My dad would give me $10 which is a lot of money when you're 9 to sing at church on tables at restaurants at family functions just about anywhere.
Well I look at it like this: When you go to a restaurant the less you know about what happens in the kitchen the more you enjoy your meal. If the soup tastes good everything's cool and you don't necessarily want to know what's in it. The same thing holds true with movies.
Having been to Europe and working and traveling there the restaurants my wife and I remember were always off the beaten trail restaurants. So I tried to seek a little 'off the beaten trail ' but cool area.
I don't go to the cool trendy restaurants. I go to either the holes in the wall or the super-fancy restaurants where there are no cool people.
You know for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years so how is one going to change or evolve the food?
I'm carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do I get 'Okaaaaaay honey.' I remember when I was 18 getting crayons in a restaurant.
The newly decorated theatres produced things like car parks and restaurants so you could have a good night out quite cheaply without all that bother of having to go somewhere else.
A couple of months ago I was down in Florida for the Food and Wine Festival. And this journalist grabbed me and said 'How does it feel to be a TV guy? You're no longer in the restaurant business.' And I laughed. I asked him 'How long do you think it takes me to do a season?' He said 'Well 200 days.' And I was like '200 days? Try 20!'
Whether you were talking about Pillsbury Burger King Godfather's the National Restaurant Association in each one of those situations I had a daunting problem that I had to solve. And I used the same business principles to approach the problem and more importantly solve the problem in every one of the situations.
As a restaurateur my job is to basically control the chaos and the drama. There's always going to be chaos in the restaurant business.