The Strange Intelligence of Plants & Why Restaurants Seem So Expensive

This episode explores the intriguing intelligence of plants and delves into the complexities behind the rising costs of dining out.

1. Plants possess a form of intelligence that allows them to interact with and manipulate their environment.
2. Chemical signaling is a key method through which plants communicate threats and strategies for survival.
3. The restaurant industry faces significant economic challenges, including the impact of inflation and the complexities of tipping culture.
4. Pricing strategies in restaurants are influenced by customer expectations and economic pressures, often resulting in a delicate balance between cost and perceived value.
5. Both segments of the episode highlight the often unseen complexities and strategies of survival and success in nature and business.

1: Introduction to Plant Intelligence

A deep dive into the sophisticated world of plant behavior, illustrating their capability to communicate and manipulate. Mike Carruthers: "Plants, they're a lot smarter and more devious than you ever knew."

2: The Economics of Running a Restaurant

Exploring the economic realities behind restaurant operations and pricing strategies. Andrew Friedman: "Restaurateurs live in fear of causing sticker shock among their guests."

1. Observe plant behavior: Take time to observe plants in your environment, noting any interesting behaviors or interactions.
2. Support local restaurants: Understand the economic pressures faced by local eateries and consider supporting them.
3. Learn about plant communication: Explore more about how plants communicate through books or documentaries.
4. Educate others about restaurant economics: Share knowledge about the complexities behind restaurant pricing to help others understand the challenges faced by these businesses.
5. Experiment with gardening: Apply your knowledge of plant intelligence by starting a small garden and observing plant interactions.

If you ever feel down, anxious or get that sense of doom, you might want to take some Tylenol. You are probably wondering how in the world that could help. Well, it can, and this episode begins with an explanation as to why. https://www.livescience.com/28770-tylenol-eases-existential-dread.html

Do plants have intelligence? It seems unlikely. After all, they don’t have a brain so how could they “think” or react to situations? Well, think again. It seems plants can sense danger, communicate with other plants and resort to devious behavior in order to protect themselves that all sounds a lot like intelligence. That’s according to Zoë Schlanger. She is an award-winning staff writer for the Atlantic and author of the book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (https://amzn.to/4deE12f). Listen and you may never look at a plant the same way again.

Dining out can get quite expensive. Yet some people believe restaurants are actually underpriced! Still, I bet you have had sticker shock more than once when the restaurant check arrived. Then on top of that you are expected to tip. It all adds up. To help you understand why restaurants may seem expensive and to give you a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes is Andrew Friedman. He is co-author of more than twenty-five cookbooks, memoirs, and other projects with some of the best known chefs; he is producer and host of the podcast “Andrew Talks to Chefs”(https://andrewtalkstochefs.com/podcasts) and he is author of the book, The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food (https://amzn.to/3xWJjiE).

Let yourself have a good sigh! It appears that sighing is something people all over the world do. It expresses a feeling to others, and it also is good for you. Listen as I explain. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201304/why-do-we-sigh

People

Zoe Schlanger, Andrew Friedman

Companies

Leave blank if none.

Books

"The Light: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth" by Zoe Schlanger

Guest Name(s):

Zoe Schlanger, Andrew Friedman

Content Warnings:

None

FX is the veil
This episode is brought to you by FX is the veil. Starring Elizabeth Moss. FX is the Veil is an international spy thriller that follows two women as they play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London. One woman has a secret, and the other has a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. FX is the veil, now streaming only on Hulu.

Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know, Tylenol can help you feel better, and it can also help you think better then plants. They're a lot smarter and more devious than you ever knew. Tomato plants have been shown to exude a compound from their leaves that make the caterpillars look up from eating the leaves of the tomato plant and start to eat each other. It actually helps induce cannibalism. Caterpillars also why people sigh it's amazing what sighing does for you and the business of restaurants, what goes on behind the scenes, and what restaurant owners really hate.

Andrew Friedman
The sort of albatross that the current generation of restaurateurs has been saddled with. They would never have had a tipping system in place. You know, that's a very unique thing to this country. If you go to most countries in Europe, the price is the price. All this today on something you should know.

Mike Carruthers
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Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers hi. Hey. If you're a regular listener to something you should know but not yet a follower, on whatever platform you listen on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, tune in, Castbox, wherever you listen, I invite you to do so. You know, with three episodes a week, that's a lot for you to keep track of.

And if you become a follower, then those episodes get sent right to you when they're available and you don't have to remember to come back and listen. First up today. You know, it's natural for people like you and me to worry and get preoccupied with life and death and the state of the world from time to time. And research suggests that if that happens, taking Tylenol might help. If you're feeling consumed with doom, that's because feelings of distress and physical pain are both rooted in the same area of the brain, acetaminophen.

Tylenol numbs that region and can help to relieve anxiety or feelings of dread in much the same way as it reduces pain. While popping a pill is not going to solve the problem, it can take the edge off so you can think more efficiently and face the problem head on. And that is something you should know.

You dont have to look far from where you are right now to see plants. Perhaps youre surrounded by plants. After all, plants cover the earth. There are a lot more of them than us. And what youre about to hear will amaze you, because theres a whole world in which plants live, thrive, communicate, defend themselves, trick predators, and do a whole lot of other cool things youve probably never heard about.

Here to explain all this is Zoe Schlanger. She is a staff writer at the Atlantic. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, and a bunch of other places. She is author of a book called the light how the unseen World of Plant Intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth. Hi, Zoe.

Welcome to something you should know. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I love the title of your book. I love this whole idea that plants eat light because that's in fact, what they do.

So explain what you mean by that. Yeah, so plants eat light. That is the coolest thing they do. They are the only thing in the known universe that can turn sunlight into usable sugars, the thing that builds our bodies, the thing that keeps us living. Plants do that.

Zoe Schlanger
So this is about plant intelligence, research, and the world of botanists who are starting to interrogate whether or not plants have the capacity to behave, to behave with some sort of intention, to make smart decisions for themselves, live these dynamic, spontaneous, really strategic lives that we think of more the domain of animals and us. But these botanists are really considering that fact. But light eating is still, at their basis, the coolest thing, despite all of that. So when you talk about plant intelligence, that seems, I don't know, almost oxymoron ish somehow, because there's no brain, right? I mean, I'm not a botanist, but plants don't have brains.

Mike Carruthers
They don't have the ability to think, well, I'm going to do this instead of that. So plant intelligence must be something else if it's a thing. So what is that thing? Exactly what you said, there's no brain there. We're pretty sure there's no brain in a plant.

Zoe Schlanger
No one's ever found one. No one's probably ever going to find one. But what if the idea of a mind could be expanded beyond this idea of a centralized brain? I mean, there's good reason to believe we developed brains because we were a species that was very mobile, that we had to move around to both find our food and to run away from threats. And so when you have something that needs to move very fast to stay alive, it makes sense to have a sort of centralized processing area where all of our decisioning is happening and can be very portable.

Plants don't have that constraint. They have a very different constraint. They are rooted in one place. When you have a creature that's rooted in one place, and their only means of movement is growing very slowly in different directions, it makes more sense to have a more distributed version of awareness. This idea that plants have many limbs that stretch far and wide, and somehow those limbs need to be able to communicate with each other somehow.

Each part of that body needs to serve the larger goal of keeping the plant alive and thriving and reproducing. So there's a sort of distributed awareness in a plant. There's also a lot of thought now about fungi, the mushrooms that spread their underground parts over vast mats in the forest, and that those mats are communicating with each other. It's one giant organism, but there's no centralized processing area. So thinking about plant intelligence falls very much into this domain of thinking about network intelligence and distributed awareness.

Mike Carruthers
But if they have this intelligence, it's the intelligence to do what you said that they communicate with each other. But do they have emotions? Do they feel things? Do they worry about, do they worry about getting old? I mean, what kind of intelligence is it?

Zoe Schlanger
Well, emotions, that's pretty hard to parse. I don't think any scientist would ever venture to say their plant has an emotion, but do they have something you could consider a desire? Do they have things that they don't like? Perhaps, certainly. I mean, you mentioned communication.

There's so much evidence now showing that plants are able to warn their neighbors of a threat. If one plant is being eaten by caterpillars, let's say that plant most likely is going to produce a whole bunch of compounds that exudes through its leaves that then tell other plants in the vicinity to pump up toxins and their leaves to make sure those caterpillars don't want to eat them. There's a million examples of that kind. One of my favorite examples of this kind of cunning quality that plants, we're learning now that plants have is the way that plants actually deceive animals. Plants are constantly in conversation, in a way, with insects.

That's the main animal they're encountering in their life. We know things like yellow monkey flowers are incredibly good at lying to bees. They've been shown to exude a chemical that, to a bee brain translates into, there's heaps of pollen here, but they'll do that even if there's no pollen there. It's very expensive for a plant to make a bunch of pollen. Takes a lot of energy, and instead of bothering with that, they just lie to the bees, and it's a bit of a bait and switch.

The bees show up and there's nothing there for them, but the plant gets pollinated anyway. So I want to go back to what you said about a plant that, like, is being eaten by caterpillars, will send a message to the neighboring plants. How is that message communicated and how is it a message? When I think of a message, it's like I better send a message. But how is this not just some sort of evolutionary reaction to the situation, but there isnt any thinking behind it.

Mike Carruthers
Its just thats what a plant does when a caterpillar eats it. Youre coming very much to the heart of the debate in botany over what could be considered intelligence and what is more just a rote reflex, like you set a sort of evolutionary trigger, that it comes with no sort of planning or thought, so to speak. I'm not necessarily saying that plants think, but there's a world in considering kind of foreplanning, pre planning, using information about the past to make a decision about the future. That comes very close to these notions. We consider intelligent behavior.

Zoe Schlanger
So in communication, for example, a plant has an interesting relationship to often the thing that's eating it, let's say a caterpillar. On the one hand, the caterpillar may become a butterfly that actually participates in the pollination of that plant. So the plant, from the plant's perspective, they don't want to kill all of these baby caterpillars, because then they won't have a pollinator on the other side or all of the flies eggs that are laid on its leaf, because then they won't have a pollinator to deal with when they grow up. But they can't afford to be completely defoliated by these gelatinous munching insects. So they need to hold out for a while, let some of them get themselves fed from their leaves, and then they start, let's say, killing them off by making a leaf less nutritious.

So they sort of slowly starve the caterpillars to death. Another tactic is tomato plants have been shown to exude a sort of compound from their leaves that make the caterpillars look up from eating the leaves of the tomato plant and start to eat each other. It actually helps induce cannibalism in caterpillars. Really. It's pretty, pretty gnarly stuff.

Mike Carruthers
Is it ever the case, like, you have plants that speak different languages? The pine tree wants to send a message to the daisy over there, but the daisy speaks daisy, and the pine tree speaks pine tree, and they can't communicate because they don't speak the same language. There's really interesting research on this, so. Of course there is. I gotta stop saying that.

Zoe Schlanger
That's one of those things. Before I answer that question, let's think about animal behavior for a minute, because it's easier to think about with something that we think of as having sort of a face, and we're already used to it, having language. Think about songbirds, birds that sing songs. There's often information in those songs, things like danger or like mate with me. But birds have different types of song language in the sense that there's some phrases that perhaps only that bird's family, that literal kin of that bird would understand, perhaps only its species would understand that type of bird.

And then there's other things that are a little bit more like someone yelling fire. Anyone speaking any language can understand it, much like if someone screamed danger, but it's in German. And you don't speak German, you still know there's a problem. You'll still get that information that there's danger there. Plants appear to be very much the same.

There are kin specific communication where plants will exude chemical phrases that really mostly only their biological family, their genetic kin will pick up on. Other ones are more general. Anything in that field would realize the meaning behind that phrase. And most often that's the danger signal. There's something eating me.

That is the signal that comes through in basically any language. So I remember hearing, and I don't even know if this is a thing, if this is even a question, but I think it was like it was some kind of debate about people being vegetarians or something and that, well, that actually when you cut a plant, it screams. Do plants scream? Yes, that's probably referring to botanist Jack Schultz was famous for saying that the smell of your cut grass is actually the grass screaming. If you could somehow build ears for yourself that picked up on chemical signals.

Uh huh. Definitely that's a scream. It's basically any scent coming off of a plant that you can smell. Most of them, we can't smell at all. They're much too subtle and complex for our noses.

But there's a lot that we can smell and they all mean something. Most often. I'm freaking out and dying over here. Yes, well, I hate to hear that. I hate to hear that.

Mike Carruthers
One of my favorite smells in the world, which is freshly cut grass, is actually the lawn is screaming, stop cutting me. It's pretty dark, huh? But the grass isn't being killed, it's just being cut. It's like a haircut. And in fact, if you didn't cut the grass, I mean, the grass does better when you cut it.

Lots of plants do better when they're pruned cut. Right, totally. Well, grasses are interesting in that way. When you think of it, it not being able to grow. Right.

Zoe Schlanger
If you don't cut it, that grass, what that grass wants to do is reproduce. So when you don't cut your grass, it goes to seed. That's, that's, it's completing its life cycle. That's what it sort of evolutionarily wants to do. I'm putting wants in air quotes, but that is the tendency it has for itself.

So its final form is, is making those seeds, which is very annoying for a lawn, for lawn maintenance. But you bring up a really important point, that grass is not dying by being cut. Plants are modular. Plants are built to be able to withstand having part of them broken off and carried away in the belly of an animal without the whole thing dying, then that's a product of evolution. If you are made to be rooted in place, you have to be made to have parts of you be expendable.

It's like we can't have an arm cut off from us and that not do something to our general physiology. Losing a limb for a plant would be a signal that there's an attack underway. So the plant's probably freaking out. It's boosting its immune system, but it's not going to die because of it. Today we are taking a peek into the secret world of plant intelligence, and my guest is Zoe Schlanger.

Mike Carruthers
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Come celebrate Mother's Day at Whole Foods Market. So, Zoe, it seems to me, and I'm no gardener, but it seems to me there are some plants that need to be pruned, and if they're not, they might die because they become so big and they could fall over and that pruning is essential to their survival. Okay, so in my house, I can't prune my plants because of all of the research I've now read. My partner actually has to do the pruning. And even though I know it actually makes a heartier plant, it is interesting when you see a plant growing in a direction that's clearly bad for it, or a plant that's about to topple itself over because it's made the decision to grow this really long limb out far away from its body, and now it's counterbalanced the wrong way.

Zoe Schlanger
What is going on there is that plant intelligence. It doesn't look like plant intelligence. I mean, maybe that's plant stupidity. We don't know. It's not a very satisfying answer.

But I do think that there's room for plants to make poor decisions in this spectrum of plant intelligence, too. Wait a minute, now. You don't prune. Why don't you prune plants? Why can't you do that?

I had the experience of being in a lab in Wisconsin with a researcher named Simon Gilroy, who is studying plant touch, plant response to touch, and whether or not there is a possibility that electrical signals are moving through a plant's body from the site, that they are touched throughout the body until the whole body is aware and responding to that touch. So I had the pleasure of pinching a plant under a microscope and watching a green luminance move through the plant from the side of that pinch. That experience permanently changed my life. To finally actually see in real time a plant responding to your touch makes you very aware that they are. Nothing gets past them.

They're noticing absolutely everything. That's part of why clipping a limb off of a tree in my house is sometimes difficult for me. Now, I don't know if this is science or folklore or whatever, but I think everyone has heard this notion that if you talk to your plants or that if you play certain music that helps them do better, is that science or not? You are describing the product of a book that will make any botanist who you mention it to roll their eyes. It was called the secret life of plants.

It came out in 1973, I believe, and it was this wildly successful work of pop science about plants. But about half of it was really shaky science, things that couldn't be replicated, including this idea that plants enjoy you talking to them, or that they prefer classical music to rock and roll. These were all things that were inside this book. It actually messed up funding for the field of plant behavior research. For decades, the funding agencies that fund science in this country sort of backed away from funding that kind of research because it was such an embarrassing moment for science.

Here was the first time botany burst onto the national scene, into the public consciousness through a popular book like this. And a lot of it was bunk. So the secret life of plants is why people talk to their plants are one of the reasons. There is no evidence to suggest that talking to your plants is something they enjoy. But there is a lot of growing evidence that plants can perceive sound in different ways and that it causes things in their growth and their dynamics.

I spoke to a scientist who discovered that these little lab plants that are in the mustard family, they are able to respond to the rhythm of a caterpillar chewing, just to the audio recording of it. The vibrations of that exact rhythmicity vibrated the leaf in an exact way that the caterpillar chewing would, and that prompted that plant to produce defenses to the caterpillars. So there is a world in which plants are very much alert to the audio inputs in their worlds. They're listening to their environment, so to speak, in many different ways. There's an evening primrose, this teacup yellow flower that grows very close to the ground.

It forms a perfect bowl with its flower, and it vibrates at the exact frequency of a nearby bee buzzing. And when it picks up that noise, that vibration of the bee buzzing, it increases the sweetness of its nectar within three minutes to become more enticing to that bee. And it'll do that just with the audio recording of a bee. So we know that it's about the audio. So plants do appear to have a lot of sensitivity to the world of sound.

What we think of as sound, what they experience, is vibration. And some researchers even posit that that means they have ears, so to speak, but the ear is their entire body. Lastly, I wanted to get back to this idea of light eating because it's such a provocative phrase, and try to understand better how that works. How do plants eat light? You've probably heard that plants produce all the oxygen in the world.

Every molecule of oxygen you're breathing comes out of the body of a plant. The process that makes that possible is photosynthesis. And it uses light as a catalyst. So it very literally uses light as an ingredient in making the oxygen, but also the sugars that the plant uses to to fuel its own body. The plant takes in CO2 from the air and water from the ground, uses the light, the energy from the sun, to tear apart those molecules and repackage them into an oxygen molecule that floats out of the plant and into your noses.

But then the rest of it becomes glucose. It becomes sugar. And that little package of sugar is literally the product of the sunlight. That sugar is the building block for the plant. It ferries the sugar throughout its body.

It uses it to grow more. Then when you and I eat it, or you and I eat an animal that has eaten it, we are just recycling that same molecule of glucose over and over to build our own muscle fibers to make our own brain work. It really is the basis for every further life on Earth, that eating of the light in the first place. Well, I love the phrase light eater. I mean, that just sounds so much better than photosynthesis.

Thank you. Yeah, I think it speaks to how alien plants actually are. Once you take a step back and recognize that they eat light, it's like, what are these little alien creatures that we live with that are absolutely dominant on the planet? There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are the backdrop of our lives.

They power everything, but we barely understand them. They really are these aliens that we live with. And that's the biggest thing I've gotten from this process of learning more about them is when I walk into the park by my house, I feel surrounded by these alien creatures, each with their own cultures and sort of social lives and dramas playing out all around me. It's really changed my experience of the. Everyday, but I think it changes everybody in the sense that when you walk into a park like that or you walk into the woods or you walk into anywhere where there's lots of wild plants growing, it does something to you.

Mike Carruthers
I don't know anybody that doesn't experience that thing. Absolutely. Yeah, there's. I don't know what that thing is. I have no idea what that thing is other than the what you just described.

Zoe Schlanger
No one quite knows, which is so intriguing. Being in nature, being in a green landscape has been shown time and time again to reduce depression, to increase your immune response, to just generally make your mind calmer. And no one quite knows why. But I think there's something really to thinking about plants head on that helps re enchant your world. And having the experience of wonder has definitely been scientifically proven to be a benefit, makes you a better community member.

It's just good for your health. It's truly a scientific basis for showing that. And there's no better fuel for wonder than thinking about plants. Well, after listening to you, it's going to be hard to look at a plant or experience a plant in the same way that I used to. This has been really eye opening and a real journey into the secret life of plants.

Mike Carruthers
I've been talking with Zoe Schlanger. She is a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of the book the light how the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Zoe. It's been so great speaking with you.

Zoe Schlanger
Thanks for having me. As a listener to something you should know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, thats kind of what something you should know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called Ted Talks Daily. Now, you know about Ted talks, right?

Mike Carruthers
Many of the guests on something you should know have done TED talks. Well, you see, Ted Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Huh. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future, learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, something you should know, im pretty sure youre going to like Ted talks daily.

And you get TEd talks daily wherever you get your podcasts.

If youve gone out to eat at a restaurant in the last few years, you have no doubt noticed its gotten pretty expensive. Some would say ridiculously expensive. Yet youll often hear restauranteurs complain they cant make enough money. So maybe we need to get some insight into the restaurant business and understand how it works. Why is it that menu prices seem so high from the customers point of view and not high enough from the restaurant owner's point of view?

And what about tipping and all the other things you've wondered about when you go out to eat? Well, here to help unravel the mysteries is Andrew Friedman. He is co author of more than 25 cookbooks, memoirs, and other projects with some of the finest and most well known chefs in the US. He is producer and host of the podcast Andrew talks to chefs. He is an adjunct professor within the School of Graduate and Professional Studies at the Culinary Institute of America and author of the book the the lives and labor behind one plate of Food.

Hi Andrew. Welcome to something you should know. Thank you very much for having me. So you say that restaurants are not overpriced, that menu prices are low, which I guess a lot of restaurateurs agree with you, but a lot of customers see it differently. So let's start with that.

Explain why you think that I can't. Quote an exact statistic, but having talked to a couple of dozen restaurateurs about this, the rate of increase of menu pricing over about the last two decades in the United States restaurant community tracks well behind the rate of inflation in this country. Restaurateurs live in fear of causing sticker shock among their guests. And this is an issue that has actually many restaurants had to after COVID because of supply chain issues and whatnot, had to raise their prices somewhat. But most restaurateurs I know feel like their menu is actually priced about 30 35% lower than it should be.

Andrew Friedman
And the few that I know who kind of ripped the band aid off after the COVID lockdown, that's about the percentage that they raised their prices in an effort to get things back in line after they had some time to reflect and play around with their business model. So they track well behind inflation. That's the easiest way to explain it. But in addition to the price on the menu, which may seem high, there's also the assumption that you will tip whether the service is spectacular or not. And in some cases, you're forced to tip.

Mike Carruthers
There is a gratuity added whether you like it or not. And some restaurants are adding service charges on top of all that. So it alienates people. I would agree with you that it alienates people. I would tell you that the sort of albatross that the current generation of restaurants tours has been saddled with is something.

Andrew Friedman
If they could have designed the american restaurant system, they would never have had a tipping system in place. That's a very unique thing to this country. As a lot of listeners probably know. If you go to most countries in Europe, the price is the price, and waiting tables is not seen the way it was for so long in this country, which was kind of like something that out of work actors did so they could have flexibility to go to their auditions or something like that. It's treated as a profession on par with the way people think about chefs.

Tipping is a very outdated system. Restaurants dislike it because it puts the servers in a terrible position. It creates this power dynamic between service worker, the waiter or waitress, and customer. And customers who look at it that way can very often make unreasonable demands. A lot of women servers will tell you that in the name of making the best living they can, they've put up with, you know, innuendos from the.

From male customers. This is the very common complaint. And they just don't say anything because they want to get the best tip that they can. If it were up to restaurants, they would just. Most of them would just have one price that covered your meal and the service team.

But that has not happened, and places that have tried to do it. The most famous example is Danny Meyer, who has restaurants like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern in New York City. He eliminated tipping for a while, and the customer resistance was so profound. And he hasn't said this, but I also suspect he probably lost a little business because you're at a competitive disadvantage. If you've eliminated tipping.

You've just simply raised the prices of your menu items. And when the customer looks at your menu, it seems out of whack to every other restaurant you might consider going to and what they charge. So he actually abandoned that system, which I think is remarkable. And I'm sure if he could have kept it, he would have. But I think for anything to change on that level in the United States, at least in individual localities, it's going to take the entire community making the change at one time.

So the customers really don't have a choice. You know, it just changes everywhere at once. Everyone's on the same playing field. And what a lot of restaurant tourists had said to me is they wish, I don't think this will happen, because I don't think it's an issue most people think is important enough, but they wish that somebody would enact a city, state, or federal ordinance or regulation that simply forbade tipping. Restaurants in New York City that went nonsmoking years ago did it when the city forbade it.

So it wasn't their decision. Customers couldn't really be upset with them. A similar example would be when people wanted to require guests to be vaccinated to come into their restaurants, when it was the restaurant making the decision. I mean, there were nearly violent incidents in New York when that happened. Once the city made it a rule, most of that stopped because no one saw it as the restaurant's decision.

So that's what I think it would take for this to probably ever get better in this country. Well, there was, at one point, tipping was considered something you did. You tip someone because they did something, exceptional service, well rendered, got a tip, then somehow it morphed into, it's just a mandatory fee. And now, I mean, if you're going to have to agree to pay a tip before the meal even begins, then. You'Re not tipping well, what that service charge is that people are reacting to, it's like when you go to a hotel and.

Or the best example is you go to a resort and they add a resort fee to the price of your stay. And your reaction, very logically, should be, well, why don't you just make that the cost of my room? Because that's effective. What it is, restaurants would rather just have a higher average price per dish out of which everybody simply gets a salary and there is no tipping. Or maybe there's voluntary tipping if you feel like you had extraordinary service.

But what the service charge that you're referring to really is, in most cases, it is a halfway house to not having tipping because they don't want to raise the menu price because people look at their menu and get turned off. But they also don't want to have customers kind of hold this over their staff to treat them in an abusive or disrespectful way. So they kind of see that as a way maybe to ease people into the idea of just paying a certain amount because they're used to that structure. Yeah. Well, I remember talking to someone about, there was a hotel chain that did exactly what you just described, where they said, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to nickel and dime.

Mike Carruthers
People on every little thing were just going to have a price, and it didn't work because the price was too high. And even though people paid the same, they didn't want that base rate to be so high, even though it included everything, they'd ra. So it's like human nature screws this whole thing up. Yeah, well, I would, the only thing I would say to just slightly tweak what you said is, I think, human nature based on generations of experience. Right.

Andrew Friedman
Because I think it's unique to this country, because we were all born into a world where this is how restaurants work. If we had never experienced that and restaurant meals just cost more than they do, and that's the way it had been forever, we wouldn't bat an eye. So when I go into a restaurant and I open the menu, or I see the board with the specials on it, who comes up with those meals and, and how do they come up with them? Do they go look in cookbooks like I do, or where do they come from? Well, this is one of the things I find interesting about the restaurant industry and the chef profession is there's a lot of different answers to that question.

I mean, in terms of specials and restaurants that change their menu on a regular basis, the best of them, and I don't mean the most expensive. I just mean the ones that operate, I think, in the way that most people who really respect and understand food think they should. It starts with the ingredients. It starts with what's available at that time of year. And then in terms of who comes up with what.

In some restaurants, it's just straightforward. It's the chef, and they communicate what's going to be cooked to their team, and the team executes it. And that's what happens in other restaurants. It can be more collaborative. There have always been restaurants in this country going back to places like people may have heard of the restaurant stars years ago in San Francisco or the quilted giraffe, which was a big restaurant in New York in the eighties, which it was kind of a communal thing.

You know, they would stand around, the chef would say, I have this idea. And everybody was invited to kind of give feedback on it and riff on it until they had an idea of what the dish should be. And, you know, there are answers that are everywhere between those two things. And then, of course, there are restaurants where they just kind of have a playbook that they go to each year on a cyclical basis. When spring rolls around, they do their spring pea soup and their asparagus salad, and they just kind of have the same go tos all the time.

Mike Carruthers
The recipes in the playbook, where did they come from? Are they grandma's old recipes? Where do they come from? This rarely gets mentioned, but almost every cook and chef I know has a pile of notebooks that go all the way back to their first jobs, and in which they have scribbled sauces, vinaigrettes, marinades, all kinds of recipes, dessert pastry recipes from the various jobs they had. And over time, they might tweak those to make them their own, and then those get communicated to their team.

Andrew Friedman
And then when their team moves on and starts to become chefs themselves, they've made those recipes their own. And then some of them may have gotten their initial recipe out of a book, or if they have an idea for something they may want to, a new dish they may want to do, just because maybe they had something similar when they were out to dinner, and it's nothing they've ever made before. It is very normal for them to look at a cookbook that would give them sort of a baseline idea of, these are the ingredients that are in it. These are more or less the ratios. Yeah.

Mike Carruthers
I remember one time sitting at a restaurant, and it was like, off hours. It wasn't mealtime. It was in the middle of the day. And I'm watching these two guys in the restaurant that worked there, and I could hear them, and they were trying to come up with ideas for specials, and they were thumbing through back issues of Gourmet magazine, and it was like, kind of pulling the curtain back from what goes on in the kitchen, because I'd never really thought, well, where did they come up with these ideas? Where did the specials come from?

And these guys were just looking through gourmet magazine, and I'm thinking, hey, I do that. That's where I find recipes. I could do that. Well, you and I could do that, but we probably couldn't do it for 90 some people a night under intense pressure. But, yes, at some level, you can do that.

So do restaurants keep score? Meaning that pasta dish, really, nobody ate it. Everybody thought it sucked. So let's take that off the menu. I mean, are they keeping score every night as to what works and what doesn't, or it just is what it is?

Andrew Friedman
Oh, no. 100%. I mean, that process might start before something, a new dish, even goes on the menu. If somebody has a regular customer, in addition to whatever that customer has ordered, they might kind of discreetly bring over a dish that they're kind of R and D ing, doing research on development on, and say, hey, do me a favor. Try this.

Let me know what you think of it. That's happened to me a few times. I think that's very cool. When it does, it's a sign of, I think, respect that. They think that customer has good taste.

And then once something does go on the menu, the first thing people look at is, does it sell? Because especially now, when everything is computerized, you can press a button and find out how many chickens you sold in a night, how many pastas, how many salads, and if there's something that's performing way below everything else, that dish's days are probably numbered. Or, over time, if that dish starts to sell less, that probably means a lot of people ordered it and they didn't like it, so they didn't order it again. It's like when a big movie comes out. I've always thought that an opening weekend doesn't really mean anything in terms of how good a movie is, because the people paying for it haven't seen it yet.

If there's extreme tail off in box office a week later, well, that probably means you had terrible word of mouth. And I think it's similar in how restaurants track how dishes perform.

Mike Carruthers
So you mentioned that a lot of restaurants like to support local farms, and that's why their prices might go up. But if it's so competitive, if the restaurant business is so difficult, why go that extra mile and add those extra dollars to the price? When you're trying to make your business a success, it seems like most businesses look for. If they're going to buy lettuce, you would think, well, lettuce is lettuce, or close to it, and you just buy it from whoever's cheapest. Well, this will sound very corny, but I believe it is true.

Andrew Friedman
They don't want to do it any other way. It's a very hard profession. It's a very hard business. They would love an easier way to go about it. They simply don't believe in serving their guests inferior ingredients.

Mike Carruthers
In a nice restaurant. Where's the real money? Is it at the bar? Is it in the specials? Is it in the add ons?

Where's the real profit center? Well, the bar is huge. The bar is huge. I had a chance to interview a guy named Andy Bursch a few years ago who for a long time, way back when, was the restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine, and he actually had been turned off to restaurants because he felt like they were so bar driven that they were scarcely about the food. I think that's a bit of an overstatement.

Andrew Friedman
But, you know, the markup on alcohol, even just the markup on wine, which I wouldn't consider the bar, I mean, that's something a lot of people order at the dinner table, is significant. There are often certain dishes that are more profitable than others. It could be different in different restaurants. In a restaurant that doesn't make its own pasta, you know, a pasta dish could cost just a couple of bucks, and you might be able to charge $16 for it. But if they make their own pasta, that's a significant commitment in terms of labor and in terms of the refrigeration kind of system and climate, you need to keep it the way it needs to be maintained, and that would be an entirely different story.

Soups can be a huge markup item, things like that. And then you probably make a little bit less of a return on your proteins, meaning your fish dishes, your meat dishes, your poultry dishes. I have a couple of questions about the wine list, because I've noticed that often wine in a restaurant is maybe three times retail, and the restaurant can't even be buying at retail. They must be buying it lower than retail, and all they're doing is popping the cork and pouring. So that's got to be a real money maker.

Absolutely. Yeah. No, yes, it is. And your guess as to the rough multiple is about right, on average. So, yes, that's a huge profit center.

I mean, this is why restaurants charge corkage, which for people who don't know if you want to bring your own wine to a restaurant, I personally never do it. But they will charge you for that, and it's because they're losing the sale, and it's that important of a sale. So that's where that comes from. The other thing is, you know, those restaurants that have those wine lists that just go on and on, and there's, you know, $3,000 bottles of wine. Is that all mostly for show.

Mike Carruthers
I mean, I can't imagine a lot of people are buying that really, really, really expensive wine very often. And it seems like an awful lot of work to carry all that inventory in certain restaurants. I think people are spending that kind of money in a city like New York, in a city like Chicago, and certainly in the Napa Valley. At some of the restaurants there, there are people, customers who are very knowledgeable about wine and who happen to be worth an awful lot of money. And a couple of $1,000 for a bottle of wine.

Andrew Friedman
Just something that they don't feel at all really in the big picture. Whereas, you know, I've never even pondered buying even a $500 bottle of wine. I've never even considered it. And I write about these people for a living. So it seems if you're not in that class of income, kind of crazy.

But there are people who do love it. I was at a restaurant recently. It was a three star Michelin restaurant. And they had three different types of wine pairings that they could do for you. Where they picked different wines for different courses of the meal.

And the highest level of experience was one where they would select and open bottles based on your taste and what was being served. They would open bottles specifically for your table. And the starting price for that experience was $2,000 per person. And everybody who comes to that restaurant gets that spiel. I can guarantee you they're not having their sommelier, their wine expert, take the time to not be working the room and tending to other people's needs and refilling their wine glasses to give this presentation to every table.

If a certain percentage of guests weren't saying yes to that, what other little. Secrets are going on in a restaurant that may be behind the curtain that we might not know about? That would be interesting to know. To me, one of the most fascinating jobs in a restaurant is dishwasher. The dishwashers who come into kitchens here in the United states in their teenage years, because it's a job that a 15 or 16 year old can get, and they unexpectedly fall in love with the kitchen.

They fall in love with the environment and some of the best chefs in this country. That's how they found the kitchen by accident, and they fell in love with the environment. I think the amount of coordination that goes on in the kitchen would be surprising to people. You know, when you order a dish like, for example, in the book, it's a strip loin with a partially dehydrated tomato, a red wine reduction and some sorrel leaves. There is not usually, unless it's a very simple dish, those dishes are not being produced by one cook.

Probably one cook is grilling or roasting or whatnot, the meat, and another one is finishing the sauce. Maybe one of them, or third person might be rewarming the dehydrated tomatoes. And that all has to be synchronized enough to get onto a plate hot if it's supposed to be hot at the same time, according to when an individual table is ready to be served that dish. And that is something that is happening for every dish all night long. And most restaurants that operate in an a la carte way where each person selects their own dishes and each table moves at a different pace.

And if you just imagine take one dish and then blow that out to several hundred dishes, or maybe several thousand if it's a big enough and busy enough restaurant in one night, the coordination required for all of that to keep happening all night long is something that I even having covered the industry as long as I have and observed kitchens as much as I have, I still find it hard to fathom. I've always been fascinated by the restaurant business. You hear the stories about how tough it is to make it in that business and how many restaurants go out of business, and it's interesting to hear your side. Well, it's not your side, but more from the restaurateur's point of view, because customers are more interested in their point of view. But to hear the challenges that restaurants face today, it's interesting to hear it.

Mike Carruthers
Andrew Friedman has been my guest. He is a writer, co author of more than 25 cookbooks, memoirs and other projects with some of the finest and most well known chefs in the US. And his latest book is called the Dish the lives and labor behind one plate of food, which follows all the steps and all the people that interact with the food on one plate of food before you get it at a restaurant. There is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks Andrew.

Andrew Friedman
Thanks so much for having me mike. Its been a pleasure.

Mike Carruthers
Ever wonder why people sigh? Sighing is the universal language of disappointment, sadness or frustration. And theres a reason that we do it and its all about self help. When we sigh, were actually regulating our breathing under stress. That stall in our breathing pattern can actually provide some mild relief.

A sigh is usually a subconscious move and can act like a mental reset button while frustration is building. A hefty sigh is also an effective way of communicating a feeling of sadness or disapproval to others without actually having to say anything, and that is something you should know. Hey, why not put your writing skills to the test and write us a quick review on whatever podcast platform you listen to this show on? Leave us a review. It helps us, and then you'll be famous for writing a review.

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Andrew Friedman
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Mike Carruthers
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