TN Flavors feat Marcio Florez and Nick Dillard

00:00Sharpies 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 sharpies.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 Sharpies Bakery. We are supported by Robins Insurance, a local insurance agency providing customized insurance policies, sound guidance, and attentive service. Robins Insurance is the go-to agency for hospitality professionals in Nashville. Listen, Robins knows how hard industry professionals work every single day. They also know how devastating accidents can be.

01:03Be it a grease fire that damages the kitchen, a severe storm that cuts off power, or a customer slip and fall incident. Both the extensive experience and the savvy to create a policy that protects your business from accidents like those, you can rest easy knowing that the work you've put in will not be for nothing. Visit Robins' website at RobinsINS.com to request a consultation or call Matthew Clements directly. His number is 863-409-9372. Protection you can trust. That's Robins. 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 I am your host.

02:07We are powered by Gordon Food Service and I'm so excited for today's episode. This is what is known as a bonus episode because we are talking about Tennessee Flavors. Tennessee Flavors is the annual benefit for the Nashville State Community College, the Randy Rayburn School of Culinary Arts. This will be the first year that they have had Tennessee Flavors post Randy passing away. So I know that this is a big one. This is an emotional one for a lot of people. And I'm excited today to bring in a couple of alumni from Nashville State. We have Nick Dillard. And Nick, you are with PFG in Lebanon. What do you do there? I'm an area manager, food sales. Area manager in food sales. Love it. And you are an alum of Nashville State. When did you graduate? I graduated 2017. 2017. I like it. Move that up a little bit right there. We're also joined with Marcio Flores.

03:09And Marcio is the owner of Limo Peruvian Eatery. That's right. I was gonna say Peruvian cuisine, but it's Limo Peruvian Eatery in East Nashville, right off of Fatherland. How are you doing today, man? Very well, thank you. I'm honored and thankful for being here. So thank you so much. So you are going to be at Tennessee Flavors. When you were at school there, what did this event mean to you? It meant a lot. It's such a wonderful event just because if you are starting to go to school you have struggles. It's financial aid and all of that stuff. So this helps a lot of students to go to school and graduate. So it's an amazing event. I love it. So same for you, Nick. You'll be at the event. What are you excited about? What did this mean to you? I'll be excited about the ability to be able to give back to the students.

04:12That's the biggest part for me is the student interaction. They get to really act as restaurateurs and help out with other restaurants like Limo Peruvian Eatery. They get to act as real chefs and real culinary. And so that's a big thing for me. So when you talk about the actual event itself, what is exciting for the students, you have, let's walk through what this event is. You go in, it's at the Nashville State campus, which is in the Old Hickory Hollow Mall. So you're going out, Old Hickory Boulevard, all the way to Antioch and it's in the Hickory Hollow Mall. And you walk in, there's a long hallway and then there's this big area right by where the students cook and everything and they have a bunch of tables set up. It's a tasting event. So there's gonna be multiple restaurants there tasting. What do the students do during the actual event? Well, they help us all the time. They are there for us if we need any kind of like a help, providing our cuisine or like our food. And what they do at the school is such an amazing program as well.

05:15Since I've been there back in 2014. So you graduated 14. Yeah, 2014. So you were just a rookie walking in the door when he was graduating. Absolutely. Yeah, I would say you have one of the greatest mentors right there and it's one of the best culinary classes here in Nashville. Who's the chef there, Paul Brennan? Paul Brennan and back in the day, I have Mary Lou Tate. She's an amazing. Legend. I had the opportunity to participate to the almost famous chef competition back then. We did the regional in Texas. Really? The national in Napa Valley, California. Oh, wow. And because of them, trusting my skills and all the support and help, we were able to get first place in that competition. Wow. Get that going on there. Our audience is very excited about that.

06:16That's awesome. I just want people to know that Nashville State in this culinary program is amazing. This is the best chance for you to go to school. So if you go to Nashville State, and I have this conversation around culinary school a lot, like do you have to go to culinary school to make it in the industry, right? And it varies. Some people say yes, some people say no. Tell me what you learned at Nashville State that has helped you own your own restaurant. Well, the basics, be organized, all the missing plus. A lot of international cuisine that I didn't know. I'm from Peru, and I know my cuisine, I know American cuisine, but then you have like many other different dishes as well. And they build the trust and some other culinary fundamentals as well. Knife skills, mother sauces, all of the things that you're gonna need, which you can theoretically learn, but you've gotta have a chef who's a teacher who wants to teach you that stuff.

07:16Yes, totally. I would say half of your experience will go to work, like work in restaurants. It's very important for you to do that, but also have the fundamentals. Like you said, knife skills, and all the fundamental basic information that you get from a college. I will tell you as somebody who hires people all the time, I'm the one who interviews executive chefs and sous chefs at our restaurants. And when somebody says that they're a culinary graduate, I know immediately that there's a level of professionalism that they take it seriously. You know what I mean? I think that one of the most important things to me when I hire somebody is knowing that they care. I mean, really, if they say, if I can tell that they care about what they're doing and that they're curious and they wanna keep learning, the fact that they went to culinary school to learn those things shows me immediately, wow, this isn't just some side job that you don't really care about. This is what you wanna do for a career. And I typically wanna hire those people more. It's almost importantly, the most basic thing that you could have is just to care about what you do and how you do it, in my opinion.

08:18Yeah. Well, Nicholas, let's move over to you. How long have you been at PFG? Just right now, six months. I was most recently at Pilato Restaurant as a chef on opening team there. So that's my most recent experience, but I got married a couple months ago and my wife is also in the hospitality industry. So we needed a change and this looked like the best change for us in the current moment. That's so fun. That's exactly why I got married and then I left being in the restaurant to go do something where I wasn't, where she got to see me. Absolutely. What does your wife do in the hospitality space? She's a director of people operations. Director of people operations. Is that like a unique way of saying HR? HR. Okay, she's in HR. Yeah, absolutely. Very nice. So what can you take from your culinary experience at Nashville State and at Pilato? How do you apply that at PFG? Basically I have, so I have a multifaceted view of the industry as a whole in Nashville. I'm also born and raised at a Lebanon, Tennessee. So I'm one of the unicorns of the area. It's hard to believe, but yeah. My wife is too. She's from Lebanon. That's awesome. Wow. Right off of 109. It's a thing, yeah.

09:18South Hartman Drive is where they used to live. Right off South Hartman Drive. That's a place, right? Yep, yep. The Hartman Leather Store, I think, was right there. They built and manufactured leather suitcases and leatherwares. That's no longer there. My mom worked there. That's so cool. Yeah, that's a small world here. So moving into what you're doing now, how did your experience at Nashville State help you? So even going from culinary one, where every day, every single class, the first thing you do is break down a chicken from whole. So you cut down on all the pieces of chicken. And as all chefs like Marcia knows, there's a billion different ways to process a chicken, but there's the one way that you learn in class and you can build from that. You can use that in any facet in life. You can start out with your chicken and learn how to do, let's say, a chicken breast or an airline chicken or chicken thighs boned in, boned out. What is an airline chicken? You leave a little part of the wing. It's just like a- Just for a fancy show. Yeah. Okay, so an airline chicken is just where they leave a little part of the wing? Yeah, it looks nicer in the plate. Doesn't it come from United or something?

10:20Why do they call it an airline chicken? That's a good question. I've always taken it as the bones sticking out as a landing strip. You can imagine it as the airlines. That's what I've always imagined it as. I don't really know. I like that. It's like, you know what? I'm gonna make this airline thing make sense. We're gonna call this a landing strip chicken. That's beautiful. So basically, the fundamentals you're learning there, you're able to apply. When you walk into a restaurant, do you ever see people, can you tell if somebody went to culinary school or not? I believe so, absolutely. You can see they're just there, like we said before, the care and the fact that they know what they're doing. You can start out by seeing just how they hold a knife. You can see that they know how they handle themselves in the kitchen, especially like it goes for leadership too. You get paired a lot in culinary classes with people who you never would be able to get the chance to be paired with. That's another thing about national state. It's very diverse in the fact that you get people who have zero experience. I went in as a person who was already familiar with kitchen, so I was kinda on the upper scale. And it was unique because I got paired with people who didn't have a ton of skills.

11:21And in life, you get paired with people all the time that don't have the same amount of skills or skill set as you have to be able to work together and make work seamless. I like that. You know, I've never thought about that aspect before. I got into an argument with one of my professors before because one class I always got paired with someone who wasn't the greatest. And I went to his office and followed him. I was like, hey, chef, my grade was affected because he just sat over there, didn't do anything. And I did the majority of the work. And he's like, Nick, let me tell you something. You're gonna be paired with people like that your entire life, so you might as well get used to it. Wow. It's the same in restaurants, you know? Yeah. And that actually helps you a lot, you know? Teach them and also provide some information that you already know. That was probably my favorite part about the show, The Bear. Did you guys watch The Bear? Somehow, yeah. I watched a couple episodes going back to Peru, but I stopped right there, but it's an amazing series. Very much an amazing series, but it's traumatic for me. I don't know about you, Marcio, but it's very like, what's it called, triggering to me.

12:22I didn't wanna come home from work and then watch the same show that I was just involved in. It's kinda like going back to the scene of the crime. It's very hard for me to watch. You know, from a leadership standpoint, I liked watching a guy come in who was a classically trained chef who had very high standards walk into a place that did not have high standards. And it was a real fat, we just get the job done. And then challenging people who had no idea inside of them that they had that ability and taking people who just didn't care about a job and gave them the ability to believe in themselves and watch them rise up to being sous chefs and being people who found their creativity and grew. And I've seen that a thousand times in restaurants. I've seen that when you start believing in somebody who nobody's ever believed in, their potential starts just blossoming. And I loved watching that aspect. I think that's what we're talking about a little bit. There's gonna be people in every restaurant that I don't really give a shit, man.

13:25This isn't a big deal. But when they can see your character and they see how much you care and what you believe in and you start believing in them and you challenge them, all of a sudden you start to see them kinda open up. It's contagious, absolutely it is. Once you start giving, I have one of my chef mentors actually says, you can be a piece of crap at home. You can do whatever in your lifestyle. But when you come here, you're my cook and you're gonna be the best that you possibly can be because you can be that here and I believe in you and you will be. And that is right. For me, in my experience, opening first my food truck because I have food truck before the restaurant, for the past seven years, it was a challenge. And all of these little things that I learned in Nashville State or different restaurants, you have to put it in place right there. And you start from zero and you have to keep going and learn the long way. We opened up a Limo Peruvian eatery about a year ago and it was, like I said, it's a learning experience from the beginning until right now, it's been a year.

14:25So- Wow, opening a restaurant from scratch is a whole different beast than just being a chef in a restaurant, yeah. It's a different thing, completely. What's the biggest challenge that you face? Well, payroll, you have taxes, you have all of that and you have to be a manager. You have to be there for your employee's problems sometimes. HR manager, director, everything. Is that only- Because I don't think a lot of people that work in restaurants or work in other jobs, there's a department for that. Well, we'll just go to HR, go to sales, go to marketing, go to whatever. And this is the thing that people don't realize. Marcio, you are the HR department, you are the marketing department, you are the sales department and you're the production team. And so you wear a lot of hats every day. How many hours a week are you working? It depends, it can be 80, it can be 90, somewhere like that. And besides doing all this paperwork, which my wife helps a lot too, but you know.

15:26Well, yeah, I mean, you can't do it all yourself. But I mean, for the most part though, somebody breaks their arm and you're like, oh shit, what do I do? And then you gotta figure out how to get them to the hospital and do all the things and it's a lot. It is a lot. Every day is a learning experience and you kind of learn trial by fire. When stuff happens, you go, oh, I need to put a policy around this. That happens fairly often. I could cut this finger the night before while you're on the AM side of it. Then you come in on the AM side the next day and he calls you from his car, hey, chef, my finger, look at it and film. He's FaceTiming me with his finger wide open. I'm like, why didn't you say something last night? You should have told somebody, right? Oh, I thought it was okay, I wrapped it up. I was in the fire of everything. It was a Friday night, it's busy. I'm like, you gotta say something, that's important. Right then or right there. Big deal. Big, big deal, yeah. So Tennessee Flavors is happening this coming Tuesday, March 11th, it's gonna be in Antioch at the Nashville State Community Campus. Tickets are available right now and we are gonna give away four tickets to the event from this podcast.

16:33Awesome, that's amazing. Pretty exciting stuff. So what I'm telling you to do right now if you are a listener is go to our Instagram page and you'll see a post with a picture of us three smiling in the studio here. And from that post, I need you to like the post. I want you to follow Nashville State. I want you to follow Nashville Restaurant Radio. And then I want you to tag a restaurant who you would love to see at Tennessee Flavors. Or tag, I'll change that. Tag your favorite restaurant who's going to be at Tennessee Flavors and I'll try and list a bunch of those and you can tag one who you're excited to see. And we're gonna give away those tickets on Friday. So four tickets, we're giving two sets of two tickets to the event. Now, if you weren't lucky enough to win tickets, I really want you to purchase tickets to come here. And let me tell you why it's important to purchase tickets. You are supporting a culinary program that brings people like these two fine gentlemen in front of me. And if you're wondering, well, hey, where do the funds go?

17:36I wanna tell you, the funds are raised to go directly to the students through the Beyond Financial Aid programs. These programs provide critical support, including childcare and transportation assistance, groceries, housing assistance, and emergency aid, all designed to remove barriers so students can stay on track to graduate. Let me tell you what this means, folks. These are students that, these are people that wanna develop themselves and get better in this industry so they can go and cook food and have a career. By you coming to this event, by paying for tickets to come to this event, you are helping with financial assistance for those students. So every time you go to a restaurant, it takes you 30 minutes to get your food and you go, what the hell's going on here? Where's my food? You're helping people get into this industry so you can get your food faster, right? And hopefully better quality. Exactly. And better quality. Every time you go somewhere, this isn't made correctly. Do they not know their knife skills? What's going on here? This is an amazing opportunity for people who maybe need childcare, who need financial assistance to get the career training, to get into restaurants.

18:45And I love that they are doing this, and I would love to see you there. I will be at the event myself. I'm gonna have a lot of the stuff you see here in the studio set up on a table, and we're gonna be doing interviews like this, live, the whole night. We're just gonna be talking to chefs, talking to people who are there, who are alumni, if you're listening to this and you want to be featured on Nashville Restaurant Radio, buy a ticket and come up and say, hey, Brandon, I'd love to be on the show. That's what you gotta say. You gotta welcome and say, hey, Brandon, I'd love to be on the show. And I'll tell you to sit down and let's do it. And we're gonna sit down and talk about your experience and we'll learn why you are excited about supporting Nashville State. All right, so there's more of a little bit of a promo for this thing. I wanna talk a little bit about you, Marcio. Going from a food truck, why did you decide to do a food truck initially? Well, let's start back in 2016 where I left Nashville State and I went to work for one of my other mentors that I consider one of the greatest chefs here in Nashville, Deppacat.

19:53Oh man, yeah. I love her. She was there last year. I'm sure she'll be there this year. For sure, yeah. She's so quiet and doesn't, I'm just kidding. No, no, she's a wonderful person and a chef and her knowledge about the culinary and everything is amazing. So I went and worked with her in different restaurants, but I decided to open up a food truck back then because I wanted to do something for my own. And I went all the way to Florida and buy one of these little trailers, a 14 foot trailer, and transform it to a little Peruvian restaurant. Also, I wanted to promote my culture, my cuisine to Nashville. Sure, no, I love that. It was no other Peruvian restaurants at the time, so that was my first step right here in Nashville.

20:53What's the Peruvian delicacy? If I go eat there, what do I have to have? What's the thing? I wanna know what eating in Peru is like. What is it? It's a multicultural experience. You have Japanese on the ceviches, Chinese food. We have Italian, Spanish, African influence in Peru. So you got a little bit of everything. In my restaurant, you can see that as well. We have like stir fries, we have noodles, we have pesto dishes and stuff like that. But growing up as a kid, like if your parents are cooking you dinner and it's traditional Peruvian food, like if you go to San Juan and you get mafongo, that is the ultimate dish. What is it in Peru? What's the thing that you gotta have? Well, where I was born and raised is next to the coast and the ocean, so ceviche for me is the number one dish in Peru. Okay. So you will eat ceviche in the morning, at night, any time of the day.

21:55It's not a bad snack. No, ceviche is the list. If I'm a listener to this and I'm like ceviche, I don't even know what that is. What is ceviche? Ceviche is made in many different cultures and different countries as well. So in Peru, we have this Japanese influence where we just marinate the fish for five minutes in this leche tira. Leche tira means like the juices of the ceviches got lime juice, it's got chili, celery, onions, fish stock. So it's very flavorful. And you stick raw fish. Raw fish. So you marinate it in these and then the acid from the lemon or the lime kind of cooks it a little bit. It transformed the texture of the fish. And correct, we put it with some tours. In this case, we use sweet potatoes. We have Peruvian corns. It's like a giant corn and corn pops as well. And we just top it up with some raw onions and cilantro. That sounds delicious. Yeah, that's it. And if you've never had ceviche, it's fantastic. Tons of flavor.

22:55What type of fish are you using? We can use tuna, we can use sea bass, we can use flounder, any kind of fish that is available. Where do you buy your fish? We do, we used to do England. We're gonna go, I'm gonna try different companies right now like Evans. Okay, very nice, very nice. So when did you decide, I've outgrown this food truck, I'm gonna get a brick and mortar? Was it a year ago? How long have you been open? No, it's been more than three years trying to find a place naturally, so hard. I mean, you can find it, but. But they're expensive. They're very expensive and some of them are not in the right location that you want it to be. Yeah, it's the thing. I got really lucky because being in the food truck industry, I know this guy who is one of the directors of the Food Truck Association. His name is BJ. BJ Luffbeck, my guy. Yeah, and thanks to him, he referred me to this place right here. It used to be a Vietnamese restaurant in East Nashville and I went there and within five minutes I said, this is the place, I wanna be here, let's do it.

24:03Wow, and so what's the biggest challenge that you have having a brick and mortar that you didn't have in a food truck? Well, it's way more people, way more employees being just like three to four employees in a food truck. You can't move it, obviously. In front of the house, it's a whole new challenge. The bar, all the permits, building, all of that is just a whole new challenge, which you just learn, but when you're- Running water is nice, though. Yes, when you're starting, you're in the budget, too, as well. You have to move fast and I wish it was more information brought up to me at first, but we made it work. I love that, I love that. There's no guide, per se, for opening a restaurant, brick and mortar. There's nothing that says you have to do this, this, and this to get open. You just have to figure it out on your own. That's right. So thank you for that. That's good information. I just like to share some of this stuff. I'm gonna move over to you, Nick. Going from being in a restaurant, I was a district sales manager for US Foods for several years and every time I'm in a restaurant, people go, hey man, are you guys hiring?

25:14You guys hiring? You guys hiring? And like 90% of the time I would hire somebody out of a kitchen to be a sales rep. They're like, dude, I'm not doing this. Like they would not make it because you have to go, it's a hunter's job. I mean, you gotta go stalk your prey, sit outside, wait, hunt it, shoot it, kill it, bring it home, dress it, serve it. Like it's a lot involved being in sales and I think a lot of chefs and people see sales reps walk in and go, man, I wanna shake hands and kiss babies, too. That job looks easy. What's the thing that you've recognized moving from the kitchen into a sales job wearing a sports coat? Tell me your biggest challenges. My biggest challenge right now is, I'm starting out new so I have the experience as a chef but it's one thing for a sales rep to come into a kitchen and say, hey, I used to be a chef, I was here, here, here, but how are you gonna help that place succeed? That's my biggest goal right now is helping you succeed. I wanna be that trusted partner for you to be able to make you, hit your food cost 21%, hit your labor at 16%.

26:15I want to be that guy for you. I wanna help you with your invoicing and your payments and your just inventories, everything, I wanna be there for you and make you succeed because if you don't succeed at the end of the day as a restaurateur, then I don't succeed as a salesperson because you're not gonna last, especially in this Nashville market. It's very challenging, it's very rough. Restaurants are opening, closing left and right every day. We see that times a million happening over here but just like that is very difficult to succeed in this industry. It really is and I think that you just touched on something that I think is really important and a lot of people, there's a lot of mistrust right now with vendors of all types. Well, I mean, eggs is a good example, but I mean, yeah, I mean, vendors are gonna take advantage in tight markets and that's a tough thing to deal with. But you just said like you're here to help people succeed and I think that so many restaurateurs don't realize that reps, they see them as bloodthirsty. I just, I wanna make as much money off you as possible and there are a lot of people out there who I think that's the best part about hiring someone from a kitchen because they wanna help.

27:25I mean, I use my broad line vendor as another manager almost like they're a part of my team. I invite them in whenever they want. You have full access to all the restaurants, come in, help dine, whatever it might be. Tell me what you're seeing around town. Is there something I'm not doing correct? Like let me know what's going on and that's something that I don't think a lot of people utilize their team for and that's what you wanna be doing every day. As a sales manager, I wanna be a tool for your tool belt. I don't wanna be just your salesman. I wanna be there for you and be your guy. Yeah, I mean, that's a, and so moving into this role, what were you, are you, do you manage other sales reps? Are you managing restaurant? Like you're a sales rep out managing restaurants. I'm sales manager, I'm just out selling food to restaurants, opening new businesses. My main goal right now, you said a hunter, you have to be a hunter to be a salesperson, but also you gotta be a farmer. You gotta be able to help a business grow. You wanna plant those seeds early on and help them grow to be as tall as you can because without that, there's no roots, there's no stock, there's no growth. Oh, I like that.

28:25You have to be a farmer also. Very good salesman. What does he, do you guys, do you sell him his food? I do not, but I would love to. We were talking a little bit earlier. Oh, look at this. He's like, oh, I got his email, let's go. How do you purchase your food? Do you buy from one broadliner or do you have like multiple? Multiple. Why do you do that? Because of the pricing. But you always wanna have somebody that brings the food for you because of your timing too. So you have to take a lot of things in consideration right there. Because for me, like I wake up every morning, I take my kids to school, I go right away to restaurant depot, you know? And then I- You got an extra time on your hands, huh? And then I- I'm gonna help you after we get done here. I'm gonna help you streamline all of that and we're gonna set you up. For sure. For sure, yeah. We do have different companies that I buy for too, but the thing is that with my cuisine, Peruvian cuisine, I have like different chilies that they come all the way from Florida as well and other places too.

29:26What chilies are you using that are like that? Aji amarillo is a yellow pepper. Aji amarillo? Aji limo, the name of the restaurant, is for ceviches. Okay. Then we have choclo, which is a corn from Peru, a giant corn. Cancha is- Where do you get those? All the way from Atlanta or I have a distributor now- Like GFI? No, no, no, it's a friend of mine. He's from Peru. Oh, okay, so it's like a dude. Yeah, he's got a distributor company right here in Nashville as well. So he brings all of that right here. I love it. That's one thing that I think the national market is doing, especially from being the purchaser for Pilato when I was there, it was, there's a lot of stuff that the chefs, the executive chef came in and wanted, but we didn't have it. He was from LA and Miami, so you would think that Nashville would be kind of close to similar, obviously not the same size, but sourcing shouldn't be that bad. If it's coming from Miami and LA, we should be able to get it, but you'd be surprised at how much specific stuff you can't get just from one person. Well, it's gotta get approved too. Well, I think you just said it. There's not, how many Peruvian restaurants are there in Nashville now?

30:29Well, I believe there's like three Peruvian restaurants right now. Three Peruvian restaurants. So if you're a broad line vendor, there's only so many slots you have. And I mean, if I bring in something and I put it, if I bring it in for you, then you're buying from four different people and you buy sometimes sporadically, then that sits on a shelf, then they got to fire sale it. There's a lot going on there. It makes it more difficult, but so a lot of interesting stuff going on here. Guys, thank you so much for coming in. And I wanna finish the episode off here because this was just a quick impromptu fun promotion for Nashville State's Tennessee Flavors, which is again happening this Tuesday, March 11th. I don't know what time it starts. I don't have all the information. Do you know what time it starts? I think it's at six. Six o'clock. You need to be there and you can go taste a whole bunch of food like Limo Peruvian Eatery. Peruvian Eatery. You can come meet Marcio and I think you'll have a lot of fun. The last thing we do on this show is we do the Gordon Food Service Final Thought.

31:29Sorry, they're our title sponsor and I love them. And so I know that you're with PFT. We are, what I do here at The Final Thing is I give you guys the mic. You guys get to say whatever you want to say to take us out, to surmise, whatever you wanna do. So the final thought gets to go to you guys. If you wanted to make it around Tennessee Flavors, that'd be apropos. But if you don't, then the final thought is up to you. We're gonna start with you, Nick. The biggest thing for me is, especially in this Nashville market, the biggest thing in the unicorn is, as chefs, as restaurateurs, as managers, we have to be able to cultivate more experience, more students, more chefs in this world. We have to start cultivating because right now I think Marcio will agree. There's gonna be a gap of students to chefs. The chefs are aging out in this market especially so we need to start putting our time and effort into young students to be able to bring them back, go into Nashville State and training them properly so that they can become chefs in this future world to open restaurants like Marcio, to be able to have other cultures, other restaurants, other lifestyles involved in Nashville.

32:36We need it to be able to be obviously staff. That's the hardest thing right now for everyone is we gotta start staffing. So the best part is chefs have the ability to mentor students. They need to start getting out there and getting into it, putting back to what has been given to them. That is 100% true because being in the industry for the past seven years, it is a struggle for me to find people to be in the kitchen. And coming from Nashville State, I know they are the most amazing teachers and program that we have in Nashville. And that's what we need right now for sure. I love it, thank you guys. Hey, sit down, sit down, we got this. Thank you guys so much for coming on today. I know it was a trip to get all the way out here to the studio and it's fun to meet both of you and to chat and I look forward to seeing you both. Come back on Tuesday and sit down with me and let's talk about your experience at Nashville at the Tennessee Flavors, which again is on March the 11th at six o'clock.

33:42And if you wanna win free tickets, go to the Instagram page for Nashville Restaurant Radio. And again, what you have to do is you have to follow Nashville Restaurant Radio, you gotta follow Nashville State, you gotta like the post. We like the likes, we gotta build the algorithm here, we gotta get people following us. It's very important for our organic marketing world. And then I want you to tag the restaurant you're most excited about seeing at Tennessee Flavors. And I'm gonna try and tag all the restaurants that are gonna be there. I think you can only tag like 12 people. So I'll go to the website, go to Nashville State's website or Google Tennessee Flavors 2025. Look at the list of restaurants and let me know who you think. So there's a little bit of work to get these free tickets. I'm not just giving them away. And we will pick two sets at random to get two free tickets each. I look forward to seeing you there. Go buy your tickets today. Thank you gentlemen for joining us. It was a pleasure, thank you, Brandon. All right.