Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lClqxlhA0ZQ
[Music] so philip 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 and he goes i don't like fish yep put that mic in front of your foot what's wrong with that what is what what could you not like about fish um well i've like i've eaten it i'm not like afraid to try it all the time i've worked at restaurants and you know they've made really great halibut okay what about fileta fish sandwiches from mcdonald's no that's not how what the [ __ ] those are goddamn delicious it's like a smell and taste to it that's just i mean have you have you tried fish i mean obviously you know a filet of fish sandwich is not going to be you know 100 pound toro it's still delicious fillet of fish is like the best thing mcdonald's ever figured out i no listen yes listen i know it's terrible for you like every time i eat one there's like the brain is saying to the mouth what the [ __ ] is wrong with you and then the body's like dude but the mouse like shut up [ __ ] i don't know man i'm staking potatoes from ohio like it's just i enjoy steak and potatoes as well though i just that uh uh i i don't know some people just say i always wonder if people just have like if their tongue works different like uh i have two my youngest daughter you've met my kids yeah my youngest loves spicy food i mean she can [ __ ] with some really spicy hot sauce like uh i got this uh senor lechuga uh hot sauce they sent me a bunch of it's awesome stuff and they sent me some with uh reapers i mean it's got a [ __ ] kick to it i don't have it and uh i and she goes what's that hot sauce and i go this one might be too hot for you she goes let me try i go you serious and she's like dipping her finger into this reaper sasha i can handle it i go wow she's 11. she's harley it's gnarly my 13 year old will not [ __ ] with it at all she's like yeah
she she she barely likes crushed red pepper on pizza she can't handle that yeah i mean everyone's a little bit different with the way that they're you know like coffee i hate coffee that's so odd i think the flavor is disgusting and i it's it's you know i've definitely had that conversation with people before and they're like well you haven't tried the right coffee and i've tried everybody's who suggested that i just think it tastes disgusting you're not like caffeine or do you not like well i don't do caffeine not my body doesn't doesn't work well with it what happens when you have caffeine i just get shaky i think i kind of od'd on uh on red bulls when i was younger i used to drink like four or five a day and then one day i just just didn't work anymore did you see that uh refrigerator that we have out in the hallway that's a black rifle coffee refrigerator yeah they have these cans of black rifle coffee it's like a cold it's like espresso with milk and sugar it's so [ __ ] good they're so delicious but there's 300 milligrams of caffeine man i mean what is a red bull red bull's like i'm gonna guess 150 as a red bull let's guess how many how many milligrams not even no idea too many what is it a 12 ounce can it says 111. okay that ain't [ __ ] it's got that touring i'm just kidding oh it's got that [ __ ] no no it's got other stuff in it do you know taurean is bulcom i do now i don't know i think that was the original that hitler was into that stuff apparently yeah i mean that shouldn't give you wings right i think that's the whole reason why red bull has a bowl on it and it has taurine i think the bowl is supposed to i don't think they get it that way i think yeah it says that this says it has a thousand milligrams of taurine oh jesus i don't know if that's a lot compared to something i don't know that might be a small amount though i have no idea i have no reference point but here's the thing um you gave me this
thank you very much absolutely this is uh it says the yamakazee single malt japanese whiskey and you said that this is uh so yeah 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 um and 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 and mainly not just because of how the fact that it won gold but they only made enough to produce 5000 bottles and so the bottles have been gone for quite some time listen to this here we go oh that smells good i have a buddy my buddy alex shout out to alex is uh he's really into like really nice japanese whiskey he'll get he'll he'll he knows this give me that glass son come on give me just just a just a touch just a touch that that ball's gotta last there's not many left come on nothing lasts i want to live forever cheers my friend cheers oh wow that's interesting it's almost like ethereal it's like god that's unique that is very unique that's a um surprising taste because it is whiskey-like but it's very different than any other whiskey i've ever tried it's also like feel now it's almost like tingling like all around your palate hmm so when did you know that you wanted to be a chef like how long have you been like really into cooking because you're a young guy by the way congratulations on the michelin stars thank you that's the thing that's giant right in the world of chefs that's that's the [ __ ] thing right yeah um i i mean i dedicated the last probably 15 years of my life just to trying to get a michelin star and uh when i found out this year uh they had me on a on a zoom call they kind of they kind of lied to me they kind of uh what they did is they said uh we wanted they said first of all i said you're not gonna you're not getting a star this year just so you know but we
want to have uh send someone to the restaurant in los angeles and um we have some interview questions we want to ask you about uh you know how it was to operate during covid and i said well i'm in austin but i i can fly back like no no big deal don't fly back just just zoom in so i zoom in and they have my wife uh who's our pastry chef and my business partner um she's at the restaurant and so is my brother who is the chef of uh sushi bar and montecito uh and our chef at pasta bar and they're all three there uh just in the restaurant and i'm at my house here in austin and i'm on zoom and they start asking us some random questions about uh you know how is it you know what's it like being open and what if the the the you know pitfalls you had to overcome and uh then out of nowhere they just go oh and um i have one extra question um uh congratulations uh two of your restaurants are getting michelin stars oh they snuck it in on it they snuck it in and i'm on and the thing is i'm on a zoom and so i was like wait what what did she say like i couldn't i couldn't hear and and everyone's it and i thought we had just gotten one and it turned out they said no no no i said wait which rest which restaurant they said sushi bar montecito and uh uh and pasta bar and uh i just said pasta bars in l.a pasta bars in l.a and um i just started crying wow yeah so i was just reading uh on the history of the michelin star and that it was really back in the early days of travel they had a book would show you where you can get your car repaired where you could refuel and then where you get something to eat yeah and then people got really obsessed with the where to get something to eat part and then it became a separate entity it was never i don't think they ever set out to become the world's standard on cuisine i don't think that was ever the point the 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 and so that's what the one star two star three star you
know delineations have to have to do with is this one is worth you know a stop this one's worth a detour and this one's worth a journey and so that's how you get one star two star three star so one star means if it's on your way stop that was over a hundred years ago now one star means you know fly there but three star means like upend your life and go figure like go find that place what's what's that who's got three stars uh here in america not mcdonald's mcdonald's yeah i think they have i think they have four stars actually is there is there uh anywhere in america that has three uh yeah a couple couple places like what uh the french laundry has three stars okay that's that place where gavin newsom got in trouble right i watched a video on that um not on that but on uh bourdain when bourdain uh i think it was the old show i think it wasn't even i think it was no resource yeah and he went to french laundry it was pretty [ __ ] incredible yeah i've only got to eat there once but it's i mean it's a it's an institution it's that good oh yeah oh yeah i mean it's it's it for a long time it was the restaurant in america um the it was the restaurant isn't it kind of a weird spot like you got to travel yeah 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 uh that part of traveling but three stars is when you're worth the journey and um so you could be in like the himalayas or some [ __ ] yeah 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 they're not in city centers they're you know they've bought ranches they've bought uh you know they have land uh el bully was on the top of a mountain where's el bulli well that's been closed for a long time but that was in spain oh yeah yeah so i mean they're saying it like i know i don't know this listen you let me into your world i don't know what you're talking about what's elbowing uh so that was fair and adria um they uh they were named best restaurant in the world several years over um it was really the
restaurant that uh really brought what became known as molecular gastronomy the all the food that's that you know jamie would probably look at and say this is what what am i looking at this doesn't look like food this looks like interesting abstract art um but you know they think 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 oh wow 12 iconic dishes of el bulli um so this is like fancy dining and this is like it's beyond fancy dining something from jamie's lineage would look about this and yeah if you asked him is that like what is this and you didn't tell him it was you wouldn't think that was food yeah jamie's not into this i could tell already it's a sea urchin that that is sea urchin yeah delicious do you like sea urchins no of course i just tried octopus recently and yeah okay i feel bad eating octopus because i found how [ __ ] smart i know that's what i thought i was like i'll try it so i can say i tried it but they're but they're you know they're so [ __ ] good they're very good but there are murderers i mean they murder everything yeah i'd rather have macaroni and cheese and steak oh my god macaroni and cheese i'm just saying i'd rather have something else there is good macaroni and cheese out there by the way there's some places i'm trying off the tip of my head there was a place that had like a truffle macaroni and cheese with like really good cheese goddammit what place was that i'm not gonna get it i'm gonna let it go my house for thanksgiving that's where you get the best mac and cheese you make mac and cheese yeah yeah what do you do with it so it's it's uh partially my grandma's recipe um so basically i make uh i make a cheese sauce separately with uh with gruyere sharp cheddar um and then uh i'll boil the macaroni cool it down and then i'll take a bunch of shredded
cheese as well and uh kind of layer it uh almost like uh almost like you would be laying like a lasagna a little bit and then cover the entire top with uh melted cheese as well and then kind of the secret to that is in the cheese sauce uh smoked paprika yeah and so when you eat it it's got a little bit of the you know kraft mac and cheese of like the the like the what is even like the sauciness uh but 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 that pull of the cheese like a nice pizza and then you have a crispy cheese crust lasagna-like almost it's really good wow damn yeah you know i am uh addicted to watching there's so many um pages on instagram now that are just they're essentially like a one minute cooking show have you ever watched any of those maybe i'm sure i'm sure i've flipped through them it's why do people love looking at people cooking food because i [ __ ] love it yeah um i think it's got to be something like psychological it's got to be something about like watching somebody nourish like some like creating nourishment maybe in some sort of like you know uh abstract way that you haven't really it's an art thing though it's also like there's a beauty to it there's a creation of like a delicious meal like you know how good that's going to taste because you've had something similar and so you're watching them put together some dish with skill and k and then all the different elements of it and all the you know the knowledge that has to be you have to you have to earn the ability to cook a delicious meal like you have it's not something very simple like to do it just right it's it's a art form it is but it's it but like most art forms it's a craft and it's a practicable craft yeah and but i think back to what you're saying about um like what why are people attracted to that i 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 where it feels like even people who aren't into food who aren't like you know you know self-acclaimed foodies they still like watching food and i think it has to be something deeper than just a craft that is interesting to look at yeah 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 i mean everybody needs food and it's also it looks [ __ ] amazing it's one of the only things where the artist if you call them 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 not just hung on the wall or worn right yeah well that it took me a while to figure out that it is art it really was bourdain that showed me from his first show from no reservations i i remember watching that show and one of the beautiful things about no reservations and then also um parts unknown was that his narration was all his writing and it was also very specific to his writing in fact his voice is so specific that you know he got obsessed with jiu-jitsu and started posting on a reddit jiu-jitsu sub-thread and eventually people figured out that it was him just because of his voice i don't know how they figured it out it may have been posthumously that they figured it out but there was this whole article about bourdain posting on this this subreddit like real honest about his journey and his battles with jiu jitsu but he he did it in a way that's very similar to the way he does the narration on his show which was uh one of the more interesting things about the show because you got an insight into an art where you're you're the practitioner is explaining it but he's so articulate and passionate and yeah yeah i see people like am i tripping yeah there's shooting stars in the ceiling but there's this there's an aspect to the way he would describe it and i remember
watching a show going oh it's art like it was like duh like why didn't i see it this way before i just thought oh that place is delicious but there's also an art to like changing a tire or anything like when you when you see someone who's really good at something there's an art to it right especially if you're into that thing yeah yeah i always talk about that with pool the game of pool because most people look at pool it's [ __ ] boring you're just shooting the ball in the hole yeah who cares but for someone like me who plays i see someone like earl strickland like a great pool player i watch and play like god damn it that's amazing it's beautiful yeah i mean when somebody can make something look easy but also make it look sexy at the same time yeah there's uh it's it's really cool that we live in a time where the entry barrier to like expressing yourself in that kind of a way is so so simple like there's a guy on instagram that i was just going back and forth with he's got a great page it's a cooking underscore with underscore fire and he makes bomb-ass mexican food and he was a chef and he uh he's just basically dedicating all his time now to putting online content out and he's doing like a one-minute cookie show he just does the whole day like no matter what he makes he hangs it out cooking with fire seems to be hard to do in one minute well he does it's just a really you know well edited thing he'll do the whole deal from creating the salsa to cooking the meat to creating some sort of a sauce to go on it and every time i watch his his channel i want to [ __ ] eat like a pig so like he's like he's creating all these different things like he's and then he's you know making the okay this is just hot dogs wrapped up bacon you picked a terrible one jamie excuse me it's delicious i think jamie picked the one he wants us to cook for him tonight that is exactly what jb would want to watch them cook shrimp ah
but anyway it's one of those things on that's a little nomad grill that's pretty badass cool grill you could take that sucker around with like a suitcase it's all insulated but the point is that it's there's a the entry barrier to putting out content like that is so it's so minimal now it's like all you have to do is have a camera and point it at you when you cook and just have some narration yeah it's something that um definitely wasn't there before but uh i don't know i haven't really gotten that into watching it really myself do you uh i mean obviously you've worked with some great chefs do you like watching people put the food together i used to watch like food tv religiously um i think that was that was you know when i was sort of like just up and coming as like a young cook um when you know the thing is being a chef and being a cook are two entirely different things obviously being a cook is uh is a prerequisite difference so if if if i was to come over to your house tonight and i was to cook you the best meal you ever had that would not make me a great chef that would make me a great cook so you cook one thing like maybe a chef means you can cook a bunch of different things no the fact that i did it myself if i cook you food i'm cooking if 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 so call calling uh saying that like you know i you know my wife make you know my wife cooks great food so she's a fantastic chef isn't correct it's it's more like saying that a conductor of an orchestra you wouldn't call the conductor a great violinist now the conductor probably needs to not just know how to play the violin but also you know be very good at it okay so a chef can cook but they really coordinate all these people that are cooking together in a restaurant it means chief but when you have a private
chef that people hire to their home to cook for them and that's an individual what is that guy now a private cook well you can hire a private chef that sounds a lot better than a private cook but what is that per what is the job function of that person well i guess in that scenario if you just have a because there's some households that have you know a team right and some households would have a single individual who's cooking so you can you can be the chef who also cooks it's not to say that if you cook you are therefore not a chef it's just that the difference and we're talking more about in the you know in the industry um being a chef is to be someone who brings others together to cook as opposed to someone who just cooks so you would call it like if you're working in a restaurant a steak restaurant the chef would be the main guy that tells everybody what to do that's the person who's typically writing the menu who's handling all the ordering that's typically the person who's dealing with the broken dishwasher oh well that's not glamorous no the [ __ ] is that no don't you have a guy that handles a ditch well i guess maybe if you're at a famous steakhouse maybe the chef isn't dealing with that but in a in a normal you know restaurant small restaurant yeah yeah and so the other people that are working for them they're cooking the meals you wouldn't consider them chefs as well well that's why the person who typically runs like the line uh is called the sous chef under chef oh that's what sue means yeah s-o-u-s s-o-u-s so you have 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 to cuisine who reports to a chef okay so the sous-vide means underwater then under pressure i think it's i think veed is pressure but i could be wrong but you're cooking in water what's the pressure it doesn't have to be water so you can cook sous-vide in like in any sort of so what you're doing with sous vide is is you're creating an anaerobic environment by uh what is it what is sous vide under vacuum okay okay so like a vacuum bath yeah so under pressure
right and so the idea is you know the picture over here on the right is what you would most associate sous vide with as one of these immersion circulators um but you also can take that bag and you can put it into a steamer which i guess does have water but it's not under water i've seen people cook sous vide in a ziploc bag though so what the hell's going on there well you've taken out i mean you didn't use a vacuum machine per se but you can do what we call ghetto vac and so if you actually take say take a stake you put it in a ziploc bag if 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 slowly put it in there until you just have the zip at the top and then you ziplock and you pull it out and it's a ghetto vac oh i see what you're saying so okay but i've seen people do it where they just put it in there and just zip it none of that ghetto vacuum they probably aren't at a really nice restaurant no they're at home yeah i mean yeah you can do it at home but is the results the same so the the less the less of an environment that is there the more accurate you're going to have the cook so if you have a bunch of oxygen in that bag then that oxygen is going to to react at a different temperature than or a different rate than if there's no oxygen now when you first started cooking did you go to culinary school did you were you cooking actively before you went to culinary school yeah so i went to culinary school i'd been cooking for years and i only went for a few months and i dropped out really yeah look at that kids you could drop out of culinary school and get two michelin stars why did you drop out i thought i was going to like university of food you know i i enrolled because i wanted to learn why i wanted to learn and everything i knew up until that point in my career was just what the guy next to me had taught me and that was because he was like all right once you get here okay turn
that okay you see what you're looking and that that that's it just do this as a line cook you you spend most of your time just doing what you're told and so i thought okay at this point i said what i knew what i wanted to do and so i thought to myself that i'm going to go to school and really learn about this and then i got there and it was cooking class and i had no no desire to to take cooking classes well what do you mean by cooking class it was just step by step basics yeah they're teaching you the alphabet essentially kind of it was i mean it wasn't even that it was the alphabet it was well there was a couple of of reasons that i quit um one was actually we talked about the french laundry i had the opportunity while i was in culinary school one of my uh chefs um had invited me to go with with him and another group of chefs to the uh the french laundry and i went to my teacher and said hey i need a couple days off i have been invited and they had this really strict rule of if you missed two uh two classes in any uh semester whatever you failed the class and this was like a breakfast egg cookery class and i said well i used to work at a restaurant called bld in los angeles and i worked both the plancha and sometimes i worked the egg station and we did 400 cover brunches um i could like i know that we're gonna boil one egg at a time next week uh but like can i you know this is a fantastic opportunity for me as a young cook to go and have dinner with the chefs at the french laundry and they said sorry you know if you're not here for this then you you're gonna fail and i said well then [ __ ] that i should be getting extra credit yeah it seems like that would be a wiser choice to give you credit not yeah fail you and and i also said well i'll look i'll take the the final quiz for this class now which is you know i have to make the dish i already spent over a year
working four undercover brunches at a really nice restaurant like you're i'm not going to learn that much more than what i've already done in real life i've already left that part of my career to go on you know to the bigger and better restaurants so do you feel like the system is just too rigid or just the way they were teaching it they ended up getting a huge class action lawsuit against them later on and they had to give everyone their tuition money back i think why i didn't follow it i also didn't join the class action lawsuit but um i think it was something about over promising and under delivering okay well is it safe to say that all culinary schools are not created equal oh 100 so if you went to another one yeah i i don't think culinary school is not worth it i just think that um like if 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 uh don't go to culinary school because if you go to culinary school you come out with debt and if you come out of culinary school and we hire you at one of our restaurants we're gonna 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 and we're going to show you how we do it you're also going to start out at the bottom of the totem pole so you're going to start out you're going to be you know peeling onions so so 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 yeah i mean think about like you've been around like tattoo shops enough sure you know what they what like the apprentices go through to be able to tattoo there yeah they tattoo on their own legs and [ __ ] um or do they get their friends the thing is you pick years you could imagine if if 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 they'd still have to go not that there's hazing in the kitchen but you still have to sort of earn your stripes yeah you know and 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 to cuisine you'll start around 75 000 a year and i think that's where they got in trouble i could be wrong but um when you get out of culinary school you're gonna work either for free well you can't do that anymore um but you still have to work for free uh or you're just gonna come in at the minimum minimum wage because yes you have a degree from culinary school but that doesn't mean that you're gonna know anything that we need for this restaurant interesting so when did you start and what what did you do when you were your first job um so my so i started well actually i feel like i should answer you the very first question you asked me which is when did i know i wanted to cook yeah because that kind of gets us there um so i guess my dad knew before i knew because uh he just recently uh sent me a video it's actually on my instagram um it's a my third birthday party and he's bought me a chef's knife wow yeah your third birthday third birthday party and he can you can clearly hear him say it's funny because i think i haven't gotten the full story but i think my mom's holding the old you know the old camera and it kind of shaking and i guess he says oh there it is right there i think he says i don't know where else to get him all he wants to do is cook [Laughter] that's not a real knife is it did he give you get you a real chef's knife i actually haven't asked him because he said that to me and he said look you've always wanted to cook um so i don't know if that's a uh i proper but oh my dad yeah it's probably a real knife and did he just hide it from you here's her here's your knife and then no i i cooked growing up every day but did you use that knife i
don't remember but you were three yeah probably not probably it seems like a lot for a three year old those little tiny fingers yeah your fingers are all there but i'm missing you know some parts are you yeah some tips yeah yeah but um so right away yeah i always wanted to cook apparently i did i don't really i don't remember that but i do remember um being i'm the oldest of uh five and uh growing up um my dad cooked every single night at home and he never wanted to go out so my parents divorced when i was very young and when we were at dad's house he cooked and each of us had a responsibility you 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 um i was the only one who could see above the counter at a certain point and uh so i was always the one who would help cook um interesting that's the days before phones because now you'd be like kids get off your phones and help daddy yeah probably just let me finish my tick tock no but apparently i would stop playing video games to come cook oh yeah no i i loved it and um i cooked all the way you know i that's how i started you know when i was younger and i wanted to you know take girls out it was a lot less expensive if you go to the store and you buy stuff and you cook at home plus it's kind of romantic and impressive like wow phillip cooks yeah and you you already finished you know you finished dinner and you're at home yeah it's very cool um when you that when you have something that you really love to do like really early on what an advantage that is because that's one of the things that troubles people the most when they're young it's like what do i want to do with my life you know when you find a thing that you're passionate about early god it's such a huge advantage yeah it's really interesting looking back because there's really only three things that i'm like that i excel at uh
cooking uh playing the drums and my dad bought me a my dad my parents got me a drum set when i was 18 months old uh and uh poker i learned my grandmother taught me how to uh count using cards really so and those are to today those are the three things that i have excelled at in my life so do you make money playing poker not like professionally but i i have i have one money see do you like when you go to vegas do you get like real serious and take like nootropics and [ __ ] sit down and call your mind i took tournament poker series for a long time uh but that's something i would go to vegas for because in la we've got fantastic tournament poker there but i you know i would study and i would listen to podcasts and i would you know review hands and things like that yeah my friend ari arch fear when he was um coming up in la he was making most of his money playing poker it's a fantastic discipline that that creates a very difficult how do you explain it it's uh well i'm sure he's explained it to you it's uh i don't listen to him i'm here [Laughter] um it's a very difficult life i tried playing professionally when i was 18. uh there were indian casinos you could play at and i would i would go there and spend you know four or five days and i play for three days straight um yeah get a room there and just crash yeah they'll give you room wow um and then uh i started one day i woke up and i was like you know i was playing for a lot i was playing for a lot of money at the time for being 18 years old um and you know i'd sit down with a couple thousand in front of me and then i would you know question whether or not i wanted to add extra cheese up my taco bell order because it was 27 cents and it was like the the world just became so skewed to me that i was like okay i need to stop
because you were looking at money so [ __ ] up because you were making some money so much money and playing for so much money when you're playing poker yeah it wasn't even that i was making it because i was you know it was that i was playing with the money and so you start looking at at the world in terms of big blinds and uh blinds big ones so when you're playing hold'em you have uh 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 a which is your basically your minimum bet and so if you're playing it like a 2-5 game and that's what i was playing back then what's that mean two dollar five dollar so five dollars the minimum bet to to to to join the hand um and so it's forced action to the left of the dealer button you're required to put two dollars in if you're uh the small blind and you're required to put five dollars in just to start the action so then you look at your cards and if you're not in one of the blinds you can fold for free or you can raise more money or you can put in five dollars just to stay and when you start looking at the world in terms of big blinds it's uh time to either make that the only thing you do forever or or do something else and were you thinking about only playing poker at one point in time yeah i was um and uh i was doing i had a really good job while i was playing cards um i was actually selling mortgages yeah so i was one of those guys that was selling the you know the stated income mortgages so you're selling mortgages playing poker but you really wanted to be a chef yeah well i wasn't a hundred percent sure yet that i wanted to be a chef so when i so when i was 15 i think is when i dropped out of high school and um i did that because the band i was playing with was starting to take off and i spent the next several years touring and um i would you know we'd be on tour and and you were on tour when you were 15 yeah that's divorced parents right there dad's like go ahead [ __ ] it well my life
don't make the mistakes dad made well get out there those are the things dad did too so oh jesus yeah um so what'd your parents think when you said you were going to go on tour at 15 well the band played in in my dad's studio my dad's record producer oh yeah that makes more sense yeah um so i uh we would we would play you know locally back then and um 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 i had to have a job i couldn't just like sleep in all day so uh there was a jamba juice right by our house and got a job there wow and what what led you to not keep pursuing the music at a certain point so so while i was playing cards or sorry i was playing music actually i i turned the studio certain nights a week into a little poker room so i'd have like friends over and we'd play cards the house um but uh while i was uh uh touring uh i eventually decided because when i when i decided to stop going to school i said to myself if the music then doesn't work i'm gonna go to sushi school so uh the music thing did work and a couple years went by and um actually my godmother owned a uh catering company and so uh in between tours i didn't really want to keep working at like jambo juice or starbucks or anything like that and so i asked her if i could work for her and so i invited over her over to the house i cooked dinner for and she said well i'll introduce you to my chef and if my chef wants to hire you then you'll be hired and so i went to uh to her um catering company met the chef uh
the first thing was like okay you're making family meal today and so i cooked for the whole staff and she said i'll hire you as a dishwasher oh jesus uh and was that because that was the only job they had available looking back at it i was offended and angry but i didn't care because of what she said after that which is um you don't get to start being a cook you have to start as a dishwasher so you can have respect for um you know what it is that the dishwashers do and she said here's how this works the faster you clean that dish pit the more i'll teach you so whenever that dish pits clean you come and find me and i'll give you a task but if there's ever any dishes that's what you're doing hmm so it kind of gave me that that bit of work ethic of like all right i'm going to work my way into that that next position that seems to be a theme with great restaurants and when you talk to chefs this work ethic theme because it seems like when you know 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 yeah and that development of work ethic almost is like kind of a boot camp for chefs it is it's um i mean it's not so much anymore laws have changed culture has changed but it was your spending like a 16-hour day was not even a really long day i dated a girl once who went to college for restaurant and hotel management and then she got a job at this restaurant and i remember i would go visit her and she was [ __ ] miserable i mean miserable she couldn't believe the hours that she had to work but you have to love it yeah that's an industry you have to love well she just wanted a
career you know she went to school she graduated from school and then she had this job that was like and then she had this boyfriend who was a fuck-up who's a comedian so it was like very very weird for her because like i had most of my day completely free and she was working you know 14 15 hours a day at least yeah i mean it's 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 yeah you know just the time you're not there for birthdays you're not there for anniversaries you're not there for for for uh valentine's day for sure because you have to work because you have to work yeah yeah because someone has to cook at all those restaurants you go to yeah yeah people listening if you are thinking of going down this path look at yourself yeah it's a fantastic path but you have to understand what it's like and i think the reason it worked for me or the reason i loved it so much is it really felt like being on tour except i got to sleep in my own bed well be like playing music you spend all day getting ready for the show that night um and there's something to getting to the restaurant and prepping all day getting ready for the show that night um and so i feel like the camaraderie of being on it like being in a crew is much is a lot like being in a band um the hours are a lot like being in a band um and then the shenanigans you know after hours are a lot like being in a band the boozing yeah let me talk about yeah that's the other thing that i learned from bourdain i didn't know how hard people partied yeah i mean when i was younger there was a lot of nights you just don't go to sleep you 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 that doesn't seem good for you no it's terrible i had i had to um and that's where the red bull comes in well no i i quit red bull earlier than that but um uh thankfully i never i never gotten a drug so it wasn't that but i would drink a lot and i actually had one time uh uh where i finished service took two steps and just collapsed just hit the ground whoa yeah at the end of the day at the end of the day it was cold an all-nighter i think two or three days in a row yeah oh jesus but i was like 21. two or three days of no sleep at 21 yeah maybe like an hour and a half sleep here and there jesus but um yeah i mean when i i my first sous chef job i was on the schedule it said next to my name all seven days said op-ciel open to close we did breakfast and we did dinner service so i would open the restaurant at about 7am and i would leave around 1 32. so when you open the restaurant at 7am what time are you actually arriving uh man this was like this a long time ago but i i probably was getting there i was probably getting there on seven 6 45 7. when i say open i mean i would get to the restaurant open the door not that we were so there was someone there that was already prepping yeah i'm trying to remember because we were at this um in this sort of like the restaurant was a lunch and dinner restaurant but we served breakfast and as like a commissary to like there was like it was like in a building complex so i really wasn't responsible for breakfast um so there would be i think there was people there before i would get there building like an office building complex yeah so they would just grab something quick yeah that kind of dude yeah like so i would get in there and the dishwasher would already like be making like ham and cheese sandwiches or something like that but um and so you were there from 7 00 a.m and then what time would you get out
of there usually i mean probably one 130. and nowadays with labor laws you really couldn't schedule that right well i was on i was on salary oh interesting but that salary would have to be you know 3x at this point yeah because because now they've changed the rule a couple years ago salary is no longer a contract between you and i salaries have to fall into a certain you have to qualify so you can't just be like oh i'm going to not give you overtime by giving you a salary to have you work when i ask you to right now you have to pay them pay everybody a specific dollar amount and they have to hold specific responsibilities in order to not uh accrue over time yeah i think that's good because i think there's a lot of employers that are abusive but i also think there's something romantic about this story of you almost dying you know what i mean i feel like i do appreciate like long hard work days there's something to that because like i hear that and i know you got through it you became very successful so i'm like see it works look when i think margarita in my first date was at that restaurant and it was uh i mean people ask me all the time how did how did you get her and it's food it has to be that's hilarious um well you're a cool guy don't tell yourself short and plus you're kind of cute i appreciate it i'm top three in this room for sure um top three i would say so um but uh so because of that schedule i couldn't take her on a date um and so i remember the very first date we had was at the restaurant i told her to show up at 12 30 after i sent everybody home and i had spent all day secretly prepping a special menu and she showed up and 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 uh go back in the kitchen make the next course oh wow yeah what did you think
she did during the time when you're in there cooking uh well i told her to bring a friend with her because i told her that i'm gonna you know otherwise she's there for 20 minutes in between each course that's that well listen man that's a clever move look it worked yeah clearly yeah that's a that's interesting i mean i would imagine that that's probably one of the most difficult occupations to date in yeah um i i sacrificed a lot of um uh relationships prior to that one yeah i can only imagine it's in that way it's very similar to stand-up comedy not in the work ethic part because comedians are notoriously terrible at that yeah but the um it's hard because you know you date a girl they want a normal evening life and you're like i gotta go do a set and you know i had relationships where they're like you don't have to and that was like the record skipping in the room like yes i do yeah yes i do like let's you you because i have friends who've had relationships where the girl said you don't have to and they listened and i saw what happened they eventually fell off the radar and then vanished and stopped being a comic and then they would come to the comedy club you know like seven years removed like yeah i'm thinking about getting back into it and everybody look at you like you said i have aids like they just backed away from you like not even aids because aids is not like it's like i have covid sure like like i'm right now filled with bugs that i could spread on you like we wanted to run away from them we didn't whatever they had maybe it's contagious like you quit you quit the greatest [ __ ] job on earth and now you want to get back in just get back in don't tell us you're thinking about getting back in [ __ ] get back in well i think it has to do with with communication and i think that's what a good relationship is built on and when we started our relationship it
was very like i was like this is what i'm doing yeah and it hurt you know at that time in her life she's like this is what i'm doing and we made it we made an agreement that our careers would always come first and uh you know luckily our careers you know overlapped um and for the last 13 years we've worked together that's awesome yeah that's very cool and 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 well i think again it's because we've we we have boundaries and we have rules for like this is this is where so like if we're sitting at home having dinner or 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 and so there's never been a 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 it's that's what we do how hard is it for you to go to restaurants because really easy are you judging that's what i mean no you're not no um i i i can appreciate food i love food food's like my favorite thing that's why i got into this um but i do think that there are times uh when i eat something and it really comes down to only one time and it's it's value is you know is what i'm eating worth what i'm paying for it um because here's the thing if i go and spend 500 on dinner uh it should be at a certain level right you're asking to be not judged but you're asking to be held to a standard right yeah if we're you know if we're at you know if jamie takes some spot to go get some you know bacon wrapped hot dogs i can just appreciate it it's not supposed to be life-changing right right right no yeah i mean that was
always the case with like like street food right like street food is delicious but it's it's unpretentious food doesn't have to be pretentious i mean look i one of my favorite things to make is a cheeseburger yeah no i know yeah i need to try your cheeseburgers i've heard legendary status from the people at vulcan they're good when you set up out there yeah well that's that what happened how did that happen how'd like this smash burger thing come into prominence because all of a sudden without in my view within the last like five or six years like smash burgers became a thing i'll be honest i wasn't really paying attention but all of a sudden yeah um i mean it's really good i mean if you look at in and out right yeah they're essentially making a smash burger they're not physically smashing the burger uh but they're making a really really thin patty right so the only difference like if you're gonna ask me what's the difference between in and out burger and a smash burger an in-n-out burger starts as a thin patty and a smash burger ends up as a thin patty a smash burger starts as a ball which you physically smash yeah um but i think just that style of like backyard pool party barbecue california um i mean that's like the burgers that that we make right now uh for these smash burgers it's just i'm trying to make like a backyard dad burger mmm they're delicious yeah no i've heard um you know you're the one who turned me on to golden tiger yeah which is uh one of my favorite spots in austin it was one of the first spots that we found when we got here um that was open late and [ __ ] good yeah and um i started eating it like four nights a week that's not good it's not good that's not good at all um but uh but i did and um it was one of those things that like i was telling everyone i could because it was that good one of the things that it's cool being friends with chefs is they know
the spots like what are the good late night spots are there in austin um so our go-to late nights would be uh golden tiger for sure um we'd go to a place called halal time have you been there yet no it's on sixth street um east sixth it is like gotta be one of the best euros ever really it's so [ __ ] good really yeah um i'm trying to think what else we would do late night what about pizza what's the best pizza spot in this town i'm torn between two uh love supreme which if you haven't been to you have to go i have not been to very very good uh and doughboys doughboys yeah and love supreme yeah love supreme sounds better they're different they're different styles but they're both really really good what kind of what is love supreme um i don't even know how to describe the styles um so uh love supreme is a little bit more like are you are you pulling it up oh boy that looks [ __ ] good yeah love supreme is like uh it's it's more of a restaurant it's like a great family style place that you would go with the kids and have like just a really good like restaurant pizza doughboys is a little truck i'm writing this down yeah i got to put this in the phone because uh i'm always looking for like a best pizza spot in town it's very good full disclosure uh the chef there russell is uh he and i go way back well i don't think you would lie no you have to have a full disclosure that looks [ __ ] good now is uh love is that's doughboys now how important is wood fire to a pizza or in general to a pizza because it's always like a thing i think you can that goddamn doughboy is that pepperoni that looks really i i'd uh you get into that [ __ ] sushi right well yeah you're all about that jamie's all about doughboy's pepperoni he's looking for a good pizza place that looks [ __ ] bomb diggity yeah i mean doughboys is in the back of meanwhile brewery so uh they've got some great beers and that's a cool place just go kind of hang out on a picnic bench i'm
sorry what's the name of the place uh meanwhile brewery meanwhile brewery yeah click on that pizza right to the left of that one man with the little veggies on it we'll drop down yeah look at that oh that looks good that looks [ __ ] good yeah i mean i'm on this uh animal based diet for all of january so all i'm eating all january is meat and a little bit of fruit and so i see pizza and it calls to me yeah you know like that's what i'm doing february 1st i'm going to [ __ ] up a pizza call me i'll go with you okay let's do it bro yeah what's that jeremy all pizza february maybe oh beads are fair see how fat i get i will look like a beach ball my face will dirty ball my face would like this my stomach will distend it would be a real issue how's that going with that great yeah yeah i added fruit this year it changed uh everything first of all stop the diarrhea in this track which is uh before when i've done nothing but meat it's i don't know what it is it just gives you ferocious diarrhea like oil spill diarrhea like somebody broke a pipeline not good ma'am maybe that's uh how you lose weight i don't know yeah um no i don't think that's how you lose i don't think that's wise uh i think you're just losing weight from the lack of calories i mean it's pretty simple equation right but for me um one of the things that comes with eating this is i i'm eliminating all the [ __ ] right i'm eliminating a lot of the processed foods and sugar and that's really what's wrong about most people's diet it's uh it's over consumption which i'm a massive i i have a giant problem with eating too much like for instance i went to golden tiger and i ordered three cheeseburgers and a thai chicken sandwich i ate three double cheeseburgers by the way and a thai chicken sandwich and people like what the [ __ ] are you doing and i'm like i'm hungry i catch a lot i eat a lot of food man it's a real problem but i work out a lot yeah but because i work out a lot i get really hungry and then by the time i get
to somewhere to eat i'm like frantic hungry see i can see that because i just recently started like working out getting in shape i noticed the whoop you got the loop strap right i do yeah it's uh changed my life really um but i've noticed that now that i'm like running a lot and exercising a lot i get way hungrier oh yeah for sure and i lose weight even though i eat more yeah well you know your body has requirements when you're working out yeah you know it's just sustenance when you're not working out but when you're working out your body's like get me some [ __ ] protein let's go yeah because you know your body recognizes you're breaking down all this tissue in your i mean that's the process of exercise it's the breaking down the building back up stronger and it's like this you got to do it right too many people start off too hard you know like when 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 you don't have to go crazy yeah like let your body get accustomed to this whole idea of exercise don't just go bananas because you won't be able to sustain it and you'll get upset and don't work out with a friend who goes to crossfit don't have some [ __ ] fitness fanatic friends like try to do this wad we're gonna do a wad today and you you doing burpees and throwing [ __ ] kettlebells over your head you're not gonna do it yeah i know that's i do get hurt i've pretty much just done been running really that's great yeah i'm up to doing about five miles a day every day nice yeah that's great i just get on i hit the five mile an hour button i do one hour so you weren't doing anything before no i work so much so um i was doing nothing and i went from having such an active like childhood of like drumming seven days a week um and back then i would i'd need three double doubles you know just to keep my weight on and um to just working so much i'm on my feet all day but i'm not sweating right all day you're not exerting no high heart rate and so i was having trouble sleeping and uh um
uh actually a buddy of mine uh got me on to the whoop and um then i had a couple conversations with you about just like trying to feel better and uh i really started like i started off really slow and i sort of got into it and then i went to um uh a doc the doctor just to get a physical and i found out that i have like or i had scary high cholesterol they were like you're you know you're they told me i'm pre-diabetic and i met you know i'm at risk of having a heart attack within the next couple of years um and uh i need to do something and so i did a you know did a little bit of research on my own and one of the things was like getting yourself into i think it's 70 to 80 percent of your max heart rate for over 30 minutes and so um i completely changed my diet i changed like just my lifestyle that so every day i'm running and uh eating differently and i've lost about 30 pounds and i've dropped about 70 points of my my uh cholesterol that's fantastic yeah did you change how much did you change your diet at all completely yeah yeah what did you change what was the big thing well i i've cut out entirely dairy and red meat no red meat no red meat well that's not true i know that's the truth nothing sent me a video you're cooking a red stag you lying son of a [ __ ] no saturated fat no meat with high saturated fats so i was eating a lot of like i mean just because i have access to it i was eating a lot of wagyu beef i was eating a lot of foie gras i was eating a lot of uh you know rib eyes if i was hungry i'd eat you know salamis um and i've just sort of transitioned that out for now if i'm hungry i ate nuts um eating a lot of like uh turkey and chicken um turns out sushi is actually really good for battling high ldl cholesterol really yeah so um i've eaten i always eat a ton
of sushi uh but eating a lot of fish uh i never really ate a lot of like um i don't eat i don't eat candies i don't need a lot of sugars i don't drink soda um so i didn't have to change any of that i don't eat a lot of breads um how much you attribute what the change is to your diet and how much do you attribute it to the increase in exercise i think that hitting it from both ends like when 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. oh wow so i think it was hitting it from both ends yeah i got my blood uh work done and my doctor asked me if i'm on medication low cholesterol medication i said i eat mostly meat yeah and they were like what like how is it what's going on yeah i i think i was so far over that i was like i have to just stop cold turk you have to reset my body and then i'm like i definitely plan on returning to eating steaks what i was gonna 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 we want to think about that with everything really but it doesn't work that way there's people that require so much more of their body that they need a different kind of fuel source they need more fuel they need in a different way and i think that a person that is on their feet all day like you are working as a chef there's a requirement it's probably pretty high but it's like a caloric requirement but there's also not an exertion yeah so like you have like this steady you're using up calories all day long but you're never ramping up your heart rate you're never like pushing your body so it's it's got to be weird for your body your body's like what is this [ __ ] doing like why are we awake all day and why why are we like just standing up yeah it's um i definitely have i have so much more energy now
uh i'm sure yeah it's it's quite remarkable now i mean like you pointed out the whoop i'm legitimately obsessed i wake up every day and the first thing check your recovery every day and and i i i i also try as much as i can every day to get my strain exactly where so when i look at the little graph my strain and my and my recovery like match up interesting now what about supplements are you doing anything to supplement your diet with nutrients uh i take a bunch of vitamins and stuff in the morning but no specific supplements because i am you know i'm still eating uh i'm still eating protein ever like every night i'm either eating you know i'm either eating fish or turkey or chicken or something well that's what i mean by vitamins i'm about supplements i mean vitamins yeah like you just um just normal stuff like multivitamins fish oil like woody yeah so my morning regimen is i take uh like a about probably about probably about one ounce of uh apple cider vinegar and a tall glass of water and then a little shot of elderberry syrup and then uh a multivitamin and then what about food what about food are you eating this with food no that's a problem um you need fat and you need some sort of carbohydrate to bind with the vitamins when you're taking vitamins and you're not taking vitamins with any food your body's like what is this your body has no idea what it is your body's super confused and probably he's going to piss most of it out interesting if you want to get maximum absorption of your your vitamins you must take it with food all right yeah because otherwise why would you have these vitamins like your body doesn't understand that your body understands vitamins in the context of something else fiber fat carbohydrates your body doesn't understand like a fistful of vitamins and water it's like what is this [ __ ] but vitamins are supposed to be bound to nutrients or to food so like
in the future all right we'll all start tomorrow yeah you got to take it with food yeah i have not taken vitamins today at all because i haven't eaten today interesting i work out most of the time fasted and i you know the the one thing that i will have though is i'll have vitamins that come with um liquid iv liquid visa supplement that i take i just pour it into a i've been obsessed with it for a while it's great stuff yeah but it has glucose in it so there's some absorption of vitamins that goes along with and they've they've got this down to a science the way they do it but when i take actual supplements my supplements are always with food and you should do that too everyone should do that if you're taking vitamins without food you're the amount of absorption you get is very minimal interesting okay cool yeah the only way you could bypass that is ivs you could do iv vitamin drips yeah i don't want to do that you're going it's great it's really great it's about one of the best ways to get like if you're sick i highly recommend it if you ever get like a really bad cold high dose vitamin c d zinc glutathione iv uh drips are fantastic it's because it'll go it's going right into your bloodstream it's bypasses you know your stomach your liver all that jazz it's going right into the system interesting yeah so all that vitamins you're taking it's being all that healthy i mean just you're probably getting a little bit of carbohydrates with the elderberry syrup there's something there and then what else i'm doing uh taking a zinc and uh omega-3 if you take a zinc you should take a zinc with an ionophore ionophores are things like quercetin there's some other stuff too i think that works in a similar way i think curcumin works in a similar way which is uh one element of turmeric and um what you're gonna or vice verse but what you're gonna what an ionophore is it helps the ions get directly into the cells so zinc is notoriously difficult for people to just take as a supplement and have it absorbed into your cells so they
recommend taking it with uh quercetin all right well we're going to talk about coverage yeah afterwards take notes on this yeah yeah by the way i'm just getting this from doctors too it's not like you know i didn't know all this nobody's it's 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 and how long has this been going on now uh since i found since i i mean finding out the cholesterol thing was like really the bit a big motivator um so probably about three months that's amazing so three months you're up to a five mile a day journey that's really great yeah the thing about a treadmill a lot of people don't oh rather run outside me too sure absolutely like when i lived in california i always because it was hills yeah hills on here but the thing about a treadmill is you could do other [ __ ] yeah like you watch a [ __ ] movie and that's that's been my thing is i'll put on a podcast or if i'm if i get into a new series i'll just watch a one-hour episode while i'm running amazing um and uh no it's been you know i tried running outside that's how i started first is like i was walking around we had this little loop by our house so i would i would walk it and then after a couple weeks i was like you know i'm gonna walk it twice and then i was like i'm gonna jog it and then i tried running it and then my knees and my back and everything just hurt so bad um and then i was like but i really want to so i got a treadmill do you know how to run correctly i do now is that what was messing your knees up were you heel striking i don't know i don't know what you call it but the the worst pain i got from from running is so i once i like mastered the five mile an hour thing i tried pushing myself one day and i was doing i think i did i tried to do the full hour at six and a half miles and um my neck and my my shoulders and my like upper back were in like excruciating pain and i'd googled you know what that's from and it's just from literally running with like your shoulders up so when i was
like trying to run faster my shoulders would would slowly creep up and what it explained is that each run is a single rep so you're doing thousands and thousands of reps with bad form and you're just wrecking yourself oh so um it showed me some like foam roller thing like how to like you know fix that and it did um like fix my my back and my neck and then now i just cracked like as i'm running i am consciously putting my shoulders back and down as i'm running trying to relax and yeah in good form are you landing on the ball of your feet uh probably yeah i'm like doing that on the floor i don't know you should be cognizant of that yeah it's really a fascinating thing that happened but nike i believe it was nike came out with the very first running shoe with a fat heel and in doing so they encouraged people to heel strike they encouraged people to run and land on your heel and they offered you this big cushion but in doing that they completely changed like hundreds of thousands of years of biomechanics of people walking and running because you're not supposed to land on your heel like that i mean you can a little bit but you're not supposed to do that consistently and constantly i'm definitely not running like this yeah but i i think i don't think i keep i don't think my heel like stays up the whole time well if you look at like a pair of running shoes yeah 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 and they [ __ ] so many people's feet up and knees up and everything from doing that it's really like you talk to like people that are experts in biomechanics and people that are experts in running they're like this is the worst [ __ ] thing you could do like you're supposed to your foot is a natural decelerator like when you're landing on the the ball of your foot your your foot slowly lets itself down with the muscles of your calf and your lower leg and that's how you're supposed to land like your foot's a built-in shock absorber it's really
amazing design and nike's like eh let's use foam let's just [ __ ] land on the heel where there's no give at all and use foam and a lot of people jacked up their knees running especially people that weren't conditioned to it and then they said you know so that's the thing that people do like 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 you want to do some [ __ ] like that you got to get your tissue prepared like 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 like all that stuff is like you got to do it slowly but when someone would get like a pair of running shoes like i'm gonna run a marathon like you hurt yourself oh my god you could hurt yourself yeah yeah you could definitely hurt yourself yeah no i got i got these shoes that are you know they're just some sort of you know scandinavian design that's supposed to like uh accelerate you or something like that and works i used to run with toe shoes those flat ass you know those vibrams yeah there's no cushion at all it's in doing the research about how to like what i was doing wrong it said that you should have the most uncomfortable shoes like the the 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 it helped me it really the running with those barefoot shoes and i went from those to some other kind because what the problem was i was running on trails and so there was a lot of rocks and like i would just occasionally like step on a rock and you can actually injure your foot because you know some of them are pokey and so then i switched to more of a minimalist shoe but still a flat you know wide toe box shoe that allows your feet to articulate the 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 and that is not how your foot is supposed to behave and when you put your arm in a cast what happens it atrophies
yeah that's the thing with your foot you put your foot in this cast and your foot doesn't get to utilize all of the muscles that surround the bones and stabilize the foot interesting yeah it makes sense yeah it does make sense well one of the things that was shocking to me i started doing yoga in a few years ago many many years ago now but when i first started doing yoga the first thing that would hurt was my feet i was like this is great like why are my feet hurt because i'm a martial artist so i'm used to like kickboxing and moving around but i was used to a very specific kind of movement on my feet but like this static holding a pose and using your foot to kind of balance and stabilize you i was utilizing all these muscles in my foot that i that were not strong because i was just these explosive movements back and forth whereas 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 it took a while to get accustomed to that yeah my wife was into yoga for a long time i've tried it a few times i actually want to get into it now well we're putting a yoga studio a private yoga studio right next door really yeah yeah we've got a gym that we're building and one of the things we're building in the gym is a yoga room so come on down come on down we're gonna take you through some classes but my my message to people that like are in your sort of situ or not your situation now but your situation back then we're like how do i get started like please go slow yes just go slow we don't have to get crazy when i first started because margarita she's been um she's been active and she's been exercising she wakes up every morning at like five six o'clock in the morning for the art the dura the duration of our entire relationship she's been getting up super early exercising running uh doing yoga when you're sleeping in no not at all never felt guilty no she's out there running you're like not at all i feel great about it i felt great i felt great about it um
but uh uh when i first you know i think it was like march of last year i was like all right because i've been talking about like okay i'm going to get in shape for years um because i use i was always in shape and then all of a sudden i just looked down one day and i was like i weigh 30 pounds more than i am supposed to and when i first started i was like all right i'm gonna start today and i did like i think it was like 20 jumping jacks like three push-ups and like 10 sit-ups and she's like that's it i was like yes she's like that's not a workout and i was like if i hurt myself and i go too fast i'm going to stop so i'm going to do whatever is easy for me until it becomes boring easy and then i'm just going to keep adding on a little bit that's smart that you had that systematic approach like how did you figure that out because that's kind of the key to anything in life if you hurt yourself on it then you don't want to do it again yeah if you burn yourself on it you don't want to keep doing it so it's like and you want to do things you're good at so do the amount that you know you can kill and then when that becomes just like boring easy make it a little bit harder you know it's the thing like everybody wants to just run at it like and just get especially when you realize you've got an issue everybody just wants to just okay i'm going to resolve that and the way i'm going to do i'm just going to push really hard i'm going to but it's not sustainable and i won't always been that guy but you always hurt yourself you always you know it's just not the right way to do it yeah it's uh it's very wise of you that's that's interesting because most people don't and most people start out and they'll they'll do something difficult and 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 a sore and then they quit yeah or something along those lines and if you hurt yourself that bad
you're like [ __ ] why would i ever do that it hurts so bad yeah i wish it was more common you know i really do when 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 this they're never doing anything physical that's like a giant percentage of our population and they're very insecure about it you know and because of that they don't want you to fat shame when they're this body body positivity nonsense like that's crazy it's all crazy it's all it's you're you're missing the point you're supposed to feel uncomfortable the 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 you're supposed to feel bad when someone points something out about you being fat if it's true it's supposed to feel like [ __ ] and it sucks that it feels like [ __ ] but that in turn is supposed to motivate you to do something about it you know i think whatever it takes to motivate yourself um 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 especially if your diet's bad yeah yeah well when it's full of booze and you know cheeseburgers at two o'clock in the morning oh yeah yeah the comedian lifestyle and the chef lifestyle yeah in that sense probably very similar now when when you um 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 is the exercise thing i'm a cold turkey guy and i know that about myself um and i'm you know i haven't even had a slice of steak i can't i'm like i'm like an alcoholic with food if i take that one bite i'll start eating it again where did that term cold turkey come from i don't know we all know what it is yeah but we don't think of it as turkey no i have no idea where it came from yeah what is that we'll find out shortly it's a weird term right it's not cold spinach no i wonder if it's like
the vegans use the term cold turkey doesn't hurt anybody i quit me cold turkey that sounds weird could be you know well it depends what the word the origination is right but i feel like how do i get into veganism well i quit meat cold turkey you could just say i quit cold turkey yeah but if you say i quit cold turkey then you stopped eating cold turkey yes merriam-webster doesn't even have a real answer they just have theories what's their theories yeah they're they suck they're okay but why turkey and why cold but why turkey and why cold the most popular theory was repeated in san francisco chronicle columnist herb kane c-a-e-n cayenne 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 oh interesting so be like for example if you just cut out doing drugs and you got like and something happened to your skin yeah but here's the thing it says the problem with both these theories that they ignore the use of cold turkey before its application of drug addiction in a cartoon that appeared in newspapers in november 12th of 1920 ace slang man thomas tad dorgan used cold turkey this way now tell me on the square can i get by this for the wedding don't string me tell me cold turkey wow boy do people talk we're in the 20s the [ __ ] is wrong with these people the editors of the historical dictionary of american slang have found an earlier usage 1910 usage where the speaker lost five thousand dollars cold turkey in the sense of losing it outright huh huh cold being straightforward a matter of fact and the earlier talk turkey oh right like talk turkey like you drive turkey that was a thing like people would call people a jive turkey isn't that weird you jive ass turkey i'm gonna start bringing that back drive ass turkey jamie [ __ ] jive turkey [Laughter] what's strange need to call someone a jive turkey what is jive even what does that even mean what's google jive right jive ass turkey yeah i wouldn't even i've never thought
about that i don't know i don't know what that means unreliable oh unrelations or empty promises oh you empty promise in turkey unreliable turkey [Laughter] turkey's a strange food because it's not that good it can be good it's okay it can be good it's all right it's not like venison it's not like a rib eye it's not no but you can make it real you can make it pretty good it could be pretty good let's be honest there's a reason why it's not on most menus yeah it's not as easy to to to make as good as a rib eye you can't it's not possible well a rib eye you have to just not [ __ ] up right by you or a turkey you have to actually cook with finesse what do you do like if you're doing a thanksgiving turkey you a boil and peanut oil guy no no so i did i did uh thanksgiving turkey this year ah um and uh so what i did is it's similar to what i do for my uh whole pigs and um i took uh just did a big in a big trash bag overnight the day before i take uh lemons limes oranges both the zest and the juices uh uh melted butter and when you say the zest in the juices you mean like you take like a microplane and yeah you grate just grate the outside the skin um a bunch of chopped onions a bunch of uh herbs and i basically like put like rub it all on inside outside everything um tie it up put it in a cooler leave it out at room temperature overnight room temperature yeah why uh because so when you cook something you want the internal temperature to cook at the same uh rate as the external temperature that's why people cook sous-vide right sure um and 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 in the oven it's still ice cold in the in the in the interior how long does it take for a turkey to get to room temperature i'm gonna i mean
probably overnight i mean it's not even i mean it's not even completely and here's the thing once it gets to room temperature even according to the health department you have four hours but you have a lot longer than that so what you're doing is just making taking into account the fact that it's been refrigerated yes so i'm i'm i'm removing the refrigeration from it right so that when i put it in the oven it immediately starts cooking from from the inside out not from the outside in right so like you know everyone's seen that like the quintessential steak where it's this it's the slice and it's like well done medium well medium medium rare and then rare right in the center and i'm like that's a terrible steak if you order a medium rare you don't want 10 of it to be medium rare it should be medium rare top to bottom some people like that though i've talked to people that like like a nice crispy sort of a crust on the outside but you can get a crust on the outside and still retain what we call gradient a very low gradient so what i was going to say is some people like the rare on the inside but like the combination of those two textures like the sea or on the outside but a rare on the inside no and that's not what i'm saying you can achieve that but that if you want it to be that rare then so if you've got a piece of meat like this right here's your visually for people that are listening rather yeah so so top to bottom right you're going to have your crust on the top and the bottom and when you cut it the very center is what would be the least cooked right because the temp the ambient temperature is coming from the next year less use of eat it but there are ways to cook it so that the internal temperature from center to colic seer or crust is the same temperature so 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 do you think that a steak that's cooked like sous-vi 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
temperature-wise yeah temperature-wise i don't go off temperature you don't if you had a gas like what do you think would be if you're going to sue via steak what would you put it at i wouldn't okay but if you were but if you had to uh a rib eye yeah well let me ask you this when it comes out of the sous vide am i slicing it needing it am i resting it and then grilling it what am i doing with it i would i don't know i mean that's what i was going to get to some people like to blow torch the outside of it they like to get it to an internal i'm not saying this is correct obviously but they like to get it to an internal of like 125 or 130 whatever they like and then they blow towards the outside of it i have seen chefs do this before what is wrong with that process there's nothing wrong with it it's just different why do you not like it that way well the i mean so scratch bar and kitchen which is the first restaurant margarita and i opened um in 2013 uh we have a i think it's 11 foot wide big fireplace hearth and that's where we cook everything um and so for the past you know almost decade uh we've just cooked with fire and um i do use blow torches um for specific things but typically if i was going like if you're gonna ask me what's the best way to cook a steak is it in a sous-vide and finished with a with a with a blow torch the answer is absolutely not um is it a comparable way sure especially if you're an apartment kitchen right it all depends on what you have at your disposal if you don't have a big fireplace to cook it in then that's going to be too difficult but i think to try to answer your question at least i'd probably go for something around 127 with with the intent to rest it properly and then finish it on in on some sort of fire so if i have if i have an actual live fire then i would finish it in the flames and if you have no other way to sear it then
a blowtorch i guess would do what about cast iron like cast iron frying pan to sear it at the end yeah i mean i personally don't like sous-vide steaks i don't like the texture that it achieves um what is different about it uh it gives it again it can be done properly but typically like when you order if i were to stake at a restaurant and it is sous vide i'm gonna go oh that's they sous vide this um it just has a bit of like almost like rubberization that happens um to me like you need to get the the 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 that's not very good you need like you 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 you know if you've ever had like a really undercooked rib eye it just becomes stringy you have an overcooked ribeye it's tough you have a properly cooked ribeye it's melt in your mouth and it's all about finding the correct temperature so each steak is going to each cut is going to have a different temperature that you're trying to achieve now are there any meats that are superior when you cook them in sous-vide uh a short rib i think a short rib why is that because it's got all the collagen and all that yeah so typically i mean the most the most classic way to cook a short rib is going to be uh braised right and when you're cooking it in the braise you're it's releasing the fat into the braising liquids what you're going to turn into your sauce later um but you're basically not not bringing it to a boil but you're cooking it under in inside of liquid you also can only cook it to a certain you know you cook it for a couple of hours but when you sous-viet we had actually went on the menu um for for quite a while and we would cook it for three days and we cook it at
a low enough three days yeah so we'd cook it at a low enough temperature that when you slice into it it was still pink so it was medium rare but all of that fat had completely not just broken down but then it had been redistributed throughout the entire thing so when you slice into it it was it had the texture of almost like a rib eye in the sense that it uh it it held together it wasn't like a fall apart stew hmm what temperature were cooking at it for three days i can't remember that's written down somewhere i don't know no how do you prefer to cook meat what and you prefer fire yeah so the the best way that i have found and again everything is different you know it we do it's at scratch bar we just do a tasting menu that's only your only option 25 course tasting menu and what we would do is we we used japanese wagyu and when guests would arrive and you'd arrive actually uh into another room where you'd have like 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 it was getting a little bit of smoke and then about four or five courses before your state course which is probably about 45 minutes later 45 minutes an hour later we would bring the piece out that was and presented to you so you could see it and it would be completely malleable that it was like it was shiny the fats had already started to render and we would explain that what we're gonna do now we you know it's been sitting up here for the last hour now we're gonna put it closer to the flames where it's about 115 degrees ambient temperature but we're not going to cook it yet that'll be for the next two courses it'll sit there and then uh right before that course we would actually take the uh the the steak and put it into the flame and what would happen is it would
actually uh start to fry itself from the inside out why from the inside out so the the internal the entire piece of meat had become about 118 degrees just from sitting just from sit just from from being that close to just being in that environment and because the fat content of the japanese wagyu uh 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 at such a high rate it would actually cause all that fat to start to fry well but wasn't isn't the outside still hotter than the inside because you're yeah but but the fat would the fat would uh conduct the heat and it would i mean technically probably the outside i mean yes the the exterior would also get a bit of a crust where the interior wouldn't because it actually touched the flame so how's it doing it from the inside out then so if it's if so if you've got the piece of meat right and you've got a there's a flame here and you go into that flame that flame is going to touch the exterior right it's going to heat up it's going to touch the the that heat is going to transfer to the fat and that fat is going all the way through the piece i mean so it's actually like the interior fat is going to be up to a certain temperature that will cause it to fry so when we pull it out of the flame it's actually the entire thing is going to be sizzling as if it looks like it's been fried so is this a strategy that you would use only for wagyu because it has that high fat content uh that specific thing yeah um but it also i i did a very the thing i sent you with the venison did a very similar thing um even though it doesn't have that that fat content and that was red stag did you get that from texas is that yeah from um i think they're called hudson meat market uh i basically called around for uh um trying to find who has like local venison it's one of the best things about texas is that you can get specifically exotics you can buy them commercially like nilgai is very popular out here which is an indian animal it's
a large elk sized they're weird-looking have you ever seen one on the hoof not in person i've seen a picture yeah i haven't either well no no i did once yeah no i saw one at a ranch in texas but i saw him briefly like he like ran through this uh this trail that we were on and i was like look at that [ __ ] thing he was kind of blue they're weird-looking yeah you could pull up a needle guy so people can do they have tiny little heads or tiny tiny holes yeah antlers but look they're kind of like blue like look how weird that thing looks it's so strange looking it's almost like a like a fake animal you know like and they the males in particular i think all of them have antlers it looks like some sort of crossbreed between like uh like a zebra and i don't even know what else well it's a very unusual animal and really delicious there's a have you eaten a die douay yet yeah did you like it i loved it it's great yeah i have you met jesse i haven't jesse griffiths who's been on the podcast before too is fantastic i might have met so i i ate there 2013 14. something like that jesse has a school where he teaches people how to hunt how to butcher and how to cook and takes people with zero experience and one of the things that he really loves is hogs he 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 are invasive and they're they're over populated there's so many of them they destroy agriculture and so it's an easy animal to gain access to hunt it's very prevalent it's an easy hunt and especially when you're shooting rifles your your success rate is very high and then on top of that jesse will show them how to break it down what is his um 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 here it is new school of traditional cookery that's it the new school traditional cookies found in 2006
current uh concurrently with die die douay supper club to provide an educational aspect of our business that promotes responsible use for our wild resources jesse's awesome i'm such a huge fan of that guy and his whole strategy like here click on that to show jesse uh cooking a full board go full screen i see this very focused but that's what the region has to offer and it changes he's uh also a giant fan of cooking over fire like everything he does is over uh i think he uses post oak for the most part well once you start doing that you kind of you fall in love with it and you kind of can't go back it's a real issue for me it's become a problem because it takes so much [ __ ] time you know like cooking over um like fire is whatever the [ __ ] it is in your caveman brain that gets excited about grilling gets excited ten percent more oh yeah or more than that maybe by cooking over actual hardwood and i don't know why that is when we first opened when we moved when we when we opened scratch bar in its current location where we got the hearth um the reason i decided to to go completely uh 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 um i 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 all right go to go to high heat and then go down to medium heat you know go here for this long and then do that and then do this and i felt like it would be really interesting to just have like them have to learn how to you know if you let your doc your fire die down you're you're [ __ ] you're completely [ __ ] you know when we opened the rest the restaurant we had we had a pasta on the menu and you have to boil water and on an open fire and you can't just like crank it by turning it up you have to keep your fire going and um so that was kind of the idea and once you really start cooking with it you just you almost can't recreate the
flavors and the feeling that you get from from that yeah the feeling is a part of it it really is especially when you're the one who's actually doing the cooking i don't know how much that feeling is for someone who is uh completely removed from the process who just gets it served to them the flavor is definitely different but they're the feeling when you're actually cooking the meat yeah it's uh there's something about it that's very enticing well at the restaurant i mean if if if this was the the hearth right here you're sitting as close to it as as as you would be so you're getting all the aroma there's no there's no seat in the restaurant that isn't within 20 feet of the hearth oh that's wild yeah and what do you is this your spot yeah that scratch bar okay and so when you're cooking do you have okay so you have wheels and you crank up and down like argentine style so when we first opened um yeah we were doing wheels uh you can already see there i've removed uh everything so so what we actually ended up going with is just bricks they're just bricks and like roasting racks and we just create our own little apparatuses i also got some just some rolled steel uh to create little planches so what was wrong with the wheels it was two one size fits all like you could see there that that's about a i'm gonna say roughly four feet and four feet so so we had two four foot wheels one of them was just a big grill and one of them was a was a big like plancha and because we're doing tasting menus um and you've got so many different things happening like that's great if you're at a restaurant where it's like all right you're going to fire 50 stakes in the next you know hour and a half or whatever but 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 so we would create all these different sort of like uh sort of apparatuses and little areas to cook that's fascinating so what kind of foods are you cooking in this fire other
than just meat everything like how you doing like fish vegetables basically at some point everything is going through the fire and so you're using frying pans you're using just the plancha like what do you uh sometimes you're going into the into the coals with with a pan sometimes you're going with the meat or fish direct directly into the coals sometimes your ghost going sometimes you're just warming something you know you may have like 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 you know flavor to it and that's it i've seen people cook on coals like they lay a steak down flat on the coals but 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 depends really what you're going for what is the difference in the flavor that you can achieve from putting it on coals versus putting it on like a grate above the coals i mean i mean right there it explains either 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 now sometimes that might be a bit harsh but for example in uh you know uh the santa maria style you know tri-tip in california which is california's answer to barbecue which i thought was something until i came here ranchers well it's not really it's grilling more than it is barbecue right completely um but but it is a it is manipulation of of of the the protein with the temp so i mean there is some barbecue aspect to it um but like uh that one um like if i'm doing a tri-tip and i i actually competed in the um i think two or two years in a row i competed in the 805 state championship or whatever um and what i did is is after you cook it and and i would i would uh rest the meat i would then dip it in a barbecue sauce get my my pit really really roaring make a little hole and then put it in and bury it in the coals um and that would sort of uh give it a really interesting exterior just like uh texture and flavor
so uh explain that again so you would take the tri-tip you would dunk it in a barbecue sauce and then throw it right into the fire and then and then bury it in more coals did you cook it to a certain temperature before that or did yeah so so i would take the whole tri-tip and you know with the rub and i would you know start it really low so it gets like a little bit sear and now 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 and um obviously there's no lid on it in the santa maria style um until you're at about 127 or so and then i take it out and i put it in an igloo cooler and i would close the top for about an 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 uh in the coals oh wow how was that it was really good sounds [ __ ] amazing i'm hungry now dude well tri-tip is an interesting cut right because it's very lean it's delicious though yeah it's very good it seems like one you could [ __ ] up though it's so easy to [ __ ] up like the thing is if you cook tri-tip like a steak it's not very good um and i think the average per like if you know tri tips in every market in la but if you just go and grab a tri-tip and you try to cook it like a rib eye it's not very good what do you have to do differently slow slow we gotta slow it down so you gotta treat it like you would treat like a game meat because it's so devoid of fat yes and i mean you can you can cook gay meat faster but in a thin slice wide tip is kind of a fat roast i mean it depends though like that that venison saddle that i showed you i mean it was a two-pound saddle about this big right and i cooked that right in the fire but it seemed long and not very thick like i'm looking at the the image that you sent me and it seems like it just doesn't have the same kind of uh thickness like that's that doesn't seem very thick maybe not i mean that makes sense to me that you would cook something like that at high
heat over fire and god damn that looks good i'll send this to jamie so he can um it's kind of interesting how you did it too because you you have made in your i mean obviously you have access to whatever the [ __ ] you want when it comes to cooking and you made like like the most primitive sort of setup you just use like concrete and that was like 250 bucks from homedepot.com they just brought it on a truck and dropped it you know so you missed probably about an inch and a half thick maybe two inches thick and you built this whole situation what is this why are we looking at jim gaffigan [Laughter] so you made this like completely on your own yeah so they're just they're literally cinder blocks on the um on the bottom and then uh just bricks on top and i basically recreated um what we have at scratch bars in my backyard here and where are you getting the grate from that little grill rack yeah i mean you could probably buy it at heb but i don't even remember where i got that from probably one of the local restaurant supply stores and when you cook do you use specific wood what kind of wood do you like to cook off of uh i prefer almond almonds um yeah but uh you can't really find that here so this is mesquite why do you like almond uh it burns really clean so like for example i explained at scratch bar you're sitting really close to the fire if i was to use you know some of this post oak everybody who left the restaurant would just smell like they were in a they came from a smoke shop oh i see and so um almond tends to taste it gives you more of a foresty flavor and less of a barnyardy flavor if that makes sense it sounds like you're selling almond wood because barnyardy flavor is not sound like anything i want my food of course you do well sort of but barnyard sounds like horseshit yeah i hear a barnyard i feel like i smell poo sure you know what's the forest smell like uh it doesn't smell like poo forest
smells like trees you know i when i think of oak i don't think of barnyardy when i think of like cooking over oak i think of like the sort of robust aroma that's imparted on the meat from the burning of this hardwood sure um you know tomato tomato okay um and but you obviously have access to whatever kind of cooking utensils and equipment that you want why do you choose to do it this way i did it the other ways um i still do it the other ways uh but that's the one that i connected with the most um it's just i mean it's the way i want to cook at home it's the way i want to cook at the restaurant and it's also you know i really thought that i could do something for the cooks who got to learn i felt like if you could if you could hold down that station at scratch bar you could work anywhere and the way you're doing it you're not even getting it down to the coals you're you're doing it just over the fire like i'm looking at those logs they were not fully submerged yeah so there's there's lots of different schools of thought and i i'm not gonna debate which ones are correct and i'm not even sure there is a correct one um i personally like to cook in the flame in the flame yeah as opposed to over the heat of the burning coals correct why is that i've just found that uh if you go down to just coals right and i actually when we first opened i was doing charcoal and i switched to to hardwood when you're just doing coals you're just at radiant heat at that point it's almost as if you could just have a grill that's like an infrared grill you've created an infrared grill out of out of wood or there's still a lot of smoke flavor that's imparted from the coals there is um however when you're dealing with a piece of wood that's on fire uh you're going to have a different like flavor aroma of of the um of the smoke itself because once it's all broken down into coals it's going to smoke you know when you have a big flame you have no smoke and when you're trying to start a flame you have a lot of smoke
so as you're burning wood you're creating different levels of smoke different amounts of smoke different levels of heat versus just one large infrared area i see now when it comes to something like a tri-tip that you have to do slower how are you doing that over fire uh same thing i mean look it's not that i don't cook with coals it's just for specific things so you're saying it but you wouldn't do it in the fire like you wouldn't have the fire touch the meat you would have you'd be above it sometimes sometimes yeah but sometimes like in that video there i actually want the the fire i want the flame to actually start to sear the meat and and that's it's similar in the fact that they're both very lean to a tri-tip with the venison yeah yeah yeah and what are you putting on the outside of a piece of meat like that are you using a rub before you're you're cooking it there are you seasoning it with anything uh typically i'm just putting you know salt and pepper like at the restaurant it's just salt and pepper um uh recently though a buddy of mine gave me this he has uh his own like uh spice rub called nadc and it's [ __ ] awesome nadc what does it stand for uh not a damn chance not a 10 chance of what just not a damn chance and what's in not a damn chance i don't know but it's [ __ ] really good this is the name of his company so people can buy it and nadco.com i think i'm not sure oh so that's the name that's the name of the same company and he only has one rub no he's got a bunch but og's steak is uh og steak look at this oh mango habanero he's a man after my own heart yeah whoo interesting so neen's a professional skateboarder oh he's this professional skateboarder who makes his own rubs yeah he uh he actually built a similar uh we became friends he came to sushi bars how he became friends but he uh we kind of bonded over skateboarding but then he's like oh i had i built this hearth in my backyard and he's cooking all over all over wood fire and he just moved here to texas too so wow yeah he's
actually uh he and i uh are the he's my uh i don't know if we call a partner it's not a real thing but we do the burgers together oh interesting yeah so this is obviously uh that's not actually our burger but uh if you go to nadc burger that's uh that's our burger and how often do you are you guys doing this a lot this is we've done it we've done it three times we did it uh at we did it there's yoni yep so that's that's uh at the vulcan after um uh one of the shows right um and then we did one at the barracks which is this like legendary professional only skate park in la and then we just did one for cm smokehouse's um one-year anniversary we would just give them away every time we don't even charge we just do it for fun oh well that's very nice of you yeah just for just to perfect the process and have fun and enjoy it we're just enjoying it and actually we do our burger with his his seasoning oh nice yeah it's nice it's good so when you're cooking like that piece of venison are you using the og steak uh sometimes yeah i don't think i did in that video but i can't remember now do you ever use like an offset grill have you ever have you [ __ ] around at all because now we're in texas have you tried the their style of barbecuing out here like the way they do a brisket uh i have i actually had i've had two traegers i gave them both away though um you're not a fan i'm not not a fan um well i like i like building a fire right and so actually that that um the barbecue championship i was telling you about i got i got a i want to traeger both both years they gave me a traeger and then i just gave them to my my cooks who did the event with me um but uh yeah i there's something about i like building a fire now i want to do it the old school way yeah i mean but then like the you know the typical offset here you know you are doing with with fire so
um i haven't played with it that much but i do enjoy it yeah when you talk to the guys at terry blacks i put something up on my instagram the other day i guess it's gone because it was in my stories but um we they gave me a tour they always do i always asked yeah give me give me a tour of the pits and see how they have it down to a science where they have like notebooks yeah saying you know they're 12 plus hours for each brisket and they you know they have this whole thing that they're doing from start to finish like ramping up the temperature towards the end wrapping it all these different steps that they take but they do not speak highly about pellet drills pellet grills are for the person who doesn't know what the [ __ ] they're doing it's very convenient i love traegers because they're very convenient it's great for wild game you know because you could you know keep a temperature probe in there it tells my phone exactly where it's at and i wonder if that's similar to my feelings unlike suvi i'm sure i'm sure which these guys are so old old-school and they use oak yeah they have these i mean everything is made out of propane tanks so they have somebody who welds these crazy gigantic [ __ ] pits out of propane tanks and this massive insulated firebox there it is is first of all goddamn that looks good yeah oh my god and their [ __ ] sausages are insane too yeah they're terry black's fanatic i'm a very very big fan of theirs um i was so glad when you liked them was like god damn it if philip shits on terry blacks we're gonna have a real problem in our friendship mark mark black actually um uh sort of threw me a uh surprise birthday party last year oh no [ __ ] yeah so as a as a surprise um margarita was going to take me to she well she took me to houston but on the way to houston she's like oh um uh we're going to stop by and pick up terry black's on the way and you know you have to get out and go in and when
we did everybody from sushi bar was was there and uh mark who we had just uh met at sushi bar two weeks prior he'd come to the restaurant and he loved it um was there and he's like nope come over here you don't have to wait in the line he's like he's like i you know personally cooked this one and like he cut it and it was like [ __ ] unbelievable yeah brisket's an art form it's one of those things that like it's achieved ultimate it's like support like i don't know how it gets better than it's what it is different at different places it is and still amazed like franklin has a slightly different taste but still [ __ ] insanely good it's all about texture for me and so there's a few places in town that just like they're at they're on a completely another level and or at least i know i haven't tried everywhere in town but the ones that i have tried you know franklin's la barbecue uh uh terry blacks um i don't know have you tried cm smokehouse no yoni speaks very highly of it though yoni's the man when it comes oh i know yeah but but cm smokehouse is the sleeper in that i i when i tried his his brisket i looked at him because you know you meet someone who's a friend of someone else's you're like oh that you know he does stuff and then when you when that friend of a friend actually is super legit you're like wait a second like you made this this is [ __ ] this is good this is really [ __ ] good interesting yeah um did you talk to him about methods i 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 those other three and i meant it to be a compliment not like uh you know hey you know yours is actually as good as other people's right um did he get offended no not at all because i mean i think there's a there's an understanding that that's the pinnacle right so if you're i mean if you were to
say philip your restaurants as good as the french laundry i wouldn't be offended i would be i don't even think you're correct right it is amazing how many great barbecue restaurants are in the city yeah it's [ __ ] incredible well it's crazy how many good restaurants are in this city yeah it's there doesn't appear to be bad restaurants in austin it's very hard to survive well i just i haven't had it i haven't been to a bad restaurant yet i could tell you a few places that suck it's okay [Laughter] i'm sure this place is there's some immediate i'm sure there's terrible stuff because there's terrible stuff everywhere further out of town but like you go to la and if you were just to throw a like a dart at a random restaurant it's hit or miss that that thing's even edible there's tons of bad food but there's so many like so many people but then here it's like i think like the peaks and valleys are higher in you know a place like la but here everywhere you eat is just solid that was one of the things that that really stuck out to us that like we didn't have you know we didn't we have we still haven't had a bad meal here well it's also a town that celebrates independent businesses independent stores independent restaurants it's like it's it would be very hard to be like a ruth's chris here you know there is one isn't it i'm sure there is yeah but i mean in comparison to like some like the eddy vs type places that you have like this feel that you go to there's a feel of like hey this is a business is created by humans and actually it's this is not like we're going to show you how to make a restaurant the way we make a restaurant you follow our guidelines we're going to do it this way because when you go to a place not [ __ ] on ruth chris they make a great steak but you go to a place that's uh 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's like there's a
feel to that place it's like a part of the experience is the fee like you know you're going to someone's place yeah and that's the thing is like i so i fell in love with this city in 2013. um we came out here and we did uh uh south by southwest i brought scratch bar out here and we spent two weeks and um we actually opened on the corner of sixth and red river not in the corner but we actually down down an alleyway we got a truck we set up some picnic tables and we were doing tasting menus um you know just all day you could walk up and have like a 50 tasting menu on the side of the you know south by nice and um while i was out here uh i just fell in love with like the ingenuity and the community of chefs and the just the like just the style you could you could it felt like a place where you could just have an idea and go and do something coming from la that's not so much the case well la is just such a complicated city and so much more complicated now because the pandemic and then the aftermath of the poor management of the city it's just it's such a [ __ ] up place now that it but it's always had this weird sort of like non-community community aspect to it you know well i grew up in the valley and so it definitely there was like there's neighborhoods and and communities it's like when we first opened scratch bar in encino um you would it was every night this person knew this person this person knew that you know it was a it was a lot of that and it was you know i wanted to open there because it's where i grew up and it because it was you know it's you know where my my parents lived and my friends parents lived and and just sort of that sense of community which you don't find all over la right yeah there's more of that in encino and and and more that even so when you go to like orange county and there's places down there but it's just l.a is just so polluted by the entertainment industry like that the disingenuous aspect of the entertainment particularly acting and like the pursuit
of acting success and then and then then on top of that we didn't think that that was disingenuous enough it was reality stars and then like well that's not stupid enough tick tock stars it's like they keep coming up with new levels of stupidity and that's the pinnacle is the you know the online like content creator star you know i guess whatever makes people happy whatever works for them okay i guess that's my political uh response to that yeah i mean it's just the problem is like there's too many people too and one of the things about a city like austin is that it's only a million people and then another million in the surrounding areas that's not a lot it's very small in comparison to los angeles well ever also everybody's nice here yes and i have a i have a theory on on why that is um and not just the people from here the people from here are nice but like you come you you people go to la and i feel like there's this this this perceived persona that's like i need to be an [ __ ] to fit in and so yeah i think so i think a lot of people move to la and they like they wanted especially in the entertainment industry they moved to l.a and like okay i'm going to be this sort of you know this this sort of like you know douchebag mentality style um i mean if you grew up in la you can always tell who's from from la because they don't honk and they put on their blinkers and they wait and they wave to you um here everyone moved here recently and they're like oh if i'm gonna fit in i gotta be really nice to everybody oh that's funny yeah go to new york that's do you think that douchebaggishness is uh prevalent in l.a in new york they really adopt it you know i was talking to a buddy of mine about that about what's happening in comedy clubs in new york that uh people get angry if you bring up certain premises and they're they're like the woke aspect of it and he's like but guess what bro none of them are from here they're like [ __ ] maine people they're like from somewhere else where they thought they were gonna adopt this persona by coming to new york and being
like real aggressive about like being like this left-wing progressive angry city dweller yeah and they're like it's a persona they adopt it's like this makes them happy to try to pretend that they're this person yeah it's it's it's just an interesting idea that like i'm gonna go somewhere and i'm gonna reinvent myself to fit in that's a lot of it though yeah it's a lot a lot of people do that man i mean people do move to places to reinvent themselves yeah there's a lot of people that don't know why they are the way they are and they don't like it they don't like how they fit in where they are especially if you grew up in a place so they've known you since you were five that's a [ __ ] problem because now that you're 18 you want to have pink hair they're like [ __ ] you like but i like pink hair you know no no no you got to move to a place and they go oh mike has pink hair he's always had pink hair and they just accept you yeah i moved to chicago when i was like uh i don't even know how old um but it was it was interesting to just be in a new place where you could i mean i didn't reinvent myself because i just moved there to cook and i kept cooking but it's interesting to like make new friends and meet new people and have the opportunity to have zero baggage or zero preconceived notion and you can i mean kind of when margie and i moved here it was like no one knew us and they were only introduced to us with the success of sushi bar um which was so interesting because like in la we've been hustlers we're known as like the the young kids who have been hustling forever and and you know have have made it and here we we walk in and everyone's like oh you're from sushi barns like that's weird because we're not used to people like approaching us that way right well there's you know again there's like not that many people here yeah it's different it's a small it's essentially a small town and part of that could be a problem you know there's there's definitely people that are like super into talking to certain people because they are famous or because they you know run a famous restaurant or something and
they they'll weasel their way into your life and i have a lot of uncomfortable conversations where people are trying to get on the podcast for no [ __ ] reason whatsoever i'm like what do you what is this conversation we're having like yeah i haven't luck i mean luckily i haven't either i haven't noticed it or i'm too naive um but i'm busy or busy yeah i know this is um this has become the busiest i've ever been this last this last year and now with uh getting out of sushi bar atx and and uh what we've got coming is is gonna get even busier so sushi bar atx though you sold it to someone what did you do so uh so does a mcdonald's [Laughter] um basically uh i'm no i'm no longer involved uh i'm not i'm not an owner i am no longer the chef there um you cashed out i some something happened and i am no longer involved oh so something negative no no nothing negative i'm just not supposed we're not not really talking about the inter-workings of of i was involved i'm no longer involved this is cryptic i want to like pause the show and decipher this jamie how you feeling about this i think i understand what he's saying i feel like it's very cryptic but also i maybe understand the kryptos cryptocity well i'll give you i'll give you some more i'll give you more context of the story okay so uh you don't have to if you feel uncomfortable about it i don't give a [ __ ] i'm just riding you no no well there's other stuff to talk about yeah um so uh margaret and i started uh scratch bar actually 2013 and uh we operated in a coffee shop and we moved it from our coffee shop to our one bedroom apartment in uh in
hollywood from there uh we somebody who ate at our apartment offered us you served food at your apartment yeah we were doing about commercially yeah we charged for it how the [ __ ] did you manage to do that so we were we were operating at this coffee shop and the deal was um they were open from like it was breakfast through like 4 p.m they closed and they hired me to be like to redo their menu and so when they hired me to do that they asked me what do you want to charge and i said you close at 4 pm so instead of paying me what if i just get to use your space at night and i'm going to open a restaurant at night here and that was the deal i worked there for free all day during the day and then at night i would turn it into scratch bar oh that's a great deal um for them yeah and i thought so and then after a few weeks the guy comes over and says uh well i i i'd rather you know you start putting a little more focus into what you know my menu and i said well our deal was i would i would change it x amount i used to be a big hothead we ended that conversation with [ __ ] you i'm out um we it happened on i think on saturday we were close sunday monday we had we were sold out next week and i was like [ __ ] what are we gonna do so we gutted our apartment and we called all of our reservations and told them to come to our apartment wow how many people could you see it at a time uh i want to say we sat close to like 20 something that is wild yeah what do your [ __ ] neighbors think i mean it only this guy's partying every night yeah i mean we were in west hollywood it's not like you know we were in a quiet area we were on like crescent heights in sunset right so um we did that for a couple of weeks and during that time one of our guests was like you know he came in basically said this is
incredible i have an em i own an empty restaurant space on restaurant row next door to matsuhisa and um if you want to go 50 50 you can move the restaurant into my space oh that's amazing we opened up on restaurant row la cienega uh the next week uh fast forward from 2013 we've opened multiple restaurants uh now today um i'm not involved in austin anymore but murray and i now uh own 100 of our restaurant so you were not 100 an owner of sushi bar i've had i've had partners since 2013. so now in uh scratch restaurants which operates scratch bar and kitchen uh both sushi bars and pasta bar uh we don't have partners there anymore we should probably tell everybody how we met and what happened because um you guys weren't planning on living in austin no it's kind of your fault a little bit it's my wife's fault um because my wife's friend who's a sushi fiends like there's going to 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 [ __ ] government so they you guys set up shop here my wife drags me out because basically i always want to eat meat and she's like you like come out for sushi it's supposed to be really good okay okay okay i go it's [ __ ] phenomenal and i put it on my instagram yeah so um in december of 2020 2020 yeah december of 2020 la said it's too dangerous to serve on the patio um and so they said shut everything down you can't serve indoors you can't serve outdoors earlier in the year when they said you can't serve indoors we literally just built a sushi bar on our patio so patio business was fine we had built tents and everything but now it was too dangerous to be on the patio either so we were going to have to lay everyone off right before christmas and so murray and i decided that we didn't want to do that instead we said if anyone's willing to work we will find another state that
will let us work because at that point it wasn't la anymore was california we were going to go up north and do a do a sushi bar uh in big sur and then they closed all of california so um 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 we got here in the end of december we were supposed to go back at the beginning of february and um when we tried to come out here you know we have a publicist in la and they were uh talking to all of the different writers here in town and they all said we're not going to promote them you know with with kovid we're just not promoting anything right now so we were like [ __ ] we're going out to a city that we don't know that doesn't know us and we have no reservations and so we sent out a newsletter to our following and i guess that's where uh your wife's friend saw it we basically said uh if you know anyone who's in austin please tell them to come support us and uh after probably about two weeks of being open we had sold out the um the entire stint yeah so we came um there it is look at you best suits you ever had in my life so this is when 53 weeks ago basically a year yeah wild and so uh yeah you um you convinced me to keep it at least one i think you said to me uh you gotta you gotta keep this i gotta we gotta you gotta stay and i said i can't i have to go back and you said well uh if you stay through february i'll post about it and i said okay [Laughter] and that's what happened and you you did and uh we you know i didn't know i mean i had no idea what to expect but that night you posted about it and we sold out february within four minutes that night and then the next morning we woke up and there's like 20 000 people on the wait list and um we just kept extending and
extending and extending and then um eventually we signed the lease and it's been phenomenal we haven't had uh uh i'm saying we like i'm still there i'm not there anymore but the restaurant never had a day that wasn't at capacity and um now and now we are um now that margaret and i have uh you know control of scratch restaurants we're um and we live here now we're bringing two new sushi concepts this year and uh pasta bar will be here shortly as well and pasta bar you're gonna put in on sixth which is uh very close from my super secret comedy club project that will probably open in a similar time frame yeah we um uh pasta bar will open in march the goal right now is march 11th which is the first day of south by oh that's awesome yeah and so as of right now um we actually we don't know the exact date yet we haven't released it but you can go on pastabaraustin.com and actually uh get on the wait list for when we open reservations so the club comic club be open just for anybody listen it'll be longer than that it'll take a little longer than that but um you're doing something else too though right you're gonna do uh a sushi place that's out like a little further outside of town yeah so um we are in escrow on a ranch out uh in dripping so in dripping springs uh right off of fitzu um we got a 1.2 acre ranch and um it's gonna be really [ __ ] cool nice it's an old uh like cowboy style log cabin which is gonna be a japanese whiskey bar oh wow and then you're gonna you're gonna go onto this property and have your welcome cocktail in there um canapes uh this is not going to be the the the sushi bar concept so all of our sushi bars uh up until now um uh which by the way uh were um with the new sushi rest well we're we're changing the name of sushi bar uh for our ones in la and montecito and another one that's coming here so it's gonna be called sushi by scratch restaurants and um
so all of those are the what was the sushi bar concept this is going to be a completely different concept so you're going to go on to the property the property you're going to have your drink and your your your snacks in this little uh like log cabin and then you're going to be taken through like the grounds of the property to another cabin where uh we're gonna have uh a pretty exciting concept where sushi bar was a one star concept we're gonna attempt set like a two or three star sushi concept here and what's the difference like what are you gonna do so this sushi bar was is was always designed to be appealing to everybody um in terms of like the the types of fish that we were getting although we were getting like the highest quality salmon you could get we had salmon on the menu we had a you know we had albacore on the menu we had a lot of things that were you know uh think of us almost as like a gateway restaurant where we weren't uh you go to some sushi restaurants and you don't recognize a single fish that's on the menu so this is going to be a little bit more higher end fish it's also going to be we're going to have a tank with like like live live king crabs and live lobsters and things like that um i haven't quite finished the full concept but it's gonna also not be 100 sushi it's gonna be like 80 sushi and when you say like like like exotic fish like what are you talking about like what kind of fish so one of my favorite fish uh is called akamutsu and it's a uh that's jamie's favorite yeah right it's actually from ohio actually yeah what were you starting with no a-k-a-m-u-t-s akamu is it german yeah it's german fish yeah from ohio that sounds super japanese oh wow okay so this looks like a snapper black throat sea perch yeah so it's a perch but it's it's very very it's in very very deep waters um it's oh that makes me hungry yeah it's it's also incredibly difficult to source
and very expensive um but you know where where we have very uh you know the type of fish selection for for a sushi bar is very um uh i don't want to say average because it's not average but it's it's very approachable for someone who's not necessarily like a sushi connoisseur so this is going to be just sort of like the next level and now that kind of fish is there a difference in the type of flavor that you're going to get from a fish like that like is there a way to describe that so that one you serve it with a skin on the skin's so soft that when you when you take the scales off i'll usually just use my hands i won't use a uh a scaler really you'll take the scales off with your hands yeah because you'll rip the skin it's so soft wow um and so the the oil content is just like a single fish sells for 736 thousand dollars what what did you say that's what it says but yeah that's a lot is that real you're going to spend three quarters of them of course you're going to spend three quarters of a million dollars on fish well i mean some some of the bluefin tunas are selling for millions of dollars but isn't that like a dick waving contest when they do that with the blue fin tuna the way the way i've it'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 uh they'll outbid everyone else but the actual market price of a single tuna is never that high yeah i mean i i carry probably the most expensive tuna that you could get um like regularly in america and i'm not paying a million dollars for a fish right that's what i'm saying this video actually says it's an akamutsu but the like caption says it's a bluefin tuna caught off northeastern japan fetch 736 got it yeah so tuna wood also i mean nakamutsu is not i mean it's not huge where tuna you i mean the thing is a lot of those those guys who do buy those tunas
they can cut it up and freeze it and send it to 10 of their restaurants and and sell it for a lot of money as this is the most expensive prized tuna of the year right and when you're dealing with sushi you think of the size of the portion and you know if it's i mean like if you're going to a sushi place like soda or somewhere in town that's a nice sushi place what would like a two piece of sushi like toro go for roughly i'm gonna guess no i would guess less but i don't know 17 let's just let's call it 20 bucks yeah so it's 20 bucks and it's two small pieces for two pieces yeah it might be more okay yeah oh you think in individuals yeah so let's just say it's thirty dollars and think of thirty dollars and then look at the entire tuna how many thirty dollar portions are in there as hundreds and hundreds and when you're saying this is the most prized tune of the year that 30 piece is 300 and people are paying for it right i get it i don't think anyone's losing money on on those tunas they spend that money on of course they wouldn't do it right well it might be worth a little bit of money just for the marketing and pr or whatever but i think when they the thing that someone was explaining to me and honestly now that i'm thinking about i think i heard it on a podcast um i think it was on meat eater and i think they were saying that it's not that they would normally spend that much money on a tuna it's that there's like a sort of a ceremonial aspect of this bidding to see if that's true i don't know how you'd even google that well there definitely is a they do bid on it but how it gets to be millions of dollars that's what's confusing and that's what he was trying to yeah i mean that's that's not in the nor i mean like i'm saying the normal market but what i'm you know because what i'm getting is is from toyosa it is from what used to be tsukiji um so it is coming from the same market where that bidding is happening but when i'm getting you know uh we
don't get whole tunas we get we get them halved but they're almost as big as like the length of this table so you get them in the full form and then you piece it up yourself so remember when you came the first time to sushi bar that that the the size of that table it was almost reached end to end and i think that was yes it was maybe like probably six feet mm-hmm that's a big-ass touch piece of tuna yeah and so that's how many pounds is that 100 and something 180 probably and what does something like that cost a couple thousand jesus so when you're doing like um inventory for a sushi place like it seems like that would require a lot of skill and clever planning yes except that you know we've been lucky enough at all of our 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 right so we have a plan you know we know roughly exactly what we're doing and that's typically also part of the reason why we push if you want extras that you get something try something new because we'll bring in four or five extra fish one or two of each just to have extras so that we know that all right we're getting 30 of these 30 of these 30 of these maybe you want an extra you know toro or yellowtail or something and that's fine well we always have a little bit extra um but it just keeps it in a constant you know right so you can manage it much easier now sushi bar um is now no longer you but this pasta bar that you're doing like what i'm not familiar with the one that you have in la so what is what is going to be different about that like what's is it same sort of a thing like a tasting menu yeah so everything that we do in our group is all tasting menus um and so uh similar to sushi bar you're gonna sit right up to the counter the stoves are gonna be like if you're sitting there the stoves are where this wall is right here and we're doing i think we're doing about about 13 course tasting menu in that 13 courses unlike sushi you're
not going to have 13 bowls of pasta because that would be difficult to have there's about five five courses that is pasta and then all the other courses are something that kind of help tell the story of like a you know an upscale pasta dinner like what kind of stuff is that um well so you start off always uh with your own loaf of margarita sourdough which is the best sourdough you've ever had like hands down tom papa's sourdough i haven't but i can't you do you might want to shut your [ __ ] mouth well i'm still going to say my wife's is better i'm sure it's amazing the tom pappas is really good we should uh we should have a sourdough off we should i am a giant fan of the tom papa sourdough look at that yes so you get uh so that's margarita sourdough and then she makes uh butter god damn that looks good yeah so the thing about bread looks so good the thing about hers is it's so crunchy but like it's the crust is very thin but it's so crusty um and then the inside is just like a pillow and it's super sour um and then uh she makes butter that it goes with she makes her own butter yeah does she turn do the whole deal of course i mean not by hand um but uh and then you know the our whole group scratch restaurants is the fact that we don't serve anything we don't make from scratch so like the fact that we make the soy sauce and um the bread the butter the ice creams the cheeses whatever so um i mean here you go this is what's on this is what's looking like it's on the menu damn that looks good so 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 [ __ ] like there's something about the wheat that they use that has a different reaction in people's bodies and it's been explained to me that it's like was it
double zero flour or something like that like yeah so there's different flat i mean if you just go and get what they call ap flour that's like that's what your is gonna give you like that kind of really thick pasty kind of like sit in your stomach and that's it's regular flour that you buy from a grocery store yeah but there are i mean there's specific flours that that uh that we use and that that um you can get that are that are much different um durum uh double zero all these different types of flowers what is this double zero stuff that everybody says is the best um i shouldn't say everybody because i've really talked to everybody about it no but everybody does say it's the best um it it's it is it's become very very popular in in pizzas in uh in in breads and it really is it's like i kind of the the best way i would sort of describe it is it's much lighter it's much cleaner is it easier to digest i mean it feels easier to digest i don't know from like uh like a compound makeup whether you know what it is that makes it different but uh it feels much better that's when people describe pasta and pizza in italy that they don't use the kind of flour that we have over here yeah and um you know maynard uh keenan from tool you know he uh has a bunch of restaurants in arizona and really yeah he's a vineyard yeah do you didn't know about no i knew he had i knew he had a vineyard i know he had restaurants yeah yeah his osterias very cool yeah um i think is it merkin vineyards osterias is that what he calls him he named his he's such a [ __ ] freak he named his restaurant after a fake vagina toupee that's what a merkin is american vineyard's tasting room in austria it's i don't know him but i've listened in enough tool to know he's you know an interesting dude oh he's super interesting super [ __ ] smart guy and a very cool guy i love him to death but uh his uh food by the way if you ever get a chance to eat there the pizza is insane my sister lives in arizona so i'll have to check it out it's in
scottsdale it's an old swiss challenge scottsdale yeah we had a ufc in phoenix and we drove all the way out to scottsdale to eat there it was that good um but i went to visit him anyway but anyway his um explanation was that when they changed wheat or they started uh adjusting and manipulating wheat to develop higher yields that the problem is that that wheat has more complex glutens in it and it's uh you definitely get higher yield per acre but it's more difficult for people to digest yeah i don't know if that's true but it makes sense i mean that's what they say is true here it is um double zero flour also known as dopioziro 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 grind sizes vary from double zero to two oh so it's the size of the grind double zero is the finest grind and two is the coarsest huh is it from different wheat well you would imagine just think about their weed is just different period right like their food is different of course yes their steaks are different they're all grass-fed cows over there but you would imagine if you have something finer rather than more coarse if you're going to dilute that in water yes right or or with whatever you're gonna make you know use to make your pasta the finer it is the more like the more it's going to spread out and become and become fine for a better well it just seems like it'd be easier for your body to break it down yeah because it's not it's not as thick and as coarse right so are you using um a specific combination of flowers do you do is there a way do you like it so so different pastas are going to have different you know different flowers and different combinations just just for the flavor aspect or the texture yeah so i mean depending on what you're if you're looking for a chewier noodle if you're looking for something that's softer and more pillowy um and then you know how the amount of hydration and and there's certain things that go into it to make it specific to what it is you're trying to achieve
and did you do this by trial and error this is something that you learned from you know is that like from so uh i worked with um i mean i've worked in a lot of restaurants that made fantastic pasta i've never worked in a pasta restaurant so what we're doing at the restaurant right now is sort of a conglomeration of you know really what everybo you know the way that i sort of run the restaurants is it really is like a conglomeration of the entire team so anyone who has anything you know a value to add it gets added um so 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 because i've never been a fan of of not being as good as we can because it was only my idea um that's interesting so you pick people that you work with that you can collaborate with yeah so like sometimes will someone come to you with an idea of a dish and you guys like talk it through yeah so we actually at scratch bar back in 2017 we used to change the entire menu every single month so 20 new dishes oh wow and um it would for a long time it was just me just solely me just with a notebook just coming up with new dishes and then eventually i was like i need to keep the team engaged and also the team would come to me and be like hey um what do you uh we were thinking we want to cook rabbit next month so i was we started implementing every friday during family meal it wasn't mandatory you 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 and we started really you know working together to kind of put these menus together and at this one point one of our younger cooks had the idea um to do a um he said well what if we do something like a uh uh bagel and cream cheese and everybody laughed at him and i was like no there's no such thing as a bad idea we have to like what okay so obviously we can't do bagel and cream cheese
so what is like i see where you're coming from now how do we get there and we worked together over probably about a month and a half and where we got to um you know i worked with him on how to actually think what are we thinking about right so first of all we have to make everything ourselves we're not making bagels that's not a option so okay um and how do you do that at a world class level so instead of making oh well bagel chip well i'd have to make a bagel to make a bagel chip so no how about a cracker well 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 of a deli you know experience okay so we have a caraway cracker okay we can make our own uh um cream cheese we've done that before but i love lakshmir so instead of lakshmi maybe we're gonna fold in right at the last second fresh salmon row you know smoked salmon row so you have like that you're gonna put a layer of this uh this um homemade cream cheese that's really light and airy because what we do is we would uh strain off the whey and then reincorporate just the amount that we would want so it would be the right texture and then we thought okay instead of uh we've already got the salmon aspect so what if we do what if we smoke sea urchin and we put that on top um and it and then we dehydrated small little red onions which gave you the flavor of an onion bagel and then you eat this little thing it was this big and it was like okay we figured out how to take this idea which everyone laughed at and turn it into something at a world-class level wow now why would you know you said like almost matter-of-factly we're not making bagels like why would you not make bagels i mean it's a very difficult thing to do and uh we're not i mean scratch bars you saw a picture of it we're not set up to be a bagel factory they're kind of boiled right they are um but the thing is it 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 and i've never made bagels and i that's a huge undertaking to like put a bagel program on the main on on the team just so we can have this one dish um so we're not making bagels because there's a like a lot of variation in like the level of bagel yeah you know it's really interesting and we want to we want to whatever we put out like if we cook a steak it's gonna be like [ __ ] that's the best steak i've ever had [ __ ] that was the best whatever now when we put out this final product that was this big people would take a bite and they'd go [ __ ] that's kind of like a bagel and cream cheese but [ __ ] good and if i gave him 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 [ __ ] yeah just don't let people in new york and the new york people are very particular about their pizza and very particular about their bagels but i think they're right unfortunately they may be they may be we we had we had good bagels and i haven't haven't found a good bagel here yet i've heard expl i've heard it explained to me that there's something about the water so in new york i realized i i hired a chef who um was working at the restaurant i was really excited for him to try my favorite bagels in in la and he tried it he's like this isn't very good and i was like i don't understand it's really good and i realized that the bagels he grew up with are different the bagels i grew up with he's like this is really soft with like a crispy exterior and i was like yeah he's like nah it's supposed to be chewy he's supposed to hurt your jaw and i was like why would i want to do that interesting and he was ex but he was explaining to me like the culture of bagels and why you want this and i was like yeah i like this one yeah there's it's a flavor profile though the the difference in the flavor
of bread from bread is probably the best example because italian bread from new york or new jersey has a very particular flavor profile that's unavailable from when you get bred in california for the most part yeah yeah i i to be honest i've not spent enough time in new york i've probably been there two or three times for like weekends really yeah i haven't spent a lot of time there oh wow that's kind of crazy because that's like one of the culinary capitals of the world yeah wouldn't you imagine right i would imagine but i haven't that's funny yeah when you know when 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 i prefer tasting menus especially now post-pandemic in the way the world is going um it's you know you ask the perfect question uh how do you inventory it's not difficult to inventory when you know exactly what you're selling um and if i have 30 people coming in in a 20 item menu how do i like what if everybody eyes the ribeye i have to throw away all the chicken right or 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 right so um beyond that i just we've found our success in these sort of experientially driven sort of fine dining tasting menus um it's also what i enjoy the most i'm someone who like when i look at a menu at a restaurant i get a little bit of anxiety i don't i'm like i i get upset cause i'm like i don't know what to order there's there's 30 things on here and i you know this is i would much rather go to a restaurant we're like hey we're really good at this so we're going to cook you this well it works and i love that you know you could just think you don't have to think about anything just waiting for the next piece of food that's all you
have to do well it's i mean i mean you don't go to a movie and then tell it what you want it to do for you you know it's like you 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 i would really i would enjoy whatever you cook for me or i would like to enjoy it well one of the things that i loved about the sushi bar experience is that it's a communal experience like everybody's experiencing the exact same piece of sushi at the exact same time yeah so we're all sitting around this bar together and you say please enjoy yeah and then people eat it and they go oh and everybody looks around like oh i love it and you hear the noises and everything yeah it's such a small room there's you know what do you guys have 10 people 10 seats 10 seats i mean that's yeah so that's what so in march we're opening another sushi restaurant here in austin um the the ranch won't open until probably august september because we have a lot of like infrastructure work to do but uh march we're opening a new sushi spot here and where's that going to be can you say uh it's going to be i can't say exactly yet but it's going to be a little bit outside of town it's going to be about about 10 minutes past the airport and that would be omakase as well it'll be the id so it's going to be called sushi by scratch restaurants which is what the la or the la montecito um sushi bars are they're becoming as well and 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 and by the way your brother catered andrew schultz's wedding yeah i broke his balls about that a little bit um he uh i mean it turns out andrew's wife uh her parents i've known them for years oh that's crazy um up in montecito um and so i've i've actually met his wife a couple times not knowing you know uh but uh lennon didn't know that um didn't know who uh like who
wasn't just told hey can you cater my daughter's wedding and that was it so funny yeah it was a fun party though and the sushi was off the hook yeah i'm sure it was tell your brother he nailed it yeah i just well you're telling him that right now oh well you nailed it i was posted up there i ate a [ __ ] he told me a couple of pounds yeah he told me well listen man please let us know when as soon as your new place is up i'll post about that too and i'll [ __ ] up your waiting list there too yeah well we're um we are uh by the time this goes up we'll sushi buyscratchrestaurants.com will be up and running nice and uh people can go on and join the wait list and uh uh we'll we'll actually release the reservations probably in the next week or so all right beautiful well thank you brother it's been great becoming your friend and uh what you do when it comes to your your food is [ __ ] sensational i didn't think sushi could be that good i really didn't it was a new eye-opening experience so thank you for that thank you thank you for this uh awesome whiskey yeah it's that stuff special be careful with that though because by the time you finish there may not be another bottle you you live sure you live you'd consume you keep moving keep moving phillip thank you very much people want to follow you on instagram yeah uh philip franklin lee is mine and then we have sushi by scratch restaurants which is all of our sushi bars um pasta bar austin and pasta bar uh la this is all instagram everything else yeah facebook i don't think we might be on facebook i don't know yeah figure it out yeah figure it out folks follow me and you'll find it i'll post about it for sure all right thanks brother appreciate you thank you bye everybody [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]