Happy Thursday,

This week's theme is authentic cuisine and what that means.  It's a great topic because it relates to a lot more than just our notion of what we think is authentic or not.  It's a reminder to question everything while still respecting and honoring the traditions of the past.  It's being open to change and being wary of the phrase 'this is how we've always done it'.

I knew it would come up in conversation with Todd, who came back on the show recently.  Check out below for more thoughts and chime in; I'd love to hear what you think.

Also announcing our latest partnership with Folio, a procuement and back office solution servicing the hospitality industry.  This reiterates the message we shared a couple of weeks ago about the importance of recipe data.  Back office systems like Folio are critical.  And without fully yielded recipe data, they can often be flying blind and miss a substantial amount of the data needed to understand costs and reduce margins.  Excited to see this synergy continue to manifest with our back office partners.

Recipe this week leans into our authentic cuisine theme and plays off of the sofrito recipe I shared a couple weeks back.

‍

meez + Folio: real food costs, right where you cook

Food costs don't sit still, and most chefs are still chasing them across spreadsheets, PDFs, and a back-office system that never talks to the kitchen. We just partnered with Folio to fix that.

Folio is the procurement and financial operations platform built for hospitality. By connecting it to meez, F&B teams can now plan recipes, manage products, track margins, and place orders in one workflow. You can see your food cost at both the recipe and the ingredient level, watch how a supplier price change hits a dish's profitability in real time, and order without doing the same work twice.

Chefs shouldn't need disconnected systems to understand whether a dish is making money. The integration rolls out to mutual customers later this summer.

👉 Read the announcement

‍

🎙️ The meez Podcast

‍

Is your restaurant your favorite place to be?

Mike and I sat down with Todd Duplechan, the chef and co-owner behind Lenoir, Dovetail Pizza, and the just-opened Bonnie's in Austin. It's a wide-ranging one: wild kitchen stories, the reality of running three concepts on one block, and a real shift in how Todd thinks about building a restaurant you actually want to be in.

• Why opening a bar taught Todd how different bar ops really are
• Rethinking service and roles to make restaurants easier to work in
• Designing a space you personally want to spend time in
• Working with your spouse as life and business partner
• Why "authenticity" in food is always evolving
• Legendary (and chaotic) Bouley kitchen stories

👉 Watch the episode

‍

📔 Chef Notes

‍

Authentic is a construct

So often we fixate on what "authentic" cuisine is, or what's traditional. Todd Duplechan and I discussed this on the show, and why both are constantly moving targets.

Todd brought up the fact that Texas barbecue evolved fairly recently, relatively speaking, and how most of the staples don't actually align with the climate of Texas. 100+ degree summers are not necessarily the ideal setting for a giant slab of fatty smoked beef.  Apparently, cattle have a very hard time producing milk in the climate as well. But settlers forced cows onto Texas anyway, German and Czech immigrants brought the meat-smoking, and a few decades later we've got salt-pepper-smoke brisket that feels ancient. It's about 40 years old as the thing we now call central Texas barbecue.

I typically reference Spanish cuisine as a good example, but really every culture is the same.  In Spain's case, Paella is an amalgamation of influences. The Romans brought the pan (paella is literally named after the pan, not the dish). The Moors brought rice and saffron, plus the irrigation to grow them. The Carthaginians made rabbit a staple ("Ispania" is a Carthiginian word translating to "land of the rabbit"). And there were definitely no tomatoes in that sofrito before they came back from the Americas.

Chef Dave Santos talked about this a couple of seasons ago too, with the influence the Portuguese had on Japanese and Indian cuisine. Tempura is Portuguese, carried to Japan by traders in the 1500s. Vindaloo gets its name from "vinha d'alhos," a Portuguese wine-and-garlic dish, and the chili that defines Indian food today didn't exist there until the Portuguese brought it over from the Americas.

Authentic cuisine feels more like a stamp in a certain time of what was.  NYC is often referred to as the city that is always changing, but I think it only gets that attention because it just happens at a much faster pace.  It is the story of everywhere.

What I think is beautiful about this is that it reiterates how connected we all are. There's no "my cuisine" vs. "your cuisine." Because as soon as we coalesce together, you fast forward a few generations, and now we have our cuisine.

👉 Chime in on Instagram or LinkedIn

‍

Recipe:

‍

Feta & Roasted Pepper Meatballs

Sometimes I feel like I'm grasping at straws to find a recipe that relates to the topic.  I don't know, this feels like it fits.  Certainly not a traditional meatball.  Nothing authentic about this.  But it marries a few cultures, and most importantly, these puppies are friggin delicious.  They require the sofrito recipe I shared a couple emails ago as well.  

Great over rice, in a pita, or straight off the tray while no one's looking.

👉 Get the recipe

‍

💬 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.

Apply to be a guest or nominate someone we should talk to.

‍