220: Anna Hezel

31:06Where are you going to be? Yeah, I'm going to be actually at Granner Farms doing a dinner with Abra Barons. on June 17th. Amazing. I love that. That'll be, you get to go to the Midwest. Yeah. Shout out to the Midwest. Shout out to the Midwest. Well, that's exciting. Now you are, I think some of the early press I've read in the previews is like, Anna Heasel is a master of the single topic cookbook. You've written two and they're both excellent, lasagna and tinned fish. This is not the final question of the podcast. I know you know that one, but let's talk about single topic. Do you, do you think you're going to do another single topic at some point?

31:41I mean, I feel like maybe. I do love just like a very themed cookbook. I mean, you're good at it. I mean, we worked on the lasagna cookbook together. Yeah, we did. That was— Well, you wrote it. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Well, it was Anna Heasel and the editors of Taste, a.k.a. Matt Rothbard. I guess so, right. Yeah. It is really fun to just like tackle one theme and like become totally obsessed with it for a year or whatever and see what comes out of that. But part of me also would like to challenge myself to think beyond these very niche little topics. Okay. Niche rectangular topics, too. They really are niche.

32:24And I love how you have the die cut, though, on this book. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Beautiful package. Thank you. Nice work. The die cut book is kind of a coup. Yeah, totally. Good work. Yeah, yeah. It looks like a can of fish. It does. unmistakable love that but okay like is there a topic though that you're interested in hypothetically if you were to be like approached to maybe write it and it was like maybe of a singular focus or topic um oh you you're asking if uh if i did another like tightly themed yeah single subject well i know like when i was at taste we were always talking about um doing like a loaf pan cookbook yes which forgot about that yeah that was like briefly a dream another like rectangular Yeah, I mean, the diet code would be perfect for a loaf pan book.

33:12Yeah, totally. I mean, the cold apps out of a loaf pan in general is pretty exciting. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Talk about Midwest. Oh, yeah. Totally. Like a seven-layer dip in a loaf pan. Totally. You know, shrimp mousse aspects. Yeah, all the aspects in a loaf pan. Okay, that's a good one. I like that. You must have more. I'm not going to bug you about that. Oh, yeah. Okay, another dream is potato chips. Yes, yes. As an ingredient, as kind of like a theme, as like a regional oddity that people feel really strongly about. Like every small town, every Rust Belt town has like their brand of potato chips they love.

33:59I see. I see it so well. This is it. You have to. All right. Anna, we ask all guests on the Taste Podcast to go write a cookbook, or food culture book without the burden of time meaning you have no deadline or the burden of budget meaning you have all the money in the world to actually do this book. I know you've asked this question to maybe 45 to 65 people. Now it's your turn to answer it. What would that book be? I think if there's like unlimited budget then I think that I just make up a totally fake conceptual cookbook and then just take the check and run and like never hand something in. Like just travel the world.

34:36go on a really long vacation such a rogue answer this is so I'm never gonna get another book deal that's like such a rogue I love that you just totally went absolute rogue with that no one will ever answer it that way good so just a vacation yeah just a vacation no book no deadline no deadline because it doesn't matter it's an infinite deadline so you're just like fuck I'm taking the money right yeah yeah exactly so great to see you Anna Hazel so great to be on the podcast after You're, you know, too long apart. Thanks for having me back on the show. You'll be right back. I know you will for that Chips book.

35:11Thank you.

35:21Evan Hanser, welcome to the Taste Podcast. Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here. I'm excited to talk to you about so many things. You are a writer, first and foremost. You're a chef, entrepreneur, an activist. You've worked with the Beard Foundation and done boot camps. So much, such a great career, and I can't wait to unpack it a bit. When did you start cooking professionally? Let's talk about that. I want to get, like, what was that first job like? My first job professionally was, well, I worked in restaurants for the first time in 2005. I went to school at Tulane University in New Orleans. Got there two days before Katrina hit.

35:56Evacuated. Quite a freshman orientation. Quite the orientation, dang. Had to leave for the semester, as, you know, everyone in the city did. some people a lot longer and I started I went back home I went to Fairfield University for a semester my parents live in southwestern Connecticut and I started working in a restaurant what was it called Clemens I think um named after Mark Twain yeah yeah um I'm sure there was some cool uh Huck Finn paraphernalia around the building you know I think there was they didn't commit to the bit any further than the name honestly I just looked like any other sort of like rural suburban wise of them to do that uh but I was a busser there and spent most of my time, like hanging in the kitchen, trying to see what was going on, sneaking Irish coffees, you know, like doing the things you do when you're 18 and working in a restaurant for the first time.

36:40But when I got to, got back to New Orleans, I'd always liked cooking and sort of quickly took myself off the meal plan, started cooking for myself when I moved off campus, cooked a lot for friends. And my last semester there, I was just curious to see what it'd be like to work in a restaurant. And there was a spot down the street from where I lived called Ye Old College gin, which I think is still there and has kind of rebranded itself as a more sustainably marketed at least restaurant. But at the time it was kind of the watering hole after the Tulane baseball games for the locals to come and get tilapia six ways or po 'boys.

37:13And basically my job consisted of cutting soup out of plastic bags and pouring into a steam table and dressing wedge salads. But real food service. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I saw I saw what was what was happening from the start. but it was just like a really interesting environment to be in for me and especially you know when you're going to a school in a city especially a school like Tulane which can be super insular you know sort of bubbled off from the rest of the city in a lot of ways to go and work with folks who just you know live live there was was a really nice kind of new environment and community to be a part of and when I left there a few months after I had started because I was graduating and moving back home.

37:54I thought that was kind of going to be the end of my food service career. It was fun. I had seen what I wanted to see. I was a writer at the time. I thought I was going to focus on the, quote, big important things, right? Writing poems. Sure. Oh, you were a poetry guy. Cool. Writing poems. Nice. And when I got back home, I started applying for jobs in the publishing world, really sort of disconnected from the realities of what that career path would look like. I thought I'd just start as a writer at the New Yorker. Why not? Isn't that what you do? I mean, you could. I guess you could, but I couldn't was the point.

38:27Not many people can, yeah. I started working at a restaurant in a couple towns over in Westport called The Dressing Room with Michel Nishan. And thought that would just be kind of a thing to hold me over until I got a job back in writing. And it turned out not to be the case. Not to be the case. And I'm so happy that you bring up Michel Nishan. I've gotten to spend time with him, and he's also a chef-activist writer. That's right. Multi-hyphenate. He runs a nonprofit called Wholesome Wave and does a lot of work with the Beer Foundation. So it's, you know, you're your own person. We'll get to your career.

39:02But it seems like working for Michel Nishan early in your career. Also, not to be forgotten, the dressing room was owned by Paul Newman, a local Westport guy. So what was that like? Those are two really interesting guys to have in your early career. Yeah, yeah. It was sort of, it was really interesting to land kind of on, not the other end of the spectrum necessarily, but in this restaurant that was super sustainability focused in a way that not as many restaurants were at that time. We would take visits to local farms to see piglets when they were born in the spring and then bring them in to do charcuterie and specials in the fall.

39:41lots of homemade handmade pastas and all these sauces a nice mix of kind of American comforty aesthetic with sort of French or Italian technique the chef there was this guy John Holdsworth who had spent time at Flidia and had a lot of Italian background and it just really like was was an amazing amazingly lucky place for for me to land and I think it was while I was there I didn't fully sort of understand this at the time, but the seed was planted where I could begin to understand the impact of food in a sort of similar way to the way I thought or hoped I could make some sort of impact through writing.

40:23where all these things I cared about and was writing about, whether it was identity or family or society or inequity, economics, whatever, all connected through food in the same way I hope they might connect in some way in my writing. And I think that that sort of started to make it seem to me that a career in food could both be the kind of beautiful tactile experience that it is of working with amazing produce and serving great meals and the act of feeding people and hospitality, which I loved, but also be engaging with these sort of bigger issues. Yeah, and actually doing the work and having some activism and also writing.

41:03And Michelle seemed like somebody who did a lot of that. I have to ask about Paul Newman. Did you guys chat dressing, salad dressing? I mean, I just have to ask the question. I feel like, you know, unfortunately, Paul died not long after I started at the restaurant. So he came in a couple of times. I got to say hello. But I don't think I was really, you know, at the level of having long conversations with him at the time. But it was an interesting sort of – Dynamic, yeah. Yeah, and precursor or foreshadowing to tables of contents to this restaurant owned by an actor and next to a theater was that kind of food and art location that I didn't realize at the time.

41:39But looking back sort of seems like a clear – It was foundational in your career. And I think, like, we have to talk about egg before we talk about tables of contents. I feel like Egg was a restaurant, is a restaurant, will be a restaurant, many different ways to say it. But it was quite influential in the way we think about breakfast sandwiches, the way we think about single topic restaurants, but also just the hospitality, really great hospitality always there. Yeah. So let's talk about your career with Egg. How did you find yourself a short line cook at Egg and then became a partner eventually?

42:11I mean, it was very unexpected for me. I was working in the dressing room. I ended up working there quite a bit longer than I thought. I thought I'd be there for a few months and ended up there a little, maybe a year and a half or so. And at that time, my now wife, Rachel, had graduated. We'd also been at Tulane and we both wanted to move to the city. She's from New York. And I was sort of trying to figure out what the next steps were for me. And if cooking was going to be part of it, then I figured I had to go to New York and see if I could hack it there. So I actually applied for and got a job at La Conda Verde in its early days.

42:42And what a blast in the past. Incredible restaurant to work and learn at. I mean, the team there was so strong. They had opened not long before I got there. And so all the kind of heavy hitters were there in the kitchen. And really amazing operation. I mean, honestly, I don't even remember everyone right now. But I know, obviously, Andrew was in the kitchen pretty actively then. Luke was there. Carmelini, that is. Yep. Sal, who just opened Cafe Spaghetti last year, was there at the time. It was a sushi show at the time. Min Lee. So a bunch of folks who went on to do a lot of cool stuff. Um, and at the same time, sort of dynamics of the restaurant, um, I'd gotten so tied into this local sourcing, seasonal food, local farmer connections thing that wasn't as present or forward at La Condo Verde because it was such a big operation.

43:29The thing that was there was just logistics, you know, getting things done at scale and deliciously, but it wasn't sort of hitting the marks that I thought I wanted a restaurant to hit for me. So I actually left and I started applying for Fulbright grad school, thinking about what I would do next. But I needed to make some money because I just signed a lease and I found Egg on Craigslist. Nice. What was the description? Do you remember what they were writing for? I mean, the thing that stood out to me was that it was a breakfast restaurant. Yeah. And I basically thought it would be easy. Great hours.

43:58Yeah. I was like, cool, I can work in the morning. I can write in the afternoons. Yeah. There was language around, you know, all the values that lived in Egg from the beginning, which included local sourcing, supporting small farmers, making a restaurant a great place to work, professionalizing the job, all that sort of stuff. So I felt it would be mission and values aligned and also easy. So I interviewed, spoke with George, who founded Egg, George Weld, and basically told him in the interview that I didn't expect to be there that long, which is not what you want to hear when you're hiring for a cook.

44:28But maybe he saw through it, knew something about me that I didn't decide to hire me. And although I had anticipated only being there for four or five, six months, when we closed in September 2020. I was there 11 years later. That's amazing. Crazy journey. You blink and 11 years later, you got a location in Tokyo. You've got part ownership, you get equity in the restaurant. I don't want to fast forward too quickly, but I do want to get to your, but like what were those 10 years like? What was that decade? I mean, it's a lot of change in the restaurant industry. I'm sure margins went up and down by the year.

45:02I mean, did you make money? Yeah, I mean, we made money and we made, I think one of the things we, the way I think about the way Egg worked is that we thought of profit in a lot of different ways. Of course, making money was part of it, but we weren't going to make money at the expense of not trying to pay people well or not sourcing ingredients from people we knew or not being a good part of the community and donating time and money and products to causes that felt important to us. And I think all those things were a big part of what kept me really engaged. And I was so lucky to land there and to work with George, who is very similar to me in a lot of ways, also a writer, also someone really invested in food and food systems and people and community.

45:43And basically it seemed like every couple of years, something really interesting happened. And that was what kind of made the restaurant feel dynamic enough to end up staying there for 11 years. We started a farm a couple of years after I got there, we eventually opened Parrish Hall, which was a sort of dinner, more fine dining restaurant that I was the chef at, had that for a couple of years. We moved egg to that location after we closed parish hall which was much bigger and an interesting project we wrote a cookbook we open in tokyo there's just always something really interesting yeah happening kept you busy yes but your north star was equity was fair practice was sourcing and i feel for 11 years if you go 11 years ago and look at restaurants that was definitely not it was not it was certainly not as common yeah i guess certainly kind of a leader brooklyn brooklyn as a whole i think was a leader in some of the early restaurants that were adopting and centering those values.

46:35But egg for sure. And especially in a unique way in that we were trying to take these ingredients that the best restaurants were using and show folks that you could just have them for breakfast every day. They didn't have to be elitist or exclusive. What was the best seller? You know, the eggs Rothko was always top of the list. The omelet, pancakes, you know, one of the few places in Brooklyn that served really good grits. So people who wanted grits would come in and get those i mean there were some things that were not great sellers but you know when someone came in and we had homemade scrapple and they knew what scrapple was yeah they'd freak out so there was sort of nice to keep on the menu it was like a nine to three operation well first started in sparky's hot dog shop yeah which was open um in the afternoon and george started doing what up last in the morning right love that's crazy like early early williamsburg yeah um 2005 um george started doing egg in the mornings and then it eventually became so popular and busy that he took over the whole space.

47:30We did dinner there for a while. And then we went back to just doing breakfast and lunch when we opened Parish Hall as kind of our dinner outpost. And then when we moved Egg over to North 3rd Street, still breakfast and lunch. So 8 to 4, 8 to 3, 7 to 3, we change hours depending on the day and year. But always a morning to afternoon place. And then the nice thing about that is we had the space available at night to do other interesting things. Cool. So I was going to ask you about that. What's the benefit of doing an 8 to 3? It seems like there's many of them. First is like maybe shortening your hours and paying people fairly but not having as many hours.

48:06Also, you have the space at night so you could do cool events. Yeah. Yeah, I think for both of us, you know, a lot of people always ask us, why don't you also do dinner? Why don't you open dinner? There are some just sort of logistical reasons, you know, folks associated us so strongly with breakfast that I think it was harder to make inroads even when we tried as a dinner restaurant. but also just a lifestyle, like not trying to maximize every inch of the space towards profit, right? Like if we can have a place that's employing people well, that's making us enough money to survive and that's making us happy and also letting us live a reasonably balanced lifestyle, let's do that.

48:44What an idea in the restaurant industry. What an idea. What was it like to close? It was hard, really hard. You know, I think COVID made it easier in some ways because there's sort of something to point to. You know, I don't, I don't know. I can't even envision what it would have looked like to make the choice to close if that time were to come without some other sort of factor that was precipitating it. It sort of happened in this fit and start way because we closed temporarily in March. We opened back up for a bit in the summer and then we were just exhausted. You know, we were tired. We didn't see a really great path forward.

49:21We weren't getting a lot of help from our landlords. And I think we, to soften the blow on ourselves, we told ourselves we'd hibernate. We wouldn't close entirely. So at that point, you kind of felt like it was not going away forever and that there would be reopening at some point, which we're going to talk about. Yeah. We were leaving the possibility. Leaving the door open, kind of like that Michael Jordan, like, you know, retirement from sport. Leave the door open, Tom Brady, et cetera, et cetera. So. But it's hard to let staff go. You know, I think that's the hardest part. Obviously, it was hard to leave the community but a lot of folks came out in the last couple weeks we saw a bunch of friendly faces that kind of feeling of support and that we've done something yeah good in this neighborhood was there but it's hard to let people go some who had been with us for 10 years yeah yeah that's that's got to be i can't imagine how difficult it is to have that conversation um but there is a happy story that you will be opening but let's talk about tables of contents because i think that's something that you founded um around the time that you closed egg it was actually earlier we earlier first started doing uh did our first tables of contents event uh in 2014 so a while ago and that was came up because our friends um were holding the food book fair which was happening at the white hotel around the corner elizabeth thacker jones was doing at the time and kim chow and amanda dell um and i think elizabeth came to us and said we're doing this thing, uh, it was around the, uh, I guess it was around the time parish hall was, was open.

50:49Um, maybe I'm getting my ears wrong, but anyway, she asked if we could do a closing dinner for it. And we said, sure, let's, let's put something together. And I had had this thought when I was in college reading the sun also rises that, wow, the food in this book is incredible. I wish I could eat and drink like these characters are, you know, through France and Spain. And George and I talked about and decided to do a dinner inspired by the sun also rises. So I think it was a five course meal and we had, you know, trout with fiddlehead ferns, which is based on a scene where two characters are hiking, I think, near the border between France and Spain and catch some fish and wrap them in ferns to stay cool.

51:26We had a bullfight scene with tartare and a piece of cooked steak with mushroom dust all over the plate. That sounds so cool. Yeah, we had a pernose sorbet at the end. Just every course inspired by a specific passage in the book and it was amazing, probably partly because people got really drunk because it was Hemingway and had a great time but we had a great time doing it and uh tried to keep it going so we we ended up doing dinners like that every year for a couple years okay so it was like a yearly event and and so it never was uh crystallized what it is today which is like a an organization right yeah and then it started to take a different shape when a friend of mine uh Rebecca Dinerstein was publishing her first novel and we were chatting about doing a reading and I offered the space at Egg just for a standard sort of reading but then had the thought, why don't we try to make it a Tables of Content style event?

52:16And we got some friends together and planned two months of readings. We had three authors each month and made three small bites inspired by each passage that they read. That's so great. And what inspires you to connect fiction and cooking? I mean, I think it's kind of obviously the perfect intersection between my interest as someone who is a writer and then someone who found creative expression and sort of purpose in food as well to tie those two things together. And I think one of the things that raised the connection for me was just the similarity I felt between the two practices of writing or I guess you could think of any sort of artistic creative practice and cooking.

52:55You know, coming up with an idea, working it on your head, trying to put it down on the page or the plate, eventually showing it to someone, probably failing several times. But as I tell folks at the Tables of Contents events, the thing that led me to cooking was that people were really happy to eat a dish I tried and less happy to read a poem I asked them to read. So I think food also kind of became the lore. Trojan horse style into literature. Yeah, to introduce people into literature. I love that. I mean, it's true. I think you need to like offer something more than just a reading sometimes when you're getting people to turn up in a busy schedule.

53:28Yeah, and the hope and the exciting part of it is that when each element of the equation, when the writing changes the context of the food you're consuming, so the food takes on kind of a different meaning, and also eating something that you've just heard described in a book really adds that tactile sense to the experience, which you don't get. You took the reading series a step further, and you wrote a community cookbook, and you self-published. That's right. So I love to hear about that process of self-publishing a community cookbook. Yeah. So that was in the COVID era. Not long after I closed, this project started to come to life and sort of one of the silver linings of closing.

54:09I'm sure the cookbook would not have happened if we hadn't closed the restaurant. And we couldn't do in-person events. Of course, COVID was all over the place. No one was really gathering. But we still wanted to find a way to bring the TOC kind of idea into people's lives. and it was a crazy timeline that the book happened on day before Thanksgiving 2020 that I reached out to first author and chatted about this with Tanya and Shuley and Rachel and Jordan like all the folks who help out with tables of contents and thrown around the idea of doing this cookbook sent out an email to a handful of authors who had read with with us in the past like hey would you be down to share a recipe of yours and write some sort of head note about it a little story of you know, brief essay something and we can put it together into a book and see if we sell any copies.

55:00And it sort of grew. We worked with this amazing designer, Mariah Rodriguez, who did so much of the work in putting the book together. We ended up getting three dozen past authors to write up recipes and then paired those authors with different illustrators around the country to do custom illustrations for each recipe, which turned out amazing. Worked with Radix Media in Brooklyn, you know, a worker-owned co-op publisher. printer to put the book together. And in February of 2021, the book came out. So three-ish months from conception to finish. And all profits go, you're a 501c3, so you go to your...

55:37Yeah, we're not a 501c3, but we also structured the book as a way to support the food justice work I'd been pretty heavily involved in with FIG, which is still doing that work, FIG NYC. And so all the profits from the book, once we covered the cost, went to FIG. We raised over$10 ,000 through the book. Very cool. I thought we'd sell like 100 copies. And then we got lucky. It ended up getting picked up. Helen Rosner put it in New Yorker's Best Cookbooks of the Year. Same for Vanity Fair. And we ended up selling, I think we're at like 1 ,600, 1 ,700 copies, which for a self-published book was way beyond what I thought was possible.

56:10And we'll link to that in the show notes. You should definitely check it out. What drives your activism, Evan? I mean, I feel like this is clearly something that you're as passionate about it as food or as cooking, we'll say. But what fuels you? You know, I think the same sort of thing that got me hooked on food as a career path, which, like I mentioned, started the dressing room when I was also reading these sort of foundational good food texts, Michael Pollan, Anna LaPay, Carla Petrini, that made me realize how many things that I sort of had an interest or care about intersected in food, made food seem like a vehicle for impact work.

56:52and also that trying to do some sort of impact work beyond making beautiful food was a necessity, a requirement of working in food. And I think, you know, Michelle, seeing how he started Wholesome Wave and was focusing on using food as a tool for social change was really inspiring. There were a lot of other folks I saw who inspired me, including George at Egg, through the work we were doing in the restaurant, but also partnerships with different nonprofits whose events we would cook at. And I started to see how that impact could happen. And then I got really lucky to take part in the James Beard Foundation's Chef's Boot Camp for Policy and Change, one of their first boot camps that they held back in 2013, I want to say.

57:37Wow, it goes back that far. Yeah. I feel like the James Beard Foundation, we talk about the awards. We snipe at the James Beard Foundation for making the wrong choice of awards. I mean, a lot of media focuses on that. But we rarely do talk about the boot camp, the training programs. that they offer. And the fact that this goes back almost a decade, please let's, let's talk about what that was like and what is the James Beard Foundation been like for you? Yeah, I think I was, uh, I would say fortunate to really be introduced to the Beard Foundation. Of course I knew them as an entity. I had done a collaborative dinner at the Beard House once, so had been there and sort of felt the, that kind of vibe of, of tastemaker award giver, um, status, uh, that the foundation holds.

58:18But I really got to know them at this point when they were shifting a lot of energy towards impact work, towards policy work, towards chef trainings. And that was fledgling at the time. But because of the way I was introduced to it became my main reference point for the Bayard Foundation, which I think is different because, like you say, most people think of them as the awards. But I do think that the work that they've done, I mean, so many chefs now have gone through this training program. personally, I felt the impact of it and saw it among the folks who are in my cohort and went back as a mentor for a mentor chef for a future gathering.

58:55And you really see the power of a simple sort of shift in perspective among chefs where they realize that the power of being a chef, the role you play in a community and how to try to take that and impact things that you really care about as opposed to just being asked to cook for someone's fundraiser, which you may also be in support of the mission of that nonprofit organization. But to learn how to go and talk to your state representative, to your senator, to your city council person as someone who is also sort of a representative for your community. Completely. You're a public figure. You're written about in the paper and talked about on social media.

59:41And you have a very prominent place in the community. You're also feeding the representatives and the people who are you're going to be speaking with. So you have a personal connection to them. So it makes perfect sense that a chef would be the ultimate gateway to activism. I feel like that's really smart. Well said. Yeah. And you're in a position where you're kind of looking in all directions. You're at this place where you are sourcing and you're also selling. So you're working with consumers and customers directly. You're working with producers. Some of your customers are political leaders or social leaders.

1:00:13and you can kind of express your influence in all these different directions and hear from these different constituents in a really interesting way from farmers what they want to be growing and the support they need from customers what they want to be eating and you can also suggest to customers and farmers here's the ways that I think here's some changes like maybe you want to consider in the way you're consuming and producing. It really pushes back against like hothead, meathead chef, you know, the stereotype that we oftentimes associate with the cook professional. Yeah, yeah. And I think we've seen, obviously, there's been enormous shifts in the way the industry is running and the issues that are at, you know, on the front burner for chefs and consumers and food media and workers, thankfully.

1:01:01And I do think, you know, for the criticism that maybe accurate at, uh, that's directed at Beard for, um, maybe a slower pace of change in the awards than should have happened. Um, I do think there's probably not enough, you know, um, kind of acknowledgement of the work foundational work they've done in that. And I just, I just joined their chef advisory board, which they're launching this year as a way to kind of move that, um, industry led impact work and focus more deeply into the way the organization has led overall. So I do think they're also responding to the criticism. I've seen it as well.

1:01:38And I hope we can have you back to talk about what that means to be on a chef advisory board. Let's get into Egg in 2023. You're in the process of reopening Egg. So what is happening right now? Man, well, for anyone who's opened a restaurant, you probably can picture what's happening. It's been a journey. you know the decision to reopen was was not a given although he left the door open to it I think George and I both felt after such a long time of running the restaurant and as folks who had always tried to work some of our creative impulses and desires into the restaurant or around the life of the restaurant offered that it was interesting and nice to see what it was like to live life without waking up in the morning and and wondering about the many things that may or may not go wrong in a given day at a restaurant and there are plenty of things that may or may not go wrong in a given day.

1:02:30And I think, you know, in a lot of ways, we're on the edge of saying, Egg had a good run. Maybe we're on to the next thing. And back in the spring of last year, 2022, I was talking to my friend Libby Willis, who had a great Mimi's Diner, all too briefly, unfortunately, on the Crown Heights, Prospect Heights border, and then ran KIT during COVID, which is this super creative, really kind of community glue of a space that hosted lots of pop-ups and collaborative food projects. And she was ready to let go of the space and move on to something else and asked if I'd be interested in taking it over.

1:03:11And so I thought a lot about it, what it would be like, what it could be like, and decided it couldn't be egg. I thought bringing egg back just as egg, same exact menu, same name. number one could never deliver on the memories that people have of it as we know let those memories settle but it could be inspired by egg it could be kind of a little sibling and so decided to try opening little egg which is what we're in the process of now which is very much rooted in the in the soil that egg you know helped to build over the years but growing in its own ways and for me it's a it's a really interesting opportunity to both bring the values of egg back to life and the food of egg back to life in a lot of ways, but bring in these other creative interests that I have and community-focused interests that I have, whether it's through FIG, whether it's through tables of contents, hosting guest chefs, having artist residencies, who knows what can happen there.

1:04:09It's a pretty open feeling space to try a few things out and to take a lot of things that we're doing informally at egg and and build them more intentionally into the restaurant. So you're thinking a daytime only static menu and then some fluidity at night? Yeah, yeah. I think daytime only, I think we're going to be open only five days a week, which as I just know from the past, even on days off, you're not mentally off if the restaurant's open, you know, and you're not there. And try to use the space in the evenings for, could be community board meetings, it could be nonprofits, you know, I just need a space to get together and chat, film screenings, you know, guest chef pop-ups.

1:04:51There's so many, obviously, I think we've seen a lot of incredible creative pop-up energy really explode during COVID. And I think keeping that going and sharing the space feels like a really, I don't know, a role I'm really excited to try to play. Are you ready to get back on the horse, though, for these early mornings and work in service? Yeah, I mean, I love early mornings. um my hope is to hire a chef uh or at least like a really strong sous chef who um is excited to grow into that role because while i'm happy to be on the line i also understand it's probably not the the most useful position for me to occupy anymore right like make space move you know grow and move on and open things up um so my hope is that as we build a team together i'll be able to share the experience that I've had without kind of holding on to the, all the reins of power that exists in the restaurant.

1:05:45Can you shout out a few restaurants that you're really loving? A lot of our listeners will be visiting New York or visiting New York. I would love to get a few of your favorites. Man, well, I live in Carroll Gardens. I've lived there for basically the whole time, been in New York for 12 plus years. And so there's a lot of neighborhood joints there that I love. Yemen Cafe is one of the spots I always recommend up on Atlantic Avenue. We used to live in Cobble Hill. So I think of everything basically from like Red Hook to Atlantic. I used to live at first in court for 17 years. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I'm third in court.

1:06:12Yeah, so we were neighbors at Campo. You look familiar in the way that maybe we were at the gym together or something on the street, but, yeah, that's my old neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, it's a great spot. I mean, Caputo's is right there. I go there for not a restaurant, but amazing Italian specialty shop. I love Long Island Bar. My friend Joel owns that spot, and it's a great place for a drink and a burger. Big fan of Court Street Grocers. As I told you on the elevator up, I went to S &P. their new spot today, which was just as it should be. Yeah. Can't wait to try that. Yeah. Yeah, big fan of Dirt Candy, Amanda.

1:06:47I really admire both on a food side, but also on an impact side. She's done so much incredible work there. You know, it's, I'm going to forget, like a million restaurants that I love. You're calling some great ones out. We had Eli Sussman on the show. Yeah, yeah. We talked about Amanda Cohen specifically. I wanted to bring her up because I agree. for somebody who just missed winning the beard for New York. I mean, she's doing so many cool things at her candy, both in the kitchen, but also as a member of the community. Yeah, yeah. I got to shout out Insa also. Yeah. Which my friend Young runs, and we host tables of contents events there pretty regularly and just one of my favorite spots for Korean barbecue and karaoke.

1:07:26Super fun place, Insa. Evan, we ask all guests in the Taste podcast if you create a cookbook or food culture book without the burden of time, meaning you have no deadline, or The Burden of Budget, meaning you have all the money in the world, what would that book be? Well, if I didn't have any restrictions, I almost certainly would never finish that kind of book. I would just keep going forever. The good thing about deadlines is you will finish. Exactly. But I'm really, you know, the tables of contents idea really animates me. And I think kind of a very broad exploration of food and literature would be a super interesting thing to work on.

1:07:58But the book idea that I've been rolling around in my head a lot that I think would be fun and could happen with those kind of lack of limitations as a choose your own adventure cookbook, sort of in the model of those choose your own adventure stories. I don't know if you read them when you're younger. Oh, of course. Absolutely. You know, turn to page 63 if you make this choice in the grocery store or turn to page 89 for this choice. So we'll see if you put that together. You're the one to do this. I think it makes sense, you know, for a TOC. Yeah, for a TOC book or for any book. I love this. Evan Hansworth, thank you for joining the Taste Podcast.

1:08:28Matt, thanks so much.

1:08:34The Taste Podcast is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.