Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 2: All right, everybody, joined today by David Chang, Holy smokes,
Speaker 2: excited to be here.
Speaker 3: I you okay, David Chang, Michelin star chef Momafuku restaurant
Speaker 3: group podcaster, Tons of television, like a lot of television.
Speaker 2: Started out as a chef, yup, we do I just
Speaker 2: play one on TV?
Speaker 1: Nice play one.
Speaker 3: We just talked about you a whole bunch because, as
Speaker 3: I described to you earlier, I had was moose hunting
Speaker 3: and we ate a.
Speaker 2: Lot of uh we ate a lot of your ramen.
Speaker 1: Wow, a lot of your ramen.
Speaker 3: With maybe in an area that no one has ever
Speaker 3: eaten your ramen. And then I got home and got
Speaker 3: to talking about this and and uh Randall Weaver here
Speaker 3: he was saying that he likes to he.
Speaker 1: Likes to eat.
Speaker 3: You're the Mama Fuku ramen because you don't feel like
Speaker 3: it's such a piece of ship eating.
Speaker 2: It's it's not.
Speaker 4: Just physiologically, not just physiologically, but in terms of self
Speaker 4: esteem and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: That's what that's like. I know exactly what you mean.
Speaker 2: You don't feel like it just yeah, you feel it
Speaker 2: feels like clean and good.
Speaker 3: Dude, I'll tell you I sat down and did I
Speaker 3: sat down to three packs?
Speaker 2: Wow? Two is really sort of the proper portion.
Speaker 1: Oh really, no, we moved down on a three pack.
Speaker 1: What are you good for, Randall?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I'm thrilled to go home though, and tell my wife
Speaker 4: that two is actually the proper amount for one person.
Speaker 2: Well, listen, we're gonna send you a whole boatload of
Speaker 2: the Mombo product. Trust that's phenomenal.
Speaker 3: No, it was that ship was good and and a
Speaker 3: buddy of mine we were sitting there after we got
Speaker 3: a moose. Uh my colleague Seth that I work with,
Speaker 3: he was he went to the over to where we
Speaker 3: were storing all the meat, and he went over to
Speaker 3: one of the game bags was cutting himself off super
Speaker 3: thin moose slices, skewering amount of stick. And then he
Speaker 3: did the momofuku.
Speaker 2: U can you say wants momofuku? So I'm saying exactly,
Speaker 2: but I've heard every pronunciation of it. Momofuko is surely
Speaker 2: the most popular way of saying it. They hadn't know.
Speaker 2: But it's fine. It sounds like the reason that I
Speaker 2: named it that it sounds like motherfucker. Sure does. That
Speaker 2: really is so it doesn't mean something. It does because
Speaker 2: I thought when we did the restaurant, when it came
Speaker 2: out with the idea of two thousand and four is
Speaker 2: to introduce ramia. Reintroduced romen to maya because most people
Speaker 2: know it as instant noodles. The guy that created was
Speaker 2: the Taiwanese guy. He wasn't even Japanese. He created to
Speaker 2: sort of feed post war Japan in a fast way.
Speaker 2: And his name was Momofuku, and I thought it would
Speaker 2: be And at the time I was still reading a
Speaker 2: lot of books about logic and teutologies and shit like that. Man,
Speaker 2: I was spoken a lot of pop back then, But
Speaker 2: like I thought, that was sounds good, sounds like motherfucker.
Speaker 2: The guy's name was MoMA fuku even though now legally
Speaker 2: I'm not allowed to say it even though we've won
Speaker 2: that case. Don't worry about it. And three, you know,
Speaker 2: the first concert I went to, A second concert I
Speaker 2: went to was Alman Brothers when I was growing up,
Speaker 2: because I grew up in Virginia and because to me
Speaker 2: that I'm waiting if this explained something, this is all
Speaker 2: gonna make sense, because there was my favorite cover as
Speaker 2: a kid was Eat a Peach, and that's when I
Speaker 2: remember going there. I remember I didn't even see I
Speaker 2: didn't even know what a vinyl record looked like, and
Speaker 2: I saw that and be like, oh, that's a cool thing.
Speaker 2: So that was always ingrained in my head when I
Speaker 2: went to the concert and people wearing T shirts of
Speaker 2: that same that that that cover of that album. So
Speaker 2: it became something that was like always, I've always associated
Speaker 2: positive memories. And then I'm in Japan learning Japanese cooking
Speaker 2: and I'm learning things words that would mostly associate with food.
Speaker 2: Momo means leg mm hm. So you know, you go
Speaker 2: to a katy restaurant, you get momo and fuku is
Speaker 2: like an edge of lucky. So I said lucky peach.
Speaker 2: So a logo became the peach. So that's why the
Speaker 2: Almond Brothers came it. Yeah, oh that's great.
Speaker 3: Isn't that funny when you're talking about your Japanese being
Speaker 3: food things? Is I've always struggled with Spanish, but I
Speaker 3: can oftentimes smoke people on my uh the wildlife names
Speaker 3: like I used to like every like I'd be like,
Speaker 3: I don't really know any Spanish, just that I can
Speaker 3: name most.
Speaker 1: Fish in Spanish and a lot of game animals and Spanish.
Speaker 2: Uh, but yeah, that l that stuff is phenomenal. Man.
Speaker 1: So he was cooking little moose slices and dressing his
Speaker 1: thing up.
Speaker 2: So did he did he boil it? Or did he
Speaker 2: roast it?
Speaker 1: We had a big argument. No, no, he was boiled.
Speaker 3: He was just skewering his little thin super moose slices
Speaker 3: on a stick a little bit and little strips of
Speaker 3: fat on a stick and then putting them in. I
Speaker 3: was encouraging him to get it boiling and just drop
Speaker 3: it in, which he didn't want to do it that
Speaker 3: way for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: And another debate we had, well.
Speaker 2: You're the better cook, because clearly I think you had
Speaker 2: a better understanding. So sorry, your friend, this friend I've
Speaker 2: never been said.
Speaker 3: He's on this show quite frequently. He also we had
Speaker 3: a debate. I'd like you to settle this once and
Speaker 3: for all. He felt that you shouldn't actually boil the stuff.
Speaker 3: He'd liked to have it be that you would just
Speaker 3: put hot water on it and then let it give
Speaker 3: it a good soak, contrary to the instructions, which is
Speaker 3: a three minute boil.
Speaker 2: Seth. I appreciate the independent thinking, that out of the
Speaker 2: box thinking. I'm sure sometimes that out of the box
Speaker 2: thinking can come in handy, but not in this situation. Now,
Speaker 2: it is not designed. In fact, I think it should
Speaker 2: be cooked thirty seconds to a minute longer than the
Speaker 2: three minutes. Because it is air dried. It will work eventually,
Speaker 2: It'll just saturate and that's how it can be done.
Speaker 2: But it should be boiled. We're working on some other
Speaker 2: noodles where it can work that way. And I'll make
Speaker 2: sure that send quicker so he doesn't look foolish. Yeah time, dude,
Speaker 2: No that stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really really appreciated it, and and I had
Speaker 3: I man, what's what yeard?
Speaker 1: You start in the restaurant.
Speaker 2: Business nineteen ninety nine? Okay, so you had.
Speaker 3: Been going quite a while before I went in, but
Speaker 3: I was I ate in your restaurants early on, but
Speaker 3: not that early. We're gonna get into your whole life story,
Speaker 3: your big fly fisherman. Yes, saltwater fly fishermen.
Speaker 2: I moved on to although I did a lot of
Speaker 2: trout fishing this summer, salt water is where I think
Speaker 2: about almost all the time.
Speaker 1: I feel like that was that was surprised a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are familiar to stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people don't don't know that. There's
Speaker 2: not a lot of crew people on the flats in Mexico.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: We got to touch out a couple of things. So man,
Speaker 3: one of these random you gotta take it over on
Speaker 3: one of these. Are you ready?
Speaker 2: I think so because the couple people, Okay.
Speaker 1: I'll get to it.
Speaker 3: I'll get to it, and you're gonna have to jump
Speaker 3: in because it has some people I respect a lot.
Speaker 1: We're riled up. Remember I was talking about the guy,
Speaker 1: the climate change guy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: Now, first off, guy wrote in to say that we
Speaker 3: were talking about the number of PhDs out there, and
Speaker 3: a guy wrote in talking about the great explosion in
Speaker 3: PhD candidates and he views it as a mark like
Speaker 3: a market economy issue. Yah, the colleges realized they could
Speaker 3: make money producing these things. But I'm only throwing that
Speaker 3: out there because I was talking about was it the
Speaker 3: journal Nature?
Speaker 2: Yes, Okay, on a past episode.
Speaker 3: And I've been and I've had multiple academics right in
Speaker 3: very upset with me, including the people that account as
Speaker 3: my friend. I mentioned a article that was in free Press.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm talking.
Speaker 3: A guy wrote, an academic researcher who works on wildfires,
Speaker 3: wrote an article in Free Press, and he was saying,
Speaker 3: I was just published in the journal Nature about California wildfires.
Speaker 3: Our point out worrying in California right now. I was
Speaker 3: just publishing the journal Nature about about wildfires. And he said,
Speaker 3: and here's what it takes. This is an op ed.
Speaker 3: He's like, here's what it takes to publish in esteemed
Speaker 3: journals like Nature is you have to push a climate
Speaker 3: change supremacy perspective in order to be taken seriously by journals. Meaning,
Speaker 3: you know, eighty percent of California wildfires are human caused.
Speaker 3: If you wrote a published paper about that, that's not
Speaker 3: going to grab their interest. Electrical transmission, like we just
Speaker 3: saw the fires in Maui. The dangers of how we
Speaker 3: you know, transfer electricity can lead to a lot of
Speaker 3: wildfires that won't be of interest to nature. What nature
Speaker 3: would want to hear what they made and date to hear,
Speaker 3: is they want to hear the climate change connection.
Speaker 1: And I pointed.
Speaker 3: Out this fact, but then it'll want to be into
Speaker 3: this guy got himself an all kind of hot water
Speaker 3: and had maybe already gotten in hot water.
Speaker 2: At the time I brought it up.
Speaker 3: And I only told a fraction of the story, and
Speaker 3: a lot of people were like, dude, you kind of
Speaker 3: like started off on the first.
Speaker 2: Page and ended and you didn't get to the end
Speaker 2: of the book on this. Do you care to take
Speaker 2: this up?
Speaker 4: I mean, I can only speak to what I read.
Speaker 4: But apparently the journal had asked him to provide They said, well,
Speaker 4: did you consider X, Y and Z. And he said,
Speaker 4: oh no, we didn't have time or we didn't have
Speaker 4: funding to look at.
Speaker 2: These different factors. Yep.
Speaker 4: And he you know, he responded to the reviewers by saying,
Speaker 4: we looked at A, B and C, not X, Y
Speaker 4: and Z, which is why. And so they apparently asked him,
Speaker 4: you know, for the thing that he said they weren't
Speaker 4: interested in Yeah, and then.
Speaker 3: They went specifically asked about the very same things. He
Speaker 3: said that they didn't want to and.
Speaker 4: Then yeah, and then he kind of turned around and
Speaker 4: said they only wanted A, B and C and they
Speaker 4: they didn't ask me about X y Z, when in
Speaker 4: fact they had prior to the publication of the article.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it wound up being like a not smart
Speaker 2: move for that dude. Yeah. I think it came back
Speaker 2: to bite him. I mean so, just just so so, Bob,
Speaker 2: you know who you are.
Speaker 1: Jim you know he are.
Speaker 3: These are actual names too. Yeah, he thinks that would
Speaker 3: makeing up names Bob and Jim. I'm not Bob and
Speaker 3: Jim you know who you are. I'm not I have I've.
Speaker 1: Stand corrected yet corrected.
Speaker 3: But I appreciate the notes. I appreciate the notes. I
Speaker 3: gotta keep these academic types keep warm. Yeah, because they
Speaker 3: provide you a lot of information. On our episode four
Speaker 3: seventy four, this is more listener feedback. This is a
Speaker 3: little thing we do, little listener feedback. On our episode
Speaker 3: four seventy four, Animal Diseases, someone writes this in Steve
Speaker 3: seems shocked to find out about frogs being used for
Speaker 3: pregnancy detection. This concept was actually developed after a test,
Speaker 3: after a test that is known as the rabbit test.
Speaker 1: It's ringing a bell.
Speaker 2: You absolutely no idea. They used to use frogs. Check
Speaker 2: this out.
Speaker 3: They used to use frogs. You could use frogs to
Speaker 3: tell if a woman was pregnant. That's how pregnancy tests
Speaker 3: used to be.
Speaker 2: Was frogs. What do you mean used to be actual frogs? Way, Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 3: You could you could take you could you could do
Speaker 3: I'm not sure how it was done. There was a
Speaker 3: swab that you could do of a woman and it
Speaker 3: would like there would be like levels of hormonal I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's like the estrogen level, whatever hormone levels,
Speaker 3: and you could induce a you could induce a like
Speaker 3: reproductive response in a frog with this swab, and that
Speaker 3: would tell you if that was a pregnant individual.
Speaker 2: Seems like a lot of work.
Speaker 1: Well these frogs.
Speaker 3: Here's the crazy part we got in this whole podcast
Speaker 3: episode with an or an animal disease specialist. These frogs
Speaker 3: developed some sort of virus and now native frogs in
Speaker 3: this country. This virus is traveling among native frogs in
Speaker 3: this country, to which I asked, how do they even
Speaker 3: get this virus? They got this virus from these pregnancy
Speaker 3: frogs being released into the wild. So this, as this
Speaker 3: listener goes on, this concept was actually developed after a
Speaker 3: test is known as the rabbit test. The test which
Speaker 3: involved subcutaneously injecting blood or urine of women assumed to
Speaker 3: be pregnant into rabbits or mice, then dispatching the rabbit
Speaker 3: to determine if there was folicular activity on the ovaries.
Speaker 3: This is the origin of the saying. And he's acting
Speaker 3: like this is gonna illuminate something for me. This is
Speaker 3: the origin of the saying the rabbit died when referencing
Speaker 3: of women who had been confirmed as pregnant.
Speaker 2: Not myself.
Speaker 1: No, I've never had that happen.
Speaker 2: Maybe we will. Did this take place?
Speaker 1: I didn't do a lot of work on it.
Speaker 2: We could repopularize that one.
Speaker 3: I think this is a misnomer. This listener goes on
Speaker 3: to say, as regardless of the woman's pregnancy status, the
Speaker 3: rabbit had perished.
Speaker 1: Wayne Wayne wrote that in Thanks Wayne, did he where's
Speaker 1: he from? Did he give a location? He didn't give
Speaker 1: any location. I'm gonna start using that man. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know about my neighbor, but the old rabbit has died.
Speaker 2: Fish spills Louisiana.
Speaker 1: This is a serious issue, and you as a as
Speaker 1: a as a fishing anger, will be curious.
Speaker 3: Uh, it will be good to know. I don't want
Speaker 3: to give the guy his full name. A guy wrote,
Speaker 3: and he's from Louisiana. He's in the Navy. He's currently
Speaker 3: stationed in San Diego. However, he's originally from South Louisiana,
Speaker 3: where he points out there is a quote massive problem
Speaker 3: with pogey boats.
Speaker 1: Manhattan.
Speaker 3: This is the fish of many names, Men Hayden. They
Speaker 3: call him Pogy's in the Gulf, they call him men
Speaker 3: Hayden in Chesapeake Bay. They got a handful of our names.
Speaker 1: Bunkers and bunkers and all.
Speaker 3: So if you're sitting there at home, you're like, never
Speaker 3: heard of a poet by Noah Bunker, same guy, same fish,
Speaker 3: massive problem with pogy boats fishing too close to the
Speaker 3: coastline of wiping out our populations of game fish.
Speaker 1: He goes on to talk about. He sends along the
Speaker 1: forwarded email. Blow is what the state president sent out.
Speaker 2: From a.
Speaker 3: From a fishing conservation organization, and it gets into this, Uh,
Speaker 3: it gets into this pogy boat habit where they are
Speaker 3: dumping trying to find the link here, dumping enormous numbers
Speaker 3: of dead fish. And I hadn't realized this when these
Speaker 3: when these pogy boats are operating, and part of the
Speaker 3: problem here is so I'm on the board. I'm on
Speaker 3: the board of organization called Theodore Rolls about Conservation Partnership
Speaker 3: and TRCP where Randall's work.
Speaker 2: They've focused on energy on the.
Speaker 3: Men Hayden, the unregulated men Hayden harvest in Chesapeake Bay.
Speaker 4: I think they're now, Yeah, they've also focused on the
Speaker 4: fishery and the Gulf, but the Chesapeake Bay one has
Speaker 4: been a really hot issue.
Speaker 3: When they're doing these when they're doing this pogey netting,
Speaker 3: apparently during the process of netting, the fish die, so
Speaker 3: when they're hauling them up, the fish are dead, and
Speaker 3: they'll now and then have these breeches and they need
Speaker 3: to report how many fish are killed when there's a
Speaker 3: breach or a spill, and it is just a litany
Speaker 3: of insane numbers of millions.
Speaker 1: Of fish dumped.
Speaker 3: And I couldn't believe when I got to reading about this.
Speaker 3: I mean, I knew about the lack of regulation on
Speaker 3: his fishery. It's like often international interests operating without regulation
Speaker 3: killing a forage fish that drives the whole ocean ecosystem
Speaker 3: so that it can be like ground up for fish
Speaker 3: oil and pet food and like knocking the legs off
Speaker 3: the stool on marine resources. One of the reasons they
Speaker 3: have to report a lot of these fish spills this
Speaker 3: blew my mind, is because they caught too many and
Speaker 3: sometimes the nets get their nets will get so full
Speaker 3: of pogi's and redfish and all kinds of other game
Speaker 3: fish that they don't have the machinery to hoist it.
Speaker 3: By the time they find this out, it's all dead anyway,
Speaker 3: and so they'll need to aband what's called abandon the catch,
Speaker 3: and then file a report. But some of these officers
Speaker 3: are in trouble now for not filing the reports. Then
Speaker 3: file a report and saying, hey, what we were doing
Speaker 3: worked better than we thought. Heads up, we just dumped
Speaker 3: eight hundred thousand dead pogies and redfish.
Speaker 1: On the beach. It blows my mind that this is
Speaker 1: a that this goes on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this if you ever see photos of these big
Speaker 4: catches and like a commercial manhadan harvest the scale of
Speaker 4: it is unbelievable.
Speaker 2: And it's one of those things too where it's like
Speaker 2: I've also worked up I can put my glasses a
Speaker 2: lot of times.
Speaker 4: When you talk about allocation and like people using a
Speaker 4: resource in different ways, there's like some nuance and some
Speaker 4: gray area. But I think this is like one case
Speaker 4: in which there's most folks agree that there's a bad
Speaker 4: actor here, and it's these boats that have this enormous footprint.
Speaker 2: Isn't this happening to most fish cotton nets? Right? They
Speaker 2: have a charter and a license to catch a cod,
Speaker 2: but they catch all kinds of species and they can't
Speaker 2: do anything with it because they're not allowed to, so
Speaker 2: they just check it back in the water dead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's common, and there are a lot of like
Speaker 3: like you know, like salmon per saying in Alaska, why
Speaker 3: it's very responsible fishery. But some of this stuff is egregious.
Speaker 3: So this is all the stuff this guy's was referred
Speaker 3: to point in the news. So here's an article. Here's
Speaker 3: an article about the Louisiana Spills. Three massive fish spills
Speaker 3: that coated waves and beaches off the southwest coast of
Speaker 3: the Louiana last week has renewed calls for title restrictions
Speaker 3: on the Man Hayden industry Manhattan.
Speaker 2: How do you say, man Hayden, Man Hayden.
Speaker 3: Two men Hayden fishing companies dumped and estimated eight hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty thousand that's more than I'd catch it a
Speaker 3: full weekend of fishing and estimated eight hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: thousand fish in the waters off Cameron Parish during three
Speaker 3: incidents over four days. The fish form rotting rafts that
Speaker 3: either floated into deeper water washed up by the thousands
Speaker 3: near Holly Beach, one of the few communities in the
Speaker 3: sparsely populated parish.
Speaker 1: Amid the dead.
Speaker 3: Amid the dead man Hayden also called pogy, were hundreds
Speaker 3: of red fish, and then it gets into contributing to
Speaker 3: sharp redfish population declines, that the industry is contributing these
Speaker 3: red fish declines, and there's photos of just beaches littered
Speaker 3: with the stuff. These companies are now required they're supposed
Speaker 3: to go around and clean up all their dead fish.
Speaker 3: The first of the three incidents happened on September eleven,
Speaker 3: when the net of a vessel fishing for omega ripped
Speaker 3: and spilled an estimated two hundred thousand dead fish about
Speaker 3: two miles off east of Cameron Bar. The other two
Speaker 3: incidents happened on September fourteenth. Another vessel released three hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty thousand fish after its net broke. Around the
Speaker 3: same time, a West Bank vessel caught quote an unmanageable load.
Speaker 3: Rather than lose the whole catching the net, the captain
Speaker 3: decided to let part of the catch go. They dumped
Speaker 3: between one hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dead fish
Speaker 3: on the beach. Follows up from the summer before when
Speaker 3: they dumped a million dead Manhattan near Holly Beach Men Hayden.
Speaker 6: Near Holly Beach. Mind boggling numbers there, really is. I
Speaker 6: just looked at the photo. That's insane. Yeah, that is insane.
Speaker 2: It's really something, all right. That's all.
Speaker 1: I know on that happy note.
Speaker 3: So, uh, tell me, uh, what what was your You
Speaker 3: you described that you grew up in what you call
Speaker 3: the preppy neighborhood.
Speaker 2: No, I I grew up in I was born in Alexandria,
Speaker 2: outside DC, but my father had a business and I
Speaker 2: had relatives that lived in Richmond, and I could not
Speaker 2: understand that why Richmond was so goddamn different than where
Speaker 2: I grew up, because it's I always say that when
Speaker 2: you get to Richmond or Winchester, it's two hours south
Speaker 2: of two hours west of Northern Virginia or DC area.
Speaker 2: That's like to me, where the South actually begins. Then
Speaker 2: everything else is the mid Atlantic. It's basically the North.
Speaker 2: So I lived in Northern Virginia. But all I did
Speaker 2: playing All I did was play golf when I was
Speaker 2: a kid. Yeah, it was your your old males in
Speaker 2: the golf business. Yeah, it's crazy golf. Now. I picked
Speaker 2: it up again during the pandemic after maybe thirty years.
Speaker 2: I'm not playing. Hold are you turn forty six? Yeah?
Speaker 2: He didn't play for no like, yeah, I gotta do
Speaker 2: the math re quick. Fourteen years old when I stopped
Speaker 2: playing competitively, but I played many tournaments, mostly you know
Speaker 2: in the South.
Speaker 1: Yeah you were, you were a child competitive golfer.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Most.
Speaker 1: I always say, it's pretty good. I mean it's been
Speaker 1: pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When the Ruinia State Championship a couple of years
Speaker 2: when I always say my old man was the Now,
Speaker 2: if you go to a golf tournament or any golf course,
Speaker 2: you're going to see a really Korean dad yelling at
Speaker 2: his kid. I always say, my dad was the first.
Speaker 2: He pioneered dad, Oh yeah, oh yeah, because he wanted
Speaker 2: you to be he.
Speaker 1: Wanted to be like good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He wanted me to be a pro golfer. So,
Speaker 2: you know, I had three brothers an older sister, but
Speaker 2: I you know, supposedly I had the most talent amongst everybody.
Speaker 2: So he really pushed me. What was what was his
Speaker 2: How was he in the golf business?
Speaker 1: He's a supply, like a distributor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he got so. He came to America nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 2: which is funny because most people they had the they
Speaker 2: repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act, so all
Speaker 2: of a sudden you had a lot of Koreans coming
Speaker 2: in that were mostly academics, right, and engineers. My dad
Speaker 2: was not any of those. My dad just hustled and
Speaker 2: he came here and didn't speak any English and he
Speaker 2: got in. That's a whole nother story how he got
Speaker 2: a visa, but he came here in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 2: not an academic, and he worked in restaurants.
Speaker 1: And where did he come from? What part of Korea?
Speaker 2: Born in North Korea curious. Yeah, so my mother as well.
Speaker 2: She lived in Kessong. So my mom's side came from
Speaker 2: extraordinary wealth. My dad came from real hardcore Christians, like
Speaker 2: from nothing really, so polar opposites. And when you say
Speaker 2: North Korea now people are like, oh, that's but they
Speaker 2: don't understand. That was like Vermont, you know, you know,
Speaker 2: and now it's not so hey.
Speaker 1: Here in North Korean now is like a Dennis Rodin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he came here with nothing, and you know,
Speaker 2: he just worked in restaurants for like twenty five years.
Speaker 2: He worked his entire life in restaurants for the most
Speaker 2: part in America, and then somehow got into the golf business. Mm.
Speaker 2: And uh, that's what it all happened. Yeah, what was
Speaker 2: when you were raised?
Speaker 3: What was what was your awareness of outdoor you know,
Speaker 3: not when I say outdoor, I mean of course you
Speaker 3: play golf outdoors, but somehow on outdoorsy in my view,
Speaker 3: what was your awareness of fishing?
Speaker 2: And we would go crabbing, we would be fishing a
Speaker 2: lot in the Chesapeake. I never went fresh water fishing.
Speaker 2: In terms of hunting, my dad had a golf store
Speaker 2: and all of his sales reps wore yeah, they would.
Speaker 2: They just they would take videos of bow hunting and
Speaker 2: I would watch that all the time. They would so
Speaker 2: they would. I remember this guy jc uh Todd, like
Speaker 2: all these guys, they were all hunters. Eddie was the
Speaker 2: repair guy. He also hunted so long ago. And I
Speaker 2: remember when the handheld camcorder became a thing and they
Speaker 2: would like, you know, record these things. And in that area,
Speaker 2: especially back then now, it's not Korean dudes or not
Speaker 2: Korean dudes.
Speaker 3: Your dad didn't. He wasn't like your dad didn't just
Speaker 3: hang out with Korean dudes because he was from creat.
Speaker 2: So he hung out with my dad hung out with
Speaker 2: Korean dudes and everybody. But the salespeople were totally different, right,
Speaker 2: And I remember that they really loved they like working there,
Speaker 2: specifically because a lot of the people that would shop
Speaker 2: at the store lived on really large plots of land,
Speaker 2: so they were not only feel so they would not
Speaker 2: you know, if you're a good salesperson, you get to
Speaker 2: know everybody, especially repeat customers. Right and at that time,
Speaker 2: and this is how it all happened. Tyson's Corner was
Speaker 2: literally farmland. When I moved from my original house where
Speaker 2: I was born, we literally lived on like a farm.
Speaker 2: There's nothing near us, and now Tyson's Corner is just
Speaker 2: like suburban retail sprawl. It's really gross and you would
Speaker 2: never know that it was farmland. And back then it
Speaker 2: started to get very very wealthy too, because it was
Speaker 2: the premier shopping center outside in Washington, d C. So
Speaker 2: McLain Potomac really the suburbs that became very very wealthy
Speaker 2: and huge plots of land. So these people would also
Speaker 2: they're not hunters, they play golf, but they had always
Speaker 2: complain about deers eating something or whatever. So this is
Speaker 2: really what happened. I think one of these guys must
Speaker 2: have got convinced a bunch of other people to learn
Speaker 2: how to sell here. And you're gonna get permission to
Speaker 2: hunt on.
Speaker 3: Land, dude, this is gonna I used to have a
Speaker 3: list of like the most like the most hunting friendliest occupations,
Speaker 3: and I recently met a guy does egg loans. This
Speaker 3: guy's like, listen, you want to talk about permissions. So
Speaker 3: a guy that does agricultural loans working for the usdaars
Speaker 3: because the Baker Asian policy is just absolutely insane. Firefighters
Speaker 3: that weren't four on four off. That's pretty good. But
Speaker 3: I'm gonna add a golf sales rep.
Speaker 2: Golf. Yeah, they probably look really respectable.
Speaker 7: You've got always kolo shirt and like, but these guys
Speaker 7: would just always when I was the hunting season on,
Speaker 7: they would always just go bow hunting and they would
Speaker 7: almost sell their services as like we can exterminate right right.
Speaker 2: I remember it as a kid almost happening. I was like,
Speaker 2: and I always asked my parents, like you are nothing,
Speaker 2: what was your what was your what was your reaction
Speaker 2: to it at the time, Like, how did you I
Speaker 2: remember seeing this guy JC. I mean I remember seeing
Speaker 2: a video being like it was so early on I
Speaker 2: even know how he did it. But he's like, Dave,
Speaker 2: check that, check this out. And I mean I that
Speaker 2: was the first time I saw a deer shot with
Speaker 2: bow was on his home video. On his home video.
Speaker 2: I remember I was sitting on a Tripod golf folding
Speaker 2: chair behind the cash register, and I remember exactly when
Speaker 2: it happened.
Speaker 3: Actually, uh yeah, when you're if your old man wanted
Speaker 3: you to get into he wanted you to be a
Speaker 3: professional golfer, meaning I read that as he wanted you
Speaker 3: to live out Yeah, his fantasy.
Speaker 2: Man, I have no idea. How the hell he came
Speaker 2: up with that fantasy? It was proxy. It was like
Speaker 2: a proxy it you're weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when when you when you got into restaurant work
Speaker 3: was his initial thing, Like, oh brother.
Speaker 2: He thought it was what do you call it? A hobby?
Speaker 2: He's such a tech He's like, he's just a hobby.
Speaker 2: But you know, I tried to drop out of college
Speaker 2: to do there, and I didn't know if. I remember
Speaker 2: going abroad and trying to go into cooking school there,
Speaker 2: but I didn't know anything. There was no internet, there
Speaker 2: was no way to stay there. What do you mean
Speaker 2: there in the UK, one of the great chefs of
Speaker 2: all time, Marco Pierre White was literally running a restan
Speaker 2: called Harvey's, maybe like ten minutes away from where I lived.
Speaker 2: I didn't know. But you know, today with the Internet,
Speaker 2: I probably wouldn't like, Oh, I'm going to try to
Speaker 2: get a job there. I had no idea, so I
Speaker 2: tried to apply. I didn't get in. That was my
Speaker 2: first attempt to enter the color and profession. So you know,
Speaker 2: you want to enter like that. You don't want to
Speaker 2: enter as some dude working at McDonald's. I never got
Speaker 2: a chance to work because I only played golf. The
Speaker 2: only thing I ever did was play golf for like
Speaker 2: fourteen years. While I played competively from age five to fourteen,
Speaker 2: I got recruited to play golf at all the top
Speaker 2: high school prep schools, and I chose to go to
Speaker 2: one good Man. I was pretty good, yeah, and I
Speaker 2: burned out. I burned out. I had a meltdown of
Speaker 2: epic proportions. I was trying to qualify the US Amateur,
Speaker 2: not the US Junior Amater, the US Amateur Sectional qualifying
Speaker 2: was that Robert Trent Jones and Manassas Virginia and I
Speaker 2: on the second eighteen. I had a total meltdown and
Speaker 2: I never recover. I was a huge basketcase. When you
Speaker 2: say a meltdown, you mean like the meltdown the dude
Speaker 2: in Royal Tenim. I actually used that as an example
Speaker 2: in a journalist of the years ago. I was like
Speaker 2: when I saw that, I was like, that was that
Speaker 2: was me?
Speaker 3: Like you had a meltdown, meaning not sort of a
Speaker 3: prolonged I mean you had a meltdown.
Speaker 2: Meltdown oh yeah, oh yeah, like all of a sudden
Speaker 2: Because again this is it gets in the nerdiness of
Speaker 2: golf Robert Trent Jones is one of the longest courses
Speaker 2: in the world, particularly from hole to hole. It's just
Speaker 2: people don't walk it. They play it in a golf cart.
Speaker 2: My caddy didn't show up was my friend Jason Dollard.
Speaker 2: I remember that didn't show up. And I played like
Speaker 2: really well the first eighteen. And it was also like
Speaker 2: a sweltering Virginia hot It was like one hundred plus
Speaker 2: one hundred percent commidity. It's just not nice weather to
Speaker 2: play golf in. And I remember being like, if I
Speaker 2: played well on the second eighteen, I had a shot
Speaker 2: of maybe making the next qualifying round. And I felt bad.
Speaker 2: This guy Jod Moseley, holy shit, he was my second eighteen.
Speaker 2: I haven't thought about you got all the names. I
Speaker 2: haven't thought about this in years. I feel like rain
Speaker 2: Man right now. I think talking about a therapy session
Speaker 2: where you're like you're coming to repressed memories. I think
Speaker 2: talking about all the sales reps triggering something over my head.
Speaker 2: I remember these looking names and years anyway, this guy
Speaker 2: who wound up playing golf at Uva, very good golfer.
Speaker 2: He never he was always so mad at me because
Speaker 2: I should have decued myself, but I kept on playing,
Speaker 2: and I think I was like crying. I don't know
Speaker 2: what happened, but I just had a mental breakdown playing
Speaker 2: golf and I just never recovered from like a kid though,
Speaker 2: man like, but that's all I did. I didn't have
Speaker 2: a one child.
Speaker 3: No, no, I'm not criticizing you for having a mental breakdown.
Speaker 3: I mean it's just putting. It's just thrusting yourself into
Speaker 3: or your your family. I mean that's just intense. You know, uh,
Speaker 3: our little my little boy plays soccer and they there
Speaker 3: was reason I didn't read it, but I heard about it.
Speaker 3: There was recently an email that's a quiet Saturday asking.
Speaker 2: People to chill parents not like a lot of loud cheers.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like I can't picture, like it's hard to picture
Speaker 1: driving a you know, like driving a kid to that.
Speaker 4: To man, it happens a lot in golf, like those individuals,
Speaker 4: especially where you have to begin at such.
Speaker 2: An immigrant parents too, it's like push push push, you know.
Speaker 3: Man, We've had a whole series of immigrant parents or
Speaker 3: children of immigrant parents. We just had a we we
Speaker 3: just had a guy on who came from Vietnam, Son
Speaker 3: Tao who became a uh he's a competitive fly tire,
Speaker 3: like a master fly attire. He came from His parents
Speaker 3: came from South Vietnam after the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Speaker 3: Then we add a Mung chef on who was another
Speaker 3: Cold like a Cold War refugee from among dude who
Speaker 3: was a Cold War refugee from Laos who became an
Speaker 3: American chef, And they both talked a lot about immigrant parents,
Speaker 3: where a son Tao.
Speaker 1: Said, there's three ways this can go. You're a doctor,
Speaker 1: you're a lawyer, You're not my kid.
Speaker 2: That's pretty much pretty much the same saying yeah, I
Speaker 2: can totally relate. So me choosing to become a cook,
Speaker 2: it wasn't just for my parents. It was at point
Speaker 2: in my life where I was like, I hate everything.
Speaker 2: I'm doing something that is effectively back then because cooking
Speaker 2: is cool now, it was like social suicide to some degree, right,
Speaker 2: Like in my world, I went to prep school, I
Speaker 2: went all this thing. Nobody I knew would even think
Speaker 2: about becoming a cook. That was ridiculous. That's exactly why
Speaker 2: if you use oh yeah, it was total rebellion. And
Speaker 2: then I found out when I started cooking I'm a
Speaker 2: hyper competitive person. I wound up playing other sports. I
Speaker 2: never really played team sports, and that got the high
Speaker 2: school and I loved it. There was something about working
Speaker 2: in a kitchen, and I'm not listen. Anytime you walk
Speaker 2: in a kitchen of any sort, if it's fast food
Speaker 2: or not, it's hard. But when you walk into a
Speaker 2: place that's trying to be one of the very best
Speaker 2: in your town, in the world, it's a different ball game.
Speaker 2: And there was a level of seriousness and competitiveness and
Speaker 2: desire to constantly improve that resonated with me simultaneously. All
Speaker 2: of these professionals that I was looking at as a
Speaker 2: DEMI gods. Almost everyone was dead serious but also the
Speaker 2: funniest motherfucker I've ever come across. And probably couldn't do
Speaker 2: their laundry properly because they didn't know how to do it.
Speaker 2: Their life outside of the kitchen was in total shambles.
Speaker 2: But you put them in whites, put them ready for service.
Speaker 2: They were like f one race car drivers, you know.
Speaker 2: And I love that dichotomy, and I love that it
Speaker 2: was everyone came from all sorts of upbringings, backgrounds, parts
Speaker 2: of the world. It was coming from like this homogenized
Speaker 2: background that I sort of grew up and this was
Speaker 2: the polar opposite, and I loved it, you know, getting
Speaker 2: to work with people that didn't speak English, you know,
Speaker 2: people that just immigrated from Mexico, or what I did
Speaker 2: see with working with a lot of the prep teams
Speaker 2: and the dishwashers. They always remind him of my dad,
Speaker 2: that hard work mentality. It was like, this is the
Speaker 2: only job they can do, so hopefully they do it
Speaker 2: so well that their kids don't have to do. Yeah.
Speaker 3: That that that perspective, I think is something that is
Speaker 3: lost on a lot of people. I think, like I
Speaker 3: saw it my own, my own dad, you know, he
Speaker 3: never finished high school. Right, But there's this like but
Speaker 3: I just don't know if that idea that I'm struggling
Speaker 3: for words because it's hard thing to phrase up, but
Speaker 3: that idea that I'm I'm like sucking hind titty right
Speaker 3: now so that you don't have to. Yeah, as I
Speaker 3: think that that families or however you track families and lineages,
Speaker 3: at some point in time you get out of that,
Speaker 3: right and then and then it's like the I worry
Speaker 3: that that you create like a decline, like a decline
Speaker 3: of the empire because like right now for me to
Speaker 3: in any way ever act like I'm sucking hind titty
Speaker 3: so that my kid don't have to. I mean, I
Speaker 3: have the you know, as my wife says, man, you
Speaker 3: better be careful who you complain to, right, is so
Speaker 3: like to see and then my kid's not gonna like
Speaker 3: I can run around and look at sacrifices, you know,
Speaker 3: I'll run around look at sacrifices. Like my dad was
Speaker 3: raised by Italian immigrants, fought in the war, right, grew
Speaker 3: up super super poor, and that created like a like
Speaker 3: a drive, right, and then you wonder like what happens next?
Speaker 2: Like do they that?
Speaker 3: Because that every everything is is opulence and decay. Man,
Speaker 3: I guess that's a hard part of So my kids
Speaker 3: aren't listening.
Speaker 2: How do you as a parent that institute some kind
Speaker 2: of struggle that's not like crazy?
Speaker 1: You know, we do it through just.
Speaker 3: Chores and discipline and long hikes and shitty experiences and
Speaker 3: whatever whatever. It's manufactured in some way it's manufactured. I
Speaker 3: found someonest recently, I'll take my kids to do something,
Speaker 3: they're like, why do I have to do this? You know,
Speaker 3: and sometimes say that let's just so you can hang out.
Speaker 1: With cool people.
Speaker 2: When you get older, theyn't appreciate it.
Speaker 3: They'll appreciate your tenacity. Yeah, man, that's it's like it's
Speaker 3: it's man, you have to manufacture it.
Speaker 2: It's not. It's not like that.
Speaker 1: It's you somehow move beyond.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you worry about what happens when when you've moved
Speaker 3: beyond the struggle. I mean, you know, you gotta be
Speaker 3: careful who you bring up the unibomber around. But that
Speaker 3: was one of the Unibomber's big gripes was that everybody
Speaker 3: had it's to damn easy now, and it gave us
Speaker 3: all this room for all of our neurotic behavior.
Speaker 1: Now that he wasn't a little bit near.
Speaker 2: There could have been other ways you could have communicated
Speaker 2: that many other ways. Yeah, I know, inheritance, inherited success
Speaker 2: is very difficult. You know, it's just as difficult as
Speaker 2: I would imagine inherited wealth.
Speaker 3: Right, it's a curse. Yeah, it's like just gonna be
Speaker 3: worried now. Okay, I want to keep going. I don't
Speaker 3: want to hang up on that one. Earlier were telling
Speaker 3: me you in your training as a chef, you wound
Speaker 3: up in Japan. Yeah, and you're telling me how you
Speaker 3: wound up somehow they had it peg that you were
Speaker 3: interested in prepping turtles. Yeah, this is this is like
Speaker 3: some kind of weird misunderstanding.
Speaker 2: I've worked at Japan a bunch, you know. First time
Speaker 2: I was not cooking, I was teaching English. Then I
Speaker 2: come back and long story cut short. Second time around,
Speaker 2: I'm working in Japan cooking and then I open up
Speaker 2: a restaurant and I come back and they invite me
Speaker 2: because now I'm, you know, a person of note or successful,
Speaker 2: and they invited a bunch of chefs, no. Three or
Speaker 2: four of us to come down. And we're in Kyoto
Speaker 2: right where there's restaurants that are four hundred years older. Wow,
Speaker 2: older than America. Right, there is a restaurant that's almost
Speaker 2: a thousand years older.
Speaker 1: You're kidding.
Speaker 3: No, I remember being at a bar in uh I
Speaker 3: remember being in a bar in Oxford and someone pointing out,
Speaker 3: this bar has been in business longer than your country
Speaker 3: has existed.
Speaker 2: Like, I never thought it makes total sense about it.
Speaker 2: Never thought of that. I don't know, I just never
Speaker 2: thought of Japan. Food hasn't changed in like a millennia. Crazy, right,
Speaker 2: especially the food in Kyoto.
Speaker 1: Wow, is it good?
Speaker 2: It's it's it's not just good, it's it's like going
Speaker 2: to the Library of Alexandria almost for food.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: They're like maintaining traditions that go back hundreds of years.
Speaker 2: I remember I had nothing to do with the kitchen,
Speaker 2: but one of the farms there that a lot of
Speaker 2: the places use. I was eating strawberries and it was
Speaker 2: like dead winter and it didn't look fancy. In fact,
Speaker 2: it looks sort of dilapidated, but you eat these strawberries.
Speaker 2: And I was eating strawberries and I was like, that's
Speaker 2: like the best strawberry ahead of my life, like, and
Speaker 2: then he's like, oh. The farmer's like, oh, eat this
Speaker 2: one over here, under this other pile of stuff. It
Speaker 2: tasted totally different, and he's telling me why it tastes different.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I have no idea because of the translator,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, why does it taste good? And then
Speaker 2: the translator goes, oh, because he's like the four pink
Speaker 2: generation farmer. No joke. Right, When you start thinking about
Speaker 2: it that way, it's like, oh, this person knows so
Speaker 2: much more about growing fruits than anybody else. Yeah, particularly
Speaker 2: in that area, probably not as good if you moved,
Speaker 2: you know, a couple of times over. But in that
Speaker 2: there are nobody's going to grow stuff better than this guy.
Speaker 1: And when you understand that, that longevity is incredible, because yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you go to most Americans, man, they can't
Speaker 1: you get bagged for generations. They're like a little hazy
Speaker 1: on what country they might have come from.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I don't even have to go that far.
Speaker 2: It's teen generations. So I think when I got there again,
Speaker 2: I was I think about all that I learned there
Speaker 2: and what I saw. But one of the things I
Speaker 2: got somehow communicated was oh, Chef Chang, he wants to
Speaker 2: learn how to you know, cook soupon, which is Japanese
Speaker 2: soft shell turtles. And I was like, cool, I want
Speaker 2: to learn it one day, And then the day after the.
Speaker 9: Day, I was just like, there must be some misunderstanding.
Speaker 9: I'm never going to cook this way. Yeah, I've never
Speaker 9: picked it. Sense, how walk me through? Like what is
Speaker 9: the what is there?
Speaker 2: What is the preparation? So you take these things they're
Speaker 2: like yellow or white and they have like sort of
Speaker 2: a soft shell and then they're clear. I mean, how
Speaker 2: many pounds is one of these things. I mean probably
Speaker 2: like four pounds. They can't be bigger. But I don't
Speaker 2: even at the tiny ones. I don't even know if
Speaker 2: they're farm raised not. No, they're they're wild, and then
Speaker 2: they're their diet is cleaned, so it's like and then
Speaker 2: you take the thing and there's like not almost like
Speaker 2: a thin skewer got pointed, and you sort of agitate
Speaker 2: the hell out of the head until it bites it yep,
Speaker 2: and then you grab it with your left hand and
Speaker 2: it's like this, and it's again you're like pretty traumatic
Speaker 2: because it's very phallic seeming. And then you basically yank
Speaker 2: the head as far as can go and you take
Speaker 2: a you know, short deba like a Japanese butcher knife
Speaker 2: in you you slice it right in front of your
Speaker 2: groin area. And it was very weird.
Speaker 1: Oh, I got.
Speaker 2: To yourself almost right, and I was like, this is
Speaker 2: not I don't First of all, that was a lot
Speaker 2: to process, just killing the chartle and then you cut
Speaker 2: around it pop off the shell and I don't remember
Speaker 2: we're talking about the organs. I just remember it all
Speaker 2: feeling like it was moving, like it was an alien.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very water inside.
Speaker 2: And anatomy that I just I don't even know what
Speaker 2: was what. You know, everything looked like an intestine, you know,
Speaker 2: what the hell was happening in there? And uh, you
Speaker 2: don't need any of that, you know, so you basically
Speaker 2: scoop all that out. But what they really wanted was
Speaker 2: the meat under the shell, Like there's like a lining
Speaker 2: of that and the feet right and the neck.
Speaker 1: But mainly what you do is you would blanch it and.
Speaker 2: Then you'd peel the skin off, and then you would
Speaker 2: make it into a broth, so any part of meat
Speaker 2: attached to it, you would again chop it up. And
Speaker 2: it's in Kyoto delicacy of this beautiful clean broth soup
Speaker 2: and with like turtle feet basically down there. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: it's lot it was. It's delicious, and I know somebody listening,
Speaker 2: that's probably again I had no idea that Michigan people
Speaker 2: late turtles. I just didn't think anybody ate turtles. I
Speaker 2: had no idea. I assure you, it's it's really wonderful
Speaker 2: and it's delicious. So that's that was my I must
Speaker 2: have done like fifty of those that had fill. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh so that, uh, what you told
Speaker 2: me earlier. I thought that was like when you're in
Speaker 2: your younger years. No, that happened when I was like thirty. Yeah,
Speaker 2: how did it?
Speaker 3: What did that path look like for you to you know,
Speaker 3: you came out of being a golfer, decided you're going
Speaker 3: to go down and be a cook and a chef.
Speaker 1: At what point did it?
Speaker 3: Did you get where you're going to take the leap
Speaker 3: and uh, you know, try to open your own place.
Speaker 2: So I think it's important to note, like, go back
Speaker 2: to college. So I went to Trinity College in Hartford.
Speaker 2: I had a great time. I had a wonderful time.
Speaker 2: I parted my ass off, and I did terribly in school.
Speaker 1: Would you what were you supposed to studying?
Speaker 2: Anything to get me into law school or investment banking
Speaker 2: or anything but that a liberal art school. There's like
Speaker 2: fifteen hundred kids nescak New England and what I wound up?
Speaker 1: So you you were being groomed to be a banker or.
Speaker 2: Something like that, right, but yea or something in the
Speaker 2: corporate world. Yeah, and all my friends are doing those things.
Speaker 2: For the most part. From college, I wound up the classes.
Speaker 2: I wound up doing really well, and mainly because I
Speaker 2: took these classes because they were like you know, three
Speaker 2: three in the afternoon, you know, like things like that
Speaker 2: were religion and philosophy. And I came from a very
Speaker 2: hardcore Presbyterian family. A lot of it was from you know,
Speaker 2: my dad's side of the family, and that's where Christianity
Speaker 2: started in Korea, was really North Korea, of all places,
Speaker 2: So my dad's side, they were like the first Christians
Speaker 2: in Korea. Like hardcore. That was just how I grew up.
Speaker 2: So I was pretty rebellious to that idea as well.
Speaker 2: So I wanted to study why people were religious, and
Speaker 2: I studied a lot of things about philosophy and things
Speaker 2: that were meaningful to me, but really makes you gainfully
Speaker 2: unemployable when you graduate. So there was nothing I could do.
Speaker 2: And besides, those were good grades, but my other grades
Speaker 2: and other classes were terrible, so like I couldn't really
Speaker 2: get jobs that I wanted. So I moved to Jackson,
Speaker 2: Wyoming in the summer ninety nine. That's where I worked
Speaker 2: at Jackson Ole Resort Lodge, and that's why I learned
Speaker 2: how to fly fish. So I worked shift and I
Speaker 2: just I was like, I'm just going to learn how
Speaker 2: to fly fish. So that's what I did during the
Speaker 2: day times. I would just drive to McCoy Creek by
Speaker 2: myself and I would just figure out how to do that.
Speaker 2: And that's when I caught that bug and moved back.
Speaker 2: When I moved to Wakayama to teach English, and I
Speaker 2: only this is just give the example of my personality.
Speaker 2: Everyone's asking me what I was going to do after graduating.
Speaker 2: I had no fucking idea. So I went to the
Speaker 2: career fair and I took the first job they offered,
Speaker 2: right on the right side of the hall, like I
Speaker 2: camera with the cafeteria where they're setting up all the
Speaker 2: job fair stuff, and it was teaching English. And I
Speaker 2: didn't want to teach English, but that's just what I
Speaker 2: did because I could tell someone at least I have
Speaker 2: something to do. Anyway, that was short lived, but that
Speaker 2: was an important moment because when I lived in this
Speaker 2: really suck like hot it was almost like the Jacksonville,
Speaker 2: Florida of Japan, right industrial, super humid, tropical climate. Not
Speaker 2: much to do, but there was only one place that
Speaker 2: only one. There's two restaurants in my small town, and
Speaker 2: one was this ramen shop. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I tasted tastes great ramen for the first time, like real, real,
Speaker 2: delicious ramen, and never had anything like that. I've eaten
Speaker 2: a lot of noodles. Is I didn't know, Like I
Speaker 2: didn't know that is ramen. Definitionally Japanese ramyen translates to
Speaker 2: loman from Chinese. Okay, Yeah, that's what I always But
Speaker 2: the origins, like most things in Asia, are from China,
Speaker 2: and it's turned into a variety of things and it's
Speaker 2: uniquely Japanese.
Speaker 1: Nowt but it found its origin and it yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know the dried blocks.
Speaker 2: That's the guy that created instant noodles.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that that the way most Americans is just
Speaker 1: in there, you know, coming of age, encounter ramen as.
Speaker 2: You know, like a plastic wrap dry that's not romyen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that but that, I mean, that's what people know.
Speaker 3: And when when you do that, you have the association
Speaker 3: of it being like a Chinese food.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's like you know how most Americans probably think
Speaker 2: taco bell is like Mexican food. It's not right. So
Speaker 2: you know, that's what I always say to anybody that's younger,
Speaker 2: is like, you can't connect the dots till after the fact.
Speaker 2: You just got to keep on like chugging along. And
Speaker 2: in the moment when you're doing something, you think you're
Speaker 2: a complete failure and everything newing sucks. I had no
Speaker 2: idea that that moment in that crappy town in southern
Speaker 2: Japan eating ramyan would come back to be a massive
Speaker 2: moment for me. Anyway, I come back, I try to
Speaker 2: get a desk job. I do terribly. I hate it.
Speaker 2: It's now two thousand, No, right before two thousand, I
Speaker 2: just I had a lot of things happen. Couple, I
Speaker 2: three friends die in a year. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff going on, my family, health, all kinds of terrible shit.
Speaker 2: And I was just like, I don't want to do
Speaker 2: this anymore. I don't know what I want to do.
Speaker 2: Were you a good cook? No, so even personally, not
Speaker 2: for your friends, cook at all. She's a great cook,
Speaker 2: my mom to her day she died and refused to
Speaker 2: give me a recipe. I alwa, I was not, And
Speaker 2: still to this day, I say I'm not a good cook,
Speaker 2: and he goes, oh, dang, change, you suck at cooking.
Speaker 2: I think I'm not a good cook. I'm a really
Speaker 2: good cook, but it's not something that comes naturally to me.
Speaker 2: So I just I got really drunk at the Christmas part.
Speaker 2: I told all my bosses how much I hated them,
Speaker 2: and uh, I literally pulled off off of space. You
Speaker 2: know that. You know, I'm just gonna quit. And and
Speaker 2: I wanted to burn every bridge possible so I could
Speaker 2: never go back to what was a possible corporate job.
Speaker 2: And I didn't know if cooking was going to be
Speaker 2: the thing. But one of the things I learned in
Speaker 2: school was this idea via negativa, which early Christian the
Speaker 2: is gonna be crazy, I'm ready for. Early Christian theologians
Speaker 2: would meditate on how to know God right, But God
Speaker 2: is ineffable. God is impossible to know. So they would
Speaker 2: think about what God was not. God is not that
Speaker 2: cup of tea, God is not that table, and you
Speaker 2: would just go on and on and on, and the
Speaker 2: more you would think about what God is not, you
Speaker 2: would get closer to God righte in some weird ways.
Speaker 2: I was like, well, I don't know what the hell
Speaker 2: I want to do, so I'm just going to try
Speaker 2: a bunch of things. And the more I try, it'll
Speaker 2: get me close to what I want to do. I
Speaker 2: just got to keep on moving along. And I'd done
Speaker 2: a bunch of jobs in my life, and I was like,
Speaker 2: you know what, I've always wanted to cook. Had a
Speaker 2: few false starts. My dad really tried hard to make
Speaker 2: sure I never worked in the culinary profession. I won't
Speaker 2: bore you with some of the stories, but he did
Speaker 2: go out of his way to make sure, Like my
Speaker 2: first job, I tried to get a cooking job. He
Speaker 2: like secretly sabotaged it, you know. And now I understand
Speaker 2: my kids wanted to come and cook. I probably do
Speaker 2: the same thing as to goddamn hard. Anyway, I get
Speaker 2: into cooking and go cooking school when I start working
Speaker 2: full time immediately and I'm pretty allergic to the work
Speaker 2: at the time. Next thing you know, I'm working like
Speaker 2: I didn't take a day off for like a year.
Speaker 2: I was so immersed in it, and I realized doing
Speaker 2: what kind of food, it's like the technical I was
Speaker 2: working for Geen George of the Mersey Kitchen, and I
Speaker 2: was going to cooking school from eight o'clock to three o'clock,
Speaker 2: and I was working from four o'clock to one o'clock
Speaker 2: working for John George. Was just sort of like modified
Speaker 2: contemporary French food. John George being one of the great
Speaker 2: chess from all sauce and he's been a mentor and
Speaker 2: a great, great culinary figure. And on the weekends I
Speaker 2: started working at Craft for Tom Klichio, just answering phones
Speaker 2: because I wanted to work there, because the crew that
Speaker 2: was assembled there I want bore people at New York
Speaker 2: genealogy of kitchens. And the only way I could get
Speaker 2: into that kitchen was answering phones. And they didn't need me.
Speaker 2: They did in fact, they did not want me. So
Speaker 2: I just answered phones on the weekends.
Speaker 1: So I literally every front of house phone answering.
Speaker 2: It worked every day for like a year till I
Speaker 2: could get my feet in the door there.
Speaker 5: And uh, exactly, yeah, I'm an I fucking grind man,
Speaker 5: like you need to grind, you know, And uh and
Speaker 5: I was allergic to work, so I was like, holy shit,
Speaker 5: like I'm working my ass off and I don't know
Speaker 5: if I love it, but like I can't imagine doing
Speaker 5: anything else.
Speaker 2: So for me, I don't. I think it's bullshit. When
Speaker 2: people say, oh I love what I do, I love it,
Speaker 2: It's like one hundred percent. I think that's a fucking
Speaker 2: crocod shit. It's like fifty one percent. You love it
Speaker 2: more than you hate it. Yeah, you know, nobody wants
Speaker 2: to get up at like four in the morning of
Speaker 2: peel potatoes, but you know you do it because it
Speaker 2: gets just another goal. So I did that and I
Speaker 2: just was like a sponge and it wasn't There are
Speaker 2: cooks that are much more naturally gifted. What I love
Speaker 2: about cooking, which is what I tell anybody that it's
Speaker 2: worked for me or anyone that's thinking about doing it.
Speaker 2: If you, if you pour yourself into this, hard work
Speaker 2: is the greatest equalizer and cooking, if somebody is better
Speaker 2: than you, if you practice and if you put yourself
Speaker 2: like fully into that situation, you will not only get
Speaker 2: even with that person that you view as I view
Speaker 2: everything as a competitor, because I am just that kind
Speaker 2: of person, because a golf everything is a fucking competition.
Speaker 2: You will not only even up with that person or peer,
Speaker 2: you will then exceed that person on hard work alone.
Speaker 3: You know, we had a we We talked to a
Speaker 3: chef recently and his his ticket to success early on
Speaker 3: was that he would he would show up. She said,
Speaker 3: it really differentiated him from.
Speaker 2: But at the time too, it was like, that's my
Speaker 2: secrets and everything else has followed showing up up in
Speaker 2: a job that's so fucking physically tough. Nobody wants to
Speaker 2: do that work. So I felt lucky because there are
Speaker 2: a lot of people that were so talented and have
Speaker 2: done amazing things, and I just I feel that was
Speaker 2: an instrumental moment for me.
Speaker 1: And and.
Speaker 2: You know the thing is, I I didn't know. Nobody
Speaker 2: thought I was going to be good. Right. If you
Speaker 2: if you had to put like odds on anybody in
Speaker 2: that that kitchen, I'm not even I'm not even I'm
Speaker 2: part of the rest of the field odds, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, be successful? Right, So they'd be like
Speaker 2: fifteen people in odds of who's going to be very successful.
Speaker 2: I would be not even making up your individual lives.
Speaker 2: You're in the everybody else. And and I understood that.
Speaker 2: And for that entire time though, I was just trying
Speaker 2: to find things that I like to do, and I like,
Speaker 2: I did eat a lot of noodles, whether it was
Speaker 2: rhyming or not. Because of where I grew up in
Speaker 2: Northern Virginia, there's amazing Vietnamese population, Koread food, Chinese food.
Speaker 2: So I ate a lot of delicious things, but you
Speaker 2: were drawn to the contemporary American and French shit. I
Speaker 2: wanted to was that because that's what you thought success
Speaker 2: would say's got.
Speaker 1: You what you like to eat?
Speaker 2: Because that's where the best war. Yeah, yeah, that's where
Speaker 2: the best war.
Speaker 1: The cell at that time that really celebrated players were
Speaker 1: from that world.
Speaker 2: And there was another chef called out and his name
Speaker 2: is Alex Lee, and he was this sixth He's a
Speaker 2: big Chinese guy and Chinese American and he ran Danielle's
Speaker 2: Kitchen and Upper east Side and he was a badass, right,
Speaker 2: intimidating as fuck. Spoke with the worst fluent French possible
Speaker 2: in a long Island accent. But all these French chefs
Speaker 2: and Sioux chefs like served him. I was like to
Speaker 2: a lot of Asian kids growing up, like he was
Speaker 2: the fucking real superstar, right.
Speaker 1: So I was like all these places you're naming, man,
Speaker 1: at some point I've been to Like, uh, I've been
Speaker 1: to these I kind of forgot about it, remember, Like
Speaker 1: Daniels and like someone hovering like all the time, someone
Speaker 1: like changing your forks and ship out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I don't want to eat that food at
Speaker 2: the time, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Was the most like overbearing sort of shuffling of plates
Speaker 3: and shit and like what fork And it's like, my
Speaker 3: goodness withold you people just.
Speaker 2: Go away for a minute. The people eating there and
Speaker 2: the food you're making and the people making it very different.
Speaker 2: But the reason why people are making that food and
Speaker 2: drawing that talent because you're working with the best ingredient,
Speaker 2: the best techniques. And back then, to learn how to
Speaker 2: make any dish, like one dish, you had to like
Speaker 2: work a year there. You couldn't go online and learn anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2: You actually had to like spend time and maybe the
Speaker 2: chef would finally teach you how to make something. You know.
Speaker 2: That's the way it was that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, to do a thing for future generations to understand,
Speaker 1: is there should be like a you're like a Library
Speaker 1: of Congress project where you try to future generations didn't
Speaker 1: understand how shit went before the internet, do you know
Speaker 1: what I mean? I think about that a lot, like
Speaker 1: because people are going to lose track of if you
Speaker 1: wanted to know something, it was hard you could it
Speaker 1: was hard to find You didn't know it at the
Speaker 1: time because everybody thinks that what they exit their existence
Speaker 1: is totally normal. But if you wanted, I remember like
Speaker 1: talking about a cooking thing, trying to figure out like
Speaker 1: how mountain men would cook beaver tails.
Speaker 2: Dude, did it take you four years to figure that
Speaker 2: shit out?
Speaker 1: Now it's like my kid can figure it out.
Speaker 2: Watch some YouTube video, watch one of year of the video. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: just everything. It's just like it's just so many years
Speaker 2: of knowledge that was hard earned is now in this
Speaker 2: five minute edited video.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the comedian Hotels his name Joey Diaz, talking about
Speaker 3: he's trying to describe dating, you know, before the Internet.
Speaker 3: He's talking about how you used to have to go
Speaker 3: up and throw rocks at their window to try to
Speaker 3: wake them up.
Speaker 2: But it's like, yeah, to learn how to make shit
Speaker 2: like you couldn't it was. It sounds wild, but yeah,
Speaker 2: you would have to work at a restaurant to learn
Speaker 2: how to do one thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, your mom, your mom had like six cookbooks, and
Speaker 1: if someone made some shit in your house is because
Speaker 1: of one of those six cookbooks.
Speaker 2: I mean, think about even on the cookbook level, right, like,
Speaker 2: at the time, a lot of the progressive stuff was
Speaker 2: happening in France, and I don't won't bore your audience
Speaker 2: with like food neurdery on the chefs, but I would
Speaker 2: have friends working at some of the top places you
Speaker 2: would want to be at. They would send postcards right
Speaker 2: about like, Hey, I'm learning this, but there's not enough
Speaker 2: to fucking fit on a postcard about like what the
Speaker 2: hell is happening? You know? So I do think we
Speaker 2: were talking about inherited success or wealth or knowledge. I
Speaker 2: think that that generation everything proceeded in the Internet. There's
Speaker 2: a level of creativity that is better in that generation.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying cooks today are fucking more knowledge? Are
Speaker 2: they know more? And I'm not trying to I can
Speaker 2: imagine all these people, Oh fuck you, dab, you're telling
Speaker 2: we're just as good you are. But the originality and
Speaker 2: creativity of the older generation from you know, pre Internet,
Speaker 2: is because we had to struggle what the fuck was
Speaker 2: happening to think about it, use our imagination. We'd go
Speaker 2: to restaurants after service and just look at their menu,
Speaker 2: be like, how do you think they're making them? What
Speaker 2: do you think that's sauces? Oh, I've never heard about that,
Speaker 2: and we then go to Chinatown, drink some beers, eat
Speaker 2: some food, and talk about how do you think that
Speaker 2: dish is being made? It was awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but now that.
Speaker 2: Camaraderie and talking about it and imagining it then not
Speaker 2: on a YouTube video. While that's amazing, that difficulty of
Speaker 2: acquiring that information is a beautiful thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another one, just to drive that point homecause I remember,
Speaker 3: long ago before the internet was like populated the way
Speaker 3: it is, really struggling with when you'd see the glaze
Speaker 3: to roast the ducks, the Chinese style, the hanging, and
Speaker 3: just to be like, if I could only know.
Speaker 2: Chinese, yeah, I would tell you one thing. That's one
Speaker 2: of those things that even if you can see the video,
Speaker 2: it's still hard to do.
Speaker 1: Hard to just be like, how would anyone ever figure
Speaker 1: that out?
Speaker 2: So hard and so delicious? But yeah, man, like I
Speaker 2: I I just wanted to learn how to make noodles.
Speaker 2: So if I was a better cook, I probably would
Speaker 2: have gone to France because a chef would have said, hey,
Speaker 2: you're so good, I'm going to send you to my mentor.
Speaker 2: But no chef I work for was ever going to
Speaker 2: do to me, you know, because I was a hot mess.
Speaker 2: I was just not good enough. So I just said,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna focus on something where nobody's focusing on and
Speaker 2: that was romy weirdly enough, that was my thing. I
Speaker 2: would get, you know, books from Japan. I'd get going Craiglist,
Speaker 2: being like, can anyone translate these books? And I'd put
Speaker 2: it the time and understand what exactly what's happening. I
Speaker 2: would get magazines know what was happening in Ramyen and
Speaker 2: Japan at the time. And I got a job working
Speaker 2: in Japan. That's a whole nother I lived in a
Speaker 2: homeless shelter. It was fucking wild because that's the only
Speaker 2: place I could afford to live, right, But I learned
Speaker 2: so much there, and I learned a lot about Japanese
Speaker 2: culture and how fucking insane it is and fucked up
Speaker 2: it is living with homeless people. That's a whole nother
Speaker 2: podcast that I don't think anybody should want to listen to.
Speaker 2: But you know, that proved to be because I wasn't
Speaker 2: good enough. I went somewhere else and I got some
Speaker 2: domain expertise that literally nobody had. It gave me an advantage,
Speaker 2: so come back and at that time, that you define
Speaker 2: it in your head as noodles ramen. I just want
Speaker 2: to run, but I wound up making soba. Tom Kliki
Speaker 2: and Marco Kanroy helped me. Got a job at the
Speaker 2: park Head Hotel where that lost in translation movie happened.
Speaker 2: So when I watched that, all those people around there are.
Speaker 8: Real employees that I, oh, really yeah, even the swimming instructor,
Speaker 8: I was like, I knew all those people, and I
Speaker 8: learned so much.
Speaker 2: And when I learned what I learned at that hotel
Speaker 2: was instrumental. Because one of the restaurants, the New York Rill,
Speaker 2: they were serving food from uh, contemporary New York restaurants,
Speaker 2: but made with Japanese ingredients. I'm like, wow, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: So that flipped the switch for me a little bit.
Speaker 2: I was like, wait a second, Like I don't know
Speaker 2: exactly how this is gonna play out down the road,
Speaker 2: but I'm gonna remember this because I thought you'd have
Speaker 2: to make everything as effectively. If you're gonna make a
Speaker 2: tiny food, it's got to be with the tinan ingredients.
Speaker 2: That like shattered it for me. Anyway, I come back
Speaker 2: and uh two thousand and three, I come back to
Speaker 2: America and at the time. This is like peak, like
Speaker 2: beginning of peak fine dining in America, beautiful time in
Speaker 2: American dining. In New York, you had Thomas two thousand
Speaker 2: and four to twenty fifteen, So at a ten year
Speaker 2: period was like peak fancy fine dining. But that was
Speaker 2: the beginning of it, and you had many great restaurants
Speaker 2: opening up, and I just was trying to get a
Speaker 2: job at per Se Thomas Keller coming back to New
Speaker 2: York after many years opening up the French Laundry, and
Speaker 2: a lot of my chef that I worked for was
Speaker 2: gonna be the chef there anyway. In the meantime, the
Speaker 2: people that I used to work for said, you got
Speaker 2: to work for Andrew Carmelinie Cafe Blue because they like
Speaker 2: that's how it is, like, you know, people trying to
Speaker 2: make sure that you develop and do a great chef
Speaker 2: and I get my ass kicked there. It's so fucking hard,
Speaker 2: so fucking hard.
Speaker 3: But give people an idea that that haven't worked in
Speaker 3: this atmosphere. What does getting your ass kicked look like?
Speaker 2: To this day, It's the hardest job I've ever had.
Speaker 3: And but like what like if you said I got
Speaker 3: my ass kicked working at the salt mine, so I'd
Speaker 3: be like, I could picture that.
Speaker 2: It was intentionally run lean. So when I say ass kicking,
Speaker 2: it's not physically getting your ass kicked. It's the workload.
Speaker 2: That's a fucking kicking the ass, but a workload of
Speaker 2: physical Yeah, most places today would probably have I would
Speaker 2: say that that kitchen you were, each person was doing
Speaker 2: the workload with probably three people in this essence, while
Speaker 2: there was a butcher, that was about the only help
Speaker 2: you would get. A lot of the bigger kitchens, you
Speaker 2: have a komi, maybe two komies, like an intern, right,
Speaker 2: then coll me comm i s on the French brigade system,
Speaker 2: so an assistant. Then you have a like you're running
Speaker 2: like the meat station. You might have a entre metier,
Speaker 2: so someone doing your vegetables inside. So like you're the manager.
Speaker 2: It's almost like a bank, right, you're the managing director
Speaker 2: of your group, right, but all these other people work
Speaker 2: for you, and in a kitchen, it's all top down.
Speaker 2: So if you're working the saucier station, you're gonna have
Speaker 2: all these other people in a big kitchen doing really
Speaker 2: high end dining. Cafe. At the time, it was intentionally spartan,
Speaker 2: like there was nothing that worked equipment wise that was
Speaker 2: done on purpose, right. It was as bare boned on
Speaker 2: as an operation staff wise intentional right, because it produced
Speaker 2: a certain mentality of like fuck everybody, fuck you, fuck
Speaker 2: the station, and fuck everything everything by our sheer mental
Speaker 2: like prowess, our technique. With everything working against us, we're
Speaker 2: gonna fucking wind. And it was that that kind of
Speaker 2: hard cad. It was like, I don't I never want
Speaker 2: to approach anything to like special Forces, but that's what
Speaker 2: it felt. And I was like that kind of fucking
Speaker 2: hardcore ship. I was like, Jesus is so fucking hardcore.
Speaker 2: And it's also dumb shit. I remember, like, okay, like
Speaker 2: I got a bundle of sugar cane. You ever break
Speaker 2: down sugar cane?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean as no, I mean, now there's any pressure,
Speaker 3: and I've seen it done, you know, like I've husted
Speaker 3: rice too, but I mean I rust like a handful
Speaker 3: of right.
Speaker 2: So this menu and it's awesome, man, and I love
Speaker 2: a see and Danielle. It's just like was a formative
Speaker 2: period for so many of us. And in that kitchen,
Speaker 2: you know, rich Teresy, Mari Carbone opened up the car
Speaker 2: like toresa carbone. So many cooks came.
Speaker 1: Over come around to why why are you breaking down
Speaker 1: sugar game?
Speaker 2: So like each station is you have four menus and
Speaker 2: a special menu. So cooking so stupid. Where the better
Speaker 2: you are, the more work you get too, right, which
Speaker 2: is crazy. So in these four tasting menus, you have
Speaker 2: a voyage, you have a seasonal, you got a vegetarian,
Speaker 2: and then you got a classic, right, a classic French menu,
Speaker 2: and plus you have daily specials. You are responsible for
Speaker 2: like ten to twelve dishes potentially with nobody helping you out,
Speaker 2: and you got to feed and you might be you're
Speaker 2: working one service and dinner service on five of those days,
Speaker 2: so you need to prep out for maybe two hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty people a day potentially, you know, ten courses
Speaker 2: for two hundred and fifty people. That's a lot of
Speaker 2: work and a lot of inch kit work, knife skills
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. And everybody's that way. Everybody's got
Speaker 2: this crazy workload. Going back to the sugarcanes, it was
Speaker 2: called sugarcane shramp on the Village menu, and it would
Speaker 2: come in. I would dread about it the next morning
Speaker 2: because I'd be like shit, we don't have a band
Speaker 2: saw that would have made it easy. I have no
Speaker 2: tools whatsoever to break down sugarcane. You know what I
Speaker 2: have have two cleavers in a mouth. Now only do
Speaker 2: you have to break down all the sugarcane which you
Speaker 2: haven't seen. It's like, you know, eight feet tall and
Speaker 2: there's like one hundred of them. That's yeah, so fucking
Speaker 2: it's just so stupid, huh. And you're reducing that to
Speaker 2: like skew it. You break it down, and it's got
Speaker 2: to be a perfect toothpick that can skewer a shrimp.
Speaker 1: And they're buying it like like some dude cut it
Speaker 1: out and.
Speaker 2: Eats like an hour's worth of work in one bite.
Speaker 2: You're like, fuck, oh kid, so like shit like that, right,
Speaker 2: and and like that's just one dish, and everybody there
Speaker 2: had super labor intensive dishes. Is the money good inness
Speaker 2: at this level?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: I think I got paid eight dollars twenty five cents
Speaker 2: an hour.
Speaker 1: So you're hourly.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and what's the promise? Nothing? No one gets
Speaker 2: into this missiness to make money. You just want to
Speaker 2: be have street crab. You want to be the fucking
Speaker 2: baddest best person there. Yeah, anyway, and your social life
Speaker 2: is proud to be baked into it too.
Speaker 1: In a weird way.
Speaker 2: There's no social life, that's what I'm saying. It's like
Speaker 2: just drinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just meaning that when you fall into the
Speaker 1: I never worked in the restaurant business book, when you
Speaker 1: fall into this world, that sort.
Speaker 2: Of becomes your It's not that way anymore. Oh, it's
Speaker 2: not no way. That's who you hang with, that's how
Speaker 2: you date like that, thankfully. In one regard, the work
Speaker 2: life balance is way better, and it's just the way
Speaker 2: it was back then and it's not anymore.
Speaker 1: But man, we would work like the industry's little friendlier.
Speaker 2: Oh it's become way more professionalized. Yeah, but I don't
Speaker 2: there's no bigrudging. That's just the way it was, and
Speaker 2: I'm happy that I was able to like experience that.
Speaker 2: But man, we would get off work at like I
Speaker 2: don't know, break everything down one o'clock. We would get
Speaker 2: there maybe six o'clock, six thirty. So sometimes like you
Speaker 2: go out just enough and then you'd go back, you drink,
Speaker 2: and then you would sleep in the locker room and
Speaker 2: wake up and just do it again. Surely, Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: not hyperpole like it was a lot back then because
Speaker 2: no one cared about it. It was like the least
Speaker 2: cool profession. There was nothing fabulous about cooking, and it
Speaker 2: was a lifestyle that people chose. And I was not
Speaker 2: good in that kitchen either. I was very I struggled.
Speaker 2: It was so hard for me. Well, what made you
Speaker 2: not good? I wasn't as good as everyone there. It's good, fast,
Speaker 2: good as everything. Good is also mentally just being organized,
Speaker 2: never being in the weeds, not making any mistakes, being
Speaker 2: efficient with your time. You know when I can see
Speaker 2: it when it's like a dance, right and like literally
Speaker 2: a professional choreograph dance, a ballet. Almost when a perfect
Speaker 2: kitchen is running, everyone's doing their thing. There's no talking,
Speaker 2: there's humor. Health kitchen, in my opinion, is always someone
Speaker 2: making another person laugh, right. Laughter is a huge part
Speaker 2: of it. But at the same time, it's like you're
Speaker 2: seeing a good team. It's efficiency. Nobody's moving in a
Speaker 2: way that you don't have to. It's efficiency movement. It's
Speaker 2: dishes coming up perfect, everything's tasted and great, all these things,
Speaker 2: And for me, I just it wasn't wasn't my was
Speaker 2: my bag And I had a lot of shit happening
Speaker 2: in my life too, right, So I was like, I
Speaker 2: gotta fucking unplug. I can't do this. So in that intro,
Speaker 2: m I go home, help out at home my mom,
Speaker 2: I'm like, you know what, fuck this, I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna try to you know. You know. September
Speaker 2: eleventh happened too. Yeah, that was also a big thing.
Speaker 2: You were in the city then, oh yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 2: was Like I remember coming out, I was in the
Speaker 2: basement of craft. I mean, even though it was a
Speaker 2: year and a half, so after spending eleventh like three
Speaker 2: months later, New York was still fucked up for like
Speaker 2: eighteen months twenty four months after it. But I remember
Speaker 2: I'll never had leaving like seventeenth Street Meting Square and
Speaker 2: seeing people covered in dust. Yeah, I was just like,
Speaker 2: what the fuck's happening, and so all these things And
Speaker 2: again I had all these things happen. Sure it wasn't
Speaker 2: like for me. It was difficult, and I just was
Speaker 2: like I needed something else to do. So I was like,
Speaker 2: fuck it. I was extremely depressed, and I was like,
Speaker 2: you know what. A lot of my friends at the
Speaker 2: time were going to business school. It was like twenty
Speaker 2: five to twenty six, and I remember like, Oh, they're
Speaker 2: getting loans out or they're getting figuring out. Oh, it's
Speaker 2: probably like two hundred grand for two years. I was like,
Speaker 2: I'll figure that out on my own. I'm gonna even
Speaker 2: though I have no idea what I'm gonna do, even
Speaker 2: though I've never even achieved, right, I've been cooking profession
Speaker 2: four and a half years, nobody would do anything like that.
Speaker 2: I also knew that if I continued in that path
Speaker 2: of what it was, the traditional way how people open
Speaker 2: restaurants was exactly this way, especially if you worked at
Speaker 2: a place like Danielle or Cafe Ballut. A wealthy patron
Speaker 2: would come in many times, get to know the chef
Speaker 2: and be like, hey, you know, I want to open
Speaker 2: up at a restaurant in Palm Beach, you know what
Speaker 2: anyone and the chef will be likeyeah, I got a
Speaker 2: great cook. Here you go.
Speaker 1: That's how you get your own opportunity, and their motivation
Speaker 1: is in some respects social.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and for a cook, that's how you got a restaurant.
Speaker 2: So you became a chef. There was this is a
Speaker 2: different time and era, even though it was that long ago,
Speaker 2: and I remember looking again, I'm a very competitive person.
Speaker 2: Like the field, I'd be like, I think I'm like
Speaker 2: number fourteen here, honestly.
Speaker 1: Like it's gonna take fourteen patrons.
Speaker 2: And even then I don't think i'd be nominated, right.
Speaker 2: I was like, there's like fourteen people ahead of me
Speaker 2: talent wise on the ladder, so I gotta just do
Speaker 2: something else. And that's when I was like, screwed. I'm
Speaker 2: going to open up a ramen bar, a noodle bar
Speaker 2: which didn't exist, and I tried to work. This is
Speaker 2: how where the state was in noodles and ramen in America.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and three, I had to work at
Speaker 2: Bally's Casino and Landing, New Jersey to work at a
Speaker 2: noodle bar because there was not one on the eastern seaboard.
Speaker 2: It was like it was just to see what it's like.
Speaker 2: But at that time, what years is again, two thousand
Speaker 2: and three.
Speaker 1: Was there.
Speaker 3: It was kind of like the ethnic explosion. No, so
Speaker 3: was it that that, you know, the the sort of
Speaker 3: cultural elevation of you know, the the Taco truck, the
Speaker 3: bond Me joint.
Speaker 2: It was there. It just wasn't cool, Okay, the gatekeepers
Speaker 2: were still was there not as like not like the
Speaker 2: cool kids were all going to It wasn't yet. Food
Speaker 2: wasn't even cool. There word food. He didn't exist. There
Speaker 2: was no cell phone. There was no cell phone, there
Speaker 2: was no smartphone technology, and there was no chat rooms,
Speaker 2: no blogging. That all happened around two thousand and three.
Speaker 2: Two thousand. Breaking out was hard, and it was all
Speaker 2: about being in the New York Times and traditional gatekeeping.
Speaker 2: And while it was there, think about how hard it
Speaker 2: would be to learn in your city when there's no internet.
Speaker 2: It was so hard. So I mean, I come back
Speaker 2: and we opened up. Nobody wanted to work with me.
Speaker 2: I had to hire. I got my first partner, Kein
Speaker 2: Obanka from Monster dot Com, who his girlfriend saw because
Speaker 2: she was in the corporate job and he had just
Speaker 2: come from Austin, Texas and he wasn't getting the love
Speaker 2: from working. He was trying. He came to New York
Speaker 2: because he wanted to get the street car working out
Speaker 2: the best kitchens too, but they didn't give him any love.
Speaker 2: So he's like, screw it, like I'll work with you.
Speaker 2: And that's how it all happened, and we almost went
Speaker 2: up business. I raised one hundred thousand dollars and we
Speaker 2: were going out of business. So I felt like at
Speaker 2: that time, every day was like it felt like we're
Speaker 2: not going to make it to the next day. You
Speaker 2: go through your investment, not just day like how I
Speaker 2: was living too, so hardcore and hard But there's a
Speaker 2: I can't remember who wrote this passage, but it's like, hey,
Speaker 2: like everything we did was like a one way ticket.
Speaker 2: We ain't coming back. And that's how we made every decision.
Speaker 2: And by doing that, we made every decision not supposed
Speaker 2: to do. And some of those decisions were so counterintuitive
Speaker 2: that they became mainstream decisions today of how you would
Speaker 2: operate a restaurant. So a lot of it was trial
Speaker 2: and error, making mistakes, a lot of luck. We were
Speaker 2: so lucky, and I won't bore you with all the
Speaker 2: different things that happened along the way. About six hundred
Speaker 2: square feet the size of one car garage, and we
Speaker 2: we went off. I remember three months in, I didn't
Speaker 2: even know what sales tax was. Iknew nothing. I remember like, oh,
Speaker 2: I gotta pay taxes on this? What the fuck done
Speaker 2: your business? What I made? You know, it's like so
Speaker 2: so dumb and such a novice at anything that happened,
Speaker 2: but you know, every day was a war, felt like
Speaker 2: a challenge, and I remember being told that we had
Speaker 2: about two weeks left of cash, right and at the time,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of cancer in my family, and I
Speaker 2: was like, huh, I've seen it happen enough where someone
Speaker 2: has given some kind of like can't diagnosis and then
Speaker 2: they started fucking like shit, like I gotta do things.
Speaker 2: I gotta like live, I'm gonna do anything I can.
Speaker 2: So at that time, I was thinking we were still
Speaker 2: trying to operate in the confines in the structure of
Speaker 2: a traditional restaurant. But when that diagnosis came in that
Speaker 2: we're going to fucking die, We're like, fuck it, fuck it, man,
Speaker 2: let's just go. Let's do whatever the fuck we're gonna do.
Speaker 2: Happened to Coenciwa Spring, So we stopped being whatever we
Speaker 2: thought an Asian noodle bar needed to be. We just
Speaker 2: started to make good fucking food. And that's how it
Speaker 2: all happened. Caught lightning in a bottle. We're blessed to
Speaker 2: have some of the best and brightest working there, and
Speaker 2: it just happened, man, And it was a It was
Speaker 2: a wild time, that's for sure. What was was your
Speaker 2: first place, MoMA Noodle bar. Yeah, one six three First Avenue,
Speaker 2: uh six hundred square feet upstairs, yeah, all in. I
Speaker 2: live next door and that was a lot. I mean,
Speaker 2: that was a long time ago. But there's just no
Speaker 2: way you could have predicted that it would have happened. Yeah,
Speaker 2: wild wild Rye. At that time. You you probably didn't
Speaker 2: do anything just for the fun of it. Ten years
Speaker 2: of my life, I felt, I honestly would tell myself,
Speaker 2: especially when I I think the important thing that happened.
Speaker 2: I started getting like mental help too, but I would
Speaker 2: tell myself, I work in a coal mine. That's how
Speaker 2: I viewed my job. I'm working at a coal mine,
Speaker 2: and that's my job.
Speaker 4: Living next door, you probably saw the sunlight every day.
Speaker 2: And I did. I never slept because our kitchen was
Speaker 2: so small and we're be king. We started to get
Speaker 2: super busy. I had to cook all the food at night,
Speaker 2: so from like I would go back, you know, i'd
Speaker 2: probably go to bed, and I'm not going to bed.
Speaker 2: I was at the bars, for sure, but I would
Speaker 2: wake up and cook things at night in the in
Speaker 2: the convection of them we had downstairs. And get ready,
Speaker 2: and that happened. God, it's hard for me to rect
Speaker 2: like recall all that happened because it was fucking insane.
Speaker 2: I worked like a crazy person. No, I remember, like nobody,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to fail because I did not work
Speaker 2: as hard as I possibly could. And I remember thinking,
Speaker 2: if I have to, I remember, even before opening it up,
Speaker 2: if I have to declare bankruptcy, then so who cares you?
Speaker 2: You know, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: One way ticket.
Speaker 2: Everything was like, let's go burn. Everything was all in,
Speaker 2: let's go. And you can do that for for only
Speaker 2: so long before it catches up with you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what do you think of like now when you
Speaker 3: hear people talk about uh, work life balance and and
Speaker 3: uh you know this this emerging movement.
Speaker 1: Against perfectionism, right.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of I think about it
Speaker 2: a lot. Now. I don't live that life and I
Speaker 2: don't even cook professionally really anymore. I do mostly media.
Speaker 2: I sort of needed to. And I don't mean this
Speaker 2: in a fucking terrible way. You know this sounds terrible,
Speaker 2: But all the things that happened in the pandemic, but
Speaker 2: for me, and one of the positives was it helped me,
Speaker 2: like really reset. I have two kids, moved out to
Speaker 2: Los Angeles. We were going to do that anyway, but
Speaker 2: it gave me a lot of time to reflect on
Speaker 2: that pursuit of perfection. And I think about a lot.
Speaker 2: I think about this a lot, particularly with sports. I
Speaker 2: wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze. Right. We're
Speaker 2: so dedicated as a culture to at least I was,
Speaker 2: to the pursuit of perfection, to being number one, and
Speaker 2: we celebrate that all these self help books and all
Speaker 2: these books about achieving greatness. Our society is about celebrating
Speaker 2: these few individuals, right that do something extraordinary, But nobody
Speaker 2: ever talks about, like you know, the proverbial metaphorical mountain peak.
Speaker 2: No one ever talks about coming back down. And a
Speaker 2: lot of times I felt like, if you get to
Speaker 2: wherever you're trying to go, oftentimes for me, was you're
Speaker 2: going to celebrate by yourself because maybe nobody wants to
Speaker 2: celebrate with you. Yeah, you know. And I found it
Speaker 2: to be an extremely lonely journey. And I think about
Speaker 2: that a lot about work life balance. Maybe I think
Speaker 2: we've definitely overcorrected over index the other way, but there's
Speaker 2: something to be said about a younger generation be like, no,
Speaker 2: I don't want that life that sucks. I don't blame them.
Speaker 2: Why would you want to work like the way I did.
Speaker 2: We're going, you know, on the upreast side, ninety hours
Speaker 2: away because the whole country fall part. I know, but
Speaker 2: there's got to be a better balance. And for me,
Speaker 2: balance has always been what how I think about And
Speaker 2: this is again this logical thing I learned in college, right,
Speaker 2: this paradox, Right, I believe balances fully committed to two
Speaker 2: things simultaneously. It's not about finding an equilibrium fifty to fifty.
Speaker 2: I think you've got to be committed simultaneously the two
Speaker 2: things and understand work life balance. I'm a big believer
Speaker 2: in it. But like we have to also work our
Speaker 2: asses off at the same time, right, trying to find
Speaker 2: a split. I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's a great point man about Uh, that's a great
Speaker 3: point about balance, being that you're committed to two things
Speaker 3: all the way all the time.
Speaker 2: We just look at a scale. Think about the physics
Speaker 2: of a scale.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not the your half one half.
Speaker 3: That when I'm trying to sell myself to my wife,
Speaker 3: I'll point out to her I'm trying to explain that
Speaker 3: she actually has it. You know, it's not as bad
Speaker 3: as it might seem. Yeah, she's lucky to have me,
Speaker 3: I'll point out. I'll be like, dude, you gotta look
Speaker 3: at you know, I'm very dedicated to work and imagine
Speaker 3: the opposite. I'm super dedicated to my family. Imagine the opposite.
Speaker 3: That's gotta be worth something.
Speaker 2: Book, what till you got to split it up by
Speaker 2: fifty percent? You know what I mean. You can't do that.
Speaker 2: I think that is your balance. Yeah, so, I mean
Speaker 2: I've side thought about that a lot of different ways.
Speaker 2: That balance I see in food, right, I think perfectly.
Speaker 2: I'm a weird fucking dude, man, I think about things
Speaker 2: in weird fucking ways. Uh, perfectly salted dish is similar
Speaker 2: to a lot of things I've learned over the years,
Speaker 2: particularly from school. But it's not a logical problem. But
Speaker 2: perfectly salted dish. If you think about if you put
Speaker 2: out ten cups of water each varying scales of salt
Speaker 2: from none to too much somewhere in the middle, what
Speaker 2: is the middle? Is it going to be like ten
Speaker 2: milligrams and ten milligrams of salt and water? No, it's
Speaker 2: going to be what you think when you taste something
Speaker 2: like that's gonna be six maybe it's maybe probably, but
Speaker 2: but the actual moment in your head when you think
Speaker 2: of balance, it's not ah, this scratch that's itched. Oh,
Speaker 2: that's perfect balance. It actually is this living thing in
Speaker 2: the sense of I taste something salty, and this is
Speaker 2: what I try to teach cook. So imagine telling this
Speaker 2: as a cook. There's like, who's eighteen years older, Like,
Speaker 2: what the fuck are you talking about. He's like, you're
Speaker 2: gonna taste it and it's gonna be No, that's under seasoned.
Speaker 2: And then you think about it and you're like, no,
Speaker 2: that's too salty, and then oscillates back to no, I
Speaker 2: think that's I could use more salt, and then you
Speaker 2: think about it, so it's like, no, that's too much salt.
Speaker 2: When it sea sauce, back and forth, back and forth.
Speaker 2: That's fucking proper salt. It is taste something. It's a
Speaker 2: simple test, and that moment is alive. It's crazy as
Speaker 2: it sounds, and that's what you want. That's fucking balance.
Speaker 2: It is both simultaneous.
Speaker 3: That's good man, that's great. Hey, well, there's one last
Speaker 3: thing I wanted to ask you about it. Talking about
Speaker 3: balance is uh part of what you know, part of
Speaker 3: what a little bit of our behind this is a
Speaker 3: little behind the scenes here. I like to interview and
Speaker 3: I have on gas. I especially love to interview and
Speaker 3: have on gus who've you know, excelled in their fields
Speaker 3: or done something really cool. But what makes them eligible
Speaker 3: is that the litmus tests they have to participate. In
Speaker 3: my mind, they have to participate in the fields, you know,
Speaker 3: the disciplines hunting, fishing, or else's place to just be
Speaker 3: a ship show, you know, there'd be no way to
Speaker 3: control who comes through the doors. So during those years
Speaker 3: of just hustle and driving yourself, you know, to the
Speaker 3: mental edge, at what point did you When did you
Speaker 3: find fishing like your growing up version of fishing?
Speaker 1: When did you find fishing?
Speaker 2: And what did it?
Speaker 1: What does it come to mean?
Speaker 2: There was a break. I mean when I first started
Speaker 2: fly fishing, what I realized was I liked it because
Speaker 2: you and I did jiu jitsu for a while. So
Speaker 2: I say, it's not chess. It was like jiu jitsu
Speaker 2: with nature. Right, every situation's different, It's constantly changing, and
Speaker 2: no matter how expert you are, if you really are
Speaker 2: thinking about it. You're like, I don't know, fucking shit,
Speaker 2: like this is impossible. But I'm also an addict and
Speaker 2: I'm adrenaline junkie. And you know when I first understood,
Speaker 2: I caught my first trout and it was like that
Speaker 2: fucking big but I did it on my own. There
Speaker 2: was no guide. It was like the best feeling in
Speaker 2: the world, and I was like, oh, I could do this.
Speaker 2: I like this. I didn't think it was something I
Speaker 2: was going to continue to do. And I actually, even
Speaker 2: when I'm into Japan, I got like a through eight rod.
Speaker 2: I was going to do it. I never got a
Speaker 2: chance to do that. And when I started cooking, there
Speaker 2: was like three or four years ago I had a
Speaker 2: rod ready to go. Man, I never never went because
Speaker 2: I wasn't near I was in the South, not near
Speaker 2: the North. Even still, let's be honest, I probably would
Speaker 2: have gone anyway, And it took some time for me
Speaker 2: to get back to At the time, I was doing
Speaker 2: a lot more winter sports too. But once I started
Speaker 2: to get back out to the rockies to fish, that's
Speaker 2: what I worked towards. Those are like my one like
Speaker 2: ten days of like I gotta fucking get there. If
Speaker 2: I don't do this, I don't know what the fuck's
Speaker 2: gonna happen. I got to get there. I don't even
Speaker 2: know how am I gonna get there? Or you're not
Speaker 2: I can afford it, but I gotta do it. And
Speaker 2: that just became something I continue to do on an
Speaker 2: annual basis. Yeah, sometimes buy annual basis and uh, at
Speaker 2: some point, like Mike Dawes who's at West Bank Anglers
Speaker 2: now and Jackson, you know, I would continue to go
Speaker 2: and made some more money and I would you know,
Speaker 2: have more trips and and such, and then I got
Speaker 2: my brother into it, and then I just sort of
Speaker 2: made the not that I listen, I am not someone
Speaker 2: that ties their own flies. I don't actually don't have
Speaker 2: the deck stay to do it. And there's so much
Speaker 2: more for you need to learn on trout fishing. But
Speaker 2: I got to New Zealand mm hmm, and I was like,
Speaker 2: what the fuck is this South Island? Have you been? Yep?
Speaker 2: It's the best man.
Speaker 1: Well, I was ship talking New Zealand earlier today. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I said, just earlier today, I was telling someone,
Speaker 1: I said, when I'm on a plane that long, and
Speaker 1: I got off the plane I want ship to be
Speaker 1: way different.
Speaker 2: It wasn't different enough. And I'm like, man, these guys
Speaker 2: are this is a lot like I'm home, but not
Speaker 2: for trout fishing. Though it's the same. It's not the
Speaker 2: same thing. It's not.
Speaker 3: It's like, it's like, you mean to tell me that
Speaker 3: I came this far and there's still rainbows and brown trout.
Speaker 2: Yes, but it's not the same. There's no gus that
Speaker 2: I want to see people's bones in their hair, man,
Speaker 2: I want to see like you know, dude, for me,
Speaker 2: it's so different. I disagree.
Speaker 7: Man.
Speaker 2: I think for me it was totally different, different, different everything.
Speaker 2: And they don't follow any of the same batterns of fish.
Speaker 2: And I was like, whoa, And it's syecasting the first
Speaker 2: time I did syecasting for real. You get seycast in
Speaker 2: a spring creek, but like fishing to like an eight
Speaker 2: pound brown trout that's in like six inches of water
Speaker 2: in the middle and you just had to walk a
Speaker 2: ship ton to get there. There's one brown chot per Colombia.
Speaker 2: Now you're making it seem cool, yeah, because it is cool.
Speaker 2: I liked it.
Speaker 1: I had a great time, did stuff there. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I'll go again.
Speaker 2: But like I said, I just felt like when I
Speaker 2: got off the plane, I was a little bit dismayed
Speaker 2: that they all because then they smoked my legs. So
Speaker 2: that was when I was like, you can, you can,
Speaker 2: you can hunt for fish. And that's when I was like, okay,
Speaker 2: dads got me on to saltwater fishing and did bone
Speaker 2: fish and there's great bone fishing and Andros and Seychelles
Speaker 2: and other places. But you know, within ten hours that's
Speaker 2: like my wheelhouse and for travel, I was like, all right,
Speaker 2: like we're gonna I need something more. And that became
Speaker 2: like permit fishing, and listen, I think I'm like permit specifically. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I got permit fever man. And I think I think
Speaker 2: I'm a good angler. I will never think I'm ice
Speaker 2: when I I mean, I just went. I caught more
Speaker 2: permit than anyone on the trip, and everyone's a good angler.
Speaker 2: But I'm not like the pros man. I'm not even
Speaker 2: I suck compared to the best man. So I think
Speaker 2: I'm pretty average at it.
Speaker 1: And it's not what I've never I thought, I've never
Speaker 1: caught a permit.
Speaker 2: I hate I hate it though I don't love it
Speaker 2: because it's so fucking frustrating. It It drives me insane
Speaker 2: because it's so goddamn hard, and that's why I love it. Man,
Speaker 2: I'm after that pain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would tell you a funny permit story to
Speaker 3: have me. Recently, we were spearfishing in the Bahamas and
Speaker 3: we're probably forty feet of water at surface, and here
Speaker 3: comes a permit.
Speaker 1: And he goes into a cave.
Speaker 3: I was like, and I was standing to the guy
Speaker 3: I was with, camer Kirkconnell. We're talking about it. You know,
Speaker 3: he stick her heads about the water and I'm like,
Speaker 3: holy shit. He goes, no, man, that's normal permit.
Speaker 1: Shit. For that permit to be on a flat is
Speaker 1: weird for him. This is what he's normally doing. Here's
Speaker 1: your idea that he like is on the flats. He's
Speaker 1: like on the flats for a minute now, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like, that's like what they do. Your experience with
Speaker 1: them up there is like not his normal plan. You know,
Speaker 1: he'll check that shit out now.
Speaker 2: And then it's funny, man. When I started to do that,
Speaker 2: and I remember showing people the reason I got into
Speaker 2: some like just shooting some guns at animals and stuff
Speaker 2: because I was with somebody from New York and I
Speaker 2: showed him a photo of a permit. They're like, you
Speaker 2: didn't catch a fucking permit, this very successful person. And
Speaker 2: I was like, no, I did. He's like, bull shit,
Speaker 2: where's the photo photo? It doesn't count? And I got
Speaker 2: like thirty of them. He's like, oh fuck. And he
Speaker 2: took me on all these fucking fun trips. Really, that
Speaker 2: permit fishing has opened my doors to a lot of things. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: The one permit I've been on a boat to see
Speaker 1: landed was even disappointing. My brother Danny wearing bleeze, huge
Speaker 1: school of permit come by. He hooks one. We're jumping
Speaker 1: up and down, hoot and holler and high five, and
Speaker 1: he gets it in. It's foul hooked in the fin.
Speaker 1: Man even like you know, it didn't count. It was
Speaker 1: the most deflating, Like, yeah, we were so excited that
Speaker 1: a while, be like, oh just it's like it wasn't
Speaker 1: even the one you were at.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like his neighbor got snagged in the fin.
Speaker 2: But doesn't seem like you love fly fishing. Though it
Speaker 2: doesn't seem like that, does he like fly fishing? I
Speaker 2: fly a lot don't talk much about fly fishing. I fished.
Speaker 3: I fly fished a lot this summer because we I
Speaker 3: camp with my kids. We spend a lot of time
Speaker 3: in the summer on a drainage where you're not allowed
Speaker 3: to kill cuts, and the fish, the trout, the primary
Speaker 3: trout that I'm interested in, his cutthroats. I wouldn't cross
Speaker 3: the street to catch rainbow.
Speaker 2: I like.
Speaker 1: I like cutthroats.
Speaker 3: I love cutthroats, and you can't kill cuts where we
Speaker 3: like to fish cuts, so I don't want to hurt them.
Speaker 3: So we just fish them with barblous dries and we
Speaker 3: like to sneak up on them, find them. It's like,
Speaker 3: you know, catching one that you don't know about doesn't count.
Speaker 3: We like to identify him, observe him, name him.
Speaker 2: How clear is this water fishing?
Speaker 1: Very clear? And we like to learn, like at what
Speaker 1: cadence does he sort of drop back.
Speaker 2: In his hole because you're in Montana and go forward.
Speaker 3: And then we catch them and then it's it becomes
Speaker 3: deeply personal, and then you let him go. And there's
Speaker 3: some fish that I even told my boy I banished
Speaker 3: him from catching that fish anymore.
Speaker 1: Like that fish, leave that one alone. We're gonna harass,
Speaker 1: you know, don't catch him the rest of the summer.
Speaker 2: And I find a great amount of pleasure in that, man,
Speaker 2: the pleasure I never knew I would find. And I
Speaker 2: was trying to find my first permit for you.
Speaker 1: But you got that's a real permit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but I got a bunch. I don't know
Speaker 2: where the fuck I put them all anyway, Great, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I never thought that that would be my thing. It's
Speaker 2: the wildest thing, Rabin man, Like I was. Here's the thing,
Speaker 2: Like I go, I go. I'm lucky enough to go
Speaker 2: trout fishing a bunch this summer, probably like fourteen days
Speaker 2: on the river. I go trout fishing to practice my uh.
Speaker 1: Permit fishing.
Speaker 2: What if the ocean moved really bad? Baby tarping? Like
Speaker 2: love to catch a baby tarping, all right, because that's
Speaker 2: basically shuamer fishing almost right. So that's the kind of
Speaker 2: asshole I am. They're like, this fucking guy, what is
Speaker 2: he doing? He doesn't even care about catching the chout?
Speaker 2: So what uh?
Speaker 3: Because uh, you're an ingredients person, you're a food person.
Speaker 3: How often do you catch fish and eat.
Speaker 2: It in saltwater? It's snook, snapper, sometimes barracuda, but less
Speaker 2: so because of all the risk. Snook is awesome. Probably
Speaker 2: one of my favorite eating fish, the snappers you catch
Speaker 2: down there when you're catching, Yeah, I mean in the manger.
Speaker 2: I caught a huge fucking clapper this summer and I
Speaker 2: have a photo of it. I don't even know where
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 1: But you'll quick one up.
Speaker 2: We grow. We split it open, butterflied it, cooked it
Speaker 2: over fire and it was awesome, and ate it with
Speaker 2: some tortillas. It was sublime, you know. And snook, I
Speaker 2: mean most people don't. It's sort of like a striped bass.
Speaker 2: But that's an amazing eating fish. Yeah, that's the only
Speaker 2: time permit. I want to eat a permit. But that's
Speaker 2: a livelihood of all those guys down there and wants
Speaker 2: you so bad.
Speaker 1: Still hang you for eating permit.
Speaker 2: You'd be better. I've eating a person I really do
Speaker 2: look for on the water floating permit that a dolphin
Speaker 2: is because they don't eat the head. Oh yeah, a
Speaker 2: lot of times. So I'm always like hoping.
Speaker 1: That, Yeah, let me.
Speaker 2: Guilt free permit consumption. So that's because I've heard this
Speaker 2: is like talking about like we're talking about a recipe
Speaker 2: on the menu, like I've only heard what a permit
Speaker 2: tastes like. Yeah, it's like because it eats crab and shrimp.
Speaker 2: And clearly I could go eat a fucking pompino or something,
Speaker 2: but like something down there or something I dream about it.
Speaker 3: Well, someday when you send me a pou, send me
Speaker 3: a photo of a headless permit, and I'll know what
Speaker 3: I'll know where it happened. All right, Well, David chang Man,
Speaker 3: thank you for joining. Next time you're into your grocery store,
Speaker 3: I'm talking to you, listeners, keep your eye out if
Speaker 3: you're heading out backpack and keep your eye out for
Speaker 3: Momo fuku ram and if you want to have the
Speaker 3: lightweight meal, and then if you want to go for
Speaker 3: the real deal, find the restaurants.
Speaker 2: Well, we got a you can go to shop down
Speaker 2: momofuku dot com and uh, I'll try to get you
Speaker 2: guys a discount code. I don't know, Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 2: we'll give you this.
Speaker 3: And then tell people, tell how people to find how
Speaker 3: best to find you, and how to find your restaurants,
Speaker 3: and you can.
Speaker 2: Visit us at momofuku dot com and all the media
Speaker 2: stuff we're doing. Uh at majordomomedia dot com and my
Speaker 2: social media is at at David Chang.
Speaker 1: All right, thanks for joining man, really appreciate the time.
Speaker 2: Honor guys, this was fun. Thank you. Thanks.
Speaker 3: Hey everyone, this is still Steve, but I'm not with Dave.
Speaker 3: Dave Chang the guess you just listened to followed up
Speaker 3: after the show with a kind gift for Y'all's right now.
Speaker 2: You can get anything you want from momo fuku at.
Speaker 3: Twenty percent off by using the code meet twenty at
Speaker 3: momofuku dot com Meet twenty twenty percent off. Get yourself
Speaker 3: a big old pocket full of ramen noodles momofuku dot
Speaker 3: com Meet twenty for twenty percent off.
Speaker 2: Ride on.
Speaker 3: Seal Gray, Join like Silver in the Sun, Ride.
Speaker 2: Ride alone, Sweetheart.
Speaker 10: We done beat this day horse to death, taking a
Speaker 10: new one and ride away. We're done beat this dam
Speaker 10: horse to death.
Speaker 2: H So take a new one and ride on.
Speaker 1: H