Well,

I think to your point about external validation, I think what happened at that time, it was a cool, again, right place, right time.

DC was in this ramp up of restaurants that had never happened before.

And we kind of hit Rose's Luxury.

It opened in 2016.

Bad Saint.

We were all in this clump of restaurants that DC had just never experienced.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

[laughs]

Yeah, three brothers, a dad, and a grandfather in the house.

So there were two people to do the work for seven.

And so I learned really early how to chop, how to dice.

I was a good sous chef.

And then it grew.

It grew from, like, family dinners and keeping culture alive in these recipes to a catering business, and then my mom got her first restaurant much later in life when she was 60 years old, her first brick-and-mortar.

[laughs]

no idea.

If it's going to land, and I never saw... made-ons kind of success coming because just like compass rose i didn't do it for that i was not formally trained i didn't go to culinary school i wasn't raised to be like going for the awards and stuff that wasn't even in my mind right it truly wasn't um i wanted to open it because um compass rose the first one was all based on those travels that i did living in russia right literally put the meals and dishes that david and i had had traveling on the menu And I wanted every dish to tell a story.

And they could.

And they did throughout the years.

As people came and went, we added employees and chefs' stories over the years, got added to the menu.

But you could always trace the things back to a place and a time and something that happened.

And food and memory and travel are all interconnected for me.

Like, whoa, this is the moment I've been