The Voltaggio Brothers: Taking Risks and Telling Stories through Food | Digital Social Hour #31

All right, Sean Kelly here.

Welcome to the Digital Social Hour Podcast.

I'm here with my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, what up?

And our guests today, Michael and Brian Voltagio.

What's up, guys?

Rog star chefs are in the building.

First chefs.

What do y'all have against chefs?

Nothing.

I love chefs.

Me too.

I mean, they give us food.

They nourish our bodies.

I love them.

Everyone needs a chef.

Right, everybody.

Now you have two.

Yeah, but you guys are rock stars.

That's a different level of art right there.

You've dedicated your lives to this, right?

Yeah, we're just cooks.

That's it.

Me this cooks.

Cooks.

We're just the cooks.

What age did you guys start cooking?

I mean, I think, what, 14, 15 years old?

14, yeah.

He's two years older than me.

I had to work under him my first time.

Okay.

That went kind of well.

not 14 you guys wasn't playing kick while y'all were like whipping up no we were straight up working because um you know we wanted to have things you know we grew up you know really well off so you know we wanted to buy clothes have cars you know so we went to work at 14 years old just start saving up and doing that and we found ourselves rolling into the kitchen because it was fun there's family um there's enough hours to work uh you know because we could work at night in the restaurant industry so it's kind of but i think that work ethic that we have like we we were joking when we got here we've been working like 120 hours a week and that's that's real like we've been doing that but what's funny is we were working like that in high school like we'd go to school Then I played football So I'd go to football practice Then I'd get off football practice go to work work another like seven hour shift go home go to bed and get up and do it all over again Wow.

To the point like by the time I was 16 I moved out of the house.

I had my own apartment.

I was in high school Wow having my own place to live.

Like it was wild.

So I had responsibilities when I was 16 years old.

Wow.

And I think I've just we've had the same job ever since.

It's just different kitchens, different menus, and different, different people.

And did your parents get you guys into cooking or how did that start?

I mean, food was always a big part of our family.

Mom made sure we sat down every day at 5.30 or so and had dinner together.

So I think that that appreciation for food definitely carried through in our career.

I think we started cooking because money was a motivator at the time when we were teenagers, but then it became a passion.

Then we got to a point where both Michael and I decided we're going going to make a career out of this.

He went off and did an apprenticeship at a Greenbrier in West Virginia at a pretty, you know, obviously an amazing resort and well-known program.

And I went to the Culinary Institute of America in New York.

So we kind of like split off at that time.

That's when we both left.

But then we still had, while doing that, had to find other ways to hustle to like financially support ourselves too.

Like Brian was delivering Domino's pizza while he was at the most prestigious culinary school.

I would hang out in the mountains and like butcher deer in like somebody's front yard to to like make enough money to get through the winter like stuff like that like just the grind of and I feel like that really our work ethic is and I keep saying that but like hard work is is what it takes I mean people are like how did you get to do this how did you get to do that and it's like when everyone else was at the bar we were at work right right and so y'all had no social life coming up pretty much I mean a little bit still fit in some time but not not the greatest I mean definitely like we're in high school and stuff like as Michael was saying you know on Saturday night we're cooking in a kitchen until 10 o'clock at night we weren't out like you know the you know the party after the football game our social hour was between like midnight and 8 a.m right so you had to like you had to fit it in midnight and 8 a.m

nothing happens between midnight and 8 a.m yeah like that's late what's the difference between an apprenticeship and culinary school well i think for me i just didn't want to follow the same path as brian and so and i where he paid to go to school basically and did that like i said delivering pizzas i got paid to do my apprenticeship and so it was like okay i'm gonna take this route.

And so you go work at a hotel.

They have this sort of mapped out education or trajectory for you to learn every station.

But what was funny is I thought I knew a lot before I got there.

And I'm like, oh, I'm going to this resort in the mountains in West Virginia.

I'm going to be great.

I'm going to be a star.

I was like 19 years old.

And like on the first day, like I was making like veal stock and I like moved the vegetables and this like wave of oil just went over my hand.

And I burned my entire hand.

And I remember like not being able to say anything because I didn't want them to send me home or i didn't want to get sent to like the emergency room or whatever so i had to like hold a kitchen towel over my hand and it stuck into my burn and by the end of the night i had to like peel it out of my burn because i didn't want to go to my boss and be like because i was so arrogant and cocky at the time and then i was like dang i have so much to learn right now and so my career really started There at that point, you know, it was like, okay, I don't know shit.

So what actually broke you is at the moment where you had that breaking point where, damn, I gotta.

I think when I was pulling kitchen towel out of my hand, i was like okay i have a lot to learn right now yeah yeah that's crazy and do you think culinary school was the right move for you i mean i i think it got me to where i am now it opened up a door that i never thought that i would go to which is new york city um because i was upstate new york i was able to go down on weekends and actually start to do what's called a stage where you go in and work in kitchens to get experience and also hopefully get a job and i did my apprenticeship program um at a restaurant called aureole ironically it's a restaurant we took over here in vegas Vegas

and where I got to meet Chef Charlie Palmer.

And that's where I kind of got my start in New York.

I don't think I would have ever thought as a young cook coming out of Maryland, Frederick, Maryland, to go to New York City and think that I had to resume to get in the door.

That's like a dream, right?

Yeah, it is.

I mean, it's like felt like big leagues, right?

But then at that point, though, I realized that after I've, you know, this many years in, really, it's just the hard work, dedication, and being there and willing to learn as a young cook.

You don't have to go to culinary school.

You don't have to do an apprenticeship program.

You can if you have the means.

Definitely, it's going to open up more doors.

But if you're great at what you do and you want to learn, just come knock on our door.

So

when did you guys get to the point where you actually started to experiment and create your own styles and your own taste and like, you know, just kind of experiment with the food that you guys are making?

Well, I think early on in our careers, we're definitely, you know, it's an ego-driven sort of thing, being a chef, right?

You're creating dishes, you know, sometimes for yourself versus your guests.

and i think there's been a transformation in our careers to where we are now and it would be in like our early 30s you know we both had our own restaurants and like you know we're you know trying to make a name right um now we we take cues from our guests you know now we're like what what are our guests looking for we're more of a guest driven experience versus being a chef driven but it's hard though because as creatives you you you want your creative process to inspire yourself but you have to do it in a way where you're going to inspire the people that you're doing it for right and i think as you mature through any creative industry, like that's the, you have to connect with your audience.

Or if you leave them behind, then that's a portion of the people that could have been coming in to experience whatever it is that you're trying to communicate to them.

And so I feel like once we got, we started, we tried to be too creative early on.

What's being too creative, right?

Well, because I feel like you're creative for creative's sake and sometimes it doesn't translate into what you're doing.

And so you leave people out because you want to show them this one technique that you learned how to do.

But if it doesn't taste good, you shouldn't be doing it.

Or if it's not better than the original dish that you're sort of reinventing, then why did you reinvent it?

And so, like, when we talk about like retro, we have a Caesar salad on our menu.

And I just posted this on my IG the other day.

It was like, Caesar salad was created almost a hundred years ago in Tijuana, Mexico.

And everyone thinks about Caesar salad.

They're like, that's Italian food.

Like, it was created in Mexico.

I thought that was Italian.

And so we, we, at retro, we're adding a little bag of Parmesan Reggiano churros to sort of bring those two dishes together or those two cultures together in the same dish and remind people like there is history behind the food you're eating.

There is a story behind it.

And so like a lot of the food we're cooking now, we're trying to build the dishes off of a foundation so that we can tell those stories our way.

And so, I mean, for this project that we're doing here in Vegas and the fact that that's the reason why we're sitting here is a couple of your boys came in the other night and had it.

Like, that's what we want to happen.

We want people to stumble in there and be like, wait what is this oh wow this is great this is and and have fun and be engaged in how we sort of flip the space how we flip the menu and how we're telling our story right now yeah

he uh he cooked uh fried chicken and cornflakes really and i i was like wow i've never had that before but it makes sense because you think about cereal has sugar in it and i'm trying to promote sugar right now but like right for we used to make this cold fried chicken sandwich and like when you fry chicken that's breaded in cornflakes and then you you let it sit out and it gets cold that sugar is caramelized now because you fried it so now all of a sudden you get that crunch and like this is what i'm talking about how you know our creative process has shifted from how do we make it obvious that we're being creative to like wait how did they how did they get it to just do that part yeah and that's that's more where our minds are at now That's awesome.

Yeah.

I've heard great things about retro and you guys are partnered with MGM.

How did that partnership happen?

Well, our partnership started back in, well, 2015 is when we got started started the conversation there was a you know a big resort that they were building in um national harbor area which is just in oxen hill just outside of washington dc both michael and i from maryland it was kind of a natural fit they came to us and said hey you know we want to build a steakhouse you know michael and i then came back to them and said wait a minute we want to build a steakhouse like rooms of a house like you're coming over to dinner at the voltagia brothers house and having steak yeah so um they're a lot nicer than any house we ever lived

we were like steakhouse and they're like yeah you guys have the steakhouse.

We're like, no, we want a steak house.

We want a house.

And they were like living room, kitchen, dining room, library, which I don't, I've never had a library before.

It sounded like an important room to have in the house.

Right, right.

And we were like, okay, these, this company gets it.

Like they're going to put the support behind us to like, whatever we can dream up, they'll bring it to life.

And then fast forward to how many years later, we did a couple pop-ups at Bellagio.

We tested some things to see how we would do here in Las Vegas.

And they were like, how about a spot at Mandalay Bay?

And we'll do it as like a residency.

And you guys can sort of be here for as long as this concept should or could be here for.

And so we thought up retro, which was, you know, it's kind of a nod to like back to Brian said earlier.

It was about the ritual of dining, the ritual of sitting down at the dinner table and having all those like sort of conversations around food with our mom.

She made casseroles.

She made mom food.

She made like Frito Pie and stuff like that.

And we were like, how do we sort of go back to that moment when we did first start feeling like what food could make us feel like and why we were doing it and the people we were enjoying it with?

How do we create that vibe?

Your origin.

And that, yeah, exactly.

And so we even found like those white casseroles with the blue flowers, the corningware, like vintage ones from all around the country.

And we told the whole, like, MGM was like, let us help you source stuff.

And then the conversation kept going.

They were like, what about sporks?

What about like little boxes that you could serve?

Like, we wanted to make general snails.

Like we're making S Cargo and the flavor of General Tyl's chicken.

So we're like General So chicken has snails.

I would eat that.

And then we're making like a bowl of

seaweed rice with it.

So everything just sort of like sometimes got inspired by the vessel or the idea.

But the whole experience, every single dish is nostalgic.

And I think that we live in a time now where you have to sort of approach a situation with like inspiration, not intimidation.

So we're like trying to do it.

We're going to take some risks because that's a totally different menu.

Cause most, like you said, we go to most places and it's pretty much the same style.

Like, you know, we order, I mean, I'm ordering salmon and mash everywhere I go and lobster Mac, you know.

But in this, in this instance, it's like a totally different menu.

It's you got to think about what you want or try everything on there.

Well, I mean, we make shells and cheese.

If you want his lobster Mac, like, come get our lobster Thermidor and get our shells and cheese where we hand make all the shells individually.

Wow.

And then we have a cloud of aerated cheese sauce that we make that comes out of a siphon that like sit.

You got to come.

You got to.

deny it.

And you'll deny it, in fact, whether it'd be growing up in childhood, college, whatever, that you haven't had a can of spaghettios, right?

And so, what we've done is we've recreated that, you know, sort of childhood experience that we've had.

And I'm not saying I haven't not had one in a long time, too, because maybe I had one a few weeks ago.

But ours is different.

So we do is make these, yeah, R D, right?

So we make this, you know, giant meatball that we place in the center of it, maybe with, you know, veal pork and really great wagyu beef.

And then at the table, what we do is we make all these O's that we hand make this pasta.

And then we put it in an Arabiata sauce, which is basically Pomodoro with just enriched with brown butter.

And then we pour that table side out of the can.

So you still get kind of that feeling.

But then when you bite into it, it's like, this is the way better version.

But it brings you right back to childhood.

That sounds fire.

How important is food presentation to you guys?

I think with this concept, it was less about, it was more about like the vessels and like the reminders of where the dish came from than like and then ironically enough like brian and i we are the architecture of the food that we do always has like some little nuance some little texture some little surprise on it that like makes it look different yeah like our key lime pie we're making them look like little limes on a plate and we're spraying cocoa butter on the outside that's green and so we've got like three little limes on a plate and then we were like well when you eat key lime pie you eat it at the beach so let's make some sand out of coconut so the key limes are sitting in coconut sand and then it's like coconut sorbet and then we're like what about the meringue part?

But like whipped up egg whites sometimes don't taste good.

So what if we make whipped up yuzu juice and stabilize it with a starch and dehydrate it so that you get the meringue, but it just

disappears on your palette.

You hear this shit.

But we just like,

you know, when you have that

wheel in your brain that's like running like this, and sometimes you have to tell it to just slow down a little bit.

How do you guys turn that off like at home?

Like, who cooks?

You or the wife?

Like, are you guys going to do chefs have to date chefs?

Like,

how does this work?

I mean, we definitely cook differently when we're at home, you know, more like one, two, you know, three ingredient dishes, you know,

more on the simple side, things you want to eat when you're, you know, comfortable at home.

So you guys do turn it off to creative fire.

Yeah, but

just because we save a lot of for the restaurants, you know, back to like the techniques, you know, a lot of the technique early on in our career, we did it because of the, for the technique, you know, going back to that key line pie, that meringue you were just talking about.

We know now how to put together textures and flavors that make sense.

Like we're looking for inspiration, going back, looking at the dish and recreating it.

And yeah, yeah, we can pepper in these things because now we're good at what we do.

You know what I mean?

When it comes to that, I'm not saying, but you know what I mean, you know, and putting the dish together.

And so we're able to use all of those tools we've learned over the last like combined 50 years of experience that we have and make dishes make sense.

At home, sometimes we have to like kind of turn that part away.

How do you guys actually,

you guys even, do you guys ever worry about will this resonate with the consumer?

Like, is this going to be good to them?

How do you guys decipher, Like, is this the play or is this not the play?

Should we just keep it original?

Like, how do you

best question because I think being able to do that part is what made us is it's what makes retro make a lot of sense

because we did ask those questions because we knew who our audience was sort of going to be when we came or who we were going to go after.

And it wasn't just a select group of people.

We wanted to get everybody.

We're like, how do you create a concept that's going to leave no one behind?

Whatever reason you're in Las Vegas, whatever occasion it is, whether you're with your kids or you're a bachelor party, whatever it is, how does this concept,

how do you make it attractive to everyone and accessible to everyone?

And without breaking the bank, too?

It's like...

Maybe we make all these intricate things and we put them together in a way that's like where it's connecting to a dish or something they've had before, but also put it in the middle of the table so everyone can share it.

So you're now not like committing to this one dish.

This is mine.

And everyone just like family style.

That's yeah, it's family style.

But so then we were like, well, the vessels need to like lean into that part of the experience as well.

And so even the plate when you sit down in front of you is a ceramic paper plate looking like the like the old flimsy white paper plate that you would have at a backyard barbecue.

We're like, these are the plates that you eat off of.

And the food's going to hit the middle of the table.

And so we thought, we tried to think about every single thing, but we also turned the space around in two weeks' time.

Yeah.

And the fact that the hotel, I mean, everyone from their creative team to their like techie digital, like, I don't know, all the different departments, but I would say it was all hands on deck, even down to like sourcing the plates.

A lot of it came from dead stock that they took out of service from old hotels in Vegas.

Wow.

I mean, there's, there's a lot of planning leading up to it.

I mean, we started really in March, you know, getting ready for this with, you know, countless meetings, you know, on Zoom and, you know, Teams.

And, you know, that part.

The fun part about that was seeing the enthusiasm of the team.

Like, it was a meeting that everybody wanted to log on to.

You weren't dreading it.

So, every week, there was just like there was something new, there's a new idea.

There was a, you know,

the biggest thing I think that we're worried about was how we're going to take an existing space and transform it and make it ours.

The art team just did an incredible job because everybody knows that iconic wine tower that's there, right?

It's been there for 20 years when it was a former space.

Now, what they've done is they've basically made it into a museum piece.

Like, it's a curated piece of like everything you would find, like, you know, um,

inspiration of, you know, items like, you know, Nintendos and skateboarding and things we kind of grew up with, you know, back in the 80s and the 90s.

And it's so, there's four sides of this thing that, you know, you want to go in and see it and walk all the way around it and take photos of it.

And so

it's just, it was just an incredible transformation.

So yeah, there's a lot of planning.

But then when it, when we hit the ground and the work had to start,

it was two weeks.

It was two weeks.

And we filled all of those hours of every day for sure.

Why do you think a lot of restaurants fail?

I mean, a lot of it is obviously you know with with what's happening with the economy in general now when you think about it you go to the grocery store you see the cost of food has gone up the cost of labor

just for the home cook but now apply that to the restaurant and then add the occupancy costs the labor costs all the other things and you're taking a but you're talking about a business where if you had a 10 margin you're celebrating you're like yeah we put 10 to the bottom line right well now as things get more expensive that 10 turns into five percent turns into zero percent turns into negative percent.

And so all of a sudden, it's like restaurant prices haven't really been able to increase in a way like everything else.

You go to the store and you're like, oh, this steak used to cost $5 a pound.

Now it's $15 a pound.

But if you go to a restaurant and you're like, this dish used to cost $10, now it's $50.

It's like that part of it, people haven't really quite wrapped their heads around yet.

But a lot of it has to do with the fact that like restaurant

restaurants don't necessarily get to increase their prices as fast as everything else without losing their customer base.

But then you talk about real estate.

I mean, that has gone through the roof.

We even noticed that after the pandemic.

We saw real estate just go.

I think a lot of real estate developers and hotels, and I think you look at like MGM right now, they really have the power to keep this industry alive because they have the infrastructure to support people that want to get into this industry.

And I think if you're building a massive office building, What better attraction than have a great restaurant?

Go find a young chef that doesn't have the means or the capital to open their own restaurant and invest in them so that you're investing in your own building with another amenity for the building.

Yeah.

And I think it's like to hit him with rent, hit him with labor, hit him with food, hit him with all the other additional costs.

It's getting harder and harder for restaurants to not only survive, but to do it at a level that people expect you to do it at.

Gotcha.

Yeah, I was upset when Chipotle raised their prices.

But back to that, I mean, I remember cooking in New York in the late 90s, early 2000s, and the price of a three-course menu, like on average, is like $90.

It hasn't changed.

You even go back to New York City right now, pre-fee menus are, you know, you see that more in that market, I think, you know, where it's multi-course set price.

They maybe have increased 10, 20%.

But it's not like it's gone up to $400.

Yeah.

So, you know, but so it's just like the threshold of what the consumer will

absorb.

It's just quite not there for the rate of, you know, our costs going on.

So how do you guys mitigate your losses when it comes to shifts and economic times?

I think you have to listen to your customer base and you have to react.

People are always like, well, do you read Yelp or do you read these things?

Do you read these platforms where people are talking about you?

You shouldn't read it because you'll get upset.

But I think you have to because you have to look for consistencies in the threads.

And if you start to see things that are repeated, you have a responsibility to react to that and correct that.

So you actually read the Yelp.

I do it to look for those consistencies.

If somebody's like, the mashed potatoes are are too salty over and over again then it's my it's my job to go taste the mashed potatoes and talk to the person in charge of that and say hey we got to dial back the salt wow 12 people have said that the mashed potatoes are salty and I think that you have to you have to put your customer base in front of your own ego and you have to listen to that I wonder how many business owners actually do that especially chefs that's like that removes you're removing the ego completely and getting straight down to appeasing a consumer like because back in the days like a server would bring a dish back to the kitchen and be like, Jesus didn't like this.

And the chef, some angry, you know, person's back there and be like, f them, they don't know what they're talking about.

But like, if it happens four or five times with the same dish, then maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

And you have to be able to ask yourself that question.

Wow.

Have you guys ever gotten a one-star review?

I think I've gotten like a, I wish I could, one star is the least amount I can give.

I wish I could give zero.

You know how far away I had to park?

And I'm like, we had ballet.

We had it right out front.

You didn't want to spend the $9.

And that was like in my first restaurant in LA, we would get some of the wildest stuff.

I wish I could give a zero.

Yeah.

I'm sorry for that.

What was it like battling on Iron Chef and tournament champions?

I mean, all that stuff that we do, because we do a lot of food competition.

I mean, Brian and I did Top Chef.

Iron Chef.

We had our own show together, Battle of the Brothers.

Right now I'm filming a show with Bobby Flay called Triple Threat.

The competition part, what's interesting about it is it keeps us fresh.

You were asking about the creative process.

In those environments, it's almost like muscle memory.

So when we do these food competitions, it's not like, this is my moment.

It's more like, this is training my brain to be creative on the fly so that I can bring that back to my restaurants and my business.

So it's almost like, it's like exercising.

Okay.

And so we do this not because like, I want to be on TV.

It's more like, all right, this is a different discipline that we can learn that we can then take back to work and apply to what our real job is which is being chefs in our restaurants yeah i actually watch uh one of the um uh shows and you don't play like you watch your business for real i'm like wow this is different back back well you're also working under a clock too so you have to you know obviously get really great with like timing you know a dish and cooking and techniques and so that is very relevant in our world because then it applies to going back to the kitchen and realizing what we can do with our team and how we can build a dish and make it executable for service.

So there's just so many cues that we could take from the experience we have in competing.

And then also just like knowing that you're going to be judged instantaneously and you're getting that feedback like, oh, could you use a little bit more acid, a little bit more solid?

Like, no, okay, I agree.

And then you continue to now like hone your skills and your palate to make sure that you're appeasing.

you know, those judges and those people who are basically picking apart your food.

But in our restaurants, I mean, the good thing about our relationship and how we work as partners is that

there's definitely a lot of honesty between the two of us when we're putting up a dish in front of each other.

You know, when we're doing it with our team, our management team, or, you know, even cooks in our kitchen and we're like, hey, you know, what do you guys think?

A lot of times it's a little bit biased.

You know, they're not going to like pick apart a dish for somebody you're kind of working for, right?

You know what I mean?

Like it's, it's harder to get that honesty.

You have to like really extract it from them.

Even though we're very involved with our team, we want them to have a voice.

Sometimes you're just not confident confident enough to raise our hand, right?

Yeah.

There's no bullshit here.

You know what I mean?

Like when we're talking about a dish, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And so that makes it faster for us to get dishes to the finale.

You know what I mean?

Like where we know it's good enough to hit the menu.

What's the time limit?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What is the time limit?

Like if I go there to the restaurant, like what's the, how fast should my dish be out like what do you guys we always try to get the food out?

Well, the thing about this particular concept at retro, it's like we want the food to always be hitting the table.

So we're not coursing it out where it's like, if you order a dish and you order a dish, you're both getting served.

We don't want them to hit at the same time because we want you guys to be like, oh, I was going to get that.

Okay.

And we're sharing this now.

And so

every five to six minutes, like something else should be coming out or you should never be sitting without something in front of you.

And so the plan was to always have food on the table.

And that's, you know, it's kind of like a good metaphor for life.

Like always, you know, always have food.

You got to have food on the table.

And so

we really like thought about it at that level.

But, you know, and even back to the competition stuff and all the TVs, I mean, they're all just extra full-time jobs that we keep adding to the roster.

Like, some of the dishes for this restaurant were conceived at 2 a.m.

in the kitchen when no one else was around.

Like, the team would, we would be the first ones in and the last ones out.

And that's kind of been our

schedule.

Like, that's in every job that we've had.

It's like, you don't leave until the job is done.

And the benefit of that style of service and a way that we handle the flow of food going to the table enables us to finish a dish like right at the moment and send it to the table when it's at, you know, its perfect texture.

You know,

the temperatures of the dish are exactly where we want them to be.

You know, we're serving a tuna dish.

It's a ceviche right now that has a coconut ice.

It has a flavors of

Tom Kai soup.

And so we freeze that coconut ice like at the moment using liquid nitrogen.

And we don't want that waiting on another dish.

You know, it'd hit the table.

We want that dish going out where the texture in it.

Plus we created that dish at like 2 o'clock in the morning.

Dead ass about to get a good fistbite.

We were in the kitchen like, we got to make a tuna dish right now.

And we were like, all right.

And so

we went and grabbed a bunch of stuff and we just stopped talking to each other.

And like an hour later, this dish was born and we were like, huh, this is one of the best dishes on the menu.

And we've been thinking about this menu for like three months.

And we just did this right before we got into like, I mean, it was heated because we're like, we'll challenge each other in the moment.

I'll be like, all right, we're making a tuna dish.

What do you have?

He's like, well, what about this?

And like, if our brains are going in two different directions, then we got to figure out how to find that intersection.

Well, how do you find that intersection?

Is it created both?

Yeah.

What do you

it can happen in many different ways?

You know, like.

We were working on an octopus dish the very next morning.

We got down there in the kitchen before everybody else, even though we're last, you know, night before, what, 2.30, 3 in the morning, back down to 8:30 again, and we're like, We have to finish this octopus dish because we're going in a completely different direction than the original, and then we had to stop and put the brakes on that for a lot of reasons.

And you know, we just kind of just dug our heels in and just like went for it.

That one, I think, was a little bit more collaborative.

You know, you know, that kind of anxiety where you feel it going through your veins and your fingertips, yeah.

And when you don't quite finish what you wanted to get done, and you have to go to bed, right, and you can't sleep, right?

And you don't figure out the plan,

then you're not going to be sleeping for days and so it's almost like your body's telling you like yo figure this dish out or figure out this fix this problem so you can sleep through the night wow and it becomes like that you know sciences bro there's the science of it yeah

yeah and ironically the last dish that we completed to finish the menu is probably one of our top selling dishes which is a s octopus dish that we did right now oh flatten octopus with uh an ioli made with squid ink and

a saffron vinegar with lots of fennel.

It looks angry though.

It looks like you can see the fight that we got into on the plate when you see it because it's like this black squid ink and this chart piece of octopus and like this little bit of color on top from this like saffron pickled fennel.

And it's like, all right, they have a little bit of brightness left, but then you taste it and you're like.

Okay, I get it.

And what makes it retro is this is inspiration from Paul Perdome who created blackening spice back in the 90s or 80s and 90s.

And so, you know, that process of cooking, we applied octopus, which is very rare.

Like, I don't think we've ever seen a blackened octopus, you know, done in the way that we're doing it.

But yet, all the familiarity of the flavors, when you bite into it, are there from the original, you know, but it's just done in a completely different way.

And yes, there was you could see the tension in that dish, you know, because it came together because of the way it's presented.

Sometimes you just got a color outside the line.

What's like the oddest,

I would say, animal or dish you guys never like had to put together was just like, how do we even like from like either the ocean or land or what I used to have this show I used to travel around the world to conflict zones and like bring two opposing sides together around the dinner table people that had war with each other so I went to like Rwanda Egypt Israel Sri Lanka Cambodia Sarajevo all these different places when I was in I think it was Cambodia

There was this woman on the side of the road selling pig parts, but like this little boiling cauldron of pig parts and she was like

First the eyeball.

So I ate that and the juice like squirrel in my mouth.

I was having like a moment.

And then it was like,

and then it was like pig roof of mouth is what she called it.

So naturally, you take your tongue and lick the roof of your mouth.

Imagine someone handing that to you and being like, try this.

And you put it in your mouth.

And you just think about that part of the animal because the pig roof of, there was no other name for it.

It was pig roof of mouth.

So that was, I think, the weirdest.

That was the weirdest thing that I'd ever eaten was pig roof of mouth.

Oh, tarantulas, too.

I ate.

You wait, tarantulas?

Yeah, yeah.

Not me.

Never again.

Never again.

You haven't eaten anything crazy?

No, I mean, I've in Copenhagen, I had a dish that was

a couple different dishes.

I mean, one was lamb eyeballs, very done in the very same way, but different

chicklet of eyeball juice.

Yeah, and what they did was, though, they served a pair of glasses.

So they were like the two eyes.

So the glasses are there.

So you're staring at these two fried eyeballs, and you had to, you know, obviously pop them in her mouth.

Live ants have eaten eaten.

Live ants.

Yeah, live ants, but actually, it tastes have the flavor of lemongrass, which is pretty incredible.

Which is why we're serving pot roast at retro.

Exactly.

Good pot roast and pasta.

Yeah, so ant eaters apparently don't like the flavor of lemongrass.

That's why the ants have

a defense mechanism, but they're really good.

They're tasty.

Wow.

Just make sure you get in your mouth.

I could talk to you guys for hours.

We got to wrap up.

It's been a pleasure.

Any closing thoughts?

Come to retro.

I mean, we ended up here because, you know, one of your homies came to the restaurant and put this together.

And I think that that's the story that we hope this restaurant helps us tell.

And you guys should pull up.

Like, that's it.

He said it was a top five meal all time.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you said they got 60% of the things that were on him, and you tried everything on Aries.

That's fine.

I just think Las Vegas is

the most exciting food city there is right now, just because of the resources that we have here to do things the right way.

And I think that there's going to be a lot more restaurants coming to Las Vegas.

I think it'll never stop here.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

People here keep these restaurants going, and we appreciate that so much.

I'm cool with that.

I live here, so

go all in.

Guys, can follow me on Instagram at TheCreator.

Sean Kelly, digital social hour.

Thanks for tuning in, guys.

See you next week.

Peace.