Transcript for #1487 - Janet Zuccarini & Evan Funke

Well I understand now why people are pissed put that fuck up there haven't come which is my level

Yeah. They've been in their house.

That's really our biggest challenges is getting our staff. back into the restaurant and feeling comfortable in the restaurant with all these new regulations. And you have state regulations, you have electronic regulations, you have a city of Los Angeles regulations. And each one of the documents are like novel length. So I'm sitting there at home reading all three cross-referencing and we basically have to abide by the most stringent rules. So I'm like picking apart each one. Okay, trying to decipher what we can actually do. And then on top of that, We're trying to get people out of their houses because they're scared shitless to come back. Because the wild card is the clientele. Coming.

Yeah, our costs don't go down, you know, 10%. We're still paying 100% of our costs, 100% of our labor, 100% of our rent. You know, the cost of food doesn't go down. So we're forced to become extremely creative. And there's one thing that I know about the restaurant industry where we're highly adaptable. You know, we have to kind of play within this game where we have to be unwavering on all of our standards. And then be completely adaptable, minute to minute from everyone's demands and everybody

At the very basis of it, you know, there's, there's got to be an employee log. We have to take the, the temperature of all of our employees when they actually enter the premises. We have to have a log on that. Anyone who has direct contact with customers have to wear a face mask and a face shield. A shield? 100%. And then on the client side, you have to wear a mask when you're not eating. So that means if you get up to go to the bathroom in the restaurant, you have to put your mask on. Oh, God. I'll take it off when you get back to the table.

A lot in a lot of it is like completely ambiguous.

Really? Yeah. Do the wording is like, consider training your employees to do this, consider this, consider that.

I have friends who drove to Santa Barbara to go sit down.

Yeah, it's been that way forever and ever. I mean, just think about my dishwashers, okay? In the guidelines, those guys basically have to be in hazmat suits. They have to have full protection, face shields, and mask, and then have like, you know, what the equivalent of like a painter's shoe. As such, because I get it, those guys are spraying down people's spit. like all day, eight hours a day. So I get it for them. But it's always been a disgusting job. 70% of being a chef is cleaning, cleaning vegetables or cleaning up after people or whatever. It's cleaning. So this business has always been disgusting. And if you don't love this business to the core, it's fucking terrible. Well, let's talk nice things.

Well that I mean that's the ultimate goal is to create that connection between pasta maker and someone who's eating the pasta like if you look through the glass and you see a pastaio or pastaio in there when the difference a pastaio pastaio is male so you know they're banging out trofia which is like a coil from luguria and you look down in your plate and there's like 160 to 180 pieces in your plate like fuck This guy is... This guy's got pictures of it. This guy's doing 180 reps just for me. That's a connection. And once you get it, sometimes a bowl of pasta is a bowl of pasta. I get it. But this is something different. This is... This is craft, this is tradition. This is continuing this conversation of... That's been passed down from generation to generation. And all I'm doing, all we're doing at Felix's... just a small spoken and a massive wheel of Italian culinary tradition.

Each pasta's cooked region specific because they cook pasta very different in Naples versus Rome versus Bologna. What is the difference? It's just preference. It's based on tradition and the thing is this. Authenticity is very personal, right? Your mom makes macaroni and cheese with velvita. My mom makes macaroni and cheese with telemook cheddar. That shits authentic to me. It may not be authentic to you. It'll ease no different. But the differences in the diversity are so specific, not only per region, but town and then house to house. And it's been that way for thousands of years. That's why I think Italian food next to Chinese food is the most diverse there is. And you could literally study your whole life and not even scratch the surface.

I think it was Skype actually.

Wow, I was in Chicago at the time consulting for Rich Melman, the lettuce entertain you. And I was kind of like on height as re-learning the business, probably getting into that later. Yeah, I got an email from Janet and I was like, all right, let's go do this. And that was it. I cooked, I think I cooked four bostas.

I mean, at the time it was rare. Now I get offers all the time.

We import six different types from four different regions.

This is different kind of wheat. It's also processed completely different. I don't use a lot of American wheat just because it's, it's just been manipulated so much and a lot of the digestibility of In my opinion, people are gonna freak out, but in my opinion, the amount of work that goes into denaturing pasta in order to get it flat via machine has a lot to do with its digestibility. Just like sourdough bread is more digestible because it's broken down on a different way. So handmade pasta is less manipulated than machine-made pasta, in my opinion. Also the types of wheat the amount of wheat germ, it's in it, the nutritional value, it all has to do with those elements within the flour, and to be honest, like, I've developed a gluten intolerance because I've been breathing raw flour for the past 12 years. So, as soon as I step in the lab and I start rolling as for you, My stomachsters start its acid straight up.

Just in the reading. It's like talcum, you know, doubles in the flowers extremely fine. So we have to throw it in order to, you know, put some on the table to roll it out. So you breathe it in all day long. When we've got extractors, we've got, you know, humidity control and air conditioning on all that, but still.

Why don't you wear a mask? I don't know.

Right? I don't like masks. Oh, okay. This whole experience is very, it's been very enlightening, wearing a mask. Right. Yeah, it's gross. I have another friend who also has a Kozuku Kawamura who is instrumental in my kind of understanding of modern post. I met him in Bologna's Japanese guy who has a lab in Tokyo called Base and he has the same thing. He wears a mask all the time because he's just breathing in raw flour all day.

Yeah, it fakes people up. It does. Sure. Like I cannot tell you how many people DM me or come to me in the restaurant. They say you've completely fucking ruined me. Thank you so much Now I can't eat pasta anywhere else and I don't eat pasta in North America whatsoever. I don't eat fresh pasta North America. I only pasta in Italy. I dried pasta in America, but I don't eat fresh pasta. Why not? Most people don't know what they're doing, but there's gotta be some people than you guys. Certainly absolutely.

I think this Robin's is exceptional.

You know, Rob Gentile and Toronto is great.

I mean, there's a handful of people who make pasta by hand, period. And even fewer people who know how to make pasta with the mozzarella, which is the long rolling pin, even fewer. And when I started, I started doing this 11 years ago. There was nobody. There was nobody. I checked. You know, I moved to Bolonian, 2007, tail end of 2007. and started this journey with my maestro, Alessandro Speesene, I love like you're squelable in Yenze, and she kind of opened up the door for me to start seeking out other pasta makers throughout Italy. When it came back in a way, I ran a restaurant called Rustic Canyon for about four years, and, you know, not a lot of people were serving this style of pasta that I wanted to serve. And so I started giving it away, like a gateway drug. I was just like sending it to tables for free, and they're like, what the fuck? and it just started gaining momentum, gaining momentum.

I mean, it's an apprenticeship. You have to put yourself in the students' chair and be a sponge. I didn't speak any, not a lick of Italian. but the Italians are very expressive, so you're able to communicate through just being Italian, I guess. And I spent three months, you know, six days a week, 10 hours a day, just making pasta. Wow.

It's not just ingredients. When people sit down at a restaurant, people aren't just paying for the experience of sitting there and the cost of food, they're paying for the experience of the people that are making the food. That's a big part of it, that's the way that I look at it. And 11 years of making pasta by hand, there's a lot of depth that some of the younger guys just aren't willing to pay the time cost. And a lot of the younger cooks out there, they bounce around from job to job six months here, three months here and they think that they've mastered it, but there's just no depth. There's no depth.

Yeah, they didn't think we could make money.

No, I mean, in the documents, it says they're going to reassess in 21 days. So, I don't know when that's going to be in it.

At least it's really about getting staff back in that that's our kind of so one of his protests died down then a week.

But even with the 60% capacity, it's, we will see if we'll be able to maintain, you know, and actually not necessarily make a profit, just stay open.

It's a massive web.

Like, how do they know how many people are coming in? The good, the one good thing about, we take a brush from business is that the metrics, The metrics, whether you have five tables or a hundred tables are the same. It's all math. And if I knew how much fucking math that I'd be doing right now on four years old, if I knew when I was second kid, I would have studied the fuck out of math, because I had to learn on the fly.

You got to be a businessman. You have to be a marketer. You've got to be a diplomat. You have to be a father. You have to give advice, you know, like that. I'm not having kids, but I have 60 kids because I exercise my fatherly duties on a daily fucking basis. But I've bailed guys out of jail. I've given, you know, beer money to guys like it is a true true true family. And you spend you know, the majority of your day with these people.

The fish stinks from the head down. Oh, yeah.

as every single building has a camera on it. Yeah. Wouldn't you be able to see who's dropping this shit off? Yeah. It's like here's some writing supplies. Right. How's that?

Real chance that people are going to change.

It shows the absolute fundamental core of law enforcement across the board is absolutely fucking rotten. You just need better training and we need people who are not fucking assholes, not racist pieces of shit going into law enforcement.

Oh, man. They for sure have PTSD. I mean, just think about it. Being on edge all day long, not knowing whether or not someone you're going to pull over is going to fucking kill you.

You know, it should be the most difficult job to get.

That's been like the most frustrating, and for me, at least the most frustrating and the most depressing thing is the literal, like, hour to hour changes of everything. and making long-term decisions is literally impossible. And in this business, you have to make long-term decisions. You have to project in order to be successful. And that's what's been so difficult is that, you know, just the other day, there was curfew as it's six. I was in the grocery store. It was curfews at six. And then all of a sudden, oh, we changed it to five. And then all of a sudden, everybody in the grocery store was working there. It was like, fuck, we have to close in 30 minutes. And then like, letting everybody who's in line, outside in oh girl all of a sudden it's packed so all the social distancing for people waiting they just gave it up

And I always have been, I learned it at Spago. So I was probably one of the most consistent restaurants in the entire country. And my mentor, Lehafter, kind of instilled in me those principles that define the way that I've run restaurants now. So you have obviously have cars, but you have to look at P-Mex. You've got to look at what you're selling. You have to look at what people are enjoying, what people aren't buying. And you really ultimately have to know your clientele. You have to get to know them very much so. And I think that that's a lot of what. Hospitality professionals are really missing, is that connection to the people? Because this is the reason why we do this shit, is to see you, Joe Rogan, eat the steak at Table 33 and say, fuck, that was the fucking best steak I ever had in my life. It was the best steak I've ever had.

They would come.

That's it. Violent fire. It's where it's where it's where the meat comes from. I mean, you have to, you know, in my opinion. 90% of cooking is ingredients, 10% technique. Yeah. That's it. So just by the best you possibly can and try not to fuck it up, you need some instruction, you need some technique. But a lot of people, I think the biggest ingredient that is missing in a lot of cooking today is restraint, restraint. Don't fucking manipulate it. Just let it do what it does. The farmers have taken great pains. The ranchers have taken great pains to get this product to where it is, to where it's ultimate. It's peak of perfection. It's peak of ripeness. It's peak of marbling, whatever. Just put some salt and some black pepper on it and apply heat. and then watch it. And you kind of have to have a little bit of an internal calibration to understand what's going on. Do you use a timer? No. No. All by field. Why are you laughing? All field. Wow. You can mock me.

I mean, it's funny. I use scales we use timers but to cook meat you have to. You have to do it a lot. Rempetition is the mother of all skill, whether that's pasta making or cooking on the grill.

At the beginning I did, yeah, but now it's by feel.

So if you use your pinky or ring finger, like this, so this, this, this, this, so this is rare, this is mid-rare, this is medium, and that's well.

Yeah. right between the thumb and the index finger.

Probably should, huh? No, listen. I think if that's what they want out of the experience, listen, sometimes people just want to yell at you and that's what they want out of the experience of the restaurants. So you got to give it to them. That's part of hospitality.

They want to think. Some people are just, they're cordial. Yeah. And you just have to say, I hear you. Thank you so much for your feedback.

Do you really? I mean, internally, I'm fucking screaming. Right. Like, can I, I love catchaway Pepe, but I hate black pepper. Say what? Like, black pepper, pasta, pecorino romano. That's those are the three ingredients in it.

Yeah, how good do you say that? Yeah. People do all the time. All the time.

Oh, no, I have people to buffer me from that. Oh, God, I can only imagine.

I could already imagine that. I used to honestly like when I first started cooking professionally as a chef, I used to read like the the Yelp reviews and whatnot.

I haven't read. I haven't read Yelp reviews since 2006.

especially for chefs like chefs put their heart and soul onto the plate you know everything that I have inside of me goes under that plate my history my family my heart my soul my emotion cooking is emotion if you if you don't have a motion when you cook then you're not doing it right yeah and when you put it out there on on the public stage and people says This is in this sucks fuck you this sucks. This is an authentic blah blah blah cooking food is so personal to the person who's receiving it and like we said authenticity is very personal So sometimes I just have to say you know what Felix is just not the restaurant for you my friend and we fired customers before.

When I started cooking, that ship was a blue-collar job, man. Yeah. There were very, very few celebrity chefs. Like, there was like, Emerald and Mario when I started cooking and like, overnight it became like the hot shit to do and all these culinary schools start opening and just meet grinders just turning out these ill prepared uh, entitled kids. And you know, they sell them bill of goods when they go to college, go, you're like, you graduate from here, you're going to be a chef. What I didn't know, as soon as I got out of college, I was making $7 a fucking hour. $7 an hour, you know, peeling fucking carrots and potatoes and picking parsley and shit. And like, you really got to love it to get to that point. You got to do it for 10 years to get good at it. And then you got to do it another 10 years start making money from it. And that's it. And a lot of the younger kids are just not willing to pay the fucking cost. And they want to skip rungs in the latter.

I demand it. Yeah, it takes. With comedy and food, the proof is in the end result. It's either good or it's bad. You might be able to make one dish perfectly one time. But can you do that shit 10,000 times with 98% accuracy? Right. That's where that's the rub.

It's pure and simple. It's foundation. You can't build anything without a strong foundation.

I feel like I think we cook specifically with seasonality. So if the market changes, we change. And that's really how the Italians have cooked for 1,000,000 years. You know, seasonality is a robust word in the US, but the Italians have been cooking that way out of necessity in thousands of years. And so many other cultures. But I really take you know, my inspiration from tradition and try to pay homage to those culinary traditions in Italy. And I try to put as a minimal amount of ego and a minimal amount of manipulation towards the traditional product. And all I want to do is present whatever it is, whether it's cash or pepper or a tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya-tallya and if you take my bull in Yezi. the inspiration from that. Do you have the bolo at Felix? I'm sure of that. Okay. That shit should taste like the streets of Bologna, the diesel fuel cigarette smoke, the melting pork fat, like that. Italy, Italian food is so, Italian food is so, is so environmentally driven. Italian food is so environmentally driven. And it's hard to accomplish that if you're in the ass end of fucking Culver City. So you have to coax out These nuances from products that are born in the place that you're trying to evoke. You know, like Prishu to the Parama, more to the village of Bologna. So like, it needs to taste of that place. If you're sitting on the island of Capri and you're eating at Caprizae salad, drinking a glass wine with the person that you love and the ocean breezes on your face and then you eat at Caprizae salad at Josh Mosplace and fucking Inglewood. It doesn't read the same way. And that's really where the difference between good restaurants, bad restaurants and great restaurants really lives.

Again, it goes down to regionality, and someone who has a great palate. You know, our wine director Matt Robel has done an exceptional job at choosing wines that are specific to the regions that were inspired by. And you got to taste it, and that's what I mean, that's the fun part, but like, you just have to taste everything. Taste it, and there's a lot of shit went out there, but there's a lot of exceptional wine that is made by very small family farms that are sorry, ventners that the allocation is so small that they barely have enough to send to the U.S.

It's totally, it has to be collaborative, you know?

We'll taste multiple wines. Multiple wines what could possibly go with. whatever you're making. If it's a new dish or a new wine, or it's the same menu in an old wine, a different vintage, a different area of the region where the wine is grown, like there's so many different elements to choosing wine. And then on top of it, training the staff to make suggestions to clientele. Like, hey, what do you really like? And that gets back to that conversation between us and the clientele. And knowing more about our clientele and who likes to come to Felix gives us better, you know, a better standpoint.

I would say at least 75 to 80 percent. Wow.

And I mean, you saw me. I stand at the pass out. I'm in the dining room. Yeah. And I check every single plate coming out of the kitchen. Wow.

The thing is this, there is no restaurant life without restaurant death. And this is a revolving door. Dude, you just got fills off, goes fuck right there. That is deep. I mean, it's just, it's the way of this game. And it's the unfortunate fact that from extraordinary These extraordinary circumstances, there's going to be a lot of leases that are available. And there are a lot of people who want to open restaurants because it's the hot thing to do.

try to create a safe haven, like a sanctuary for the celebrity clientele. You know, if you need to go out the back door and, you know, because there's paparazzi outside, absolutely, let's go through the kitchen, whatever you need. And I think that's a lot of the reason why celebrities are attracted to Felix is that I'm just here to feed you and make sure you have a good time and then if you need anything further on top of that, we're willing to supply that whatever it is. And on top of that, the food's pretty good.

Would you agree with that? I think L.A. is the best place to cook right now.

All of the United States. Absolutely. Why so? Just because, you know, for very, for a very long time, L.A. wasn't really respected as a, as a bona fide place for people to cook. People I was at? just never expected. Just never expected. And it was always San Francisco, it was always New York.

They didn't think it was good. Really? For real. Because we just have a different style and approach to dining, finding it has its place in Los Angeles, but there's literally a handful. of fine dining restaurants. And that's what Michelin is really geared towards rating is fine dining restaurants. You have to do certain things, a certain criteria that you have to hit, to get a Michelin star. That's all there is. And they focus a lot on French and Japanese style restaurants. And which is big in New York, it's big in San Francisco, it's big in Chicago. So they focus on that. So they pulled it, I think it was 2009, they pulled the guide. Wow, they just didn't take a serious thing.

These people don't read tire company that's like French tire company.

Yeah, they send inspectors are supposed to be you know anonymous. Other certain criteria that they they also die and you know they It's always a two-top. They always do special requests.

Two-top. Two-top. Two people. Okay. Or a douce. And you talk to them restaurant talk here. And, you know, they ask for birthday candles. They ask for special adjustments to their meal. They always order a bottle wine or two glasses. It's just, there's a lot of hidden kind of things that they do that give you the heads up that they're there. In my opinion, I don't think Michelin actually came to Felix and that's why we were left off because it couldn't get a reservation. Real, yeah, man. We're booked out 28 days in advance at Felix and for every day of that month we have over 500 people on the wait list for that day.

No. Yeah. I don't do it for them. I don't do it for Accolades. I do it for the people who show up to cook there and work there for my team and I show and we do it for the people who come to eat.

I just think the criteria is a little bit archic. Yeah. It's a little bit archic and they had an exceptional chance to really create some support for the list in Los Angeles and they really created animosity throughout the city.

Everyone who sits down. Right. It's a media word of mouth word of the real yeah, and that's I just say scoreboard man scoreboard on busy every night.

That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah.

Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah. That's the best compliment. Yeah.

That helps to rest on America, Esquire. Wow.

have you guys thought about making a larger version of Felix or do you like the fact that it's all manageable small it's exclusive you know I like to keep my eye on everything and then restaurants just big enough that we can be busy, we can employ a good amount of staff members, and we can serve a significant amount of people per night. And anything over that is just, you know, I think it loses some of the specialness of the restaurant. You know, that restaurant is, it's a jewel.

You can't open another restaurant, do something else. But there's only one Felix on Ibeckini, and That's how it's going to stay.

That's a good question. Honestly, I try not to create. Obviously, I'm putting my own, not a spin, but my own fingerprint on it. But I'm really just drawing from thousands of years of tradition and just trying not to fuck it up and pay homage to the people who created it. And anything on the Felix, on the Felix menu, I've learned from someone in Italy. Like, I don't make pasta shapes that I saw on YouTube, because for me that's cheap. It's cheap. There's more value to me to learn it from a grandmother in Italy, in their region, in their house, and pass that knowledge on to me so that I can authentically present it in the best way possible.

And hammered by the passion of making absolutely fell in love with the Italian approach to cooking, the Italian approach to living. Their reverence for land and tradition. And when I got, you know, I've classically trained French, you know, French food. I went to look for it on Blue whatever I cooked for seven years, French and Asian techniques at Spago and Beverly Hills. And as soon as I went to Italy, all of that went out the window. And I adopted this approach because I just absolutely fell in love with the country. And I've, you know, that, that loves, you know, it burns hot.

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

That's like how many times could you go to a buoy? How many times could you go to a buoy? What's a buoy? A buoy is a, um, friend, Audrey has, now close restaurant and essentially the Godfather and my leg of the gastronomy. And, you know, how many times can you go there and have the experience and say, fuck, I wanna go back to that place because this was so good. It hits you in a different way. When you make food that people crave on a daily basis, it just hits different. It gets inside of you. You'll never forget that steak that you had at Felix. Never. And once it's in there, once it's in your mind, like, fuck I'm gonna have that again. And that's really my goal as a pasta maker, as a chef. is to create dishes that hit different, you know? and two ultimately like evoke memory. Do you have the culture of Pepe at Felix?

Yeah. So my goal is like if you have the culture of Pepe at Felix and you've been to Rome and you can catch your Pepe, I want you to be like fuck, this is better than Rome. Or remember that time we're in Rome we had to catch your Pepe, this is better or this is worse or whatever. You evoke memories and you make them. And that's really the ultimate goal is to get inside people's heads. So I think they come back.

That's a fucked up way to say.

There's nothing like it in the world.

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

We have to move forward. We have to go Yeah, we don't have a choice. We must move forward if we don't we die once you stop moving you die and that's it. It's like

We didn't have containers, dude.

And then what we did. We created the kits specifically geared towards shelter at home. so that you could get restaurant quality pasta and just literally boil water and you're there.

Yeah. The whole bit is basically heat up the sauce. boil the water at this amount of salt, boil it for three minutes, add it to the sauce, boom, add the cheese, you're good to go. It's been successful and I think a lot of restaurants took notes for us and started doing the same thing because it's really kept us alive and obviously people fucking love pizza. And I think, you know, one upside to this is we weren't necessarily known for how good the pizza is at Felix, but now people fucking know how good the fucking pizza is at Felix.

Of course, sending them prepackaged, cryovac steaks with instructions that, you know, everybody likes their steak cooked differently. So we give general guidelines and pro tips of how to rest and, you know, We send them salsa verde and we send them steak salt and whatnot.

High heat either the grill or in the frying pan.

High heat, man. High heat, and then just intervals. High heat, take it off, let it rest. High heat, take it off. So you cook more, especially the tea bones.

I'll take it up to an hour to cook like a 35 ounce tea bone. Really? Absolutely. Why? To bring up the temperature, very slow and gradual increase.

Because that's all you got in restaurants, high heat. Low and slow is typically for brazing, but if you're dealing with dry heat, it should be violent, it should be quick, and then let it rest. Especially the T-bone. You got to start the T-bone on the actual bone, right? So vertical. Start it on your knees.

That's the trigger, yeah.

You start it on the bone so that the heat can radiate gently through the bone and out towards the meat. So if you just throw the T-bone on side and then sign it, you have a part that's connected to that actual T-bone, the separation bone, it's gonna be raw. And everything else is gonna be medium and medium rare. But if you start it on the bone, the heat is gently radiated through the meat. So then halfway through we take the filet mignon off and cook the New York side a little longer.

I never even thought of that. Yeah, man. He's stuck a few old antenna. The master is Dario. Who's that? Dario Chikini. He's one of, he's like the most famous. You should look him up. He's one of the most famous butchers in all of Italy. He quotes Dante's fucking maniac. But I went to his restaurant two years ago.

It's in, um, I want to see. I got to remember that now.

What's good, Daria. Look at him. Yeah.

He's that face. Amazing. So happy. He said. Well yeah, he says he's a wild man. He's a wild man. But he starts the the T-bone on the bone. So he's, oh, Jesus Christ is the fucking absolute master. That's preposterous master. And so you learned from him? So I did not learn from him. You know, I've been we've been cooking, you know, I've been cooking for 20 years. So you pick things up. along the way. Cooking is just like a practice. You get a doctor, you get a lawyer. You learn the fundamentals and then throughout your career, you upgrade those fundamentals with new and relevant techniques or laws or whatever. Cooking is the same thing. You get a foundation and then you upgrade. new and relevant techniques.

We're cooking on California almond and white oak. almond almond almond for the smoke because it it'll go to fire like that because it's so saturated with almond oil and then oak for long and slow cooking so it's burnt super hot so the almond burns really quick and the oak burns very slow and so you put different woods in for different times like yeah so we you started off with the start with almond and then we add oak and then we add almond and then we add oak and it's just kind of fire maintenance is 90% of wood fire cooking

Deep the cold bed is and how evenly dispersed the heat is. We'll have a cool side and a hot side and then a fire side all within like a, you know, two square feet.

So did you set up this girl this way because like you that's the only way you cook steak you prefer to cook it over wood or the design of Felix the actual shoe box of a kitchen that we have is really you know the design was based on the restrictions of the size so We've crammed a hell of a lot into, I think it's just just under 220 square feet, something like that. There's a fucking pizza oven in there as a wood fire grill. Oh, wow. Oh, what? 10 burners. It's a fryer.

Mm. I think top end is like 350 350 people. So a few times that by three or four different plates per person. Wow. We're somewhat in that. Bill for speed. I build restaurants for speed.

Does it? I can't stand. It's like a Boston broiler, top and bottom.

It's like a drawer. You pull it out. You can stay gone. A lot of, like, mushrooms and old school steak houses have them because it cooks with crazy intent heat from top and bottom at the same time.

That's analog. I like to do as many things analog as possible. I still write pencil.

Well, the simplicity kind of belies the background of the dish. You know, it looks really fucking simple, but there's 20 years of experience behind it. And that's like the ultimate goal. It should look simple. It should be delicious. You know, do you necessarily need to know about the wizard behind the curtain? No. I do.

But little health. Everything is an impact. I go Wednesdays and Saturdays, not recently. Obviously, but everything is hand-picked. We don't do pre-orders. I go there. And that's the very basis of cooking Italian. You sort of... You get them all your ingredients from the farmer's market. I would say 90 to 92 percent of all the vegetables that we use. Well, no farmers. Nothing outside of 500 miles.

But we talk about weather. We talk about soil content. We talk about water content. We talk about if it's going to rain. What's coming up? What do you have in the ground? What are you planning for three months from now? I've smuggled seeds back from Italy so that they can like plant stuff that you had to smuggle. Yeah, man. Don't tell anyone. Some things are allowed, but I brought certain species of bitter greens and different types of spices. No, I give them the farmers equally to different like microclimates because California is great, right? They have a ton of microclimates. So, say for instance, we buy broccoli, sprouting broccoli. I'll buy broccoli from three different farms and three different microclimates with three different soil contents, right? So, I'll buy broccoli from Kong Thal and Fresno, and then I'll buy broccoli from James Birch and Flora Bella, which is three rivers, and then I'll buy broccoli from Romeo Coleman. and all three of them have different soil contents. So James, all of James' water and three rivers comes from melting snow caps, so it has a huge amount of mineral content in the soil. And then you buy, uh, Kong's broccoli in Fresno, it's super hot with cold nights, complex sugars, so it's very sweet. And then you buy Romeo's broccoli, which is less than, I think, a mile and a half from the ocean, high salinity content in the broccoli. And you mix all the broccoli together, and it's like broccoli on fuckin' sterile.

It's a little easier to do with wine. Is it really?

It's terrible. It means the territory, the ground, what's in the ground? The term wars is specific to where that thing is grown. And it tear war exists not only in wine, but in fruits and vegetables. Mmm. All of it. And the same approach to me, like what kind of 100% if you're raising steers in Colorado versus Utah versus California, California has very, very little grass. And all the grass that's down tastes like dry-ass fucking grass because there's no water. So the beef tastes of that place. And if you're finishing cattle on corn or feeding at 100% corn, it's going to taste completely different. The Marbley is going to be completely different. The stakes I brought you today are 80-20. So 80% of the steers life is grass. And then they're finished on corn because America's literally in love with corn fed flavor. And that mouth feel from the fat. So it's 80-20. But corn makes cattle sick. Right. That's why they pump them full of antibiotics. Right. So, you know, the good ranchers who practice animal husbandry, they do it in a way that doesn't make the, you know, the animal sick.

There are certain cuts of the steer that benefit from grass-fed beef or just a hundred percent grass diet. Typically, shanks working muscles, because working muscles have way more flavor than non-working muscles, like flamingo. And flamingo doesn't taste like fucking anything to me, right? Because it's a non-working muscle versus a shank is working all the time. That's why it's tough. Right? So if I was to eat you, Joe Rogan, right? If I was to break you down like an animal, I would choose the working muscles and then braze them because they're stronger. Versus your filet mignon, I don't even know where the fuck that would be on our human, but like it would taste different and I would have a different texture. Cattle is the same way. Non-working muscles versus working muscles. Have you ever got a hold of any wild boar? 100%. Yeah. Wild boar is huge in Italy. Do you do you change that? It's a hard sell on a bikini. Is it really? Yeah, man. Some people don't enjoy the nuances people would call it gamey, but I don't find a gamey if you treat it and apply certain, if you apply certain herbs and certain I wouldn't call them spices, but place certain ingredients to it, it takes the game in us all the way. So for me, if I cook while bored, I think of Tuscany. I think of a bootsaw, I think of wild country. And for me, the hills of Tuscany smell like wild fennel and rosemary and dirt, and you want to bring out those Again, back to the terrarium, give those types of elements to the wild board. And it makes it sing, man. Makes it sing.

It's a tough animal. It's a tough animal. A most pork that's on the market that don't really do anything. All right. Yeah, they just sit around and eat. Just sit around and eat. Yeah, fat. And that's what people are really looking for when it comes to pork.

Hard cell. Is it? Hard cell on Avakini? I love venison. I love elk. I've cooked it in the past, but yeah, it's a hard cell. It goes back to knowing your clientele. Just because I want to put some ego into the menu doesn't mean that

You want anything that's something that's going to be just to spend gravity.

And also meet of any kind whether that's fish or whatever is extremely expensive. And going back to the conversation of charging an accurate amount of money for a dish, it's hard. You know, take a look at lamb. Lamb wholesale is like fucking $18 a pound for me. That's wholesale cost.

That means I need to charge you 65 bucks for three bonds of a rack of lamb. 65 bucks. That's for me to cover the cost of running my kitchen out of that one dish. That's so crazy. And every single item on the menu is costed in that way. We have a cost. Now we have to figure out how much labor it costs to make that dish. And then we have to figure out our lights and our utilities and our rent and all that other shit. And then we got to put a price on it. So when you go out to eat, you're not just paying for the ingredients. You do that home. You're paying for the experience, the staff.

most of it. I'm not sure.

I do have faith. I do have faith in our community. I have faith in our industry that we are creative enough to get through this and and we're just fucking stubborn. As fuck, we're all so stubborn. We do this for the love of doing it.

I just, listen, there's just, there's a complete lack of, of leadership at the top. Complete fucking lack of leadership and it's, uh, it's fucking depressing man. Yeah. It's fucking depressing. And again, the fish stinks from the head down.

No, it's what keeps me going is the, like you said, it's the enthusiasm of our staff and the people that come back to our restaurant again and again. It's what keeps us going. You know, that's our reward. And we're so used to that immediate reward of sending the food to the table and seeing people enjoy it. That's like the drug to us is making people happy. It's a, it's a media.