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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-msX3vnXMk
let's talk creativity the age old question of where we gonna have dinner tonight I'd something that thankfully we get to experience by cooking %HESITATION and we love to be able to do there's a lot of choices in should among restroom the world especially around the different cities in the different countries so I have one called spin unstable actually have to in fact that's what's crazy is
thank you what's crazy is is that this statistic is in the first year of opening up a restaurant seventeen percent of those restaurants close it used to say ninety percent which wasn't a false number but it sounded very dramatic and that's great but it's not true the reality is though you put all that blood sweat and tears and energy into a restaurant seventeen percent of them
in the first twelve months goes away students say was almost three years old but I opened up a new one called Bellcore which is four months old one half months old so it is still you know in that area that could be a statistic this is one of our first days it's monostable we open up the restaurant what's crazy is I turned around and I looked
at this and I watch this line grow I never read any of the press my open up that restaurant I was afraid that I would believe it whether it was positive or negative I was afraid I would believe what people are writing about and I'm me so I turn around and I look and I see this line form twenty people thirty people forty people the immediately
I think to myself how do you create hospitality moments really important our business my ego would love to tell you it's all about the food that has nothing to do with the food and everything to do with the hospitality moments I walked out there to this stance the people and I said okay fine well can I give up my hot cider I had Bourbon that was
good I walked out I gave everybody shots on outsider Bourbon what's funny is the line can get a logger exactly they'll figure out that they give free booze so then I realize I'm just gonna open up at four o'clock in the concerned pain for the slicker creating those moments is really an important thing to what's interesting about small disables at the facade of the building is
very very small it's very narrow so when I first looked at this space I thought to myself the inside was equally small news in because it quite in the great a snow storm it would look great when it's nice outside and I walked in and I saw this I saw this sort of over the top space he was twenty five foot floor to ceiling and ninety
foot sky like that that ran the length of the space and I kept walking through this is sort of through our build out it's fast days we actually didn't do a lot to the space when we took it over it was an office building I cubicles we just walked in and we demo at all the cubicles out which took three days because it's very easy to
demo office buildings and we started to build it but when what as were starting to build any of these restaurants were looking for stories we're looking for him moments in which we can create the hospitality moment for the guest or as I like to call the majestic moment for the cast this this area here in that front table is a great story it was an area
of the restaurant that was unusable it was talked by the bar we had six seats up perched up at the bar and then we had sort of this dead space my brother who happens to be a furniture maker an artist as well any building designed sets for TV and film so I can build your table so we don't need this table except the front part that
looks like a privacy flap their that front part actually flips open segment six more chairs on the sidewalk so I have both inside and outside dining but again it's an opportunity for us to create a moment for gas when they walk into our space this is looking and seeing what's going to stabilize this is what you walk into so this right here and a couple of
people just started to gasp a little bit when they saw that that's the moment that we wanted more than anything else when you walk in and you see that space and it's small and you walk in and you see this you immediately say while and for me that's the clean slate any expectation that aghast hablan they walked into that restaurant anything that they read any Instagram
post that they followed remarked on anything everything changed when they walk into that building and I would watch it and I still watch it and I'm very blessed to be able to see it every night these gas walk in and they say what look at the space that for me sets a clean slate whatever it is that we're going to create we have them at the
zero point and we can go up when the expectations very high because it takes too much to get a reservation our restaurant expectation I can't I can't live up to that this allows us ground zero this is looking into the space that ladder tell Shia kind of a better picture of it so this latter right here to the right of the bar this is one of
those moments when we walked in this space was a horse stable built in nineteen oh six okay so that has a lot of history to it there's eighteen horse stalls I know that because I paid for all the fire rated drywall to fix all eighteen of them and a loser credibly expensive but as we are building that the station where the beverages are there Jack hammering
the ground and also the jackhammer fell to the ground and dropped twenty feet below literally twenty feet that's an issue on two things once we we thought we're slab on grade number two that's a twenty five thousand dollars six because were awesome we're now we're not slamming great will be discovered as we discovered nine prohibition tunnels below our restaurant that latter led me down to those
tunnels there's not much there there also most Amer all sealed off we do grants a majority of those tunnels Minnesota health department is here don't worry there's him down there but it's fine we found a wide room there about six months ago that I thought was an electrical room it's all beautiful four foot limestone walls the temperature does not change no matter what time of the
year it is but this latter brought me down twenty feet below my space and let me explore these nine prohibition tunnels and made me read about the history of the space even more more than that it gave us a story when people walk in and they see that ladder they might not necessarily think that this is the story behind it when they ask their always blown
away now creating a majestic moment is one of the hardest things for us to do and we try to do it through a lot of ways through food there's the ladder again this is my grandmother's pot roast now I cook my grandmother Dorsey's pot roast since I was seven I put it in a crockpot before I go to lunch or before I go to school I
come back to school and I would have dinner what's crazy is is that I left that that pot roast recipe when I went off to live in Europe in the when I lived in New York City and worked there for close to a decade and then I came back to Minnesota we start to do this pot roast again and we changed a little bit of it
just to make it easier on us because my grandmother's recipe was a lot harder so we figured out ways with fascinates me is that my grandmother who is no longer with us pro pot roast recipe that she gave to me on an index card with the written rescue with her hand hand written notes was the top five most downloaded rest in the New York times website
share and again that for us is an incredible moment that we can tell our guest and we exclude splaine to them how much energy we put into something as simple %HESITATION and as pedestrian really as it as pot roast another thing that we try to do is we finish everybody off cookie tins so this is another ode to my grandmother when I started dating I was
seven years old and we bake all these cookies Christmas cookies written on the matter but we've just become and as my cousins and my brother and everybody would come in we were given this ten of cookies and watching their faces and their expression and seen how simple it was to make him happy is what got me in love with food and watching that moment happen every
single day sort of changed my life for the better so at the end of every meal it's good and stable you get a little cookie tin filled with all the streets that our team put together I will say we had to stop giving the late because everybody would steal the whole tend so now we just give that said without the lives of people don't take it
but it's a really special moment for us because it's the last impression of school in stable but it's a lasting impression that my grandmother had on me that we're trying to give to our gas every single night this is a story about a majestic moment that happened for me and this is out outside of Leon France so every other year this cooking competition and that I
was helping run is in Leon every two years it's called the bookies or and I would go to Leon and there was one year that we were asked to go to someone in the farm which is just outside of the on it's about an hour and a half drive from Leon so we ended up taking this drive this exact drive at the start of the drive
was not as beautiful we're gonna go to a restaurant called Regis and Jacques Marcone Regis is a three star Michelin chef use teaches son Joxer jacket take over the restaurant as we left early on it was pouring rain just pouring and then us we get halfway up this mountain and the sun sort of starts to come out the clouds spread apart and also we roller windows
down we start to smell and brief we're breeding in this fresh air from the rain and it's like this you can smell it everything about the terror war of the space you smell the peat moss you smell the mushrooms use now just double lands that were driving through what's amazing to me is that before I even got to that dinner I was already so blown away
by just that experience I couldn't wait to get to the dinner these people had created this majestic moment for me and I have even shown up so we show up to the dinner after we go through this mountain there's no artwork them restaurant is filled with picture windows and all you do is over look he's mountains you just drove through and you still have that sets
in that's now in the of lentils that are all over the ground that are sort of you know they're methodically it's strategically as artwork implants etcetera and you sit down eats and it's mushrooms and it's polite souls and it's everything that you were just surrounding yourself as you're making that drive and they sort of took us off this path that we just never expected to be
a part of that moment always stood with me and it made me create two majestic moments %HESITATION at school in stable in the first one was when we opened up the restaurant %HESITATION we had a little issue with within our reservation company they turned the reservations on one week before we actually opens so I'm sitting in a photo shoot and all of a sudden one of
my managers comes up and says shaft we have two hundred fifty reservations for this week but we don't know the liquor license I see how we've two hundred fifty reservations as well they they turn the system on too early I looked at the lady taking my picture I said you're done thank you and I walked away and I said send it off so they turned it
off and I said okay with no liquor no liquor license you know staff everybody's on a week break would be ideal to give me all the phone numbers I'm gonna call every guest myself so I called every guest I said listen there is a mistake and I'm really sorry I know you want to come in tonight we officially don't open till Sunday night you come in
Friday and don't tell anybody care to read about it I'll take care your meal so okay fine course two hundred like forty eight people out of the two hundred fifty said yes it wasn't really a tough sell because I'm saying come Friday not Monday they show up we give everybody a bottle of champagne right when they show up cook them dinner we give them a rocky
road lost on the way out say sorry for the rocky start but that was the majestic moments that moment right there is two hundred forty eight deaths that become regulars at school to save one Bellcore forever because I looked at and thought to myself how do we change this and it happens every single might if you're coming to my restaurant and you're stuck in traffic in
your thirty minutes late and you call the restaurant you say with thirty minutes late I'm really sorry and you feel terrible and now you're entering your wife your husband is angry at you when you walk into the restaurant you give me an opportunity to make that majestic moment happened by just giving you a glass of champagne saying welcome to the restaurant relax and you watch the
body language is track down immediately and all of sudden everything's okay looking for those majestic moments in your own life is my call to action for you it's great because I have to do it every day and I look to do it every day and I absolutely adore and treasure that time when I can do it I love watching our gas eat and I love watching
them walk out with them at just that moment my call taxes for you to do the same do it to people that you don't even know do it's people that you surround yourself with every single day find something special about that person to create the hospitality because it's not just about hospitality restaurants it's everywhere you look thank you
