767: Chai Pani Is a James Beard Outstanding Restaurant. Molly Irani Says the Culture Did It.

10:36Molly Irani:A little less dense in the spice, lighter and brighter. And then really inspired by his mom's home cooking, which is like the ultimate comfort food and putting those two things together in a restaurant space. So that's where we started. and we started in 2009 with like the one sentence version is we had no idea what we were doing. We had no money.

10:53Rashad Frazier:You write about it. I mean, and really the money struggles continue for years and years. It wasn't like an overnight success. No. Though you write beautifully about how, you know, people were lining up day one, but that still doesn't mean success, which I think is a big part of it. Yeah, totally. And the craziest part about that whole early chapter, and I think I knew a little bit about this, but like marijuana, like you guys had all the ideas, because there was no chef. Marijuana wasn't going to be the chef. You weren't going to be the chef. No. The idea was we're going to do this restaurant.

11:24Molly Irani:Yeah.

11:25Rashad Frazier:Like, what?

11:26Molly Irani:I know. I know. It's so crazy. And when I say we didn't know what we were doing, we had no money, I mean that literally. On the first day, we had to take the money out of the register to go buy food for the second day. Yeah.

11:38Rashad Frazier:It was bare bones. On a recent episode of This Is Taste, I spoke with Erica Roby, barbecue champion, former criminal defense attorney, and the person who taught me exactly what to look for when buying a brisket. She wants striations. She wants white flecks throughout. She described it like a kaleidoscope. Because fat is flavor and that marbling is the whole game. It's what keeps brisket moist from the smoker all the way to the moment the judge takes a bite. We also heard from Tucker Brown, a sixth-generation Texas cattle rancher whose family has been in business since 1895. That's episode 754 of This Is Taste.

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13:11Molly Irani:The idea originally, the vision, was that he wanted to set the menu with his palate. But the idea was to find a professional chef because he wasn't delusional enough to think that he knew how to run a professional kitchen. It might have been a little delusional to think we could run a restaurant.

13:27Rashad Frazier:You were like, we're going to find a pro.

13:28Molly Irani:We were going to find a pro. And we tried and we hired someone. And he basically never got the food. He never got the flavor that marijuana was.

13:36Rashad Frazier:The cranky Italian American guy. Yeah, exactly.

13:40Molly Irani:So, but even when he was there, Marwan's mom came from India and she was the one for like three weeks in that kitchen teaching these young kids, basically handing down like her wealth of knowledge of Indian cooking to this line of, you know, like practically teenage white boys. And ultimately the head chef that we had hired never got the flavor profile. And so we had to say goodbye and Merwin had to learn how to cook on the line. But in that, which is crazy, like highly don't recommend that, but also he uncovered something that had been in him all along, which was this incredible talent as a chef.

14:24Molly Irani:But never in a million years did we think fast forward that there would be James Beard chef nominations and all of that. It was such a crazy, wild experiment.

14:32Rashad Frazier:You're talking beautifully about your husband, and you're just so perceptive, and you obviously know him better than anyone, but about his transformation, about his different moods. I mean, it's, like, wild because I've known him in marijuana for a long time and spent a lot of time with him. Like, I've always—he's a complex guy. Yeah. Wonderful man, and he's been on the show, and we'll talk about his book in the fall, but this is your time. Listen, nailed it, and complex guy.

14:58Molly Irani:Oh, that's good to hear.

15:00Rashad Frazier:I mean, from what I know, I just think— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

15:02Molly Irani:You know him. You traveled to India together.

15:03Rashad Frazier:Yeah, we traveled to India together. We traveled. I mean, I met Marjuan at an Asha Gomez party in like 2011, him and Mikey at an after party. And we were shooting our first cookbook, Koreatown. And I just met these cool Indian dudes at this party. And I was like, you should come shoot with us tomorrow. And like, oh, yeah, sure, Mikey. They like, everyone rolled.

15:23Molly Irani:They're always up for a party. Always up for a party.

15:25Rashad Frazier:And we went around Atlanta to a bunch of restaurants. And that's how I met them. Maybe it's like 2013. 13. But like, you're, you're, you're, you're kind of like, feeling yourself, like through this working yourself through these first couple years. But it seems like a struggle. It was rough. How do you turn? How do you turn the corner?

15:45Molly Irani:Yeah, it's a it's not a simple answer. The truth is that it's not a simple answer, right? We had to learn how to walk through the fire together, not just as business partners, but in our marriage. Because it's not a simple thing to raise a family together and run a business together. And the way that we were running our business was a lot like a family. And so there's a lot of enmeshment there. And we learned our way through it. And I think ultimately the thing that made it work for us is that we kept being honest with each other throughout that time. It was like a constant work in progress. We'd figure out something that was working for us.

16:26Molly Irani:We'd like, here's just an example. We'd have rules like, okay, no talking about work after whatever time. It never worked. Never worked. That's impossible. Like, what are we talking about? You're passionate about it too. Yeah. And there was so much to talk about. There was good juicy stuff going on all the time. It's restaurant business. It's like nonstop drama, you know? So why have expectations that aren't going to actually work? So we had to find for us what did work. And really, ultimately, that came down to this idea of like, you can start out as co-founders, but you can't co-decide everything forevermore if you're going to run a business together.

17:00Molly Irani:You have to figure out what your roles are and where your strengths are and really lean into those and give each other space to be yourself so that you can grow and not be constantly butting heads because we're really different people. We have different personalities. We bring different strengths to the business. And we had to figure out over time what those were and lean into them.

17:19Rashad Frazier:It's a great point about how this is also a book about relationship. Yeah. Not just working, but like being partners. Yeah. You had a Starbucks safe word. Yes, we did. It was great. Talk about what that meant. It's always nice. And I think having like a safe word or a reminder to a spouse or a partner in the moment. We're doing a little couples therapy here. Yeah, yeah. A little bit of that. Yeah, yeah. But it's good to have. I mean, it's a good takeaway. But tell the audience what you meant by that.

17:50Molly Irani:Yeah. Well, we got in a big fight and we had to go to a business meeting that day. And it was like, oh, God, how are we going to manage to be professional in this meeting? And we ended up deciding to meet at a Starbucks to talk it out. And we picked the Starbucks because it was like a place that we wouldn't run into anybody. We live in a small town. Like you see everybody, you know, in the grocery store.

18:11Rashad Frazier:You had to find your privacy. It's like gas station Starbucks.

18:15Molly Irani:Yeah, yeah, exactly. We had to find an off-site location where we weren't going to just run into everybody we knew. And it helps to get out of the house, you know, and not be trying to have a professional negotiation in your pajamas at home. So we went to the Starbucks and we had this big debate. And we went all the way through it and came out the other side. And at the end of the conversation, we realized it was like one of those letdown, you know, debates, arguments, whatever, where you feel the release afterwards. And we were just laughing at ourselves after this conversation. We were like, my God, the problem was we were both taking ourselves too seriously.

18:52And to be able to return to a lightness of being with each other, we decided we needed to commit to remember the conversation.

19:02Molly Irani:You know how you have these like breakthroughs when you're working through something with anybody, not just your romantic partner, but like anybody in life. You go through something, you have a breakthrough and you're like, oh, we're never going to forget this. But then like 10 minutes later, you forget. So we decided Starbucks was our safe word. So we'd be in a business meeting. And if either of us, we did this for like a year, maybe even longer. if either of us started getting overly reactive to the person's opinion or bringing our relationship into our professional working dynamic, one of us would yell Starbucks.

19:35Rashad Frazier:And it would make both of

19:36Molly Irani:us laugh. And then the whole business meeting would look at us like we were completely crazy. They had no idea what this meant. We never told them, by the way. And we would start to giggle, and they just felt the relief of us returning to lightness of being. And they're like, oh my god,

19:47Rashad Frazier:It was a good reminder of that compromise, of that moment. It's a great book filled with these piece of advice. Jagad. Let's talk about it. Jagad. A theme in the book. Marijuana and I have talked a lot about this while in India. And it's an Indian principle. It's an idea. But it really applies to restaurants. Yes. Talk about it.

20:12Molly Irani:Isn't it such a cool idea? It is. I love it. And it's basically the idea that it's a concept that you it's a term that's used all over India to describe this way of making do with what you have. How do you get scrappy and inventive and creative to make something work despite the fact that you don't have the proper tools or supplies or money or whatever it is? And you see these wonderful like if you Google Jugaad in India, you see these hysterical photos of how it plays out in India. I think it relates to restaurant life because we never have, like we're an under-resourced industry. We never have enough money or enough resources or the right tools or whatever it is.

20:55Molly Irani:Your typical restaurant like ours that was bootstrapped, starting with nothing, learning on the job, rolling up your sleeves and having to get creative and inventive to make things work. Like Marwan describes, my favorite description is his, where he says it's sort of like trying to get a Zamboni, you know, those ice scraping vehicles to become a chai maker because why waste a perfectly good machine? And you see that kind of thing in India on the streets where it's like literally like a crazy machine will be adapted into an espresso maker or something. So in restaurants, I feel like we, our industry attracts and fosters and grows and supports a particular kind of tenacity and grit.

21:37Molly Irani:And it's one of the most beautiful things about our industry. It's something that most of the world, I think, can really learn from our industry because we have to function that way. That's what we learn on the job. And people that come in with that already, that like that's their natural thing. They thrive in this industry. But it can also be taught. It can be learned. So we started with nothing. We had to jagat it all the time. And it ended up becoming like one of our foundational principles that now we teach. We actually have a management. We have a monthly manager meeting. We do one concept a month.

22:09Molly Irani:And one of those concepts is jagat.

22:12Rashad Frazier:Every month you're like reminding each other of jagat in practice.

22:15Molly Irani:Yeah. It's like, how do you practice this? What does that mean in application?

22:19Rashad Frazier:I mean, you also could like think about it in terms of service. You write a great story about a diner in Asheville who had a lot of dietary restrictions and you wanted to help them have a meal because they were sitting there with just water and you decided to offer them just a simple scrambled egg, which I think is like great hospitality. And we're going to talk about your style of hospitality, mind blasting hospitality, which is great. But like, that is a bit of you God right there. Like we got eggs, we got this person, you know, like putting it together.

22:46Molly Irani:Totally. Yeah. It's like, how do you just make it work with what you have? You know, we weren't in the position where I could like run somewhere and get a stake for this lady. So what how do you just make do? How do you get creative and work with what you've got?

23:00Rashad Frazier:I like the moment in the book where you and marijuana in the car and he's getting cranky. He's getting cranky. And you're talking about an employee. And he's like, I don't have time for effing feelings. And you're like, marijuana, pull over. So great. I mean, there's moments in this book where it's just like the two of you having these scenes, which is so great. And you remind him of an NBA Hall of Fame coach. What did you want to say?

23:28Molly Irani:Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I felt like I needed to tell the true story of it. And I also realized while I was writing this that all of our arguments were happening in the car when we were driving. Because that was the only time we had alone together to have conversations. Yeah.

23:41Rashad Frazier:I mean, because you have your daughter. Yeah.

23:43Molly Irani:Yeah. We were trying to like not fight at home, not fight in front of the kids at work, not fighting for kids at home. Right.

23:47Rashad Frazier:Yeah. So, yeah, it was a moment.

23:50Molly Irani:It was like a turning point moment. And in the beginning, when he sold me on this idea, he woke up in the middle of the night. He had this idea to open an Indian street food restaurant. I told him he was out of his mind, you know, that it was the hardest industry in the world. And like, what was he thinking? And then he sold me on it. And part of what he sold me on was the idea that we could bring our very unusual and unique backgrounds into this industry and try to change it. Try to bring a wave of like positive management practices and things that at the time really were not being discussed actively in our industry.

24:29Molly Irani:And my background is in child psychology, which totally relevant for running restaurants. It turns out it's like really, really helpful, actually. But we made a deal, you know, in the beginning that we were going to try to do it differently. And that doesn't mean that we knew how to do that. We didn't know how to apply these ideas in the early days. We had to learn it. But we were always trying. We still are. We're perpetual students of this industry. We are learning new things every day. I mean, literally, like by the time the book comes out, we'll have more principles that we've figured out.

25:04Molly Irani:We are just constantly learning in order to make it work. So back to the argument in the car, I was trying to talk through an issue that one of our employees was having. He had the classic reaction that any chef would have when you're exhausted working 80-hour weeks, by the way, at the time. Like it was a reasonable response given how exhausted we were. and he was like pushing himself so hard to learn how to be a chef, to run the business of the business, to get the books to balance, to have enough money to pay payroll. It was so much, there's so many stressor points, you know, that were like, yeah, you're going to really like talk to me about somebody's feelings right now.

25:43Molly Irani:So, and yeah, like that was the point was we had to learn how to figure out how to bring the culture of our management strategies and the culture behind the scenes. Like, how do you build a culture that inspires people to show up and want to do mind-blasting hospitality? So at the end of the day, it comes down to taking care of your people. And what does that actually mean in real life? It's like figuring out how to have time and space to deal with people's feelings and for them to be allowed to have feelings. So back to the argument, to finish the story, he is a big basketball fan, you know, and I felt at the time like, wait a minute, I need to help him see that he has the potential to be literally like a groundbreaking leader in this industry.

26:39Molly Irani:But I had to really push him for him to believe that himself. So I was using this analogy of like, how do you elevate our industry and bring out of the box ideas to a space that's not used to them in order to force change, in order to really grow beyond its bad habits? So that's what that.

27:04Rashad Frazier:And Phil Jackson shows up.

27:06Molly Irani:Phil Jackson. Yes. Sorry. I missed the that's the punchline is like I was saying to him, you could be the Phil Jackson of the restaurant industry.

27:15Rashad Frazier:Yeah.

27:15Molly Irani:Because I believed it. I really did. And it's turned out to be true. Like he has he has pushed himself and us and our team to be that kind of leader.

27:25Rashad Frazier:You break down an important point of being a chef and leader. A lot of times chefs just don't want to deal with it because there's, as you outlined, you know, 80 hour work weeks, lots of pressure with sweating payroll. Like, you know, people are calling in sick. And the easiest response is like, fuck feelings. Yeah. Like they should come in line. Yeah. Get in line. And like this is symptomatic in the industry. Right. We we continually talk about this and we see it as a problem where chefs lose their anger, lose their temper. and there's anger or, and it's not because they're like vindictive people.

28:00Rashad Frazier:Some are, but many aren't.

28:01Molly Irani:It's because they just aren't taking the time to like stop and actually listen to their

28:06Rashad Frazier:employees, even if their employees may be wrong. But it's giving them the space. So I think you make this really clear point when thinking about Phil Jackson. Yeah.

28:13Molly Irani:Phil Jackson was the inspiration. It did get Marwan curious enough about what I meant by that to really start doing some deep digging into what are the management practices that we could bring into this? Because this really comes down to how. It's one thing to say that, but normalizing the idea of things like active listening and positive management strategies within a restaurant space, we had to create the infrastructure for that. It doesn't exist in our industry. It's not something you typically learn when you go work in a restaurant. So we had to bring – we had to sort of adapt these ideas and principles from other industries into ours and then get them to work for the restaurant business or really any service business.

28:51Rashad Frazier:This book can be applied to many types of industries, such as restaurants. Mind-blasting hospitality. It kind of rhymes with some of these other hospitality guru methods. Mind-blasting goes back to India. It's a reference to Parliament. Russell Peters. Yeah, exactly. Talk about this philosophy.

29:11Molly Irani:Yeah. I mean, philosophically, it is very much aligned with the other sort of hospitality, inspirational hospitality, books and goals that are out there. For us, it was in the early days. We were just, you know how in restaurants, everything works in shorthand. Like everybody finds a code to say the thing with the least amount of words.

29:30Rashad Frazier:Sure.

29:31Molly Irani:Yeah. So we were relying on Russell Peters, who's an Indian, Canadian Indian comedian, yeah, to sort of get us through the stress of that time. And he's got a bit that he does where he uses this word mind blasting. And it's such an Indian way of describing how going above and beyond. It's not just blowing somebody's mind. You want to blast their mind. So we locked onto it and it became a description for not only our goal, but also a code that we use in service to be able to cut through all the words and it becomes a tool to actually accomplish the goal. So basically we'll say like, I need a mind blast.

30:17Molly Irani:And you can say that to a chef and they know that that means there's something going on out there. I need to save this dish that just got over fired and have an extra one of and send that out. Nobody has to explain why. Nobody has to have the whole conversation of like, what's going on with our guests that I need to have an extra dish. People are empowered to be on the same team to reach that goal.

30:39Rashad Frazier:And you give everyone working the floor or your line or your, you know, CDC to make that call?

30:45Molly Irani:Yeah, absolutely.

30:46Rashad Frazier:That's the way it goes.

30:47Molly Irani:They need to be empowered to be able to make that call on the fly. We have to communicate with each other about it so that if there's patterns going on in service where, like, the same dish is getting sent back 20 times, obviously we need to know why. But it's not about permission. It's about communicating with each other. But this is like our fast track word that gets us all on the same page to accomplish the same goal.

31:07Rashad Frazier:We have to talk about food. Yes. And we have to give serious props to James Grogan and Daniel Peach, two guys who I've gotten to know over the years, over a decade. They both play roles in the book, and I think they're just like unique talents. But like talking about food, like who invented the Kilpikora? Oh, my God.

31:25Molly Irani:Yeah, it's crave-worthy. One of my favorite foods in the world.

31:29Rashad Frazier:Oh, really? That's incredible. I love it.

31:31Molly Irani:Well, the inspiration of it came from, so in the early days when marijuana was learning on the line, James and Daniel, these were some of our first hires, literally like we were just talking earlier about finding them through Craigslist, which is some kind of divine intervention miracle. They were growing up with us in the industry. And Marwan was learning on the job alongside them. And they would literally like Google, like watch YouTube videos of how to make a particular dish on the streets of India. And then they would break the ingredients down and recreate it with ingredients sourced locally in Western North Carolina.

32:13Molly Irani:So it was this idea of like, how do you work with what you have? That's that Jugaad idea. Like you've got kale in abundance in season. What can we do with that? That's authentic Indian street food. And they would come up with these dishes. So it was a real collaboration. And I think at that time, that was in, you were talking earlier, you referenced this transformation that happened in marijuana. What I got to witness, which was really fun as his partner was seeing this sort of wild, creative, artistic side of him really come out and be born through this industry, through the chance to become a chef on the line.

32:50Molly Irani:But it was a collaboration that was going on. So James and Daniel were in there with him. They were testing and retesting and figuring it out and dialing it up and dialing it down. And it was a real like the I don't think people outside of our industry know the magic that happens behind the scenes in the kitchen when that kind of collaboration is going on. It's really addictive in the best kind of way. It's really beautiful. Yeah.

33:16Rashad Frazier:Getting all that positive feedback from your guests and from your staff. And there's like new dishes and new specials flying. Love that. Yeah.

33:25Molly Irani:Yeah. It's pretty magical. So, yeah, that was the I don't remember who exactly came up with the idea, but I guarantee it was a collaboration.

33:31Rashad Frazier:The collab between the team.

33:33Molly Irani:Yeah.

33:33Rashad Frazier:Well, let's get us into the present. I mean, you've got Chaipani in Decatur. Right. And like that there's a whole section about the opening of your second location. And it's so interesting how you admit and you reveal that you opened your second location when your P &L was looking really kind of questionable for the first location. It's a philosophy and a theory that when you know you have something but you're not landing on the P &L and your budget's not balanced, you can still expand. I mean, how did you – it feels a little atypical to me.

34:08Molly Irani:Yes. And there's a good reason for that because it's something to proceed with caution. Yeah. Right? It's like it's not going to fix all the problems to grow. And particularly if you're growing from a place of fear of losing what you have, but you haven't mastered the model you're already in. So we were in the process of mastering it, but we hadn't nailed it yet. One of the challenges that we were facing was Asheville is a seasonal economy. So the first two winters that we were in business were Asheville's worst winters in 30 years. So they were really rough. And how do you hold on to a team and not have to let people go when it slows down in the winter?

34:49Molly Irani:It was really hard. So one of the things with expanding to Atlanta was, I would say it was twofold. One was we needed to stabilize our income and not have it be so seasonal. And Atlanta doesn't have as much of a seasonal market as Asheville. Asheville's tourism-based. So that was number one. The second thing was our team was starting to grow up and potentially out of some of their positions. And we wanted to grow for them so that we could all be continuing to grow together. So the timing of that lined up, but it was, I panicked because I was scared that we were going to recreate the same problem.

35:29Molly Irani:So I tell this whole story in the book about how I broke out in hives. You know, the tax collector came to our house. Literally to your door. Yeah, like literally to the door of my house. Like people look at us now and we've got multiple locations and growing brands and three different companies and people think we've got it all figured out. But we did not get there overnight. Like we learned a lot on the job. And ultimately, growing in Atlanta was about learning how to empower this remarkable group of young people that had devoted a lot of their time and energy and spirit into the business's success, figuring out how to create positions for them of leadership so that they could grow up into those positions.

36:09Molly Irani:and alongside that continue to break our brains to figure out the finances of the business, which we did eventually do. The math has to math. You have to figure out the math equations and get it to work.

36:20Rashad Frazier:Yeah, and clearly Decatur really, really becomes a popular restaurant.

36:26Molly Irani:Yes, took off. Like right away.

36:29Rashad Frazier:And so you start to turn the corner financially and then Asheville writes itself as well.

36:34Molly Irani:Yeah, exactly. Well, I think ultimately what helped Asheville Wright itself was not only did we continue to improve our consistency, our quality of service and food execution, but also we started to understand some of the pieces that we had been figuring it out as we went, you know, figuring out on the job of like, how do you appropriately price your menu? Like we were shooting for this goal of like high quality. it's not an easy like nothing everything is made from scratch it's like we were hand cutting the okra in thousands of you know

37:12Rashad Frazier:pounds of a lot of labor there

37:13Molly Irani:so much labor it's so labor intensive so we had to dial in our cost of goods we had to learn how to get things priced correctly without overcharging because we were shooting for lowest price possible and accessible food we wanted it to be you know available to everybody and you know that's an art form of learning what how to price appropriately and neither of us had degrees in this we had to figure it out if you're on the

37:40Rashad Frazier:fly and you eventually land on that and then the acclaim of the outstanding restaurant for chaipani in ashville and then you've got spice wala you got boti wali yep wala yep boti wala i mean like what does the group look like today you said you have 450 employees yeah i think that

37:56Molly Irani:was the latest count. I only know that because I was writing Christmas cards.

38:00Rashad Frazier:Your arm was tired, yeah.

38:01Molly Irani:Really tired. Yeah, so Botiwala was the next adventure for us, and that's a more fast, casual counter service model. And it's our fast growing model because it's much easier to replicate. It was designed specifically to be able to scale. And it's another version of street food, basically. And so that one's growing fast.

38:26Rashad Frazier:How many locations?

38:26Molly Irani:So, gosh, well, let's see. We've got two in Asheville. We've got one in Atlanta. We have one in Charlotte, North Carolina. We're about to open in Raleigh. We're about to open one in D.C. And there's more in the works.

38:41Rashad Frazier:What about New York?

38:42Molly Irani:You know, New York scares me. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard.

38:48Rashad Frazier:It's also...

38:49Molly Irani:Not from the city. Like, I love the city. But, I mean, what scares me is, like, how do you afford it? How do you afford it as a business owner here?

38:55Rashad Frazier:It's a challenge, especially if you're doing more fast, casual style dining.

39:00Molly Irani:Like, we're not—this is not fine dining. And so it's really hard. We just opened in D.C. We have a Chaipani in D.C. Yep. And that was a big adjustment in terms of, like, the price structure there and getting all of the revenue. Each city is going to have its own challenges. But we love this city. And so I would not be surprised if it happened one day.

39:18Rashad Frazier:I think so.

39:18Molly Irani:We got to keep working. We got to keep working.

39:20Rashad Frazier:We got to find the real estate. And what about the spice business? This is like exciting. I'm a Hungry Root subscriber. I'm always getting your spices in Hungry Root. And I'm like, it seems like that business is pretty sizable.

39:33Molly Irani:Yeah, it is. It took off. Again, it was one of these lightning in a bottle ideas that marijuana landed on and we scrambled to figure out as it was unfolding.

39:43Rashad Frazier:Yeah, I remember.

39:44Molly Irani:It's a wild story. but you know again inspired from his upbringing in India spices there are not these sort of flat things that sit in containers on shelves and like you know big box stores for years before they get into your kitchen they're bought fresh roasted and ground daily in homes across India and And Marouane was inspired to try to recreate that to really disrupt the spice industry and make really high quality fragrant spices available and accessible. So that's been really fun. That's a whole CPG line that took off.

40:22Rashad Frazier:Yeah, it's great. I love the spices. I think Tamara, my wife, loves the Italian blend. It is like her ride. We always are buying it.

40:31Molly Irani:I love that.

40:32Rashad Frazier:Yeah, so good. I mean, so much more to cover. I mean, this book, you have to pick it up again. And it's like a really like nice blend of genres. Let me ask you, being a co-founder is not a role. It's a title. What did you mean when you made that statement?

40:48Molly Irani:Yeah, I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about if you start a business with somebody, you're considered co-founders. And there's an instinct to consider that your business working title. it's natural because you feel deeply invested and you care so much about everything in the business that it's a really natural response to to hold that as your title um what we learned over time was the importance of having very specifically defined roles in the business and we will both always be the co-founders of this restaurant group that's part of our story it's part of what made us who we are.

41:30Molly Irani:But learning how to be our highest, greatest impact in our roles in the business was a process. And we had to keep changing our titles and our roles in order to be the most effective version of ourself in the business. So we kind of grew out of the phase of just calling ourselves co-founders. We are still co-founders. We do say that as a thing, but that's not my title. That's not what I'm doing every day. It's not my job title.

41:54Rashad Frazier:Not your job title. That's good. Well, I have to ask you, like looking at the P &L of restaurants and just like the way our world is working right now with inflation. Why would you actually want to open a restaurant in 2026? We have listeners who maybe are chefs looking to open their own thing or we just have many in the industry listening. Like it seems difficult. It may be misguided, but I want to get your take.

42:20Molly Irani:Yeah, no, it's hard. It's not an easy industry. And if you're going into it looking just for a paycheck or for the money, it might not be the best choice for that. There's certainly other jobs that you could do that might be like technically easier or like especially if you're going to own your own business. What I think is not fully understood by people outside of our industry is how much fun it can be. Like what an incredible gift that our mission every day is to bring people together in a world that needs to be reminded of the joy of gathering. And if your love language is food, like if you love bringing people together and cooking for people, it's the best thing you could possibly do with your time.

43:14Rashad Frazier:Or serving people or bartending or working in the back office. Totally. It's also something very gratifying of just like completing a task and doing a service. Absolutely. You know, like, and then walking out the door.

43:26Molly Irani:Absolutely. You are every single day bringing joy into the world. Yeah. And, you know, we talk a lot about the restaurant being a third space and how in America, it's like we don't gather as much in parks. I mean, you might in New York City, but in most of America, it's like everybody's isolated in their boxes and increasingly so on their devices. And it divides us. And we see that happening in the world now. We're all in our own little curated bubbles, and it's lonely and isolating. And restaurants are a place that people find each other again. You know, they can reconnect there. And the people that get lit up in this industry, the reason to do it is for that.

44:10Molly Irani:And it makes a difference in people's lives. It really does. You see it. The littlest thing. You meet it every day.

44:16Rashad Frazier:You meet people who work in the industry, and they may be in different phases of their career, but the real love and passion for working a very difficult, physically demanding job. Yep. It's remarkable.

44:27Molly Irani:Yeah, totally.

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45:40Meherwan Irani:I just got up there and I was just like, oh my God, thank you, thank you.

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46:10Rashad Frazier:Molly, and this is Taste We Asked Guests About Their Discerning Taste. So to close this interview, here's a little rapid-fire Fast and Furious taste check. Okay. Are you ready? Let's go. The best fruit.

46:19Molly Irani:I was raised coastal South Carolina, so for me it will always be an in-season ripe peach.

46:26Rashad Frazier:Yeah. They're the best.

46:27Molly Irani:I mean, ideally on the beach, right? On the beach. Salt, sand, and the whole thing.

46:32Rashad Frazier:I don't think I've ever had a peach on the beach.

46:33Molly Irani:Oh, you've got to do that. But that's goals.

46:35Rashad Frazier:You're on the beach, man. Goals. That's goals. The worst vegetable.

46:40Molly Irani:I'm not a fan of eggplant.

46:42Rashad Frazier:Okay.

46:43Molly Irani:Yeah. I will say there's a bang and barta at Chaipani that is changing my tune on this because that one is really good. But I just have never related to eggplant. It's not my thing.

46:52Rashad Frazier:I'll say as an aside, probably the most common vegetable is okra. And if you eat okra at Chaipani, it's going to change your opinion of okra.

47:00Molly Irani:Yeah. It kind of has a cult following. It really does. The okra fries, they're not to miss things.

47:05Rashad Frazier:It's kind of like the only way to have okra. Yeah. What is your typical breakfast?

47:09Molly Irani:I'm really predictable every day. Organic blueberries, Greek yogurt, plain Greek yogurt. I love that.

47:15Rashad Frazier:I love that too. It's one of my faves. I'm kind of close to that. The best dessert?

47:20Molly Irani:I mean, honestly, anything my mom makes. My mom was a phenomenal baker. She still is. She's an amazing baker. But if I had to pick one thing of hers, She has a flourless chocolate cake that she makes with Scharfenberger chocolate.

47:34Rashad Frazier:Oh, cool.

47:35Molly Irani:That is like the most crave-worthy dessert I've ever had.

47:38Rashad Frazier:Love that memory. When you're craving fast food, where are you going?

47:41Molly Irani:Can I say tacos?

47:43Rashad Frazier:You can say yes.

47:44Molly Irani:Does that count? Like tacos, street tacos.

47:46Rashad Frazier:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

47:47Molly Irani:Street tacos, like ideally Mexico. You're in Mexico and you're grabbing a street taco off the street. Like that's the model. That's like the gold star that I'm always looking for.

47:55Rashad Frazier:I love that. A restaurant you wish you could bring back from the dead.

47:59Molly Irani:And Nani's, which was one of our concepts that was born in the pandemic, but we had to close because of all the chaos that happened after the James Beard Award. It was a grab-and-go, rotisserie chicken joint. Comfort food beyond belief. We just had to make the hard decision that as much as we all loved it, and it was such crave-worthy food, we loved it, but we were stretching our team too thin to manage so many concepts. And Chaipani needed us. We had to rally around it and show up for that incredible opportunity that happened after this big award. And it took a thinning down of our concepts to be able to do that, to be able to execute chaipani well at that time.

48:39Rashad Frazier:I feel you'll bring back Donnie's one day.

48:41Molly Irani:I hope so. Or maybe somebody else will. But it was like, it was the best rotisserie chicken I ever had. It was inspired by the rotisserie chickens you pick up on the streets of Italy that are just like, so good. Why are they so good?

48:54Rashad Frazier:Your favorite city outside America to visit for food. Okay.

48:59Molly Irani:This feels like a trick question because what is food, right? Like there's so many different categories. So I have to do rapid fire. I'm going to go fast. Okay. Paris, if you're just talking like technique, right? So good. I spent time in Italy and Greece writing this book to get away as like by myself on a different time zone and write it was heaven. And I fell in love. I mean, there's pizza in Italy that can literally bring tears to my eyes. It's so beautiful. And it's because of the purity of the ingredients, the way the farmer treats his tomato like a piece of art. That is something that just moved me beyond belief.

49:36Molly Irani:And then in Greece, last thing, you have to at some point, like this is bucket list thing, dining on the Aegean Sea where the fish comes out of the boat and they grill it next to you with olive oil and lemon and salt. It is so simple and so spectacular. It changed my life. So I got to say those three.

49:58Rashad Frazier:I love it. Molly, you came to play in Greece. I love the food in Greece.

50:01Molly Irani:It's just so good. Feta cheese from the farms in Greece. Are you kidding me? Get out of here. It's so good.

50:09Rashad Frazier:Last one, your favorite sandwich.

50:11Molly Irani:I'm a banh mi girl. Yeah. I love a good chicken banh mi.

50:14Rashad Frazier:I love that. It's my number one as well.

50:16Molly Irani:It's got to be the right bread though, right? It's got to be like authentic and that little bit of crunch, but not too thick. Yeah, it's not too thick. Just a little bit.

50:24Rashad Frazier:Molly and Ronnie, I love this conversation. Thank you so much for joining This Is Taste.

50:28Molly Irani:Thank you, Matt. What an absolute pleasure to hang out with you and chat. Thank you for everything.

50:37Rashad Frazier:Rashad Frazier, welcome to This is Taste. How are you?

50:41Meherwan Irani:I'm doing great, man. Doing great. Book just launched. Pub Day was yesterday. And morale is high.

50:47Rashad Frazier:Oh, well, Cookout is really special. It's such a unique book. It really kind of cracks the code about outdoor cooking, cooking when you're camping, or just spending time outside. Major congrats.

51:00Meherwan Irani:I appreciate that, man. I appreciate that. We're really excited to get it out in the world. We've been chasing this Camp Yoshi concept for six years now. And the book's kind of representation of all my mistakes, all my learnings, and just some tips and some easy recipes to kind of get your foot in the outdoor space.

51:19Rashad Frazier:Well, let me ask you, Rashad, when did you catch this outdoors bug? And really, when did you start thinking deeply about food and camping?

51:29Meherwan Irani:I don't think I really caught the bug, man. I think I was raised in it, man. Like I'm from North Carolina, Charlotte specifically. My summers were up at pretty much Lake Life all summer. I was up there pretty much doing barbecues, shindigs, cookouts, family events, anything outside, anything around food. In fact, those are the two main mechanisms that kind of drove my summers. And so I think my core memory since I was like four pretty much were built around that, man. So what I'm doing today is not too far off from how I was raised. in a lot of ways as far as the community around food and just people and connection.

52:06Meherwan Irani:Obviously, the excursions and the activities and the locations and backdrops are much more extreme,

52:11Rashad Frazier:but it's pretty much how I was raised. So, hey, what's on the menu of these cookouts and these outdoor activities in North Carolina as a kid? Oh, man, come on.

52:20Meherwan Irani:It's barbecue, man, vinegar style. A lot of cornmeal crusted fried fish, pound cake. Strawberries are typically always in season when things kick off, but it's usually the play man just good old-fashioned down-home cooking um very potluck style uh that was more about not really catering more so like hey everyone brings a dish and kind of hangs out and has a good time a lot of mgd uh beer was being drank as well um but yeah man i feel like those were all just around some big black pot cooking fried fish and cornmeal or you know things like that and just the pool pork oh yeah and that north carolina barbecue is the

52:59Rashad Frazier:best like straight up let's just go there it's just let's go let's go okay all right we gotta

53:03Meherwan Irani:we gotta uh bought in man i appreciate you saying that man there's a lot of controversy around uh who's the best man who is uh pretty unique it's not all the sweet sauces like you get from other

53:14Rashad Frazier:places i say no names but uh yeah give me some pork give me some vinegar what a pairing all right well you've said that the adventure industry always drops the ball in food i think you're really right. What does not dropping the ball actually look like in a camp kitchen?

53:32Meherwan Irani:I think cooking with intentionality. I think cooking with care. I think cooking with honesty. I mean, listen, man, showing on one of these trips, whether you're out with us or any guide company, outfitter, nature does its thing. I mean, obviously the backdrops to views, the vibes are always going to be there. I mean, there's some amazing places on this planet, and I would never ever take away from that. But when it comes to the food, I think for the amount of money you spend on these trips, all the gear you buy, all the Gore-Tex you might end up wearing to kind of make sure you look the poor and you're cold and you're warm and you're dry, I feel like that can also go towards us having better meals outside.

54:10Meherwan Irani:My personal philosophy is the best meals are the ones outside. And I think we're kind of missing the mark on that, man. So, you know, I'm not saying everything's got to be local fresh ingredients, but it can go a long way to seasoning some potatoes and adding some fresh herbs and some dishes and, uh, pre cooking some things at home and going out there and maybe like reverse searing them. There's just some technology information is way too accessible, but it's not to be something resolved. And so if you're going to book an experience with a guide company, an outfitter and adventure brand, I would always ask the team.

54:45Meherwan Irani:They're like, Hey, what's on the menu? And if the menu's weak,

54:47Rashad Frazier:it might not be the adventure for you. Oh, completely agree and then when doing your own too i think we get into this muscle memory where we gotta get like that pack of hot dogs and maybe some burgers and like we you know food is important like you don't have to you know go to the the meat counter and get get the the standards

55:06Meherwan Irani:no you don't i mean this is not your dad's camp out anymore i mean i think enough um resources really kind of go out there and get anything you want from the grocery store and go out there and create an amazing meal when you're out there with your fan friends etc i mean listen to do all the work even go outside to go camp to go to these magical places it's almost

55:28Rashad Frazier:blasphemy to not eat a good meal to go along with it i agree fully and in your your book is filled with like really i think many recipes that are very easy to make on the fly or of course at home before you go on your trip let's go back to new york walk me through yoshi jenkins it's super cool It's an Afro-Asian catering company you founded. I feel this identity, this hybrid look at food is really everything you cook. Where did this idea come from?

55:55Meherwan Irani:I've never been a genre-based kind of guy when it comes to food. Obviously, I'm a black man from the American South. I think oftentimes they try to fill you into a category based on that profile. But the reality is in my house, we ate everything. I went to school in New York and D.C., ate everything there. New York City was its own food ways in itself. I think it's more so me saying that I didn't want to commit to just one aisle of the grocery store when it comes to ingredients and foodways and whatnot. But also, too, man, let's get deep, too, man. There's a lot of intersectionality around Afro-Asian cuisine.

56:29Meherwan Irani:You know what I'm saying? The African diaspora, the Asian diaspora. There's foodways there that are much older than you and I that have been there forever. They just haven't really been talked about. And so I think the storytelling around the Yoshi Jenkins concept was more so about highlighting those stories, highlighting the intersectionality, but also more so is having fun with food and being playful and kind of getting out of the rigidness that comes to cooking sometimes in terms of people's backgrounds and certain spaces and whatnot.

57:02Rashad Frazier:So what's it like running a catering company in New York? I mean, talk about meeting some cool people. And I mean, that's a hard that's a hard job.

57:10Meherwan Irani:rush out it was the best man it was the best it was um i mean obviously it's grueling it's it's it's a hustle it's a grind yeah um but the people the chaos the the the hustle it makes for this really beautiful romance with being a food operator in new york city you know things never go according to plan uh you get access to some amazing places as far as kitchens and showrooms and spaces. But even just building morale and camaraderie of other chefs, man, and other cooks and food operators is always a beautiful thing, man. That was a nice little 10-year run. And I think at some point you realize that, you know, in doing that, yeah, you love making the money.

57:56Meherwan Irani:You love the hustle, but also just the people was probably the main thing that makes that industry just so fun.

58:02Rashad Frazier:Speaking of romance, let's talk about fire cooking. Cooking over live fire, It really has this romance. It's part of American history. I mean, you watch a Western and everyone's cooking over fire in those films. But it's also kind of hard at times. What's the difficulty that nobody talks about? And how are you really smashing through with this great book?

58:27Meherwan Irani:So fire is beautiful, but it's very disrespectful. It's very humbling. you know you can have a go-to dish that you've always used to make over fire and then next thing you know that one time you make it could be a complete failure that's just the nature of cooking over fire especially in the middle of nowhere where conditions like a wind might come in and destroy the whole heat level or there might be a fire ban or you know one dish like some foil roasted potatoes is done, but your fish is undercooked. It's just a very, what's the word? It's just a very precarious approach to cooking. And I think it's also why it's so intriguing because you don't have any control.

59:14Meherwan Irani:Like you do have control, but you really don't have any control. You know what I'm saying? Which I think the reps at home is so important to make sure you practice what you want to do outside when you're out camping with folks. because the reality is nothing you plan for goes according to plan. It can always go backwards, blow up in your face. When it comes to fire, man, it's a whole other animal. Oh, my gosh. Nowadays, too, in the American West, fire bands are going to be probably more and more and more part of the experience for most people getting into the outdoor space. If you don't already know this, fire bands are very common.

59:43Meherwan Irani:This year, with being so little rain poor and snow poor, I mean snow, that it might be more aggressive this year, man. And so get your Coleman grill ready, your gas tank ready, you know, your charcoal. But in terms of like live fire cooking, it's a very it's hard to really kind of master.

1:00:06Rashad Frazier:Yeah. I mean, it's incredible that you can do this not just for like friends, but do it as like an operator and a caterer. I mean, how do you when you're cooking live fire for a large group? I mean, how do you get your fuel source together? I mean, this is impressive.

1:00:22Meherwan Irani:Yeah, I mean, I would say a lot of stuff starts at home, man. I mean, it's like anything, mise en place, whether you're working in a professional kitchen or catering outdoors, don't be the hero going out there trying to prep onions. I say do all the easy things. Sorry, do all the hard things at home. Yeah. In your prep kitchen before you even go outside. Also, too, like, some of these places you go to, man, not to hate on these locations, but they can be food deserts.

1:00:44Rashad Frazier:Yeah.

1:00:45Meherwan Irani:The ingredients you think are going to be out there may not be out there, you know. Not to mention, the cost of ingredients on these places are also much higher. You know, people always talk about how bodegas in certain parts of the city are just extremely expensive as far as some of the ingredients. That also applies to some of these towns and adjacent places to epic locales you want to explore. And so, whether you're cooking for 12 campers or this past weekend, 95, the goal is to always kind of prep as much as possible beforehand. man, just to keep your costs low, to kind of get ahead of any mistakes, any unforeseen things.

1:01:21Meherwan Irani:I mean, hell, this weekend we were camping out. We were making buttermilk pancakes, and that's sort of raining. And so things like that just kind of come into play around, put the tarp up, making sure the fire is dampened down or protected. Like, all these things matter, man. So nature could care less about your mood board.

1:01:42Rashad Frazier:Tell me about this event this week in 95 Campers through Camp Yoshi. It sounds amazing.

1:01:50Meherwan Irani:Yeah, it was for Nike ACG, man. ACG is coming back on strong. And we built out a Basie village for all the runners, influencers, and media that were attending the event in Cascade Locks, Oregon. Pretty much you set up all these tents. We had a listening room. We had a dining hall. But it was a very beautiful soft landing. then mixed in an astronomer. We had a sauna, you know, amazing breakfast, amazing dinner, daily hikes with naturalists. It was pretty much an all-sensory, all-encompassing sensory experience across the board. But my point to you is like, you know, Camp Yoshi's entire vibe is about building out soft-landing experiences for folks when they get outside.

1:02:37Meherwan Irani:And I think we did a really good job with that this past weekend.

1:02:39Rashad Frazier:I bet. I mean, really smart stuff, thoughtful. and so we can book Camp Yoshi for our own private events or is it only for corporate?

1:02:47Meherwan Irani:No, it's for private events, consumers, individuals, solo travelers, solo trekkers, non-outdoorsy folks who just want to get outside and touch some grass. If you have no experience whatsoever in outdoors, all good. We kind of cater towards that really, really well as far as providing all the gear, sleep kits. You just really show up. We do a lot of B2B as far as off-sites and catering for corporate companies But, yeah, private groups, fellas retreats, ladies getting outside, families. There really are no rules, man. If you want to show up, we'll show out.

1:03:20Rashad Frazier:I like that. I'm linking to it in the show notes, this Camp Yoshi website. I mean, man, so cool. Well, a couple recipes. This banana bread with espresso butter, genius for camping. I feel this is what you want in the morning or maybe like a light dessert. What inspired you to include this?

1:03:41Meherwan Irani:I'm kind of a banana bread snob. I love cooking it at home for the family. It packs well, wrap it in some parchment paper or a bandana, and the kids just kill it. But I do think sometimes it gets a little dry after three, four days camping. Yeah. And so the espresso butter is kind of a nice little nod to having something, I don't know, savory, but also just kind of a nice pairing to give it a little bit of moisture, if you will. Not to mention when you're packing out for a camping trip, You want to make, you want to have a pantry of items that can work more than one use. Yeah. If you, and so the, the espresso butter is really well in pancakes.

1:04:22Meherwan Irani:Does great on other things as well. Even a parfait, depending on how crazy you want to get with that. But yeah, I like having ingredients that have multiple use, man.

1:04:30Rashad Frazier:Really cool. So you, you bake the bread at home. You maybe griddle, you griddle the bread with the butter.

1:04:37Meherwan Irani:Exactly. Exactly. So make it at home. and then when you're ready to serve it at camp, a little griddle, medium heat, toast it off a little bit. You don't want it super crispy, but you just want to add moisture, add heat to it, if you will, to kind of bring it back to life. And then you finish it off with a dollop of espresso butter.

1:04:53Rashad Frazier:Love that. I mean, I use that technique too when I have friends over and if I have like the bread, the loaf for the morning isn't as fresh, I think it's a good tip. You can do a little griddle on it. Simple, simple, fast, quick. Love that. So tofu donuts, with pear compo is a dish that gave me a little bit of a double take for a camping cookbook, but it really makes too much sense. I think if you can do donuts out in the campfire, I feel that's pretty ill. I mean, tell me, why did this recipe appear?

1:05:22Meherwan Irani:So this dish has a few inspirations behind it. One, I'm from North Carolina, where I grew about an hour away from Krispy Kreme Donuts. So donut country is all I know in terms of where I'm from. Two, it's very ridiculous. I mean, like you said, your reaction you've seen on the menu is kind of I'm like, wait, what? And then third, one of our, there'd be no Camp Yoshi about a brand called Snow Peak. Snow Peak is an outdoor brand. They have an experiential restaurant at their flagship store here in Portland. It's called Takibi. The menu's changed now, but the original menu, they had this on there.

1:05:55Meherwan Irani:And if you know anything about tofu donuts, it's a very popular, common Japanese dish. And so this is an old day to those guys. Amazing dish. The paracampo hits it even harder with a ginger hint in there a little bit of spice. But for me, it's one of those things where it's vegan, it cooks well, and it's just one of those things where, for a nice surprise and delight for our campers, that goes much further than giving them s'mores. No disrespect to s'mores. I love them. But this isn't one of those dishes where it's like, holy shit, you make donuts and tofu? How's that even possible? So, yeah.

1:06:31Rashad Frazier:I love Snowpeak, man. Having to plug at that company to get some gear, I mean, that's pretty nice. oh i mean it's well you know it's it's i think as far as operating a business like we do yeah

1:06:43Meherwan Irani:having them as a partner has been gold man i mean obviously having the gear is amazing but more so too like they've been great mentors helping us kind of figure out some things here and there as far as operating such a gear intense business man yeah it's great stuff for hospitality

1:06:58Rashad Frazier:and hosting and community i've heard that restaurant is very cool as well so yeah really So you have a client or you just have your interest, like a friend who you're taking out. They're like, I really want a steak. What's your idea if you want to like maybe pivot away from doing like nice steaks?

1:07:18Meherwan Irani:As far as like an alternative option? Yeah, yeah, like an alternative. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if you really wanted to flex, you mentioned fire earlier, man. This eggplant dish where we basically bake it over to fire to get the skin removed. and then let it obviously cook in its own juices. If I get 10 minutes, 20 minutes, remove the skin. It's a nice little play on just having something savory, super duper umami, and then you can pair it and sear it off at camp. But I would say an eggplant dish where you literally just kind of finishing it off at camp was a nice little play. If that's not the play as well, I'd say fish is a lot, living out here in Oregon.

1:07:56Meherwan Irani:Fish is a huge, huge, huge thing. Rock fish is probably our go-to for a lot of different dishes and whatnot. But I would say those are probably the alternative options around just something non-cattle heavy. Lamb's been a big friend of mine lately. I'll take some lamb chops, the only one of our universal seasonings, and finishing it off with a chimichurri sauce. That might be a better play because it cooks faster. And I think it's less heavy on the system. And so when you're eating all these dishes, you don't want to be sitting around with a food coma after you eat. Like that's kind of a whack feeling at camp.

1:08:31Meherwan Irani:but I would say probably between the eggplant dishes which is in the cookbook as well as our the lamb chops are not in there but either way you can't really go wrong with either one

1:08:39Rashad Frazier:I like those choices and a really good point you don't want to make the food too heavy because you're also sleeping outdoors you know might be sleeping a little lighter and yeah it's a good call this book was published through Brian Terry's imprint for Color Books I'm a huge fan of it you were also in Black Food Brian's incredible anthology what was it like working with this editorial team and putting out this book under four color books

1:09:05Meherwan Irani:brian's like the big bro he's a mentor he's a homie but more importantly i think when we were shopping around the book to different publishers i feel like brian presented the greatest opportunity to not have to shrink myself for the brand you know i think that's really important especially being an author of color um i think also he's had a really good history with authors of color doing some really unique things in the spaces they take they take up and so for me it was like i'm a no-brainer man but working with them has been amazing shout out to claire shout out to brian shout out to annie uh shout out to aaron megan alex um extremely extremely uh warm um thought-provoking publishing house I work with, man.

1:09:52Meherwan Irani:But yeah, I think it's special. I think the book is special. I think it's special that we actually went through Bryant and his team for Colors Books. So it's kind of a double whammy as far as just the impact here.

1:10:01Rashad Frazier:So cool to hear that. And that's really great that you had a great experience. Well, Rashad, I love Kukau. It's a really compelling work. Thank you so much for joining This Is Taste. I appreciate you, man. Pleasure talking to you.

1:10:20Rashad Frazier:This is Taste is hosted and produced by Eliza Abarbanal and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Episode portraits by Louise Zergon Pomeroy. Logo design by Ellie Skrzat and Ian Dingham. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste. Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up.

1:11:10Rashad Frazier:Spring's calling. Ross, work your magic.