Matt Leff, owner, Rhizome productions talks covid 19 and beer

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. And that is Still with a why. And why are we talking about the coronavirus? Because it's consuming everybody and everything. And it is closing restaurants, canceling flights, canceling beloved beer festivals. And I think we should discuss it. I think we should discuss how it affects you, person that works in the restaurant business, person that dines out. So joining me right now is Matt Leff. Matt is the owner of Rhizome Productions. That is correct. Hi everybody is listening whenever this goes live. Which will be tomorrow after I kind of put everything together. So I'm glad that I've got a chance to talk to you because we're kind of in an unprecedented time. And while this is Nashville Restaurant Radio, you're in the hospitality space.

01:09Will you tell everybody exactly what you do? Yeah, so for those of you that have not heard of Rhizome Productions, we've been in the live event space here in Nashville for actually where we hope to be celebrating our 10th anniversary of the East Nashville Beer Festival in a couple weeks. I think we might be postponing that sadly. But we produce beer, food and spirit events across the South and beyond. We've done events all over the country now. And here in Nashville, we've done a lot of work with a lot of great restaurants and bartenders and beer shops. And so we're not directly in the restaurant industry. We definitely work in a similar space, of course, to many of you in this town. So yeah, that's kind of what we do. So a lot of people that work in restaurants are out there right now going, that sounds familiar. And if I said some names such as the East Nashville Beer Fest, which you just said 10 year anniversary next month, potentially on hold based on all of this, which is a downer, Whiskey Tabernacle, Brew at the Zoo, 12 South Winter Warmer, Newey Belge, the Rosé Festival. I mean, you're all over the place.

02:19Yeah, we're doing, we had a pretty busy schedule starting like last weekend. We actually had to postpone two events in Chattanooga. Rightfully so, of course. We want to set the right example out there for everybody in our industry and the community that we were going to be doing the event and so yeah, busy calendar. Hopefully we'll get to pick it up here in a few months. So what, tell me, walk me through some of this. So as a person that's putting on events like that, how, when did this start for you? When did you had the Chattanooga? So it was, what were the events in Chattanooga? Chattabruga? Whiskey Tabernacle, which is like a roughly 300 person whiskey event. And then the following day was Chattabruga, which is roughly an 800 person beer festival that we recently, we actually relocated to a new venue this year where we were planning to. So it was actually, the event was being made smaller and brought indoors just to change the spirit of the event. We also moved it back from May to March to sort of celebrate the oncoming St. Patty's Day. Got it. So you've got these events planned. When does the coronavirus come on your radar? When do you, what's the first thing that kind of starts getting in place where you say, Hey, wait a minute, we got to start looking at this. Yeah. So, I mean, I was definitely concerned going back into December when I started hearing about what was happening in China.

03:48Um, you know, we, we didn't overreact. We didn't under react either. We were communicating with our venue partners. We were communicating, um, with the city of Chattanooga probably about a month ago. Um, just because people were starting to really think about it and seeing how quickly it was, it was growing in China. And then obviously, you know, a few weeks ago we heard about Italy and Iran and some of these other places that it just, you know, kind of came in and really flew, flew through the population. Um, you know, I think unfortunately the information that we were being provided in the United States was probably not, not quite as, uh, rapid as it needed to be. I would have loved to make these decisions earlier as opposed to later. Cause we, we didn't call Chattanooga until two days before it was supposed to take place, which is not the ideal situation. But we were, you know, again, we were hopeful that it was going to happen, but we know we made the right call. We don't, we want to be part of the solution to our current issue and not further the problem. So who makes that call? Was it, was it, was it a call by you? Cause we were talking, everything was somewhat status quo going into Thursday and then Thursday, the NHL suspended their season. And then we had, um, major league baseball call off spring training. March madness was called off. Every single, it seemed like everything closed. Is that when, was it you who made the call or did somebody tell you this isn't happening? Uh, well, so, so Wednesday, Wednesday, I guess last Wednesday, um, that was the moment where I was like, all right, we're going to have some hard decisions that we definitely need to make in the next 24 hours. I think once we saw the NHL and the NBA and the NCAA make those, those key decisions, um, to me, that was a signal. If it's going to start from the biggest, that's a pretty good sign that everybody needs to, you know,

05:49fall in line and pay attention to what's happening. So, um, ultimately it was a decision that, that I made. Um, you know, we, we care about our customers. We care about all the breweries that we work with and distilleries that we work with. And we didn't want to put people in a position where potentially we were going to get them sick. So, um, we weren't doing this in a city park. We were doing it in a private venue. So ultimately, unless the venue ownership told us, Hey, we're not having any events or the city came to them and said, Hey, you got to close your doors. Obviously those, those decisions would have immediately, we would have fallen in line with them, but we actually chose to make that call on our own as, as painful as it is going to be. Um, it's just not worth getting people sick. It's not worth taking that risk and the liability of God forbid someone contracting it at your event or spreading it to an elderly person that's home at their house. So we made that call. It was the right call. I support my decision, but it was certainly a hard one. You know, it's, it's, it's interesting because I feel like I was in a meeting just recently and we're talking about what do you do? Cause now we've got all these restaurants in town. And then yesterday, the health department and the mayor said that, Hey, lower Broadway here in Nashville gets, we're shutting it down. And there's so much, it's this, it's an interesting dichotomy because everybody's saying, well, the restaurant workers, what are we going to do? And then again, there's a social responsibility that we have. It's almost like we want to do the right thing, but then you want to kind of support your community and help your community, which is the people that come into the restaurants, people that come into the bars, that your patrons, as well as the people working at them. And at some point the do the right thing is tough because the people that work there are now saying, we don't have any income. What's going to happen? What do you anticipate the government doing? Well, I mean, I definitely think given the, um, the strength of our hospitality community and how important it is, especially from a tourism perspective, I hope that we see, you know, the Davidson County

07:50leadership, the city, um, the state, I hope we see some support from the state. And I received an email actually today that probably many of you got from, uh, but steered in over at the NCBC. And I know there was some point of reference there, but they're working really hard to make sure that our hospitality industry is taken care of. You know, again, being the fact that this really is unprecedented and that we've never seen anything like it in our lifetime, it's going to be really hard and people are going to have to get very creative, I think, and what's going to happen. But I think these hard decisions and this, this hopefully limited momentary suffering that we're all going to go through, if we can all make that right decision to close our restaurants, uh, to the public, you know, I don't know what's going to happen with the whole delivery concept right now. I'm concerned that that won't even be a good solution for some of these restaurants in the immediate timeframe, but maybe in a few weeks down the road, I think we're just going to, you know, people are going to have to take care of one another and get through it and be real smart with their resources and be smart at home. And hopefully landlords are, you know, flexible, but we definitely need to see some good support from obviously the city of Nashville, the county and the state. That's, that's what it's going to take. It's going to, you know, we don't need to be bailing out the cruise lines. We don't need to be bailing out the airlines. We need to be bailing out small businesses. That's really what's going to help everybody. And you know, this is something that's interesting because it's not just limited to the hospitality industry. This is, you know, the tornado comes through and we, we don't mean Nashville's dealt with some crazy stuff in the last week, but this, this affects the entire country.

09:29This isn't just something that uniquely we can say Nashville strong, we're all going to get together. We can, but this is a, like, this is a national thing. It's not just us. Every city is going through it. Every town is going to go through it. But again, you know, and I'll, I've shared this with everybody I've spoken to today, friends and family. We all just need to get behind these immediate measures to be smart and hopefully we'll get through it sooner. I think the longer we ignore the responsibility of, you know, social distancing, hopefully the sooner we won't have to do this. So, you know, obviously we, information's changing every day. It's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to take it all in. You know, you want, you want to believe everything, you want a good source, but it's a challenge because it is changing so quickly, but it's going to be tough. There's no, there's no doubt about it. It's not just hospitality. It's every industry and, you know, on my end, obviously I've got a lot of people that we work with that are in the music business, they're in the production business for the music, staging, sound, lights. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a big domino effect. Everybody's going to get impacted by it. But I think creativity and especially here in Nashville, we know we've got a lot of great creative people. There's going to be some creativity and thankfully the internet makes a lot of things possible remotely. I think it's not going to help so much with food and hospitality directly, but we're all creative in this industry. That's why we're part of it. It allows us to be creative. So hopefully we can use some of those creative juices to use some of the technology that's available to us to, to scrap some pennies together. Yeah. And I mean, you know, creativity, I'm talking to you via the telephone and you live three minutes away from me.

11:14Exactly. We're, we're, we're setting the example of what's appropriate. Come on over, man. Hang out for me. Like, no, we need to make sure we're staying apart. And um, so what's next for you? What do you, what do you, what are you, so one of the things we do in the hospitality industry and you said, you don't know what the to-go and delivery and all that stuff's going to happen. I have a hypothesis that there's not going to be to-go boxes. I think that to-go boxes come from China typically. And I think that if every restaurant in the world starts doing to-go, to-go boxes and to-go cups and all these materials are going to be the new toilet paper and sanitizing solution, they're going to be gone. So the restaurants that have it are going to be the ones that can do to-go. I don't think it's going to have it if this thing goes any longer. But yeah, yeah, that's a fair point. I mean, the one good thing that may come out of this situation though, is the fact that a lot of American manufacturing may come back online very rapidly. Um, so there, you know, there, there's going to be, I think some benefit from the negativity that we're going to see, you know, we're going to be manufacturing. I think in the United States is going to definitely be forced to pick up some of the slack. You know, I haven't, I don't, I don't know if you've been seeing something and I've just not been paying attention. I feel like they're all, the news in America is definitely overshadowing whatever is happening in China right now. But it seems like their numbers were starting to plateau, which is a good sign. Um, I don't know if they're going to start loosening anything over there. I think if they're smart, they'll keep it pretty, pretty similar to where we're at and continuing to be at. But we may see some of the manufacturing over there come back online and get back over here, which will obviously be important. But hopefully we see some, some manufacturing here come back online to support it. Um, that, that will maybe be helpful. Well, I think that, I think that the thing is, it's just, there's so much uncertainty, which is creating worry with everybody. And I think that, I think what you just said was a positive message that we do live in a creative community in Nashville in that if you, like worrying doesn't do anything positive for you.

13:19No, definitely not. You know, when you're pulled up in your house and trying to entertain probably children or other family members, you know, it's, it's a lot of pressure and a lot of things you want to try and focus on to help each other out. But definitely I think being creative and trying to, uh, to focus on what you can do to make things better is certainly going to be helpful until we can, uh, until we can get through this. So, you know, it's, it's in, in our, you know, in our field and with our events, obviously we're, we're very limited in what we can do until this comes to a close, working on maybe doing some virtual beer tastings and working with some retailers around town to create some unique, like custom packages of beer that we can tell people to hopefully go buy or we can get delivered to their houses and then we'll do some virtual, like tastings with Brewmasters or ourselves, some of the folks on our team, which yeah, you know, again, we're getting creative, you know, it may not drive a whole lot of revenue, but if it's something that we can do to help ourselves and help others be entertained, we're going to do it.

14:22So you've got the Nashville restaurant community listening to this, hopefully. What kind of, what's, what's your beer of the moment now? What are you drinking? What do you, um, if you were to tell people people are holed up in their house and they want to drink something that's amazing, what are you recommending the Nashville get into your wheelhouse? Obviously I'm a bit spoiled and have quite a personal stash of, of, of beers that are hard to come by. Um, your brother Justin still likes them quite a bit. I'm sure I'll drop some off in his driveway or pretty soon. Um, so you know, I'll be drinking a good bit of my, I think my sour lambic stash the next few weeks, but oddly enough, most recently I went to the, I went to Publix on Thursday and I actually, real quick, I'll just say I want to compliment all the folks that we, uh, that I encountered at Publix. People were calm, cool, collect. The store was not barren. I think Publix is doing a really good job at keeping their stores stocked and organized and clean. Um, so I think to them, I'm going to tell you this real quick and you, I want to get back to your beer story, but I want to say to all the people that are cashiers and people working at gas stations and people working at Kroger and Publix that are just out there every single day dealing with all of the madness. Thank you. Thank you.

15:40All the servers, bar to everybody who's working right now, who's out there, who's doing it. Like, like, thank you. I can't even tell you enough. You putting yourself in harm's way. I don't know if that's the best thing, but you're making civilization move forward. So good point. Publix, what'd you find there? Anyway, so you'll laugh. I went there and, you know, I don't buy beer in the supermarket often, but I bought a 12 pack of Highlife and I was quite pleased with my decision. The champagne of beers. Yes. You know, and the good thing with beers like that, they don't, you know, they don't have a short shelf life. You're going to go out and buy IPAs. You got to drink them pretty quick. Um, you know, so, um, I would say, you know, me personally right now, I'm definitely drinking lots of lagers and pilsners, not necessarily, uh, domestic macros, but, um, I'm a big fan of, uh, of the pilsner and lager market right now. So that's what I would probably recommend people drink. You can throw back a few of them and not, uh, get too drunk too quick. Um, and then whiskey, of course, I think whiskey is probably a high on my list of, uh, necessary beverages currently. We're going to, we're going to get creative and, you know, the, the reality for us is, you know, in terms of events, we're trying to do a good job of communicating with people's bought tickets and make sure we're not leaving them out in the dark. Like, uh, what are these guys going to do? Are they going to refund their tickets? Are they going to reschedule?

16:59Are they going to cancel? You know, we're just like everybody else. We're taking it kind of one day, one hour at a time. We, we don't want to jump to conclusions. We don't want to, nor, nor do we want to be the experts. Like we just, we want to be given good guidance and make the right decisions and take care of people. You know, it comes back to hospitality. We want to give people good experiences. We want to treat people right. Um, you know, at the same time, people who buy our tickets, they support not only the Rise On Productions team, but, you know, all of our events support nonprofits around town here in Nashville, uh, which, you know, it's going to be a struggle for them right now too. Simply with East Nashville Beer Festival, Ride For Reading has been our nonprofit partner since the first year in 2011. We've raised roughly $175,000 for their organization in nine years. So this event's just as important to them as it is to us. So there's a lot, there's a lot on our shoulders with, um, the unknown of when we're going to get to pull this event off. It's a challenge. So what do you have? So we're going to be saying a prayer for you and this whole, the whole country that we can get this thing going. But what's, what is beyond that? What do you guys have going on? If we're telling people, so once we're able to get out and move forward, what do you have going on maybe something later in the summer? Talk about your company. What can we do to support you? Well, so we, you know, we're keeping our events live and online. So if you, you know, if you go visit EastNashvilleBeerFest.com or if you go visit Nashville Rosé Festival, just as examples, obviously you can go to RiseOnProductions.com and see a lot of what we got going on. Like I said, all of our events are, do support nonprofits rather. Um, so if you do want to help us out and buy a ticket in the hopes that things go as planned or rescheduled, that's awesome. And that is going to help us once we, once we get to open the doors. Obviously with us trying to reschedule things, we're going to, we're probably going to consolidate our calendar and do a lot of events rapidly, which I think will be great. I think people are going to be anxious to get out of the house.

19:01They're going to be looking to socialize and enjoy themselves. And we look, we look forward to being an organization in Nashville that can deliver that to people. And I think one of the things that will take away from all of this too, and across all our events, and I think the restaurant industry should take this if they haven't already, even before what's going on, is cleanliness and sanitation needs to come before anything because unfortunately this could happen again. This might last a while. So while I know everybody's a professional and a lot of people that I know personally in the food business here in town always put, you know, cleanliness and sanitation, food safety first, I think this is going to be a real wake up call for our industry to ensure that we go above and beyond it, not just now always. So that's something that we're going to make a big part of our events because many of you have been to music festivals and beer festivals and all that stuff in the past. And you know, sometimes it's hard to find a place to wash your hands. Sometimes you're going into a nasty porta potty. And so we're going to put a big focus on our efforts at our events when we're back online to make sure that people have proper facilities or enhanced facilities, I should say. We can prevent this from happening again. So of course, that's a big thing. And you know what I think that you're spot on? There's so many people, I've seen so many different memes on Facebook that have said, so now you're washing your hands after all these things? Like this is something you should have been doing your whole life.

20:29Like, why are we now putting the emphasis on every time I see another restaurant say, we're now doing these things. It's like, yeah, you should have been doing those things. This is common, like, cleanliness. And I think that people are saying that it is. They're doing extended cleaning. But it's like, hey, wash your hands, people. Seriously. And this may be something that ingrains, you know, takes 21 days to create a habit. Maybe it's something that's going to be great for the world. Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I've been stressing to everybody that I've spoke to today, people in similar industries, friends, family, is if we can all take the next two weeks, you know, fix your house up, mow the lawn, go for a run, you know, just distance yourself. Like, you know, I think we're going to find ourselves in a much better position. I think what we're seeing on the news with these ever-changing timelines is assuming the worst in people. You know, I think our government unfortunately needs to assume that people are not necessarily going to listen enough. And that's why they're giving us these long timeframes. And that may make people afraid, that may cause some panic. But I think the more people adhere to a pretty tight timeline of staying at home, the better it's going to be.

21:54But, you know, then again, that's my opinion. But I'm also, I want to be hopeful for all of us in this industry because we've got to get back to work. You know what I did yesterday? My wife's been nagging me. I say she's nagging, she's amazing. But she's been wanting to go for a hike at Percy Warner Park. And I've always been too busy. And yesterday I went, yeah, let's go. We took the kids and we went, we walked all throughout Percy Warner Park. It was amazing. I'm like, why don't we do this all the time? Like, this is the, yeah, I know. It's like, I've just found that. And then today we went to Sherwin Williams right down the street next to Publix and we bought paint. I'm going to paint the boys' bedrooms. Like we're, we're planning projects around the house that we just haven't had time to get to. And I'm like, if I'm going to be stuck in the house, I'm going to get stuff done, man. I'm going to start knocking, I'm going to feel productive. I'm going to have like, I'm going to put together a podcast. It's going to be great. So that's what it's going to take. And you know what? 14 days is, I know it sounds like a really long time. It really does. But I think 14 days to the alternative, if we can all get behind 14 days is going to be a lot worse. So, you know, I've got two little kids. I know you got little kids. Like for people with kids, you know, the sooner we can get back out there, the better. The sooner daycare can open. That's where my head's at. So I'm all about, I don't care if I, you know, don't leave the house. Like if I just got to go to the supermarket and nowhere else, I'm good. Yeah. Ace Hardware. Get some grass seed. Working in the yard. Yeah, that's exactly right.

23:32So obviously you're doing this or you're doing other stuff? No, I've started a company called New Light Hospitality Solutions. So I'm doing some restaurant consulting where I'm actually going in and this is a great time. Thanks for the segue. This is a great time for if you do in a restaurant, when you are slow or this isn't happening, I'm doing cultural realignments, identifying people's core values, what they're doing, why they're doing everything. I'm trying to help people become intentional with everything they do inside of their restaurants. So this is actually a pretty good time when you're not busy to sit back and do some off sites and do some really good game planning for when we do reopen and we do go full strength that you're almost using this as an opportunity to reopen your restaurant. Let's get this thing, let's revamp it and come out strong, out of the gate. If we're sitting around worried about what's going to happen, the day is going to come where this is going to be over and if you're not ready and if you don't take this time to just get out there and really do everything you possibly can to make your business better than it ever was before, I think you've missed out on a big opportunity and that's where I'm I'll come in. What do you need me to do? And I put some one month and two month packages together to where I can come in and help you do stuff and I'm even thinking about doing a promise pay.

24:56Look, I'll do the work and when you guys get busy again, pay me. I mean, I don't know what that is. If you can't pay me ever, then it's a thing but it keeps me busy and it keeps me going and I'm able to help somebody succeed and that's really what it's about, right? Yeah, I totally get you where you're coming from. I'd rather be doing something and helping other people with good intention than sitting around doing nothing. Yeah, and if somebody can pay me in the future, great. I mean, obviously, I'd like to get paid. That's a positive thing but I mean, right now, we just got to do kind of pro bono, whatever we got to do to help out and if there's something I can do to do that, then I'm in. Yeah, no, I'm with you there. I mean, I think this obviously is going to make our industry a lot stronger in the long run and people are going to, I think, have to rethink things and you know, actually, something I mentioned a little earlier and this speaks specifically really to the hospitality and restaurant business side of it. You know, one of the things that I think that's really lacking and it would be great to see it come together eventually across the country but there's a great organization down in Atlanta called Giving Kitchen that is basically a nonprofit that's designed specifically to support hospitality workers who don't have health care. You know, if they have issues with health care and get sick, they give them money. If they get injured on the job, they can give them money. Really awesome organization that started out of a restaurant that the founder passed away and his family was left in a really tough spot. So I believe his wife started the organization and it's gotten really big but it's only in Atlanta or in the state of Georgia right now. I've actually inquired with them about helping potentially grow it into other states but I think that's something that, you know, if it's not an association that comes out of the industry that is, you know, funded privately, seeing some sort of nonprofit that's either

26:58nationwide or state by state that's similar to what Giving Kitchen does and definitely go check them out. Once you hear this, it's a great organization and I'm sure they're doing whatever they can to help people out right now in Atlanta and in the Georgia area but I think that's something that hopefully we see come of this as a better support channel for hospitality because, you know, my father worked in hospitality, I've worked in restaurants, obviously I work in hospitality now. On the event side, you know, there's not a lot out there to help people in these situations. No, there's not. You know, in the state of this emergency, hopefully we see our, you know, local governments help out but I think long term hopefully we can find some organizations that can be there when these kind of situations arise. Absolutely. Well, all right, well, Matt, thank you so much for doing this and spending a little time talking to the people of Nashville. This is awesome. Anything else you want to add? Anything else you want to finish off with?

28:04I appreciate getting to talk to everybody. If everybody, you know, if anybody needs, has some questions or ideas and wants to email me, feel free to give me a shout. It's just Matt at rhizomeproductions.com. It's R-H-I-Z-O-M-E productions.com and happy to talk beer if anybody's bored. Whatever you want. We got time. And look out for virtual beer tastings that you may be hosting. I think so. We're going to shoot for it. We'll probably let people know V.S.R. social media channels. I think that I can see like thousands of people sitting in their rooms watching the internet drinking beer together with like the largest internet tasting ever and that, my friend, is creativity when what to do when you're quarantined in your house. Heck yeah. We're gonna have a virtual bottle share. I like it. All right. Well, Matt, thanks again, man. And thanks for joining us today and best of luck to you and everything. And to keep in touch with Matt and what's going on with the East Nashville Beer Fest, all the news, follow all Rhizome Productions social media sites. I'm sure you're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all those things. And if you have any questions about any of this stuff, Matt at rhizomeproductions.com. Thank you so much, man.

29:28All right. So again, thanks, Matt left for joining me and thank you for listening. And if you like what you hear, I'd love for you to share this podcast. Let other people hear this too. I'd love to have you comment on our Facebook page at Nashville Restaurant Radio. Thanks again for listening, everybody. Love you guys. Bye.