Hugh Acheson

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 we are going to get perspective. I say this on the podcast all the time that this podcast is about perspective and sometimes I forget that. I tend to look at planning and the operations aspect of everything and what are we gonna do when this whole thing is over and what's the market gonna look like that sometimes I lack perspective. Luckily today's guest, Chef Hugh Acheson, helps me find my way.

01:00If it's perspective that I wanted, well perspective is what I got. All right so Hugh Acheson, welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Well thanks for having me. It is great having you here and just if you're a listener and you're thinking Hugh Acheson, that name sounds incredibly familiar. You may know him from Top Chef Masters. You may know him from being a judge on Top Chef or being an Iron Chef on Iron Chef Canada. He is a two-time James Beard award-winning chef and author for his book, A Turn in the South. He has three restaurants currently. Empire State South in Atlanta, 5 and 10 your flagship in Athens, Georgia by George in the Candler Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia and you also helped found Seed Life Skills and you have two daughters. I do, yes. So while I recognize that some of that you know in this current state that we're in doesn't matter much but besides having your daughters, I know every parent that's their number one accomplishment. What are you most proud of? That's a pretty impressive resume there. Yeah I mean it's just a lot of due diligence over the years and working hard but I think I'm most proud of being a good employer and providing and having a social contract with a lot of people where they bring me their professional services and we morphed it into what we call restaurants and I think at the end of the day that's a pretty more important feat than a lot of awards and accolades and definitely more important than TV. Well definitely it affects a lot of people what you're doing and I'm really interested in Seed Life Skills.

02:57Sounds like such a cool foundation. How did that get started? It started geez about almost ten years ago about eight years ago I guess when my oldest daughter Beatrice came home from school and it had her first home economics class which is in the school system is called Family and Consumer Sciences and they had learned how to make you know red velvet cupcakes and from a box and had a wrap you know using frozen croissant dough around a hot dog or something like that. Which my wife makes every year at Halloween. Yeah it just it wasn't very pertinent to really providing nourishment in your life it wasn't teaching you sort of you know skills that you're really gonna remember and retain so I went to the school district and talked to them for a while and then head of the school district the superintendent guy named Phil Lanou pointed me in the right direction and asked me to start working on a curriculum so we worked on a curriculum kind of based around the concept of like a Lego set that if you have 20 blocks of technique that you can learn in cooking that you never forget that then you can always nourish yourself somehow and those around you for you know next very little money and it's not about making fancy food but it's about being able to roast a chicken then make a salad dressing from scratch so if you can take those skill sets that aren't really recipes that are more technique and then you can arrange them in multiple different ways to make and provide for those around you so I always thought home economics was meant to prepare people for the most difficult times in their lives which is kind of 18 1920 when a lot of Americans these days are you know they're having children and they're poverty-stricken and yeah I just want to get them away from a reliance on happy meals which don't tend to make many people happy so I'm assuming some of that is the basis for your new book how to cook building blocks a hundred simple recipes for a lifetime of meals yeah so that's that'll

05:02be out in the fall and you know we're really proud of that book it breaks down into sort of 25 technique core ideas in the first half and then kind of flashes them out in the second half into more substantial recipes and meals and concepts and it's meant to be the book that you send your kind of send your kid way to college with which is very pertinent to me because yesterday my oldest daughter announced that she's going to University of Toronto which is great Wow congratulations yeah it's a lot cheaper so you're a native you're from Canada I am yeah so what does it mean for your daughter to go to school in Canada is there any kind of do you feel special about them and obviously you're proud of her yeah immensely proud and yeah I think it's it's she's an American citizen but she'll eventually be dual which is great and my family has very deep connection with the Canadian University system my dad was a professor for his and pretty much his entire life he's still around but he's retired and then my sister's the is the assistant dean of the art school at liberal arts at Waterloo University so there's a lot of connections to that and then University of Toronto my dad went there and my sister did her PhD there another one of my sisters that are undergrad there so my grandmother went there so there's just a lot of connections and that'll be good for me yeah that's amazing sounds like education has been a big part of your life yeah I'm an academic brat so I want to kind of pivot what is a chef who lives in Athens Georgia and has restaurants in Georgia doing on a show called Nashville restaurant radio one of the things I'm trying to do is bring perspective out there so for kind of everybody in the city of Nashville who works in the hospitality industry this has been a tough time it's been a challenge and I'm just trying to let

07:05everybody in on what everybody else is doing and I've been speaking to some pretty amazing Nashville chefs we've been talking about all facets of this new reality that we live in and I think people will be interested to hear your perspective from Georgia so I read an article in Atlanta magazine where you were interviewed on March the 17th Saint Patrick's Day was exactly one month ago today you weren't happy this was a raw interview right in the middle of everything rapidly changing and as we've learned things change by the hour and on a half hour it seems we were one month later where are you at you know I thought I thought that interview was was good and telling and I just kind of spilled the beans on what I was feeling at the time because that day we had shut down Empire State South AM 5 and 10 they by George was doing just meals for apart for hotel guests so it was just it was kind of a letdown that I was sort of breaking the promise that I had made to all of my people that I would always provide so long as they did their their played their roles and the this is beyond my control was the most heartfelt part of it when you feel anxiety prone and desperate when it's the causation of something is is just way beyond your control and nobody saw it really coming I mean we we definitely saw that signs out there that there was something amiss I remember and I mentioned this in the article I remembered in I think it was even early February reading an article about restaurants in Shanghai and the fact that they were you know Shanghai six hundred miles away from Wuhan or it's a like the distance from you know a

09:09huge amount of distance and that the restaurants the Shanghai wasn't really affected at that point in time with a lot of cases the restaurants were dead the restaurants had dropped by 95% of their business and I remember reading that going oh this is not a good omen and so when it finally happened in that interview I think it was just I was still kind of dumbfounded that what we really didn't see coming that is that the restaurant industry was going to be the first phalanx in a war that just got absolutely clobbered and would never like didn't get up we were unable to fight this enemy and when you're unable to fight you just feel absolutely defeated obviously so sure and you know we're still in a sense of that but you know we've we've I've recommitted to there's a lot of anxiety and worry in the restaurant industry right now about what you know are you gonna get a PPP loan and are you going to get be able to get back open as much as I I feel for the people who are really having trouble getting those PPP loans in a lot of ways it's just a supplanting of getting people off the unemployment rolls I think that if you're smart and can hustle well that you can you can probably figure it out that's not my worry is getting reopened I still think a lot of places will not get reopened which tears of my most of my heartstrings a lot and it's very sad and hard but I think that the next six months after that after reopening are really going to be the telling place where we're gonna have to pivot to a new business style and that we have to take this as a constructive opportunity to fix some malaise that was inherent before the epidemic or the pandemic and and fix some things that we knew that the writing on the wall and fine dining was there that we can pivot

11:13to something a little more open and more spacious literally and physically and emotionally and we can have contactless payment and menu on disposable paper and you know just really thinking about sanitation and the ideas and that's you know we should be thinking about all those things anyhow but I'm still worried about the general consensus of whether we're gonna have customers you know six months after so you know it's a hard business and it's low margin and when you talk about you know five six seven percent margin and you're suddenly requiring us to seat half as many people well the landlord's not charging me half as much in rent no you know that's that's a terrifying thing and I you know and I need half the amount of people eventually you know if that takes hold so there's just there'll be a gradual erosion of the business even if we build up so it seems like we're building a bit of a sandcastle so I had this conversation the other day with somebody who's a marketing guy we talked about what the landscape is gonna look like for front of the house when we come back so let's just fast-forward restaurant industry we're back open do you see the need to have as many front of the house staff and as a restaurant owner you know I think on the West Coast they went to being minimum wage for servers and what we found is a bunch of places just went to a self-serve kiosk kind of model where you didn't need the front of the house staff people kind of realized that we can just do this ourselves do you think that the just the idea of having a server is in real jeopardy and do you do you think that as a restaurant owner coming back after this you can kind of erase a lot of labor and just general issues I mean I I don't want to look upon it that way this

13:15is this is not a cost-saving exercise this is a pandemic and this is a complete falling down of an industry I I don't know where full service is gonna land in the next year I've long seen the sort of what I call and it's it's not me being demeaning the brand because I think they do a good job but you know the sweet greenification of American restaurants is is mildly terrifying to the ethos of what I believe in which is that full service and professionalism and intuition and efficacy and smarts and knowledge and studied people and professionals doing full service brings a level of hospitality that no quick service thing can ever ever provide agreed and it is a very important paramount reason why people want to go and eat out you know though I believe in those things am I a big fan of three-hour meals now no do I believe that you can bring in an hour and 15 minute dining experience that type of service and generosity and authenticity and transparency and presentation of knowledge and skill set yes I do think you can do that can you do it at a distance way or are we gonna be ordering from a counter and food delivered by a robot I don't know I sincerely think you will see some of that but I hope to see a proven path of hygiene and sanitation and distancing that can still assure full service I don't know about the job market in Atlanta or Athens but in Nashville Tennessee we are exploding the city is to me you've never seen growth like the maybe Atlanta ten years ago was that I

15:18think you should probably put that in the past tense yeah absolutely no absolutely so we were exploding I mean everybody's closed now this is going to bring about a whole new world but as somebody who works with chefs on a regular basis if I was to walk into your restaurant and say what's your biggest issue you have almost just in a weird world people would say people I can't find enough people Nashville's hiring we need people we don't have line cooks we need servers we need dishwashers we need anybody and through this I've been talking about on this podcast if you're displaced and you're at home do every single thing you can right now study wine classes learn spirits do you all these chefs are doing cooking classes right now what can you do to really come out of this thing like a beautiful butterfly I've made the reference that this is going into quarantines like a butterfly going into a chrysalis and in a couple months or whenever this thing is people are gonna come out and they're either gonna be beautiful these big beautiful butterflies they're gonna have you know a six inch beard 20 pounds and they're gonna be like my turn to go get a job now what are you gonna do with it and I see the market in Nashville as being this it's gonna be condensed the people that really hone in their skills and come back I think there's gonna be jobs for them but it's gonna be different the market here is not gonna be a we're hiring we need people it's just gonna be completely different what do you see it being in Atlanta and is it like that at all yeah I mean it's it's like that across the entire North America is that unemployment rates been so low that finding people to work in kitchens who are pedigree and good and smart and knowledgeable and experienced and have a wherewithal to do it it has been a rarity and more difficult this is going to change that but you know it seems like a bit of an economic vulture argument to say that that's a good thing maybe it's good I just don't

17:20want to I don't want to go there I mean unfortunately that means that millions and millions of people won't have jobs as some of us benefit on the skill sets they're you know employable now and I don't really want to think that way look at the very beginning before PPP and the cares that came into fruition Tom Kalikia who I talked to a lot you know he's been very publicly was saying 75 percent of restaurants won't come back well cares that comes in he lowers the serve prognosis and his doomsday scenario and he says like a third I think we're easily at a third won't come back so if you've got 15 12 to 15 million people in working in hospitality and you've got a third of that you know four to five million people where are they gonna work right now we need more than ever we need a public works program that is not geared at you know the creation of a new hospitality genre it just it needs to be putting people to work who are smart and diligent and hard-working and who were working in kitchens or were working in restaurants and putting the work on you know building the next Hoover Dam or you know solar panels everywhere or monorails connecting Athens and Atlanta or Nashville and Memphis you know all these things need to be looked at as a massive public works program this is an economy in a country that's just we're about to bail out the coal industry again you know can we not figure out that that the writings been on the wall for something like coal for 20 years we can do better we know how to do better but we fail in investing in the proper things hopefully this is a you know a chance and a touchstone to do better I love that perspective I put out these hypotheticals for you because as much as I don't want to think about it and I you know the doomsday scenario of getting better talent is not a priority by any

19:21means right now I completely agree with you a hundred percent I know so that's why I wanted to have you on I mean just that mentality to think what can we do going forward what are those employees going to be doing it's something we've got to look to our government for right yes and no I mean some sometimes yeah if you play in Little League and have a coach who's just not worthy of your attention then you're probably gonna go and find out how to feel the ground ball from shortstop on your own I don't think as a coach this federal government has really been leading people lead lead leaders are to me I mean obviously we have many maniacal leaders in history who were pretty successful but that's not leadership to me that's tyranny and I want to look at leadership as being somebody who's benevolent yet forceful and understanding and empathetic and classless and and believes in in the heartbeat of something and I don't really see that so I think we have to look within ourselves you know on plans I don't think we're gonna get a great plan from the government right now we did successfully apply for PPP so at least one of the restaurants has got funding now for that so you know my job now is to bring back all my staff onto the payroll and I'm gonna atomize them into teams and I'm ascertaining skill sets of each individual person to make teams one team is gonna be oh those two people happen to be able to do woodworking so they're going to make new tabletops at home and I'm going to give them supply money and they are on my payroll and they will do that work from their home I've got another team is gonna break up into social media I've got another team that's gonna break up and do hygiene practices another one doing deep dive into inventory another one doing how do we get a better system going forward on you know best practices

21:25on how we greet customers etc etc and looking at new contactless payment systems and so I think we just have to energize and activate our people and that's what I'm doing on the individual atomized level of one restaurant but I think that needs to be done everywhere you know at the same time that we're doing all that the same time that we're navigating through reams of paperwork to make applications to bail ourselves out and provide jobs next month to people still we are also serving 1,400 meals a week from two restaurants for in need communities wow we have been for the last two weeks and we will continue for two for another six weeks those meals are packaged up and delivered in blocks of 250 or 125 or 500 to groups that need them whether it be immigrant rights communities or whether it be a local church who feeds the homeless or whether it be a local hospital or police precinct or YMCA or public transit drivers who are first-line responders in this case because they're put in danger delivering people to their jobs every day who possibly could be carrying the virus so all those people need what is most important right now in this world in this hectic world which is not just nutrition they need nourishment and nourishment is a level above nutrition it implies a heartfelt response to something it is a meal that nourishes your soul and so that is the message that we're doing and that's through the Arthur Blank Foundation Arthur owns used to own Home Depot and on Falcons and Elaine United and much of other stuff and he's an amazingly benevolent and generous philanthropist and then also through World Central Kitchen so those people are backing us to do the front line job that we are more than able to do so my suggestion right now to everybody out there who's in this industry is find some way to help you need to realize that you can help every day if you get up and start a fresh day

23:28and do something good for yourself or your community around you and that doesn't mean going into a group scenario and getting you know crossing over social distancing boundaries but it means making a difference and that's what you got to do and that's good for your soul I think when you do stuff like that it definitely can get you out of the funk but it's also doing good for your neighbor and that's community yeah I'm doing it because of my community but yes definitely I'm doing it also because it makes me feel good at the end of the day to bring smiles to people's faces is why we do hospitality and whether those smiles are coming from a homeless guy who is totally distraught at this situation and hasn't eaten a proper meal in a week or it's a cop who's really nervous about approaching a new situation and can sit in his car and have a nourishing meal that means something or it's a nurse who just worked a 16-hour shift and their fellow worker passed away yesterday I mean this is there's a lot of heartfelt stuff going on right now and a lot of pain and I can make a difference and everybody can make a difference but you have to want to make a difference you've said I read an interview that you said food is a relationship with your community and that's from everything that's from your vendors to the people that dine I've been speaking with chefs and I think the overwhelming response I'm getting from chefs is the void I mean we have the people the people that work there obviously there's a main there's a major pain we discussed earlier just from letting having to tell people I don't have a job for you especially when promises were made yeah but the idea that we all live in a service world we are people that thrive upon helping other people in creating experiences for not only ourselves but other people that's where we find the joy the people that really love to do this are doing it

25:28because they're making memories for others and that in turn drives us so I started a hashtag yesterday called replay challenge where I've been talking only chefs and they're creating this food they create this artwork they've sourced these amazing products and they put it in a to-go box now and it goes home and they don't they don't get to hear the server come back and say table 24 loved that dish they loved the the scallops or whatever it might have been I'm asking people when they get home and they get that food to put it on plates and rearrange it so that it was what they imagined the chef would have liked it to put on their plate or take a picture and then put it on Instagram and let the chef know that they appreciate their artwork is that a crazy idea no I think it's good I mean you know at the end of the day I think that nourishment doesn't have to be fancy and chefy you know my most prideful moment right now is going to the grocery store a couple weeks ago and seeing the dried bean aisle totally bacon not that it's we don't have any but it's amazing to me that maybe I sold America short because I didn't think they had the wherewithal skill set to cook that many dried beans but I think they're learning and they're trying and there is a necessity to nutrition and and a necessity to nourishment right now that is happening and you see it on social media you see people trying new things you see people checking on their neighbors and sometimes they didn't even know their name you know a month and a half ago I I waved at this woman many many times and she lives across my street and she's older and she walks her little dog and I see her and I wave as I'm pulling out of the driveway but I finally went over and from a distance I was like you okay and she was like yeah I'm doing fine I was like if you ever need anything I don't know if you know what I do but I'm a chef and I can help and then I went over

27:31to my Chinese graduate graduate student neighbor and I have for the same type of thing I left him a note saying you know if you ever need anything there's tons of water in the garage and there's gallons of bleach and you know whatever you need you just go and take and if you need something else and you go to the grocery store you let me know I've got systems and I can figure it out you've got to grow your community network and you've got to realize that maybe we're all maybe the audience of this show is mostly in hospitality but the key to hospitality is it's it's that outward want to make yourself and those around you happy and that is a universal thing and should be universal and if we're gonna make demand anything out of the citizenship of this country right now hopefully it's some sort of goodness and I think we can get there I think we're seeing it I think so too I think we're seeing lots of just unique stories of people doing everything they can to help others and I love it I think that this the news was dominated by this bipartisan politics and the election and everything has changed I've seen more positive news stories and I tend to search those out myself I want to read those they've had so many positive stories about people doing the right thing right now and it kind of gives me faith again and it gives me hope it does you know I think that at the same time it's giving me hope I'm making a very big long list of people I will I will hold and in higher esteem than I ever have who I've seen help my community through this and then I've got another list of those who they can go to help I mentioned this about a month ago they said we're gonna see when this whole thing comes back the people who have done the right stuff and the people who haven't and believe me people are people are making lists right now yep yep you need to and you know let's say it's like yeah okay so you there's some just people who just died in they didn't need to help I needed a van so I shot an

29:37email to a guy I know who is the manager of the Mercedes-Benz dealership and he's like sure pick it up tomorrow it's free have it for two months I'm like okay that was easy wow and I realized that I've got you know inroads and connections that are helpful in this time and I can figure things out and I hustle well but it's like sometimes you just have to ask can you be amazing of the generosity of people in times like this to figure it out at the beginning of this not the beginning of it but when when stuff really after the closure maybe around the 20th of March I kind of put out on social media just a little hand-drawn note saying you know will cater in the future if you pay me now I didn't think much of it but I kind of fleshed out the idea where it was like you know parties of 10 to 30 and if you $125 a head and myself and one of my chefs Sam Herndon would go and cook at your house and it's just the two of you we'll serve you we'll cook a lavish five course meal later on when the dust settles and I thought we'd sell you know for five or ten of them we've sold about 90 of them oh my gosh yeah so it's it's like a ton of cash that came into us and and that we've we've set aside and and you know made our people whole and and given them charitable funds and and it's better than gift certificates everybody was saying you know sell merch and gift certificates and that's fine merch doesn't actually raise that much money unless you're hugely successful with it and gift certificates are terrifying notion to me because what I don't want to do is sell $50,000 in gift certificates and in the first month that we reopen people just decide oh let's go we bought that gift certificate let's go to five and ten use it and that that's great that's heartfelt that they did that I just I can't because I would have used that money already it would be leave me cash vacant in that month of reopening so it's just kind of an economic quandary to be in so this what the advanced sales of caterings did is I'm spacing those whatever 90 caterings over you know almost a year and a half so there's really it's a slow repayment kind of a balloon which is great and so

31:43that works but again it's like I think in hospitality hustling is is a term that sometimes gets pooh-poohed as being a negative term and when I say hustle I just mean the wherewithal and crisis mode to do good and to take care of my people and think of novel ways of fixing and addressing the issue at hand it's kind of I go into an economic triage mode and I figure it out and that's what we've always had to do in this business and I just think that we're more keenly aware of that now so all the hospitality people out there realize you got a hustle game and you got to use it and it doesn't mean pulling the wool over somebody's eyes it means just figuring out a new idea that's gonna be great and believing in yourself and your ability to do that I love that what a it's a very empowering message you just discussed and your note that handwritten note was actually my very first Instagram post for Nashville restaurant radio as I saw that on Instagram and I went that's brilliant just wealthy people of Atlanta hey help me out we had I had I had chefs who I mean they're like mainstay huge TV chefs and stuff calling me they're like okay look plot out this idea what are you doing how's this work okay this is good you know and so we kind of we tabulated into a really good system and I have what the contract looked like what the deliverable is how to make it you know efficient for for chefs involved and we got it out there as a system that they could use and I think that that helped a lot of people out whether it was five ten or a hundred thousand dollars in advanced catering they sold it it helped and I think that if I can help with the hustle that's fine it's all open source I'll give you whatever you want Wow so what's just to recap I mean I think that what you're doing is amazing I follow you on social media I see kind of what you're out there doing and I think if you have a core value of do the right

33:45thing you're you're living that every single day to the best that you possibly can and the message out there is to stay positive and do something not only just do something if it's getting out and washing your car get out of the house help somebody if you see somebody in need help them do something positive use that servants heart that you have for something good right now as long as it's not in groups yeah but get out there and help anybody can do anything it doesn't take Hugh Acheson to make a difference you can do it yourself anybody out there yes somebody was reaching out to me the other day he's a lawyer in town who I really like and he was like hey I'm pretty good in the kitchen can I help you feed all these people in your kitchen I was like not right now but I was like let me let me think about some ideas and I came up with this idea I thought was really interesting I didn't put it on social media so you may have seen it but what if like somebody consolidated as a central block sort of cook who's that you know an amateur cook and they assembled the ingredients into 10 bags for one recipe each week they get those bags with little specialized to-go containers that can be microwavable and they get it out to 10 of their friends so they're 10 cooks now or households cooking and safe and quarantine environments and they're producing 10 meals each of that recipe well then you've got suddenly they freeze them they put them together and then it goes out for delivery into some in need communities that's the creation of a hundred meals by people just doing small amounts of food like ten small portions once a week and you've got something together you've figured out a way of addressing boredom in your household because you got your kids to help you cook this you know manicotti or whatever it is that you're then freezing and then you can compare how the recipe turned out amongst the households you gather together you take it to the homeless shelter frozen they put it in their freezer nobody cares right now an egg certification I'm not saying you want to get people sick by transmitting it through the food but we've known that

35:47this virus is not transmitted through food possibly through through contact services yes but you can ensure safety on that if you just follow smart protocols and I think we're even everybody's getting better at sanitation right now which is great but so many people need food or maybe it's just like you're feeding you're finding the elderly people in your community who will not go get out of the house you know we've got to realize that right now in Nashville in Atlanta in Athens Georgia we are seeing people admitted to the hospital not just for COVID-19 sometimes totally separately from malnutrition and starvation that is happening on our watch I've got kids I've got like Athens is not a big town I've got 24 kids in the homeless shelter if I've got the ability to help those people I will 100% got to and everybody out there man I love that idea just something small if you like to cook if you have any sort of skills put together small meals 10 meals that you can give away to people you talked about your neighbors I mean I'm sure they would appreciate that hey here's a here's a couple of meals cook them if you need them if you don't like give away one block chef guy finds 10 other people so there are 10 of them and they do it three times a week that's 300 meals it's just exponential ism it's the idea of taking something simple and small that's totally obtainable and ramping it up and and that's totally cool because then you're gonna find somebody with van who's bored and trust me I've got 20 guys with bands in Athens we're bored right now and are offering to help and they go and drop by and those people have left them on the front porch that guy cleanly picks them up and that delivers them where they need to go on mass distribution is done by other people but the mass distribution is done by that one van we can do this this is all dispatching this is what I've been doing for the last week I've got spreadsheets of where I'm going in my in an hour and a half I'm going to a lower income trailer park community that of mostly Hispanics who are really destitute right now and then I'm going

37:50to a Hispanic church total delivery of that of today will be 600 meals but it's just a matter of me reaching out and getting in contact with those people so you got to find the community activists in your area call them and say hey how can I help what do you need so you just touched on a huge demographic of people who really need help right now the Hispanic population the people that are working in the restaurants they're displaced who might not have the right documentation but they're not getting stimulus checks yet they pay taxes but they're not getting stimulus checks and that is a very vulnerable section of our population that is the key thing they pay taxes so the argument the people go to me and they say well they're getting a free ride in America and they came here illegally I'm saying no they're running under regular payrolls and they pay pay full taxes and they do not file taxes so there's trillions of dollars that gets kicked to the government and never gets put back into the hands of those low-income taxpayers so don't come to me with that xenophobic argument because it's wrong those people cannot file for unemployment they are the backbone in a lot of ways of this country they have made this country in hospitality possible and in so many ways it's exploitive and wrong not in my kitchens they get paid every penny that they deserve and they also packed background checks and we asked for ID and we get them I don't know if it's real usually it is so that you know it's just such there's so much xenophobia that we need to just go against in this country now more wholeheartedly than ever completely agree people flying Confederate flags in Michigan people flying what well Confederate flags of those protests in Michigan that the State Assembly in Michigan it's like what if you're in Michigan flying a Confederate flag that has one undertone which is racism because you are not a son of a Confederate hero up in Detroit no that's an interesting it's an interesting thought for sure well chef how familiar are you with with Nashville

39:52I mean do you come up here for the food and wine festival right yeah I've been there many many many times very familiar with it I've got a lot a lot of friends who are chefs up there Philip but folk and Rolf and daughters yeah yeah Phillips badass chef he's amazing human as well so they're just there's there's so many restaurants in Nashville they're worthy of just amazing accolades and they're gonna it's a just such a growing town I'm a huge Nashville Predators fan yeah I was gonna ask you being from Canada if you're a hockey fan yeah I mean Montreal Canadians are my first team but I go and see a lot of Nashville I'm friends with one of the the owners and we go a lot to the games and that it's it's just amazing you know how that town has adopted the sport of hockey it blows my mind it makes me so warm inside as Canadian it's just like yeah that town is just awesome that way I am wearing a fang fingers shirt right now yeah yeah I'm a huge hockey fan and more importantly a Nashville Predators fan I think that's something that everybody else is hurting on right now too it's just right now should be playoff time I know it's a lot of people out there growing beards just in solidarity yeah Predators NFL you a Falcons fan Titans no more of a college football fan in the big MLS fan Atlanta United big college basketball we just started our very own MLS team the Nashville soccer FC Nashville SC our first game was against Atlanta and you guys beat us thanks for that yeah but we lost our third player that game so yeah it'll be okay Atlanta's good you know it's a that's Arthur blanks team and man he fills up Mercedes Benz it's the highest amount of people on average of any MLS team and it Atlanta is just totally into it which you know Lana was never really into hockey we had a hockey team for a while with the NHL and that never really went anywhere yep they went to their Winnipeg now yeah they're Winnipeg now yeah they're the

41:56Jets so yeah but it's it's yeah MLS is great great stuff well awesome do you have anything anything else you want to share with the Nashville restaurant community yeah sure I mean I think that everybody just needs to need to be good to yourself right now and being good to yourself is helping those around you and coming up with good logical plans on how we get out of this you know talk to people and and be kind to yourself stay healthy that helps I've told people I've said call a friend you haven't talked to in five plus years and just reconnect try and do that once every couple days it's amazing yep it is well thank you so much for your time today I feel like I could talk to you for just hours and hours there's so much to get to and I know right now we're in such an unprecedented time that I really wanted to get your perspective on what's happening and I feel like I feel like you've done that you've you've been an amazing guest and I just thank you so much for taking the time this morning well thank you you guys be well up there and let me know if you need anything we most absolutely same here you need anything from us you just say the word we got it all good thank you chef thank you so there you have a Hugh Acheson on Nashville restaurant radio I think you had if anybody out there had any sort of a perception about what a big star chef somebody who's a top chef judge or top chef masters what this guy is if that didn't just bring him down to just a everyday guy that just wants to help me and wow I talked about perspective and his perspective was was just amazing I just love how he phrased everything and that anybody out there can do anything what you could be doing right now if you did get some PPP money what some opportunities are I think he outlined that really well just a just a great interview thank you chef Hugh

43:58Acheson for joining us that meant the world to me and hopefully everybody else out there too I hope you guys are staying safe love you guys bye