This is later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More what you hear Weekday
Afternoon's on the Drive. Andrew Freeman is the author of Chef's Drugs and Rock
and Roll. How food Lovers, free spirits, misfits and Wanderers created a
new American profession. He also is the producer and host of the independent podcast
Andrew Talks to Chefs. His newest book is called The Dish, The Lives
and Labor behind One Plate of Food. Andrew Friedman, you say after this
book, you'll never look at a restaurant meal the same way again. How
so, Well, what we do in the book, thank you for having
me, by the way, is we take one dish at a restaurant in
Chicago, and we look at all the people whose lives and work come together
on that single plate of food. So you get to meet at the restaurant
everybody from the dishwasher to the line cooks, to the sioux chefs, to
the chef owners, to the server. And then I also went out in
the field. I interviewed all the farmers who's wares show up on the plate,
everyone from meat purveyors to produce farmers to even a winery because there's a
red wine production on the dish, and the book is told during a restaurant's
service, from which we break away into those profiles, so you also get
a very intimate look at the inner workings of a restaurant, how something goes
from your order being spoken to a server to your food arriving at your table.
We track the entire logistical process, so people are going to learn,
I think, unless I miss something, literally everything there is to know about
how food gets from a farm to your plate. This is particularly timely because
people during the pandemic would go to their favorite restaurant and sometimes the items they
wanted were no longer available, and this look at the supply chain is probably
going to explain and why it very much does. There are moments in the
book where the supply chain issue and also what became known as the Great Resignation.
You know, a lot of people left the restaurant industry and other industries
during COVID when they had all this time and to sit back and reflect,
But there are moments in the book where that situation kind of rears its head,
and you also get a sense of the things that can go wrong that
maybe people never think about. You know, there's a there's a meat purveyor
at one point who talks about how much he has to spend as a small
independent versus what large companies spend because they get a break for the volume of
it on shipping boxes. I mean, that's something nobody probably thinks about.
But a related issue is if you can't get shipping boxes, you can't ship
your meat. My book actually got published a few months later to take this
to a metal line level that it was originally scheduled to because there was a
paper shortage. The dish, the lives and labor behind one plate of food.
Andrew Friedman you know him from his book Chef's Drugs and Rock and Roll
and his podcast as well, and when worlds collide, which often happens in
the world of food. Oh absolutely, you know, we do get to
see how these seemingly disconnected fields come together. I mean, for me,
one of the great links in the book, and it's actually my favorite thing
in the book personally, because it's the thing I learned the most about is
I spent a day with a truck driver who delivers food ingredients from one of
the area farms outside Chicago. They are about fifty minutes outside Chicago and Marengo,
Illinois, And I met him at two thirty in the morning and spent
a day with him as he delivered produce to maybe about fifteen restaurants in the
Chicago area. Again, this is a job most people probably don't think about.
He's the one who collides those worlds and it's a fascinating job. I
will never again be upset as a New Yorker if I see a delivery truck
double parked, because you know, one of the things I learned was there's
nowhere in major cities really for someone to put a truck while they're bringing produce
or whatever else into a place of business, and it's an incredibly difficult,
spontaneous, quick on your feet kind of job. The other thing I find
interesting is just you know, all the restaurant that I profile is in the
city, and all of these farmers obviously, you know, they're all between
forty five minutes and three hours from where the restaurant sits, but they're all
in very rural areas, and you know, the personality types, very often,
the politics, just the lives that the farmers lead versus the lives that
the people that they service lead are those are very much two different worlds,
and it was very stunning to me. Not that I wasn't aware of this,
but I made all my farm visits over the course of one week from
my hub, which was in Chicago that week, and to see to just
constantly be reminded of the very different lives led between restauranteurs and chefs and cooks
and the people they do business with is quite stark. But I hastened to
add they all get along great. They all get's a very intimate working relationship
between farms and restaurants. The name of the book is the Dish, the
lives and labor behind one plate of food. Andrew Friedman is the chef and
the author as well. What was the number one thing you learned from putting
this all together, addition to what I've just said about the truck driver,
which was just I'm embarrassed to say, a job I never thought much about.
You know, the commonalities in life story between a lot of people in
the restaurant industry and the people who service the rest for an industry are very
similar. I mean, we've known for a long time through the writings of
people like Anthony Bourdain and and I'm not comparing myself to Tony, but you
know, some of the work I've done in my colleagues that a lot of
people who just don't really fit anywhere else in the world kind of end up
in kitchens. It's just it's just the way it works. And that proves
to be in a lot of cases, very true of people who are working
on farms, people who are producing other things for restaurants. Again, this
delivery driver, who had a very interesting professional career, never really pondered even
going into an office job. Just isn't metabolically suited for it. And that
is something they very much have in common with chefs and cooks. You know,
these are people who very much with life that most of us, you
know, most even me as a writer. I mean, I spend my
day at a desk, you know, I spend my day not that differently
the logistics of it, you know, from someone who works at an insurance
firm, But these people very much live a life that's you know, out
of the public eye, that kind of goes to its own rhythm, that
has its own hours. You know, farmers are up very early and their
day ends relatively early as well. You know, cooks very often start their
day in the afternoon and end at midnight. They were kind of all living
in their own world. And that again, it's not that I didn't know
it, but to see it writ large in real life, and over the
course of the two weeks I spent traveling around and interviewing people was quite stunning.
And he puts it all down in his book, Andrew Friedman's Creation The
Dish, the lifes and labor behind one plate of food. I like to
cook, I like to eat, and I love this behind the scenes kind
of thing might even confirm Andrew when people say, oh, Lee, you
need to open a restaurant, Why I have not. Yes, Well,
it's very hard work. And also, you know, it's the finances,
as we all learned at the beginning of the pandemic. Well, when all
of a sudden, restaurants were shuddering, you know, in record time,
and everyone started to learn about the margins. You know, a lot of
restaurants function function on a profit margin somewhere between three and five percent. You
know, a lot a lot of these places when when the lockdown happened,
they didn't even have enough money in the bank. To make one payroll or
one rent payment. You know, that was a big educational moment for the
rest of us. And you know that's in addition to how hard the work
is. You know, I have a friend who likes to say that,
as with live theater, to the restaurant business is a show, must go
on kind of business. You know, one person doesn't show up, or
the dishwashing department goes down during a service or falls behind, or delivery doesn't
make it when it was supposed to, or like you said earlier, supply
issues and the ripple effect. I mean, if just one item doesn't show
up at your restaurant, you may have to alter your menu. You may
have to not just change what you're cooking, but you you know, your
staff has to adjust to that, and you may have to reprint your menu
on the same day. And this is a constant fact of life in that
industry. It is not the same as throwing a dinner party by any means.
The dish, the lives and labor behind one plate of food. Andrew
Friedman, thank you for joining us and we'll enjoy your book. Thank you
so much for having me. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews,
The Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons
from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation