Chef Andrew Gruel - Freedom, Food, and Inside the Restaurant Biz

Published Jan 30, 2023, 12:53 PM
Andrew Gruel is a chef, restauranteur, and small business advocate.

You're listening to The Buck Sexton Show podcast, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Welcome to another episode of The Buck Sexton Show. We have very special guests. I'm excited and I'm getting hungry just thinking about some of the topics we're gonna hit here. Chef Andrew Gruel is with us now. By the way, I'm sure people have told you an amazing name for a chef, right given what people think about as gruel, which I believe is usually given to people in the naval service of you know, nineteenth century England, and maybe in certain like prison camps and penal colonies, and people think of gruel as a very specific thing. But I've seen your photos of your food service delicious. Chef Andrew is the owner of American Gravy Restaurant Group, and he recently sold another restaurant. Chef, can I call you? That? Is that cool? Go for it? So, Chef Andrew, we can. We'll go back and forth on some of these things. First, I need to ask you to weigh in on a very important controversy right now. I know you've been talking about it a little bit. Gas stove versus electric stove. Had you ever heard before your many spent a lot of time in front of a stove, had you ever heard before that there was in fact a massive health risk and basically by cooking with gas stoves, the planet was being destroyed. I mean, you know, people had talked about it for the past couple of years here and there about just gas stoves, natural gas and the effect that that has on the environment, and how we need to electrify everything. But really, in kind of that grand and very broad context, the health element, no, I have not considered that at all, never been talked about. I mean, I live in front of a stove essentially and half for the past twenty to thirty years. Besides the fact that I used to be six foot nine and now I'm five ten, everything's good with my health, and you know, when it when it, when it comes to the you know, kind of the environmental element, I've always thought of it pretty simply, and I consider myself a staunch environmentalist of course, pretty simply that if we are going to electrify, right what we normally would be cooking with gas from a direct source, we are only using gas and coal to create the electricity, which is now one step removed from the direct source. So in actuality, by the very standards, it's worse for the environment was being proposed than what we're doing today. Pretty simple, all right, Andrew. So on the gas versus electric stove thing, what are the cool kids in the kitchen say? Because I am, at best an advanced beginner, maybe even a mediocre beginner at cooking, I'm okay, I'm better than like my radio co host Clay, who says he has never boiled water before, and he told me he was serious about that. So I can do a few things. But even I feel like I grew up watching gas stoves used in every fancy kitchen I ever saw, every excellent restaurant, I've never seen them cooking on electric. Yeah, so electric from the perspective of commercial cooking is laughable. Nobody's using electric in a commercial kitchen. It's virtually impossible to do. So gas is the preferred outlet. There might be some circumstances in which you can use electric or induction, but by and large it's all gas. The industry hasn't even caught up. There is absolutely no real commercial alternative and just from a culinary perspective, I mean, you want that direct heat. Gas can manipulate the heat from high to low very quickly. Medium heat. Electric on the other hand, as you know you you know you said you had electric, is that it's just that long, slow, gradual, gradual incline and decline. You're going to burn everything. Yeah. I just feel like an electric stove is it's good for boiling water, and that's that's about it. I mean, I'm really not a fan at all of using it. I just think it's funny that all of a sudden, the pseudo environmentalist groups out there are telling us they made this push to ban the gas stove through regulation, and when people notice said, hey, that's kind of crazy. It's what do you Why are you freaking out about the gas stove band We're not even doing that. It's like, oh, okay, this is the game they play, which is not surprising at all. You know one thing that I know you've You've done the rounds on Fox. I've seen you talking about this in the past. You during COVID were a bit of a rebel, a kitchen rebel, if you will. You kept your restaurant open at least for outdoor dining, even though you're out there in California, even though they wanted to shut down outdoor dining too, right, which we all know now one hundred percent for sure and really did then one hundred percent for sure, is completely insane. Every single thing that the government does, you can always actually draw back a case study that shows that it's actually worse than what they were intending to help, right, So intended or unintended consequences. What I said, by banning outdoor dining, you're going to kill more people buy the very metrics or the very science in which they world in which they lived, right. So what we saw in California was that when they started banning outdoor dining, then people were having these private, you know, kind of backyard neighborhood parties because everybody wants to socialize where they're actually jamming indoors more than what the government was suggesting. Having the ability to dine outdoors for people who perhaps were at high risk, which now we all know it's all of this was jump but at the time wasn't was an outlet. It was a safety measure to be able to do so so by dining as not going to do a guilt people trying to kill people. How did you get into this? How did you become a chef? Take us back a little bit here. So I grew up, gosh, you know, watching the old school cooking videos yon Ken Cook, Julia Childs, right, those old PPS, dump and Stir TV shows, And I got so into it that I used to actually fake being sick at school and skip school and I'd sit at home and I'd try and make a lot of those recipes. My mother was a full she worked full time. Both my parents. You know, I was kind of a latchkey child, so I kind of just myself. It became a hobby. I never thought it would actually become a career. My first job was in kitchens, washing dishes, and as I ultimately went to college, I ended up spending more time in kitchens and restaurants than I did in class. And I realized at that point, hey, this is an opportunity for me to kind of pick this as a career, and then I did. So. Do you remember the first thing you ever made, the first thing you ever cooked that you were impressed with yourself? You're like, wow, that was actually really good? Probably an omelet an omelet. I remember watching this old Julius Child's episode where she was showing everybody how to cook an omelet. And I had like a full stick of butter, and I cooked it in a full stick of butter, and because I had all that butter, it didn't stick at all. And at that point I considered myself more of like a Jacques Papen. I actually kept asking my dad do we have any French in our lineage, at which point he told me no, you know, shut up and go to school. But still it was something exotic I do. I have a similar although I'm not actually a chef, but the first time as an adult that I made scrambled eggs that tasted really good, and I learned from YouTube videos specifically actually the Gordon ramsay, you know what I want to ask you about celebrity chefs in a second, actually, and restaurant tours, and then we'll get back into some of the politics of the color earble. I got a lot of questions. I look, I'm born and raised in New York City. I love food. I get very excited about it. I also love people getting a great night's sleep, Andrew, and that means they need my pillows. Because My Pillow is an amazing company that helps millions of Americans sleep better all the time. You can trust Mike Glendel to help you get a great night's sleep. We know the pillows are phenomenal, it's why it's my Pillow company. But you know the Geezy dream sheets are also absolutely incredible. I sleep on them every night. They're very soft, very durable, come in a bunch of different colors. 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You know, you're like Alan Ducas, Eric Repair, Thomas Keller, these types, or is there anyone who you think they're they're cooking Your culinary aesthetic is at the absolute peak. Yeah, I mean, look, I love all those Titans, right, those are all the guys that I, you know, yearned to train under, some of which I staged under in New York City. I'm a Jersey boy myself. The you know, when it comes to just the pure food and names, household names, I'd actually say Bobby Flay. I love the way that he puts flavors together. He's able to do so in a manner that's approachable to everybody. But he uses kind of a lot of exotic spices and he just does it on the fly. I'd put him up there. Obviously, Anthony Bourdain was the best of the best, not just from the culinary perspective, but almost from that kind of philosophical standpoint when it came to food and kitchens in the world, and the lore of the kitchen was Kitchen Confidential, a book that you read early on. I mean I remember reading that, and that book is one of my favorite reads at a young age. I thought that book was phenomenal. Yeah, and you know what's funny. Actually, so my dad was like a big mystery novelist. I read, I mean books, like three books every single day. We were reading family and he had introduced Anthony Bourdaine to me prior to even Kitchen Confidential. I don't know whether you know this, but he wrote a lot of these like mystery novels, kind of mafia style mystery novels that took place in kitchens, and it was very cult like writing. Obviously, he didn't hadn't made a name for himself at all. And I started reading some of his stuff prior to that and that and really falling in you know, kind of falling in love with that kitchen style of writing. There was a little bit of Carrot Peppert in there with his own insanity, you know, Bourdain's insanity. So yeah, Kitchen Confidential the best of the best. I mean that I think put restaurants on the map in the sense that it created this rock star element to it. You know, these these long nights and you know, cocaine fueled three day banquet events that Bourdain was able to kind of make sounds really sexy and fun and exciting and good for him. Yeah, it was. It was very eye opening. I remember reading that book also. I mean it might have been very early in my in the internet age. I mean, I still remember the Zagat Guide, which I knew it as a New Yorker. That thing for going out to eat in New York City was like the Bible, right, I mean, because because there are so many restaurants, and I always tell people it used to be that New York was, I mean, in my opinionum, so far above the rest of American cities in terms of just the top tier of food and then the options. It still blows everywhere else out of the water in terms of options. But Chicago, La, actually a whole bunch of cities now have food that's really you know, at the same level. So I remember reading a Kitchen Confidential, and because you didn't have all these sites to tell you about these sort of inner workings of restaurants and all the reviews and all these things you can you know, now you can go. You can see the men, you see the photos, see the staff, see you know, all the amount of information that's at our fingertips. When Bourdain wrote Kitchen Confidential, there were things that people took out of like, ah, maybe I don't want to order the special on Sunday for brunch that seems to be just thrown together from whatever they didn't sell the night before. But what are what are the rules? I mean? I have, I have some as a customer, some rules that I apply to restaurants, but I want to as a chef and an owner operator, a guy who knows the business. What are things that you tell people if they're just looking to make wise choices about where they're going out to eat, and you know, try to guide them in the process. First and foremost, if you are going to take any food home, get the server to bring the to go container to you. Don't allow them to put it into the container in the back, because too many times I've seen not in my restaurants, obviously, where they bring it back and then the food gets either thrown away or thrown in the dishpit. And then the server comes running back and they say no, they wanted to take that home with them. And then you've got dishwashers picking through the garbage to get that thing to put into the to go container. Oh yeah, all the time. So I've never even heard of it. Yeah, think about it, right, I mean, you know they come back, servers are running around, they got four tables. They put a tray of food down, and then the buser runner or the dishwasher wants to immediately clean it. Next thing, you know, that stuffs, if it's not in the garbage, is sitting with five other dirty pot plates piled on top of it. So that's first and foremost. Get the container, use it at your own table, and then put the food in the container yourself. That is gold. I you know my mother the other day we went out to eat and she did that and I said, no, no, no, Mom, get get the container at the table. I went back in the kitchen area. They threw me out. We're never allowed back in that restaurant. I'm just kidding, all right. So some of the maxims that are out there, if yeah, if you see, if you see the kitchen, if right, if you if you see the bathroom, and how clean and well appointed it is, you know, how clean and well appointed the kitchen is true or untrue? True? Yep, I totally agree with that. Floorboards right where the floor actually meets up the walls, if those are dirty, you know, that's another sign that they're not necessarily taking care of things in the kitchen as well, because the front of the house is the easiest thing to keep clean. If you can't keep that clean and the hard to wipe areas well, then Lord only knows what's happening in the hard and wipe areas in the bath, And that's ultimately where bacteria is going to grow and you're gonna end up with things like nourovirus or whatever other food boarding illness is out there. What do you think if someone's considering getting into this business. One thing, I know him and I grew up with a family friend who is a restaurant tour like you, started out as a busboy. I do have to say bus person now at whatever you know, it was called bus boy in my day. I don't know, but he started out as a as a is it a busser? People will say? Now? Is that? Is that the term that we're supposed to use? I don't a buser, and he made his way all the way up and now there's a bunch of restaurants that are franchised in the name, and he's done very well. And the thing that he would always say, because I remember my family, we would ask him this sometimes is that you're basically operating like a bank in terms of cash coming in, cash coming out, whether it's produce or actual cash people are paying their meals with. So you have to be there all the time, or you have to have someone you trust the same way you trust them with your checkbook running the place. Does that Does that ring true to you at all? Oh? I mean, you know this is just from a business side of it. It's he basically said, you have to live there or have a family member who lives at the restaurant. Yeah, Or you've got to pay somebody a pretty good amount of money or give them skin in the games so that they're overseeing. And I mean, we're opening a restaurant, sitting in a brand new restaurant we just opened right now, and my wife and I run these restaurants, and I've got my kids running around here at all times. Right up the road. We always the first concept that we always opened that. Because we like to franchise and scale a lot of our concepts, we make sure that we're there, you know, for at least the first six months, every single shift twenty four seven. So my wife and I split that up. We got cameras in and throughout all of the restaurants. And then one thing that also we've been doing more so is we're co packing a lot, right, So we'll do an off site product development and execution and then bring it into the restaurants so that there's just less areas in which you can either steal, manipulate product, or just in general mess up. Right, So then that's a much easier approach. How is it finding people to work at the level that you are looking for? These? And one thing that we're hearing a lot in the post pandemic era. I get this on our radio show all the time, people saying or small business owners, which is most restaurants. I mean, I know there's big restaurants and restaurant franchising, etc. But you know, restaurant maybe has fifteen twenty employees whatever it may be, so qualifies as a small business. Say, it's just really hard to get people who want to show up and even if they do show up, it's really hard to get them to work with the same degree of you know, in enthusiasm, efficiency, whatever you want to say, at the same level that they previously did. As that is that a problem or are you seeing that or are you disable to find the right people for the right positions. And so it moves pretty smoothly for us because we've been at the game for so long loyalty, we've got our own kind of deep bench, if you will. But constantly with opening new concepts or pivoting, we do need to consider bringing on new employees all the time. And it's totally different caliber coming out of the pandemic three years now out of it than it was let's say in twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen. And it's not about you know, everybody likes to lean into the money, minimum wage, what do we pay people. It's not about the money, right because even if you're making let's say you're making fifteen dollars an hour on unemployment or through government benefits not to work, you don't get somebody in by paying them twenty dollars an hour, because then you're really only paying them five dollars an hour they're getting paid to not do anything. You actually have to double the pay theoretically to compete with the government or whatever the benefits are. That's if you're working and looking specifically within the restaurant industry. But what we've done in the way that we've approached it is that I actually don't hire people with restaurant experience. I look for people who have no restaurant experience. It's much easier to create the right habits and it is to break bad habits. And we just budget for creating our own little mini university within the restaurants to give people the education they need to meet our standards. And that's a much easier way to approach this, and people are a lot more excited about doing that, especially people who want to get into the restaurant industry who otherwise having no experience. When people ask you about this, do you say if they say, hey, you know, I'm thinking about getting in and becoming a you know, a chef, I think there's a lot of even I would say from my own experience at a young age, you know, and I mean like seventeen eighteen, it's like maybe man going to culinary school, there's there's a romanticism around it, right, because especially if you're somebody who just really appreciates and thinks very highly of of well prepared and excellent food, and we all mean food to live, but you know that that food becomes more of certainly a craft, if not an art form for them. But you know that you have, on the one hand, the oh, I'm going to go to I don't know, a quart on blue in Paris or something and go to some fancy, fancy school and I'm going to be amazing, and I'm going to be in this like kitchen that works like a Swiss watch and everything, and maybe I'll I'll start doing some uh, you know, influencer YouTube stuff, and then you have the more bordained kitchen confidential. Obviously he became a huge super star, but I mean what he writes about, which is, you know, burning your your knuckles and your fingers and being there at night and cutting your thumb open and having just rapid quickly because you don't want to miss dinner service. You know, how do you like balance those two things when you're talking to somebody about the business. Well, first and foremost, that's how people don't go to culinary school. If you are going to go to culinary school, go after you've got at least three or four years experience under your belt, because you won't appreciate it and you'll spend a ton of money. I mean, the price of culinary school is just unbelievable and Taiway robbery. And you know, the education system has been infested with obviously, you know, is there a wokenness? You got to tell me the chef, is there a wokeness in culinary school now? Too? Because every other school there's it's hard, it's horrible. It's just as bad, if not worse, to be honest, because you know, in the culinary world, the people that want to get into culinary now, ninety percent of them want to do it because they want to be the next network star, they want to have some huge YouTube channel. They don't understand the work that goes into it. So there's this quasi Hollywood like element to the people that are going into it. And then obviously that kind of galvanizes within the culinary school system and it's a higher education in general. Right, They're all drinking the same juice. It's the same calculus, whether it's culinary or whether it's liberal arts, which they've kind of merged to some degree. So yeah, it's just I mean, it's just as bad. I'll put it to you this way. I don't even call my dishwashers dishwashers. All of them are aquatic directors. That took me a second. I was like, oh, is this the new term? Note I don't. I don't think so. Very life aquatique steves you. Do you ever see that? By the way, Oh, it's a great movie at Garden. I should probably check that one out. Data breaches, my friends, happen all the time, and if you're not paying attention, you can get absolutely rinsed. I mean you'll find out they've got a credit card taken out on your name, they've got loans taken out of your name, and you can't watch all this stuff. 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Use my name Buck that's buc k as the promo code for twenty five percent off. You want this protection, you kind of have to have it. It's like insurance for your identity online in a sense. So my friend is the culinary world as left wing as it seems to an outsider who watches a little bit of Top Chef and sees like Tom Colligio sounding like a Marxist theoretician when he goes on Bill Maher I mean, you know, is it just the people we hear from or is it overtaken? I mean, you know, right now you mentioned before journalism school, by the way, a bigger waste than even going to culinary school in terms of expense and education, total waste of time. But journalists or people consider them such or ninety percent leftists, democrats, whatever you want to call them. Is the culinary world also kind of overtaken with wokeness in that way in terms of chefs and an owner, operators or are there more conservatives than we think we just don't hear from them a lot. I would say it's a little bit of both, right. I don't think that they know what they are. And I say that not to be condescending, but you know, this is an industry where you've got to work fourteen to sixteen hours a day on your feet, hustling just to get by. That's why most restaurant tours are pretty bad at social media, right. I mean, you see all these restaurants that don't have website on social media presence. It's because they're just doing everything that they can in order to operate and hit the necessary break even margins. So what we're left with is you know, the you know, a little buffet of information that we get every single day, and those are the headlines. So we as an industry are just taking these little bits, these headlines, which we know are incredibly left leading, and we think of that as fact. And I say we kind of in this collective sense. Obviously you know me if you follow me on Twitter, those aren't necessarily my viewpoints. And when I actually start to talk to a lot of these restaurant owners, which I did during the pandemic, and explain to them why the government wasn't the answer to COVID, and why unemployment benefits weren't available for their employees even though the government basically forced them out of work, and why they were not getting any money from the government even though the government's the one that forced them to shut down. They a lot of people woke up and I can't even tell you how many hundreds of messages I got during COVID day said oh, thank you so much for speaking out. I never realized how oppressive and how crazy the government could be until COVID. But I can't say anything because I'll get canceled in the industry. I mean, I got fully canceled, right, I had, I got dropped from board positions. I obviously I was at the time doing a lot of food network stuff, TV stuff, never been asked back to do any of that, and you got canceled. You got canceled over the COVID stuff. Oh, I got fully canceled on that stuff. YEA. Prior to prior to the pandemic, I've been, you know, kind of an outspoken guy, but more human, more from the perspective of being funny and touching on a lot of kind of food libertarian topics, right like why can't I import why can't I use cheese it hasn't been pasteurized, and talking about local food systems and peppering in the government element to those conversations. When it came to the pandemic with me speaking out, yep, totally dropped, totally dropped from any of my you know, kind of industry trade stuff. And you know what, Number one, I don't care and number two are business skyrocketed they parallel economy is real. And when you speak out and you're brave about what you believe in and beliefs that are the foundation of liberty and obviously all those things that we know about in America and what this country is founded on. People are going to support you, no matter how far and why they got to go to get to your product. I mean, we had people calling from Kalamazoo, Michigan saying, hey, take my credit card number, here's three four hundred dollars just ring something up. I want to be able to support your business just for you speaking out. It was unbelievable. Yeah, I think that's so important that we've seen this more and more in the last few years. I think COVID was a big turning point actually, where people realized that if whether it's a creator online or somebody who's speaking out against the machinery, or businesses who were standing up against the apparatus, and there were there was that Jim Adalyst Jim in New Jersey. Remember those guys who refuse to shop out of it. Yeah, totally right. They were totally right. This is people forget this. It's not like they weren't reckless, they weren't wrong. There was that bar, and I think it was Staten Island that refused to close. There was a bar that got shut down by the DC authorities that kept saying, look, we're not just closing or we're not going to do the vaccine passport. I know you kept serving outdoors, which I mean it would have been safe to serve indoors. I know at the time, that's a tougher argument to make to prevent people from being served food outdoors. That's just sadism, right, that's just wanting people to be miserable and punish them for no actual reason other than asserting the control of the state. You know, it's funny you brought up libertarian food issues always. I'm always reminded of the fact when we talk a lot of the FBI these days and all the documents and the Marlago raid and all this stuff that's going on. Do you know about the the the Amish unpasteurized milk ring that the FBI took down? And I figured you would, The FBI actually ran a sting operation in conjunction with the FDA on unpasteurized milk from Amish people in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. That actually happened. It is absolutely unbelievable. You can just talk about food food in the government, and I think every single food story or case study will exhibit to the average person how insane the government is. And how insane these three little letter agencies are. When you're talking about the FBI and you get into kind of these complicated avenues with documents and classifications, it glazes people's eyes over right. The average everyday person who's going and working two jobs and taking their care of their family. They don't care about it, they don't think about it when you start to explain it by way of food. And I always say food is the great unifier. It's such a great medium through which you can actually get people to understand not just politics, but kind of community government, all of those things and where the crossroads are. But this story about the milk is unbelievable. Or the fact that like I can't serve cheese that hasn't been aged for sixty days because of the theoretically there's bacteria in that cheese that could make you sick, but only. But on the counterpoint that to the fact that only two percent of all seafood imports in the United States are inspected by the DA, ninety eight percent come through. And if you tested that ninety eight percent, which we actually did a test back when I ran a seafood nonprofit, at least fifty to sixty percent of it is infected with bleach and antibiotics and malchite green, all these chemicals that we aren't even allowed to have in our food system. But the guy serve and cheese that hasn't been pasteurized is going to get arrested, or the amish guy who's serving unpasteurized milk is going to get arrested and have an entire FBA task correspondent. Well, I always remind everybody that they shouldn't be surprised about what a little maniac Fauci is. And I don't know if you know this when the Android, if you follow me on Twitter, you would have known this in the getting the pandemic. I don't think anybody hated Fauci more and sooner than me I was. I was, this guy is the absolute worst. I was saying in an April of twenty twenty. I was totally like, this guy is a tyrant. He's awful. Like the whole thing was a mess to me. But I always remind people that you know, the FDA. We often you know, people think of the FDA and oh, FDA approval for like a vaccine or drugs or whatever. The FDA also is what gives us the eating you know, like slightly undercooked meat or shellfish or whatever it might you know, give you, you know, some kind of terrible bacterial infection and you might just you know, you know, eight of the whole thing. It's like, oh, that's true of anything you could eat lettuce and get ekal. I like, why are we doing this thing on the bottom of the FDA, you know, with the FDA warning every time I go to a steakhouse, I'm sorry, I'm a civilized person. I'm not ordering my steak well done. I'm ordering it medium rare. If I die, I die, you know. But that's what the FDA has been, the little the little hall monitor in every restaurant across America at the bottom of the menu. It's it's moronic. Well it was funny actually you bring that up, because the other day I was in a I was at a hotel and then they're outside of the conference room. Is that sign that you see in California everywhere? And I don't know why it stood out to me, like I've seen it, but it just stood out to me. And it was, you know, drinking a distilled spirits blah blah blah and lead to birth defects and children if you're pregnant, right, It was just this little sign. I looked at the sign, and I thought to myself, how many people have looked at that sign and said, you know, I'm not going to have this class of wine actually, or I'm not going to go into this conference or this ballroom like And then on the flip side, how many of those signs have been printed? How many millions of dollars have been spent to print those signs? And I can guarantee you it hasn't even helped one person. And yet they they'll they'll never stop. Once they get this stuff going, they will keep pushing it and pushing it further and further. Actually, some interesting stuff that I've seen on by the way, your Twitter account, if someone just wants to see food by I'm trying to get into a little bit. I'm getting married, so I'm trying to get into a little a little better shape. You're not making it easy with your like hash browns with Bernez sauce and lobster burritos and all this stuff that you're making all the time. Do you serve some of these delicious concoctions in your restaurants or are you just making everybody go, oh, that look so amazing, you know what I'm saying, Like you are any of these on the menu? The stuff that I'm seeing on your Twitter account? I mean there was hold on, there's one that I saw a lobster bacon burrito with eggs from Cartier. Well, it's a little bit of both, right, So two things. Number one, I want that to be an outlet for this kind of food point that you see with your eyes and not with your hands. So it's actually fulfilling people's kind of culinary desires without them going to the refrigerator and adding on the calories. So I see myself as just a little bit of an outlet without adding the weight. On number two, a lot of what I cook and what we put together and I take photos of it's all for the team, right, So it's fruchao, It's I let all my chefs and cooks and you know aquatic directors kind of cook their own food and take photos of it. It's fun. And then thirdly, yes, we do have a lot of those decondite, indulgent, kind of over the top items that we run as features on the menu, but by and large. Ninety percent of my venues are a lot healthier and approachable. They're crave worthy, right, and they're they're they're full of butters and real fats. We don't use any seed oils, tons of pressure herbs, vinegars, like real, bright, vibrant food. But yeah, the decadence certainly is it draws in a little bit of a crowd. And we sold a ton of those lobster breakfast burritos this Sunday alone. Yeah, it looked I mean, they look amazing on the on the Twitter account, I'm sure on the Instagram on the seafood question. By the way, it's funny because before I'm talking, my my fiance had just made tuna nieuas salad, and so we had tuna, and you know, she's she's an excellent cook, and I was thinking this, I was like, well, where should one get how can you maneuver around I'm like, I know, for example, there's all these different designations with eggs, and I also know that eggs have gotten crazy expensive. I'm sure you guys do too, because you're having to look very closely at the costs all the time for your business. But you know, there's like I can't even think of all the different designations. But there's like free range, there's you know, grain fad, there's all this different stuff that goes into the chickens. How can you maneuver around buying fish that is the best fish that you can get? Is it about what species you're gonna buy? Is there any real labeling you can look for? Like how do you know? That's a great question. And so just to kind of break it down, and I'm going to speak broadly, right, so obviously there's nuanced to this. But Number one US wild. Anytime I want to get wild seafood, I get it from the United States. We have the best fisheries in the world. Actually, we could feed most of the world with our fisheries alone, and yet we export the majority of it. The third largest trade deficit behind oil and automobiles is seafood. So US wild number one. Number two, if you are going to buy farm seafood, which more than sixty percent of the seafood we'd consume in the world is farmed, which is not a bad thing. Actually, a farm seafood is made huge giant steps forward and is pretty healthy and sustainable. I look for something called the BAP, which is best Aquaculture Practice. It is a third party organization that certifies everything from the feed to the processor down to the fish. And it's just a little label on the package, he says, BAP. It's two blue and white fish. And then if I am going to buy international seafood, perhaps New Zealand, Australia, Japanese fish, which all are great, I look for the MSc logo logo which is basically the same is the BAP, but for wild fish. So number one US wild number two Best Aquaculture Practice with the BAP logo. Number three the MSc logo. And here's the thing about seafood. Frozen is actually not a bad thing. And I'll tell you this. Nine of all seafood's been frozen. It gets frozen in the minute it gets on the boat. There's not a requirement that you have to label fresh versus frozen. So most of the seafood that you see that's being sold as fresh and the fish counter has been frozen. You have to freeze sushi to kill the bacteria, so all sushi that we consider to be the freshest has been frozen. Freezing technology is very advanced nowadays, so once again, I would look. I actually go to and seek out frozen seafood for that very reason. In many cases, is sushi grade really a thing or is that just a marketing term. It's a marketing term. However, you can look for and I go for sashimi like, I'll typically look for a product that will market it as this is sashimi ready or sashimi grade. When I am shopping for fish like that, right, tuna, a yellowtail, some of those thicker meteor species, always look at the label and make sure there's not carbon monoxide in there. You would be shocked to find out that they actually treat seafood with carbon monoxide because it gives it that bright, bright red color. So they take in like Indonesia, China. China does this a ton. They'll take fish that's turning, it's like brown, and then they'll they'll hit it with carbon monoxide. This is totally legal. They'll hit it with carbon monoxide and then make it that bright red watermelon color. So when you see tuna that's that bright, bright, bright red watermelon color, it's actually trash. They've taken bad fish and hit it with carbon monoxide. So when you're looking for a good fresh tuna, you almost want more of like a purple, deeper kind of ruby hue, which is the natural color of like a bluefin or a yellow fin tuna. So when you are buying it frozen, if it says treated with carbon monoxide, don't buy that, people I've heard say, and you know, look, it's food. So some people get a little snobby about it that telapia is a crap fish. Is that is that unfair? Do you can you do good stuff with Tilapia's tilapia getting a bad rap um there? Yes? And no. So tilapia as a fish is just a species of a freshwater right, So it's not the tilapia that's bad. It's how you raise it, what you feed it, where you the environment which it lives. So like Chinese tilapia nasty. They're just these big muddy puddles and they'd probably treated with antibiotics. But there's two types of tilapia tilapia from Colombia the country and then um and it's called Regal Springs tilapia and they've got the vap logo. And then there's another one called rain for Us tilapia, which is a real nice brand of tilapia. Just know where it's coming from. They have to actually farm tilapia here in the United States. That's a real, real, great product. We grew telapia in conjunction with the local high school here. We grew like five hundred species. It was one hundred percent organic. We had an integrated multi trophic aquaculture system where we were growing vegetables with students as well. Um and silapia. Right, it was a great fish, but we treated it and we gave it right. So I think they've gotten this rap about what you said about how you can just want to make a big vat and throw these slope in there and the water's dirty, and they do this in some other countries and then they just freeze it and send it to the US. So because I had heard that, people like, oh, you know tilapia, you don't you don't want to eat you know, eat that um. Anyway, I find the seafood discussion very very interesting. Tips that you can give people, uh, tips you can give people that for the everyday cook make a big difference. I want to actually just you tell me what those are. I need your help on something though. Uh no, no, no, no, no, We're gonna get to tips. I want to get your mind, your mind jogging on that because and we also, you know, we gotta tease this a little bit, because people right now, they've been listen like twenty thirty minutes. I want them to be like, oh, I need the chef's tips. I can't go. I can't balance on this podcast till I get the chef's tips. Um letting meat rest. I love cooking red meat. It's one of the only things that I do with enough frequency that I'm pretty decent at it. I'm a reverse sear guy. Everyone tries to get me to be a souvied guy. I just don't have the patience, and I feel like I'm doing a science experiment or whatever. Reverse here makes a lot of sense to me, and I nail it every time. Like medium rare, great crust. I did a little thing so that that chef you give me a pad on the head. You know, you wouldn't tell me to pack my knives and go. But I'm sitting there and right I'm sitting there, though, and I'm looking at this perfectly seared piece of medium rare, you know, pinkish in the middle, medium rare. Let's call it a ribby, and then I'm being told to sit there for ten minutes so that the juices doesn't it get cold, Like this is my problem is aren't letting my meat get cold? And then I'm serving cold meat? Like how do I Because people say the juice is right, you got to you gotta let the juices settle. Help me through this. Yeah, And I don't know if you saw my post the other day. So I took two equally eyes rib eyes, cook them exactly the same way. One of them might cut immediately and the other one I actually let sit for fifteen minutes. And it was roughly a twenty six percent moisture loss on the one that I immediately cut versus the one that I allowed to rest. However, to your point, you're correct the other one, the latter piece was more like warm. I wouldn't say room temperature, but it was warmer versus just that hot right off the girls steak that people like what I would suggest because just so you know, the the quick kind of and dirty science behind that is the exterior of your meat is really really really hot, and it's and it's trying to, like the blood trying to escape the meat because it's reaching the temperature of the oven. So when you when you cut into it, the moisture can't flow to the exterior of the meat because those those protein strands are can dance, so it's coming back to the center of the meat that running out on the plate. What I would say, understanding that science is if you are going to eat your steak right away, cut the outside in right because then you're cre relieving the pressure basically, so versus the juices running to the center of the meat. That's a lot cooler and it has a ton of mask. It's going to come out really quickly. You cut the exterior, you're almost relieving the pressure, which is going to decrease the likelihood of losing a ton of juice onto your plate. Should you should the outside of the steak in? Should you pepper your red meat or do you worry about the pepper burning I mean running before cooking it? Yeah, I don't ever cook with black pepper. I always finished with black pepper. You'll never find me cooking with pepper. There we go. That's what I had a feeling because I know some people they always say salt and pepper your meat first thing, you know, I'm like, I don't know about peppering it actually, and now the chef, the chef has confirmed what I thought was the case. All right now, sir, We now we give people the best of the best, just for the every day because if people watching this or overwhelmingly going to be ninety nine percent of them are just you know, every day cooks, men and women who want to make some decent food. What are some things you tell people that are easy to apply in remember that just make whatever they're making better. First and foremost, brighten all your food with an acid, whether that's lemon juice, whether that's you know, or any citrus juice, tomato product, or a nice high quality of vinegar. Ninety percent of the time when food tastes bland, it's because it's missing that brightness that pop that acid, which typically cuts through the richness of the food. Because if you think about it, we taste food with our palates. Salty, sour, is sweet and bitter, and we get the salt part easily. Foods are naturally sweet. The bitterness also comes naturally from the food, but can come from like peppers and mustards and fresh herbs. But that sourness you've got to balance that out in your palates. Number two, if a food, if food taste bland or when you're creating a dish, texture, texture is key. I mean, just even as we're doing having this conversation right now, imagine eating a spoonful of mashed potatoes, right, it gets kind of boring after a bite or two. Now, imagine taking a handful of potato chips, crushing them up, folding them in your mashed potatoes, and then eating that same spoonful of mashed potatoes with those crunchy potato chips in there. That's a lot more exciting, right. We love that crunch when you bite into it, it simulates, you know, all of your senses. So texture is key, and that's incredibly important. So I mean, really, those are like two tips right there that I think can take your food from basic to extraordinary. So what's a just with the adding an acid. What's something that somebody might cook that just that acid edition, right? People know? Okay, lemon on fresh fish, Like that's pretty straightforward, he said, lemon vinegar or some kind of a citrus. What's something that you might not necessarily think or you know, it's it's not an automatic oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna add that acid to it. And you're like, well, no, it'll actually make a big difference eggs. Right, So we actually I did this. I usually cast a couple a couple of weeks a couple of weeks ago, and we did a member's only segment afterwards. I made omelets for everybody and I showed them. I finished the eggs at the very end as a seasoning with a little a nice like sherry vinegar, because it amplifies the flavor. Eggs are so rich and unctuous almost with that naturally, Mommy, you want that acid to kind of make that richness pop. So it's not overwhelmingly heavy and it just completely opens up your palate. It's a catalyst for flavor. In another so add a little bit of fresh lemon juice to scrambled eggs or like an omelet. Ye at the end, right, finish it with the acid. You don't cook with the acid because then it will just caramelize and get sweet. You finish with the acid or right if you you know the end or actually is the zest of citrus. So if you get a microplane and you just zest a little bit of lemon or lime, or even grape fruit. There's so much oil in the exterior skin of citrus, and that's also acidic, but that's also got some fat to it, some oils in there. It will just take your food to another level. So use the juice and use the zest, and then always be equipped with a real high quality vinegar, sherry vinegar, champagne vinegar, white pulsamic vinegar, or even just a nice ball samming can be as good too. So like the little drizzle of a champagne vinegar, I'm getting hungry. You're talking about this, of course, on like my omelet at the end, just just that simple, just like a little dude, just drop it on there, yep, yep. And and it's fun to play with food like this, right, So next time you cook or grilled chicken, just take one piece of chicken that's totally plain, right, and then take another piece of chicken and just maybe brush a little dijon mustard on there and try that, and then another piece of chicken, brush some dijon mustard, throw some potato chips on there, and then hit it with a little bit of acid and then taste test all three in sequence and you'll understand the principle of adding those layers of flavor and texture, and you'll see from point A to point C, if you will, how different it tastes. And then apply that to other foods, other dishes, and play with it yourself. These basic you know, think of it as music, right, You kind of have a jazz standard, a one, four or five, right, and then you improvise over that, over these basic standards, and you add in your own little personality, you know, kind of your stick, kata or what have you. You do the same with food utilizing these basic principles. Texture can be anything from nuts to chips to fresh raw vegetables. Very cool, learned, something learned, something very useful everybody today, As we always do on the show, before we let you go, Chef and you Gruel, you are working on a concept out there right now. You said you have a new launch for a restaurant. Just tell us a little a little bit about what it is, so not only me, but other people listening can show up and be like, I stand with freedom, I stand with Chef Gruel and his delicious lobster burrito. Hey, if somebody came in and said that word for word, there you mean for free, so and I'll stand behind that. So this is called Calico Fish House. It's what I call a seafood chop house. So it's the best in both meat and fish and everything that we get, you know. And it's kind of a cliche, but we're really trying to support out of the local farmers, fishermen. Nothing processed, no seed oils, putting my money when my mouth is. I mean, we talk about all of these things, but the basic premise behind this restaurant is get the government out of my kitchen. The government is in all of our food products, the mass manufacture them, your soybean oils, to your transpats, your Omega six patty acids. And I want to flip the food system upside down and present my version of the real food pyramid right here with the best of the best when it comes to proteins and fats and needs. Chef appreciate you being with us, Chef and you Gruel everybody follow them on Twitter if nothing else for the food photos and for the food wisdom and other things. Chef appreciate you being with us. Thanks so much, and Honor, thank you so much for having me