The Business of Butterworth's, the Hottest New Restaurant in Washington DC

22:10I was really mad. I'm sorry I wrote that. It's not true. So the funny thing about Anthony Bourdain, and this is, he wasn't like a good chef. He was like a very normal run-of-the-mill chef. He was a great writer, a really good media personality. But like if he lived in Columbus, like he would be the chef of an Applebee's. Like it was a very like medium. Oh, that's so mean. A workman. God, that's going to get clipped. I'm going to look like a jerk. But like he would say that himself. Like he wasn't like a grand sort of ho chef or whatever. He was a workman. He was a journeyman. And so that is true at that level.

22:46It's totally true. And all of it's still true to this day. Like if the fish is starting to go bad on Friday and you're at one of those restaurants, they are going to toss it in some vinaigrette and put it on a salad on the brunch menu. That's 100 percent going to happen. But the bar – since that essay was written in the 90s or I think it was the 90s. The bar for chefs and because of the whole foodie revolution of the mid-aughts, the lowest level of like chef is much higher than it was then. Like there's not – there's fewer and fewer journeymen and there's more and more people who are into it because they're like obsessive about the products and sort of artistically minded in that regard.

23:18So if you're eating in a restaurant that's not a chain, I wouldn't worry too much about that stuff because they, if anything, they're more inclined to throw it out before you would even notice because they're just sort of like they would be ashamed if they sold a piece of fish that smelled bad. In defense of Anthony Bourdain's cooking ability, his cookbook is really good. And he has an awesome recipe for lasagna and then a whole schedule for doing Thanksgiving dinner. And I follow those religiously. Although I will admit, they're basic recipes in some sense. They're not particularly creative. But they're great and I rely on them.

23:54Anyway, you mentioned the importance of chefs in a restaurant like this. How competitive are restaurants when it comes to getting the best chef? Extremely. It's like when we were opening Butterworth, I would go stand out back of restaurants that I liked where the sort of dumpsters were, where people might take smoke breaks in hopes that I could talk to the cooks and steal them. So we trade talent and sort of fight over talent in an extremely competitive way. So much so that there's like serious feuds over and across cities like in New York, D.C. and L.A. There are chefs who hate each other because they steal each other's cooks, particularly if you have like a really good fast dishwasher and I can have one dishwasher instead of two.

24:36I'm going to take your dishwasher. Wow. Can I ask you? So the night that we were there, I after I tweeted, we were there and I think maybe you sent maybe it was via DM and you're like, oh, I'm glad you enjoyed the meal. I think we had sort of an off night or something like that. What does that mean? Like an off night or from the perspective of the chef? Because it certainly seemed like a very busy night, et cetera. Our food was excellent. In your mind, when you say, you know what, we kind of had an off night, what does that mean to you? It can mean a few things. That night specifically, it meant it was very busy that night, but the busyness was not spread out.

25:10It wasn't like, oh, there's a table at 615, then another table at 630, then another table. It was every single table came in at the exact same time. And so what happens then is all your production lines get screwed at the exact same time. So then there's a huge wave of cocktails and the bartender's rushing through all the cocktails because all the cocktail orders came in at the same time. and then it moves to the kitchen and the kitchen's rushing through all the orders because they all came in at the same time instead of sort of like being super purposeful and like okay i have 10 minutes to do this one and then the next one's going to come in and then the next one's going to come in it's they all come in at the same time so you're rushing through it and as a result like things get sloppy and so that night specifically i watched the rhythm of the restaurant and everyone came in at this exact same time and i could see the kitchen getting backed up and tickets were a little slower than i would like them to be and some of the plates like i was like oh i wish we We had played to that a little bit differently.

25:56I wish it was a little neater here. And so when that happens, reservation systems are mostly designed to do that. Some of them are designed to fit as many people in as they can and good for them. But most reservation systems are designed to slow down the number of people who are coming in so that the dishes and the drinks and whatever it may be are done well and done intentionally. And when there's like a huge swath of walk-ins on any given night, that's when the sort of like the production capacities of a kitchen or a bar get sort of backlogged and they get sloppy. Tracy, it sort of reminds me a little bit of like our conversations that we talk about electricity and grid, which is the difference between total throughput and peak throughput.

26:36Right. And so, you know, you want an even distribution and the problems come on that one really hot day or whatever. And so spreading the demand out is also a very important consideration in sort of optimal grid design. Only you would compare the restaurant business to electricity grids, but it makes sense. I agree. Since we're on the topic of reservations, one phenomenon of living in a foodie city is that you have restaurants where it's very difficult to get a reservation. And I'm thinking specifically of Carbone. I would love to take my husband to Carbone one day, but my impression of the process to get space there is that it's so difficult, it's basically not worth it.

27:18And in fact, in New York, you now have reservation auctions, people selling platforms. There are these one, I forget which app it is, where you can get a reservation fairly easily if you pre-commit to a minimum spend. So it's like you can pre-commit to like a$300 spend or whatever. $300 worth of garlic bread at Carbone. And then anyway, so. First of all, how do I get a reservation at Carbone? What are your tips? And then secondly, what do restaurants think of these like very intense competitions for seating in the restaurant? Yeah. Number one, this is mostly David Chang's fault. So I hope he knows this is entirely his fault.

27:59Momofuku Ko was this is like sort of Michelin star restaurant. I think it's closed now. But it was the first one that I knew of at the time that did this like there's no way around the reservation system. Like you have to log on exactly two weeks before and you have to sort of win the lottery. There's this famous story about how his parents couldn't get a reservation for the first year because he refused to sort of break out of this system. And so used to you would like know somebody and you would shake hands and you would sort of get a reservation and whatever. And this like super scarcity model sort of produced this like this reservation thing to some extent.

28:30So how do you get a reservation? A lot of them are now designed to not have any workarounds. Right. So like knowing somebody is not going to help you because if you interfere with that scarcity model, you interfere with the entire system. And so your best luck is to sort of be online at the right time when they go live. Some reservations book a month out. Some book a whole year out. Some book one week out. So understanding exactly where you are in that process and when those dates unlock is sort of where you want to be. Most of these systems are sort of automatically ran by OpenTable or Resi. And so they're pretty standardized.

29:01A lot of them are midnight. I think Resi is midnight. I think OpenTable is like 2 a.m. So, understanding that might be helpful. Other than that, there's just like not a lot of ways around it anymore because of this sort of scarcity model that we have to maintain. That being said, knowing the owner would help. So, go meet the Teresi brothers, have them on the podcast and then see if they can get your reservation. That might do it. there's an idea very ethical yeah you mentioned david chang i just remembered some friends of mine back when david chang had um his food magazine lucky peach do you remember that closed down in like 2017 but they used to do dramatic readings of lucky peach sit there and you know someone would read it out loud in a really dramatic fashion and it was hilarious it was so much fun i need to do that again i think that sounds very fun i love lucky peach i still have um every issue i saw it like oh really yeah it's like oh wow those are probably valuable now you know what they might be actually those were the good old days we need a new lucky beach um i want to talk a little bit more about the labor market so you talked about the intense competition for chefs but also you know there's the competition for a really high-skilled dishwasher i kind of like a two-part question which is like right now we're recording this december 17th like a how does the competition for sort of the sort of more everyday restaurant labor?

30:22Like, what does it look like? And I'm also curious, restaurant kitchens, I suspect, are sort of disproportionately draw from the immigrant workforce, perhaps probably in many restaurants, a lot of undocumented immigrants. I'm curious if you see any effect from that. And just to the extent that there is a restaurant ideology or that, you know, and I associate it, obviously, as sort of the crackdown on immigration or the reversal of unrestrained immigration as part of the signature moves of the current political environment. Could you talk a little bit about how this all looks from the perspective of someone who has to staff a restaurant?

31:02Yeah, I mean, there's an arms race to some extent, right, which is like traditionally the restaurant industry has drawn from this undocumented labor market. And there's obviously less and less of those each day right now for a multitude of political reasons. And so the good restaurant workers that are left are becoming incredibly scarce. And so there's huge incentives. If somebody – if your dishwasher comes and asks for a raise, you just give it to them because you're finding another one like training, you know, training a new person who's never done it before, whatever it may be, it's going to take you months.

31:35And the cost will just work out to be exactly the same as giving the one you have a raise. And so the market on cooks is, you know, sort of when I started out, the cook and dishwasher sort of level of the staffing, not the management level, but below that, the average was like sort of two or three dollars above the minimum wage. And now it's like at least it's close to double now. Right. Like so the D.C. minimum wage is creeping up to 15. And I think our average cooks and dishwashers are like 26, 27 an hour. And so that market is becoming harder and harder to staff because there was decades of sort of training this undocumented community on how to do these tasks.

32:09And now all of that sort of like human capacity, all of that training has been pushed out. And so for the ones who are documented, the ones who stayed or whatever it may be, their prices and their value are skyrocketing because there's just less and less of them. And that time that was spent training, whether it was at sort of an Applebee's or a restaurant like mine or whatever it may be, those years and years of training are becoming harder and harder to find. You can't just like replace that in six months. Like you can't teach – with a dishwasher maybe. With a cook, I can't take a guy who works at Dunkin' Donuts or whatever and train him to be like a French line cook in less than a year.

32:44It's going to take a long time to get him sort of to where he can do things to order and be useful. And so there's a lot of just training that's gone. And it's been great for the waitresses, the people who are still here. But it is really competitive right now.

33:22Powered by Bloomberg's Global Newsroom and data from the Bloomberg Terminal, this flagship summit will cover everything from AI-driven disruption and central bank policy shifts to the emerging risks and opportunities in private credit. Join the conversation and register today at bloomberglive.com slash invest. One notable thing about Butterworth's is it's in a really cool building, a historic building, and the decor is really nice. Joe knows that I'm into interior decorating. So, you know, you've got the antler chandeliers and the sort of plush seats and all of that. How important is the, I guess, the vibe of the restaurant to the overall business?

34:04Massively important, right? Like, I think these days I spend as much time thinking about lighting and volume level and like spacing out of seats and whether or not you can hear the person you're talking to and that stuff as I do about the food. Wow. Because there's this sort of arc that started in – the foodie thing sort of started in 2008 with the housing crisis and the real estate bubble. And so all of a sudden, all of these young ambitious chefs could afford to go open a restaurant. And they hired cooks beneath them and they trained those cooks. So we got sort of a wealth of good cooks and good people that went on to be chefs.

34:37And so that foodie thing that we saw in the mid-aughts produced a ton of really good food. Like we were better off because of it. Yeah. But now sort of real estate and those things are back to where they were in that way before that. And so now your competitive advantage isn't just that your food is good because good food is easier and easier to come by. Like you can find a good chef in any neighborhood. Yeah, it's everywhere now. But you need a competitive advantage because rents are sort of back to where they were or whatever. They're very incredibly expensive right now. And so you're, oh, we have the best food in town.

35:09It doesn't work anymore, right? So like you have to combine the best food with a comfortable place to hang out or with a specific social scene or with a whatever it may be. You mentioned lighting. When you think about lighting, how much is it about the experience of the diners that night versus lighting for Instagram ability or TikTok or whatever it is? And how do you think about the fact that part of eating is creating social content? And how does that factor into your strategy and thinking about the overall vibe? So I think a lot about it. And you saw this again with that sort of like the foodie thing.

35:45Restaurants were incredibly bright. And this Scandinavian minimalism thing was a trend at the time, but also lent itself to Instagram and like posting and taking pictures. I hate minimalism. I really can't stand it. But it lent itself to sort of photography and those sort of things incredibly well because you had these bright natural light restaurants and you could sort of photograph something top down in a way and it would look really good on Instagram. And so to say I don't think about it or I don't want to be a part of that is not true because what I'm actually trying to do is the exact opposite, which is like our food photographs terribly.

36:17If you have photos on your phone from that night, they probably look awful. But it's a reaction to that thing, which is like I want to feel like something sort of before that date or something sort of more classic or more timeless than that. The rule of thumb, I worked for this really good restaurateur named Brendan who's down in Florida now. So if you're ever in Destin and you find a good restaurant, he probably owns it. But his rule of thumb was if it's too bright to reasonably get away with giving a handjob, then it's too bright in the restaurant. That's not what I thought you were going to say.

36:48But there is a good rule of thumb. I'm going to start paying attention to that. If you tell that to your staff, they never forget. Like you'll never come into Butterworth so it'll be too bright because they won't forget that one. Thank you for changing my restaurant experience forever. There's a really good breakfast place in Connecticut that I like to go to. The food's amazing. The service is excellent, but the decor is terrible. It's like gray vinyl flooring and just white walls. And every time I'm in there, I'm like, they should let me redecorate. I would do it for free just to enjoy it a bit more.

37:18And Tracy, you know how much I loathe the degree to which the built environment has been designed. You've heard me rant about millennial pink and all of these design cliches. I like millennial pink. I know. But these design elements that are just so clearly designed to be a backdrop for someone's Instagram and the way our whole real life has been reoriented for social photography drives me crazy. And I do appreciate anything that just like this looks like the pre-iPhone era. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. One thing I wanted to ask is, you know, we talked about the clientele earlier and, you know, you got some well-known people into the restaurant.

37:57Do you try to like directly publicize that or like monetize that? If Steve Bannon comes in for the first time, what do you do? So it's actually the exact opposite. And on some level, I'm grateful that the media at large has done this for us because it's as a restaurateur, it's like really embarrassing to do that. And so my big fear is if you have a major client, Nancy Pelosi was like a regular one of my older restaurants. The big fear is if people find out they're there, they'll start coming to interrupt her in the middle of dinner. And then that person's gone. And I've watched it happen with restaurants over and over again.

38:36And that can range from like a famous person to, you know, if your bar gets known for having like pretty women at the bar, all of a sudden it's like 70 % male and the pretty women are gone. This is like a reality of this thing, right? Which is like they're there because nobody's bothering them there and they get to be normal and sort of human. And so in some ways, it's been an incredible thing for us that the sort of media has picked up on this and they're happy to sort of write about it because it does bring in new customers who are looking for that specific thing. But at the same time, you're always afraid of losing those customers.

39:09So for me specifically, I would never, ever in a million years be like, hey, Politico, by the way, like in the spotted, Marco Rubio having dinner with his family because then you'll just never see that customer again. And that's a terrible thing to do to somebody. OK, but it's funny you said Marco. I was literally just going to use Marco in my example of the question I was going to ask. So you're there, the chef. Someone said, oh, by the way, Marco Rubio is in the dining room tonight. Do you want to do anything different? So at that point, it's the same thing with a food critic. At that point, it's too late to do anything different.

39:41So much of cooking and so much of preparing food for a restaurant happens before the first diner sits down, right? Like if you're braising something, you take the four hours it takes to braise that thing and then the service starts. And you're basically just sort of heating up at that point. So there's not a lot you can do on the food level, but there is the sort of like minor details around the edges, which is like, OK, the plate is going to be a little bit cleaner. You're going to let the server know. One of the funniest ones is we had the ambassador from the UK and early on and I didn't know who he was.

40:12And so I said I was like, hey, what's up, man? All the British people were like, well, you're supposed to say whatever the title. I don't even remember at this point because I don't care. But, you know, I use the wrong greetings and there's a whole proper greeting etiquette that I just didn't know. And so you do sort of try to let the servers in the front of house know that sort of thing because it's just embarrassing for them if you don't. You mentioned pretty women at the bar. So now I have to ask, I imagine running a restaurant, you see some interesting things go down and you probably hear a lot of interesting conversations.

40:43What's the most dramatic incident or intriguing conversation that you've seen? This is so funny. So the sort of political era we're in now where that seems to be all anyone talks about is incredibly boring to me. So there's a lot of sort of like political arguments or deal making that happens at the restaurants in D.C. Whereas like pre this era, I had a nightclub restaurant lounge thing in Adams Morgan where like semi regularly this one I'm specifically thinking about. this woman came in with her she was in a relationship and she was having an affair and so she came in with her affair partner and was seated next to a guy who was also having an affair which was her partner and so they were seated right next to you wow and had to like we had to find the bouncers and sort of drag all of those people out because the the sort of arguments and the yelling at each other that started was just over the top and ridiculous i don't know i feel Well, like maybe that'd be a good way to discover that.

41:43It's like, OK, let's just call it a wash. Yeah, we're both guilty. Yeah, we're both guilty. All right. I actually have like a million more questions. I'm mindful of the time. I have one last that's sort of like maybe an important macroeconomic question. So Butterworth hasn't been open that long, but you've been in the business for a long time. And one of the things that we talk about a lot is, you know, in the 2021, 2022 era, one of the phenomenons of that time was for the first time in maybe many people's lives. lives if they were a small business owner, it may have been the first time that you couldn't just put a sign in the window saying help wanted and expect a lot of people to show up.

42:21It was an era of labor scarcity, the likes of which we hadn't seen in decades. And maybe people never had to contemplate that possibility before. And the question we've been wrestling with and asking a lot of people is like, what are the sort of scars from that period, the traumas of that period, and how do they carry over? Has your experience of that time of realizing that you could wake up and might literally not be able to perhaps staff a restaurant that day so that you can function, has it stayed with you to now in such a way that you think strategically different about things like optimal staffing levels or optimal inventory or anything like that?

43:00Did it change the way you do business in some sort of lasting way? Yeah, in a ton of ways. I'm not even sure which one to start with. So number one, if you came to the restaurant tonight and you went into the kitchen, it's the exact same people that worked with me the day COVID started. And so I've kept them in various ways through multiple restaurants because I watched all my other friends sort of lose cooks and dishwashers and whatever during that time and not be able to get them back. And so a chef designs a dish and maybe even does a bunch of the prep, but at the end of the day, you're still putting it at the hands of your staff to do it right when an order comes in.

43:33And I saw the wholesale quality of their food plummet because they all of a sudden they were handing it to people they didn't train. And so through a number of reasons, got really lucky, kept a lot of those people. And I will keep them as long as I possibly can, because to train a new generation after them myself would just, I mean, I'm almost too late in my career to do it. And so that's a big thing. We did see a huge exit of like management level staff during that time. So if you're a really good front of house staffer, if you're a really good waiter, really good manager, really good bartender.

44:03Turns out you're also a great salesman. So a lot of them went into real estate and sales and whatever it may be. And so there is, if you're at restaurants now and you're like, why is service so bad? Number one, they're understaffed because labor has become so expensive that they're trying to get more tables out of one server. Number two, the people that they spent training to do those front of house jobs exited that entire economy during COVID because we were sort of front lines of this thing happening. We were expecting to be open every day, but without any staff or money to do it with. And so a lot of like the best sommeliers, the best front of house managers totally exited the market.

44:38So those are still hard to find. And we struggle with it all the time. I've got a good front of house manager right now. I'm really lucky. But it took us, he's our third one in one year, because they're just really hard to find. The talent pool for that is really empty right now. And then the cost of goods is just never recovered. And so sort of like, you know, when it started, we were like, oh, you know, supply chains are bad right now because of shipping or whatever it may be. And they'll go back down on whatever it was, fryer oil. This is a big part of the beef tallow thing with the fries is I buy the cows from this farmer.

45:08So I also get a good price on his tallow because I sort of buy the whole thing. But most fryers in any restaurant in the entire world are filled with canola oils that are sort of globally processed, right? And so during COVID, you saw these things go up in price and you were told they were going to come down and shipping containers, whatever it may be, they never came down. It costs an unbelievable, it's like 200 bucks a night to fill a fryer or something like that. And so that's when I sort of started the switch to beef towel and all that, because I was like, okay, well, I know this guy, he's 30 miles away or whatever.

45:39I'm going to just buy his entire product and keep the supply chain like one to one. So there's just all kinds of things that happened during COVID that we're still recovering from, but the big ones are the staffing and the cost of goods, obviously. Vertical integration. There's one more macro, one more macro question that we got to ask, we talked about the supply side, but what are you seeing on the demand side in terms of customers coming in and ordering? And how connected would you say you are to the broader business cycle? Because I imagine, you know, if you're running a McDonald's franchise, you probably experience the business cycle in a very different way to someone who's running a boutique restaurant.

46:20Yeah. So my understanding just from other restaurateurs and the news and stuff is that it's down right now. And that I think reservations are down like 15 % from last year is what most people are reporting. We're in a very special circumstance. Obviously, we're new and we're at the end of the day, a luxury item. And so Hermes prices never dropped once and Hermes demand never dropped once during COVID. Like this is sort of like the side of the business that we're in and we're lucky to be in and I hope we can stay in it. So for us, it's a totally different ballgame. My understanding is that reservations are way down, spending is way down across the board.

46:53Yeah. I'll give you a chance to sort of like really let your right wing side come out. Health code violations and permitting and all that stuff. Of course, those are some of the most uncomfortable scenes. If you watch that show, The Bear, how real is it from your perspective? Do you want to rant a lot about the sort of, do you want to tell us anything about permitting and such in DC? Yeah. I mean, so number one, The Bear is fascinating. The first season, that Uber Eats episode, I still, so all of us switched to Uber Eats and all of these things during COVID to figure out how to survive. And that ding that it makes when a new order comes in still sends me into like a blackout rage.

47:30I remember one time during COVID picking up the iPad that the Uber Eats order came in and just throwing it in the deep fryer and being like, screw it, I'm not doing this anymore. And so that episode, I watched it with my wife. We, at one point I was like, I think we might have to turn this off. Like I was getting like too, too upset, too anxious because it was too accurate. It was totally spot on what that feels like. With the health code violations and the permitting and all that stuff. Oh, God. Is this where we're going to have to bleep the episode? I've been doing so good avoiding that. Yeah, you have.

48:02I'm trying so hard. It's ridiculous. There was a restaurateur that I worked for, and the prep kitchen was in the basement, and it wasn't ventilated. And I was like, how did you get a permit for this? And he was like, well, we put$10 ,000 in a briefcase and gave it to the guy. And that's how we have this. So if you go down to the city hall and you pull the records for the building, this basement doesn't even exist. And this was like less than 12 years ago. And so that obviously doesn't seem like an ideal system. But to do that same thing at the restaurant we have now took us almost eight months to get the single permit for that.

48:35And so there's sometimes where you're like, was it better when we just put some cash in a briefcase? Like I'm not sure what we're doing here because you're paying rent that entire eight months. At that point, you know,$10 ,000 is a lot cheaper than whatever your rent is X eight months. And, yeah, it's a strange thing. I'm not sure what sort of like – don't say that. What sort of make-work job it is for the city to have these health inspectors that come by and say the same thing every single time, which is like, hey, by the way, like they put a thermometer in all your food, which is hypothetically for food safety.

49:05But all the half-decent restaurants are fine. So, like, what are you doing here? I saw you last month. They were the right temperature last month. Can you leave me alone? But it's really the permitting process because you're in this race against your landlord to open before you start paying them. and getting 17 different permits to like have a basement or have a closet or whatever it may be is legitimately stopping new restaurants from opening. So it's pretty miserable. And that's just that's not left or right wing. That's just like really like sort of like a technocrat would be better in this regard, right?

49:34Like it's like, please let me get my permit a little bit faster or a mob system, right? Like my understanding is for my friends in Montreal is that it's still very much a mob system. And so they go, yeah, well, we still put some cash in a briefcase and then boom, we're open in a month. So, you know, let's pick one of those, but this middle ground right now where like it's just like three guys in an office who are completely. God, they're going to come like inspect me this week for saying this. It's like three guys in an office who are all idiots is just is miserable. Yeah, you're definitely going to get a visit, I think.

50:03Yeah, whatever. Who cares? Bart Hutchins, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on Nodloss. That was a lot of fun. It was good to talk to you. Really fun. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys.

50:26I love restaurant episodes. I know. I mean, I love restaurants, but I love restaurant episodes. I've just always learned so much talking to these guys. We could do like a spinoff series on restaurants or something. No, they're incredibly informative in terms of the macroeconomic environment, but also all these little themes that we talk about on OddLots, like the supply chain, like labor hoarding, like, to your point, distribution of resources such as energy. No, I never thought about that time because obviously I presume a restaurant wants all tables filled at any given time, right? But I had never really thought about the thing.

51:02You have to have them staggered so that you do not have all the cocktail orders come out all the same. I'd never thought about that and the sort of risk of like demand spikes. You have this system designed for some optimal throughput. But the idea of, like, you don't want it all at the same time, very intuitive, I suppose. I just it hadn't occurred to me before. Did you watch The Bear? You must have. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to stop watching because it was so stressful and it was so many people shouting at each other. I just I couldn't do it after the first season. It's funny how, like, basically everyone we talk to is like, yep, it's exactly how it is.

51:38And it's super difficult. That and have you watched The Pit, by the way? No, but you keep recommending that. It's good. There's a new season starting soon. But I was talking to a friend of mine who works at one of the NYU medical facilities. But he had the same reaction, like, you can't watch that. As a consumer of TV shows, to my mind, that's a very good sign. And people say, no, I can't watch this. It's too real. It's like, OK, I'm not getting something overly dramatic. Yeah, I'm going to put the pit on my list. Yeah, you should. This is something that stands out whenever we do a restaurant episode, which is there's an intensity about the job.

52:12And in many ways, it's a unique industry because the profit margins aren't that big. You're probably doing it for something other than money. You're selecting your ingredients usually often because you want to make the best menu item possible, not necessarily, again, because it's going to produce the most profit. And you basically dedicate your entire life to this undertaking, right? Absolutely. It's interesting to think about what is a chef? You think it's like, oh, this is someone who makes good food, right? But then the idea is like that the chef then has to think about lighting. All these other things that do not strictly fall under what we think of as the making of food.

52:50I don't know. There's so many interesting things. I mean, it's so interesting how many trends seem to date back to 2008. And so part of the story there was like, OK, there's a lot of cheap rents. Restaurants can open up. But it's also the truth that media is was such at the time because of the invention of the iPhone and so forth that like foodie culture was like a thing in the media. Right. And all these all these different crosswinds that happen and at certain key points that made it difficult to disentangle history. I don't know. That was just a really fun episode. I felt like I learned quite a bit in that one.

53:25Oh, and also the the burger, the burger crowding. I was something I'd never known about. Yeah, that makes sense. Again, intuitively. I got to say, though, it makes you wonder what comes next. So like we've perfected food. A lot of restaurants have perfected the vibes or certainly pay attention to it more than they used to. What comes next, do you think? I don't know. What do you think? Do you have some thought? Do you have some? I mean, I'd like it to be service. Yeah. I worry that it's going to be like some customization thing, which I hate. Oh, yeah. We shouldn't give customers options. I hate that.

54:00No, I don't like choice. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Bart Hutchins. He's at White Guy Fieri. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmandDashelBennett at Dashbot and KaleBrooks at KaleBrooks. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, Discord.gg slash OddLots.

54:35And if you enjoy OddLots, if you want us to do more restaurant episodes, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

55:15portals yes

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