Why did you want this to be a fundamental of the book, which you call a radically honest cookbook?

I don't want bipolar sober chef on my tombstone.

I don't want to be remembered for that.

I dedicated 20, 25 years to doing this thing.

I still love it, but I unraveled.

I wanted to be on solid ground again.

Through instructions from my doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, I had been documenting my time in rehab the first time.

course.

... writ large.

Yeah, like, so f- at Olmsted we were pretty strict.

We had a lot...

I, I had made up a lot of arbitrary rules about seasonality and stuff.

So we would make ketchup a lot with green tomatoes or tomatillos, because they were sort of a little bit more readily available.

And, uh, but then that migrated into I, I took all the tomato out and I just put cherries in it, and it comes out...

I mean, it's m- I mean, it's some hodgepodge Alton Brown recipe with some other two recipes that I kinda just tinkered around with.

Right.

Got it.

So this is garlic, onions and beef.

Here it's already cooked out, and we're gonna add all the spices.

It's garlic, it's pepper, paprika, oregano, chili powder.

All that goes in.

All right, now we have a tomato schnitzel.

So the tomato schnitzel, it was popular at a restaurant I had in, uh, Brooklyn.

I sold that restaurant.

[laughs] Technical problems, right? Um, but, um, we're interested to hear, Greg, how did it all begin? How did you get into hospitality?

I mean, truthfully, I tend to leave this out, but, you know, when I...

So we had a rule in my house growing up.

I, uh, at 15 you had to get a job.

So the, the only thing really in my hometown that would take a 15-year-old was, was fast food, and so I applied to the Wendy's.

And at that time, what I did is I had a bunch of my high school friends also apply at different times throughout the same week, and we all got hired.

We pretended like we didn't know each other until we were all onboarded, and then the restaurant was just run by a group of my buddies.

... job out of school?