Turning a Crisis into Success

David:

Welcome to Disarming Data. We're looking at data and privacy from the perspective of two generations.

Paige:

I'm Paige Bitterman. I'm a millennial who grew up in the tech generation.

David:

I'm David Bitterman, I'm the boomer. I don't know anything about tech. I usually lose my cell phone rather than use my cell phone. I'm a tech novice. In this podcast, we'll be having conversations with cyber hackers, privacy experts, and guardians of security who can explain some of this to me.

Paige:

And Dad, you forgot about whistleblowers and other people who are interesting or influential to us.

David:

And Paige, you forgot to say thank you for listening to the show.

Paige:

Thanks for listening.

David:

Hey ladies and gentlemen, thanks very much for joining us and listening to Disarming Data, which is a multi-generational perspective on data and data collection. And part of that, though, just entails us bringing interesting successful people that we admire a lot to this podcast. With that, Paige, I'll turn it over to you. Paige is my guest host and she's the boomer in the group. She's the millennial in the group. I'm the boomer in the group.

Paige:

So today our guest is Gavin Kaysen, who is an award-winning chef and advocate for the culinary profession. He's the founder of the Soigné Hospitality Group, a nationally recognized group of restaurants in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, including Spoon and Stable 2015 James Beard Award finalist for best new restaurant, Demi, an intimate tasting menu experience, and Bellecour Bakery at Cooks of Crocus Hill, and Mara at the Four Seasons.

David:

And they're all great restaurants. I've been to, I think every one of them, and they're just fantastic. I had the privilege of meeting Gavin years ago when he and I were sitting next to one another. You probably don't even remember this, Gavin, you're on a plane. I think we were going to San Diego or San Francisco. And you were sitting there and you kindly introduced yourself. You said, "Oh yeah, I'm Gavin." And anyway, and then we talked briefly and then you went right to work, because I think you're a workaholic. But anyway-

Gavin:

Yeah. No, I remember that because what I remember was I was working the pass at Spoon and Stable at night and I was, as I often do, read the room and sort of see who's who and who's, who's in the space. And I remember you standing at the bar for whatever reason. And then I just so happened to sit, we were in 1A and 1B, you were in 1A and I was in 1B.

David:

That's a good memory.

Gavin:

And I sat down and I looked over and I said, God, I know this face. And then I said to you, "Excuse me, I don't mean to be disruptive, but were you at Spoon and Stable last night?" You said, "Yes, I was. How did you know that?" I said, "Well, I own the restaurant." And then we spoke for a few minutes and then you're right, I think I went straight to work because I was probably 150 emails deep and I needed to get out of it.

David:

Yeah. But I've always, since then, I've really admired you a lot because even in the short conversation it was clear that you're very serious about running things, but also about running things well and doing it right. And I remember later on I requested a copy of your personnel manual, which is what, 150 pages or something like that?

Gavin:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

David:

But anyway, with that introduction ...

Paige:

We always like to start with our guest background. How you got started in the culinary profession and where you went from there.

Gavin:

Really the beginning for me was in the culinary profession was when I was 15. I started to work at a subway. My mom had a very specific rule when I was a child, which was you either play sports or you work, you always got to keep moving. And so it was a summer and I was doing nothing in the summer. And she came home and she said, "What are you going to do now?" And I said, "I don't know." She said, "Go get a job." So I went to a Subway, I got a job and I was working at this place. And what was interesting is that, this was 20 plus years ago. And what I found out then, and truth to be very similar now is a lot of people who have busy lives, they tend to keep a daily routine.

And so that daily routine could be, I could ask David, "Do you eat breakfast every day?" You could say yes. And it could be the same thing every day because it's one thing you don't have to make a decision on. And I recognize that making lunch for people at Subway. And so I would often memorize their name and then I would write it on a chart and I would see Susie walk in. I'd say, Susie, your sandwich is at the register. And she'd pay for it and leave. And the gentleman behind her would say, wait a minute, how come she doesn't have to wait in line, but I have to wait in line? And I'd say, well, you're only here twice a week. Susie's here five days a week, so if you want to come five days a week, I'll memorize your sandwich. Now I was just being a smart ass, but what I was really doing is it was creating a lot of customer strength.

And so a gentleman by the name of George Saran moved in next door and he opened up a pasta restaurant. And he would come in every Saturday and he'd order a four inch tuna fish sandwich on a round bun and he'd walk out and he'd throw it in the trash every single Saturday-

David:

Oh, come on.

Gavin:

He'd throw it in the trash, I swear. And it took me four weeks to figure out why he would throw it in the trash. And so I asked him, I said, "George, what is your deal? I just don't understand." And he said, "I'm watching the way you interact with the guest." And he says, "And you don't understand because you're a 15 year old punk kid, but your hands understand food and you should probably consider doing something like this for a living." I had no idea. It's not that I didn't know, I had literally had no idea what he was talking about.

I took a job, I worked for him and I went to culinary school, I worked for him for four years. Then I went to New England Culinary Institute in Vermont. From there I went to Napa Valley, and then I was in Switzerland. I was in Sweden, London, San Diego and New York City. But I'll tell you what's interesting is 10 years later after meeting George, I was on the cover of a magazine called Chef Magazine. It was an industry trade magazine. It was the first cover I was ever on. And I was of course proud. And so I sent George ten copies and I said, "Hey, check this out. Look, I'm on this cover." And he says, "Oh, it looks good."

I get a call from the editor six weeks later and they said, "Hey, we're doing a story on George and we want to make sure that we have the right phone number and email." And they give me it and I confirmed that that's correct. And I asked out of curiosity, "What is the story on?" And they said, "Oh, George is the founder of our magazine and we're doing a history of the magazine. I said, "What?"

And they said, "Yes, I called George." I said, "Wait a minute, George. So you were the founder of this magazine. You knew I was on the cover. Did you have anything to do with this?" And he says, "No." And we've never talked about it since then. But I will tell you, George is the only human being on planet Earth that has a standing reservation at Spoon and Stable, every Wednesday at 6:30, table 21. If he's not there by 7:15, I give the table away. And sorry, table 31. And he lives in Florida most of the time, so I know he is never going to show up, but I just keep it there for 45 minutes just in case.

David:

Oh, that's a wonderful, that is wonderful. I read that your bio, that you were born in Thousand Oaks. Tell us about that. How'd you get to Minnesota?

Gavin:

My dad is in the medical business and so he worked, moved us around. So we went from Thousand Oaks, California, then we lived in Chicago for a couple of years and then just outside of Chicago actually. And then we moved to Minneapolis when I was seven. And so I grew up there. I lived there from 7 to 18, and 18 is when I left to go to culinary school and travel the world. And then I moved back to the United States when I was 24, which was in San Diego and then back to Minneapolis when I was 35, which I never thought I would do, to be honest with you.

David:

You're being very modest in terms of describing your career, because maybe you could elaborate a little bit for a guess about some of the people you worked with and what you did. I know in New York in particular, that was a formative experience.

Gavin:

It was. I've always been somebody who's very driven by goals and I write a lot. I journal a lot. And so I spend a lot of time through my journaling, I guess I could say. Now I understand that I have spent time through my journaling, manifesting what it is that I've wanted. I wouldn't have told you I knew that when I was 20 years old, journaling. But I can look back on those journals now and see that I was trying to write my future in many ways. And in often many cases I ended up doing that. When I was living in San Diego I read a book called Letters to a Young Chef that was written by Daniel Boulud. And I said to my wife at the time, "I need to work for this man. I need to understand what it is that he does in the food business and in the food sector and world."

So I wrote him a letter in 2005 requesting a one week stage, which in our world, that means you work for free for a week. And that's fine. It's an educational piece. And so it'd be no different than somebody going to take a course in a college or whatever and paying for it. So I show up at the restaurant Daniel in 2005. I work for that week and we become friends from that in a very, very loose term. And we always stayed in touch and I was always very good about staying in touch. Now what's crazy is that in the top right hand corner of that letter he wrote to Cynthia, who was our human resources director at the time, he wrote, "Cynthia, please save this letter, could be a good possible future chef for us." And he gave it to her.

So fast forward in 2007, the position of being the chef at Cafe Boulud on the Upper East Side of New York City opened up, unbeknownst to me and Daniel called me and said, "I'd like for you to be the chef of Cafe Boulud." And I accepted the position. I should have asked my wife if we could move to New York before I accepted the position. But nonetheless, I accepted the position and I worked for Daniel for just under eight years. And in that time I was lucky enough to win the Rising Star Chef Award for the James Beard Foundation. I had just won Food and Wine Magazine, Best New Chef in America. The year that I had left San Diego, I had competed in the Bocuse d'Or, which is our Olympics and the most prestigious international cooking competition on planet Earth. And that letter that I wrote Daniel, he gave back to me the day I left him to move home. And he said, "This letter's for you."

I have that letter now. And I think that working for him was my PhD in this business, understanding what genuine hospitality really means and not being transactional hospitality is something that's really important. And I think often we go out to eat and I'm sure all three of us have gone out to eat somewhere where you feel genuine versus transactional. It's incredible how much that changes, how you perceive that experience and what the perception will be if you ever want to go back to it.

David:

Could you elaborate on that a little bit? That's interesting.

Gavin:

Well, to me, when you go out to eat, the word restaurant comes from the word restoration, and to be restored. We have been trained as a culture to go out to eat and find experiences rateable. We are already possessing the opportunity of transaction to be placed in front of us without any sort of opinion because we're going to rate the experience. We're going to put X stars on Yelp, we're going to tell OpenTable it was this, we're going to tell Resy it was that, Tock it was this, and then we're going to say to our friends, it was a 1 through 10, this is what it was. The problem with that is that we've allowed ourselves to get away from the whole intention and the pure intention of going out to eat, which is to find restoration through that experience. That doesn't always come from the food.

In fact, it rarely comes from the food. What it comes from is it comes from the experience that we're providing for you. The food is the vehicle that brings you to the table. What we often look at when we're cooking for people is that when you really touch them, when you really hit that nerve that is unforgettable is when you touch on nostalgia. And that's a really hard thing to achieve. But when you give them genuine hospitality and when you give them a restorative experience through that hospitality, which is all encompassing of food, wine, and experience, you create a memory for them that allows them to feel the nostalgia the next time they come back.

So you end up setting that stage for what that looks like. And that's truly the restoration that we need to find. And if we were to go out to eat the same way we go to a spa, or the same way we approach a vacation that we've needed for so long, or the same way that we approach a bike ride because we bike every weekend for 25 miles, whatever it is, the mentality of going out to eat would be far different than what it is today, which is how do I rate today's experience.

Paige:

And is this how you built Spoon and Stable off of, essentially?

Gavin:

Yeah. And I think we built our company on that. I built the company on the idea of what it means to truly be cared for. As much as to the dismay of the guest, that doesn't always mean for the guest, it's also for the team. And that's really important because the team needs to feel that too. It's funny, Spoon and Stable's been open eight years and we just ripped out the entire kitchen line that I built and put in place eight years ago and I put a brand new one in right before I left to go on this book tour trip. And I haven't even cooked on it. I literally put it in Monday and I left Tuesday morning.

That's an example of showing your team that you're trying to give them that experience that you give the guests every night. It would be easy to avoid investing in that and saying, oh, the equipment works, it's fine, because it did work. Yeah, but was it working to the abilities and the capabilities that I expect? And the answer to that is no. And so if the answer to that is no, then I need to fix that. And so a lot of how we build what we build is based on that. It has to be based on that.

Paige:

Do you think that you were a natural born leader or you kind of had to grow into being one and gaining leadership skills?

Gavin:

I think I was probably always born to lead. I just don't think I ever had the confidence to do so. And I think that I've learned how to be confident through the years. I have always been that type of person that has known what I've wanted. I've always been the type of person that has, I'm happy to be the first in line. I'm happy to be the first to give the speech. I'm happy to be the first to raise my hand. The risk has never been something I've been afraid of, but I've learned through the years how to both calculate that risk, and then I learned how to be confident through that calculated risk. And I think a lot of that has come from me also not being afraid to fail.

In our profession, we have unfortunately made a mistake in that we have allowed people to not fail. And what we've done is we've given them too much critique. We've given them too much opportunity to see what happens when you fail. And the other thing that we've done is we've put a timestamp on people. There's a lot of awards in our profession that says 30 under 30 and whatever it is. And while those awards are great, we're not baseball players or athletes. We don't retire at 40, we hit our prime at 40. So it's a little bit different. But I'd say it's taken me years to understand the confidence piece.

David:

For background again, once you were the chef up at the Upper East Side, didn't you go on to take a manager role? I thought you had at some point, you were sort of keeping an eye on all of Daniel's restaurants.

Gavin:

At one point I was his director of the culinary and in charge of all of his culinary operations. And so that was a really big job and it required a lot of responsibility and it required a lot of organization. Look, I made a resume. I think the only resume I've ever made was when I was 18 years old. I don't think I've ever made a resume since then. Because I've often gone to the people I've worked for to ask what it is that I need to do next and where I should go. And I think that I've had an innate ability, whether I've meant to do this or not, and I actually don't believe I ever have meant to do this, but I put a lot of trust in the people that came before me. And I give a lot of what was before me, the credit as to why I am where I am.

I'm not here because of anything that I had. I'm here because of the result of who gave it to me and who provided it to me. Now, yes, I was willing to be open and accepting of it and I was willing to listen and to learn and to sacrifice certain things to get there. But had my many mentors not given me that opportunity and that grace to learn from them. And I wouldn't be where I am. And I'm very, very self-aware of that. And I'm very self-aware that we then stand on the shoulders of those who came before us and it's now our opportunity to create what that looks like for the next generation.

Paige:

So you talked about George seeing that thing in you when you were making a Subway sandwich. Are you now able to see it in younger chefs coming in pretty easily?

Gavin:

Yeah. You see it, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable when you see it and what that looks like and what it means. And it's a very aha moment when you see it and that person is in good hands and that they're being led in the right direction. And so now I find the responsibility of when seeing that, to be honest, to kind of get out of their way and come back when they need it and understand that they'll ask they'll when they need it because they understand that. But there's a little bit less guidance that you need to give. And one of the reasons that I think I've been able to do what I've been able to do is that I have failed and I have done things that have not worked. And I have come across situations that I could have been better at. And again, I journal about it and I write about it. And so I'm self-aware of understanding what that was, and those have taught me a lot and they've given me a lot of clarity.

David:

Without being too personal, but what would you describe as a failure that ultimately led you to the right place?

Gavin:

In 2007 when I was training for the Bocuse d'Or, which is this cooking competition, I had done a competition called the National Trophy of Cuisine and Pastries. And I had won this competition. It was just for the US. I had never competed before in cooking, but I'm a very competitive person.

David:

You must be.

Gavin:

And so I take first in the United States, it allows me the opportunity to represent the United States in Paris. So I go to Paris, I compete against 18 countries and I'm the first American to stand on the podium in over 25 years. And I take first in the world for my fish platter and third in the world overall. I'm 24 years old, I come back to the United States and I have a request from the French organization in the United States to try out for the Bocuse d'Or. So I do that. I win the first competition to get into the top three. I go to the finals competition. I compete against two other people, both of whom have competed in this competition before. I end up winning. I'm now the youngest American and still have always been the youngest American to ever compete in this competition in Lyon, France.

I'm riding a high, that sort of unexplainable because I've won what everybody said I would never win. And I'm in a position to see success that I would only hope I could come across once in my life. And I get to France, I compete in Lyon. I had trained hard, I had trained with very little money and very little resources. In fact, I had put myself in debt over a quarter million dollars.

David:

Oh, you're kidding.

Gavin:

Through this process. And I get to Lyon, France and I recognize the first day that I'm there, which is six days before I'm competing, that I'm out of my league. And that the teams ahead of me had trained in a way that didn't allow me to be ready for what was to come. But I thought through that mentally and then I competed and I took 14th place. It's the worst America has ever done.

It was the biggest mistake and the biggest failure that I had ever had. And I walked out of that stadium with thousands of people watching. And for a glimmer of a moment I thought I had cracked through the top 10 only to find out that I wasn't even close. And I walked out of that stadium thinking to myself, we can never come back here as the American culinary team and show that we're not prepared. We have to meet the opportunity with preparedness. So how are we going to do that?

The next year, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller and myself created a foundation called what was Bocuse d'Ors USA and is now the Mentor Foundation. I then went on to coach the teams in 2009, '11, '13, and '15. In 2015, the US had never done better than sixth place. We took second in the world and we stood silver as a coach. I was then the vice president for 2017. We took first in the world and we were now the gold team. And I'm now the president for Team USA, and I run the organization alongside Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud.

Paige:

That's amazing.

David:

That is pretty good company. I was going to ask, who else would you call a mentor? I assume Daniel.

Gavin:

Yeah, Daniel for sure. Thomas, absolutely. George, early on in my life, absolutely. There is a woman by the name of Pamela Wishcamper, who was my first ever publicist when I was 24 years old. And I consider her a mentor as well, somebody who gave me a really foundational strength in understanding what it means and how you talk to people, whether it's media, whether it's the guest, whether it's your team, how do you show up and what does that look like? And David, you know this, it's like if somebody texts me or emails me and says they need a reservation, I'm fairly quick to respond.

David:

Very quick.

Gavin:

In getting that sorted out. And that comes from Pam. Pam was very early on in saying to me that, listen, if the magazine emails you and says, can you give us the recipe for your cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, if you don't respond back quick enough, you're not going to be in the story. That's not 'cause they don't like you. It's just 'cause you're not fast enough. And so that was sort of ingrained in me and she's definitely part of that.

David:

Oh, that's wild. That's cool. Paige has never been to Minnesota.

Paige:

I've never been to Minneapolis.

David:

We got to do a gastro tour, whatever they call it.

Paige:

Maybe in the spring.

Gavin:

Yeah, that's true. It can be a little cold, although it's nice now. It's warm.

Paige:

Did you choose to go to Minneapolis because you saw a gap in the restaurant industry there? I've never been there, so I don't know much about it.

Gavin:

Yeah, no, it's a good question. I was living in New York at the time. I had come to a point where I was ready to move on and I had learned what I believed was what I needed to learn with Daniel. And I wanted to leave the restaurant better than how I found it. And I wanted to leave on charge with Daniel that were really strong. That all happened. I was looking at spaces in LA, I was looking at spaces in New York, I was looking at spaces in Minneapolis, and I was just sort of casting this very wide net. Honestly, Paige, I didn't have a plan. I know that's crazy to say and I know it's crazy for people to hear, but I didn't have a plan. I had a business plan. I knew where I knew what I wanted to do, but I genuinely didn't care where it was because I believed, and I still believe that if you create delicious food and you give genuine hospitality, people will show up and they will show up and show up and show up.

I walk into Spoon and Stable space. It was an office building, it was exposed brick, it was cubicles where the kitchens are. The skylight was covered with fiberglass and plywood from sheets of ice falling through it. I mean it was a sort of beat up old building. And I was like, this is perfect. It's exactly what I want. And I don't necessarily know what it was that made me say that, except for the fact that after I toured the space, I walked across the street to Spoon and Stable and I looked at the facade of our building and I loved how small it was.

It gave you this preconceived notion that it's this tiny little neighborhood restaurant with maybe 40 or 50 seats and the chef's back there working and et cetera, et cetera. And then you walk in and it's 24-foot ceilings from floor to ground. It's this beautiful sort of over the top space. And honestly, you walk in and you just kind of go, holy shit, this is a lot different than I expected. And that's what I wanted. I wanted people to change the perception of what they thought of us before they got to their table. I felt like that put us at a level playing field.

David:

Oh wow. And Paige, I was going to say, you got to go there because when you go in, the room Gavin, I don't know what you call the room where you hold, the wine cellar, I guess it is. It's unbelievable. It's got to be floor to ceiling, all glass. Well you could describe it better than I, but it's just ...

Gavin:

Yeah, no that's it. I mean it's a 24-foot tall wine cellar with a huge ladder. They were climbing up and down, pulling wine from, and I call that the chandelier of the restaurant. When you walk into a restaurant and you see a beautiful chandelier, that's what that is.

Paige:

Did you design the layout of everything since it was an office building that you converted?

Gavin:

My wife is a designer, so she had-

Paige:

Oh, okay. That helps.

Gavin:

She had her touch on it. So David Shea and his team, they're local designers and architects in Minnesota. We teamed up with them and my wife and that team were very, they were hand in hand in helping design all that. But the wine cellar idea, that was David Shea's idea. I think David came to us and said, "Hey, we should put a wine cellar there. It would be perfect." I said, "Oh, that sounds great." And honestly, visually I knew what it was going to look like, but I don't think visually I understood the impact of what it would give the guest. I think it's hard to know that until you actually see the seller. And I remember them building it and thinking to myself, oh, it's too big. It's going to take away tables. But in reality, you can get enough revenue out of wine. It's okay.

David:

The newest one, I think this is your newest, is the one of the Four Seasons, right?

Gavin:

Yeah, Mara.

David:

Yeah. And I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that 'cause it's really cool.

Gavin:

Yeah, that's been a space. So we teamed up with the Four Seasons and United Properties to create this space. And Mara's a Mediterranean restaurant and the name is, it's Greek, it means internally beautiful. I found the name by trying to understand and look up. So when you name a restaurant, okay, you can name a restaurant a couple of different ways, but if the restaurant has a feminine approach to it versus a masculine approach to it tends to be a little bit softer for people to understand that they can go eat there. If I tell you you're going to go eat at Whiskey and Bourbon, what's your expectation? And so if I tell you that you're going to go eat at Mara or Demi, it's a little bit more whimsical. There's a little bit more je ne sais quoi to that, which is why we did it. So I actually googled little girl names in the Mediterranean and I found the word Mara, the name Mara. And I was like, yeah, I love that name.

But that restaurant and the inspiration actually comes from when I was living in Europe and traveling a lot and I was journaling about my experience backpacking in the Mediterranean. So I read that journal piece and that journal entry of when I was 21 years old and I thought, my God, it's just so crazy how enamored I was with the Mediterranean lifestyle and food. And I said, oh, let's build a Mediterranean restaurant. So we partnered with them, we do breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's all focused on that Mediterranean lifestyle.

I like people to come in and share things. I like to see the family style, the hummus and pita bread, the baba ganoosh, the roasted, the grilled chicken, the salt crusted branzino, the great dessert selections from Eddie, our pastry chef. It's been a remarkable restaurant to open and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a really powerful, geographically powerful restaurant to open in the city of Minneapolis for all it's gone through.

David:

Oh yeah, well particularly because of the neighborhood, but also because of what happened in Minneapolis.

Gavin:

I think so. And I think also too, where it is geographically, it's on the corner of downtown and I think we see a lot of downtowns throughout the country sort of fizzle away because not a lot of people are going into work. There's not a lot of office tenants and so that's a lot of energy that goes somewhere. And so we're on the corner of that downtown area and I think opening it and bringing back office workers and seeing that life come back and that energy, it's been awesome.

Paige:

Can I ask how you approached the pandemic?

Gavin:

Yeah. My God, what a time. So I approached it two different ways. The first way that I was approaching the pandemic was similar to a lot of other people in that we didn't think it was going to last as long as it did. That approach unfortunately became a very reactive approach. We found ourselves doing things in a reactionary state and in a little bit of a panic and a little bit of a ... Well, it was fear-based. It wasn't little, it was all fear-based. And I remember stopping and I was writing in my computer a document. I write a document, it's called the dream weaving document, and I keep it going all the time, all year long. And what I put in this document is very personal things and I share them with my team, sort of my creative outlets of what I want to do and what we want to accomplish.

And I wrote in that document, we're no longer going to be reactive to what the pandemic is and we're going to be proactive. So if the governor says to us, you can open up May 1st, before we say we're going to open up May 1st, we're going to meet and say, are we ready to open up May 1st? And if we're not, then we don't. And we're not going to be reactive to losing money because we've already lost too much to worry about it. It's all gone. It's never coming back.

So rather than managing it through fear, I'd rather manage it through harmony. I'd rather manage it through what it is that we've always done in the past, which was let us write our story. If we're going to go down, let us write the story of how we go down. And once we did that, tell you what, it got a lot easier to manage that pandemic for us because it was not fear-based. It was how we wanted to do things.

David:

That's fascinating. You still journal today, even every day?

Gavin:

Yeah, I journal a lot. Probably not every day, but I journal ... Yeah, I journal a lot. I spend a lot of time writing down things.

David:

You do it by hand or you do it in a computer? How do you do it?

Gavin:

I do. I do it, well by both. By both. I'll do it by hand. Sometimes it's like I'm on a plane, there's too much turbulence, then I'll just jump on a computer and throw it on the computer. But even sometimes I'll do it on my phone in my notes on my phone. You'll get a random thought and you'll be in a taxi or whatever and you just sort of need to write things down. I just can't keep it all jumbled up. I like to have it somewhere so I can go back and reference it and spend some time thinking about it.

David:

And so you've got all of the journals you've ever done somewhere?

Gavin:

I do, yeah.

David:

Oh no kidding. You got to tell me, how do you store them and how do you access them, that's good. What?

Gavin:

Everything that's handwritten, those are all in my house, in a little storage cubby in my house in the basement. And then I have the document on my computer drive that has all of the journal and then that's all backed up into Dropbox or whatever it is, BlockBase, I can't remember which one it is. But everybody needs to have whatever that outlet is. And I think one of the things that I often get asked is I get asked about balance and how do you balance life and how do you balance work with life?

I was out to dinner last night with some friends in Chicago who came here from Minneapolis. They're here for the weekend and they surprised me. And so we all went out to dinner and she looked at me, my friend, and she's like, "How do you this? This is your life and I don't understand." And I said, "I just take it day by day as is, and I have an opportunity to have this platform that allows me to tell people about what it is that I do. And I'm really honored. I'm really excited to do that. But I'm also not afraid to share the vulnerability of journaling and what that does for me and the power of that. Everybody needs to have that thing for them that that's important."

Paige:

Is this your first cookbook?

Gavin:

It is. Yeah.

Paige:

So when you're deciding what to put into a cookbook, essentially, how do you choose, which recipes, do you think about what types of people are cooking it, or how it translates to a home kitchen or ...

Gavin:

So this book, it's called At Home, it started during the pandemic, believe it or not. And we don't use that word in the book at all. And it's very purposeful as why we don't. But we started to do an online cooking series called GK At Home. And the first class we did was paella. And the concept was created by myself and a colleague of mine named Kylie. And the premise behind what we wanted to do was basically jump on a Zoom call for an hour, get everybody on, and I would cook with them, I'd give them a list of ingredients to go shopping and nobody's got anything to do anyways and you all want to get out of the house, so let's figure this out. And we'd cook together.

Paella is the first class and I tell a couple of friends of mine who have some butcher shops and specialty shops around town like, "Hey, I'm doing this class this weekend. You might get some extra business, because I told them in the email that they should buy the rice from you, they should buy the sofrito from you. They should come get the clams and mussels from you, et cetera." So I talked to my friends after the class and I said, "Hey, how did they go? Did you guys sell anything?" And they said, "Did you sell anything? We sold out of everything in 40 minutes." And I'm like, "Wait a minute." I'm like, "If you're selling out a product in 40 minutes, maybe I should sell the product."

So we did about 150 people on that first Zoom class, which I was so excited about. It was generating revenue, which would help me pay my team. And it was giving us something to do. So by the second class, we created these kits of food. You could come down to Spoon and Stable, we would do coq au vin, so red wine braised chicken. You could come pick up the whole kit of food. It was the chicken butchered, the red wine, all the vegetables, everything to make the spaetzle. And by the way, at the time you could have wine, so you could buy a bottle of wine from us that we paired. So we sold 250 of these kits and then by the second class we had about 700 people on the Zoom call.

By the third class we had over 1500 people on the call. And so we just kept getting more and more people on these calls. And what was crazy is that we had no idea that what we were doing is we were building a community for people when they wanted community so badly. And we ended up creating a Facebook page where people were connecting with each other from all over the country, showing each other what they had cooked with me. And then they were becoming friends as a result. And I've had people in our restaurants now saying, it happens every single week where people will say to me that those classes got me through COVID.

I would rush home from work or I would stop everything I was doing on that Wednesday night or Thursday night and I would just cook with you. So we had 80 of these recipes, Paige, by the time we were done with COVID. And we're like, what are we going to do with them? We have them all tested, we know they work because I did them live with people in an hour. Literally you have dinner in an hour. And so that's how we turned it all into a cookbook.

Paige:

Oh wow. That's awesome.

David:

Can you really cook the dishes in about an hour?

Gavin:

Yeah, most of them you can. The red wine braised chicken and things like that, those will take longer. An hour and 30 minutes. There's a pot roast in the book that's a couple of hours for the braising. But yeah, there's a majority of the dishes are very quick.

Honestly, it is actually what I cook at home. Three of the dishes that are in the book I cooked last week for my family. It is truly what we do cook at home and what my kids eat. And it's cute. In the inside of the book, I have three sons and I have a 13-year-old, a 10-year-old and a five-month-old. So my 13-year-old and 10-year-old both gave me testimonials inside the cover of the book, which is awesome. They said Dad's cooking's pretty good.

Paige:

That's funny. Could you see any of them going into cooking? Not the little one, not the five-month-old. Obviously they're too young.

Gavin:

I don't know. I don't know, maybe. I don't know if they are as interested in it yet, but my 13-year-old, he loves good food, he loves to eat. I think he'll do something. I think he'll be very artistic. So I could see him going into the food business. But in some ways I almost hope he doesn't because he's very smart at math. He's a really smart kid. He's in seventh grade taking high school math classes now. And so I'm like, hold on onto to that.

Paige:

Yeah, that's real.

Gavin:

Yeah, yeah.

David:

Kevin, it's funny because I'll see you at Mara, then I'll see you at Spoon and Stable in the same night. But it never occurred to me that before then you'll be at home cooking for the family too.

Gavin:

Well, I'll cook for them on the weekends. And so I'll just sort of do meal kit. I'll try to do some meal kits and it doesn't last for the week, might last till Tuesday or Wednesday. Because as they're getting older, they're just eating more, so their portion sizes are getting a little bit bigger, which is fine. But my family does an amazing job of being self-sufficient when I'm gone and at work.

David:

What are your hours? You're there a lot.

Gavin:

Yeah, if I can I try to take the weekends off, honestly, I try to take Saturday night off and Sunday off. My kids are in sports, a lot of soccer and hockey right now. And so their schedules are very active. So a lot of the times the games are on weekends, so that allows me to go to them, which I'm happy to do. But for the most part, I get up at six in the morning and I get everybody ready for school, get them off to school. I head to the gym and then I go into work and I get into work probably around 10, 10:30. And then I get home anywheres from 10:00 PM until 1:00 AM. Just sort of depends on my day. I get back and do it all over again.

David:

Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Paige:

Were you worried about having kids at first with your first one because of how crazy your schedule is a little bit?

Gavin:

Not really. I think that there is something really special when your children see what hard work does. And they know that I'm on this book tour right now and they see me in the newspaper and they see me in the magazines and I can't look back. And this isn't anything to say bad on my dad, but it's like I can't look back on my dad and read anything about him like my kids can on me. And so I hope that it provides context for them and they realize hard work and when you put in that hard work and you can result in a great reward. That's really the lesson at the end of the day.

Paige:

I agree with that because you worked a lot, Dad. He worked a lot 'cause he was the litigator. But now looking back on it, sometimes it was hard growing up obviously, but he was so successful and there's something about how hard he worked that has always been super admirable.

Gavin:

And I think too, I take trips with my kids, we try to do a trip every other year, just of a single father and son trip, because I do want them to know that time can stop for them too. If they want to go somewhere and just spend three days together, we can do that. But it's hard. There always comes a lot of guilt, I think, when you're a parent because you feel like I'm not there enough or I'm there too much, or there's always like this, what is the right balance there? And at the end of the day, it's like, I don't know. I think if you're authentic and if you work 70 hours a week and that's what happens, then you work 70 hours a week. I don't know. Did you guys see that story about the coal miner who brought his son to the Kentucky basketball game?

David:

Yes. Unbelievable.

Gavin:

Wasn't that amazing?

David:

It was unbelievable.

Gavin:

Yeah. And that to me is such a perfect representation of balance. He's a coal miner and it was more important for him to get out of the mine, not take a shower to make sure his son could see the Kentucky basketball game the same way that he saw the Kentucky basketball game with his dad. And I just love how it went viral. But the lesson in that is, that's what everybody is going for, is how do you create that balance. I thought it was a really powerful story. I think a lot of people looked at, it was like, oh, he should shower. It's like, the shower doesn't mean anything.

Paige:

Yeah. And do you enjoy being on the book tour, or would you prefer to not be on it?

Gavin:

It's so cool. It's very surreal, honestly. I wrote in my goals for last year that I wanted to write a book this year and I did it, which is great. It's just a surreal moment when you see your book is sold in different stores. And we self-published this book and I think that that's a really important thing to bring up because we didn't go out there the traditional way and sell a proposal and find a publisher and then have that publisher pay for everything. I paid for everything and I put the team together to create this book. And we beam with a lot of pride because we're really proud of what it's that we created. And I believe that we're putting something out there in the world that people will use, which is the intention.

David:

Tell us about your team, because we're interested in the way you run the team, and particularly talk about. We were told that you don't use the term restaurant industry, you use a different term. Tell us a little bit about that, if you don't mind.

Gavin:

Yeah, yeah. We have a big team of people. In our executive team, we have a chief of staff and we are director of hospitality, director of accounting, an assistant to us, and a handful of folks that oversee all of the restaurants. Then each restaurant has a general manager who then has managers underneath them who manage the dining room. And then each chef, each restaurant has a chef de cuisine and sous chefs under them to manage the kitchen. And there's an executive chef who oversees them. What's interesting about our profession, and that's the word that I use versus industry, is that it's hard for the general public to see what we do and what I do for a living as you look at a CEO of a company. We have a lot of artistic ability. There's a lot of controlled chaos in what we manage on a daily basis.

And from the outside in and just from the outside in, it looks like pure chaos. But I will tell you that when I work 10:00 AM until 6:00 PM, when I'm in meetings or in interviews or dealing with emails or whatever, that's great. But the most calming part of my day is when I'm in the middle of doing 250 covers at service between 6:00 and 10:00. That is when I'm at my most peace. It is really such a great way for me to just be who I am.

We have an incredible team of people that I put a lot of trust in, I put a lot of faith in to help us run this business together. I don't ever expect or anticipate that they'll all stay forever, because everybody will leave and everybody will move on and that's okay. And you have to be accepting to what that looks like. But if we can find a way for them to be the best version of themselves while with us, or at least learn that while with us and then find it while they're away, then I believe we've done what we needed to do. Because that's what happened to me.

David:

What was the conversation like with Daniel when you told them you were going to leave?

Gavin:

Well, it's funny because the conversation actually started about four years before I left.

David:

That's a long conversation.

Gavin:

I wanted to make sure he knew it was coming. It was an open conversation. I was honest with what I wanted. I was honest with my goals. He was honest with me with what he felt he could provide and what he felt he could not. And as a result, it allowed us to come to the conclusion of what we needed to do to move on. It really wasn't a hard conversation. It was one that came from the right tone and the right spirit. I was not leaving because I didn't like anything. I wasn't leaving because I was mad about anything. I was leaving because I knew what I wanted to get just wasn't under that umbrella. And as a result, it's just been such a wonderful blessing because he's continued to mentor me through all of it.

David:

Oh, that's fantastic. I used to go to the ... What was the restaurant he had on, was it 45th or 44th?

Gavin:

Yeah, DB Bistro.

David:

Yeah, yeah. We've been to that place.

Paige:

Oh yeah, yeah. Before going to Broadway shows, yeah.

David:

Yeah, I remember being there one night and for some reason, I don't know if his book was there or if I read about the book that you mentioned, Letters to a Young Chef. And I went out and bought it, and he's an amazing guy. It was just amazing. I would tell our listeners, if there's one thing they need to do is they have to get your book. And I would recommend also getting that Daniel Boulud book.

Gavin:

Yeah, the Letters to a Young Chef. It's a great book. And he wrote a second edition of that book. As irony would have it, I ended up writing a chapter in that book, the book that I read in 2005, and inspired me to work for him. 10 years later, I ended up writing a chapter, chapter in his second edition of that book on discipline.

Paige:

Oh, discipline.

David:

Oh, on discipline. Oh wow. What's the takeaway on discipline for us?

Gavin:

Just about creating the routine. I talk a lot about that, and I talk a lot about the discipline of holding yourself accountable for what it's that you want, and just sort of being self-aware of all of those and to not really be afraid of the fear, what we were talking about earlier, the fear and the risk and all of those things. So it was a crazy experience to write a chapter in that book after having read it and been inspired by it. And then here I am tasked with contributing.

David:

Ah, that's amazing. That is amazing. And speaking about chefs, so we have to ask about the Synergy Series, which I was not aware of until I started to prepare for this meeting today. Sounds amazing.

Gavin:

We invite four different chefs every year to come to Spoon and Stable, and we cook with them. And the intention is to really give our team an opportunity to train with a different chef and a different restaurant group and to learn from them, learn their food, learn their service style and hospitality style. Maybe they have different cocktails they want us to make, et cetera. So we've done five years of synergy, so we'll be on Marcus Samuelson, he'll be at Spoon and Stable December 1st and 2nd, so he'll be our last chef of this year. He'll be our 20th chef. And then shortly after that, we will announce who the next four chefs will be next year once we firm everything up. We haven't gotten there yet, but we're almost there. It's just an incredible opportunity. I reach out to my friends and see if they're interested in cooking and usually they say yes, which is great.

Then the hardest thing is to figure out a date, which then we ended up figuring out at some point. And then they come in and they're there for two nights, Thursday night and it's a Friday night. I'd encourage all your listeners that if they can't come and dine with us every Friday, we do a dialogue conversation. So Alison Arthur, who's a friend of mine, she moderates a conversation with each vision chef and talks a lot about what we're talking about today, how did you get through your career, and what did that look like, and how do you give back to the people that are listening?

So those are recorded, and we put those on our website, and that's thesynergyseries.com, and you can find all of that there. It's really a remarkable thing. My goal has always been, and you know this, David, about me, but I'd like to be able to give back to our community in a way that is not always so transactional. So this is a way for us to give back to our community, and it exposes these chefs to Minneapolis if they had never been there before. Because not a lot of people go to Minneapolis for the negative 30 degree weather.

David:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Talking about giving back. That's right. I remember our friend told me that he took Jerry Blackwell there. Jerry Blackwell is the lawyer who basically prosecuted that Derek Chauvin and that you insisted that you had to buy that meal. You would not let him pick up the check at all.

Gavin:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly.

David:

That's pretty amazing. That's really pretty amazing.

Paige:

What do you see in the, what's next for you after all the book tour, just in the future?

Gavin:

Yeah, so we're Bellacour Bakery, which is our bakery brand. We have two of those. One in Minneapolis, one in St. Paul. We're working on the third location now in Edina, which we would like to get open by the end of this year if possible. But we'll see what the construction gods have to say about that. And we'll continue to move forward. We have some intentions and some goals to have some growth in our company. Growth doesn't always mean more restaurants, but we have a catering company called Spoon Thief Catering that we've launched, but we're going to sort of pick that up and do a little bit more with that. And in addition, we cook for the Minnesota Wild, the Timberwolves, and for another catering company called KZ Provisioning. So we spent a lot of time doing that. I'd like to see that grow a little bit, have us expand outside of the Minnesota market.

David:

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I took a deposition of a guy, a minor league baseball player. It was on these food cases and whatever. I said, "Well, tell us about what you ate." He said, "They just gave us peanut butter and jelly." But it sounds like you do something a lot different for those teams.

Gavin:

Yeah, yeah. We have a whole chef team in kitchens and all of their practice facilities. So we cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for them, for the basketball team. We cook up to five meals a day for them, and then in game days we bring food into the locker room after the game is over to feed them as well. And if they're going on the road, we pack food for them to get on the plane with. So we're actively involved in integrating into the nutritional base, the strength system to understand how to make the athlete perform at the highest ability possible. So we're a small piece of that puzzle for them, but we're happy to be there.

Paige:

That's awesome.

David:

Yeah, that is. Other than journaling, what else do you do to decompress, if anything else?

Gavin:

Probably the gym. The gym helps me a lot. I'm at the gym a minimum of four days a week or running or something like that, but that's always a nice escape. I like to be able to have something that kind of gets me out of my element. It also challenges me out in a different way. I think we all need that.

Paige:

I really appreciate you taking the time.

Gavin:

Yeah, thank you both. Thanks for having me. It was awesome to be on the show.

David:

Oh, no, Gavin, it's great to see you and we've always admired you so much. So it's just great that you took the time to talk to us. And Paige, you and I are going to have to take a ride out to Minnesota. There's a couple, two or three restaurants we got to go to.

Paige:

Yes, we definitely will.

Gavin:

All right guys. Thank you.

Paige:

Thank you for listening to Disarming Data and thank you to Eric Montgomery for producing this podcast. To support the podcast, please rate review and follow on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. If you'd like to learn more about the current state of data security, head on over to our website, disarmingdata.com.