Co-Owner of Boka Restaurant Group, Kevin Boehm (ENCORE)

[00:00:01] Speaker A: I cannot tell you how excited I am for today's conversation. Kevin Boehm is a giant in our industry and he really brings tons of transparency to this conversation, talking about how we got started, how he's grown, how he thinks about culture and leadership and vision and profitability and so much more. So excited for you to hear this conversation. Don't go anywhere. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the room. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Jim Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated solely to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 20 plus years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and more sustainable business. I also work directly with restaurant owners and operators from all over the world through my P3 mastermind program. To date, we've got more than a hundred members enrolled, spread across three different groups. The work work. So if you make a lot of hungry people happy, if you're generating a lot of revenue, you've been around for a while, but you struggle to generate consistent, predictable returns, specifically 20% profits, then I want to talk with you. Set up a call with me or someone from my team. We'll talk about your restaurant, we'll learn about what's going on, we'll answer your questions about the program, and then we'll talk about next steps. We'll see if you're a good fit. The way to do that is to visit restaurantstrategypodcast.com/schedule and yes, that link is in the show Notes now we all know managing costs is one of the most important parts of running a profitable restaurant, especially now. But between fluctuating vendor prices, waste labor, and the never ending list of tasks that demand your attention on a daily basis, it can be challenging for even the most experienced of us to manage costs. Well, that's where Margin Edge comes in. Margin Edge is a complete restaurant management software that automatically uses data from your POS and invoices to show you your food and labor costs in real time. Don't wait until it's too late. Margin Edge gives you tools to make decisions in the moment, like a daily P and L tracker, price alerts on key ingredients, and real time plate costs, all without ever having to touch a spreadsheet. Take control of your costs, work more efficiently, and be more profitable. Learn more at margin edge.com chip and yes, that link is in the show notes now. My guest on today's show is Kevin Boehm. He is the co founder and co CEO of Boca Restaurant Group, based out in Chicago. Together with his partner Rob Katz, he was the finalist for the James Beard Award for outstanding restaurateur in 2015, 16 and 17, and then they finally broke through and won the Dam Award in 2018. Some of his restaurants include Boca Restaurant, the Girl and the Goat, Swift and Sons, and nearly two dozen others. There's a ton that we're going to get to, but let me start by saying, Kevin, welcome to the show. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Let me start by saying thank you for pronouncing my name correctly. I always know a podcast is going to be good when they get my last. [00:03:28] Speaker A: You know, I think it's the least, I think it's the least an interviewer can do is just do a little bit of homework to understand who they're talking to. I got to say, especially somebody as accomplished as you, I'm grateful to have you carving out the time, especially as you're in the midst of another restaurant opening, which we can start with now or we can get to later. But I know how crazy restaurant openings are. And the fact that you've carved out an hour of your life to give to me, I appreciate. [00:03:54] Speaker B: No, I'm happy to be here. And honestly, you know, we open tomorrow. We have 400 on the books tomorrow. And I needed an hour today that where I wasn't thinking about that. I'm a big believer in balance. And so I've had no balance the last week. So this is a pleasant distraction. [00:04:16] Speaker A: I want to go way back to the beginning, but I want to follow that line of thinking. So balance, it's not a word you hear a lot in our industry. Certainly. Talk to me more about that. You run an empire with a ton of restaurants all spread out, not just in your town anymore. How do you balance all of the requirements of you and then how do you find balance between personal, professional and all of that? [00:04:44] Speaker B: If you break down the word restaurant, it literally comes from restoration, restoring other people. And when I was young, I was kind of Superman. I could get up on three hours sleep, run six miles to the restaurant, work till midnight, have drinks till two in the morning, do again the next day and actually be in an incredible mood and want to do it all over again. And as you know, now in my 50s, it doesn't quite work that way. And so if I want to be at my best, you have to conserve A lot of that energy. And so for me, finding time to either hit a yoga mat or just some time alone and thought, I have an office by myself that I can grab a little solitude that allows me to then be inside of a restaurant or meeting with my teams and be my optimal self. [00:05:36] Speaker A: So you're talking about boundaries. Are those. I mean, I imagine, like you said, it was different in your 20s and your 30s and 40s, and it's sort of, I imagine, an evolution. Talk to me about how you set those boundaries for yourself. If you find a meditation practice or a yoga practice or just working out or whatever, do you specifically look at your calendar? Just carve out time every week for that. [00:05:59] Speaker B: You have to be intentional about boundaries. With the amount of restaurants I have, the amount of emails and texts alone that I get every single day, if I wanted to, I could just live in that space all the time. I could just live on my DMs right now that are all asking for different times of reservations for Life select right now. But, you know, I have rules for myself. And some of those rules are I'm going to return emails in the morning when I have my green tea, and once in the afternoon and before I go to bed. Now, within that, I'll flip through my messages, make sure that Nothing is a 911. But otherwise, those are my times to sit down and do those things. There are so many things within the restaurant business that require you to be analog, that require you to speak to people, to talk to people, to see how people are feeling. And to me, that supersedes all the electronic stuff that bogs us down all the time. So if I do everything my phone tells me to do, which is kind of what my calendar is, I tell it for me to go and find a yoga mat or to take a half hour or to eat lunch here. And I'll be honest with you, I've broken some of those rules this last week. Last night, I just realized at the end of the day that I had forgotten to eat. My last meal yesterday was a Portillo's cheeseburger. It's the only thing I ate all day at 11:30 at night. And I just was kind of laughing at myself. I'm like, well, you've been here before. This is not. This is the wrong way to do it. You're doing it wrong. So I still do it wrong sometimes, but for the most part, I stick to that schedule of if I'm going to do everything my phone tells me to do, I'm going to make it tell me to do good things just for myself. Yeah. [00:07:45] Speaker A: I think it's something very easy to overlook. So it sounds to me a little bit, and I've thought a lot about this over this last year. It was sort of a. Sort of a theme of 2022. I worked with a bunch of my clients on sort of the similar thing. Again, how do we balance? There's this famous old pamphlet that was written, I don't know, 100 years ago about the tyranny of the urgent. Right. That so often the tyranny of the urgent crowds out the important. And how do you weigh that? Because in the restaurants, everything is urgent. Right. There's somebody complaining now. There's a table that has to get reset now. There's food that has to get to the table now or it's going to be cold and it spills over outside of service. Partially because I think we let it. Partially because I don't know. How do you think about that, the balancing urgent versus important. [00:08:33] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, I used to say that I was very concerned in creating my own current in life when I started. That's why I wanted to go into business for myself. I wanted to push this current. And what I realized quite a few years ago that the current was actually dragging me at a certain point. So that urgency inside the restaurants became a microcosm for life that you would. You would come into the restaurants and, yes, somebody needs something right now, and you got to get this for them right now. And the inertia of that will carry on to everything you do if you let it. So mind, body, soul, those things can't be less, any less important than your business. And I've seen this happen to a million people where their entire life is that business. And then when that falls apart, your whole life falls apart. So if you think of your relationships in buckets. If you think of your relationship, there's a relationship with yourself, there's a relationship with your family, there's the relationship with your work life, There's a relationship with all those things outside of work, the things that you do that make you happy. If all four of those are in chaos, there's no way you're going to be happy. Yep. So prioritizing importance for me, and every recipe for every single person is different. Solitude, the exact opposite of urgency is really important to me. For me to be able to do all the other things well, and that's be a good father, that's be a good family member, that's to be a good leader at work. And for me to show up when I need to inside my restaurants and be, be a warm, energetic host, those things only happen where I can. When I need that sense of urgency, I can do it if on the other side I've supported myself. [00:10:33] Speaker A: I want to go back and like I said, I want to start at the beginning. And I feel like that is a theme that I'd like to sort of touch upon as we go through the beginning. [00:10:44] Speaker B: Like my birth in the hospital in Flint, Michigan or. [00:10:47] Speaker A: No, I want to talk about how you got started in the industry because like you said, the way you conduct it yourself, the way your life was constructed in your 20s is different now that you're in your 50s. I think it's true for, I would hope it's true for a lot of people that they have the luxury of bringing some intentionality to how they conduct themselves. That's not often the case. And something you just brought up there is something I see a lot from a lot of independent operators. So I've worked in big groups, I've worked in small independents. And one of the things that I see that a lot of independents struggle with is that you start a business so the business can support you in your life. I mean, literally, I'm going to create a business that can pay for things so I can put a roof over my family's head, food on the table, all of that. And very soon, to your own point, pretty soon, if you're not careful, it ends up the other way around. You've created a business that you just always have to attend to and it sort of defeats the main purpose of why you did it to begin with. It sounds like you were very focused on making sure that didn't happen. But that's now me talking to you, where you're at in your career. So let's go back to the beginning. [00:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that's 52 year old me, 21, completely different. [00:12:04] Speaker A: So then talk to me. So tell me about how you first got started in the industry. When did you say, hey, this is cool or I could do this, or I don't hate this, or I love this, I want to do this for the rest of my days? [00:12:14] Speaker B: Well, there's the kind of childish dream part to the story, which is like 10 years old telling my mom that I wanted to open up my own restaurant. But I only really thought about it when I was in, when I was in college. Two of my housemates were people who became like legends, you know, one was Mike Hopkins who became, he's the last American astronaut In space. He was the commander of the SpaceX mission, but he had, he had a mission about 10 years before that. And one of the other ones was Dave Eggers, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer and has, you know, written all kinds of amazing books like the Circle and Hologram for the King. And Dave was actually pressuring me one time and just being like, you don't want to be a lawyer. You have no interest in being a lawyer. And I go, yeah, I don't. And he goes, well, what do you really want to do? And I go, well, it's kind of cheesy. I mean, I want to open up my own restaurant. I mean, this is like 1989. It wasn't very cool to be in the restaurant business in 1989. And he goes, well, why wouldn't you do that? And I go, well, A, I don't know anybody in it, B, I don't really know what it is. And see, I don't have any money to open up one anyway. I grew up with no money. You know, how am I going to make that happen? It's super unrealistic. And Dave goes, well, Kevin, you know, Mike there thinks he's going to be an astronaut. I mean, that seems pretty. There's only been 450 of them. I think if you really want to do that, you could probably navigate it. And that's probably the first time my brain thought about, okay, well maybe, maybe I could make that happen. And so that next semester I just said, I'm going to drop out of college and I'm going to go work at what I thought was a legit restaurant, try it on for size, and, you know, you don't know what you don't know, right? So I was like, I can always come back to college, whatever, let's go try this out. And it took me about. After writing a fake resume and getting a job at this restaurant three weeks in, I was like, this is it. Yeah, I can, I can do this. And I just, I loved it. I loved the excitement of it, I loved the energy of it. Serving felt like my own business, that I was controlling my own economics every single night at each table. Sure there was. You could gamify it. Like if I gave somebody really good service the next time they came in and they asked for me, I wonder. And so I loved all that stuff about it and I developed a plan, very simple plan, but looking back on wasn't a dumb plan. It was if I can live off everything I make off of this job, couldn't I get a second job in the afternoon and save everything I make off that job. And eventually I'll have enough money to open up a restaurant. And that's basically what happened. You know, two years at that restaurant. Just two years later, with no experience and a bit of a moron still, myself and my girlfriend at the time opened up a six table restaurant 30 years ago called Lazydays Cafe. And that building today is still a restaurant. It's for the people who know Rosemary beach and Seaside and Alice beach and the Panhandle of Florida, and Seaside, Florida, it's now called George's. I opened a six table restaurant. [00:15:38] Speaker A: So two years to save up the money to open it on your own. No other help, no other investors? Nothing. [00:15:45] Speaker B: No other investor. But you have to understand, it was the most modest restaurant in the history of restaurants. It was stuck together with bubble gum and scotch tape. [00:15:53] Speaker A: Okay, and how long? So then tell me about that. How long did you, did you run that restaurant for? [00:15:58] Speaker B: So, you know, first of all, opening night I reached out to put a piece of bread in the oven and the bottom of the oven had kind of shifted. The pile of light had gone out and the oven blew up in my face and caught my hair on. So two hours, two hours into a restaurate tour, I was being whisked away to the hospital in an ambulance and it scabbed my whole face. So it start out well, but we had, we were there for two years and somebody bought the property. We had an option on it and we negotiated a buyout and I took that money and I opened up a wine bar, sushi bar, rock and roll bar just down the street. And that was even more fun and I loved that. And then a couple of guys from New Orleans came in one day and wanted and loved my bar and wanted to buy it and I sold it to them. So in the beginning I was like flipping houses. Yeah, I was. What I loved about that was that like every dime I made, I would put into the restaurants, I wanted them to look better. Like I lived horribly, actually embarrassingly. Like my. I had a house that I didn't have a bed in, I slept on a couch and I drove the world's worst cars that were constantly breaking down because I didn't care about anything but putting any money I made into the restaurants to make them look better. That was my house. The other place was someplace I slept at four hours a night. [00:17:23] Speaker A: So obviously you're on one place runs for a couple of years, it. It's profitable. I got to imagine Ish. What do you mean by ish? [00:17:33] Speaker B: I just mean that that first restaurant, if I wasn't making tips, because we were waiting on every table cooking all. You know, my. My girlfriend was the chef. You know, I helped prep and did garment, you know, and then, you know, I would wait on every table and do dishes, and then we would pool our tips. And then we paid each other, like, $1,000 a month. That's what we made. [00:17:53] Speaker A: Okay. [00:17:54] Speaker B: And it was enough to survive. And so. And the restaurant, other than that kind of broke even. And then we got bought out. So we did make a little bit of money. Second restaurant made a little bit of money better in tips. Paid ourselves, once again, like, a thousand dollars a month, me and my partner Jeff, at the time. And so at that point, I was making money by accident. I was not. I wasn't. I didn't know the formulas of what restaurants should be, what the benchmark numbers are, until I bought a book around that time of that second restaurant that was called Restaurants that Work. [00:18:35] Speaker A: Okay. [00:18:35] Speaker B: And it was. It's still around. You can find it. It was case studies of restaurants and what their food cost was, beverage cost was, what their rent should be. And when I saw that, I was like, I thought I discovered oil. Oh, my God. Now I punch my numbers in and see what I'm doing. Is what I'm doing making sense. And some of it wasn't. I wasn't marking things up enough. Maybe I didn't sign the world's greatest lease. My labor cost was low, but my cost of goods sold was super high. And I was like, oh, all right. I kind of get this. And so when I opened up restaurant number three, then I was doing it scientifically. [00:19:23] Speaker A: So then talk to me about that, because I want to spend. I want to live in that. And I'm so glad you brought that up, because it's one of the big questions I have. I have very specific views about profitability, about our industry, about sort of where we've been, where we are, where I think we're going or should be going. Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to exert them onto the conversation, but we'll certainly get into that. But I want to know how you think about it. So you struck gold. I think of, like, Back to the Future, too, right? When. When he's got, you know, the almanac of all the. Of all the World Series, all the games, everybody who's won, and he goes into the past and he bets on everything. Like, for me, that's what that seems like. It's like I found the book that has the best. All the answers to the test. [00:20:03] Speaker B: I just discovered the answers to the test. And. And I was not going to share that with anybody else. [00:20:10] Speaker A: So I love it. And it's a published book that anybody can get. [00:20:13] Speaker B: Correct. I'm not telling anybody about this book. [00:20:18] Speaker A: So when you said you approached your third restaurant scientifically, explain what you mean by that. [00:20:24] Speaker B: So then I've got this formula, and I'm like, okay, 30% cost of goods sold, 30% labor equals 60%. And 60% is prime. So I got to hit that magical 60% prime. Got that. And then occupancy needs to be somewhere around back then. You got to remember this is. This is 25 years ago. [00:20:47] Speaker A: It's going to hurt. Go ahead. [00:20:49] Speaker B: It's all going to hurt. Was like, 4%. [00:20:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. [00:20:52] Speaker B: And then everything else, which they did not have a name for, but we internally at Boca call it Silo, which stands for supplies, insurance, lease, equipment, and other. Great. That was about 16. And that if you killed, it, could leave 20% profit. And there were people back then making 20% profit on restaurants. And I was like, great, okay, let's do that. That makes sense to me. And so now I had a goal every single month, and I could change things by just a little bit. And I was just like, okay, price. Cost dictates fairness. And so when I would construct a dish together, and I was like, okay, we're going to do seared tuna with a mandarin soy ponzu and a ginger cabbage stir fry. And that dish cost me eight bucks. Well, let's extrapolate it. What's 30%? And then I got really smart, and I was like, oh, there's a margin of error here. I have one waste. Every single day, I got people not following the recipe, so let's add a couple points in there, and let's make it 28%. [00:22:01] Speaker A: That's right. [00:22:02] Speaker B: So by the time I. By the time I got to the end, this is 1997, 98, 99 in Springfield, Illinois. That restaurant's still open, by the way. I don't own anymore, but it is still in Springfield, Illinois. It's about to be their 25th anniversary. [00:22:16] Speaker A: Love it. [00:22:17] Speaker B: I'm going for it. I started to figure it out, and I was like, okay, this model works. Now, where we sit today is completely different. Yeah, we run about 38 to 40% labor cost in most of our restaurants. There are some restaurants that still run a traditional model because of the check average. So a steakhouse restaurant runs a little bit like the old days, which is. It is a higher food cost, but is a lower labor cost. You know, Swift gets to prime in that old traditional model of basically 30% food cost. And labor is about 30%. But most of our restaurants fall in this 38% labor, 22% blended. Cost of goods sold still gets us to 60, but occupancy is between 6 and 8. [00:23:13] Speaker A: You can keep it below 8. [00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:23:16] Speaker A: I've been in New York City for too long. [00:23:18] Speaker B: There you go. Depending on the city. And if you go to New York, maybe it's 10. [00:23:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:22] Speaker B: And silo is more like 20 instead of 16. [00:23:26] Speaker A: Yep. [00:23:27] Speaker B: So 20 plus 6 plus 60 leaves you 14% profit. And that's about where we try to fall is this 12 to 14% profit. [00:23:38] Speaker A: I love it. I love that you just walked us through all that. I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I work with clients all over the country, and it's funny, I bring to them in my program that I. When I work with people, I talk about what I call the 30, 30, 20 rule, which is basically 30 cogs, 30 labor, 20. I call it everything else, the kitchen sink. I love your. Your word of osteopathy and silo. But it's funny because I say, hey, listen, this is how restaurants were built. This is how they were built when they. When they worked. 30, 30, 20. Now, I'd rather try for 20% profitability, fall short, land at 15 or 14, and rather than try for 10. Right. 10 was the promised land for most. For most restaurants. And I just want. It's funny that you bring this up. I want people thinking bigger than that because. And we'll talk about this, because I. As I think about the past, present, and future of the industry, I don't think there's. I don't think there's going to be a lot of people who want to get into it for 4% profit. Nor should they. Or 5% profit, 5% profit. That also requires them to be there 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I think there's a different way. But I love that you're thinking about. You reverse engineer it, right? What's the rent? Right. What's the dollar amount per square footage? You multiply that out. If that's what I'm paying in rent, then what's 6% of that? What's 8%? That is 8% of what number. That's how you arrive at your revenue. Can I drive that kind of revenue? How many butts do I got to get in here every single day in order to do that. It's just, I've been saying this a lot in this last year. I just. I went to business school and got my MBA in food marketing. And I was there with a lot of restaurant people, but more people who came from the retail side, manufacturing side. So people from Campbell's and Tasty Cake and, you know, and Frito Lay, PepsiCo, and they just think differently about all this stuff. And they really come at it. They're really savage about this. And something I learned from them is that the restaurants are really closer to a factory than we like to believe. Yeah, it's sexy what we do. Yeah, we take care of people. But at the end of the day, we still have to build numbers that make sense. Otherwise, there's no reason to be in business. No one aspire, right? You aspired to open a restaurant because it was fun and it was sexy. You loved it, all of that. Nobody aspires to open a factory. The only reason somebody opens a factory is if they see a business opportunity, they know they can make a widget for $1, sell it for $5. Great, let's open the factory. Right? And I think it's got to be that. I think we have to apply some of that same thinking to the restaurants, because it is. We bring in raw materials, we do something, and then we sell a finished product. [00:26:15] Speaker B: It's an artist. Same thing. You can be an artist and a businessman. They're not mutually exclusive. We try to find that perfect intersection where the two of those meet, where there's not too much of either of them. Because we've seen this with a million chefs, where they're like, I don't care if I make money or not. You're not going to change my art. And a lot of times that person has a business minded partner and those relationships, just like most rock and roll bands, don't last very long. Partnerships are really, really hard. Fortunately for me, you know, my, my main business partner, which is Rob Katz, And I agree 97% of the time. And then I have seven chef partners, and we have an understanding of what we're both trying to do. But, you know, I think it works for us because, you know, Rob and I both appreciate the artistry and the way I started Lazydays Cafe, I was 100% artist and 0% businessman who was hoping there was money left at the end of the month. [00:27:23] Speaker A: Today's episode is also brought to you by.7 shifts running a restaurant is hard work, but managing Your team doesn't have to be. If you're spending hours on scheduling and chasing your team down through text chains and emails, you need to check out 7Shifts, a team management platform built specifically for restaurants. With 7Shifts, you can create and publish schedules in minutes. You can create with your, communicate with your team, pay your employees all in a single tool. 7Shifts helps your team make more profitable decisions, improve operating, operating efficiency, and most importantly, it gives you time back in your day. And right now, restaurant strategy podcast listeners can get three months free. To get started, visit 7shifts.com RestaurantStrategy that's the number 7s h I f t s.com RestaurantStrategy to get three months of industry leading team management software for free. As always, that link is in the show notes, which is how so many operators run, which is how many independent owners do that, right? They do what they think they should be doing. At the end there, I'm just waiting to see from my bookkeeper to see if I made money and what I learned when I was coming up in the industry, they're pulling it down. [00:28:36] Speaker B: It's like a slot machine. They're pulling it down. Like, please say, please say it. [00:28:40] Speaker A: But so my first, I'll say two management jobs. That's how the place ran. And I didn't realize that that didn't make sense. It wasn't till my third place when I worked with a guy who then became a mentor of mine, one of my best friends in the world. We went and opened five restaurants together. And he said, I know by the 20th, if we made money or not, if we're on target, are we on track to hit our revenue targets? And each week have we, where have we come in on labor and cogs? He's like, I know exactly where we are. I know to tell Beveridge to hold their order. No, no, no, let's push it to next month. I know to tell the kitchen to go lean on the order for this week. I know what to do. I know where we're gonna wind up exactly. [00:29:21] Speaker B: And I was like, whoa, there's too many surprises. You're doing it wrong. [00:29:25] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. And I just think, so again, when we talk about the past, present and future of the industry, I think that's where we have to go. Because I think it's just too tiring and too exhausting. And as food prices go up and labor keeps going up and rent continues to go up, that's not gonna stop. I just think we get squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. Unless we can be intentional about how we do it. I just think there's no. It's just not. It's just more fun when you're making money. It's more fun when you can manage proactively and actually look at things on the 20th and say, oh, we're off track. Great. Now what are we going to do? Let's pull the fire. Let's pull the fire alarm. Fire drill. Everybody's got to do this and that. What does everybody need to do in order to get us back on track? [00:30:06] Speaker B: I love it when a model works. You know, we last. The last restaurant we opened before Lay select was Olive to no, Laser Wolf's last one. Oliveeta was before that. Oliveeta is just one of those models that we knew month one was going to work. It all just worked. We had great rent structure. The food cost was good. It didn't take a tremendous amount of labor to put it out. And it was busy all the time. And every once in a while you get one of those. [00:30:33] Speaker A: You're just like, yeah, it just works without having to do anything. So that sort of leads into my next question here. So I want to talk about. Because now. So you open the places in Florida, you open the place up in Illinois. You're getting closer to Chicago. Talk to me. Obviously, you talked about your partner. Talk to me about that partnership. Talk to me about. I'm really curious on the 3% of the things that you typically don't agree on, because I think that's probably interesting, that's worth talking about and all of that. I want to talk about how you assess business opportunities, how you approach a new concept, how you approach a new opening with this sort of scientific methodology and this mixture of art and craft. Walk me through all of that. You start wherever you want to start. [00:31:21] Speaker B: Sure. Well, you know, after Illinois, I went and opened up a restaurant in Nashville, and I got. I got shit kicked. I opened up something that was too big, and I had my feathers a little too high in the air because I'd gone and opened up three restaurants in succession when I knew nothing and did really well. So I'm like, now I'm going to go and just, like, really kill it, and I'm going to open up this giant restaurant. And there's so many reasons that didn't work. But coming out of it, when I got to Chicago, I was like, you know what? I probably need somebody to be a true business partner to me and somebody who operates a little bit different than I do, where we fill in each other's holes, and. And we can bounce stuff off of. Not somebody who's, you know, constantly agreeing with the other one. Yeah, that's a great idea, man. You know, and so Rob and I were introduced by a mutual friend. We had a cup of coffee. We're supposed to sit for 15 minutes. We sat for four hours, and we said, let's open up one restaurant. What's the worst that could happen? And that was Boca. And Boca was a pretty broad sketch. We're like, Lincoln park doesn't have a lot of, like, destination dining. It's right across from Steppenwolf. You get a good theater turn. Let's open up a contemporary American restaurant, put 450 grand in it, and see what happens. It was designed, ironically, by the same guy who designed Danny Meyer's first restaurant, designed Union Square Cafe. And we went to work. And I think the most important thing of that restaurant in the early days was that Rob and I found our footing. I would come in, and I would turn the lights up, and I would turn the music down. He would come in and turn the music up and the lights down, and we. And we. It took us a while to figure out, and. But what we became was the alchemy of both of us. You know, he had been a little more on the nightclub side before that, I had been on the restaurant side. And our DNA became these restaurants that had. Were serious restaurants with serious chefs, but had a real energy to them. And so as we were figuring each other out, we were kind of building the architecture of what our restaurant group was going to be on the back of cocktail napkins at the end of the night. And that architecture ended up being, hey, let's not build it around one chef. Let's build it around multiple chefs, and then we can do all kinds of restaurants. So, you know, Boca opened in, oh, three. And then. Then we made a couple of mistakes. We open Boca in O3, Landmark in 5, and Perennial in 8. Three restaurants that were about two blocks from each other and were all American restaurants. Landmark was a little clubbier. Boca was a little more serious. Perennial, you know, had the Green City Market right across the street from it. But it didn't matter. We were cannibalizing ourselves. And the next restaurant is what started to define, really, who we were. We partnered with Stephanie Izard, and we built Girl on the Goat. That was our fourth restaurant. Our fifth restaurant was GT Fish. And after that, we had defined concepts in everything. And then we looked at it. We were like, wait a second. Landmark should not be landmark anymore. Landmark became Balena. We did a serious Italian restaurant with Chris Pandell. We put Paul Varant, who was one of Food and Wine's best new chefs, at Perennial, and it became Perennial Verrat, and it became a farm to table restaurant. And then we figured out who we were. We're like, every time we build something, it needs to have a signature look, a signature culinary voice and a narrative and a story that it's. That it's its own. And so we sort of got it. We figured out who we wanted to be, and we went into each restaurant knowing what the identity of that restaurant should be, which I think is one of the most important things you have to do when opening up a restaurant is stick to who you are. Don't let those first couple weeks where you're shaking out who your clientele is going to be, don't let them push you into anything. You know, I love. We opened Arrow. The idea was we're going to do the entire fish program direct from skiji market to 100% Japanese fish program. And we're not going to be doing dragon rolls or, you know, arnegiri is just going to get a quick brush on it. And, you know, people came in and they wanted a lot more aioli on their. On their sushi, but those were groups of people that were not looking for our restaurant. [00:36:03] Speaker A: Okay, so then talk to me about. Because I want to stop you here, because now you're starting to get into marketing. This is sort of where I live and what I love to talk about. [00:36:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:11] Speaker A: So you talk about identity, you talk about perspective and point of view, and I think that's all great. But there's another part of this conversation that I'm sure you didn't. I'm sure factored into what you did. And I want you to talk a little bit about that. So you said, oh, people wanted this. We were serving that. But you knew that there was an audience for that. There was an audience for what you were doing. Talk to me about how you assess that. You look at the market and you say, hey, there are going to be a lot of people who want this kind of thing. We're not giving this kind of thing. The kind of people we want are over there, and we're going to do that for them. Talk to me about how you assess your market. And how do you determine what a town, a neighborhood, a block needs so that you can very confidently bring that point of view to the table? [00:36:57] Speaker B: Well, first of all, it's a guessing game. And there's no idea how to. How to completely blueprint it, but we've had pretty good instincts as far as that's concerned. And Japanese restaurants did very, very well in Chicago. And, you know, the few big box ones were pretty clubby. And we were like, let's do something that maybe the design's a little more serious. And we engaged with Abrico, and that was the first time we did a project with them. And we said, you know what? Let's do an Izakaya downstairs. Create something that's maybe a little bit of a younger demographic and create a second door that goes down there. But let's do a serious fish program, and then do a Japanese seasonal kitchen that is really taking some chances, and let's see if it connects. We think it'll connect. We loved it. It was my favorite kind of food. It was Rob's favorite kind of food. We did the tasting, and we said, the food's delicious. The menu is going to probably read a little bit confusing, and for some, it might read a little bit heady, but you know what? We're gonna stick to it. So a couple things we stuck to. We stuck to the food program we were gonna do, and that Izakaya, which took a little while to find an audience because it was buried downstairs. It stayed open till the wee hours every single night. We're like, we're gonna get there. And the first thing that really happened and buoyed us was the Chicago Tribune did the 50 best restaurants in Chicago. The very first list Phil Vettel did, the Chicago dining food critic at the time. And the number one restaurant in Chicago he listed was Alinea. And that was not a surprise. But number two was Momotaro. And then soon after that, we got Esquire's Best New Restaurants, and we really started to find a crowd. And that's a crowd that's now gone for eight years. But there was a stick to your guns moment where we were looking at the people that were coming in, and it might have been a, you know, 12 girls coming in on a girls night out, that we might not have been the exact place for that group. And we still tried to make them as happy as possible, but we found an entirely different crowd for that restaurant. And I'm so glad we stuck to our guts. [00:39:18] Speaker A: So is this one of your superpowers? If there's something that you're innately good at? I mean, you talk a lot about instinct there, and you said your own taste and all that, and surely taste comes in any great Artist, for example, sort of rides their taste for a while until their sort of craft can catch up or their artistry can catch up to what they. They want to do. You're talking about one restaurant. You've opened two dozen, and you've gotten it right more than you've gotten it wrong. So how do you get it right as often as you do? And talk to me about how that decision might have happened for other restaurants. [00:40:02] Speaker B: We're really good at whiteboarding. Our superpower is whiteboarding. And a lot of times, what we do. Let's say we're opening up a steakhouse. One side of the board says, what are the core competencies that you have to have to be a steakhouse? Well, obviously, you have to have steak. Do you have to have a Caesar salad? Do you have to have shrimp cocktail? I don't know the answers to these questions. Let's get a group of us together, which is usually myself, Rob, and the chef, and maybe it's our chief development officer, or maybe it's our coo, who's been with us a long time. And then the right side of the board is like, how are we going to bend it? And so with Swift and Son, specifically, we said, what if we had a concierge in the restaurant who is only doing stuff for the guests were in the space? So when somebody said, hey, is there a good jazz club we can get into tonight? Not only do we have a printed copy of that envelope, but we're also going to call that jazz club and see if we can get a table for them. If somebody at the table has chapped lips and we notice it, we hear somebody say it, we run somebody to Walgreens and we get them some bliss stacks. I mean, so that was one thing. We're like, okay, yeah, let's do that. Two, we're like, what can we do with carts? And we're like, let's build a chocolate trolley. Let's do something. The room kind of looks like 1920s, maybe the dining room that would have been on the Titanic. It looks like a big ship. Let's do these beautiful carts that we roll through. Let's do a cocktail cart that we press ice and make these beautiful ice balls for people's drinks on a cart throughout the dining room. Let's do a chocolate trolley, and let's do a beef Wellington cart that comes out, and we cut it tableside. And then we're like, what if we had a magician in the restaurant? And the magician was on the menu and it said, 20 minute magic show. 60 bucks and you could order that. And so now we're looking at the board, and we're like, okay, now we got enough weird stuff to be something. We're not just a steakhouse, we're our steakhouse. And that's how that opened up. That restaurant opened. And so now we do that with everything. You know, Lay select opens tomorrow. And part of the DNA of this restaurant is we're doing hors d' oeuvre service. And hors d' oeuvre service is you say you want it at the beginning of the meal. Everybody at the table has to participate. A card is going to come up, and you might get duck riettes and eggs with caviar and French baguette with. With. With French butter. And so six things get dropped on your table immediately. And so that was one of those things in that same conversation. What are the core competencies of a French brasserie? And what is our brasserie? [00:42:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. [00:42:54] Speaker B: And so I think that's one of our superpowers, is that we make things that look different, that taste different and feel different, but they don't look like anything else we ever did. They're not facsimiles. You might be able to feel a Boca restaurant because our hospitality is warm in a certain way, but they don't look the same. [00:43:22] Speaker A: Yep. [00:43:23] Speaker B: I'm okay with people not knowing that that restaurant is ours. They walk in just like, I'm at Stephanie Izard's Girl and the Goat, or I'm at Daniel Rose's Lay select, or I'm at Lee Wolin's Boca. Great. Wonderful. We've done our job. [00:43:38] Speaker A: Yep. Yep. You know what I love most about the example you just gave is that you've systematize that which, you know, we started off this conversation talking about balance, and that's balance. That's a balanced whiteboard. Talk about setting boundaries. Talk about. I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about differentiation that we don't need just another anything we don't need. Certainly Chicago doesn't need another steakhouse. So you answered the question. Hey, if we're going to say we think Chicago needs another steakhouse, why, What. And, and really, that's what comes down to. That's what marketing is all about. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Right. [00:44:11] Speaker A: How do we persuade someone to do this instead of that, Ours instead of theirs? And we have to give them answers to that. And if you don't supply that, they'll make decisions on far feebler pieces of information like convenience or price or familiarity. I spend a Lot of time thinking about that and talking about that. So I love that system. I love the whiteboard. It does sound like a superpower because you're thinking intentionally about that. [00:44:38] Speaker B: But we have conversations outside of that that sometimes have nothing to do with the restaurant we're about to open. But it might just be like, why does Olive Garden do so well? You know, what is it about that? What are the smart things that they've done? You can't say they're not smart. [00:44:57] Speaker A: Agreed. [00:44:58] Speaker B: When you're here, your family. That's a good bumper sticker, man. That is a good, good bumper sticker. It works. The salad bowl, that dressing, that's got tons of sugar in it, but it's craveable. The breadsticks, they kicked ass at all those things. They really did. They nailed what they were trying to do, and it's worked for, I don't know, 40 years or whatever it is, bunch of decades. The group that they were going for, they absolutely nailed it. So when you're conceptualizing things, you can't just discount stuff like that. Yeah, you can take what they did and turn it into something that's more artisanal, but you can't turn your back on that and say, they didn't nail it. They nailed it well. [00:45:45] Speaker A: And so much of the conversation that we do, I think about it, right? When we talk in marketing circles, you talk about positioning, right? The idea is the. The assumption is, is that a market exists, which. Which is true. Pretty much every town, every city, every block, every neighborhood has a market for restaurants, Right? Restaurants exist. If you're going to open a restaurant, you are going to be inserting yourself into the market. And so by definition, you've got to say, we're like that, meaning we're another restaurant. But we're different because of the following reasons or because of this one very important reason. Whether we realize it or not, that's what everybody does when they. When they enter into any market, in any industry, no matter what product, service you're selling. And. And I wish we spent more time talking about that. And again, you brought up with Olive Garden, say, you know, what they do is brilliant for the people they're trying to reach. And I think you're probably right. I think if there's anything Olive Garden does really well, it's. They know exactly who they're trying to reach, and they've crafted the perfect experience for that demographic, and they created a. [00:46:46] Speaker B: Bumper sticker that makes sense to who they are. And I think this is a really important thing. Even if you're not using it outside of your own family. Creating a bumper sticker. That makes sense. Miley Carpenter, who's married to Wiley Dufresne, had this brilliant speech a few years ago that was at the welcome Conference, and it was know your bumper sticker. And what she talked about was the army and the. And every decade they changed their bumper sticker. So one year was be all you could be, you know, but as times changed, they changed it. They stopped talking to the recruiter, and they started talking to the parents at a certain point, because kids were staying at home longer. So then it was, you made them tough. We'll make them army tough. So instead of talking to the kids, they were talking to the parents. And then during the me generation, it was army of one. And so they understood from a marketing and recruiting standpoint who they were going for within a restaurant. Your guiding principles, I think, are so important, because if everything goes back to that, you won't do anything that disrupts that bumper sticker. Here's who we in this restaurant. This is what we mean. This is what we care about. And it might not be one line. It might be the 12 guiding principles of that restaurant. But I think that's super important, too. Like, can everybody agree that these 12 things are who we are? [00:48:14] Speaker A: Yeah. It's so funny. Yeah. I was giving a talk with Sean Walsheff, who runs a barbecue company called Cali Barbecue out in San Diego, and he's sort of slowly taking over San Diego, providing the Amazon of barbecue. But we gave a talk out in California last year together, and one of the things he talked about was, you're too wise. [00:48:34] Speaker B: Right. [00:48:34] Speaker A: Why do you do what you do? Right. Like, why do you exist? And why should anybody care? And it sort of gets to the heart of what you're talking about. Like. Like, what is this? Why are we here? Why do we bother doing it? And why should anybody care that we are doing it? And I think if. If more operators just answered those two. [00:48:52] Speaker B: It's very. Simon Sinek. Right? [00:48:54] Speaker A: It's. So we were sort of building on. [00:48:57] Speaker B: Right. [00:48:57] Speaker A: So, Simon Sinek, for any of the listeners who don't know, and I've talked about it a little bit, but in case. Just a refresher, he talks about something called the golden circle. And three concentric circles on the outside is what one ring in is how. All the way in the center is why. And he said, most companies work from the out in. They know what they do. They know how they do it better than anybody, but they never get to the why, because they do the what in the house so well, they never have to figure out the why. And he sort of turns around, he says, but the best companies in the world, the apples, the Coca Cola's, the Patagonias, the. You know, they start at the center and they understand the why. Why we exist. And what we sort of added to that was that it's fine if you know why you exist. I think a lot of people don't know why they exist. And I think there's real beauty in naming it, pinning it to the wall. But then our job then, as merchants, as business people, is to then communicate that as to why that matters and why anybody else should care about being part of that story, part of those core principles. [00:49:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And, I mean, I have a personal why of why I started that goes a lot deeper than business. You know, I grew up in a. I grew up in a very quiet home that never entertained. And it was a bit of a. It was a bit of a sad home, too. And I wanted to be in a space that was happy and joyous and people were having fun and people were giving great feedback. And that was my original. Even though it was kind of this superficial surface love that people were giving back. That's what I was looking for. I was looking for a space that I could build that was like a home or extension of other people's homes where they came in and had a really good time and I could feed off of their energy. [00:50:50] Speaker A: I love it. Talk to me about how that's evolved, because we all grow and change, and I think we don't spend enough time talking about how the things that we wanted back then don't have to be the things that we want now. We're allowed to change as people. In fact, that's one of the coolest parts about being a human being. Talk to me about how that's evolved. [00:51:06] Speaker B: Well, if you interviewed anybody who knew me 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago, or maybe even possibly 10 years ago, they would describe me as an extroverted extrovert. Anybody who's ever met me in this last three years, and there's a few people who become close friends that I met in the last three years would probably describe me as an introvert who's talented at being an extrovert. But he just kind of turns it on when he has to. I think that's the change is that, like, I never ran out of gas or conversation in the old days. I didn't. Now I really. When I. When I want to do it. I go in and I do it, and I can really like it, but it has to be balanced with me spending a lot of time by myself. So I really like executive producing within a restaurant, and I really like some nights being on the floor. It excites me. When we opened Laser Wolf with Michael Solomon off in New York, it was back to, like, being on the floor and clearing and talking to guests, and it was beautiful. I had, like, three weeks in New York at Laser Wolf that were just magical. And it was felt. It was a different stage. It was New York City, which is this huge stage. I had all these, like, really fun moments that were happening inside that restaurant. I remember that in one night, Otto Lange, Kate Crater, Dana Cohen, Amanda Klute, and Ruth Reichel were all dining in the restaurant at the same time. And I was like, this only. This shit only happens in New York City. That's true. And I went to Ruth and I said, I just want to tell you I have a few reviews in my office that are framed as, like, art, and one of them is yours. And she goes, what review was it? And I said, union Pacific. And she said, the lady next to me is moaning. That's the first line of that review. And I was like, that's it. That's the review. And so later on in the night, I went by and I sat down. We serve soft serve at the end of the meal there, and I brought some fries along with it because they liked the fries so much. And the next time I walked by, she grabbed me by the arm and she said, this time it's me that's moaning. I was like, this is it. This is it. This is why I got in this business. [00:53:30] Speaker A: What a great. [00:53:31] Speaker B: Right here. [00:53:32] Speaker A: What a great moment. [00:53:36] Speaker B: I was talking about this last night. I got to moderate Cat Cole last night. [00:53:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:40] Speaker B: Who's a legend, and I love her. She's a good friend. And we were talking about how you build yourself. What is the Frankenstein? That is you. Where did you get your management style from? Did you get it by rebelling or emulating against other people who managed you? Or did you just, like, take bits and pieces of people? And I said, I remember seeing Syrio inside Le Cirque, and Syria was like, the show, man. He was like. He was all monologue, no dialogue. He was like, what? You haven't been sat yet? Come right this way, ladies. And he would whisk them throughout the dining room. And I was like, that's cool and fun. And then I would watch, like, a Bobby Stuckey or a Donny Medea. And they were, like, in the service, you know, they were opening wines at the table, and they were delivering food, and they were a part of service. And then I watched Will Guidera the first time I ever went to a lead, Madison Park. And I'm like, he's like a CIA agent. He builds a whole dossier before you even get in the place. So he can do service things when you're in there. [00:54:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:47] Speaker B: And so that's how I started to build who I was slowly was all these little bits and pieces of someone else. And so I felt like when I was that person inside the dining room, that's how I could get the most joy out of being inside the dining room. If I got to be all those people at different parts of the night, that's when I loved it the most. [00:55:10] Speaker A: So I love this line of thinking. We're coming close to the end of our time together. And a couple of things I want to wrap up, but I want to just spend a moment on this. That's obviously, they say this, right? It's one of those things can't be taught can only be learned. You got to want that. How do you instill that sense of curiosity? Humility, Right. The humility to look around and say, who's doing stuff better than me? Who's doing stuff really great. The curiosity to say, how do they. What makes them so great? You just talked about this whole. This Frankenstein idea, which I love, which I think it certainly resonates with me. I understand that. I. I feel like I have that muscle. I know that. What I spent a lot of time thinking about is how do you instill that in others in your management team? How do you get them to instill that in your line level, hourly employees? How do you think about that? [00:56:05] Speaker B: Well, I tell everybody that everybody's doing cover songs, you know, is that we're all. We're all taking original material. Almost all of our jobs have been done before. There's been matri Ds before, hosts, before lime cooks, before all of this stuff. And then how do you make it your own? And I've told a story at every opening of every restaurant we've ever done. And I tell that story because it's the perfect analogy for this. For the COVID version story, which is in 1997. I don't know if you've heard me tell this one before, but in 1997, a friend of mine and I drove to. We're driving to St. Louis to look at a Restaurant. And we stopped at a Wendy's in Carlinville, Illinois. And we walked in the door, and there was a woman perched at the front, and she was like, gentlemen, welcome to Wendy's hamburgers. And I was like, thank you very much. I'd never seen a matriat at Wendy's before. That's pretty awesome. Thank you so much. So I walked up to the front, and the guy at the front, they. They had just done, like, Dave's spicy chicken sandwich. And he was like, let me tell you about our new special. We're doing a spicy chicken sandwich, and here are the ingredients. And I was like, it's a good salesman. That's a good sales approach. I'll take that spicy chicken sandwich and I'll get a water and I'll get the superbar. You know, Wendy's back then at a superb with like, pasta and salad on it. And then the woman who was purchased as the host was coming by with a napkin, and she was cleaning and keeping that immaculate. And at one point, she re poured my water with a pitcher of my table. And it was at this point I looked at Scott sitting across from me, and I was like, what the hell's going on? [00:57:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:57:44] Speaker B: He goes, I. I think we're dining in the greatest fast food restaurant ever. And I was like, well, you know what? Let's go ask for the manager. I go, I'm curious about who this manager is, because he's obviously amazing. And I just wanted. I just want to ask him a couple questions. So I went up, I go, can I speak to the manager, please? And they go, sir, is there an issue? I go, no, no, no, no, there's no issue at all. And he walks out and he goes, can I help you gentlemen? And I said, I just want to tell you, you have the best fast food restaurant that I think I've ever seen run ever. And he goes, well, as you could see, we're very proud of it. And on the wall they had a plaque for like, it was something called, like, the Golden Wendy's Award or something like that. They were like, the best run Wendy's in the. In the corporation. And I was like, wow, this guy was given the same song everybody else was. And I started thinking about the Beatles, and I was like, the Beatles? Every song they wrote was the standard bearer for every song until Joe Cocker redid with a little help from my friends. And it doesn't even sound anything like the Ringo sang version. It's a completely different song. And he killed it. And I Go, this guy's Joe Cocker. [00:58:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:57] Speaker B: And so what I say to everybody else is like, hey, go be Joe Cocker. You know, do it better than anybody else does. And if you don't like your job, nobody was ever a bad runner and became a good server or a terrible server and became a good manager. Nail your job and then move on to the job that you want to have. Love it. [00:59:22] Speaker A: I love it. The last question, then I got like six rapid fire questions for you. But the last thing I want to circle around is to go back to this idea of profitability and this book. And you discovered oil and that sort of changed your approach for restaurants, that there's a science to it. Talk to me about how you then bring your managers into that at each new property, how you teach them the science and the mechanics. Because it's one thing. And I. And I go through this a lot as I coach clients. It's one thing for me to work with the. The owners, right, or the owner operators, and I sort of open their eyes to this different way of thinking about revenue and tethering expenses to revenue and all that. And I watch the light bulbs go off. But then they have the responsibility to then go back and teach all of that and sort of make that part of the culture, you know, systematize that. Tell me about how you do that. [01:00:14] Speaker B: Most people keep their information proprietary, which I think is dumb. You've got to share every line item of every P and L with everybody. And as a level set, at the very beginning, we sit people down and we go, guys, we spent $5 million in this restaurant. Until we get $5 million back, we haven't made any money at all. So we're gonna build a budget together, and we're gonna show you how we do it. And then when the P Ls come out, we send trial balance, preliminary P and L to the store level before it even ever comes to Rob and I, or to the C suite so they can look at it. And if they have any questions, they could say, I don't understand how we got to this number. And accounting will tell them. Or they can recognize a mistake and say, I think our inventory counts wrong. So then by the time we look at it, they have all the answers to the test. Then we sit down with them and we go over every line item. We say, do you guys want to explain to us why supplies that we budget 3.5% is 5.2%? And they're like, yeah, we screwed up and we did this or this happened. Or whatever. So there's accountability, there's actionable items, and there's full transparency. [01:01:27] Speaker A: Love it. [01:01:28] Speaker B: Within those three things, they learn it. And I know at this point, because I've seen it before, they'll take our P and LS, which we've created. You know, our P Ls are not the ones that get spit out by the by, you know, Great Plains accounting system. We built them to our own specs. And I know people that leave our company then use those P L's. I've seen other people who've shown me their P L's with our formatting. That's our formatting right there. [01:01:56] Speaker A: It's one of the first things I teach all my clients. I say, hey, listen, your bookkeeper, your accountant are going to hate me and I don't care. You can have them call me. This is how a restaurant P and L has to look. They're giving you some other. You can't. You've got all this crucial information that's gotta be separated out, not to pull labor out in its own section. Like, I'm sorry, it does us no good. Just like if I tucked in, you know, beverage costs and food costs, you know, in between with, you know, electricity and maintenance. Like, doesn't you. You need to look at all together. So, yeah, there's a specific way. And I make enemies pretty early on. [01:02:27] Speaker B: Well, we create bench. We create benchmark numbers for everything. And we're lucky because we have, you know, 25 restaurants that we're able to look at. You know, even little things like what is the amount of beverage inventory that we're keeping on hand divided by the amount of beverage sales that we have and what is a suitable number for how much inventory we should keep on hand? And so how much cleaning supplies are we using divided by sales? You know, we. We get really. We get really into the. Into the deep end of the pool with that stuff. We have a director of strategic initiatives that works for us who used to work for Microsoft, and she'll do anything. I'll say, tell us how much it takes to make a dollar in pastry at each of our companies. And she'll have to go in and say, well, we give away bread for free here, so we have to give that a value. You know, it's not. Get those numbers. But she's the best at it. And we've been able to get all these comp. Set numbers of all of our restaurants and really dial it in. [01:03:28] Speaker A: I love it. That sounds like a whole other conversation, which maybe I'll talk to you down the line. This is great, Kevin. This has been an amazing conversation. I got six vaguely rapid fire questions that I want to throw at you to sort of wrap this thing up. All right, first question, what's the last, the last great meal you had? [01:03:46] Speaker B: The last great meal I had was, I was just in Thailand, I was in Chang Mei, and we met this 70 year old chef at the market and we shopped for two hours. We went back to her house, we picked vegetables from her garden and we prepped and made with my whole family. You know, my son Luca was helping make the curry paste an entire meal together. And it was everything a great meal should be. It was, there was love in it. My whole family participated in it. And it was delicious and it was jovial. You can't get anything more out of a meal than that. It was so emotional. I cried at the end of the meal. [01:04:41] Speaker A: I love it. Second question. What's the last great hospitality touch that really moved you? That went, whoa. [01:04:54] Speaker B: I've got a big one. My mom passed away in March, right before the pandemic, literally the day before they shut down restaurants. So my mom passed on a Saturday. Sunday was the last day restaurants were allowed to be open. And we went to my restaurant in Springfield, Illinois, because we weren't going to be able to have a funeral. And so inside that restaurant is my mom's paintings because I had asked her to paint 18 paintings inside that restaurant. And so we felt like we were surrounded by her. And at the end of the meal, the now owner came up and said, I'm so sorry about your mom. Could you tell me a story again about the blue dogs in the space? And I told him and he said, which one is your favorite? And I said, I love this one of the blue dog in the field of poppies. And he walked away from the table and grabbed it off the wall and we took it home with us. [01:05:55] Speaker A: Amazing. [01:05:56] Speaker B: It's in my house. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Amazing. Question three. If a genie came down could grant you one wish as it relates to our industry, what would it be? What would you wish for? [01:06:09] Speaker B: Oh my gosh, so many things. You know, I think that we're in a place right now where people need more wellness, more balance. They're having more trouble finding happiness within the spaces of these restaurant four walls. This is something that we talk about and is on our agenda all the time. I want to find a balance in the restaurant business where restaurants can both naked pencil to where the economics make sense. But at the same time, everybody across this whole country earns a fair wage, and that we can really find that happiness, that initial happiness that I found in this business. There's so many beautiful things that happen inside this business. Learning how to cook, being mentored by a great chef in the back, being able to capture some of that contagious energy that exists in the front of the house, all those beautiful things. I just want everybody to be able to capture and feel that. [01:07:19] Speaker A: That's definitely another episode, because I want to talk about how we. How we take action to make that happen. I love that. All right, so I asked you about a hospitality experience that resonated with you. I want to flip it around and say a restaurant experience, something that you did in your restaurants that you were a part of that affected somebody that you knew, somebody you saw, somebody you didn't know. Whatever. Something you did in a restaurant that continues to resonate with you, that still says, yeah, that's why I do it. [01:07:51] Speaker B: Four weeks ago, a woman reached out to me on Instagram and she said, I'm going to dine at Boca this week. And my father and I have dined at Boca each of the last 15 years. On our birthdays, we share the same birthday, and we always have martinis and eat the tasting menu. And she said, my father passed away, but I'm still going to come in. I wanted to let you know how important it was to me. So we got two martini glasses. His name was Seymour. And we etched Seymour's name on two beautiful crystal martini glasses and we put them in a little box. And then we changed the name on all our cocktail menus that night to Seymour's Martini. And we bought her dinner, and we. We brought her the glasses. [01:08:44] Speaker A: What. What a cool touch. And in the end of the day, right, it doesn't really take much to do that. It just takes the. The will to do it. [01:08:52] Speaker B: And it was fun, I mean, honestly, to like, what are we going to do for her? That's what makes this business fun, man, is those moments where you get to be creative once again. It's back to the whiteboard again, man. If you don't have a whiteboard in your office or. Or somewhere, get one and spend some time in front of it. Spend some time talking about what you're going to do at pre shift, what you can do for guests, and how you can make your restaurant better. [01:09:18] Speaker A: Love it. Fifth question. What would you tell someone who's about to open their first restaurant? [01:09:23] Speaker B: Go slow, make it small, don't overbuild your first restaurant. You can figure out how to make money in a small restaurant. But that's your bachelor's degree, your master's degree in getting restaurants. So don't start out with this giant place. Learn it the right way. Really take care of your guests. You can pour over, you know, you have a 40 seat restaurant, you can pour over every single table, every single night. And I guarantee you, if you're great, if you're great, great's a big word. You'll find a customer base and you'll do really well. And then that reputation you get off of that restaurant will catapult you to doing more if you want to. [01:10:05] Speaker A: I love it. All right, last question. Tell me about the future of restaurants. So I'm going to say, look, five years down the line. What is coming that other people you think don't see coming? [01:10:17] Speaker B: Well, we have to create more food in the world in the next 50 years. The amount of food that we have to create compared to where we're at right now is a staggering number. So we need to figure out a lot of things, technology and otherwise, to be able to feed everyone in the world. Restaurants themselves, I think, are going to benefit from how digital the rest of the world is. I think there is going to be meals that are utility, that people order off of a keypad and their food just shows up in front of them and they never talk to a human. But what, what we do in our company I don't think is ever going to go away. And I think it's going to become more important. So if you can really lean into giving hospitality that has real emotion behind it, people are going to be dying for that because we're getting further, further and further into tech and it's super one dimensional and it's not great for your brain. And so we need to create restaurants that help produce dopamine from people. And that's by having loving, real service inside of restaurants with people who actually want to take care of people. That's our first question to everybody. Do you like taking care of people? Those people are going to be harder to find people that do find those people and curate those people. Those restaurants are going to succeed. And then on the other side of that, let's create a model that's not so focused, fragile, you know, like you said, 4 or 5% profit. One thing happens and then you're out of business. That shouldn't happen anymore. So let's, I hope we figure out how to create more food, have a better financial model and continue to open up restaurants where people are happy in the space. Everybody's happy in the space. Teammates, everybody. [01:12:14] Speaker A: Love it. Kevin, I appreciate your time. Real quickly, tell the audience where they can go to learn more about you and all your restaurants. [01:12:22] Speaker B: You can go to bocagrp.com that's b o k a grp.com for Boca Restaurant Group. I have a private wellness club here in Chicago called Beyond B I A N. It's livebeyond.com and you can go. You can find me on Instagram at Kevin Bame Bokeh. That's K v I n B o e H m B o K a on Instagram. And I and I answer all my DMs. So if you want to send me a DM, send me. [01:12:51] Speaker A: Love it. We will include all those links in the show notes. Kevin, really appreciate your time. Thank you for being here. Have a great opening here with the the new restaurant. [01:13:00] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. [01:13:04] Speaker A: Once again, a big thank you to Kevin for taking time out of his day in the middle of what must be a very hectic restaurant opening. To anybody out there who's opened a restaurant, you know how that goes. So big thanks to Kevin for sharing all of his insights and wisdom with us today. As I said, all the links are in the show notes. I appreciate you guys being here and I will see you next time.