April 25, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
41:40
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| The example that I use is the ways in which they have deputized a lot of these local agencies, right? | ||
| So the Health Department has become an arm of the government. | ||
| The OSHA has become an arm of the government. | ||
| The Labor Commissioner has become an arm of the government. | ||
| We have been served complaints, after my little spiel, from every single one of those agencies that I just listed. | ||
| And when you go back and you try and utilize the legal process to get to the basis of those complaints, you find out that they're all political. | ||
| And that they are utilizing bureaucratic red tape to try and take out those people who even mere question authority in California. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a restaurateur, an entrepreneur, the CEO and founder of Slapfish Restaurant Group, and a man with a seriously delicious Twitter feed, Chef Andrew Grewal. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| First, we just got to talk food pictures because I'm pretty proud as a regular citizen, a non-chef, of the steaks and the dinners that I put up on Twitter. | ||
| But if there is anyone that puts me to shame, it's you. | ||
| You are just absolutely killing it on the food photos. | ||
| What is the secret? | ||
| Well, first of all, thank you, because I do drool over your photos. | ||
| I actually go and search them, you know, because traditionally, I've got to go find you now that Twitter doesn't want us to get together. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Well, we are very dangerous people posting food pictures with a political bent, you know? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, we touch the stomach first and then... So, look, hey, it's all about the sauce. | ||
| I say this over and over again. | ||
| Sauce is boss. | ||
| All right, so we're gonna post a bunch of your pictures. | ||
| As we're talking, we're just gonna be laying in some pictures. | ||
| So people are gonna see your lobster rolls and the cheese steaks and the steaks and just everything you're doing is just awesome. | ||
| And we are gonna announce, in the next couple of weeks, we're gonna do a live Rubin Report meetup at one of the Slapfish locations in O.C. | ||
| pretty soon. | ||
| How did you get into the food thing? | ||
| Before we get into why I really have you here, because you've been really outspoken about lockdowns and what has happened here in Cali with Newsom and all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| But what got you into cooking and all that? | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I actually went to college for piano performance and philosophy. | ||
| I went to a small liberal arts college up in, you know, I was just kind of a drifter, right? | ||
| I was there for a couple years. | ||
| I was lobstering the whole time, working full-time in a restaurant. | ||
| I started working in a restaurant industry when I was like 13 or 14, right? | ||
| So the bite happened early, you know, and then there was that inner kitchen culture. | ||
| I call it like a band of pirates. | ||
| So it was, I could never get away from it. | ||
| And after spending all my time in restaurants while I was going to college, I realized, wait a minute, I got things on reverse here. | ||
| I'm, you know, I'm learning about how to protest capitalism on the one hand, but on the other side, I'm, you know, I'm really building my skill level in the kitchen. | ||
| So I might as well fulfill that path. | ||
| Did you want to be a chef first or more of a restaurateur, an owner? | ||
| Like what part of it really interested you at the beginning? | ||
| I mean, it's always the food, right? | ||
| So like, that's the exciting part. | ||
| That's what drives me towards it, is the food. | ||
| 90% of being a restaurateur, being a chef, is really the human element. | ||
| We're psychologists, we're counselors. | ||
| It's about putting a schedule together, really. | ||
| Big game of Tetris, but with people's hearts and minds. | ||
| I love the food, and it was really the whole space. | ||
| So as I got immersed in the restaurant world, I realized that the opportunities were, you know, Limitless, really, from hospitality to hotels to travel, et cetera. | ||
| So, you know, I mean, I did stints with the Ritz-Carlton, hotel industries, got to travel and work all over the place. | ||
| So it really was the perfect vehicle through which I could kind of indulge in so many of these different desires. | ||
| Did you ever fear throughout the adventure that the more you grow, the more restaurants you have, the more that you do TV stuff or whatever it might be, that that kind of just removes you from the kitchen part, which is the fun part? | ||
| Yeah, definitely does, and I've had to turn down a ton of opportunities. | ||
| There's been multiple cross, you know, kind of crossroads, if you will, where I've had to decide which path I want to go down, whether I want to fulfill the vanity element, right, and do a lot of TV and do radio and media and all that, and I've always stuck to the kitchen. | ||
| Ah, I'm just a YouTuber, don't worry. | ||
| Alright, so what put you on my radar was when the lockdown started and suddenly after a couple weeks people started fighting back. | ||
| You know, they're not letting us go to restaurants and I kept hearing from people, you know, I'm in LA, which was under severe lockdown. | ||
| I kept hearing, oh, but you know, OC's a little better. | ||
| It's still, it's a little more conservative there, a little more red. | ||
| They're fighting back a little bit more. | ||
| There's a little more happening there. | ||
| And that, and then I was kind of trying to find people that were there. | ||
| That's when I came across you. | ||
| Well, so first off, how many, how many restaurants do you actually have right now? | ||
| And what has the last year been like? | ||
| Last year's been a roller coaster. | ||
| I mean, everybody's kind of experiencing a similar thing in that regards, whether it's just, you know, small business, retail, restaurant, what have you. | ||
| We've got six Slapfish locations in Southern California, and I have two other concepts. | ||
| I've got a chicken concept. | ||
| I've got a pizza concept. | ||
| I did have actually a plant-based vegan concept that I had launched two years prior to the pandemic that got wiped out in the first month of the pandemic. | ||
| So, We really experienced measures and the ways in which the government was or wasn't helping from the perspective of small, small business. | ||
| That was just my wife and I, owner-operator, one employee, and that was ripped out from underneath us immediately. | ||
| We were trying to grow that brand. | ||
| You know, we've experienced everything from I've got franchise locations around the United States. | ||
| Some do really well in certain states like Georgia and Florida. | ||
| But then also we've got owner-operators that are franchisees in places like Albuquerque, where the lockdowns, frankly, I believe, have actually even been worse there than they have been in California. | ||
| That market's been crushed, especially on a hyper-local level. | ||
| And we've experienced that too. | ||
| So I've had the opportunity, and I wouldn't say that the luxury, I mean, it's an opportunity I wish I never had, to dashboard that's got a lot of different components. | ||
| What was going through your mind those first couple weeks? | ||
| You know, you had the first two weeks, it seems like a lifetime ago, but two weeks to flatten the curve. | ||
| And if I remember correctly, everyone basically obeyed, no questions asked, like, oh, two weeks, we'll do what we gotta do. | ||
| Did you kind of feel that as an owner of a restaurant? | ||
| And then when did you realize, oh, maybe something ain't right here? | ||
| Yeah, bingo. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| For the first two weeks, that's what everybody was thinking. | ||
| And I joke about this and I say that's when the cliché really was true. | ||
| We all were in it together. | ||
| And then we kind of put our business capes on at that point because we had let a lot of our employees go, unfortunately, because we didn't know what was going to happen. | ||
| So we were almost encouraged by the business community that, yeah, you know, you lay everybody off, the government's going to be really easy about making sure that they get the unemployment benefits and then you can just, or furlough them and then you can take them back aboard. | ||
| So we tried to only lay off those that were either You know, working from college, living with mom and dad, who kind of wanted the unemployment benefits, and then we kept on a lot of our team members who were, you know, sole providers for their family, and we pivoted immediately to be able to feed all of the first responders, right? | ||
| Police, EMT, fire, and then those in the medical field. | ||
| And, you know, what was pretty funny about that, I joke, I tell this little story, we were giving free food to anybody who was a first responder in these kind of broad categories, and, you know, People picked up on that right away. | ||
| So even within the first two weeks of the lockdown, we had people showing up for takeout. | ||
| They would go buy scrubs for like a dollar to get their free locterol. | ||
| So the grift was in from the very beginning. | ||
| So when did you realize though that like, oh, this is way beyond two weeks and we got a much bigger problem here? | ||
| Well, when everyone started to over-intellectualize the numbers, right? | ||
| It was all about this, you know, it kept getting higher and higher and higher in regards to altitude, right? | ||
| So by altitude, I mean we're grounded in the beginning. | ||
| It's very easy to understand. | ||
| Two weeks, we flatten the curve, we give the hospitals opportunity to increase, you know, all the necessary PPP and the equipment they need in order to to deal with this pandemic. | ||
| But then it goes into the next level, right? | ||
| In the stratosphere where it's okay, well now we have these metrics about ICU capacity | ||
| and then the numbers. | ||
| And we started to play this overly intellectualized game of math where businesses couldn't even | ||
| keep up anymore. | ||
| So then it was almost as if we were confounded by the numbers and just forced back into these lockdowns | ||
| over and over and over again. | ||
| Can you talk about just like the personal side of when you had to make calls or meet people | ||
| or whatever it was when you had to lay them off Because I've met a lot of restaurateurs over the last year, more than I've ever met in my entire life. | ||
| And most of the ones, at least that I've met here in LA, they're not particularly political people. | ||
| They suddenly, they've been mugged by politics. | ||
| So now they're Political, but most of them really were just upset about having to lay off people, you know, people that had to lay off chefs that had been working with them for 30 years. | ||
| I met one guy who owns something like 40 restaurants, had to lay off almost a thousand people, like, and this is serious stuff. | ||
| Yeah, and we were at a point, a trajectory, if you will, in our business. | ||
| We had just kind of finished recapitalizing the company, so we actually had just brought on some new positions from a corporate perspective, and we were trying to grow the franchise angle, and then it was an immediate Sorry, like, we just brought you on, but we gotta let you go. | ||
| And, uh, we let a lot of people go. | ||
| My wife and I, it was just the two of us. | ||
| We kept on a couple key players on the corporate side. | ||
| You know, I'd stopped taking a salary. | ||
| It was really about survival at that point. | ||
| But the hardest thing was trying to explain to people who didn't necessarily understand what was going on. | ||
| A significant portion of the workforce, they don't speak English that well. | ||
| Many of them, look, frankly, are, uh, you know, Don't necessarily understand the government framework in the United States. | ||
| So it was okay. | ||
| You're letting me go, but am I gonna get paid? | ||
| I don't want to file for unemployment because I'm kind of afraid of government systems So a lot of hand-holding my wife was getting phone calls almost at every hour of the day trying to explain to people Don't worry. | ||
| We're gonna be able to bring you back on board. | ||
| We're gonna loan you some money We're gonna help you out in this regard. | ||
| We're here for you. | ||
| And that was the hardest part How stressful was it for you financially? | ||
| I mean, you layin' off people to save some money, but you had no idea when things were gonna open, and even now, things are still weird. | ||
| Yeah, we didn't have the cash flow to be able to sit back comfortably and say, we're gonna see this thing through. | ||
| We didn't, you know, we had debt being called in regards to all the different businesses. | ||
| As I'd mentioned with my other concept, Butterleaf, it was immediate, right? | ||
| Like I still had, what was really fascinating about this was I was still getting phone calls from sales and use tax, right? | ||
| The board of equalization on sales tax saying, okay, the year's up, now you owe X amount of dollars. | ||
| And we're not even open, right? | ||
| We're in the middle of a pandemic. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| I'm getting letters in the mail that not only tack on the amount that we owe, and I'm talking within the first month of the pandemic, but adding interest and penalties, and then more interest on the penalties. | ||
| That never stops. | ||
| Man, it's just crazy. | ||
| So were you, did you consider yourself kind of political before this? | ||
| We've talked off the record once or twice. | ||
| I have a sense of what your politics are. | ||
| Now I can tell, obviously, on Twitter too. | ||
| But were you political before any of this stuff? | ||
| I've always been fascinated by politics. | ||
| I was in Model UN Youth and Government growing up in high school. | ||
| I volunteered for multiple senators. | ||
| She's an urban planner, so you kind of have to be across the board. | ||
| So it was always imbued in my environment, but I was never really, really vocal about it. | ||
| And I always knew not to be vocal about it. | ||
| What was really interesting in the restaurant space is that I joke about how really chefs are all libertarians. | ||
| You know, you have Anthony Bourdain, who frankly I believe has had some amazing, | ||
| we'll call them quotes when it comes to the ways in which government affects or doesn't affect | ||
| the restaurant world and everything beyond. | ||
| But everybody knows, especially in California, just kind of keep your mouth shut. | ||
| And even in Orange County, right? | ||
| But in the beginning of the pandemic was the first time ever I opened my mouth on social media. | ||
| And I remember it was when we started to reopen and we realized, OK, we can start to serve through third party delivery. | ||
| And we became a pillar in the community and our sales started to pick up about three weeks after the initial lockdown. | ||
| So we reached out to a significant amount of the people who we had originally laid off. | ||
| Now, remember, I mentioned those were people who were living at home, college students working with mom, you know, kind of living with mom and dad and all of them. | ||
| I'm not being sarcastic when I tell you this. | ||
| Rejected the offer to come back because they said, I'm making $1,200 or $1,100 a week now on unemployment. | ||
| Why would I come back and work? | ||
| And I get it, right? | ||
| We said, okay, I understand. | ||
| I would love to be able to make the same amount of money, read some books, take care of the kids. | ||
| So I don't hold them. | ||
| You know, accountable for that decision. | ||
| But I posted that anecdote just on Twitter. | ||
| And man, it went, it blew up. | ||
| It went completely viral. | ||
| And I started getting attacked, you know, along the lines of, oh, well, if only you paid your employees more, then they wouldn't be able to do that. | ||
| If you only provided them healthcare, etc., etc. | ||
| And it immediately became a divisive debate. | ||
| When all I was merely doing was just saying, hey, this is what's happening out there in the business world. | ||
| Right, because even if you paid them double that, some of them might be like, ah, it's still not worth it, because I can get half for free, and it's like, there's no economics behind it, in essence. | ||
| Exactly, well, even a lot of the people who were having come back, because we do pay a significant amount of money for people to work in the restaurant, and then add tips into that, they were making about $35 an hour, front of the house, so let's say they were bringing in $1,500 a week, but now they bring in 1,000 by virtue of the unemployment, They're still netting $1,000 to not work, right? | ||
| So it's not a matter of, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. | ||
| People didn't care about that. | ||
| It was, here's my position, and here's what's gonna happen. | ||
| So it just became, at that point, I realized, okay, well, you know what? | ||
| I'm not gonna sit back anymore. | ||
| I'm gonna dig in on this, and I'm not gonna be a dick about it, but I'm going to use real-life stories to kind of back up some of these platitudes. | ||
| Was that kind of the first moment that you decided to really get more vocal about all this? | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| That was exactly it. | ||
| That was the moment right there. | ||
| And it's funny, because if you go through and you do a full, you know, search, which I'm sure many people have done, of my social, you will see that that was the moment in time. | ||
| Everything before that was mayonnaise and fart jokes. | ||
| That was when you put the red pill in the lobster roll, apparently. | ||
| What was it like though? | ||
| Okay, so then you get confronted with that issue. | ||
| Did you have trouble getting guys back then because of that? | ||
| I mean, did you have to hire new people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we did. | ||
| We had to hire new people. | ||
| We had to completely alter our operations. | ||
| So for me, it's I'm not always, I'm not going to sit back and cry and complain. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Well, what can I do to get ahead of this? | ||
| So once I realized that one of the barriers was going to be having accessibility to a strong labor force, okay, well then we're going to automate our systems, right? | ||
| So immediately it was co-packing a lot of our sauces, which we previously made in house, spices, et cetera. | ||
| So trying to decrease the units of labor that we need in order to provide a high quality product without, of course, compromising what our original mission was as a restaurant. | ||
| Do you sense that some restaurants, and I don't blame them actually, because it all just sucks, but do you sense that many are starting to cut corners and things? | ||
| And the reason I ask that is, you know, because of my Twitter, I mean, we cook a lot around here, so I've only gone out to restaurants a couple times, but I've noticed that a bunch of the restaurants Stuff is just not as good. | ||
| And I kind of don't blame them for A, having to cut corners, but also like the zest for life that a chef would have when they get to see customers and get feedback and get compliments, as opposed to just sort of being a robot now on these takeout orders. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| And, you know, I always joke, I say food is representative of life. | ||
| And by that, I mean, if, you know, if you're in a, you know, everyone's partying and everything's great, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| It's like you remember the flavors of the food you ate in the midst of that, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The spice, the pepper, the acids, the pop, this and that, the hard char, right? | ||
| Just this overly amplified food. | ||
| And right now, what are we living through? | ||
| We're living through a time where absolutely everybody feels hopelessness, despair, anxiety, depression, et cetera. | ||
| And I think food is reflecting that. | ||
| So yes, I agree 100% with your point, but I'm not just seeing it in the restaurant space. | ||
| I'm also seeing it in the hospitality space. | ||
| I traveled a lot throughout the pandemic and what I noticed was that people were using the pandemic as a There's no means by which they could increase profits, cut corners, but of course blame the pandemic, right? | ||
| So no housekeeping, no room service, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| You know, old bars of soap with hair in it. | ||
| You name it. | ||
| We went, I don't know if you know the restaurant, Boa in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills. | ||
| It's my favorite steak joint in LA. | ||
| I took my team there last week for my producer's birthday. | ||
| I love that place. | ||
| The food is awesome. | ||
| The atmosphere is great, but this was the first time indoors since this whole thing. | ||
| You know, they had to do what they had to do. | ||
| So it's separated. | ||
| You know, the guys have masks, the waiters with masks and face shields. | ||
| Nobody's sitting at the bar anymore. | ||
| They can't do the table side Caesar. | ||
| And it was like, we had a great time, but it just didn't feel right to me. | ||
| It just kind of didn't feel right. | ||
| Are you worried that as things continue to open up, that just getting the atmosphere back is going to be tricky? | ||
| And also people's ability to like want to sit at a bar and talk to somebody. | ||
| I miss that. | ||
| Yeah, the fear is palpable, and it's coming through in the design, the branding, every single element of the restaurant industry. | ||
| And that is intentional, in my opinion, right? | ||
| Because what's happened is that the consumer mindset and the business mindset has been crushed with fear throughout this pandemic. | ||
| And the restaurant industry specifically has been vilified as these vectors of spread. | ||
| And that is so wrong. | ||
| That's not the case at all. | ||
| From the very beginning, I said, look, we should be used as the proper models through which we can, you know, exhibit to everybody that you can operate in a safe manner. | ||
| Restaurants inherently, pre-pandemic, are trained and taught to focus on safety, sanitation, surf safe, food handler certificates, We're, in some cases, probably more sanitary than certain medical environments. | ||
| But yet, we have become the fictitious villains of the pandemic when none of the data and none of the science proves that. | ||
| And we've absorbed it, right? | ||
| So now, it's these restaurateurs kind of tiptoeing through and hoping that they don't get cancelled or that a private Facebook group doesn't take a photo of somebody without a mask. | ||
| You know, it really is unfortunate and it's going to put the industry back What kind of crazy nonsense have you had to do? | ||
| Well, I don't even know. | ||
| So what's going on in OC right now? | ||
| Are you guys somewhat open indoors? | ||
| What's the regulation as we speak right now? | ||
| Yeah, 50% indoors. | ||
| We can dine outdoors now, which is huge. | ||
| And, you know, obviously there's all those kind of little levers that you need to put in place in regards to operations are still there. | ||
| But people are scared. | ||
| I mean, that's the reality of the situation. | ||
| whether it's OC, whether it's LA, people kinda try and draw us to distinction | ||
| between the two, but it's not as distinct as many would suggest. | ||
| And of course, there's a political tribalism that runs through a lot of it. | ||
| And I tell people the stories, it's funny. | ||
| Me personally, I have been the target of a lot of ire here in Orange County. | ||
| And we, from day one, have been really vocal about how we can follow the rules, | ||
| but also open and operate properly. | ||
| And that we are safe spaces for people who wanna get out, but also feel free and can eat | ||
| independent of fear from COVID. | ||
| People don't like that. | ||
| Yeah, were you worried that as you kind of spoke out more against lockdowns and some of this stuff that we're talking about here, that because you're political, you know, because everything sort of then becomes political, that that was gonna have a cost? | ||
| Yeah, of course, of course. | ||
| But it was, after I spoke out against Newsom's ban on outdoor dining, it was full panic, right? | ||
| Hitting every single outlet from New York Post to what have you, right? | ||
| This little rant that I went on in my own kitchen went completely viral, and my phone was blowing up with positive and negative comments, you name it. | ||
| But then What started to happen was people started to support the business from afar. | ||
| People were calling up saying, Hey, I just run a thousand dollars on my credit card. | ||
| I appreciate you speaking out. | ||
| And I realized at that moment that it was true. | ||
| People had talked about this idea that the people who cancel you are not the people spending money at your business. | ||
| And it really rang true. | ||
| I mean, look, since we've been vocal and not, I don't think that we've been vocal in the sense of offending anybody. | ||
| We've just been very principled with our positions and supporting those in the restaurant industry. | ||
| Our sales have been up 300, 400% in certain circumstances. | ||
| When that happened, that shutdown, or I guess it was maybe the second shutdown, | ||
| it's hard to remember the order of all this, but that outdoor ban, when Sheila Kuhl, | ||
| Supervisor Sheila Kuhl here in LA, announced she was the three-two deciding vote | ||
| to shut down outdoor dining, and then she went to eat outdoors in Santa Monica | ||
| to her favorite Italian restaurant. | ||
| That, to me, was the one that, like, snapped me. | ||
| I was at her house the next day protesting, because I was like, this, like, this is now beyond, just beyond the pale. | ||
| Yeah, and, you know, I was getting messages, emails, phone calls from hundreds of restaurant owners in LA and Orange County All of whom are, you know, died-in-blue Democrats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just absolutely livid. | ||
| And it was at that point that I realized that this is a nonpartisan issue. | ||
| You can make anything partisan. | ||
| But really, when we start to watch the people who are setting the rules, breaking their own rules, and then it's literally crushing the businesses, people who put their blood, sweat, and tears into it, now suddenly people's eyes open up. | ||
| So from Sheila Kuhl going to a restaurant, let's talk about our governor. | ||
| I know you're not a fan of Mr. Newsom. | ||
| That's not even a question. | ||
| Just talk about him. | ||
| Look, you know, I would love to be able to sit down in a room with Newsom and try and understand what's driving a lot of his decisions because he's very, very eloquent. | ||
| He's well-spoken. | ||
| Sometimes he does seem principled. | ||
| We know who's driving a lot of his decisions. | ||
| He's tribal with the ways in which he makes decisions. | ||
| He's a good team player for those that are within his political sphere. | ||
| And I give them that. | ||
| But through the pandemic, it went beyond those partisan lines. | ||
| And he started to do things to fundamentally alter the ways in which a lot of us in California operate and look at local governments and state governments. | ||
| And I think that he was trying to set a new baseline nationally by a lot of his peers to say, look at how far I can go. | ||
| This is what we can do in California. | ||
| And look, Biden even echoed that message when he said, California is really the example by which we should all go, the entire country. | ||
| And a lot of that went to his head clearly. | ||
| But when he started to break his own rules, And the arrogant nature of his comments about that started to get replayed over and over again on all these outlets, and then he would double down on it. | ||
| It made me realize that his narcissism was in full effect, and I don't even know if he was a human making those decisions or some sort of a robot. | ||
| $18,000 on booze alone at French Laundry. | ||
| That's a lot of booze. | ||
| How much beer would I have to buy at Slapfish for $18,000? | ||
| On Taco Tuesday, we're going $2, so you do the math. | ||
| Divide by two, carry the zero. | ||
| That's a lot of booze. | ||
| That's a lot of booze. | ||
| All right, so it came with some costs, but obviously some benefit. | ||
| I sense you're kind of actually digging this new direction, just for you personally. | ||
| It's tough, right? | ||
| It's a juggle. | ||
| But I think it all still does come back to food, and that's what I've said from the very beginning. | ||
| Food is the great connector, right? | ||
| It is the great unifier. | ||
| When it comes to food, I mean, You know, you can put all of your differences aside and argue over whether it's pineapple on pizza or whether it's toasting two sides of a grilled cheese sandwich. | ||
| People very quickly forget about the reasons. | ||
| And we do need a little bit of that unity right now, and I'm not trying to sing kumbaya, but I do feel that food is the vehicle through which we can get there. | ||
| Yeah, and part of the weirdness about this was they kept telling us, oh, you know, just do takeout, do takeout, and don't go to the gym, so now we're not working out. | ||
| You know, most people, if you think takeout, although you can get all sorts of stuff, it's like you think about Chinese and pizza, and next thing you know, we know that the average person gains something like eight pounds in the midst of all of this, while comorbidities include diabetes and being overweight. | ||
| Yeah, and one of the things that I've said throughout, even pre-pandemic and throughout my career in the food service industry, is it's all about personal, right? | ||
| And when they try and tell us how many calories we have to put on the menu, or they try and manipulate what ingredients can go into our food, I always remind local health departments and those people advocating for those regulations that, look, this is about personal responsibility. | ||
| And if we try and this behemoth who's making decisions for people, and we lose that personal responsibility, So are you worried that at any given moment they could just pull more lockdowns? | ||
| that we're on. | ||
| And I think that we saw that happen throughout the pandemic is that we went | ||
| from 10 miles per hour to 60 miles per hour when it comes to fundamentally altering | ||
| the nature of our own personal responsibility. | ||
| So are you worried that at any given moment they could just pull more lockdowns? | ||
| I mean, as we're taping this, we're holding it for a couple of days, | ||
| but we're taping this on April 15th. | ||
| That is two months to the day of when Gavin Newsom says we can fully open. | ||
| He is now telling us June 15th. | ||
| There is no science behind that. | ||
| Magically, in two months, we can open up. | ||
| Are you worried that, okay, so maybe they do it June 15th, although I remember August 1st, remember, that was gonna be one of the open ups way back when. | ||
| But are you worried that, okay, they could open us up and then two days, people go out, next thing you know, on the 18th, here we go again? | ||
| Oh, and that will happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not just worried about it. | ||
| I know it's going to happen. | ||
| And it's actually changing the way in which I operate as an entrepreneur. | ||
| Look, the pandemic has been the predicate through which they have decided they're going to change the entire system, right? | ||
| Whether that's a personal system or whether that's more of kind of an institutional system, we've seen it. | ||
| And I know that sounds like sensationalism, but it's the reality of the situation. | ||
| Now that can be, in one person's opinion, that can be changed for the good. | ||
| In another person's opinion, that can be changed for the bad, and perhaps you're middle of the road and you say, oh, some changes have been good, some changes have been bad. | ||
| But nonetheless, it's been a massive change and a fundamental shift. | ||
| Even we hear it today, right? | ||
| Now suddenly they want to pack the court with more Supreme Court justices, right? | ||
| That is a massive change to the very nature of our entire constitutional republic. | ||
| Those changes have set a new precedent and we're seeing it, especially in the restaurant industry. | ||
| And the example that I use is the ways in which they have deputized a lot of these local agencies, right? | ||
| So the health department has become an arm of the government. | ||
| The OSHA has become an arm of the government. | ||
| The labor commissioner has become an arm of the government. | ||
| We have been served complaints. | ||
| After my little spiel from every single one of those agencies that I just listed. | ||
| And when you go back and you try and utilize the legal process to get to the basis of those complaints, you find out that they're all political. | ||
| And that they are utilizing bureaucratic red tape to try and take out those people who even mere question authority in California. | ||
| And that is an incredibly scary thing. | ||
| Did you have any actual one-on-one run-ins with any of these regulators or health people or anyone just showing up to your place, shutting you down, anything like that? | ||
| Oh yeah, oh yeah, of course, 100%. | ||
| And I've engaged with them and spoken to them. | ||
| And what I think is really interesting is there are people just like the rest of us who want to collect a paycheck and want to live their lives. | ||
| And when you start to talk to them one-on-one to really try and understand, we had a health inspector come into the restaurant three days after the incident up at Bravery Brewing, where the lady was apparently dancing. | ||
| But, you know, the excuse was, no, I was drying my hands, you know, to the rhythm of air supply. | ||
| Because that's what the government should be involved in, figuring out if that's true or not, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, exactly. | ||
| I mean, don't get me started on that. | ||
| So the guy comes in and I said, hey, weren't you here a month ago? | ||
| And he said, yeah. | ||
| I said, well, I'm just curious. | ||
| Why are you coming in again? | ||
| He goes, oh, well, you know, it was just the routine inspection. | ||
| And I said, no, it's not the routine inspection. | ||
| And then he immediately says back to me, oh, I saw your post about the health inspector up in LA, right? | ||
| As if to kind of trick him. | ||
| I said, what are your thoughts on that? | ||
| I would love to have your opinion on that. | ||
| And he gave it to me and he said, well, you know, I think in LA they've gotten a little bit too stringent on X, Y, and Z, etc. | ||
| And he kept it pretty vanilla. | ||
| But the point being is, I saw that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That is incredibly odd to me or coincidental. | ||
| But You know, that's just one little example. | ||
| We have been hit with multiple OSHA complaints where customers can just say, oh, they're not wearing masks. | ||
| Then OSHA will give us this complaint and then we'll have to take the time and the opportunity cost to lay out all the ways in which we are actually following the rules, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Do you have any evidence that anyone even got sick at any of your restaurants at any point throughout any of this? | ||
| Not only has nobody gotten sick at our restaurant, but we have actually kept, none of our employees have had significant COVID spread. | ||
| We've had maybe three cases, and a lot of my contemporaries have told me about having to wipe out their entire staff and shut down for good. | ||
| And people ask me, well, why is that? | ||
| Well, we, within the free market, we have told our employees, if you even feel the slightest bit of a sniffle, if you have a friend of a friend of a friend who contacted somebody with COVID, Take off. | ||
| Do not come to work. | ||
| Get a test. | ||
| We'll pay for all of your time off. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| If it's a month, it's a month. | ||
| We will pay for all of your COVID tests until you can come back. | ||
| And what that's done is that that's allowed a safety system within our restaurants whereby people feel comfortable taking the time off knowing they're going to get paid. | ||
| Now, have we had people take advantage of that? | ||
| Yeah, we did. | ||
| Two or three people. | ||
| Did we end up getting rid of them for other reasons anyway or they quit? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You're always going to have bad apples. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| All of our employees have been good. | ||
| They've all been healthy. | ||
| We haven't had spread within the restaurants, because we put that, mandated that we do that. | ||
| Can you talk about how tough it is, just forget COVID for a second, like in normal times, the good old days, just how tough it is to start and continue a successful restaurant before all of this nonsense? | ||
| Well, yeah, the biggest issue in the restaurant industry is that you have to have people in order for it to survive. | ||
| You cannot automate the restaurant industry. | ||
| Yeah, you can put a kiosk up, but you need people to make the food, you need people to input the numbers. | ||
| So for us, it's been about managing people. | ||
| Increasingly over the past five to ten years what we've seen is just this crescendo of lawsuits associated with the people element so it's become incredibly risky to even endeavor into the restaurant space and whether that's Third party lawsuits, slip and fall lawsuits, internal lawsuits, the lawsuits associated with just general human resources in states like California, New Jersey, New York, what have you, that the cost of even doing business is negligible. | ||
| The only thing that would motivate you to get into the restaurant industry is passion. | ||
| You almost get into it knowing you're gonna lose money, and if you break even, you're happy. | ||
| Yeah, so speaking of break even, you ended up helping a whole bunch of people financially in the midst of all this too. | ||
| When Newsom shut down outdoor dining the second time, it was right after the holidays, right after every single news outlet was littered with photos of people shopping at Black Friday sales on top of one another, indoors, at Walmart, eating Burger King with their mask off, or eating a hot dog at Costco with their mask off, in the takeout area. | ||
| I mean, it was like Coed Naked Twister. | ||
| Outdoor dining gets shut down. | ||
| That was the only bastion of hope for restauranteurs in California. | ||
| And they were hiring a lot going into the holidays, so people were feeling kind of good, and then BAM! | ||
| We're gonna crush the entirety of the industry. | ||
| The whole industry is shut down. | ||
| Oh, and by the way, California's unemployment system is in gridlock because we misappropriated upwards of 50 to 60 billion dollars to destitutes, poor guys, street dwellers, gutter snipes, who knows where, who knows what, right? | ||
| We completely left people on the streets and by we I mean the collective we of the state of California and Newsom said If we can save one life, no, you know, there was no message of hope there, right? | ||
| That's where I get frustrated with Newsom. | ||
| So what started to happen with us is that we were kind of known in our own local community as an outlet through which people could get help if they needed it. | ||
| And people started reaching out saying, I can't pay rent, I can't pay a life, filed for unemployment, or I'm afraid to file for unemployment if perhaps maybe they were one of the undocumented workers, let's be honest, right? | ||
| And I can't buy any Christmas gifts for my kids, as I said. | ||
| So we said, OK, well, look, we've got people calling up talking about writing these thousand dollar checks. | ||
| We don't want to grift for ourselves. | ||
| We'll get by on our own. | ||
| But why don't we try and utilize and galvanize some of the attention that we're getting to raise funds for all of those restaurant workers that are struggling right now, whether it's to bridge the gap for rent or whether it's five hundred dollars to put food and gifts under the tree or on the table for the kids. | ||
| And you did it. | ||
| And do you know how many people you helped or how much you raised? | ||
| There was like a whole bunch of different things that you were doing. | ||
| Yeah, well, we've raised over $400,000. | ||
| We've helped over a thousand families. | ||
| We have, you know, my wife, myself, and my kids. | ||
| I've got four kids. | ||
| They were driving around with me, dropping checks off to people as far north as the Valley and as far south as San Diego. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| This money starts to come in, first GoFundMe freezes the money. | ||
| So we had kind of told people, hey, you're approved, you applied, we looked at your system, or we looked at all your references, you're good to go, and then there was no money. | ||
| So then we tried coming out of pocket for that. | ||
| Wait, did they tell you why they were pausing it? | ||
| Or shutting you down? | ||
| It was a glitch. | ||
| It was a glitch. | ||
| And we were frozen for about three weeks. | ||
| So that was really hard on us because the donations kept coming in and we wanted to help people. | ||
| It was in the holidays, time was very sensitive. | ||
| So eventually it was, okay, well now how do we get this money out, right? | ||
| You got limits on Zelle, limits on Venmo, limits on Cash App, all of this. | ||
| So it became, we became, we were trying to run eight restaurants in the midst of the holidays while we were shut down. | ||
| Well, we didn't shut down outdoor dining. | ||
| And then my wife, myself, and my four kids with a newborn were driving around Southern California handing checks out to people or to landlords, because in many cases we were paying people's rent, etc. | ||
| Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. | ||
| Speaking of your kids, a lot of times on Twitter, you're showing your kids are doing stuff in the kitchen. | ||
| They're doing some cooking. | ||
| They seem to be learning life skills while everyone else's kids are getting dumber in the midst of all this. | ||
| I've got all the kids in a restaurant every single day. | ||
| Obviously, the newborn, it's a little bit more difficult, but nowadays he gets it. | ||
| But, you know, they're doing everything from breaking down fish to taking inventory, counting the drawer, wiping the tables, but most importantly, engaging with people, right? | ||
| Looking into people's eyes. | ||
| You know, it's those soft skills. | ||
| We're teaching them those soft skills, and I get free labor. | ||
| Now you really know that the labor board's gonna come after you. | ||
| They watch this show like a hawk, man. | ||
| They've already, they're already unionizing the kids, so. | ||
| They're gonna take on the man, there you go. | ||
| What do you think's gonna happen with Newsom? | ||
| I think that obviously the recall goes to ballot, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that anybody who votes with a D next to their name is going to vote for somebody with an R name when it comes to actually choosing his replacement. | ||
| So I think he survives the actual vote itself. | ||
| I think it certainly is a chink in his armor, but The one thing I say about the Democratic Party is that, man, they stick by each other's sides. | ||
| One resounding message, one singular message. | ||
| So the way in which they've all come out in support of Newsom, with the same chorus, the same refrain, the same narrative, has actually been, look, it's impressive. | ||
| Well, I saw, I mean, remember there was that three-day span where everybody from Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, oh, it's far-right wingers and right-wing maniacs are driving the recall, and it's like, come on, it's not, as you said before, these are not political people. | ||
| No, and I made the fatal flaw of tweeting, I disagree, I think I re-quoted like a Bernie Sanders tweet and I said, this is disingenuous because all of my restaurant friends in California are Democrats and they all want Newsom out. | ||
| Well, what do you think I became immediately thereafter? | ||
| Racist, huh? | ||
| You nailed, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. | ||
| Wow, I'm getting good at this. | ||
| Yeah, next thing you know, you're racist because you defend somebody for not being far right because they want to go to work. | ||
| It's actually quite extraordinary. | ||
| Speaking of the recall, though, you know, you've got your libertarian-ish, conservatarian-ish beliefs. | ||
| You're a functional human being in a very unfunctional state. | ||
| You gonna make a move here? | ||
| What are we talking about? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to on the recall specifically, and I did open my fat mouth and I did say once on Fox & Friends, I said, heck, I'll run against Newsom. | ||
| But then I very quickly walked downstairs after doing that Skype, only to have my wife sitting at the kitchen table saying, we need to talk. | ||
| But is part of the problem because, well, first off, you love what you're doing. | ||
| It's very obvious. | ||
| You love what you're doing. | ||
| Why would you want to be involved in that headache? | ||
| That's really what the problem is for everybody, that every functional, good, decent human being is probably doing something a lot more rewarding than just micromanaging people's lives. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But I will tell you this, I will run for office here in California sooner rather than later, and I will run on the platform that chefs are the best politicians because we understand the ability to mitigate against waste, right? | ||
| And that would be the cornerstone of my platform. | ||
| That's pretty much all we got here in Cali, so that's it. | ||
| All right, to wrap this thing up, I want you to walk me through. | ||
| So as I said, we are gonna do a live Rubin Report Locals Meetup at Slapfish in the next couple weeks. | ||
| I want you to walk me through. | ||
| If I was hiring you, if I had the kind of cash it would take to hire you for a full day of eating, walk me through three meals and maybe a little something between lunch and dinner. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Oh, that's pretty intense. | ||
| Well, and let's just put calories aside here and let's say, you know. | ||
| Calories aside. | ||
| I sense after seeing your pictures, I'm going to have to put calories aside. | ||
| Everybody yearns for that over-the-top, ooey-gooey egg breakfast sandwich. | ||
| So we're going to go with that breakfast sandwich. | ||
| We're going to go with a double-smoked, thick-cut bacon, you know, hard toast on the bread. | ||
| I think a nice, hard, crusty roll on the bread. | ||
| I would be inclined to want to serve Taylor Ham, aka pork roll, but the last thing I want to do is create a schism in New Jersey and Philadelphia. | ||
| So we're gonna go right to the bacon. | ||
| And then, you know, for a little bit of a snack thereafter, I'm gonna teach you how to make yogurt cheese | ||
| and maybe we'll have some fresh berries and yogurt cheese and then we're gonna go into lunch. | ||
| Lunch is gonna be all about indulgent, right? | ||
| Because you're gonna work those calories off. | ||
| Natural cut fries, scratch-made clam chowder, once again, topped with double smoked bacon | ||
| and our signature tiger sauce recipe, which should be coming soon. | ||
| You know, lobster roll, whole lobster packed into a split-top butter roll, | ||
| finished with a little bit of brown butter, maybe a touch of celery salt. | ||
| And then, you know, going into dinner time, we got to do the reverse sear on a 48-ounce tomahawk. | ||
| I like to go with the dry-aged on that. | ||
| Half of you can do a nice wet-aged, as long as you do that hard salt ahead of time, draw out all of that moisture, get that salt in there, a nice dry brine. | ||
| And then for dessert, we're just going to eat cheese and condiments. | ||
| All right, sounds good. | ||
| First off, I'm gonna make sure my guys are putting up images of some of the stuff that you were just talking about so people can actually see it. | ||
| But wait, talk to me about the dry sear for a second. | ||
| Sorry, the reverse sear for a second. | ||
| You're full reverse sear guy, basically, at this point? | ||
| I'm full on a bigger cut of meat, right? | ||
| Because the idea scientifically is that you want to keep your meat in between 80 and 120 degrees for as long a period of time as you can. | ||
| There's an enzyme that exists that really breaks down and tenderizes the meat, number one. | ||
| And when you also reverse sear, what you're doing is that as it's cooking, a lot of that moisture is evaporating. | ||
| So when you sear at the end, you get a much better browning on the meat because Look, there's way too much moisture in the beginning. | ||
| Nothing can brown in the presence of steam. | ||
| So, you know, utilize the time and temperature to get rid of some of that moisture | ||
| whilst using the enzymes to break the meat down. | ||
| Sear it at the end, get a better flavor, get a better crust, get a better sear, | ||
| and you get the best of both worlds. | ||
| All right, well, this is what I wanna do. | ||
| We're gonna do our thing at Slapfish, and then I want you and the wife to come over, and I'm gonna reverse sear you a steak, and I want full-on TV chef legit critique. | ||
| I've seen your photos, so I actually am really excited about that. | ||
| My question is, who eats the bone? | ||
| Oh, well, the dog gets the bone for a little bit, and then, you know, you're not, they tell you not to give the dog the bone for the entire thing, but he works the, well, we're pretty good about slicing. | ||
| David's an incredible, he's got some sick knives, so we can get pretty much everything off there. | ||
| Yeah, I love the slicing skills, so it's good to know there's a team behind it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, he's got the cleaver and the whole thing. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I think, you know, it's so interesting. | ||
| So many people in this past year kinda crumbled under the weight of this, and you can't blame them for it, but some people kinda stepped into exactly what they're supposed to be doing, and it seems like you're definitely one of those people. | ||
| So I'm happy to be allied in this thing, and I'll see you soon in OC, and we'll link to all your stuff right down below. | ||
| Awesome, thank you. | ||
| I can't wait to be hanging out with you. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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