Business as Usual: big Burrito Group

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. I have so much fun during the show, and today is going to be no exception. I'm very, very thrilled to have chef Bill Fuller to be with us. He is Fuller, sorry, I'm looking at my screen. I'm so sorry, Chef, Bill Fuller, he is going to be joining us and wait till you hear all the information that is going to be packed with his perspective. So give me a moment, I just want to make sure that I'm giving huge shout out to the people who support us in the companies that have partnered with us right from the beginning Huntington bank, and they are very busy now as the next wave of PPP is starting to be released. So stay tuned and stay connected to them. They're here to provide support to all of you that are running businesses, particularly during this period of the pandemic. also want to give a shout out to 40 by 80, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Pittsburgh tech Council. And you will hear more from that group in particular, about workforce development and entrepreneurship in some of the focuses that we have there. And also, thank you to the team at the Pittsburgh tech Council. We're almost approaching 200 of these daily shows. So we're pretty blown away by the amount of people that we are hearing from the leadership that's going on this community. And just an opportunity to do a little bit of a deep dive with many of them, as we make sure that Pittsburgh soars as we approach the beginning of 2021. So thank you all for being here. Really appreciate it. We've muted your microphones, we've just but we have allowed for a chat. And that chat is definitely there so that we can have a conversation with our guest today. So today we have chef, Bill Fuller, and I'm so sorry, bill that I got that wrong, my phone was blocking it. And but I'm going to tell everyone you're really in for a treat that you're in for a treat, because he is not only the corporate chef, but he is also the president of the big burrito group. And he's going to peel back for us a little bit about what's happened across his industry and across the restaurants. So I'm going to bring him on now. Welcome. Welcome to the show. And before we talk about the big burrito group stuff, I like calling him chef, the big burrito group. Can you spend a few minutes talking about like your own journey with food and your background for becoming our hometown hero, and famous chef? Hey,

Audrey, thanks for having me on. I'm happy to be here. It's, you know, nice to be able to reach out to the community and you know, you know, build some bridges between what's going on and what people are aware of. myself. I grew up around Dubois, Pennsylvania. I graduated high school, I spent some time hitchhiking around the country. Working in restaurants. As I moved around, I ended up in Washington, DC, where I worked at a place called the Occidental, which was a fine dining restaurant in the middle of downtown right around the corner from the White House. Not happy not to be there this week. And while I was working at the Occidental, I went to college got my degree in chemistry from George Mason University in Virginia. I went to grad school in the Ph. D program at Berkeley, studying synthetic bio inorganic chemistry. And then I left there after the mass was part of my program. I kind of missed the food world move back to Pittsburgh to be closer to where I was from and joined up with big burrito about 20. Toby 26 years ago next month.

Wow. Well, we're glad to have you back. We're glad that you're here. So here you are you that's a great background and chemistry, no wonder why you're such a great chef, because that's really what cooking is about. And that's actually why I'm such a terrible chef. Because there's no way I can draw the relationship between both. You have so you have 25 plus years of your life in the in the big burrito group and talk about the business itself. You're the president in addition to that, so you have to have, you know, operations, you know, oversight, and everything that's happened in almost nearly a year, it would really be great for you to sort of talk about that, that journey up to where you are now and more and all the restaurants that are actually under your umbrella.

Right so you know, big burrito restaurant group is all the Mad Max's which we have a bunch here in Pittsburgh plus State College Erie and Willow Grove outside of Philadelphia, and Kaia and 11 in the strip. So Bumi and caspa and shadyside and Ulta via in Fox Chapel. You know, we had our 2020. You know, I was looking at, you know, sort of sales numbers from a year ago now. And we, the year it started out, like on fire, like it was gonna be a really good year. You know, the January it was, the weather wasn't bad there was, you know, real consumer confidence. And, you know, just we had an exciting start to 2020. You know, and there was some concerns as a presidential election year, that's always a little disruptive. You know, there were some, you know, the fires in Australia, which had nothing to do this, but it really look good. And, you know, of course, like everybody else to this spring, all of a sudden, this pandemic showed up. And in March, the march 15, Sunday night at 9am or so the governor, Governor Wolf announced that all best bars and restaurants are closed, except for takeout and delivery. And I have to say, at the beginning, is I think that the county and the state have done really well, in trying to keep people safe. And I don't want at any point in my discussion, for people to think that I'm condemning it, because the you know, they have some tough decisions to make. And, you know, the decisions were painful. But I think, mostly they were, they were all well, they were all well meaning and mostly, mostly right. So, you know, in, you know, in March, and this is almost a year ago, you know, we thought, first of all, we thought it was gonna be for a few weeks, you know, or month or whatever. So we we kept the for the first week, we kind of kept our whole staff on, you know, we're doing takeout and delivery only and it was not a lot of business. So every restaurant we just scrub top to bottom and you know, busy restaurant, you know, you clean every day, we didn't always get in those hard to find places. So we just tore the restaurants apart, cleaned them, anybody who wanted to work that week, we allowed them to work and pay them. And then after the first week, when we kind of saw how it was gonna lay out, we made the decision to you know, furlough, almost all of our non manager staff. And the logic was, is that we could run takeout and delivery with, you know, the chefs and managers. And, you know, we would furlough the hourly staff and bring them back when the time came. And of course, that that went a lot longer than we'd kind of hoped. It's funny, I have this document I've, that I've been keeping, and I haven't looked at it for a little while. And I got it out this morning to prepare for this. And I've kept track of, you know, week to week and month to month, the changes in business and the changes in regulations. And you know what we did to adapt? And, you know, one of the first things we did is, you know, that Wednesday, March 18. We put the Goblin burrito on all the Mad Max menus, because we figured what people needed some comfort and people love the garden burrito, which if you don't know what that is, it's Turkey, mashed potatoes, corn and stuffing inside a burrito with gravy on top and cranberry sauce on the side. And when we you know, that's generally a thing we bring out around the end of September and run through November. We thought we'll do it now. Because people are scared and they want something homey. And that was sort of the first adaptation we made. And people really received that. Well, you know, it was just a warm, friendly thing. You know, as we went on, you know, we said second adaptation we did, you know, is weren't allowed to sell alcohol, for takeout with the liquor licenses we have in our restaurants, we can sell beer for takeout, but you can't sell wine and hard liquor. And so, you know, we're like, you know, how are we going to get margaritas and so we dove into some research and finally found and now beer is defined by anything that comes through the beer distributor system and we found this high alcohol, lime flavored neutral spirit beverage and we use it to approximate a Mad Max Margarita isn't it you know, the same or same lines use lemon juice, orange juice, and we added a god a nectar instead of sugar to give it a little bit more Gabi flavor. So that wasn't real tequila. And we approximated the frozen that next Margarita which it was illegal to sell, because there was a product from the beer distributor, not from the liquor store. And so we're really excited about that. The painful part is we that we release it on the Tuesday that the government saw fit to dump 12 $100 into everybody's bank account. And so on the first day of the mat, Margarita, and we just got annihilated because everybody had 12 $100 to go out. It was crazy. It was completely not on purpose.

But that was a lot of fun. And you know, it gave us a big, you know, it gave us a big you know, lifted our spirits and gave us you know some income. And so since then we've just adapted you know, and then you know in May there was the counties being red, going to yellow one or two Green and we were allowed to reopen as different counties changed, and we reopened the restaurants as we could. And then, you know, in like, early June, it kind of felt like it was over. You know, like the case counts in the beginning weren't as high as anywhere else. And they tapered off to almost nothing. The state was saying, Hey, everybody, let's let's reopen, and they reopen the restaurants to 50%. And people went out, and people started to have fun. And it just felt kind of over. And then all hell broke loose. You know, if you remember, you know, all of a sudden, that case is shot up, right, which led to another round of closings. And there was two weeks where like, you know, Allegheny County, suspended liquor sales, and then they allowed us to have back and suspended indoor dining, then they gave us indoor dining at 25%, I actually have to look at my outline to get this all right. Right, you know, and, and then the state CUT TO 25% indoor dining. And so you know, the Mad Max is we kept going with takeout. And this the non Mad Max restaurants where it's a little bit harder to operate, we just closed them down. And we said, we're not doing this 25% we can't, you know, we've lost, all restaurants have lost money all the way through, unless you're a pizza place, pizza places are on fire. If you own a pizza place in March, you've been really busy since then, wow. And then we you know, as we were able, once we started to get closer to 50%, like we had take out one a chi ANOVA. And then once we got to 50%, we slowly reopened the rest of the restaurants, which was in end of September. And then of course, everybody knows that, you know, cases popped off again, around Thanksgiving, and the state closed indoor dining, from December 12, through January 4, and then we came back with 50% indoor dining, which we reopen everything, and that's what we're here now. And so, you know, we're running, the restaurants will take out delivery and 50% capacity, six foot spacing, indoor dining, and, you know, our goal from the beginning, because there's going to be an end of the pandemic. And the goal from the beginning, was to keep the company, you know, in a sound enough position that we could restart. And so we've kept all of our chefs and managers all the way through, even when there was times when there wasn't work for them to do, because we were restricted. Because what when it ends, that's our core, and when it comes time to rebuild our teams, we'll need to start there and work our way out. And you know, it's coming, the end is going to come, I mean, January is gonna be a drag, you know, in addition to the other rough things going on in the world, February is gonna be a drag, but you know, by the time we get to March, we're gonna start to see a lot of people vaccinated, we're gonna start to get some good weather, and we're gonna start to get a little bit, you know, society is going to get to a place where they can, you know, I think, maybe go out and feel safe again. And so that's what we're looking forward to. We're just, you know, just taking it as a cops.

Well, listen, I can't imagine how you run an array of those restaurants, given the fact that things have changed so frequently. And to keep things normalized has to be just beyond our wildest imagination. So my hat's off to you for being able to pull off what you've been able to pull off right now.

We have an amazing group of people, you know, and a lot of people working really hard. And one of the things we did at the beginning is we said, well, this is going to be crazy. And so we went to having, you know, we had a weekly upper management meeting and some other meetings, we went to having a daily call with all the senior management and department heads, and increased all the communication up and down through the organization. So that day to day, we were talking about everything that was going on, rather than once a week or once a month. And since we initially you know, March 17, we established this higher level of communication, they've kept adding on to it, as things change, we were more able to communicate with our people and to get everybody to shift. And so one of the things that we were taking away from this, is that and we're not going to lose, we're not going to, you know, we're gonna win the pandemics over we're gonna keep this level of communication because, you know, we know everybody knows what's going on everywhere else. And that's been a great thing that's come out of this was,

yeah, I mean, that's a big learning, right? You can't, you can't communicate enough with your teams. And your teams have certainly been, you know, the shrink and swell in terms of the staff. I you know, and in terms of keeping that continuity is probably been more than tricky to say the least.

Yeah, we had 1100 employees in March, the beginning of March. At our lowest point, I think we were down To 300, we're probably in I don't know, right now 500 600 employees, and they, you know, county managers and staff, so we're maybe at about half, half the people, but you know, we don't have full, we don't have full service. And, you know, there's a lot of the places, you know, where, you know, we have lunch and dinner, almost every restaurant, and some of the places where lunch wasn't, you know, wasn't great, but we did it, we haven't really done it, you know, in some restaurants, we restrict the days and hours. So when we get to full capacity, we'll add all that back in and, you know, add people back as soon as we can.

Well, you know, you've had such a hit, the restaurant industry has the almost like the closest relationship and understanding sentiment, sentiment of our community, how they feel their confidence levels, and some of the trends, what do you think is going to be your very optimistic on the future, and as, um, I do see that there's going to be an end in sight, what are some of the things that you're going to keep, or there are some things that you know, that it, you know, like, that you've learned through here, that you think you're really going to keep is there going to be this whole migration to a lot of outside dining, that we're still going to keep, I mean, I know you were at the forefront of it, you know, particularly like in caspa, some of the Mad maxes and even at 11, or there's some learnings that you have, that you would be willing out

there, sure, you know, and there's, there's what things are gonna be like, in six months and 18 months, in three years, you know, and, you know, we believe that the takeout component is going to stay very strong. And so we believe that even when we get 100% indoor capacity, that there's still going to be a lot of people who, for a while, are going to continue to do take out a lot. So the work we've done to, you know, sort of tighten up those programs and really understand how to serve our guests. Well, that way we're going to keep you know, we're not sure how long it's going to take people to get comfortable coming back into a full restaurant with chairs back to back. I believe, you know, once we get most of the population vaccinated, I think a lot of people will be comfortable with that. There are also a lot of people like ultra via it as a as a cozy little restaurant, and you know, we're doing 50% capacity. And I think tomorrow, we could open up every table and fill it, you know, there's a lot of people that don't care. But, you know, we're sticking with the guidelines. So we're gonna have to feel our way through that. One of the things we did too, in the beginning of this pandemic, is, you know, we cut our menus back, we've looked at our menus, and there were items, whether it's Mad Max, two, or 11, then we just kept for the years because like, you know, we got to keep that people love it, even though it wasn't really a big performer. And we got rid of a lot of those. A lot of those items that didn't perform well, and it's made it a lot easier to operate our kitchens. So we'll probably keep on the smaller side of the menus for the near term for the, you know, six to 18 month range, just to keep it a little easier to operate. And, you know, one of the things we've also learned is that you never know when it's going to change, you know, and so, you know, we do business now, knowing it's Wednesday, and things could go sideways, and I can lose indoor dining by Friday. And so and that it's happened enough times that we were living with that now. And so, you know, one of the things we did is have a whole bunch of draft beers, you know, the Mad Max is and now we don't know how much indoor dining we have. So we keep that amount low, and we keep our inventories low, you know, we try to buy day to day. So and we're gonna carry that for a while too, until we have 100% confidence that we're living in a world where, you know, I'm not going to get told this afternoon on the four 4pm. gov press conference that Friday, you lose indoor dining, which can happen, you know. And, you know, pain, you know, we we had to let go of a lot of people that have worked for us for a long time, you know, and some of them came back. A lot of people, a lot of people in the service industry have taken this opportunity to go a different direction. And we know that it's going to be very hard to rebuild our teams on the other side. And so we're gonna have to figure out how to attract and, and, and retain people more than we ever did before in this industry. And it's that's gonna be a big challenge. And it's a thing we're thinking about. And we're thinking about the people that came back in the beginning when we reopen it in June, like we brought everybody back because we're like we're open. And there were a lot of people that didn't want to come back. And so the second time around, When we got to real for indoor dining, we only brought back the people that really wanted to come back the people who needed to work, people who felt comfortable working the people who wanted to work. You know, we didn't, we didn't go to anybody and say, you know, you got to come back to work. If we couldn't get enough people back, then we didn't open every day, we didn't open for lunch, or we didn't put all the tables open, we stayed restricted until we got a comfortable staff and, and going forward as we move in. And I am very optimistic, you know, whether it's March or May, things are going to become better and open up, and people are going to feel better and feel safe. And we're going to get to have more dining, we're only going to go as fast as we can with people who are super stoked to be there. So and that's really the most important thing.

No, that's great your nimbleness is, is I'm in awe of it. So Jonathan, there's a couple of questions there that people want to ask yourself. Okay.

Sure.

So, uh, Steve Irwin, give me a direct message here. He wants to know, if you think that all the talent in the industry that has been sidelined, has been planning new restaurants that might replace those that were forced to close permanently in Pittsburgh?

That's a good question. You know, and one of the truth of the matter is that the replacement rates for restaurants is pretty fast. And what that means is mean, even before the pandemic, a restaurant can close, you can go in there with a couple buckets of paint some new China, and some new furniture and reopened as a restaurant. And so while there has been a disaster of restaurants closing out, most of them, most of the ones that have closed, have been struggling anyhow, you know, there's, there's a couple of restaurants that close around Pittsburgh that were very old, and I know, they were looking to get out anyhow, there's some, you know, some people who are on the border. And so, you know, I, I anticipate end of 21, beginning of 22, to see a bunch of reopenings, especially a small owner operator kind of places, you know, and as a business, we know that there's going to be opportunities for us, you know, because we're going to come out of this hole, and there's going to be empty, empty storefronts. And so while it sounds a little bit, you know, vulture ish, I mean, there's gonna be opportunities going forward. I mean, I think I think financing for restaurants is going to be tricky, because you know, the lenders are going to take a look at this disruption in the business and how fragile the restaurants position is in the economy and have some anxiety about lending. So that's going to be a tricky part of it. Finding money is going to be tricky for people, but I agree 100%, there's going to be a new thing. There's also the other side is, a lot of the people, like I said earlier have left the business, so it's going to be difficult for a lot of these new restaurants to build their teams, you know, that's gonna be the big fight in the middle of 21. Is get enough people. Jonathan, keep going. There's

a couple of really good questions. Yeah. So

um, so from Brent rondon, wants to know, so some restaurants have purchased food trucks to diversify their offerings. Are you planning something similar on those lines?

You know, we talked about the food trucks. And one of the lessons we learned early early in our company is we tried some things that were outside of the box, you know, we are we we do a pretty good job running restaurants. But we try to do it, we did the sushi counter or Whole Foods when it first opened. We've done some other contract things, we look at food trucks, and we realized that there's a thing we do, which is run restaurants, which we do all right. But when we try to do the things outside the box, it doesn't work. And so we went through the food truck, pizza cart, kiosk, all those discussions early on, and we still weren't gonna focus on the thing we do. And as we can do it, we're gonna do it and not get outside the box. So the answer is probably not.

That sounds sounds like a good solid answer there. So I want to know, can you talk more about your work with the food bank? You've done so much with that talk about some of the impact, and so forth around that work? You've done?

Yeah, great. Yeah. You know, the I grew up in a small town called Falls Creek outside of Dubois, Pennsylvania, and we were pretty poor. And a lot of there were, you know, there were holidays, where Thanksgiving dinner came in a box from the local food bank, or Christmas presents came from Salvation Army. And so when I got to a point in my life where I could help others, you know, I wanted to get back in the food bank really seemed to be that the best way. And because and I also fundamentally believe that in this country, we have, everybody should eat. I mean, everybody should eat, there's enough for everybody to eat, everybody should eat. And so, you know, I did some work with the food bank over the years, and then I, you know, became a member of the board about four or five years ago and I just, you know, I was Want to be as involved as possible to help people the food bank this year? You know, the demand has been out rageous, you know, it's the demand is more than doubled. Right. But the uplifting thing and, you know, a really good message about humanity is the giving has also been outrageous, you know, and it's not foundational gifts of millions of dollars, it's it's checks $25 $40, you know, $100 people, people, as a community have really given to the food bank and has enabled the food bank to move more than twice as much food as they were before. And so that's been a great part of this thing, watching, watching the people in our region, realize there's a need out there and open their wallets and send the money to the food bank so that they can they can feed people. And that's been great. And if anybody wants to charity to give to greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, supplies, food to organizations all over Southwest Pennsylvania.

Well, you know, it's a we have done, we've had these on really early on. And many, many of our members and organizations and companies have gotten together to give big checks to be give big checks, because we all feel that way.

Big checks are good, too.

Yeah, I'm just gonna say, yeah, we like both. We like that kind of giving, and appreciate that you're actually on their board. So that's really just incredible and positive. So here you are with an amazing background. You are a chef, right, you're chemist, you certainly understand business. I mean, in the most nimble way, what have you done with technologies or anything new?

Yeah, so that's a that's a good question. And I figured that was gonna come up saying this is a Pittsburgh technology. And, you know, we, we've adapted within the systems we have. And so of course, you know, we have our point of sale system, which is Aloha, which is what you ring things at the restaurant. And there's an online ordering system within that, that we had set up before this, and we, you know, it was there and nobody used it, and it wasn't set up well. And so right in the beginning, you know, we took that box, and we open that lid, and Dove right in and integrated it much better into our, into our websites and our ordering systems. You one thing that we missed is there's a restrictor through that online ordering system where you set up number of orders every 15 minutes. And going into that fateful day, when we released the Margarita, and everybody got the stimulus check, we had not addressed that throttle within that system. And of course, it was an infinite. And so that led to a really bad night. But we've increased our attention to our website and communicating that way to our people. We were coming into this year, moving from an old reporting system to a real new business intelligence software package, which we've used a lot to take a look at what's selling where and how it's adapting. I know these answers aren't as juicy as they could be. But that's definitely done.

But what about if people think they have some solutions? Are you open to that? Are you open to to connecting with any people who think they have some solutions?

Yeah, I'm almost the 100% wrong person in the company. But if somebody had some good ideas and solutions, I'd happily direct them to the right person. Okay.

Because Because all of us believe that we have solutions for you.

I'm sure you do.

So what about what is your go to you have all these different restaurants, all this different kind of genre in terms of food? And what is your go to dish?

One go to dish,

you can do maybe more than one tell us because I know, I'm a huge fan of many of your restaurants. And I've been blown away by the success of the food that I've gotten from caspa. That's actually been picked up because I always worry is it going to get soggy? Is it going to be the same? And it's been consistently over the top positive?

Well, that's great to hear.

Yeah, I hanker I hanker for, for your beet salad, and for the salmon, and I gotta tell you every time and most recently, myself, I was out with Jeff Broadhurst of Eaton Park, sitting at the outside portion of the porch. And I know he's pretty passionate about wanting to help all restaurants, not just in Eaton park in the Eaton Park group. So what's your go to?

All right, so mad max go to. Ah, I mean, I'll often just get like a steak. here cuz I think it's as simple as thinking it's really good. I always get guacamole but my custom go to is I get the boneless wings Southwest spicy. I get excited tortillas and blue cheese I just take the boneless wings put it on a tortilla with a lot of blue cheese dressing which are blue cheese dressing a Mad Max is the best in the whole world.

Hungry I'm gonna order dressing. Okay. That's great,

I think the best in the whole world. At caya I either get the Cuban or we have the state Cuban we added after a trip to know to Miami. It was in Miami in Florida in February and now we're here at soba, I just get a bunch of small plays dumplings and Maki's and just mix it up a caspa. You know, we put that pork chop on day 125 and a half years ago and I still I still can't not order it.

I know. I know people who feel the same exact way. Yeah.

workshop at my wedding at my wedding reception to tell you that.

Yeah, yes. Sometimes when you have an item on the menu for a long time, you just can't stand the look and smell of it anymore. And there are some dishes throughout the company that I cannot abide. But the pork chop, you know, 25 and a half years later still is good. Let's see. altavia via pastas, all the pastas. You know, we make a bunch of fresh pasta everyday there and eat all the pastas and 11. I mean, oysters in a burger. I mean, you know, we're really good, nice, good oysters, we keep them fresh oysters in the burger.

So do you eat at a different restaurant every day? What do you do? How do you keep up with all this?

Oh, I you know, I eat in the eating the restaurants as much as I can. You know, one of the things that I've tried to do is not be in the restaurants more than I have to because the last thing I want to do is say be at Kaia and find out in the morning that we had a COVID positive and then I had also gone to Mad Max Monroeville and, and, and cause by and not only do we have to deal with the one restaurant COVID positive, but the fact that that if I was exposed and exposing other people, so I really reduced my time in the restaurants for that reason, okay, but I I get take out three or four times a week from one or the other. And then all the upper management on ownership does the same. But we do a lot of sharing of pictures and text messages, and feedback. And so we really spend a lot of time looking at, there's a lot to keep up with. It is a lot. It's Luckily, we have so many people that have been with us for six years, eight years, 10 years, 20 years, we can count on them, you know, to really keep things going.

So with all the optimism that you've shared with us in the past, and I can't thank you enough, there is, and I thank you for your leadership in the community food makes a difference. And food matters so much to building the cultural amenities and all the support and building the tech ecosystem. We need these restaurants we need the kind of quality restaurants that you're at the helm of, is there anything you have in the pipeline? Like developing something new? Are you just going to sit tight? Through 2021? And maybe 2022? Oh,

we have I mean, you know, when we before the pandemic, we're about to build a second altavia. And we are we have plans for a concept called Alta via pizza, which is a pizza restaurant, you know, sort of a little bit lower and altavia style pizza restaurant, and we're going to move forward with both of those, as we come out of this, we're definitely going to going to do that. You know, the one of the things you know, Mad Max has been around for a long time. And I you know, as a company, we kind of maybe take it for granted sometimes. Oh,

how long was it? How old is the first Mad Max

1993. In October? It's 27. I think Oakland is 27. Yeah, and I would and we, throughout this pandemic, the resilience that it has and how much people like Mad Max has really brought renewed interest and you're growing that and we think that can really go forward. And we think, again, that the pandemic has taken a good hard look at the parts of the program that maybe didn't make the most sense. And so we can go forward with a you know, a cleaner, you know, more efficient idea of what Mad Max is and have run and you know, you say that the tech community really appreciates the restaurants and the restaurant scene really appreciates the tech community. Right, you have to share that, you know, it's been very obvious, as this tech community has grown here in Pittsburgh, that is, you know, hand in glove with the growth of the restaurant business over the last two decades. So it's great.

I cannot thank you enough, not just for joining us today, which is amazing. But I also want to thank you so much for the leadership that you've had, and we will support you. I am now salivating thinking about what I should order from the Casbah. Maybe later today. And people take advantage of all these restaurants here. They really matter. Thank you, chef for spending the time with us and for your leadership. We will stay connected to you and stay safe. Okay, stay safe. So we'll see everyone here tomorrow, same time. Thanks, Jonathan, for being with us. And I apologize if we didn't get to all the questions. I hope we did. But as you can see, there was a lot of information to pack in. So thank you again, Chef. Be good.

See you soon. Take care.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai