Janet Zuccarini and Evan Funke of Felix discuss surviving LA’s 2020 riots with National Guard presence, despite $65 rack lamb prices covering operational costs. Evan defends artisanal pasta—handmade in Italy, using imported flours—while rejecting modern trends like molecular gastronomy, favoring dishes like cacio e pepe tied to regional terroir. Their pandemic pivot included cryovac steaks and pasta kits, with 90% of revenue reinvested locally. Rogan praises their passion, calling it infectious, as they vow Felix’s future despite challenges. [Automatically generated summary]
Like, if you told me that something happened in LA and people were rioting, I'd be like, well, if it happened in LA, it kind of makes sense that people are upset.
And then you said, but they're smashing businesses and destroying restaurants and destroying small stores and family-owned businesses.
But I also think there's been thousands and thousands of peaceful protesters out there.
And the press is really not focusing on all the peaceful protests, which is our right to protest.
And there's going to be, you know, a bad apple everywhere.
And then you're going to get, you know, hundreds of people that and I think you were saying, you know, on your last podcast, it's a bunch of young people that don't know where, yeah, where's your iPhone made?
I think if you were open full capacity, you'd be fucking sold out instantly.
I really don't think there's any issue at all.
I think there's so much fear mongering going on, but I think the actual attitude of people, way more people are interested in going out than are interested in being locked up for longer hours.
We're still paying 100% of our costs, 100% of our labor, 100% of our rent.
The cost of food doesn't go down.
So we're forced to become extremely creative.
And there's one thing that I know about the restaurant industry where we're highly adaptable.
We have to kind of play within this game where we have to be unwavering on all of our standards and then be completely adaptable minute to minute from everyone's demands and everybody else.
There's also this extreme lack of communication as to what the timeline they're looking at and what will be the standards for you to be open 100%.
The same thing with the Comedy Store.
The Comedy Store has no idea when they're going to be able to be open because restaurants are open and they're saying, well, aren't we kind of like a restaurant?
We serve food.
And they're like, yeah, but no one goes to you specifically for food.
Even though they're sitting down, you can't be open.
And they're like, but it's not a nightclub, meaning like a bar where everybody just mingles.
Everything in politics and how the pandemic has been handled and also handling the businesses, mandating overnight that we close our doors and go to zero revenue, but there's no mandates on how we operate with zero revenue.
Moving forward, what do we say to our landlords who deserve to be paid?
But nobody knows anything.
And right now with opening the health department, it's a 17-page document on how you are supposed to open in a safe way.
Most morons think that six out of ten Americans will not feel comfortable, you know, sitting in a restaurant.
I don't know.
I'm not sure how comfortable I would even feel sitting indoors, where you come in with a mask, but then you're going to eat, you take your mask off, and then, you know, Joe blow two tables over coughs, and then you're sitting indoors.
Whenever you're inside, you feel like you're in a Petri dish.
Well, each restaurant that I've opened definitely has a different story.
So I have a few Italian restaurants, I have Thai restaurants, I have a Jamaican restaurant in Toronto.
So, you know, all very different stories.
But I wanted to basically expand outside of Toronto.
And I came to LA for lifestyle reasons to get out of the Toronto winters.
And decided, you know, this will be my first place that I open a restaurant outside of Toronto.
And I had a dream of being on Abikini.
I just love Abikini.
It feels like one of the only streets in Los Angeles where it's, you know, like a neighborhood and a street that you can walk down.
So luckily, I found this location on Abikini.
And it's a long story, but I was working with another chef for about nine months.
And then at the 11th hour, I had the location.
We were all set to begin construction.
And he just said, I've decided to go work with another restaurant group.
And I was like overnight, just like left without a chef.
And I only had one other name of another chef in LA, and it was Evan Funke.
And a food writer just sent me an email because I was just out meeting people saying, hey, I'm looking for a chef that has a following, a super talented chef.
And this one, Kevin West, shout out to Kevin West, sent me an email and said, Evan Funke is an amazingly talented chef and he's available.
And so when this other chef bailed on me, and I was on vacation at that time, I was in Morocco of all places, and I asked for a week off to go off the grid for a week, and then the president of my company contacted me.
She said, you've got to get on the phone.
We don't have a chef.
Oh.
And so I go, I have one name in my Rolodex.
It's Evan Funke.
And I sent Evan, I felt that I had to send him a compelling email so that I could get his attention because I had no other, you know, options.
And I said, you know, Evan here, you know, Kevin West says you're an amazingly talented chef.
we're partners wow i was in chicago at the time uh consulting for rich melman of let us entertain you and um i was kind of like on hiatus relearning the business we'll probably get into that later but uh yeah i got an email from janet and i was like all right let's go do this and that was it i cooked i think i cooked four pastas So for you, is it a rare thing to get an offer to run a restaurant?
You know, I learned from Bourdain, from watching his show, No Reservations, the first show, I was like, oh, okay, I have a wrong idea of what food is.
I had this idea that food just tastes good.
You go someplace, food tastes good.
But then watching his love of food and watching his deep respect for chefs and the preparation and all that's involved in making a dish, I was like, oh, it's art.
Of course it's art.
I didn't think of it as art.
I thought of it as just food.
And then watching his show completely changed my perception of what food is.
And it's such a, when you have really good pasta, and then you have pasta that maybe you enjoyed before, you had the really good pasta, it's like having water in your ear.
I mean, there's a handful of people who make pasta by hand, period.
And there are even fewer people who know how to make pasta with the mozzarella, which is the long rolling pin.
Even fewer.
And when I started, I started doing this 11 years ago, there was nobody.
There was nobody.
I checked.
You know, I moved to Bologna in 2007, tail end in 2007. And started this journey with my maestra, Alessandra Spisni, of Lavecchia Scuola Bolognese.
And she kind of opened up the door for me to start seeking out other pasta makers throughout Italy.
And when I came back in 08, I ran a restaurant called Rustic Canyon for about four years and, you know, Not a lot of people were serving the style of pasta that I wanted to serve.
So I started giving it away like a gateway drug.
I would just send it to tables for free and they were like, what the fuck?
And it just started gaining momentum and gaining momentum.
When people sit down at a restaurant, people aren't just paying for the experience of sitting there and the cost of food.
They're paying for the experience of the people that are making the food.
That's a big part of it.
That's the way that I look at it.
And 11 years of making pasta by hand, there's a lot of depth that some of the younger guys just aren't willing to pay the time cost.
And a lot of the younger cooks out there, they bounce around from job to job six months here, three months here, and they think that they've mastered it.
You know, you have to also consider how labor-intensive it is to, you know, hand-roll out the pasta.
And, you know, what Evan was saying before, like, each one rolled by hand.
You know, when you eat a bowl of pasta, you're not thinking that each one was, like, pressed out by hand.
So it's, like, extremely labor-intensive.
And a lot of people, when we were opening, Evan did have his own restaurant, Bucato, before, which was also basically focused around pasta as well.
That's a whole other story.
But when we were going to open up this restaurant and we put in the middle of the restaurant the temperature-controlled pasta lab, which is taking up tables.
So if you're a business person, a restaurateur, you say, how many tables could fit in there?
How much is each table worth to your bottom line?
You're using up that space to put in a pasta lab?
Are you crazy?
Also, when you're thinking about training the people and how labor-intensive it is, People were saying, like, we're crazy doing this again.
Yeah, they can't just say, you know, there is a balance between people's health and the economy, and they can't just shut everything down and say, well, we're just going to print a bunch of money.
We're all going to be paying for this in the end, right?
Right now, it's been $2 trillion, you know, because of COVID. They have to get us back up and running and working.
And I've said from the very beginning, get your young and your healthy back out and working.
And if you're over the age of 65, or if you have underlying health conditions, then you should definitely stay at home.
And you have to wait for either a treatment or the vaccine.
Yeah, I think the goal has always been when this first started was, you know, your goal is to survive and to get to the other side of this.
You're not thinking about making money.
And when you see these, like, iconic, legendary restaurateurs like Daniel Hume with Eleven Madison Park, which last year was the number one restaurant in the world, and he does not think that he will be reopening.
So he might be closing permanently.
Or David Chang closing two restaurants, one in New York City, one in D.C., and then he's moving another restaurant, consolidating his company, essentially.
So when you see these iconic restaurateurs that are struggling to make it to the other side, it's, like, extremely sobering.
And, you know, some experts will say they think 50% of restaurants will not make it to the other side.
I don't agree, but I think 25% won't make it.
And even in L.A., one of my last dinners was at Bon Temps in downtown California.
L.A., Lincoln Carson, an amazing chef.
I was blown away by the restaurant, and he's closed permanently.
All that time to open, all that capital to open.
You train whatever you're training, 50, 75 people to open, and he's closed permanently.
Or Auburn, another restaurant that was getting great accolades, closed also permanently.
They just got a finalist in the global industry.
Design awards.
So they're getting these awards and they're closed permanently.
And, you know, so, you know, it's really survival of the fittest right now.
So new restaurants, because it's so hard, this business, you're very vulnerable when you're a new restaurant and you just have debt.
You're just looking at a bunch of debt and then you're closed permanently.
You know, you're going to you're not going to make it to the other side.
And if a business was not making that much money, so when you see a restaurant in New York City like Lucky Strike that's been there for 31 years close permanently because it just wasn't doing that well.
So all the businesses that were just kind of teetering on not doing very well, they're going to close.
It's survival of the fittest.
Even with the pandemic and hitting older people, it's kind of like all around in business, it's survival of the fittest.
No, this is what I was saying before is the pandemic really exposed the restaurant business.
And the restaurant business probably has been hit the hardest.
And then next, all small businesses and retail, and then we're going to see commercial real estate really be affected right now.
But the restaurant business, the national average of the profit margin is 4%.
That's a national average.
We don't operate that way.
We operate at 14%, essentially.
But 20 years ago in the US, most restaurants would make 20-25%, you know, the net profit margin, but it's gone down, it's gone down, and really, the business is broken.
The restaurant business is broken.
We should be charging a lot higher prices, but then you're not going to get the customers.
So what you do is you just accept a lower and a lower profit margin.
That's why this business is so difficult.
And even 10 years ago, you might have a runway in your bank account to survive a few months.
But most restaurants, you know, they have a month and then they're done.
They've got nothing in the bank account.
It's a horrible business.
Nobody should be in a restaurant, unless you're crazy and you're so passionate about it.
Well, 11 million of us and then you think, you know, and when you look at the supply chain, so we, the restaurant, restaurants employ 11 million people in the United States, but then when you add in the supply chain of the farmers and the winemakers and the linen cleaners and, you know, we employ 20 million people and we're the second largest employer in the United States next to the Pentagon.
I just read things, but, you know, that's what we're talking about in the Independent Restaurant Coalition.
You know, we're working together with the government to ask for a certain amount of help, right?
We need the right help.
Or, you know, when people think, you know, screw you, restaurants.
Like, we're all in trouble, right?
With 40 million plus.
Now it's like, I think, 42 million.
Filed for unemployment.
A lot of people are hurting right now.
So it's hard to say, you know, romanticize restaurants right now.
Come back and support your local restaurants when a lot of people are hurting.
But I think if we think about the economic domino effect right now of essentially 20 million people, we need help to stay in business and not close down permanently.
I think the economic effect right now will be staggering.
Yeah, no, it's something to consider when you think about what you said about the people that clean the linen, the people that make the wine, all the various people that rely on restaurants.
It's not just restaurants.
Most people like myself don't really consider that.
You go, wow, they probably employ 10 people or 20 people or 50 people, whatever it is.
Do you see like the farmers obviously dumping, you know, tons of food and 36 million gallons of milk and nobody knew that restaurants are the number one purchasers from farmers, that and institutions, schools, institutions and restaurants.
And they process the food in a different way for restaurants than they do.
You can't just say like get the food.
You know, out there, they process food differently for individuals and grocery stores as they do institutions and restaurants.
The one good thing about restaurant business is that the metrics, whether you have five tables or 100 tables, are the same.
It's all math.
And if I knew how much fucking math that I'd be doing right now, I'm 40 years old, if I knew when I was like a kid, I would have studied the fuck out of math.
So, Janet, we were talking on the phone about what it's like for you to have all these restaurants under construction, and you were this unstoppable machine.
It's a nice little neighborhood in Toronto and I wanted to buy this real estate, so I saved my money to buy the real estate.
So I was very cautious of growing the company and building a foundation.
And then I bought one piece of real estate, then I bought another building, and then I put another restaurant twice as big as my first restaurant.
And then I bought another building, so I've been buying these buildings and putting restaurants inside the buildings.
Until I felt that my foundation was so strong that nothing could happen to me.
So I could only put through the lens back then, before the pandemic, to say, in an economic upturn, people will eat pizza.
On an economic downturn, people will eat pizza.
I'm untouchable.
That's how I felt.
I felt nothing could touch me.
And then we opened up Felix, and Felix has gotten, you know, incredible accolades, you know, in the press, and rightfully so, and Evans Cooking is off the charts.
And I thought, you know, we're ready to really grow.
So let's do this.
And I built a company where, you know, I have a head office, it's a proper company, and I have an incredible team of people, and I felt very ready and very stable and with an incredibly It's a strong foundation that I said, we're ready to do this.
And so 2020 was my big year to open five restaurants in one year.
So I just before the pandemic flew to Toronto to open a 9,000 square foot restaurant to immediately close it.
And that cost $9 million to open this 9,000 square foot restaurant that opened one day, trained 100 people for two months And then immediately shut that down.
Shut down all restaurants.
So shut down eight operations.
And I also have a catering company.
So shut down eight operations in Toronto and a catering company.
Furloughed 700 people.
And then I have four other projects under construction and personally all of the money in the company out on construction sites.
Plus I personally loaned all of my money to build the restaurants.
Because that's what I do.
What I do is I buy buildings and then I get mortgages on the buildings.
Then I use all the cash that I have anywhere that I can find it to open restaurants.
So I might have a temporary, you know, lack of cash, but then, you know, backed by a very strong revenue.
So I'm funding all the construction sites by all these restaurants that have extremely strong streams of revenue.
So once again, I didn't feel like I was taking a big risk.
Opening five restaurants in 2020. So I swear to you that the day the pandemic happened, I had to shut down.
It was literally the day before I loaned out, I wrote a massive check for one construction site, like all of my money in my bank account, you know, out to one construction site, then we shut everything down.
And it was like I was kicked in the teeth, like I was brought to my knees.
And I had never felt stressed like that because of how conservative I am and how fiscally responsible that I've always been and feeling that I was untouchable.
I just thought, you know, nothing could ever happen to me in this, you know, I could never risk anything.
But I woke up one day when I had to close everything down.
And first of all, the feeling of laying off 700 people when you know the majority of your staff live paycheck to paycheck was absolutely heartbreaking.
And that I ran the real risk of losing everything, not only all the restaurants, but all the buildings, because the bank, you know, owns my buildings.
I don't own the buildings.
And, you know, this pandemic caught me with my financial pants down.
Like, I just was like, Oh, my God, this is really bad timing for me.
I actually don't think so, and I think that we're going to be living with this virus.
And I've said this from day one.
When this happened, I said to my team, give me the two-year plan.
What's going on for two years?
We have to live with this for the next two years.
And I think that we just have to live in a safe way.
And yeah, wear the masks out, and we're going to go to restaurants, and people are going to be wearing gloves and masks, and maybe take your temperature, and we're going to sit You know, be seated six feet apart.
I think this is, we're going to just find a safe way to live.
But of course, there's going to be a second wave and a third wave.
It's going to keep going until, but also when a vaccine comes, you have to inoculate, you know, between 60 and 80% of the world.
Health officials, no new COVID-19 cases from Missouri parties.
No additional new...
Well, you know, what's interesting is what we were talking about before the podcast, when you guys were getting tested for the COVID, we were talking about Italy.
Well, sometimes when you read things and you don't say it out loud, and all of a sudden you say it out loud for the first time, you're like, I don't know how to say that word.
People are worried that the police are doing it, encouraging people to throw rocks.
So if those people throw rocks, then the police can come in and break up what would have been a peaceful protest.
That's through the actions of agent provocateurs or just giving people rocks and encouraging them, you know, just by virtue of the fact the rocks are there.
There was another thing that we talked about the other day.
We should probably correct that now.
There was stacks of bricks in front of this synagogue, and we thought those stacks of bricks were also the same thing, sort of left there because people were protesting.
But it's actually even grosser.
The stacks of bricks were there to keep people from driving their car through the synagogue.
And, like, it takes something like this to make everybody realize, like, there's some fucked up aspects of our society.
They need to be corrected.
There needs to be some serious refocusing of what it takes to be a police officer and what police officers can and can't do and what the punishment is and who's responsible.
And then if you're a cop and you see someone do something horrible that's also a cop, you gotta step up.
Did you see Chris Rock's post from three days ago?
There's some vocations.
You can't have a bad apple.
He's like police officers.
Police officers are one.
You can't have a bad apple.
Just like you can't have a bad apple as a pilot.
You can't.
Like some of our pilots like to land.
Others like to go into mountains.
We can't.
We can't have this.
I'm also extremely hopeful even if I feel like I've been brought to my knees and I'm seeing other small businesses and friends of mine getting looted right now and I'm like, It's also senseless, and I feel for Black Lives Matter right now is like the most important thing.
I didn't think anything could knock off the pandemic, but you know, it has.
We're all thinking about this, but I do feel that it's been an awakening.
And I think that it's in our face like it's never been before.
And I think what you were saying, to witness a man essentially be tortured, It's something we can't unsee.
And I think it changes you forever.
And what you were also saying is for this one man to reverberate all over the world, really, to see the protests all over the world is really something.
And I think we have to be super uncomfortable for change.
And I think that cop has been doing that shit since the beginning.
He's been charged with multiple times, multiple complaints since like 2006. And how crazy is it that one kid, a 17-year-old girl, films this, puts it out on the internet, and it changes the world.
This one time.
Imagine if he knew.
Imagine if he had any inkling that leaning on that man's neck with his knee for eight and a half minutes or more even, almost nine minutes, That that was literally going to change the world.
You just look at all the systems and it's all broken.
Like when we look at the restaurant business, it's actually a broken business.
Our society is broken in that we pay teachers hardly anything for doing such an important job and police officers and people who are working on the front lines.
And you're mentioning that the kid that's stalking the shelves and he's putting himself in harm's way making minimum wage.
But they don't, again, I'll say they still don't know enough about this virus, and every day you wake up and you're like, oh, you're blood type, so I have blood type A, and that supposedly you'll have a rough time.
You have a higher chance of having a rough time needing oxygen.
That's been like the most frustrating and for me at least the most frustrating and the most depressing thing is the literal like hour to hour changes of everything.
And making long term decisions is literally impossible.
And in this business, you have to make long term decisions.
You have to project.
In order to be successful.
And that's what's been so difficult.
Is that, you know, just the other day, there was a curfew.
It was at 6. I was in the grocery store.
It was curfews at 6. And then all of a sudden, oh, we changed it to 5. And then all of a sudden, everybody in the grocery store was working there.
It was like, fuck, we have to close in 30 minutes.
And they're like, letting everybody who's in line outside in.
So you have to do all these calculations when you're figuring out how many meals you're going to serve, how much food you're going to order, and you have to kind of guess.
Do you guess how many people are going to order fish, how many people are going to order steak?
You have pars, obviously, but you get into this rhythm.
And Felix, I'm a student of consistency.
And I always have been.
I learned it at Spago.
Spago is probably one of the most consistent restaurants in the entire country.
And my mentor, Lee Hefter, kind of instilled in me those principles that define the way that I run restaurants now.
So you obviously have PARs, but you have to look at Pmex.
You've got to look at what you're selling.
You have to look at what people are enjoying, what people aren't buying.
And you really ultimately have to know your clientele.
You have to get to know them very much so.
And I think that that's...
A lot of what hospitality professionals are really missing is that connection to the people.
Because that's the reason why we do this shit, is to see you, Joe Rogan, eat the steak at table 33 and say, fuck, that was the fucking best steak I ever had in my fucking life.
Listen, sometimes people just want to yell at you, and that's what they want out of the experience at the restaurant, so you've got to give it to them.
But still in hospitality, I mean, you know, we train our team to just, like, not make anything about you.
And, you know, you just look at someone and say, maybe their mother died today.
And if you just – it's so easy to diffuse, and it's really a lot of psychology being applied to To people where, you know, people need to be heard and understood.
And so you just let people vent and, you know, there's ways to kind of mimic people's, you know, bodily movements and stuff to show that you've heard them.
And it's just really powerful to diffuse that.
And so in hospitality, you can't take anything personally.
When you, like, I don't have kids, but so these restaurants, and I feel like I do have a lot of kids that work for me, but my restaurants feel like my babies.
And then in the early days, I would read reviews, and it would be like somebody saying, your baby's ugly, so ugly!
But I think there's been a lot of focus on food over the last, you know, maybe call it 10 years where you have the chef's table and people really appreciating the art of cooking.
When I started cooking, that shit was a blue-collar job, man.
There were very, very few celebrity chefs.
There was like Emeril and Mario when I started cooking.
Overnight, it became like the hot shit to do.
And all these culinary schools start opening and just meat grinder, just churning out these ill-prepared, entitled kids.
And they sell them a bill of goods when they go to culinary school.
You graduate from here, you're going to be a chef.
What I didn't know, as soon as I got to culinary school, I was making $7 a fucking hour.
$7 an hour peeling fucking carrots and potatoes and picking parsley and shit.
And like you've really got to love it to get to that point.
You've got to do it for 10 years to get good at it and then you've got to do it another 10 years to start making money from it.
And that's it.
And a lot of the younger kids, they're just not willing to pay the fucking cost and they want to skip rungs in the ladder and – That's the case with every art form.
There's a lot of kids that they want to do stand-up and they develop a YouTube channel and then they get a following for making funny YouTube videos and then they think they're a stand-up comic and you're like, hold the fuck on.
There's also a thing, I think, in being a chef, what you were talking about, making $7 an hour, peeling onions and stuff, that's real similar to comedy in that you've got to do the road.
At Felix, I think we cook specifically with seasonality.
So if the market changes, we change.
And that's really how the Italians have cooked for thousands and thousands of years.
You know, seasonality is a real buzzword in the U.S. But Italians have been cooking that way out of necessity for thousands of years.
And so have many other cultures.
But I really take my inspiration from tradition and try to pay homage to those culinary traditions in Italy.
And I try to put as a minimal amount of ego and a minimal amount of manipulation towards the traditional product.
And all I want to do is present whatever it is, whether it's cacio e pepe or tagliatella bolognese, the truest form that you can possibly get in the US, that's what I want to put forth.
And if you take my Bolognese, The inspiration from that...
And it's hard to accomplish that if you're in the ass end of fucking Culver City.
So you have to coax out these nuances from products that are born in the place that you're trying to evoke, like prosciutto di parma, mortadella di bologna.
So like it needs to taste of that place.
If you're sitting on the island of Capri and you're eating a caprese salad, drinking a glass wine with the person that you love and the ocean breezes on your face and then you eat a caprese salad at Joe Schmo's place in fucking Inglewood, it doesn't read the same way.
And that's really where the difference between good restaurants, bad restaurants and great restaurants really lives.
Again, it goes down to regionality and someone who has a great palate.
Our wine director, Matt Rogel, has done an exceptional job at choosing wines that are specific to the regions that we're inspired by.
And you've got to taste it.
I mean, that's the fun part, but you just have to taste everything.
Taste it.
And there's a lot of shit wine out there, but there's a lot of...
Exceptional wine that is made by very small family farms, sorry, vintners, that the allocation is so small that they barely have enough to send to the U.S. So does the wine director look at your menu and then say, you know, this is going to require...
If it's a new dish or a new wine or it's the same menu in an old wine, a different vintage, a different area of the region where the wine is grown, there's so many different elements to choosing wine.
And then on top of it...
Training the staff to make suggestions to clientele, like, hey, what do you really like?
And that gets back to that conversation between us and the clientele.
And knowing more about our clientele and who likes to come to Felix gives us a better standpoint.
Your bread and butter is really your returning customers in any restaurant.
You're going to have an element of people that come in because they're traveling from other parts of the world and they want to check out your restaurant.
But imagine right now where traveling is really hit.
So if you don't have your local customer base built up, then you're in trouble.
Well, I have an amazing team, so I'm definitely not alone in this, and I have amazing people.
And we're in this together, and I think I had a moment where I was brought to my knees.
I felt stressed like I had never felt before.
I was thinking, like, could I have an aneurysm right now?
I was just feeling uncontrollable stress, you know, with the thought of just losing everything that I had built up.
And my personality being so conservative, I just couldn't believe it.
It was overwhelming.
And then I gave myself, I just gave myself a few days to be that way and have, you know, that reaction.
And, you know, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm gritty and I just gave myself essentially a few days and then I picked myself up and I said, well, what are we going to do?
And I'm not alone in this.
Everybody in my industry, the industry has been decimated.
And to know that we're in this together and to look at solutions where you have to adapt and innovate and renegotiate.
So, you know, how are we going to create these other new revenue streams?
And so I got back into working mode, working around the clock with my team.
And a lot of my restaurants in Toronto, you can buy all of your groceries and essentials and just looking for other revenue streams to survive.
Well, each project, again, is very different, and I have different amounts of money invested in each project.
So what we're doing is negotiating around the clock with, for example, if we have landlords in certain places, we're renegotiating the leases right now, and we're asking to put it on pause, put the entire project on pause until we come out of this, and I can start building the company again and have some revenue to put back into the projects.
Some landlords have been unwilling in the beginning, but now they're more willing as they realize who can take my place.
But, you know, landlords maybe initially were saying, just you got to pay your rent.
Even on construction sites, my rent was kicking in.
I'm like, I'm not even open and I got to pay rent.
I said, I can't do that.
So take the keys.
And so some of them were like, why would you want to waste your investment?
And I'd be like, I'm like in triage and I got to save the restaurants that are open.
I can't be, like, building a worse time to be building a restaurant.
So I have to be willing to walk away.
And in negotiations, your strongest position is being willing to walk away.
So I'm like, just take the keys.
I can't even be concerned about this.
Even if I've got millions of dollars out on construction sites, I'm like, take the keys.
And then they come back and they say, well, I guess we don't have anyone else to come in our place.
Restaurants have been decimated.
Retail, are you going to get Neiman Marcus in there?
J.Crew?
Who's coming in my place?
So once they start to realize that, they're saying, okay, let's sit down at the negotiation table and work this out.
So I'm working through every project.
So, I don't have the answers right now, but I'm willing to walk away if I can't, you know, negotiate to be something that I can actually, you know, survive in the end, and not just pour more money into something that I'll just lose my shirt.
And it's the unfortunate fact that from extraordinary These extraordinary circumstances, there's going to be a lot of leases that are available and there are a lot of people who want to open restaurants because it's the hot thing to do.
I just think that there's going to be a lot of young people coming now because commercial real estate is going to be very affordable and they can come in.
So I think a little bit there's going to be a changing of the guard.
Obviously, I'm putting my own, not a spin, but my own fingerprint on it.
But I'm really just drawing from thousands of years of tradition and just trying not to fuck it up and pay homage to the people who created it.
And anything on the Felix menu, I've learned from someone in Italy.
Like I don't make pasta shapes that I saw on YouTube because for me that's cheap.
It's cheap.
There's more value to me to learn it from a grandmother in Italy in their region, in their house and pass that knowledge on to me so that I can authentically present it in the best way possible.
So when you were learning and you were in Italy doing this, did you have this understanding that all this would eventually play out like that and that you would become a great chef and that this is the idea that you're putting in the work?
Or were you just enamored by the passion of making that food?
So my goal is like if you have the cacio e pepe at Felix and you've been to Rome and eaten cacio e pepe, I want you to be like, fuck, this is better than Rome.
Or remember that time we were in Rome, we had cacio e pepe.
This is better or this is worse or whatever.
You evoke memories and you make them.
And that's really the ultimate goal is to get inside people's heads so that they come back.
I wish there was more emphasis by the government put on having you take strategies to strengthen your immune system and explain to people how important it is.
Stop eating so much sugar.
Stop drinking so much.
Get some exercise.
All these things have a real measurable effect on your immune system.
Well, I don't know if your immune system gets weakened because of non-contact or it gets strengthened because of contact.
If it really does get weakened because of non-contact, you're dealing with a bunch of people with severely compromised immune systems going out marching together, stacking on top of each other.
It's really kind of a crazy experiment to see where COVID is right now because of these marches.
Boil the water, add this amount of salt, boil it for three minutes, add it to the sauce, boom, add the cheese, you're good to go.
It's been successful and I think a lot of restaurants took notes from us and started doing the same thing because it's really kept us alive and obviously people fucking love pizza.
And I think, you know, one upside to this is we weren't necessarily known for how good the pizza is at Felix, but now people fucking know how good the fucking pizza is at Felix.
We start with almond and then we add oak and then we add almond and then we add oak and it's just kind of fire maintenance is 90% of wood fire cooking.
We talk about weather, we talk about soil content, we talk about water content, we talk about if it's going to rain, what's coming up, what do you have in the ground, what are you planning for three months from now?
I've smuggled seeds back from Italy so that they can plant stuff.
If you're raising steers in Colorado versus Utah versus California, California has very, very little grass.
And all the grass that's down tastes like dry ass fucking grass because there's no water.
So the beef tastes of that place.
And if you're finishing cattle on corn or feeding it 100% corn, it's going to taste completely different.
The marbling is going to be completely different.
The steaks I brought you today are 80-20.
So 80% of the steers' life is grass and then they're finished on corn because America is literally in love with corn-fed flavor and that mouthfeel from the fat.
So it's 80-20.
But corn makes cattle sick.
That's why they pump them full of antibiotics.
The good ranchers who practice animal husbandry, they do it in a way that doesn't make the animal sick.
Well, it's also, the menu at Felix, the entrees, the secondi, it's a very small section because our kitchen is very small, so there's only going to be usually about two proteins on the menu, so you don't want to, if you have a much larger menu, You can be a little bit more creative or put on those cuts that aren't as popular.
But when your menu's that short, you have to look at sales.
Just hearing you guys talk about it sounds like such a balancing act.
And then to be hit over the head with something like this pandemic and everything getting locked down.
Restaurants are so valuable to me.
And it's one of the things that I worried most about this pandemic, other than the lives, was businesses that I enjoy and then restaurants specifically.
Because it's such a great way to spend time with someone.
I mean, it's one of the great pleasures of life to be able to go to a place and have a fantastic chef sit you down and cook amazing food and you enjoy it.
Well, you know, I think over the last few years, restaurants in general have really, in North America, I will say, have really reached a pinnacle of cultural relevance right now.
But it has to be reimagined.
We're not going to go back to that for the next little while.
And, you know, there's going to be, you know, there's one restaurant in the Netherlands who has a robot.
I just love when someone does anything with the kind of passion that you guys display at your restaurant.
Whatever it is, whether you're making music or you're writing books or you're making food, I just love when someone does something like that because it makes me excited about all the things that I do.
I think we, you know, as human beings, as we interact with each other and we explore each other's lives and what other people do for a living, what their passions are, you get energized by that.
You get energized by other people's work.
By their enthusiasm.
Their enthusiasm is really contagious.
You know, and that's one thing that I've really got out of your restaurant.
It's very contagious.
It's very obvious that you guys take extreme pride in what you do, and you do it so well.