Yeah.

And we didn't wanna do it that way.

We wanted to find a more enlightened way to run our team.

And, um, uh, we kept butting heads, so we had to let him go, and ultimately, that led to a very pivotal moment in our business because Merwan literally had to learn how to be a chef on the line.

He jumped in, and initially the thought was, "Well, we'll find somebody else, and he'll cover, you know, the, the shifts until we can find the right person." What ended up happening was that he fell in love with it.

He not only was able to totally transform the management structures of the kitchen, but he was lit up by the creative process of learning how to cook and running that kitchen hands-on, and he loved it, and he never looked back.

So that was a pivotal moment because a lot of the halo effect of what made our business successful ultimately was him getting recognized as a chef.

So get into that point.

Yep.

There's a lot happening.

Um, I think it started originally from the desire to capture our stories for our team, and this feeling of like wanting to preserve them so that our team always knows who we are, where we came from, what's our why as a business.

And it was getting harder and harder as we grew.

We're now alongside, working alongside all these hundreds of people now.

There's over 450 employees now, and how do we make sure that those stories get preserved, and that the heart of who we are as a business doesn't get lost in translation? And, um, I started with that, and then as I started writing it, I realized that these sort of core principles that I was focusing on in the book were the same themes and topics that keep coming up in the industry as like, well, how do you grow your culture, and how do you hold onto young people and inspire them to want to build careers in an industry that they started out in thinking they were just waiting tables for the summer? And all of those how questions ended up being the meat of the book as I started really capturing the stories.

So I decided that I wanted to give something back to this industry that's given us so much.

Mm-hmm.

So tell us a little bit about the food that you specialize in all your different places now.

Oh, goodness.

Well, the first restaurant we started, Chaipani Indian Street Food.

We were really introducing this idea of Indian street food to the West.

And I traveled to India throughout my life, but I could never eat the street food or I would have gotten sick.

So Marwan was introducing me to this cuisine that I had never had before.

And it's so fantastic.

What went through your mind?

And if Molly at any point had looked at me and said, no, or had an idea or an opinion, and instead what Molly did was leaned in and said, tell me more.

Yeah, you know, my initial response of like, forget everything I said about following your wrist, you're out of your effing mind.

It's so hard, you don't know how hard the business is.

That was informed from what I had witnessed growing up in the industry.

And then also, you know, waiting tables throughout college and worked in a bunch of different restaurant environments.

But it also occurred to me almost simultaneous to that thought was it also had provided me with a lot of information.

And what I realized pretty quickly was I felt you hear people describe this.

And the good news is going out to dinner has never been more in demand, right? So there's lots of opportunity for us to continue to perfect.