July 5, 2019 • 26 mins
Ever walk into an eatery and wonder why you can’t get a table — even though there are plenty of open seats? There’s a method to the madness, and Marc, alongside chef Jonathan Waxman, will explain it all. With a bunch of successful launches under their belts, the two talk about the economics of operating a restaurant, the importance of layout (hint: being mindful of how both staff and patrons circulate is essential), and why passion can only get you so far if you want your new business to thrive.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. I was a American chef opening a
restaurant in New York City, which was highly unusual. Was
like the new animal of the zoo. You know, let's
go see that new animals he striped exactly. Welcome to
(00:25):
Food three sixty, the podcast that serves up some serious
of food for thought. I'm your host, Mark Murphy. Some
of you may know me as a chef and a
New York restaurateur. Today's episode we're going to talk about restaurants.
Some people think the restaurant business is difficult, Well it is,
but for people that are in it, it's really a
labor of love. And there's nobody who's done this better
(00:46):
than today's guests who you heard at the start of
the show. Jonathan Waxman. But his story doesn't start in
the kitchen. Instead. When he grew up in Berkeley, California,
he found himself doing odd jobs like selling ferraris and
playing in a band, but his love of food eventually
he grew When he moved to France to study at
La Verenne School, it was there where he began to
cultivate his style of California cuisine fused with French cooking influences.
(01:09):
He then helped open Michael's Restaurant in Santa Monica in
nineteen seventy nine, and years later when he came to
New York, he opened Jams, a very hot restaurant, which
made him one of the first celebrity chefs. In two
thousand sixteen, he was named James Beard Award winner for
the Best Chef in New York City. And currently he
owns a variety of restaurants and he's always involved in
a bunch of projects. Welcome, Mr Waxman, Mark, pleasure to
(01:32):
see you came here from California. When you showed up
in New York and you planted a restaurant in New
York which became I think everybody knows. Jams was completely
like everybody knew it. It It was very famous. It was
a huge success. But you planted yourself in the middle
of the city where all the restaurants that were around
you were like these heavy French restaurants, and you brought
a totally different cuisine and were you worried like, oh wait,
(01:54):
I'm bringing something that people don't know, people don't understand,
and you have to educate them. What was it like, Well,
I think that clueless is a good word for my
behavior at that point. You know, Um, I was dumb
and I didn't really have a game plan per se.
I just thought, and this is Larry Forgioneses fault. Larry
(02:14):
Forgiones said, the Frank's not a song. If you make
it New York, you can make it anywhere. Doesn't mean
anything at all. But Larry just said, look, if you
can make it New York, you've done well. So number one,
I was very lucky because I chose the location unbeknownst
to me, that was kind of at that point in
the early eighties, a sweet spot. It was a good location. Secondarily,
(02:36):
even though I thought my rent was higher than which
is nine thousand dollars a month, which was very high
for the rest of New York at that point. And
third that I got lucky. People started coming to the
restaurant that used it as a local. But in those days,
remember the competition mark was so low. It was kind
of like low hanging fruit. You know, it wasn't that
(02:56):
hard to pick. In those days. There was no restaurants
in Soho. There was really no restaurants in the Upper
West Side. There were no restaurants in Tribeca. There was
no restaurants in the Lower east Side. There are no
restaurants anywhere except for Upper east Side, Midtown and a
smattering of other areas. So when I opened up, I
didn't have that much competition. That's in the Secondarily, I
(03:18):
was a American chef opening a restaurant in New York City,
which was highly unusual. It was a new thing. So
I was I was like the new animal of the zoo,
you know, let's go see that new animal exactly. And
then I served food that was seasonal and people flipped out.
But that's all I knew how to do. I didn't
realize that was such a revolutionary idea, to serve food
(03:41):
that was in season. And then the last thing I
did was that I had a good looking restaurant. My
hired designer who knew what she was doing. I got
galleries in New York City. That low me art. The
greatest achievement of Jams at that point was that I
had gone to Andre Sultner when I first got to
New York in eighty three, and I asked him for
some help, and he said, Jarret and come down and
have coffee with me. And Andre Soldier, if people don't know,
(04:03):
had a restaurant called Lutess and he was the restaurant
in New York City. He never left the restaurant to it.
He was there every night, never left, and he opened
up his roll deck, he opened up his heart, he
opened up everything, purveyors friends, and it really gave me
a little bit of a leg up. And other people
did the same thing. So when I opened up, I
was operating about a year and one day my major
(04:23):
he calls me up, said Jonathan Andre Soldiers to the
front door with his wife. I said, what he never
leased his restaurant matters something and it was on resultant,
he came up and we found a table for him,
thank god, and he sat down to me. That was
the greatest achievement of my career because here's this person
that I revered more than anything, that I respected, who
(04:44):
had helped me tremendously, and I knew had never left
his restaurant for anything. And that was kind of like
my little James Beard award. You know. I got the
Andre Soldier Award that night because he showed up by
restaurant and in those days, things are a little more intimate.
I think what happened was the explosion in the restaurants
after I opened up was huge. All of a sudden,
everybody wanted to open a restaurant New York. At that point.
(05:06):
The competition became intense, and all of a sudden, people
started looking for other areas to open restaurants because they
were looking for places that, you know, we're cheaper or
had no restaurants, and they didn't want the competition, you know,
So it exploded. So I don't know how many restaurants
were in New York in the early eighties, but I
know there's more than New York City now. There's a lot. Now,
that's a lot of restaurants now that include Starbucks things
(05:28):
like that. But you think about twenty five thousand restaurants,
even if half of them were real restaurants and you
sat down in that's a boatload of restaurants. Something else
you just mentioned there. So when Audrey Sultan came into
your restaurant, and of course you were totally honored that
he was there, did you give him a check? You
know what? I don't remember, But this is another part
because I know somebody told me the first time I
(05:50):
opened a restaurant, if your friends come in the restaurant,
give them a check, because if you don't, you're not
gonna make it. And when you're a young cook or
a young person opening up your first restaurant, if all
your friends start coming in and eating for free at
the end of the day, right, wait, there's there's no
more money in the bank. Well, because you just gave
everything away. So I think it's really important when people
open restaurants. I think it's not just going to be
(06:11):
a playground for them to hang out in. Yeah, I
think that's what we call the gray area of how
to survive, you know. I think that the bottom line
is that how do you create a viable economic model
from passion? And it's a little bit like an artist
creating a painting. Now you never know if you're gonna
sell it or not, but you have to have a
passion do and you have to have the creativity and
everything else. But then you have to get lucky. You
(06:33):
have to get an agent or a gallery that's gonna
show your art and restaurants a little bit the same
way the other day is there was an adage we
used to say, if you found a location you couldn't
find investors, or you found investors and you couldn't find
a location. Somehow the gods of restaurants did allow the
two of those things to align. Those are kind of
tests along the way to keep you focused on the prize.
(06:54):
The prize really is to open a restaurant that comes
with integrity and comes from your heart. But along the
way it also has to be viable. Absolutely, And what
you're alluding to is that if you're overly generous or
you're let's say a little sloppy in your bookkeeping, I'll
meet on stay in business. It's not gonna last long,
not gonna last. What does it take for you when
(07:15):
you open a restaurant? What are your thought process? Well,
we could do this historically because I think it's kind
of interesting. So when Michael open a restaurant forty years
ago in Santa Monica, it is entirely different process than
it is today. You have an architect come in, will
give you plans, and you design it with them. You
hire a contractor, they come and build it. And there
wasn't a lot of bureaucracy, like look at your plans,
(07:37):
they stamped them and boom you go. Now in New
York you have Landmarks Committee, You've got the Health Department,
you bought Department of Buildings. In department buildings, you've got
all the different electric department, the plumbing department, the elevator department,
and whateverbody has to understand is that it's a good
thing to have scrutiny, it's a good thing to have
checks and balances. But on the other side of it,
(07:59):
from the restaurant a tourist point of view, it's becoming
more and more difficult because the people that sign off
on your job, so to speak, are various scaredt of culpability.
And I understand that, I get that, but what it's
creating is bureaucracy that's so confluted that the cost of
building a restaurant has gone out from forty years ago
to now astronomically. And I think then you also have
(08:22):
to consider in the old days, you open a restaurant
and your cost want is high, so you could just
you know, wait to build the business. A restaurant has
to have a soul, and when you open a restaurant,
it doesn't have one right away. The employees make the restaurant.
But now once you just described all these costs you
have to opening a restaurant. If you're not busy from
day one, you're gonna last six months. Yeah. I think
the problem with most what I would call virgin restaurate tourists,
(08:43):
people that have never done it before. There's no place
to learn how to do it. There's no like school
of thought. I mean, you could go to school to
become an architect, to school become a designer. You go
to school become a chef, but you need to have
all those hats. You need to wear a designer hat
and architect's hat and engineers a chef's hat. You also
have to understand things from a business point of view,
(09:05):
and that's where the biggest problem becomes. You know, most
people that open a restaurant have zero clue about how
to ride a business plan. They go into and I said, well,
I'll grab a building on West Broadway and it's twelve
feed and and then I'm gonna do great because I
have a passion. Well, passion in the old days was
half the story. Now it's about five percent of the story. Yeah,
(09:27):
that is the sad part because I always say people
ask me sometimes, you know, we what does it take?
To open a restaurant. Just take a French bistro for example,
I want to open a French bistro. Okay, great, So
now you got to go find the property, right, Okay,
I found the great property, great price. I think I'm
gonna be able to up my French b store. You
gotta put the brakes on, Okay, what does the neighborhood need,
because you're also a convenience for the neighborhood. If there's
(09:47):
already five b stros within a five block radius, well
don't go open the sixth bistro because you're gonna have
much more competition. But if you find the great place
in the great spot, you go, oh wait, there's no
Italian restaurants in this five block radius. Why would I
open a bistro? There's five of them? Let me open
an Italian restaurant. So I think that a lot of
the times people don't understand. You know, a restaurant has
(10:07):
to have a need to be there to start with, right. Yeah.
I think the old days that the adage location, location,
location was the marching paradigm, and there's criteria for that.
And you learned that over the years with mistakes. Of course,
you know that corners are better than the middle of
the block. Western facing is better than south facing. Look
(10:29):
at your competition, see if there's anybody walking around, there's
no one walking around, Well, then you're gonna have to
be a destination restaurant. So there's a lot of criterion
in terms of location, location, location, But I still think
that paradigm of looking for a place that has a
sense of place. You should become a gathering spot where
people want to come and dine. So that's the first
(10:50):
thing you look for. The second thing you look for
is viability in terms of economics. Well, I look at
that too, and people don't realize that if you have
a restaurant that has seventy five seats, you have to
have x amount of cooks, you have to have x
amount of managers, you have to have x amount of
prep cooks and dishwashers and so on and so forth.
But if I had that same footprint, but I could
put a hundred seats, I might only have to hire
(11:12):
one more cook. Yeah. I think that now that I've
made enough mistakes of my life and I've worked for
enough people that in certain places like New York or
Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you do under
a certain amount of sales, you're not gonna make it.
You're just gonna break even. Now, a lot of restaurants
are happy to break even and pay themselves a salary.
(11:32):
That's what I call a mom and pop shop. And
there's nothing wrong with that. I think that exists all
over the world. I think the cornerstone of our business
other the people that toil every day and they won't
make any profit, but they'll pay enough money. So the
mom and poppy each take a salary, maybe the kids
make a salary. And you know, I've got someone who
works for me. Now, he's from Mexico, from Pueblo, and
his family open a restaurant out in Queens and it
(11:54):
does well enough, so the family all gets money, but
it doesn't make any money on top of that. So
there's that styllar restaurant. And then there's a restaurant that
you go into it and you get investors, and let's
say it's two thousand square feet and you go, well,
two thousand square feet. I can take that one thousand
square feet. That's how many people I can cram in there,
(12:15):
one twenty square feet. Then you know you can have
a fifty seat restaurant. There you go, that's it, that's
the math, so that the math becomes sort of simple.
But then you go like, if a fifty seat restaurant,
how much money am I going to do a year?
And then you go, well, okay, I'm gonna have a
fifty dollar check courage, So that's great. So if you
have one seating, you'll do a day and you multiply
(12:37):
at that time three sixty five days. Of course, you
have to throw away some days because it's snows or
it's too hot to go out to eat, whatever, so
call it three other days a year. So that means
you're gonna be doing seven dollars in business. And we
both know you can't make any money. You can't do.
But a mom and pop shop could make money in
the white location if the rent wasn't high enough. So
(12:57):
here's all the criteria. People, do you understand the ratio
of rent that you pay to the volume of sales
has to be a certain percentage. No one gets this,
but everyway, so well, I can afford to pay this
rent because they're just doing hocus focus with numbers. The
reality of life is that if the rent is above
five percent of your growth sales, you're dead. Unless you're
(13:20):
a genius like John George fun director, then you know
how to do it. And a lot of people gladly
pay five percent because they want that location. Their hearts
get involved with the situation and they get passionate about
a space and they go, well, I'll just pay fifty
percent rent because I love the space. Well, then okay,
so that you pay fifty percent rent, and then your
(13:40):
cost of goods is thirty percent humoratives. So right now
you're forty five percent you've already spent, and your payrolls
another thirty five percent, you're eight percent, and your genea cost.
You do not make any money. You're losing money. So
I think that from the public's point of view, they
have to realize how small our margins really are. Our
margins are so tiny that if you get the formula incorrect,
(14:05):
you're screwed. And it's one of those things that if
you have five companies and one of them is not
doing well, and you're taking all the money from the
other four to subsidize the fifth one that's not doing well, well,
just close it. But the problem with chefs and get
all this emotion behind and they're like, no, but that's
my little baby, and I want to keep it, and
it's gonna make it. It's gonna make it. Next year,
will to do better. Next year'll do better. But it's
(14:26):
actually not true, because you gotta bite the bullet and
just close it down if it's not doing what it
needs to do. It's a little bit like forming the
roster for the Yankees that you spend enough money, get
the right players, you think you're gonna win the pennant.
And that's how restaurants work. Initially, you get the right location,
you get a great designer, you have a great idea
(14:47):
what you want to do, and then you build it.
You hope they don't spend more than you should have.
You hire a great chef, a great manager, and get
all the roster together, and you open up the door,
and therein lies this Gary. It's a little bit like
Lord of the Rings when you go into that cave
and you don't know what's inside there, because there could
be a monster that's gonna swallow you up, or there
(15:09):
could be a bunch of doors throwing a party. And
I remember talking to Danny Meyer about this many times.
Every time you think you got it right, and you
open up in a year and a half later, you're
still struggling. And why are you struggling? Because the formula
is amorphous. It is this organic creature that you really
can't control. So is there an element of luck? I
(15:30):
think so. A lot of people say you make your
own luck. Well, I think there is a sensibility about
making your own luck per se. But there's also talent.
And talent is really the brand talent and passion of
the brand. And how do you codify the passionate brand?
And how do you bottle the magic? And balling the
magic is the hardest thing to do. You can get
(15:52):
all the economics right, you get everything else right, But
then you could have a restaurant that people walk in
they go, this is nice. Unfortunately, a lot of restaurant
you can walk into them and you just smell bean counters.
You're like, oh, look they did this because that's trending. Now,
Oh they did this amount of seats, because this is it.
They put it in this location. Oh they use that designer.
But then you sit down and have dinner and it's
not that it's not good, it's fine, but it doesn't
(16:15):
have a soul and it doesn't have a heartbeat. It
test has a feeling like you're going through a factory
and it's like, oh, this is another one of those restaurants.
People's taste changed dramatically. So I always say the restaurants
are like nuclear particles. After five years, they start losing
their their mojo and you have to re energize the
matter five years or ten years, whatever it is. I
think that's a part of it. And also you can't
(16:36):
stand still. You can't serve the same menu every day.
It just doesn't work. More on Food three sixty right
after this quick break, welcome back to Food three sixty.
So one thing we haven't talked about yet is layout.
I've done it. I had a restaurant with three hundred seats.
It's like, what is the pattern of flow of bus
(16:57):
boys and runners and customers. I've a really done that
where I take a different color pencil and I try
to mark up where I'm like, okay, at this corner.
If every plate that goes to the kitchen and out
of the kitchen and each customer going to the bathroom
have to squeeze by this narrow area, we're going to
have like a mash pile up every night if we're
actually busy enough. The funny thing about that, when I
was doing Barbudohum, I literally laid it out by hand,
(17:20):
and I chalked in the floor, and I've got furniture
from a warehouse someplace. I set things up. But I
want that much pit. I want everything to come together
because it creates energy. So if you walk into Barbudah,
the host is right at the front door, literally at
the front door, the bar is three ft away, and
the corridor to get the bathroom and get the kitchen
(17:41):
is the same thing to get to your table. So invariably,
especially in wintertime there everybody's got coats and all this stuff.
It looks like chaos. But I love that because I
love that. It's like going to a party where everybody's
sitting down and having a drink and it's quiet. Well
you want you want to go a party where people
bouncing off the walls, and lot of the people think
(18:02):
that way. They want to manage the flow, or they've
managed the situation. They want to almost a military like
order things. I want things on the edge of chaos.
But that goes back to different types of concepts. Because
if you're a place like you had Barbudo and I
had Landmark, or if you go to La Berna, DA,
they're walking around with big silver trays. The last thing
you want to do is bump into that guy. It
(18:23):
just took them a half hour to plate those plates,
and if they go back to the kitchen and have
knocked it on the floor, it's going to be a problem.
I think that's the beauty of our business because you
could have the mom pop shops, you could have the
bird cakes, you can have massive restaurants like a Landmark,
or you could have sports bars. The beauty of our businesses.
Nothing is wrong and nothing's right. It's just what you
(18:44):
want to do. You know, when I talk to people
that are not in the restaurant industry, I always like
to say to them, you know difficult it is just
to get that fronch onion soup in front of you
on the table. Somebody has to order it, Then somebody's
got to drive a truck and get it delivered. It's
got to be checked into your restaurant, then it's got
to be prey up, and then a cook's got to
put it on the line and it's gonna be ready
to cook this. And in the meantime, somebody in the
(19:05):
front of the house has got to write a schedule,
and they've got to make sure that everybody's gonna show
up on time to do their job. And then a
waiter is gonna come over and take your order. They're
gonna go we're getting into a computer, and then a
ticket's gonna come up in the kitchen. Somebody's gonna trigger
to cook that French onion soup, and then they're gonna
give it to an expediter, and then the expeditor is
gonna give it to a runner, and the runner is
gonna bring that dish to you. And now you're sitting
(19:26):
there having your French onion soup. But now somebody's gonna
have to come and take that away. Somebody's gonna have
to wash that plate you just date out of, and
then the waiter is gonna have to come and give
you a check. So when you think of a restaurant
and you think of all of the mechanics of it,
how it works. When I say to some people are like, well,
why would you ever want to get in that business?
It sounds like the stupidest thing in the world. There's
so many places it could go wrong. That's why you
(19:46):
have the evolution of things like Chipotle. You know where
Steve els that took a restaurant complexity, you know, the
multiple layers you just describe, and there's way more than
you way to describe, and he created a synthesis of
all those things and made a fast, casual restaurant that
people enjoy, almost like a real restaurant. But he threw
(20:08):
away a lot of the layers and he created a
business model that makes sense when I'm Barbudo. I sort
of took that notion about throwing away the layers because
I really had never made any money in the restaurant
business for thirty years. So what I decided to do
is have one fork, one knife on one wine glass
and one water glass. No table cloths, just napkins. I
(20:32):
bought the cheapest plates I could possibly provide a fish
as Eddie. I wanted to have a kitchen where there
was no more than two people lunch and four people
at dinner. There was one dishwasher, one bar dinner. And
I was kind of stupid because I opened up without
a manager, without a point of sale, because I thought
I really peeled back the layers of the onion as
far as I could. Some of the stuff really worked
(20:53):
well and it served me well. But it's so true
that the complexity of a restaurant. I just finished reading
Rits and Scoffier, and you know, a hundred twenty years ago,
the way people did it was much much more complicated
than things are now. In those days, it took five
people to make one dish in the kitchen. It took
five people to serve that dish when they were clarifying
(21:15):
style and together, the saucy would make the sauce, the
grill guy would grill the chicken. The entremontier would cook
the vegetables. Uh, they all came to this pass and
the chef would annoying it and then two other people
would put it in a garret on, take it out,
slice to the table, put it on plates. I mean,
they think that the process was so complicated that amazing.
(21:35):
But it was a great show. It was the three
ring circus that people really enjoy. They love the show,
and people went out for that. Because people the show
and eating became more of a like a normal thing
going out. So now I think restaurants are a little
bit as you say, like eating in someone's house, Like
you're going to someone's house to eat dinner, but you're
(21:55):
doing in a professional sense. That's always feeling. I wanted
you to come to my house, and I wanted you
to feel that intimacy that I would could for my family.
Now you're my family, and that's the other connection I
wanted to create that I felt that was kind of missing.
Like most restaurn't you walk into and you're just Joe
Schmo right right, and that's wrong. You should walk in
(22:16):
restaurant and it's like welcome to my house. You ask
people about their experience at a restaurant, and people really
wantly remember who said hello to them and who said goodbye.
I hate that when I go to a restaurant and
I leave the restaurant and I realized that I don't
know who was the server. It could have been as
a cardboard cut out of somebody. I always tell my service,
bring your personality. I want them to remember you. There's
(22:37):
so many reasons to come back to a restaurant. It
could be the food. It could be the lighting. It
could be the music. It could be the mood. It
could be the waiter. It could be the location. You're
one of the equations, So bring your personality to the table.
You don't have control of that situation. You can't have
any fear of flying. You got to assume that person
at that table is going to say the right thing.
It's a people business, if it really is, and you
(22:58):
have to create sort of a truth little situation where
you could take criticism. You have to be able to
have someone say to you say, you know, chef, I
really don't think that's right. And you have to be
able to have thick enough skin, or customers says it,
or employee or your partner or whomever. You have to
be able to take the criticism because otherwise you can't grow.
And the only way you're gonna do that is by
(23:20):
getting in the restaurant business and being in it for
a while. I always say to people, young cookes, I said,
you should open a restaurant on somebody else's money, Like
you should be a line cook and do an opening,
just so you can see the process if you ever
want to do it yourself one day. I know, I
opened a lot of restaurants for other people and other
people's dimes, just so I could learn. I had one
other thing. I just read about this, or maybe I
listened to it on another podcast, But the amount of
(23:42):
time people sit at a table. Somebody found like a
bunch of old videos that they were recorded with watching
people eat, like they were just security cameras and restaurants,
and they found old ones before phones and before social media,
and they calculated that now, because of phones and social media,
it takes people tend to fifteen minutes longer to eat
a meal because when you sit down now, the first
(24:04):
thing people do is they're taking a picture of the
place to put it on social media, or they're looking
at a menu and they're looking up things. You're looking
at a wine list and they're going, oh, how much
does it cost at this other restaurant this wine. So
the phones have slowed down people eating, which is another thing,
just to bring it back to running a restaurant, you know,
turning a table. You want to turn a restaurant at
least two and a half times in a night, starting
(24:25):
seating somewhere around six six thirty and seating up to
ten o'clock. Now, all of a sudden, if each table
is sitting there fifteen minutes longer, it's going to cut
into the profits. Yeah. I mean back in the day
when I first started and I worked in France, there
was no seatings. There was just the one. They were
just you sat people and that was it. That was
the whole evening. No one ever thought to come in
(24:48):
and take up somebody else's table. That just didn't It
just it was your table for the night. That was
your table for the night, and that was the whole thing.
And you know, that's a beautiful, finite situation if you
can make it work. But nowadays I don't think it works.
So when you're home cooking by yourself, and I know
you started in music. You played the trumpet, is that correct? Trombone?
(25:08):
What do you listen to now when you cook? What
kind of music? Well, if my wife will leave the room,
then I play rock and roll and jazz. If my
wife's around and we play classical music. All right. I
got a little quiz. What pops into your mind when
I say it? Where do you go for comfort food?
I'm gonna say king great place. If you were to
open a theme restaurant, what would it be. I would
(25:29):
love to do a music theme restaurant. I don't think
there really is like a new Orleans style bad style restaurant.
I think it would be kind of cool in New
York here after hours? Where do you eat? You know,
I'm like everybody else, I need to blue ribbon? What
was the best meal you ever ate? I actually don't
have any best meals I've ever eaten, but I'll tell
there's a restaurant that I would put on top, which
(25:50):
was Freddy gier Day Increstiate in Switzerland. Well, Jonathan, thanks
so much for joining me. I know you have to
get back to work and we have to go to
check our calendar because we just named about ten places
we're gonna go eat together. Thank you, Thank you. I
hope you guys had as much fun listening to Waxman
as I did. Food three six is a production of
(26:10):
I Heart Radio and I'm Your Host, Mark Murphy. A
very special thanks to Emily Carpet, my director of Communications,
and producers Nikki Eator and Christina Everett. Mixing and music
by Anna Stump and recording help from Julian Weller and
Jacopo Benzel. Thank you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weisenstein
for handling research. Food through sixty is executive produced by
(26:32):
Manguesh at ticket or For more podcasts on my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. I was a American chef opening a
restaurant in New York City, which was highly unusual. Was
like the new animal of the zoo. You know, let's
go see that new animals he striped exactly. Welcome to
(00:25):
Food three sixty, the podcast that serves up some serious
of food for thought. I'm your host, Mark Murphy. Some
of you may know me as a chef and a
New York restaurateur. Today's episode we're going to talk about restaurants.
Some people think the restaurant business is difficult, Well it is,
but for people that are in it, it's really a
labor of love. And there's nobody who's done this better
(00:46):
than today's guests who you heard at the start of
the show. Jonathan Waxman. But his story doesn't start in
the kitchen. Instead. When he grew up in Berkeley, California,
he found himself doing odd jobs like selling ferraris and
playing in a band, but his love of food eventually
he grew When he moved to France to study at
La Verenne School, it was there where he began to
cultivate his style of California cuisine fused with French cooking influences.
(01:09):
He then helped open Michael's Restaurant in Santa Monica in
nineteen seventy nine, and years later when he came to
New York, he opened Jams, a very hot restaurant, which
made him one of the first celebrity chefs. In two
thousand sixteen, he was named James Beard Award winner for
the Best Chef in New York City. And currently he
owns a variety of restaurants and he's always involved in
a bunch of projects. Welcome, Mr Waxman, Mark, pleasure to
(01:32):
see you came here from California. When you showed up
in New York and you planted a restaurant in New
York which became I think everybody knows. Jams was completely
like everybody knew it. It It was very famous. It was
a huge success. But you planted yourself in the middle
of the city where all the restaurants that were around
you were like these heavy French restaurants, and you brought
a totally different cuisine and were you worried like, oh wait,
(01:54):
I'm bringing something that people don't know, people don't understand,
and you have to educate them. What was it like, Well,
I think that clueless is a good word for my
behavior at that point. You know, Um, I was dumb
and I didn't really have a game plan per se.
I just thought, and this is Larry Forgioneses fault. Larry
(02:14):
Forgiones said, the Frank's not a song. If you make
it New York, you can make it anywhere. Doesn't mean
anything at all. But Larry just said, look, if you
can make it New York, you've done well. So number one,
I was very lucky because I chose the location unbeknownst
to me, that was kind of at that point in
the early eighties, a sweet spot. It was a good location. Secondarily,
(02:36):
even though I thought my rent was higher than which
is nine thousand dollars a month, which was very high
for the rest of New York at that point. And
third that I got lucky. People started coming to the
restaurant that used it as a local. But in those days,
remember the competition mark was so low. It was kind
of like low hanging fruit. You know, it wasn't that
(02:56):
hard to pick. In those days. There was no restaurants
in Soho. There was really no restaurants in the Upper
West Side. There were no restaurants in Tribeca. There was
no restaurants in the Lower east Side. There are no
restaurants anywhere except for Upper east Side, Midtown and a
smattering of other areas. So when I opened up, I
didn't have that much competition. That's in the Secondarily, I
(03:18):
was a American chef opening a restaurant in New York City,
which was highly unusual. It was a new thing. So
I was I was like the new animal of the zoo,
you know, let's go see that new animal exactly. And
then I served food that was seasonal and people flipped out.
But that's all I knew how to do. I didn't
realize that was such a revolutionary idea, to serve food
(03:41):
that was in season. And then the last thing I
did was that I had a good looking restaurant. My
hired designer who knew what she was doing. I got
galleries in New York City. That low me art. The
greatest achievement of Jams at that point was that I
had gone to Andre Sultner when I first got to
New York in eighty three, and I asked him for
some help, and he said, Jarret and come down and
have coffee with me. And Andre Soldier, if people don't know,
(04:03):
had a restaurant called Lutess and he was the restaurant
in New York City. He never left the restaurant to it.
He was there every night, never left, and he opened
up his roll deck, he opened up his heart, he
opened up everything, purveyors friends, and it really gave me
a little bit of a leg up. And other people
did the same thing. So when I opened up, I
was operating about a year and one day my major
(04:23):
he calls me up, said Jonathan Andre Soldiers to the
front door with his wife. I said, what he never
leased his restaurant matters something and it was on resultant,
he came up and we found a table for him,
thank god, and he sat down to me. That was
the greatest achievement of my career because here's this person
that I revered more than anything, that I respected, who
(04:44):
had helped me tremendously, and I knew had never left
his restaurant for anything. And that was kind of like
my little James Beard award. You know. I got the
Andre Soldier Award that night because he showed up by
restaurant and in those days, things are a little more intimate.
I think what happened was the explosion in the restaurants
after I opened up was huge. All of a sudden,
everybody wanted to open a restaurant New York. At that point.
(05:06):
The competition became intense, and all of a sudden, people
started looking for other areas to open restaurants because they
were looking for places that, you know, we're cheaper or
had no restaurants, and they didn't want the competition, you know,
So it exploded. So I don't know how many restaurants
were in New York in the early eighties, but I
know there's more than New York City now. There's a lot. Now,
that's a lot of restaurants now that include Starbucks things
(05:28):
like that. But you think about twenty five thousand restaurants,
even if half of them were real restaurants and you
sat down in that's a boatload of restaurants. Something else
you just mentioned there. So when Audrey Sultan came into
your restaurant, and of course you were totally honored that
he was there, did you give him a check? You
know what? I don't remember, But this is another part
because I know somebody told me the first time I
(05:50):
opened a restaurant, if your friends come in the restaurant,
give them a check, because if you don't, you're not
gonna make it. And when you're a young cook or
a young person opening up your first restaurant, if all
your friends start coming in and eating for free at
the end of the day, right, wait, there's there's no
more money in the bank. Well, because you just gave
everything away. So I think it's really important when people
open restaurants. I think it's not just going to be
(06:11):
a playground for them to hang out in. Yeah, I
think that's what we call the gray area of how
to survive, you know. I think that the bottom line
is that how do you create a viable economic model
from passion? And it's a little bit like an artist
creating a painting. Now you never know if you're gonna
sell it or not, but you have to have a
passion do and you have to have the creativity and
everything else. But then you have to get lucky. You
(06:33):
have to get an agent or a gallery that's gonna
show your art and restaurants a little bit the same
way the other day is there was an adage we
used to say, if you found a location you couldn't
find investors, or you found investors and you couldn't find
a location. Somehow the gods of restaurants did allow the
two of those things to align. Those are kind of
tests along the way to keep you focused on the prize.
(06:54):
The prize really is to open a restaurant that comes
with integrity and comes from your heart. But along the
way it also has to be viable. Absolutely, And what
you're alluding to is that if you're overly generous or
you're let's say a little sloppy in your bookkeeping, I'll
meet on stay in business. It's not gonna last long,
not gonna last. What does it take for you when
(07:15):
you open a restaurant? What are your thought process? Well,
we could do this historically because I think it's kind
of interesting. So when Michael open a restaurant forty years
ago in Santa Monica, it is entirely different process than
it is today. You have an architect come in, will
give you plans, and you design it with them. You
hire a contractor, they come and build it. And there
wasn't a lot of bureaucracy, like look at your plans,
(07:37):
they stamped them and boom you go. Now in New
York you have Landmarks Committee, You've got the Health Department,
you bought Department of Buildings. In department buildings, you've got
all the different electric department, the plumbing department, the elevator department,
and whateverbody has to understand is that it's a good
thing to have scrutiny, it's a good thing to have
checks and balances. But on the other side of it,
(07:59):
from the restaurant a tourist point of view, it's becoming
more and more difficult because the people that sign off
on your job, so to speak, are various scaredt of culpability.
And I understand that, I get that, but what it's
creating is bureaucracy that's so confluted that the cost of
building a restaurant has gone out from forty years ago
to now astronomically. And I think then you also have
(08:22):
to consider in the old days, you open a restaurant
and your cost want is high, so you could just
you know, wait to build the business. A restaurant has
to have a soul, and when you open a restaurant,
it doesn't have one right away. The employees make the restaurant.
But now once you just described all these costs you
have to opening a restaurant. If you're not busy from
day one, you're gonna last six months. Yeah. I think
the problem with most what I would call virgin restaurate tourists,
(08:43):
people that have never done it before. There's no place
to learn how to do it. There's no like school
of thought. I mean, you could go to school to
become an architect, to school become a designer. You go
to school become a chef, but you need to have
all those hats. You need to wear a designer hat
and architect's hat and engineers a chef's hat. You also
have to understand things from a business point of view,
(09:05):
and that's where the biggest problem becomes. You know, most
people that open a restaurant have zero clue about how
to ride a business plan. They go into and I said, well,
I'll grab a building on West Broadway and it's twelve
feed and and then I'm gonna do great because I
have a passion. Well, passion in the old days was
half the story. Now it's about five percent of the story. Yeah,
(09:27):
that is the sad part because I always say people
ask me sometimes, you know, we what does it take?
To open a restaurant. Just take a French bistro for example,
I want to open a French bistro. Okay, great, So
now you got to go find the property, right, Okay,
I found the great property, great price. I think I'm
gonna be able to up my French b store. You
gotta put the brakes on, Okay, what does the neighborhood need,
because you're also a convenience for the neighborhood. If there's
(09:47):
already five b stros within a five block radius, well
don't go open the sixth bistro because you're gonna have
much more competition. But if you find the great place
in the great spot, you go, oh wait, there's no
Italian restaurants in this five block radius. Why would I
open a bistro? There's five of them? Let me open
an Italian restaurant. So I think that a lot of
the times people don't understand. You know, a restaurant has
(10:07):
to have a need to be there to start with, right. Yeah.
I think the old days that the adage location, location,
location was the marching paradigm, and there's criteria for that.
And you learned that over the years with mistakes. Of course,
you know that corners are better than the middle of
the block. Western facing is better than south facing. Look
(10:29):
at your competition, see if there's anybody walking around, there's
no one walking around, Well, then you're gonna have to
be a destination restaurant. So there's a lot of criterion
in terms of location, location, location, But I still think
that paradigm of looking for a place that has a
sense of place. You should become a gathering spot where
people want to come and dine. So that's the first
(10:50):
thing you look for. The second thing you look for
is viability in terms of economics. Well, I look at
that too, and people don't realize that if you have
a restaurant that has seventy five seats, you have to
have x amount of cooks, you have to have x
amount of managers, you have to have x amount of
prep cooks and dishwashers and so on and so forth.
But if I had that same footprint, but I could
put a hundred seats, I might only have to hire
(11:12):
one more cook. Yeah. I think that now that I've
made enough mistakes of my life and I've worked for
enough people that in certain places like New York or
Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you do under
a certain amount of sales, you're not gonna make it.
You're just gonna break even. Now, a lot of restaurants
are happy to break even and pay themselves a salary.
(11:32):
That's what I call a mom and pop shop. And
there's nothing wrong with that. I think that exists all
over the world. I think the cornerstone of our business
other the people that toil every day and they won't
make any profit, but they'll pay enough money. So the
mom and poppy each take a salary, maybe the kids
make a salary. And you know, I've got someone who
works for me. Now, he's from Mexico, from Pueblo, and
his family open a restaurant out in Queens and it
(11:54):
does well enough, so the family all gets money, but
it doesn't make any money on top of that. So
there's that styllar restaurant. And then there's a restaurant that
you go into it and you get investors, and let's
say it's two thousand square feet and you go, well,
two thousand square feet. I can take that one thousand
square feet. That's how many people I can cram in there,
(12:15):
one twenty square feet. Then you know you can have
a fifty seat restaurant. There you go, that's it, that's
the math, so that the math becomes sort of simple.
But then you go like, if a fifty seat restaurant,
how much money am I going to do a year?
And then you go, well, okay, I'm gonna have a
fifty dollar check courage, So that's great. So if you
have one seating, you'll do a day and you multiply
(12:37):
at that time three sixty five days. Of course, you
have to throw away some days because it's snows or
it's too hot to go out to eat, whatever, so
call it three other days a year. So that means
you're gonna be doing seven dollars in business. And we
both know you can't make any money. You can't do.
But a mom and pop shop could make money in
the white location if the rent wasn't high enough. So
(12:57):
here's all the criteria. People, do you understand the ratio
of rent that you pay to the volume of sales
has to be a certain percentage. No one gets this,
but everyway, so well, I can afford to pay this
rent because they're just doing hocus focus with numbers. The
reality of life is that if the rent is above
five percent of your growth sales, you're dead. Unless you're
(13:20):
a genius like John George fun director, then you know
how to do it. And a lot of people gladly
pay five percent because they want that location. Their hearts
get involved with the situation and they get passionate about
a space and they go, well, I'll just pay fifty
percent rent because I love the space. Well, then okay,
so that you pay fifty percent rent, and then your
(13:40):
cost of goods is thirty percent humoratives. So right now
you're forty five percent you've already spent, and your payrolls
another thirty five percent, you're eight percent, and your genea cost.
You do not make any money. You're losing money. So
I think that from the public's point of view, they
have to realize how small our margins really are. Our
margins are so tiny that if you get the formula incorrect,
(14:05):
you're screwed. And it's one of those things that if
you have five companies and one of them is not
doing well, and you're taking all the money from the
other four to subsidize the fifth one that's not doing well, well,
just close it. But the problem with chefs and get
all this emotion behind and they're like, no, but that's
my little baby, and I want to keep it, and
it's gonna make it. It's gonna make it. Next year,
will to do better. Next year'll do better. But it's
(14:26):
actually not true, because you gotta bite the bullet and
just close it down if it's not doing what it
needs to do. It's a little bit like forming the
roster for the Yankees that you spend enough money, get
the right players, you think you're gonna win the pennant.
And that's how restaurants work. Initially, you get the right location,
you get a great designer, you have a great idea
(14:47):
what you want to do, and then you build it.
You hope they don't spend more than you should have.
You hire a great chef, a great manager, and get
all the roster together, and you open up the door,
and therein lies this Gary. It's a little bit like
Lord of the Rings when you go into that cave
and you don't know what's inside there, because there could
be a monster that's gonna swallow you up, or there
(15:09):
could be a bunch of doors throwing a party. And
I remember talking to Danny Meyer about this many times.
Every time you think you got it right, and you
open up in a year and a half later, you're
still struggling. And why are you struggling? Because the formula
is amorphous. It is this organic creature that you really
can't control. So is there an element of luck? I
(15:30):
think so. A lot of people say you make your
own luck. Well, I think there is a sensibility about
making your own luck per se. But there's also talent.
And talent is really the brand talent and passion of
the brand. And how do you codify the passionate brand?
And how do you bottle the magic? And balling the
magic is the hardest thing to do. You can get
(15:52):
all the economics right, you get everything else right, But
then you could have a restaurant that people walk in
they go, this is nice. Unfortunately, a lot of restaurant
you can walk into them and you just smell bean counters.
You're like, oh, look they did this because that's trending. Now,
Oh they did this amount of seats, because this is it.
They put it in this location. Oh they use that designer.
But then you sit down and have dinner and it's
not that it's not good, it's fine, but it doesn't
(16:15):
have a soul and it doesn't have a heartbeat. It
test has a feeling like you're going through a factory
and it's like, oh, this is another one of those restaurants.
People's taste changed dramatically. So I always say the restaurants
are like nuclear particles. After five years, they start losing
their their mojo and you have to re energize the
matter five years or ten years, whatever it is. I
think that's a part of it. And also you can't
(16:36):
stand still. You can't serve the same menu every day.
It just doesn't work. More on Food three sixty right
after this quick break, welcome back to Food three sixty.
So one thing we haven't talked about yet is layout.
I've done it. I had a restaurant with three hundred seats.
It's like, what is the pattern of flow of bus
(16:57):
boys and runners and customers. I've a really done that
where I take a different color pencil and I try
to mark up where I'm like, okay, at this corner.
If every plate that goes to the kitchen and out
of the kitchen and each customer going to the bathroom
have to squeeze by this narrow area, we're going to
have like a mash pile up every night if we're
actually busy enough. The funny thing about that, when I
was doing Barbudohum, I literally laid it out by hand,
(17:20):
and I chalked in the floor, and I've got furniture
from a warehouse someplace. I set things up. But I
want that much pit. I want everything to come together
because it creates energy. So if you walk into Barbudah,
the host is right at the front door, literally at
the front door, the bar is three ft away, and
the corridor to get the bathroom and get the kitchen
(17:41):
is the same thing to get to your table. So invariably,
especially in wintertime there everybody's got coats and all this stuff.
It looks like chaos. But I love that because I
love that. It's like going to a party where everybody's
sitting down and having a drink and it's quiet. Well
you want you want to go a party where people
bouncing off the walls, and lot of the people think
(18:02):
that way. They want to manage the flow, or they've
managed the situation. They want to almost a military like
order things. I want things on the edge of chaos.
But that goes back to different types of concepts. Because
if you're a place like you had Barbudo and I
had Landmark, or if you go to La Berna, DA,
they're walking around with big silver trays. The last thing
you want to do is bump into that guy. It
(18:23):
just took them a half hour to plate those plates,
and if they go back to the kitchen and have
knocked it on the floor, it's going to be a problem.
I think that's the beauty of our business because you
could have the mom pop shops, you could have the
bird cakes, you can have massive restaurants like a Landmark,
or you could have sports bars. The beauty of our businesses.
Nothing is wrong and nothing's right. It's just what you
(18:44):
want to do. You know, when I talk to people
that are not in the restaurant industry, I always like
to say to them, you know difficult it is just
to get that fronch onion soup in front of you
on the table. Somebody has to order it, Then somebody's
got to drive a truck and get it delivered. It's
got to be checked into your restaurant, then it's got
to be prey up, and then a cook's got to
put it on the line and it's gonna be ready
to cook this. And in the meantime, somebody in the
(19:05):
front of the house has got to write a schedule,
and they've got to make sure that everybody's gonna show
up on time to do their job. And then a
waiter is gonna come over and take your order. They're
gonna go we're getting into a computer, and then a
ticket's gonna come up in the kitchen. Somebody's gonna trigger
to cook that French onion soup, and then they're gonna
give it to an expediter, and then the expeditor is
gonna give it to a runner, and the runner is
gonna bring that dish to you. And now you're sitting
(19:26):
there having your French onion soup. But now somebody's gonna
have to come and take that away. Somebody's gonna have
to wash that plate you just date out of, and
then the waiter is gonna have to come and give
you a check. So when you think of a restaurant
and you think of all of the mechanics of it,
how it works. When I say to some people are like, well,
why would you ever want to get in that business?
It sounds like the stupidest thing in the world. There's
so many places it could go wrong. That's why you
(19:46):
have the evolution of things like Chipotle. You know where
Steve els that took a restaurant complexity, you know, the
multiple layers you just describe, and there's way more than
you way to describe, and he created a synthesis of
all those things and made a fast, casual restaurant that
people enjoy, almost like a real restaurant. But he threw
(20:08):
away a lot of the layers and he created a
business model that makes sense when I'm Barbudo. I sort
of took that notion about throwing away the layers because
I really had never made any money in the restaurant
business for thirty years. So what I decided to do
is have one fork, one knife on one wine glass
and one water glass. No table cloths, just napkins. I
(20:32):
bought the cheapest plates I could possibly provide a fish
as Eddie. I wanted to have a kitchen where there
was no more than two people lunch and four people
at dinner. There was one dishwasher, one bar dinner. And
I was kind of stupid because I opened up without
a manager, without a point of sale, because I thought
I really peeled back the layers of the onion as
far as I could. Some of the stuff really worked
(20:53):
well and it served me well. But it's so true
that the complexity of a restaurant. I just finished reading
Rits and Scoffier, and you know, a hundred twenty years ago,
the way people did it was much much more complicated
than things are now. In those days, it took five
people to make one dish in the kitchen. It took
five people to serve that dish when they were clarifying
(21:15):
style and together, the saucy would make the sauce, the
grill guy would grill the chicken. The entremontier would cook
the vegetables. Uh, they all came to this pass and
the chef would annoying it and then two other people
would put it in a garret on, take it out,
slice to the table, put it on plates. I mean,
they think that the process was so complicated that amazing.
(21:35):
But it was a great show. It was the three
ring circus that people really enjoy. They love the show,
and people went out for that. Because people the show
and eating became more of a like a normal thing
going out. So now I think restaurants are a little
bit as you say, like eating in someone's house, Like
you're going to someone's house to eat dinner, but you're
(21:55):
doing in a professional sense. That's always feeling. I wanted
you to come to my house, and I wanted you
to feel that intimacy that I would could for my family.
Now you're my family, and that's the other connection I
wanted to create that I felt that was kind of missing.
Like most restaurn't you walk into and you're just Joe
Schmo right right, and that's wrong. You should walk in
(22:16):
restaurant and it's like welcome to my house. You ask
people about their experience at a restaurant, and people really
wantly remember who said hello to them and who said goodbye.
I hate that when I go to a restaurant and
I leave the restaurant and I realized that I don't
know who was the server. It could have been as
a cardboard cut out of somebody. I always tell my service,
bring your personality. I want them to remember you. There's
(22:37):
so many reasons to come back to a restaurant. It
could be the food. It could be the lighting. It
could be the music. It could be the mood. It
could be the waiter. It could be the location. You're
one of the equations, So bring your personality to the table.
You don't have control of that situation. You can't have
any fear of flying. You got to assume that person
at that table is going to say the right thing.
It's a people business, if it really is, and you
(22:58):
have to create sort of a truth little situation where
you could take criticism. You have to be able to
have someone say to you say, you know, chef, I
really don't think that's right. And you have to be
able to have thick enough skin, or customers says it,
or employee or your partner or whomever. You have to
be able to take the criticism because otherwise you can't grow.
And the only way you're gonna do that is by
(23:20):
getting in the restaurant business and being in it for
a while. I always say to people, young cookes, I said,
you should open a restaurant on somebody else's money, Like
you should be a line cook and do an opening,
just so you can see the process if you ever
want to do it yourself one day. I know, I
opened a lot of restaurants for other people and other
people's dimes, just so I could learn. I had one
other thing. I just read about this, or maybe I
listened to it on another podcast, But the amount of
(23:42):
time people sit at a table. Somebody found like a
bunch of old videos that they were recorded with watching
people eat, like they were just security cameras and restaurants,
and they found old ones before phones and before social media,
and they calculated that now, because of phones and social media,
it takes people tend to fifteen minutes longer to eat
a meal because when you sit down now, the first
(24:04):
thing people do is they're taking a picture of the
place to put it on social media, or they're looking
at a menu and they're looking up things. You're looking
at a wine list and they're going, oh, how much
does it cost at this other restaurant this wine. So
the phones have slowed down people eating, which is another thing,
just to bring it back to running a restaurant, you know,
turning a table. You want to turn a restaurant at
least two and a half times in a night, starting
(24:25):
seating somewhere around six six thirty and seating up to
ten o'clock. Now, all of a sudden, if each table
is sitting there fifteen minutes longer, it's going to cut
into the profits. Yeah. I mean back in the day
when I first started and I worked in France, there
was no seatings. There was just the one. They were
just you sat people and that was it. That was
the whole evening. No one ever thought to come in
(24:48):
and take up somebody else's table. That just didn't It
just it was your table for the night. That was
your table for the night, and that was the whole thing.
And you know, that's a beautiful, finite situation if you
can make it work. But nowadays I don't think it works.
So when you're home cooking by yourself, and I know
you started in music. You played the trumpet, is that correct? Trombone?
(25:08):
What do you listen to now when you cook? What
kind of music? Well, if my wife will leave the room,
then I play rock and roll and jazz. If my
wife's around and we play classical music. All right. I
got a little quiz. What pops into your mind when
I say it? Where do you go for comfort food?
I'm gonna say king great place. If you were to
open a theme restaurant, what would it be. I would
(25:29):
love to do a music theme restaurant. I don't think
there really is like a new Orleans style bad style restaurant.
I think it would be kind of cool in New
York here after hours? Where do you eat? You know,
I'm like everybody else, I need to blue ribbon? What
was the best meal you ever ate? I actually don't
have any best meals I've ever eaten, but I'll tell
there's a restaurant that I would put on top, which
(25:50):
was Freddy gier Day Increstiate in Switzerland. Well, Jonathan, thanks
so much for joining me. I know you have to
get back to work and we have to go to
check our calendar because we just named about ten places
we're gonna go eat together. Thank you, Thank you. I
hope you guys had as much fun listening to Waxman
as I did. Food three six is a production of
(26:10):
I Heart Radio and I'm Your Host, Mark Murphy. A
very special thanks to Emily Carpet, my director of Communications,
and producers Nikki Eator and Christina Everett. Mixing and music
by Anna Stump and recording help from Julian Weller and
Jacopo Benzel. Thank you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weisenstein
for handling research. Food through sixty is executive produced by
(26:32):
Manguesh at ticket or For more podcasts on my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com