Philip Frankland Lee joins Joe Rogan to rave about the Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2016 whiskey’s gold-winning, limited-edition appeal and his Thanksgiving macaroni and cheese masterpiece. His shift from Wagyu-heavy feasts to lean proteins slashed cholesterol by 70 points in three months while embracing wood-fired cooking—like his NADC-spiced tri-tip—over pellet grills. Austin’s barbecue scene thrives under his mentorship, from Terry Black’s artistry to CM Smokehouse’s rise as a sleeper hit, and his Sushi Bar ATX pop-up sold out instantly after Rogan’s endorsement. Now expanding with Pasta Bar Austin and a high-end sushi ranch featuring live king crabs, Lee’s communal tasting menus redefine fine dining, proving even "bad ideas" can shine with precision and teamwork. [Automatically generated summary]
So, Phillip, my friend Phillip here, who is the head chef of the greatest sushi place on planet Earth, I say to young Jamie, young Jamie, have you had sushi at Sushi Bar ATX yet?
Probably 15 years of my life just to trying to get a Michelin star.
And when I found out this year, they had me on a Zoom call.
They kind of lied to me.
What they did is they said, first of all, you're not getting a star this year, just so you know.
But we want to send someone to the restaurant in Los Angeles, and we have some interview questions we want to ask you about how it was to operate during COVID. And I said, well, I'm in Austin, but I can fly back.
They're like, no, no big deal.
Don't fly back.
Just zoom in.
So I zoom in, and they have my wife, who's our pastry chef and my business partner.
She's at the restaurant, and so is my brother, who is the chef of Sushi Bar in Montecito, and our chef at Pasta Bar.
And they're all three there, just in the restaurant, and I'm at my house here.
In Austin, and I'm on Zoom.
And they start asking us some random questions about, you know, how is it, you know, what's it like being open?
And what if the, you know, pitfalls you had to overcome?
And then out of nowhere, they just go, oh, and I have one extra question.
Congratulations.
Two of your restaurants are getting Michelin stars.
Yeah, but that's part of sort of the allure of, and not to say they wouldn't be a three-star restaurant without, you know, having that part of traveling, but three stars is when you're worth the journey.
They were named best restaurant in the world several years over.
It was really the restaurant that...
Really brought what became known as molecular gastronomy, all the food that, you know, Jamie would probably look at and say, this is, what am I looking at?
This doesn't look like food.
This looks like interesting abstract art.
But, you know, today you have restaurants where, you know, you'll get literally a balloon that's brought out to the table and you eat the, suck the helium out and eat the balloon and that's, you know, one of the courses.
So basically I make a cheese sauce separately with Gruyere, sharp cheddar, and then I'll boil the macaroni, cool it down, and then I'll take a bunch of shredded cheese as well and kind of layer it almost like you would be layering a lasagna a little bit, and then cover the entire top with melted cheese as well.
And then, kind of the secret to that is, in the cheese sauce, smoked paprika.
Yeah.
And so when you eat it, it's got a little bit of the, you know, Kraft mac and cheese of like the, like the, what is it, like the sauciness.
But you have layers, and you build it when it's cold, so you have layers of just shredded cheese all through it, so you still have that pull of the cheese like a nice pizza.
Yeah, I think it's got to be something like psychological.
It's got to be something about like watching somebody nourish, like creating nourishment maybe, in some sort of like, you know, abstract way that you haven't really...
I mean, you can go on and watch, you know, people blow dry their hair or apply makeup, and that, you know, is probably attracting some people, but only people who care about, you know, makeup.
Where it feels like even people who aren't into food, who aren't like, you know, self-acclaimed foodies, they still like watching food.
And I think it has to be something deeper than just a craft that is interesting to look at.
It's one of the only things where the artist, if you call him an artist, or craftsman, have to take enough responsibility and have enough integrity to understand that the art they're creating is going to be ingested by the audience.
It really was Bourdain that showed me from his first show, from No Reservations.
I remember watching that show and one of the beautiful things about No Reservations and then also Parts Unknown was that his narration was all his writing.
And it was all so very specific to his writing.
In fact, his voice is so specific that, you know, he got obsessed with jujitsu and started posting on a Reddit jujitsu subthread.
And eventually people figured out that it was him.
If I brought five or six people over to your house, and I got them to work together to make you the best meal you've ever had, that would make me a chef.
So, saying that, like, you know, my wife cooks great food, so she's a fantastic chef.
It's more like saying that a conductor of an orchestra, you wouldn't call the conductor a great violinist.
Now, the conductor probably needs to not just know how to play the violin, but also, you know, be very good at it.
That sounds a lot better than a private cook, but what is the job function of that person?
Well, I guess in that scenario, if you just have a—because there's some households that have, you know, a team, right?
And some households would have a single individual who's cooking.
So you can be the chef who also cooks.
It's not to say that if you cook, you are therefore not a chef.
It's just that the difference—and we're talking more about in the industry— Being a chef is to be someone who brings others together to cook, as opposed to someone who just cooks.
S-O-U-S? S-O-U-S. So you have chef de parties, which are basically station cooks, and then they report to a sous chef who reports to, in some cases, a chef de cuisine who reports to a chef.
And so the idea is, you know, the picture over here on the right is what you would most associate sous vide with is one of these immersion circulators.
But you also can take that bag and you can put it into a steamer, which I guess does have water, but it's not underwater.
Well, you've taken out—I mean, you didn't use a vacuum machine, per se, but you could do what we call ghetto vac.
And so if you actually take—let's say you take a steak, you put it in a Ziploc bag.
If you take a bowl of ice water and you submerge the steak into the ice water, it's going to push and force all the oxygen out the top, and you slowly put it in there until you just have the zip at the top, and then you Ziploc and you pull it out, and it's a ghetto vac.
So the less of an environment that is there, the more accurate you're going to have to cook.
So if you have a bunch of oxygen in that bag, then that oxygen is going to react at a different temperature or a different rate than if there's no oxygen.
One was actually, we talked about the French laundry.
I had the opportunity, while I was in culinary school, one of my chefs...
I had invited me to go with him and another group of chefs to the French Laundry.
And I went to my teacher and said, hey, I need a couple days off.
I have been invited.
And they had this really strict rule of if you miss two classes in any semester, whatever, you fail the class.
And this was like a breakfast egg cookery class.
And I said, well, I used to work at a restaurant called BLD in Los Angeles.
And I worked both the plancha and sometimes I worked the egg station and we did 400 cover brunches.
I know that we're going to boil one egg at a time next week, but this is a fantastic opportunity for me as a young cook to go and have dinner with these chefs at the French Laundry.
And they said, sorry, if you're not here for this, then you're going to fail.
I just think that, like if you were to come to me, you know, 30, 40 years ago and said, I want to be a cook, I would say, don't go to culinary school.
Because if you go to culinary school, you come out with debt.
And if you come out of culinary school and we hire you at one of our restaurants, we're going to end up saying to you, great, everything you just learned, okay, don't do any of that because now we want you to do it exactly how we do it.
And we're going to show you how we do it.
You're also going to start out at the bottom of the totem pole.
So you're going to start out, you're going to be, you know, peeling onions.
You could imagine if they went to school to learn how to tattoo and then went to the tattoo shop, they'd still have to go through that hazing.
Not that there's hazing in the kitchen, but you still have to sort of earn your stripes.
And one of the things was, when I enrolled in culinary school, they had said, when you graduate, you will be eligible to be a chef de cuisine.
You'll start around $75,000 a year.
And I think that's where they got in trouble.
I could be wrong, but when you get out of culinary school, you're going to work either for free—well, you can't do that anymore—but you still have to work for free, or you're just going to come in at the minimum, minimum wage because, yes, you have a degree from culinary school, but that doesn't mean that you're going to know anything that we need for this restaurant.
I took tournament poker serious for a long time, but that's something I would go to Vegas for because in LA we've got fantastic tournament poker there.
But I would study and I would listen to podcasts and I would review hands and things like that.
I tried playing professionally when I was 18. There were Indian casinos you could play at and I would go there and spend, you know, four or five days and I'd play for three days straight.
So when you're playing Hold'em, to the left of the dealer button you have a small blind, and then to the left of him you have a big blind, which is basically your minimum bet.
And so if you're playing a 2-5 game, and that's what I was playing back then.
So I... We would play, you know, locally back then, and then we'd start doing, like, weekend tours, and then when it was time to, like, okay, I'm gonna stop going to school, the only deal I had to make was that whenever I wasn't on tour, I had to have a job.
I couldn't just, like, sleep in all day.
So there was a Jamba Juice right by our house, and...
At a certain point, so while I was playing cards, sorry, while I was playing music, actually, I turned the studio certain nights a week into a little poker room.
So I'd have friends over and we'd play cards at the house.
But while I was touring, I eventually decided, because when I decided to stop going to school, I said to myself, if the music doesn't work, I'm going to go to sushi school.
So the music thing did work and a couple years went by and actually my godmother owned a catering company.
And so in between tours, I didn't really want to keep working at like Jamba Juice or Starbucks or anything like that.
And so I asked her if I could work for her.
And so I invited her over to the house.
I cooked dinner for her and she said, well, I'll introduce you to my chef.
And if my chef wants to hire you, then you'll be hired.
And so I went to her catering company, met the chef.
The first thing was like, okay, you're making family meal today.
And so I cooked for the whole staff and she said, I'll hire you as a dishwasher.
And when you talk to chefs, this work ethic theme, because it seems like when you talk to people that have worked in restaurants, one of the things that they will almost unanimously discuss is the amount of hours and the grind and how difficult it is.
I mean, it's one of those things where if you really want to take food seriously and cooking seriously, you're going to have to, you know, make a lot of sacrifices.
Yeah, I mean, when I was younger, there was a lot of nights you just don't go to sleep.
You just get out of the restaurant at 1.30 in the morning, you go to the bar, then you go somewhere else, then you go back and open the restaurant the next day.
Well, no, I quit Red Bull earlier than that, but thankfully I never got into drugs, so it wasn't that, but I would drink a lot, and I actually had one time where I finished service, took two steps and just collapsed, just hit the ground.
Uh, man, this was a long time ago, but I probably was getting there.
I was probably getting there around 7, 6.45, 7. When I say open, I mean I would get to the restaurant and open the door, not that we were open in public.
Because we were at this, in this sort of like, the restaurant was a lunch and dinner restaurant, but we served breakfast as like a commissary to like, it was like in a building complex.
So I really wasn't responsible for breakfast.
I think there was people there before I would get there.
But so because of that schedule, I couldn't take her on a date.
And so I remember the very first date we had was at the restaurant.
I told her to show up at 1230 after I sent everybody home.
And I had spent all day secretly prepping a special menu.
And she showed up.
And I sat her in the dining room that, like, overlooked the kitchen, and I would make a course, bring it out to her, sit down with her, have a sip of wine, and then go back in the kitchen, make the next course.
Well, I told her to bring a friend with her, because I told her that I'm going to, you know, otherwise she's there for 20 minutes in between each course.
And it's very cool that it works and you guys still get along so great even though you're in this like highly stressful like very strenuous sort of an environment.
Well, I think, again, it's because we have boundaries and we have rules for, like, this is where...
So, like, if we're sitting at home having dinner or if we're at a restaurant, you know, for her birthday, and there's a call from one of our restaurants or we have something, like, that always comes first.
And so there's never really been an issue where it's like jealousy because one of us has to do what we have to do because that's what we do.
So the only difference, like, if you're gonna ask me what's the difference between an In-N-Out burger and a Smashburger, an In-N-Out burger starts as a thin patty, and a Smashburger ends up as a thin patty.
But I think just that style of like backyard pool party barbecue California I mean that's like the burgers that we make right now for these smash burgers it just I'm trying to make like a backyard dad burger mmm they're delicious Yeah, no, I've heard.
I mean, Doughboys is in the back of Meanwhile Brewery, so they've got some great beers, and that's a cool place to just go kind of hang out on a picnic bench.
Because, you know, your body recognizes you're breaking down all this tissue.
I mean, that's the process of exercise.
It's the breaking down, the building back up stronger.
And it's like this...
You got to do it right.
Too many people start off too hard.
When someone has not worked out at all before, I always say, listen, all you have to do is go walk around the block and do some push-ups and some jumping jacks and then build from there.
You don't have to go crazy.
Let your body get accustomed to this whole idea of exercise.
Don't just go bananas, because you won't be able to sustain it, and you'll get upset.
And don't work out with a friend who goes to CrossFit.
Don't have some fucking fitness fanatic friend who's like, try to do this WOD! We're gonna do a WOD today!
And you're doing burpees and throwing fucking kettlebells over your head.
Actually, a buddy of mine got me onto the Whoop, and then I had a couple conversations with you about just, like, trying to feel better, and I really started, like, I started off really slow, and I sort of got into it, and then I went to the doctor just to get a physical, and I found out that I have, like, Or I had scary high cholesterol.
They told me I'm pre-diabetic and I'm at risk of having a heart attack within the next couple of years and I need to do something.
And so I did a little bit of research on my own and one of the things was getting yourself into, I think it's 70-80% of your max heart rate for over 30 minutes.
And so I completely changed my diet.
I changed, like, just my lifestyle.
So every day I'm running and eating differently and I've lost...
About 30 pounds and I've dropped about 70 points of my cholesterol.
So I always eat a ton of sushi, but eating a lot of fish, I never really ate a lot of like, I don't eat candies, I don't eat a lot of sugars, I don't drink soda, so I didn't have to change any of that.
I think that hitting it from both ends, like when I went back for my first checkup with the doctor, she was expecting to see like maybe 20 points drop off and I dropped off 70. So I think it was hitting it from both ends.
Well, what I was going to get to is I think it's literally a matter of what, you know, we all want to think of this one-size-fits-all dietary approach.
We want to think about that with everything, really.
But it doesn't work that way.
There's people that require so much more of their body that they need a different kind of fuel source.
They need more fuel.
They need it in a different way.
And I think that a person that is on their feet all day, like you are, working as a chef, there's a requirement.
It's probably pretty high, like a caloric requirement, but there's also not an exertion.
So you have this steady, you're using up calories all day long, but you're never ramping up your heart rate, you're never pushing your body.
So it's gotta be weird for your body.
Your body's like, what is this motherfucker doing?
Yeah, so my morning regimen is I take probably about one ounce of apple cider vinegar in a tall glass of water, and then a little shot of elderberry syrup, and then a multivitamin, and then a...
I don't know what you call it, but the worst pain I got from running is...
Once I mastered the five mile an hour thing, I tried pushing myself one day, and I was doing...
I think I did...
I tried to do the full hour at six and a half miles, and my neck and my shoulders and my upper back were in excruciating pain, and I... Googled, you know, what that's from and it's just from literally running with like your shoulders up.
So when I was like trying to run faster, my shoulders would slowly creep up.
And what it explained is that each run is a single rep.
So you're doing thousands and thousands of reps with bad form and you're just wrecking yourself.
Oh, interesting.
So, it showed me some foam roller thing, like how to fix that, and it did, like fix my back and my neck.
And then, now I just practice, like as I'm running, I am consciously putting my shoulders back and down as I'm running.
Well, if you look at a pair of running shoes, the heels are always big and fat, and then it narrows down towards the front, which would encourage you to run and land on the heel, because that's where all the cushion is.
They fucked so many people's feet up and knees up and everything from doing that.
You talk to people that are experts in biomechanics and people that are experts in running.
They're like, this is the worst fucking thing you could do.
Your foot is a natural decelerator.
When you're landing on the ball of your foot...
Your foot slowly lets itself down with the muscles of your calf and your lower leg.
And that's how you're supposed to land.
Like, your foot's a built-in shock absorber.
It's a really amazing design.
And Nike's like, eh, let's use foam.
Let's just fucking land on the heel where there's no give-it-all and use foam.
And a lot of people jacked up their knees, especially people that weren't conditioned to it.
And then they said, you know, that's a thing that people do.
Like, I... Saying about someone, if you don't exercise at all and you go with a friend to CrossFit, like, no, you have to build up to something like that.
You want to do some shit like that?
You got to get your tissue prepared.
Like, slowly over time, build your tendon strength and your muscle strength and your endurance so that you don't drop a weight on your head.
Like, all that stuff is, like, you got to do it slowly.
But when someone would get, like, a pair of running shoes, like, I'm going to run a marathon.
Yeah, no, I got these shoes that are, you know, some sort of, you know, Scandinavian design that's supposed to, like, accelerate you or something like that, and it works.
It helped me, really, running with those barefoot shoes, and I went from those to some other kind, because the problem was I was running on trails, and so there was a lot of rocks, and I would just occasionally step on a rock, and you can actually injure your foot, because some of them, they're pokey.
And so then I switched to more of a minimalist shoe, but still a flat shoe.
You know, wide toe box shoe that allows your feet to articulate.
The way it was described, I forget who described it this way, but they said, essentially, when you look at most shoes, they are like a cast.
And that is not how your foot is supposed to behave.
And when you put your arm in a cast, what happens?
It atrophies.
That's the thing with your foot.
You put your foot in this cast, and your foot doesn't get to utilize all of the muscles that surround the bones.
Well, one of the things that was shocking to me, I started doing yoga a few years ago, many, many years ago now.
But when I first started doing yoga, the first thing that would hurt was my feet.
I was like, this is crazy.
Why are my feet hurt?
Because I'm a martial artist, so I'm used to kickboxing and moving around.
But I was used to a very specific kind of movement on my feet.
But like this static holding a pose and using your foot to kind of balance and stabilize you.
I was utilizing all of these muscles in my foot that were not strong because I was just used to these explosive movements back and forth.
Whereas yoga, like if you're standing there and you got your one foot up in the air like this and your foot is balancing everything and it's like all the stabilizing muscles were very weak.
We've got a gym that we're building, and one of the things we're building in the gym is a yoga room.
So, come on down, bro.
Come on down.
We're going to take you through some classes.
But my message to people that are in your sort of situation, or not your situation now, but your situation back then, they're like, how do I get started?
When I first started, because Margarita, she's been active and she's been exercising.
She wakes up every morning at like 5, 6 o'clock in the morning for the The duration of our entire relationship, she's been getting up super early, exercising, running, doing yoga.
Because most people don't, and most people start out, and they'll do something difficult, and then they'll be really sore the next day, and then maybe they'll take a day off, and then they'll do half-ass the day after that because they don't want to be as sore, and then they quit.
When I look at the obesity rates in this country and I look at the amount of people that are living these essentially constant sedentary lifestyle, like they're never doing anything physical.
That's like a giant percentage of our population.
And they're very insecure about it.
You know, and because of that, they don't want you to fat shame and they're this body positivity nonsense.
Like, that's crazy.
It's all crazy.
You're missing the point.
You're supposed to feel uncomfortable.
The whole idea about being fat and the reason why you're upset That people point out that you're fat is because you're supposed to do something about it.
You're supposed to feel bad.
When someone points something out about you being fat, if it's true, it's supposed to feel like shit.
And it sucks that it feels like shit.
But that, in turn, is supposed to motivate you to do something about it.
You know, I think whatever it takes to motivate yourself, I mean, it's interesting because you also could fall victim of not living a sedentary lifestyle and being on your feet 15 hours a day and still being incredibly out of shape.
The comedian lifestyle and the chef lifestyle in that sense.
Probably very similar.
Now, when you did this change, did you just immediately cut all that stuff out of your diet or did you like sort of slowly do that as well as the diet or as the exercise thing?
The most popular theory was repeated in the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Cain, C-A-E-N, C-A-E-N, in 1978. It derives from the hideous combination of goose pimples and what William Burroughs calls the cold burn that addicts suffer when they kick the habit.
It says, the problem with both these theories is that they ignore the use of cold turkey before its application to drug addiction.
In a cartoon that appeared in newspapers in November 12th of 1920, Ace slang man Thomas Tad Dorgan used cold turkey this way.
Now tell me on the square.
Can I get by this for the wedding?
Don't string me.
Tell me cold turkey.
Wow.
Boy, do people talk weird in the 20s.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
The editors of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang have found an earlier usage, 1910 usage, where the speaker lost $5,000 cold turkey in the sense of losing it outright.
A bunch of chopped onions, a bunch of herbs, and I basically rub it all on inside, outside, everything, tie it up, put it in a cooler, leave it out at room temperature overnight.
Because, so, when you cook something, you want the internal temperature to cook at the same rate as the external temperature.
That's why people cook sous vide, right?
Sure.
And if you just take a turkey out of the fridge and you put it in the oven, or you leave it out for an hour and put it in the oven, it's still ice cold in the interior.
Yeah, so I'm removing the refrigeration from it so that when I put it in the oven, it immediately starts cooking from the inside out, not from the outside in.
Everyone's seen that quintessential steak where it's the slice and it's like well done, medium well, medium, medium rare, and then rare right in the center.
And I'm like, that's a terrible steak.
If you order a medium rare, you don't want 10% of it to be medium rare.
Do you think that a steak that's cooked like sous vide style, like say if you wanted it to an internal of say 130, 135 degrees, what do you like for an internal of a steak?
If I order steak at a restaurant and it is sous vide, I'm going to go, oh.
They sous vide this.
It just has a bit of, like...
Almost like rubberization that happens.
To me, like, you need to get the actual proteins to a certain temperature to coagulate to actually, like, when everyone was like, oh, bring me a ribeye, like, you know, bloody.
That's not very good.
You either need to eat it raw or you need to cook it enough where the proteins have coagulated enough that when you chew through it, it snaps and you can chew through it.
You know, if you've ever had like a really undercooked ribeye, it just becomes stringy.
You have an overcooked ribeye, it's tough.
You have a properly cooked ribeye, it's melt in your mouth.
And it's all about finding the correct temperature.
So each steak is going to, each cut is going to have a different temperature that you're trying to achieve.
Yeah, so the best way that I have found—and again, everything is different.
At Scratch Bar, we just do a tasting menu.
That's your only option, a 25-course tasting menu.
And what we would do is we use Japanese Wagyu.
And when guests would arrive, and you'd arrive actually into another room where you'd have welcome cocktails and canapes before you come into the kitchen for dinner— We would be notified when you came in and immediately we would take your portion of meat out of the fridge and we would put it above the hearth where it was about 90 degrees ambient temperature roughly.
It was getting a little bit of smoke.
And then about four or five courses before your steak course, which is probably about 45 minutes later, 45 minutes an hour later, we would bring the piece out and present it to you so you could see it, and it would be completely malleable.
It was shiny, the fats had already started to render, and we would explain that what we're going to do now, it's been sitting up here for the last hour, now we're going to put it closer to the flames, where it's about 115 degrees ambient temperature, but we're not going to cook it yet.
That'll be for the next two courses, it'll sit there.
And then, right before that course, we would actually take the steak and put it into the flame.
And what would happen is it would actually start to fry itself from the inside out.
Just from being that close, just being in that environment.
And because of the fat content of the Japanese Wagyu, it had so much fat all over it and inside of it that when it went into the flame and it heated up at such a high rate, it would actually cause all that fat to start to fry.
Jesse has a school where he teaches people how to hunt, how to butcher, and how to cook, and takes people with zero experience.
And one of the things that he really loves is hogs.
He takes people to hunt wild hogs, first of all, because they're A plentiful resource in Texas in particular, you must kill them because they're invasive and they're overpopulated.
There's so many of them, they destroy agriculture.
And so it's an easy animal to gain access to hunt.
It's very prevalent.
It's an easy hunt.
And especially when you're shooting rifles, your success rate is very high.
And then on top of that, Jesse will show them how to break it down.
What is his, can you see what, it's old school cookery, I forget the name of his school, but he takes you through the entire process and it's a very small amount of people that are allowed to attend because...
Here it is.
The New School of Traditional Cookery.
That's it.
The New School of Traditional Cookery was founded in 2006 concurrently with Dai Due Supper Club to provide an educational aspect of our business that promotes responsible use of our wild resources.
Jesse's awesome.
I'm such a huge fan of that guy.
And his whole strategy, like here, click on that to show Jesse cooking a full bore.
When we opened Scratch Bar in its current location where we got the hearth, the reason I decided to go completely wood fire only, I mean there's no other cooking apparatus in the kitchen, was because I wanted young cooks to have to learn how to control their environment.
I felt like there was a lot of, you know, when you're learning to cook or you're working a station as a young cook, it's like, alright, go to high heat and then go down to medium heat.
You know, go here for this long and then do that and then do this.
And I felt like it would be really interesting to just have, like, them have to learn how to, you know, if you let your fire die down, you're fucked.
You're completely fucked.
When we opened the restaurant, we had a pasta on the menu, and you have to boil water on an open fire.
And you can't just crank it by turning it up.
You have to keep your fire going.
So that was kind of the idea.
And once you really start cooking with it, you almost can't recreate the flavors and the feeling that you get from that.
You could see there, that's about, I'm going to say, roughly four feet and four feet.
So we had two four-foot wheels.
One of them was just a big grill, and one of them was a big plancha.
And because we're doing tasting menus, and you've got so many different things happening, that's great if you're at a restaurant where it's like, all right, you're going to fire 50 steaks in the next hour and a half or whatever.
But this was like, you've got like seven or eight different courses coming off this, and each one needs to be, you know, treated a little bit differently with the fire.
So we would create all these different sort of like, sort of apparatuses and little areas to cook.
Either you're going directly into it, either you're touching the grate and you're getting the smoke that the coals create, or you're getting the flavor of the coals.
Now, sometimes that might be a bit harsh, but for example, you know, the Santa Maria style tri-tip in California, which is California's answer to barbecue, which I thought was something until I came here.
But it is manipulation of the protein with the temperature.
So, I mean, there is some barbecue aspect to it.
But, like, that one, like, if I'm doing a tri-tip, and I actually competed in the, I think, two years in a row, I competed in the 805 state championship or whatever.
And what I did is after you cooked it and I would rest the meat, I would then dip it in a barbecue sauce, get my pit really roaring, make a little hole, and then put it in and bury it in the coals.
And that would sort of give it a really interesting exterior, just like texture and flavor.
Yeah, so I would take the whole tri-tip with the rub, and I would start it really low so it gets a little bit of sear, and then you go all the way up, and you just let it kind of like an hour and a half Just let it sort of slowly get the smoke and obviously there's no lid on it in the Santa Maria style until you're at about 127 or so and then take it out and I put it in an igloo cooler and I would close the top for about
an hour hour, hour and a half and then when it was time to serve open up the cooler, dip it completely submerged in barbecue sauce and then I would basically char the barbecue sauce in the coals Oh, wow.
Yeah, so there's lots of different schools of thought, and I'm not going to debate which ones are correct, and I'm not even sure there is a correct one.
However, when you're dealing with a piece of wood that's on fire, you're going to have a different flavor, aroma of the smoke itself because once it's all broken down into coals, it's going to smoke.
When you have a big flame, you have no smoke.
And when you're trying to start a flame, you have a lot of smoke.
So as you're burning wood, you're creating different levels of smoke, different amounts of smoke, different levels of heat versus just one large infrared area.
And then we did one at the Barracks, which is this legendary professional-only skate park in LA. And then we just did one for CM Smokehouse's one-year anniversary.
Yeah, when you talk to the guys at Terry Black's, I put something up on my Instagram the other day.
I guess it's gone because it was in my stories.
But they gave me a tour.
They always do.
I always asked to give me a tour of the pits and see how they have it down to a science where they have like notebooks saying what was in where and they're 12 plus hours for each brisket and they have this whole thing that they're doing from start to finish like ramping up the temperature towards the end, wrapping it, all these different steps that they take but they do not I speak highly about pellet drills.
Pellet grills are for the person who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing.
It's very convenient.
I love Traeger's because they're very convenient.
It's great for wild game because you could keep a temperature probe in there.
I haven't talked to him about methods, but I did say, I did tell him that I'm like, this is, and I don't know if, I said it just without thinking, I think I was drinking too, but I was like, this is as good as any of those other three.
And I meant it to be a compliment, not like, you know, hey, you know what, yours is actually as good as other people's.
But I mean, in comparison to some of the Eddie V's type places that have this feel that you go to, there's a feel of like, hey, this is a business that's created by humans.
And actually, this is not like, we're going to show you how to make a restaurant the way we make a restaurant.
You follow our guidelines.
We're going to do it this way because...
When you go to a place, not shitting on Ruth's Chris, they make a great steak, but you go to a place that's like a place that's been doing it forever and with the owners and the chefs and all the people that have been cooking and serving it there, there's a feel to that place.
Well, LA is such a complicated city and so much more complicated now because of the pandemic and then the aftermath of the poor management of the city.
It's such a fucked up place now.
But it's always had this weird sort of like non-community community aspect to it, you know?
Well, I grew up in the Valley, and so it definitely, there was like, there's neighborhoods and communities, and it's like, when we first opened Scratch Bar in Encino, you would, it was every night, this person knew this person, this person knew that,
you know, it was a lot of that, and it was, you know, I wanted to open there because it's where I grew up, and because it was, you know, it's, you know, where my parents lived and my friend's parents lived, and just sort of that Sense of community, which you don't find all over LA. Right.
But people go to LA, and I feel like there's this perceived persona that's like, I need to be an asshole to fit in.
And so, yeah, I think so.
I think a lot of people moved to LA and they like, they wanted, especially in the entertainment industry, they moved to LA and like, okay, I'm going to be this sort of, you know, this sort of like, you know, douchebag mentality style.
I mean, if you grew up in LA, you can always tell who's from LA because they don't honk and they put on their blinkers and they wave to you.
Here, everyone moved here recently and they're like, oh, if I'm going to fit in, I got to be really nice to everybody.
Do you think that douchebaggishness is prevalent in LA? In New York, they really adopt it.
You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine about that, about what's happening in comedy clubs in New York, that people get angry if you bring up certain premises and they're like the woke...
Aspect of it.
And he's like, but guess what, bro?
None of them are from here.
They're, like, fucking Maine people.
They're, like, from somewhere else where they thought they were going to adopt this persona by coming to New York and being, like, real aggressive about, like, being, like, this left-wing, progressive, angry city dweller.
And they're, like, it's a persona they adopt.
It's, like, this makes them happy to try to pretend that they're this person.
Yeah, I moved to Chicago when I was like, I don't even know how old.
But it was interesting to just be in a new place where you could...
I mean, I didn't reinvent myself because I just moved there to cook and I kept cooking.
But it's interesting to, like, make new friends and meet new people and have the opportunity to have zero baggage or zero preconceived notion.
And you can, I mean...
It's kind of when Margaret and I moved here.
It was like no one knew us and they were only introduced to us with the success of Sushi Bar, which was so interesting because like in LA, we've been hustlers.
We're known as like the young kids who have been hustling forever and, you know, have made it.
And here we walk in and everyone's like, oh, you're from Sushi Bar.
And it's like, that's weird because we're not used to people like...
There's definitely people that are super into talking to certain people because They are famous or because they, you know, run a famous restaurant or something and they'll weasel their way into your life.
And I have a lot of uncomfortable conversations where people are trying to get on the podcast for no fucking reason whatsoever.
So we were operating at this coffee shop, and the deal was, they were open from like, it was breakfast through like 4pm, they closed, and they hired me to be like, to redo their menu.
And so when they hired me to do that, they asked me, what do you want to charge?
And I said, you close at 4pm, so instead of paying me, what if I just get to use your space at night?
And I'm going to open a restaurant at night here.
And that was the deal.
I worked there for free all day during the day.
And then at night, I would turn it into Scratch Bar.
I've had partners since 2013. So now in Scratch Restaurants, which operates Scratch Bar& Kitchen, both Sushi Bars and Pasta Bar, we don't have partners there anymore.
Because my wife's friend who's a sushi fiends like there's gonna be a pop-up in Austin Sushi bar is like her favorite spot in LA and she's like they're coming to Austin because they can't work in Los Angeles because the draconian measures by this goofy fucking government And so you guys set up shop here.
My wife drags me out because basically I always want to eat meat.
December of 2020, LA said it's too dangerous to serve on the patio.
And so they said shut everything down.
You can't serve indoors, you can't serve outdoors.
Earlier in the year when they said you can't serve indoors, we literally just built a sushi bar on our patio.
So patio business was fine.
We had built tents and everything, but now it was too dangerous to be on the patio either.
So we were going to have to lay everyone off right before Christmas.
And so Mari and I decided that we didn't want to do that.
Instead, we said if anyone's willing to work, we will find another state that will let us work.
Because at that point it wasn't LA anymore, it was California.
We were going to go up north and do a sushi bar in Big Sur and then they closed all of California.
So I had some friends out here and we came out and we found a space and we did this pop-up that was supposed to last five weeks.
We got here at the end of December, we were supposed to go back at the beginning of February.
And when we tried to come out here, you know, we have a publicist in LA, and they were talking to all of the different writers here in town, and they all said, we're not going to promote them.
You know, with COVID, we're just not promoting anything right now.
So we were like, fuck, we're going out to a city that we don't know, that doesn't know us, and we have no reservations.
And so we sent out a newsletter to our following, and I guess that's where your wife's friend saw it.
We basically said, if you know anyone who's in Austin, please tell them to come support us.
And after probably about two weeks of being open, we had sold out the entire stint.
And Pasta Bar you're going to put in on 6th, which is very close from my super secret comedy club project that will probably open in a similar time frame.
Yeah, it's also incredibly difficult to source and very expensive.
But, you know, where we have very, you know, the type of fish selection for a sushi bar is very, I don't want to say average, because it's not average, but it's very approachable for someone who's not necessarily like a sushi connoisseur.
So this is going to be just sort of like the next level.
Yeah, I mean, I carry probably the most expensive tuna that you could get, like, regularly in America, and I'm not paying a million dollars for a fish.
The thing is, a lot of those guys who do buy those tunas, they can cut it up and freeze it and send it to 10 of their restaurants and sell it for a lot of money as this is the most expensive prized tuna of the year.
And when you're dealing with sushi, you think of the size of the portion, and if you're going to a sushi place like Soto or somewhere in town that's a nice sushi place, what would a two-piece of sushi Toro go for, roughly?
Yes, except that, you know, we've been lucky enough at all of our locations to have, we have 10 seats, we do 30 people a night, they do the menu that we choose for them, and we do it seven days a week.
Now, sushi bar is now no longer you, but this pasta bar that you're doing, I'm not familiar with the one that you have in LA, so what is going to be different about that?
Is it the same sort of a thing, like a tasting menu?
So when you make your pasta, now one of the things that I noticed, and many people have remarked on this, talked about this, when they go to Italy and they have pasta in Italy, you don't feel like shit.
Like there's something about the wheat that they use that has a different reaction in people's bodies.
And it's been explained to me that it's like, was it double zero flour or something like that?
I mean, if you just go and get what they call AP flour, that's what is going to give you that kind of really thick, pasty, kind of like sit in your stomach.
We had a UFC in Phoenix, and we drove all the way out to Scottsdale to eat there.
It was that good.
But I went to visit him anyway.
But anyway, his explanation was that when they changed wheat or they started adjusting and manipulating wheat to develop higher yields, that the problem is that that wheat has more complex glutens in it.
And you definitely get higher yield per acre, but it's more difficult for people to digest.
Double zero flour, also known as doppio zero or zero zero flour, is a finely ground Italian flour commonly used to make pasta and pizza dough in Italy and other parts of Europe.
Grind sizes vary from double zero to two.
Oh, so it's the size of the grind.
Double zero is the finest grind and two is the coarsest.
Yeah, so, I mean, depending on if you're looking for a chewier noodle, if you're looking for something that's softer, more pillowy, and then, you know, the amount of hydration, and there's certain things that go into it to make it specific to what it is you're trying to achieve.
So, I worked with, I mean, I've worked in a lot of restaurants that made fantastic pasta.
I've never worked in a pasta restaurant.
So, what we're doing at the restaurant right now is sort of a conglomeration of, you know, really what everybody, you know...
The way that I sort of run the restaurants is it really is like a conglomeration of the entire team.
So anyone who has anything, you know, of value to add, it gets added.
So, you know, there may be that, you know, this cook has this recipe and this cook has this recipe and we've worked together to kind of develop just like the best recipes that we can do.
Because I've never been a fan of not being as good as we can because it was only my idea.
Just solely me, just with a notebook, just coming up with new dishes.
And then eventually I was like, I need to keep the team engaged.
And also the team would come to me and be like, hey...
We were thinking we want to cook rabbit next month.
So we started implementing every Friday during family meal.
It wasn't mandatory.
You could either stay, eat with the team, and we can talk about what you guys want to cook next month, or you can go and call your girlfriend or whatever.
And we started really working together to kind of put these menus together.
And at this one point, one of our younger cooks had the idea to do a...
He said, well, what if we do something like a bagel and cream cheese?
And everybody laughed at him.
And I was like, no.
There's no such thing as a bad idea.
We have to, like, what?
Okay.
So, obviously, we can't do bagel and cream cheese.
So, what is, like, I see where you're coming from.
Now, how do we get there?
And we worked together over probably about a month and a half.
And where we got to...
You know, and I worked with him on how to actually think, what are we thinking about, right?
So, first of all, we have to make everything ourselves.
We're not making bagels.
That's not an option.
So, okay.
And how do you do that at a world-class level?
So, instead of making, oh, well, bagel chip.
Well, I'd have to make a bagel to make a bagel chip, so no.
How about a cracker?
Well, if we put caraway in that cracker, then we're going to have the flavor of rye bread, which is going to be reminiscent of a deli experience.
Okay, so we have a caraway cracker.
Okay, we can make our own cream cheese.
We've done that before.
But I love Lakshmir.
So instead of Lakshmir, maybe we're going to fold in right at the last second fresh salmon roe, you know, smoked salmon roe.
So you have like, you're going to put a layer of this homemade cream cheese that's really light and airy because what we do is we would strain off the whey and then reincorporate just the amount that we would want so it would be the right texture.
And then we thought, okay, instead of, we've already got the salmon aspect, so what if we do, what if we smoke sea urchin?
And we put that on top.
And then we dehydrated small little red onions, which gave you the flavor of an onion bagel.
And then you eat this little thing.
It was this big.
And it was like, okay, we figured out how to take this idea, which everyone laughed at, and turn it into something at a world-class level.
But the thing is, what's really difficult about Being a restaurant where you have to make everything yourself is like, if we're going to make something that everyone's used to, we have to make it better than that.
And I've never made bagels and that's a huge undertaking to put a bagel program on the team just so we can have this one dish.
And we want to, whatever we put out, like if we cook a steak, it's gotta be like, fuck, that's the best steak I've ever had.
Fuck, that was the best, whatever.
Now when we put out this final product that was this big, people would take a bite and they'd go, fuck, that's kind of like a bagel and cream cheese, but fucking good.
And if I gave them a bagel that wasn't as good and the guy from New York's like, this isn't as good as the bagel I grew up with, then I'm, you know, I'm fucked.
Bread is probably the best example because Italian bread from New York or New Jersey has a very particular flavor profile that's unavailable when you get bread in California for the most part.
When you create these restaurants, do you have any desire of doing something that is not a tasting menu, or is that just you prefer being in complete control of the experience?
I prefer tasting menus, especially now post-pandemic and the way the world is going.
You asked the perfect question, how do you inventory?
It's not difficult to inventory when you know exactly what you're selling.
And if I have 30 people coming in and a 20-item menu...
What if everybody buys the ribeye, I have to throw away all the chicken?
Or, I have to sell the chicken when it's past its prime and not very good, and then people won't come back because it wasn't very good.
So, beyond that, we've found our success in these sort of experientially driven, sort of fine dining tasting menus.
It's also what I enjoy the most.
I'm someone who, like, when I look at a menu at a restaurant, I get a little bit of anxiety.
I don't I'm like, I get upset because I'm like, I don't know what to order.
There's 30 things on here and I, you know, this is, I would much rather go to a restaurant and be like, hey, we're really good at this so we're going to cook you this.
Well, I mean, you don't go to a movie and then tell it what you want it to do for you, you know?
It's like you go to a restaurant because they serve the food you want or you like the chef and what they've done in the past, and then you say, okay, I would enjoy whatever you cook for me, or I would like to enjoy it.
So it's going to be called Sushi by Scratch Restaurants, which is what the LA Montecito sushi bars are becoming as well.
And it'll essentially be the same, well, I don't want to say the same like we've just phoned in another one, but it's going to be another of the same concept.