Turning the Table - Geoffrey Zakarian’s Continued Growth (Part 3/3)

third and final episode in this series. If you miss parts one and to make sure you check out those first, otherwise you're going to be picking up on the story of a pretty fleshed out version of myself, which if you have listened to parts one and two, you know

wasn't always the case. Today, Christopher and I talked about what I usually discussed with guests during our fourth and final course together, the future, those tough questions about growth and risk and balance between work and family that I love to ask our guests. Towards the end of our conversations, yep,

Chris turned those back to me. Also, please enjoy. You know, you get to a point where you've opened restaurants, you have these relationships with hotels, and you've got to keep growing, right, and some people are satisfied cooking opening, running restaurants over and over and over again. And you did that for a while. But I'd like to know more about what opportunities there are for people who work in the food

world now who have had that chef experienced. You know, these days, there's there are things like cruise ship restaurants, consultancies, licensing deals, designing food and beverage programs for restaurants while not running them. You know, this element of the business behind the business. That's something that you seem to be

really adept at navigating. Yeah, that's a great question. It's a big question, and I'll try to bite off a small chunks at a time, but I think you know, for me, I go in a restaurant, a new restaurant, and I see it, and I hear the buzz, and I feel a buzz and I'm like, oh god, I remember. I mean, I feel it. I love it. But it's separated now, it's compartmentalized into do I want to do it in the same way I did it before? And you know, it's like Billy Joel, I heard of podcast

and he's you know, I can't. I'm not gonna be able to do any conscience anymore because I wrote that music in my twenties when my voice was up here. I can't hit those notes anymore. So singing it's incredibly physical and difficult. I'm not at that point, but a physicality of opening a restaurant, being there all the time because people want to see if you put your name

on it. It's very hard, and it's probably the reason a lot of people, a lot of chefs get physically and emotionally run over the problem of the lifestyle and the problem of the hours needed to launch yourself into a position where you have a brand of sorts. But I think what I've done and what I've tried to do Christopher is okay. I love everything about the restaurant business. I don't just love the food in the artist try. I love teaching, so I love doing zoom classes and

teaching and I do lots of that. And I love product I love everything that's about. Where is that from this product? That I love? All that I've learned all that. So I'm doing products now with some retail companies to back me, and I do the products I want to do, and I love solving problems for home cook So I came up with some pans that like, we're teflon and cast iron and they work, and we just created off of that. I still do restaurants, albeit not as many

because they don't have the physical time or energy. But I think that my use I want to be useful to people and bring value to someone. So there will be restaurants, But what kind of restaurants I'll bring We the restaurants were was serving very simple food made very specifically, very delicious, but a consistently great vibe in a restaurant. Hustle, bustle, bright, happy, loud, that kind of restaurant. I probably won't do fine dyning anymore because it's not who I am anymore. It's I

learned through fine dining. But now I choose to want to do something that's more fun and more like I can do more things with the food and have it be laid back enough but still great food. Like you said, in New York, the food is amazing. You can go to food now basically sit it a an empty plawood table, have a Michelin star meal and re Dell glasses and you're in like a restaurant that was probably a deli before, and they just like spiffed it up and it's all

is pre fixed, and that's wonderful. You know, the bells and whistles are gone. You don't have to do all that stuff. Really, it's about the food and the experience, and they really get it and they strip it away. So I think for those who want to do other things, just you know, aim at something. There's so much in the culinary world now that is like you said, behind the scenes. It's creative, but you don't have any of the brain damage of operating a restaurant, which is a

lot of brain damage. No one wants to talk about it. You know. What this makes me think of, Jeffrey, is when you had Gael Simmons on on your show, you kind of had a little off handed comment in your conversation and and maybe it was a joke, but you said that you wanted to open an Armenian diner one day, and she said she'd be there, And I just want to tell you I would be there on day one two. I think that's a great idea and I would love

to eat that simple, fun, approachable Armenian food. So I just need to find four very old Armenian ladies because that's the kind of restaurant, Well, you will have family in the kitchen, and there are those kind of restaurants. Not enough of that, you know what, I'll have. Our producer Jonathan pulled the demographics of who listens to the show and if we have enough Armenian grandma's out there listening, or or if you are or have an Armenian grandma, reach out to Jeffrey and uh I I that would

be fun because that's the kind of food. That's the first stuff I put in my mouth, and that was still I. I reach for those flavors. So I think that this field someone like myself, I can only open multiples of restaurants and I put my name on them. That I'm sure I'm gonna like be good because once you put your name on it, like they're gonna come after you. It's just the way it is. I mean, John George has a gigantic operation and he has thirty

five restaurants or thirty restaurants. And that might not sound like a lot, because you know Chipotle or Sweet Green says hundreds. You know, Shake Shack has a thousand. To have thirty restaurants at that level, this astoundingly complicated. It's amazing. If I were to do thirty restaurants would be thirty very simple restaurants. I would aim for a hundred, but doing very simple. So there's so much opportunity because of the pandemic and because of how food is now so global,

so social, so entertainment. It's an entertainment industry. It's no longer a food industry only Jeffrey. A lot of listeners to this podcast probably first got to know you on TV. You were on Iron Chef America, The Kitchen Chopped, and these days food on TV seems like a given, but that wasn't always the case. So I'd love it if you could walk us through that decision early on when you had an opportunity to say, is a TV career something I, as a chef want to do. It's not proven,

but I want to dive in. What was your decision making process like at the time. Well, I have a couple of comments on that one. First of all, when I grew up as a grade school student from the ages I would say nine to that fourteen range, and I used to come home for lunch at an hour and I was ten minutes always, so I came home a bunch your mom would make me at lunch, which is very nice at my mom and she would have it ready on a TV stand and I was sit in front of the TV and watch my favorite show

at the time, which was The Galloping Gourmet. Little did I know that I would be doing exactly what that man was doing on TV and say ten years from then going to Europe. But The Galloping Gourmet was a show run by a gentleman named Graham Care and his wife produced the show I Leave. It was on PBS. It was extremely successful. I think it ran for ten seasons and for lack of a better terminology, it's one of the first cooking shows. It was that Julia child

that was it me there's nothing else. And he would dress up in a double breasted suit and tie all spiffy it out cravat and he would run it was a live show on TV. He run down to his kitchen which is an open kitchen set with a kitchen and oven and the cabinets and bag very much like today, and a table set for two in front of the kitchen, and he would show I went to Italy and today we're cooking. I don't know Nato, blah blah, blah, whatever he cooked, and I want to show you what I mean.

And then in the back of screen would come up and it was him in Europe at this restaurant, dining with his wife and this candle life and he's eating and he's showing this, and he's going in the kitchen and this flambaying happening, and he's showing on TV video of what he did. So he had this production company and will go with him and everything was handle it and he would take this bite. He would close his eyes, put his head back, salivate and just have a glass

of wine. And like, oh my god, oh my god. He was eating that dish. They panned over the audience and people like salivate. You can see them their mouths opening and closing. I'll never figure that as long as I live, because at that point in time, something was going on with me, because like, oh my god, then

you cook the dish. And then he said, come on, everybody, I'm gonna show you how to cook this Vitello's not and he cook it in front of you, whild drinking probably a bottle of wine, and he would pull some from the audience, tell all stories. While he was doing so and I had this and I said, you think that's funny? It would like begg you make fun of people while he's cooking this. Okay, back to the veal and then they would pull one person sit down and

that was the end of the show. I'm Graham care cheers and clink and they would eat the dish together. That was the show. And so I'm dying to do that show. Hey, I've been pitching it forever and it really made a huge impact on me that I carried forward into the restaurant world. So but TV that was the beginning. Food Howur came around the late nineties. I

think it's thirty years old. It changed the world. Now you have instead of two patrons a day before watching a show, there's a million or two million people watching that show you, So there's so many more eyeballs. It jumps started revved up the restaurant world. So that we created in thirty or forty years in New York in this country what it took three hundred years to create in Europe. We caught up and now we surpassed them, I believe in a lot of ways. So TV is everything.

Did I think I was gonna be on TV. No. Was I enamored by it? Absolutely? Who couldn't be? So I was named by Graham care the Wild Wild West, James Bond, and then I ended up in France. I mean, go figure. So I think that for me, my first shot came. They gave me this opportunity a judge on Chopped, and I'm like, at first, I said, what Chopped? What's this? What's the show? I knew Bobby Flay was on TV

so and he was very successful. It was still in the sort of wonky phase, but not in two thousand seven. It was like full flight. They said, yeah, you wanted They wanted to be on Chopped. They want a really successful chef. And at that time I ran a lot of restaurants and I had like a lot of good reviews, and they wanted a food expert. They had like different personalities, someone chef, a restaurateur, and maybe a baker or something like that was always a mix. And I heard the

premise of the show. I thought it was ridiculous at first, and then I went to do a sizzle reel. We didn't get paid anything for it was I remember how how wonky it was, and I'm like, this is never gonna last. And that was twelve years, seven and fifty episodes later, and I never forget when I was invited after that to do Iron Chef and and I won in two thousand eleven, and everyone said, I never knew you were a chef. I thought you were a judge chopped, and I was like, wow. It dawned on me that

perception is everything. It's perception. It's not reality, it's perception of reality. It didn't matter how many stars I had, how many years I cooked, thirty years, killing myself and you know, cooking for not making any money, and that didn't matter. It was like, you're on TV. Now they know you're a chef. So it's like an aha moment, right, So the power TV is something you need to really use if you have the ability to use it, and I'm blessed to have the ability to use it now.

It worked very hard to get on TV, and I'm thankful that I got on TV because of my relationship with food and my knowledge of restaurants and food. That's great. So I am doing what I'm naturally good at doing. So I think that there's no end now. Social media is like really, you know, lost it and it's TikTok cooking. There's I G t V, Facebook, Twitter, Every imaginable person now has is a cook, Every actor is a cooked,

every author now has a favorite recipe. It's like it's another part of the world that they are now allowed to open up the world to their love of food because it's it's ingratiating. It's shown to me, make you human, and people go nuts. And that is why it can't end. The paradigms change. But it's not going to end because you do it three times a day, and it's one of the most enjoyable reasons to be alive is to eat.

And the access now to with TV and social media to food, even if you're watching someone cook or watching someone do a kitchen hack, is remarkable. It's just remarkable, Jeffrey. Anyone who has paid attention to your social media, who's watched you on the kitchen, anyone who has even come across your name in the past three or four or five years, they know that family is super important to you. Your wife, Margaret is your business partner, your daughters are

writing a cookbook. Tell me what it's like to fold family and cooking and business all into the same basket. It's a delightful basket I wake up every morning. I'm so grateful that I have the ability to somehow pull off my eating, love of eating into like a career that can help provide for my family. And my family is learning to provide now why writing that cookbook? And my daughters wrote that themselves without my help, and it

became a bestseller, And I'm so proud of them. And I'm like, well, that's a good way to get into college. You wrote a book at twelve. That's cool, that's really cool. And I try to tell them that whatever you want to do, that's a cool thing to do. And you might not know the impact of it now, but it does register. And I'll go ahead and plug that for you. Jeffrey Listeners that that book is The Family That Cooks Together. It came out, Yeah, imagine right in the middle of

the pandemic. Family family and home cooking during lockdown became a very very important thing. I think that's something that you really conveyed to through your social media, through your videos, you know, really reaching out to people during a time when when we were all at home. You know, it was one of those things like, let's take a breath. We all took a collective breath, and you're on social media. You're not going to work, your kids aren't going to school.

What are you doing. We're doing the same thing we used to do, except we enjoyed it a whole hell of a lot more. I mean, we shop, I shopped, We grew a garden, We did all the things that a munday sort of silly. You think they're goofy and never get a chance to do it. But I'm gonna tell you something. I challenge anybody here, the smartest person that's listening, I challenge anybody. I challenged Jeff Bezos to go buy an acrel land, planted himself and grow and

eat what he grows. It's hard. The skill of farming is right up there. I'm sorry, I'm gonna say that. It is so difficult, so reliant on nothing. You can't control anything. All you can control is watering and you know the amount amount of knowledge you get and what kind of dirt to use. That's about it. You can't control the sign, you can't control the wind, you can't control the plant. You can't control bacteria, flies, infestation, anything.

You can't control rabbits suit. It's hard, and when you learn how to do that, you you really have an appreciation for what you what goes into the people that do this for a living. It's just like you assume to find these perfect peppers and package baby zucchini a labeled and numbered and waiting and being spritsed with water. It's just like, it's there, no problem. It's a huge problem.

You learned that during pandemic, and I think we all learned a valuable lessons about like, all right, let's be grateful for all we have and just see how hard it is and how lucky we have it that basically at a click you can get anything you want from anywhere in the world. You have no idea how lucky we are be at this juncture. So I think a

lot of that came to it. And I think the viewers we just post me cutting an onion, and you cut an onion, and my wife Margaret would say, like, let me hold on a second, what are you doing. I'm cutting anice and let me get that. I'm like okay, and you'd get a d fifty thousand people liking it.

I'm like wow, And of course this is doing the kitchen we've been working on it, but we never really paid attention to the posting, and so now we just do simple things that would be to me like I don't know, like how to mow your lawn, you know, would be that sort of mundane. But it's fascinating that people I really are interested in in in the pandemic behind the curtain. Right, It's like the Wizard of Oz.

Now you're in my in my my kitchen, you're seeing my products, you're seeing my oven, and people comment, oh I love that, Oh I have one of those two. I'm using the same salt. You know. It's like this humanity again, and it resonated and it resonated with us as a family. My wife and I are working together for years, but this year was really tough because now we're working together and then now we're now you're on the camera and I'm cooking and there's no prep helping.

It's like we're actually working, you know, and we're gardening and we're raising and we're running a school. Right. I've never worked so hard in my life. But I honestly just to say this with all my heart, it was it was a remarkable gift in a lot of ways, and we talked about it all the time. So we wrote a book. It was finished long before the pandemic. We just wrote this book that we thought would be nice to write about it. What we cooked together miraculous says,

Miraculous things happened. It was very timely. And so the family that it cooks together, it needs together. The family that cooks together does it together, and it's them. I always say, the most important time you have is the is the time you sit around the table and eat, because you you need to talk. You'll fight and you'll like want to leave the table and you'll check your into a grand but you're like you're around the table,

and that is very important. So, like I said, I'm blessed to have this family that's interested in this business. I don't know how interested they're gonna but I don't really care. It's like whatever makes them happy. And you know, I think they'll find that. It took me a long time to find it, and I thought I found an economics, but it like kind of found me. So I hope it happens to them in a sort of serendipitous way like that, because it's it's really fun when it happens

when you don't know what's going to happen. Jeffrey, we started this conversation talking about some of your earliest food memories. Things that you're polish dishes, Armenia dishes, the things that your parents, your aunt you know, your your family really gave you these memories through dishes and and it may have just been that something that was cooked to them, it may have been SuperOrdinary, but to you, that's an

iconic taste. And so I think the more that you and and anyone listening, but but that you have these experiences in the kitchen with your daughters, with your son, that's the way that you form those memories. Right we we sit around the table, and the more you do that, who knows what memories we will pass along to our kids. You know, they may they may love one thing they had one time and to you, that was a forgettable dish that that really didn't you know, it's not something

you'd put back on the menu, but they loved. So this is kind of you're taking an active hand in building that foundation in the same way it was built for you through family and through togetherness and through time at the table. Yeah, and you know it also dove tails for me into like being of use to someone and being abused to yourself and what are you doing for a living? And I think of it all the time about like he was like, what are you driving?

You always doing this? You're doing so much? How can you do this? You're everywhere? And I'm like, I know, I think, I I don't think I'm everywhere. I think I feel like I could do more. And I feel like when I'm most satisfied, And I think that the word happy is a minefield. But when I feel that I'm being helpful helping someone, or bringing value to someone or smile to someone's faces, when I feel that sense of like, this is it. This is what meaning the

meaning of like content means, you're content. I'm content when I put a piece of food down for people and I call them around the table and they start eating it, and I see their face and their reaction and they're really eating it and really enjoying it. And for those few moments an hour, you've made six, eight, ten people happy and they're enjoying the process of eating because it

is a process, and that is very gratifying. I can only tell you that's very gratifying because those things gratify me. And you can tell right away when it doesn't gratify, it just doesn't feel It's like this is I'm just going through emotions. It doesn't feel right. So I always try to tell people, like, find something that when you do it, you're gratified. It brings value to someone, it brings brings a smile. It sounds simple, but it's like

it helps the daily chaos. It really does. And then your day has become full of gratifying moments and you pass them on to your kids. And look, I'll be crazy to tell you that I'm not trying to make the kids understand table manners and get to the table. They all know it's you're sitting down. We don't grab breakfast and leave. And they understand that this ritual is

important to our family, this particular ritual. So some families have different rituals, but the ritual of sitting down, pausing and putting something that's made for you and being respectful of the person that makes that and being respectful of, like I said that before, the people that grow and make this food. It's like kind of remarkable that it all works. And I try to tell my children this is what this means. This is what you don't get.

And what was wonderful is to watch them write the book and like dad, we have to do it again. That's yeah, the rest of me again, how many times until it's right? Well, Jeffrey, that that makes me really value the very first time you and I ever met, it was over breakfast and uh and so I appreciate that. Jeffrey, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Chris, Thanks very much for listening to Four Courses this year.

I've truly enjoyed talking with so many amazing guests. Myself and our team are taking a short break until after the New Year, and then we'll be back soon with more exciting updates. Don't forget to subscribe to four Courses on your favorite podcasting app and we'll be back before you know it. Happy holiday and have a great new year. Thanks very much for listening to Four Courses with Jeffrey Z Carrion, a production of I Heart Radio and Corner

Table Entertainment. Four Courses is created by Jeffrey Z Carrion, Margaret Zacarrion, Jared Keller, and Tara Helper. Our executive producer is Christopher Hesiotis. Four Courses is produced by Jonathan Hawes Dressler. Our research is conducted by Jesselyn Shields. Our talent booking is by Pamela Bauer at Dogtown Talent. This episode was edited and written by Priya Mahadevan. Special thanks to Katie

Fellman for help as recording engineered. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.