Coq Fighter Founder: How to Rebuild Your Confidence & Overcome Self-Doubt

0:00Fried Chicken Space is filling rapidly. rather than try and be a restaurant and then also fight these guys, these behemoths. Let's just focus on being a great chicken restaurant. It's forced us to do what we've always known we needed to do, which is great. And I'm thankful for it because it's made us go like, we're never going to be able to do an£8.95 chicken burger because that's insane and they can't be making any money on it. I think one thing we're good at is not being too precious. And if things need to change, they need to change.

0:31so what we thank you so much for doing this mate um as i said i think i can't remember when i first had cockfight i think it may have been in i think it was one of the box park sites i feel like box parks yeah gateway drug it was a gate it was a gateway drug yeah it was that because it was weird i don't know who said it i think it was a pizza pilgrims guy who said 2013 to 2017 was like for food was like the 1962 for music you know never heard that before with the Beatles because you basically had you had this melting pot of places like Box Park yep um loads of new up and coming startups like yourself Instagram getting big and it just created this foodie revolution a bit like the music revolution and I remember trying I was like this is fucking insane yes street feast street feast yeah that whole like I think I think as like yeah as as you said like an incubator time it was it was pretty incredible yes also i think the barrier to entry was so much less than like you could just start a food business with kind of no fucking clue what you were doing yeah yeah yeah um as we did and and i think loads of people did they just kind of jumped in and they they had a crack at it and then and then hello mate hi mate yeah so we're rocking and rolling because yeah yeah yeah yeah um they uh you know people just like jumped in and it was it was it was a really fun time it was like there's almost like these incubator and these um gestation sort of things that got these food and business like it made everyone could make a shitload of mistakes yeah in these kind of safe environments and then go out like you guys have like stew as an honest but um at black bear burger and built but what i'd love to start with mate is is take me back to Melbourne and to Chinatown in Melbourne.

2:17Yeah. Because I think from what I've gathered is that you guys were walking around there and that was a really unique type of fried chicken. Like what is, I'm trying to get into the different, like. Exactly. Yeah, so talk to me about, paint the picture for me. What does it feel like when you're in Chinatown in Melbourne? How's it different to the one in London? And what's so unique about the fried chicken? Yeah. okay so i mean i think i think the first kind of thing to cover is that most times when we went there we were absolutely shit-faced at three a.m um not to discredit the food at all um but i think i think for us it wasn't just the chicken it was the experience it was it was kind of it was everything around it um so look back in melbourne uh i was working as a i was working at a burger joint called grilled um shout out simon crow um great guy uh tristan was working there too and deacon was working on radio so he would finish his he'd do like a late night um radio show he'd finish at 2 a.m um and then he'd also generally have like a dj set afterwards right and i would go and meet him and he'd put me on his rider so i could get some free beers i'd go and meet him and i'd be like cool we'd party for a bit 4 30 in the morning we'd be like we need to eat so biggest difference between chinatown and melbourne and in the uk is australia melbourne particularly is brilliant at letting people open late so it's a real 24-hour city right um everything's open like you can go for a full service three-course meal at four in the morning if you want yeah brilliant yeah yeah yeah incredible um Chinatown especially is just it just never stops uh and often is like some places are at their busiest like midnight to four or five a.m so we would kind of roll in there after having a few beers already um to a place called Gami which is now quite big chain I think they've done really well um and we'd order these huge plates of of Korean fried chicken and it was it was like very traditional so you kind of you get your Korean fried chicken it's a whole bird diced like literally cleave it up wow and fried in like a really like heavy corn and rice flour mix which is I mean heavy on corn flour and rice flour not heavy it's very light coating um and then it would get tossed in one of like four or five glazes that you'd choose yeah we'd kind of get a mixed plate of that we'd get a jug of beer we'd eat a shitload of chicken and smash a jug of beer and that would kind of be the end of the night and it was always like it's always just like you'd meet people there you'd see people that were in the club with you guys like two hours ago and you're like hey man cool you'd like end up joining tables the staff were also like you know it's 3 4 a.m so like they're trying to trying to make it fun yeah yeah yeah yeah it's just a vibe yeah a really good vibe um what sort of music was Deacon playing Deacon was doing like house.

5:23I'm like, I'm such a dad rock guy. So like, you know, I don't really. What's your, what's your tipple? I'm like, I'm just an old man, man. I'm like, give me like Led Zeppelin. Oh, sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm an old self.

5:39So yeah, it was just, I think it was, it was obviously the food was incredible, but it was also like, it's just a great way to end the night. when we all moved to London we all moved kind of within six months of each other we all ended up living together again and we're in this house um Deacon was kind of trying to trying to get a handle on radio in the UK I don't really know what I was trying to do um how old were you guys at this point I think I was 21 oh so super young yeah I've been here yeah I would have been 21. Yeah. I got a job in Byron Burger. Yep. I was waiting tables. Anyway, we were all kind of like back in that thing where we were all working late nights.

6:19And then what we realized in London was like, there's no late night food and there was nowhere to, like we were like looking for that and we just couldn't find it. Obviously replicating the late night thing is pretty tricky because of the way licensing is in this country. Sure, sure. But we, yeah, we were just like, we talked about it a lot. And it was kind of stuck with us. We were like, remember that place? Like, it would just be great if we had something like it. And then what we ended up doing is just cooking for friends at home. So obviously, as we met people in the UK and like, I've got family here.

6:54So we kind of like built a little community. And then we, I was like, I like cooking. I can cook. My mom's an incredible cook. She taught me to cook from a very young age. what sort of stuff did she cook you honestly like anything and every mom you say you've got family links here is your mom yeah so my my dad's australian my mom's english oh nice my mom's from birmingham oh nice yep um and then she moved to australia and then just could not believe that i was leaving australia to move back he's like i spent spent so much money trying to leave this place and you've gone back there um so yeah despite it's interesting so one thing there's kind of a thing in the a lot of um not food podcasts put it that way but there's a whole thing of like loads of people elite kind of lambasting and slamming london and the uk at the minute it's like everything's fucked it's all and it's and it's like and kind of part of me if you listen to that online whereas on the ground it's like you know everyone's like oh you almost that whole sort of tick tock vacation which brings fear into it as well if you walk down the street you're gonna get fucking mud yeah yeah and it's like on the ground family that think they're like oh is it safe yeah and you have your phone out it's the same thing with la right so in la um a lot that i've been recently but like you've got all the thing of like san francisco's completely yeah yeah you see the whole they've i think they've got that poo fucking thing which you can see where tramps of shit honestly there's an app not that's not even a gag mate that's not there's an app in san francisco that no way like a like a poo finder yeah yeah and this is what i'm It sort of creates this kind of warped reality of what it's like on the ground.

8:31And I think I listened to a guy called Eric Weinstein. He's like, mate, you walk down the street in LA, there's like nothing's changed. A lot of people are saying this. It's like loads of people are leaving London. The whole place is fucked. And it's like... I think from the outside, it looks really bad. It looks from the outside really bad. If you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in D2C, but you're struggling to crack retail, then you've got to listen to this. Maybe you've got an Ocado listing. maybe you've got a Whole Foods listing, maybe you're absolutely killing it in Selfridges, maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies.

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9:43northstar i'm not like another data company that force feeds you data like foie gras that act like a nasa space mission it's super super simple to use their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset northstar are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need northstar link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with Northstar highly highly recommend that and thank me later but I'd love to know from your from your lad's perspective what was the gravitational pull to go around the other halfway around the world to London like you could have gone anywhere you could have gone New York like what was why did London pull you to be honest I think I think it was for me personally it was there was some familiarity like I'd spent a lot of time here growing up right um never lived here before but like always my family in the uk are wonderful people as well i've got i've got a really incredible network of family here as well so it kind of felt like a i think when you're you know when you're 21 as well you're still a little bit like oh bit scared yeah um i was like oh i've i've got aunties there like i've got family that like if everything goes tits up i'll be like hey can i cup of cup of tea can you cook me some soup yeah can you stroke my hair um so i think i always just had like a bit of a you know i had i had family here that would that would i knew could support me if i needed it so that was always a nice like warming feeling um deacon tristan i think um i'm not to be honest i'm not sure why i think it was probably somewhat well i know exactly why tristan moved here tristan was chasing a girl right um who i think he spent i think he he really like he basically upended his whole life to move here to chase this girl and then they broke up like six weeks after he moved here or something.

11:36How it always works. How it always works. But, you know, all for different reasons. Deacon, obviously, for him, like for radio at the time, like Radio 1, I think it just felt like a natural progression for him. Yes. Try and crack a bigger market as well. Right. I think all different reasons. But, you know, then obviously this was the thing that kind of made us all stay. Yes. No, it's mad. I hadn't thought of the radio thing. because what was he was he wanting to be kind of like a um broadcaster or is it more it was more the djing stuff uh i think i think probably more broadcasting wow yeah it's mad how i just love all these stories like this sort of melting yeah like why people come and do these things and why you create yeah i mean it it almost is like wild how how it could never have happened yeah it was literally just one night and we were like i was like we've never we can't find that fried chicken yeah shall i make some yeah go on and then i'm i also like side thing i was really getting quite into like reading about food science and like why things work and like i was watching all these videos of like heston putting vodka in batter because it lowers the gluten formation i was like nerding out on all this shit yeah yeah cool i'm gonna make this yeah i'm gonna make these like amazing chicken wings what sort of stuff were you learning about the foods because we literally the podcast that went out this week was ashley palmer watts oh well Oh, cool.

13:01Who did, who was Heston's head chef when they got three stars. And I was asking him, again, nerding out, because he's got the kiki and the babau. Have you heard about that? Which is like different foods, by the way they sound, will invoke a different flavor of taste. So it's like strawberry is the babau sound, which is like that round sound. And then something like spicy would be more of a kiki sound. It's kind of more like... Yeah, almost like crispy fried... And I was like, I was sat there nerding out, and I was like, this is fucking mad. It's the, what's the word? Onomatopoeic? Onomatopoeic, yeah.

13:34It sounds like it's meaning. And he was also saying, I was talking about why are humans addicted to spice, right? Yeah. And he was saying that they plugged him in like something up the fucking matrix into this thing with like loads of different tubes. Yeah. And he was in like an MRI chamber. And... They're horrible, aren't they? Yeah, mate, I would not do that just to see why humans like spice. I have one in a few weeks together. Oh, it's absolutely grim. And basically they had all these things and they had different flavors going in and the spice tolerance wasn't actually going up. But he thought in his head that they were just ramping more and more and more spice into it.

14:08Well, well. Basically what he learned is the pain. I was like, why are we addicted to spice? It's like the pain and pleasure receptors. They are basically the two sides of the same coin. So when you're getting loads of spice in it, it's like bondage for your mouth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, quite literally. But yeah, what sort of stuff were you learning? I'd love to know how you've applied sort of that weird food science to I think fried chicken. Because this is not just fried chicken. it's like there's so much more depth yeah i think look i think the products changed a lot we've we've well i think one thing about us is like we've maybe for for better or worse like we've never like sat on our hands um sure we've constantly tweaked everything yeah um but originally so like the first iteration of it was very much um very much like proper korean fried chicken but what we were doing is we were using like a vodka batter in the in the coating um which is what heston does with his fish and chips basically the alcohol content lowers gluten formation so imagine like gluten in a pizza right you want to get you want to really work that pizza dough and get as much stretch into it can build as much gluten as possible because you want it to be stretchy and that's the exact opposite of what you want in a batter right um because because that when it's fried gives you clagginess gives you kind of chewiness rather than crispiness so what you're looking is to inhibit gluten formation so you want to get this as you want to get it as light and as like brittle as possible um and the alcohol content like stops or slows down gluten formation so um so we were we were we were like obviously jump forward a little bit when we were first starting out we were like going to the shop at like seven in the morning and just like buying like 20 liters of vodka just like me and my chef covered in like chicken and flour who are these Aussie alkies the guy at the off-license next to the pub we were in the pop-up and was just like iron me up every time like and then like eventually he started stocking more vodka and I was like and I would always be like dude have you got anything cheaper because like it doesn't matter what it tastes like so like he started getting in these like one and a half liter bottles of glens for me I just must have looked like such an alkyl absolutely wrong just like with a trolley coming back to the pub with a load of like cheap vodka you get a load of glenn's vodka going into a boozer at 7am that's fucking we used to um we used to do these like we used to do these end of service shots called a called a cock shot and it would just be like our hot sauce 50 50 with the glenn's vodka wow and um fuck i mean that was that'll get you fucking won't it yeah yeah yeah Yeah.

16:39Awful, awful. But yeah, so we like, I was very into that. I was very interested in how that worked. And I think, you know, we were just kind of made some food at home. And yeah, like first time, Deacon and Tristan were like, fuck, this is really good. And also we'd done it a little bit different. So I was like, I was like making the food for the guys. And I was like, right, rather than glaze all the chicken, and you kind of have to do it. to like choose one or the other and be like this horrible like ah i was like let everyone have everything so i made all the glazes and then gave everyone a paintbrush to do it themselves so there's a bit of like theater to it as well we're just like cooking food at home and everyone got these massive plates of wings big thing of like paintbrushes on the table and then yeah kind of like brush your own sauce on choose what you want mix and match there's a weird behavioral science thing about that about personalization when you when you have skin in the game you're the perceived value of it goes up exactly so people love um barbecues well and also i interviewed the guys funnily enough actually do it mark palmer is the the guy i was telling you about uh he's doing the aussie stuff he sits on the board at aussie nando's oh right really interesting and he was i was like saying like why is nando so successful and half it is well not half obviously gross gross we've talked about this as well but it's like the personalization yeah because then you feel like not only are you getting the chicken but you're going up yeah and actually it's genius because it means they've got less servers because you're basically serving yourself but i mean i go in and you know and it's the same thing with your paintbrush and it's like once there's a real value add conceptually and theater yeah that's fucking genius so what so this is this was this is when you're doing it in the boozer they were so this was literally i mean we we kind of did that we we did that just when we were cooking for friends and we and we did a few nights like that um and then we and then yeah we moved to a pub and the way we moved to the pub was quite funny we like so obviously i'd worked in a restaurant before but no experience as a chef and none of us did and none of us knew really anything um so we we kind of had this idea and i was like cool i'm gonna throw a menu together and and it was basically just like a real basic menu sure wings and fries and and real small and we were like we've got this hero product and we like we want to get it out there we think it's really good which the hero product was the like wings the korean wings so there's just nothing like it at the time korean fried chicken hadn't really yeah entered the uk yet um so we were like right how are we going to do this and i was like right we're going to do a food truck we're going to do market stores we were like applying for all these things while i was applying for one of the market stores i saw an advert i don't know if you remember how facebook ads used to look yeah yeah you have your screen you have a little sidebar and you get the adverts on there and um there was an advert for the star by hackney down saying they needed a new chef just and i was like let's give it a shot sent them an email told them we run loads of restaurants in australia then we had loads of experience yeah you need a bit of completely sorry rob yeah completely lied through our teeth and uh he was like cool come in and do a tape we sent him a menu and they emailed back and said cool come and do a tasting when did the tasting gaffed everything up was really nervous i was like shaking i was like oh oh fuck um food was terrible somehow they said yes i think basically just because they had no one else at the time this was to do your fried chicken and yeah yeah yeah that's mad that's so you guys were super early on that because that's now like the whole idea of a pub sort of outsourcing their food to a upstart is kind of now ubiquitous yeah back then that was quite a new we were we were one of the first not one of the first there was a few people doing it there was a brand in before us that I can't remember the name of um lovely guys doing really good burgers but we were like yeah cool this is going to be the way forward because the other thing was like we literally had no money um we started the company with 500 pounds um like I was broke um and it was the only way we could do it like it was less capex than it was less capex than starting than doing even like a market store because for a market store you'd have to go out buy fries tables a gazebo yeah you'd be you'd be up for two and a half grand even then and we were like yeah and also you're paid to be there whereas like the pub was like right you can start on this date um all you need to bring is yourselves and obviously you need to bring some food to cook so like we spent 500 pounds on um stock a printer so we can print menus and i think like some chef aprons um we did that and we we didn't have any suppliers either so like we had to i used to get i used to have a trolley that i'd stolen from the tesco and i used to keep it in the like doorway of the pub and i would take that trolley to the butcher in hattie central pick up my chicken at like 5 a.m then go back drop that off prep it then go to tesco grab a load of veg and just we just like that's how we had to start yeah so the whole i mean the whole um what's the vision at this point is it just like we're having good cracks or was it i think it was more that like we were we i think the vision was just that we'd all deacon wasn't really like deacon had some work in radio but he wasn't getting the work he wanted to get um tristan and i were just kind of working in restaurants and then anytime we weren't in the restaurant we were just drinking yeah and you know or like doing dumb shit yeah so like i think it was more like right let's just do something that's positive that's fun that we're going to enjoy doing and like for ourselves and just see what happens like we were so young that like if it all went tits up it didn't fucking matter yes you know and like there's i think there's there's a real lesson there as well is like when you're that young if you've got an idea it can only go so wrong like you can only fuck it up so bad yeah as long as you you know and and just like starting small as well like letting it grow organically like we're still we've never taken investment we're still independent and like amazing we've it's been a fucking slog and it's you know meant we're not able to pay ourselves loads of money and all that stuff but like it also just gives you that freedom of like yes i can do anything i want yes yeah when you're young you have that sort of brash you can you can brash oblivion naivety which forces you to do something and um almost like high agents i love i like i'm always intrigued with people who start things like why they've got such high agency why they've why they're like fuck it i'm just gonna fucking do this yeah i like people who yeah and and i think that like and sadly i i actually i talk about this a lot like i question whether i would do it again now yeah because as well like it was painful you know the first four years were literally like grueling and I enjoyed every minute of it.

23:36I don't know if I would now in the same way. So that early bit, four or five years in, I ask a lot of these questions. So we're four or five years into this, right? The first bit, you're just like, fuck it. I was going to interview some people. There's no real plan to it, figure it out. And then you kind of get through that. And when you look back retrospectively, you're like, oh my God, that was graft. Then it starts going and it's great. But there's almost like this, as you called it, the slog period, which is like the naivety goes away. Yeah. The naivety fucks off. Yeah. And you're like, oh, shit, like I've created this not monster.

24:14Yeah. Sometimes it's either a monster or like it is a monster, but you want it to be like a nice Shetland pony that you can just ride around on. But more often, no, it's a fucking monster. Yeah. And that slog period, because you guys have been going 15 years. We've been going nearly 10. Sorry, 10 years. You've been in London 15. been in london for nearly 12 12 right miles off then don't worry um but yeah that slog like what keeps you keeping on during that stop here because i think it's like a guy someone called it the trough of sorrow which is like that it's a quite a quite a morbid way of putting it but off of so but it is that that bit where you just got to like how do you keep going in that and how do you keep the joy in the work it's tricky because yeah you do you kind of have this like unbridled you know blinkers on like everything's great and like i'll take on every opportunity and every problem that comes my way and then you do get worn down by it and eventually it's kind of like it starts you know as you said you start just going like okay right this is this is real now also like naturally just as things get bigger they just it gets more real like you know opening shoreditch we had to take a loan out and it was like oh god like we've got to take a loan from the bank how much did you have to take out like 40 grand which is like that's a shitload of dough well yeah but like you know we ummed and out about it for months and like i'm glad we did it because like 40 grand we opened and like had queues literally out the building down the road yeah day one and i was like thank god we're fine um but yeah i think um to answer your question i think you have to like you have to just be really resilient and like you have to kind of every day just go like okay right what I do is what I do can be really difficult but also what I do is incredibly rewarding um and and and like it really is like to be able to well I think like it's just little things it's a it's an amazing review saying like hey this member of staff like gave us a great experience last night we had the best time you know my baby was crying and like they moved us into a quiet corner and they helped us out and like um we want to thank you so much it's those it's like you know or like we had a i think we had a couple come in after a wedding once where like something had gone terribly wrong and like they were just had like they food had gone wrong or something and they needed to come and eat some food like six hours after they'd been married and they come in they come and had a really nice wild yeah like it's those little things they're really rewarding and i think also like just talking to people about it like it whenever you kind of explain it to someone else it reminds you how good it is like and how much and how much fun it is and like you know and like that you've actually made it work and and um that's quite fulfilling i think it's always a small thing isn't it because you can get you could get so pulled up in into the well we've got to raise this much or we're going to open this site we've got we've got to get that site up and running and it's like we've got these bills to pay but it's like that's stress that's the monster yeah the shetland pony multi-colored fucking pony is the like the couple coming in with the wedding and it's just like you've got to try i think you're titillating between both those sides yeah like if you're too much this way on one the sort of the you know i think egregious monster then you that's the thing with like with being you know and like i i think every every founder i've ever spoke to says this is like you really need to be able to hold both in equal regard you need to be able to look macro look micro you see the big picture look forward but also be able to walk into a restaurant and see all the small details and and and be able to hold on to both equally and realize that they're both equally important and not lose sight of the little things because like what as soon as you and like we've been guilty of it you know i think you have periods like we've had periods where we've kind of we've been opening this site and soho's kind of lost a bit of our love and we've gone like oh shit the eye of sorrow needs to shift back to because like you know and keeping that founder's touch direct input i think is really important mate um the uh the biggest learning i've got from the podcast is it's um is this what you're saying now is a thing called a barbell strategy which is this clever fucker called nasim taleb but i'm upset i've read his book like 10 times and it's all about being anti-fragile which basically i need to get that off if you're anti-fragile mate like yeah you're all good mate get a beard and you're too early but but basically what he's saying is and it's the biggest learning i've got from the podcast is is the ability to hold two opposing things at once so as you said it's like the focus on the the the scary projects but also be really appreciative of the the little things little things another one for me is i have huge amounts of self-belief but not too much because then that equals hubris yeah but then also then also have self-doubt because that will like make you get better that will make you be all over everything you know checking everything's working but if you have too much self-doubt then you ain't gonna open the second site yeah i think as you said that it is it's trying to hold those two tensions are there any other tensions that you think are worth that you sort of picked up on with doing this yeah um tensions i would say rather than tensions what I would say is relationships um I would say that I think what's been I think we're also we've kind of almost like gotten through tricky periods where maybe we shouldn't have or you know we've we've been able to like navigate situations is I would like to think anyway that like we have really good relationships with all of our suppliers we have great relationships with all of the staff that work for the business um and i think if you kind of you know almost like in every part of your business if you treat it a little bit of as as if it's a community um you'd get so much more back like i've had to lean on all of my suppliers so much in the last 18 24 months um how so um being an annoying customer and being like i need this now no one's ordered it sort it out please and them just going yeah no worries um or you know like obviously you must have been speaking you've probably spoken to a lot of people about this food costs are mental restaurants is really struggling to make money right now um you know if your burger's gone up pound 50 stop complaining it should have gone up three yeah um yeah yeah i think everyone needs to hear that a bit more right now um i say what so food costs are spiraling right but i get that but Like why the$350 versus$150?

30:56Well, as in, you know, like I just think that, I mean, no, I think. Costs, problem is, personally, I think it all comes down to perception of value. So you've got, you know, people that aren't in the industry, like punters coming in and having food are just going, why is everything going up constantly? Fair enough, you know? So they should ask that question. I'm not getting paid anymore. Why should I be paying more? I think the rate that, you know, the overheads for a restaurant and food costs are inflating is so much faster than prices are actually going up. So, like, our pricing hasn't caught up with our costs.

31:34No way. And it probably never will. We'll probably never recover back to those same margins. So everyone's kind of right now trying to make their restaurants work. um and not just restaurants plenty of businesses but like they're trying to make businesses work with completely different cogs um and kind of like rebuild the whole thing from scratch like you know suddenly you've got to find five percent so your labor's got to come down a bit and then but then how do you keep the experience that's what i was going to say that's where it gets true yes how do you again that's another tension right or relationship it is like it is balancing yeah so so one of the things someone said to me scale kills magic so it's like as you get bigger um yeah uh how do you keep the how do you keep the magic alive and like we were just that is a great question yeah we were just in prep right and i've interviewed julian metcalf on the show and he was um he was the sort of the guy the first guy to be like i don't give a fuck about the p &l if you want to give someone a free croissant or a free flat white fucking do it and that stopped for a long time admittedly because of cover they did the prep scheme yeah and all that we've just been in there like the best one of some of the best service of experience and they're like it like um you want to you look like you look like having a tough day not to me to someone to one of the punters i'm like just have a free cappuccino yeah and it's like but but that is you can't just do that to do that on scale and but also to manage that and be like right over however many sites they have like hundreds yeah you know like don't give away too many but yeah you know it's tricky so scale scale kills magic but then what now is killing the magic is just the cost of everything going up so how have you began to sort of re sort of look at cockfighter and be a bit malleable and move and change it around a bit i mean plenty of things and i could go on about it for a real long time i'll try and keep it brief but i think so we we've we've kind of experienced that i think like right now we've got a real like the three of us are having a real focus on the brand as a whole service um keeping that magic um i think if anything like we've kind of come back and we're doing it better than ever um right now yeah i think there's a period maybe after covid where we did lose a bit of that what did you lose just a little bit of that warmth because i think we were covid for us was hectic um we were opening delivery kitchens left right and center because we would we had no rent relief on any of our sites like we would like we've got to cover the rent or we're going to go bust so we were like deacon tristan and i were in the car every day like unloading fryers doing it was busy sure um and then i think after after covid there was a bit of a period of like when everything reopened up we were so drained that we all kind of just maybe for a few months went like you know took a bit of a deep breath and i think that you know i think what we've realized as well is like as a founder it really is like it's quite often you that makes the brand you know whether you like it or not and it is it's your personal touch and and whether or not you're serving customers but just being in your you know being around your teams and and again community and like being around more and i think like right now we're really we're back in our sites loads we're really making an effort to kind of really understand the business again from the ground up and i think that's kind of where the magic happens is again it's the small things you know it's me and Deacon did a shift two nights ago and um Deacon just giving away some food to some people that had come in and loved it and been raving about it and um you know someone the other day was here while I was shooting next month's special and they were really interested so I was like why don't you try it gave them some of the um with this month's collab with Dr.

35:19Stings gave him a bottle of hot honey sick tiny thing blew their mind they were like oh my god this is amazing we love i also have introduced them to a new brand dr stings they're like cool we love it now they're one of their customers it's those little interactions and i think as well when you're not physically in your sites and you don't have the money that prep do to have an amazing ops team to go like right this is what we want to push into our sites it has to be you so us coming back in and doing a bit of you know being with the teams and be like it's okay to do that you know if you've got a group give them a shot if they're interested in trying something let them try it don't worry too much about those little things it has to be you that demonstrates that anything else I love the idea of almost like from the bottom up going almost literally with sort of microscopic and kind of forensic looking through evidence and like you know sort of those freebies those surprises those easter eggs yeah of magic is there anything else you sort of picked out or any other not necessarily like customer facing but even maybe because i think you can innovate not just customer facing but like the back end as well absolutely um what i would say is yeah i mean like because i'm i'm obviously the food side of the business so i've been i've been in the kitchens a lot more lately i mean not that we were ever out of them but like we're kind of it's a real it's a direct focus point right now yeah so um again i would just say like you know it's just listening to your teams like we had this great idea for we have like stickers that go on the burgers right and we have like a different sticker for every item so like you know we've got like six burgers like six different wings there's like a roll up there of like 19 stickers and i was like ah doing my head in and there's like there There are little rappers everywhere in service.

37:10It's just messy. So I was like, right, one sticker, tick box. They just tick off what it is. I was like, amazing. And then a week in, the staff had been like, Troy, we didn't want to tell you. These stickers are a fucking nightmare. They're like, please, can we have the old stickers back? And I was like, no, you're insane. What was the thinking with loads of different stickers? Well, so they rather that because it means... From the originally to have 19 stickers. Oh, right. honestly just idiocy just us being like that just not looking at it yeah looking at it properly and going like yeah stick for every every skew um they were like oh this tick box thing's a nightmare it's really slowing down service so i was like bullshit came in did service and like they're kind of right um you know because you've got to have the pen and you're like yeah yeah yeah yeah so like it's fine we've got another solution now that's something completely different but like I think just listening to your teams as well, the people that work in your business day-to-day know it in a lot of ways better than you do in that sense.

38:16And I think there's a mistake that a lot of people make, maybe not so much anymore because I hear this a lot as well, but traditionally the boss saying like, do it because I told you so or just being a little bit belligerent and being like, well, no, I've said it's right, so it's right. So, you know, getting insights, listening to your teams, finding out why they don't like something. Generally, it's not because they're being difficult. Generally, it's because they want to do a good job and they're trying to do things in the most efficient way possible. And they're generally seeing, you know, opportunities for it.

38:49And often they don't even know if they like that. You know, sometimes they're like, oh, we don't like, how do you feel about this? I'm like, yeah, please tell me. Yes. Give it to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to hear it. It's almost having your like founder tentacles, octopus tentacles like in. Yeah. Yeah. And then extracting the gold. the way like generally when i go if i do a shift i'm like guys you're my boss tonight what am i doing so i think that's the best way to approach it like let them you know you know obviously let them feel that they know that they can speak to you about anything but also that they that their their thoughts um their insight is valid and that you appreciate it whether you agree with it or don't agree with it but you want to hear it and i think like letting your staff know that you want to that feedback and that insight is really important there any other like interesting feedback you've got from sort of the bottom up that you've made changes oh loads over the years yeah i mean over the years like over the years little things not working i mean like um oh i'm trying to give you a good example little things like you know they'll be like oh well the the baker's packing this like this and it doesn't work with this box can you change it to like eight buns per bag instead of 12 because it'll fit perfectly in the box and like it's just someone nerding out about like yes jenga of buns yeah yeah yeah yeah um little things like that and they're not you know often they're not huge i mean or like one of the big ones we had a few years ago was the way that tickets were printing they were they weren't printing in any kind of order so like you would get a check through and it would just be like it'd be a burger then it'd be an add-on then it'd be a wings then it'd be fries then it'd be another burger then a roast chicken then it'd just be all over the place rather than being grouped and i think like little things like that like them saying like this is a nightmare if you just fit if you can fix this that'll make it way easier yeah and it does and it makes things way more efficient and food times improved drastically because of it um yeah it's all the little things yes which always compound what's your i think like the ability to prop like face problems almost like you know in the gym when you get like calluses on your hands that sort of hardens over time yeah mine are a bit soft yeah yeah yeah i mean i i'd fucking drop the 25 kg plate on my that that made my that's been like that made my bum do that mate mate that's been like that since january i'm like waiting for it to grow back i had a bike accident last year and i completely lost because don't you go i saw on your instagram my skull you go motor biking yeah yeah in some wild places talk to me about that like so my um always loved anything with an engine right my dad used to race speedway for the australian speedway team and it was speedway speedway like motorbike going around in a circle oh okay sorry yeah sorry like flat track yeah yeah yeah i've seen that film tagadella nights yeah yeah yeah yeah um not quite um but it's on a motorbike yeah so he used to do that's how he met my mum actually um mum was like oh man and a man some leather and um yeah so he was always in bikes um and then when i was growing up and i used to race go karts oh sick australia so always been into anything like that and then always wanted to get a road bike and my dad was just like absolutely not so as soon as i moved to london i was like absolutely far away yeah bike dad sorry yeah um so yeah bought a harley and have now crashed many of them how many motorbike crashes have you had three wow something through those i've only only one big one um the last one was uh was was filtering through traffic woman didn't see me in a rear view and just i thought it was in london it was in london i was expecting some like some being chamonix in the alps no no thank god i don't know it was literally like my flat was like 30 seconds away oh um yeah broke my skull in like eight places fucking both cheekbones my nose uh just kept my collarbone my shoulder had a had a good one yeah yeah when was that nearly a year ago um so yeah but uh how do we get into bikes i may i've got severe adhd so we'll just jump around yeah don't worry about that yeah no but yeah lots of fun um love it and what's the so how does that so when you go on these long rides um because i think i saw a picture on Instagram of like you and the Alps and stuff.

43:18Yeah. I try and do one every year with a group of friends. Yeah. Um, there's a book called the Zen of the Zen of art by motorcycle, uh, the art Zen of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's a bit of a mouthful. Yeah. That's it. Um, not read it, but I've got it. It's, um, it's like, it's there. Yeah. I mean, so I just think, I just think the title's good. Yeah. And I think that I'd love, and I think, um, I'd what, how does motorcycle, motorcycling give you Zen on it? To be honest, it's literally that is the main reason for it i think um obviously you know as as we all know like this can be quite stressful industry yes um and also just you know restaurants especially you're never off the clock there's i mean my screen time is just horrendous like you're always on and you're always kind of checking in or or there's always an issue or someone's called in sick or yeah you know a fry is broken or there's always there's just never ends yeah so it's it's for me i think like the the the bike firstly is obviously like it's pretty fun riding around on a motorbike it's great fun yeah close thing you can do do you rag it about like in yeah yeah yeah um sometimes are you one of them harleys or you're one of them i'll show you yeah yeah show us a piggy uh it's a big harley it's uh you're you're sat down like what's that water not war dogs uh that film I'll find it for you yeah yeah yeah but you're low down you're riding like that yeah yeah yeah I've got a chopper which is a bit more like that and I've got another one which is like a bit more of a speedy one right is that not really uncomfortable it's not it's more like that yeah but as in when you're on those chopper ones oh or do you just get used to it yeah I mean I don't have anyone like I'm not doing that yeah that is the ape hangers thing yeah yeah yeah yeah they're ridiculous yeah um no mine are quite comfy yeah you know i'm like mid mid range yeah um so yes the mechanics of i mean look yeah working on them's great especially like harley's always break down so loads of opportunity to do that um i rent a garage with four friends we've got all our bikes in there there's like 20 motorbikes in there um it is very much like the kind of the man cave thing you know you go there like if you if i have an evening off go there put some music on open the garage door we've got a little barbecue out the back as well like it's just really like sit there have a beer take something apart put it back together again it's it is quite zen to it also it's said that i think there's something you know inherently um calming about focusing on a on a small task yeah um so there's that and i think also the other side of it is like when i moved to london i didn't really found quite found it quite difficult to really kind of like meet my people um obviously started meeting people in the food world yeah um i met some of my best friends through the pub residencies my friend maxime who is the general manager at plunk um me and him met at one of our um residencies and didn't really sleep for six months because we were partying too much but um yeah i've met loads of people through that but i think then like bikes and the whole like there's a real community around it yeah um i've i've kind of met yes lifelong friends through that and that's amazing um doing those trips is incredible because like we do we'll kind of do like 14 days start in london literally ride through 12 countries and then ride back um it's incredibly it's like there's these things yeah it's relaxed it's for it's like uh the sort of the juxtaposition of the aggression of the motorbike and the calmness but it's true it's like you need to find these things that are like that give you that like not peace of mind but peace from mind exactly because i think i agree i'm the same with you where i'm like i can if i want to be on it just all fucking day even if i'm like out and something comes in i'll be checking instagram yeah and it's just like i can't get peace from mind and it's like i think as well like yeah i don't know if you've if you've read about the kind of like shower incubator thing right so loads of people myself included you know your best ideas come in the shower yes you know and it's a combination of there's no distractions you can't have your phone in the shower thank god they haven't made them that waterproof yet um and but it's it's the it's the noise it's that static it's the noise it's the warming uh it's the whole thing but like i consistently will maybe once a week i'll have a really long shower that i yes maybe spend a bit too much money on the water sorry like my housemate um but it's like that's where you know your brain kind of can calm down and and fresh ideas can like actually kind of bubble up to the surface i think same thing on a bike yes you know you kind of throw your earplugs in you've got the sound of the bike there's nothing else happening you can't be doing anything else and you're kind of just you know is it like go kart i mean i'm my only go kart experience was down in chessington by the a3 yeah i did that for an hour and i came off off that thinking shit like yeah because also you just you just the only thing you're focused on is taking over that next person and i mean it's like this is like it but yeah it's the same sort of okay i get that it's so because your hands are moving like this i'm assuming like your body can't like it probably takes a lot your body can't really focus on what's going on as well exactly you can't i mean you can't do anything else you literally can't so in terms of the brand building piece like harley davidson's a brand that is hugely revered i'd love to know and as i say we just go wherever we go with it yeah yeah um what from like the consumer perspective of like you said you couldn't find your tribe you couldn't find your people you then almost through this community whether it was harley or not or even just motorbikes in general like you found your tribe you found the thing that gave you connection and status and all those things like what are some the lessons you've taken from from that that you've kind of applied to this and fried chicken okay i mean again not to keep banging on the same thing but i would go back to community yeah but when you see there's really let's really put like sink into that i think i mean

49:33with that friend circle i think having that like common thread that you know that shared passion for something um it it creates friendships that are a little bit deeper than than your normal ones because there's like you know there's there's a common goal you're working towards in a way whereas like you know and i think you've got a kind of restaurants or any business it's kind of the same thing it's that you know i mean a lot of my best friendships have come through i mean i i work my you know my two the other two founders are my two best friends sure i think when you work together on something and you kind of building something together um that's where your deepest connections are made and i think same thing you know with whether it's whether it's working on you know when it's working in the garage till 2am four nights in a row so that you can all get your bikes ready last minute to get on this trip to the alps and then go and like have this incredible time together where like you're literally with each other every moment for 15 days or whether it's you know building a brand together and spending years working on that that is kind of where your deepest connections come from um what are like say is i think brand building for us has been something we're still to be honest i think it's something we're still working we're still kind of always in a state of flux with we've we've always known we've always had uh we've always had clear goals we've always known what we wanted to be but i think we've we've quite often been been told that we shouldn't be that and i think We could unpack that more.

51:12And so we've always wanted, from very early on, we've always wanted to be a restaurant, right? And the dream was... I love the a la carte menu, a chicken restaurant. It's just genius. Exactly. And the dream was to be a dine-in restaurant with great service, with good cocktails, and also with more than just fried chicken. And now we do roast chicken, we do grilled chicken. um we're just a great chicken restaurant and and i don't we're kind of at the moment trying to shift the public perception of this is a chicken shop or a fried chicken brand to being a chicken restaurant and that's something we're working on now yes everything about what we're doing with that but that's something we're working on now and i think we've always felt that deep down um we've talked about it for years and years and years and everyone we've spoke to not everyone most people we spoke to have just all have said look it's not going to work you've got to be qsr why like no one's interested in dining in to have a chicken burger no one's interested in that like why are you pushing dine in so hard and then i think after there was a point where we let that get to us a bit and we really kind of we had this like maybe 18 months where we were like what are we are we because we had box park and that's how we started we started out qsr but we always had dreams of being dined and when we opened soho we were like right we're a dine-in restaurant but then covid hit and we kind of had to pivot back to pushing delivery really hard so we were like we were a bit like lost yeah and then in the last year we've gone right we've always wanted to be dine-in we've always wanted to be a restaurant that's where we excel and that's where we are like our menu's built for that there's so much more going on our menu than just you know fried chicken with like we're very different to most fried chicken brands in in what we offer and we were like right fuck it let's hone in on what we've always known we are let's just focus on the dine-in restaurants everything else is just a distraction um we've we've shrunk because of that and we're now just we're three restaurant we've still got box park and croydon but and and we've we've got a great team down there and how many so how much what have you shrunk from to well we had plenty of delivery kitchens um and now we've we've scaled all that back and we've got three dine-in restaurants and we've got croydon box park and it's mad so this you know what we're talking about earlier about like how that when you're in the beginning no one's it's just you so no one's telling you what to do and you've just got so much brand confidence because there's that's the only thing you can really have and as you get bigger like the winds of distraction come and there's effort to pull you and i think you can have that and i've had these moments where you sort of lack confidence and what i'm doing people like do do the podcast for 45 minutes an hour and then you start getting i'm like i don't want to fucking do that like i want to create the thing i want to create i want to be i want you've got to have that yeah i want it to like you know if you didn't now we wouldn't be talking about motorbike crashes do you know i'm saying like this is what i get but i think you can lose that you'll think you start thinking oh shit am i doing good like how did you go from this state of kind of um brand kind of unconfidence to confidence because basically pretty much everyone listening to this will go through that at some stage and it's like it's not as easy thing to pull yourself out the abyss of that do you know what i'm saying and if anything it's harder because at that point you've got success well yes well not success but you've got money coming in exactly and also the thing is it's like i think one of the hardest things you can do as a founder but also like one of the most important things you can learn is knowing when to say no to turnover money income yeah and just say like no this is not part of the plan like we need to we need to stop getting fucking distracted by every all the noise because it is really you know you ever we have a weekly you know delivery is obviously a big part of our brand and we really and now we're looking at it as like right we we almost hold it in two separate kind of ideals and we go right we need to this is how we need to be the best as we the best we can on delivery because it's a real viable part of our business sure so we have a real focus on that but then separately this is how our dine-in restaurants need to operate that's another tension isn't it and and it is a tension but i think we're like again like we've had this kind of calmness wash over us recently where i think we've come out of that that fear of how do we do both and how do we how do we merge them together into the something and you know and to to just go like right we are a restaurant business we also we also have a delivery business and almost street and two separate businesses um and and having that mental clarity and and kind of um split of the two yeah yeah is is is for us really important but and and again like just to we were we were doing all these dark kitchens because we were like right we need more turnover we need more turnover we need to scale this thing and and it was kind of treading water and and and work for the sake of work and and turnover for the sake of turnover we weren't really making any profit out of it but also we weren't really able to build the kind of teams that we are able to in a dining restaurant um and therefore we weren't able to deliver the same product even on delivery you know because we weren't getting that same investment back um so i think we've just learned that like right we need to like we we've always felt that we're a restaurant brand and we've always wanted to be that and it's always been our dream so let's stay in our lane let's just do that yeah um and now we are like laser focused on that we're hopefully opening two deliver two restaurants this year um and we're we're also way more confident in what what we're doing is right and i think like where did that going back to that confidence yeah honestly I think sometimes confidence is it just has to be between you and your own mind and sheer brute force and saying stop being scared you know that you can do this, stop doubting yourself just do it what are the voices and the rainfall of self-doubt for you, what does that voice sound like?

57:43Constant I'm thankful for that because I'm the same mate well I think look the thing is Rich, can we just check that one? oh it's because the red mean it's on okay sweet we'll go yeah we're good yeah what does that sound like for you i think i think over the years it's been different i think at the beginning it was i don't know what i'm doing i shouldn't be here you know imposter syndrome i've never worked in a restaurant i don't know what i'm doing yes um to then going oh are we are we ever going to like are we ever going to get recognized for this is it going to and then and then suddenly you do and you and then that gives you that confidence but then i think now that that little voice is different and it's purely down to social media because you're constantly seeing you know this projection of success from other brands um and and you know you especially chicken right now you're seeing we're seeing loads of big brands from the u.s move into our sector and there's there is a real fear of like are we just going to get stomped out by some of these big boys yeah um and i think again that's moving over well i mean like popeyes have opened however many sites yeah chick-fil-a coming over there's a brand called bondbird who definitely ripped off our logo design uh in the uae but um it's cool don't worry um who then that's just taking private equity and are opening 60 sites next year but i think again and this is why i think it's really galvanized us is yeah the fried chicken sector is being heavily populated like the qsr qsr yeah fried chicken space is filling rapidly you know chicken shop are doing a great job of it um popeyes are doing a great job of it bond bird will do a great job of it and i think that we've just gone like rather than try and be a restaurant and then also fight these guys these behemoths let's just focus on being a great chicken restaurant and it's kind of we've it's forced us to do what we've always known we needed to do which is great and like i'm thankful for it because it's made us go like we're never going to compete we're never going to be able to do an eight pound 95 chicken burger because that's insane and they can't be making any money on it unless you know who knows how they're doing it but it's really forced us in back into our into our lane And I think you've just got to have some kind of fluidness.

1:00:14Yes. Or, you know, you've got to be agile and be able to say, right, what we're doing now isn't right. We need to pivot. And you need to be, you know, like you're constantly tacking. Yes. Never quite. Never like concept, you know, proof of concept, sell the thing or like, you know, take investment and open 40 sites. it's always a constant kind of you know navigation and and being able to i think one thing we're good at is not being too precious and if things need to change they need to change um the what you said there is like there's so much on that so like the first thing is i don't know who said it's i think it's a strategist guy um yeah i'll go for some as well there's a guy who wrote a book called no bullshit strategy alex smith is being on this pod he's probably a good mate of mine actually and he um yeah he's just like a brand strategy guy and he was he always says that like competitive advantage is an inside job and by that he means it's like look look what you if you look into what is in here it's like we want to be a fucking restaurant well actually with all these other plate the qsrs coming in it's like that's going to be our our positioning and our point of difference yeah and then the other thing which seth godin taught me which is your competition should be your colleagues i so you say let them so all these qsr people come in and you say right if you want qsr go and see my colleague popeyes and that you'll get that if you and then and they will say if then but if you want a restaurant you come to us exactly and how i mean it doesn't because competition's competition but it's a very kind of utopia way of looking at things but what should be happening is popeyes would be saying right if you want fast food come here if you want an actual restaurant sit down with a load of beers go there yeah and i think but and that's i think you're so right but and i've had these doubts and stuff with this so am i doing what i'm meant to be doing and it's just like also it's so easy now to be looking at what everyone else is doing oh because there's social media yeah yeah you know um yeah no so do you not look at so how do you navigate that no i do i do all the time i think yes and and like it's tricky you know you still you know the kind of the worry and the self-doubt can creep up on you but i think Like, I don't know why it's kind of happened this year, but I do, for the first time in a long time, really kind of have like a calmness about like, I know that what we're doing, we're putting out food that's better than we've ever done it.

1:02:38We've, you know, we're constantly working on that. And like, we've never kind of rested on that. Like, I feel like our business is in the best place it's ever been in. Yeah. And the vision is kind of finally, after nine years, like the final kind of vision. Yeah. is um it's kind of finally being realized right and i feel really good about it yes and that's fantastic and also seeing as you know as we're just talking about seeing a space that we kind of used to kind of dip our toes into just become bigger and bigger and bigger and get more and more occupied has made me way more comfortable with going like right well that's fine we're actually we don't need that yes we're gonna go we're gonna go here yes um because we're not that and i think you know what like when you talk about the magic as well the magic of our brand is more than getting than than you know ordering on a on a um screen on a screen and and you know we have them but obviously like the the real magic for us is that we have a menu where that you can you can come in with six friends and you can and there's something for everyone and there's there's there's there's roast chicken there's grilled chicken there's more exciting flavors you know we do like laxa butters and all sorts of stuff so there's there's a bit more to it and i think that's where the magic is that you can come and enjoy all that and have a cocktail and hopefully and they're just gorgeous what's wild as i'm looking at that picture you know we were talking earlier about the pink but i didn't even realize i didn't even looked at that about the it's either a monster or a donkey there's literally for listeners there's a picture of a pink horse these are all the artworks done by my housemate felicity marshall she's incredible um she's doing some she's doing some work for us at the moment now but um so what's that all her artwork and all the restaurants wow um yeah because it's fucking fun yeah it's fucking fun yeah what i'll do is i'll take a picture we can have it slide on the screen but yeah that's like a pink horse thing which is is wild on that note of competitors versus colleagues like yeah what would you say are some of the most underrated chicken places in london oh that's a really good question um underrated chicken places in london um let me have a quick think about that

1:04:56depends on the type of chicken there's a can't even remember the name but there's this like you know you've got like all the kind of nando's like knockoffs right roosters yeah there's there's a peri peri chicken place that i order from it's near it's nearly bridge i don't actually know exactly where it is but i get delivered quite a lot um you know if i'm like on the couch it's fucking great really so good and it's like it's that proper like tangy there's like loads you know there's no fresh lemon in it it's like citric acid it's like full-on like sauce out of a packet but i don't know what it is but they're using but like that and then like it's proper wood fired as well like you can tell it's like done on wood but it's that combination of like kind of almost like fake sauce yeah yeah yeah it's like really punchy and it's great yeah brilliant um i would say fried chicken look i i think i think what chicken shop are doing for the scale that they're kind of doing it at now is incredible.

1:05:56I think they're doing a fantastic job. And I love the fact that, like, we talk about them a little bit as almost like a gateway drug for our brand because people kind of, you know, people have fried chicken. They start with maybe they're going to, you know, maybe their experience is KFC, right? And then I love KFC, by the way. I love KFC, man. It's like, I love it. I smashed a zingham meal the other week. I was off my nut. yeah i was like this is just i've entered sort of nirvana like do you know what i mean you know the way the hot wings right yeah they're fucking in australia you can get right the you can get you know your original recipe you can get like any you know it's a whole bird chopped up yeah you can get that but in the same coating as the hot wings it's called hot and spicy oh um and it comes in like a black bucket with this oh so the bucket's got the heart there's the actual pieces of the in the fried yeah in the hot and and like i literally grew up like smashing that it's probably still my favorite fried chicken like i know i shouldn't say that but it is yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um any little quick quirky spots in chinatown that do really good fried chicken i haven't actually eaten any fried chicken in chinatown i think like because so gammy was like such this is formative kind of place for me i think i kind of just went i've done it like yes i've i've had nirvana and i've i'm gonna learn from the best and and it really was like it really was incredible um hopefully it still is i'm sure it's still there um it really was great though the other place i'd say is where was i gonna go with this i've lost myself um fried underrated fried chicken yeah underrated fried chicken um you know what i haven't tried yet but i really want to because i i used to love it when it was other side fried is busters i'd love to try it haven't been other side fried gone to change the busters yeah so they've kind of like merged the two and it looks incredible like whatever you guys are doing looks great oh because they've got that restaurant plus plus side i think as well yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's mad um what have been some of the other learning like i think there's um there's a thing between like 2d learnings and 3d learnings so like 2d learnings is like you read a fucking textbook and it's like you know you can learn it from a textbook 3d learnings are something you can only experience through the through experiencing it right so it could be like for example heartbreak you can't learn heartbreak in a in a you know gimpy management textbook you can't learn grief in that i think that's the same with with you know building a business yeah what are some of those sort of 3d lessons those ones that are like fucking hell like that was so painful but in that pain it taught me so much deep wisdom all of it um i would say look there's been those kind of painful lessons they you know they come they come in different stages of growth and i think the first one of those for us was close to day one in the pub not having having ever cooked food professionally before was just not understanding how a commercial kitchen works and looking at it from a home chef perspective and some of the shit i did was so dumb man like i used to i used to hand make my own bao buns every morning at 5 a.m because I thought you had to make every single thing from scratch and they were great but you can also buy them made from a guy called Tan who makes fantastic bao in an industrial park in Leighton I don't know if he still makes them anymore because we don't sell bao anymore but you can just buy them from him and they're still handmade and they're fantastic and not spend four hours a day doing that and then because I was the one doing it i had to be there even on my days off i would be there in the morning making the buns and then i'd be proving them and then i'd steam them and then i'd leave them all out for the chef to come in and be like cool your buns are ready and i'd go off and have my day off and go back to bed little things like that and it's like kind of i guess like when we started we we i had this kind of naive um you know rose-tinted yeah yeah yeah um where i i kind of thought like we'll do everything every we can do everything ourselves and and we don't need any help and i think learning that look that's actually the lesson is learning to take help learning to accept help and to know that you're not the best at everything you can't be like obviously play to your strengths but if you if someone is available to you that knows more about something fucking like ask them call them up who's been that for you who's given you the best sort of advice so many people over the years um there has been plenty i think um the guys from honest been incredibly helpful um deacon knows them a little bit better than i do but when we've had questions and when we've had you know concerns and period of periods of you know freak outs like fuck what do we do in this situation like having someone like that on the phone has been what would you say that freak outs being when you're like oh like as in you know we're about to sign on a lease and then suddenly they've completely changed the terms at the last minute and they want 40 grand a year more or you know how to navigate things like planning permission and all the things that you don't you know when you when you go into this business you're like oh i'm going to cook some food and it's going to be beautiful and everyone's going to have a great time you don't think about ehio planning you don't think about you know i taught myself how to do cad so that we wouldn't have to pay an architect cads uh oh this yeah yeah yeah we've we've we've done all i've done all the floor plans for the restaurants because we didn't have the budget to do it yeah now we're able to pay someone that knows more than me so we do but like um yeah you you don't realize how much you know everything you don't realize all the other things that are that are involved and also how much people are actually willing to help and people also yeah that you're exactly right people if you just ask for help people generally give it to you and like i now i'm in a position where people ask me for help and obviously i try and give it to them where I can.

1:12:31That's another thing that's kind of macro a load of bollocks about London is everyone's like, oh, everyone's so miserable. Everyone's so miserable. It's like, yeah, it's because they're on a fucking tube. Yeah. Go to a boozer on a Friday night. Everyone's happy. Everyone's happy and you're getting like, and that's another thing. Again, I think there's a lot of podcasts like these big ones that are sort of saying that, oh, you know, you go to London, it's all like, you know, or even the North South divide. Like, to be fair, people are warmer up North. Like, there's just no, like, but it's, but people in London are willing to help, especially in food and it's like you can just don't be like that's that's a massive learning i've picked up as well actually is it's like i think especially in this country i think it's like the whole thing about you know the whole sort that we're not going to help that's bollocks like and i think it's especially like look as as an australian who's spent a lot of time here and having kind of good perspective on both aussies are incorrect like upfront overtly helpful and like we're very we're very open people um english people i think can give off this kind of stoicness that maybe makes them feel unapproachable but like yeah what's your perspective from the other side honestly everyone in the food industry here everyone that i've met has been incredible i don't think there's anyone really that's been unhelpful or has not been up for a chat um in any capacity and also from every kind of you know i've got friends that are super high-end fine dining i've got friends that are running you know starting up like takeaway businesses people doing um kind of direct to supermarket um ingredients things like that it's a beautiful community of people and i think there's such a such a big lesson for me and something i wish i'd done more is use that up and like ask for advice go and have a coffee with i think like i'm terrible at this for myself i never feel like i have time to have lunch with someone or have a coffee with someone every time i do i feel like man that was so valuable like yes it you know and even if the value in that is just you both having a bit of a whinge getting some stuff off your chest and being like it's really good to see you i hope you're well and also just not being on your phone for half an hour yeah even like this it's great yeah yeah and i and i think there's real value in that um it's hard to quantify maybe but there's real value in that like keep in touch with people in your industry that like they are you are all in it together and it's not you know as you said competitors versus colleagues i i don't really i don't think i think that that idea of competitors is hopefully kind of waning and well so i think if anything it's like who's well actually my therapist when i was partying too much basically he said to me like i was trying to sort things out and i won't i mean i'm really oversharing here but he was like um like he was saying sort of like resentment is a is a drug that you try it's like a poison you try and give to someone else but you actually you're actually consuming yourself yeah and i think with competition is people can get like that where they literally want to destroy their competition it's like all you're doing by thinking about it is destroying yourself yeah it's like actually it's like all you're doing is literally hurting yourself it's just insane it's insane in the same thing i think finding that place of peace where it's like they're actually your colleagues yeah and yeah providing or not and you position yourself allow them to sort of push position yourself here as we're a fucking restaurant yeah yeah um it's so wild i spoke to that zan or zan uh from bleaker yeah yeah and it got a bit fucking weird but we were talking i ended up talking about how that how you'd make a burger and almost like the rolling stones and i was like so who's the front man is it the patty what's what's the bun and we end up she basically said with with her burger the the bun is almost like the drummer it should just sort of fade away and let the meat like mick jagger sort of fucking you know go and prance around yeah what's the art yeah it's a bit of a where it got random as i say but what was what would you say is like you've you've obviously made a shitload of chicken burgers i mean i'm sort of salivating now but yeah the uh i love chicken burgers like what would you say is your sort of your art of like the chicken burger what's the most important bit where does the lettuce come involved is it like the sauces talk me talk me through it maybe your any of your burgers yeah no no no i that's i think it's a great question i think um you know beef and chicken two very different things obviously like i think with i think because this is interesting because we've tried to make the chicken in our chicken burger we've tried everything we can over the years tried some dumb shit as well to make it unique make it special and i think like what we've always come back to is that like really like fried chicken when it's in a bun form as well especially is like that kind of american style fried chicken is it just works and there's a reason for it so we've almost gone a little bit full circle on our burgers where like our chicken now is juicy it's moist it's well seasoned um it's crunchy on the outside but it's that's it that's the simply it's not and and it doesn't need to be more than that and i think we've tried we've been like oh let's try and get all these extra spices in there and you kind of just lose it all i think for us like where we the most important thing obviously the chicken's important but really for us it's our it's our sauces and pickles like we have a central production kitchen now that makes so we have a kitchen and our office is above it in bermondsey um we make everything by hand there yeah we have uh christian uh prep kitchen manager used to be a head chef from one of our first sites so he's like he knows how it should he knows how every he's like yes the guru yes right yes um and the fact that we're still like the fact that we make everything like we'd like 25 sauces and pickles from scratch every single day like from scratch what so what and just on the way is that important to the well i think so that is actually the sauce and the pickles exactly exactly and i think for us like the point of difference is like we put so much work into them to make sure that they complement the chicken but also that they're delivering you these like kind of punchy flavors that are that are maybe a little bit unexpected as well um that's where like that's what our burger needs and and that's the most important part without that it's grape fried chicken but i think there's a lot of people doing grape fried chicken and I think like that's where we differentiate ourselves from yes also again our bun I mean we spent we spent a year working on our bun with um actually can't tell anyone where the bun comes from yeah we'll cut that out that's all good um but like we our bun's fucking brilliant yeah um and it really as Zan said it's a vessel it's it's nothing more yes it's a vessel I think um see weirdly with a bacon sandwich I actually think the bun is more important.

1:19:44Yeah. Like my favorite bacon sandwich is like the soft, you know, the soft sort of baps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the floured baps? Yeah, the floured baps. Like actually the bacon's actually... You always want that bit of flour. Yeah, you don't, yeah. The bacon's not actually that important. You could go and get, I'd rather have shitty bacon from Tesco's and one of those floury baps. You just want salt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas you can get me the best pork in the world. Yeah. But if you've got it in some like Hovis, you know, 50-50, you're fucked. Do you know what I mean? the thing is my i actually for my for me like i i've i always get a bit annoyed with this like i i sometimes you just want a bacon egg sandwich right yes like you're like yes i had too many beers last night i need a bacon egg sandwich and then you go and it's fucking sourdough and like the big holes in it and the eggs like squirt through it i'm like i actually want personally i'm a shit white bread kind of guy yes like give me two fried eggs not like gooey but like in between jammy yeah yeah yeah a shitload of crispy bacon and then or top tip half the bacon super crispy half of it a little bit less yeah a little bit of contrast and texture yes yeah this is what Ashley was saying yeah I don't have ketchup and then controversial margarine margarine yeah instead of butter oh margarine I was thinking of marmalade I was thinking this boy fucking hell i'm like i was taking something no no no i saw margarine over butter for me like my fondest memories of bacon and egg sandwiches are rolling into a greasy spoon hung over yes 11 a.m on a sunday and just being like give me three bacon egg sandwiches and they always use margarine yeah i'm like they butter the out they they spread the outside of it and they toast it on the on the flat top and like there's something about that flavor combo that's just stuck in my brain that I'm like, yes, this is right and righteous, but I know it's wrong.

1:21:36I know it should be butter. Yes. I hate to say that. It's so good. I would never use margarine in any other circumstance, but on a bacon egg sandwich, fuck yeah. Yeah. Again, as I said, I'm fucking scatting and go all over the shop, but back to the motorbike stuff. Yeah. Is the motorbike stuff, but your motorbike journeys, like what's some of the wildest places you've been to? Like where you're like, this is, what's the most beautiful place you've been to? The most beautiful places I've been, have been on a motorbike. so being in the alps um like i've got i mean there's some videos on my instagram on the stories of like riding through you you know like up in the mountains and there's lakes either side of you and there's like you can see snow hitting the mountains but it's like 20 degrees and you're like that's sick just honestly it's fucking incredible there's this day where so we'd we'd been like riding through we had a really shit day the night before like two of us had broken down we had to get apart like we we pulled into this old dude's house and he let us use his garage he spoke no english we were like between like austria and germany and one and one of the guys that i go on these trips is sven is german so he spoke some german and he was like whereabouts were you in germany honestly can't tell you i'll find out i'll find out for you yeah um somewhere yeah funny name sure sure sure but um we were like yeah we'd had this really bad day and like i'd broken down like four and then like it was raining all night there's a thunderstorm we were like all drenched next morning beautiful and sunny we're like awesome there's this pass um called stelvio which is um famous road right like um the first scene in the original italian job i don't know if you've seen it incredible scene yeah yeah guys driving a ferrari um beautiful song playing over it i can't remember the name of the song but it's fantastic um and then his car blows up in the tunnel but like one of the most incredible riding roads in the world and we're like riding through this road and um i've got my headphones in and free bird comes on by lynda skinner and as so i don't know I'm not asking you to sing it now.

1:23:48Anyway. Is that that ding ding ding ding? Do you want me to play? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go on, yeah, yeah. Otherwise, I'm going to do some rendition that's hopelessly shite. It's so good. So there's a part where, like, it kicks in. Oh, and you're just absolutely ripping it up. And we're ripping it up. And then two eagles, like, fly overhead as it kicks in. And I was just on my bike, like, yes. Oh, my God. This is the best thing that's ever happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:24:17yeah yeah yeah yeah what's the bit that it kicks in

1:24:24oh sick does this for ages oh sick

1:24:35here we go all right i know exactly yes sick oh yeah yeah all good um yeah i wish i was doing that i'm going in getting into richard's ford fiesta after this and driving through london but i'll pretend i'm listening to free bird by lynyd skinner or whatever it is but um mate so that's sick and then um what would you say is some of the best musics because i think as i spoke to stew at blackbeardberg about this um and we were talking about um so he's got an interesting about on the restaurant thing have you spoken to him about this you should speak to him so basically he says we're not a burger restaurant we're a restaurant that does burgers yeah so their point it's a great way of their their point of difference a bit like you with the sauces um with the sauces and the pickles is have you make their sides of yeah oh my god make their sides the the um oh my god what is it the the brisket spring roll is phenomenal isn't yeah it's like a thing of beauty um but every time you go to one of his restaurants they're blasting hip-hop yeah and i was like i was asking him like why why is hip-hop such a good music to like to eat to eat to what i'd find fascinating is obviously as you said deacon was in radio and a dj like you clearly love some of the old yeah older sort of rock dad stuff how do you create the music to create the magic so i think like for us we've we've and weirdly we're talking about this two days ago we're like is it time for a refresh on the music we have over the years like played around with a few things i love a bit of like dad rock yeah it can be a bit abrasive in a restaurant but like alternative like 80 like 80s music in a restaurant just so fucking good man yeah like i love it hot chicken cold beers yeah you're up for it boy if there's a bit of madonna playing i'm like i'm stoked yeah yeah you know roxy music like anything like that but i don't why in our setting it it just works yeah um so we are like pretty heavy on like 80s music yes yeah it's the best we love it when you're picking sites how do you uh kind of how do you adapt to the local like how do you do each one so for example and obviously it's slightly different right so i interview the founder of gales tom fucking genius like that's scales in frinsbury park is wild it's like going into a nightclub in the 80s really it's all pink it's fucking wild yeah and he was like each site me and roy we literally like maniacal about how each one looks and does it and they have like this ai system it's crazy to like figure out how yeah the location yeah yeah yeah um but like how do you do that or like do you want to keep it consistent like as you say you're trying to do more of a restaurant now like do you want the restaurant to be the same at each place or i think what we want is a you know there's if you go to any of our restaurants now there's a common theme there's obviously you know there's differences and there's differences because multiple things budget time learnings you know what's worked what's not worked tastes evolve there is a common theme you know like we're and and we always want to keep that um i think we're not we're never going to be a brand where you walk you know you walk in and every restaurant looks identical um where it's a carbon copy um we're never going to be i think that works i think some brands it works really well hello hey um i would say for honest burgers that formula works incredibly well um because for me like honest is like you know you see it and you instantly go oh yeah i could eat that like because you know what it is and you're like, I just want to eat some rosemary chips, man.

1:28:25It's all about the chips, with Honest. We've talked about it so many times. The rosemary, yeah. The success of that brand is not only. But I think also one of the biggest learnings is always picking something that your competitors can't copy you on, which is kind of a weird foible. There's a great book by Will Gadara who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality and basically he was trying to build the best restaurant in the world in New York. And he's like, well, we need to find something that almost an Achilles heel in our competitor that we can focus on and they won't be able to do. Or they're probably not thinking about it.

1:29:01So what they did is they decided to get, so why have you got, you've got a wine sommelier. Why? Well, why have you not got a beer sommelier? So they got a beer sommelier and suddenly it's like, no one's thinking of that. And it creates this touchpoint magic. Same with Honest Burger. It's the chips. It's not actually the burger. Yeah. Pickles. That is amazing. Yeah. But it's the chips that are talking about. like they yeah it's like undeniable isn't it you're like oh man i just you but you walk past and you immediately know the brand and you go cool yep i could do that 100 yeah and i think like we're we're i guess what we're trying to be is a little bit more of a destination brand where we want to create something we want to create space that people are going like oh yeah should we like book in for that because like there's you know we want to try there's like quite a big menu now and we can try a few menus massive like yeah i mean in a good way that's for a restaurant yeah yeah yeah the cart chicken is fucking genius yeah yeah yeah i mean there's some really exciting stuff coming food wise um which i'm not going to tell you about now because i want to i want to leave it for tristan to to be able to post about but um yeah we're really excited about some of the food stuff that's coming on i think with with the fit outs though like and and picking locations is i mean look when you're in what you've got brighton here king's cross yeah so brighton is shelter hall um which is sadly wrapping up soon right um shelter hall kind of is that like uh on sites for take on brands for a period of time and then they you know they rotate every sure every 18 months um so we're gonna we're gonna be back to the three dine-ins as as the restaurants um i think picking sites for us is obviously when you're independent you're hamstrung by cost so you know there's sites that we've seen that we've gone oh man we would love that site but you know they're asking 300k yeah premium on it and like there's just no way we can do that yeah where were some of those sites you reckon that you'd absolutely love well the an area that we've been trying to crack for forever is liverpool street because we started you know box park shoreditch we had a site there yes we're not there anymore you've got the restaurant in shortage no oh no no we're not in shortage at all so oh so i read on instagram i thought you were opening somewhere in shoreditch we're working on it oh okay no that was in 2017 oh uh maybe i was just no no no ignore me that would have been box block okay sorry no it's fine yeah yeah so we we um we just kind of like have this i think sometimes like you've kind of got to listen to your gut we've got we feel there's a pull like it's a gut feeling yeah couldn't tell you why yeah we've always wanted to be in that area um finally fingers crossed uh touch wood we might have something sick but um you know it's tricky finding sites i think what we've had to learn over the years is how to make ourselves um we don't really write anything off we're not we're not a we're not a brand that says we've got someone who who like looks for property for us at the moment we don't say to him like needs to be 1500 square foot it's got to be this it's got to be this many covers it's got to be this could be this could be this we just say like just come back to us if say if he comes back with a pitch that's in an amazing spot but it's only 800 square foot we'll make it work and i think that's where you know if you're independent and you don't have the luxury of just going like you know whacking a lot of cash on the table yeah the other side is you haven't got some fucker telling you what to do yeah like there's pros and cons yeah exactly but if you don't have the money to kind of throw your weight around with you have to be um you've got to be open to everything and i think like we've got a you know two sites that we're working on kind of looking at now a lot of brands have not taken those sites because of you know they're a bit difficult it's a funny shape square footage isn't enough you know whereas we're like we'll make it work come on give it to us please like i think you know for us we're very much like we'll we'll figure it out um you know and i think that's our mentality and uh and it's almost like we pick up on scraps in a way because you know we're we're not going to be able to fight prep on on offering the same money as them for for like the best pitch so we'll go for something next to it that's not quite as not quite as prominent um and we'll happily do that because we believe in we believe in what we're doing we and we know that we can make the site still look great and and we can we can work around an annoying layout or you know uh like a difficult floor plan yes that links back to that like this what they've given you but that that holding that tension of flexibility versus what you've got yeah i think you're gonna have to run a sec final question um um what's some of your favorite restaurants in london again i'm a fat little fucker so i love to eat um try different things so favorite restaurant in london it's always a hard one i had you're not on the spot it's always like i was speaking to somebody yesterday it's As soon as you're on the spot about your favorite restaurant, you're like...