Join host Greg Boulos on The Boulos Beat as he interviews Chef David Turin, a distinguished culinary expert based in Maine, who boasts over 43 years of experience in the industry. Chef Turin has successfully owned and operated several esteemed restaurants, including David's Monument Square, David's Opus 10, and David's 388. David’s exceptional contributions to the culinary world were recognized in 2012 when he was named Chef of the Year and inducted into the Honorable Order of the Golden Toke. During the interview, Chef Turin shares his remarkable journey, beginning with his education at Cornell University and his first job in the Virgin Islands. He candidly discusses the myriad challenges associated with running restaurants, emphasizing the critical importance of financial planning, treating employees with respect, and maintaining consistency in recipes. Chef Turin also touched upon his personal experiences with anger management and highlighted his appearance on the Food Network's "Guy's Grocery Games," offering a glimpse into the dynamic and often demanding nature of the culinary profession.
Join host Greg Boulos on The Boulos Beat as he interviews Chef David Turin, a distinguished culinary expert based in Maine, who boasts over 43 years of experience in the industry. Chef Turin has successfully owned and operated several esteemed restaurants, including David's Monument Square, David's Opus 10, and David's 388. David’s exceptional contributions to the culinary world were recognized in 2012 when he was named Chef of the Year and inducted into the Honorable Order of the Golden Toke.
During the interview, Chef Turin shares his remarkable journey, beginning with his education at Cornell University and his first job in the Virgin Islands. He candidly discusses the myriad challenges associated with running restaurants, emphasizing the critical importance of financial planning, treating employees with respect, and maintaining consistency in recipes.
Chef Turin also touched upon his personal experiences with anger management and highlighted his appearance on the Food Network's "Guy's Grocery Games," offering a glimpse into the dynamic and often demanding nature of the culinary profession.
MSD 25-0082 Chef David Turin
Sun, May 04, 2025 8:35PM • 1:16:42
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Chef David Turin, Maine restaurant scene, Cornell culinary school, Milton Academy, Virgin Islands, first restaurant, emergency fund, COVID impact, gift cards, alcohol to-go, restaurant challenges, labor costs, food quality, anger management, Food Network., Culinary school, financial decisions, emotional involvement, menu changes, special events, restaurant week, customer preferences, business mistakes, cooking trends, cookbook reading, book writing, career advice, industry passion, restaurant success, personal growth.
SPEAKERS
Greg Boulos, Speaker 1, David Turin
Greg Boulos 00:00
Greg,
Greg Boulos 00:01
I'd like to welcome our listeners to The Boulos Beat podcast. I'm your host. Greg bolas, the Boulos company is northern New England's largest commercial real estate services firm with offices in Portland, Maine as well as Manchester and Portsmouth New Hampshire. We've been selling and leasing real estate in Maine and New Hampshire since 1975
Greg Boulos 00:19
This podcast is designed to provide insight into Maine's leaders, its movers and shakers. And speaking of leaders, I'd like to welcome Chef David Turan. For more than 43 years, David Turan has been cooking up a storm, using his creativity and culinary skills to please the palates of locals and tourists alike, as the chef owner of David's Monument Square and David's Opus 10 in Portland, and David's 388 in South Portland. He has become an iconic fixture in Maine's vibrant and ever expanding restaurant scene. David was named chef of the Year by the Main Restaurant Association in 2012 and garnered 4.5 star reviews from the main Sunday telegram in 2016 he was inducted into the honorable Order of the Golden Toke. This is an organization that is limited to 100 American chefs. Chefs are recognized for their contributions to their community, rather than the status of the establishments or their culinary achievements. The members are an affluent group of people who have spent a lot of energy teaching chefs, promoting culinary arts and building community. David was also voted Portland's best chef in 2019 and has won the main restaurant week's spirit quest event six times. David has owned and operated his own restaurants since 1983 although there have been many famous and well known customers who have dined at David's restaurants, one in particular stands out when he cooked for Barbara Bucha 90th birthday dinner. David's partner is Christy Bomba. David has six children, Ashley, Austin Kyle, Josh Dustin and Emily, plus five grandchildren. David is an avid surfer, and started surf camp for young children and then later adult surf camp for the older crowd. David's children now run the surf camp. Welcome to bowl of speed podcast, David, David, thanks for being our guests. It's good to be here. When did you first decide you wanted to become a chef?
David Turin 02:11
You know, I this is a family issue of hot contention, because I was about 13, and I was very adamant that I decided I was going to be a chef. I can't tell you why. I don't know what jumped in there, but my dad was a nuclear physicist. He was not a fan of this idea, so I'm sure he wasn't,
Greg Boulos 02:31
yeah, but it seems to have worked out okay for
David Turin 02:33
you. You know, surprisingly, yeah, David,
Greg Boulos 02:36
you graduated from Cornell culinary school. It's a very well known and prestigious college. However, your road to Cornell was not smooth. Tell us about Milton Academy and how you ultimately ended up at Cornell well, so
David Turin 02:50
yeah, that it's a fun story, because I went to Milton Academy well, so Cornell is actually a Cornell hospitality school, and they, at that time, they included Culinary Arts in the program, which they don't anymore, but I was after my dad died. My mom moved to southeast so we're we moved up to Massachusetts, and she was a school teacher, so she got a job at a very prestigious high school that I'd never heard of, called Milton Academy. And never would have gone there, except for my mom. But I ended up repeating my junior year. My dad had died during my junior year, and so they said, All right, you're gonna repeat your junior year, and then you can go two years here. So I went to Milton Academy, and I had the distinct honor of being the only kid in the graduating class to not get into college. And so I had it in my head that I was gonna go to Cornell. So I applied to exactly one school, got rejected from exactly one school, and I was, you know, out of my ass and so. And my mother, being who she was, was very clear about it, you know, I'd been living with her and whatnot. And she said, Well, you know, you didn't get into school, so better get a job and find an apartment. I'm like, What do you mean? Mom's like, well, not going to school. You're not on my dime anymore. So how would you go? So I ended up getting an apartment in Mattapan mass, which is sort of on the other side of the tracks from Milton, in a big way. And I rented a room. And people will love this. The weekly room rental rate was 20 bucks. And I lived in this woman's house named Frans, who was like 85 years old, and she was a lose ears cosmetic salesperson. I know, I think it's like one of these pyramid kind of programs. And so she was so anyway, so she was kind of like a grandmother to me, took care of me, and I got my first restaurant job, and I just was working, and I just kept pursuing, trying to I volunteered my time going into the I was a busboy in a dishwasher, but I go in with a chef in the in the kitchen at this first place I've been working on he showed me how to cook and I realizing I've got to do something. So I enroll at Fisher Junior College in Boston, and go to Fisher junior college, and I. Keep reapplying to Cornell. I go up there three times, and I go to the school, and I don't think you could do this now. I just walk in and say, I want to be interviewed, and I think I was just a big enough pain in the ass. I wouldn't go away. And so eventually they accepted me as a transfer student. I got a year's credit from Fisher junior college, and so I graduated from Cornell in three years. Graduated in 1980
Greg Boulos 05:22
and your first job in the culinary field, it was working in the Virgin
David Turin 05:25
Islands. No, actually, well, yes, my first job that I was supposed to get was supposed to be in the Mediterranean, and I so I got this job. It was a family friend who had retired from the music business. He was a classical conductor and he was a sailor, and so he had this boat being built in in Marseille, France, and he was going to start a Charter Business in the Mediterranean. And then the idea being that he would then take the Virgin Islands. Anyway, I get to Marseille, and I show up at the boatyard, and I'm gonna get on this boat, which is where I'm supposed to meet the guy. And I get there, and the owner of the boat yard is like, well, you can see Mr. Fournier ran out of money, and you can see the boat there is not finished. So you go now. What do you mean? I go now. You go now. And that was it. And so I'm stranded in France, too proud to call my mother for, you know, like, I don't have enough money to get home. I had enough money in a sea bag to get there, and my knife and my knife kit, of course, because I was gonna be the chef on this boat. And so I sort of wandered around, didn't get a job in but I ended up getting a job, which started in the Virgin Islands, and I ended up being a cook on a charter boat. And then I got my captain's paper. And so I did that for three and a half years. So four seasons, I think,
Greg Boulos 06:44
then you came back to the United States, and you opened a restaurant in Plymouth, mass, right,
David Turin 06:48
yeah, North Plymouth, Massachusetts. You were 25 years old, 25 and, well, I had, I had a job. I worked at a restaurant called Cafe Budapest, and then I got my first head chef's job at this place called the crane Brook tea room. I think my job at the cafe Budapest didn't last very long, like probably a month, and then I got this other job, and I was there for a year, and I opened my own restaurant in North Plymouth mass and I it's it was very fortunate. So I saved every dollar I was ever paid when I was on the Virgin Islands. And if you go back to that time in the 80s, a Fidelity cash fund was earning about 22% interest or something like that. So I threw my money in there. I remember that I had, like, I think I had like, $60,000 or something like that in cash. And I was like, All right, so I bought this building in North Plymouth mass he actually purchased the bill. Yeah, I bought the bill. He's only, only building I've ever owned. So 12 restaurants later, I'd never owned real estate, except for that first place. And it's funny, I bought the building. Did every bit of build out, renovation, everything that needed to be done, liquor in the in the liquor room, wine and the wine cellar. $125,000 amazing. I own the building. What could what could you, you know, you're an expert on this. What could I own and build out and start for $25,000 I mean, maybe a lemonade stand now, or a dog house? Yeah, dogs. Yeah, exactly. Anyway. So yeah, did you have partners? Equity Partners? So, no, my, my, my first wife was, was from a fairly well to do family, and so she sort of supported me, I would say, through that first thing. I mean, I the restaurant made money. But, I mean, I think, I think we did $325,000 a year in revenue. Something was very small. I had 44 seats, and the restaurant did ultimately stand up on its own. But I invested the money, and she invested a little money in that first restaurant. And then, you know, off we went. Do you still own the building? No, no. I sold that in 1988 I think something like that. I own that restaurant for five and a half years. And what kind of restaurant was it? It was a French restaurant called Sante, as in, like a voter Santa, you raise your glasses and cheer and at that time, you could go to any hotel concierge in any city in America and ask them what the best restaurant in the city is, and they would have told you a French restaurant. And I mean, so now, I mean, it's last time you get in a French restaurant. It's pretty maybe in France, but there's a few around, but it not like that. And so naturally I thought, Oh well, I'm gonna open a French restaurant. I had spent that summer in France, you know, trying to find a job, which didn't work out. And I knew, like, I don't know, probably 25 words in French. It was very, very fluent. And, you know,
Greg Boulos 09:30
and you said you've owned 12 restaurants. Well, I've had
David Turin 09:33
12 entities, individual locations. I think I've had nine locations. And so the last one I opened was David's Opus 10, which is, as you know, you've been in there. It's a it's an entity with inside it's inside David. So it's its own thing. And so it's marketed as a separate restaurant, but it's not its own, its own brick and mortar. So
Greg Boulos 09:57
the restaurant you have now, as you just. Mentioned is David's Monument Square, David's Opus 10, which is also Monument Square, and then David's 388, restaurant in South Portland, yeah, which I affectionately refer to
David Turin 10:10
as little DAVID That's right up the street from your house. It is
Greg Boulos 10:12
great restaurant, since this is a real estate podcast, tell us what you look for when picking a location for a restaurant? Well, I
David Turin 10:21
have to say that the exception of owning my first restaurant, where I bought real estate a completely emotional decision, which is, by the way, a terrible way to do a deal. You probably know this. It was all, all GART, all gut, no, no head. And I literally was in the street, in the in a appliance store across the street from that building, which was a rundown candy store, and I decided that it had for sale sign on. And I decided, while I was buying appliances, that I was going to buy that building. And I literally walked out of the building, went into a phone booth that was right across the street from the restaurant back when they had phone booths, and I called my wife on the on the phone, and I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna buy this restaurant. She's like, are you not? You know, anyway, so that's not the right way to do it. So I did that once, but my angle has been really for the rest of the restaurants, except for one, was to take over something else that had gone out of business, or it was failing another restaurant, yeah, another restaurant. And so I, I had the, I mean, I guess looking back, I don't know that it was ever a formal business model for me, but I would recommend it to anyone a place that's there, somebody has already put in the effort of doing the build out, and they've gotten the permit. So it's already been permitted. Maybe they've already had a liquor license, and all these hurdles that can be time consuming and expensive have been handled, and now for whatever reason, either they've I've taken over only restaurants that have failed. I've never taken I've never bought a restaurant that was existing, that was successful. And so you walk into a place that was that was failure for any number of reasons. And there are plenty of ways to fail in the restaurant business, like anything. And I took over and started my own concept and that's worked for me really well. So I've done that 10 times. So
Greg Boulos 12:14
I remember Monument Square Davis. Monument Square that used to be a Burger King. Yeah, yeah. He went from Burger King to David.
David Turin 12:21
You know, funny story. This is absolutely true. We took that space over, totally did it over, and the footprint of the space was still fundamentally the same, where the you know, the county that you would step up to is still exactly where it was. And Burger King, by the way, did a magnificent job of doing the infrastructure that building the exhaust hood, the tile floors on the stuff, and we still have that. So it's like, 40 years old. We've been there since 1998 and the first customer that walked in there, you know, we've got new signs, and, you know, neon light out front that says Dave is with this fancy new logo, and, you know, decals on the window. And she walks right up the counter and tries to order a whopper. I'm like, You got kidding me? This can't be, yeah, that's a true story. Anyway. It's like, No, we it's actually table service. We're not Burger King anymore anyway, but it works
Greg Boulos 13:11
in little Davis in South Florida. What was there before that
David Turin 13:15
was Barbara's kitchen, and that's Barbara had a her restaurant. I think it sat 14 or 16 people, and there was a wall, if you walk in there, now you can see from the front of the building all the way back. And that building is that space is 52 feet long and 14 feet six inches wide. And I can tell you that because I measured it and I built, I built everything in there myself, but she had a wall about two thirds of the way to the front, and that's where she had seating. And then everything else was a prep kitchen. And then she had a kitchen in the basement, because her business was really catering. And sadly for her, she was a she was a retired history teacher, I think, who decided to get in the catering business. And sadly, she got to get very ill. And so her partner actually reached out to me to say, Hey, would you be interested in taking over this space? And I bought it from them for, you know, not much money. And my landlord was Santo DiPietro.
Speaker 1 14:17
If you ever talked to Santo, you know, he talked like that says, David, I'm
David Turin 14:22
not going to do anything for you, but the rent is cheap, you know, true. I think my rent when I went in there was like, because the Petros are located right across the street, yeah, Sam, his son, Sam, is my landlord. Now. They're great family, great family, and good, uh, good people to do business with. But, I mean, I think my rent when I moved in there was like 550 bucks a month and
Greg Boulos 14:40
didn't you expand into this? Yeah, that was when I was a kid. That was a barber shop. Did you have your
David Turin 14:46
hair cut there? Oh, yeah, all the time. Yeah, it's funny. So there was a barber shop, which was like an additional 200 square feet, I think, something like that. It's like, it's 16 feet wide by 18 feet long, or something like that. And when the barber was. You know, sadly, he, I think he, he put down his scissors and died after cutting his last haircut, which is, you know, what he wanted to do. And I had asked Sam before if I could have an option on that space. You know, me, though I had, I had a real estate option once. Greg was a big deal anyway, but he offered it to me. And so I took over the space. And I want to say that was maybe two years into owning that. And I think we're, I think we're, I think we opened there 18 years ago now, or coming up in 18 years time, it
Greg Boulos 15:27
goes by so fast. Yeah, you know, with COVID was a big deal a few years ago. How did you survive, adapt and adjust during the COVID period? Well,
David Turin 15:36
so COVID was extremely tough on my industry, I have to say. And I recall when we shut down thinking, Oh, this is going to be a couple of weeks, you know. And I gave away the perishable food to our staff. And then after it was a couple of weeks, I'm like, Well, you guys want to come back and take the, you know, I'd kept the cream and the butter and the eggs, you know, because they had the last three weeks, whatever. And then came back and I gave away the cream, the butter, the cheese, you know, all that stuff. And then a couple more weeks went, and then I was like, you know, the stuff that's in our freezers. We don't have a lot of freezers, but, you know, clean down. I thought, I thought we were going to be done. But what was interesting is, when I was on that middle Street location, when I first opened in Maine, we had a disaster happen. We had a plumbing problem, and it shut us down. And was in November, and I, I like to tell the story like I was the captain of the Titanic, and I'm the only one in the whole ship that realizes that I just hit this iceberg and we are going down. So it was a very seasonal location, and we'd been there about, I don't know, five and a half years, I think at that point, and every winter, it was just a terrible struggle. But I had gotten in the habit of putting a little bit of money aside in the busy season, so I had, like, maybe $20,000 in the bank, and we have this plumbing disaster. We're shut down for two weeks, and the landlord's fighting with the city, and I'm fighting with the landlord, and then I'm fighting with the city, and I'm fighting with everybody, no one, no one wants to take responsibility for it. A pipe collapsed. Our main drain line collapsed out in the street, and I ended up having to pay to get it fixed and endure being shut down. And I spent all my winter money, so I knew that I was out of luck. Anyway, all of those things happened. I ended up leaving that building, and I had a big disagreement about that with the landlords there. And so I left, and we moved up to Monument Square. And so the thing that I learned in that though, which relates to your question about COVID, is that this idea, this mythical idea of having an emergency fund. It's a really good idea. So after we survived that, which we literally survived by the skin of our teeth, I started putting away money every single week into a separate account, and it was as little as 50 bucks and as much as 1500 or 2000 bucks. And every I did it religiously, every week, every single week with my payroll money, I just put it aside. And so by the time we got to COVID, I had like $750,000 in there. Incredible. That's a lot of money, I mean, and I not being an investment guy, it's just not my I don't have a gut for risk. And so I basically had the, this is really dumb. If I invested the money, would have a lot more. But I didn't just sitting there in cash, and that's what helped us get through. So we had an emergency fund. I was able to keep people employed for the most part, when we were when we were found to be able to reopen, and then we, you know, we did, and that saved my ass. So that should
Greg Boulos 18:36
have something like $45,000 worth of gift cards purchased. Oh
David Turin 18:41
yeah, this was actually, this was a shocking thing. So you and I talked about this before, because one of the things that happened, if you recall in COVID non essential businesses, and I put air quotes around that non essential businesses shut down, and so restaurants were deemed to be non essential, and so we were closed. And I have to say that wounded me in a way that I didn't expect. I never really thought about, you know, this is a it's an identity thing, like, well, you know, I'm doing important work, and, you know, I mean, come on, we're feeding people. You told you're not essential, right? Not essential. We're shut down. And I was really wounded. But what happened is so we're shut down, and we started to inch back, and we're starting to do like, a little bit of takeout. And there's actually a really funny thing where I sold a bunch of beer and got in trouble with the state, and I'm because of my stupidity, I actually am responsible for why we now have alcohol to go in the state. And we can talk about that if you want to get that. But we were, we were just kind of bumbling along, and all of a sudden we sell online gift cards, and that was still available on our website. And all of a sudden, these gift cards started to get sold. I never asked anybody to buy them. I thought we were going to go out of business. I didn't think we're going to survive. And all of a sudden. And I'm starting to see and I think over the course of three months, people bought, like, $45,000 worth of gift cards. And I'm saying to my partner, I'm like, This is crazy. Like, how am I going to give this money back to people? And people are like, no idiot, this is they like you. They want you to stay in business. It's they don't expect to get the money back. Maybe, maybe they'll get the gift cards redeem. Maybe they won't. I actually have no idea how many of them were redeemed. I'm sure my accountant could tell me that. But
Greg Boulos 20:23
that was a lot more than you would typically sell even at Christmas. Yeah, I mean,
David Turin 20:29
I mean, this time now, I think we sold, we might have sold $18,000 with the gift cards in December. So to sell $45,000 with the gift cards in, you know, whatever months that was, October, November. Well, I guess, I guess, I guess it was probably, I don't even remember what months, but such a blur, COVID, such a blur to me. But yeah, it was a lot of money. And, you know, I mean, literally, I'm shut down. So it was just flat up cash. And that, combined with my little emergency fund, it got us through. And then, you know, business came roaring back. And so really, the interesting lesson for me was, oh, maybe we're not essential. In the same way an emergency room or heart transplant is essential, but in terms of the way people live their lives, dining and entertainment is essential.
Greg Boulos 21:15
So yeah, it must have been very gratifying. I can't even tell
David Turin 21:19
you yet. There's no words for me to describe that. I mean, it was, I don't know it's like getting a, like getting a, I don't know it'd be like for an actor, you know, winning an Academy Award, while they didn't even know that they had a play, you know, or a movie. I mean, yeah, I just was totally caught off guard.
Greg Boulos 21:37
And earlier, you mentioned that you were responsible, indirectly, for being able to take beverages to go yes.
David Turin 21:43
So we're about, I think we've been shut down about five weeks, and maybe a little less. I don't remember exactly the timeline, but we have a bunch of draft beer in our restaurant in Portland. And draft beer has a shelf life, and people don't really realize that, but beer goes stale. So I'm looking at this, and we've probably got, you know, four or $5,000 worth of beer in our beer cooler. And I'm like, Oh, crap. What are we going to do with this? So without really thinking it through, I'm just like, Oh, all right, we'll sell the beer, and we'll put the money towards the employees, medical insurance, and we put it out there on social media, pre sell all the beer. People were, people were calling up and saying, Look at, I'll take up 20 quarts of beer. You can keep the beer, you know, it's just the same thing as the gift cards. They're just giving us money, and it's, we're gonna do the sale on Saturday, and all the beers pre sold, we're gonna sell it in those plastic quart containers that you get, you know, with a snap on lid. You get, like, potato salad in them at the deli. And I get a call from the State Liquor inspector, and he's like, David, what are you doing? I'm like, Oh, how are you well, we're doing great. He says, What are you doing this weekend? I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm having this beer sale. And he's like, You can't do that. It's against the law. I'm like, What do you mean? He says, David, come on, you know you're not allowed to sell liquor to go and I'm like, oh my god, I never thought about this. I'm like, Well, what am I going to do? And he says, Well, I don't know what you're going to do, but you can't sell the beer. He says, maybe if you call the governor's office, maybe you can sell it, but without some magic pen, you're not selling this beer. And I'm like, crap. So I at that time, I was on the board of hospitality Maine, and we had a lobbyist, Greg Dougal. He probably met Greg Doug over the years. He's retired now, and I'm like, Greg Jesus, I really screwed up. What am I going to do? And he says, Well, I mean, I'll call the governor's office. So he calls the governor's office and explains the thing. And so she decides that, okay, not it wasn't for me specifically, but once she understood the concept that all these restaurants have this inventory that they could sell and maybe hang on, it was like, okay, sure, this is a, you know, this is a Hail Mary man and so, so she signs this thing. And first it was just beer and Governor Mills, yeah, yeah, Governor mills. And very shortly thereafter, she does the same thing for bars. So that's when people are going and, you know, takeout was insane. I mean, my restaurant in South Portland, there were days when we sold $2,000 with the cheeseburgers with, you know, two people in the building, and we were selling these, we got these little, you know, they looked like a pulling spring bottle you could buy online. You know, the bottle would seal. And then the state came out with some regulations. You had to put a label on and say what was in it, and the alcohol level and all that stuff. And so, you know, so we were selling beer, selling cocktails to go, and the take up business kept us afloat. And then now, as you probably know, we have alcohol to go as a state law sort of permanent.
Greg Boulos 24:41
I didn't know was still out. Yeah, I mean, I
David Turin 24:44
had nothing to do with that after the fact. But my naive stupidity, really, I just bumbled into starting that ballroom like, which is very funny. Could you
Greg Boulos 24:57
have structured it so? You know, you buy. A burger and fries and you get a free beer? You know, I don't
David Turin 25:02
know the answer to that. That's a good question. You can't, you can't give away alcohol in a licensed establishment. So I think, for example, if you're a, you're an art gallery, and you invite people in, you can give away wine, but you can't sell it. But if you're licensed to sell stuff. I don't think you can give it away, so I don't know. I I'm sure, I'm sure, after this airs, I'll get a call from the State Liquor department telling me that I've got the
Greg Boulos 25:28
wrong answer. Well, but you know, when the next pandemic comes, you'll be all set. You know what to do? Yeah? There you
David Turin 25:33
go, exactly. I'll know how to break the rules without getting in trouble. I just call the governor. Yeah?
Greg Boulos 25:37
So present day, post COVID, yeah, what are say, two or three top challenges for restaurants right now?
David Turin 25:46
You know it is. If you told me when I opened in 1983 that the difficulty in the business would be all the other things other than food and service, I would have laughed. I'm like, no, no. It's all about food and service. It's gotten to be a very, very difficult climate restaurants. Now, one of the things that really changed when I opened my first restaurant, the idea of an open kitchen was absurd. Chefs were relegated to being, you know, masked men in the back, you know, and you didn't want to see them. Now, we have open kitchens. We have Food Network TV and, you know, I mean, Jose Andreas was on the cover of Time Magazine as the man of the year last year, right? This is, it's unbelievable to me. So food and beverage has become highly politicized. We're kind of a dog whistle for minimum wage and employment issues and immigration and just, I mean, you know, and again, Jose Andreas with, you know, people in, in, in the Gaza, you know, he had workers in the world, food kitchen, feeding people, and they got killed. You know, it's like, so we our biggest challenges are how to stay in business without having a $35 cheeseburger. Everything has gone up. It's just gotten more and more and more expensive. And I'll just to put it in perspective. When I opened my first restaurant in 1983 within a year, we had every single employee on full 100% employer paid medical insurance.
Greg Boulos 27:27
Unusual for the restaurant business, right? Well, it's unheard
David Turin 27:31
of now, and yeah, but at that time, you know? I mean, I think probably everybody did. But you know how much it costs per person to give them full insurance, like 35 bucks. I mean, you think about that. There was no deductible, there was no co insurance. The industry hadn't invented these concepts with regard to medical so you walk into a doctor's office, you'd say your name, whatever. You probably had a little paper card. And you know anything now that insurance is $600 and, I mean, you know, you know the insurance for old guys like us, it's like, you know, if you know, if you go on Medicare, for God's sake, cost you 900 bucks a month. So those kind of issues have just gone up. And so you look at, if I sold a cheeseburger in 1983 it was maybe five $6 now a cheeseburger in Portland is 20 or 25 I mean, honestly, someone just showed me what a cheeseburger at Sunday river costs now, and it's $30 so what's the rate of increase in price? So the burger only went up five times, but the medical insurance went up 500 times. So everything is like that. And so we have more regulation. I'm not I'm not really against regulation. I kind of believe that government has a place in a lot of this stuff. But sometimes it gets a little wacky. I mean, we went through a big fight a couple of years ago that somebody in Maine here decided that every, every restaurant had to have disposable toilet seat covers. You know, like, I don't know, like, it seems like a little bit of a of an overreach. Is that a law? No, it's not. It didn't pass. But there was, I remember talking about Greg Dougal, again, being the lobbyist for the Restaurant Association, and then hospitality Maine. I remember one time he's speaking to our group, because I was on the board, and he says, Do you know how many new laws were introduced in Maine last year? And I'm like, Oh, I don't know, 15, 1800 new laws. I'm like, 1800 new laws. How can anybody keep track of that? So there's a, there's a fair amount of that, but I'm, I'm kind of a government fan. I think government has a really important role in our world, and I don't really trust industry to do what's best for society in the long run. But so that is a that is an issue. Housing is probably the biggest factor we have and poisonous food. And by that, I mean one of the one of the things that happens in our industry is, of course, we're all trying to stay in business, and the margins in restaurants are pretty low. I mean, if a restaurant makes five or 6% on their gross, they're doing. Very well. So you got to do a lot of volume, and as things get more expensive, so labor, the cost of working labor, went up dramatically. And I'm not against that. I think it's wonderful. But the cost of food and the cost of labor are kind of crossing things. I can buy food that's prepared from some food plant somewhere, and not have to spend labor making it, or I can spend a lot of labor making homemade food. And so what's happened is big companies have created foods that no one should ever eat. They are just laced with chemicals and additives and, you know, combination of salt and sugar and all these. I mean, you look at the food labels and it's making America sick and so but, but restaurants are we're serving as a I mean, we're not, but a lot of the industry is serving more and more sort of homogenized food that is essentially a commodity in order to just buy it cheaply enough so they can stay in business, because they're the food's more expensive for them to buy, but the labor to serve it is negligible. And so that's a that's a that's an enemy of real restaurants serving real food, because if you're going to have to employ skilled people to make real food, they have to have certain amount of knowledge and ability, and you have to buy good food to begin with, which is more expensive. I mean, you know, you go to the grocery
Greg Boulos 31:29
store so and I thought you would have said labor was an issue. Well,
David Turin 31:35
labor is an issue in the sense that there are, there are not enough people in our industry to that want to do the work. But I personally haven't experienced that in the same way that a lot of places have. We been very lucky. So my restaurant in Portland is a teaching kitchen, and I've been really, really involved now for, I don't know, a couple of decades in the culinary arts schools, from high school into the junior colleges that have culinary schools. And I've mentored and taught in the schools and had interns and externs, and that's just given us, personally, a pipeline that has helped us sort of solve that problem. So the Culinary Federation, yeah, I'm the president of the Casco Bay culinary chefs Association, which is local affiliate of the American Culinary Federation. So I've been the president of that for seven years, and before that, I was the vice president for a couple years.
Greg Boulos 32:36
And what about pro start? Oh, I'm
David Turin 32:39
so glad you asked about that. So pro start is a high school vocational program, and it was created, I don't exactly know, about 20 years ago, by the National Restaurant Association, and it is taught for juniors and seniors in vocational schools across the country. Pretty much every state has the pro start curriculum taught in their schools. We have 18 vocational schools in Maine that participate, and it's a program that teaches so very different than a home ec class where, you know, people would learn how to, you know, thaw out some frozen peas and take some, you know, tomato soup and turn it into, you know, pizza sauce or something. It's real cooking, real skills, and I've been involved in that as a mentor. And they also have a national contest that happens, and I've been a judge both in the state, regional and national level, for at least 1214, years. So yeah, great program. And
Greg Boulos 33:36
in the past few months, I wanted to go back to the restaurant business. The past few months, the port and press Hell has been running articles about all these restaurant closing. And I'm wondering, is it more than normal, yeah, and it, or is it more seasonal? Because I think most restaurants tend to close in the fall. Because, I mean, if you're going
David Turin 33:57
to close, that's a good that's the best time to do it. It's both though. It's, I have to say, it's very it's concerning to me. Yeah, we had, I don't like, 18 restaurants, I think in October that kind of announced that they were shutting down. And that was a shock to everybody. I don't exactly know how to feel. We always have restaurants closing and opening, and as we spoke about earlier, what my business model has been. I mean, I've been the person who's, in a sense, taken advantage of those closures to take an existing place and open a restaurant. And that's been a successful plan for me. And a lot of that will happen places that will shut down. Although we have seen, in the last couple years, we've seen a lot of restaurants shockingly turn into cannabis related businesses. So you know, you see like, 5551, of my favorite restaurants in Portland for years, and now it's, I don't even know what's called, like, some cannabis store. Not my thing, but it's. Is, I think it's a combination of a couple things. We had a huge upsurge in popularity in restaurants in Portland. Portland was voted as the best restaurant city in America in 2019 I think. And that is a, it's a, I think the reason for that is that for years and years and years, it was very inexpensive to go into the restaurant business. In Maine, you could take over a place, or, you know, there were a lot of restaurants vacant. When I came here in 1992 I took over a place, got a cheap rent deal, and here we are with the most amazing seafood right down the street. And if you drive five miles out of Portland, you're in farmland, and all of a sudden there's all these artisan farmers. And so this collision of Chef restauranteurs who didn't have big investors, who were telling them more and more and more money, and they were just passionate about the craft, opening restaurants for relatively low money in the immediate proximity of amazing seafood and seasonal I mean, pardon me, artisanal farmers, it was great. All these things collide all of a sudden you have great restaurants. Well, then advance that 1520, years instead of, I mean, you can remember this, if you went into a restaurant in Portland, it was like cobbled together old tables and chairs, and the food was great, the service was good, and you were happy. Well, now you need a million dollar build out so the restaurant is stylish enough, and all of a sudden you've got investors, and people are investing a lot of money, and then all of a sudden, the standard cost of occupancy for a restaurant 20 years ago was between five and 6% so that would include any build outs you had, your debt service, or your rent, or whatever you had that cost, and now in Portland, is approaching 15% so that means that instead of that kind of world where a restaurant could survive with busy and busy Fridays and Saturday nights and then, you know, maybe, maybe a smattering of customers, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and, you know, building towards the weekend. Now you've got a scene where if restaurants aren't busy every single day of the week, they can't survive. They've and so a lot of the restaurants had closed. They'd spent a lot of money making a big bet that this thing is going to hit big. They've got investors up the wazoo. Their occupancy cost is 15% and or more if they don't do the business and they just can't make it. So then the seasonal aspect of that is we know that Maine continues to be a seasonal area. Portland is a seasonal business area for ours, for my industry, and I'm losing money if I go through the winter, I'm just going to be deeper in the hole, so I'll pull the plug in October, and that's kind of what
Greg Boulos 37:43
happened. And do you think that will continue
David Turin 37:47
a lot of pressures? I mean, City of Portland is they just keep it's funny, because I used to call myself a progressive. Now I'm just a liberal. I think the progressives in Portland are a little out of touch with reality. And, you know, it's constantly we're going to get rid of the tip credit. We're going to raise the minimum wage. And you know, they just had a hearing this last Monday that I went to and testified at in city council, and they want to have a $20 minimum wage in Portland, which would be the highest minimum wage of any city in the country. And I'm for people getting paid more. We haven't paid minimum wage in my restaurant a long, long time, but they it's if we continue to have the sort of political actions that ask the businesses to do such a heavy lift, I think we'll have more failures, and I hope that the good thing about our political system in Portland Is that the city council has open hearings, so people with all views get to go to the mic and speak. And I think our city council is good at listening to people. I think that there's a moderate area there. We did have a new minimum wage that is set up to be adjusted for inflation every year, and so Portland still has a pretty high minimum wage, but there's a lot of factors like that, and the City of Portland has not been the easiest place to do business with the last, you know, the last decade. So maybe we will have more. No.
Greg Boulos 39:05
Portland's got that reputation across many, many industries.
David Turin 39:09
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I do business in South Portland. And, you know, I like Portland a lot. I'm not trying to speak badly about Portland. I'm not trying to single anyone out, but it is South Portland seems to be a more business friendly environment, although, in Portland's defense, it's just a magnet for a lot of other kinds of problems that South Portland doesn't have to deal with. So it's not really fair to compare the surrounding towns to Portland, because Portland has a I mean, the situation with housing and homelessness in Portland is kind of unique to Portland, and there's good reasons for that. We have a big city infrastructure. You're not going to have that in Falmouth, Yarmouth, Scarborough, South Portland. It's just Cape Elizabeth, yeah. Cape Elizabeth, not a big guy, yeah.
Greg Boulos 39:56
Let's talk about restaurant portions several years. Years ago, I was involved in an international art competition that had a number of judges fly into Portland from all over the world, England, Norway, Canada, etc. I remember taking them out to dinner, to a really nice restaurant, and when the dessert came, I was actually embarrassed, because the portions the size of the desserts were huge. I felt like a cow being fed to get ready for slaughter. What? What is going on with restaurant portions? What? Why is they so big? Or is it is that changing? You don't know what I mean. I
David Turin 40:31
Oh, I know exactly what you mean. And it has changed. It has changed a lot. It's a very slow adjustment. Actually. What's funny is so coming up in 18 years ago, I opened my restaurant in South Portland, and the whole mantra was smaller portion, smaller prices. And we served so that the standard portion of protein in our industry at that time was eight ounces. So if you got a piece of fish on your plate, it probably weighed eight to 10 ounces. A steak would be eight to 12 ounces. Well, when I opened in South Portland, we changed the standard portion size to four ounces, and people were revolted by that idea. I mean, I had pushed back when we first opened, the first five years. I remember I finally put a section on my menu called restaurant classics that were essentially double the portion of what we were serving. And finally, people started to get in. So the idea, I was like, Well, have a smaller portion, have more things to eat, have three or four courses, and don't go away feeling like you're, you know, been raised for slaughter, right? But, yeah, there's something about the main culture, you know, what's, what's the phrase that made me he's a good eater, you know? It's like, yeah, portions are still pretty big. And restaurants that, I mean, do you remember when the standard was you'd go to a restaurant and then you take out, like, a huge takeout bag of your leftovers, because nobody could possibly finish the portion? Well, that still happens somewhat. It's changed a lot. But yeah, I think portions are still generally, I think portions are a little bit big, and if you dine in Europe, I mean, people wonder like, why are the Italians so slim they eat? It's a mystery. They eat less and healthier too. Yeah, and healthier. Well, they don't have, they don't have the same, although it's creeping into European markets as well, the same, the same kind of business oriented commodifying of food, where they're just putting horrible things into food to make it cheaper. They're doing that in other countries, not as much. But, I mean, they have a lot less food related disease in foreign countries than we have here. We allow stuff to happen to food in our country that should not be happening, that are banned in Europe, and we should follow that lead. You've
Greg Boulos 42:46
been in business 43 years, so you've got a good feel for this. What's the biggest mistake most restaurants make, or the ones that don't make it? What do you
David Turin 42:56
Well, the cheeky answer is, and I've given this advice to a lot of people, just sort of off the cuff, don't drink at your own bar. Don't sleep with your bartender.
Greg Boulos 43:15
If you follow, she's really good looking, yes,
David Turin 43:17
or he or whatever. Yes, but, and I joke about that only because we've lost an awful lot of restaurants to people who become prey to alcoholism, and it's real easy to drink at your own bar, and it's not a good look anyway. You're the, you know, the you're the owner of the restaurant, tipping them back at the corner of the bar on the Saturday night and I've seen so many restaurants fail because people end up having relations with somebody with whom they work. So those are honestly, if you took those two things out, 35% more restaurants would survive. But the biggest mistake I ever made was opening a restaurant on emotion. And I actually did it twice, my very first restaurant, and the first time I came to Portland just wanting something so badly where you don't do the numbers. So the biggest advice I have for people is that restaurants don't succeed or fail in the kitchen. They succeed or fail in the office. And I've done a little bit of consulting, well, fair amount, actually, and it's invariably the fact that you know, people call you usually because they're failing financially. That's the number one, like, we're not making it. I've actually had a couple of times my first consulting job I ever did was actually a restaurant in Boston that was too successful for their own good, and they didn't know how to cope with that. But that's a one time only that I've ever been asked to do that. But when you go in, you end up looking at someone's books and you end up saying, what should be the most obvious thing, which is ready for this one? As I said, it's earth shattering. You're spending more money than you're bringing in and people. What do you mean? It's not a complicated concept, but very often, rest. Months by design, they haven't planned out, what's my check average going to be? How much are people going to spend? What is the dumpster going to cost to be emptied? What's my rent? What's my light going to cost? And pro forma, yeah, and honestly, they just skip that step there. It's all emotional. We're going to go in, and they're in it, you know, it's a very often a, you know, a couple of people who are friends or work together, a couple, and they're all excited. You've seen it a million times. I mean, you've sold. How many restaurants have you sold that have, you know, three times? How many places have you sold five times? And it's people get emotional. They don't do the they don't do the work, and then they make a deal that is impossible for them to, you know, I mean, you could, you could tell before they signed on the dotted line that they were going to fail, because it was an impossible plan,
Greg Boulos 45:41
yeah, and that friendship that they had, yeah, that goes away real quick, yeah,
David Turin 45:46
yeah, invariably, yeah. Partners, it seems like there's always somebody that's, you know, that's into watching the money, and somebody that's not, and, you know, crazy stuff.
Greg Boulos 45:56
You know, in real estate, we have a saying in the saying is, partners are for dancing.
David Turin 46:03
Well, I had, I had one partnership ever. I don't think I was a very good partner and not a good dancer. I'm not a bad dancer. Actually, I'm a terrible dancer, anyway. But yeah, yeah, partners are for dancing. Can I borrow that? Absolutely. Okay,
Greg Boulos 46:20
so with multiple locations that you have, David, how do you control the quality and the consistency of what you're doing?
David Turin 46:28
It's really, really boring. We write recipes and then we people follow. Have to follow. Well, yeah, so we honestly, it's the most boring thing. So there are a lot of restaurants that have been enormously successful, and one person knows how to make the thing that they're famous for, or that people go there for, or their recipes change all the time, and people decide, oh, it's a little bit more, a little bit more of this. So the boring thing is, we people say Culinary Arts is very creative, and it is enormously creative, a very small percent of the time, and then the rest of the time it's factory work. And by that, I mean when you're writing a new menu, or you're writing a special it's great. You can brainstorm, which I define as crazy ideas being thrown up there with no judgment, right? You do crazy stuff. Maybe something sticks every once in a while, and then you get a little momentum, you come up with a good idea, but the creative part is really fun. You do it occasionally. And then you, then you write those recipes down. You're like, this is really good. This exact thing is really good. Let's reproduce it over and over and over again. And then you, not only you have to write the recipe Well, which means two things. One is the recipe is good when it's made properly, but the other part is writing a recipe. The actual technical skill of writing a recipe, so it's easy to follow, is very difficult, and a lot of times, if you I don't know if you ever cook from a recipe, you'll get a recipe. The New York Times does a really good job of writing recipes that you can follow, but there are a lot of publications where you read the recipe and it's very confusing, or there's a stranded ingredient, or there's an ingredient listed in the text of the recipe that doesn't exist in the ingredient list, and, you know, things like that. So, so, and then the other part is, it's process. So I think our success is we literally have things that we call station maps and cheat sheets. And a station map is literally, I could take you to my kitchen today and say, Greg, you're going to work this station. And there's an actual schematic diagram of everything that you have to have in your station where it's supposed to go, and in what size, shape, type of container. And so I can take somebody on that station on the first day, I can train them and say, This is your station. This is what you've got to have in your station order. And then there's a cheat sheet on the wall, which isn't really a recipe, it's a order of operation. So it tells you, you know, what thing goes on the sauté pan in what order. And then you're relying on the person's cooking ability to be able to manage through that. But with those things, it gets very standardized. And then, you know, people come in for the meatloaf at my restaurant, which is like a got a cult following, and it's the same meatloaf on the same plate with the same crispy cumin onions and the same candied carrots. And people are like, Yeah, I want that. Yeah.
Greg Boulos 49:16
People like consistency, yeah. Well, it's funny, because
David Turin 49:19
there's a lot of restaurants that are empirically not very good, and I won't name any chain restaurants, but the food in most chain restaurants, frankly, isn't very good, but it's consistently not very good, and it's at the same level. So if you go into that restaurant, you know what you're going to get. And you know, as a chef, it's really hard for me to admit, but there is, there is a lot more to success in a restaurant than having good food. In fact, I think having good food is not the most important thing. I think people respond to a clean, organized, uncluttered space. They like to walk into a place that looks and feels nice, that has you know, that it smells nice, that it has a the lighting is good, that maybe the music is a perfect. Korea to which your mood is going to be and then, if you're greeted nicely, and your server is warm and friendly and maybe looks you in the eye, and then, by the way, your food happens to be good, this is a win. But there's an awful lot of restaurants that have mediocre food, and people go again and again and again because they like the environment. The service is really warm, the environment is cozy. And, you know, there's just so many different things. And you I think you know what I'm talking about. Everybody does,
Greg Boulos 50:31
yeah, do many people ask you for your recipes all the time? And what do you say? Yes,
David Turin 50:34
absolutely, I give them up freely all the time. Oh, really, yeah, we have a, I don't know how many. We probably have 50 recipes on their website. I actually, when we decided to do that 10 years ago, I started with like, 300 and our marketing guy was like, no, no, no, no, no, you're, you're, you're giving out too many. Just cut it down. So I don't even know how many are on there. I haven't actually updated it, but for a long time I would go on, I did the 207 show about 100 times. I still go on there from time to time, do a cooking segment, and then we put the recipes it was on their website, and then we started putting them on our website. And then I realized people are interested, but I worked at a restaurant in Boston called the cafe Budapest. The woman's name who owned it was Edith bond. She was a concentration camp survivor, very, very interesting woman. And she would say, and she's Hungarian, and she would say, darling, I give the recipes to the chefs. They can barely cook them. Why am I worried that someone else is going to make it? You know? So there's a there's as much as I like that recipes are precise and that anyone should be able to make them. The reality is, people, they go to restaurants for so many other reasons, if they come in and they made the meatloaf at home, I had a guy, actually, during Restaurant Week, I had a guy who came in he says, on me, your meatloaf 20 times at home, what was he eating at my restaurant? Meatloaf? Okay?
Greg Boulos 51:55
The David I know, is very calm and even keeled. However, by your own admission, that was not always the case. In fact, you had such a temper you decided to hire an anger management coach. What was that all about? Well, and did you yell at your coach?
David Turin 52:12
You know, I don't know if I it's funny. He was a Scarborough guy. His name was Howard Lehrer, who tragically died during COVID. And I would say that was probably the smartest thing I ever did in my life, to go see him, and he
Greg Boulos 52:25
How long ago was this? Yesterday?
David Turin 52:31
Let's see, I was main chef of the year in 2012 and the first person I thanked when I gave my acceptance speech for getting the award was Howard lair. And so I think I'd seen him, probably started seeing him about three years before that, so probably, oh, 2010 2008 something like that. And so, yeah, I had a terrible temper, and I did a lot of work around that. I'm actually, I still have a temper, but nothing, nothing. I mean, not even a fraction of what I had. And there are a lot of reasons for that. I think the biggest thing I learned personally is that anger is a secondary emotion, so meaning that when you get angry, it's because one of your primary fears or your primary emotions is activated. So fear is one of them. Embarrassment is another one, humiliation. And so I think two factors for me, three factors, really. So I grew up in a time when, you know, if you got in trouble, you got sent to the woodshed, I put air quotes around that, you know, your dad would take off his belt, maybe he'd hit you with it. Maybe he wouldn't. And I got plenty of that. Plenty of that. My mother was also, I mean, I got, I got spanked, you know, beaten with the hairbrush 1000 times, probably. But so part of that, but so I grew up in a family where there's a lot of tempers raging, but also I grew up in an industry where it was totally expected that the Chef de Cuisine was screaming. And I say pretty often, and I'm not really kidding, if a chef's lips were moving, he was screaming. And I grew up in that environment, and so when I first became a chef, I had a couple things. One is my model was a screaming chef. So, okay, I'm going to be a screaming chef. I'm going to get my message across by raising my voice yelling. I was never a violent, like a physically violent person. I wasn't the one who was like, you know, beating people, although I had plenty of pans launched at me when I was younger, you know, by chefs. But so there was that factor, you know, the factor from my home, and then I went into business for myself without, you know, frankly, I had a good education, but I was I opened my first restaurant 15 years before I had any business doing so. And so I was scared to death all the time. And so every time something would go wrong, my brain would admit. Immediately go to failure. And so, you know, I mean, I'm like the, I'm like the mother who has a kid who gets a C on a math grade, and can envision that child under the highway culvert, homeless, you know, and so gets all worked up, you know, you're gonna be a failure, you know, if you don't get a better math grade. So, anyway, and I, oh my gosh, I just, I hated losing my temper. I always felt horrible about it. And afterwards, oh my god. Always I felt guilty. And, you know, I, frankly, was pretty good at apologizing I would. I never had any shame about going to saying, well, like, wow, I was just a tremendous asshole yesterday, and, and I've actually still had to do that from time to time. I had to apologize to a kid about three weeks ago that I yelled at during Restaurant Week. And, you know, it's hard, but it's, it's, it's good to have the knowledge that I had that and keep that. I think it's kind of like, it's kind of like people who have some kind of a chronic disease, though you might never be over it, you can, you can manage it, and I manage it pretty well. Now I don't lose my temper too much, but I know what to do. Now, when I start to have those telltale signs and the physiological signs of anger for me, I get like, a hot behind the neck, and my mouth starts to get dry, and I'm just like, I'll talk to you in 20 minutes, and I just go for a walk, and it works pretty
Greg Boulos 56:23
well. How was the How long did you go to anger management? I think
David Turin 56:27
I saw Howard for about two years. Yeah, probably a couple times a week. I should be able to figure it out, because I saw him in at least two locations. So he moved. I could probably figure out he was in Scarborough, in one place, then he moved to another. I think it's some two places, actually. But, you know, I, I would say anybody that feels like anger or rage is a thing for them. It's such a it's such a freeing thing. When you get to a place where you can feel yourself getting angry and you control it. You can control it. And, you know, take steps. We have positive things to do. I mean, honestly, Howard saved my life. He really did. I mean, I don't know whether or not I would be dead by now. I don't necessarily mean it in that way, but he certainly saved the quality of my life. And so it's great. It's a good thing. I'm not happy that I had that to get over, but I'm, I'm actually pretty proud of myself that I've that I've made so much progress with it. Well, thanks
Greg Boulos 57:22
for sharing that. Yeah, next question is about inventory control. My father worked at a hunting lodge when he was, like, 16 years old, and he always said to me, as when I was a young kid, that the restaurant's profits ended up going out the back door. Oh, well, there's and I think what he meant by that was the staff and the chefs were taking home the whatever. Is that still the case?
David Turin 57:52
Well, if you don't get to sell what you bought, you're definitely in trouble. And I think you're, you're the notion that it goes out the back door is correct in two ways. One is it walks out in someone's pocket or bag, or it goes out in the trash. And the amount of waste in restaurants is just enormous, and so part of it, I mean, and that's the one we deal with, I learned I was the executive chef at the Bay town room, and when I got hired there, they had a terrible problem with food cost and labor, and they were in the middle of a union fight. And the reason they were in a union fight is because they were awful to their employees. And so they, when I got there, they said, well, as the chef, we have three, three things that should be top of mind for you. One is you need to solve our labor problems so we don't have the union pass. We need you to fix our food cost. And the third is, you need to raise our stature in the community, make the food better, because the food doesn't have a good reputation. And so my first month I spent there, I didn't change a thing on the menu. I didn't I would just was taking it all in, and what I realized is that they had this large we had, I want to say, about 160 employees. It was the 13th largest dollar volume restaurant in the country when I was there. And so it was a big, big restaurant, and a rooftop up above Daniel Hall Marketplace, looking out on those at 60 State Street. Yeah, 60 State Street, yep. I remember, anyway, yeah, when it was a private club during the day. So that was kind of an interesting was club and day and public restaurant at night. But they had, they had a contingent of probably 45 Hispanic employees in their kitchen, and they were terrible to these people. And by that, I mean they just they wouldn't ever pay them more money. They wouldn't give them any kind of advancement. They didn't try to do anything to make it easier for them to either learn to speak English or work within the languages that they were comfortable with. And so I saw that, and I figured it out right away. And so I was there a month, and there was one Spanish Hispanic server who acted as an interpreter for the Hispanic community that were in the kitchen, that were mostly they were half Spanish speaking and half Portuguese, and they didn't like each other, which is another problem. But so he came to me one day and he says, Well, I've got this guy, Carlos, and he's been here for eight or nine years, and I don't remember the exact but, you know, he wants a raise, and can we talk about that? And I sat down with him, and I looked Carlos right in the eye, and I said, No, I can't give you a raise. You've been here for eight or nine years. You're a best paid dishwasher. It doesn't make any sense for this business to pay you more money to do that job, but I will give you a promotion, and then you can earn more money. And he had to think about that, because they were in the middle of this union fight, and he was pretty sure that that was just a way for me to promote him into a position that then I could fire him from because he was the highest paid guy. Well, that was my intention at all. And so he came back, and he's like, okay, and so I turned him into a vegetable prep cook, which required a lot of skill, and that restaurant being so busy, and, you know, this is the old school things. I mean, we were turning carrots. And you don't even probably know what a turnaround carrot is, but it's a seven sided thing that you make. A turnaround carrot is the single hardest thing to do with a knife on the planet, in my opinion. And you know, I still have a forearm over here from doing that anyway. So he, this is a guy, and I taught him how to do all these very difficult skills. And next thing you know, he's almost doubled his wage. And then what I did in over the course of less than a month, I opened the doorway to all these Hispanic people to be able to be promoted. And next thing you know, we still had Hispanic stewards and dishwashers, but all of a sudden I had, like, a dozen people that had moved up into other areas, and they had tremendous skills. So what happened? I mean, you asked me about food inventory, so the flip side of this is if your people like you and they respect you, and they think that they are treated respectfully, they don't steal, if they distrust you, they don't like you, they don't think they're treated with respect, then they do steal, and they feel entitled like, Well, this guy shaved my paycheck by 10 minutes. I deserve to steal this steak. And so what I learned is I solved the labor problem, and then I solved the food cost problem at the same time, because all of a sudden we got to sell all the food we let, but your, your relative, was 100% right inventory. If you, if you can't sell what you bought, you're sunk.
Greg Boulos 1:02:40
I relate this story to you the other day, also speaking of my father, when he was working at that lodging camp at age 16, there was a patron who owed a steak, and I guess it came to the table and wasn't done the way he wanted. It wasn't well done. So my father, being a waiter, he was told to take the steak back to the chef, who was one of the screamers, right? Yeah. And he brought the steak into the kitchen and said a chef, the guy wants it more well done. And the chef said, Oh, he wants it more well done. He doesn't like the steak. Oh, we can take care of that. So he took the steak, and he pulled down his pants, and he rubbed his ass with the steak, then threw it on the grill, so gross, cooked up a little better, and put it on the plate, gave it to my father, said, See how he likes it now. And oddly enough, the guy loved the steak so but my father, my father, would never, ever return something to the kitchen because he was scared to death. So I'm sure David's restaurant in the open kitchen
David Turin 1:03:46
is that, have you heard stories like that? I have heard there's actually, there's a movie called Waiting, there's a book, I think the book was waiting, and they made a movie about it, and that that exact scenario was played out in multiple ways. You know, I, I have never experienced that myself. What usually happens with us? It's more that the server comes back and says, This steak isn't cooked, right? And the and the chef then responds like, well, what's wrong with it? Is it undercooked or overcooked? You know, we don't know. But unfortunately, I think that that that that probably true story, not exaggerated story, happened a lot. I don't think, I think that the profession of Culinary Arts has grown as we've gotten open kitchens, and people take a lot of pride in doing this work, where, in that day and age, it was the lowest kind of profession you could have, and I still can't understand why it is. I mean, we're still doing a household chore that a lot of people don't like to do, and some of us just happen to like it kind of gross, though, right? Well,
Greg Boulos 1:04:53
I don't know. I mean, the guy liked the steak when it came back, so, yeah, extra flavoring in 20. 19, you appeared on the Food Network, show guys, grocery games. Oh yeah,
David Turin 1:05:03
good research. Blast. How was that experience? Oh, my God, so much fun. I just it's probably the most fun thing I've ever done in my field. It was hard. It was really hard. Guy Fieri is he's a real gentleman. He's a chef's chef, and I have to say, really, really kind. I had so much fun. It was hard, and I won't spoil it for your listeners about how I did, but I didn't embarrass myself. And I've been asked back. I've never been able to put it together to get back. I've been asked to go back a couple of times on the Food Network, and I probably will go back at some point. But what an experience. That's great. What effect did
Greg Boulos 1:05:42
that have on your restaurants? Was there enough? Yeah, it's
David Turin 1:05:46
funny, because the, you know, part of the contract, of course, you can't tell people what the outcome is. You can tell them in advance that you're going you can't tell them. I can't remember if we can talk, I think, yeah, we were able to tell them when it was going to air. And so I remember the day that it aired, I was I was cooking, I think I was in David's Opus 10 kitchen that night. And when the thing aired originally, all of a sudden, my phone started blowing up. I mean, I probably got 100 text messages from, you know, friends, family and colleagues. So it was fun, yeah, and then people came to the restaurant. People still mention it. And interesting. Students mention it at the junior college a lot, at the Culinary program and students invariably, when I always teach an introductory hospitality class, and somebody will ask a question, but you know, to talk about guys grocery games,
Greg Boulos 1:06:37
do you still cook? Or are you? Oh yeah,
David Turin 1:06:39
I'm still I'm not in the kitchen anywhere near the amount that I used to be, but I'm always involved in menu changes and special events. I'll be in, I'll be in the Opus kitchen, you know, every day during Restaurant Week or wine week, or, you know, when we do special events back there, that more than a special menu. So I, yes, I'm still pretty active in the kitchen. Love it so much.
Greg Boulos 1:07:01
Worst and best decisions you've made with your restaurants, and I would say on the on the best decision would it be that practice of putting money aside every week? Well, the best
David Turin 1:07:12
financial decision I ever made was that, definitely that saved my bacon a number of times the worst decision, I would say, is sort of a category of becoming emotionally involved in a decision I very nearly, right before COVID, I very nearly bought a restaurant up in Edgecombe, which would have been the death of my business, I would it was a terrible decision, and I got, I don't know, it's easy to get your ego involved in it. It's ego. It's easy to just get super excited about an idea. And, you know, it is a it is a business operated on saving pennies. And the that adage, watch your pennies. And how's it going? Watch your pennies, your dollars will come or so, I don't know, but that adage is so true. So I remember one of the worst mistakes I ever made. There was a French restaurant in Portland where 555, ultimately went, I can't remember what it was called. And at the same time the public market opened, and there was a restaurant that guy came up, this guy, Matt Kenny, came up from New York, and opened a restaurant called the not the Conservatory, it was the commissary. And so on one side, we had this French restaurant that was just getting a lot of press, and the commissary was getting a lot of press, and I was there in the middle, and I decided, on a very emotional level, oh, we're going to start serving all this stuff that's really not on our brand. And I started serving caviar and foie gras, and my business just plummeted, like overnight. I just lost my way, you know, and I got influenced by what was going on, rather than just sticking to what I was good at and what my business was about. And so the things are, you know, following trends make your own trends be true to what you're good at. I mean, you know, like, I really like sushi. I have no business cooking sushi in a restaurant. You know, it's just like, there's, I like Indian food. I'm not going to cook Indian food my restaurant. You just got to do what you're good at. Do it really well, and then the other, I think the other. So the times that I made the decision to cook what I wanted to cook rather than cook what my customers wanted, that was those are the biggest mistakes. And the reason we're still in business is because we really focus on preparing the meals that we think our customers want to eat. And of course,
Greg Boulos 1:09:47
the customers become accustomed to, yeah, what you're serving. And they come in one day and they're serving Chinese food. It's probably not
David Turin 1:09:54
gonna Yeah, exactly, or, I mean, it's funny. There was an article Meredith goad did a interview. Of a lot of different chefs around the city. It's probably 10 years ago now, asking people chefs, what dish do you make that you're tired of cooking, because we all have them. I mean, my top three sellers, I mean, I've made my pepper crusted tuna. I've probably sold 40,000 pounds of yellow from tuna. I mean, and it's still one of our most popular dish that, frankly, I still really enjoy making the dish, but it is, and I said earlier, in a lot of ways, it's like factory work. I mean, I created that dish once. It's never changed. It's really good. We just keep making it over and over and over again, yeah. And if you change it, like one little bit, you know, I used a different kind of soba noodle once. And I'm like, people are like, Wait, what happened to my soba noodles? It's like, okay, well, no, we'll, we'll go back. Remember when, when coke decided they were gonna, they were gonna make New Coke? Yes, you know, talk about, I think, backlash, yeah. And I think that was, that was, I listened to some business show. We're talking about some of the worst business decisions ever in the history of business. That was one of them. So, you know, try to avoid those. Do
Greg Boulos 1:11:03
you read much relating to food industry? Or do you try to get away from that? You
David Turin 1:11:08
know, I like cookbooks that have writing that are is not cook, not recipe related by the chef. And so I've enjoyed those my I think my favorite cookbook I ever read was by Jeremiah tower. And I can't remember a single recipe from the book, but him talking about food and his process and what he likes about it. And there's a, there's some other ones. I always say his name wrong. Yodam otolenier, I think he's a he wrote, like the Jerusalem cookbook, and he's got, you know, beautiful, beautiful cookbooks, but the recipes are interesting and I like them. I don't very often look at a recipe and make something from it, but I like reading what chefs have to say about stuff. Like the French Laundry Cookbook is one of the cookbooks I reading what Thomas Keller writes about our field, the craft. I mean, although, come on, he says at one plate one of his books that they strain sauces sometimes 100 times. I call bullshit on that nobody strains a sauce 100 times. But anyway, if they do like okay, more power to them. But that's not what I liked about the book. I liked the way he talks about the industry and food and cooking and just his passion for, you know, the whole process, so that I like that kind of stuff.
Greg Boulos 1:12:26
Ever thought about writing a book?
David Turin 1:12:29
Yeah, I have, actually, I think I have a pretty good idea for a book. And I got offered a book deal about five or six years ago, and they're actually going to give me money in advance and stuff, and I just didn't do it. And it's funny, my partner, Christy, is just like, Do it, do the book, you know? So I don't know, I would like to write a book. It would be, it wouldn't. It would have recipes in it, but it wouldn't really be a recipe
Greg Boulos 1:12:53
book. Call it cooking me.
David Turin 1:12:56
I think, I think I could. I think if I put some in my the front of the restaurant, I could probably sell a COVID. I think you could.
Greg Boulos 1:13:02
Yeah, hey, David glassley, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
David Turin 1:13:07
Oh, man. Oh, that stuff. Don't you hate that type of what would your old self say to your young self question, right, man?
Greg Boulos 1:13:17
And maybe it's nothing.
David Turin 1:13:19
Well, I got to say I've made a lot of, like, really bad, you know, nearly fatal missteps. And, you know, I've been married and divorced a couple of times. And I, I don't really, I don't regret my life in the sense, but I, I kind of wish that I hadn't, you know, been married and divorced, married, and divorced, married, divorced, married, divorced, that's a lot of stuff to go through. You know, I don't know what I think I would. I think if I had to do it over again, I think I might have added two more years of culinary school at the beginning, to be honest. So I went to Cornell, graduated in three years, and at that time, their program was designed to be intermingled, not all at once, but two years of culinary arts, two years of business stuff, and intermingled in there. You went over into the art school, and you had to take the humanities, so philosophy and, you know, just a comparative religion and stuff like that. But I think I wish I spent a little more time in school, and I think that I would be a better chef if I had spent a little more time in culinary school. I think there's a big push now. A lot of people don't want to go to culinary school. They think they can learn everything they're going to learn in the industry, and I dislike that idea. And I've seen so many cases where people who are really passionate about Culinary Arts in this industry, because it is, can I just tell you, I love my job. I love the career I've had. I have just been fortunate beyond any I mean, just so lucky. I. Um, but I think if I had spent a little more time studying culinary and so what happens to the young people is they'll go to work in some place, and the chef will say, you don't need a culinary go to culinary arts. I'll teach you everything you need to know. And what they get taught is everything they need to know to work that station. So they learn those five recipes and those five techniques, and that's all they ever learned. And 10 years later, they're still doing that, and they make a little bit more money, and they never really have a career. And the kids who go to culinary school doesn't have to be kids anybody. They go to culinary school, they really learn it, and they have the externships, where they go out to different places, and they start to make those relationships with chefs that are really willing to give them expansive opportunities anyway. So that's what I would have done different, I think, but I as a general matter, God, I've had a charmed life. Man, I really do. I'm having a good time. You
Greg Boulos 1:15:54
can tell you can tell, David, thank you for being our guest on the bowl of speed. It's
David Turin 1:15:59
my pleasure. I can't believe you invited me, but I'm really flat I'm glad you accepted. Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much,
Greg Boulos 1:16:06
David. Thank you for being our guest today on The Boulos Beat Boulos company podcast. I really appreciate your taking the time to chat with us. You can learn more about David's restaurants at David's restaurant.com, on Facebook at David's restaurant, and on Instagram at David's main and if you'd like to learn more about the Boulos company, please be sure to visit us@Boulos.com you can also find us at the Boulos company on Facebook and LinkedIn, and at the Boulos CO on Instagram and x. And lastly, if you want to know the secret to owning real estate, it's pretty simple. Just be sure to outlive your debt you.