Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
No, here we go. | ||
Good? | ||
unidentified
|
Good? | |
Here we go. | ||
Three, two, live? | ||
Boom. | ||
We're live. | ||
Gentlemen. | ||
David. | ||
Fred. | ||
Hey. | ||
Good to be here. | ||
Good to see you guys. | ||
What's happening? | ||
Not much. | ||
We're in sunny California. | ||
Yeah, it's too close to the sun. | ||
A little bit. | ||
Been barbecued over the last week and a half. | ||
I've been hiding in a hotel for six days. | ||
How proper that we're here to talk about surviving the apocalypse. | ||
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. | ||
Your book is Joe Beef Surviving the Apocalypse. | ||
A cookbook for Surviving the Apocalypse? | ||
What's the purpose of the title? | ||
Just a goof? | ||
We haven't written a book in years. | ||
I don't think we really wanted to write a second book. | ||
When we started getting a bit of pressure to write a second one, we kind of... | ||
You know, laid down the gauntlet to the editors and said, we're going to write what we want. | ||
Are you in or are you out? | ||
And they said, well, you know, show us a little bit of the framework of what this is going to be. | ||
I said, I want to talk, you know, cooking doesn't define me or Fred. | ||
It's not all that we do. | ||
Like, you know, you see some people, they seem to, like, eat, live, and breathe cooking. | ||
I said, no, I'm into the outdoors. | ||
I'm into mushroom picking. | ||
I'm into fermentation of berries. | ||
I'm into canoeing. | ||
I know all about canoes. | ||
I love swimming in lakes. | ||
I want to talk about multiple subjects. | ||
I want to talk about the native Mohawks of Quebec. | ||
So I said, let us write a book. | ||
About the multiple subjects of which we're into, you know? | ||
Hey Joe, if we're not cooking, we're building first aid kits and like survival kits for real. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, David goes to like LL Bean. | ||
He has a lifetime membership there. | ||
I have an off-grid cabin up north, like north of Montreal, about an hour and a half. | ||
You can only get there by boat. | ||
It's eight kilometers from the landing. | ||
You know, 2,000 watts of solar power. | ||
Completely off-grid. | ||
You can barely walk in because of the jagged cliffs all around it. | ||
Behind me is an old-growth forest that's protected federally. | ||
And I have a suture kit and saline in my car. | ||
Always? | ||
Oh, dude, his car's outfitted. | ||
Like, he's got shovels on the roof and propane tanks on the roof. | ||
Two years ago, I drove to Alaska, down south, Arizona, back home. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
20,000 miles. | ||
I grew up in Boston, and I did stand-up in Montreal for the first time, I think, in like 1991 or something like that. | ||
And I remember thinking Boston was cold until I went to Montreal, and I went, oh, this is a different thing. | ||
We had it last year, too. | ||
We had a polar vortex last year come roaring through. | ||
I think all the pipes blew in all the restaurants. | ||
I'm sure. | ||
Like, January 2nd, you know? | ||
But what I was going to say is, do you think that living in such an extreme environment, a beautiful city, amazing city, but it's an incredibly harsh environment in the winter, do you think that makes you more cognizant about the need for survival? | ||
It's always in the back of my head. | ||
unidentified
|
It's always. | |
I have three daughters. | ||
It's always in the back of my head. | ||
They say, this is incredibly cold. | ||
If the power goes out for 48 hours, I have to start a plan B. | ||
Where am I bringing my babies? | ||
What are we going to eat? | ||
Where are we going? | ||
In our city, over the last couple of years, I've been talking about a complete ban of fireplaces and wood-burning stoves inside of homes, condominiums, and houses. | ||
The laws governing wood-burning in the city of Montreal are stricter than the ones in California. | ||
And we die, man. | ||
If it's cold, we die. | ||
I go, this is irresponsible, you know, by the government to do this. | ||
I said, okay, make sure we don't use them, but let's all have them just in case. | ||
Same goes for... | ||
Because if the grid goes down... | ||
What are they worried about it for? | ||
Are they worried about the... | ||
Particle emission. | ||
Particulates? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's correct. | ||
Man, but it smells good. | ||
Like a nice wood-burning stove smells amazing. | ||
Who doesn't like bagels? | ||
Yeah, this affects everybody. | ||
This affects restaurants and grilling food. | ||
This affects barbecue. | ||
This affects traditional bagel stores. | ||
Traditional bagel stores cooked with wood? | ||
Is that why you said that? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course. | |
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
You go into my land, St. Vieter bagel, Fairmount bagel, all the other ones, you smell it. | ||
It's a massive part of our culture as well. | ||
You have to understand that food-wise, the province of Quebec, the city of Quebec City and Montreal, This is the first place that's populated in North America. | ||
The Europeans, to get to anywhere in North America, came through Quebec first, New York afterwards. | ||
The food culture in Quebec is over 400 years old. | ||
You can't say that about... | ||
Over 1,000 years old. | ||
Yeah, absolutely. | ||
And wood is detrimental to that. | ||
If it wasn't for burning wood... | ||
I'm not saying we should do it for historical purpose, but man, if we run out of gas, there's still wood. | ||
unidentified
|
For safety's sake. | |
And then they're going to come and give you a ticket, you know, two grand, because you're having a fire? | ||
A few years ago, like about a decade ago, we had this crazy ice storm in Quebec. | ||
You know, the perfect storm of rain and then cold and then rain and then cold. | ||
All the power lines went out. | ||
All the pylons crashed. | ||
Yeah, everything got thick with ice, right? | ||
Yeah, for two weeks. | ||
Yeah, two weeks. | ||
There's a baby boom right after that because people stayed home, no television and no heat and procreated. | ||
Then there was a true baby boom nine months later. | ||
There was a ton of new kids born. | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
But you know the deep freeze, it also like cleans the city in the winter. | ||
So from your perspective, if the shit hits the fan, they come and see us. | ||
Because it's a pretty good city to survive anything, you know? | ||
It's a pretty neat place because the winter just like sanitizes everything. | ||
You start again every year, you know? | ||
Yeah, as opposed to LA where you never really get that. | ||
You can't get the full clean down. | ||
Never. | ||
It's the long haul. | ||
Yeah, you do like a whore's bath. | ||
You know, you just get it like you're in a restroom somewhere with paper towels that you wet down and sort of get your underarms or whatever. | ||
That's what LA is. | ||
The wet towelettes. | ||
Yes, yes. | ||
So you just wanted to write a book that kind of covers all of your interests, not just with food, but... | ||
One of the things that I really enjoyed about, there was an episode that you guys did of Anthony Bourdain's show where you were ice fishing and you had one of those ice fishing huts and you guys cooked. | ||
Tony told you it's notorious in the show that they never caught fish and whenever he had a gun he never hit anything. | ||
So we knew that and we knew that there was not a pike and there was not a walleye that was going to bite. | ||
So we're like, okay, option A, we sit there and we like take some fake fish and we fry it up in cornflakes and shortening in a hollow cabin. | ||
Or we just went like Joe Beef crazy and we brought all the old cookbooks we had, all the spirits, like Cuban cigars, all the copperware, all the stuff. | ||
And we made the menu from an old Leonet restaurant, Paul Bucuz, that he did a show at after. | ||
And he knew nothing about that day. | ||
And we just went from fishing after he asked us about like strippers in Quebec and like just a few funny banter. | ||
And we just went in. | ||
It was like magical. | ||
It was seriously a tenth of the size of this room here. | ||
Yeah, it was a tiny, tiny little shack. | ||
And he tapped out that day. | ||
Yeah? | ||
Yeah, he was having a good time. | ||
And we brought some fine wines and fine spirits and some really rare oddities, some old chartreuse and stuff like that that Fred had lying around. | ||
And Tony was funny. | ||
There you guys are. | ||
It's up on the screen right there. | ||
He let it go a bit. | ||
He calmed down and enjoyed us and let us do our thing. | ||
I'm a bit fatter, eh? | ||
Oh, God. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That was in the wine drinking days too, right? | ||
Yeah, correct. | ||
Look at that. | ||
unidentified
|
God, that looks good. | |
Is that foie gras and some sort of mashed potatoes or something? | ||
Yeah, that's a wild rabbit. | ||
It's a French recipe. | ||
It's called hair a la royale, where you cook the hair for a long time. | ||
And hair? | ||
And you serve it with truffles and you keep the blood. | ||
This hair is snared, so it's still full of blood. | ||
And you keep the blood and at the end, you thicken the sauce with the blood. | ||
It's very good. | ||
And I bet you, you know, it's funny. | ||
I bet you it fits all the principles of nutrition now, you know? | ||
It's like blood and all the organ meats and all that. | ||
Same with cheese. | ||
Look, this is like pure probiotics right there. | ||
Isn't that interesting, right? | ||
That no one thought of that until recently, that that was what it was. | ||
People just thought of it as cheese. | ||
And now people think of it as there's live cultures on it and organ meat is much healthier for you. | ||
And people are so much more aware of that. | ||
And look at the cheese thing, too. | ||
It's like Now, a lot of the probiotic makers are doing lipo deliveries. | ||
They coat it in fat so it resists the stomach acid, right? | ||
But that's fat. | ||
Probiotic from cheese is covered in fat. | ||
You eat it after your dinner, it lives through you. | ||
In a perfect world, it comes from right around your house, right? | ||
So you eat a cheese and the probiotics are the same one that you're going to encounter later, so you kind of get immunized in a way. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's the benefit. | ||
That's what true local is. | ||
Right, right, yeah. | ||
There's a benefit to eating cheese after a meal? | ||
Yeah, sure. | ||
When it's a very pungent, advanced, alive, raw cheese, it'll be seen ultimately as a non-alcoholic digestif. | ||
What is a digestif? | ||
To help stimulate digestion. | ||
Ah, no kidding. | ||
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
So it's almost like an enzyme. | ||
Yeah, like a probiotic. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
But mostly, now they're figuring this out, that The problem of the low-fat diet and the, you know, like brown rice and chicken breast, you know, the bodybuilder diet, nothing triggers your fullness. | ||
Because they realize that fat actually makes you full quite fast, right? | ||
So if you eat a bit of cheese, you're done. | ||
You tap out after. | ||
You don't eat like a full plate of cheese or layer it on a hamburger, but just a little bit of cheese after just cuts you off and then you have spirits and cigars are not that healthy, but... | ||
Yeah, I've been talking about that with a lot of nutrition experts where they say that your body, when it eats a lot of carbohydrates, you can consume carbohydrates far past what you actually need, whereas if you're just eating a lot of fat and protein, your body tends to regulate itself much better. | ||
Satiate, yeah. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Now, you guys, how long have you been in Montreal? | ||
And I have to tell you, and I've said it before... | ||
If I had to say my all-time favorite restaurant, I think Joe Beef's my all-time favorite restaurant. | ||
I don't like to say my all-time number, because there's a lot of great restaurants in this world, but damn, if I had to choose one, I think I might choose you guys. | ||
No, you're very kind, but we have to take you out to other places to change your mind. | ||
No, I don't think you're gonna, man. | ||
You guys are the first. | ||
If you're a horse lover, turn your head. | ||
Plug your ears. | ||
You guys are the first people that ever served me horse. | ||
And I was like, what? | ||
You brought over a horse tenderloin. | ||
And I was like, what the fuck? | ||
You guys are eating horse up here? | ||
And horse tartare. | ||
But it's a stigma. | ||
It's a cow, an elk, a bison, a deer, a horse. | ||
It's a four-legged animal. | ||
And what if I put... | ||
If I put a bison tenderloin and serve you a beef tenderloin and a cow tenderloin and a deer tenderloin, at the end of the day, it just has a couple of degrees of separation from the other. | ||
It's all flesh, really. | ||
And it's very subjective that we base our nutritional choices on how pretty or how cute an animal is. | ||
You know, it doesn't make sense, you know. | ||
And we're lucky now we're able to choose what we eat. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
You know, like it wasn't like that 100 years ago. | ||
You know, the purpose of the food guide until like 40 years ago was to make sure you had enough calories. | ||
Now we're in an age of restriction. | ||
So we say like, I don't want horse, I prefer deer or I prefer veal or I had chicken yesterday, can't have twice in a row. | ||
Like all this is a bit of fluff what we do in a way because we're so fortunate to have enough food to decide. | ||
My friend Remy Warren was on a backpacking horseback elk hunt, and one of the horses fell down and broke its leg. | ||
And they had to make a decision. | ||
They were deep in the backcountry, and they had to shoot it. | ||
And it just wasn't going to get out of there. | ||
And after they shot it, he decided that really... | ||
This animal's going to go to waste. | ||
So they took the back straps off, and they cooked it and ate it. | ||
But he said it was a really weird moment where, like, this is an animal that was like everybody's petting it, and you're riding it, and it was a working animal, but it was an animal that you loved. | ||
And then all of a sudden it's down, and you have to kill it, and he's like, well, it's going to go to waste. | ||
He said it just felt wrong to let it go to waste, so they cut the back straps off of it. | ||
You know, the reason I think we don't eat horse culturally is really based ultimately on the Battle of Wolfe between Montcalm on the plains of Quebec City. | ||
You know, that was a decisive battle in North American history, whereas if the French had won that battle, everybody in North America ultimately would be speaking French. | ||
You know, they didn't win that battle. | ||
So British rule imposed. | ||
So in England, you didn't eat horse by royal decree. | ||
But the French ate horse. | ||
The Belgians eat horse. | ||
The Germans eat horse. | ||
You see? | ||
Oh, so that's what it is. | ||
Yeah, it's very old history. | ||
You know, it was mining... | ||
It's just verboten an anglophone world to eat horse. | ||
And all the mining countries, half my family is from Belgium, and it's traditional there because they bring the horse in the mine. | ||
The horse, you know, it's sad for a horse to live in the mine in the dark, but they wouldn't bring it out when he was old, you know? | ||
They would just eat the horse. | ||
Most cultures, Turkish eat horse, you know? | ||
Well, it was a necessity. | ||
I mean, you couldn't pick and choose back when all this was instituted. | ||
We're very limited in the proteins that we eat, especially in North America. | ||
Quebec less so. | ||
You know, Quebec is a very open-minded dining public, very advanced dining public, very old dining public, and of course Latin, French dining public. | ||
The amount of proteins that are served in a Montreal restaurant are numerous compared to, let's say, even when I go to Manhattan. | ||
If me and you and Fred are in Manhattan tomorrow night, say, let's go have rabbit with mustard sauce, it's going to be a tough sell. | ||
We're going to really struggle to find rabbit mustard sauce. | ||
We're going to struggle even to find, you know, let's go have a couple slices of liver tonight with onions. | ||
It's going to be very difficult. | ||
Or sweetbreads, really. | ||
Lamb neck, you know, lamb liver. | ||
Deer is a hard, tall order, you know. | ||
Ultimately, Manhattan or America eats a limited scope of proteins, beef, chicken, so forth. | ||
Whereas, you know, French culture, Quebec... | ||
You know, we have all the proteins. | ||
I have young dining clientele that have no problem eating kidneys medium rare, liver, lamb liver, deer neck, deer heart tartare. | ||
It's not a thing. | ||
Like, it's not what other restaurant people are eating. | ||
It's just part of the registry, you know. | ||
Little girls, like your daughters, raised eating, you know, the food that their dad hunts and the food that their parents buy. | ||
Some people of lesser means eat pork liver and are raised on it. | ||
So when they see liver on the restaurant, cute little, you know, 19-year-old girls that are about to go out to the club later will have a slice of liver. | ||
You won't see that in New York City. | ||
Are you allowed to sell venison here that you hunt? | ||
No, not that you hunt. | ||
You have to buy farm-raised stuff, and oddly enough, most of it's from New Zealand. | ||
Most of the stuff that we're getting here in the United States is from New Zealand, and if they call it venison, it's most likely some sort of stag, and the elk that we get, if we buy elk at a restaurant, it's all from New Zealand. | ||
So you can't harvest that. | ||
When you do a kill, you can put it in your freezer? | ||
Yes. | ||
Okay, perfect. | ||
Yeah, well, I have two freezers back here. | ||
All of the elk that I get, I get from myself, and I give it to a lot of my friends, and I make sausages for my friends. | ||
But that's the only way they're going to get it, unless they go out and get it themselves. | ||
It's not a place in Los Angeles where you can go buy elk meat. | ||
In Newfoundland, they're... | ||
They're allowed to... | ||
Hunters are allowed to sell moose back to the restaurants. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, moose were introduced onto the island of Newfoundland from Maine. | ||
And there was no natural predators on Newfoundland. | ||
And it's a perfect environment for them, so they just propagated. | ||
And that's why they drive slow there, man. | ||
When we shot with Tony, they drove slow. | ||
Like, we drove for hours, like, full days to go, like... | ||
300 miles because you can't drive fast because of the mooses. | ||
So you can have a restaurant, like in the hotel we stayed, the restaurant had a permit to buy moose. | ||
So they would make like moose curry and moose sausages. | ||
Like a days in kind of vibe. | ||
Not a great restaurant, like a hotel restaurant serving wild moose burgers. | ||
But it's pretty cool that they do that. | ||
That is cool. | ||
But if they did that everywhere else, then we're just reinventing the wheel, you know? | ||
We're going back to market hunting, which is what almost wiped out almost all of the animals in this country anyway. | ||
Some chefs in Quebec would like to bring that back, and I said, listen, we can barely manage our roads, our infrastructure, we can barely manage our... | ||
And that's the risk of foraging, too. | ||
Like, eventually, you know, like, people go for mushrooms. | ||
It's like, you heard about the fights between the mushroom pickers in Oregon and stuff like that? | ||
No. | ||
unidentified
|
Ah, fuck. | |
Like, the people who harvest clams, too, eh? | ||
Like, between the communities, there's huge fights for territories, and they'd hijack, like, trucks of abalone at night. | ||
Yeah, geoduck, the giant king clam? | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
Yeah, I've heard stories of a guy in his Econoline van with 500 pounds of geoduck going to the Victoria airport to send them to Japan, get hijacked on the highway at night, and they steal the clams because they're worth a fortune in Japan. | ||
And same for mushroom patches. | ||
Matsutake mushrooms as well, another famous white, it's called a pine mushroom, and in Japan, a Matsutake mushroom. | ||
The closer the shape of the mushroom to a penis, the more expensive it is, you know? | ||
So they'd actually hijack people on their way to the patch and undress them and make them turn around so they can never find a place again. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, it's competitive. | ||
Morel mushrooms, you look at a morel mushroom, it's, you know, how much, Fred? | ||
Very expensive. | ||
44 bucks a kilo in Montreal. | ||
Dave, can you pull this a little closer to your face? | ||
Absolutely. | ||
Just try to keep it about a fist from your face. | ||
Yeah, the morel mushrooms, I buy them online. | ||
They're very expensive. | ||
I buy them dried, but they're so delicious. | ||
I mean, people who don't like mushrooms, like one of my daughters does not like mushrooms, but she loves morel. | ||
It's my favorite. | ||
It's the number one mushroom. | ||
unidentified
|
They're so good. | |
Good, with salt, with garlic salt and sauteed in butter. | ||
They're sensational. | ||
Great mushroom. | ||
It's a strange flavor. | ||
One of our favorite, there's a great recipe for that in the book, is like you poach chicken legs, right, until they're ready. | ||
And then in the broth, very little broth, you know, you strain the broth, you add cream and saute morel mushrooms in there, and a little bit of sherry wine, any of oxidized wine, and you just add the legs in there and you let that simmer. | ||
Man, that's good. | ||
We have a picture in the book of some morel mushrooms of the size of these water bottles. | ||
We've had morel mushrooms that are about the size of my hand. | ||
You can stuff like half a chicken leg inside of them and serve one stuffed morel mushroom in broth for one customer. | ||
It's brilliant. | ||
They're a strange mushroom, right? | ||
Where they pop up after burns. | ||
Yeah, and they're also a spring mushroom, which is weird because most of the other mushrooms are later on fall damp, right? | ||
And morel is like literally quite quick after the snow. | ||
That's the first mushroom that appears in the forest. | ||
So it's very different than all the others. | ||
Are they commercially cultivated? | ||
They could be, but I've never seen it in my career. | ||
I tried growing mushrooms. | ||
We tried everything at the restaurant. | ||
I tried growing mushrooms, and you get everything but the mushroom you inoculate. | ||
It's very difficult to keep the proper conditions and stuff. | ||
That's why I'm not against the fact that they're expensive. | ||
It's a good way to regulate a market price. | ||
It's like, yeah, bluefin tuna is going extinct, but just make it three times the price. | ||
It's going to regulate the market, you know? | ||
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
I wish there was a way to reintroduce bluefin to the wild. | ||
It just seems like the appetite that people have for those things is just untenable. | ||
If you look at any given night in a city like Manhattan, how much red tuna is sold on the island of Manhattan any given night of the year, it's scary. | ||
Yeah, I almost feel like it's like killing the last giraffe in a herd, you know? | ||
Like fishing a giant tuna like that. | ||
It's... | ||
And again, you know, they're big, they're feisty, they're majestic, so that shouldn't guide my choice, my decision to protect them, but that's heartbreaking. | ||
Well, the problem is there's complete lack of regulation in the open waters when these guys have these enormous ships filled with huge nets and they just drag them across the ocean floor and capture everything. | ||
Or bycatch. | ||
That's the biggest joke. | ||
What is that? | ||
They call it bycatch. | ||
So you didn't set off to fish for tuna, but that's with kind of bit, you know? | ||
Like, yeah, come on. | ||
You know, you go fishing for what? | ||
To catch a bluefin tuna in the first place, you know? | ||
Place? | ||
Oh, so they're pretending they're not fishing for it. | ||
Is that what you're saying? | ||
Allegedly. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, you know that whole thing with Japanese whalers. | ||
They found a way to work around it, and the way to work around it is a science research boat. | ||
So they... | ||
Science research where we're going to do research on these whales that we kill and then they chop them up and sell them. | ||
Sea Shepherd has been tracking that down and they hover over them, take photographs of it and report them. | ||
It's ugly business. | ||
Wild protein is ugly business. | ||
We've worked hard at the restaurant to ultimately avoid it, to be more sustainable seafood focused. | ||
The oyster is a great thing to eat. | ||
We should eat more oysters. | ||
We should eat more clams. | ||
Florida, oddly, is an amazing sustainable seafood scene. | ||
Just the work that they do with the Florida stone crab, right? | ||
You know that every year they just harvest the left arm? | ||
And they put the crab back. | ||
And the next year, it's the right arm. | ||
And they put the crab back. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, it's a brilliant fishing industry. | ||
They don't kill the animal. | ||
The claw grows back. | ||
Right. | ||
unidentified
|
And they all fit nicely on the plate, all side by side. | |
I don't like that you're telling me something good about Florida. | ||
They have a great shrimping scene. | ||
They're actually leaders in sustainable seafood. | ||
Well, the seafood and fishing is such a gigantic part of their economy. | ||
It makes sense that they would do that. | ||
That's a smart thing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, grouper fishing down there is a giant, giant part of their industry. | ||
There's a good book that was published a few years ago, The Big Oyster, I think, Mark Kolanski. | ||
He wrote a book about cod. | ||
The History of the Oyster. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The New York and the History of the Oyster. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
And it's super interesting because his thing was like... | ||
You know, we try to portray our history as, like, glorious, and we herded bisons before for protein, and that's how we started, like, modern farming. | ||
But, in fact, we probably farmed oysters and snails and clams, because they don't move, and they're the most prolific and the most abundant source of protein. | ||
In that book, Kurlansky brings up a premise, and I'm loosely... | ||
I'm interpreting it now because I read this book a few years ago, but think of this for a second, right? | ||
The island of Manhattan is a perfect—all the rivers around it, all the water systems around it—is actually one of the greater oyster situations on the Atlantic East Coast, right? | ||
The reason that the population exploded in Manhattan in the early days was that any person could literally get off a boat, walk onto the island of Manhattan, homeless, broke, and sleep in an alley and walk down to the river. | ||
And pick five oysters. | ||
A small oyster is five grams of protein, right? | ||
A medium oyster's got 10 grams of protein. | ||
So a completely destitute person could just eat six oysters a day, you know, three oysters, and live again another day to find a job. | ||
So the population ultimately, you know, New York City and its population was based on this huge supply of oysters. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
That's crazy. | |
It was a free, available source of protein that will make you live another 24 hours. | ||
So if it takes you three days to find a job, four days to find a job, 20 days to find a job, you're not going to die because there's oysters. | ||
Look at this. | ||
And they found oysters. | ||
What is this from? | ||
Harlem River. | ||
Oh, this is incredible. | ||
There's actual islands that they thought were geological formations that are made of oyster shells. | ||
Layers and layers of oyster shells. | ||
The article that Jamie put up is from Thrillist. | ||
Is that what it's from? | ||
Pull up to the top so I can tell people what the name is. | ||
Why oysters are ridiculously important to the history of New York City. | ||
And it's just showing all these ancient photos of mounds of oyster shells. | ||
There's an amazing program today. | ||
You know some of the areas that... | ||
They take these giant cages. | ||
One oyster, if I'm correct, one oyster filters four metric tons of water per day. | ||
From what I understand, I might be wrong with my math. | ||
So take this for instance, you know, a cage, a caged box of thousands of oysters. | ||
There it is. | ||
There's the math. | ||
A single oyster can filter about 30 to 50 gallons of water every day. | ||
A little off. | ||
And in case you haven't noticed, New York's waterways aren't exactly the cleanest. | ||
The folks behind the Billion Oyster Project are trying to change that by recycling shells from the partnering restaurants and getting them back in the water to build oyster reefs. | ||
The goal is to add a billion oysters to the water by 2035. So far they've restored 1.1 acre. | ||
1.5 acres of reefs. | ||
Don't say 1.05. | ||
Bitch, you got an acre. | ||
You just add in those extra two numbers. | ||
1.05 acres of reefs and count 11.5 million newly grown oysters. | ||
But the oyster will clarify the water. | ||
It'll make a murky river clear again. | ||
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Wow. | |
But does that affect the taste of the oyster? | ||
They don't eat those oysters. | ||
I think those are pulled back into landfill after or mulched into gardens. | ||
Or for the shells again to reap it for more reefs. | ||
But the oyster is interesting. | ||
It doesn't move, right? | ||
It opens its shells to feed. | ||
This is showing how they do it. | ||
This is incredible. | ||
And the oyster, you know that the oyster has a... | ||
It will change gender according to the density of the population. | ||
So it will go from male to female in order to balance the population. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
We're watching a video where the... | ||
What is it? | ||
The oyster recovery... | ||
What does it say? | ||
It was the time lapse of it. | ||
Oh, sorry. | ||
So it's a time lapse, but it said, what does it say it was from? | ||
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Oyster filtration. | |
Right, but there was a watermark on the video there in the corner. | ||
It was showing. | ||
Oyster recovery partnership. | ||
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Oyster recovery partnership. | |
Yeah, so the watermark is, so what they do is they have this horrible green water. | ||
They chuck these oysters in and it turns it completely clear. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
I did not know that. | ||
I did know that they used to eat lobsters and they thought of lobsters as poor people food because you just get them out of the river. | ||
The rich kids eat bologna. | ||
Isn't that crazy? | ||
In New Brunswick, they used to harvest the lobsters to feed to the prisoners and keep the shells as fertilizer. | ||
Jefferson was one of the first presidents to bring the lobster into the White House because it was seen as a servant's food. | ||
When did it switch? | ||
Jefferson. | ||
So when he started doing that, that's when people realized it was so delicious? | ||
No, that's what the lobster spaghetti at Joe Beef... | ||
We changed the whole thing. | ||
The lobster spaghetti at Joe Beef is insane. | ||
That lobster spaghetti, that's off the charts. | ||
You know, also the child labor laws where... | ||
And stored primarily because of the kids that used to work in oyster shucking plants. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
We had one of our best friends, if not our best friend, passed away like six months ago, John Bill. | ||
He was a great shucker. | ||
He helped us at the bar, but he was like deep into sustainability and history of oysters and everything. | ||
And he was like the source for oysters for everything. | ||
He wrote a beautiful book. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We'll send you a copy. | ||
It's an incredible book. | ||
They're a good food for vegans to consider too because they're more primitive than most plants. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Most mollusks. | ||
John used to call them ocean cupcakes. | ||
Well, they're delicious. | ||
It's a great source of protein, but it's also, they don't have any nerve endings. | ||
They're not feeling anything. | ||
It's a sea vegetable. | ||
Yeah, it basically is. | ||
We have an issue, or some people, not myself, but some people have an issue with things that are capable of moving. | ||
For whatever reason, we just decide that don't eat that. | ||
But if you want to talk about something sustainable, like mollusks and seafood, I mean, they can be commercially farmed. | ||
They actually do have a positive impact, as you're describing, on the environment. | ||
Incredible source of protein as well. | ||
Yeah, and really a complete source of protein, not like a very bioavailable source, unlike a lot of vegetable proteins. | ||
So maybe we should do a protein powder out of dried oysters. | ||
Just eastern oysters? | ||
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Clam protein? | |
Yeah. | ||
No, totally. | ||
How would you get so ripped? | ||
Clam protein, bro. | ||
I mean, a lot of people are eating cricket protein. | ||
Have you guys ever serve any insect dishes? | ||
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No, but I'm not opposed to it. | |
Not knowingly. | ||
I got a letter last week that someone found... | ||
A bug in their salad. | ||
You know, sometimes the people are a bit... | ||
They want the cake and they want to eat it too because people want organic. | ||
And we support that. | ||
We love that. | ||
Occasionally get an ant in there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Organic is no pesticide. | ||
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Right. | |
That's okay. | ||
Bugs aren't bad. | ||
The idea of bugs being... | ||
Roaches are bad. | ||
Most other bugs are not that big of a deal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If we're serving 100 people a day, that arguably being 40 salads, it's some kind of crazy work to really look at both sides of each leaf. | ||
We try our best. | ||
Right. | ||
One will get past us every year. | ||
I think you're better off. | ||
The people that are freaking out about bugs, you don't want them coming in there. | ||
Just give them their money back and get the fuck out of here. | ||
Yeah, I agree with that. | ||
That's my policy. | ||
But when I was in Mexico, we checked into this resort and they had a bowl of fried crickets. | ||
In the hotel. | ||
They had some sort of flavor to them. | ||
They added some flavor to them. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Rene Redzepi in Noma, arguably one of the world's best restaurants, is obsessed with serving ants. | ||
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Really? | |
Loves them. | ||
Lemony fresh. | ||
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I don't know. | |
I think they're crunchy. | ||
They're delicious. | ||
He thinks they're fine. | ||
Of course, and he's doing this wonderful Nordic cuisine. | ||
And there's ants. | ||
And when they forage vegetables and they forage mushrooms, there's also ants. | ||
So why not forage those too? | ||
And it's a homework they do for the rest of us. | ||
They're doing the right thing. | ||
People pay a lot of money, fly there to go eat there. | ||
You know, he's doing some good legwork on how to prepare them, how to raise them, how to, you know, I'm not saying his food is based on that, but I'm happy that somebody did that part of the research. | ||
And he'll bring the point up and they'll, you know, ultimately by osmosis, the other younger chefs. | ||
We'll try to do that. | ||
And they'll normalize it a little bit more. | ||
So, you know, expect ants at Nordic restaurants. | ||
Interesting. | ||
So this is the new trend. | ||
Get ahead of it, folks. | ||
You heard them, Los Angeles. | ||
I know you trendy fucks are out there thinking about what's coming. | ||
Crickets are a weird one. | ||
Crickets seem to be universally accepted, like cricket protein. | ||
You see a lot of cricket protein bars. | ||
You don't see too many other insects being commercially harvested. | ||
David and I were in New York for Anthony's memory thing, memorial thing, and we walked in the Bowery, and middle of the afternoon, Hudson. | ||
Oh, this is a good one. | ||
And there's a little store. | ||
No refrigeration and there's buckets of clams and you know like mesh bags like you put onions in this big mesh bag in a bin and it's full of giant bullfrogs. | ||
Like looking up at us. | ||
Like a hundred little bullfrogs. | ||
But like lined up in a box like oranges in a box. | ||
Like one, two, three, four, five. | ||
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And they're alive. | |
And their little eyes just looking up like this. | ||
And I was like sure we have frogs in the book but that was... | ||
So hang on. | ||
Fred and I have been cooking for years. | ||
You know 25 years arguably if not more. | ||
I've processed every animal in French cooking. | ||
So, of course, we just look at the frogs. | ||
We don't say anything to each other. | ||
We keep on walking. | ||
And I go, hang on a sec, Fred. | ||
Walk me through this. | ||
He goes, how exactly does this work? | ||
I know how to do a rabbit. | ||
I know how to do a hare. | ||
I know how to do a duck. | ||
I know how to do any fish, any seafood. | ||
Lobster, no problem. | ||
So you get a case of frog in the kitchen. | ||
What's your first move? | ||
Right now. | ||
What's our first move? | ||
So we take the live frog. | ||
Do I put it on the cutting board? | ||
Do I hack its legs off? | ||
And what do I do with the 60% remaining of the frog? | ||
That's what I'm worried about. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Is it ground? | ||
Does it end up in dumplings? | ||
Where is that other part of the frog going? | ||
Is it soup? | ||
Is it broth? | ||
You know, that's an amphibian. | ||
Right. | ||
It was fascinating. | ||
Did you experiment? | ||
No. | ||
No, no, no. | ||
I'm mortified. | ||
And after that, we went to Tony's Memorial. | ||
It was in a Chinese restaurant. | ||
And I was just like, I couldn't eat. | ||
Because by default, everything had like frog in it, in my head. | ||
So you were freaking out just because they were alive, staring up at you? | ||
No, because I know that the legs are delicious. | ||
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Right. | |
I know that, you know, if I chop the legs off and I peel the skin and I dredge them in flour and I fry them and I serve them with garlic cream, that they're delicious. | ||
They're as delicious as chicken wings. | ||
What I'm worried about is the frog is so big and... | ||
The discarded part of the frog is the size of a softball. | ||
It's like eating the stem of the apple and leaving the apple. | ||
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In cooking, we don't throw stuff out. | |
I want to know what happens to that part in Chinese cookery or French cookery. | ||
The place that you guys were at was a Chinese market? | ||
Yeah, it was one of those hole-in-the-door kind of, like, supplier. | ||
And it was, like, we got it. | ||
There were clams, there were periwinkles, there were, like, all, like, gooey ducks. | ||
I've never processed frogs in my career, really. | ||
You know, when I've gotten fresh frogs, I was working in France, and it was just the frog's legs in a basket. | ||
But even then, I would wonder, in France, where does that other part go? | ||
I know, this is a very disturbing story. | ||
It seems like there's got to be an answer to this. | ||
Maybe. | ||
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I don't know. | |
You would be the people that I would call. | ||
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That's the problem. | |
Wonton stuffing. | ||
Right. | ||
Like some sort of boiled and ground. | ||
I'm hoping they're discarded. | ||
I just Googled it and the video is graphic. | ||
Let it go. | ||
Let's do it. | ||
Let it roll. | ||
I'm not going to put it up on YouTube. | ||
Okay, we'll put it up for us. | ||
Put it up for us so we can see it. | ||
Here we go. | ||
Okay. | ||
Oh, no! | ||
They don't even bother killing them first. | ||
They just do it on the fly. | ||
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So far, that's exactly how I presume. | |
Okay, so they squeeze it out. | ||
Once they cut the head off, they squeeze it out like a... | ||
What would you describe that like? | ||
They're peeling it now. | ||
Right. | ||
They squeeze the innards out. | ||
Like through the neck cavity. | ||
Like the last of toothpaste. | ||
Yes, that's a good way to describe it. | ||
Okay, so then they take it. | ||
Now it looks like a man because it's headless. | ||
It's like a headless man. | ||
It's like one of those mannequins that you use to draw bodies there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
At what point do you put the batteries to the hind legs? | ||
Batteries? | ||
No, in like high school. | ||
Oh, right. | ||
You put the little battery in the backlight? | ||
No, we used to put cigarettes in their mouths. | ||
So he's chopping them up. | ||
It seems like he's leaving the bones on. | ||
Is that what he's doing? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Okay, so you know what? | ||
It's really great that we're watching this because I'm a lot less horrified by the whole prospect of it. | ||
So he's just hacking it up, bones intact, and chucking it into a basket. | ||
So it doesn't look like they're missing much other than the guts. | ||
So it seems like the innards, and then they seem to be boiling all that stuff, and okay, so they put it in a soup with the bones intact, and you just sort of... | ||
I need that. | ||
I need that. | ||
Yeah, it's funny. | ||
If I had to make a dish with that, I'd make the soup with daylilies inside. | ||
Water lilies, I mean. | ||
Mmm, right. | ||
With lily pad soup with frog. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Have you ever tried anything with lily pads? | ||
No. | ||
With tapioca? | ||
Those are hot right now in cooking. | ||
Do you guys try to do that? | ||
Like add some of the ingredients of the native environments of the animals? | ||
One of the best tricks to cooking. | ||
One of the best tricks to cooking. | ||
Chef told me this a long time ago in France. | ||
He goes, well, chef, what should I cook the lamb with? | ||
He goes, it's easy. | ||
What would it eat? | ||
If you had a lamb, what would be growing around it? | ||
And automatically, you just scroll down. | ||
If I had a lamb and an acre of land, what would be around it? | ||
There would be turnips. | ||
There would be carrots. | ||
There would be onions. | ||
There would be apples. | ||
There would be pears. | ||
There would be thyme. | ||
There would be basil. | ||
There would be garlic. | ||
There would be... | ||
So just, there you go. | ||
Traditional, more idyllic environment. | ||
The problem is when you have lobster and you cook it with mangoes, right? | ||
Where lobster is, where it comes from, there's no mangoes. | ||
So the recipe doesn't make sense. | ||
It might be delicious, but it's dumb. | ||
But butter, lobster and butter, they go together. | ||
Lobster, butter, potatoes, what else grows there? | ||
Onions, there's clams. | ||
Yeah, you go to Prince Edward Island. | ||
Okay, small island in the Gulf. | ||
One of the provinces of Canada. | ||
We have cows, potatoes, and lobster. | ||
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The region. | |
The three resources. | ||
Not the actual environment. | ||
If you have a rabbit in your backyard. | ||
In the line of sight. | ||
What can you see there? | ||
Rabbit with apples and carrots. | ||
Makes sense. | ||
That does make sense. | ||
But what if lobster and mango is fucking delicious? | ||
Yeah, but then, you know, it's for other people to do. | ||
We have our principles. | ||
It's academically incorrect. | ||
Oh, academically incorrect. | ||
That's fascinating. | ||
One of my favorite pizzas, don't get disgusted at me, don't hate me, pineapple and anchovy. | ||
Pineapple and anchovy? | ||
That's right. | ||
Pineapple and ham is out there. | ||
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No, no, no. | |
Pineapple and anchovy. | ||
It's goddamn delicious. | ||
I fucking love it. | ||
I don't care what you say. | ||
Who does that, though? | ||
You'd invented that. | ||
I might have. | ||
That's good. | ||
I want to try frog soup with lily pads and pineapple and anchovy pizza. | ||
I go hard with both. | ||
Hard with the pineapple and hard with the anchovy. | ||
Do you want to write a book three with us? | ||
No. | ||
Cooking with Joe? | ||
I'm good at elk steaks and I know how to order pineapple and anchovy pizza. | ||
I have to say that when I see the picture you post of your meat cooking, it's always on point. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
Because there's a lot of hunters Yeah, some hunters don't know how to cook. | ||
We have a lot of hunters in Quebec and sometimes, you know, the hunter will bring by the... | ||
Because I shot this beautiful moose, David. | ||
It was 2,000 pounds or 1,500 pounds. | ||
And he shows me a picture on his phone. | ||
And then he brings me a jar of the spaghetti sauce he made out of the moose. | ||
I'm like, really? | ||
You shot a majestic moose in the forest and you made spaghetti sauce with it? | ||
And I put kiwi in it because it tenderizes the meat. | ||
Well, listen, spaghetti sauce with ground mousse is delicious. | ||
I'll give you a tip. | ||
You gotta have... | ||
I eat everything. | ||
I eat the whole thing, right? | ||
I mean, I know how to make the roasts, and I use the ground for a bunch of different things, and I just think that... | ||
If you do it properly or if you want to handle it properly, you've really got to read up on how to cook wild game as opposed to how to cook anything else. | ||
There's a very low fat content. | ||
It's a tricky kind of meat to cook. | ||
There's a tool. | ||
It's called a lardoire in French. | ||
It's like a big needle with a swivel tip. | ||
And what you do is you cut long strips of fat and you poke them through the meat. | ||
Oh, and you inject it? | ||
Yeah, you don't inject. | ||
You put like long... | ||
You're like threading it. | ||
You're threading your piece of meat, like the loins or the fat, the back straps. | ||
It tends to be leaner. | ||
So you put long strips of pork fat inside and you cook it slowly enough that the pork fat will melt inside so in every bite you'll have a little bit of fat. | ||
It's a neat thing. | ||
It's an old French cooking trick. | ||
That sounds sensational. | ||
Or what we do, actually, like for the wild rabbit, which is extremely dry, we'll put a veal foot with the skin, so that'll give off the collagen, and we'll put a slice of pork belly with it. | ||
That'll give off the fat. | ||
When are you guys going back to Montreal? | ||
Tomorrow. | ||
Tomorrow? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I can't give you meat, right? | ||
No, we couldn't get through the border. | ||
It wouldn't work. | ||
Not this way. | ||
The other way works. | ||
Yes, it works if you hunt it and bring it through. | ||
I've brought meat back. | ||
But, damn, I'd like to give you guys something and see what you do with it. | ||
It's a lot of things. | ||
It's our favorite meat, but... | ||
You know, it would be sooner be cut with bricks of hashish than venison as restaurant owners. | ||
You know, like you cannot have any wild game in your restaurant. | ||
Even if it's just for your own personal consumption? | ||
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No. | |
Really? | ||
Yeah, sturgeon too is a problem in Quebec. | ||
Caviar. | ||
We have a lot of sturgeon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. | ||
The laws are like lights out ridiculous. | ||
If you get caught with like a gram of caviar in your boat and you don't have a license, they'll freeze your bank accounts and seize your house kind of thing. | ||
Really? | ||
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Wow. | |
It would go south quick. | ||
What is the concern? | ||
Is it such a commercial market for sturgeon caviar? | ||
Is that what it is? | ||
Yeah, exactly, yeah. | ||
Wow, so people just go that far out of their way to get caviar that they had to just make these... | ||
It's like a fish right now is worthless if you can't use a caviar, right? | ||
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Right. | |
We're allowed that there's a fishery for them. | ||
They fish the sturgeon. | ||
In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, when they catch them, they have to gut them. | ||
They have to remove every egg and dump the eggs into the water. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
They're allowed to bring the meat back to smoke it and salt it and to sell it. | ||
There is a commercial wild fishery for sturgeon meat. | ||
So ultimately, you just put a price tag on the fish. | ||
Let's say it's worth 200 bucks. | ||
But all of a sudden, if you're allowed to harvest the eggs and the fish... | ||
15 grand. | ||
Yeah, it would just be... | ||
15 grand. | ||
Yeah, because they produce a monolithic amount of eggs. | ||
Well, what's crazy is now you're making it useless because you're throwing it away, something that's incredibly valuable and delicious. | ||
The quotas are very small, though. | ||
Let's say if you had a sturgeon license, I imagine you'd allowed five or six or something like that. | ||
And the First Nations, like Mohawks, the Iroquois, have the right to fish. | ||
You know, we've been on boats where a guy was fishing. | ||
You know, he showed us the traditional technique, and it's not sports fishing. | ||
Like, they eat soup, they eat this, they eat, like, They love it. | ||
It's great fish. | ||
And themselves, they eat the eggs. | ||
They make soup. | ||
They put the eggs in it. | ||
Oh, they catch sturgeon 20 minutes from Joe Beef. | ||
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Wow. | |
Yeah. | ||
Right there, downtown. | ||
It's a dinosaur. | ||
Yeah, with a spear. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's a crazy animal. | ||
When you see them in the water. | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
You see the scales on them? | ||
It's so bizarre. | ||
I mean, they're from, what, 100 million years ago or something? | ||
They're prehistoric animals. | ||
They look like dinosaurs. | ||
They really do. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And the guys that we know that fish them... | ||
He's quite the character. | ||
He's an interesting guy. | ||
He's a Mohawk. | ||
And he told us that the biologists put underwater cameras there to keep track of the fish. | ||
And they said they see like 16 layers of sturgeon swimming, one on top of the other. | ||
He said, I could walk on the fish. | ||
Wow. | ||
There's that many. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's a ton. | ||
Wow. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
But again, you know, the people don't really... | ||
We even struggle with it at the restaurant. | ||
For me to sell a plate of smoked sturgeon... | ||
Tough sell. | ||
I'll sooner sell other things than that. | ||
Because people aren't interested? | ||
I think it's a tough sell as a fish, let's say as a 200 gram or a four ounce piece of fish. | ||
Look at that thing. | ||
That is so crazy. | ||
Is that the same river? | ||
That's probably Columbia River sturgeon, it looks like. | ||
Fraser River? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Fraser and BC. Look at the size of that thing. | ||
That is so... | ||
Ancient looking. | ||
It looks like it shouldn't be here. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's a fish that's a bit muddy sometimes, depending on where it's caught and everything. | ||
How do you handle it? | ||
Like if you were going to cook one of those. | ||
We make Jamaican patties with it. | ||
In this book we did. | ||
In old French cookery, one of the ways to cook sturgeon is ultimately you apply cooking a piece of sturgeon loin as you would a piece of veal loin or pork loin. | ||
Meat juice even is acceptable. | ||
You know, roasted carrots, roasted onions, roasted celery, roast the sturgeon and serve it with meat juice. | ||
Bacon, mushroom, red wine. | ||
Bacon, mushroom, red wine, like Fred said. | ||
So you treat the sturgeon as you would meat is possibly the best way. | ||
To treat it as you would fish is not the best. | ||
You know, people got to expect... | ||
We were overly fortunate to have 300 gram, like a pound of fish seared in a pan and served with a little sauce was a common thing, right? | ||
But it's not the right thing to do if we want to keep things in the water for our kids or whatever. | ||
So people got used to this, like a piece of fish that tastes like nothing that you can eat for like an hour and a half because you have so much of it. | ||
And that's the standard. | ||
But a fish like sturgeon is great if you have a little bit in a sauce like David May talks about over like buttery mashed potatoes or like with like egg noodles or something like that. | ||
It's a great way to do it. | ||
And it's a great way to look at fish where like you need actually 75 grams of protein, not like 500, you know? | ||
What is the... | ||
Is there a comparison that you can make in terms of what it tastes like? | ||
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Yeah... | |
Veal loin a little bit, I guess. | ||
Somewhat. | ||
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Braised veal collar. | |
What do you say? | ||
Blanquette. | ||
A larger piece of stew. | ||
Not a small two-inch block of stew, but let's say a bigger piece of stew. | ||
With a chunk of seaweed in it, you know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's neat. | ||
Wow. | ||
It's neat. | ||
It sounds... | ||
Now I'm hungry for it. | ||
We do. | ||
Fred made the McNuggets molds, you know? | ||
Because, you know, the McNuggets have this, like... | ||
There's, like, four or five different sizes. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Fred made the mold in the first book, precisely exactly like the McDonald's McNuggets. | ||
And we used to do sturgeon McNuggets. | ||
Or eel. | ||
Or eel McNuggets. | ||
Same fishery, right? | ||
We have eels where we get sturgeon. | ||
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That's another weird fish. | |
We sold a ton of them at the restaurant. | ||
It would literally, you'd be at Joe Beef and you'd get on your plate what looked to be like six McNuggets with a sauce and a little paper cup on the side. | ||
People were like, what the hell is this? | ||
I said, sturgeon nuggets. | ||
Eel is a weird one. | ||
When I used to go fishing a lot, people would catch eels, they'd be upset. | ||
And then I would go to buy sushi later on in life, and there'd be eel sushi. | ||
And I'd be like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
It's a different wolf. | ||
Is that a wolf eel? | ||
Yeah, it's a different fish. | ||
It's not a true eel. | ||
In sushi? | ||
Yeah, correct. | ||
Even like the real eel. | ||
I can eat bits of it, but if we were to take an eel and first you have to put a nail in its head and a nail in its tail and skin it. | ||
You can cut its head off and peel it and put it in a cast iron pan with butter and it's still moving like a snake. | ||
It's a horrific creature. | ||
It makes you choke. | ||
We had a little trout pond at Joe Beef that I built. | ||
Really? | ||
It was a bad experience because We had a refrigerator thing to make the water cold, you know, a cooler, and we had a pump. | ||
Every time it rained, it would turn the breaker off, and now the fish, like... | ||
Drown. | ||
Drown, no oxygen. | ||
Martin Picard gave us some eels. | ||
And we found him the next day in the parking lot, like... | ||
Dude, on the other side of the parking lot, in the baseball field where the bleachers were... | ||
Look at that shit! | ||
They're cooking it, and it's swimming at a rapid pace. | ||
It's got no head and no skin at this point. | ||
This is a grill. | ||
What does it say? | ||
It's a shocking clip of cooking an eel alive in Seoul. | ||
No, but it's got... | ||
That eel is beheaded and skinned. | ||
Beheaded, skinned... | ||
And it's still... | ||
Nervous system is still very intact. | ||
What are those things in the bottom? | ||
Is it its legs? | ||
That's probably its guts. | ||
Oh, God. | ||
Look at that thing. | ||
Bucking it. | ||
Oh, man. | ||
That's real stir-frying. | ||
I caught one once in Nova Scotia on a hook and line. | ||
And when I caught it, the fisherman next to me said, oh, don't reel it in. | ||
So I just held my fishing rod. | ||
I wasn't reeling in. | ||
And the eel reeled itself up my line to the tip of my fishing rod and started reeling down my fishing rod towards me. | ||
I was a kid. | ||
I was horrified. | ||
Ever since then, I've had an issue with like eels. | ||
I worked in a restaurant in France, in Dijon. | ||
And in the fridge right near the cook of the hotline, the cooking line, there was a wooden box with a cinder block on it. | ||
It's the first day I worked there. | ||
I was helping out on the fish station. | ||
And I hear in French, un angui en commande, one eel ordered up. | ||
And then the fish chef says, go in the fridge. | ||
There's a wooden box. | ||
You take the cinder block off it. | ||
You just lift the lid a little bit. | ||
Plunge your hand in there. | ||
Grab an eel and bring it back to me. | ||
I was like, you're kidding, right? | ||
So I literally do that. | ||
I go into the walk-in fridge. | ||
I pull the wooden box out. | ||
I take the cinder block off the top. | ||
I lift the... | ||
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It was just literally... | |
You know, 50 eels writhing together in a box. | ||
That's like Indiana Jones, you know? | ||
No, they live out of water, no problem. | ||
Martin Picard at Pieter Cochon, in his restaurant right now, I was there last week, he has a lobster tank. | ||
Right in the doorway, I think they hang your coats right above it. | ||
And in it, there's like eight massive eels. | ||
They have to chase them when they come at work in the morning. | ||
They reopen the restaurant. | ||
They'll find them like in the cash register, in the coat check, in the lettuce bins. | ||
They have like cinder blocks down now on the top. | ||
They got a plexiglass top with holes in it so it oxygenates. | ||
And they're literally pinned down in that tank. | ||
But even as you're eating... | ||
And you just see those giant eels in a tank the size of your flag here. | ||
It's just horrific. | ||
You know what's the best thing about eels? | ||
Talking about it. | ||
That's the best thing. | ||
Now, what about the flavor? | ||
I like it super smoked, super salted down with a good sugary, salty brine. | ||
So you have to cover it. | ||
Yeah, like in nuggets like we did. | ||
But even in that restaurant David was talking about, if you take a fresh piece of eel and put it in a cast iron pan, the smoke it does, it's like mustard gas. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
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Really? | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
It's super allergenic. | ||
I'm a little bit allergic to, I guess, not all fish, but some fish. | ||
And when I used to work at that restaurant, we would literally put a knife through its head and into the cutting board, and then another knife through its tail so it would be straight on the cutting board. | ||
So we'd pin down the left side and the right side of the eel. | ||
Then we'd lift the fillets, skin them, score them, And then pan-sear them with artichoke and country ham. | ||
And as I was pan-searing them, I was breathing in the vapors of searing the eel and my lungs would seize. | ||
It would give me an asthma attack somewhat. | ||
It was wild. | ||
Now, is this a popular dish in France because of necessity? | ||
Because of a lack of food choices? | ||
A lot of old French cooking would be based on what you had in your neighborhood. | ||
French cooking was very different pre-Federal Express, pre-Roads, you know. | ||
So eels in French cooking would come from the Bordeaux region ultimately and, you know, would be like la matelotte d'anguille. | ||
So it would be an eel stew in red wine, of course, carrot, onion, celery, exactly like a beef stew. | ||
And I think also the thing about it is that it's a dish that you wouldn't make at home, you know. | ||
So people would go, allez, on va manger de l'anguille, let's go and eat eel. | ||
That's what there was. | ||
You don't want to have the cinder block plexiglass case in your house. | ||
Imagine your house with your kids or my kids. | ||
They eat lampreys. | ||
In Bordeaux, some of the famous iconic dishes of Bordeaux is lampreys. | ||
This is like an animal from Dune. | ||
It's like a big hole with teeth. | ||
They're the ones that cling to the bottom of sharks. | ||
Correct. | ||
No, that's a remora. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
The lamprey is a problem, actually. | ||
Now, even in America, they're coming up in some rivers, and they attach themselves to fish with their suction cup head. | ||
They're just horrific animals. | ||
Toothed suction cup head. | ||
Yeah, it's tooth. | ||
It's like dune. | ||
It's like that animal in dune. | ||
It does look like that, yeah. | ||
What do they taste like? | ||
Probably crappy, like, eel. | ||
We did a dinner. | ||
Like a shittier eel. | ||
We did a dinner for Tony and he did his second book, I think, at Liverpool House. | ||
And we were much younger and I was like, oh, let's buy some, like, daring food, you know? | ||
It was Tony Bourdain, let's buy something, like, fucked up. | ||
So I ordered, like, two of those eel. | ||
And I try to make soup with it. | ||
I try to make everything. | ||
And again, my classic joke, the best thing to do with it is to put it in the garbage. | ||
You make stock, you reduce it, then you throw it away. | ||
I'm sure there's a recipe that's good. | ||
And I'm sure in case of apocalypse, after the winter succeeds, We'll fish for that and we'll eat it. | ||
But until then, I'm okay with cutting my Big Macs in half so they last for two days. | ||
There's a cool company, though. | ||
I've been following a company online, I think on Twitter or Instagram. | ||
It's called American Unagi. | ||
They're up in... | ||
The Atlantic Northeast, I think in Maine or Massachusetts somewhere, they're raising eels, I think, releasing them into nature, and they're selling eels commercially. | ||
It looks, again, like horrific work. | ||
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Raising them and releasing them into nature. | |
Is there some sort of environmental benefit of having the eels in the nation? | ||
Is that like sting about the lobster and put it away in a freshwater river? | ||
They're a weird animal, right? | ||
Again, loosely based. | ||
My facts are old reading. | ||
But from what I recall, eels are cool because all the eels, every year, go back to the Sargasso Sea. | ||
Is it true then? | ||
That's what I remember. | ||
Is that folklore you think? | ||
Is this an old fact in my mind? | ||
The oyster filtration volume? | ||
Yeah, oysters filter eels. | ||
So they all go back to this one area? | ||
Supposedly there's a breeding area for them called the Sargasso Sea. | ||
Great place for swimming. | ||
And where's the Sargasso Sea? | ||
It's kind of a southern middle Atlantic, from what I recall. | ||
That's a pretty safe bet. | ||
Right where the mythical plastic patch is. | ||
Oh, the plastic. | ||
That's the Pacific. | ||
You think that's mythical? | ||
I don't know. | ||
I've never seen really a real true picture of it. | ||
There's a Sargasso Sea. | ||
Eels. | ||
Making their way. | ||
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|
Wow. | |
That's so creepy. | ||
Look at that fucker. | ||
Making his way. | ||
Beautiful video, too, eh? | ||
What is this? | ||
Pretty cool. | ||
Wow. | ||
There's a guy named Boyan Slott, who is a young fellow that figured out a way to filter out the garbage patch. | ||
And he developed this device and they recently started implementing it. | ||
But he's been on the podcast before and went into great detail about it. | ||
The garbage patch is real. | ||
See, that's the American Unavi site. | ||
Look at those fuckers just flopping around. | ||
Yeah, so they're in Maine. | ||
American Unagi's Instagram page we're on right now. | ||
They're in Maine? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Our aquaculture. | ||
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That's cool. | |
The Amaroscata has great oysters there, too. | ||
Yeah, amazing. | ||
What about, have you guys ever cooked or eaten blueberry bear? | ||
No, we don't. | ||
Martijn in Montreal. | ||
Martijn is eating bears. | ||
He's hunting bears. | ||
He goes and baits every weekend and then he goes in shacks. | ||
What's a blueberry bear though? | ||
My friend Steve Rinella has described this to me. | ||
Apparently when bears eat blueberries, when they find, like it's towards the fall in particular, when they're trying to fatten up before they go into the den, they'll find these massive fields of blueberries. | ||
He shot one in Alaska. | ||
And this bear had eaten so many blueberries that when they opened it up, it smelled like blueberries. | ||
The actual fat had a purple hue to it. | ||
And it's supposed to be a spectacularly delicious meat. | ||
That totally makes sense. | ||
But you know, it's funny you say that because I was thinking about that with venison before. | ||
We have some friends who had a venison farm and what they... | ||
This is it right here. | ||
This is Steve cooking it on his show. | ||
The show's called Meat Eater. | ||
Steve will actually be a guest on the show here Friday. | ||
But see how the fat has a hue to it? | ||
Amazing. | ||
But he said it all smells like blueberry. | ||
So he rendered down the bear fat, because this was all in the field, and then cooked the bear meat, this blueberry bear meat, chunks of it in the fat. | ||
Well, if the pigment is liposoluble, then it would make sense that you find it in the fat. | ||
But they made experiments, our friends with the deer farm, and what they did, they wanted to know if the taste of venison was owed to the fact that... | ||
The diet of the animal or the way that hunters traditionally break down the meat in the field, the field dressing of the meat, you know? | ||
So what they did is they put a beef, like a steer, and they shot him and they prepared him. | ||
They dressed him the way you would a deer or a moose. | ||
And then they, at the same time, did the same thing with the deer. | ||
And then they did The slaughterhouse treatment, like a commercial treatment for both animals. | ||
And they realize that once you wait a little bit, even on the beef, before you gut it, before you skin it and everything, that funky or that gamey taste will come even to beef. | ||
So you picture that's what, yeast in nature? | ||
It's probably also they think that you might lack the skills to properly extract the guts. | ||
You might perforate the guts. | ||
Sometimes you might perforate the bile pouch there. | ||
Parts of the innards might come in contact. | ||
That makes sense. | ||
The skin will be on too long. | ||
Or it's not bled properly as well. | ||
Yeah, it's not blend properly and then, you know, it's not chilled super rapidly. | ||
You kill in the morning, the whole sun is out, you know, you don't have a fridge with you, you have no water. | ||
But on the other hand, when we have the wild rabbits, they taste like juniper. | ||
Like, very, very, very strongly like juniper. | ||
And that's, in fact, the challenge is to get rid of some of that juniper taste. | ||
Yeah, it's like the partridge that we shoot at the lake. | ||
And in fact, it's... | ||
It tastes like spruce, spruce tips. | ||
And instead of, when we cook sometimes, we'll cook meat, and then we'll even add... | ||
Partridge or at home, I'll have a partridge or a wild rabbit just as seasoning to the rest of the pot. | ||
If you look at all the traditional French-Canadian dishes of hunters, all the games are mixed up. | ||
So you never have... | ||
This is a modern cuisinier, like culinary fancy thing to have a breast of partridge seared on a bed of cabbage. | ||
You know, those things are always treated with, like I said earlier, with fat, with like all the spices, with wine, with cognac, with layers of like... | ||
Even organ meats in there and you put a crust over it and cabbage. | ||
Like we said, it needs a lot of skills to eat good games. | ||
I've never had gamey venison. | ||
I've been very, very fortunate. | ||
First of all, I've learned to hunt from people that really know what they're doing. | ||
So we didn't let anything sit out in the heat and made sure we opened it up and cooled it out quickly. | ||
But one of the things that they do do when guys are deep into the backcountry and they have an animal and they kill it, and even in the summer when it's warm out, what they do is they hang it and give it a lot of air circulation and it develops a crust on the outside. | ||
And then they cut that crust back and then the meat underneath it is sort of tenderized in a lot of ways. | ||
And a lot of hunters say that it's even more delicious that way. | ||
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Yeah, it's protected by the crust the air is created. | |
And of course it probably starts, the bacteriological work starts to work inside of that crust. | ||
There's two process, right, by which the meat gets tender. | ||
The first one is the rigor mortis, right? | ||
Like the meat rests and the rigor mortis, like all, I guess all the cortisol and everything that like stiffens the meat at death. | ||
Well, the meat will rest. | ||
And then it's an enzymatic reaction where the enzymes work and break down some of the meat fibers and the tougher muscles and stuff. | ||
In French, the word for resting meat is called faisandé. | ||
And faisand is a pheasant, you know, because they used to hang the pheasants by the neck. | ||
Yeah, until they fell. | ||
You'd say when the beak falls off the skull, then they're ready to eat. | ||
Yeah, I've seen that before. | ||
That is so strange. | ||
It's hard to eat. | ||
I've had it a couple of times. | ||
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What does it taste like? | |
It tastes like death warmed over. | ||
What the fuck is wrong with these people? | ||
Why are they eating it like that? | ||
Because a lot of people love strong flavors like blue cheese, like Munster cheese in Germany. | ||
Because ultimately, if you just eat it fresh, it's chicken of the woods, really. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
But it's good. | ||
By letting it go a little bit, letting it rot a little bit, they get these secondary, tertiary, intense flavors. | ||
Maybe, too, we're talking about probiotics. | ||
Those traditional ways, you don't always know why you do them. | ||
But maybe initially, you incubate, you immunize yourself a little bit. | ||
The taste is, you got to love it after... | ||
You're used to it, but initially it might be a way to have some of the bacterias. | ||
I think you talked about soil-based probiotics before I read about that. | ||
We're realizing that, okay, yogurt probiotics are not the whole thing. | ||
So maybe there's soil-based probiotic, animal-based probiotic. | ||
Maybe we're completely wrong about what flora we're ingesting. | ||
And maybe there was like a... | ||
A good way to get your flora. | ||
Makes sense. | ||
I guess there would be some strategies for taking that stuff in, but I would think flavor-wise, it would... | ||
Because pheasant, if you just eat it fresh, it's delicious. | ||
It's light. | ||
It's very nice. | ||
I would think that... | ||
Unless there was no other way to store it, and they didn't have refrigeration, which of course they didn't when they first started doing this. | ||
Refrigeration is a super modern invention, if you look back. | ||
I worked for chefs in my apprenticeship that told me stories about their apprenticeship, and it's like night and day. | ||
They said, when we woke up in the morning, we used to have to fill the ovens with coal, you know, and go down to the ice locker and drag an ice block through the... | ||
What's that stuff called? | ||
Sawdust. | ||
Sawdust shed. | ||
I was like, what? | ||
Wow. | ||
A lot of these old French restaurants that are famous had coal-fired ovens and ice block fridges. | ||
And the apprentices would live above... | ||
And they'd take shift, you know? | ||
One night, it'd be you that would make sure it doesn't die, because otherwise it'd be hard to start again, you know? | ||
Like, real cold. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, the stoves would burn every day, all the time. | ||
Wow. | ||
The restaurant stove was ultimately, it was also heating the whole building as well. | ||
The hotel was heated by the restaurant. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
Yeah. | ||
Well, it makes sense. | ||
I mean, it really does. | ||
But there's not a lot of animals that they would let get that funky, other than... | ||
Shark. | ||
Shark. | ||
Oh, that thing they do in Iceland, the pickled shark. | ||
There's a Korean dish that I'm actually curious to try, a skate wing that is fermented. | ||
But until it gets that ammonia flavor, you know, like... | ||
You smell a camembert and a poise and you smell it. | ||
It smells good. | ||
Funky cheese. | ||
Then you go a bit deeper, you know, bigger whiff, and then you're like, wow, Windex. | ||
You know, you got like the ammonia and some people look for that. | ||
Different cultures are into different flavors. | ||
A friend of mine, Andy, went to Calcutta three weeks ago and came back with the number one candy in Calcutta or in India. | ||
It's this weird candy called Pulse. | ||
If we had one right now, all three of us, it's a repulsive candy that tastes incredibly of sulfur and fecal rot. | ||
But in India, that's the candy. | ||
Like, people love it. | ||
What? | ||
In American winemaking and French winemaking, there's things in winemaking called flaws. | ||
You know, usually the flaws of wine in France and in natural winemaking, organic winemaking, will always be volatile acidity and Bertanomyces. | ||
Wow. | ||
Volatile acidity smells, in the wine, vastly of vinegar. | ||
And Britannomyces smells vastly of fecal matter, barnyard fecal matter, you know? | ||
These, in North American wine and even in French wine, are considered as flaws, you know? | ||
In Japan, they love... | ||
Natural wines from France that have high volatile acidity and Britannomyces smells. | ||
What would be ultimately considered a flawed wine in France in natural wine world is considered a delicacy in Japan in the natural wine world. | ||
Wow, so do they purposely take ones that have that funky smell and ship them off to Japan? | ||
Some winemakers, you know, the wine agent will come and visit the cellar and usually the winemaker will point him in the direction and say, maybe this might be for, and then he goes, yes, yes, this is what we like. | ||
Do they cultivate it on purpose in that direction? | ||
I figure, like, nobody right now will come up and say it outright. | ||
But I believe so. | ||
As in, they don't stop it. | ||
There are Japanese winemakers now all through France that work in a very funky way and are more or less pushing those wines into the Japanese market. | ||
Okay, I have to try this just because it's disgusting. | ||
So tell me what the name of the candy is again. | ||
unidentified
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Pulse. | |
Spell that P-U-L-S-E. It's a green mango candy. | ||
Originally, it's a classic snack, right? | ||
They used a sulfur salt. | ||
It's called black salt. | ||
And they put a bit of chili and sulfur salt on mango. | ||
And I have to admit that when I had the real green mango with the sulfur salt, it's not that bad. | ||
That candy was like pushed. | ||
It's like the mega warheads, you know, that we had as kids. | ||
I wonder, too, sometimes, like, the gamey flavor of the pheasant, the cheese, the this, the eel, the that. | ||
I see it sometimes as a bit of a, like, you know, the ghost pepper. | ||
It's a bit of a pissing contest between... | ||
Ah, yeah. | ||
You know, like... | ||
Right. | ||
Like, no one could possibly enjoy the taste of ghost pepper, right? | ||
No. | ||
I mean, does it even have a taste? | ||
I mean, are you even responding to that taste? | ||
I won't even try it. | ||
Have you at all? | ||
You know who loves that? | ||
You know Olivier? | ||
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Yes. | |
Those guys, they have, like... | ||
Well, they watch, like, Game of Thrones. | ||
They get together. | ||
And they eat ghost peppers? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
unidentified
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We're talking about Olivier Aubin-Mercier, who's a fighter in the UFC. Yeah, and they'll have, like, ghost pepper parties, you know. | |
And then the next day, they'll go to Comic-Con and dress up as superheroes and then play some online poker and then eat more ghost peppers. | ||
But he's also a UFC fighter. | ||
I mean, you gotta think, he's a very extreme human being. | ||
He's a funny kid. | ||
He's a very, very, very nice guy. | ||
If you didn't know that he was a trained killer, you'd have no idea if you talked to him. | ||
He just seems like a gentleman. | ||
Yeah, he's a sweetie. | ||
He's a good kid. | ||
For us, it's interesting. | ||
We actually have a bit of a chapter in the book where we talk loosely about those guys and that relationship. | ||
Well, you guys sponsored him or something? | ||
Before the Reebok thing. | ||
Right, yeah. | ||
Because I remember one of the fights that we did in Montreal, we went to your restaurant afterwards and Olivier showed up after his fight. | ||
And you guys were congratulating him. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
His fiancée, his wife, his girlfriend works with us at the restaurant. | ||
Yeah, for a long time now. | ||
And, you know, we met because... | ||
These guys, it's interesting, eh? | ||
They're super into food. | ||
And they're open to a lot of things. | ||
And they're curious. | ||
And a lot of them get aimed in the wrong direction, you know, like the brown rice and chicken direction. | ||
And you're responsible for, in big part, for the awakening, the nutritional awakening of these guys. | ||
You know, a lot of them go for their gun license now, just to be able to hunt. | ||
They go fishing on the weekend. | ||
They go for, like, two hours hike in the wood and, like, little fishing rod. | ||
They come back with trouts and we get a phone call. | ||
He's like, hey, Fred, I go fish for trouts. | ||
You know, what do I do with that? | ||
You know, it's... | ||
It's a great thing. | ||
And yeah, we did sponsor them after, but then what we do now is we cook for them post-Way In. | ||
Ah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Marco did GSP at the last fight at Madison Square Gardens. | ||
The boys were there for a week. | ||
We've done... | ||
Tim Kennedy after... | ||
So they came for a week and just hung out and cooked meals for them? | ||
We send the kids, Marco and Fred goes and Gab goes, Gabrielle Joppo, they rent a suite. | ||
And they prepare all of the meals up to weight cut and afterwards. | ||
And do they have nutritional requirements for the weight cut? | ||
They do. | ||
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They have a nutritionist there with them, but then they have the plan. | |
But I have a take on that. | ||
If the nutritionist writes a plan and the food's not good and you don't eat it, then it doesn't work, right? | ||
It can be right on paper, but if you don't take the pill, then you don't do the job. | ||
You can say chicken and kale, this much grams, but we can... | ||
A professional cook... | ||
We'll make the kale delicious. | ||
Or Brussels sprouts instead. | ||
And cook the chicken properly. | ||
Because the kale could be bad and the chicken could be dry. | ||
And the thing, too, that works... | ||
The guys are already suffering. | ||
The thing that works the best in that case is that all of a sudden you have in the room, we set up a little table. | ||
It's not like PlayStation dirty underwears, like pre-fight vibe. | ||
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It's... | |
Dining with friends. | ||
It's dining with friends. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Whether it's Marco, Gab, me, we know. | ||
We don't talk. | ||
If you don't want to talk, if you want to talk, we're here, you know, and we'll hang out. | ||
But then you feel like you're eggs in a tortilla, you feel like you're eggs with potatoes, or, like, it's mellow, and it helps a lot with just the context of not being, like, ordering pizza from room service, you know? | ||
George used to tell us horror stories, you know, before some of his biggest wins years ago, George said, eating, like, room service rigatoni. | ||
And pizza before a major fight, you know? | ||
So now it's different. | ||
And it's fun because, like David said earlier, we have many interests. | ||
And it's great to be able to explore them like that, you know? | ||
Because we couldn't... | ||
We couldn't do this job if it was for, like, 12 stoves in the kitchen, a bunch of pans, cooking pieces of meat, writing books about the seasons, and tomatoes, and starting again. | ||
Like, I couldn't do it. | ||
Like, we love... | ||
Yeah, being a chef is, like, one-dimensional, really, you know? | ||
And that, whether it's, like, Olivier, whether it's, like, going to visit a Neil farm, and, you know, like, it makes it... | ||
Worthwhile up to this point. | ||
Well, you guys have a great philosophy about that, and that's one of the things that really came through with the Bourdain show when you guys were in the ice shack, is that you enjoy living well. | ||
Yeah, everybody has to live better. | ||
Take care of yourself, man. | ||
Turn your phone off. | ||
Sit with your kids. | ||
unidentified
|
Listen to them. | |
That's one of the things that I really liked. | ||
Brilliant things, man. | ||
Turn your phone off and come with stories. | ||
I had friends. | ||
I have all my children now. | ||
I love to sit at the table and I'm quiet. | ||
I just let them talk and ask me questions and watch them. | ||
It's just the best. | ||
My relationship with my kids is better than any relationship I have with any of my best friends. | ||
My kids are more interesting. | ||
My family is more interesting. | ||
It's work to stay in contact with your family and even the staff. | ||
I enjoy very much working in the restaurants that we've built. | ||
I work five days a week With people that I've been working with for 15 years. | ||
These are important relationships. | ||
It's not employee-employer. | ||
It's if you quit and you tell me you're leaving, I'm going to go in my car and cry. | ||
I've been working with you for 15 years. | ||
My relationship that I have with many people that I work with is intimate. | ||
I've seen their children born. | ||
I've seen them go through breakups. | ||
I've seen their parents die. | ||
I've seen... | ||
We go to war every night at 6 o'clock. | ||
150 people are coming to eat in the next three hours in four restaurants. | ||
We, you know... | ||
It's a job that's so different. | ||
Very high-stress environment for five minutes. | ||
For two hours, we've got to walk properly. | ||
We're knowledgeable of each other's space. | ||
There's a ballet, you know, when you're washing the glasses and the food's coming out behind you. | ||
You know, you have a sixth sense to know to move, not to get the plate to burn your elbow. | ||
You know, there's this ballet we dance every night with these people. | ||
And for us to think that, like, and most people still think that we're behind the stove cooking. | ||
I've got more phone calls to get help finding a doctor, therapist, whatever, you know, nutritionist for the staff. | ||
Then I got calls about recipes or food. | ||
You know, our job is I'm an expert in drainpipes. | ||
Artisanal plumbing? | ||
Artisanal electricity? | ||
Artisanal refrigeration? | ||
I know about concrete pouring now. | ||
Why? | ||
Because you've done it yourself? | ||
Yeah, we have these restaurants. | ||
They're very decrepit old buildings. | ||
And you can't... | ||
We're running restaurants with employees and a constant burden of payroll. | ||
And we can't just call everybody all the time. | ||
By default, any good cooking school today... | ||
What Fred is saying, and Fred is the example of what a great chef should be, should be a very good cook, a very good person with people skills, but should also have a minor in electricity, plumbing, and refrigeration technology. | ||
First aid, you know? | ||
Even now, like, we both don't drink. | ||
We both, I wouldn't say a health kick, but just, like, want to be there, you know? | ||
Mind and body. | ||
We want to be, like, present. | ||
And that's... | ||
We built something cool. | ||
I want to appreciate it and not be clouded. | ||
That's overlooked. | ||
People don't think about that when they get into this job. | ||
They think it's this warrior thing. | ||
We're savage. | ||
We're going to drink. | ||
We're going to party. | ||
We're going to do this. | ||
No. | ||
If you want to do that until you're 60 and then get a little cottage and write, paint, watercolor, buy a sailboat, you have to think about it. | ||
You can't live that life of... | ||
Why do you think that life is synonymous with chefs? | ||
We've been promoted and taught ultimately that you will get paid, you will make money, you will persevere if you understand how to promote excessive eating and excessive drinking. | ||
You will be recompensed if you build a place where people come and eat too much and drink too much and then spend too much, then you will be able to have a life, a car, a house, and raise children. | ||
Okay, so it's all good. | ||
First you have to learn how to cook, then you have to learn how to run a restaurant, then you have to learn what a restaurant looks like, and how to host, what the playlist should be like, how to fix a plumbing disaster, how to fix an electricity disaster, how to fix a staff situation disaster, how to run a clean house, or people are working together with all their different idiosyncrasies. | ||
But... | ||
For my whole apprenticeship, alcohol was a reward. | ||
You did a good job tonight. | ||
Drink. | ||
And then it went from reward to, oh shit, there was like a blood bath in the restaurant. | ||
We had to pick up this guy at the hospital. | ||
Okay, it's not a reward. | ||
Let's forget about it. | ||
Let's drink. | ||
And it was always there. | ||
Great service. | ||
Let's have a drink. | ||
You're in the food industry, but you're also in the wine industry. | ||
Because 50% of what you're doing is selling food to people, and the other 50% of what you're doing is selling alcohol to people. | ||
So by default, you're part of the people that sell food. | ||
A liquid drug. | ||
And you're in that world every day. | ||
You go to wine tastings. | ||
You talk with people that sell alcohol at bartenders. | ||
You talk to people that sell wine. | ||
You're partaking, eating in your colleagues' restaurants and drinking wine. | ||
Next thing you know, you have a little bit of celebrity. | ||
You've been open for 15 years. | ||
And you look back and you go, there's seven days in a week. | ||
And I drank six of them. | ||
I don't feel good on Sunday. | ||
I'm just kind of recovering. | ||
And then what happens is one week turns into two to four, and then you kind of look back and you realize in 2017 that you may have drank 48 weeks out of 52. And then it goes quick. | ||
Then it's 10 years. | ||
You're a 10-year restaurant, and you've been drinking... | ||
Five days out of the week for ten years. | ||
And then all of a sudden, you kind of have a problem. | ||
You realize that, like, my day-to-day is based on food and wine. | ||
Right? | ||
Now, I don't want my... | ||
It's not making me happy. | ||
I've had all the wines. | ||
I've had all the foods. | ||
Am I better for it? | ||
Not really. | ||
What am I better for? | ||
Restriction. | ||
Eating less. | ||
Eating clean. | ||
Drinking only on very special occasions. | ||
Do you still drink on special occasions? | ||
I don't. | ||
I'm completely sober, no. | ||
Did you make that decision based on the idea that you weren't able to control it? | ||
Or just that the best decision would be to just completely eliminate it? | ||
Textbook case of a person who couldn't drink. | ||
Yeah, I tried several times to stop. | ||
I googled it. | ||
I read about it. | ||
It didn't work. | ||
I was intervention by Fred and my managers of the restaurants in January 12th, around there, 16th, I think we figured. | ||
Of this year? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm eight months sober or something. | ||
Congratulations. | ||
Thank you. | ||
You look really good. | ||
Thank you. | ||
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
You do. | ||
You look healthy. | ||
I'm happy, man. | ||
It changes the skin, everything. | ||
Isn't it amazing when that happens? | ||
Conversation. | ||
I was angry for a long time. | ||
It's not only alcoholism. | ||
I think all alcoholics are codependent somewhat. | ||
It had been part of my whole apprenticeship, not being sober for so many years. | ||
It was all under control and funny for a very, very long time. | ||
It was always a big part of my life, drinking wine, eating food. | ||
Until it wasn't. | ||
Then one day, I was 45, my relationship with alcohol changed. | ||
I became dark. | ||
I became unhappy. | ||
I had success. | ||
I had beautiful children. | ||
I was not happy. | ||
I tried many different things. | ||
Nothing worked. | ||
I was interventioned by people that I work with that are dear to me, that I love very much, I guess that love me. | ||
They're tired of watching me. | ||
You know, make bad decisions and I just went to a great rehab called Chatsworth that Educated me. | ||
You know, I was sitting in a classroom with a pad and paper for six hours a day, learning about the disease called alcoholism, learning about a disease that 30% of the population has, you know, and how and why I was an addict, you know? | ||
First, I was an addict with food. | ||
Then, you know, at a young age, after a traumatic event, then I was an addict with beer, then I was an addict with marijuana, like, you know, all drugs, and then I was an addict with wine. | ||
Follow up a couple more traumatic events in my, you know, horrendous apprenticeship and the stress of leadership in these restaurants. | ||
You know, one thing led to another. | ||
My relationship with alcohol became not positive. | ||
With help, I understood. | ||
Through education, I understood. | ||
And now everything's great. | ||
It's funny, too, because... | ||
I saw it as an example. | ||
You know, I don't like to tell him, but maybe it's a little bit of mentoring, you know? | ||
I was the canary in the coal mine for Fred. | ||
You know, and I decided, I was like, fuck. | ||
You know, after Tony passed, I was like, you know, I remember I was working on a new project doing tilings, and I was like, oh, I heard the news in the morning. | ||
I went to tile all day, and then I couldn't wait to get home and have, like, two bottles of wine. | ||
And I was like, why? | ||
And... | ||
We were the same about that. | ||
It didn't matter, like, what we loved at a point. | ||
Look, for example, we loved MMA, right? | ||
We loved going to the fights. | ||
We were, like, so fortunate. | ||
We'd go and see, we met the Fertitta brothers. | ||
We discussed, like, we sat with them at dinner table. | ||
We met you. | ||
We met all those guys. | ||
David loves winemaking, met all the winemakers. | ||
We met the best people in the field that we loved. | ||
Charmed life, not happy. | ||
Not happy. | ||
Like ungrateful fucking little pricks. | ||
Well, you know, I think part of the problem is that alcohol is a depressant. | ||
Correct. | ||
It's your problem. | ||
Just you get down. | ||
It brings you down. | ||
It brings your energy level down. | ||
It brings your vitality down. | ||
It's also a solvent. | ||
Alcohol is a solvent, and it destroys your soft brain tissue. | ||
You know, I was taught that in rehab. | ||
I said, would you drink acetone? | ||
I go, no. | ||
Well, if it was made by a lovely French vineyard and had great aroma... | ||
But do you miss anything about the flavor of wine with a meal or anything? | ||
Have you ever tried non-alcoholic wines? | ||
I don't even know. | ||
Non-alcoholic beers? | ||
I go to wine tastings. | ||
I was just at Raw Wine in Los Angeles. | ||
I went to taste all the natural wines, beautiful natural wine festival. | ||
And you can taste them still? | ||
I taste them. | ||
I don't swallow. | ||
I rinse my mouth out. | ||
I'm very much involved in natural wine and viticulture, reading, and all that stuff. | ||
That's got to be so weird to have a mouthful of delicious wine just spit into a bucket. | ||
No, it's the same. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Why did I drink wine? | ||
Olfactory, the nose, the flavor, understanding the winemaker, his philosophy, the geography of where the wine comes from, his work... | ||
You know, with using organic and biodynamic viticulture, not using sulfur, just making this amazing organic beverage with very little intervention, natural wine. | ||
Without side effects. | ||
I don't have to swallow it because the drug is the same drug that's in all the other ones. | ||
That they can't change. | ||
The flavor is what's different. | ||
Yes. | ||
And what I like is more of the story, the guy, the vineyard, the varietals. | ||
Would you eat at a fine restaurant and have a delicious steak and a wine accompaniment and then just spit it into a bucket? | ||
I've done it. | ||
It goes to the bathroom. | ||
I was really worried. | ||
He shuts his mouth and he goes to the bathroom. | ||
I was worried that... | ||
With a mouthful of wine. | ||
Ryan Gray, our friend from Elena that worked with us for years, Ryan goes to a restaurant and asks for a bucket... | ||
He'll sit with other people, people in the wine business, and they all drink wine, and he tastes the wine, and he has discussions about wine, and he tastes it and spits it. | ||
Because he's an alcoholic. | ||
Yeah, he's a recovered alcoholic. | ||
Three years, but he's a wine buyer, and he's very much involved. | ||
He was my mentor when I got out of rehab, because in rehab they were telling me, you may never be able to go back to the restaurant. | ||
What? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
High risk of re-offending. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And I was like, I can't. | ||
I don't know anything else. | ||
I have no education. | ||
I've been in kitchen since I'm 17. It's way too late for med school, and we don't do well in Adderall. | ||
I really don't want to clean iceberg lettuce at the fruits and vegetables store and try to make a go of that. | ||
And you know, it's funny, too. | ||
Even de-alkalized beer, non-alcoholic beer, it's better than alcoholic beer. | ||
What are you talking about? | ||
Heineken 00, man. | ||
Crisp. | ||
Really? | ||
Crisp. | ||
Outstanding. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
Heineken 00? | ||
Outstanding. | ||
It's really good? | ||
It's fine. | ||
Well, I've only had like O'Doul's. | ||
No, that's not good. | ||
Okay, so Heineken does it correctly. | ||
The order of non-alcoholic beer, okay, in my head is Heineken 00, Carlsberg 00, Grolsch, zero. | ||
Bex, zero. | ||
And then everything else is not good after that. | ||
Let me add to that because I'm also celiac, right? | ||
And there's a Glutenberg they make in Montreal that's no gluten and no alcohol. | ||
Now you can insert any joke you want. | ||
People are signing off the podcast right now. | ||
I thought these guys were going to talk about heroin and getting fucked up and eating meat. | ||
Though we eat meat. | ||
Yes, I'm sure. | ||
I'm sure. | ||
That's fascinating, though, that you actually still taste it. | ||
It's almost like if you're a heroin addict just scratching the skin with the needle. | ||
We don't penetrate anymore. | ||
I don't recommend that. | ||
My therapist and the people at rehab do not recommend that I taste wine and spit it. | ||
I'm sure they don't. | ||
But I have friends, again, I know a lot of sommeliers, and even I know winemakers, some of the most famous winemakers in the world I've met in Burgundy at an AAB that are completely sober. | ||
Wow. | ||
Because they wanted to break this cycle of my great-grandfather was an alcoholic, abusive person, my grandfather was an alcoholic, abusive person, my father was an alcoholic, abusive person, and I didn't want to take over this thousand-year-old winery, the legacy of my family. | ||
I didn't want to work here. | ||
And I'm sure, like, you know, with all the epigenetic stuff, if you don't drink when your kids are young, like, there might be a thing where you can stop the passing of the gene, you know? | ||
But you did Sober October. | ||
How'd you do? | ||
Fine. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, I did, but... | ||
You didn't love it. | ||
unidentified
|
No, it wasn't... | |
How was the relapse? | ||
Sobriety wasn't... | ||
This was a very crazy Sober October because we added this insane fitness challenge. | ||
So I was literally working out between three and a half to five and a half... | ||
One day, six and a half hours in a day. | ||
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
Yeah, it was insane. | ||
One day I did five and a half hours and I did another hour at night. | ||
Six and a half hours in the day. | ||
We were trying to kill each other to see who could get the most points. | ||
We had a fitness tracker. | ||
We wore this heart rate monitor. | ||
Oh yeah, I heard that. | ||
The application would score up the amount of points you would get. | ||
Who won? | ||
I won. | ||
That's the belt right there. | ||
If you get 70% of your max heart rate, you get three points per minute. | ||
This is how crazy it got. | ||
70% of your max heart rate is three points per minute. | ||
80% and above your max heart rate is four points per minute. | ||
One day, I got a thousand points. | ||
So just think about that. | ||
Think about how many minutes you have to exercise at 80% of your max heart rate to get a thousand fucking points. | ||
So you think sober helped you with performance or recuperation? | ||
I think I was on drugs the entire time. | ||
This is what I think. | ||
I think I was on the endorphins that come from long-range cardio. | ||
There's what I was calling the I-don't-give-a-fuck drug. | ||
There's you get this... | ||
This feeling when you do, like everybody always talked about runner's high, and I never really experienced it, even though I had worked out really hard my whole life. | ||
I'd never been into like long-range cardio. | ||
I'd never done hours and hours of the same activity, just droning on, you know, either on a bike or running. | ||
I'd never really done that. | ||
I'd run hills for the most part, and I'm sure it benefited me and it made me relaxed, but it's at a totally different level when you're doing it for three and a half hours, four hours a day. | ||
It's a true survival mechanism that kicks in. | ||
It's that, but it's also you feel wonderful. | ||
You have zero anxiety. | ||
And you're still benefiting from that? | ||
No, no, that's what's interesting. | ||
I've been out of the house for a week now because of the fires, so we've been running around and the kids aren't in school, so they're here hanging out with me. | ||
We haven't had a chance to get our stuff together. | ||
It's been very stressful, so I haven't really been working out much. | ||
I've only worked out like once or twice this week, so I have more stress. | ||
I feel a little bit more tense, a little bit more take a deep breath, calm down, During October, I had none of that. | ||
None of that. | ||
I felt great. | ||
I was like, if you could take how I feel and put it in a pill form and give it to people, everyone would be hooked on it. | ||
Because you feel fantastic. | ||
And I never understood that. | ||
I would see these people running every day, and I thought they were just exercise fanatics. | ||
Like, they just want to be leaner, or they want to just... | ||
Maybe they're obsessed. | ||
Body obsessed, yeah. | ||
Yeah, maybe that's what it was. | ||
But I think they're drug addicts. | ||
They're natural drug addicts, but in a very positive way. | ||
I shouldn't call it drug addicts. | ||
Endorphin junkies. | ||
That's what they are. | ||
It makes sense, too, that you would... | ||
Every cycle... | ||
In nature, it's like feast and famine. | ||
It's like running and resting. | ||
If you're a hunter-gatherer, you don't hunt every day. | ||
You follow a cycle. | ||
For a month, you'll hunt. | ||
You'll drag back the meat home. | ||
You'll eat a lot. | ||
And then after the next month, you'll be quiet. | ||
You'll eat less. | ||
And then the next month... | ||
So there's very little exercise program out there that look at it like that. | ||
But if you were to look at it over a year, maybe you'd see it like... | ||
I see October is more quiet. | ||
I'll do my month in October. | ||
November will be quiet. | ||
Busy with other things after that. | ||
I'll go back to it in December. | ||
It's better for the soul, too. | ||
You don't have this... | ||
Is there any obsession looming over you that you have to do it tomorrow morning and at night? | ||
Well, my take on it was a little bit different. | ||
My take on it is that everyone's anxiety levels and all the different stress and all the things we deal with, a lot of it is because your body has capabilities. | ||
And you're not using even a small percentage of those capabilities, so it's always like, what are we doing? | ||
Are we going? | ||
We're going to go? | ||
We're going to go? | ||
And we're in traffic, you're moving quickly, so you're constantly aware of all these cars around you, and there's all this stress, and there's very little physical release that the body takes part in. | ||
And for most people, I mean, the great percentage of our population lives a sedentary lifestyle. | ||
They sit in their cars until they get to the office, they sit in their office until they get home, they sit in front of the TV until they go to sleep. | ||
This is a giant percentage of our population, whatever the number is. | ||
It's very normal, and occasionally they work out, and when they do, it's a struggle. | ||
When you force the body into rigorous exercise on a constant basis, your body's, all the needs of this capacity, the capabilities that it has, all those needs are satisfied. | ||
So what I found is incredibly low anxiety levels. | ||
And I didn't think I had anxiety. | ||
I'm not an anxious person to the point where I thought about taking medication for anxiety, like I'm nervous or... | ||
But I didn't know how anxiety-free I could be until I did this exercise program for a month. | ||
See, I found that in sobriety. | ||
I suffered, and Fred suffered from anxiety our whole careers. | ||
Every day, 200, 300 people are coming for dinner. | ||
unidentified
|
Painful. | |
It's always there in my head. | ||
unidentified
|
It's crippling. | |
Is there staff? | ||
There's 300 people coming. | ||
It never goes away. | ||
There's always people coming for dinner. | ||
Are they happy? | ||
I'm throwing 400 people every night. | ||
But when I was drinking, that would just keep the stress going. | ||
Now I'm fine. | ||
It's gone. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
There's this magic number. | ||
I kept on hearing in rehab, and I kept on hearing through therapy. | ||
Four months? | ||
16 weeks, man. | ||
16 weeks. | ||
I was like, yeah, shut up, fuck. | ||
You know, what's this fucking guy who's always telling me about these 16 weeks? | ||
They're like, 16 weeks, man. | ||
Watch 16 weeks. | ||
The morning, 16 weeks. | ||
That morning. | ||
I woke up that morning and my phone said, oh, 16 weeks. | ||
And I had this peace and this joy and this childhood... | ||
Innocence that I hadn't had in years on the day, 16 weeks. | ||
Not because I'd been premeditating in my head and I was looking forward to the 16 weeks. | ||
I didn't believe in it. | ||
But it was literally 16 weeks of sobriety that brought this I was clear. | ||
The drain is clogged. | ||
No problem. | ||
I'll be there in half an hour. | ||
Yeah. | ||
As it should be. | ||
The fridges don't work. | ||
The lights are out in the restaurant and five tables are unhappy. | ||
I'm coming down. | ||
Do you think that some of the anxiety was just your body responding to the fact that you were poisoning it all the time? | ||
I also think it's the psyche creating reasons for you to drink. | ||
Your mind is telling you, you're stressed. | ||
I have a quick remedy for it. | ||
Why don't you try drinking? | ||
When you feel this way, usually what's your go-to? | ||
I'd be like, I could taste sometimes when I'd fall into stressful situations at the restaurant, three tables I don't like, a couple of criminal elements behaving badly at one table. | ||
Maybe on the border of lacking respect to their waitress, I might have to get involved, and I could almost taste Chardonnay in my salivary glands. | ||
Yeah, your brain still plays the trick on you. | ||
My brain was making me high before the high. | ||
I was like, why do I taste Chardonnay? | ||
I think it's the same with sugar addiction too, where people eat sugar, lots of carbs, mostly carbs. | ||
Then you're like, oh man, I have to go for three hours without eating. | ||
I have to bring something sweet with me because I'm going to get shaky. | ||
It's like you're feeding basically. | ||
I don't know if it's your gut biome that changes, but you're feeding a monster inside of you. | ||
You're not feeding Fred or David. | ||
You're like feeding something else, you know? | ||
Like you're planning a weekend at the cottage. | ||
You're like, the kids are going to be loud. | ||
I'm going to have to bring like two more bottles of wine, you know? | ||
And I have to make sure that the wine is cold and have to make sure we have that. | ||
Or like you have to, you know, I have friends like that. | ||
I have to make sure I have like four granola bars because I have to eat all the time. | ||
And you know that. | ||
If you don't have breakfast, you have like a quick coffee. | ||
You can go till like four or five in the afternoon and not shaking and getting cold and sweaty, you know? | ||
Especially if you have a good, healthy diet. | ||
If your body's not sugar-dependent. | ||
I think it's funny, eh? | ||
Every time... | ||
You know, sometimes we fall off the wagon and stuff. | ||
And I was pretty solid for a few years. | ||
I think that two weeks of drinking more water, having walks, and not eating ice cream and fries, and two weeks of home-cooked meals and water, cutting down on coffee, because that, too, will fuck with your anxiety, you know? | ||
Sure. | ||
We know this, too, like both of us. | ||
So many diseases are based simply on overconsumption. | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
Yeah. | ||
Just period. | ||
Overconsumption of cigarettes, overconsumption of alcohol, overconsumption of sugar, overconsumption of meat, carbs. | ||
Restriction brings clarity. | ||
Yes, and restriction diets are one of the best remedies for people with autoimmune diseases. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
Yeah. | ||
They cut down almost everything. | ||
One of the things that people are doing today that's very popular, but I keep talking about this, unfortunately, is the carnivore diet. | ||
Because Jordan Peterson made it very popular when he was on the podcast. | ||
It's really fascinating. | ||
There's a spike. | ||
If you look at the Google search results for carnivore diet, it's July of 2018. It goes like this. | ||
Takes off because that's the day that Jordan was on the podcast. | ||
So he's on the podcast, you know... | ||
Whatever amount of millions of people listened and watched it. | ||
Steak, salt, and water. | ||
Because of his ranting and raving about the positive benefits that he's experienced. | ||
On the carnivore diet, people really got into it. | ||
I got into it as well. | ||
What is it about this? | ||
I started consulting a lot of actual nutrition experts and scientists. | ||
What they believe is what's going on is calorie restriction. | ||
Because of the fact that Jordan is only eating steak with salt and drinking water. | ||
That is all he's consuming and he feels fantastic. | ||
And not lean steak. | ||
unidentified
|
Real steak. | |
Yes, fatty. | ||
So then you can't eat too much because you have the fat. | ||
You're feeling full. | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
That fat is important. | ||
Yeah, and because of this, quite a few autoimmune issues that he had went away. | ||
He was having receding gums. | ||
That went away. | ||
He was having severe depression and anxiety and all these different issues. | ||
That went away. | ||
Lost a tremendous amount of weight. | ||
His body leaned up. | ||
And the scientists that I've talked about... | ||
You know, this is a very new thing for people to embark on this and do it on a mass scale because there's quite a few people doing it. | ||
What they're attributing it to is the calorie restriction, is that because of the fact that you really can't eat that much steak, if you eat a steak, you know, it might be a thousand calories, whereas if you eat a full, big, Thick steak, lots of fat. | ||
1,000 calories of steak is a lot of steak. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
But, I mean, he might be eating two of those in a day, whereas if you're eating french fries and soda, you're getting way more than that. | ||
What do you think an 18-ounce ribeye is, if you had a guess, calorically? | ||
11? | ||
18? | ||
600? | ||
800? | ||
Depends if you have like the end of the rack. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay, so let's just get crazy and let's call it 700. It's probably like 1700 calories a day. | |
Yeah. | ||
Because he's not putting cream in the coffee. | ||
He's not having a... | ||
Seven to nothing. | ||
Water and steak. | ||
When I started eating no gluten, right? | ||
It's fully diagnosed, right? | ||
I'm not making this up. | ||
I stopped eating gluten. | ||
He gets flack every day. | ||
What does that mean? | ||
Everybody gets crazy about the gluten thing. | ||
No, he is. | ||
They don't want to hear it. | ||
People don't want to hear it. | ||
We don't want to hear it. | ||
I sit. | ||
But what does it mean? | ||
I don't eat gluten. | ||
Smoking cigarettes. | ||
unidentified
|
Smoking cigarettes. | |
But what does it mean, no gluten? | ||
It means that you don't go to... | ||
No drive-thru. | ||
No slip. | ||
Right. | ||
There's no... | ||
There's no options out there in the fast food world. | ||
So I have to plan my day. | ||
So I'll eat a piece of meat for breakfast or eggs or whatever, and then I won't eat until I show up at work or at home later and eat. | ||
So it's what you've excluded that counts. | ||
It's not that the steak is so good for you. | ||
It's that you're not eating all this processed food anymore because you can't eat it anymore. | ||
That's what the scientists are saying. | ||
But the people that are pro-meat, it's really fascinating because they're just as culty as the vegans are. | ||
The people that are the real pro-carnivore diets, they want you to think that it's the meat that's healing them, the meat that's helping them, the meat that's making them lean. | ||
Well, it's not hurting you. | ||
I mean, it's nutritious. | ||
I mean, there's a lot of real nutrients in red meat. | ||
And this is also a problem with a lot of studies that people have A lot of vegans love to cite about heart attacks, strokes, cancer in relationship to meat. | ||
These epidemiology studies, they're essentially saying, look, when you look at people that eat meat five days a week, these are the people that have higher instances of cancer, higher instances of diabetes, all these different things. | ||
What they're not taking into consideration is they're not just eating meat. | ||
They're usually eating a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, and there's all this sugar. | ||
Two gimlets before dinner. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's bullshit that's involved with the meat. | ||
There's not any studies that show that people who eat a grass-fed... | ||
Only meat and water. | ||
Yeah, a 12-ounce grass-fed steak with a good plate of sautéed spinach and olive oil and garlic that these people are getting cancer. | ||
There's no doubt on that. | ||
There's nothing. | ||
You can't make a nutritional study. | ||
It's impossible. | ||
People fundamentally lie. | ||
So you cannot have people, you cannot say, like, this is cocoa fat and beef tenderloin, I'm gonna give you a weak portion, you go home, then you come to report, we do blood tests. | ||
You get anecdotal evidence from people that talk about their own personal diet, but yeah, it's very difficult. | ||
And it's also... | ||
Very ideologically based. | ||
I mean, whether it's on one side with the vegans or the other side with the carnivore diet people, I find the same psychological characteristics in both groups. | ||
They want to convert people, they want to proselytize, they want people to think that their way is the right way, and they are not honest about health issues that they're having. | ||
You should make like a... | ||
A conference on a deserted island, you know, in a rich man's castle, like a Bruce Lee movie, and you invite the vegans on one side and you don't tell them you're also inviting the other, you know? | ||
And then both groups, you just have like a kumite. | ||
Well, both groups think the other group is going to drop dead any second now. | ||
The proof is in the pudding. | ||
If somebody is on your podcast to talk about eating meat, he's alive and he's not dead, so it works. | ||
You know, like, why look any further? | ||
Well, who knows how long they're gonna last. | ||
Well, none of us are getting out of this alive. | ||
No, that's for sure. | ||
When it comes to meat, do you guys prefer a grass-fed beef, or do you like corn-fed? | ||
Because I had this discussion with Tony, and he was telling me that he actually liked corn-fed beef. | ||
He's like, it's a fattier... | ||
There's two schools of thought, and then there's two schools of what is quality beef. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
So... | ||
One school will say, yeah, quality beef is an organic animal, pasture-raised, eating grass, the flavor's different, it's not as tender, but it is high-quality beef. | ||
Okay, then the other, of course, is, you know, a cow, USDA Prime, corn-fed, incredible marbling, ridiculous fat content, restricted motion. | ||
I'd say a lesser quality beef than the other. | ||
But they all start grass-fed, though. | ||
Eating-wise... | ||
They're all pastured at first. | ||
Eating-wise, pound for pound, the corn-fed steak will be more delicious for some people. | ||
And then for some people, the other one will be. | ||
In my mind, the grass-fed, organic, pasture beef with its different flavor, for me, is a higher quality animal. | ||
I prefer that taste. | ||
Correct. | ||
I feel it's a richer taste. | ||
It's a denser, darker meat. | ||
More of that iron taste. | ||
Yeah, I just like it better. | ||
And I do like a corn-fed steak. | ||
I do like it. | ||
But there is. | ||
And the general public, the steak-eating public that come to restaurants and counter more corn-fed beef, and their first... | ||
Judge of character to the quality of that meat is... | ||
Marbling. | ||
It's tenderness. | ||
It's marbling. | ||
It's not tender. | ||
It's not tender. | ||
That's the reoccurring thing that we fight with every day at Joe Beef. | ||
Juicy and tender. | ||
Just eat a 16-ounce foie gras. | ||
I know. | ||
Because they just want tender. | ||
I know. | ||
I mean, what are they looking for? | ||
unidentified
|
Tender. | |
It's not tender. | ||
Don't your teeth work? | ||
When we get a steak sent back, it'll be because... | ||
It's too tough? | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
I usually go to this steakhouse and it's more tender. | ||
Because you're serving a grass-fed steak. | ||
Serving a grass-fed steak that's not as marbled as it's non-organic. | ||
Well, it's an animal that's healthy. | ||
But you can also have... | ||
It's an upgrade file. | ||
It's like the natural wine versus conventional wine fight that we're having. | ||
Yeah, but it's also... | ||
We're calling it binary. | ||
Now it's like it's only corn or it's only grass. | ||
No, I think the solution is maybe a little bit of corn, a little bit of barley, but mostly grass-fed. | ||
A brief finish in quality grains. | ||
Why not? | ||
And then there's a whole other point. | ||
Not giant feedlot. | ||
I like to sell beef in my restaurant that comes from very close to my restaurant. | ||
When we opened Joe Beef at the beginning, when the first book was written... | ||
Beef was a problem back then. | ||
You know, local beef was kind of difficult. | ||
And, you know, we were buying beef from larger wholesalers. | ||
And if we didn't know how to read the barcodes on the boxes, they would say it was Canadian beef. | ||
But it might not be Canadian beef. | ||
It might be Northern USA beef. | ||
But we didn't know because only a professional could read the barcode. | ||
But they were saying it was Canadian. | ||
But one day I had a professional come into the restaurant and he said, Investiture is in Canada, but this is from Western Australia. | ||
And I said, I don't want to serve anything in my restaurant from Western Australia. | ||
That's super far. | ||
Like, you know, just like remove beef from the menu or seek alternatives. | ||
But it's a business that's complex because there's pastures and feedlots, slaughterhouse and packers. | ||
Right? | ||
And it's not like we have lambs. | ||
Get a baby lamb that come from the parents' lamb and then they raise the lamb and they bring it to the slaughterhouse themselves and then we get a lamb. | ||
Beef is like tracing bourbons, you know? | ||
It's like trading and brokerage and stuff and we're not... | ||
It's the most sketchy item on a restaurant menu. | ||
Like, I know that I bought lamb from you and I know I bought rabbit from, you know... | ||
Beatrice. | ||
And I know I got goat cheese from this family. | ||
And all of the products in my restaurant, I know exactly. | ||
The farm, the farmer, beef is always dicey because beef always goes to the packer. | ||
Beef always goes to the distributor. | ||
And the general public only really eats two cuts of beef in restaurants. | ||
You know, three cuts. | ||
The tenderloin, the... | ||
What do you call it in English? | ||
The entrecote? | ||
Yeah, the loins. | ||
The loins and the ribs, right? | ||
That's what people eat. | ||
And the hamburgers. | ||
Beefs are not that, you know? | ||
There's two big humps, and there's two big shoulders, and there's a lot of braise. | ||
So... | ||
You know, it's difficult. | ||
Did you guys see that documentary on steak? | ||
Yeah, we were in it. | ||
We were in it. | ||
That's right. | ||
You were in it, right. | ||
What did you think of that? | ||
Their conclusions? | ||
What was the conclusion? | ||
Well, basically we're saying that Peter Luger's Steakhouse in Brooklyn is the greatest steak in the world. | ||
USDA, Prime, Corn Fed. | ||
For taste, maybe. | ||
It's a good restaurant. | ||
Good story, good history, great restaurant. | ||
I ate there just a few months ago. | ||
It was very good. | ||
Yeah, very good. | ||
But again, it's a subjective thing, right? | ||
Correct. | ||
The flavor in terms of what you actually look for. | ||
As they were talking about, like your customer was saying, they're accustomed to a certain type of meat. | ||
They were saying that their customers are accustomed to this. | ||
They're not interested in grass-fed anything. | ||
But I understand that. | ||
Yeah, they've been doing that for a long time and grading that beef that way, and I don't think they should change ever, not based on anything, right? | ||
Well, it's a great place where you get consistency. | ||
I mean, you go there, you get this fantastic steak. | ||
I mean, it's so old-worldy, too, when you get in there. | ||
I mean, how long has Peter Luger's been around for? | ||
God, forever. | ||
Forever, yeah. | ||
120 years? | ||
Something insane like that. | ||
Moishe's is like that in Montreal. | ||
It's a very old steak restaurant. | ||
Moishe's is a famous restaurant in Montreal, and they do have their beef program, and they should not change because there's new conversations happening. | ||
He knows what he's doing, Lenny Leiter, and he should keep on doing that. | ||
In a small restaurant, let's say that Fred, marginal characters like Fred and I own, I always see it like... | ||
Those restaurants maybe are public places. | ||
My restaurant is my restaurant, of which I want to do what I want in. | ||
We don't listen so much to the public. | ||
I serve at my pleasure. | ||
It's not the customer's always right. | ||
It's the customer's often wrong, and I'm always right. | ||
unidentified
|
Because we can do salmon, chicken breast, and tender one. | |
I serve the food we want to, and I serve the wines we want to, and if you don't like it, you don't have to come. | ||
But this restaurant is for us. | ||
Well, that's one of the things that I learned from watching Bourdain's original show, the No Reservation show, that it changed my opinion on things. | ||
Because I didn't have a strong opinion on food before that, other than I really liked it. | ||
I didn't think of it as an art form and watching his show and seeing the passion, his appreciation for food and for the way it's grown and brought to table and the production of it and then ultimately the flavor of it and the taste and his admiration for chefs and you guys as well. | ||
His admiration for it and his appreciation for the way everything's put together made me realize, oh, this is an art form. | ||
It's a craft. | ||
And, you know, Tony did something. | ||
Tony was the most faithful, most, like, we were so lucky to be on that ship with him, you know, that he took us aboard. | ||
He had the same apprenticeship we did, you know, like suffering and like big bistro kitchens and stuff. | ||
And you think about it. | ||
The guy, he didn't make the promise to himself that when he'd get rich and famous, he was going to buy a big house and not talk to people. | ||
He helped every cook not walk out of the kitchen and get famous, but get a voice, you know. | ||
Even outside of the television show, the work he did in private is massive. | ||
And not look like a dirty guy that makes the pasta in the back, you know? | ||
All of a sudden, it's like, yeah, the manager in the suit and the owners, but who's the guy in the back, you know? | ||
No, he had appreciation for everybody, and he had a real passion for the process. | ||
And the marginal characters, you know, there's lots of commercial restaurants in the city of Montreal, in any given city that he went to. | ||
He's able to isolate, let's say, the marginal characters in every city that, you know, were... | ||
We're historically bound, kind of. | ||
Fred and I practice a weird faction of French cooking called Cuisine Bourgeois, and only kind of Tony and a handful of other guys could look at what we do and go, huh, those fuckers, they're up to that. | ||
No one's up to that. | ||
He curated his crew. | ||
You guys are into that, really. | ||
He goes, you guys are the only people, like the last of the Mohicans that do this kind of food. | ||
I mean, oh, yeah, no, we can't stop. | ||
We got to keep on. | ||
What a great guy to get it, dude. | ||
Yeah, because nobody does, right? | ||
Nobody understands the rabbit hole we're down. | ||
Tony did. | ||
Yeah, the cognoscenti. | ||
Yeah, he really did deeply influence my appreciation for food, the way I think about it. | ||
And, again... | ||
Treating it as an art form, which I just thought it was just delicious. | ||
I didn't think of it as like, oh, these guys are making temporary art. | ||
They're making art that you're going to enjoy now. | ||
You can't put it on film. | ||
I mean, you can, but you're not going to get it all. | ||
You're just going to want to go out and experience it. | ||
Yeah, ultimately food is, you can't, we go and do like, we're asked to do like demonstrations, you know, you can go on a big stage, 5,000 people to talk about food or make like little crackers with smoked salmon on stage. | ||
Food is not fit for a stage. | ||
Food is for a table for us to enjoy, you know, with a fork, a knife, we talk about it, we go hunting. | ||
That's what food is. | ||
People offer us food shows all the time. | ||
And I mean, I can't, it doesn't work. | ||
It's like, what's the concept? | ||
Well, you guys can be in a pickup truck and you go and visit your suppliers and maybe have a bottle of wine with them after. | ||
I was like, dude, like we worked hard not to copy our like fellow, you know, culinarians. | ||
Yeah, you look at our food and it's like it's ours. | ||
TV producers are out there just like blatantly proposing. | ||
The previous show to you again, you know? | ||
Well, that's one of the things right after Anthony died. | ||
There was some talk about Gordon Ramsay doing some very similar show, and the outcry against it was enormous. | ||
I mean, he was just getting assaulted online. | ||
I mean, it was crazy. | ||
Everybody that I was talking to, our agent who represents us for our book, And she was saying all the big production companies are being berated by people pitching who's going to be the next Tony, right? | ||
You know, I don't want to say that, but one of the characters, and you guys, you could take over. | ||
Yeah, you could do it. | ||
Because you guys, you know the way he went in West Virginia? | ||
And it wasn't like Republican, Democrat, like he went to places and he's like, yeah, sure, I have my views, but let's break bread, you know? | ||
And I always said that, that like all our countries are divided on issues, but there's nobody that overlaps them with a coherent vision. | ||
Everybody loves each other when there's delicious food on the table, man. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And guys like you, with a clear view and a rational and science-based and evidence-based view on things, and like Tony, just have such a voice now in our countries that it's... | ||
I could see you doing a food show. | ||
I love food, but I'll never do a food show. | ||
I just can't imagine. | ||
No, because you ask good questions. | ||
I like doing shows. | ||
I mean, I love having guys like you on and talking about food. | ||
It takes a special type of person to want to travel 300 days a year. | ||
And that's essentially what Tony was doing. | ||
And I think that has a massive toll. | ||
It takes a massive toll on your body. | ||
It takes a massive toll on your psyche. | ||
Your family, everything. | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
It's not healthy. | ||
There's not enough melatonin or like CBD or like... | ||
It cleanses to help you with that. | ||
I travel more than enough already, and I've cut my traveling way back. | ||
I'm down to only 10 UFCs a year now, and I do comedy around that and stand-up comedy, but I consciously make the effort to travel much less because I just don't think it's good. | ||
I just don't think it's good for you. | ||
And also that road life, you know, the drinking and all that other stuff that comes with it, that accentuates all the problems that you have with travel. | ||
And I think that's also one of the things that was dragging Tony down when he would talk about the sadness and the loneliness of being on the road. | ||
I can't help but, from knowing him and partying with him, I can't help but have thought that a lot of that was probably accentuated by the alcohol consumption. | ||
And, you know, you guys could... | ||
Speak to that now that you're clean and you're not experiencing those rugged hangovers every morning. | ||
I was worried for Tony that way. | ||
Just that, you know, that hotel living, planes, trains, and automobiles constantly. | ||
And it wasn't like for a year. | ||
It was like 12 years. | ||
It's a sad life to watch River Monsters at 11 in the morning burping Jameson. | ||
And I'm referring to many occasions in our lives where you're traveling in a hotel room and You're in a beautiful place, but, like, it just... | ||
You feel weird. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Yeah, I've taken steps to mitigate some of that. | ||
One of the big ones is I travel with friends. | ||
I bring really good comics to work with me on the road so that when I'm in these cities, I'm in these cities with friends, and we just go. | ||
It's like they're family, so we go, we'll go eat together, we'll go work out together, you know, and try to keep the unhealthy shit to a minimum. | ||
Plus, I'm more of a marijuana enthusiast than I am a drinker anyway. | ||
It's legal in Quebec now. | ||
We have stores. | ||
Yes, the entire country. | ||
Canada is way ahead of America there. | ||
Quebec, as usual, we got a little bit of special treatment. | ||
Yeah? | ||
Does it have to be in French? | ||
On top of it, yeah. | ||
You can't grow. | ||
What do you call it? | ||
Cannabis. | ||
Cannabis. | ||
You can't grow. | ||
Can't grow. | ||
No, and you have to only consume the government's... | ||
People are going to grow anyway. | ||
I'm not worried about that. | ||
The government stash. | ||
So you know what they did, right? | ||
Yeah, it's like, you know, we have a Monopoly Liquor Board. | ||
So we have like stores. | ||
Liquor Commission. | ||
Liquor Commission. | ||
Now we have the Cannabis Commission. | ||
So what they did, it got legal on October 17th at midnight. | ||
The stores were opening October 17th at 10 in the morning. | ||
The cops were giving tickets to people smoking weed during that little layover time because they knew that it was impossible. | ||
They bought it legally. | ||
So some people got ticketed for smoking illegal weed. | ||
In the lineup waiting for legal weed. | ||
Oh, God. | ||
What a bunch of assholes. | ||
We just drank the Kool-Aid on that one, I think. | ||
Fuck. | ||
unidentified
|
That's good. | |
We'll put more money into Medicare. | ||
Well, I think it'll ultimately lead to a relaxing of people's opinions and ideas about marijuana and what it is. | ||
But I also think that marijuana, just like alcohol, can be used as a crutch and it could eventually overcome your life. | ||
I like it, but I like it every now and again. | ||
And one of the things that came out of last year's Sober October was taking a whole month off of it, realizing that, A, I don't need it, I can function fine without it, but it made me more apprehensive about regular use. | ||
Like, instead of using it every day, I'll use it a day a week or two days a week or something like that. | ||
And I appreciate it more when it does happen. | ||
When I do get high with my friends on Friday night or something like that, it's like it means something. | ||
It's almost like a sacrament We're experiencing a little moment together and just having fun. | ||
That's the proof, though. | ||
What you just said is the proof that you don't have addiction issues, you see. | ||
I couldn't be able to prove that I smoked marijuana responsibly once in my life, that I drank alcohol once in my life, that I did drugs responsibly. | ||
I'm fascinated. | ||
I brought some of our cooks that were here in L.A. with us to a restaurant. | ||
And we had a beautiful dinner and I ordered them a bottle of wine and they barely finished it and I didn't understand. | ||
The first and only bottle of wine. | ||
I was like... | ||
Do you guys want more? | ||
I was like, I would have paid for nine. | ||
Right. | ||
And they had one, and I was just sitting there. | ||
I told Fred, I go, I don't really... | ||
What is it like to be in that environment and watching people glass over? | ||
Like, see the booze hit them? | ||
They don't get drunk. | ||
We say that all the time. | ||
We used to think that everybody was smashed. | ||
No. | ||
It was only me. | ||
It's like the beer goggles. | ||
Right. | ||
You just thought you were in it with everybody else. | ||
I realize now that everybody at the restaurants, generally, like 9 out of 10 times, drink quite responsibly. | ||
Well, they must. | ||
Otherwise, it would be just accidents everywhere and violence everywhere you turn. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I realize a lot of the people that I'm friends with drink responsibly. | ||
They can have a glass of wine with lunch. | ||
Me and Fred opened a bottle of wine at lunch. | ||
We'd go till 10.30 till we couldn't anymore and then that was it. | ||
Last time we came to LA, we did Hell's Kitchen. | ||
We're a judge for a show on ostriches. | ||
It was disgusting. | ||
Ostriches? | ||
I've had an ostrich burger before. | ||
Fuddruckers serves an ostrich burger. | ||
It's actually delicious. | ||
It's really bloody, right? | ||
And there's that thing for cooking shows like that. | ||
It's regulated by the Gaming Commission. | ||
So they have to keep the camera rolling and they're not allowed to touch the dishes because they're the object of the competition. | ||
So you take your break, you go to the green room, you wait, they're cleaning up the kitchen. | ||
Now the food sits on the pass there, like for two hours. | ||
And you come back, you sit at a table and there's like rare ostrich, tenderloin. | ||
That's been sitting for two hours? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Two hours post-cook? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That's ridiculous. | ||
And you have to like... | ||
Judge. | ||
Wait a minute. | ||
You're judging food that was cooked two hours ago? | ||
TV. That's so fucking stupid. | ||
And I felt like, again... | ||
That's insulting. | ||
For guys like you? | ||
No, but the thing is, I felt so bad because there's people who put a job on hold. | ||
They left their kids at home. | ||
I made it. | ||
I'm in the casting. | ||
I was selected to be part of Hell Kitchen. | ||
And then... | ||
We say something and then... | ||
You know Gordon's gonna hate us right now, right? | ||
No, the show's great. | ||
unidentified
|
But I felt like I felt sad. | |
But all that to say that whenever we came, we stayed by the airport, you know? | ||
We stayed at the... | ||
Just so you can get out of there quick? | ||
unidentified
|
Frozen margaritas at the hotel bar, man. | |
11 o'clock, we're in the whirlpool at the Radisson Hotel. | ||
It's sad, man. | ||
Having cocktails at the Encounters. | ||
That hotel life can be fucking sad, man. | ||
I know. | ||
I get it. | ||
And now we're completely not drinking. | ||
They got us a room and we're staying at the Chateau. | ||
I never thought I'd stay there. | ||
I would really love to get drunk at the Chateau Marmont, though. | ||
You did once, but not this time. | ||
Yeah, that's like a spot. | ||
You know, I've been here forever. | ||
I've never even gone in that building. | ||
It's beautiful. | ||
Maybe I did once. | ||
I think I was there once for a TV thing that I had to do, one of those party things in the 90s. | ||
I think I went once. | ||
It's funny because there's really B-list Hollywood stars hanging out at the pool, drinking champagne cocktails, trying to be cool, smoking blunts and trying to pick up girls. | ||
That's where Tony used to stay. | ||
He used to get a villa there. | ||
When he was writing, he used to stay there. | ||
He told me he loved it. | ||
He just loved everything about the feel of it, the whole dirtiness of it. | ||
We stayed at the Raleigh Hotel with him in Miami. | ||
He loved that place, too. | ||
He likes dirty spots. | ||
The Raleigh was fun. | ||
That's how Tony was. | ||
He's like, guys, I like old food like you do. | ||
What if we do a dinner based on old transatlantic ship boats, dining room? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So we say, oh yeah, sure. | ||
He gets Eric repaired, Daniel Balu, a bunch of guys. | ||
He's like, oh, I'll put you up at the Raleigh. | ||
We're just going to do that one dinner, but we're just going to hang out for a week after, you know? | ||
And we're in the pool. | ||
The pool every day. | ||
Sneaking cigarettes. | ||
Otavia was like there with the kid in a rash guard all the time. | ||
We went to Cyborg, Roberto Abru. | ||
We went to school there, and I was just like starting. | ||
Fucking killer. | ||
Yeah, he's a monster. | ||
How long have you been doing jiu-jitsu now? | ||
I did it for a year solid and I stopped because I had a back surgery. | ||
Oh, discs? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
What's going on? | ||
It's totally fixed, but I keep surgery. | ||
What did you have wrong? | ||
It was stenosis. | ||
Stenosis, so shortening of the disc? | ||
Yeah, and then compression and then they went in and chipped some parts out. | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
In retrospect, I spoke to some rheumatologists, and it's interesting you're talking about, like, Jordan Peterson, because the autoimmune thing can be everywhere, right? | ||
And now my doctor says, like, maybe celiac caused inflammation in so many places. | ||
That's what I would say. | ||
And all that, like, maybe the drinking, too, like this inclination towards abuse, you know, this inclination towards depression, this... | ||
You know, back problem. | ||
It's all related to that. | ||
And again, the proof is in the pudding. | ||
I don't eat bread. | ||
I don't eat sweets. | ||
Very little. | ||
I eat mostly meat. | ||
And I feel 100 times better. | ||
I don't give a fuck if it's in my head or not. | ||
Fred's also sober now. | ||
Four months? | ||
Five months, yeah. | ||
Five months. | ||
unidentified
|
So it works. | |
I don't think that it's in your head. | ||
It's definitely been proven that all those foods cause inflammation. | ||
But I do think that jujitsu in particular is ruthless on your back. | ||
Because of the torsions. | ||
Well, it's just big people on top of you. | ||
You're yanking them around. | ||
You're moving your back. | ||
And very few people strengthen their back. | ||
That's a big issue. | ||
And after we're done here, I'm going to take you into my gym and I'm going to show you some machines that I bought specifically to strengthen my back. | ||
I've had some disc issues too, and the doctors are pretty adamant about putting me under the knife. | ||
And I... I just didn't like the idea of it. | ||
I've had many surgeries. | ||
I've had both my knees reconstructed. | ||
I know when you need surgery and when you don't. | ||
And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that there's doctors that they have a hammer, so everything is a nail. | ||
Like, oh, that's a nail. | ||
Let me just fucking whack that thing. | ||
They're not like, oh, you're going to have to change your diet. | ||
You're going to have to lose some weight. | ||
You're going to have to strengthen all those muscles around your back. | ||
And if you do do that, I find that the results are superior in many cases. | ||
Yeah, it's a combination. | ||
Like, yoga works wonderfully for that. | ||
Fantastic. | ||
Yoga. | ||
Decompression of the spine is critical. | ||
Because you're always compressing. | ||
You're always like, well, these chairs we're sitting in. | ||
These are chairs from a company called Fully, and they're called Capisco's, and these are ergonomic chairs. | ||
You notice we've been sitting in this place. | ||
It's two and a half hours in the podcast now. | ||
Wow. | ||
Comfortable, beautiful chair. | ||
They feel good too. | ||
They're comfortable. | ||
So I knew there was a solution. | ||
Had to find a solution. | ||
Luckily this company contacted me and sent us these chairs. | ||
This is what we needed. | ||
I tried a fucking shitload of chairs before that. | ||
But it was the same thing with exercises. | ||
I knew there was a solution. | ||
I had to figure out what it was. | ||
I tried decompression. | ||
I tried a bunch of different forms of decompression. | ||
I figured out the best ones. | ||
You know, I have those... | ||
Those things where you hang by your ankles. | ||
What the fuck is the name of that company? | ||
Hooks? | ||
No. | ||
The Upside Down thing? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Goddammit, they're a sponsor of the podcast. | ||
Sex Swings? | ||
Teeter. | ||
Teeter. | ||
Teeter makes those, like, just relaxing in those. | ||
We have one back there. | ||
You clamp your ankles in, just let that back just stretch out. | ||
And then there's a bunch of different exercises that I do with yoga that stretch your back out as well. | ||
We're in a constant state of compression, right? | ||
Constant gravity, constant pushing you down. | ||
And a guy like me, I'm always lifting weights too. | ||
So I've got these heavy kettlebells and everything's compression and I'm pushing up and... | ||
You've got to spend as much time lengthening as you do pushing down. | ||
And you also have to stretch everything out because the more your hamstrings are tight, it's going to pull down on your back. | ||
A lot of people that have back pains, it's connected to having tight hamstrings. | ||
A theory, too, that a lot of things starts in school. | ||
Because you look at kids. | ||
I have two boys and one daughter, Henry, Ivan, and Eleanor. | ||
Five, seven, nine. | ||
They can do monkey bars, pull-ups, muscle-ups. | ||
They do judo. | ||
They play hockey. | ||
They're very active. | ||
But school, the way that physically a classroom is designed, is wrong. | ||
It's like putting them in a cast for the next 15 years. | ||
And then they're going to come out of high school, like I was, unable to climb a rope, unable to do monkey bars, unable to do anything. | ||
And then they're going to go to more school and sit down for more times. | ||
They don't get enough physical activity. | ||
Not even close. | ||
Not even the education towards it, not even the education of nutrition. | ||
And they get... | ||
We're graded and evaluated on how well they listen in gym class, which is completely insane. | ||
Yeah, it really is. | ||
I mean, it's just making them sit down for all that time during the day. | ||
We're just preparing them for some job that's going to be unnatural in the first place. | ||
Making good little taxpayers. | ||
And look at it too. | ||
This is a model of school that was based on like religious schools, you know, and like old Catholic schools, let's say in Quebec. | ||
How did you keep them from like being distracted? | ||
You know, the ruler and the fingers, you go to the corner, the leather strap. | ||
Now we haven't changed the classroom, the schedule and the curriculum barely, but there's no more straps. | ||
So like, okay, we haven't changed anything. | ||
Like, it's normal that particularly little boys don't listen in school that well. | ||
We have to find a way. | ||
We have to redesign school from, like, the schedule, the design of the classroom, the hallways, the introduction. | ||
You know, like, we have to bring restaurants back into school, like cafeteria and all that. | ||
No, but, like, cafeterias. | ||
And... | ||
I don't know if it's you that talked with Jeff Bridges about that because he's in the like school lunches thing. | ||
And the problem with school lunches is that if you subsidize half the kids, then you have a kid with like a badge here that says like poor, you know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So the only way to do that, and I know some people are a bit anti-socialist, but you have to feed all the kids. | ||
It's like crucial. | ||
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
I mean, the idea that that's a problem. | ||
I mean, Jesus Christ, we're talking about food and also the sense of community that's established when everybody eats together. | ||
You're going to create this rift between students where you establish that one student is poorer than the other one. | ||
So it's going to fuck them up already. | ||
You know, it's going to already make them insecure. | ||
Unless you have the labor force with the kids. | ||
Not to say that we're going to make the kids work, but it's going to be a learning experience and people can take their turns preparing family meals inside of the school system. | ||
It's a valuable tool. | ||
And if it was done and handled with respect and appreciation, if they had classes perhaps that showed how important food is. | ||
I mean, maybe even show an episode of No Reservations or Parts Unknown and show how people can appreciate food. | ||
What food really is, and then how great it would be. | ||
I mean, and also, it would open their eyes to the possibility of food as a career, of getting into the same position that you guys are in. | ||
I mean, this is something that's never discussed. | ||
I mean, when was the last time a kid was encouraged to become a chef? | ||
It's like a stand-up comedian. | ||
You know, you never get encouraged to become a stand-up comedian. | ||
They just call you a fuck-up and try to put you on drugs. | ||
It never comes out when they do the survey. | ||
You know, 90% of our labor force inside the restaurants is... | ||
Anybody who cooks inside the restaurants... | ||
As someone who didn't work inside the traditional school system, we employ dropouts. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But brilliant. | ||
There's brilliant people on the team. | ||
The school system did not work for them. | ||
Well, that's the same thing with both of my jobs, whether it's the UFC or whether it's stand-up comedy. | ||
Everyone that I'm close with is a fuck-up in the traditional sense. | ||
None of us fit in. | ||
There's very few people that get into stand-up comedy that were thriving in some other career. | ||
Most of us were extremely frustrated with traditional environments, and most of us didn't do well in school because we felt confined and just couldn't wait to get... | ||
I used to have nightmares about going back to school. | ||
Did you have ADD as a child? | ||
I'm sure I got it all. | ||
Whatever the fuck it is. | ||
Whatever it is that gives you energy, that makes you better at stuff, I got that. | ||
They'll call it a bad thing and say, like, you can't concentrate. | ||
Well, I'm fucking bored. | ||
You have to harness it, not treat it. | ||
Right, but give me something that I can concentrate on. | ||
Give me something that I actually enjoy. | ||
I got a lot of energy. | ||
It's not that there's something wrong with me. | ||
It's that I have no interest in what they're selling. | ||
And it's being sold by some underpaid, under-motivated person who really is just following some sort of a curriculum and they have to do that because they want to keep their job. | ||
This is what kids are being subjected to all across the world in the most fertile time of their life in terms of their imagination, their creativity, and their free time. | ||
Frontal cortex is a sponge. | ||
They're ready to take everything. | ||
No one would ever say to some kid who's cracking jokes in class and running around being a fool, no one would ever say, hey, you ever thought about being a comedian? | ||
No one says that. | ||
It just never comes up. | ||
But meanwhile, everybody loves comedians. | ||
People love to go see comedy. | ||
But nobody ever says to some fuck-up kid, hey, man, you might be a comic. | ||
It just doesn't come up. | ||
They'll do the test and like David was supposed to be a travel agent. | ||
I was. | ||
I was supposed to be a golf pro. | ||
Is this something in Canada? | ||
You were supposed to be a golf pro? | ||
Are you really good at golf? | ||
No. | ||
And then according to the questionnaire and one of my friends who flies planes was supposed I think to be a folly artist, make sounds of horses with coconuts and stuff. | ||
For movies? | ||
Yeah, that's what they told them after the questionnaire. | ||
What the fuck kind of questionnaire do you guys have in Canada? | ||
The success of Restaurant though, you have to think though, is due to a lot of very sad people that have gone through the academic process. | ||
I have a disproportionate amount of lawyers and professionals and people who wear suits that love to come to the restaurant and drink wine and let the dogs stop barking inside their heads because they're really fucking miserable. | ||
You know, when you spent your whole day in the 72nd floor of the IBM tower downtown in your cubicle punching data into graphs and taking a licking from your boss who's also a suit. | ||
Just a constant. | ||
You can't wait to get to Joe Beef and, you know, relax. | ||
It's like the Michael Douglas movie there. | ||
Enough? | ||
Oh, what was that called? | ||
Falling Down. | ||
Falling Down, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
Oh, Enough is with J-Lo. | ||
What is enough? | ||
What does she do? | ||
Jiggly, you mean, no? | ||
No, no, no, no, no. | ||
Enough is the movie with J-Lo where she avenges some ex-boyfriend that traumatizes her. | ||
It's great. | ||
I love those movies. | ||
What? | ||
Okay, there's something about airplanes. | ||
I don't know if the altitude in the plane... | ||
Stupid movies are great when you're in the sky. | ||
The last two days I discovered he's quite the movie buff. | ||
Yeah, he loves Notting Hill. | ||
He was like, that's a beautiful movie. | ||
I was like, what? | ||
I don't even know what that's about. | ||
What's Notting Hill about? | ||
That's a movie with you, Grant. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, Christ. | |
I wouldn't... | ||
I can't remember what it's about. | ||
You know what I love, too? | ||
unidentified
|
What? | |
I love the night at the Roxbury. | ||
Start drinking again, man. | ||
Something's happening to you. | ||
Notting Hill, Julia Roberts, and Hugh Grant. | ||
unidentified
|
It sucks. | |
We were just... | ||
You know, the chateau is right by the Roxbury, where it was. | ||
And I couldn't wait to just get out of the car, go walk there, take a picture of it, and just, like, try to show... | ||
Like, I sent a picture to everyone. | ||
Nobody reacted. | ||
Dude, it's the Roxbury! | ||
You see? | ||
You saw that movie? | ||
Night at the Roxbury? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, I saw that movie. | ||
And for me to travel there is like... | ||
Did you like that movie? | ||
Did you like that movie? | ||
Yeah, I loved it. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Interesting. | ||
Same reaction. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
What else is your favorite movie? | ||
What? | ||
Alone in the Wilderness, Dick Prenneke. | ||
That's great. | ||
You saw that movie? | ||
The guy that whittles hinges for his house in Alaska? | ||
Joe, that's a must view. | ||
Is it really? | ||
It's like once a year you watch. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Alone in the Wilderness, Dick Prenneke. | ||
Can you bring that up on the thing? | ||
What is that? | ||
unidentified
|
Do you know what this, Jamie? | |
The guy runs away. | ||
Is this a Canadian thing? | ||
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no. | |
No, it's Alaska. | ||
A guy who just moves and lives in the woods for the rest of his life. | ||
Is it like how the French love Jerry Lewis? | ||
No, they play it on Vermont PBS as a fundraiser every year. | ||
Wow! | ||
This is it? | ||
So the guy put a tripod and films himself, and he carves everything you need, hunts everything. | ||
Oh, okay, okay, okay. | ||
I did not know this guy's name. | ||
See, I thought you were talking about a movie. | ||
This is like a documentary, almost. | ||
Self-made. | ||
He literally gets dropped off there with an axe, and then he builds a house, and then he kills a goat, and then, you know? | ||
Yeah, I do remember this guy in interviews that I think I probably saw on YouTube. | ||
But yeah, he builds his own house, and Log cabins and shit. | ||
Yeah, yeah, this guy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's, like, such a beautiful, like... | ||
Did you guys ever see that Vice piece about the guy who lives in the Arctic? | ||
Heinmo's Arctic Adventure? | ||
No. | ||
Fucking amazing, man. | ||
It's a Vice guided travel piece where this guy got a very small cabin in the Arctic in like the 1970s and he's been there since. | ||
The only thing he's ever seen from 9-11 is some photographs. | ||
He had no idea what was happening when it happened. | ||
Does he still love Michael Jackson? | ||
I don't know. | ||
But this is it. | ||
This guy lives alone in Alaska with his wife in the Arctic National Refuge. | ||
And you have to get in with a float plane and he just hunts caribou and lives with his family. | ||
His wife is Inuit and they have children together and children leave and eventually went on to college. | ||
I mean, it's fucking crazy. | ||
One of their kids was two years old, died in a canoe accident. | ||
The canoe fell over and the kid fell into the river. | ||
They revisit the spot at the time of her birthday and it's really intense. | ||
But this guy really believes that people are happier and healthier when they live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. | ||
Caloric restriction. | ||
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
Yeah, I mean, all he does is eat caribou. | ||
I mean, the guy is out there eating caribou, and during the time where they're filming this, his cabin and his caribou stash gets attacked by a grizzly bear, and he shoots the grizzly bear on film. | ||
He chases it down in the night and blasts it. | ||
One of the grizzly bears had eaten one of his dogs. | ||
I mean, this motherfucker's out there living. | ||
But he's a very smart guy. | ||
He's not what you would think. | ||
When you think of someone like this, you think of someone who is some weird kind of inbred half-wit who's living up there. | ||
No, he's very intelligent, very introspective. | ||
Slightly introvert. | ||
Maybe introverted, but he doesn't seem to have a hard time talking to people, so I don't know if he's introverted. | ||
But I mean, he's definitely restricted his access to dialogue. | ||
I mean, he's out there alone in the forest by himself, but he makes a very compelling point that there's a natural... | ||
feeling that he gets from doing this where everything falls into place. | ||
He's constantly getting exercise because he's hiking and chasing after these caribou, but that there's natural human reward systems that are in place in his DNA for hunting and gathering and cooking this food over an open fire and the way he lives. | ||
He just thinks it's the way people really are designed to live. | ||
We're absolutely not meant to live piled on top of each other within, you know, 10 million of us in a square mile on the island of Manhattan, you know, absolutely. | ||
Do you remember when there was the floods in Manhattan? | ||
Yes. | ||
All the money in the world couldn't get you out. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
You had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to leave Manhattan with everybody else. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And there was a real worry because of climate change. | ||
I That was going to be happening every year now. | ||
People were like, is this the new normal? | ||
I remember Shane Smith had some piece on Vice. | ||
Shane had to walk out. | ||
Yeah, Shane had to walk out. | ||
He had some piece on Vice where they were detailing the inside of his apartment building. | ||
The fucking thing was completely flooded, like six feet high in water. | ||
And people were worried. | ||
This is going to be what's happening on a regular basis now. | ||
This... | ||
Climate change thing has changed. | ||
I have a heightened sense of, you know, since three kids, it's something that I think about. | ||
It's something that I have ready, you know? | ||
I bought a generator. | ||
I have... | ||
Yeah. | ||
I check the batteries, the rechargeable batteries, for all of the equipment that I have. | ||
I own solar panels. | ||
I own a duffel bag full of everything that I need to throw in the back of my pickup truck, grab my kids, and I know which way to drive away from the city to go to the cabin. | ||
It's something I've planned just because I'm the ward of these small humans whom I love. | ||
It's funny. | ||
You talked about restriction again. | ||
I'm thinking of preparing. | ||
The most common thing that people prepare is food. | ||
They prepare cans and cans and cans of food. | ||
But still, they eat so much of that food that the best way to prepare... | ||
The best way to prepare would be to start to eat less and learn how to live at 1700 calories, you know? | ||
And learn how to live with the people around you because if you're going to spend like two months in a bunker or in a bug out location or whatever, you're not some like asshole to your kids and your friends and the family and people with you. | ||
One of the things that happens to people, this is really fascinating, when disasters do strike is everyone gets a lot friendlier. | ||
And this is one thing that I've experienced myself this week. | ||
Because when we got evacuated, it was 2.30 in the morning on Thursday, and there was fire, rocks throw from my house. | ||
And I'm not talking a little bit of fire, I'm talking just hundreds of acres of fire. | ||
I mean, it was just roaring over. | ||
We started to see the gas lines explode. | ||
Houses burst into flames. | ||
And it was right down the street. | ||
So we're seeing this. | ||
And, you know, we got outside. | ||
We're in the driveway. | ||
The neighbors come over. | ||
Everyone's talking. | ||
What are you going to do? | ||
I go, we're getting the fuck out of here. | ||
And he's like, have they given the evacuation orders? | ||
I said, no, we haven't. | ||
But I go, it's right there, man. | ||
I go, we got to go. | ||
I go, if we're wrong and we come back and the house is still here, that's okay. | ||
But... | ||
You want to get out of these things quickly because they can turn south quickly. | ||
But there was a sense of camaraderie and community that happens. | ||
And then quite a few of us all went to the same hotel, including my friend Tom Segura and his wife and his family went to this hotel, too, with some of my friends from this neighborhood who were all there huddled in together. | ||
But people were a little extra friendly. | ||
And there was the same kind of feeling after 9-11 when I was in New York City. | ||
There was people a little bit more friendly. | ||
We felt that during the ice storm back in the day. | ||
People were like assessing the street that we live on. | ||
And then they go, well, who's got a wood-burning stove? | ||
And they go, oh, Roger does. | ||
And then people would go to Roger's house. | ||
And all of a sudden, all these neighbors that just wave at each other were all at Roger's house by the wood-burning stove. | ||
Going back to the houses to get blankets, planning sleeping arrangements, planning food arrangements, and assessing each other, giving each other their personal space, and learning how to speak to each other in a respective manner that we might have to do this for several days. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Do the best out of it. | ||
Through tragedy, a sense of community was built somewhat or reinforced for a brief moment in time, which made going back to our regular lives on that street better. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Have you ever read Sebastian Junger's Tribe? | ||
No. | ||
It's a great book, and he kind of talks about that, about how, in part... | ||
Situations of extreme stress and when people are really pushed, those people bond together and they find that these are the happiest times of their life. | ||
People that even go to war, they find that they miss the camaraderie of the bunker. | ||
They miss the camaraderie of being in the trenches. | ||
They miss the camaraderie of being together, huddled up, not knowing what's going to happen in the future, but counting and depending upon each other for their very lives. | ||
That's a thing that happens in very, very, very busy kitchens. | ||
A bunch of no-education guys out of cooking school working a difficult restaurant line. | ||
We're working six guys on six four-burner stoves every night, a difficult menu with a difficult chef. | ||
In a very busy restaurant, those hours, you know, from 6 p.m. | ||
till 10 p.m. | ||
at night... | ||
Like, it's intimate. | ||
It's intimate. | ||
You're bending over to get into the stove to get a chicken out. | ||
I'm grabbing something out of the fridge. | ||
My nose is in your butt. | ||
Your nose is in my butt. | ||
You know, I need your knife. | ||
You need my knife. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's very, very, very close quarters. | ||
Often, like, some of my strongest relationships, some of his strongest relationships are, you know, the bond that I've built with guys that I've cooked on lines, whether in Europe or here, are unbreakable. | ||
You know, these guys got your back. | ||
Tony talked a lot about that, you know. | ||
Yeah, I think people are better off when they're struggling. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I really do. | ||
I mean, I think they're better off when they're, you know, when life creates challenges. | ||
And there's things to overcome, and there's difficulties to get through, and there's real pressure involved in these, and there's physical activity involved in these pressures as well. | ||
Yeah, it's like rowing on the galley. | ||
Yeah. | ||
A centurion and a cat-o'-nine-tails looming over you. | ||
Well, all the years you guys have been in business now, what do you look forward to now? | ||
What keeps you going now? | ||
You have this established restaurant, this amazing menu, and you have fans of your restaurant like myself. | ||
What keeps you going? | ||
Tiny restaurant where David and I cook. | ||
You saw the movie The French Connection? | ||
Yes. | ||
You see when Gene Ackman's on the other side of the road, it's like freezing in New York. | ||
He's in a deli with a piece of pizza and a shitty coffee. | ||
He has little leather shoes on the icy pavement. | ||
And then the French gangsters are in the bistro and they're eating like snails and eclairs and like all the food that comes in the little crockpots on the cart at the table. | ||
If we could open a place like that for like 16 customers that we have the key only, we decide to open whenever we want and we don't lose money. | ||
That's all. | ||
I want to build with Fred a tiny little French restaurant that we... | ||
Do what we want at. | ||
16 seats. | ||
An art project. | ||
Or I can take a four or eight or close it or just a toy to just practice this skill that we've learned all of these years to do this very, very weird, old, forgotten food that's not cool. | ||
But that I adore, you know? | ||
What is in the back of your head that you don't bring to Joe Beef? | ||
Oh, you know, one that everybody would know, but to do a proper lamb wellington served for two people and a little trolley. | ||
To still bring out the 12 cheeses on the little trolley. | ||
To have a trolley just of digestif, you know, after dinner alcohol. | ||
To do crepes tableside. | ||
To do a duck flunk. | ||
Flambe. | ||
For two with orange sauce, table side for two. | ||
You saw with Tony, we went to the Flambe place in Quebec City in the first show, in the first Parts Unknown. | ||
And it was wonderful. | ||
Like, little langoose, flambe. | ||
And, like, there were skills. | ||
Like, we want to be able to, like, this morning we'll do tartare and it'll be mixed table side and that's it. | ||
Or Dover Souls. | ||
To really practice hospitality at the level that it used to be. | ||
Back in the day, to bring out the very old porcelain, very beautiful silver, not ostentatious way, just almost in like a kitschy romantic kind of... | ||
Nostalgic. | ||
Nostalgic sense. | ||
What, you know, to build a restaurant from the 20s, you know? | ||
Do that food. | ||
Handwritten menu, flowers on it, you know, like... | ||
Yeah, the appreciation that you guys have for it is very contagious. | ||
It really is. | ||
Dining is great. | ||
Candlelit dining. | ||
Heavy velvet, woodwork, silver trays, copper. | ||
There's a Hemingway-esque. | ||
Who's the other big guy? | ||
Orson Welles. | ||
Did you ever see those Orson Welles interviews at the Hotel Pierre in Paris? | ||
Those are just brilliant. | ||
You want to just eat yourself to death at Hotel Pierre. | ||
That's kind of what he did, though. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
It's the only way we could build a time travel machine, right? | ||
Like, you read about it. | ||
It's fun. | ||
And you go to a museum when you see, like, silverware from Sunken Ship. | ||
Yeah, it's nice. | ||
But we'll never travel back in time, nor do I want to get polio, you know? | ||
There's great, great benefits to living now and then, now and here, you know? | ||
The art of it. | ||
Yeah, and the beauty of it is like we've grown up watching like This Old House, Victory Garden, all those shows on PBS, right? | ||
We're huge fans. | ||
And the beauty of this is we can build a restaurant like that with our hands. | ||
So it's just a matter of is it this year, is it next year, you know? | ||
Well, yeah, we're doing it now, by the way. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Are you? | ||
Yeah, I bought a farm and he's going to read. | ||
I bought a farm. | ||
unidentified
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I bought Fred a farm for me. | |
That's what the gag is. | ||
Where are you guys going to do it? | ||
I think down in St. Armand there, I bought a little farm right on the Vermont border, but there's a summer kitchen part that has beautiful brick, wood-burning oven situation and... | ||
Big window, an old factory wrought iron window. | ||
The room is just begging to have like three tables of four or three tables of four and a little stove and a zinc bar. | ||
And I don't know. | ||
He's been cracking out. | ||
He's talking about going down there in January and starting to build it. | ||
This is the polar opposite of the theme restaurant in Vegas. | ||
TGIF. Well, not just that, but like the celebrity chef as you're going down the escalator at the airport, there's a giant billboard of this latest chef. | ||
Did you ever hear this story about the Fertitta brothers? | ||
No. | ||
So they called Fred one day and they said, we're coming to Montreal. | ||
We'd love to meet you guys. | ||
I'm like, yeah, okay. | ||
What's going on? | ||
You know, we're not open for lunch. | ||
What year was this? | ||
Last year. | ||
Last year? | ||
After they sold. | ||
I think they bought the palms. | ||
They had all that cash. | ||
It's burning a hole in their pocket. | ||
They're great guys, man. | ||
I love those guys. | ||
Best. | ||
Wonderful. | ||
They get a hold of you? | ||
So they fly privately to the airport in Montreal. | ||
Three Escalades roll into Joe Beef at noon on a Tuesday. | ||
All the boys get out, plus help and the crew that surrounds them. | ||
Assassins. | ||
Yeah, we make a table at 10. We all sit down. | ||
Lorenzo starts off, first, I'd like to let you guys know that Joe Beef is my favorite restaurant. | ||
And I'm like, what? | ||
This dump? | ||
You're Lorenzo Fertitta. | ||
You're all over the world. | ||
You live in Las Vegas. | ||
Everything is at your beck and call. | ||
You live in the... | ||
So that was flattering, you know, and we prepared a little dinner for them, a little lunch, and we talked, and they pitched us to take over one of the rooms in the palms upstairs. | ||
And, of course, it was flattering. | ||
We had a wonderful meeting, but we knew right away as we were having the meeting that that was not for us and it was never going to happen. | ||
We have young children. | ||
We're in a bad place, too, at the time. | ||
It was tough in our life, you know, still drinking, still slept. | ||
Yeah, it was pretty dark, but it was nice and flattering. | ||
And I think Fred moved them on to Mark Vetri, who eventually did the project from Philadelphia. | ||
And in retrospect... | ||
Yeah, it was nice, flattering, but we wouldn't do that. | ||
There's no way we couldn't do Joe Beef anywhere else. | ||
People don't eat. | ||
The dining public doesn't exist unless it's on my street. | ||
Montreal's just such a different place. | ||
The idea is like, before they offered any room there, I said, is there like a decommissioned laundromat in the back that's for employees only? | ||
We said all the wrong things, man. | ||
800 square feet that we can make a five-table French restaurant. | ||
They're pitching us the top floor of the pubs and we're asking for the door next to the garbage container in the alley with no windows. | ||
And they were looking at us like we were insane. | ||
He wanted a five-table French restaurant. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And Lorenzo was looking at his brother and his brother was looking at Lorenzo like, why the fuck did you bring me here? | ||
Did we fucking fly here? | ||
We sent them some books now. | ||
Well, I'm sure they're happy. | ||
It's such a funny way of responding to that. | ||
We want to give you the top floor of the palms in Vegas. | ||
Do you have a fucking 800 square foot room? | ||
In the back alley that nobody can access? | ||
I want to make it so expensive that basketball players think it's too much money? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Well, that would be a very interesting spot, and I'm sure if you did create something like that, or someone did, an unbelievably exclusive spot that literally has 20 seats available in a night, and they only open for one sitting. | ||
Right. | ||
And we want to build the, what's the movie? | ||
The Roxbury? | ||
No, the... | ||
We want to build the French Connection restaurant. | ||
No, the other one with J-Lo. | ||
What's that one? | ||
Jiggly. | ||
Enough. | ||
Ishtar. | ||
Made in Manhattan. | ||
Yeah, I mean, I guarantee if someone did do something like that, particularly because of Vegas, it's all about who you know and who you are. | ||
I mean, if you can get in, you know, you can get into Joe Lamb. | ||
Oh, it's Joe Lamb is in Vegas. | ||
Right behind the garbage container, the leaky one next to the grease trap. | ||
Yeah, girls and their Jimmy Choo's have to step in these puddles of grease. | ||
La Boutin. | ||
Yeah, on their way to the back. | ||
It would, ironically enough, it would be probably the hot spot in Vegas. | ||
I know, Joe. | ||
Lorenzo didn't get it. | ||
Probably wouldn't be very profitable, though. | ||
Right, exactly. | ||
Obviously. | ||
Well, when they took over the Palms, I was excited. | ||
I know that Nine Steakhouse there was excellent. | ||
I haven't been there in years, but that used to be a great place. | ||
But Mark who's there, Mark Vetri is an excellent cook. | ||
Yeah, great. | ||
He's really involved in like solid charity things. | ||
I think he's also brown or black belt in jujitsu. | ||
unidentified
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Really? | |
From Philly. | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
Mark Vetri is a resourceful dude. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
So is the restaurant open? | ||
I think this week it was opening. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
That's fantastic. | ||
That's awesome. | ||
And his food is delicious. | ||
I'll try it out. | ||
Yeah, Vetri is in Philadelphia. | ||
It's like an institution. | ||
We opened, like, there was one thing when we, what was the story? | ||
The lobster spaghetti. | ||
You know, we took the kind of like, there was a story in Bon Appetit magazine about Mark Vetri doing lobster spaghetti and fighting with his dad about removing a table to put a meat slicer in. | ||
I think they had 24 seats and he bought a nice red slicer and he said, we're taking out four seats and now we're down to 20 seats. | ||
His dad thought he was insane. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
But he insisted that, you know, they have 20 seats instead of 24. That story was endearing to Fred and I. And he was doing a lobster spaghetti at his Philadelphia restaurant at the time. | ||
So when we opened Joe Beef, one of the first items on the menu was our version of the lobster spaghetti that Mark Vetri was doing. | ||
And just a simple homage to that story. | ||
That's great. | ||
Years later, we met him and we told him the story and became friends. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
So why did it take four seats? | ||
What did this thing look like? | ||
Well, you know, have you seen those big Italian red Burkle meat slicers? | ||
No. | ||
They're amazing. | ||
They're not electric. | ||
So did he do it just because it would add to the ambiance to have this cool thing in it? | ||
Yeah, in Italy, this is a pretty standard piece of equipment that you'd have on the bars and cavernas. | ||
It turns slow. | ||
It's a big blade that rotates slowly. | ||
It's very, very sharp, so it doesn't... | ||
It's a pinwheel. | ||
Yeah, it doesn't melt the fat of the ham, right? | ||
So you don't get this white film. | ||
So it makes like perfectly thin, cool slices of perfect ham. | ||
And they're gorgeous objects. | ||
Like we have a couple now. | ||
We have a blue one and we have a red one. | ||
They're gorgeous. | ||
Got one for me, Jamie? | ||
I'm trying to find one like cutting meat. | ||
Oh, that one's nice. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, you know, I saw one of these in Italy. | ||
Yeah, sure. | ||
They're all over the place. | ||
Yeah. | ||
When I was in Italy, I saw one of these. | ||
They were making sandwiches with it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
That's like a $10,000, $15,000 machine. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
That's beautiful. | ||
So when you remove four seats from your restaurant to put one of those in, you're kind of like, you know... | ||
You're stepping up. | ||
You're on the wrong side of business. | ||
But you're in Dobie Point? | ||
You're on the right side of business. | ||
You guys have something going on tonight, right? | ||
No, no, no. | ||
No? | ||
No. | ||
We did last night. | ||
We cooked an Animal last night in Las Vegas. | ||
How was that? | ||
Yeah, those guys are great. | ||
Awesome. | ||
Have you been there? | ||
I've never been. | ||
Yeah, John and Vinny's, man. | ||
unidentified
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Amazing things. | |
Yeah, they're good boys. | ||
They have John and Vinny's across the street. | ||
Animal is a restaurant that kind of opened around the same time. | ||
Joe Beef. | ||
We were friends back then. | ||
They came up to Montreal a bunch of times. | ||
I brought them to all the weird... | ||
We're all kindred spirits. | ||
It's like the same... | ||
Yeah, same thing. | ||
They practice the restaurant business like we practice the restaurant business. | ||
The restaurant's so similar to ours in weird ways. | ||
And their relationship, John and Vinny, is very Dave and Fred. | ||
It's strange. | ||
You have these sort of connections with these fellow like-minded chefs. | ||
All the pirates on Tony's pirate ship, man. | ||
Yeah, well, he was the one who introduced me to you guys. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He told me about you guys. | ||
Listen, Joe Beef, Surviving the Apocalypse. | ||
Is it out now? | ||
Yes, sir. | ||
In a week. | ||
24th. | ||
November. | ||
I have it already, you fucks. | ||
Sorry. | ||
But you're going to have to wait. | ||
But please, go out, go buy it, support. | ||
And if you're in Montreal, go visit my best restaurant, Joe Beef. | ||
You guys are the shit. | ||
Thank you, Joe. | ||
Thank you so much. | ||
Thank you very much. |