NRR Best of Volume 2

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast for and about the people of the Nashville restaurant scene. Now here's your host, the CEO of New Light Hospitality Solutions, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host for this Best of Nashville Restaurant Radio episode. Today we are going to hear snippets from our episode with Chef Andy Little from Josephine. We're going to talk to Sylvia Gagner who is the CFO, the chief farm officer at Green Door Gourmet. We're going to hear from Tom Morales as well as Alex Ballou and I'm going to tell you this is a really, really fun episode today. I have enjoyed listening back to these episodes. I apologize while this episode is going to be like 30 minutes long, it's going to cost you like four hours because you're definitely going to want to go back and listen to the entire episode from Andy Little. That is, that is one of my absolute favorite episodes and it's probably one of the most referenced conversations that I'm going to play here. We talked about him filming his team doing game tape that I talked about in most most episodes with chefs because I'm just so impressed and then you're gonna want to go listen to Sylvia Gagner. Tom Morales, his stories are second to none. He tells the story here. We're gonna talk about his story of starting Tomcats and what what that was like and then Alex Ballou talks about his famous Facebook post that he did, his passionate plea. So we thank you for listening today. Thank you for the best of. Let us know what you think on Facebook and Instagram and we're gonna

02:02jump right in today with Tom Morales. This episode was from May the 20th and I was so excited when Tom said that he would come on the show because obviously hits Tom Morales and the guy is just as a legend in this town and his stories were so epic but this particular story was one where he told the story of how he started with Tomcats, how he started the the whole movie business, how he got his first food truck, his mobile kitchen as he calls it and his storytelling is just out of this world. So without further ado, let's jump right in with Mr. Tom Morales. A little movie came to town and they called me for an interview so I went to interview him and the last question they asked me was do you have a mobile kitchen? Well I had never heard those two words together in my life but I knew the answer and of course I said yes. Of course. Yeah. Well I immediately left and the don't call us we'll call you is you know the typical answer that they give you when you leave and or statement. So I called my sister immediately who lives in LA and you got to remember this is 1987 or 88 and there's no internet and so I said what's a mobile kitchen? She said well it's because she worked on movies she's a set decorator and Leslie said well it's like a Winnebago with a kitchen in it. I said oh gosh I said send me an LA Times so I could look in the classified section so you know she sent me FedEx which did exist and I found one in Phoenix Arizona and it was a anyway so they called me back and they said hey you got the job we start I think like was in August and I said well I can't block off my summer if you're not gonna give me a deposit because I needed the money to buy the mobile kitchen. Yeah you got to put a you said a third of it down right? Yeah so I said how they said how much you need I said $10,000 and they said I thought they're gonna laugh me out of

04:05the room that seemed like a lot of money to me and they said no problem wrote me a check I got I got on an airplane got off the airplane I can say this Morales but a little Mexican guy meets me and and he leads me over to this taco truck it's Ricky Ricardo's Chili Express and I'm saying oh my god I bought a taco truck I had about three and a half days to get back to Nashville driving the thing to figure out what I was gonna tell my wife that we just spent our life savings on mobile kitchen and so anyway we got Lowe's exterior white paint and painted over the Mexican and the name and then I had a little guy I can't remember his first name maybe Frank's I want to say Frank Stallworth but he was 16 years old he's an artist I said hey you got to come up with a hip looking cat because we're you know we've got to paint this we're gonna start next week the movie so he came up with my logo in about 25 minutes and and it's funny because as our as our reputation grew our logo was the t-shirt was the most wanted thing everybody wanted a Tomcat t-shirt I can remember Billy Crystal coming up to me humbly on city slickers saying can you give me like three or four more your t-shirts so it was always a fun thing but you know we started with a little movie and funny story about the mobile kitchen is I had read the Fred Smith story with about FedEx yeah without him without an airplane plane he had a he had software that he used at Eastern Airlines to deliver packages and and so he rented an airplane actually and use that to convince people he filmed a TV commercial a 32nd commercial and use that to film the commercial convince yeah convince people that he had a fleet of airplanes so I put mobile kitchen number three on my truck to convince people that I had three trucks which eventually I did have but that little

06:10but that's that's brilliant though well that little movie led to another little movie which led to another little movie which led to Prince of Tides which led to League of Their Own which led to Groundhog Day which led to what about you know it was just one little movie and the producers move around so the relationship we built was like you know it fractured out I mean one you might have three producers and they'd all go do three different movies so it was it was quite the time and I mean three thousand movies later we just finished one in Budapest we did Terminator last year in Madrid Spain and Budapest and we just finished a Netflix movie right before COVID hit so and we were supposed to be the Peter Jackson movie that's coming up but that's on hold too so I don't know how that that world is gonna reemerge either I love that story and I love the aspect if you were talking about running kitchens on movie sets as you've said is the NFL of working in kitchens food service there's no doubt your kitchen moves every day sometimes twice a day I'm I cooped a bill which was one of our first big movies and and it moved two and three times a day I learned never to take a movie that had a car for a name and because it was it was like oh my god they'd get a scene and then we'd move 40 miles down the road and set up again and if anybody's been around the kitchen set up it's you know with what we do we're the maitre d we're the dishwasher we're the cook we're we're the you know we have to be well read we have to know if a star comes up I can remember Jodie Foster coming up and asking me one day have you read this book and I said oh yeah actually I have and she was blown away you know and then we started talking about it and and it was that's how you you know it is in a

08:11fellow food service you have to be well read you have to know all the culinary buzzwords and you have to know every aspect of how a kitchen runs plus you have to be a mechanic because you're you're dealing with heavy equipment so there's just a lot more going into it when you wake up in the morning you know where your restaurant is you're you know you're three-quarters ahead of the game well I think that it's in the innovation that you had to create I mean you've talked about the aspect of how fast you were able to put production in and how you were innovative based upon being an entrepreneur and the fact that you just did what you thought you had to do and you started putting food out so fast that the producers were going hey wait this guy's saving us a ton of money and it's now kind of just the way that you operated has now kind of become the industry standard well we we innovated through ignorance really we we did not know how it was done so we tried to do it the right way and I was three years into it and a league of their own and Bobby Greenhut and Joe Hartwick who's Joe is still ahead of Fox the film division he's about to retire but they came up to me and said you're feeding everybody in 15 minutes and I thought I was in trouble I said am I in trouble no but what was happening we had 1,500 people and so every time we got 150 people we'd set up another two-sided buffet and they were identical the food on both buffets were the same so on a league of their own we would have ten identical buffets set up and and they would you know come through and boom but I didn't realize in setting it up that way that the way the union works is the last person to get their food is when their 30-minute break start so if you take an hour and a half to feed people the last then they start their 30-minute break so it's a two-hour break well they explained to me that the league of their own was costing $15,000 an hour to film so when I was giving them back well over an hour a day then they were

10:17saving that $15,000 in production time which basically meant their lunch was free so they like that yeah they like that now not every producer appreciates it but now every every caterer in the business is doing the Tomcats way I feel like I could be Paul Harvey right now and say and now you know the rest of the story I just love that story it's so good he put the number three on the side of the truck yes our next segment is going to be for miss Sylvia Ganyer and she is she is the chief farmer over at Green Door Gourmet over in West Nashville if you haven't checked it out you should definitely do it but one of the things that we were we're kind of having a casual conversation and we talked about farmers markets and one of the things I was really fascinated by was her explaining exactly what a farmers market does for a farmer and how we can best support our farmers this was an incredibly incredibly eye-opening aspect of this interview so this interview is from May the 18th 2020 enjoy right we wanted to be a central aggregator and you were talking about the importance of going to farmers markets yes farmers markets are amazing for the consumer and this is this is a different way to look at this farmers markets came about because farmers needed a place to quote sell their items in a simpler time now every street wants their own farmers market every business wants a farmer to come and set up and create a farmers market if all we did was spend our time going to a farmers market we'd never have time to farm so more farmers markets is not necessarily in my opinion the modern way to promote agriculture the

12:20best way to promote modern agriculture is to allow the farmers to farm I know very few farmers except for me because I'm crazy that would want to sit there and talk about how to cook a rutabaga and how do you grow it and why it's important to know that this is the heirloom strain of rutabaga that we grow most of the farmers are like I need you to buy your stuff and move on I got somebody else I need to take care of because they're just there to sell their wares and then be able to get back to their farm and farm it takes approximately 24 hours to get ready and to do a farmers market so if you think about the farmer gets up the day before the market he has all of his regular chores to do and then he has to go out and harvest for the market he's going to harvest differently for that farmers market it has to be packaged differently look differently the size may have to be different than he would if it was a wholesale or a CSA that sort of thing has to get that prepared ready to go the next morning he has to get up usually 5 530 to load out the truck make sure everything is iced down get everything can't forget one thing if you forget the bags you're in trouble if you forget the iPad to ring people up you're in trouble and then you drive however long it takes you to get to that farmers market you take out the tents you take out the tables you set everything up you take out the produce you see what's been destroyed in transportation you put it all out you stand out in freezing cold or extreme heat most of the time you're gonna lose product from doing that you're gonna have people who come by and they're gonna go and they oh could I get this but could I also get that with it and I need a bag and it comes up to 98 cents and by the time you run the credit card you've paid a 10 cent transaction fee and given them a 7 cent bag and lost

14:21you know three things for people rifling through the barrel you've lost money on the transaction so farmers markets are a very difficult thing for the farmers but they're great for consumers because you get the best of the farm coming to you I don't think he thinks made more sense that was incredible because I mean you go to a bunch of farmers markets I think the perception is you want to go there to support the farmer but going to that farmers farm and purchasing from them there makes a lot more sense to really support the farmer what you're doing for forever dust and noble from noble Springs goat cheese which is so delicious with our strawberries and our baby greens that we grow those partners make sense to us I don't need Dustin to come out here and see if he can sell you know $50 worth of cheese I need him to be on this farm milking his goats feeding those goats taking care of the new kids that were just born and that's where I think our system has to go I think our downtown farmers market has made great strides in trying to make things truly more local and I commend them for doing that Tasha's doing a really nice job down there on that but I think having aggregators that you can come to a farm setting makes a lot more sense than a tent village on every street all across town to me I think we need to make sure that we have some centralized places that's convenient for people to get to how amazing was that we don't need one every street we need farm aggregators to help out the farmers farmers need to farm farmers don't need you to pick through their bushel and give you samples to do the whole thing I was so opening for me listen to the rest of that interview go that was the most

16:23that's the number three most notes yes number three most listen to episode that we have made on Nashville restaurant radio with Sylvia Ganyer that whole episode was just unbelievable go back and listen to it from May the 18th next interview is with Andy little in Andy little is the executive chef and partner over at Josephine and we did this interview on April the 21st and this is the most referenced section of any interview I think that I do in the rest of my interviews when I talk to a chef because this is him talking about creating game tape and filming his line during a shift to see perspective as well as a way for him to save time and go back in and watch the film but it's just so innovative it's one of those things that I was so absolutely blown away by Andy little in his entire interview just the way that he approaches things you could tell that he is a true pro and he's one of the guys in town who's a mentor to so many people and he's just a leader he's a good guy and absolutely respect the living heck out of him I hope that you enjoy this clip of him talking about game tape I love that I did a podcast yesterday where I said stay hungry right now in these times it's okay to take some time to do everything to do but stay hungry constantly be looking for the next thing don't get satisfied with where you're at constantly try to get better learn take something that you can learn out of everything that you do and I love that even in that same blog I saw you posted a video of your line for five minutes on a Wednesday night or something it was just a video of your line and I love the idea of hey football players watch game tape all the time why can't I just put a video this is my line for five minutes what things can I see there that we could get better at I just love that mentality that you would

18:25do something input out there for the public yeah we actually call it game tape so I'm glad that wasn't lost on you and that you know there are times where if you come into the restaurant you may see me up on a ladder filming I'm not sure what you know what angle that particular video was but I will stand up on a ladder so I can look down and be taking video down on the line as they're working because there's some you know it's amazing what happens to life when you change your perspective and in kitchens especially it's the same four walls it's the same floor equipment but when you stand on top of a piece of equipment and look down or when you get on to a ladder and look across and you see things a little differently you're gonna see different things and you're gonna see more and you know I started doing that those videos one for my own you know I wanted to look at them just like a coach would look at game tape and say okay well what you know we have an open kitchen what are people seeing if they're coming to the pass and then that evolved into what I'm you know what can I see that I can help each individual with four people on the front line and we have one chef in the back so you know so how does that I just for people that are listening that aren't chefs that kind of our guests that come in kind of go through a little bit about what each one of these stations does while you're describing this I'm sorry go ahead so as you look down the four chefs that are in the front of our line starts farthest away from where most people would be able to see on the garbage a station which is a cold salad appetizers half of they share a fryer the next station down is what we consider hot first course so that is pastas and hot appetizers then the next station is the fish and roast station and the final station is the meat

20:29station which is on a 100% wood-fired grill the chef in the back is responsible for the cheese and also all of the desserts throughout dinner service and also doing bulk prep managing stocks doing a lot of the bulk prep during dinner service so as I'm videoing them you know if I can get behind the line and I can work with one chef on a specific technique or something that's going to make them more efficient I'm only really able to work with 20% of the team at one time if I can take a video and then go back and watch the video again there may be something that I find that is applicable to the entire team and so that's going to make every one of them better it was just a way for initially for me to be more efficient with my time and then what it turned into was the chef themselves actually really enjoyed being able to go back and look at it even to the point we never did this but we had considered installing a GoPro and just turning it on every service so that we would have a library of things to go back and look at and then you know the other thing too is when you're dealing with the minutia of let's try and do this one little thing better and then tomorrow we're going to do another little thing better it's fun to look back at last month's video and say and look how far I've come because the the reality of all of what we're talking about here is no one who is just going and punching a clock cares about any of this it is something that you have to be passionate about the progress of your career to care about a crazy chef who's up on a ladder filming you're going to go through an eight hour day and then when that eight hour day is over you're going to take the time to go

22:32back and watch a video of yourself with other people or a chef who is being very critical of what you're doing I mean think about the the mentality is that requires that's pretty special stuff you know that is top-level athlete kind of stuff reopening your restaurant comes with great responsibility are you doing everything you can to keep your staff and guests safe with trust 20 certification you and your guests can feel confident you're doing everything you can to keep everyone safe trust 20 is home to the new standard of restaurant safety and consumer comfort by becoming a trust 20 certified restaurant diners will know the practices you follow to create a safe and healthy environment have confidence you're going above and beyond minimal requirements have comfort knowing your practices have been independently verified to learn more visit trust 20.co that's trust the number 20.co trust 20 restaurants have access to a suite of resources that include expert-led training in four key areas individual consultants communication material and signage when you visit trust 20.co and tell them you heard about them on Nashville restaurant radio trust 20 partnering with you to keep everyone safe and that my friends is next level passion that is the kind of thing that I am drawn to that is the kind of thing that I wanted to start this podcast for was to get people talking like that I wanted everybody out there to know that there are chefs that do game tape and like damn I don't know I just blown away I love the passion I love everything is doing and if you are out there and you have not eaten at Josephine you should go do that he's got these cheese steaks right now that are just off the chart our next and final segment of the day is from chef Alex blue the owner and chef of Dallas and Jane in Murfreesboro this was such a cool episode for me because I'd met Alex a long time ago but I never really got to know him really well until we did this

24:36interview and since then we talk on the phone on a pretty regular basis we follow each other's Apple watches for our activity rings and we just did a chef collaboration dinner this past Sunday night together and it was really neat like he's just a great great guy and couldn't be more excited to have that from April 8 through this podcast during a pandemic which is just crazy so in this episode in this segment he talks about he did a Facebook post where he got really vulnerable and he talked about what was going on with his restaurant and what was gonna happen if he didn't have more guests come in and it was just a really powerful moment for me because it wasn't COVID this was pre COVID and it just outlines that local businesses need our help not just during a pandemic or during COVID but all the time and it's not just restaurants it's all local businesses people that take the risk and put up shop to open a local business in your backyard if you have a choice make sure that you are choosing them on a regular basis so we can support these people who are we're making our communities better on a regular basis so enjoy this final segment with my friend Alex blue you put a video out on Facebook a couple months ago and you basically said hey this is hard we need your help time but tell me about that video you know from August of last year until January of this year our sales for some reason and I don't know why just they just tanked and they dropped by 40% out of nowhere for no reason I mean we are the number one you know as much as you can take Yelp we are the number one rated rated restaurant on Yelp in Rutherford County we won best restaurant in Rutherford County by the local awards we got nominated eater called us the number one restaurant in

26:42Murfreesboro we've got great reviews five stars on Rezzi all across the board and it just just vanished sales just gone flatline we would be it'd be 645 on a Thursday night and there'd be no tables in the restaurant I mean we went from doing $80,000 a month in sales to 35 Wow 40 we would have nights where we were doing 700 $800 in sales and I was throwing every idea I could at the wall to make something happen that we we have happy hour every night we have free house-made snacks at the bar we do we were doing a date night special two nights a week where you got any two entrees and two glasses of wine for $50 I mean that's super cheap we were doing kids meals we were doing we tried to we tried to change our menu to make it a little bit more accessible we changed the wording of things we added a pizza we we did all these things and our social media following is great we have about 15,000 people that follow us on Facebook I think we have like eight nine thousand likes and eight thousand followers our Instagram gets pretty good traction but none of that social media traction actually turned into people in the seats and the perfect and the perception was that we were doing great that we were killing it and people thought we were killing it but we weren't I mean we were we were drowning I've we had to refinance our house I had to sell my car I mean we've done all that we could to make it work and the question I asked myself was how long do you work a hundred hours a week without paying yourself to make something work and I just couldn't do it anymore and you know we went we went through Christmas and sales were down and we opened we opened back after a little four-day break with our winter menu in January and I posted the picture of the winter menu and it went it got like 150

28:45shares and a bunch of likes a bunch of comments and everybody was like oh my god that looks so great can't wait to try it so the Tuesday we opened we had 18 people come eat here wow and then the Wednesday we opened we had 16 people come eat here and then Thursday we opened and we had 17 people eat here and after 6 45 there wasn't a guest in the building and I was sitting at one of our tables looking in this empty dining room servers have been cut kitchen staff have been cut and about five minutes later my CPA emailed me five emails back to back to back to back to back sales and use tax for December is due liquor by the drink tax is due business tax is due and then payroll tax is due and then payroll was coming out tomorrow and I added it all up and it was about $27,000 and we had $32,000 in the bank and I I just broke I broke I didn't know what to do and I had seen all this hard work and I you know my dream and my family and my staff you know I've got 20 people that work here that I'm worried about how are they going to make their money how are they going to get paid they've got kids they've got families and I just kind of snapped and I decided to post the video where I was very honest about what we were going through and our hardships and I said basically unless something drastic changes we're going to have to close by the end of February because we don't have the funds to keep going so I mean you put that video out there and that's that's just a I mean I don't know if you can get more of a stark reality you know I mean I think people hear about restaurants opening too much fanfare and they're all excited and they like to like pictures like you said but just what you just mentioned was so raw and real and I don't think people recognize like how much just them coming out to eat dinner just a date night how much that means to the local independent restaurateur spending time eating from

30:47eating food from you that comes from local farms and like I said is unbelievable it's better for you but then you drive by like a longhorn steakhouse and it's packed killing it and I mean that that's a they're on a two-hour wait on a Wednesday at 6 45 and you're like my food is amazing I'm like two minutes down the street come on yeah and I you know we've heard the location argument before and I get that I didn't think it would matter as much as it has because of the type of food that we were offering but apparently it did and but I posted that video to our Facebook page not expecting I was just trying to reach our followers the people that support us and follow us I was just trying to let them know because I would I dare say 100% of the time restaurants close they do not let you know they're closing they just shut their doors I mean your employees show up for work and the door has a padlock on it because there's a number of things that go wrong when you tell people that you're closing staff start stealing they start quitting because they know that the end is near so they start trying to protect themselves which is completely normal but restaurants by and large they don't let people know when they're closing they just shut their doors and I we have relationships with the people that eat here and I didn't want to just shut the doors on them I wanted I wanted to let them know this is what might be happening and what happened after that was just insane I mean the that video reached 76 000 people wow it went it went crazy it was shared over a thousand times it was written about in the local paper it was it was being shared by people in Las Vegas there was a gym in North Carolina that shared it and for business

32:49I think I spoke for most all small business owners and there was definitely some hate I got some people that were calling me whining and you know saying I was pandering to Facebook and that I was you know blah blah whatever they were saying it's fine you know I this is my my dream my business and I'm gonna go down swinging for it it's what I believe in so I'm gonna go down fighting and that's exactly what I did I could not have been prepared for what happened that weekend we had 35 reservations for that entire weekend and that's the number of guests we had booked for Friday and Saturday Friday night we did 165 people I mean we were running and we're a 50-seat restaurant so that's three solid turns here and we ran out of food and the next day prep was insane because we pretty much had to prep the entire menu it was wild wow that's that's that's amazing what a what a way for the community to kind of just show up and what did that do how did that make you feel inside because when you pour your heart out like that and you're that vulnerable when you just when you put out there what you're feeling what's on your heart and you know the very real reality is you go into that weekend and 35 people show up and you got to just go okay um I guess they didn't listen but when it gets that many shares and that many people watch it and then you have that kind of a response what does that do for you what does that do when you go home do you just like break down I mean I was just in all of what happened I could not I just could not believe what I was seeing I mean I was standing in the dining room taking pictures of the dining room there were so everybody there were so many people in here I mean was standing room only people were outside waiting to get in it was a it was a surreal experience that those are the moments that you that you love it's it wasn't about the sales of the night it was about there were there were 55 people in here eating at the same time

34:52nobody was on their phones there was laughter and it was it was just a great moment it was great all right there we go best of volume two thank you for listening and we will be back next week with all new interviews I will do one more of these best of episodes before then probably on Thursday it will come out and we will announce who we will be interviewing next week remember we have an all new live episode of the roundup it'll be this Thursday at 3 30 on Facebook and every three every Thursday 3 30 on Facebook and YouTube you can listen to it live and of course it'll be out for your drive into work Friday and all weekend long Friday morning on Nashville restaurant radio thank you guys for listening and as always we hope that you are staying safe out there love you guys bye