Howie Kahn

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast for and about the people of the Nashville restaurant scene. Now, here's your host, the CEO of New Light Hospitality Solutions, Brandon Styll. Hello, Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host. Today our guest is a James Beard award-winning writer. His name is Howie Kahn and he's also the host of the Carol Takeaway Only podcast. I am a big fan of what he's doing. I've been listening to his podcast all throughout the pandemic and the work he's doing is just absolutely amazing and I'm so excited that he decided to join me on my podcast because he's very, very insightful and just a lovely, lovely human being. I cannot wait to get you to that episode. But first, I gotta tell you about a couple things. One thing is we have a brand new show here on Nashville Restaurant Radio and it will be released tomorrow, our very first installment of the Nashville Restaurant Radio Roundup presented by What Chefs Want. I'm so excited about this opportunity to bring all of the new exciting things that are coming to the Nashville community.

01:31We're going to talk about restaurant openings, restaurant closings, when chefs move to different jobs. We're going to talk about the best restaurants in town. We're going to talk about the hottest restaurants in town. We're going to talk about the best places to eat brunch. From a local's perspective, my co-host Delia Jo Ramsey from Eater Nashville is going to be here talking about all the things she's doing as well. So we want this to be the episode you listen to if you want to know what's happening in the restaurant scene in Nashville and that comes out tomorrow, our first episode, which is going to be a guide to dining out in post-pandemic Nashville. So hopefully you listen to that and enjoy it. I do want to talk to you a little bit about FOH and BOH, Fow and Bow as they are called. This is a website that I have so many people, so many friends that are hiring people and right now people aren't ready to come back to work and I totally understand that. But there is a website right now if you do need people you can log into and it is free, 90 days. You get in free access, no strings attached. This is something they're doing as a response to COVID-19. If you're looking for a job you want to find the right place, go create a profile. It's free as well for you and it's a unique way to do it. So I think you'll just play with it. Go check it out. It's at foh and boh.com. They're called Fow and Bow and I want to thank them for sponsoring the show. They are a locally owned and operated company.

02:54This is only in Nashville, so support local guys. These are the people to use. I also want to say thank you to Springer Mountain Farms Chicken. If you want to join the flock, I suggest you go to springermountainfarms.com, put in your email address and you will get really cool recipes, up-to-date news, everything to your inbox. I got mine yesterday. Again, I'm so excited every time I get an email from Springer Mountain Farms Chicken. It's just fantastic. Thank you for supporting us as well and I'm excited to get you into my YouTube channel. We are now live. You can see me. If you're watching this on YouTube, here I am. You can see me. You can see me talk to Howie. I'm putting new episodes up all the time. So go to our website, NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com. There are special offers from our sponsors. You can also find links to our YouTube videos, as well as links to every single episode we have here. If you scroll down the homepage, you have my favorite episodes. I kind of put a little blurb about each one. You can click to listen to those also. I thank you, the listener, for your support of listening to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Let's get on with the interview. I want to bring in Howie Kahn, such an amazing guy. I hope that you guys enjoy this as much as I enjoyed creating it.

04:11All right, so we want to welcome in Howie Kahn. Thank you for being on the show today. Thanks for having me, Brandon. You started off your episode yesterday on Takeaway Only and you said, yeah, I'm not going to ask you how you're doing. You're not going to ask me how I'm doing. It's invalid. You said there's protests, cities are on fire, restaurants are closed, cops are killing black people. Let's get into it. I don't know of a better way to start a podcast. Thanks. With Takeaway Only, we've run 56 shows. I've done more interviews than that. Even more if you count pre-interviews. The strangest question since COVID started in mid-March and all the restaurants started shutting down is how are you? It's so loaded.

05:14It's this question we ask each other as a conversational formality and usually it's just to hear the other person say they're fine and you pass on to the next thing. Right now, the obvious thing is no one's fine. People are suffering. People are angry. People are losing money. People are dispirited. People are fighting hard for survival. They're fighting hard for racial equality. They're fighting hard to change the political system in this country. They're fighting hard to change media. They're fighting hard for justice. They're fighting hard for rights surrounding food and human rights. It's a big moment. Huge moment. It's been so much introspection for myself also. I interviewed somebody on Monday. Kim Totsky is a local CEO of a grocery chain and she said that she really feels like at the end of this it's what our world needed. I mean just for the environment and for every single person to really stop, sit back and think about who they are in the grand scheme of all of this and I'm hopeful.

06:26I'm hopeful. Yeah, I think holding on to some semblance of optimism is really important. I think it's almost impossible to get through this if the thought that change is not going to occur. It becomes the predominant one. I think the Sam Cooke, a change is going to come thing is the song that kind of has to be in the back of your head to get through a moment like this. But I think it also has to be combined with the realism of buckle up. It's going to be rough and it might last for a while. There's an endurance factor too. So I think the combination of the optimism with the endurance and the commitment to both things is maybe one of the more important realizations I've had for myself. It's always kind of about taking this deep breath. Yeah, 100%. You started a podcast at the beginning of all of this and it is called Takeaway Only and it is a podcast. Let's see exactly what it was. It was an emergency podcast about the hospitality industry in crisis. Why did you start that?

07:45I've been covering the food industry and the culture surrounding food and the people who make it, grow it, provide it, dream about it, conceive new ways to bring it to people. I've been working that beat my entire career. I'm 42. I'm 42 years old now so I've been covering the food world since before there was any acknowledgement that there was a food world. There were just people who cooked and there were places you went to eat. I did a story for GQ magazine which was one of the first of my career in the early 2000s and there was this really novel term that came up in the story, farm to table. It was about a guy who went to farms and brought people to eat on farms and it was the newest hottest thing. I have been around for the most positive wave of growth in the food industry that the world has ever seen.

08:49I've been around for many good years so I felt like as everything was going under, as all of the people who I've covered were starting to struggle in a major way, we just decided and by we I mean I have a podcast production company with my wife Casey and our partner Rob Corso and we decided that now was the most important time to stick with the story. It wasn't time to bail or to sit at home and think about what was next. There was a real urgency in that moment to save restaurants so I think that's where this started just to continue to get those voices out there in a meaningful way and hopefully direct some attention to a cause where millions of jobs were suddenly lost and on the line and no one knew whether they were going to come back. The restaurant independent restaurant industry is the second largest job provider in the country so for that section of the economy to suddenly go dark seemed really dangerous and the only thing I had any control over was to try to shine some light on that story and those people. And that is a incredible story. I mean just the opportunity for everybody in the country to hear what you've been doing has been amazing and I want to get more into that but I also want to get back to you mentioned you've been covering food forever in your first article at GQ. Did you coin the phrase farm to table? No, no I didn't coin the phrase farm to table. I think it was it was coined sometime in the early 90s but you know it was really interesting because this story was about a guy named Jim Denovan who's a chef and also an artist and he has a company called outstanding in the field which has now grown you know to be this kind of major commercial thing he tours around the country they do like

10:5060 70 or were before covid doing like 60 or 70 dinners during a year and he's done car commercials and he's done these massive drawing installations there's a documentary film about him but back then you know he was doing six to eight dinners a year just trying to convince people to come to a farm and have a dinner cooked by a chef and for the most part unless you had been you know a devotee of home gardening or you know an early farm share in an urban city or majorly into the idea of Alice Waters there was virtually no connection between people and farms at that time and this isn't that long ago right i mean people had no connection to how their food was was grown so you know that seemed like a really groundbreaking story at the time as well well i mean it was what what is the thing that got you into that where does that thought process come from did you grow up yeah i mean what's your story i'm from michigan so you know not that far from from a farm or a body of water if you grow up in uh you know suburban or rural michigan you're definitely seeing the seasons change or i was i mean it was very obvious michigan has um a huge share of the sour cherry crop i think they grow more sour cherries in michigan than any anywhere else in the country i think it's something like 70 percent of that crop so did you write the sour cherry article i think i read an article that you wrote that was i wrote a story about cherries a couple weeks ago yeah for uh for prior which is um an awesome travel company and content company that some friends of mine have put together so yeah i i wrote about sort of cherry nostalgia it was an amazing piece thank you thank you it's always it's always nice to write about michigan i love michigan very very much i've lived in new york for

12:55almost 20 almost 20 years and i think i miss michigan now more than more than ever which is kind of one story i only you know the show brandon's putting his his hand up because michigan's shaped like a hand and you can sort of geolocate where you're from by pointing to a spot on your palm and it is useful for for people not from michigan you don't do that in michigan it's like it's like wearing the the uh the band's t-shirt to the concert you know what i mean from there like you don't do it in in michigan it's maybe useful if you're trying to describe you know where you're from and you're like in italy or something or spain or you know if people really have have no clue so i don't do that reflexively but there there is a use there is a use for it everybody that i meet in nashville who says i'm from michigan they go from you know and they just put their hand up immediately and show you in their hand and i'm like i'm not familiar they're trying to be they're trying to admission there's a there's um a way that people from michigan want to be friendly and helpful so that's that's definitely part of it there's a lot of people from michigan and nashville there is and uh they're all lovely lovely people and you know they're very prideful of michigan and i love that and there's something about that that makes me feel like i need to go spend more time in michigan i've been to detroit one time visited the old tiger stadium saw sessel fielder hit a home run deadway center it was a really cool moment for me to be able to that was a big that was a big season when he hit 51 home runs that was like a big a big marker at the time oh yeah it's huge and he went out of the ballpark too yeah so i want to pivot here because i've done a little research on you and yesterday if you saw the social medias you saw everything blow up uh with people posting pictures of anthony bourdain yeah bourdain was i've seen a meme i'm paraphrasing but it says if anybody out there had a show that was vehemently trying to get you to learn other cultures and understand other people it was anthony bourdain you interviewed anthony bourdain and um a few times tell me kind of what

15:03thoughts you have right now i mean going a couple years later and the last interview i read was wall street journal and it was two months before he passed away yeah that profile was eerily close um to the end you know i i tried to take a sort of social media hiatus yesterday so i didn't catch a lot of the the bourdain day posts and i know they were mixed in with many other important news stories so this is really the first time in this cycle of this that i'm having a chance to sit down and and talk about it out loud i mean it's it's it's so sad it's it's it still makes i feel you know i'm choked up and i just miss the guy you know i think a lot of us um miss him terribly he there's people who were you know i know who are super close to him and their lives will will never be the same without him but we're all enriched by having had him here and having him communicate at such a high level and in such a beautiful open rigorous way for so long he created so much um and there's not a part of it i wouldn't want to go back to for even a few minutes or an hour or a day or a week just watch it all through or or read it all through i mean i think all of us who who give any kind of shit about food media and and the world are all wondering what he would have said during this time and how his voice would have been expressed through the covid moment on through the you know george floyd david mackety protests continuation of the civil rights movement black lives matter protest because that relates to food and restaurants

17:03too of course and i just miss i miss him i miss having the ability to cover him i miss having the ability to have a conversation with him i miss seeing new things that he creates i i miss knowing that somebody that brave was was in the world it's really hard to get a show made it you know in a major media outlet that's your show that does it the way you want to do it that doesn't compromise that tells the stories you want to tell and he pulled that off he did and i think there's a lot we can learn from his shows i think even going back and watching parts unknown or any of his other shows you can see that just his attitude as to who he was like go back and watch those and try and emulate that guy because he didn't care who you were which everybody was equal to him unless you were a bad tipper or you were rude to a server but i mean then you were then you were then you were dead to him but i mean um you know i'm thinking about his his writing and you know this is this is a guy whose first major book um or whose you know his first batch of major writings included a part about going to mexico to see where restaurant workers in america really come from and that was that was revolutionary gesture i don't know what year that book was published in but you know and on on our show on takeaway only um we get into undocumented workers a fair amount we've done several episodes and have have more coming up and then that's a story that's under covered and not spoken about enough in 2020 you know tony writing about that in like it must have been the early 2000s was just so far ahead he's not an investigative reporter by training either and he did that work he just well he just cared yeah i mean he just you see he saw what

19:06mattered he saw what was important he understood inequality in a deep way and he understood how to start shifting the spotlight he did and he did i don't think i think everything the allure to me for him i did i never got to meet him um when i read kitchen confidential when i was 25 years old i learned a lot about myself growing up in the industry and just kind of what i could be doing and a lot of life lessons i made that required reading i've been in food sales for many many years and that was required reading for anybody that came into the industry who didn't have an extensive background said you need to read this book this is this is what it is but he's so genuine the thing i loved about him was that he didn't do anything for any reason it wasn't a oh if i do this i'll get this he did it because that's what he cared about he didn't give a shit he was just like this is something that's important to me i'm gonna do it and it it was so authentic but i i think what you're what you're actually saying is he did it for a very important reason he did it because it was the the right thing like some people just inherently know what the right thing to do is and and we're in a big mess in this country because i think a lot of people get away from that i mean there's there's there's a right thing to do in regards to people there's a right way to treat people there's a right way to be inclusive and accepting and not self-righteous not too proud generous giving charitable hospitable yes i'm gonna and i'm gonna pivot to that because one of the quotes an anthony bourdain quote that i have written down right here says if you're 22 physically fit hungry to learn and be better i urge you to travel as far and widely as possible sleep on floors if you have to find out how other

21:07people live and eat and cook and learn from wherever you go i think that's right i mean i always thought that there should be conscripted restaurant service in america where every person who turns maybe 16 should have to work in service of some sort for six months or for a year as some kind of national program of getting to know how to deal with people and seeing people from different walks of life in an active way it's one thing to read about it it's another thing to do it i know countries have conscripted military service you know which i would never be in favor of in the united states of america but wouldn't it be an interesting society wouldn't it be interesting if everybody had to work in a restaurant for six months or a food bank or some something i think it definitely adds some perspective to our nation uh for sure yeah i don't know who i would even be without having had that experience i know i've been i think it's there's a certain type of person who who i speak to i know you speak to as well and it's people who are givers people who really understand true hospitality and what it means to to gain to give love in the way that you know the book the five love languages you know some people have acts of service and that's certainly in your heart right you get something out of helping other people and i think that's why the restaurant industry is so powerful and so hard to get out of so to speak because it's just it's in your blood it's who you are it's in your dna so whenever anything first happens in this country restaurants are the first ones to respond right it's true just doers doers and you you interviewed jose andres of world central kitchen on takeaway only i mean that's his mission yeah i mean connecting two dots um i was working on a story about jose and world central kitchen for the wall street journal in puerto rico when

23:09tony died and jose um was was doing some service work and just didn't show up to the story because he was so sort of deeply destroyed by by tony's death we did it we did it later but you know it was very telling for me that it was the priority for jose was to continue serving people and he was he was feeding people after a volcano erupted and he just couldn't pull himself away from that to do a media story and that's an example of doing the right thing you know he he he stuck to where he was most needed and understood that we could catch up later what do you so going back to um takeaway only yeah what are some of the people that you've interviewed what's been the most impactful things you've kind of taken away it's interesting i've spent the last you know two and a half months asking people for their big takeaways and a few people have asked me off off microphone what mine have been and they're they're evolving i mean i i think there's there's a lot you know first first of all you know the power of of the individual and what everybody's story means to them and what they bring to it in terms of their their background and their experience i mean that's been a huge thing to me to pay attention to the person and try to start there to understand where that person is coming from and then how they envision the world so it's it's been a an exercise in deep listening for me which has always been my favorite part of being a reporter being a journalist it's the opportunity to ask questions and let people talk so that's one and to try to present that to the rest of the world as something that's important in this time i mean my my show it's not about you know it's not about the show it's about the people who are

25:14are on it it's not about takeaway only it's about christian gill it's about omar tate it's about nina compton it's about you know javier and arlene barzola who are a father and daughter from ecuador running a small restaurant in in queens you know in one of the parts of the country that's been hardest hardest hit by covid and just hearing how they've gotten through it everyone's gotten through this in a different way everybody's at a different point in their trajectory so i i think the listening piece has been hugely important i think just hearing about the hustle and the problem solving and the way people are fighting to make change and to survive has been incredibly moving and the way people have started new things from from nothing you know the way people are have moved outside of their comfort zone and their areas of expertise to start foundations and to start community advocacy groups and mutual aid societies and human potential is an amazing thing to watch grow in a crisis people are are doing incredible things and they have risen to and continue to rise to the occasion in an incredible way that's one of the things i've kind of picked up on is just how resilient we are you know if you ask somebody in february what would you do if everything shut down if you're in a business meeting and you sat down and said we're going to shut the restaurant down for two months and we're just going to see what happens everybody would go oh how do we do that we can't do that we can't do that and some aren't going to make it unfortunately but just the way that everybody has had to stop and think outside the box to use a phrase that's way overused but you know i do think i think it's been just amazing you know in nashville we kind of had a double whammy here with the tornado and then covid yeah we had a tornado on march the second late night march second march third which took out i mean a ton of restaurants

27:17and our city was reeling and then literally 10 days later everything closes we're in the middle of march madness here we had um the downtown was completely vibrant scc tournament was or the first round of the ncaa march madness was going and everything just stopped going by and the way that everybody had to kind of pivot around that and where we're at now i mean it's just i don't know i'm a different person than i was yeah i think i think we all we all are and we all have to be and it's just it's just starting i mean i i think covid was the the tip of the iceberg in terms of the change that needs to happen the reflection that needs to happen the ways we all have to reckon with and you know fight systemic racism and that exists in all industries so eyes are wide open what do you do what do you do personally to i mean there's a lot of anxiety that can happen right now there's a lot of just stuff that happens in stress i'm a believer that stress is a choice but what do you how are you what are you how do you personally cope it's a it's a good question i mean i'm trying to you know take care of my family i have a young kid who i want to keep happy and safe he's four um my wife and i i mean our our focus is on on him and trying to make this the best world possible so i you know i try to talk to a lot of people i try to gain a lot of information i donate to causes that i feel are are important i think being extremely giving being extremely generous and being extremely open are things i can do there are things i can do every single single day so that's i think the basis of of my coping you know it's being charitable it's being a good listener it's it's it's learning

29:21how to be a better activist i i think that's that's a start so i mean that's for people that are listening i mean i like to ask these types of questions because i love your perspective and for somebody who's speaking to people who are actually making a difference and who's making a difference himself you know i think that everybody's in the same boat where we're all just trying to figure out what we can do and i think i appreciate you saying that so i think i think also i mean something that that's that's true is kind of getting comfortable with with the idea that maybe i haven't done a good enough job in any of those fields and maybe now's time to really double down and focus on on doing better in all regards and i i i think that kind of self-reflection is okay too and striving for for more i think now is a good time to do that as as well 100 and you know i i don't want to say that and make you feel like if you're not doing that you're a bad person i mean some people are some people don't have it's it's it's all it's all really personal i mean all i can advocate for is i think people should should figure out what it is that's the best they can do and then try to do it and i did like a kind of what i learned because that's a question i get too what have you learned brandon from talking you've done 49 podcasts in two months what have you learned and i did it i did have sort of called what i've learned and i said there's three things i would say stay healthy mentally before physically like you gotta stay mentally healthy and if you can be physically healthy great stay hungry identify your next thing don't eat what you caught today look for the future and then help yeah so get out there and help doesn't have to be um i physically went out and did something help means i got a friend who might not be doing so great right now and i picked a phone and i called him i've reconnected with somebody and said hey everything's gonna be okay can i do something for you that's as little as you can do versus as most you can do

31:27yeah there's a lot of ways there's a lot of ways to help and there's a lot of help needed for sure yes so i want to get off this topic but i think you're a very fascinating individual and you've done some and he's like great let's let's move off this really introspective deep topic and let's talk about you let's talk about what you've accomplished okay let's not so you are a james beard award winner i am i did win one of those what was that like it was really exciting it was um it was a long time ago already it was 2008 it's thrilling to be recognized you know for for a professional achievement especially when the professional achievement is is something that um you know it's hard to writing is hard figuring out how to do it professionally is hard um accessing that world is is hard is it competitive finding good stories is hard yeah i mean if you think about how much room and this is so i i won that award in 2008 and magazines were doing pretty well then right they were the books were thicker there were more pages if there's more pages there's more opportunity um there's still a lot of people fighting for that real estate um but there were more pages then there's fewer pages now and there's more people fighting for the pages um so i think it's extremely competitive and it's extremely important for magazines to create places that are diverse that express curiosity that do you know a bourdain thing and and shine a light into as many important corners of the world as they possibly can um but yeah i mean winning that award was was thrilling it's you know as a kid you get

33:30recognized i think all the time you get like little awards from your teachers and you get gold stars on your papers and you get smiley faces and and stickers um and as as an adult i think it's it's up to every adult to find enough pride in their work to carry them through their career or carry them through day to day or carry them through enough until there's a point where it's time to to make a change um you know you got to figure out a way how to pat yourself on the back otherwise it's it's very hard recognition is very seldom people do not put gold medals you know the james spirit award's not gold but it's it's bronze colored or whatever people do not put medals around your neck on a regular basis as as a grown-up so i think i'm just grateful to have ever had that moment i think i'm still um um moved by the fact that it happened and grateful for that kind of thing it's an amazing honor and i'm so fascinated by what you do what was and forgive me um what was the actual piece of work that you were honored for we were talking about it earlier it was that piece about jim dennevin it was called the wandering chef and it was about i mean okay the one in gq yeah brandon i mean this was you know an era in in magazines where you could pitch a story and you could tell an editor an editor would agree to send you to report on the subject for like as long as you wanted i went and traveled with jim it was like three weeks you know now it's like you get uh you know a 35 minute zoom with a person well now we're all at home so like you know you can't go anywhere and and report necessarily um with a few exceptions if you know you're a staffer for a newspaper you're still in the world reporting but like freelancers are not traveling to report stories right now it's just not it's not on the table maybe that'll open up again soon but even when that's not the case you

35:35know the travel has has scaled back the budgets are much much smaller um there's no way that story would have ever could ever happen now in a way i flew to seattle to meet jim and i called jim on the phone and i said hey i just landed in seattle where we agreed to meet where where should i meet where should we meet up where should we start our interview and he said oh i decided to go to vancouver so you know the subject of my story decides to go to vancouver i had flown to seattle per our arrangement and so i call the office and i say my subject's in vancouver and it was like no problem we'll call travel and you'll go to vancouver tomorrow and then i went to vancouver and i just stayed with this person on the road and we drove from canada down through washington into idaho um into wyoming into utah ended up in colorado and it was just like oh man like the romance and the sort of magic of being able to travel with a subject in that way so in a way like having that kind of having that kind of access and that kind of time um you know set me up to be rewarded in a certain way like that kind of privilege to think about something for so long and to live with somebody in that way and to be able to go that deep with somebody it took me a week to get jim to sit down at a table for an actual interview like he just didn't understand like what my purpose was being there he hadn't given a lot of interviews at that point he was shy um and it was it was like that almost famous thing where you're just chasing around your subject trying to to get them to talk to you but like the whole experience is is it's just from a different era you can still do that as a reporter you just have to pay for it yourself yeah which isn't really happening what um what how did your thought change throughout

37:40that interview when you're flying out to seattle because i when i do interviews like i like to have a general roadmap i did one interview where i had no roadmap and i will never do that again i like to have kind of an idea of how what we're going to talk about how we're going to talk about it you're on your way there how did that change as you started driving around going from city to city because you had to pay that right well i was really well prepared um i had some people at the magazine who were way more experienced than me and were good mentors um you know the the person who assigned and edited that story is a guy named andy ward who is now the editorial director of random house and he edits great books and he's kind of been known in the narrative journalism industry as being one of the smartest being the most generous being one of the most sensitive and you know that also included mentorship at the time i was a young writer i was writing my first stories it was really you know the beginning of something for me and he um did the right amount of hand holding he sent me stories that he thought would inspire me um i had been a fact checker also at the magazine so i'd been working with reporters for years and you know within those exchanges i was always learning about their process and there were some writers whose voice and whose tone and whose stories were really muscular and their prose included a lot of their point of view um because they had sort of the confidence and almost the arrogance to do so and for me i just always knew that my stories were going to be about my subjects you know my point of view is important you have to have one as a writer but there's almost um a measure of of of faith i take in these stories where i'm gonna hand it over to i'm gonna just watch i'm gonna be

39:41patient and with jim it was just like he he's a force of nature in in his own right and i think understanding that the story wasn't about me took a lot of the pressure off i just had to be be the best observer of jim yeah you know it wasn't you know i could being prepared being prepared is like having insurance right it's great to have insurance it's responsible to have insurance it's good to pay for the policy if you can um you're not always going to use it but it's good that it's it's it's good for it to be there so one of the things that i learned while i was preparing was that you wrote a book for simon and schuster called how to become a private investigator i did and it takes place largely in nashville really i did not read the book but i the the beginning of the book um takes place in the restaurant and uh it's called the puffy muffin which oh yeah which is in a strip mall in brantwood it is and i've been there many times it's uh it's about a pi who who lives around there her name is shila waisaki and she's a great investigator she's a great reporter i think she's a really good person um so yeah i did i did read the book about private investigating it's part of a larger series that simon did um called masters at work and it's about people who are um and have found their ways to the top of their professions did you have you always have you had a fascination for private investigators or not not not not at all but the but i am fascinated in in how people do their jobs i'm fascinated in how people help define their professions and i'm really interested in how people's professions help define their own identity so it was it was kind of an and this this

41:43series is all um essentially long for magazine journalists and newspaper reporters writing about work writing there's um ones about how to become a neurosurgeon ones how to become a hairdresser how to become a yoga instructor and they just kind of turn these over to journalists who they thought would do a good job uh you know private investigating um is not something i've categorically had a big interest in in my life at all but i think part of the fun of being a being a reporter being a writer being a journalist is is stretching it out and writing about different things i didn't intend um at the beginning of my career to write about food as much as i have i'm glad my career has taken me on that course but it's still fun for me to write about something outside of that um when i can do you uh we're getting close to a time where 45 minutes goes by pretty quick and um you just said you're fascinated by how people's jobs what they do their vocational choices shape who they are sure how do you feel like what you do has shaped who you are that's a great question um you know having spent so much time reporting on on the hospitality industry i i think i've become much more open to that concept i think hospitality isn't something that necessarily just happens in a restaurant i think it's a kind of way of life we can be hospitable to each other as friends we can be hospitable to each other as as colleagues and cohorts you can be hospitable to your your partner your husband your wife your child it's a way of being generous it's a way of serving it's a way of addressing people's needs so i think i've i've brought that into my own life in in a serious way i also think you know writing about food and being in that world for the last 20 years has has given me a way to

43:50try at least to observe what tony observed and and you know i've been lucky enough to report all over the world and then talk about all different cultures and people from all different backgrounds and that's been important too well thank you so much for being here what would you want to say to the people of nashville tennessee and around the world and you know what uh what kind of final jerry's final thought would you have i mean if i'm talking to people in nashville just go have lunch at arnold's that's like the most important thing i you know because the self selfishly like i need arnold's to exist you know in in perpetuity i need to be able to have lunch at arnold's when i come to nashville so like please for my sake and for yours keep that restaurant going i think arnold's uh i'm kaleel and i have talked like nine times about coming on the show and he's been so busy and he's he's the busiest and i think he's the greatest he he really is he's uh he's the best and we're going to make that happen and yes go eat at arnold's uh everybody out there that's definitely something to be said well thank you so much for coming on my podcast today and i wish you nothing but the most the best of luck and success and if you're out there check out howie's podcast takeaway only and it's found everywhere that podcasts are available and what else you got going on anything else you need you want to plug or anything you want to tell people to go check out the viewers that you're doing that's the plug man that's i think that's a that's good all right well thank you howie have a wonderful rest of your day sir brandon thank you so much i'm honored to be a part of your show thank you for having me so big thank you to howie kahn for coming on nashville restaurant radio he's a busy guy and um i just appreciate his kind of a worldly perspective and uh it's fresh and just uh he's a wonderful dude so thanks again howie and i hope to see you guys back here tomorrow

45:51for our very first installment of nashville restaurant radio roundup presented by what chefs want thanks guys hope you're doing well love you bye