The Magic Is in the Work You’re Avoiding: with Restaurateur Kevin Boehm

Kevin Boehm cofounder of Boka Group, James Beard Award winner, and one of the most influential voices in modern hospitality has opened 46 restaurants. But behind the success was chaos. In his memoir The Bottomless Cup, he shares his story for the first time. Kevin has lived through highs that felt euphoric + lows that nearly cost him everything: homelessness, bankruptcy, bipolar disorder, and suicidal ideation. His story began with a shocking discovery at 18, that the man who raised him wasn’t his biological father; setting off a lifetime of reinvention, rebellion, and relentless drive. Kevin shares:

• The “one-take Frank” mentality: why chasing big, loud moments (openings, applause, launches) became his dopamine drug
• Building a six-table café at 21 and scaling to 46 restaurants
• The real cost of the high: alcohol, burnout, suicidal lows
• What an actual rock bottom looks like + why he calls it a gift
• Choosing happiness like a job: therapy, meds, Hoffman, sobriety, boundaries
  The mantras: “The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding” and “Everyone is responsible, but no one is to blame.”
• Forgiving three complicated parents
• Why hospitality is emotional surgery, not just food and service
• The purpose as playing a cameo role in other people’s biggest nights

• Social media & mental health hygiene: curating your feed like your pantry

Content Warning:: This episode includes candid discussion of depression and suicidal ideation.

Follow Kevin here

Grab a copy of his memoir The Bottomless Cup here

Book Recommendation: The Tender Bar by JR Moehringer

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
No one has all the answers, but when we ask
the right questions, we get a little closer, closer to truths,
closer to each other, even closer to ourselves. I'm journalist
Danielle Robe, and each week, my guests and I come
together to challenge the status quo and our own ways
of thinking by daring to ask what if, why not?

(00:28):
And who says? So? Come curious, dig deep, and join
the conversation. It's time to question everything. Today is a lore.
It is a lore, It is a saga. It is
a story of all stories. I'm gonna jump right into
this one because some people carry their stories quietly, they

(00:51):
move through the world without revealing the battles that they've fought.
But Kevin Bame is not one of those people. He
has lived loudly or relentlessly on fire for a long time,
almost no one knew what it was really costing him.
And now he's telling the truth, the whole truth, in

(01:12):
his new memoir The Bottomless Cup. Kevin is one of
the most celebrated restaurant tours in America, forty six restaurants,
a James Beard Award, and a life built around hospitality.
And when I say hospitality. He eats, sleeps, and breathes it.
I love the way he talks about it. It's all
about making other people feel seen and celebrated and cared for.

(01:32):
But Kevin learned how to build joy in a room
long before he even knew what it was like to
feel it himself. He grew up in a home where
love felt conditional. His dad called him an idiot, a loser,
but at eighteen, everything he thought he knew about himself detonated.
Three years before leaving for college, Kevin's biological father, a
man he didn't know existed, showed up and shared the

(01:54):
truth with him that his mom had an affair, and
that guy who he thought was his father, the one
who despised him, was not his dad. In that moment,
the ground beneath him gave out. The story he'd been
telling himself about family and love and identity cracked wide open.
So he did what he'd been trained to do. He reinvented.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
When you feel like someone who's despised in your own home,
when you're growing up, you kind of feel like the
only way that you can be loved is out of invention,
And so I created this sort of avatar very.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Early on, he lied his way into his first restaurant job.
He wrote a fake resume, and he never stopped running.
By twenty one, he owned his first cafe. By thirty,
he was building the kind of restaurants where people fell
in love, proposed, grieved, and celebrated. But behind the success
was a man sprinting from the truth. And you know

(02:49):
what they say, when you run from yourself, eventually you
run into yourself. So when COVID hit, when Kevin's mom died,
when his marriage cracked, and the restaurant industry collapse, he
ended up alone on a ledge in Los Angeles, hung over, heartbroken,
and just as he decided he was going to jump
the phone ring, a single call saved his life. That

(03:12):
was his real rock bottom, and after that day he rebuilt,
not the restaurants himself.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Everyone is responsible, but no one is to blame.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Kevin stopped drinking, He started writing his book. He went
to therapy and Hoffman, he faced his bipolar disorder. After
twenty three years of denial, he forgave people who hurt him,
and he learned what real happiness felt like. Not the mannic, fast,
glittering kind, but the quiet kind. So the question we're
circling today is how do you stop being the version

(03:45):
of yourself you invented to survive and become the person
you actually are, even if it costs you your old life.
It's time to question everything. With Kevin Baine, Kevin, your
story is wild. I get to hear a lot of
stories in what I do and your book it takes

(04:06):
you on so many twists and turns. I felt like
I was reading a screenplay. If Your Life was a movie,
what would the logline be?

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Miles Davis has one of my favorite quotes, which is,
it took me years to learn to play like myself.
So maybe it took him years to learn to play
like himself because a I had a real identity crisis
early on. I grew up not understanding why my father
hated me so much, and at eighteen I figured out why.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
So I want to start with the title of your memoir,
it's the Bottomless Cup. It sounds like you spent almost
your entire life up until a few years ago searching
how to fill it. What was in your cup or
what wasn't in your cup at the beginning?

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, I mean I've been a seeker for a long time.
Because when you feel like someone who's despised in your
own home, when you're growing up, you kind of feel
like the the only way that you can be loved
is out of invention. And so I created this sort
of avatar very early on. If you do that long enough,

(05:10):
you end up becoming a stranger to yourself. And so
as I was on that search for who I was,
I figured out that manic moments gave me dopamine, and
so when I wanted to fill my cup up, I
would have these grand gestures of these big moments, and
I thought that was happiness. So I dropped out of
school when I was nineteen years old and ended up

(05:33):
living in my car and the panhandle of Florida, and
I wrote this really beautiful piece of fiction which was
my first resume, which had all these restaurants on it
that no one could call for a reference check because
they had all mysteriously gone out of business. So I
walked my way into this job, and instantly that rush

(05:55):
of a busy dining room gave me a rush. And
so I figured out was you know what, I could
do this every night and it could be mine. I'm
going to throw a party every single night, we're going
to clean it up. Then we're going to set it
back up again and do it the next day. And
I was going to be a party thrower so I
could constantly have this rush of dopamine. And in the

(06:16):
beginning that worked, but I mistook manic moments for happy moments.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Well, fast forward. You've been incredibly successful in the hospitality industry.
How many restaurants have you opened?

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Forty six in counting in counting.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
You've also been candid that a lot of that success
came from that frenzied high that you're talking about. Why
did you decide that now was the right time to
write this book and talk about all the high and
low moments.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
First of all, rock bottom is a gift. It is
if you survive it. And so there's a million people
who are rock bottom and there is no survival, and
that goes for depression, it goes for addiction. And for myself,
when I survived the lowest of the lows and came
out of it, I felt like I had kind of

(07:05):
a free spin. I was like, Okay, death is the
other side of this. Then I'm going to throw the
kitchen sink at happiness and try to write the ship,
and when I did, I was like, you know what,
I'm comfortable with sharing this story now. And for some reason,
I always thought the story was going to hurt my
image in some way, this carefully crafted avatar that I

(07:27):
had tried to create, which included at times me having
a happy childhood. And so now I don't give a
shit about the Fugaci part of me that he used
to be out there. I'm more concerned at the real me.
I'm more excited to put the story out there and
say this is actually who I am.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
You decided to write a piece right after your mom
passed away. Was there permission there to sort of put
your story out there.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it a little bit.
And even though that story didn't delve into everything. My
mom passed away the day before restaurants closed for COVID.
So if you think of two of the only anchors
in my life my mom and restaurants, both of them
went away in a very short amount of time. So
the next day we couldn't throw a funeral for her

(08:15):
because of COVID. We had a dinner at a restaurant
that I had in Springfullinois together and then I had
to drive up to Chicago the next day and close
down all my restaurants, so I didn't really sleep for
like two or three days, and within my insomni, I
woke up and wrote this piece about her, and I
sent it to my publicist, who was also a close friend,

(08:35):
and she was just like, hey, do you mind if
I send this to Esquire? And Esquire ended up printing it,
which sort of led to the book. And so there
was truth in the story that I wrote, but I
left a lot of parts out. And when a book
agent saw that story and complimented me on it, he
kind of said, hey, pitch me some ideas for a book,

(08:55):
and I pitched him three or four, none of which
he cared for, and then he said anything else, and
I said, yeah, I have something, but it's pretty personal.
And it was one of the first times, maybe the
first time I had ever told my full story to
a stranger.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
How did he react?

Speaker 2 (09:10):
He said, that's the book.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
That's the book.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
I don't even think I got it all out. He goes,
this is the book.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
So we've been kind of talking around it. We mentioned
avatar pain, your mother, your father, hating you. Can you
start from the beginning sure, and just kind of share
the broad strokes.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
My mom was one of fourteen kids who grew up
on a farm in ross Common, Michigan. She was farm
labor at age six, beaten by her dad at times,
sexually abused by a relative. Horrific childhood by any standard,
got away to high school and said, I'm going to
be valedictorian this high school. I'm going to get a
free ride to college, and I'm never going to come

(09:50):
back to ross Common, Michigan. That's what she did. She
got a free d to Central Michigan University. She's very pretty.
She sits down the cafeteria that first week and she goes,
I'm gonna marry the first nice guy that I meet.
Guy sits down next to her in the cafeteria. Four
months later, she's married to him. On her wedding night,
he's screaming at her and she's like, oh crap, I

(10:12):
don't even know this guy. So they have a daughter.
She's miserable, and she just thinks, man, these are the
cards I've been dealt in life. Maybe happiness for me
is not a worldly possession. Maybe I'm gonna inherit it
later in the afterlife, she answers an ad in the
newspaper to write speeches and book travel for an ex

(10:34):
professional boxer who had become a motivational speaker. He's fifty one,
she's twenty four. He's wildly charismatic, he's good looking, and
they have an affair. She gets pregnant. She goes back
to the man she's married to and says, I'm gonna
leave you, and he instantly says, if you leave me,
I'll kill myself. Protestant gil gets the best of her
and she stays. Three months later, she's noticeably pregnant, and

(10:59):
they don't say a word about the origin of that baby,
even though he must know it's not his because they
haven't been together in a long, long time. So the
baby comes out. His name fraudulently goes on the pertificate
that's me, You're the baby. I'm the baby. So as
soon as I come out, all he sees is that man.
And so what he looks at me, he doesn't see

(11:20):
a son. He sees an enemy. He sees somebody who
ruined his life. And I pretty much felt that all
the time. So you're a young kid, and all you
want your dad to do is love you. Be proud
of you. And I just always knew he had a
real problem with me.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
How did you know?

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Well, first of all, he wasn't shy about it. He
would tell me that I was an idiot and a
loser pretty much constantly. I remember a moment where I
thought I'd solved it. I was watching Little House on
the Prairie and Charles Ingalls was swinging an axe and
my dad was like, you know what, I need an
ad because we got to chop down that willow tree

(12:01):
that had died in our backyard. And I went to
Mom and I go, Mom, I know what I'm going
to get Dad for Christmas. I'm going to get him
an ax. This is like my pressient hospitality skills very
early in life. And she's like, that's a great idea.
We go to Sears and we buy him an axe.
And you know when you wrap something like an axe,
you can already tell it's an axe. Yeah, it's under
the tree and he opens it and he was actually, hey,

(12:23):
thank you, this is really great, and I'm like, that's all.
It took an eight dollars ax from Sears and I
have solved our relationship. And I was so happy that
I made him happy that I kept bringing it up,
like you really like it, And at one point he
was just like enough, you know, you're going to make
your sister feel bad about her gift. And it quickly
just turned and I knew very loud there was gonna

(12:46):
be no way that I was going to make this
guy happy. And so at a certain point we were
just sworn enemies.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
And your mom never said a word to you, never.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Said a word to me when we talked about it later,
and she was right. She was like, I was just
afraid if I told you there was going to be
this moment where you're going to be like, well, oh yeah,
well you're not my father, and she was dead I'm right,
and she was just trying to keep the peace the
best she could.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Fast forward, you're nineteen and you have this job for
the first time, and how are you feeling about yourself?

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Well, something had happened a year before that. You know,
three days before I left to go to college. My
real father had come and found me and taken me
out to breakfast, and it said, your whole childhood's a lie.
You know, I know from your mom that you'd never
cared for your father much so perhaps it helps you
to know that I'm your father.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Do you remember that moment sort vividly?

Speaker 2 (13:39):
I remember how uncomfortable it was, because instantly what you're
doing is you're rewinding, and you're thinking, oh, crap, this
is why you hated me. And I can't believe my
mom didn't tell me. And how am I supposed to feel?
Now this guy's a stranger to me. I feel awkward
around him. And so at that moment where the beads
of sweat start coming down your face, I was in

(13:59):
a full flop sweat and probably within like five minutes,
red face, red neck. And I remember the server coming
over and she's just normally doing your job. Can I
get you more water? And I was like, well, somebody
take me home. I need to go home. And he
was like, are you sure? Can we talk about this,
It's like, no, take me home, and so I just
wanted to be alone. So he dropped me off in

(14:19):
my car. I literally ran to my grade school parking
lot for an hour and a half. I knew what
time it was, and I knew Larry, who raised me,
was at the house because he always came home for lunch.
So I just had to sit and wait it out
in the parking lot by myself, and just like, think
about all this stuff.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Being alone in a parking lot is really depressing. Imagery
did it feel as depressing it did?

Speaker 2 (14:41):
I was just trying to figure it all out. My
mom had always been my hero parent, and so to
feel like I'd been betrayed by her then threw my
whole life out of whack. And what it did was
it turned me pretty rebellious for a little while, because
I was like, well, you know what, fuck everybody. And

(15:02):
I was so happy that I was leaving. Those three
days in between that moment and leaving for school couldn't
happen fast enough. I was just scarce those last three days,
and I drove myself to college. My folks didn't come
up with me, and I was gone, and I was like,
get me out of here.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
Sometimes in memoirs, when people write about their childhood, I'm like,
want to fast forward to the next part. Not your book.
You write about your childhood so vividly. What was the
earliest seat of the person you became.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
I wanted peace in my house. I was a peacemaker,
and I liked to have a good time, and I
liked making people happy. And my house was the exact
opposite of that, and it was also seven hundred square
feet with a bunch of hard services. There was this
cacophony of arguing and consternation constantly, and I knew that

(15:53):
once people had food in their mouths and drinks on
the table, that everybody would shut the hell up. Oh wow,
And so it would be like an argument would start
between my mom and my dad or me, and I'd
be like, hey, time, let's go, let's get some stuff
on the table.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Time for lasagna, talk for lasagna.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
And I would help in the kitchen and I would
just try to separate people and get to the dinner table.
And my our dinner tables were pretty quiet, people just
eating as fast as they could. And I knew as
soon as I got done with that, I washed the
dishes and then I got out of there. So those
seemed to be the most peaceful moments when we were
sitting in a dining room table.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Selling tomatoes door to door. You built fake restaurants with
your sister. Take me back to your very first cup
of coffee. How old were you when you had it
first cup of coffee?

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah? I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I was
intrigued by flavors of all types. So if I saw
adults doing it, I wanted to try it and see
what it was. And so you also get a nice
buzz of caffeine. I didn't need any more energy than
I already had, but that really put me over the top.
So I was so fast by things that wealthy people did.

(17:03):
I would watch Dynasty and I'd be like, why is
Alexus Carrington so fascinated with this caveat? What does it
do to people when they put it in their mouths?
You know? And so yeah, food was even though we
weren't eating fancy food. My mom had been a farmer
and we had a garden plot that the city of

(17:24):
Springfield donated this part of land out. I sing them
in State University where you could have your own garden
plot for free, and my mom let me grow whatever
I wanted to grow. So I grew tomatoes. And because
we didn't have a lot of money is chili bowl
haircuts and bad jeans and hand me down goodwill clothes,
I was like, I'm going to sell these tomatoes ten cents,

(17:46):
fifteen cents, twenty cents, twenty five cents, there's a picture
in the book of me sitting at the end of
my driveway, and the first time I ever sold tomatoes,
I made ten bucks and I was like, Mom, you're
not cutting my hair anymore. I'm going to the hair affair.
I'm getting a proper haircut.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
You knew it was a bad haircut.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
I knew it was bad haircut because I was getting teased.
So there's this moment in my life where I'm not
popular in my home. I'm not popular at school. And
one of the things that I knew that I could
do to change that was my own industriousness. So I
got a paper route, I sold tomatoes, working at Harty's
when I was fifteen years old. I always had a job,

(18:23):
and I always had cash in my pocket. All the
way up to when I was eighteen years old, I
was the kid with the fake id going to get
kegs and throwing the keg parties, and my cake parties
were organized. Man. I had initials on the bottoms of
my solo cups, so somebody would show up with their
own solo cup and I'm like, huh, Scott, I don't
remember you buying a cup for me. Let me see
the bottom of that cup.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Maybe, like, sorry, bro, here's three bucks. If I had
money in my pocket, to me, that equaled freedom. And
I didn't like being poor. I didn't like not having
any money. It made me feel trapped. And to this day,
the jailed me bad me. And So if you want
to look at why I was such a nomad when
I was a kid, why I opened up my own business,

(19:06):
why I didn't want to work for anybody, it all
comes from these patterns that were built by that childhood.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
How long did you feel like that kid with bad
jeans and a bad haircut?

Speaker 2 (19:27):
I mean, a little bit that always existed. But then
there's a moment when you know, you get to go
out a date with a pretty girl and you're like, Okay,
maybe I've turned the tide a little bit. We were
kissing a very pretty girl in high school and say, hey,
maybe things have changed a little bit.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Maybe I threw on a pair of Levi's and made
it all that.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, Levi's and that haircut made it all better. That's fascinating.
I'm still the same kid.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
The book reveals that your entire identity was built around
this avatar that you made up to outrun the truth
of your childhood. You mentioned it earlier. Can you paint
me a picture of who that avatar was? Because I
get this very clear picture of who that kid Kevin was.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
I'll tell you an embarrassing story that's not in the book.
Somebody from my fraternity a college happened to be in
my hometown and we went out. Instead of having him
drop me off at my little, tiny house, I had
him drop me off at a house that was a
blockover that was bigger. Because I had created this whole
thing about.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Who I was, and you told people's stories in college.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
In college, there was no mention of like me hating
my dad or what happened, or my father not being
my father or anything like that. I wanted to be
a very normal kid. I'm a kid, parents were successful.
Here's who I am. My fraternity specifically, was filled with
people that were very successful and knew exactly who they
wanted to be, which made me feel even worse about myself,

(20:52):
which probably ultimately led to me dropping out. One of
my housemates at school is one of the most successful
astronauts in history. So I remember meeting him, and you know,
he was an aeronautical engineering major and I'm like, yea,
well what are you going to do? And he's like,
I'm going to be an astronaut and you're like whatever.
There's been four hundred of those, right, And one night

(21:14):
another one of my housemates was asking. He's like, you're
pre law He does, I don't think you're a lawyer, man,
and I was like, I think you're right. I don't
think I am either. He's like, well, why are you
doing that? Fear disguised his practicality, and he goes, what
do you really want to do? And I was like, man,
that's kind of cheesy, and he's like, what is it.
I was like, I want to own my own restaurant,

(21:36):
and he goes, why aren't you doing that? I go,
no money, I don't know anybody just doesn't seem realistic,
and he goes, Kevin, Mike thinks he's going to be
an astronaut. Touche. Yeah, but there are people at my
school that were dreamers, who were already manifesting who they
wanted to be, and that type of behavior is contagious,

(21:57):
and so I was thinking maybe I can drop out.
And at a certain point, my real father was coming
up to the University of Illinois and he would just
show up. I would get out of class and he
would be sitting there like on a park bench. And
then my mom took a job in the same town
that I went to school. I was commuting from Springfield

(22:20):
to Champagne and my father who raised me, Larry, was
also coming up there. And at one point I had
almost exploded, and I just one day took off. I
was like, that's enough.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
How do you make sense of all three of them?
Kind of checking in on you, especially Larry like Doude,
you hated me my whole life.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Larry was regretful. My mom adored me what he was regretful,
what he was getting older and knew that he had
watched me from a distance all these years. It must
have been hard on him. And now he wanted me
to just instantly feel like he was my father.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
Did you look like him?

Speaker 2 (22:58):
I did, but I couldn't up the switch of just
loving him. And with Larry, he was too far gone.
Once you go through the things that I had gone
through with him. You know, this is a guy that
hit me in the face when I was eight years old.
There was no going back with him. Maybe someday I
could find something with him, but our relationship for all
intentsive purposes at that point was dead. And as much

(23:20):
as I loved my mom, I felt suffocated. And I
just got to the point where I was like, Man,
I'm going to go all in on me whoever this
new me is. I'm going to create this new me
that doesn't have to deal with all of this baggage.
And so all I wanted to do was pretend all
that didn't exist. And so I needed a new town

(23:42):
to create the new me. Now these people know me,
they're not going to know anybody to ask questions. The
fake resume was the symbolic of everything that I was
trying to do.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
It's interesting for me to hear you talk about each
of these people and feel your energy. It's different when
you talk about.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Each one of them. I adore my mother.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
You adore your mother. What I'm feeling.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
I feel sorry for Larry. I never knew Woody well enough.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
Why the emotion and the tears for Larry.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
I so desperately wanted him to like me that never
went away.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
So the tears are really for you maybe.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
And for him. I actually finished my book and I
had turned it in. Larry had a heart attack, and
my sister called me and said, you know, Larry died
for several minutes last night, but they revived him. And
she said, I'm just letting you know. She didn't say
come down. She left that up to me. And I
called my therapist and she said, what are you going

(24:43):
to hope you did five years from now? Seems very simple,
but it's a great question in a lot of different ways.
And I was like, I'm going to wish that I
went down there, even if it was just a support missy.
So I drove to Springfield and on the middle of
the table was a letter from Larry. A seven page

(25:03):
letter was an apology letter. It was not an apology
about his treatment to me when I was a kid.
It said nothing of him not being my father. It
was very specifically about him never really getting to know
me or my kids. And he said, you don't talk

(25:24):
to me anymore, and I know why, and I'm sorry.
And I was able to go to the hospital and
forgive him. I think I wrote in the book that
when I told him that I loved him, because I
wasn't sure if I really did or not, that it
felt like throwing a curveball. With a broken arm. It
was not easy to push out of my mouth. I
had not told him that I loved him since I

(25:46):
was a very little kid, and I had never said
it to my real father. And I was like, it's
what he needs to hear, and what the hell, just
do it? So I did.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
How do you feel in hindsight?

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Good? I'm glad I did. And like twenty minutes later,
Crazy Larry came out and I was telling my sister
a story about me running in the tough mutter and
adding up in the medic tent and then he goes,
god damn stupid, more on move per usual, and my
sister and I just laughed about it. We went She's like, well,
we're not crazy.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
He's still I'm missing the years where you really found
a version of yourself from nineteen on. Talk to me
about that time period.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Yeah. Well one, I found my people. So I went
into restaurants and I met these people in restaurants and
became so intrigued about food and one hostelling service. And
I met the restaurant people and I go, wait a second,
these people are smart, you know a lot about food,
wind music, and they're dangerous. I mean they go out

(26:50):
like four in the morning, and I'm like, they're cool, man.
I mean, like everybody else is boring compared to these people.
So I was like, Okay, I can hang with these folks.
That was fun. It was for a few years where
I was saving all that money up and like I
met the girl that I opened up my first restaurant with,
and I found my running buddies and friends, and I
didn't need to sleep much. So I would go and

(27:12):
I would sprint hard in the dining room floor and
then I would go straight from the dining room floor
to the bar, from the bar to the bed, and
I'd wake up in the morning and I'd run six miles.
I was a maniac. I was a total maniac.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Are you experiencing highs and lows at this time?

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah? I would still experience all the crashes, and so
the running was part of like the crashes, because I
would wake up and I would be hungover and I
would feel like I wanted to die, and I would
go run and I'd feel a little better, and I'd
feel terrible to work, and then work would make me
feel better again. And then as soon as I started
to crash, then I would add some tequila to the

(27:49):
equation and then I would feel better again. And I
was like, well, if I just keep doing this for
forty years, I mean, what could go wrong?

Speaker 1 (27:55):
You felt like it was fine, like you had found
the potion.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
I was like, oh, well this is fine, this is
not unhealthy. What's five to seven margaritas the night between friends?
And then that gets to be a little bit more.
And I knew it was pretty good at it, and
I instantly just what made you good at it? I
didn't have very good technical skill in the beginning, as
far as wine service or being able to talk about
tawar and what great wines were and the characteristics of

(28:21):
the individual pina noirs in the list. And I wasn't
good at table maintenance, and I wasn't serving from the
left side with my left hand yet, and all these
technical skills that I had not learned, but I still
got a ton of call tables. General manager is baffled
by it. You would tell me, he goes, you are
not a great server. I understand why you get eight
freaking call tables tonight. My emotional intelligence is good and

(28:43):
I was really concerned with people having a good time.
Then I was able to catch up on the technical
skill part of it. So as soon as that happened,
I was like, Okay, I could open up my own restaurant.
I looked at the people I was working for. I
was like, these people sort of know what they're doing,
but I don't think they know what the doing a
whole lot more than I do. I think I can
go do this. So I went and opened up a

(29:05):
six table restaurant on the money I had saved up
with my girlfriend at the time, and we went to work.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
How do you look back on that time?

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Oh my god, it was just absolute and total chaos.
It was so poorly drawn up. I mean we opened
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and there was two of us,
which means you'd get there at like six am and
work till like midnight. We dropped breakfast pretty quickly because
it wasn't sustainable. But her and I had deeply fallen
for each other. But we're both pretty hot blooded and

(29:35):
so instant way to ruin a good relationship open up
a restaurant together. So we ran hot because sometimes there'd
be forty people in our dining room and it was
two of us washing dishes, serving, prepping, cooking, she was
a chef on the line. I would have the cold station.

(29:55):
We would both wash dishes, and she had a daughter
and her daughter. It was underneath this counter we had
with a little TVVCR combination watching The Little Mermaid. It
was absolute insanity. But for those first six months, I
wrote something in my journal and it was like, not
sure if this business will ever fill my pockets, but
it sures how fills my soul. And I was pretty

(30:18):
poetic for twenty one year old kid. And so I
was happy and it was mine. I could go out
and be able to be like, oh, what do you
do for a living? And I was like, Oh, I
own lazy days cafe. That made me feel so good.
I had something that was me.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
You weren't saying like I'm waiting tables at this restaurant and.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
I can tell Larry that I'm a restaurant owner.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
That's big.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
It was big.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
So how does one cafe turn into forty six it's.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
A good restaurant openings, Well, you find out a certain point.
The size of our restaurant was a really bad size.
We didn't have great weather conditions in our restaurant. It
was like a back deck that had like plastic biz
Queen wrapped around it with a kerosene heater if it
got really cold. We were kind of screwed, and so
seaside Florida became very popular. Somebody bought that building and

(31:06):
they bought us out, and I went up the street
and I go one, are my three favorite things? Well,
I love sushi, I love one, I love rock and roll,
one hundred one's by the glass, sushi till three o'clock
in the morning, live rock and roll seven nights a week. Now,
that sounds like, oh, what a cool concept. In the
Panana of Florida in nineteen ninety five, it was just
downright weird. But people dug it and there was only

(31:30):
a couple places to drink late night on thirty A,
which is now kind of a famous road, and we
killed it. It was busy and I was having a blast,
and I probably would have stayed there a long time,
but somebody came made me an offer to buy it,
and I was like, I guess I'm flipping restaurants. I
still wanted more. It was still stuck together with bubb
gum and Scotch tape, and I was like, I want

(31:52):
something just a little nicer. Something it feels a little
more real and weirdly enough, I took the money I
made off of that, and I went back home to
Springful of Illinois, and I said, Okay, I'm going to
show everybody what I've done. You know, it was like
this also ran kid in Springfield. You know, I was
a kid on the other side of the tracks who
went to like not the best high school and lived

(32:14):
in the little house. And I wanted to go back
and say, I'm going to open up the best restaurant
in Springfilloinois and you know, maybe I can buy in
some respectability in my hometown, make Larry proud. And I
told Mom to quit her job. I go quit your
job at TJ Max and come do this restaurant with me,
and she did for those special years. It's very special,

(32:35):
very special because my mom was so hard working and
so smart, and if you gave her a project, she
was going to do it ten x better than you
drew it up. And she was brilliant.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
You said your mom hid from the world most of
her life and only found peace and purpose after twenty
nineteen when she got her cancer diagnosis. You describe it
as the best time of her life. She described it
as she described it, and it's because she found out
how people really loved her. It's hard for me to
wrap my head around.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
It's a heartbreaking statement. Because I interviewed her and I
asked her, I said, Mom, what was the turning point
of your life? She said, after I got diagnosed with cancer.
I found out that people really loved me and weren't
just tolerating me.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
And I was texting this back and forth with her,
and I just cried. I was just was like, Mom,
she really did think that her whole life, that she
was so hard to love. I started reading her diaries
after she died, and I couldn't read them, and my
therapist said, don't read them. She was like, they were
never meant for anybody else to read. They were meant

(33:43):
for her to read. And she said that's how she
was feeling at that exact moment. It doesn't mean that
she felt like that all the time.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Did watching her find peace towards the end of her
life influence your process at all?

Speaker 2 (33:55):
It did, because she really did seem so zen and
it was the best version of her that I had
ever seen. Even with me, my mom was not super
excitable and she threw around compliments like manhole covers, and
so for the first time she was saying stuff like
you know, it really amazed me, and it was this

(34:15):
really sweet version of my mom. And I was like,
it proved that there is evolution with people and that
you can get better. My whole life, I knew there
was something wrong with me, but it took me a
long time to figure that out. You know, I remember
being a kid. When you get in bad moods a lot,
or you get dark a lot, you just think everybody's
like that. It's a herculean leap to go from I'm

(34:39):
in a bad mood sometimes time bipolar, and so my
mom was definitely bipolar. So, you know, as I looked
back on it, and I was like, oh my god,
my mom had a worse than I did, and her
mom had it. My mom always talked about how depressed
her mom always was. So the first time I ever
went to a therapist when I was twenty seven. When
I was twenty seven, I didn't go to a therapist

(34:59):
to get for twenty three years. I went one time.
She was an hour and a half evaluation. She was kevin,
I think you might be bipolar, and I told her
to go at herself. I was like, you don't get it.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Stay in the back of your mind.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
A little bit. I was like, you don't know me
not bipolar. People throw bipolar around a lot. That's like
a dig on somebody, right, They're like, oh, man, she's crazy,
she's bipolar. And so when I heard that, it was
like somebody telling me that I was crazy. And I
was like, no, no, no, no, My mom and dad
are bipolar. Haven't you seen my life? My life's amazing.

(35:35):
I get a bad mood every once a while.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
You write in the book ambition and adrenaline was your
drug of choice. So how did you learn the difference
between this healthy drive and what you didn't know at
the time was bipolar disorder.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
There's the loss of diminishing returns with anything, and so
every time I opened up a restaurant had the big opening,
it was like up here and then it was here,
and then it was here, and then it was here,
And so I knew that wasn't giving me the same
response that it used to. But then when you're standing
on a ledge in Los Angeles getting ready to jump,

(36:23):
you start to realize that everything you thought was true
was not true, and that all the things that you
had done didn't really mean anything. If you were miserable
and sad and wanted to die and wanted to check
out your life felt so bad that you were willing
to leave your family and your friends and leave this earth,

(36:47):
then pretty much everything that you were doing was probably wrong.
It's a tough thing to think that all the stuff
I've done all this year is right now means absolutely nothing.
That was the rock bottom, and then that was the gift.
Do you think that's true that it was a gift?

Speaker 1 (37:03):
No, that it meant nothing.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
No, not now? Yeah, not now, because it kept me alive.
So once the dust settled and I was able to
look back on it, and I was like, Okay, first
of all, one, there's been a lot of great things
that you've done in your life. Two, you have had
a lot of really joyful moments that you helped produce.
Three You've done a lot of things that have helped

(37:25):
people throughout your life. And you have provided a lot
of beautiful experiences for people. And the problem was like
I just wasn't doing it in the right way. I
needed to be a part of it again in a
way that I could feel it again, I become numb.
I wasn't feeling it anymore. So I've been an extremist
my whole life, and so coming off that ledge, I

(37:49):
was like, I'm gonna throw the kitchen sink the happiness.
If somebody's done it for happiness, I'm gonna try it.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
Because you had thrown in the kitchen sink on every restaurant,
every project you've ever worked one which time you chose happiness.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
This time I've thrown it in myself. Yeah. I had
done all this for business and all those things my
whole life, and I'd done a bunch of superficial stuff.
But I was like, the real work. What is the
real work that I'm gonna do. So that was in
the beginning therapy five days a week, stopping drinking. I
stopped walking dining rooms and being around people for a

(38:23):
series of months. Went to both my companies, in both
my C suites and said, leave me alone for a while.
I told me to leave me alone for a while.
The next day, like several people called me and I
was like, I don't think you heard me yesterday. Leave
me alone. I did ayahuasca, I did buffo, I got
on medication, and I went to Hoffman. And I know
you've talked about Hoffman before, and you want a big,

(38:45):
heaping spoonful of self awareness, go to Hoffman. It's not
just about you, it's about your parents. And this idea
that ninety percent of who you are is because you
either tried to emulate or rebel against a parent. With me,
it was so true.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Why do you think you were so open to everything
this time?

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Because the alternative was dying. I had come to a
point in my life where when I got on a
plane and if there was extreme turbulence, I'd be pretty
okay with this plane crashing right now, that's a bad
place to be. Or when I got really anxious and
really stressed out, my mantra was, if it gets any worse,

(39:24):
you can just kill yourself. I mean, what a terrible, dangerous,
awful place to be. And so I'm gonna try everything.
And I was hoping something would stick, you know, but
this is all stuff I'd never tried before. There was
some low hanging fruit there. Therapy was some low hanging fruit.
Medication was really low hanging fruit. And my therapist asked me,

(39:45):
she goes, why do you think that you've never done
this stuff. You try everything else. Why do you think
you've not done this? And it came back to Larry
only believed in the traditional ways to get somewhere. You
go to college, you get a degree, this is what
you do, pay your taxes, you get life insurance, you
get married at a young age, you have two children.

(40:07):
And I wanted to be the opposite to him. My
rebellion from him was I'm not going to do anything traditional,
and so I was like, I don't need therapy. I'm
going to go float in a tank for an hour.
I was starting to hurt myself in my rebellion against him.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Do you remember the first moment that you thought I've
made it and what that feeling was like versus the
feeling now when you're sitting and like you've really made it.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
You know. And my profession, the James Beard Award is
like the biggest thing that you can win.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
My partner and I won Outstanding Restaurant Tours in America
in twenty nineteen, and man, for about a week, everything
was right in the world. It's kind of like my mom.
I was like, Wow, people do like me. Oh, thank god.
And I reached his pinnacle and nobody can take that
away from me, and I felt like I made it.
I was like, man, that's my Oscar. It lasted for

(40:59):
about a week to really making it was in the
last year. It was a very quiet moment. I had
finished my book and I was sitting in my house,
my new house that I really love, and I was
listening to Miles Davis Kind of Blue, and my girlfriend
was there, and I was just having the most beautiful,

(41:21):
peaceful night, and I just thought to myself that I
was really happy. My whole life had been about creating
these giant, loud moments. I lived a really loud life,
and I found happiness in the quiet. Miles Davis Kind
of Blue was the album I opened service with every
single night. That album was at lazy Days start with

(41:43):
so What, and it was just playing in the background,
sort of the soundtrack of my life. But instead of
working a room this time, I was just sitting with myself.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
I think it takes a lot of courage to write
a book while you're still kind of going through all
of the feelings.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
I was writing the book while I was living it,
and so once I got to like chapter thirteen, it
was no longer the past I was writing about. I
was writing about while it was happening.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
That's sort of my question, because you don't get that
A lot a lot of people write in hindsight, and
I understand why they do it. Why did you choose
to write, to quote Rene Brown in the messy Middle?

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Well, there had to be a beginning, of middle and
an end. And when I started writing the book, I
hadn't figured it all out yet. I was in the
mess at that point, and so I was hoping something
was going to happen. It was going to button it
all up. And honestly, i'd written the ending before Larry
passed away. I remember. I think it was my publisher's like,

(42:44):
you know, you have to take the book back right.
Life just kept happening, and it was like I was
writing in a journal some of.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Those loud moments that you mentioned. Your life seems so
rooted in connection, and you have such great stories. Can
you share a story from your restaurant life that really
means something to you.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
One of my favorites is at the Indigo Wine Bar
in the mid nineties. A man it was his wedding anniversary,
and on his wedding night, his father had given him
a bottle of nineteen sixty one Chateau Lafitte, and so
he came to me and said, hey, this is really special.
Today we're going to open this bottle. You know, sixty
one Lafet's one of the most expensive and most renowned

(43:26):
bottles of one in history nineteen twenty nine, nineteen forty five,
nineteen sixty one, nineteen eighty two, the best years in
Bordeaux and sixty one. You know, this is a multi
thousand dollars bottle. The invitation to the wedding anniversary was
a picture of the bottle. It represented his father being
there that night because his father had passed away. So
he brought it to me about forty five minutes before

(43:48):
the party started for me to decant it, and we
were going to display it. He had a podium, We're
going to put it on it. And I go to
open up the bottle of wine and it's court. He
had stored it all these years, and it was bad,
and he cried in front to me. He couldn't believe it,
like hysterically crying. And I was like, sir, what if
I replace it with one of these bottles up here?
And he's like, Kevin these people are super wine savvy.

(44:09):
They're going to know that this bottle right here is
not that ninety seven silver oak, you know. I was like, wait,
I go, there's an old man here who has this
incredible wine cellar, and he's so sweet and such a romantic.
He goes, Kevin, I don't have the money to buy that.
I go just a wile a second. I call my
friend up and he goes, hold on, cause Beck, He goes,

(44:31):
I don't have a sixty one, but I have a
sixty six. I was like, I'll be there in a second.
How much do you want for it? He's like, one
hundred bucks cash money. Drap my car, race down there,
and grabbed the bottle of sixty six. One hundred bucks down,
go back, decant that bottle. It's perfect. We rin outh
the bottle of sixty one, pour it out, put it
next to the decanter. Throw away the bottle of sixty six.

(44:51):
And right when I do that, everybody comes into the room.
He pours wine for everybody and he tells this beautiful
story about his father. Everybody's crying in the house, and
then everybody tries the wine, and the whole chatters about
this is the greatest glass of wine I've ever had
my entire life. And he comes over to me. He
pours me two ounces of the wine, and he puts
his hands on my cheeks. He kisses me on both cheeks,

(45:13):
and he goes, you are a beautiful liar, young man.
He goes, My father would have loved this story. I
completely changed the temperature of what would have been a disaster.
And I was like, this is my purpose in life.
I get to play a cameo role in people's lives,
sometimes really big moments, and I'm that guy that comes

(45:35):
in for a second and can steal the scene and
then dart back out. And so then I became obsessed
with finding those moments where I would dart in.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
I've never heard anybody put it that way, and I
love that because we all have the opportunity to do that.
You mentioned purpose. You faced homelessness, bankruptcy, You've dealt with
being bipolar, divorce, and there's some trials that I haven't
even named in that list. You've opened fifty restaurants and
you've become a leader in the independent restaurant coalition. People

(46:06):
in hospitality idolize you like you say your name and
hospitality and people's eyes light up. Those are some highs
and lows. Yeah, what did the lows teach you about purpose?

Speaker 2 (46:15):
The lows taught me that if I don't protect and
restore myself, that I'm not going to be able to
restore other people moving forward. And that's really what I
want to do. If my purpose is restoration, then I
have to constantly set boundaries and set rules for myself

(46:37):
that allow myself to be restorative. I'm the happiest ever
been in my life right now, the second, thank God,
and so it still allows me to do some pretty
great things when I have those moments where I know
I can like dart In for a second.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
It's interesting for me to hear that you've never been
happier because you said it's actually never been harder to
be happy. Yes, I think that statement will resonate with
a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
People.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yes, I have a weird relationship with that statement, Kevin. Okay,
and I don't know why I do, but I want
to better understand because I think most people would agree
with you.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
I got some hacks for it, though, Okay. Well, one
is I treat my pantry and I treat my social
media feed the same way. If I keep junk food
in my pantry, I will eventually eat it. If there's
Dorito's in there, there is going to be some night
where it's like one point thirty in the morning'll be like,

(47:33):
fuck it, give me the cool rechtritos. If I keep
stuff on my feed that is bombastic or negative, or
I keep it on there because I like to be outraged,
sometimes I will carry that energy with me all day,
and so I put both of those things on a diet.
I only keep things in my pantry that I think

(47:54):
serve me, and I only keep things in my feed
that I think serve me. And my feed isn't just
my social feed, it's also the people that I converse
with and talk to on a daily basis. And so
I challenge everybody out there to look at everything in
their life, including the contagious behavior that they surround themselves
by with people. I don't hang out with the exact

(48:15):
same people that I used to hang out with. The
fuck I've added some real beauties in these last few years. Man.
And there are a couple of people that know me
only is the person that I am. Now, Oh that's interesting,
And so they don't have an expectation level set of
me as the old me. What is that like, I
went a year without drinking. I'm not drinking right now,

(48:37):
but like when I first did it, and this is
like maybe twenty twenty two, I went a year and
I decided to have some drinks because we had something
to celebrate. And afterwards, I went to a friend's birthday
and they were pouring tequila shots and she looked at
me and she's like, oh, too bad, you're not drinking.
And I was like, actually, I'm drinking tonight. And I
took a drink and she put her hands on my

(48:57):
cheeks and sheeses, yes, I love drunk. And I looked
at her and I go, everybody loves drunk Kevin except
for drunk Kevin, and yes. I continued to drink that night,
and then the next day I was.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Like, damn it.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
And since that time, I haven't had a night where
I went off the rails like that, and I haven't
had a drink in months and months. It just doesn't
serve me anymore. But there was a certain amount of
people that were like, come on, give me tequila Kevin.
He's a blest and I'm like, hey, man, sober Kevin
can be a lot of fun too. I heard Rob

(49:29):
mosay that he thought when he got sober that he
was never gonna have fun over again. That's what his
original thought was. And I guess I thought about that
a little bit too, that I wasn't gonna be able
to have fun if I was sober. It's so wrong, man,
I'm having so much more fun in this.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
Version of myself than I did that old version of myself.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
So you say that your actual bottom is a supreme
gift and that all the supposed rock bottoms before it
were fucking pretenders. I love when I have to read
people's quotes and they make me curse. What is the
difference between a real rock bottom and a pretend one.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Well, the pretend one is one that you go back
and just keep doing the same behavior. So a lot
of people have back problems. They go to the chiropractor.
Chiropractor is just but the problem is they stand in
a certain way, or one legs longer than the other,
and so it just goes back to the same problem
again and the guy adjusts you. And this is the
whole financial model for chiropractors. Instead, how about get orthopedic shoes,

(50:39):
or really correct the problem, or go get surgery? What
have you? A lot of times with alcoholics or addicts,
And I've listened to Dak Shepperd talk about this before
that he has like thirty six entries in his Alcoholics
Anonymous book. There were all the times he thought he
hit rock bottom until he finally hit rock bottom. And
so for me, I kept going through these moments where

(51:02):
I felt like I wanted to die or I had
suicidal ideation. Then I feel okay again, I go back
to the same behavior, and I ended up in the
same place. I finally had to fix it at its foundation.
So if you're going through anything depression, addiction, just general
malaise and unhappiness, usually you have to go twenty steps

(51:24):
backwards to go fifty steps forward. And most people aren't
courageous enough to take that bargain. They're like, I already
feel like crap, and you want me to get worse.
What are you talking about. That's where I was for
a long time. And then when you have a moment
like I did in Los Angeles, I was like, if

(51:44):
I don't really correct it at its core, I'm gonna die.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
What led to the moment in LA.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
In successive order, my mom passed away, we closed all
of our restaurants. My partner and I had to borrow
basically million dollars just to keep our company afloat, because
we had like ten million dollars a year in rent alone.
We had a couple thousand employees that you know, paid
for everybody's insurance, made sure everybody was intact. We were

(52:13):
burning money at a rate that we were only going
to be able to be open for so long, and
then there would be like some government intervention and then
we would use all of that and then it would
start up again. Every day felt like I was going
to step on a landline. And then there were like
little moments where it seemed like everybody was also turning

(52:34):
their guns on the restaurant industry. Somebody wrote some terrible
blog post about us, and I just couldn't handle it anymore.
I just felt like my marriage was crumbling, and I
felt like everybody was turning their guns in the restaurant business,
and I didn't have my mom to call, and I
didn't know if we were going to stay in business
or not. I was having a nervous breakdown, and I

(52:56):
also didn't have my restaurants to go into that were
a joyous place. The restaurants felt like fear. And so
I was in Los Angeles. I'd had a bad meeting.
We were trying to open up a restaurant there. We
were in the middle of building a restaurant during the pandemic,
and we couldn't even open it, and we were bleeding money.
And I went and sat at the bar at the

(53:17):
hotel and had like fifteen drinks, and I woke up
in the morning and I was terribly hungover and terribly depressed,
and I just sat there and decided I was going
to kill myself. I was trying to figure out which
way I was going to do it.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
Sorry, you were in pain like that.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
That's awful. It's funny where the mind goes when things
like that happened. First thing I thought of was what's
the saddest song that I can put on that helps
make this progress go faster. I had already decided I
wanted to do it, and I wanted to feel as
bad as I possibly could. I played that song on
repeat for about two hours, and my saving grace was

(54:00):
I stood on a ledge and I lifted my hands
off of it to jump, and for the first time
in two hours, my phone rang and it stopped the
song Who called Nobody of Circumstance.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
You mentioned two quotes in the book that help you
heal that I really love the first. Can I share it?
Or do you want to share it? Sure, the magic
you're looking for is in the work you are avoiding.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
And the second is everyone is responsible, but no one
is to blame.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
How did those mantras help you move forward?

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Well? These both came later in life. One of my
low points, somebody looked at me and it was one
of those where you kind of get punched in the
face by somebody really giving you the truth, and they're like, Kevin,
you can keep going on these like silly hiking trips
and thinking this is healing you. But if you really
want to be well and you really want to be happy,

(54:50):
do the work. Asshole?

Speaker 1 (54:52):
Who was saying that to you?

Speaker 2 (54:53):
This was I went on a hiking trip and I
had had the.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Gait Way to therapy, the gateway to therapy, the ranch
at Live Oak.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
It's actually a really great place. It's amazing. You should go.
It actually did help me a lot. But I was
on the Mountain with a guy, and I was telling
him all that was going on, and he was telling
me why I should do ayahuasca and all this stuff,
and I was like, I don't know about that, and
he's like, well, have you got in therapy and was
asking me all these pointed questions, all of which I
was saying no to, And he was like, bro, the
magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding.

(55:24):
And sometimes when somebody gives you a whole lot of truth,
it pisses you off. That was one of those moments
where it stuck with me for weeks, and he was
absolutely right the other quote, I was never going to
get anywhere if I didn't forgive these three damaged people
and understand him a little bit. And so if you

(55:45):
scratch under the surface, Larry Bain was an only child
who's had a mom who ran her house with an
iron fist and was very cruel at times. So all
those years, when he saw me, he saw Woody. And
so when my father passed away at the very end,
I saw who he was and I had empathy for him.

(56:08):
It took me a really long time, and I was
with him when he passed and we had a moment together.
I never knew Larry Bam until the very end, and
I don't blame him anymore. He's definitely a part of
my story. He's definitely a part of why I became
who I became. But I can look back and look
at his patterns now and it wasn't his fault. It

(56:30):
was just the cards he got dealt, the cards we
got dealt. And then with Woody, I always thought that
Woody got away with something, and so I look at
all three of their stories now. They were all doing
the best they could and they didn't always show up
in the best way. But I haven't always showed him

(56:50):
in the best way either.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
What would eight year old Kevin think about your life today?

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Oh? Man, I think he'd be super proud of me.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
I always think kids sort of have these vision of
what their life will be like, and the differences of
how they play out are really interesting to me. Did
you think this was going to be the path?

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Well, first of all, going back to your eight year
old question, it depends on what video you showed eight
year old Kevin. You could show them the highlight reel
of all these years and he'd be like, wow, so amazing.
Or you could show them the low light reel and
he'd be like, what the heck happened? Man? He can
watch the whole reel now before it's just selected moments.
Pick which one you want to look at, the high

(57:29):
Kevin or the low Kevin. I like it that I'm
more of a coaster now. I'm a lot of sevens
and seven and a half and that's just fine.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
If there was a line from your memoir that outlived you,
what would you want it to be?

Speaker 2 (57:43):
Everyone is responsible, but no one is to blame is
a good one. I think we live in a victims
society a lot of times. I think that being self
critical is super important. I think most people think that
they're a good person, but I think the most people
aren't self critical. You really want to take a good

(58:04):
look at yourself and who you are and who you become.
And I think you got to poke holes in that
all the time. And I think all of that is
within that Everyone is responsible, but no one is to blame. Part. Yes,
you were shaped by your parents, and you were shaped
by your circumstances. But at a certain point, I'm going

(58:24):
to take control of my life. And this is an
infinite game and that means there's no winning and there's
no losing. But I'm going to get a little bit
better all the time. And that's where I am at
in my life right now, is like what can I
do every single year to get a little smarter, a
little better, a little bit more empathetic, be a better partner?

(58:47):
And so I feel pretty good about where the evolution's heading.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Okay, you ready for some rapid fire?

Speaker 2 (58:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (58:56):
How much do you tip for bad service?

Speaker 2 (58:58):
I never tip lower than twenty percent, even if it's
really bad, Like I'm usually like a thirty percenter, and
so if it's twenty percent, that probably means it was bad.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
I was a waitress, yes, and when people tipped cash,
I was so grateful. Now I always try and tip cash.
How much do you tip for grape service?

Speaker 2 (59:18):
Sometimes?

Speaker 1 (59:19):
Really do tip on the alcohol if you're drinking? It's
very kind. Okay, the best dish you've ever eaten?

Speaker 2 (59:25):
That is so hard? I don't know. Weirdly, nobody's ever
asked me that question in my entire life.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
How about a memorable one? Because best is hard.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
There was a dish that just caught me at the
right moment one time and had more umami, and it's
probably any dish or had my entire life. It was
warm nashiki rice, and then it was room temperature beef tartar,
and then cold hakkaido uni at the top in one shooter,

(59:56):
and it was freaking magnificent.

Speaker 1 (59:59):
A food you secretly don't like.

Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
I don't like corn ships. I hate corn ships. I
hate the smell of them. I really like Freedom's corn ships.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
The best food city in America, Okay, I want to
qualify this because food to me is not just food.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
Food to me is a combination of hospitality, and it's
a combination of atmosphere and design, and it's a combination
of actual food. I'm super biased, but the alchemy of
those three things. I don't think anybody does it better
than Chicago. And I am in love with the food

(01:00:37):
in so many cities, and I think it variates between
Chicago and New York. But right now the second, I'll
give it to Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
I love that you said that because I think about
this a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:00:47):
Yes, and New York has an array of options Chicago
doesn't have. Yes, Like, you can have incredible Jamaican food
in New York, incredible Indian food like and there's a
bunch of spots you could go to, but the service
isn't the same as in Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
Everybody is kind mostly.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Indeed, yeah, mostly, It's like I do think that Chicago
is a no bullshit town, and so I think when
people are giving great service is because they really want
you to have a good meal. And I think people
feel that's scharity. They digest it, it becomes part of
the meal.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Something everybody should try once writing their own life story,
whether they publish it or not, sit down, strip all
the coats of varnish off of it and write your
life story.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
You will learn a ton about yourself in your place
in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Has it freed you? A book that changed your life?
Something you think everybody should read?

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
The Tender Bar by J. R. Moringer. I think he's
a great writer. It's a great coming of age story.
It's a great story about a relationship between the people
who raise you and your actual father and what's more
important having somebody who loves you there and sometimes that's
a team of people.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
Grab the question of reading card game, please and pick
whichever card calls out to you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
What compliment do you hear the most? Which means the
most to you, and which one makes you the most uncomfortable.
I get a lot of compliments about speaking. I speak
a lot to groups or at small tables. Just yeah,
the way that I talk to people. I think that
one means a lot to me. My whole purpose is
to make people either feel more comfortable, or feel motivated,

(01:02:33):
or feel better about themselves. And if all those things
happen and I'm able to do that just with words,
that makes me really happy. Feels the saying stuff about
my hair my whole life. I shaved it off recently.
I had like long hair my whole life. I think
that probably makes me uncomfortable. My business partner, when we
won the James Beard Award, actually said the first thing
I'd like to thank is Kevin's hair. It's opened up

(01:02:54):
so many doors for us.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Kevin, thank you. I'm just going to say, it's not
just on behalf of me. I think think you've opened
so many doors in this book for healing for people
with all sorts of pain. So thank you for your
deep honesty.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
You pulled a real Barbara Walters on me and made
me cry gohole time here today. That doesn't happen very often,
But yeah, I'm glad we have some real talk. You know.
The one thing in life that I'm completely allergic to
a small talk, really small talk for a living. I
ran a front door for so many years of my life,
and that distance from the front doors to the table
is almost always about small talk. You can only get

(01:03:32):
into so much during those times. So everything outside of
the restaurants, I never want a small talk. I want
to get right into it. Let's do it, religion, sex, relationships,
all the time of subjects, let's talk stuff, all the stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
Did you have any go tos for small talk? Because
the weather is the worst one.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
I try to stay away from the weather. I always
thought if you ask people a question with a question
mark not a period, you get a real answer.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
So the one I would always do is I would
just be like, how's your life right now? And if
you really ask, like you cared about it, sometimes be
able to take it like, you know what, it's pretty great,
And I'd be like, well, tell me what's so great
about it? So then the follow up question, they're like,
you know what, it's pretty great because my son just
went away to college. He's really happy about his choice.

(01:04:22):
I'm like, that's fantastic. Let's celebrate that tonight. So it
would lead to a dialogue piece to where if they're
in a bad mood and something just happened, let's try
to make it better. And if they said something great,
let's figure out how to celebrate that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
That's a good tip. Okay, you know what time it is.
Today's a good day to have a good day. I'll
see you next week. The band