How do you maintain, Connie, a unified creative vision for 25 years without, let's say, alpha chef ego getting in the way?

Yeah, that's a very good question because a lot of chefs are very alpha and have huge egos.

Our dynamic and our relationship is very unique because John actually hired me right out of culinary school.

So, for many, many years, John was my chef and my mentor until we became co-chefs probably about halfway through my career.

So for that reason, I think like ego aside, there really wasn't an ego because he was my mentor.

I looked up to him for most of my career.

And when we became co-chefs, that's when our relationship changed and the dynamic in the kitchen changed.

like we had some like but the good thing about connie and i's relationship we usually take turns right like connie is like super dark and like really down and and that means i gotta be like i gotta be like mr rogers like you know like and bring her up and and we take turns at that but there was a couple points where we were both kind of spiraling in our heads you know too much in our heads and Yeah, we had some really nice one-off conversations with some of the judges and it really picked us back up.

Okay.

Um, we opened their, um, uh, hotel in 2005, and, um, we worked there for five years before deciding that we wanted to open up our own place.

And, uh, we loved charcuterie.

Charcuterie and wine bars were, were kind of like the, the big trendy restaurant-

Yeah.

There's not, um, I think contrary to what a lot of people believe, Portuguese food isn't that spicy.

Um, if you go, like, into the, some of the surrounding countries, you, you can really pick up a, a little bit more heat.

But, um, this is, uh, uh, predominantly pork, and then-