This week, at a glance:
🎙️ The meez Podcast
Greg Baxtrom on his first cookbook, sobriety, the reality of chef-driven restaurants, and the babysitter math of dining out decisions
I've known Greg since my Bark days in Brooklyn (he still lives by the Barclays Center). Alinea, Per Se, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, private chef for the Seinfelds. Opened Olmsted in 2016 and won basically everything: Food & Wine Restaurant of the Year, Esquire, Bon Appétit.
Then he sold all his Brooklyn restaurants and went all-in on Rockefeller Center. His first cookbook is out now, built mostly from recipes he cooked for himself during his first 90 days of sobriety.
- Why Olmsted won every award and still struggled financially
- Greg's new book: Nothing Matters but Delicious: A Radically Honest Cookbook (get here)
- The unit economics of a chef-driven restaurant
- Getting sober in an industry that runs on booze
- The babysitter math that decides where parents eat
- His plan for Chicago and a restaurant outside the US in 2027
- Why Greg still thinks uni is overrated
🤔🌶️ Allergen Alert
Allergen compliance is coming.
20 days until SB-68 goes live.
California's new allergen disclosure law kicks in July 1. If your group has 20+ locations and even one of them is in California, you're disclosing the Top 9 allergens on every menu item, in every format. Printed menus, digital menus, apps, kiosks, third-party delivery.
meez enables you to automate allergen tagging on your recipes and menu items. Create your recipes, get your allergens. We're here to help.
👉 Grab the checklist or chat with our team to learn more
📔 Chef Notes
Chefs and their retirement plan
Greg said the thing chefs everywhere often say behind the curtain: "How the heck do we retire in this industry. Not that there is retirement talk in your 40s or 50s. But when we're in our 70s, and our bodies start failing, how will we afford that?"
Scaling your business and yourself is a must. Long before retirement, consider how your kitchen can run without you on the line, which is the only way to then run multiple kitchens.
The metric of success starts with how well you can cook. Then how well you can manage. Then how well you can create your own vision. Then how you can enable that to happen without you needing to be hands-on day to day, even if you still are.
Then eventually, how do you scale your vision so that it's so clear and inspiring that many others want to be part of scaling it with you. All while creating positive unit economics along the way. It's a tremendous amount of work and effort on top of the ability to foresee when to jump from one phase to the next.
👉 Watch the clip on LinkedIn or Instagram
Recipe:
Red Velvet - Marshmallow "Book" Cake
My son almost shared a birthday. My wife went into labor on my birthday with him 7 years ago, and he ended up being born the next day. We celebrate together every year now. (his 2nd bday/my 40th included a mariachi band and pig roast; needless to say, best bday ever).
Stone turned 7 this year on Saturday, and he's going down a rabbit hole of reading books lately, and he's tearing through the Dragon Masters series like it's a Netflix binge. He requested his party to be at a bookstore, and was adament about having a cake in the shape of a book. I'm no cake artist, but I can assure you this was a crazy-delicious cake and hopefully it slightly resembles a book.
Buttermilk plays a star role both in the cake and the frosting. The fondant is a cheat; you can just use store-bought marshmallows or feel free to make your own. I'll let you guess what route I went.
💬 Want to Be a Guest on The meez Podcast?
If you’re building at scale, or wrestling with hard zero-to-one problems worth talking about, I’d love to hear from you.
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