Jarrett Steiber

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01:25That's C-H-A-R-P-I-E-R-S dot com, or you can give Erin Mosso a call directly. Her number is 615-319-6453. That's Sharpier's Bakery. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello, Music City. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and I am your host. We are proudly powered by Gordon Food Service. And man, we just did the Gordon Food Service show yesterday, and it was really, really fun. If I got to see you, you came out, you did an interview with me. Thank you. We had so much fun. Man, it's so good to talk with people in other markets about what they are doing. And just the colorful, amazing people that I got to meet, we interviewed probably 10 different people, maybe more, yesterday at the show. And we talked to the Bad Luck Burger Club. We talked to Rose Pepper, Andrea Chavez over at Rose Pepper.

02:54We talked to a bunch of restaurants in Newburgh and Memphis and other restaurants in Nashville. We talked to restaurants from Evansville, Louisville, E-Town. I mean, you name it. Barbecue restaurants, prime rib restaurants, all kinds of people. And I'm going to bring that episode next week. It's going to be just a litany of a bunch of people that we talked to. Another thing that I did last week is I went to the Atlanta Food and Wine Festival, and I was able to catch up with Jarrett from Little Bear the day of the festival. And that's what this interview today is going to be. Little Bear is a restaurant in Atlanta, and they are right over by the Old Braves Stadium. And this guy is a farmer champion. It's a farm-to-table restaurant. And Georgia Organics does this program where they highlight people who actually use the products from farmers. They look at your invoices, and then he is a gold-rated farm-to-table restaurant. So we get to talk about what that means, what that means for him, what that means for his restaurants, all the people. And it was just a lot of fun. And if you don't know other cities, and I don't. I mean, I'm learning. I know Nashville, but I'm learning these other cities. And it's amazing the similarities and what everybody goes through. But there's just these subtle small differences. And I can't wait to highlight that in the episode you're going to hear today. And hopefully you love it. Hopefully this is something. If you haven't checked out Atlanta Restaurant Radio, there's interviews over there with Ford Fry and some other folks that are pretty fun. And I haven't put them out on Nashville Restaurant Radio yet, but this one I am, because I was really happy with the way this one turned out. I really enjoyed our conversation. I want to tell you that the Giving Kitchen is an amazing organization, and they help restaurant workers. I am on the Tennessee Engagement Council, and I'm hosting a big event for them. And it's going to be at Maribol Restaurant in Brentwood. It's going to be on October the 17th. And you can purchase tickets to come hang out. It's going to be a tequila

04:59tasting with food. So it's not going to be like a sit-down dinner. It's going to be past food. So you'll get to eat all kinds of small bites and things during your tequila tasting. We're going to have a band. We're going to have a bar. It's going to be a fun little soiree at Maribol. So I would love to invite you out. You can go to givingkitchen.org and you can check it out there for tickets, whatever you want to do. Or there's a website. I'll put a link to the website on our Instagram page. Or you can go to the Maribol website where we will have a link up. I don't know if it's up yet, but it'll be up next week. And purchase tickets. If you're a chef out there and you would like to help out, we're going to be doing an auction at this event. And we would love some chef experiences. Anything that we can do to auction off, we'd love for you to help out the Giving Kitchen. We're trying to raise a bunch of money to help restaurant workers. And your help is needed. If you are a liquor company or you're a food company and you have some kind of item you can donate for a raffle or an auction, we'd love to do that as well. But that's going to be October 17th at Maribol Restaurant in Brentwood. Lots and lots of fun. We are going to be back next week with the GFS show and then we're going to be talking to chefs and getting this whole thing rolling.

06:14Crystal will be back and you need to go check her out. I had lunch over at the Cafe Cheesery the other day with my wife. We celebrated 19 years of marriage on September the 16th and I don't know how in the hell we made it 19 years, but we have made it 19 years. It feels like yesterday. It's kind of crazy. Love you honey. I didn't make a Facebook post about it or Instagram post about it because I told her personally. And so she did. So that was nice. Yeah, so I don't have a ton. We're just absolutely slammed. I do want to do one more promotion and we're almost done with this. We have partnered with Arnold Mint over at the international market. If you don't know Arnold, he used to own a restaurant called PM and PM had this burger. It was a hamburger with chow chow and it was like a glazed. We're doing a smash burger at Chagos right now. We're doing a special pop-up and it is called Burger Patty based around his mother's name. Patty meant who owned the international market for years. Neighborhood icon. Just an amazing opportunity. These burgers are the best burgers I think I've ever had. They're absolutely delicious. I think he won Nashville scenes best burger for like many straight years with this burger and now we've brought it back into pop-up called Burger Patty and it is going to be the next Monday and Tuesday and then Monday in September. So the rest of the next week, Monday and Tuesday and then the last Monday of September, September 30th, you can come out for a limited run to try this burger at Chagos Cantina on Belmont Boulevard directly next door to the international market. We've collaborated. It's going to be a lot of fun and we'd love to have you come by. I'd love to see you. I'm going to be there. Come by, say hello and give it a shot.

08:01It's a damn good burger and it's for a limited time only. So if you want to do it, you got to come now. I'm going to jump in here with this show, with this interview with Jarrett from Little Bear and I think you're going to love it. So why don't you guys stay tuned right now for this interview with Jarrett. Super excited today to welcome in Jarrett Steber. Jarrett is the owner of Little Bear in Atlanta, Georgia. What's going on, man? Not too much. Glad to be here and thank you for having me. Well, I was really excited. We had the ladies from Georgia Organics on the podcast and they were talking about their farmer champion program and they said, we'd love to get some of our farmer champions on. And I said, hell yeah. And they, they, they threw your name out and we've been able to make this happen. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I've been part of the program pretty much since the beginning. I think when they started it, I was kind of going through the build out still. So I think I got like a little partner sticker or something that was just kind of like, you don't have any food costs to track.

09:11You're not open yet, but we know what you do from sourcing from the pop-up I had before the restaurant. And ever since then we've been gold tier. We source a lot of our product locally and it's, you know, great to celebrate it for farmer champion week, but it's kind of a, an all day, every day, every week, every year thing for us, regardless of farmer champion week or not. It's just kind of a guiding ethos for the restaurant. I love that. Where does that come from? I mean, cause I'm looking at your menu and there's really unique ingredients that you're using and it's kind of, it's a smaller menu, but it looks absolutely delicious. Where do you source your products from? Yeah. I mean, we, we buy everything from farms around Atlanta. The only purveyor that we use is really just for, you know, kosher salt, some spices, fryer oil, just the things that we can't really source locally. But if it's fresh, you know, fruits, vegetables, any of the meat we source, even seafood, which we don't do a lot of as a locally sourced restaurant in a landlocked city, we still get wild caught catfish from the Econi sometimes, you know, rainbow trout from North Georgia. So we really go direct to farm with everything just because it's, you know, kind of for me, it's a more personable way to do things. We have the relationship with the farmers. We know how they grow things, how they care about growing things in the same way that we care about preparing them. We know how they treat their staff. You know, it's kind of a full circle thing for us rather than, you know, not knowing where the food comes from, who's on the other side of the transaction.

10:39And supporting people in your community also, I mean, continuing to the community supports your restaurant. They come and spend money. And if you can keep that money here locally, it really helps everybody. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's kind of the way I look at it is, you know, a lot of the bigger, bigger box purveyors and, you know, grocery store quality ingredients, you know, the chain of where the money goes from when it leaves your pockets to where it ends up. It's, you know, so many steps removed versus, you know, this is going directly to the person who's dropping off the produce or, you know, the driver from the farm is getting paid when they come to drop it off, you know, it feels like it's actually doing something that matters and we can see where it's going. So is that the driving force behind it? Because it's hard. It is not like, I think if you're listening to this and you're a guest in a restaurant, you think farm to table, sure, you know, but it's not easy because seasons, especially, you know, around here that they change so rapidly and you can't grow different things. Do you have, do you have farmers that grow specific products for you? That is definitely a part of the conversation, especially the ones that we've worked with for longer periods of time that, you know, we have a kind of closer relationship with and they will ask if there's certain things we want to grow. I mean, obviously it has to be within reason. We can't be like, you know, I want you to grow me a mango or something. They're like, you just won't work in the climate exactly where we are. But there are things where, you know, ask, will this grow? Do you think you could grow it? Or some people will grow it. I've seen it before. Do you want to grow it? And sometimes they'll have their reasons for things. Some people don't want to grow, you know, lemongrass because it's hard to harvest by hand. The roots are really deep, whatever. There are things like that where people are like, yeah, we can grow it. It's just kind of not really worth the time as much. Some people do. Not everybody wants to. So you can't weeding through. Commit that kind of volume that makes sense for them as one restaurant. Yeah.

12:33Do you promote these farmers to other restaurants that you have friends that you have or anything like that? Yeah, I mean, there's there's definitely a network of it. And we see it the other way to where there are farmers who reach out because they've heard of the way we source from other farms or they've seen us on Instagram or whatever. And they want to, you know, reach out and get in touch and sell product to a restaurant like us that sort of stands for the same principles that they believe in. So the networking kind of takes care of itself. And then, you know, we do have some other restaurants who reach out and, you know, they might see an ingredient that we post that we got in and they're like, oh, I've been looking for that. Who's selling it? And you kind of ask, you know, that way people aren't necessarily as committed to it as we are. There's definitely a lot of restaurants that are that are focusing on it. And then there are a lot more that don't do it at all. And then there are some that are kind of getting their feet wet and figuring out how they can source things locally or at least integrate some of that into their menu. You know, but not everybody has the luxury of a being owner driven like some chef owners. So I don't have anyone to answer to. I just make the menu whatever I want. Do whatever you want. Yeah, exactly. Which helps.

13:36And we're also really small. So we have the ability to change around a lot. You know, I'm in there doing prep every morning. I don't have a full prep crew or anything like that. It's me, my two sous chefs, my two cooks. That's it. We make it kind of happen. So it gives us the flexibility to change the menu around a lot, which is not necessarily possible for every restaurant concept. But that allows us to source the way we do because, you know, we just kind of look at things and say, all right, we only got 10 or 15 pounds of broccoli delivered. That's like first of the season, fall crop coming in. They might have more next week, but that's not enough for a whole week. So we run a dish and then a day or two later we run out of it. It's got to change. We do something else. That's it. That's what I'm saying. Like to execute something that's very hard. This isn't just like, oh, order it from Gordon Food Service. Yeah, exactly. And especially like certain times of year right now being one of them, you know, for a reference point of somebody's listening to this months and months down the road, we're kind of at the end of summer just before fall. It's a time of year where fall crops haven't really started coming in. A lot of the farms started planting them in the last few weeks, but they haven't come up in full force. And the end of the summer, it's so hot and dry. There's not much growing. So it's, you know, a bunch of varieties of peppers, some eggplant, some okra, that kind of stuff. But it's not really a huge variety of things. And same in the dead of winter when it's just hearty greens and roots and there's not a ton of other stuff. So we still have to put together a full menu and we don't want to cheat or anything. So it's, you know, we're not buying commodity stuff just to get through. We just have to find a way to get creative. And how do you do that, though? And who does that? Do you sit down with a sous chef? Do you have a idea meeting? Do you sit with farmers? Like, how do you create those menus? Yeah, we, we kind of look at it like a Tetris. So there's sort of a template for what makes a little bare dish a little bare dish that I kind of go over with my sous chefs. And, you know, they have the flexibility to put freedom, I guess, to put whatever they want on the menu.

15:28Generally, I do the majority of the menu planning, they contribute a couple dishes. They're very responsible every day for just kind of keeping up with the prep that's needed for service each night. So there's not always as much time for experimentation, research and development, that kind of stuff, just so we don't have to staff, you know, free time to make that possible. But we do try our best to kind of distribute things. If somebody has an idea, it's like, cool, wrap a dish, you know, come, come up with an idea. As long as it's not just one or two components, it's a full dish, put it together, let's taste it, see what it needs. But we try to fit things in sort of like playing Tetris with the ingredients that we know we're going to be getting from the farms every week. And we pick and choose from there, like balancing colors, balancing textures. So we don't want to have too white or green or whatever color vegetables on a dish. If we have the option to do one that's white and one that's red or whatever, it just looks a little more aesthetically pleasing. If we have something that's starchy and soft, we want to maybe put something crunchy and bright and fresh with it, that kind of thing.

16:35We try to always have at least two sauces on every dish so that as you eat it, they mix together and it kind of becomes something different. So your last couple of bites are different than the first couple of bites. So there's a few things like that. We try to always have some sort of sprinkly topping. We'll save things like melon skins that people throw away and dehydrate them and crush them into powders and use it for little seasoning blends that you can kind of finish a dish with some sort of herbaceous component, you know, as long as we have access to good herbs that are in season. And so we kind of build off a template like that, like how do we make a dish that sort of fits the style that we generally do for our dishes but utilizes whatever came in this week so we can get everything distributed for balance and color, texture, aesthetics and sort of go from there. No, I love that because I have three restaurants in Nashville that I operate and it's a, we're big 250 seaters, you know, and I'm doing, I have one restaurant that has almost 5,000 guests a week. You know where I can't fathom doing what you're doing. Like I'm hearing this because to me it's like I'd need hundreds of pounds of these things to do. When we buy quality ingredients the best we possibly can. I'm not going give me the cheapest of this so I can sell a bunch of it. We're buying quality stuff but to be able to execute a seasonal menu based around what the local farms can offer. I think I'm trying to demonstrate how freaking hard that is.

18:06Yeah, it's tough. I don't think everybody realizes that. No, that's what I'm saying. Like it's not just like, oh we'll just create this and then we'll fill it. Like no, you really are the mercy of Mother Nature to a degree. I mean if it rains for a month and they lose crops then you're at a disadvantage. That's how it was for sure. This was a hard summer for a lot of the farmers because it was so hot so early in the season and then just kind of persistently hot and very dry for long stretches. So a lot of the crops, even the summer crops, were not as bountiful as usual and a lot of farmers lost money this year in the summer. Do you buy regionally? I mean can you buy from, does it have to be within 250 miles or like 500 miles? Because local, some people think local. Like do I need to go there? Where are you finding a farm in Atlanta? Like well I mean there are some. Look you got to go outside a little bit. I mean it's a thing. Yeah for sure. We go about as far as like Columbia, South Carolina area where Anson Mills is located just outside of Columbia for grains and legumes and stuff. That's about the farthest away that we buy. So before you opened Little Bear, how long has Little Bear been open? We opened February 26th 2020 so we nailed it on the timing. You can always track the anniversaries of COVID based on our restaurant anniversaries. February 26th 2020. Yeah yeah so we had about two and a half or so three weeks of kind of standard dinner service. We had two weeks and then they declared the state of emergency and nobody really knew what that meant so there's one more week after that where everybody was still open. We're trying to figure out like we'll put in the post so like hey we wash our hands. Yeah like Lysol wipes and on all the surfaces whatever. What did you guys do?

19:54I mean so you're a brand new restaurant. Yeah. Walk me through. I want to get back to that. What did you do before you opened Little Bear? So I had a pop-up restaurant for seven years before this that kind of led up to opening Little Bear which is great because it was you know kind of like dipping your toes in the water to see if it's cold before you jump in. So that really helped with kind of figuring out a little bit more of my voice as a chef on my own. Not working for other people. The business side of things. How I wanted to people manage the intangibles that you know aren't just cooking. What would you say your leadership style is? How do you what is your culture like? It's pretty good I think. I mean we don't have a lot of turnover which I think is a good sign. I try to be somewhat laissez-faire about it. Like we don't have an out and out GM for the restaurant. Our bar manager does a lot of you know behind the scenes kind of stuff helping with some of the computer work with me and then I do a lot of the stuff too for front of house. That would be sort of the quote-unquote management side of it. But during service we sort of allow the front of house staff to manage themselves and it's one of those things that's like as long as you don't abuse it this can work. If you hire adults. Yeah you have to hire adults that can manage themselves. That could thrive. Yeah exactly. People love working in that type of environment. Yeah they want to feel like they're not just clocking in and clocking out and if they do want to just clock in and clock out then it's not really the restaurant for them. That's not the point of Little Bear. I want it to be kind of a launching point for people. Like I want you to be able to learn and grow and feel like you're actually a part of the restaurant. You're not just a random person who walks in gets a paycheck and leaves and my hope is that you know when people do decide to leave from Little Bear it's like not even a lateral step. It's an upward step when they leave us to you know a managerial job that isn't possible at the restaurant because nobody's left or vacated the ones that we do have or they're opening their own thing or whatever it is. You know I kind of want them moving forward from Little Bear and not just having it be like this is just a job and then I'll get another job and then another job.

21:58So we we've tried pretty hard to make that an important like main aspect of the restaurant. There's there's not really any like yelling or toxic kitchen culture because I grew up in fine dining. It's all I worked in treated like shit a lot of the time. You know it's kind of like a big attitude thing in kitchens you know whose whose ego can win out and I don't want to have something like that as our culture at the restaurant. So we've tried to nurture that a little more you know we we provide health care. We have paid time off and sick days and everybody full-time works four days a week so everyone's got three days off a week in addition to being able to take PTO. So we're trying to make it like this isn't just a restaurant job this is a real job. So even if you're you know working in front of house or whatever we don't want that stigma of like well what are you like trying to do with your life and you just work here which is frequently a thing or it's like oh you're just you know serving for now but what are you gonna do. It's like no you can work as a career if you have the right restaurant. Well that's that's part of one of my missions and what I do is I want people I want to normalize people retiring from restaurants.

23:06Yeah I want to normalize having a big ass party because Ronnie's worked here for 25 years. Yeah you know we offer a four a matched 401k at all of our restaurants for full-time employees after 12 months. Yeah yeah because you wanted the investment like you're gonna pay in time and effort into training somebody you want to know they're gonna stay with you. So yeah so after 12 months you can sign up to be in the 401k but like I want somebody to work there for 20 years if it's a dishwasher a line cook a server manager bartender whatever yeah and I want them to have a bunch of money saved yeah and we do health care and all those things because people at my least I'm in Nashville right so it's a I'm a musician yeah but I'm just doing this until I get a real job kind of a thing and I'm like no this is a real job this is I pay for very real children and a very real mortgage with the money that I make here and I don't want you thinking that this is just something if you can come in that I'm not opposed to hiring that person but like if you're really good at what you do and you can you can care about it while pursuing other things then great I'm not saying that that's a negative thing but I want people to realize that working in a restaurant is a real job and can be very profitable yeah and the people that are good at it and have the natural hustle and things like that it's like yeah why don't you focus on that like look at that you are good at this and maybe that's okay you can just become a career restaurant person this is something you're excellent at and it's a flexible job in a lot of ways it's a dynamic work environment maybe just focus on that a little more yeah I think about like well I have to get a you know a big kid job eventually it's like this is one well I think it's interesting because we're about to talk about the pandemic a little bit and I think a lot of people when a lot of restaurants had to close there was like that 30 days where everybody was closed from late March to like May 1st or May 4th I think is when we reopened in Nashville yeah I think a lot of people like went into I said it was like people going to a cocoon and like you can you have a month to go figure out

25:09what you want to do or how you can do it I think a lot of people love to do real estate I think a lot of the really talented people that had other options but I think a lot of those people are back now because they just missed it yeah I mean there's an excitement and a just a whole fervor of a shift I miss being three deep behind the bar like there's an endorphin rush you get from being in the weeds you know having tickets just start coming out of that thing you're like oh let's roll yeah you don't get that at real estate you don't get that in other jobs and I think that I think we're getting a lot of people back and I'm excited about that yeah for sure I mean it's I think there was like a burnout too that hit like during the pandemic it was so weird and hard working in restaurants where you're constantly readjusting like we're gonna still be doing takeout only and now we're doing dine-in and takeout but with a limited capacity and we're doing this schtick and that schtick to try to bring in business and I think it was just kind of a lot on the staff of like what the fuck's going on what I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this you're allowed to swear man 100% yeah what are you know what are we doing all the time it was hard on the staff as much as it was in the ownership where we were worrying about the stability of our businesses they were you know put into chaos it's kind of like coming from a broken family or something you have like come home from school and your parents are fighting or whatever or they're separating it's kind of that thing or there's this uncertainty for the staff well what is happening with my job this is not what I signed up for this is different you know and a lot of people was an owner I mean so as an owner that's not what you're walking in every day with new mandates and mask mandates and you have got to put up plexiglass and I have to do these things and it's like every day you're coming in going this isn't what I signed up for I thought I was going to open my dream restaurant this brick and mortar I put my heart and soul into this thing and now I've got to figure out takeout and family meals yeah that's like that's the bullshit for owners to deal with like the the rest of the staff doesn't have to deal with that normally it's kind of like here's the system that works at this restaurant or this is what's in place here's our protocol here's our opening checklist our closing checklist this is how service goes

27:11and they know what to expect because the owners deal with all the crap on the back end you know you're the one paying the bills you're the one figuring out the permitting doing the renewals every year you're the one figuring out what the identity of the restaurant is that will bring people in and their job is to come in and execute it and make some money and be a part of service and you know just have it be their job and when that was constantly changing every couple of weeks it was like yeah sure this is stressful for me as the owner trying to figure out what we're doing but it's definitely more stressful for the staff too when they just have this constant like you know ice thin ice that they're skating on which they're not used to and that was a hard thing to manage is just people's feelings scary for everybody yeah and that's a whole thing so what did you guys do i mean you opened february 26th he said every 26th march 17th it was um my first podcast was on march 14th okay 2020 okay and it was based around all the stuff that was going down and what are we gonna do as a community what did you end up having to do what was the first thing that you did in the pandemic so the we're we're open wednesday through sunday so the first sunday before they're like shut down i had a meeting after service with my two sous chefs at the time and we were sort of like all right we see the writing on the wall they're gonna force you know dine-in service to be shut down we never thought we would do any takeout at all let alone exclusively take out but you know unlike every other restaurant that had been open for a while we didn't have any money we had just opened so we couldn't wait it out or like a big clientele of regulars who've been coming there for years who are going to support you the benefit of the pop-up at least so there was like some business from that but still yeah it was like you know most people just closed and we're like we're gonna wait it out it'll just be a few weeks we didn't have that luxury so we we sat down went through the menu and kind of looked at what would absolutely not travel well got rid of it like all right we have to change these couple dishes like

29:12steak tartare reopened with not a good takeout item like we got to replace it so we started thinking about you know not just what are we going to do which was going to be take out how are we going to do it in a way that would still reflect our style and give people like kind of an upscale option for takeout but would be essentially idiot proof somebody comes and picks this up and then goes and runs errands for two hours and they get back to their house is it still going to be good french fries chicken wings or something that's like when they're hot and fresh and crispy they're great but when they steam in a box for a couple hours they're not so they're not so great yeah so you know just thinking through not just what will be a good dish but what will be a good dish to go and then we kind of looked at you know the couple of weeks that we've been open a little bit of money we made it was like we have to take a risk now and buy a bunch of to-go supplies that we don't have because if you could get them yeah yeah because they were everybody was that early that early on we were like ahead of the nobody was nobody was panic buying yet because most people weren't even thinking about being open at all to do takeout so we had a couple weeks of like we were the only ones buying stuff and that was great but we had to risk all the money that we made to buy enough to-go supplies we're like if we are going to do takeout we need to have enough of the boxes and bags and all the stuff to put the food in to sell enough takeout to make it worth our while if we just buy a little bit and then sell through all the boxes and we can't sell any more to-go food then what's the point so we took the risk we spent like two thousand bucks or something on takeout supplies to hopefully have enough to last through a week and then we were busy we sold a lot of takeout for a few weeks and it kind of worked and then from there we started thinking like how do we get repeat business so we started switching up we're doing like a prefix for two kind of thing just you know four course meal reasonably priced enough for two people or if you're single you can just have some leftovers not a big deal and we were switching up the like cuisine every week so it was you know way to bring people in it was like all right we're doing italian food this week we're going to do

31:14chinese food next week we're going to do whatever and that was sort of an incentive to be like you can come back every week and try the new menu of different kind of makes it fun for you because you're also getting to flex some creativity and do the hey let's do italian this week and who knows how to do this and what can we find locally that's doing this and that could can still bring some more fun to what you're doing yeah exactly because it's you know you open a restaurant to serve people you don't open it to flip all the chairs up on the tables every day and just fill up a bunch of bags with boxes and put them up on the front and have people come by and call and let you know when they're there and you come out and just leave it in their trunk and they drive away like you know it dehumanizes the whole thing we're going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors we are so excited to introduce a new sponsor to nashville restaurant radio all-star fire protection these guys are your local solution to all your fire suppression needs all-star fire opened in nashville 34 years ago and they continue to grow they're now serving chattanooga noxville and bowling green they have over 130 team members and they got 40 trucks out on the roads at all time to service your restaurant and you know you know what i love just when i was talking with them and i said hey man what makes you different i get your local you do all the things but what makes you different and he said you know what makes us different is that we actually care because i actually care these people are small business owners this is their life and we're a small business as well and we understand what they're going through and we take that approach we actually care about their business we want them to be ready in the case of a fire which is why they offer training they will go in and they will sit with your staff and say hey this is how you use a fire extinguisher how many people out there actually know how to use a fire extinguisher they want to make sure that you're getting the most out of it they're building those relationships and that is why i am proud to introduce all-star fire protection to you you can get a hold of rob bowman you should call him today his number is 615-431-3760

33:15that's 615-431-3760 this is matthew clements robin's insurance agency we care about ensuring the hospitality industry we want to make sure that you're taken care of and that we take one less stressor off your plate so you can sleep well at night at the end of the day when you purchase an insurance policy you're really purchasing peace of mind and we want to showcase that and how we operate within the hospitality space during the summer of giving by giving back to the giving kitchen if you call today to ask for a quote we will be sure to give 50 in your name to the giving kitchen just give me a call area code 863-409-9372 we specialize in ensuring the hospitality space we want to be sure to give back we look forward to hearing from you are you looking to grow your business or are you looking to start a business finding a retail spot is number one you got to do this and that is why we're talking about the chandler james retail team at lee and associates miller chandler and lian james are your go-to brokers to do just that they're located downtown in the heart of it all and the batman building and they're serving all of middle tennessee let me tell you both miller and lian are tennessee native so you know they know the neighborhoods they know they know the demographics and they can help you find your dream location now here's the cool part chandler james can help you find and negotiate terms on your next restaurant location they represent both retail tenants and landlords in our market which means they can also help you with lease versus buy decisions and act as your leasing agent should you ever decide to go all in and purchase commercial real estate if you'd like to get a hold of them give them a call at the office their phone number is 615-751-2340 that is the chandler james retail team give them a call today i did a i did a replay challenge and i'd love to bring this back what i did was

35:23called a replay challenge so i had the chef from the hermitage hotel on the show and he goes the hardest thing for me is when i plate food yeah it's like a piece of art and then i gotta do it in the box i gotta put it in a box yes and then i gotta send it home and then people put it on a plate and they're just ruining it so i said what if we have a replay challenge people when they get your food they can yeah set like see if they can take the food out of the go box and put it on the plate and make it look as sexy as possible and then take a picture and tag you in it and post it just almost as a love letter to the chef so if people were going home and taking your food and replating it and making it look beautiful and then tagging you in the picture to say look what i've done with it you'd be like that's just some idea and you get some ideas out of that too people were naturally doing it which was really cool like they were just craving that like nice dinner out experience that people would bring it home and then put everything into they wouldn't just always eat it out of the to-go box they put it in porcelain and yeah nice dinner like people would go to the park like phoenix park right down the street from us and like set up a little picnic they'd bring some wine like a little blanket or tablecloth and they have a little park picnic or whatever like people were getting creative with it for sure i think i think those times where we're in the middle of like your back is against a wall like that people are so resilient and we figure out like how to get shit done yeah and i look now at your website it says due to our small size takeout is no longer offered yeah that was an adjustment no longer doing takeout at all but just talking about those times is there anything that you learned through the pandemic that you still do today or any is it just a perspective perspective yeah that's the big thing like i never took it for granted when anyone would come into the pop-up or the restaurant this first couple weeks but now i very much don't like every single person that

37:24walks through the door and sure not everybody has a great experience some people don't enjoy it it's not for them you can't make everybody happy but every single person that walks through the door is important to me now in a way that i would have never been able to appreciate before because i wasn't expecting a global pandemic to come and you know interrupt my dream after working towards this since i was 15 and got my first restaurant job the fact that you're still open and that you're rocking and rolling today i mean there's got to be a testament to like also bring it on like i can we did yeah it's like what's next we'll see i mean you know you got landlords they increase your cam every year you got the city and their you know whatever stupid permitting stuff you know there's always something always something but that stuff's you know relatively manageable ultimately i think our biggest issues now as a business is because we haven't had a ton of turnover everyone who's been there we've given up like lots of raises we have more people on the health care than ever before we just you know the old days especially now with like pay is so much better in restaurants than it used to be which is good but the old days of like you shoot for 30 labor costs is you know outdated i think and you have to be looking at it more of like 40 to 50 is the new 30 percent because people demand more money they should make more money and if you want to keep people you have to pay them well and so that's kind of the hardest thing is how do we keep our staff that's been here for a long time from getting complacent how do you keep them like hungry every day to you know push and make every shift the best they possibly can and beyond that how do you make the numbers work when you open a restaurant with certain projections and you thought you'd have to be spending a certain amount for you know what you expected to be bringing in and now in reality you see what you're bringing in and you see what you're spending and oh i'm spending twice as much as i thought i would on payroll and how do we keep this sustainable and so those are the biggest hurdles more than anything now but that's all just kind of standard operating stuff that's so much better than how do we survive a pandemic so how do you do it he just a question every every day i'm just chasing my tail yeah

39:28basically yeah it's it's like chasing your tail or you know sticking a fork in the socket and expecting a different outcome just getting shocked every time yeah you just you know yeah you balance things out there's weeks where it's like this is a payroll week so it's not going to be a pay the credit card week and then the next week is going to be a pay the credit card week because it's not payroll and then the week after that is maybe a rent and payroll week which means you know we need to get more spices it's like not this week sorry we're riding dirty on what we have i mean and it's you got to budget this stuff yeah and margins are razor thin and people still complain that things are too expensive oh yeah yeah i mean people don't realize that they're paying for more than the food that's on the plate and that's also one thing with fine dining like we're not super fine dining in that sense so like you know it's not but it's it's but it's upscale it's very upscale with fine dining like i always joke that you pay for what's not on the plate you know it's these big beautiful coupes with a tiny little scallop and some foam on it whatever it's a lot of dead space like that's what you're paying for in fine dining but it's the same well the tablecloth is a dollar and the you know i mean every the big ice cube in your old-fashioned costs a dollar 25 yeah we buy we purchase ours the crystal clear ones and it's yeah every little thing has a cost everything has a cost yeah and people don't think about that and they're like this is this is a small portion it's like you're not paying for the food that's on the plate you're paying for that yes but you're paying for the plate that we bought you're paying for the extremely expensive dish machine chemicals that clean that plate you're paying for the experienced chefs that have yeah you're paying for them around and they they're the ideas of you guys just the idea of you guys sitting around figuring out how to do the menu and buying from all that effort and all that work like it's hard to hire people that just innately do that they go why don't you just order it from gfs and you go well because this is what we're doing so the the skill and then you got to pay those people more how do you quantify your time is the biggest thing you can never charge enough to justify the time and effort and energy that

41:28you put into something it's i wake up in the morning and i get a coffee and i go straight into work there's no breakfast there's no morning routine i jump into my prep list at 8 30 in the morning and i do it all day long it doesn't stop and then service starts and then you get home from service and i'm answering emails and instagram messages from people and requests and doing payroll or running the books the days off are ordering their payroll they're you know all the other accounting stuff that needs to get tidied up and then when i go to sleep i'm having stress dreams about the restaurant i'm thinking about my prep list in the morning what order am i going to do things people don't realize how 24 seven it is so when you look at it it's like oh you think that $18 chicken dish is small like fuck you like you say my time is not worth more than $18 are you like 24 7 365 thinking about this and working towards it you know if it were up to me we could charge a thousand dollars a plate like how else do you justify your time and your energy but you know i say it doesn't work you won't i tell people just charge charge whatever you have to charge i mean charge more charge more i think so many people look at what other people charge and then they decide to charge based on what that market is and it's like no no i'm buying from a local farmer i'm buying this product at the peak of the season when it's in season at the peak of freshness my food's going to taste better yeah the energy it takes for me to source that product and all the invoices and all the things i got to do to make sure that you get that product when it's supposed to be eaten yeah i mean products grow in season for a reason getting asparagus in december that's not when it's supposed to grow but if you get it at the end of march and in april or you know when it's if you can get a good local asparagus versus something from chile you're like dude this stuff tastes weird the difference all year round we're buying that food to to serve you and there's there's an effort i would tell people it says you're charged too little you need to charge more for this because this is incredible food yeah and one of the things that we focus

43:28on with that like we could definitely charge more i'm aware what my peers and contemporaries are charging and what the general quote unquote fine dining realm of price points looks like compared to ours but our margins are good on food cost we could definitely charge more ideologically we could probably charge more and get away with it in terms of people not being repulsed by it and rebelling against it but we also want to think about the neighborhood we're in and the fact that it's long been like summer hill was dormant for a long time it's just quiet it was empty there wasn't business there's a lot of people who've been living there that are low income households for many decades and now it's you know kind of booming again with all these new businesses that have been open and you have to keep in mind that like not everybody that is coming into your restaurant or like you know the yuppie young you know high income households have moved in and pay for the million dollar like balsa wood bullshit condos that got put up in six months and like you know that's not your only clientele or the people who drive from buckhead or john's creek or whatever that are coming in on the weekends like there are also people who live in this neighborhood who've been there for years and years and years who aren't used to fine dining who don't have a ton of money and if we want them to come in and take a chance on some food they're not familiar with and enjoy us as part of the neighborhood not look at us as somebody who's just coming in and being obtuse then it's kind of our responsibility to make it more affordable and approachable for them so it's kind of like a you know double-edged sword for us how do we get what we need out of this but also make this restaurant approachable to more than just experienced fine dining diners that's a hard balance to strike i'm really impressed that you said that i'm really impressed that you said that because it's the restaurant business right and what i do i'm a director of operations for a restaurant i look at a pnl every day and i have to make a lot of business decisions on what we're doing and this is big volume stuff but man it's

45:29refreshing to hear you say that you care about the people in your community yeah that it's not just about profits that it's not just about you making all this money so that you can have these things or you can provide that like that i want to make sure that people who've been in my community everybody that it's equitable that we can all it's well it's nicer but i'm not i could charge more but i want people to be able to enjoy it i love i love that yeah because then you get somebody who's not used to fine dining they might not know the ingredients they might not know like you know when you get into fine dining you kind of in a pretentious way just assume that a lot of your customers are going to know french saucework terminology or you know exotic chinese condiments or whatever like things that we kind of take for granted because we dedicated our lives to this career and we know as much about all kinds of foods as possible because that's our job you sort of assume the customer also is going to know that but they're not always going to know that and people who aren't used to fine dining will come into a fancy restaurant and look at the menu and feel overwhelmed they'll feel stupid because they don't know what everything is they'll be made to feel stupid by the staff that is frustrated or having to answer a million questions and if there's also a you know three hundred dollar price tag attached to that meal why on earth would they go and try to have that experience and then they'll never know what that sort of creative food can be like versus if we give them an experience where they can try something that's way outside of their comfort zone for you know less than 35 40 bucks if they want then you know it's less of a risk i'm looking at your raw beef dish and you've got daikon ahi chili shishito peppers just a shishito like if i don't know what duca is i don't know what a pecan duca like i'm like i don't know if i want to try this i don't know but these things are all delicious and you want people to come in and give it a chance so they can expand what they're i mean that's also why that's on the menu that dish in particular is raw beef which like some people be like oh that sounds gross

47:30why would you call it that or whatever it's like well because you're just assuming when you put steak tartare in the menu that somebody knows what steak tartare is and they're not going to be disappointed when they get a bunch of raw beef so it's like this is raw beef enjoy it or don't that is what it is it is what it is no surprise so i want to pivot a little bit here um and thank you for the the vulnerability and talking about a lot of that stuff this is really really good stuff i i hope everybody who eats in restaurants just listen to what we just talked about there is a television show it's not called the big bear it is called the bear and when you were talking about your daily life 8 30 prepless just going into your nightmares at night time all of these things it reminded me a lot of that show did you watch the show yeah i watched the first few seasons we haven't caught up on the third one yet uh yeah i mean if anything my wife is almost like you need to save these for your days off like it's stressing you out too much coming home from work and then watching this show and like you know personalizing the anxiety of it again what part of it did you really personalize what part did you hear like what did you take out of it being a chef owner which is what carmy is in the in the show but like what i mean he's definitely uh a little more of like a kind of classic brooding emo chef type that i don't necessarily relate to quite as much i mean i'm as anxious and restless as any restaurant person but i i try to move it into more of like a positive kinetic kind of thing i like to think of my anxiety as like fuel for the engine sort of do you meditate no well in my own ways i guess but not not directly not like sitting quietly with your hands on your left definitely cannot breathing deeply and doing the whole thing yeah definitely not good at that if we go on like a beach trip or something like i can't just like sit on the beach all day long and chill i gotta go explore a little bit and you know whatever so you're i have add that's the thing for me i have to go do stuff i can't just yeah sit so you find your meditation in other ways i think for me is meditation yeah there you go by

49:30myself hiking through the woods that's quiet time i can it's great yeah yeah you think driving to atlanta for me is meditation i love getting in the car for two and a half hours three hours by myself just look at the roads see everything going by listen to podcasts listen to music whatever yeah i called like four people yesterday i came in yesterday i called like i haven't talked to skylar i have time to talk to somebody right now i'm gonna call some i go hey i don't need anything from you i didn't want anything i'm just calling to say hi yeah exactly how you doing exactly like really yeah like i don't when i drive i can do that anyway yeah no i mean that's that's an important part of it i think from from that show that the like the way the camera at least in the first season just constantly zooms into the clock on the wall that was like the most accurate kitchen thing like i've ever seen on a tv show or movie i was like yeah that's exactly what it's like every day is like the deadline like i've talked about that with my my sister in the past who works in advertising you know she's like oh we have this project coming up there's you know deadlines in a few days and like you know it's a lot like it's getting stressful crunch time we're thinking about it it's like yeah that deadline's in a few days your projects are like days weeks months out to the deadlines restaurants the deadline is every day service is the deadline there's a deadline every day you're working towards that every single day no matter what's going on and every minute counts you're just constantly looking at the clock how much time do i have how much time do i do i have enough time for this do i have no time for that are we almost there two hours out hour out 30 minutes out and that was something that i feel like they did really well in that show i use it i call it game time i know because i throughout a shift and if you don't work in restaurants you know like there's ebbs and flows throughout a shift sometimes there's a there's a timer slow then it starts building and then it's balls to the wall and then it starts slowing down but a lot of times you'll you'll feel you're over the hump now then there's that last people always take their foot off the break yeah always and it's like no no no we got another we got another yeah another pop is coming we and you have to maintain that level of intensity through that little lull that's that's so i call it game time i go like we got four hours

51:34yeah four quarters yeah we don't go to bill belichick's never in the office yeah in the middle of a game he's like uh you guys got this i'm gonna go to the office and do my orders like no we work that way you're on the field the whole game yep through all four quarters you gotta do it and it's a that's just the way that i look at it and it's like every day yeah it's an endurance thing and you have to be able to make it through yes you can't just be like well these people came in 15 minutes before close so they can get a bad experience it's like now they gotta get a good one too you gotta keep it up i really liked in season one i liked the progression of the characters uh and i don't know how this conversation why this is relevant but i and because i think you probably see it a lot in your restaurant you hire people with attitudes good attitudes people that want to do their job and then as they come in and they start learning what the raw beef is and what how to make a pecan duca and and how to do all of these different things you start seeing them get buy-in and that's what i saw from the the regular chicago beef and then when he came in the yes chef stuff hasn't really happened a whole lot as far as i know but yeah not in our kitchen no it's not it's not a thing in our kitchen either but like people who didn't know that they could accomplish things and then you give them a challenge and then they create something that tastes really good and they go i did that and you see them that little spark happen and then they their creativity and their curiosity starts getting peak and they go i wonder what else i can do exactly and then they start leaning into it and i think that was the coolest part of the second season was seeing all of the line cooks at a chicago beef place turn into fine dining chefs and their progression in staging the fine dining restaurant and learning about you know forks was yeah exactly that was the best i've i brought my whole team in on a sunday and played that episode yeah and i go people save their money to come eat here and this is while this might just be a job to you people are this is circled on their calendar that they're gonna be here tonight

53:37yeah this is a highlight for them everybody we have to have you can't have that one fork that isn't ready yeah it's just one table it doesn't matter yeah it's not it's not just one table they all matter they all matter and they all have to matter the same amount i thought that was a pretty cool thing i just thought it's interesting because you're the little bear and then they came out with this show called we definitely get that a lot of people like did you name it after the show we were way before the show we were ahead of time so i guess that's a good transition to fernando yeah who's fernando yeah fernando is my wife and i's dog um he is enormous he's a great pyrenees so he's about 140 pounds big boy so everybody says he looks like a little bear so we figured if we named it fernando's people would think it was like an italian or spanish restaurant or something so we went with little bear instead little bear that's amazing then you have a really cool shop i was looking i was like i want like nine of these shirts yeah there's like all of them are so cool man your merch is fantastic we'll have some good stuff coming out soon too for like fall winter kind of refresh the shop a little bit but yeah i've been working with the same branding team for a long time office of brothers here in atlanta i've been working with them from back in the pop-up days like a long time on you know decade and a half almost at this point that we've been working together and they're super creative so with that stuff like the menus the the merch all that's just really collaborative with us or it's kind of like you know i'll tell them roughly what garments i'm thinking about for the next batch of merch and just be like whatever designs just make make them look good and they kind of do whatever they want there's a couple things in your menu that i um i gotta talk about because i don't know if everybody knows this if i have mostly chefs and restaurant owners that listen to this but if you are a if you work in restaurants and you go to a restaurant where your friend is the chef or you know the people there they'll come out and they'll say what's up man how you doing and they'll go what are you eating that and you go i don't know they go can i just feed you yeah and you'll go fuck yeah you can just feed me like that's all it's the greatest thing that you ever do when a chef says can i just feed you that's like an honor yeah that's like a oh my god yes you allergic to anything

55:41nope just you don't like it whatever it is you're making i'm down to try like i love it you've encapsulated this on your menu yeah you have um under the menu you have something called a dealer's choice four course individual prefix menu just fuck me up fam as they say 50 dollars a person that is the most badass thing so when when that order comes in right so somebody says hey just fuck me up fam what do you got i got a four top of that what happens inside do you do you guys plan that before the shift hey this is what that meal is going to be or does that just your creativity it's kind of becomes more standardized at this point um we just don't we don't have the the staff or the size of the wherewithal for like a very fancy separate more elaborate prefix thing so at this point it's just kind of become a way to get almost like a discount on four of the items on the menu for the luxury of not picking it yourself and just letting it be whatever we want so they're generally on menu items you just don't pick and we send it out to you it's really good in particular for like first dates people who maybe are like having a large group dinner or something they don't know like how everyone feels about sharing and whatever for me the best way to order like any restaurant is just order a bunch of everything and share it family's table yeah but not everybody wants to do that some people like yeah we'll just take the prefix whatever so we have that and then the booze pack is also a fun option which is kind of our version of pairings it's not as much of like a direct wine pairings in a classic sense but it's sort of like a beverage pairing to match the the prefix or you can just have it with all our cart food either way it's and that one's an off-menu cocktail to start and then we do two half glasses of wine that are not on the glass list they're usually something that's either more expensive or more allocated or something that you know we're just going to get a very limited run of and then dessert you get like a little nightcap or handshake some kind of house made you know

57:44whatever at the end to finish the meal right now we're doing like a strawberry royale so we have strawberry liqueur we made at the end of the summer when they were still in season topped with some sparkling cremant de limo rosé and it's like you know a version of a kir royal but a strawberry liqueur instead of cassis so yeah something like that and that's a fun way to do it too or it's like yeah just same thing with the drinks like just fuck me up whatever you want and you have the xl meat du jour a big hunk of flesh whatever the hell we want xl veg available 50 bucks like yeah that was another fun one the food's very vegetable heavy obviously the way we source you know even the meat dishes on our menu are not just a giant slab of steak with you know sauce and maybe a couple little leafy greens it's all in kind of in uh proportion the vegetables and the meat so you know we have some people who come in especially it's very much like a middle-aged white guy thing of just being like where's the meat and it's like oh there's four of the eight dishes on the top part of the menu that are the a la carte things have meat but you know what you're looking for maybe is a little different so we're like all right fine how about we also have a large meat du jour so if you just want it here you go this is a giant piece of meat and we're just gonna serve it with whatever we want for the given night and it's you know kind of like a reverse steakhouse kind of thing of like here's all this smaller dishes and then if you want a side of meat here you go get the big meat du jour man i'm what time do you close at night we close at 10 but that's just kind of like when we stop letting people in you know we're not going to be like you came in at 9 50 you got to be out in 10 minutes like and where are you located we're in summer hill which is a neighborhood that's close to what used to be the old brave stadium when it was turning field now it's uh gsu's park place um so yeah kind of adjacent to downtown you know not too far from the airport not too far from grant park and the zoo and a bunch of other kind of tourist destinations but a little off the beaten path nice and how many seats do you have 30 so it is small and reservations are available on

59:45yeah reservations via resi we take those for all the tables and then the two or three bar stools right in front of the open kitchen are available to book is the kitchen seats and then we have another couple seats at the bar that are for walk-ins and a two seats in the little front window nook kind of area that you get reservations or are they booked all like a month in advance no you can people people frequently be like it's so hard to get in it's impossible to get in but it's like yeah you're looking for seven o'clock on a friday or saturday of course those are always booked like you can find a five o'clock on a tuesday you can get in there yeah so like wednesday thursday especially before seven o'clock or after that you know the reservations are frequently very available people are afraid to walk in a lot aside from our regulars who know the deal it's usually pretty easy to walk in and grab some bar seats there are exceptions to that obviously some nights are just bonkers for no reason but for the most part like it's pretty easy to walk in and sit down either right away at the bar or not have that long of a wait and there's like a brewery across the street that's great there's a southern national is a good restaurant across the street that has a good cocktail program too there's so many options like you'll get a drink somewhere we'll text you and some bar seats open up you know it's mostly just trying to get people to not be so stubborn about i have to be there with a reservation friday or saturday between like seven and seven thirty and it's like no you have a lot more options than that so yeah there are people that like it's hard to get in it's always called that amateur hour yeah exactly it's like you're fitting into amateur hour and you're just kind of like beating your head against the wall or you're like constantly looking at the last minute like i'm trying to go out tomorrow night you guys are all booked it's like yeah maybe plan in advance if you're that concerned and if you're not then just come walk in and grab some bar seats so the people call like the day before valentine's day like you guys going to reserve like yeah i don't have any like you shit the bed that's your problem dude valentine's day like this year it came on the 14th like well dude yeah you knew that you should have been here on the 14th for a while make the damn reservation just all right it's it's right now it is in september the beginning of september right there were mid-september something like that somewhere in that range yeah something in that range make reservations right now for like christmas eve and thanksgiving and all that shit

01:01:52don't wait until the week before christmas eve if you make like go let this be your reminder right now go make valentine's day reservations if the place will take it yeah make the reservation now if you have a date maybe it's excuse to go find it look i got a reservation at seven o'clock little bear you want to go yeah that's that's that's your that's your call you got that reservation make it happen now happen yeah we get that i'd be like i've been trying to go like i want to get in so bad it's been like really want to come to your restaurant and it's like all right cool we have like friday at five o'clock open and they're like oh no not that that's like well you must not want to come in that bad yeah not bad enough to be flexible i guess i want to be seen yeah um i just i saw online you're doing a cool kind of a collaboration we're gonna tell you all about this collaboration right after this word from our sponsors we are so excited to introduce a new sponsor to nashville restaurant radio all-star fire protection these guys are your local solution to all your fire suppression needs all-star fire opened in nashville 34 years ago and they continue to grow they're now serving chattanooga noxville and bowling green they have over 130 team members and they got 40 trucks out on the roads at all time to service your restaurant and you know you know what i love just when i was talking with them and i said hey man what makes you different i get your local you do all the things but what makes you different and he said you know what makes us different is that we actually care because i actually care these people are small business owners this is their life and we're a small business as well and we understand what they're going through and we take that approach we actually care about their business we want them to be ready in the case of a fire which is why they offer trainings they will go in and they will sit with your staff and say hey this is how you use a fire extinguisher how many people out there actually know how to use a fire extinguisher they want to make sure that you're getting the most out of it they're building those relationships and that is why i am proud to introduce all-star fire protection to you

01:03:57you can get a hold of rob bowman you should call him today his number is 615-431-3760 that's 615-431-3760 at what chefs want they deliver the seven most needed product lines to meet the unique needs of chefs and restaurateurs from local to global and from staple items to gourmet rarities they have the variety of products to cover all of your needs produce seafood meats gourmet staples to go and dairy at what chefs want they're transforming food service by eliminating minimum orders offering split cases and providing daily deliveries with 24-7 customer support this means chefs have the flexibility to order what they need when they need it experiment with new ingredients and keep their kitchens consistently stocked with fresh supplies it's all about empowering culinary creativity while streamlining operations check them out at what chefs want.com or give them a call at 800-600-8510 y'all today we are talking as always about super source and you know one cool thing about super source is did you know that they develop most of their cleaning products and chemicals in their in-house facility they're environmentally conscious and only use dyes that are safe for the employees and the environment they carry a number of products for keeping your dishes flatware services floors restrooms laundry basically your entire facility clean bright and smelling and feeling new this is just one of the many reasons super source is taking over this city for dish machine and chemicals you need to call Jason Ellis his number 770-337-1143 and he would love it if you would give him a call and let him come down and just check out your operation meet him say hi see if there's any way he can help he is here to

01:05:58help you succeed that's Jason Ellis with super source 770-337-1143 where is it the one with damp work distillery yes yes i'm in minnesota that's in minnesota yeah yeah so they uh it's a great like uh german style distillery uh based in minnesota just outside of minneapolis uh i guess it's in minneapolis but one of the one of the neighborhoods germanic adventure in jewish chinese cuisine yes so we've we've sort of been we've sort of been doing jewish chinese cuisine for a little while but with the locally sourced ingredients um and then damp work does german style distilling and my dad's side of the family his parents lived in germany growing up so you know i have some childhood memories of german dishes and whatever you know so we're like well let's find a way to mix all this random stuff that doesn't make any sense up and find a way to make it good so they came down for our uh four-year anniversary in february and did like a little bar takeover we just had a good good report them it's a small family run operation very similar to little bear adventurous you know kind of playful we're ideologically very similar so yeah it was like we're gonna come up and cook in your tasting room sometime then is you know repay the favor you came down hung out with us we'll go up to minnesota and do something there saturday october the 12th as you're going to be at the damp work distillery in minnesota yep you should you should go check that out anyone's there you were um the first michelin young chef award yeah for atlanta at least i know they did individual awards in general so that was all news to me but now is james beard something that is in your sights something you want not i mean sure it would be obviously great i'm not going to turn it down no it's not so are you making decisions based around i want this no absolutely not we didn't do that with michelin stuff either we're kind of like yeah if any i never thought michelin would come to atlanta

01:08:00in general so me and the branding guys when we first opened little bear we had this running joke about us being michelin tire dining just like this kind of like broke ass fine dining we're doing so we put three and a half michelin tires or two and a half michelin tires something like that on the on the front door like a little decal next to the hours it says michelin tire dining two and a half tires and then we found out that michelin was actually going to come to atlanta which i never thought they would and i was like oh i hope they have a sense of humor like the inspectors walk in some friends were like are you going to take that down or i was like no no it's playful that's what we do i'm not going to change who i am because and i just assumed we wouldn't get anything because we're very casual and whatever we're like you know if we get something great i'm not expecting it i'm definitely not going to change what we're doing which that was kind of crazy to see that idea spread across atlanta there were a lot of chefs and restaurants that were like we're changing everything we're chasing michelin and it's like these are the most experienced diners in the world they will see through your bullshit in a hurry like they are looking for somebody with their own distinct voice that's what they're looking who does their thing and is yeah apologetic about what they do they're gonna they've eaten 50 million imitation meals across the world and they're gonna see that that's what you are serving if you're trying too hard so we're like let's just keep doing our thing and if they like it they do if they don't okay whatever we move on as long as my staff is paid and the bills are paid and we're confident in what we're doing that's good enough for me so then to get those was just kind of like a huge surprise and we're just icing on the cake and reaffirmed that what we're doing is good and unique and interesting and while we might not be the fanciest place in town and we'll probably never get a star for that reason we got bib ramon we got the young chef award and it was kind of a you know way to remind myself and my staff like what we're doing is worthwhile and interesting and we basically commanded their attention whether we wanted it or not they just couldn't ignore us essentially and you know that's that's the most little bear thing i can imagine which

01:10:00were just enough of a stick in the mud that you know we caught their attention jared i i don't know how to thank you enough for coming down here today and talking with me i it's been a long time since i've like sat and talked with the chef for a place i didn't know about and i know all the people in nashville so it's like you have these conversations like oh i ate there last week and but for a place i've never eaten to talk with somebody it's so refreshing i love coming to another city and just learning like what you guys are doing down here because it's very there's a lot of similarities but then there's also um it's so neat to just see how you're carving your own niche and i want to go eat there i've never finished an interview where i'm like holy shit i want i want to bring my wife back i don't know because she and i this is like every city we go to we look for yeah the little bear of that city it's a place that genuinely cares that's doing great local food that cares about their community the food is delicious but there's a vibe and it's just a whole thing you can try a bunch of different things and like wow dude can you believe i didn't expect that like you just leave that meal and you're like god i'm so glad we found that place that's like our new place in the city and that is exactly what little bear is i hope so um and we're definitely gonna i'm gonna bring her back to do it i just thank you for your time thank you for having me we do one last thing and this is where i'm gonna put you on the hot seat i'm gonna film you doing this i don't feel like okay weird about it have you done jumping jackson i'm just kidding um we do the the gordon food service uh final thought gordon food service is our fine title sponsor for the show awesome and um we ask our chefs or restaurant whoever the the guest is to take us out any thought that you have whatever you want to say to the i'm gonna put this out as an episode on nashville restaurant radio as well so you're talking to the nashville community the people

01:12:01in atlanta that are listening anything you want to say as long as you want to say it it's up to you go where are we going out to eat uh well if we're in nashville i'm gonna start by taking you out on broadway i'm gonna visit dirks bentley's uh whiskey row whiskey row uh is that where you go when you're in nashville no definitely definitely not i mean he's in like a bastion kind of guy to me yeah i'll go or wherever yeah passing would be great uh if i'm gonna be focused off of broadway i'll try to probably go to robert's western world and get a fried bologna sandwich if i'm gonna have to be over there if you're on broadway robert's or leila's is my opinion where you need to go to the oh geez or tootsies but yeah um so that's uh for atlanta though yeah i'm gonna say there's a couple shout outs for sure uh gg's italian kitchen one of my favorite restaurants in town it's one of our former sous chefs so sure there's some nepotism i guess involved in shouting it out but it is genuinely one of my favorite places to eat and they're open on mondays and tuesdays very industry friendly sunday monday tuesday uh there's a pop-up called so-so fed that's a lay ocean pop-up uh out of okay yaki uh which is a restaurant on uh moorland kind of outside of east atlanta uh she also does like sunday monday very industry friendly which is great so that's also one of my favorite places to eat just like a young driven passionate motivated chef making great food so those are two of our our standbys for sure on the days off um i like a place called hyland tap we call it steak basement it's not like the cool hip new thing it's been there forever but it's like if a steak house and a dive bar had a baby just minds its own business and makes affordable tasty steak because they're not buying 90 day dry age meat they're buying fine enough meat and charging accordingly i feel like that's like skulls rainbow room and yeah like it's a similar kind of thing to skulls subterranean stone wall yeah whatever that vibe and like you know they do like monday night special where the prime ribs like 10 bucks you know just ran stuff hell yeah so that's definitely a go to uh a big thing for people

01:14:03coming to atlanta if they really want interesting food they got to get on to buford highway where all the amazing ethnic food is stretcher road from here to buford georgia it's you know 45 minutes of any cuisine you could possibly want you can find that's a huge resource for atlanta um so yeah i mean those are probably the main ones that jumped to mind first and aria and bucket that's another restaurant it's been there forever same thing though just like mines its business doesn't care about what's hip and cool and new they just make delicious fucking food with like great old school service that's you know good and thorough and the chef jerry glascala is still in there he's like you know in his 70s and he's still in there working in the kitchen and you know there's something to be said about us like grizzled old martyrs who don't you know give up on doing the damn thing i love it well jared thank you so much for joining us today on atlanta restaurant radio and uh if you are out there go check out little bear and um we'll see you again soon man i'll see you in the rest yes i'm definitely bring my wife back we're gonna come eat for sure anytime all right man thanks again yeah thank you