:25.000But Nike, I believe it was Nike, came out with the very first running shoe with a fat heel.
01:10:31.000And in doing so, they encouraged people to heel strike.
01:10:34.000They encouraged people to run and land on your heel, and they offered you this big cushion.
01:10:39.000But in doing that, they completely changed like hundreds of thousands of years of biomechanics of people walking and running.
01:10:48.000You're not supposed to land on your heel like that.
01:10:50.000I mean, you can a little bit, but you're not supposed to do that consistently and constantly.
01:10:54.000I'm definitely not running like this, but I don't think my heel stays up the whole time.
01:11:01.000Well, if you look at a pair of running shoes, the heels are always big and fat, and then it narrows down towards the front, which would encourage you to run and land on the heel, because that's where all the cushion is.
01:11:14.000They fucked so many people's feet up and knees up and everything from doing that.
01:11:19.000You talk to people that are experts in biomechanics and people that are experts in running.
01:11:23.000They're like, this is the worst fucking thing you could do.
01:11:47.000Let's just fucking land on the heel where there's no give-it-all and use foam.
01:11:51.000And a lot of people jacked up their knees, especially people that weren't conditioned to it.
01:11:56.000And then they said, you know, that's a thing that people do.
01:11:58.000Like, I... Saying about someone, if you don't exercise at all and you go with a friend to CrossFit, like, no, you have to build up to something like that.
01:12:09.000Like, slowly over time, build your tendon strength and your muscle strength and your endurance so that you don't drop a weight on your head.
01:12:16.000Like, all that stuff is, like, you got to do it slowly.
01:12:19.000But when someone would get, like, a pair of running shoes, like, I'm going to run a marathon.
01:12:25.000Yeah, you could definitely hurt yourself.
01:12:27.000Yeah, no, I got these shoes that are, you know, some sort of, you know, Scandinavian design that's supposed to, like, accelerate you or something like that, and it works.
01:12:37.000I used to run with toe shoes, those flat ass, you know, those Vibrams.
01:12:44.000Doing the research about what I was doing wrong, it said that you should have the most uncomfortable shoes.
01:12:49.000The more you can pretty much replicate running on just your bare feet, the better your form will be and the better runner you'll become.
01:12:57.000It helped me, really, running with those barefoot shoes, and I went from those to some other kind, because the problem was I was running on trails, and so there was a lot of rocks, and I would just occasionally step on a rock,
01:13:13.000and you can actually injure your foot, because some of them, they're pokey.
01:13:17.000And so then I switched to more of a minimalist shoe, but still a flat shoe.
01:13:22.000You know, wide toe box shoe that allows your feet to articulate.
01:13:26.000The way it was described, I forget who described it this way, but they said, essentially, when you look at most shoes, they are like a cast.
01:13:34.000And that is not how your foot is supposed to behave.
01:13:36.000And when you put your arm in a cast, what happens?
01:14:07.000Because I'm a martial artist, so I'm used to kickboxing and moving around.
01:14:11.000But I was used to a very specific kind of movement on my feet.
01:14:14.000But like this static holding a pose and using your foot to kind of balance and stabilize you.
01:14:21.000I was utilizing all of these muscles in my foot that were not strong because I was just used to these explosive movements back and forth.
01:14:28.000Whereas yoga, like if you're standing there and you got your one foot up in the air like this and your foot is balancing everything and it's like all the stabilizing muscles were very weak.
01:14:39.000It took a while to get accustomed to that.
01:15:00.000We're going to take you through some classes.
01:15:04.000But my message to people that are in your sort of situation, or not your situation now, but your situation back then, they're like, how do I get started?
01:15:16.000When I first started, because Margarita, she's been active and she's been exercising.
01:15:22.000She wakes up every morning at like 5, 6 o'clock in the morning for the The duration of our entire relationship, she's been getting up super early, exercising, running, doing yoga.
01:15:33.000Do you feel guilty when you're sleeping in?
01:17:17.000Because most people don't, and most people start out, and they'll do something difficult, and then they'll be really sore the next day, and then maybe they'll take a day off, and then they'll do half-ass the day after that because they don't want to be as sore, and then they quit.
01:17:42.000When I look at the obesity rates in this country and I look at the amount of people that are living these essentially constant sedentary lifestyle, like they're never doing anything physical.
01:17:54.000That's like a giant percentage of our population.
01:18:08.000You're supposed to feel uncomfortable.
01:18:10.000The whole idea about being fat and the reason why you're upset That people point out that you're fat is because you're supposed to do something about it.
01:18:30.000But that, in turn, is supposed to motivate you to do something about it.
01:18:36.000You know, I think whatever it takes to motivate yourself, I mean, it's interesting because you also could fall victim of not living a sedentary lifestyle and being on your feet 15 hours a day and still being incredibly out of shape.
01:19:01.000Now, when you did this change, did you just immediately cut all that stuff out of your diet or did you like sort of slowly do that as well as the diet or as the exercise thing?
01:19:13.000I'm a cold turkey guy, and I know that about myself, and I haven't even had a slice of steak.
01:20:20.000The most popular theory was repeated in the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Cain, C-A-E-N, C-A-E-N, in 1978. It derives from the hideous combination of goose pimples and what William Burroughs calls the cold burn that addicts suffer when they kick the habit.
01:21:14.000What the fuck is wrong with these people?
01:21:16.000The editors of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang have found an earlier usage, 1910 usage, where the speaker lost $5,000 cold turkey in the sense of losing it outright.
01:23:17.000When you say the zest and the juices, you mean like you grate the outside, the skin?
01:23:25.000A bunch of chopped onions, a bunch of herbs, and I basically rub it all on inside, outside, everything, tie it up, put it in a cooler, leave it out at room temperature overnight.
01:23:52.000And if you just take a turkey out of the fridge and you put it in the oven, or you leave it out for an hour and put it in the oven, it's still ice cold in the interior.
01:24:01.000How long does it take for a turkey to get to room temperature?
01:24:18.000So what you're doing is just taking into account the fact that it's been refrigerated.
01:24:24.000Yeah, so I'm removing the refrigeration from it so that when I put it in the oven, it immediately starts cooking from the inside out, not from the outside in.
01:24:34.000Everyone's seen that quintessential steak where it's the slice and it's like well done, medium well, medium, medium rare, and then rare right in the center.
01:24:43.000And I'm like, that's a terrible steak.
01:24:45.000If you order a medium rare, you don't want 10% of it to be medium rare.
01:24:48.000It should be medium rare top to bottom.
01:25:35.000But there are ways to cook it so that the internal temperature from center to, call it sear or crust, is the same temperature.
01:25:45.000So if you want a rare steak, you can still get a nice crust on the outside, the exterior, and still have a properly cooked interior.
01:25:54.000Do you think that a steak that's cooked like sous vide style, like say if you wanted it to an internal of say 130, 135 degrees, what do you like for an internal of a steak?
01:27:01.000Scratch Bar and Kitchen, which is the first restaurant Marguerite and I opened in 2013, we have a, I think it's 11 foot wide, big fireplace hearth.
01:28:45.000Almost like rubberization that happens.
01:28:48.000To me, like, you need to get the actual proteins to a certain temperature to coagulate to actually, like, when everyone was like, oh, bring me a ribeye, like, you know, bloody.
01:29:02.000You either need to eat it raw or you need to cook it enough where the proteins have coagulated enough that when you chew through it, it snaps and you can chew through it.
01:29:10.000You know, if you've ever had like a really undercooked ribeye, it just becomes stringy.
01:29:14.000You have an overcooked ribeye, it's tough.
01:29:16.000You have a properly cooked ribeye, it's melt in your mouth.
01:29:19.000And it's all about finding the correct temperature.
01:29:21.000So each steak is going to, each cut is going to have a different temperature that you're trying to achieve.
01:29:26.000No, are there any meats that are superior when you cook them in sous-vay?
01:29:34.000Because it's got all the collagen and all the other stuff?
01:29:37.000Yeah, so typically, I mean, the most classic way to cook a short rib is going to be braised, right?
01:29:44.000And when you're cooking it in the braise, it's releasing the fat into the braising liquids, which you're going to turn into your sauce later.
01:30:49.000Yeah, so the best way that I have found—and again, everything is different.
01:30:54.000At Scratch Bar, we just do a tasting menu.
01:30:57.000That's your only option, a 25-course tasting menu.
01:31:00.000And what we would do is we use Japanese Wagyu.
01:31:04.000And when guests would arrive, and you'd arrive actually into another room where you'd have welcome cocktails and canapes before you come into the kitchen for dinner— We would be notified when you came in and immediately we would take your portion of meat out of the fridge and we would put it above the hearth where it was about 90 degrees ambient temperature roughly.
01:31:28.000And then about four or five courses before your steak course, which is probably about 45 minutes later, 45 minutes an hour later, we would bring the piece out and present it to you so you could see it, and it would be completely malleable.
01:31:42.000It was shiny, the fats had already started to render, and we would explain that what we're going to do now, it's been sitting up here for the last hour, now we're going to put it closer to the flames, where it's about 115 degrees ambient temperature, but we're not going to cook it yet.
01:31:55.000That'll be for the next two courses, it'll sit there.
01:31:58.000And then, right before that course, we would actually take the steak and put it into the flame.
01:32:07.000And what would happen is it would actually start to fry itself from the inside out.
01:32:20.000Just from being that close, just being in that environment.
01:32:24.000And because of the fat content of the Japanese Wagyu, it had so much fat all over it and inside of it that when it went into the flame and it heated up at such a high rate, it would actually cause all that fat to start to fry.
01:32:40.000But isn't the outside still hotter than the inside because you're...
01:32:45.000Yeah, but the fat would conduct the heat and it would...
01:32:48.000I mean, technically, probably the outside.
01:32:50.000I mean, yes, the exterior would also get a bit of a crust where the interior wouldn't because it actually touched the flame.
01:32:56.000So how's it doing it from the inside out then?
01:33:02.000So, if you've got the piece of meat, right, and you've got a flame here, and you go into that flame, that flame is going to touch the exterior, right?
01:35:14.000So I ate there 2013, 14, something like that.
01:35:19.000Jesse has a school where he teaches people how to hunt, how to butcher, and how to cook, and takes people with zero experience.
01:35:29.000And one of the things that he really loves is hogs.
01:35:32.000He takes people to hunt wild hogs, first of all, because they're A plentiful resource in Texas in particular, you must kill them because they're invasive and they're overpopulated.
01:35:43.000There's so many of them, they destroy agriculture.
01:35:46.000And so it's an easy animal to gain access to hunt.
01:35:52.000And especially when you're shooting rifles, your success rate is very high.
01:35:57.000And then on top of that, Jesse will show them how to break it down.
01:36:01.000What is his, can you see what, it's old school cookery, I forget the name of his school, but he takes you through the entire process and it's a very small amount of people that are allowed to attend because...
01:36:20.000The New School of Traditional Cookery was founded in 2006 concurrently with Dai Due Supper Club to provide an educational aspect of our business that promotes responsible use of our wild resources.
01:37:28.000When we opened Scratch Bar in its current location where we got the hearth, the reason I decided to go completely wood fire only, I mean there's no other cooking apparatus in the kitchen, was because I wanted young cooks to have to learn how to control their environment.
01:37:50.000I felt like there was a lot of, you know, when you're learning to cook or you're working a station as a young cook, it's like, alright, go to high heat and then go down to medium heat.
01:38:00.000You know, go here for this long and then do that and then do this.
01:38:03.000And I felt like it would be really interesting to just have, like, them have to learn how to, you know, if you let your fire die down, you're fucked.
01:38:37.000It really is, especially when you're the one who's actually doing the cooking.
01:38:40.000I don't know how much that feeling is for someone who is completely removed from the process, who just gets it served to them.
01:38:48.000The flavor is definitely different, but the feeling when you're actually cooking the meat, there's something about it that's very enticing.
01:38:56.000Well, at the restaurant, I mean, if this was the hearth right here, you're sitting as close to it as you would be.
01:39:55.000One of them was just a big grill, and one of them was a big plancha.
01:40:00.000And because we're doing tasting menus, and you've got so many different things happening, that's great if you're at a restaurant where it's like, all right, you're going to fire 50 steaks in the next hour and a half or whatever.
01:40:12.000But this was like, you've got like seven or eight different courses coming off this, and each one needs to be, you know, treated a little bit differently with the fire.
01:40:20.000So we would create all these different sort of like, sort of apparatuses and little areas to cook.
01:40:47.000Sometimes you're going into the coals with a pan.
01:40:51.000Sometimes you're going with the meat or fish directly into the coals.
01:40:55.000Sometimes you're just warming something.
01:40:59.000You may have a raw fish course that just sits by the fire for a few minutes just to get warm and get a little bit of smoky flavor to it and that's it.
01:41:08.000I've seen people cook on coals, like they lay a steak down flat on the coals.
01:41:14.000But I was always under the impression that coals were not the best conductor of heat and that you really are better served with a hot metal.
01:41:35.000Either you're going directly into it, either you're touching the grate and you're getting the smoke that the coals create, or you're getting the flavor of the coals.
01:41:42.000Now, sometimes that might be a bit harsh, but for example, you know, the Santa Maria style tri-tip in California, which is California's answer to barbecue, which I thought was something until I came here.
01:42:03.000But it is manipulation of the protein with the temperature.
01:42:08.000So, I mean, there is some barbecue aspect to it.
01:42:11.000But, like, that one, like, if I'm doing a tri-tip, and I actually competed in the, I think, two years in a row, I competed in the 805 state championship or whatever.
01:42:25.000And what I did is after you cooked it and I would rest the meat, I would then dip it in a barbecue sauce, get my pit really roaring, make a little hole, and then put it in and bury it in the coals.
01:42:39.000And that would sort of give it a really interesting exterior, just like texture and flavor.
01:42:54.000Did you cook it to a certain temperature before that?
01:42:58.000Yeah, so I would take the whole tri-tip with the rub, and I would start it really low so it gets a little bit of sear, and then you go all the way up, and you just let it kind of like an hour and a half Just let it sort of slowly get the smoke and obviously there's no lid on it in the Santa Maria style until you're at about 127 or so and then take it out and I put it in an igloo cooler and I would close the top for about
01:43:28.000an hour hour, hour and a half and then when it was time to serve open up the cooler, dip it completely submerged in barbecue sauce and then I would basically char the barbecue sauce in the coals Oh, wow.
01:48:02.000Like, I'm looking at those logs, and they were not fully submerged in the fire.
01:48:06.000Yeah, so there's lots of different schools of thought, and I'm not going to debate which ones are correct, and I'm not even sure there is a correct one.
01:48:14.000I personally like to cook in the flame.
01:51:58.000So that's at the Vulcan after one of the shows.
01:52:04.000And then we did one at the Barracks, which is this legendary professional-only skate park in LA. And then we just did one for CM Smokehouse's one-year anniversary.
01:52:13.000We would just give them away every time.
01:53:44.000I always asked to give me a tour of the pits and see how they have it down to a science where they have like notebooks saying what was in where and they're 12 plus hours for each brisket and they have this whole thing that they're doing from start to finish like ramping up the temperature towards the end,
01:54:05.000wrapping it, all these different steps that they take but they do not I speak highly about pellet drills.
01:54:13.000Pellet grills are for the person who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing.
01:56:40.000But CM's Smokehouse is the sleeper in that.
01:56:45.000When I tried his brisket, I looked at him, because, you know, you meet someone who's a friend of someone else's, and you're like, oh, he does stuff.
01:56:52.000And then when that friend of a friend actually is super legit, you're like, wait a second.
01:57:05.000I haven't talked to him about methods, but I did say, I did tell him that I'm like, this is, and I don't know if, I said it just without thinking, I think I was drinking too, but I was like, this is as good as any of those other three.
01:57:16.000And I meant it to be a compliment, not like, you know, hey, you know what, yours is actually as good as other people's.
01:58:49.000But I mean, in comparison to some of the Eddie V's type places that have this feel that you go to, there's a feel of like, hey, this is a business that's created by humans.
01:59:00.000And actually, this is not like, we're going to show you how to make a restaurant the way we make a restaurant.
01:59:07.000We're going to do it this way because...
01:59:09.000When you go to a place, not shitting on Ruth's Chris, they make a great steak, but you go to a place that's like a place that's been doing it forever and with the owners and the chefs and all the people that have been cooking and serving it there,
02:00:04.000And while I was out here, I just fell in love with, like, the ingenuity and the community of chefs and just the style.
02:00:14.000It felt like a place where you could just have an idea and go and do something.
02:00:19.000Coming from L.A., that's not so much the case.
02:00:22.000Well, LA is such a complicated city and so much more complicated now because of the pandemic and then the aftermath of the poor management of the city.
02:00:35.000But it's always had this weird sort of like non-community community aspect to it, you know?
02:00:43.000Well, I grew up in the Valley, and so it definitely, there was like, there's neighborhoods and communities, and it's like, when we first opened Scratch Bar in Encino, you would, it was every night, this person knew this person, this person knew that,
02:00:58.000you know, it was a lot of that, and it was, you know, I wanted to open there because it's where I grew up, and because it was, you know, it's, you know, where my parents lived and my friend's parents lived, and just sort of that Sense of community,
02:01:13.000which you don't find all over LA. Right.
02:01:16.000Yeah, there's more of that in Encino and more of that even so when you go to like Orange County and there's places down there.
02:01:25.000LA is just so polluted by the entertainment industry.
02:01:29.000The disingenuous aspect of the entertainment, particularly acting, and the pursuit of acting success.
02:01:36.000And then, on top of that, if we didn't think that that was disingenuous enough, it was reality stars.
02:01:43.000And then, well, that's not stupid enough, TikTok stars.
02:01:46.000It's like they keep coming up with new levels of stupidity.
02:01:50.000And the pinnacle is the online content creator star.
02:01:57.000You know, I guess whatever makes people happy, whatever works for them.
02:02:41.000I think a lot of people moved to LA and they like, they wanted, especially in the entertainment industry, they moved to LA and like, okay, I'm going to be this sort of, you know, this sort of like, you know, douchebag mentality style.
02:02:53.000I mean, if you grew up in LA, you can always tell who's from LA because they don't honk and they put on their blinkers and they wave to you.
02:03:03.000Here, everyone moved here recently and they're like, oh, if I'm going to fit in, I got to be really nice to everybody.
02:03:12.000Do you think that douchebaggishness is prevalent in LA? In New York, they really adopt it.
02:03:18.000You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine about that, about what's happening in comedy clubs in New York, that people get angry if you bring up certain premises and they're like the woke...
02:03:34.000They're, like, from somewhere else where they thought they were going to adopt this persona by coming to New York and being, like, real aggressive about, like, being, like, this left-wing, progressive, angry city dweller.
02:03:46.000And they're, like, it's a persona they adopt.
02:03:48.000It's, like, this makes them happy to try to pretend that they're this person.
02:03:53.000It's just an interesting idea that, like, I'm gonna go somewhere and I'm gonna reinvent myself to fit in.
02:04:27.000Yeah, I moved to Chicago when I was like, I don't even know how old.
02:04:32.000But it was interesting to just be in a new place where you could...
02:04:36.000I mean, I didn't reinvent myself because I just moved there to cook and I kept cooking.
02:04:40.000But it's interesting to, like, make new friends and meet new people and have the opportunity to have zero baggage or zero preconceived notion.
02:04:48.000It's kind of when Margaret and I moved here.
02:04:50.000It was like no one knew us and they were only introduced to us with the success of Sushi Bar, which was so interesting because like in LA, we've been hustlers.
02:05:02.000We're known as like the young kids who have been hustling forever and, you know, have made it.
02:05:08.000And here we walk in and everyone's like, oh, you're from Sushi Bar.
02:05:11.000And it's like, that's weird because we're not used to people like...
02:05:28.000There's definitely people that are super into talking to certain people because They are famous or because they, you know, run a famous restaurant or something and they'll weasel their way into your life.
02:05:40.000And I have a lot of uncomfortable conversations where people are trying to get on the podcast for no fucking reason whatsoever.
02:05:46.000I'm like, what is this conversation we're having?
02:07:48.000How the fuck did you manage to do that?
02:07:50.000So we were operating at this coffee shop, and the deal was, they were open from like, it was breakfast through like 4pm, they closed, and they hired me to be like, to redo their menu.
02:08:03.000And so when they hired me to do that, they asked me, what do you want to charge?
02:08:06.000And I said, you close at 4pm, so instead of paying me, what if I just get to use your space at night?
02:08:12.000And I'm going to open a restaurant at night here.
02:09:21.000So, we did that for a couple of weeks, and during that time, one of our guests was like, you know, he came in and basically said, this is incredible.
02:09:30.000I own an empty restaurant space on Restaurant Row next door to Matsuhisa.
02:09:41.000We opened up on Restaurant Row, La Cienega, the next week.
02:09:48.000Fast forward from 2013, we've opened multiple restaurants.
02:09:53.000Now, today, I'm not involved in Austin anymore, but Murray and I now own 100% of our restaurant.
02:10:03.000So you were not 100% an owner of Sushi Bar?
02:10:08.000I've had partners since 2013. So now in Scratch Restaurants, which operates Scratch Bar& Kitchen, both Sushi Bars and Pasta Bar, we don't have partners there anymore.
02:10:21.000We should probably tell everybody how we met and what happened, because you guys weren't planning on living in Austin.
02:10:30.000No, it's kind of your fault, a little bit.
02:10:33.000Because my wife's friend who's a sushi fiends like there's gonna be a pop-up in Austin Sushi bar is like her favorite spot in LA and she's like they're coming to Austin because they can't work in Los Angeles because the draconian measures by this goofy fucking government And so you guys set up shop here.
02:10:52.000My wife drags me out because basically I always want to eat meat.
02:11:30.000We had built tents and everything, but now it was too dangerous to be on the patio either.
02:11:35.000So we were going to have to lay everyone off right before Christmas.
02:11:39.000And so Mari and I decided that we didn't want to do that.
02:11:44.000Instead, we said if anyone's willing to work, we will find another state that will let us work.
02:11:49.000Because at that point it wasn't LA anymore, it was California.
02:11:51.000We were going to go up north and do a sushi bar in Big Sur and then they closed all of California.
02:11:59.000So I had some friends out here and we came out and we found a space and we did this pop-up that was supposed to last five weeks.
02:12:07.000We got here at the end of December, we were supposed to go back at the beginning of February.
02:12:13.000And when we tried to come out here, you know, we have a publicist in LA, and they were talking to all of the different writers here in town, and they all said, we're not going to promote them.
02:12:23.000You know, with COVID, we're just not promoting anything right now.
02:12:27.000So we were like, fuck, we're going out to a city that we don't know, that doesn't know us, and we have no reservations.
02:12:32.000And so we sent out a newsletter to our following, and I guess that's where your wife's friend saw it.
02:12:38.000We basically said, if you know anyone who's in Austin, please tell them to come support us.
02:12:44.000And after probably about two weeks of being open, we had sold out the entire stint.
02:14:12.000We're bringing two new sushi concepts this year.
02:14:16.000And Pasta Bar will be here shortly as well.
02:14:18.000And Pasta Bar you're going to put in on 6th, which is very close from my super secret comedy club project that will probably open in a similar time frame.
02:18:16.000Yeah, it's also incredibly difficult to source and very expensive.
02:18:22.000But, you know, where we have very, you know, the type of fish selection for a sushi bar is very, I don't want to say average, because it's not average, but it's very approachable for someone who's not necessarily like a sushi connoisseur.
02:18:40.000So this is going to be just sort of like the next level.
02:19:34.000It's been explained to me is that that's like a restaurant wants to establish that they're like the big kahuna, so they'll outbid everyone else.
02:19:46.000But the actual market price of a single tuna is never that high.
02:19:50.000Yeah, I mean, I carry probably the most expensive tuna that you could get, like, regularly in America, and I'm not paying a million dollars for a fish.
02:20:01.000This video actually says it's an akamutsu, but the, like, caption says it's a bluefin tuna caught off northeastern Japan, fetched $736,000.
02:20:15.000The thing is, a lot of those guys who do buy those tunas, they can cut it up and freeze it and send it to 10 of their restaurants and sell it for a lot of money as this is the most expensive prized tuna of the year.
02:20:27.000And when you're dealing with sushi, you think of the size of the portion, and if you're going to a sushi place like Soto or somewhere in town that's a nice sushi place, what would a two-piece of sushi Toro go for,
02:22:57.000So when you're doing like inventory for a sushi place, like it seems like that would require a lot of skill and clever planning.
02:23:12.000Yes, except that, you know, we've been lucky enough at all of our locations to have, we have 10 seats, we do 30 people a night, they do the menu that we choose for them, and we do it seven days a week.
02:23:50.000But it just keeps it in a constant, you know...
02:23:53.000Right, so you can manage it much easier.
02:23:55.000Now, sushi bar is now no longer you, but this pasta bar that you're doing, I'm not familiar with the one that you have in LA, so what is going to be different about that?
02:24:09.000Is it the same sort of a thing, like a tasting menu?
02:24:12.000Yeah, so everything that we do in our group is all tasting menus.
02:24:16.000And so, similar to Sushi Bar, you're going to sit right up to the counter.
02:24:39.000There's about five courses that is pasta, and then all the other courses are something that kind of help tell the story of an upscale pasta dinner.
02:26:09.000So when you make your pasta, now one of the things that I noticed, and many people have remarked on this, talked about this, when they go to Italy and they have pasta in Italy, you don't feel like shit.
02:26:20.000Like there's something about the wheat that they use that has a different reaction in people's bodies.
02:26:27.000And it's been explained to me that it's like, was it double zero flour or something like that?
02:26:34.000I mean, if you just go and get what they call AP flour, that's what is going to give you that kind of really thick, pasty, kind of like sit in your stomach.
02:26:46.000And that's regular flour that you buy from a grocery store?
02:28:42.000But anyway, his explanation was that when they changed wheat or they started adjusting and manipulating wheat to develop higher yields, that the problem is that that wheat has more complex glutens in it.
02:28:56.000And you definitely get higher yield per acre, but it's more difficult for people to digest.
02:29:08.000Double zero flour, also known as doppio zero or zero zero flour, is a finely ground Italian flour commonly used to make pasta and pizza dough in Italy and other parts of Europe.
02:29:20.000Grind sizes vary from double zero to two.
02:29:47.000Or with whatever you're going to use to make your pasta, the finer it is, the more it's going to spread out and become fine for a better...
02:29:58.000Well, it just seems like it'd be easier for your body to break it down.
02:30:01.000Yeah, because it's not as thick and as coarse.
02:30:12.000So different pastas are going to have different flours and different combinations.
02:30:18.000Just for the flavor aspect or the texture?
02:30:22.000Yeah, so, I mean, depending on if you're looking for a chewier noodle, if you're looking for something that's softer, more pillowy, and then, you know, the amount of hydration, and there's certain things that go into it to make it specific to what it is you're trying to achieve.
02:30:38.000And did you do this by trial and error?
02:30:41.000Is this something that you learned from, you know, is that like from...
02:30:45.000So, I worked with, I mean, I've worked in a lot of restaurants that made fantastic pasta.
02:30:51.000I've never worked in a pasta restaurant.
02:30:53.000So, what we're doing at the restaurant right now is sort of a conglomeration of, you know, really what everybody, you know...
02:31:01.000The way that I sort of run the restaurants is it really is like a conglomeration of the entire team.
02:31:07.000So anyone who has anything, you know, of value to add, it gets added.
02:31:12.000So, you know, there may be that, you know, this cook has this recipe and this cook has this recipe and we've worked together to kind of develop just like the best recipes that we can do.
02:31:22.000Because I've never been a fan of not being as good as we can because it was only my idea.
02:32:09.000You could either stay, eat with the team, and we can talk about what you guys want to cook next month, or you can go and call your girlfriend or whatever.
02:32:16.000And we started really working together to kind of put these menus together.
02:32:20.000And at this one point, one of our younger cooks had the idea to do a...
02:32:27.000He said, well, what if we do something like a bagel and cream cheese?
02:33:09.000Well, if we put caraway in that cracker, then we're going to have the flavor of rye bread, which is going to be reminiscent of a deli experience.
02:33:26.000So instead of Lakshmir, maybe we're going to fold in right at the last second fresh salmon roe, you know, smoked salmon roe.
02:33:33.000So you have like, you're going to put a layer of this homemade cream cheese that's really light and airy because what we do is we would strain off the whey and then reincorporate just the amount that we would want so it would be the right texture.
02:33:47.000And then we thought, okay, instead of, we've already got the salmon aspect, so what if we do, what if we smoke sea urchin?
02:34:19.000I mean, it's a very difficult thing to do, and we're not, I mean, Scratch Bar, as you saw a picture of it, we're not set up to be a bagel factory.
02:34:27.000Bagels, they're kind of boiled, right?
02:34:30.000But the thing is, what's really difficult about Being a restaurant where you have to make everything yourself is like, if we're going to make something that everyone's used to, we have to make it better than that.
02:34:43.000And I've never made bagels and that's a huge undertaking to put a bagel program on the team just so we can have this one dish.
02:35:08.000Now when we put out this final product that was this big, people would take a bite and they'd go, fuck, that's kind of like a bagel and cream cheese, but fucking good.
02:35:16.000And if I gave them a bagel that wasn't as good and the guy from New York's like, this isn't as good as the bagel I grew up with, then I'm, you know, I'm fucked.
02:35:23.000Yeah, just don't let people in New York in.
02:35:25.000The New York people are very particular about their pizza and very particular about their bagels, but I think they're right, unfortunately.
02:36:26.000The difference in the flavor of bread.
02:36:29.000Bread is probably the best example because Italian bread from New York or New Jersey has a very particular flavor profile that's unavailable when you get bread in California for the most part.
02:37:00.000When you create these restaurants, do you have any desire of doing something that is not a tasting menu, or is that just you prefer being in complete control of the experience?
02:37:16.000I prefer tasting menus, especially now post-pandemic and the way the world is going.
02:37:23.000You asked the perfect question, how do you inventory?
02:37:27.000It's not difficult to inventory when you know exactly what you're selling.
02:37:31.000And if I have 30 people coming in and a 20-item menu...
02:37:37.000What if everybody buys the ribeye, I have to throw away all the chicken?
02:37:40.000Or, I have to sell the chicken when it's past its prime and not very good, and then people won't come back because it wasn't very good.
02:37:46.000So, beyond that, we've found our success in these sort of experientially driven, sort of fine dining tasting menus.
02:37:58.000I'm someone who, like, when I look at a menu at a restaurant, I get a little bit of anxiety.
02:38:02.000I don't I'm like, I get upset because I'm like, I don't know what to order.
02:38:05.000There's 30 things on here and I, you know, this is, I would much rather go to a restaurant and be like, hey, we're really good at this so we're going to cook you this.
02:38:22.000Well, I mean, you don't go to a movie and then tell it what you want it to do for you, you know?
02:38:29.000It's like you go to a restaurant because they serve the food you want or you like the chef and what they've done in the past, and then you say, okay, I would enjoy whatever you cook for me, or I would like to enjoy it.
02:38:40.000Well, one of the things that I loved about the sushi bar experience is that it's a communal experience.
02:38:45.000Everybody's experiencing the exact same piece of sushi at the exact same time.
02:38:50.000So we're all sitting around this bar together, and you say, please enjoy.
02:38:54.000And then people eat it, and they go, oh!
02:38:57.000And everybody looks around like, oh, I love it.
02:39:35.000So it's going to be called Sushi by Scratch Restaurants, which is what the LA Montecito sushi bars are becoming as well.
02:39:44.000And it'll essentially be the same, well, I don't want to say the same like we've just phoned in another one, but it's going to be another of the same concept.
02:39:54.000And by the way, your brother catered Andrew Schultz's wedding.
02:39:58.000Yeah, I broke his balls about that a little bit.
02:40:00.000He, I mean, it turns out Andrew's wife, her parents, I've known them for years.