CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman

As we kind of got busier and busier, we didn't really know what we were doing. We were bringing in octopus and let's just say the octopus weighed 40 lb. We would divide that by the ounces that we served and we were like, great, we could serve octopus for six bucks. Well, we didn't take into account that once we cooked that octopus off, that 40 lb became 18 lb. And so all the loss in that, we didn't capture that in the pricing. So, we were really giving away octopus for way less than you could buy anywhere in the world probably. And we did the same for scallops and lamb chops. And uh we were kind of getting busier and busier and losing more and more money.

He did jobs on his own. You know, it was a company, but he was the only employee, right? So, it was called JX Contractor. And uh my dad would come home pretty late from from those construction days. And I remember him dragging me to a few days of work with him, whether it was, you know, a construction site or roofing job or whatever that was. And I I remember a day where he said, 'I need you to move all that wood from this side of the room to that side of the room.' And I did it. And when I was done, I said, 'What's next?' He's like, 'I need you to move that wood back to the other side of the room.' So he was definitely testing me. And I just remember it being so hot and I was like, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. I'm going to have to figure out something to do.

Yeah, my mom worked at Taliho restaurant, which is actually her sister's restaurant. So, my aunt and uncle owned it. Uh, and she used to take me all the time because she couldn't afford child care. But I loved it. I loved being there.

PTOIC, Maryland. I a classic Greek American diner.

They have uh oddly Italian items, pizza, Greek items, bacon and eggs, breakfast. Yeah. A little bit of everything. My uncle actually still cooks breakfast there every single day. So, it's uh whenever I get the chance to stop by, I do. But I remember her dragging me there and and I fell in love with it. I was able to wash dishes. I would bust tables. I loved interacting with the customers. Um, it's it's really where I fell in love with the restaurant business.

That is literally all I ate. I mean, I I was truly amazed and I am more amazed today because I know how difficult it is to have a family and have work that my mom would go to work and still have time to prepare these elaborate amazing meals. you know, whether it was like a whole leg of lamb or stuffed tomatoes or spanopita that she would make from scratch. I mean, I tried to make one the other day and it took me like 5 hours. I'm like, I don't have time for this. And it was really amazing the experiences that we had around the dinner table and in my mind it's it seems like it was yesterday where I opened my lunch at school and the smell that came out of the tinfoil container was of spanopita which is you know spinach and feta cheese sitting sitting in my lunchbox for a few hours before I opened it. Kind of smelled up the whole cafeteria and people were like what is that? What are you eating? And I was always embarrassed to explain what that was right. was a young kid and I was trying to explain what spanacopita was and it was really really hard uh kind of growing up being so different. Um now I obviously really appreciate it and love it and uh any chance I get to eat my mom's food is a is a treat.

Yeah, we met at the church. I mean, one thing about there were so many different churches around us, all Greek churches, and you got to interact with the kids from all over, right? So, I met both Dimmitri and Ike through that church system. And we were a little different in ages. I was the oldest. I was one year older than Dmitri, two years older than Ike, but we hit it off as soon as we met through those church programs.

Yeah, mainly as a server. I I did work in on the line a few times in the kitchens. I would bartend. I I managed a little bit. A good friend of mine uh opened up an Italian restaurant called Olato in Bethesda, Maryland. Still there. Bethesda. They uh they do a great job. Both Ike and myself worked there. And I really loved it. I did everything there. It's it's where I really learned and and started to understand the restaurant business. Started to understand what it meant, you know, to have a P&L. and they really let Ike and myself kind of entrench ourselves in that business and do a lot of like the wine ordering, the food ordering, the menu creation. Uh Ike, who is an accountant by trade, was doing a lot of the bookkeeping for them. So, it was it was an awesome opportunity to learn.

And we grew up visiting Greece. We grew up visiting our villages. We grew up really seeing uh what Greek food was about, whether it was our our parents cooking it or exp those those experiences in Greece and in our villages. And you know, Greek cuisine was never technique driven like the French or the Italians or Japanese, right? It was always about the quality of ingredients. So even when my mom cooked here, she didn't need Greek tomatoes or Greek rosemary. She just needed the best version of those from here to make amazing Greek food. So that's what we wanted to bring here to open a restaurant.

So you know we we didn't have any money. You're right about that. We just had the will to to want to do something different. And I remember, you know, Dimmitri got a call from one of his distributors who said there there's this uh Russian bakery going out of business and this is probably 40 45 minutes outside of Washington DC uh in Rockville, Maryland. And we went up and we looked at the spot and I mean this shopping center was just barren. There was no cars in it. Uh we went into this kind of Russian bakery. It looked like a um looked like a subway if I could best describe it, you know. And so we offered to buy the business and I remember it was I don't know I think it was like $10 $15,000 and the agreement would would be that we would pay that over time and in buying the business you would buy the you weren't buying like the brand name or anything. What were you buying? Just all the equipment. Yeah. Just the equipment and everything inside. Uh which I later came to find out was you know worthless because we couldn't use any of it. But uh so when we met with the landlord, the landlord actually said no because some of the same things we ran into in the past. Our finances weren't there. We didn't have the personal guarantees. We didn't have any cars or homes to put up. So he didn't want to give us the space. We were 26, 27 years old. He just didn't want to do it. So we eventually we come up um with this plan. We had found out through conversations with the woman who owned the Russian bakery that she owed back rent. And so we went to the landlord and we said, 'Well, what if we paid her back rent? Would you give us the space then?' And I'm sure as many of your listeners will will know already is that money talks. And he immediately said, 'Yeah, I can do that.' So then the question was, 'Where are we going to find this money now?' We offered something that we didn't have. And by the way, how much was the rent per month? I'm not sure what the actual rent was per month, but I knew that she owed about $20,000. And so, what where are we going to find this $20,000, right? None of us had 20 bucks in our pocket. So, um I think I always preface it with like this is this is what you shouldn't do when you start a business, but we took all our credit cards, our personal credit cards, and we just pulled money off them. Withdrew cash. Uh we basically maxed them out. Uh, and we were able to come up with that that money to pay the landlord off like like you what you like walked in with like a suitcase of cash. I think we turned it all into a cashier's check, but the story would probably be much better if we did walk in with a suitcase of cash. It felt like that. It did feel like that. Hand numbered bills. Yeah. So, and and what was the concept that you were thinking of? It was I mean, this was a Russian bakery that you were taking over. Tell me what it was going to be. So, the idea was that we would do uh mezz, which uh many people know as tapas or small plates, shared plates, because that's how they eat in Greece when you go Yeah. you order a bunch of these plates and you kind of share them. So, the idea was that we would create these these dishes. Zadziki, we had um crazy feta, which was feta infused with jalapenos and shallots. We had l baby lamb chops over French fries, but we would hand cut them every day, fry them in olive oil, top them with oregano. So, uh, the way that we had them in Greece, right, with real fresh potatoes. And so, and this was a sit down restaurant or you would order at the counter and sit down. You sat down. We had full service. We had a full bar. Full service waiters. Well, everything full service bar, host stand, um, everything that you would experience at at a nice restaurant. And the three of you guys were going to do everything. Everything. Dimmitri was going to cook. I was going to run the kind of front of the house with Ike. He would use his time to focus on the finances. Uh but that was the plan that we would own and work in this restaurant for the rest of our lives. All right. So you got the 20 grand to pay off the back rent, but you still need money to like get supplies and get and and build it out and you know and Right. So where did the rest of the money come from? So, the rest of the money came from us working during the day, during the evenings I should say. We worked at night at a lot restaurant and Demetri worked at his restaurant and uh during the day we we would build and we would do all the work ourselves. Your dad was a contractor, so presumably you had some guidance. They helped. Um they were really disappointed that we were going into the restaurant business and that we were not lawyers and attorneys. You're not going to be a lawyer or a doctor. What are you doing? Why do I move from Greece for this? Yeah. And they and and you know, they saw the center and they were like, 'Are you going to even have any business here?' Um yeah, they weren't happy about that, but they did help. Um Ike's dad, Ike's uncle, my dad, Dimmitri's dad, they all really helped us bring it together. But I'm telling you, we built this thing for right around like 10 grand. We everything was from Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Target. We We would go into these to Target or Walmart. We would open up the credit card so we could get that extra 10% discount, you know, when they offer that at the at the point of sale and we did everything ourselves. It was it was there were crazy stories that happened along the way. I mean, we did our own electricity. Wow. Was that permitted? Um, I'm going to plead the fifth on that. You know, it's uh Not everything was done by the books, I will say, for for the buildout. And uh everything's up to code today. So, we we resolved any issues we had. But before it was a Russian bakery, it was a tile shop. So the person who was selling tile there had tiled every part of this place in different color tiles. And so we tried to hand chisel this stuff up. We tried to get it up with machinery. None of the none of the tiles would come up. Once we hand chiseled it all off, there was about an inch of glue underneath them. I don't know why anyone would need that much glue, but for some reason it just was there and we could not get it off. And I remember asking people what they recommended and someone said to me, you know, you should try muriatic acid. And I said, okay, that sounds cool. I head over to Home Depot. I buy some myriadic acid. I remember mixing it with my flipflops and a t-shirt and shorts. Uh it starts kind of, you know, steaming up. The vapors are coming up. I pour it all over that glue. And I'll tell you what, that glue was gone. Uh that myriadic acid works miracles. But I was literally at the doctor uh and in the hospital. I hours later I was just I could not breathe, wheezing. I had blood was dripping from my nose and you know you're supposed to be wearing goggles and a mask and gloves and there I was just literally just pouring that stuff out. But it worked. We got the glue up and we can move on. So you guys are working your day jobs as waiters or night jobs and then or maybe in the daytime you're working on the buildout. How long did it between the time that you got the lease and the time that you eventually opened? How long did it take? I think it took I think we were working on it in in the summer of ' 06. Uh, and we eventually got to opening day was in November of ' 06, a few days before Thanksgiving. Uh, and I remember right around October, we went for final inspection and the fire the fire inspector came in and he looked at us and he said he was there to to test the Anel system. Anel system in the restaurant is basically what puts out fires on your grill or fryer if you have one. And he said, 'Where's your grease hood?' And we said, 'What do you mean? It's just a there's the hood right there.' And he said, 'Well, this is a baker's hood. call me when you have a grease hood. And we went out and we we got a quote for this and it was going to cost over 20 grand. It was like 23 grand to remove that hood and put a new one in. And I just remember we were sitting in that restaurant. It was all built out. The candles were lit. We had the tables. The tables and chairs were all set. I mean, there was we were just ready to go. And we thought we were done right then and there because I don't know. We just didn't know how we were going to find that money to put that hood in. Wow. I can only imagine how how just disputing that was because you need that approval to open up. You can't open it up until you get that final inspection. So, what did you do? So, that was one moment where it felt insurmountable because where was this money going to come from? Our credit was already down the tubes, by the way, because we were not paying those credit cards we maxed out. Uh so nobody was was really uh going to give us another credit card. And I remember talking to my uncle who had recommended we talk to a banker he knew. And so we met with this banker and he met us. He came into that restaurant and sat down. By the way, this restaurant at the time had no sign on the outside. So you it it was hard enough for him to find it, let alone our what our customers were going to experience down the road. So he comes in and he's like, 'Where's your sign?' and we start to tell him our story about the money and how we've run out and the hood. But he kind of looks around and he sees the space and he's like, 'Well, how did you get it to this point?' And you know, I told him the story that I've been telling you about all the work we had done ourselves. And he looked at us and he said, 'You know what? I believe in you guys. There's something here. I love the story. I love everything you've done in here. I'm going to lend you the money.' Wow. You guys had no credit. No credit. But this is I mean it happens less and less with bank consolidations, but this is what used to happen more often when you'd have small local banks. Yeah, it was it was a nice it was my first interaction with a bank or a banker um because I never even had any money to put in a bank. So I I kind of thought it always worked like this. You meet a guy, he gives you money and and you build your business. But, you know, obviously as we've been in business for since then and we've learned that that was actually a pretty miraculous moment. Yeah. Very lucky break. What kind of collateral did you guys have to put up against then? Well, there was no collateral except for the restaurant itself. So, there was a lean on the restaurant which like I said, I mean, we built that place for 10 grand. So, the collateral was less than the loan was going to be. So, yeah. What was impressive is how quickly we also got that loan. And I mean it was probably uh a week maybe 10 days later we we the check came in. So you then went out and bought that grease hood. We bought the grease hood. We got it installed and we called the inspector in. Everything worked. Everything clicked and we were set to go. And that was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving of 2006. Huh. So let let me let me ask you about the name uh Cava Mesa. Uh why did you choose it? Does does by the does cava mean like a a seller or or like a cave? So cavo with an O on the end means seller or cave. And the word cava actually comes from that word. It's when you go to Greece, you'll see a lot of uh stores called cava or you'll see a lot of bottles of wine with the word cava on them. And it's not the sparkling wine from Spain. It it really means uh that this wine has spent a little time in in a in a cellar and and becomes kind of like a a reserve wine. And and tell me about the menu. Was like was it spanicopa, musaka, satsiki, dolma, sulaki? Was it like that kind of stuff? Yeah, we had we had some of the basics. Uh again, it was like all small plates. Uh we had chicken sulaki, but we also, you know, did these beautiful like U10 scallops that we sauteed in our Greek olive oil. Uh we did lamb chops. We did uh grilled meatballs. A lot of the recipes came from Dimmitri's mom and just doing it in the way that Greeks would do their food or their treat their food or their cuisine and have the best possible products and create food out of that. All right. So, you eventually get the go ahead to open. I'm assuming when you open there was probably a lot of friends and family and people from the church to support you at the beginning, right? Like people were coming in and you were probably busy from day one. So, we had some friends and family who came in just to kind of help us practice and, you know, things kind of went wild. Uh, we didn't really know what we were doing and we were trying to figure that out because we didn't have a POS system. We didn't have any way of like tracking orders. We were handwriting everything. We were using all these You're handwriting orders on tickets? Everything. And we were so we were writing it on on a ticket and then we were going in the kitchen and transferring that order onto yellow sticky notes and you know I remember I remember one of the early moments of of those sticky notes. You know I think the common theme has been we we didn't have a lot of money and we were trying to save money and everything we bought and I remember we bought the knockoff brand of the 3M sticky notes and walked into the kitchen. We had a packed house. I'm looking around. I'm wondering where the chefs have gone. I'm wondering where all the food is. I looked down and they're all on their hands and knees kind of looking through these tickets. Uh it was so hot in the kitchen that the glue was melting on the back of these knockoff sticky notes and they were all falling down on the ground. So, you know, I remember we end up kind of giving all this food away for free and uh you know, that was a little bit later after opening, but I just I remember funny stories like that uh along the way. I mean, restaurant is a very risky business, right? I mean, anyone who's been in the business knows that that you're more likely to fail than succeed in the first three years. I mean, once you factor in, you know, the cost of labor, the cost of of rent, the cost of food, there's very little margin left. I mean, it was just the three of you, so you didn't have presumably you didn't have to pay employees. But were you bringing money in? Were you losing money? I think in the restaurant industry, and maybe it's it's just I don't know, maybe it's in our blood, but every single day, you feel like the restaurant could fail. It's uh it's kind of a a crazy feeling. Even even that first day of opening, we had one customer come in. I remember he came in, he sat down, I was the waiter, and I and I went up to him and I said, 'This is what we're doing here. We're doing this Greek concept, small plate shared.' Uh and he said, 'Well, I I want big plates. I want a dinner. I came to have a meal. And you know, I tried to be as charming as I could. I I love talking to people. I love making people happy. And I went into the kitchen and I think it was Ike that pointed out that we had only purchased small plates. So there were not even any big plates in the restaurant. Literally, you only had small plates. Exactly. And so I went back out there and I said, I'm I'll figure it out. I'll make him happy. And he got up and left. And we didn't have another customer for two more days. Huh. And again, we thought we were going to fail there. And so, like, as we kind of got busier and busier, we didn't really know what we were doing. We were bringing in octopus. And let's just say the octopus weighed 40 lbs. We would divide that by the ounces that we served. And we were like, great, we could serve octopus for six bucks. Well, we didn't take into account that once we cooked that octopus off, that 40 lb became 18 lb. And so all the loss in that, we didn't capture that in the pricing. So we were really giving away octopus for way less than you could buy anywhere in the world probably. And we did the same for scallops and lamb chops. And uh we were kind of getting busier and busier and losing more and more money.

Yeah, I mean, we were super happy to have the help and what we really saw was that business slowly start to turn around and I saw him so complimentary of what I do. I like to be a little more creative. I like to be a little loose with the numbers. I'm like the guy with the briefcase of cash, right? And he really just brings this completely different way about thinking about the business. And I really started to think right then and there like how he could help us in our restaurant business.

He said to us, he's like, "Guys, look around. You know, this kind of Mediterranean food is already healthy." And I don't think I realized that. I just grew up eating that, right? The prebiotics and yogurt, the amazing qualities of olive oil, the chickpeas, just the natural healthfulness of all the different items that we had at our restaurant, right? And so I remember saying, "Hey, let's talk. Let's have a coffee." and we sat down and I said to him, "Hey, you know, I really love what you're doing. The guys love what you're doing. I think what you bring to the table is very different than all the tools that we have, and I would love nothing more than for you to join us as our fourth partner." And I remember, you know, to his credit, he looked at me and he actually told me that that was actually a bad decision. That's bad. You know, he's trying to give me good advice as a business partner already. like that's not a good thing to just give away 25% of your equity of a company, right? And I said, I really see something. I believe in what you're doing. I believe in our partnership.

So the restaurants were making profit. The dips of course were not. We were funding those with the restaurant profit, but you know, we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel coming out of that whole economic collapse of 0809. and we were in a good place. Ike was running the books. Brett was actually even helping us a little with that without having any kind of consulting agreement. We were just kind of going to him for advice. And so things were going well at that time.

You know, we had people who worked there invest bartenders, servers, family members. I mean, we had almost anybody who wanted to. We were willing to take money to help get this thing off the ground.

and we also felt like those handcrafted dips and spreads were the flavor centerpiece of the menu. So we started to think about building the menu around that and that grain bowls and greens and mains that were elements of the full service restaurant whether spicy lamb meatballs or the chicken marinade that was used at the restaurant. So that's how we started to build out the menu. And then Ted and Dimitri really working on how do you take these items from a made to order format to a cook and hold format on the serving line.

It didn't do great at first.

We had many, many moments of that.

So I actually moved out there in 14 to start building that commissary and to build that restaurant.

and for the restaurant.

The commissary would provide the dips and spreads. So you know, I moved out there. We thought the restaurant was going to open up much sooner. It ended up being delayed and I was out there kind of doing the commissary. We had huge delays in construction out in Los Angeles. And when we finally did get it open, you know, Brett alluded that we were making our dips in the restaurant. This space was so small. I remember the door of the walk-in box opening and hitting the back of the chair to the office that I was sitting in you know in that tiny little space. So, we were making the dips in there. And what a challenge it was being 3,000 miles away, having no help, no one knowing what the brand was, no one knowing anything about Cava. We could barely hire people. We could barely keep managers there. Had to have my wife come in and help me run that restaurant. But through it all, what I really noticed was how much the customers loved it. And if we were slow on some days and we couldn't keep up, whatever issues we were having because of the expansion being so far away from home, I noticed people coming back, people telling their friends, and people really loving what Cava was.

This goes back to the community day that we first had at that Tysons Mall, right? We were really slow there and we had that community day and so

Yeah, free food will bring people out. That line was I remember going through the line and telling people, this is going to be an hour from where you're at and then this is going to be 2 hours from where you're at. And the line just I have a video of it just went down the block and it was really really crazy. And so slowly slowly the business just start to grow.

I love being there. I wish I could have stayed. My wife and I decided after about 18 months, we felt disconnected from family. We felt disconnected from our friends and wanted to come back home. But I just kept traveling back and forth because, you know, I really believed in what we were doing out there. And, you know, we just it was the same as building a business here. It felt like we're just starting all over again. And I remember when we had the first manager had resigned and I had to go in there and start running that restaurant again and getting into the dish pit and getting into the walk-in, ordering food again, making schedules again and at times was brutal, but overall it was a really awesome experience that again I look back on and miss those days.

Yeah. So, we took over that restaurant in Park Potomac. And we just started to work on it. We started to figure out, you know, they were doing things like serving a full chicken and it was taking 40 minutes to serve that chicken because you had to cook it from scratch and or you pre-made them and you end up throwing them away. So, how could we get rid of items that were being wasteful? How could we reduce the pantry size? How could we make it easier for the team to operate without having 30 people in the restaurant? We started to look at all that and break it all down. We looked at quality of the food. We looked at how we serve it, how we cook it. Dimitri was hard at work in the kitchen with the culinary team. We had some of our operations team members come in and really help with that finance to really drive home what the numbers should be. So, it took a big team effort to really try to fix that Zoe's menu that was hemorrhaging at the time.

Yeah. I mean, that's where we started. You know, we have this document called concept essence that talks about our food, our people, our design, our, you know, everything that we do. We look through the document. So something like pimento cheese, right? tasted good, was delicious, but didn't really fit Mediterranean essence, didn't really fit our concept essence, so it was gone. Chicken salad, things like that, right? And what we found out, which was a pretty funny story, on the day that we opened, reopened that restaurant after we had reworked the whole menu. And I was talking to customers, and it was really funny. These Zoe's customers had been coming, a lot of them for just one item. Some people were coming just for like a tub of pimento cheese or a tub of chicken salad. And I had a few customers just go nuts on me, you know, and say, "What are you doing here? Nobody asked you to come here. Nobody asked you to change these recipes. Why are you changing the hummus to Cava hummus? Why are you changing tzatziki to Cava tzatziki?" We were obviously doing it because we could run them out of our commissary to make it easier for our team members. So, it was really hard to explain, you know, why we were changing these things and what we were doing them for because people just didn't want to hear it. And I think, you know, a lot of this work that we were doing, it was ultimately bringing us closer to the decision to convert all these Zoe's locations to Cava locations. And ultimately, that was going to be what we were going to go forward with. And I think the turning point really came when by January we had the first positive comps in Zoe's business since 2017, a year before we bought it. And Cava was comping double digits.

You know, I think for me being a founder, I really genuinely care about how they're going to grow their careers here. My mom was beat down in this industry. I don't want that for people. I started this restaurant business to change that. And look, are we perfect? Are we where we want to be? We're at almost 300 restaurants. Chipotle has over 3,000, right? Panera has thousands. So, as we grow, we have to continue to offer more to those team members to keep them, to bring them in, and those are things that we're working on. So, I really honestly think, you know, to Brett's point that we care about our employees and that we give them the opportunity for growth.

Look, I think when we decided to bring Brett on and, you know, we gave him the keys of the kingdom, as I say, we believed in him. I definitely believed in him, you know, no matter what happened, you know, when he felt like he chose that wrong location at the mall, I felt like we just had to work harder because there was a reason he chose it and we had to work harder to prove that out, you know, where he felt like he had made a mistake with Zoe's. He had mentioned again, I felt like it was our job to deliver on what he envisioned by buying that Zoe's. So, you know, originally we had in one of those investment deals, early on, one of these big VCs wanted to kind of buy the whole company.

Yeah, we would have gotten some cash and, you know, whether or not it was a lot or a little depends on how you look at things, but yeah, we didn't start it for that, right? And I don't think we started the first restaurant for that. And I don't think cash has ever been the number one driver.

I think I remember back to my mom working in this restaurant industry and how hard she worked and you know at the end there was nothing really left for her and I wanted to create something bigger and better and there were so many moments along the way of believing in Brett and believing in this business that he told a story of you know what I think you asked the question what did we learn from our first restaurant and there were so many things within that restaurant that we learned right about operationally and how we can make it better. But what he left out was we ran out of money after two restaurants and our investors didn't want to give us any more money. And so we went and took a loan out against everything that we had worked for. We took a loan against our full service restaurants against these fast casuals really because I believed in Brett and what he could take Cava to and what he could ultimately help me become in the end. Right. And along the way,

Look, I think that anytime you're successful in life, you got to get lucky. I mean, I was lucky that that banker walked through my door, but he saw the hard work that we put into that restaurant and that's why he gave us that loan. I was lucky enough to meet Brett, but all along the way, we've had so much help. I in no way take credit for anything that has happened the last 16 years. We have had people have busted their ass in the kitchens for us. People have, you know, busted their ass growing these restaurants, building these restaurants, doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I get a lot of the credit. People come and thank me all the time and say, "Your restaurant's amazing. What you do is amazing." But the people that work every single day in those restaurants, they are doing a lot of the hard work and they have really helped us build this brand and make this what it is today.

I tell people to visit that restaurant today, and you can still see a lot of the heel and shoe marks on the bar from all the dancing on it. So, there were just crazy crazy things always happening, but the craziness of the restaurant business is something that I've always been attracted to. So, I kind of actually miss those moments.