Canlis

No. Or? Oh, there's another choice.

Or Seattle's iconic Canlis?

Okay, this has to be a trick question, because if it isn't, I'd say it's so obvious.

If you told me, oh, KFC in Soto has a lower rating than Canlis, I'd be like, yeah, of course.

But you're not going to tell me that, are you?

The KFC in Soto has an excellent rating.

Like I said, the KFC in Soto is an excellent location to dine.

And Canlis... has a good rating.

You climbed the ladder just as I did.

You worked at Canlis when you were going through the majority of that journey there.

How did you find wine and decide to pursue the Master Sommelier diploma?

Along that journey, I was working as a server, as a bartender, and I just got bit by the wine bug.

One of the types of teams I looked at were restaurants, in part because restaurants have inbuilt 110 micro-conflicts every night of service.

And I looked at this restaurant called Canlis.

Part of what they do as a team is they assume that there will be disagreement between ev- and conflict between every employee at some point or another, and they find ways to ritualize it, to normalize it, and to be able to have a place to diagnose what's happening, and then also have a second moment to go and deal with it.

If the team is sort of snapping at each other while preparing the evening's meals or cleaning up after close and, and the- and someone can hear something's, you know, starting to really bubble between two employees, you may actually hear one of the owners or the chef or any leader of the organization yell on the floor, "Take it to the hooch." And the staff involved in the exchange, as irritated as they might be, drop what they're doing and file into a secret room they built in the restaurant for these purposes, specifically created to relieve tension in the heat of battle, and you sneak downstairs in this funny little room in the basement of the basement, and it's time to talk.

How do you decide what to do in the heat of the moment? Really, teams and organizations that h- are-- have group intelligence are starting to find ways to normalize, ritualize, and give both tools and places and skills for, for people to be able to actually have the argument and not rely so deeply on the, you know, on putting it on the weight of the individual.

In fact, one of the things I li- I actually have it with me.

Canlis has come out with an employee manual.

It's the first time I've ever seen an employee manual that doesn't look at if conflict arises, you have to go to HR, right? Or if conflict arises, you have to go to alternative dispute resolution.

A post, a postmortem, because there's so much assumed shame.

So part of this is the way to kind of actually come back together is reframing it, but then saying, "Hey, I wanna talk with you about this because I want to work with you," right? "I want to invest in you." One of the teams I looked at that I think is so interesting, it's a family-owned business, third generation, fine dining restaurant in the Pacific Northwest called Canlis.

And I'd heard about them from other restaurateurs, and they were saying, "You should talk to them.

The brothers there are doing something very interesting about how they actually hold heat." And they have two spaces in their restaurants.

so one of my favorite examples of their fighting is a restaurant team that is a fine dining restaurant in the Pacific Northwest.

It's called Canlis and their third generation family restaurant.

And the two brothers, the third generation, Mark and Brian, took it over from their parents in around 2009.

And they wanted to make the back of the house, basically the kitchen, as strong as what they call in restaurant speak as the front of the house.

I mean, part of what I look at the art of fighting is where are places that are practicing healthy heat? And one of the places is in restaurants that expect conflict.

And every night of service, I look at a restaurant called Canlis in the Pacific Northwest fine dining.

They and they bake conflict and conflict skills.

They have two rooms in their restaurant.