Jim Myers

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. We're so excited that you are here today joining us. We've got a great interview ahead. If you love stories and if you've ever wondered what the life of a food writer was like, today we're going to delve into that world. My thought was, if you're a chef out there and people write about you all the time, maybe you'd like to know about them. So I have a new friend, his name is Jim Myers, and I messaged him and said, hey, I'd love to interview you for our show. And he was like, heck yeah, dude, let's do it. So the result is what you're about to hear and I think it's beautiful. I think some of the things he says are brilliant and he's just a kind soul and I'm excited to be able to bring it to you guys here. So we're going to go ahead and bring him in. You guys enjoy this episode. So I'd like to go ahead and welcome into the show, Jim Myers. Jim is a storyteller, a journalist and an author and he's the food and drink writer at Culinarity. Jim, how are you doing today, man? I'm great. How are you, Brandon? You know what, as I tell people, I said I'm doing wonderful as I can be stuck at home. I'm finding lots of stuff to do. My wife's finding lots of stuff for me to do. Yeah, we're all learning that, that the use of our time has shifted and changed and how we spend it and what we do with it is a little bit different right now. And I will say, I say I'm doing fine, but I think here in

02:08Nashville, we're all reeling with the news of the death of John Prime yesterday. And that one, I think, is really going to hit a lot of people hard in this community. And it's also just to share a little personal stuff because this has been on my mind lately. It's the anniversary of my father's death today. He died three years ago today. So it's a little bit of a melancholy pall over my brain today, but it doesn't mean we can't have a great conversation and talk about some important things that are going on in our lives and our world today. Absolutely. And it's important to note. I mean, I think everything on my Facebook feed last night from nine o'clock until this morning was people talking about John Prime and how much he meant to them and what he means to the music community. I mean, just everybody really who was touched by him and really bringing home the importance of staying at home and that this virus, it can do devastating things and definitely a somber day for sure. Right on. So I said in the intro that you are a food and drink writer at Culinarity. That's your company. Tell me about Culinarity.

03:38Yeah, it's funny. Culinarity is a word that I made up. You know, back in the, I mean, honestly, I can't remember how long ago I bought the domain name Culinarity. You know, when you're typing things in and going, let's see if this is taken. Ah, damn, that's taken. You know, I really wanted Crumb Snatcher, but that was taken. And so it's just a, you know, Culinarity, Curiosity, you know, just trying to mash up some words. And so it was a made up word. So I bought the domain name. And I even hanging in my office right now is an old enameled letter. It's a big red C. And I bought this saying, oh, this will be the logo for Culinarity. And it's this cool, it's about a foot and a half tall. It's a red C and that's mounted on a sort of dappled white enamel square.

04:39And then the whole thing's framed in an aluminum frame. So it was obviously a letter that was part of a larger word. I've never been able to figure out what it was, but that's the official logo for Culinarity. All of that to say is it's just, it's an email address. I've never actually created a company or anything formal with it, but I use it because it just seems to, it's been attached to me for so long. And the funny thing is, you know, as new social media platforms spring up, I immediately try and jump on there to grab Culinarity, you know, to protect this brand as it is. And some guy in Ohio who has never used it has the Culinarity Twitter name and I've never been able to get him to let it go. And he hasn't even asked for money.

05:40He just says, no, it's mine. And I go, well, I invented the word. How can it be yours? I made this up. But anyhow, that's what that is. You are a writer and an author and you do food and drink. You just, you write about everything. You find these stories that aren't just the regular run-of-the-mill reviews that you do of restaurants. You've been doing it for a really long time. 2003, you were the food and drink writer for the Tennessean. In 2007, you left that. You came back in 2013 to 2016. So I mean, you've seen the city change in a bunch of ways over the last 20 years. Yeah, I really have. You know, there are some old running jokes in Nashville, at least in the sort of the old blue blood Nashville that people used to say that the only two places to go out and eat were Jimmy Kelly's and the Bell Meat Country Club.

06:44As sort of elitist as that sounds, it kind of captured what the landscape in Nashville was for a very long time. I grew up coming to Nashville in the early 60s to visit my grandparents here. And that statement also doesn't take into account all of the great old barbecue places that used to exist, the mom and pop restaurants that were around town, the history of the old chili parlors in Nashville, the Italian restaurants. We used to have a whole handful of them in the 60s. But yeah, Nashville really has evolved over that time. And dining in general in this country has changed from the high end fancy places like Mario's and Arthur's and Julian's, which kind of put into the category of expense account restaurants. The Wild Boar. Yeah, the Wild Boar. I mean, these were places where- Cakewalk.

07:45Yeah, a lot of business entertaining was done. And they were, you know, most of them were continental cuisine, haute cuisine, French and Italian. But then those kind of started to fade right around the time that the age of the chef-driven restaurant came forward. Because we didn't use to talk about restaurants always in such reverent ways about the chefs. Sometimes we knew who the chef was, but the whole chef-driven concept in this the chef is celebrity thing, you know, started to come in and we paid more attention to who they were and what they did. And, you know, food TV had played a huge role in that. And we started to see chefs in the distance or in a different light at that point. So that's when things started to change around Nashville. And we started to see the restaurant scene evolve with places like Randy Rayburn's spots, Jody Faison before him with sort of eclectic funky kind of places like Faison's and then 12th and Porter. 12th and Porter had a great menu, even though it was a great music club. It also had a really great menu.

09:11So there's a couple restaurants to me that when they opened, it kind of changed. They were kind of monuments for Nashville. And this is just from my opinion as really a kid when I was like 15, 16 years old before I even knew anything about restaurants. When the Hard Rock Cafe opened in downtown Nashville, it was almost like there was a reason to go down there again. And then there's Planet Hollywood and then the downtown Second Avenue became kind of a thing. People started going downtown again, which I thought was a big was almost like a benchmark or a tipping point for Nashville going towards the come downtown, making it friendly. And then Bar 23, I thought when that opened in the Gulch, where the Gulch wasn't really anything, Bar 23 was just so far ahead of its time. And obviously it didn't last forever. But I thought those were just moments to me when I went, okay, Nashville's going places. Yeah. I mean, that was a watershed moment. You're right. Because downtown, what would you go to? If you were a kid, you went to the spaghetti factory on Second Avenue, maybe. And there was L'orel's seafood on Second Avenue, which was great. In fact, I can remember I was living in East Nashville at the time and you could drive across the Shelby Street Bridge. This is making me sound like a real old man now. You could drive across the Shelby Street Bridge and you could park anywhere on Second Avenue. You could go into L'orel's and get a pint of Guinness and their amazing gumbo.

10:49And you had downtown to yourself. In the 80s downtown, it was really pretty seedy, the strip clubs and lower Broadway was not a haven for tourists that it is today. Not even close. No, no. So yeah, Hard Rock, it really anchored that corner on Second and I think brought some national legitimacy to the downtown district. And it really did change things. And it's funny you mentioned Bar 23, because I was a pretty harsh review of that, that I remember when I was reviewing and I was joking. So that was opened by Austin Ray and Ben Goldberg. Austin Ray has gone on to do amazing things with M.L. Rose and that concept. And he's got the Suttler.

11:56He took over Melrose Billiards. He's a good guy and he runs restaurants well. He's a good restaurateur. Plus, he's got Vaughan L. Rods over there by that. And him and Jason, yeah. Yeah, by the ballpark. And so Ben and Max Goldberg had not joined as brothers and built strategic hospitality yet. And I wrote a pretty harsh review of the place and mainly because they had the sort of insouciant hostess there who ignored you. She was a beautiful young woman who just didn't even greet you when you came in. And the service was spotty and it was trying so hard. You're right. There was nothing else like it at that time. And I think I knocked it pretty hard for just trying too hard to be different and forgetting the fundamentals of running a good place. And it didn't last very long. But I joked with Ben and Max recently that, you know, going back and reading that, I was surprised that Austin, whose mother was I think the sheriff of Nashville at the time, didn't hire some of the jail trustees to come and break my legs after that review. And I think Ben said, well, I can't say that he didn't. So we had a laugh about that now. I remember just walking in there and it was just all white. And it was like walking into some sort of a dream that you had of what it would be like in New York if you were at a cool club. And I was like, but we're in Nashville. This is crazy that this type of place is here.

13:46It just stuck out like a sore thumb, but it was wildly popular. Bottle service, the whole thing. Like, who does this? And everybody was, I was not even close to being cool enough to go there. I don't know who the people were. Like you said, the hostess was rude and almost similar to like the Patterson. When the Patterson house first opened, again, it was like, you have six different kinds of ice. Come on, guys. Like, is this a little pretentious? But it was so ahead of its time that it absolutely worked. It was. And it was a harbinger of what the Goldbergs would go on to do, which is sort of scour the land for things that interested them and trying to aggregate ideas and concepts and bring new things to Nashville, like the Patterson house, like the catbird seed, like Pinewood social. I knocked them pretty hard on Paradise Park too. I think I was probably a little bit too harsh on that. My biggest complaint about Paradise Park was the whole redneck Southern culture thing. And I still kind of take this position that we're better than that.

14:59Yes, it's funny, you know, the toilet seat planter and the El Camino inside and the whole trailer trash. Yeah. And it's fun. And man, talk about wildly successful. That place did really well. And they kind of saw the tourist boom coming. And that fit in very well. And it was very successful. And I think they regret dismantling it. And they have since brought it back. But it shows what those guys were doing with Nashville. And that's kind of to have the kind of boom that we've had. It takes people with some vision, like the Goldbergs, to say, hey, we're going to try some things. We're going to put ourselves out there a little bit and be a little bit different and see if it works. That's scary to do that in the restaurant business. And because most people say, well, let's just nail something down really well and then replicate it. And that's how we're going to create tremendous wealth. But they've taken a completely different approach. And it seems to be working for them. I agree. I love their innovation and what they've done. And I think that there's plenty of criticism out there for everybody. But from what they've done, just the vulnerability to have the idea to take something that they're doing in a bigger city and introduce it somewhere and it work. It's really, truly amazing just their execution and how they run their business. I feel like when you said that Paradise Park, you don't like the way that it looks, I feel the same way about the tractor that drives up and down Broadway that pulls the bachelorette parties. I don't mind the pedal taverns. I don't mind all that stuff. I think it's good fun. Everybody's having a blast. But the lasting image of a John Deere tractor pulling

17:00people, dancing behind them down Broadway, to me, I don't think paints Nashville in the best. The one thing I wish would go away. Yeah. I mean, it's just being protective, I think, of southern culture and trying to, you know, cringing at the fact that that's what people think of when they think of the South. And they forget that the South is so rich with storytellers and literature and our cuisine. You know, the foundation of the Southern Foodways Alliance, really the first academically-based organization to look at the intersection of a place and its people and its food and its culture to treat all of those things with respect. And, you know, yes, Paradise Park is tongue in cheek in the tractors. But I think it just it feeds into a stereotype and detracts from really the beautiful, subtle, amazing culture of people that we have here.

18:05So I'm going to use that as a segue because I want to talk more about that. And one of the reasons why I really wanted to interview you today on Nashville Restaurant Radio is because you've been writing about food and drink in Nashville for a long time, 20 plus years. I think I've interviewed chefs. I talk about what it's like to be behind the lines. But one of the things I've over my career, I've read a lot of articles you've written in Chris Chamberlain and Dana Cop Franklin. There's a bunch of people that I've been reading for a really long time. Now it's turned digital. But your perspective on what you do, how you do it, why you do it, I thought was super unique. And if I was a chef, I'd want to learn more about what makes you tick. What are some of the things that you do on a daily basis that most of us don't realize? Because we're just reading kind of the final culmination of this body of work that you do, all the research that goes in. I want to get into the fundamentals of how that happens. So let's pretend like there's no quarantine.

19:11And let's pretend that this is regular old April. And what are you doing on a Wednesday? What does your day start off? What does your day look like? Oh, man, that's a tough one. Well, now that I'm, you know, working independently from home, people say they're morning people or they're evening people. And I can pretty much function either way. Everything's a function of sleep. So I need to get a good night of sleep. So when I'm going to bed early, I'm going to be getting up early and I'll get up, you know, 536. That's when I read, look at I'm a news junkie. I'll try and read everything that I can scan the headlines. Is there a particular site or something that you read daily? Yeah, I love the New York Times. And I love the Washington Post. I'll scan other other sites. But those are those are the two primary ones. I also just having worked in newspapers, I'll look at UPI and Reuters, just because I know you're going to get some good straight reporting on things. And, and then, you know, I read. It's funny, I've been talking to some old high school friends who are both writers, and they're talking about all the literature they're reading. And for so long, all I've read are trade magazines, when I say that, like restaurant news, and food and wine and Bon Appetit and gourmet and savor, art culinaire, all of those, reading those and reading cookbooks that that's pretty much consumed my life for so long. And I'm trying to get back into actually reading literature and nonfiction just to keep my interests alive. Because I didn't grow up wanting to be a food writer. But so just in

21:12terms of routine, and then I'll sketch out notes for what I want to write about that day. And I'll sit in and write, if I can, although this is in the perfect ideal world, you know, when you don't have the dog to walk where you're you have to get your son fed for breakfast into school by 715, or you have to help your wife with something. So, but I'll try and write for a couple hours in the morning, and then I put it away. And then I'll sit down and I'll look at what I wrote the day before and edit that. But I mean, it's, it's, it can be very disjointed within that. And I think working in a newspaper, you learn how to do that, how to work on one thing, and then shift gears and work on another thing, the hardest thing to do, depending upon what kind of writing it is, is to change voice, change style, format, length, because it's so much easier to get into a rhythm when you're doing one kind of thing. For example, writing a column, you know you have so many words, and you get into your head this internal rhythm where I'll outline a piece and just put key words every 10 lines, and then I'll just, it just flows, and I'll go back and edit it.

22:41And you just you know in your in your head how that rhythm works. And when you're coming up on the thousand word point, and you need to be wrapping it up. I mean, just a little bit here and say, when you're writing the actual topics that you're writing about, do you do these just come to your head? Are you looking for, and I know talking about food and drink, are you looking for, are you scouring the business journal to see which restaurants are opening? Do people call you and say, hey we're opening a restaurant? Or do you just look for a unique nugget of something out there that piques your interest that you might think that a reader might find interesting? Yeah, I mean, I don't want anyone to study how my brain works, because it's just its own little world. But yeah, you try and find something that fits into your kind of worldview, if that makes sense. I'm not saying that you're prejudging a story, because I'm a firm believer, and it's why I always overreport everything. It's why I lose money writing, because I'll get an hour of interview and only have space for a hundred words. But the story often emerges in that process, depending upon what kind of story it is. But you just have to be open and observant in how things come to you. I know I'm a little bit all over the map on this, but writing a more cultural piece about food and people, and trying to put that into some kind of cultural context, is very different from a formal restaurant review or a straight-up news piece. You know, how you go into each one is different, because you're going to ask different

24:41questions. If it's a straight-up news piece, you have to have in the back of your mind, what are we trying to get at here? What is happening here? And what kinds of questions do I need to answer that help this story? Is there typically a sense of urgency with that too? Well, there is. And yeah, if it's timely news-wise, yeah, it's deadline reporting. And with the internet, there's this expectation of immediacy for everything. And it's even a mandate from the editors at the Tennessee Inn and at Gannett, is get the story up right away. You can fill in more later, which is the beauty of digital. You can go back and edit a story and change something, add something, get a photograph to go with it, because you need images for everything today. But yeah, it's get it up immediately. And you bring up a great point there. When I was at the paper, I would take people around the newsroom and show them what it's like. And the thing that always amazes them are the banks of TV monitors mounted throughout the building, some of them always playing the news, especially when news is breaking.

25:59But we also had these monitors that show the metrics of what's going on in the website. It's like this moving list where you see people moving up the list or moving down, the tracks in real time, how many people are in a story and how long people are in that story. What's the average engagement time, they call it. And it's the real kind of hard truth of online journalism and of clicks and clickbait and all of that stuff and lists, why lists are so popular because readers love lists, they're quick hits. So the engagement time is the real telling thing. And people were flabbergasted. I said, guess how long, like a grand slam home run. Man, I really kept people in that story for a long time. They read down, they didn't just sort of glance at it and move on. I really had them. Like a home run is if you can keep someone in a story for a minute. It's depressing, but it's the reality that we've come to. I think I read somewhere that when Twitter launched with its character limit, that was based on the average length of a political sound bite on the evening news. So that doesn't mean that there aren't places and opportunities for longer stories. And I'm not even talking about long form journalism, which is its own thing, like the stories in Bitter Southerner, for example. That's still out there, but what I see is kind of disappearing is that mid-range. Even 1500 to 2000 words, which is not very much, is a long story in daily journalism now.

28:02Well, I think that with the internet, ADD is like rampant because everybody has whatever they want so fast and it changes so quickly that we don't have attention spans anymore because we can have whatever we want. We want it right now. And there's no researching and spending a lot of time. It's like, oh, I just flipped through my phone. First thing I do when I wake up and I can read 20 stories in nine minutes, which if you think about short attention spans, we go to our conversation. We were talking about your day and you were talking about getting in writing, going back, editing. I kind of had mentioned to you, how do you get those stories, which took us off another tangent and I love that. But let's keep going with your day. What does your day look like after you do that initial writing and then you go back to edit? What do you do next? Yeah, I mean, I try and find some time to exercise in there and go for a walk, a long walk, walk the dog, live in a pretty neighborhood of valleys and hills. But I'm also five minutes from Warner Park, which is a Nashville treasure to go for a hike. I love nature. I love the natural world. I love reading about it. I love the poets like Mary Oliver and writers like Wendell Berry. So the park really recharges me. And then read throughout the day. It's really just a mishmash. My son plays baseball and one of the beauties of being home and working from home is having that flexibility so I can go to his games and go to his practices. And part of the day is spent cooking meals for the family, reading when I can. Usually by the end of the night, I am not as productive because I'm just tired. And if I don't read early in the day, I don't read at night because I fall fast asleep and it's just a narcotic for me. So that's the reality of that. So yeah, that's pretty much it.

30:10And so with the virus now, my wife works from home. She's a silversmith. I work from home. The only difference is we have the teenage boy home all the time now, which takes some adjusting, especially for him. But for us, it hasn't been a radical lifestyle change, except the fact that I can't go out, which I do like. I am social. I like going out and seeing friends and being with people and interacting with them and not being able to do that. It's been challenging. So again, I'm going to pivot a little bit here and I just thanks for the insight as to what you do. I think that a lot of people are curious. If you're a writer, what do you do all day? What do you do to spark creativity in your brain? Because I'm just looking for ideas over here. Well, no, it's hard. I mean, you joke with especially newspaper people and so many stories or your requirements are, okay, this is the perfect example. Valentine's Day, huge food holiday. A lot of people go out to eat in restaurants. So there's the service journalism side of doing roundups of what special things people are doing with restaurants. You want to help people to make reservations in a timely manner so that they don't wait to the last minute like a lot of people do and then can't get a reservation for Valentine's. But then there's the, okay, fuck, what am I going to write about this year? How am I going to write something different about love and food, romance and food, food movies that are romantic, foods that are aphrodisiacs, foods that are suggestive of sex. It's hard. You've kind of run out of ideas and that's one of the challenges. How do you do something that's fresh and interesting to you

32:14as a writer that you're not just doing the same thing again each year? Yeah. So what have you written about? One year I wrote about saffron, just the history of it, how it's harvested, how like nimble little fingers have to pluck these stamens from crocus flowers and how if it's adulterated it was like punishable by death or by having your hands cut off or something in countries like Iran back during empire days and how it's so expensive and exotic. And I remember we were able to find an online source and most saffron that you buy is in a tiny little glass vial and it's just precious and you learn how to take just a couple threads and put it in some warm water with some acid to bring the color out and you treat it just as this precious filaments of gold and we got like this whole tin of saffron in from this importer from Iran and for the photo shoot we dumped it all out on a white board and shaped it into a heart with an arrow going through it. So that was one time. Another time I got Vivek Surti who now has Taylor Restaurant in Nashville. Vivek is a huge proponent of sabering bottles of champagne open. It's the Sabrage Society. So I said well that's kind of sexy in its own way. Here's how to open a bottle with a sword. So we went on to the roof of the Tennessean and Vivek taught me and one other person how to savor a bottle of champagne and then he poured it into my mouth directly from the bottle overhead. So that was a little bit out there but that was a fun thing to do. So honestly I can't

34:18remember all the other ones. But there's something like that but just using creativity versus hey look somebody's doing a heart-shaped beat this year. I mean you're looking at more personal interest stories that are involved around a holiday. I see where that can be something that can be a challenge. Yeah it is and you know there are other avenues. You try and connect it in some way to people in a way that the story is going to resonate. Because not everyone is a total food geek and will get off on the just the hardcore cooking food ingredient kind of science stuff. So you want to try and make it as engaging as possible. And that honestly we talked a little bit about this. I mean I think that's what drew me to food writing originally was looking at it from a cultural perspective. My background was in anthropology. So I think that's more than just the food itself and cooking. When we started writing about it more from a cultural context food writing became a lot more interesting. So one thing that is part of food writing is doing kind of reviews talking about a new restaurant talking about a current restaurant going in and doing reviews. And one thing that everybody and their brother is these days is a food critic. Because we now have Google and Yelp and TripAdvisor and OpenTable and Seven Rooms and every single one of those is saying hey you should you should put a review.

36:11Which we know there's a lot of amateur critics out there that aren't necessarily qualified to be critiquing the dining establishment. I thought it would be fun for somebody who is somewhat of a professional albeit not what you do like on a daily basis but somebody who is able to fashion a review of a restaurant. I think it'd be fun to kind of talk about how to do it the right way. Well there are lots of right ways but yeah to go back everyone's a critic. I don't remember who said that line originally but it's so true. Everyone is a critic. Everyone has opinions about things especially something as fundamental as food. We all eat. But yeah doing it from a professional standpoint and that's getting to be a little bit of a lost art. Fear and Fear newspapers have dedicated restaurant critics anymore. For one it's a staffing issue. It's the newspaper industry which is just going down and down with each passing day. But it's just a budget issue as well not just for the talent but the budget to review to do reviews properly. So you know I came up through that old school vein and I'll never forget I happened to be in Austin and this is when I was working as a formal restaurant critic for the Tennessean. I was in Austin just on a vacation and in our hotel there just happened to be some kind of food conference and they had this panel of Mimi Sheridan from the New York Times was there and Danny Meyer and from New York Union Square Hospitality Group and Drew Nieprent another big restaurateur from New York and the title of the talk was Restaurant Critics Who Needs Them and I know this will be fun so I'll jump right in there. Yeah I went I stood in the back of the room and Drew Nieprent had one of the funniest lines I'll never forget. He said restaurant critics are they're sharks.

38:18They're sharks swimming in the sea but as restaurateurs we need to get across the ocean and to do that we need to ride on the backs of these sharks which was you know a fairly aggressive portrayal of the relationship. I don't think most restaurant critics most good and credible restaurant critics are not out to eat anybody but you have to be truthful. You have to be just honest in your opinions. You have to be prepared to back them up with reasons why you feel a certain way and you have to be informed to make critical decisions and so you know everyone asks oh man how do you get to be a restaurant critic. That's like the best job in the world. It is a great job. I don't miss it at all but I would tell people number one you need to know how to write. A restaurant critic is a writer. You are writing hopefully well crafted tight opinion pieces and you need to be able to know how to do that well meaning you state your case. You back it up. You make it interesting. You come to your conclusions and you wrap it up and that's harder to do than most people I think realize and then you have to know your subject. You have to know something about food. You have to know enough to be able to judge the quality of something. If it's trying to be something and it's not measuring up you need to state that. If it's trying to be something but in a different way you need to be able to explain that. If it's a riff on a dish you can't slam the dish because it's not exactly the way it's the original version of that dish was made but as long as you know that they're riffing on

40:22it and that's what they're trying to do and it's done within the context of that place. But the thing that always got lost and I know this podcast is geared towards chefs is from the old school restaurant standpoint people would lose sight of the fact that a good newspaper restaurant critic is a consumer advocate. It's okay to be a foodie or whatever term you want to use. You hopefully love food and love dining and love that experience but people would often conflate a restaurant critic as someone who should be a booster for the restaurant industry or for chefs and in that old school approach you can't do that. That's not your job and that's not your role. Your role is to go into a place and evaluate it and then report on it in a way that tells people what they can likely expect and help them make an informed decision on whether they want to spend their hard-earned dollars in that place or not and that's what it what it boils down to and people go you should be nicer to these restaurants they're struggling their margins are thin. Yes I agree with all of that and I've always been fascinated with how kitchens work but at the end of the day when you're writing about it from the perspective of a formal restaurant critic you don't care what's going on in the kitchen all you care about is the immediate environment of the seat you're in the table you're at and the environment of the restaurant it's almost as if you have to take the emotion out of it and kind of just look at it from logic and through what you've learned before going in and being educated being educated about what you're doing you said riffing on a dish if somebody's riffing on a dish and you're trying

42:26it doesn't quite hit the market at least you know what they're trying to do which I think helps a lot helps a lot when you're doing a true review of somebody's work what was the biggest miss you think you've had or you just put a review out there that was not positive but turned out to be great or what's the worst reaction you've got from a chef well those are a lot of different things there um I don't know that I've ever really screwed one up not to say that I'm infallible in any way but I think I've mostly gotten it right but you know for example Paradise Park I said hey these the burgers and tater tots are really good for a place that is mocking trailer park culture I talked about how I hated what they were doing there but the food was was pretty good um what I got wrong is that it was the right concept for the right place and that does matter and it it became very financially successful very popular I don't think a bad review has ever put a good restaurant out of business a bad review only really hurts a place that is not doing the things that it needs to do and it exacerbates those things I think if you're being honest your view and I I'll go back and say based upon what you just said as to how you do the review you're really just calling out things that people aren't doing well or that didn't work and I think that restaurateurs have an opportunity to listen to that and if they're objective and they say you know what you're right we didn't do that right and they can make changes which I think is what everybody out there would say is the best thing about Yelp or TripAdvisor is that they're getting immediate feedback and they can now fix things that they didn't know were wrong yes absolutely absolutely um and and I will say the successful restaurateurs and chefs

44:28would would contact me and now they may have go that motherfucker I can't believe he came in here and said that and did that but the good ones would call and say hey thanks for reviewing us because they know any kind of press is valuable they need that kind of exposure if they're if they're honest and I'm honest they'll say hey you busted our chops on that you're absolutely right it's something we need to work on those are the ones that that continue on and do well and and no one's ever going to get it right all the time especially in in restaurants which is like theater daily theater performed over and over in the in the space of of a shift there you know some some will call and try and say well let me explain to you why it's this way and uh that happened for a review of flight Jeremy when they had opened yeah and he sent a really beautiful very long email explaining you know there how their kitchen is set up in a certain way and there's there they're working through some things and they're struggling with this because it's always a work in progress it was fascinating to me because I always loved learning about that and what they're what they're going through in the back of the house and the front of the house and everything to you know to always continue to inform my own base but again at the end of the day I said hey Jeremy that's all really interesting and fascinating thank you for taking the time to tell me that but for the person who's sitting there again in the seat in the restaurant they don't care about any of that all they care about is the food that's in front of them is it coming in a timely way and is it well prepared and is it are they getting what they expected to get exactly and so and that's that's kind of harsh uh but you have to have that kind of like you said sort of operate from logic uh the dispassionate distance from everything

46:34doesn't mean you don't love and respect these guys and women who are toiling away in what is essentially a blue collar job uh with that's physically demanding and with low margins and really hard to do but again in that role I was writing for the consumers not for the chefs and we still you know I was operating anonymously my picture wasn't published trying to do it so that you got as honest and appraisal of what a place was like as you could I'm fascinated what is the best you walked into the restaurant and you went oh my gosh it's beautiful you just were greeted with like like welcoming home and everything you left there and you went this place is going to be amazing like this is it one of the times when that happened was um I did Sean Brock's tasting menu when he was at the Capitol Grill I don't think I had been in the Capitol Grill many many times before that and I just love that room even though it's a basement room I love the vault the old vaulted ceilings very elegant yeah and you know I love the even the banister as you walk down to that level it's this beautiful oak banister that is gosh it's it's like 18 inches wide it's just huge it's massive and you go down and you know the bathroom which is cool and iconic but that that dining room and I think they did something they changed something but it with those vaulted ceilings you know how you go to the state capitol rotunda and one person can stand on one side and whisper and it bounces off the the dome and the other person can hear you whisper on the other side of the room the Capitol the Capitol Grill had that but because it wasn't a singular dome there were times where you would hear whispers of conversation in your ear

48:37and you wouldn't know where they were coming from and you'd hear like things that oh I really shouldn't be hearing this right now you know personal things business things I think they did something to change that because I didn't experience it recently anyhow again sorry I'm I'm I am the tangent king but I walked in there and Sean Sean did it was I think a 30 course tasting menu it was obscene and and it was way too much it was over the top and it was at the height of his molecular gastronomy phase but just immediately you knew okay this guy has an understanding of not just the science but of taste and texture and juxtaposition of flavors and he's pushing the limits on everything he's not afraid to experiment and he's he's wildly creative clearly intelligent and borderline obsessive because you just can't do food like that without being obsessive about it and and that turned out to be a pretty prescient window onto this young up-and-coming totally driven talent in that case it was more about the chef than than the place but everything it was just an extraordinary experience and I think I remember those things more in terms of how are my chops at evaluating this and and predicting success and I got pretty good at that I knew right away Tandy was going to do something I knew right away talking to him on the phone that Pat Martin was going to be something special yes it's just barbecue but he understood barbecue and he understood the sides and he

50:42understood southern culture and he also understood business and how to run a business and how to be a personality and how to bring all of those things together I remember meeting Julia Sullivan at a new year's day party and she just moved back to town and I said I just there's something really special about this person the way she talks about food the way she carries herself it's that sixth sense of realizing that something's going on and one of my greatest disappointments at the paper was I talked Julia and Max Goldberg into letting me chronicle the process of opening Henrietta Redd I said I want to be there through the whole thing so that people understand what it takes to launch a restaurant from the ground up the decisions you have to make on fabric and colors and everything how it all goes to your vision and your strategy and your mission and they agreed I couldn't believe it I said I wanted all warts and all like when you pour the concrete slab and the plumbing was laid wrong and you have to rip it up and do it again when you order the wrong size of something and it doesn't fit in the space all of the things chefs and restaurateurs go through and the paper said no we we we don't have the resources to devote you to something like that so and you know so the world missed out on that opportunity yeah and I you know I think I bet on a good horse there she she's done amazing things along with Ali and and it's it's just uh anyhow she's on my uh list of people that I would love to have on the show Julia if you're listening uh call me uh the uh every time I've met her and I used to do the iron fork when I was at U.S. Foods and she

52:45won one year and I got to hand her the trophy she has always been the example of professionalism and grace and she's every time you go eat at Henrietta Redd now we like to sit right there at the bar next to where the oysters are and you just see them working they just it's she's like a maestro she's in the middle but she's just so in control I'm just so impressed with everything that she does uh she's just amazing yeah I agree I concur wholeheartedly wow what a cool project that would have been all right so I've got a million more things I want to talk to you about but what do you want to talk about is there anything you are I didn't ask you about that you kind of want to say or anything you're working on you want to talk about well yeah I again to bring it back to um to this city uh this place we live in Nashville the incredible growth we've gone through years ago I used to go to Arnold's Country Kitchen with John Edgerton the dean of southern food writers who was a tremendous mentor of mine and we would eat at Arnold's a lot and just talk about everything except politics when when Jack would start when going in different directions when Jack was there working the line telling jokes in his overalls but uh but John he loved Arnold's he loved meeting threes for the authenticity of it and he begged them to do a book and they never sort of got interested in doing a book and um John passed away suddenly and one day Rose came to me and she said you know John always wanted us to do a book and we lost that opportunity with him uh would you do a book with us and that's like a command performance from Her Majesty the Queen uh oh yeah we talked about it forever um I

54:46either didn't have the time or it just was never right but finally we we agreed let's do this book we need to do it now it's been really one of the pleasures of my life is is becoming part of the Arnold family of getting to know all of them getting to know Rose uh Khalil uh little Rose his sister Man and Franz uh the whole family and getting to see how they work uh their trials their tribulations um the difficulty of running a restaurant in Nashville uh the the the beauty that they were able to buy the the real estate wrapped around them which gives them some security and longevity and to see how restaurants uh the food has to be good that just has to be a given no matter what you're doing but uh the relationships of the people uh that they have with their customers it's just been such an honor to be a part of that and to be working on it and to hear the stories uh that we're going to have in this that are that are just crazy like how Gore Vidal came in one time and ordered a martini and they made a martini for Gore Vidal uh how um Shil Silverstein you know used to sit there with Chet Atkins for hours but it it brings me back to thinking about John Prime who would be in there almost every week when he was um not on the road and was such a such an integral part of the fabric of Arnold's I think one of the first stories I read about his passing last night on on NPR was you know how are we going to walk into Arnold's and and not see John there but it just uh in Nashville especially this um there's a beautiful relationship between music and food of uh songwriters going to meet and threes

56:53songwriters going to bars and hanging out uh deals being done uh you know record deals being signed at the old Elliston Place soda shop it's just uh the the two are are linked very closely and I think over the last few years chefs have kind of become rock stars through their celebrity but also musicians that are on the road all the time food is is one of the pleasures they have of coming into a town and discovering the greatest places to eat that the joints and the high-end places uh wherever they go and musicians have always had that relationship with restaurants and chefs and food and now they're those relationships are even closer especially in a city like Nashville and uh that's one of the things that does make this place something extraordinary um the the respect musicians have for chefs and um and the love chefs have for nurturing other people in the creative industry uh and it all you know I think it a lot of it goes back to the story about Bess Tootsie who kept a pot of soup behind the bar to feed struggling songwriters like Roger Miller and Willie Nelson um this nurturing of the creative community uh and some of the earliest restaurants in town uh the old chili parlors were were founded by Italian musicians who worked on cruise ships and traveled the world and opened up restaurants in Nashville at the turn of the century so we have this long uh history of uh of food and music being joined together I don't even know what to say after that that was beautiful um kind of everything you just said kind of brought brought it all home I uh I can't wait

58:55to read that book when it comes out and the day that you want to bring Rose and Khalil and anybody else on Nashville restaurant radio and talk about the book and tell some stories I am more than happy to host and um Jim Myers thank you so much for joining us today and um this meant a lot to me this is a really special interview I appreciate you taking the time well Brandon thank you very much I um I'm a fan of this podcast and what you're doing and bringing people together I'm glad you're doing it so people can stop telling me to do something like this and I appreciate being asked on it's always nice to be acknowledged as I my favorite thing to say to people who critical or or or praising is thank you for reading it's you just appreciate people who take their time to read or to listen or to eat and so I appreciate being asked on thank you very much it's the honors all over here Jim Myers ladies and gentlemen what an honor it was to have Jim Myers stop by Nashville restaurant radio not going to have a long finish to this again thank you to John Still for doing post-production and editing and thank you the listener for coming by and taking the time to listen to this episode hope you're staying safe out there and love you guys bye