John Stephenson

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01:05That is the Chandler James Retail Team. Give them a call today. Hi, this is Matthew Clements with Robin's Insurance Agency. Do you own a restaurant, bar, catering company? Well, we're the insurance company for you. We have a specific program dedicated to the hospitality industry. We love to work with you. Give me a call today, 863-409-9372. We'd love to see if you'd be a good fit for our hospitality program. Again, Matthew Clements with Robin's Insurance, 863-409-9372. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello, Music City, and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and we will be joined with Crystal DeLuna-Bogan here shortly once the episode begins.

02:10We are powered by Gordon Food Service, and welcome in today. We have a unique episode for you. We are speaking with John Stevenson. He is the owner of the now closed Hathorn on Charlotte. We've never done an episode like this where we've spoke to an owner a month after he closed or she closed their restaurant. And so just want to say thank you to John for coming on and being vulnerable and talking about sharing his experience. My goal here was to hopefully share some of the things that were good and bad, and hopefully you can take something out. We don't know who's struggling out there. Nobody tells you we are on the edge. And I imagine there are other restaurants that are that way. And I thought maybe we could bring him in and he could share some of the things that he did that were excellent and some of the things he did that maybe I could have done this better. I didn't think about this or this happened or we don't know. So that was my goal.

03:10And I think that he did a fantastic job of just being vulnerable and talking. I know, I didn't know what to expect, but it was difficult. It's a difficult conversation to have because you don't want to go, man, you learned a lesson there or whatever it is. And he was, he's just an amazing individual. And I love John. And I just want to say thank you for him coming in today. So on that note, there's a lot of things that I do as a director of operations where I manage costs. I look down at P and L and I look at numbers. And one of the things I jumped into a couple years ago was the linen industry. How do we maintain linen costs? How do they work? It's so complicated. You read an invoice and you're like, well, this doesn't add up, what is this? So today I do not have a linen sponsor on the show right now. So this is the time that I felt I would educate you because I've been talking to some restaurant owners recently about linens and there's a lot of misunderstanding. So today at the beginning of the show, I'm going to break this down for you. If it gets convoluted, because that's because it is, okay.

04:16So here's what happens. A linen company will come in and they will tell you that they are a rental service. And what we do is we rent linens to you, linens, towels, microfiber towels, uniforms, aprons, cloths of all kinds. They do uniform, like I said, uniforms, first aid kits. A lot of different companies offer different things. What they want to do is they want to set a par, right? So if you have a par, that typically is what your guest count is. So if you, we're just going to make this really easy for math sake so that you can understand. If you do 900 guests in a week, they want to set your par to a thousand, right? So they have a thousand linens and they're delivered twice a week. So they're going to build your par to 500 each delivery. So if you get delivery on Tuesday and you get delivery on Friday, they're going to come in and build your par. So your par is a thousand for the week, but they're going to build the 500.

05:18So let's say your busy time is the weekend. You do 80% of your business on the weekend. Maybe you change that to your par being 600 deliveries on Friday and 400 on Tuesday. So when the driver comes in in the morning, if you already have 200 linens on your linen shelf, he's going to bring you 300 linens and build it to 500. So you always have 500. And on Thursday or Friday, when he comes in, if you have 300 linens left over from earlier in the week, he's going to build you to 600. So he's going to leave you 300 linens. So if you do the math there, you have a thousand linens. This was a slow week, right? So you only did 600 covers. He built you to a thousand. He left you 300 on Monday and 300 on Friday. Well, he still charges you for that par, which is a thousand. So you used 600 linens and he charged you for a thousand. So you paid for 400 linens you did not use. Your par is what you're going to pay every single week, no matter what, right?

06:18So if you do 500 guests or you do 1500 guests, you do 1500 guests, well, man, we have an issue because I only have a thousand. Now I'm short linens. So the reactionary will go, wow, I never want to be in that position again. Let's change our par to 1500. So now your par is 1500. They're building you to 750 and 750. Well, if you don't do 1500 guests, you go back to your a thousand you do a week. They're still charging you for 1500 linens every single week. That's the goal. They want to build, they want to make your par as high as possible. So that is something you need to manage almost on a weekly basis. Updating your pars, especially going from season to season where you don't know how much bits or you have a slow season, you need to be adjusting that par. I think that they're making their money on hoping that they can set your par very high and then you don't use as many linens because when they come in and build you to your par, every linen that's left on the shelf is what you're paying for. There's also something called an ARC, which is your replacement cost.

07:19So a lot of people use linens and they'll lose a linen or they'll use a linen, a table linen to clean the grill. Well, that'll ruin the linen. And when you turn that back in, they lose, they have to throw that linen away. So what they will do is they will charge you a replacement cost. There is a line item on your invoice that says replacement cost. A lot of times that number is not broken out as an individual number. It just says ARC, replacement cost, or however they denote it. And then that number is married into the number of your linen cost. That's the key. Because a lot of times they'll set that percentage north of 2% of your total par. And your total par is double whatever your par is, right? So if your par is a thousand, they have to in turn carry 2000 linens to make sure they have enough for your par at all times. You'll have to check on this. A lot of companies will charge you a two to 3% of your total. So that's 2000 linens, they'll charge you 2%.

08:21That number gets to be astronomical. That's where they're making their profits. If you're just using linens at your tables and you're buying kitchen towels that you're using, and the same thing goes with kitchen towels, by the way, it's the exact same process. Look, go back and negotiate that ARC number, because that's the number that they're charging you the most money on. 1% is what you need to be paying in your ARC, because there is a replacement cost. You do use linens, they have to replace those linens. That's the full price to replace the linens. But 1% is what you need to be paying there. So go look at your invoices, call your linen company, and say, hey, what's my ARC percentage? And if it's anything north of 1% and you don't use your linens to clean the grill, and you return your linens in a normal fashion, you're doing all the things you need to do, get that number down to 1%, it will save you hundreds of dollars a month. Also, managing that PAR, raising it, lowering it, based around your business, is how you're going to be able to keep your cost down. They are betting on the fact that you're gonna raise your PAR and not bring it back down.

09:27They want you to pay for as many linens as you possibly can every week that you're not using. This is where linen companies get mad at me for saying this because this is how their profit is built in. One thing you can do is you can hide linens. Okay, this is something that people don't like me to say. But if that 300 linens that are still on your shelf, if you move those away and they have to give you their full PAR every week, then you'll have a stockpile. And then when you do go over, if you have 1,000 linens as your PAR and you do a 1,200 week, you've got 500 linens in a coat closet that you can pull out. My goal is to only pay for linens I actually use. They'll actually count the linens if you put silverware rolls or you put linens on the tables to set the tables. They count those towards your PAR, by the way. Those are linens that basically are on the shelf that they're gonna count towards you. So I walked into one of my restaurants the other day and we do 1,000 guests a week at one of the restaurants. And our PAR was 1,600.

10:28And there were 600 linens sitting at the top of our shelf that had the dust all over and hadn't been touched. And I was paying for 600 linens every single week that I did not use. You imagine on a ARC, they're charging me for 3,200 linens. That's kind of ridiculous. So I was overpaying hundreds of dollars a week just for linens I never used. And they never said anything to me. They said, hey, we noticed you have 600 linens sitting on your shelf. That might be something that you wanna lower your PARs. They're not gonna come to you and tell you proactively that you need to lower your PARs. So my thing to you today, go find your linen invoice. Identify what your PARs are. Identify how many guests you're using in a week. And if you have toast, just go to the report section, look, schedule it for last week. Maybe look at your six week average. Find out how many guests you're serving in a weekly basis. Lower your PAR, raise your PAR, whatever you need to do, but then also go back and renegotiate your ARC number. This will save you thousands and thousands of dollars and you have to manage it week to week, month to month.

11:32There is my tip today. If you have, I have a lot more to talk about when it comes to that. If you'd like to, please feel free to reach out to me. Find me on Instagram at Brandon underscore NRR and send a message and say, hey, I'd like to learn more about this. Or if you have questions about good linen companies, cause there's a couple of them out there that are fantastic that will understand this and that will work with you. I have the names of those companies. If you would like to reach out to me, I'm happy to talk to you about who is willing to work with you and who is not. And the companies that are very bad about this. I'm not naming names on the show, but they're out there. So that's my intro today. And I'm excited to share some more stuff like this with you cause I want to help you guys succeed. I want to do everything I can to help you win. This episode with John Stevenson is going to be, it's going to be awesome. I hope that you guys enjoy it. We are jumping in right now with John Stevenson. Super excited today to welcome in John Stevenson to Nashville restaurant radio.

12:34Not your first appearance on Nashville restaurant radio. No, I had to have you back. I think, what did I come on right after you started? I think really close after we started and through like the whole pandemic we had just, you were doing so many amazing things over at Hathorne that you were one of the most innovative people, I think. When people would ask me, what's Nashville doing? I would say, you know what? Really savvy people are doing collaborations and they're bringing other people into the fold. And if they have space, they're bringing other people in. And, you know, Michael Hanna from St. Vito's, from Ocasio Rio, did he work at Hathorne at the time? Yes and no. You know, when Michael started doing his pizzas, my chef, Evan, my executive chef at the time was got wind of it and he was doing them out of his house. And so Evan brought in this box of pizza one day. I was like, look at this, you know, check out what's coming to Nashville.

13:34Michael's going to start doing this and he's doing a pop-up and this and that. And it was obviously incredible. I'd never had that kind of pizza, that kind of dough, and just thought it was really cool. So, you know, when Michael did his initial restaurant out of the place next to Bongo Job in East, it was the Van Dyke. Oh yeah, Setsun maybe? Yeah, Setsun. Was it Setsun? Well, Setsun was there. Yeah. He was just doing a pop-up there, yeah. Yeah, he was doing a pop-up there for a while. And he was looking for another space to do something. And, you know, this is coming out of the pandemic and I think we were only open at that point, about four days a week. I think we were just doing Wednesday through Saturday. Yeah. So I invited him in to do a Sunday nights. And, you know, I was trying to figure out how that was going to work. You know, am I going to rent the space to him?

14:37Am I going to, you know, how does this all work? Because he's going to bring people in and cook during the week, prepping for Sunday nights. So I just couldn't figure out how that worked. And I didn't want to make it so onerous to everybody that there was, you know, a mountain of paperwork to get insurance and da-da-da and this and that. So essentially I just hired Michael as, you know, I brought him onto my payroll, paid him X dollars an hour, you know, let him use, you know, he would buy a lot of the food in, but, you know, use our equipment. And then same thing with his staff, which I don't know if I would do that exactly the same way. That's so interesting, because you're taking on a lot of their taxes and everything, like you're doing a lot of, a lot for a pop-up. That's so interesting. I didn't realize that was, whoa. Well, again, I might not do it exactly the same way again. Yeah, thinking about it. But at the time, it was the easiest and most direct way to kind of just like, look, I just want to do this.

15:38I want to program the building an extra day, you know? So instead of him taking all the money and giving me a cut, I took all the money and gave him a cut. And so that's the kind of the way that worked. I don't think it was really financially, I don't think it was a loss necessarily, but it certainly, you know, nobody was making a lot of money. I think at that point you use it as almost, it's almost a marketing expense. That really was what it was. And I don't know if y'all have met or had Michael in here, but Michael's great in the kitchen. He's, you know, it's never a dull moment with him. Right before he did that pop-up, he was working out of my commissary at Hunter Station. So yes, like we had the same, yeah, he was in our kitchen when we weren't using it. And we got to like have a lot of downtime with him. And he's like a dear friend now. So yeah, very similar experiences, but he was like paying us rent basically and just utilizing all of our stuff and selling out of the parking lot basically.

16:40He's very good at fantasy football too. Is he? He's in our Nashville restaurant radio league. Oh, nice. And I just knocked him off the top spot two weeks ago. I was very proud of him. He was six and oh, and I was his first, I beat him for the first time in the league. So take that Michael, Hannah. But you also did like Alabrije. We just had on the last episode in here, we had Edgar Victoria, who just won best chef in Nashville and the Nashville scene readers poll. And he was doing pop-ups. I remember pulling up on Charlotte Pike and then coming out to my car and handing me the food. And really, is that how he did it? Yeah, I didn't realize. Yeah, we did at least one of his and I don't- You did more than one. I know there's a couple. I think we made one or two. I think there were both just to go. Yeah, it was to go only. You just had to- And then we did one with Julio. Miles De La Vida. Miles De La Vida. And then we did one with El Leon Dorado. Yeah, which was the Taco Bell canceled the discontinued Taco Bell items.

17:40Yeah, yeah. Oh, yes. Crunchwraps and- That's right. I never had to try that. Baja Blast and Mexican pizzas. Yes. So we did quite a few in that time between like late 2020 and the rest of 2021. We did quite a few. Matthew Meeker, I think had a, he's a local chef in town and he was my executive chef for a minute, but he came and did a pop-up as well. So we had, you know- Well, it's a good way for other people to promote bringing people to your space because when you walked into Hathorn, I mean, it was absolutely gorgeous. I mean, all the details that you put together for it, I mean, just to, and to get people to come over to that side of town. I mean, it was booming. And honestly, you get that kind of age bracket of people. Yeah. You know, the West side is a little bit older, skewing older than most of the rest of the national neighborhoods. That's one of the positives and negatives of being over there is, you know, sometimes it's hard to get that East Nashville crowd or that 12 South crowd or those people to come over there.

18:42So to get, to have those people in, it brought a lot of people over to that side of town who- Oh, this place is cool. Now I know where to park. Now I know what to do and how to get there. So would you be doing anything marketing-wise while those pop-ups were happening to promote Hathorn or offer any kind of like, come in for a drink on us next time, or were you doing anything? Cause I'm always interested of, because we know it's not really financially viable to host a pop-up in our restaurants, right? It's really just a like, hey, we want to pay it forward. We want to support you. Cause a similar situation with even like food trucks, like, you know, hey, we're not using the food truck on stay. Like somebody wants to kind of utilize it, but it's like, there's so much liability. There's so much that could go wrong. And then there goes your whole space. And you know, so what were you, were you doing any kind of cross promotion or anything or? I mean, it wasn't a yes and no. We were, we were definitely, you know, bringing people into the space. That's the first step is obviously getting people to be aware of like, hey, we're a little bird of Hathorn.

19:46This is exactly where it's at. This is what we're doing. And then we would, you know, we would have our menus out. We would have a lot of times we would have our servers doing service for. So they can speak to the space and, oh, you got to come back and try this and kind of, yeah. I mean, that's all part of it, right? But I think the most important part is just awareness of, you know, where you are physically and you know, that you're also kind of in with people that are of like minds and, and kind of, you know, in with the cool kids and, you know, cause a lot of people wouldn't, a lot of the people that went to some of these pop-ups maybe wouldn't have ventured over there, you know. That's true. And they saw it and liked it and realized, oh, it's across from the park. It's, it's got this and you know, we do our own menu on our regular nights, but you know, we're also friends with all these great chefs and up and coming chefs and giving those chefs a place to kind of do their thing. It felt really good, especially coming out of the pandemic. Oh yeah. I mean, I think it was just all about community building and how can we help each other. Because when one of us does well, we all do well.

20:48Like, I feel like that's just always, and especially in the food truck community, like how we feel, like when one of us is busy, we all kind of benefit from that. So talk to me about like how after the pandemic you reacted, like, so you opened four days and then you kind of transitioned back to full service and do you feel like you ever really recovered or how was that for you guys? Cause I know everybody has such different stories just based on what kind of food that they're serving. Well, yeah, you know, going into the pandemic, February of 2020 was our, we'd been open a little over a year, about a year and three months. And February 2020 was our first positive cashflow month. So we finally made it into the black. You know, we had gotten, we'd been on Bon Appetit's best 50 best new restaurants. And so we were still writing that for about six months. Business was good. We were open seven days a week. We were open six nights for dinner and brunch on Sunday.

21:50And I'd finally, you know, we got there. I think we did this thing. Look at this. And then of course, March happened and you know, March 17th, you know, we shut down and we basically shut down for seven months. Wow. We were doing some takeout, call ahead, pre-order takeout once or I think two days a week. But that was just me and executive chef, you know, doing that. And I was just not comfortable bringing everybody back in during that time. And look, I don't think there's a right or wrong way necessarily for each restaurant needs to make their own decisions. But you know, I think my staff was not ready to come back and I don't know, I just didn't wanna take the chance of opening and spending money on labor and spending money on product. And then there's still nobody really coming out. Yeah, or one person having tested positive and then the whole staff now and they have to shut down and it kind of like is back and forth.

22:52Which is what happened after we opened, you know, it's like, you know, you gotta shut for a week here, you gotta shut for, you know, cause somebody's, you know, so. I remember paying like $2,500 because somebody tested positive in the restaurant and I brought a mobile team, like a mobile doctor to the restaurant to test every single employee with one hour results because it was like, okay, we can quarantine the entire staff for five days. Oh my God. Or I can know in an hour and a half who potentially has this thing and who doesn't and we can keep rolling. It came, like that's what we were dealing with. Like one person comes down, hey, I think I have COVID but you worked last night, shit. Yeah. Now I've gotta bring in a 2,500, I gotta test everyone, it's $100 a person. Don't you remember feeling like every day you woke up and it was like something? Like I just remember every morning we were like checking the CDC stuff and like, we were like, okay, like did anybody, was there, and we were in Hunter station so we were in a food hall, which is like other restaurants that we don't have control over and we're just like, did that guy just cough?

24:01He coughed a little too much. Like he's over there, like we don't have any control over what that guy's doing, you know, it's like, he's not masking. Like, you know, it's just like, there's all this like, you know, anxiety and to come out of that, I feel like it's just a whole new world of how we are as business owners, you know? I think you kind of touched on it there for me, not opening for those seven months for in-person dining. I didn't want to have to be the policeman every night. Yeah, that's what we were basically. And I figured, you know what? That kind of, that's not a good conducive to a good experience dining, it makes us feel bad. And so, you know, fortunately, you know, we got some PPP, we were, you know, that was very, very helpful. Great assistance. You know, the restaurants that received it. We got two rounds of it and a restaurant grant. So that's what we were living on for the past four years, you know? Yeah, and that was so helpful. And it was really just like, how much staff can we keep on, right?

25:02Like how much work can we generate for people that we actually shouldn't really be doing? And like, you know, like restaurant work, we're like, it's not remote work. There's not much you can do from home, you know? And so, yeah, we would do these weird things where we had like two people working and then there's another shift of people that come, you know, like, so they can fulfill the takeout orders. And then everyone was doing takeout. And then Uber and all them were like, yeah, let's charge them a lot of money to do takeout. It was a crazy, crazy time. And one of my favorite things is having this podcast because you can go back today and you can listen to people in real time talking about like, what the actual fuck is going on. Yeah, I'm just being confused. And go back and listen to the episode with John. I mean, cause he was right, he was closed. The restaurant was closed and we were talking about, like you mentioned, I remember in that interview, you said we just had our first positive month and here we are. Oh my God, that's huge. I don't wanna bury the lead, but Hathorne closed on September the 8th is what I think that's the actual date.

26:09And I've never really done an episode where we've brought in a restaurant owner from a restaurant that's recently closed. But I think that what we've been talking about here is you're an innovative guy. You're a passionate guy. You care about this industry. Your restaurant was amazing, yet you made the tough decision that we're gonna close it. And I think that there's some knowledge here that I'd like to kind of dig into some of the things and somebody out there is struggling. There's anything that you've learned or any guidance or any kind of wisdom kind of in the past that we can go, oh, in that moment I should have done this. Or just if it's a, whatever it is, I'd love to talk about it. And thank you for coming in to even have this discussion. This isn't, tell me about your, this is- It's so helpful for younger business owners like myself. Like how, I mean, we're in the middle of it. You know, I've closed two restaurants too since then. So it's like, how do you do that? You just do it and you figure it out and like, you know, but like, how could I have done it differently?

27:11Could I have prevented it? Well, the first thing is that you own the property. Yeah. That was a big, when you first decided that, hey, look, I'm gonna open my own thing. The decision to own your property, looking back on it now, good, bad, what? Oh, it was great. I mean, and honestly it was the other way around. It was more like I had just come out of the Family Wash project, that part two, that was on Main Street for a couple of years. And I was involved in that, kind of creating that and building that and I was there for a year. I left that and then I was, I didn't know exactly what, I didn't have my restaurant in mind at that point. I'd always wanted to have a restaurant. I've been in the industry for a long time already. But I met somebody who was about to buy that property at 4700 Charlotte, which is the old church, which is Clementine. The Clementine, yeah. And the building that was attached to it. He had bought it, Dan Cook had bought it. We ran into each other at a Christmas party and he said, look, I've got this part of the building that I don't really need.

28:12I'm gonna use the church. Do you wanna come take a look at it? So went by the next day and looked at the building and just fell in love with that space over there, which is the fellowship hall of the old church. The church was built in 1889. His fellowship hall was built in 1948. It's just a really cool space. So I fell in love with the building first and then developed the restaurant after we came to the building. And it was an opportunity, he said, I'd like to lease it to you. No, he wanted to sell it. He wanted to sell it. Yeah, he wanted to sell it. And I'm familiar with West Nashville. I thought that West Nashville was kind of the next big corridor that was gonna develop. A lot of people. And at that time in 2017, it was. Things were coming pretty hard to the West side. There was a lot of plans, a lot of development that was happening. ML Rose had just opened. Things were starting to bubble up over there. And we've just seen what happened. I mean, this in Nashville is blowing up, right? Downtown is huge.

29:12East Nashville is huge. You look at Mount Juliet, which just blew up. And then what's the next one? I mean, if you think about the next one, I mean, if you ask Caroline over at Nicky's Cold Fire, they're the same thing. This is gonna be, and it was a lot slower than they thought that it was gonna be. Yeah, because it is a little bit out there. It's West side and then a little bit further that way. Not real. Not really, but it is though. East Nashville people are really, it's not. I mean, East Nashville people, they don't cross the bridge once they've crossed the bridge back over. From East Nashville, it's far, sure. Yeah. I mean, not far. I'm talking about, I'm representing the East Nashville people, I guess. Yeah, yeah. You're, that's right. No, you're right. I live in the West side-ish. Yeah. So. I mean, the nation's developed into a neighborhood. Sylvan Park has been there for a long time. Yeah. Very developed. A little bit older clientele there. Yeah. It did develop a little slower than I think people thought it was going to, but I think the pandemic played a big part in that.

30:15I think there were plans that were put on hold in 2020 that would have been, now they're starting to kind of get back going again. And now you have some more restaurants and people are putting in Publix and putting in, it's starting to fill in. It just took a little longer than I think people thought. And that's the case in a lot of places. Sometimes they just bang, it's there. 12 South went from kind of like, oh, it's 12 South, it's cool to, oh, now we're just gonna take it over and turn it into whatever it is now. Whatever it is now. Whatever it is now. That thing that it is, lots of cranes over there now too. Yeah. Remember when they put up Urban Grub, the neighborhood was like not happy because it was just this big, huge thing. Big, huge thing. Now they're putting up, I mean, there's Henry and these other places that are just in like multi-story places. It's not quaint anymore. No. No, it's definitely not quaint anymore. It's not quaint like the Bell Hill neighborhood. Oh, quaint in that. Really? You like that? The Bell Hill neighborhood over the international market in Chagos.

31:17I'm not including Bell Hill. I'm more Hillsborough Village. You are Hillsborough Village. Dang it. There's 12 South Hillsborough Village and then there's the local Bell Hill neighborhood. Bell Hill. You made that up, right? The Belmont Hillsborough neighborhood. You made that up, right? I made that up, yes. He just made that, he's gonna make shirts. But we need to come to the Bell Hill neighborhood. I wanna pick up. It's classy. You're closed for seven months. You reopened. Hard-finding staff when you were reopening? No, I mean, most of my staff came back. Most of the staff came back. That's amazing. How was business when you first reopened? It was good-ish. That's the good, like, mm. We had the amount of business that we could handle, I think. Sure. People were excited to go back out. Yeah, I mean, we took out chairs and tables and our tables were 10 feet apart and I had stanchions at the bar, keeping bar seats, separated from each other. Isn't it weird? I know, the measuring tape.

32:17I was always with the measuring tape everywhere. Yeah, the thermometer on the forehead. Oh yeah, the thermometer in the forehead, yep. Which to me now just sounds so intrusive and invasive. It's a little silly, yeah. A stack of COVID tests and just, yeah, what a wacky dump. But business was pretty good. It was fine for four days and to be honest, it was a little bit relaxing. And I see a lot of restaurants now are doing four days a week, you know, are doing Friday to Sunday or Thursday to Sunday or whatever and trying to make their money on, you know, in that condensed amount of time. We close Mondays and Tuesdays at Chago's and it's the best for scheduling. Yeah. It's great because scheduling- So you close Monday, Tuesday, so then- Close Monday, Tuesday, everywhere's five days. Yeah, that's how a cafe is. Everybody works full-time. Cafes, five days. Yeah, you have one crew room. You have to be like, you're off this day and everybody's off Monday and Tuesday. Once you go over five days, that's when it starts getting really complex and- Part-time people, you have some like, you know.

33:24I need them short this day. Well, I gotta get my two days. Like, everybody's off Monday and Tuesday. Everybody else works the other five days. It's so much better for scheduling. Is that gonna be from here on out or? I mean, obviously if business gets to a point where we can, where the math works, I mean, really that area, the Bell Hill neighborhood on Mondays and Tuesdays is just kind of- I'm just gonna say it as many times as he can. Stop. Stop trying to make it happen. It's not a thing, okay? He's like, I live in the Bell Hill neighborhood. Stop making such a thing, yeah. Already got a name. Belmont Hillsboro. He's trying to up the real estate- It's called Belmont Hillsboro. That's what it's called, but I think Bell Hill's a really neat little- I think you can safely just call yourself Belmont. Belmont, okay. I mean, you can hit- He doesn't like that. You can hit the college with a stone. He doesn't like it. There's already a Belmont. Yeah. That's fans of many blocks. That's in 12 South too. Anyways. So, we're back open. Things are going well. We're 2021, 2022. 2021 started, first quarter was obviously lower than previously, but it was okay.

34:31It was starting to ramp up. And then, yeah. And then it kind of, we kicked back into five days a week and two, three and four quarters of 2021 was pretty good. 2022, still pretty good. Are you in the black in this time? No. So, you're not back up to February 19 or 20. You've never quite made it back to that. Never made it back to in the black. What do you think that? I mean, what do you attribute to that? Just actual butts in seats? Well, food costs went up too. Well- A lot of that too. Most of it was just not enough business. Yeah. We're down five days a week. So, we're two services fewer than we had before. So, a dinner service and a brunch service. So, just the amount of people coming in and then we're cutting our hours. And then, I've got fixed expenses obviously and fixed expenses in the kitchen with labor. And that's when labor really started to start cranking up in 2021, 2022.

35:35Whereas, you could, it was $15 an hour for a dishwasher before now it's starting to get 18 and line cooks were going from 17, 18, starting to- 23. 2021, 22. Yeah. Starting. Starting. And- And these are people with experience. Hey, I come from strategic and I wanna do something different. Sometimes. These are just people that I've never cooked before. Yeah. And I'm gonna come in and do this. Well, if you could get them to come in. Yeah, that was a big thing. Yeah, I would say that labor for me is probably the, everything is a part of this equation, but labor for me I think was the final piece of the puzzle for me- Wow. When I decided to close. Because I couldn't get anybody to come in from, for an interview, for a start. I mean, we would sign up 40 people to come for an interview or a stage or something, you know. To show up. Two people would show up. Isn't that insane? And this is over six or seven months. I hear that all the time.

36:36I mean, just how many was yesterday? At 20 to 23, starting at 23. Yeah, you're like, you're gonna hit this and you're not even showing up for your interview. I don't even wanna hire you anyways, but like, wow, you know. Yeah, and I'm just line cooks. That's why we were doing brunch on the weekends and I had to stop doing brunch because my regular crew was about to burn out and walk. And then I'm left with nobody and it's not like I have a huge, you know, we had five people in the kitchen. You know, prep between prep and line cooks. And so that was the ultimate. At the end of the day, my chef came to me and said, hey, I've got about another month in me at this pace. You know, we're doing 70 hours a week. Plus, he couldn't find anybody to come in and line cook. He would have to do most of the production. So he's not being able to develop recipes or do costing and, you know, do things correctly because he's having to be in there producing every day and then expoing and then running the line. So, you know, 12, 13 hour days on the regular.

37:40And so I think if you're not in this industry, you go, well, you need to offer better benefits to people and make them stay longer. And you're like, do you know how much offering insurance costs people? Oh my God, yeah. I mean, it's thousands of dollars a month to do an insurance program, which they may get on, they may not. I mean, we do insurance at our restaurants and probably 25% of people actually take advantage of it. Yeah, because if you have a lot more younger people, they don't see the value in it. They're like, we're fine, I'll be fine. I don't need, I don't want it taken out of my paycheck. Even though you're paying like, what, 75, 80% of it. Oh, it's insane how much insurance costs. And I think that a lot of people don't understand that. And it's like, and not, people don't even take advantage. It's not even that. What we're talking about is all the cranes downtown. And when you see the W open and the West End and the Four Seasons and all these hotels that are 24 stories high, they have to fill those with people. And people, if you're going to get a job, those places have, they're taking talent, like right and left, and they're going up faster than we can even, you know, all these big, huge restaurants coming in from Chicago and New York that are, they need to hire people too.

38:55And they, this is where working in local restaurants, that's the challenge, I think. There's just not enough people and we don't have affordable housing for people to live in Nashville who also work in these positions. Sharpier's Bakery is a locally owned and family operated wholesale bakery, providing bread to Nashville's best eateries. They've been operating in Nashville since 1986, providing high quality, fresh bread daily for restaurants, catering companies, hospitals, and universities. Their bread is free from preservatives and artificial additives. Learn more at sharpiers.com, that's C-H-A-R-P-I-E-R-S.com, or you can give Erin Mosso a call directly, her number is 615-319-6453, that's Sharpier's Bakery. Y'all, today we are talking, as always, about SuperSource. And you know, one cool thing about SuperSource is did you know that they develop most of their cleaning products and chemicals in their in-house facility?

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41:05Produce, 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 whatchefswant.com or give them a call at 800-600-8510. Yeah, and then you have people coming in and expecting 24, $25, and I'm like, I get it. And to do less work, though, because I had a guy, I have a great guy that is really loyal to me, and he was working at the Four Seasons, like overnight shift, which is a hard shift. I worked Four Seasons 18 years ago, and I've had to work that overnight shift before, and it's like you by yourself, and maybe one other person, and you're doing room service.

42:11And that's a hard shift to work. He was getting paid a lot of money, and he just was like, I'm not happy doing this. I just wanna, how can I just work for you guys? How can we make my salary work? And we made it work, but it was a struggle to get him that overtime that he was working just so we could keep him, and it's to know how much they're paying. And he was like, I would just stand around and just make a couple. I mean, he was like, I'm doing nothing basically, so you're making close to $30 an hour. You're doing nothing. How do you compete with that? How do you compete with that? Yeah, it's just very discouraging when we're trying to be like, we just need better people, but it's like. We need passionate, talented people who have. I just had this conversation two days ago. Yeah, and it's like, we can't. That's not the world we're living in right now, though. We have to make it simplified, easy, and streamlined in a way where we're giving good customer service, focusing on customer service, customer experience, and making it easy for somebody who just has a great attitude to come in and be able to produce something.

43:22And for me, simple like a sandwich. That's a challenge sometimes, too. Well, my challenge with that is I love coaching. I love teaching people. I love bringing in people with a great attitude who wanna work, who get it. They're like, hey, look, dude, I'm not anybody special, but I will learn from my mistakes and I'm gonna grow. And you're like, if you wanna learn, if you're coachable, I love to have you on my team. What I've found is that this is maddening is that I find really, because I'm always looking. I'm at the gas station and the guy's like, hey, man, what's going on? I'm like. You're poaching left and right. You're great. You seem like you're sharp, let's go. I'm always looking for that person. I have three restaurants. I have a lot of positions, but if I can find that person, then I train them and I spend all this time with them and I coach them, I teach them how to do this. No, no, they show up for work and they do a fantastic job. But at some point they go, man, I'm really good at this and I love this. Oh, I'm gonna move on. But this new restaurant over here is gonna pay me 125,000 to be an assistant manager.

44:23And you're like, well, I can't do that. You're like, thanks for all the coaching and you really made me great at this, but now I'm gonna go to, and then I gotta start over and I gotta find the next person. And I have a leadership development team and it's great, but it's eating at my soul sometimes. It's really, really hard, because it's like this game of whack-a-mole that just never fucking ends. Never ending, yeah. I'm painting this industry well right now. This is what it is. But you know what, I think too with the pandemic, because we were just talking about this. We're like, we developed all these training systems. We were looking back at this training guide that we made probably two months pre-March, 2020, and we were like, it's so, because at that point we were operating three restaurants and a food truck and we were doing great. I mean, Franklin was thriving in the square right there. And all this, we were like, everyone's happy. We feel like everybody was doing a good job. And I just feel like the pandemic killed that momentum because you were working shoestring crews, right?

45:24So now I have a standard operating procedure that has four or five positions. Now we're trying to do it with three positions. So now there's more work for those people and it just doesn't feel, there's not a bus or maybe, there's not a dishwasher as much, like everyone's kind of stretched out a little bit. And then we came back and now the whole training systems were off because now what we were planning for five people is now having to be four because of costs and labor. So it's like, now we're stretching out everybody's capabilities. It's like, now you have to also check bathrooms at this time every hour and do this and this and this. And it's like, that used to be someone else's job. Now it's my job plus this, this and this. I don't blame them for it being like too much. And then you get that business that you want and then you're giving poor customer service because you're not staffed appropriately. So I feel like it's this kind of roundabout kind of game of like trying to catch up and then you're like, well, yeah, maybe we should staff two extra people and then you don't do the business you think.

46:24Yeah, and you can't really push too much on the prices because you'd have a certain point and- No, not when you're a QSR like us especially because that's offensive to people. Oh, anywhere? Yeah. And all of your costs have gone up 30%. Oh my God. And it's like, what do you do? Did that affect you at all? Like supply chain, procurement, getting items into the restaurant? It did, probably not as much as some because we didn't use a lot of broad line stuff. A lot, probably 70% of ours are from farmers that we have individual relationships with. So that was the upside of those relationships is that we didn't see a lot of shortages and we didn't see a lot of price increase on some of those items. But there was enough of it, especially starting in 2022 where things started to, you know, okay, so chicken went from 50 to a hundred dollars and that was one of our items that we actually made money on. And all of a sudden we're not making money on that. And that was, and everything just a little bit more expensive, even if it's five or 10% on everything, it really is cumulative.

47:31And I tried to push up on the prices. We're sitting at about 55 ahead plus tax and tip, you know, casual, fine dining, elevated experience. I think that's very reasonable for Nashville, especially for where you are. I mean, that's a very reasonable price. In my opinion it is. Yeah. And knowing what the products were and how they, you know, the techniques we used to cook them. And I tried to push up to get up to, you know, 60, 65, so that we could survive and make money on the amount of people that were coming in. And I could tell that, you know, it wasn't working just because, you know, people would, are a little bit more like, well, it can only come, you know, for special occasions. And that's definitely not what we wanted. We wanted it to be a, you know, a monthly, weekly, monthly kind of thing where you can come in and not feel like we're, you know, breaking the bank, but getting that experience and that quality. And it just didn't work. So, you know, kind of pulled things back down a little bit and went back to where we were and kind of let the market kind of dictate those prices.

48:32But I, at the end of the day, I couldn't make that work. And printing, you know, how often did you change your menu? Like, pretty often. I mean, we are hyper seasonal. So we would have things change every couple of weeks. I did all the printing in-house. We just did just a paper menu, so. Well, I think a lot of people don't realize that like, if you work, if you're Kroger, right? Kroger changes their prices, I think every day. I mean, as the market moves, if you see that milk has gone up to 325, whatever it is, a gallon, Kroger doesn't, well, they don't like print the prices for a week. They change that shit that hour. The price goes up. And in restaurants, a lot of people, printing menus is very expensive. If you're not doing a paper menu, if you don't make the investment on it, if you're just saying, I'm doing a melamine menu that is for high volume places. I don't have to replace a bunch of these. It's like 700 bucks to print enough menus to keep you going for a few weeks. And if any of your prices spike, there's a hurricane and hey, there's no oranges.

49:40We don't have oranges for a little while and orange prices spike, but your number one dish is an orange chicken that you, speaking all in just random terms, but like you have to eat that or I'm gonna spend $700 and print new menus and then, oh, that's over. And now I'm over, like there's a balance with that. It's hard to do for a lot of people. Incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. That's why we've always changed our menu twice a year because of that reason and we evaluate prices. Now I'm like, oh my God, we need to change our, like every month. Like, I feel like we're like kind of, oh, we're just eating this until we have to change it. Daily, see like. I would print the name, I guess I knew the reservations I had. This is at Mirable and I can run a report through restaurant 365 with my cost analysis and it gave me a percentage of every single item I bought, what it went up, what it went down. I could look at the theoreticals and go, oh, my filet prices went up $2 a pound. Oh, well, I'm gonna adjust the price of the filet today and it would just say market price or whatever or I would actually change the price $2 today, down $2 tomorrow based around what I actually paid.

50:48Do you think I could do market price for grilled cheese? Is the cheese market that. It is actually, it's coming from East Tennessee. I mean, it's a, I don't think I'll be able to realize that. Yeah, yeah. Listen, Cisco, GFS, US Foods, PFG, their prices change every single week too. You know, our reps are trying to be like, I'm gonna try to lock the price in for you for three weeks. You know, like they'll give you that and then you're like, okay. And they're like, well, I'm gonna set a reminder at three weeks to reset your, you know, price. And I'm just like, you're just hoping they don't forget cause it'll, you know, that's like the life I'm living right now. I'm like, don't forget to reset my prices three weeks. Just so, you know, we're buying so much of one thing. It ends up being crazy. You know, this is like insane. I know this is very much shop talk, but like, I feel like people listening need to know this stuff because if you also don't even know your food costs, like sometimes I talk to people that have no idea and they're just like going off of like, hey, that food truck's selling it for seven.

51:53I'm gonna go, I'm just like, how? You don't know their labor. You don't know their commissary costs. You don't know their, like, are these a gas? Is it diesel? What they're purchasing it for? Yeah, it's like, you're, I'm like, oh wow. Like, this is, how long are you gonna be in business? You know? So sometimes like we start with square one when we're trying to coach like these small businesses, like, let's start with your cost of goods. Like, what is your labor? Okay, what if you get sick? How much does it cost to run this without you involved? And a lot of times it's like that breaks them because there's so much a part of the operation taking them out of the equation is huge. You know, that's the chef, the driver and the service person, you know? Well, that's what he was just saying. He's got his chefs working 70 hours a week and they, I can't do theoreticals. I can't tell you that our cost on that chicken dish was $3.25 two weeks ago and today it's $4.65. We need to raise the price to X amount, whatever it might be. When they don't have time to do that, it makes everything more challenging. Yeah, yeah.

52:54And you asked earlier about, you know, what I would advise new restaurateurs to do when they first get going. And one of the things is what you were alluding to is get in there early on and get your cost of good and get some sort of inventory program that responds in real time to prices. There's so many of them out there. I know you have a favorite. I didn't do that, you know, and I was doing a lot of old school just spreadsheets and, you know, kind of clipboards. Toast will do this. I'm doing that right now until I fully set up my margin edge. Yeah, yeah. Margin edge, we'll use margin edge. Yeah. I know, I just haven't fully set it up yet. Well, that's, and that's where all the work is done. It's like, that's... It's hard. It's hard. It is. And putting all those recipes takes a lot of time. It does and you gotta do it right. But once you get it done... I know, I gotta do that after I leave here today. I'm not giving you anything. I feel your judgment. There's no judgment whatsoever. Like, that is a lot of work. It is a lot of work, especially when you're literally doing, like, last night I was fully making grilled cheeses on the line.

53:58Like, that was where I was at, washing dishes, fully, I mean, it was new menu day. So, like, that was the important thing to be, like, in there with the team training, you know? So, yeah, no, I don't have time to, like, input the recipes into margin edge, but I need to do it today. Well, and the advice to new people is, look, get that done before you open. Get that done at the beginning and then you just have to put them in as they come up. If you get it done before you're open, then there's not this excuse of, like, oh, well, we're busy tonight, gotta get on the line. It's, if I had done that, I would have been in a lot better place as far as knowledge of what's going on in the restaurant. And I've been in the industry a long time, but I've also probably picked up some bad habits along the way of, you know, hey, just forget about it. Don't worry, it'll work out. And I really did focus more on, like, okay, let's focus on customer experience and perceived value and, you know, keeping the staff happy and just, you know, trying to be busy.

54:58You have to reprioritize every single day. When you're underwater and you have a straw that's sticking out of the water and you're trying to breathe, that's a perfect analogy. There's a balance of, okay, I need guests in the building to get the sales. How do I do that? There's marketing, there's all the things. Today, I'm going to Vanderbilt Medical Center and I'm walking in, I'm going to 25 different doctors' offices. I'm just walking in and introducing them, handing them catering menus and a $25 gift card saying, come try our restaurant. If you have a drug rep, we do catering. I'm literally just gonna spend three hours walking through the hospital, introducing myself to people. I gotta do that. But also, when I'm doing that, I'm not spending time looking at my theoreticals and I'm not looking at, hey, what time does this delivery come in and what are my linen pars and dish machine and chemical prices and first aid kit. Like, I'm not looking at all of that stuff because I'm- Good thing you use SuperSource. That is a good point. I like that. It's sponsor on the front.

55:59We do too. They're great. But it's, in the midst of it, you have to reprioritize every day and you know what, sometimes, it's more fun to go talk to guests and build business than sit in front of a computer and I'm not a sit in front of a computer kind of guy. I've had a podcast in the queue for six days now and it still isn't out. I noticed. Because I have to sit and edit it and add all this stuff to it. We're doing a lot of podcasts right now though, to be fair. It's a lot of things. It's a lot of work. And the restaurants, I mean, it's just, it's reprioritizing and I think, to paraphrase it, just to kind of say what you were just saying and I wanna add something to it, a theoretic, like, what he's talking about is, when you talk about recipes and margin edge, every single thing that you buy has a cost, right? A case of chicken is 40 pounds and there's so many chicken breasts being what you buy and you have a five ounce chicken breast on your menu and there's sauce with it and rice and vegetables, right? There's an associated cost with each one of those items and so when you add, when you put that recipe in, it'll pull from your sales and you'll get a cost.

57:01That dish costs us $4 to make, plus labor, plus overhead and then you have to figure out what you're gonna charge. If you go, hey, they have a chicken dish, they're charging $12 for, we can't be much higher than that. Well, they're a chain and they have 82 restaurants and they've negotiated a price on their chicken because they've committed to purchasing 400,000 cases of that chicken so they get it at pennies on the dollar where you're committing to buying 110 cases. You're not getting that same price that they are so you can't compare that, what you're purchasing to what they're purchasing because it just doesn't make sense. That's kind of the whole, get all that together but I think the one part of that that I would give to a new restaurateur, any restaurateur is find a broadliner that if you're gonna work with a broadliner, if you're choosing one, I hear an argument, well, I don't know how much it's gonna cost because I'm using four different companies, I'm gonna beat them up on what the price is. That is a thing that's called spreadsheeting. I recommend you find a broadliner, you negotiate an MDA, a master distribution agreement, sometimes you're not big enough to do that but you can at least find one person and be vulnerable, tell them what you're gonna do, ask for transparency and partner with that vendor because they're gonna give you consistent pricing if you give, it's like any relationship, if I give them my, I'm with you, you're my partner, let's do this thing, they're gonna know everything you're doing, they're gonna learn your habits, they're gonna be able to predict what you're gonna do and they're going to help you and then you can cost them.

58:31They'll set prices for you, they'll do so much more when I say it's like any relationship, if you have five different girlfriends and every single day you're like. You're not loyal to anybody, they're not gonna help you. You're not loyal to anybody, when you get sick, when you have the flu, nobody's making you chicken soup. This analogy. Call your other one. You know, I mean like that's, I think, I think. It's so true though, yeah. That's what it is. Your cooler goes down, I need you to bring a box truck. Guess what? Tough man, call your other guy that you called yesterday when you needed something. I mean that's the way it works. So find that one broadliner, lean in to find if it's a smaller company or if it's multiple companies, because you need produce from one and you need fish and meat and then there's paper goods. Like if you're using those, still give them your business and make it happen and then you'll get really consistent pricing based on the market, but. I agree with that, I totally agree with that and I think that goes from your broadliners to upfront for your alcohol, honestly. Yeah. I feel like one of the things I learned is that we use too many different suppliers, distributors.

59:36And I love, the reason is because I was, I fell in love with the product as opposed to letting the neighborhood dictate what my product should be. Like I knew, I had an idea of what I wanted, especially behind the bar and I just got too much of it from too many different places and a lot of it sat on my shelf for years and esoteric out liquors and wines that really made me excited, but were a little bit out of the price range of what people wanted to buy. And so another piece of advice to new restaurant is like, hey, don't, open first and let your market dictate what you're providing, what products they want to a certain extent. I'm not saying that, we definitely want PBR in a can. Like, well, if that's not something that doesn't fit, but within reason, they're gonna come in and if you don't have anything, you're like, oh, do you have this or do you have that? And that will, should dictate what's in your back bar and to some extent, what's on your menu.

01:00:42It's so interesting at Maribol, one of our, we have two Chardonnays by the glass that we just sell, I mean, mass amounts of. Sonoma Catrere and Kendall Jackson. And are these great wines? I don't. I know so much about this because of having. Yeah. Yeah. The number one thing, bar manager's kind of the new manager position, it's easy, you're learning inventory and this and that. Every single new bar manager that you get, you move somebody up or whatever and you bring somebody onto that. First thing they do is they go, why do you still have Kendall Jackson? You know that there's so many other Chardonnays that you could do and there's this Chardonnay that comes from, you know. Natural wine. Yeah, this cave that the water drips off and then a frog eats it and then it poops out and then it's gonna make this Chardonnay that tastes like cotton candy. And you're like, that's great. But my guests who come in here love this. And I paid $11 and 40 cents a bottle for Kendall Jackson.

01:01:43I sell it for $13 a glass and I can't keep it on the shelves. Why would I change that? Yeah. Because I have some ego that I don't wanna sell Kendall Jackson, but every single person that walks in, that's what they want. You play the hits. You know, like it's going to see Pearl Jam and them not playing alive or black. It's like, I wanna hear, that's the song I wanna hear, you know. And I think that's what you were kind of saying that you fell in love with a bunch of stuff that you particularly like. And maybe you loved it, but it's, and it probably is that good, but training your team to have the same passion you have for it is the harder part because they're doing all the things they do, but you gotta try this. This is amazing. This is the next thing to accurately take it from your brain and your passion to a server's or bartender's passion. And then that translate to a guest is not easy.

01:02:45It's very hard. No, it's very, very, very difficult. But it's a hard lesson to learn too because when you're opening at your own place, especially if it's your first place, you want it to be just right and just perfect. And you want it to be like this and like this and like that. And yeah, you need to have a target and a goal for that. But in my case, I just overshot a little bit and should have really listened more to, it's like, okay, well, what's perfect for this location, for this neighborhood, for this clientele? You know, what do they want? What works over here? What's worked in the past? And that's a lesson that I think, I've been in the business a long time, but it took me to have a restaurant like this one to realize that you don't have to have everything and you don't have to have the XYZ perfect product that you think is perfect. You need to really gauge the clientele and let them kind of dictate what they want and what's gonna sell.

01:03:45You can push on the envelope there. And that's the fun part is where you're like, oh, I got to take that Kendall Jackson drinker and check out this other Sonoma Chardonnay that's from a small producer. And we think you're gonna like this, but don't fill your shelf with those and then just have them sitting there. Which tastes 10 times better than that. You know, I know it tastes, it's much better wine. Yeah, but people forget that people like consistency. If it doesn't sell, then it's gonna sit there, yeah. A lot of times people are just not willing to take a chance on something that they're not familiar with. My brother has this amazing saying, and I've used it a lot recently with my salsa at Chagos. We've changed the salsa. And he said, do you know what I love the most in the world? He goes, triple cream brie. I love a really good triple cream brie, like a cut small. I feel like you just told me this last week. Yeah, I did. Because I was talking about the salsa. Yeah. And he said, and it's delicious, but do you know what the number one selling cheese in the world is? And I said, I have no idea.

01:04:46He goes, Velveeta. I went, when you're feeding, like people buy Velveeta. It's the number one selling cheese in the world, but that's not the best cheese in the world. We wanna pretend that we're fancier than we are, but at the end of the day, we want what we want. We want what's nostalgic, right? And I feel like that's the business. I feel like going to your restaurants through the years, I've like, you really hit home on comfort food. You really, those like, you know, those, I don't know, what did I have at the bowling alley? That was so, I don't know. There was something you did. No, maybe it was, it wasn't, it was at the place off of Main Street. Family Wash. Family Wash. And it was like a, I don't, it was so savory and so delicious. Like I never, it was just like the shepherd's pie or like, it was something like that. It was just like, and then you also used to serve it at Fido. Is that right? Not the shepherd's pie, but I'm not sure what I'd have served at Fido that I served at Family Wash, but.

01:05:47It was something similar to where I was like, oh, this is definitely his. It's like, I just, you have this like comfort food flavor that I was just like, I enjoyed so much through the years. And it's so inspiring as somebody who's always trying to hit that note with people of like nostalgic, like this is what I remember, but it's leveled up with local, you know? And that's like my, what I try to do. And so I just, it's so inspiring to someone like me who's like a younger chef that's like always trying to, like I'm of Mexican background. So like I, my comfort food flavors are different. So, but like this kind of food you give people, people follow you around because they want your flavors. You know, I know so many people that are like, wherever he goes, we go too, you know? And I just so, I respect that so much in like what you're doing. And I feel like whatever you do, even if you make dinner for someone, someone's going to be like, I know exactly. I'm going to feel comfort. I'm going to be local. Well, since I don't own a restaurant anymore, I think I might be making dinner again.

01:06:48I'm just trying to get you to make me dinner. I'll finally start cooking again. I've been, I've been out of the kitchen for several years. And that's another thing of like when you, when you open a restaurant, like, you know, sometimes you get taken away and look, I'm not as good as I used to be. I'm out of practice and there's so many talented young chefs coming up. Yeah, but everyone's got their own thing, you know? That's what I've like, I feel like, I feel a little intimidated sometimes because there's so many new, amazing, talented chefs, but just like getting to know people through the podcast and just doing like chef stuff with like dinners and whatnot, everyone's got their own niche, you know? And maybe something that Julio's doing isn't something that I do, but there's something I do that Julio doesn't do. You know, like, I think we all have our own things and we all respect each other for finding our thing and doing it the best we can do, you know? Not just staying in our lane, but just really like owning that we grew up doing this and we like this flavor and we're trying to do it locally and we're trying to utilize the same kind of local vendors.

01:07:49And I think that's what I really admire about the Nashville chef community right now. Like, we all are doing something a little bit different and I respect like what Red Perch is doing. I respect what LaVon's doing at Fat Belly. You know, like, I respect what everyone's doing because it took a lot to get to that point where they really found their thing and people are supporting that business, you know? Cause it is all simple food. It's nothing fancy, you know? And I think post pandemic, that's what we're kind of looking for comfort. And so I feel like you can never go wrong with that. And now these nicer dining restaurants, I feel like it's really hard for those restaurants because they're really having to like, this is not a weekly restaurant we're eating at anymore. This is like a nicer celebration restaurant and that's hard for a lot of people because you don't get that weekly customer. Well, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think a lot of modern, newer restaurants are kind of the scope of them is more focused. And so they're doing two or three items as opposed to more traditional neighborhood restaurant that has, you know, however many, I mean, we had a small menu, but you know, there's some restaurants that have a pretty extensive menu and that is difficult to keep up the quality of everything, of every item.

01:09:03And, you know, people are getting used to kind of picking and choosing. It's like, oh, let's do kisser. Oh, let's do grilled cheese. Oh, you know, let's do these individual kind of like focused. Very focused. Focused places. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I think hopefully it makes it a little bit more attainable to kind of maintain that quality, maintain your prices, maintain your, you know, your staff and everything because you're not having to do so many different things at the same time. Yeah. You're streamlining, you're buying a lot of local, like for us, we've maintained our food costs. I mean, I'm just saying that loosely because it's crazy high right now, but because we can buy in bulk big huge 40 pound blocks of local cheese, you know, and when someone's buying like a five pound block that's cut down, that's processed more. So you obviously paying more per pound. So like, because we're using so much of less things, that's how we're maintaining high quality. But then we start, if we start broadening out, then we're starting to play around a little too much with like, we only getting a little bit of this and that.

01:10:06So that's what I was like, do the thing that you're really good at and then try to venture out. Because if you start doing a little bit of this and that, I feel like then your food costs is all over the place. You don't know what's selling. You're not really, you know, and sometimes people listen to their customers too much on food trucks. They're like, you should do this. It's not even something you know how to do, but you try to do it. And it's like, what are you doing? Why are you even doing that? So there is a fine line of like, you know, people throwing out menu suggestions and you're being like, yeah, I'm gonna get right on that. I have no idea how to make that, but I'm gonna try, you know. So anyways, a lot of, how long? This is too long. Brandon, cut us off. Me and John are just gonna talk chef stuff like forever. I'm gonna take this opportunity. John, thanks for coming in. This means a lot. Just, it's good to see you again. And I know it's gonna be difficult to come in and talk about this kind of stuff.

01:11:07I know, doesn't seem to be. It's a little bittersweet, but it's becoming less bitter. Yeah. The further I get away from it. And you know, we had five, almost six years of a good run during probably the most difficult time to run restaurants in the past, you know, 50 years. So, you know, and had a lot of successes, a lot of respect from the community and the broader restaurant community. And you know, I don't look at it as a failure at all. You shouldn't, yeah, absolutely not. You know, I think it's, most of it is circumstantial. I mean, of course I made plenty of mistakes and would do things differently if I had to do it. Are you trying to tell me you're a human being? Yeah, exactly. What the hell is wrong with you? But the circumstances hit me and it hit a bunch of people. And I'm talking from low to high. You know, it doesn't matter what level or restaurant you were. If you were quick service or food trucks to high-end restaurants. We're all kind of hit this past year.

01:12:08I think we all kind of hit this wall of people were, inflation was finally hitting people. People were going out a little bit less. And, you know. We're seeing in all three of our restaurants that, and everybody that comes in right now is telling us gas counts are down. That people just aren't going out as much. You didn't talk to one person that said their gas counts are up from last year. I don't think one. Oh yeah, no, everybody's down. This is not a, everybody is down. And it's a thing. I don't know what it is. I had somebody, I've heard different theories. I think there's a lot of competition. I think there's a lot of options. I think people right now, I think the election has a big, is a stranglehold on a lot of, a lot of people are freaking scared. A lot of people are like, what is going to happen? Are we, I mean, dude just said, mass deportations on day one. Yeah.

01:13:08I mean, I don't even know what that means, but if I'm anybody, I mean, I'm a white guy, but if I was a person of color and I heard somebody say that, we're just going to start, people that look different, we're going to start deporting you. Like, what the fuck does that actually mean? I'm going to hang on to every single dollar I have because my future is uncertain in this crazy political landscape. No matter who you are, I think that is an actual thing that is happening right now. Next week is an election. This week is, this will come out election week. Oh wow, yes. But the last week that you were open, you announced that you're closing. The last week that you were open, you said you did record numbers. Well, yeah, yeah. Really? Everybody came out to see you. Everybody came out to visit Hathorne those days. I wish we could, like, it's so much like, why are we waiting until after we realize something's not going to be there to go do it? Like if there's a restaurant that you love and it's a local restaurant, this is why it's so important to go eat local. If there's a restaurant out there that you love, like go eat there.

01:14:11Don't wait to hear that they're closing. Chances are they're not doing well right now. There's not any restaurants out there that are just, dude, we're crushing it. We're just going on vacations. Unless you're new. You know, you've got that honeymoon phase. Unless you're brand new. So if there's, that's why the first year of the podcast, and when we did the roundup, I always focused on a local legend because nobody talks about the people that have been doing it for a long time. The Midtown Cafes, the Cafe Nonas, the Park Cafes, the Germantown Cafes, these places that have been Margot's. There's just so many amazing restaurants out there that we just kind of, oh, they're not the new restaurant. And so if you're listening to this and you're trying to decide where you're gonna go out to eat, find a place that is a locally owned and operated restaurant and go spend money there. They need it. It's like that old adage, because I just celebrated five years, alcohol-free the other day, and I was really excited to have this. But I was writing out a speech I'm doing tonight, at my meeting tonight, where I get to give my five-year speech, which is weird.

01:15:17But you know what? You never know just when you smile at somebody. You never know what people are dealing with, because people put on these brave faces. You see it on Instagram. You see everybody. It's like this highlight reel, but people are hurting. There's a lot of people that I've gone to meetings, and I'm referencing AA meetings, where I've sat down and I've been depressed and I've been sad, and I hear somebody get up and talk for two minutes, and it saved my life. Not literally, but just hearing that somebody else is going through that, or smiling at somebody when they're on the verge of complete breakdown. Going on to eating at restaurants is a similar thing. When you're choosing, do we go to Chewy's or Chago's? Well, Chewy's money is going back to Austin, and they have tons of money already, versus spending it at a local restaurant that's support, that's giving back to their community. I'm using me as an example, because it's easy to do. But that one small decision, how you're voting in elections with your wallet, makes or breaks people. And to see the last week they're open to be that busy.

01:16:19It's like, we couldn't just do this. This couldn't be a thing. Where were you guys? I know you guys want, and you know you liked it. Why didn't you come out a little bit more? It kind of makes you a little bittersweet, right? A little bit of both. After I made a decision to close, it was kind of like, it was good to see everybody come out. And I appreciated that. I wish they had come out a little bit more often. But a lot of the people that came out had been coming. It's not, they just all came in a couple of days. But there's a lot of tears, or a lot of people just saying, you're my favorite restaurant. I can't believe this has been my go-to for however many years. And that makes you feel good. And it also makes you feel sad that you're, because I wanted to stick around. Mostly wanted to stick around. But you got to just, that's what I said in the interviews that I've been in, is like what you just said, Brandon, is if you like a restaurant, don't do it once a year.

01:17:21Do it more often than that, especially the smaller local ones. And I'll say congratulations to you, Crystal, on your new place, right? Well, thank you, yeah. Cafe Cheesery. Cafe Cheesery at The Frist. And I haven't been yet, but I'm really excited to go. I can't wait to welcome you in. Delicious. I'm always there. We went right before you were open, and we went to The Frist to see an exhibit, and I saw what was happening. I was really excited, because that to me is such a cool thing about bigger cities. When they have a nice museum, a lot of them have really cool local restaurants in there. And we haven't really had that. And I think it's really cool. So I want people to know that like, you don't have to go to the exhibit. No, no. It's a beautiful space. It's right in the middle of the city. It's just got so many cool things going for it. So I really hope people kind of catch on to that. Yeah. It's a serene space too, like in the middle of a crazy Broadway. It really is beautiful. And the team at The Frist couldn't be more nice and sweet.

01:18:25I mean, just the nicest people ever, most accommodating to every kind of need. Every kind of type of person is welcome there. It's a wonderful transition. And I love that that's kind of our home base now. And I really feel like we fit right in. And they're like, we have museum food now. Like they call it museum food. I'm like, I don't know what that means, but yay. So yeah, I can't wait for you to come in. Brandon's been in with his wife and he's- We came in for our anniversary. I know, I love it. Anniversary lunch and tour that we went and did the art. Well now both galleries are open. Journey Through Japan just opened this week. And it is so cool. And y'all are seven days a week there? No, we have museum hours. So we're five days a week right now. And we operate same hours as the museum. And that's like 11 to- It's like 10 to five. And then Thursdays, it's a little weird, but like whenever the museum's open, we're open. Go to cafecheesery.com right now to check out your store hours and menu.

01:19:26Yes, but it's so like people supporting. I mean, I think I posted on Instagram too. It's like, it's not lost on me who's come so far. Like my friends. And then like all of a sudden there was like five more of my friends that came. Cause they probably just think like, I don't notice. Or like, we don't notice these things, you know? It's like, no, I know who's coming. Like I see the faces. Like it means a lot that you came, you know? And so I think people take for granted. They think we're just like, oh, she's got multiple restaurants and she's rolling around and she probably doesn't notice. I'm like, I notice everybody that comes in. I appreciate everybody who is like, no, no, no. I wanna pay for my food. You know, like it's like, cause you feel that like, oh, you're here. I wanna give, you know, they're like, no, no, we wanna support and give dollars. That's the next thing I was gonna say. If you work in the industry and you go to another local restaurant, demand to pay for your food. If it's your friend and they're like, oh, I got it, man. Be like, no, let me pay. A dessert, something like, hey, I'm working on this appetizer. I want you to try it. Sure, I'll give you some feedback on it, but like demand to pay for your food.

01:20:29Yeah. Like that's a thing. There's an old Bill Graham quote about when they were doing some Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco and Bill Graham was like, everybody pays, everybody. Like nobody gets in free. Like this is not, we're not doing this for free. This is something that people put their hearts and souls into. Everybody pays and then everybody can get paid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's how we all support each other. But you know, my first real, real restaurant job, like hire fine dining was at the Grand California Hotel in Disneyland. And it was this wine country cuisine restaurant called Napa Rose. And my chef would comp so many, cause it was Disney money. So it's like, you know, so that was my first real restaurant experience where I was like, yeah, your family comes in, you comp the whole table. Like, you know, you're just like constantly giving out free appetizers and stuff. So that was just my mentality. And then I started owning a business. I was like, oh no, we're not giving food away for it all the time. Like, this is not, we are not Disney. Like we don't have Disney money, but that was like my mentality of like, yeah, no, your 12 top comes in, you comp the table.

01:21:33You know, like you kind of like a big shot comp in the, you know, everything. It's like, no, that's not the reality. That was like a fantasy world that I was a part of that like, that was not his money, he was comping. And people do it all the time. And I think they've got it wrong in that they'll comp, you'll comp your friends or some VIP celebrity. And you're like, no, if you're going to comp anybody, comp the person who is in there for the first time. Comp the person who didn't have a great experience. Yeah, I mean, it's not your friends and celebrities that need to be comped. They're coming in, they love you, they're going to support you, they're fine to pay. But it makes it feel much more special if you're just like, you know, if it's their second time in and you said, oh, I saw you, you liked the XYZ last time. Well, you know, we're going to send out this, we think of like this. That's where I think comping is the best. Comping to make yourself look good or, you know, I don't think that's. It feels like, yeah, taking care of. Like, I don't know, there's this kind of like macho-ness about it, I don't know. I just, that was my first restaurant experience as like a bright-eyed 18-year-old out of culinary school. I was like, yeah, I can't wait to get to that point where I'm just like, oh, don't worry about it.

01:22:37It's between the two. It's on the house. And then I'm like, as a business owner, I'm like, I'm not giving any sandwiches away for free. You're family, but you want to pay, you get to pay. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, all of a sudden, you know, they don't let me work register. Cause then I'm like, you know, it's a weird, awkward thing. So I'm like, I'm not on register. Cause then it turns into like a, yeah, total is this. Yeah, that's awkward. It's a thing. John, we've kept here for an hour and 10 minutes. See how fast this goes. We were kind of talking beforehand. You're like, how long do you take a coffee? I'm like, I don't know. We just have a conversation and when it ends, it ends. But the hour goes by. It's like being in therapy. You're like, it's already an hour? Damn, give me another hour. Let's do another hour. How many hours do you need? You have no idea. You have no idea how much therapy I need. Dude, if I could do three hour sessions with my therapist, I would totally be in. I love that stuff. I am a, everybody needs therapy. I had so many, yeah, yeah.

01:23:38You get a good nap in after that. Drain all of your emotions out. I told somebody the other day that I said, I'm going to therapy. I'll be back in an hour. He was like, therapy? And I go, yeah, like my therapist, I gotta go. Who just goes and then comes back and does stuff like. Me? Really? But the guy goes, the guy that worked with me goes, oh, I won't tell anybody where you went. And I go, why? I'm not ashamed that I'm working on myself. It's okay. That's an old school mentality. Yeah, like stop. It's okay, I talk about it. You know what? I'm working on me. I'm not perfect. Who knew, right? It's good people know that. I'm going to therapy. Therapy. Don't say it to everyone. Are you broken? Yes, I'm human, I'm broken. What's next for John Stevenson? That's a good question. What are you doing next? What's next for the building space? I'm gonna make dinner at my house. That might be on the docket there. Start cooking again. Building is on the market. We've got a broker. We've put it up for sale, I think last week.

01:24:38Hopefully you're using the Chandler James team at Lee & Associates for your broker. How many sponsors can we throw in organically? Not sure. I don't know if it's them or not. It should be, if it's not. Yeah. So yeah, we're gonna sell the building. Probably gonna sell the FF&E, all the equipment. So winding down the business, getting that. It's gonna take another month or two at least. And hopefully the building will sell in that time. And then after that, I'm hoping that I can take a little bit of a break before I have to get back into finding what's next. I've been in the industry since 1991. Oh my goodness, that's amazing. My first job, and even before that, but in Nashville, my first job was as a line cook at the brand new Amerigo restaurant on West End. 1920 West End Avenue. 1991. I was there. I was like, didn't you work there? I was there in, no, I was there in 2002 to 2004.

01:25:42Yeah, so I was there for a couple of years and have been out of the industry since then, mostly in. But I think I'm gonna look around and see what else, whatever is next as far as not immediately jumping back into a restaurant or the industry. But look, I've been doing it for a long time. I still have love and passion for it, but I maybe wanna try to find a different angle to come at it as opposed to an operator or being in the creative part of it. I might wanna find somebody to help out or give advice to, consult. I don't know, and there may be something completely different outside of the industry that I find that I can do, that I enjoy. So I'm gonna do that and see what happens. I'm never gonna say never because people are like, when's you gonna open another restaurant? I'm like, when somebody walks in with about a suitcase full of about $3 million, we can talk.

01:26:44Yeah, like a three million dollar gift. Don't pay me back. Exactly, a three million dollar gift, not a loan. A three million dollar gift, not a loan, because then you're like, that's a whole nother thing. Exactly, exactly. People think, oh, so just open another restaurant. Do you understand what it takes? I feel like I'm traumatized. Every time I hear of somebody opening up a restaurant, I'm like, oh, why are you doing that? What's your deal? You paying for everything? I'm only happy if I know that they know what they're getting into. Yeah. If somebody's like, oh, I've never, you know. Oh, bright-eyed, I'll be like, please, just don't do it. I worked as a server for a couple of months, and I've really always thought it, you know. Well, I throw really good dinner parties, and my friends keep saying I should open a restaurant, so I'm gonna do it. How many times have we heard that? It's so, it's so scary. And whenever anybody asks me, that's the first thing, I spend an hour with them trying to convince them not to do it. Me too. Yeah, and then if they still want to do it after that, okay, now here's some things that you should look out for. Okay, you've passed the test. Yeah, yeah. The first hour, yeah. You have no, you really haven't thought this through enough, but I guess you're gonna do it, so let's try to make it as painless as possible.

01:27:47Yeah, exactly. Yeah, good luck to him. Well, John, you're a lovely human being. Well, thanks. And thanks for coming in today. Yeah, any time. Happy to call you a friend, and obviously we're here for you if there's ever anything you need or whatever. Right on. We love you, and we loved Hathorn. I loved going in there, it was beautiful. I didn't get together as much as, I was not a regular, but I certainly have been in the space several times, and definitely gonna be missed, and I'm glad to have that little piece in my heart, and that memory, like I do of the Sunset Grill, like I do of mafiosas, like I do of so many places that are no longer around, and I know you're gonna land right where you are. You're gonna be doing something really awesome to help this community, and whatever that might be, I wish you the best of luck and success. I can't wait to see it. Thank you, I appreciate that. And again, thanks for joining us today. We typically do like a final thought, the Gordon Food Service final thought. I kind of glazed over that. Do you have a final thought today that you'd like to give our listeners?

01:28:54How do you take everything seriously, but not too seriously, you know? Just like follow your passion, take yourself, you know, be serious, but don't take yourself too seriously. I don't know if that's too philosophical, but. That's awesome. I think that's perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for in a final thought. All right. All right, John Stevenson, thanks again. Thank you, appreciate it.