Chef Jon Bonnell

Full episode transcript, auto-generated from the audio and lightly formatted (verbatim, not edited).

purple eyes [Music] [Music] we're here with the John Bonnell is it Bonnell or bottle yeah there you go out of Fort Worth Texas born and raised born and raised fourth generation Fort Worth fourth generation what is your so what would that be that'd be great my great grandfather was uh into oil and cattle imagine that as a testament yeah totally cattle so

are y'all still in cattle or we are um I'm part of the Walsh family and they're still in cattle in a little bit but my brother and I have just started our own kind of cattle operation just between the two of us to supply the restaurants we're running akiyushi crossed with Angus generous doing an all-natural uh you know we'll grain feed him

at the end but free choice out in the field we're not sending them to a feed Lots grass-fed grain finished that's it sorry y'all just doing like feeders and stalkers or are y'all actually doing like a cow calf now we're breeding our own we bought 100 akiyushi bulls and we're breeding them to Red Angus Mamas and then we'll rotate the Bulls and

go back one more time for hopefully 75-25 across uh 75 akiyushi is what we're looking for ultimately I want to talk about that later but because I have an interesting uh take on some of that as well um but I wanna I wanna start because we're right before we started you started talking about how you were a school teacher early on before

you even got into being a chef that's right um and that's an interesting because that'll set us up for a little bit later in the conversation to see how you're a leader in a businessman and how you operate in that way so like the transition from being a school teacher to being a chef seems like it was a pretty that's sort of

random wasn't it kind of a sharp turn there wasn't it yeah and if a lot of people don't know I mean you have I and you're gonna have to forgive my ignorance but I don't know a lot about your world I like food and I think I got a pretty good palette but I don't you have a lot of awards you've been

a chef at a lot of impressive places in New York City and you've you I didn't cook in New York I've cooked for at the James Beard house as a guest but uh I didn't I didn't work up there okay so like explain some of these awards that you've gotten oh man we've been doing this 20 years so it always starts with

the fun stuff when the readers of the Fort Worth weekly or they'll start telling when somebody votes you as like best new restaurant or best chef and you know you kind of think man that was that's pretty cool all the people in the city voted your restaurant as their favorite and then best wine list and then it kind of builds up to

State kind of stuff where the Texas Restaurant Association gave us restaurant tour of the year a little ways in then there's some national ones like the uh the wine spectator big magazine as far as far as wine goes that's kind of the most uh most powerful name in The Wine world and they award uh restaurants based on their wine list and wine

program different type of stuff so we're up to a double glass award over there uh it's been awesome I can't tell you how much fun my industry is it is it odd to think back to where you started your school teacher and then where this is gone yeah that was a crazy transition I uh when I was in college I was I

was at the number one education department in the country and I jumped in the education department at Vanderbilt University absolutely loved what I did and I loved teaching but I'm as ADD as possible I'm all over the place all the time and Summers off was killing me I didn't know what to do fresh out of college without a wingman or anybody else

just teaching in Dallas um right out of college I was teaching in Dallas at the Winston school and the hawk a day school okay so you graduated Vanderbilt and came back down here that's right I came back I came back to Dallas first and then also and I just had that you know that hit yourself and they had that V8 moment that

I should I should be doing this the Food Network had just started this V8 moment yeah you know hit yourself in the head I should have had a V8 you know like that was it I was watching the Food Network which was a brand new channel the original essence of emerald and I was watching the all the PBS great chef series and

I just kind of had that moment of wait a second they said culinary school why have I never even thought about culinary school my whole life I mean I've heard of it I knew what it was but it never came up and in our family you go to high school and you go to college you didn't think about vocational schools it wasn't

a popular thing then and I realized all I ever did was cook all I ever did was think about food and try to recreate dishes that all these chefs are doing I was like I've been into this my whole life oh so you were already cooking and doing all that and experimenting on your own but just at home and having fun with

it and at some point when I when I was watching a show then they started talking about a culinary school I just said you know what culinary school would be incredible I want I want to see what this is all about I want to learn more about it we weren't quite in the uh the internet age well we were we were on

AOL dial up at the time what year was that was 95. okay so well it wasn't like that long ago no so I found a book called the guide to culinary schools and just started reading through and it listed every culinary school from the U.S to Europe and all the different stats and how they operate and set up a few interviews and

without telling my family or anybody I just took off and started interviewing a different School how long is culinary school is it like an associate's degree typically most will offer an associate's degree and that's what I was looking for I already had a bachelor's degree most will also offer a bachelor's program but I didn't feel like I needed the academic part I

needed to go learn how to cook commercially the best advice I got was one who said you know you called us Because You Loved cook nobody ever dials my number who doesn't love to cook but have you done it professionally okay because a lot of people come to school and drop right out saying it's not what I thought it's not it's not

a lot of fun it's really hard work and I thought you know that's a great idea I got three months off this summer I need to go get a job and they said go to an independent restaurant ask to speak with a chef tell them you'll work for free if you have to you need experience and then after a few months of

work and if you still love it call us back you're going to be a great candidate but so many people go straight to culinary school within two weeks they're out so they don't really see what all it actually takes yeah the professional side of cooking is very different than cooking at home okay and what would that typically consist of the things that

people just don't see they get a lofty idea about being an executive chef but then the two things that will keep everybody out of this industry are just the hours and the strenuous nature of the work it's very physical you're always going to be cut and burned you're on your feet all day and you work the opposite hours of every civilized person

on the planet so you work with nobody's Place yeah okay I mean they told us first day of school you need to know right now you're giving up all your Friday and Saturday nights and all your holidays for the rest of your life and if you're okay with that let's keep talking yeah but that's just how we do we work nights your

friends will come in on a Friday night at seven o'clock and say hey sit down have a glass of wine with us I'm working exactly yeah man it's the same thing because like we're we got a band and stuff and I'll be out there doing the merch booth and like I'm trying to sell t-shirts and these guys come up at 11 o'clock

the same hangout time no man like I can't unfortunately I can have some drinks when I do it though yeah I can drink while I'm working too but not when I was first working you know yeah but that's a pretty uh Bad Rabbit Hole to go down as well if you end up being the guy that just drinks his way through every

shift uh you start losing people in a hurry yeah I bet the industry swallows a lot of people up drugs alcohol anything that is your Vice you're out at midnight every night so anything that is a weakness it can it can grab you in that swallowing up thing what a what a common thing everybody that does what I do they struggle with

that exact same thing so but you did you say that you worked for free with the three months that I walked before you went to culinary yeah I talked to a chef and I said I'm willing to work for free I mean I was a teacher so I was getting paid year-round even though I wasn't working for a few months and he

said well I can't I can't technically have you work for free I'm gonna put you minimum wage and you're just going to be plating up desserts and making salads so it's not going to be glamorous and I said dude I'm in absolutely I showed up the first day I didn't have the right shoes the right clothes I didn't have anything they're like

where are your knives I'm sorry I did I didn't know I was supposed to bring knives I mean I didn't have a clue what I was doing within a week I was having a blast they're like all right we're gonna have you clean calamari today and nobody in the kitchen wants to clean calamari I was like hey I'll do it show me

show me how this works and no it's not glamorous it's not cool clean and Squid ain't that fun but I'd never done it somebody wants to show me how to clean calamari I got a 10 pound box over here yeah let's do it I want I was just hungry for every single bit of information that they could give me and all the

experience I looked down the line there's a guy on the grill cooking 30 pieces of meat at a time that are all different from Duck to beef to fish there's a gun saute he's got 12 pans going at once and 10 more in the ovens underneath finish and there's a guy next to him who's coordinating tickets making plates and sauce in this

and that well this is the most organized chaos of fire and steam and smoke it's awesome this is my world I want to hear everything going at once for your add is Perth enough stuff going on that's it every window open at once let's do it awesome them so do you think it was raw ability initially or just a willingness to work

I think it's got to be both you have to have a passion if you don't love food and you're not really into it the industry's not going to work for you the crack that keeps us going is when you create a dish or a night or a wedding and the people are having a blast when you look outside or you get to

walk by the tables and like we have just had so much fun tonight this is great if that doesn't feed your soul this industry is going to be really hard on you so you have to love it you got to really enjoy it you have to have a certain knack for Taste some of it can be taught but some of it you

need a little bit of ability but if you're not willing to work the industry is not going to work for you are you finding that I mean obviously everybody likes to poo on the younger generation and stuff it's like a national bus time right now yeah which there's some truth to it but are you finding that some of the I mean you

went over there and just worked for free put in the work went to school learned how to do it throughout your story I think it alludes to the idea that you were willing to make sacrifices monetarily and with your time to get yourself in positions to be able to learn get better and have opportunities to do some pretty great things but you

had to sacrifice some stuff on the along the way and just work hard for not much are you finding that some of the younger people aren't as willing to do that or maybe with your generation they still weren't able to do that and that's what always separates successful people yeah it is tough and every generation will always say well you know we

had it harder yeah you know my dad always said you know we didn't have ballpoint pens growing up I'm like yeah that was the greatest Advantage we ever had I mean you know those were the salad days once he started getting to write with ball points but you know we didn't have the internet we didn't have smartphones so it is different and

the industry will keep changing and keep becoming different I couldn't believe when I said when I heard somebody first say you need to let people order off their phone I was like no way they need to come in and make an order or get on the phone what was your what was your apprehension to something like that I mean the first time

they suggested it was just a foreign ID I'm like oh forget it you're losing customer service and we're in the service industry and now it seems so common of course you do that we barely had a web page when we opened in 2001 the greatest ad we could get the best advertising we could possibly do in 2001 was a full page ad

in the Yellow Pages it was absolute gold worth every nickel really that's 2001. hey isn't that crazy that's it and people would look at your website occasionally but they were on dial-up so it took forever and most people didn't do it that way people called and I answered the phone to give them directions on how to get there all the time that

just was only 20 years ago but it was a completely different world we sent direct postcards to people and paid for postage saying hey we're opening so now do you think with the change in technology that there is still a way to have that personal connection and that rapport with a customer but you just have to find the way to do it

there still is and that's the balance and that's where the younger generation instinctively intuitively knows how to do it and we need to embrace that it's easy to poo this generation and say oh they don't want to work hard they don't want to when I talk to high school kids in culinary programs I always ask where do you want to be five

years from now you're graduated what do you want to do you want to be in a restaurant a hotel a resort you want to be a personal chef in a bakery I mean you can go anywhere in the world and somebody is paying to eat so this industry is wide open where do you want to go and the answer is always start

off with well I want to be on Chopped and then uh I think yeah I think when I do uh yeah YouTube yeah YouTube channel and I'm like no I'm talking about how do you want to get paid those are cool I think chopped is neat I've been on TV over 100 times nobody ever pays you to be on TV there are

a handful of people that can be on TV and get paid for it I'm just telling you the odds are lower than you going to be a pro baseball player right now that you're going to be the next Mario Batali or the next uh Gordon Ramsay the next Rachel Ray there's only a few that are going to make a really good living

cooking on TV and there's thousands that are trying losing money doing it but hey if that's your dream good luck but you need a set of skills that you can get paid for along the way yeah where do you want to work what do you want to do fine dining you want to do fast casual you want to be the Burger King

you want to be the taco guy you want to have a food truck you can go anywhere and cook there's so many cool Avenues they can take but the vision of kids now is not the fine dining scene that we used to all look at and say oh man these are the greatest chefs ever they're doing the fanciest food the vision is

so much more online and our perspectives are hard to mesh sometimes so at what point in your career did you decide did you go into culinary school saying hey I'm gonna own like three badass restaurants in Dallas Fort Worth do fine dining also do some like have a bar I mean you have a bar too isn't that Buffalo you know you got

two of them yeah so oh I didn't know you had two yeah we got two Buffalo bros we're up to four restaurants now all right so our they're all in Fort Worth they're all in Fort Worth that's right okay uh so like at what point did you decide that you were going to take that route did you go into culinary school thinking

that or what I was a crazy one I went into culinary school thinking I want to open a really cool high-end but very Texas kind of ranch concept similar to like Dean fearing but a little more on the Fort Worth side not quite as fancy not quite as you know the Ritz or the at the Mansion at the time I was like

I want to do Southwestern upscale and Texas we're known for like wild game and gulf seafood and like that's what I want to focus on and every Chef instructor without fail said please don't go throw all your money at an independent restaurant you're going to graduate you're going to open a place and you're going to lose all your money anybody who invests

in it everybody loses their first restaurant so just be careful go work for somebody for a long time first don't just say I'm gonna go open a place and try to get started too soon they've seen it happen too many times I mean 90 of restaurants don't make it past a year independently 90 90 won't make it past a year financially just

based on Independence saying Hey I want to get into it and you were right at the beginning everybody thinks they know how to do it because they go to restaurants they're like hey I could do this yeah I had a dinner party and everybody said my chicken wings were great my wife makes this great spinach dip we could do this yeah so

it seems like with most things and it seems like being a chef is the same way what you'd maybe do In the Heat of the Moment uh maybe if we even called it like a performance like actually the active cooking is a in some ways a very small part of how to actually be successful in doing it the part that you actually

enjoy about it isn't even necessarily the part that might make or break you so for instance like your Restaurant Waters I'm a big Seafood guy and so it sounds like that you guys are always trying to Source fish from sustainable places healthy places no farm-raised fish and you're trying to get it to your plate as quickly as possible and to be able

to do that doesn't really have anything to do with how you prepare it but I bet that consumes a lot of your time it's a huge chunk and it's really hard to make a restaurant successful because there's two different ways to define success does everybody love it and do they give you five stars that's a success are you making any money that's

another success and there are tons of chefs who are incredibly talented better than I will ever be and never many money at it oh so is there so like in the art world how do you define success well yeah so like in the art World music uh even like drawing painting anything like that there always seems to be this conflict between like

if you monetize it and you do well monetarily it's not true art what do you find the balance yeah so does that exist in the 100 culinary world I would say one of the chefs that every other Chef looks up to pharaoh and Adria this guy from Spain he is amazing he's a magician he treats food very much like an art and

a science project at the same time he sets Trends around the world I mean this guy he's kind of the one who put Molecular Gastronomy on the table and on the map everybody look up to him his restaurant was losing 240 000 a year so just couldn't run that they had reservations five years out you're losing money you couldn't get into the

place and they couldn't make money at it being successful is a different definition for everybody his investors were okay with it for a while now they're now he's doing different things the guy's still amazing but financially I wouldn't back an independent restaurant that he was going to open because I don't see how you're ever going to make money at it you've got

to figure out what do you do besides cook because I one thing I always say is that now in the restaurant industry the cooking is easiest part because I know that part I feel comfortable cooking if somebody says here's a bunch of ingredients and I think they're good ingredients I can probably make something taste real good pretty quick but cooking is a

very small part of the overall picture when you're trying to run a business too the Personnel the labor the figuring out your numbers all that stuff is hard and you can't just pick it up along the way if you try to open your own place immediately so when I got out of school I shoved around a little bit I kind of work

for this guy I work in this place I was in New Orleans for a little while worked in Dallas a couple different restaurants and finally said okay I feel like I've been in enough kitchens and seen enough setups and understood how this works I'm gonna try my own and a good friend of mine Frederick Andre he's a French chef I believe he's

at the Four Seasons now in Dallas but he opened a place in Fort Worth he had been in Fort Worth for Four Seasons in Dallas like that one over in Las Colinas yeah I think he's I think he's still Chef in there okay I hadn't seen him in a while but he said hey I'm opening a restaurant called escargot and I can't

afford many other people this is my independent place will you help me and I said you know what I'm getting ready to try to open mine but I hadn't found a deal yet how long after culinary school was that I was about a year and a half okay where were you at in that year and a half I also worked at Randall's

downtown in Fort Worth Cafe wine bar and cheesecakery so you were still is it still there uh nope that one uh went by the wayside 90 years back yeah exactly they made it made it several years though no kidding yeah it was really cool so you were working there and then I was working there and then I helped open escar go and

this was a guy who's like look I'm an independent guy it's just me and the general manager and my wife I mean there's really kind of three of us and when we need at least one more person in the kitchen I don't have a lot of money to spend and I said look I don't need a whole lot of money here just

a few hundred bucks a week but you have to include me on everything you're doing and we saw cut tables we built you know built the furniture and in the kitchen not built it but you know put everything together from you know the cheaper way to buy it is in pieces Ikea more Restaurant Depot but yeah you know stainless tables we're back

there you know drilling stuff together and every single thing we did from ordering to payroll to everything I said just include me on it I want to see every bit of the opening and how this works and watching the guy try to do payroll himself instead of having a payroll company was like man I can't believe how much time he has to

spend on figuring out taxes and the penalty for getting it wrong is pretty bad so I think we're going to hire a payroll company and all those lessons of experience that you can get working with other people when it wasn't my money on the line was incredibly valuable staff so some of those things are yeah you can't even really put a number

on some of that stuff I mean culinary school doesn't have a class on accounting or right payroll and HR management you see it as you go every restaurant you work in you're going to meet the HR person they're going to ask you about you know benefits or 401ks and you hear about these things but to turn around to be the one in

charge is a pretty big step heck yeah so you guys started escargo and then were you yeah you were working there for how long uh I was there for about a year and we finally found a real estate deal and said okay it's time to start building ours I had worked in Dallas at Mediterraneo I've been down in New Orleans at Mr

B's in the French Quarter that was on a culinary externship that was the greatest thing ever 97 98. so how would you always obviously you were learning from a lot of great people and you were being creative and you were trying to do develop your own craft in your own unique way but balancing that with just the business side of it like

how do you grapple with those two things coming together coming up with a menu in the concept to me was very comfortable and I knew what I wanted to do and I felt like I could execute it now I needed to hire good people also and I've got a great business partner and I've got tons of really talented employees in lots of

different departments but the menu I was like I can do that I can write a wine list I've had classes in wine I feel like these are my skills but then I realize that 80 of my time 90 of my time was trying to figure the rest of it out and my wife and I was I was 31 years old when we

opened our first restaurant and I was like man does y'all have kids yet we didn't have kids yet we got married in February and opened the restaurant in October same year of 01 so it was it was yeah we started building in the summer and we just remodeled the place how long did y'all date before you got married just under a year

oh no kidding dad gum we met during our tornado you just said let's do it that's it you remember when that tornado ripped through downtown Fort Worth my wife and I met that night at Randall's what do you what do you mean I mean we were both at Randall's in the restaurant I just finished working there and she had just started working

there and I went in to grab a paycheck and sat down at the bar like hey who's the cute girl behind the bar and then the tornado ripped through downtown we spent the night in the you know in the basement for a while with all the customers and then I walked around looking at damage that's the first time y'all met that was

the day we met that is one of the coolest stories every time you see it in the in the paper that hey on this day I'm like oh that's right hey honey this was the day we met yeah what year was that uh that was two thousand no kidding and then you all walked around together yeah I walked around looking at Dan

Walker home yeah that boy you're better yeah that's right and then a year later y'all got married yeah we got we got married uh the next February and opened bonnell's our first one in um October of 01 so we're about to have our 20-year Lord have mercy I mean it's already hard enough being married much less running a business together and what

was her experience with was she a server at Randalls or what did she do she was actually working for a Publishing Company publishing like College textbooks and then pouring wine at the bar at night no kidding oh so she knows rewind huh she knows her wine now yeah we do a lot of uh study at home yeah I bet I try to

too my stuff's probably not quite as fancy I'm still in that little uh I have found that between like 20 and 50 dollars you can find a lot of good wine yes you can a lot of good ones they spend as much as you want but you can find a lot of good stuff in there and I'm gonna a great unique spot

that I can I've got five liquor licenses so I can I can buy wine at a good price I can sell it here and I in the middle I can drink above my pay grade most of the time there you go so did she had she always been into wine or you no I got her into that oh she blames me she

says you know I used to be just fine and I was happy drinking a really cheap bottle of wine and I can't do it anymore it's your fault yeah that's totally right that's what my wife did to me you're probably gonna like scold me but I drink like Woodbridge on Ice did you say white claw yeah I love Woodbridge there's nothing wrong

with that at all I like the brown water too so is there not it seems like within what do I call it culinary arts is that like a good term sure it seems like there might be a part of um like practical cooking making stuff that people really want to eat absolutely and then there's like a pretentious side of it where it's

like it's almost disingenuous because it's like why did you why does it look like that and why'd you make it like that there's every single level and it goes to the extremes on every end I mean you if you want to live on 50 cents a day in ramen packets you can do it if you want to go with what do I

get by with just eating and not spending any money and on the other end you can spend 200 bucks ahead and go to the fanciest places with tasting portions and 26 courses in one meal over three hours and everybody plays in that Spectrum somewhere okay the bonnells and Waters experience are more on the high end this is where you go for your

anniversary this is where you go to celebrate this is a really fancy fun night we try to give a really upscale experience and unique ingredients presented in a nice way but still a decent portion what is in your opinion the best way to go out and have a dinner like at a high-end restaurant like bunnell's like what's the best way to do

it the best way to do it oh that's tough pick the cuisine you're thinking I want Wild game I want Seafood I want Thai I'm thinking you know some whatever you're thinking that night what am I in the mood for and then we typically start looking and again this is this is where the young kids will do even better we start looking

at sites like open table or as a gat or um yeah TripAdvisor is okay and see what people say about it and those star systems actually have some power and that's a good and a bad thing is that sometimes difficult to swallow oh my God that's the hardest thing in the world to read what somebody wrote you know like I mean somebody

said about our number one most popular appetizer bonnell's is our elk tacos and this is Rocky Mountain elk we grind it in-house with our own blend of seasonings it takes a long time to simmer this down and make the taco filling we also on the bottom have our green chili cheese grits most requested recipe ever really cheese grits yeah so a little

mini taco shell with our famous grits in the bottom Rocky Mountain elk over that pico de gallo and queso fresco this is a really fun dish it's three little mini tacos and this has been I've sold thousands of these and online somebody says hey this is like a Foodies you know kind of a you know social media page and somebody says hey

we're going to bonnell's what should we get one person you got to get the elk tacos and I don't know who it was some guy gets on there obviously a fake handle and he's like I have had the tacos at Jack In The Box and they are better as a matter of fact I think they're using the same crap in those but

they charge more I was like did you actually read it of course I see all that stuff you can't look at that it's hard I mean yeah it's like almost impossible what's funny too is the amount of comments and likes and stuff of people supporting you yeah and it's weird because that one that was that one this is trash like the 246

customers last Saturday night and 245 were happy yeah but that one drives you and I'm still thinking about that damn one who was drunk walking in you know so you actually know who it was oh over and over and over I'm like I know exactly who do this and the one that sticks in your craw is one person who said this one

thing and they and they go online and say it or something that's absolutely not in your control during the pandemic some guy says you know we love the food the atmosphere was great and the server couldn't have been better but they made my wife uncomfortable by asking her to wear a mask and I will never go back one star let's see how

they handled that I was like man come on we all have to do it I'm trying to make a living like look I said I don't get the choice I didn't want to be the police of this but I can lose my liquor license if I don't he said well you call yourself a Texas restaurant and those who sacrificed more than a

liquor license to keep Texas I was like good Lord but come on let's not die on this yeah the irony of that is if you went into that guy's personal life he's probably the most passive pushover person that ever existed but he's an incredible keyboard Warrior oh it's brutal man but you gotta learn to grow a thick skin but if you stop

taking any of it personally then you don't care anymore there's such a healthy part of being able to take some criticism though because sometimes they probably say stuff that you're like I might get better at that yeah well that's tough to do we may have had we may have had an off night for a little bit that happens one of the most

cathartic things ever is when you see like online you can watch chefs read their bad Yelp reviews and to just say it out loud and kind of laugh about it and then watch Bobby Flay do it and watch Gordon Ramsay you're like okay you're not alone no restaurant has ever just had perfect scores and everybody was happy going in and out somebody's

gonna hate it somebody's gonna love it finding the balance of what you want to put out what people really like what they're willing to pay for and then figuring out how to make money at it that whole equation together if you get it right is Magic but it's a it's hard I tell my kids fine dining is really difficult and I love

what we do at bonnells and Waters I will always be passionate about fine dining that is something I love to do when I said kids you're going to college based on Buffalo Bros that's it's an easier formula just math wise to make simpler food yeah now with I don't this might get you in trouble I don't want to do that but like

which I don't know it's probably an easy answer which do you enjoy more which is more fulfilling I spend more time at the fine dining restaurants my presence is needed there and I have to keep an eye on it you can't just disappear and say oh it's fine it's it you know keep it in neutral and let it let it ride it

doesn't work that way sure Buffalo Bros needs to stay consistent but we're not trying to reinvent the wheel every day we're not trying to come up with all right what is a new special how are we gonna we're not we don't have our own organic garden outside of Buffalo Bros we have the same products year round we're very consistent at it and

Personnel is always hard you know getting your labor numbers to work right but we consider a really good customer at bonnell's three four times a year they come in and that's great and you got to be right on every time the same person go to Buffalo Brothers twice a week three times a week just a different Market it's a lower price point

but there's more consistency to it do you think they're both fulfilling just in different ways absolutely okay you'll see that a lot with fine dining chefs they'll have a super fancy trying to get a Michelin star you know restaurant in Paris and the next door they'll have more of a more of a bistro more of a casual one like you kind of

need to do more than just one you can't do extremely exotic food all day every day some people can but there's also what do you eat and that's a question I get a lot like all right Chef when you go out where do you eat I'm like we where do you think I eat I got two kids I got a fourth grader

fourth grader and a ninth grader McDonald's we're not doing the fast food so much but you know I'm not saying we didn't drive through Whataburger the other day on a road trip we did heck yeah man you got to we eat very normal stuff but and again we also get to try really exotic stuff all the time my kid went into kindergarten

this was great they go around the room introduce yourself what's your name and what's your favorite thing to eat you get a lot of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese and they're like okay Ricky what's your favorite thing to eat and he goes well how old is he kindergarten is five six clams I don't think clams hey what's the difference between a

clam and oyster they're both they're both bivalves they're both mollusks but clams mussels and oysters are all just different species oh okay but they're pretty similar uh similar in the way you treat them yeah okay in the same family but you wouldn't like clams on the half shell like eating them raw you wouldn't do that you would really good fresh clams you

can do on the half shell I've never done that before typically around here you're gonna find clams cooked almost always but in New England any Oyster Bar will probably have one or two clams also whoa yeah house I guess a little more chew to them okay but they kind of taste like an oyster yeah similar man I live down in outside of

Destin when I was like 20 and those are the dark years like I didn't do anything that's pretty unproductive but they had a bar and they have those appalachicola is one of the greatest Seafood producing areas in our entire nation they are phenomenal so they don't get a lot of stuff out of there uh probably not as much anymore we don't I

get a lot more stuff out of Texas because we do similar stuff oysters and shrimp but if when we're doing oysters on the half shell sometimes I'll get some of some of the Florida oysters but typically we're going to go up the East Coast more because you can get a lot more consistency all year round out of Colder water oh okay I

didn't know that well and so when I was down there it was I think it was before the BP oil spill yeah it didn't hit them too hard everybody was worried everybody was like man here it comes here it comes and it didn't actually put nearly as much of a damage what's the because I'd always heard that they have a strain on

some of those fishing spots down there in Apalachicola Bay but is all that from the runoff from like Atlanta and the water that feeds down there I've always heard they have like it all depends on what they'll do they'll get out there with the fish fishing game department of every state regulates their Seafood so they'll go out in the state waters and

they'll monitor water temperatures and water qualities daily every Oyster Bed has a number and a name on it when I get oysters in a sack it has a tag these oysters were harvested from this exact spot on this exact date if anybody ever had a quality you know issue with an oyster or they think somebody got sick and they verified it that

bed is shut down that hour whoa so they're out there testing the waters all the time things like red tide when you just have like an algae bloom That's not healthy there's all those things that they shut areas down frequently all over the gulf on the East Coast too they're constantly watching that sort of stuff so they're a lot better than they

used to be we're technologically better at this knock on wood I've never gotten sick from eating oysters me neither uh but when we were living down there was a little bar and you could get you ever had Yingling beer oh yeah okay so you could get a dollar Yingling dollar draft it just came to Fort Worth last month did it really yeah

they just showed up well because they wasn't it originally from the Northeast Pittsburgh yeah and then but they actually put a brewery down in Florida I think nice seconds outside of Saint Pete or something I think so we would get a dollar Yingling draft and 4.95 for a dozen oysters at this little bar right there on the beach and that poor guy

back there would be shucking oysters and we would sit there all night and eat them and he'd just sit there and stare at us you know he's so pissed off the guy whose right arm was twice the size of his left arm it's crazy it's a different breed of people down there yeah but most of your stuff comes from comes from Texas

and I read somewhere that you get a lot of stuff from like New Zealand it depends so um we like to do wild game quite a bit and when I can use Texas Farms we only get Quail from Bandera Texas Diamond age Ranch is the best stuff when we get our like axis deer and fallow those are all coming from the Hill

Country and Texas Broken Arrow Ranch those guys are awesome we use Texas oysters when we're frying them for our oysters Texas filler but occasionally we like to do a little more exotic like a bison tenderloin or elk tenderloin which are really cool game flavors and a lot of people around here appreciate that you get a lot of a lot of outdoorsmen in

the area but we don't have that many Texas Farms producing that stuff so we'll use as many from the Rockies as we can but New Zealand is a very big producer of elk so they really they call it Wapiti but yeah we'll uh we'll get help from New Zealand Maori I've never heard of that's that's their local indigenous people really in New

Zealand like Aboriginal is to Australia yeah totally what's it called again Maori and then what's the language uh gosh I don't know okay but it's just the indigen how many languages would be from there probably like probably those two I don't know I've been in New Zealand a couple times but uh it's a beautiful place and I couldn't believe that their number

one export is wool they've got sheep everywhere more sheep than people but their second biggest export is venison they do a lot of Red Deer and a lot of elk yeah this is all just like on farms branches I guess it's farmed with high fences yeah no kidding uh do you buy a lot of fish from there though uh yeah we'll get

fish from there every fish is one plane ride away and we typically try to find wild seasonal sustainable products from the sea that are Shore to Door meaning from the ocean to my back door into 24 yeah if it's from New Zealand it might be 35. yeah flight's a little longer you liar but they've got such clean water and really cool fish

and not that many people in New Zealand so there's a lot of fishermen that are exporting a ton of it and they've got some really cool stuff so I've tried to do as much research as I can I love fish and we just finally got a subscription thing with the company out of Alaska that ships the stuff on dry eyes Frozen down

to us because I got went down that black hole of farm fish and all I was like oh my gosh you know like I won't even look at tilapia now I was going to say if you just look up where do they raise tilapia it's kind of gross yeah so I that was a funny quote by you said if uh let me

let me think of it probably you said if you won't join them that's it if the farm-raised fish in that country is a country where you wouldn't drink water out of the tap so what is the I would butcher it if I tried to tell anybody why farm-raised fish is bad but like what's the brief synopsis of what the heck is going

on with a lot of our not all farm raised fish is bad but the majority of it is done because it's a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot easier and a whole lot faster that's the hard part about fishing you don't know what you're going to catch there's storms there's seasonal there's seasons and wild Seafood is difficult and menu guys I

mean I'm the one over here writing the menu saying look I just want to put red snapper on the menu every day and make addition like well we can get it here or I don't know if these guys are going to be catching but in a few weeks the season will open over there it's hard to Chase and so you either have

to adapt all the time or try to look at an aqua farm and aqua Farms I mean Texas redfish we get from copper Shoals they're down there on the coast not too far from like Galveston Houston area they are amazing and it's very clean very well done I can get the same quality any quantity I want price is going to be the

same all year long I can put that on the menu permanently and count on it there's only been one or two times in the last 20 years that I could not get redfish from these guys and it was only for a couple of weeks and then everything's fine again the big freeze turned everything off for a little bit but everybody wants that

consistency on the menu side you can't get that from the wild so Aqua farms and the way to do it cheaper is to find cheaper places countries like uh countries like China or Pakistan or Belize or Honduras places that the Labor's cheaper and the water is cheaper and they don't have very many regulations can vary inexpensively grow a ton of shrimp or

tilapia or the salmon they're putting through Walmart I mean there is a lot of salmon going through the big box stores in the U.S that is not being caught you know off the canine peninsula in Alaska right that's a very seasonal very cool product but it's only a certain time and there are very specific quotas for wild Pacific salmon farm-raised stuff there

are a few really high-end amazing Aqua Farms that do salmon 90 are an environmental disaster really yeah so is that mainly just because of what they feed them the type of water that they're in yeah and what they're doing to the local populations around them when you put big ocean pens and dump all this stuff and there's always waste involved where do

you process it how do you do it there's lots of different issues that go on with it but if you want to do it the cheapest possible way it's usually it usually comes at some sort of a cost and ecologically environmentally some of those are pretty bad it doesn't seem like there would be an awful lot of restaurants especially in north Texas

maybe more so in South Texas but in north Texas that are uh sourcing fish the way that you do because we try to find places to go all the time we just can't find it yeah it's hard because I haven't been to Waters and I can't believe we haven't been so you gotta come see me no kidding well I read that one

I read that one Yelp review and I was like the one yeah it was buried Pages down but every time you see the star system you got it well somebody gave it a one I gotta see what he said now it is hard and to play the game every day I think it's one of the most fun and interesting things to talk

to my Seafood guy every day because I got different Brokers that I work with at seafoods.com out of Florida he's constantly talking to fishermen every day and what we try to find is you know I'll call and Josh will say hey yeah the Lynn Brothers you know them they got two boats coming in they're gonna make FedEx cut off time today so

I can get it to you tomorrow they've got 600 pounds of black and red grouper they caught four big cobias and they got almost a thousand pounds of red snapper so you tell me what you want that boat will be sold by the time they get to dock they'll get the dock right at FedEx cut off time when we get the fish

next day that's a family with their own boats they do stone crab during this season they do Snapper and grouper during this season and maybe catch some Wahoo or some Cobia here and there I want to support that guy every time and we've got a whole bunch of those guys that's what we try to find it's hard though most of the seafood

gets caught by huge Factory boats that are going out for four weeks at a time and they're catching cleaning everything comes back boneless skinless fillets and they label it's there's not a lot of Truth in marketing with fish when something just says ocean trout ocean perch sea bass there's a lot of generic names and there's not a lot of Regulation to tell

you what it is or what it isn't that stuff comes in Frozen or a bunch of it just you might be in Galveston looking at the water that boat might bring in red snapper that gets sent to New York to the big huge auction and then turn around and come back and come right back to you and it's three days old instead

of right off the dock over there so our systems are so there's so much money involved and they're so high volume it's we always try to find those entrepreneurs the smaller mom and pop operations and so you probably were doing the same thing with your with your beef right is that what you're trying to do as well sure um beef is a

little easier game to play because every time I call he always has tenderloins he always has rib eyes and always has strips but hey we've got b3r Ranch and that's a unique Texas product doing here or we got 44 farms and this is their program you can always buy certified Angus beef that's a very big program I'm not saying there's anything wrong

with cab certified Angus beef is just fine but it's also what you would find at uh Fridays or Chili's or orange tickets right there's nothing there's nothing wrong with it but it's a big box item so if we're gonna be a fine dining restaurant we better try to find a more of a niche higher end Hardware product yeah heart Brand's fantastic that's

who I bought my akiyushi bowls from that's what I figured they're awesome I went down there like I guess it was probably about a year ago yeah the Beemans are amazing yeah man uh because I was gonna I was well I'm still looking into buying some makushis and Crossing them and it's funny that you said that's what I was talking about I

wanted to get into that because it was I was looking at doing them Crossing with Red Angus as well so my brother and I have been talking about doing this forever and we've got the cattle and we're ready to go and then covet hit so we kind of had to put all our plans on hold what we had what we had designed

and what was just going to be the perfect timing when you when you cut a cow I know exactly where I can sell the glory Cuts tenderloins rib eyes and strips are easy bunnells and Waters we can sell high-end Stakes especially when it's that kind of product that we will stand by because it came from our Ranch to our door and we

know what we got but there's a whole lot of cattle left after those cuts totally so the fifth restaurant that we're about to open is John's Grill and it's a burger joint okay so we are going to grind the rest those are going to be some badass Birds that's gonna be good stuff right oh my gosh akiyushi ground and we're going to

grind the rest we're going to do burgers and brisket kind of a barbecue on the light side but Burgers is our main focus right there the TCU campus I mean those are still going to be expensive Burgers they got to be they will I mean they're gonna be bad ass yep but look at the price of beam and beef when you know

you're buying something that's a really high quality that was not in a feed lot let's just say this if they come by if the news comes out and says hey we've had a huge E coli outbreak that's going to affect about 30 million pounds of beef it ain't going to be ours no it ain't one of them it ain't one of them

explain to people the difference explain to people what Aku she is I don't think a lot of people even really know understand the whole wagyu so anytime you hear a Japanese word associated with cattle Japan has a completely different idea of how to raise beef they don't raise a lot of beef but what they raise is the highest and possible and some

other stuff like their A5 levels are even more fat than meat it's incredible but it's a different experience we think of just a big huge steak and they're thinking of small portion but incredibly decadent and we kept trying to figure out the rest of the world was looking at Japan like how do you get marbling like that nobody gets marbling like that

I mean this is eight times more marbling than Prime how do you do it and they said well it's these are cows that the genetics allow it the genetics and how we treat them and what we feed them day one to the to the day they're butchered it's a completely unique program and everybody kept trying to figure out how to do it

I think it was six cows total ever got out of Japan and every single Japanese sounding program is based on those animals you know through artificial insemination typically anything that's called Kobe style can Kobe can only come from Kobe Japan you know kind of like champagne has to come from Champaign but Kobe style means it's one of those Japanese breeds there's akiyushi

there's Mishima there's wagyu typically what you'll see is if something is a black animal they'll call it wagyu if it's a red animal it's probably akiyushi now there are different breeds I thought wagyu was just I thought that just meant Japanese cow in some circles it does but there are and there are different sub breeds there's a mashima without getting too specific

all the Japanese breeds are incredible genetically um they have an incredible genetic ability to Marble like you've never seen but they don't look like a beef cow they don't have that much meat to them so we typically cross them with an Angus or a Hereford to make it balloon up and become a nice big heavy animal and get some of those genetic

properties of marbling so that's typically the American way but Australia's doing a ton of it there's Japanese programs all over where we're crossing and my brother is a doctor and I'm a chef and we decided what kind of dog is he uh he's a professor of medicine at TCU he's a Pediatric ER specialist kind of done a little bit of everything heck

yeah that's cool me and his wife are both uh both medical doctors really yep dang so they y'all are some educated people why are you talking to me right he's incredible so uh we said let's figure out how to do the healthiest heart healthy possible beef that also tastes the best ooh get into the heart healthy that's it so they'll make a

different type of fat don't say it Omega-3s and omega-6 is the kind of stuff that they get from eating natural grass oh okay it is genetics but it's also feeding them natural stuff and not pumping them full of growth hormones and lots of extra stuff we don't we don't inject them with anything they don't need we might give them vitamins you might

give them an antibiotic if they got sick but we're not going to automatically just put chemicals on the cattle for no reason so we go with the most natural program we can we're raising some really good high carb stuff to get them up to weight and at the end we'll do a it's a it's a custom grain mix that'll be free choice

feeders but then you can move that feeder so that you don't have animals standing in front of a feeder for days and days and days you end up with a cow that's a very clean animal and it's a much healthier beef and we're raising them uh We've cut our first two and they've come out really good we dried some we wet age

some and we're pretty excited about how the stakes are coming out and we're gonna um hopefully we'll be open about February to March uh next year at John's Grill really for the burger Side Edition so that's coming up pretty quick we're getting there we're getting beds right now gosh Doggett how many so Mo you wouldn't be selling this retail this meat this

would be purely just to if everything goes well in the restaurants uh and the restaurant's successful we'll be barely be able to keep up with demand for that really we got about 130 animals right now oh my gosh that wouldn't even holy cow so luckily we've got some neighbors that are doing very similar Pro um programs that we are and we've got

one of our Bulls on a neighbor and so we've gotten more than just our own cattle that can qualify for our program under the same parameters that we're doing yeah man what a story I think it I think it plays into the whole part of this like being an art form because I think what you do is an art form it's self-expression

and it's part of the whole story because it goes all the way from like where the animal is sourced to like how you prepare it and how you even give it to the customer I think that all is like a form of self-expression I think it's art I love it too and I know monetarily just the business of it a burger place

will be an easier Financial Venture than most fine dining restaurants should be but then somebody's going to walk in and say well I can't believe I paid that for a burger you know yeah because they don't understand yeah that's totally it's going to be hard and it's funny they always say you know you weed out your customers and they weed you out

right back and there's Growing Pains any place that starts is going to have a difficult time it's hard to find good Personnel it's hard to get them all trained it's hard to get everything going right whether it's the cooks in the back or the servers in the front but once you once you hit your step and everybody says okay now we know

what that place is usually we can we can get that within you know a couple months and we're really excited to create a cool concept with a rooftop bar burger joint that's a much healthier option than almost every Burger Joint out there and should be a pretty fun place is that going to be in Fort Worth where'd you say it was yeah

right there on TCU campus it's the old Aardvark so it's a double-edged sword with the whole technology thing going back to what we've talked about at the very beginning where it's it used to be so simple to Market your stuff where you put it in a yellow page ad and people showed up and then you had that one-on-one report but other than

that there wasn't a whole lot you can do other than like getting an ad on TV or radio that was it but the other side of that coin is now with technology like you're able to tell a pretty extravagant story through all these different social media platforms and YouTube and like sitting here talking on a podcast and I mean you're able to

put out the entire story in a lot of effective ways and really gets people to buy into the overarching theme it is um amazing and most of what you can do on social media if you're Savvy you can do it almost for free so it's that's the crazy you'll buy some ads here and there and there are ways to Target it specifically

but just utilizing the social media presence that we have already with our four existing Concepts a lot of this word of mouth all I had to do was put up my liquor license sign in the window and just sit there and watch my phone within about 30 minutes somebody's like hey I saw a liquor license with their name on it talk to

me and the paper start calling they want to know about it so yeah word spreads really fast people put it out on a tweet and then they put it on Facebook and somebody Instagrams it and before you know the whole city has heard of John's Grill within 48 Hours yeah and you couldn't do that with a billboard right so there's always two

sides to it yeah and honestly we can get a lot more efficiency of service when we utilize the stuff properly for example when we open Buffalo Brothers it's been 15 years now when we first opened we thought we are going to deliver its Pizza Wings and subs and we're on a college campus if we can deliver this will be great and we

looked into delivery and we couldn't make it work the money you pay in Insurance how do you schedule your drivers they may show up and have zero delivers or they may have 26 deliveries we could not figure out how to make a delivery service work so we just quit so pick it up if you want but we can't do the delivery part

we're not big enough to handle it all these delivery services started between favor and caviar and doordash and Grub Hub and they all want your business now they're all going to take a chunk out of it but now we can deliver to anybody anywhere yeah and they already know how to use these Services we didn't have to put anything into it so

we do pay a premium on those and it again a double-edged sword but our volume of sales is so much higher because of the technology and I gotta tell you my wife and I came home we were late last night with the kids and we're like man I'm tired you tired here let's just get something delivered everybody does it you just hop

on an app order your stuff it says here's what you ordered last time I wanted to do that again they're so good at it and the order goes in the efficiency is like no other so if you don't Embrace that especially at a burger place a wing place a pizza place you're missing out on a tremendous amount of business because that's what

people are doing and if you can also utilize their social media and technology and ping where their phones are and start hitting people in the area with hey we got a special today on you know interesting that stuff works really well yeah man gosh you are on it how the heck do you like I just saw how do you juggle all that

man so I mean how many partners would you have in these different restaurants is it just one and you guys just manage all this yeah for the new one my brother's joining also so there'll be three of us and that's it yeah I know it's between two of us we've been doing it my partner's from Buffalo so that's where Buffalo Bros came

from people asked if we're brothers and he's from Buffalo there you go well I had it I just don't is it just a Time efficiency thing and you're just it is it started off that I slept at the restaurant sometimes when I was 80 hours a week with one place and I thought I can't believe somebody could ever do more than one

and a few years in and realized you know when you go off to a charity event that night I'm like you know the place did fine without me for that night so you can figure out ways to not be there 100 of the time it took a while to get there and then when we opened the second one and then we opened

a third one there's a point where you have to give over control which is really hard for somebody like me to do I want to be finger in everything I mean I want to be there watching and talking to every single step of the way from the servers to the tables but why do you think it's so hard for you to do

that because it's got my name on it and if somebody messes up I'm the one who's gonna get you know texted I'm going to want I'm the one who's gonna you know get the bad review but if you can hire really talented personnel and talk them into staying the greatest thing I possibly have is the ones who can anchor the ship when

I'm not there and treat it the same way that I would when I am there and finding those people is hard and when you do you got to hang on to them because you kind of just slip like slipped over the whole talking to stay in thing yeah that's like a whole you could write a book on that somebody has to feel

comfortable and like coming to work and that's where I think Gordon Ramsay is one of the most talented chefs ever and he's really good with TV personality and stuff too but I can't stand the approach that you scream and yelling belittle people personally in the kitchen and it's a very European thing all the instructors ever had in culinary school from Europe they're

gonna they're gonna make you feel like an idiot all the time but you walk in scared always and if that's your work environment I can't live that way I always tell the staff look we spend more time with each other than our families in a lot of cases so no matter what everybody gets treated with respect here and I mean there's nights

at the dishwasher you know got sick or got hurt and left and I wash dishes all night okay you know what somebody needs to do it and I'm going to flex position tonight so I'm gonna do it no one is above anything we're all part of the same team and if everybody feels safe and they like coming to work and they like

their colleagues at the end of the night like hey man you got some great comments when a server comes back and tells the chef hey they love that fish nice job and everybody's communicating in a nice way now there's going to be mistakes sure and if somebody says hey this plate is wrong I need it done like this right now yeah so

how because that's my toughest thing with running a business myself is treading that line between being empathetic and compassionate and I don't want to be an [expletive] right but at times it's like you gotta because then it's like it's almost a respecting if they never feel like they ever have to because you want them to do the best that they possibly can

and sometimes that takes a little bit of and I believe in the in the firm series but we're on this we're on this path and you can't vary from that you can't straighten so what do you think is the best way to like to Tread that line man if I knew how to do it I would have everything figured out but we've

been very good at being able to get good quality people put them in a position where they end up making enough money and being happy with their work environment the other hard part for us is you've got to give somebody a job where they can still have a family life too and in our business it is really hard especially like Waters was

open seven days a week right now we're open five days a week we're really trying um you know we're still clawing our way out of the pandemic but when we open seven days a week that's 14 shifts a week and you know the executive chef or the general manager those are the people in charge when do you schedule time off and how

much do you get that's a very difficult thing and there are places that'll say sorry I need you this much and I don't care if I pay you overtime but they'll work you to death and it's not a realistic it may be a it may be a plan that you can do for a while when you're young and gung-ho and climbing the

ladder but at some point I want to keep this person for many years you got to come up with a realistic life at the same time outside of the restaurant so the those are all the things that we try to balance and if you've got great people and they can handle it on the days that I'm not there which is most of

them now I mean I'm at One Restaurant sometimes I'm at another restaurant sometimes I go on vacations too I'm doing podcasts like this I have a whole busy schedule lots of fun stuff lots of you know hard work but most of the time somebody comes to a restaurant and I'm not there with five restaurants the math doesn't work out I ain't got

five of me so I'm just I'm not going to be there most of the time and if you've got the right people and they can handle it that is the most beautiful thing ever person Personnel is the key to having more than one place yeah and it seems like to me that some people are motivated by money some people are motivated just

by like hey attaboy and like empowering them making them feel needed some are motivated by both of them and I guess that sure makes it so freaking difficult because I'm more the type like I don't really need to Pat on the butt as much it's like pay me I'm gonna do my job but some people aren't like that but the server at

the end of the night heard 50 compliments like oh my God this tastes so good oh we are having the best time and they're all having fun the guy on the grill cooked 281 pieces of meat and he got screamed at for the one that was overdone just one he didn't hear all the good ones totally he's going Turn and Burn as

fast as he can and he is a very talented very high pressure high skilled position but he only got the one hey this was overcooked you're costing me money give me another one that's interesting some people some people need the personal reaction and when everybody works together in the front of the house in the back of the house communicate and it's working

it looks like organized chaos but it's the most beautiful machine when it's all going and all it takes is one bad action and you know the gears come grind into a halt but I love the business it never stops it changes everything imagine through the covid thing oh man just it got even it got even do a whole show on that one

but you got an award from the mayor yep for doing the meals to go right yeah so when this whole thing started gosh I've got a book coming out in the next couple weeks just based on a year in the life of how this whole thing happened and it surprised me when I put the timeline together on March 1st of 2020 we

still ran the Cowtown Marathon everything was fine on March 1. 20 000 people running a marathon no problem March 16th they shut down I mean everything was so fast but we were supposed to have a clay shoot on the 16th of March it was a Monday uh and it was shooting with the chefs it was for the Fort Worth food wine festival

and it was a big fundraising deal and when they said yeah looks like we're gonna have to cancel I mean they're canceling everything I said y'all want to y'all want to all just come out to the ranch anyway it was out at our family's place and I said y'all wanted to come to the ranch anyway and talk about this because there's some

there's some stuff happening everybody said I don't know and I said well the mayor said she'd still come she was supposed to shoot for this one too and like yeah let's go ask her some questions and we got out there Monday and as everybody introduced himself around the room you know around the aisle in this restaurant I'm a chef here I'm a

general manager of this restaurant it gets to me and then there's the mayor the head of City Health and then our brother's like oh yeah I'm a global health expert and you know everybody looks at him first and says you know is this that bad and he's like yeah it is and Betsy says I don't want to shut y'all down I don't

and well okay great and then somebody holds his phone up and says hey Dallas just shut all the restaurants down it all happened literally right there within a minute sure well yeah what did you and so the whole room got quiet there's 15 restaurant owners and the mayor said I'm not going to shut you down and nobody will we all knew okay

this is going to happen and we got shut down the next day okay so you want to be in the fine dining restaurant industry service food atmosphere but you can't open the door how are we going to do that and so she said look we're gonna have to send out some information and I'm not going to be able to answer all your

calls and texts there's a lot going on to her credit she showed up she was there and her phone was blowing up the whole time but she's like I'm giving you guys this hour I'm gonna tell you everything that I know and here's the head of City Health and I'll tell you everything he knows but you'll need to designate a point person

for information and so that ended up being me I got the email list and for the whole pandemic I would send out to our group okay this is official news from the governor this is Senator cornyn saying this here's a new rule from uh the mayor is now doing this the County Judge is saying this I ended up just kind of on

this email newsletter that was an official Source rather than well here's what I heard and so half the pandemic we said okay we can't do fine dining anymore it's just not gonna work but the people of the city really need to eat so we said right off the bat we have to figure out how to do the most possible food for the

least possible price and efficiently get them through here we're not set up to be a to-go place we're a fine dining restaurant with a big dining room and a bar but if you can't use any of that all right no choices and we I mean we started by firing everybody we went from 265 employees down to 31. how tough was that one

day that's the worst day I can recall really I started at Waters restaurant said all staff meeting on the porch 9 A.M we've never had one because you have a breakfast I mean a lunch crew and a dinner crew and you don't make everybody you know come at one time and everybody knew something was going on and you know just to walk

up to the patio and everybody's there and it's solemn and I said they all deserve better I wish I had something else I can do but I have for everybody down to six people at a whole restaurant damn and they all knew it and everybody hugged it out and talked and then they all just you know shuffled away and then we went

we did that four times all day long and then I went to the to the governor of the county judges Courthouse where they were doing a presentation on TV and they said well you know come say something about restaurants and I just got on TV and it's been a rough day already and I just said please continue to support your local Mom

and Pops because they're not going to make it without y'all I like Chick-fil-A too but they're gonna make it sure guarantee you Chick-fil-A is going to come out of this your mom and pops won't yeah you know just an impassioned plate and then every time there's a new set of regulations a new set of rules it's like okay I'm gonna go to

the source I'm gonna watch every Governor's press conference I'm so tired of watching Press Conference but take notes at all these and so when the pandemic was over we finally lifted everything um there was a there was a party scheduled for the mayor at our place and I thought oh this is great she's you know she's finishing up and they said yeah

she wants to rent the whole place out and have a big kind of a last two Rod just to thank all of her you know supporters so that's great so the mayor's rented the whole place out and then when I showed up I got there and she had done a surprise it was it was it wasn't for her she was actually doing

it for me so she made a proclamation was like and all the all the different restaurant owners and everybody were there it's kind of cool and yeah I can't believe they pulled a surprise off on me they made me cry yeah no kidding man on both ends of it so were you able to eventually like things are getting back to normal you're

able to hire some people back or yeah we were at 265 before we're up to about 220. oh wow we're close all four restaurants are going the fifth one's now back in production again we should have opened last year with John's Grill but obviously that would have been a bad idea yeah um we were closed for who were closed completely for 87

days at the fine dining places you know before we wanted to wait till we got to 50 25 occupancy wasn't gonna do any good so at 50 we started to open spaced out and plexiglass and you know all the stuff that seems a little more normal now it seemed really strange at the time but once the governor said hey we're lifting all

restrictions that was kind of the best email I got this into the group was like that's it we're not we don't have to be the police anymore yeah man well shoot I'm bought in I know when we have some friends that love your restaurants and they like follow you and when we said that uh you were coming out here they're like oh

my gosh are you serious so and I haven't been to any of the restaurants yet but Lord knows the wife and I are going to Waters well we're gonna get some fish and we're gonna have a glass of wine it's fun to try to find when you're going to be there so you can have a glass of wine with it you bet

just text me and I'll tell you if I'm gonna be here on this night or that night yeah it's funny bonnell's is still doing the curbside meals they were very popular and people said man 40 bucks feeds four people this is kind of a deal perfect I'm like look we're not doing out tenderloin you know this but we can figure out a

way to cook volume too at a low price and you know as long as I keep lining up every day we're going to keep doing it heck yeah it's just kind of an extra little bit of business we can do out of out of our kitchen that's already operating so totally well I appreciate you finding the time to come here and do

this no problem yeah we'll be down there for sure sounds good all right see y'all [Music]