 I'm Rachel Harkness. I'm the programming manager here. Thank you all so much for coming. We're psyched to have Andrew and Brianna Volk here talking about their new-ish book, Northern Hospitality with the Portland Press Herald reporter Peggy Griddinsky. I will say I don't usually try to sell books, but I have a copy of this book and I've been making the most amazing cocktails, and before this I could not even pour a glass of wine properly. So it's very impressive to friends and family when you make them something. Also just a really, we were psyched to have them here in the winter because it is like a very sort of wintery, Finnish traditions and lovely book to have. So I highly encourage you to pick up a copy and take a look and purchase it if you can. So anyway, I'm not going to say much. I just want to make a few small announcements. The restrooms are outside in the hallway there to the right if you need them. If you're having trouble hearing, I can get a hearing assistant unit for you, and please help yourself to coffee and tea in the back provided by Coffee by Design. And thanks to Print for being here today, and I'll go grab the writers. Thanks. I'm Peggy Griddinsky. I'm the food editor at the Portland Press Herald. I'm Brianna Volk. I'm a co-owner of Hutton Alpine and Little Giant. And Andrew Volk, I have the same titles as her. And I have really been looking forward to this for a very personal reason, which is I have far too many cookbooks and they're taking over the house. I feel like I can barely get inside. So I recently had some bookshelves built hoping I could get them out of my way, but right now they're all sitting in the middle of my living room. We're talking like 600 of them. And I am sort of trying to Mario Kondo as my cookbooks. So I'm somehow hoping that Brianna and Andrew are going to say something that's going to just give me a epiphany of how to look at a cookbook and think about a cookbook and I'll be able to clear a lot of them out. I hope you keep ours. Yes, I will definitely keep yours. I need a lot of drinks as I'm going through this process. So do you want to maybe just start by introducing your cookbook a little bit briefly? I had a passage. Do any of you have this cookbook or have you looked at it or seen it? I see one. Okay. And if you don't, Josh from printbook stores over in the corner and would happily help you out there. It's just it's very personal. There's a lot of personal and kind of charming moments where you feel like you're at a party with Brianna and Andrew. I was just going to read two passages which I thought really showed that. And then maybe you can talk briefly about it and sort of give just a tiny introduction to it. Let's see if I can find these. 177. So it's called this is above a note for a recipe for a drink which is called late night at OOB. I'll just read the introduction to this one recipe. Brianna whose background is in writing for advertising and TV was filling out dummy menu copy before Hunts and Alpine opened and made this drink name up as a joke. The original recipe called for rum other things and shame. Quickly became something that the team loved and they told us we had to make it come to life. Thus the late night at OOB was born. For those not already in the know, OOB is a reference to Old Orchard Beach, a party hard beach town about 30 minutes from Portland. It's lovingly referred to by many around here as the Jersey Shore of Maine. Thus we thought this drink needed to feel like tiki, salt water, wooden boardwalks, and nights that maybe you don't want to totally remember. Every so often we create a new recipe for the late night at OOB. So what follows are versions one, two and three. Try them all with as much or as little shame as you'd like. So just think that gives a nice flavor. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we Northern Hospitality for us was something we always kind of played around with in our head as, oh, wouldn't it be fun? I mean, Hunts and Alpine has been open coming up in six years in September. And always said, oh, wouldn't it be fun to write a book? But not really knowing how or what to do about that. My history, I've been in restaurants for, I'm going to my 15th year working in restaurants and haven't done a whole lot else professionally. Brianna has professionally been a writer in advertising mostly, and a very good writer, but not always writing in her own voice. And so we were approached by our publisher, Quarto, or Voyager Press. And they said, hey, we've heard that you guys might want to, you might be a good good people to write a book with. And we said, that's funny. We've been talking about that a lot and we put together a proposal. And it's very flattering and nice to hear you say that it's like being at a party with us, because that's very much how we tried to approach this book, that we wanted something that people could hold in their hand and feel like was distinctly Hunts and Alpine. And for us, going to Hunts and Alpine is showing off, like, having a good time, making sure other people have a good time. And so we wanted to make it very personal, we wanted to make it very fun, we wanted to make it very accessible, that they're, you know, we've, like I said, we've both been in restaurants for over a decade now, and there are lots of great food and drink books. And some of them we have, we don't have 600 cookbooks, but we, Brianna, Brianna is working her way towards 600 cookbooks. And, you know, as we flipped through these books and talked about writing Northern Hospitality, it seems like there are lots of different kinds of cookbooks. And one of them that we have a lot of, and I don't know about you, but is those really pretty ones that you look through and you look for inspiration, and then you start looking at the recipes and you're like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to, I'm not going to spend seven days creating that recipe because, you know, we have other stuff to do. And we didn't want to write that kind of cookbook. We wanted to write one that was beautiful and inspiring and got people excited about what we do, but also felt very accessible. And so it's, it makes me very happy to hear you say that, talking to Rachel earlier, she was saying how she makes the hot toddy out of the book when she goes camping in the winter time. And like, that's the idea of the book that you can actually open it up and use it. You know, we, the two or three cookbooks that we grab at home are the ones that you can quickly open up and you have five or six pages dog ear that you just keep going back to and back to. You've got all my questions here now. Which are those two or three cookbooks that you use? Curiosity. We used food lab a lot. Kendrie Lopez Alts book. I think we go to, especially if we're making something that we make a lot of like a steak or whatever and want to figure out how to do it better. Yeah, is a great tool. I often go to what's Ken's last name. The there's a pizza book by Ken Fortnish in Portland, Oregon is a guy that we knew when we lived out there. He is a phenomenal French style baker and probably six or seven years ago opened a pizza restaurant. He now has a pizza book. I've been making a lot of pizza at home. And so that book is is currently well worn as well. Yeah. And that actually is another question I wanted to ask you is how much you cook at home? Cook a lot. We cook. Yeah. Every night we're home. Pretty much. I mean, one of our two small children, four year old and a almost two year old. Most two almost five. And you'll see if you get this cookbook that the four year old eats oysters. The two year old does now too. He just was an old enough for me printed the book to let him eat oysters. Yeah, we cook as much as we can. I mean, the balancing restaurant life and we have two restaurants that are open seven days a week or six days a week, depending which one and family life is tough. So it's one of those things we intentionally make a lot of time for when we're both at home in the evenings, we try and cook together and we try and bring our kids into it and let them help out and then sit around the table and because we don't get to do that every night, we don't get to do that every meal. Switching to sort of a general question. What makes a good cookbook? Oh, I mean, there's I think there's so many different ones. I think, you know, for me, what makes a good cookbook is something I want to use something I keep going back to something that has recipes in it that I can relate to and understand. You know, I'm always a fan of great design and photography coming from my ad background. So, you know, I'll still buy those beautiful books and enjoy looking at them and get inspiration from them in different ways, even if I'm not spending seven days making, you know, a sauce out of it or something. But yeah, I think I mean, you know, I think especially when it's a restaurant based cookbook or a cocktail bar based cookbook, it's the feeling that you can open the pages and feel like you're in that space. You know, I think death and company their cocktail book does a really phenomenal job of that having been to death and company multiple times knowing Alex, who is one of the writers of it. I opened that book and I feel like I'm in death and company like it takes me there. And you know, that was, you know, so I think with restaurant and cocktail books, that's one of the things I like to see. And did you think of this book as a cookbook or as a cocktail book? Um, yeah, both. I mean, we really wanted it to be both. We didn't want it to be primarily one. You know, I think one of the things I think when people think of hunt and alpine, they mostly think of the drinks, which were we call ourselves a cocktail bar first and foremost. But there is we've always had really good food and had great chefs in there. And I think, you know, being able to highlight that and you know, my background's finished and highlight some of that as well, which was a huge inspiration for the bar, made sense to put in there. Because I thought it was interesting. It seems like in the last maybe five or six years, maybe more than that, a lot of cookbooks suddenly have chapters on cocktails, which you would not have found 10 or 15 years ago. And what was interesting, one of the things that was interesting to me here was it, it felt like a cocktail book in a way, but then there were all sorts of recipes in it too. It almost felt like it started with the cocktails. Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, which I thought was interesting. And I'm not sure I've really seen that before. Yeah, I mean, we were trying to do something that I think kind of feels like the bar in a way where you walk in and you feel like you're in this cocktail, like you're in this cocktail bar, and you can do, you know, things that are, we have, you know, very involved recipes to very simple recipes. But then, you know, I hear time and time again from people when they come in and then they sit down and like eat the food, how surprised they are by how good the food is or how the food really pairs well with the drinks we're doing and like, you know, the whole programs that are together. And we wanted to showcase that in the book. Yeah, I think we definitely were very aware of sort of the evolution of cookbooks and cocktail books. And we're, we didn't want to write a book that was, because so many cocktail books over the past 15 years that have been published are very technique driven. This is how to make a drink, which is awesome and helpful. And as a bartender for 15 years, I own lots of those books and have learned a lot from those books. But that's not the book we wanted to write, you know, for us to answer your question of what makes a good cookbook and what makes a good book of this nature is very much what Brianna was talking about personality. And we wanted to infuse as much of the personality of Portland Hot and Alpine Club into the book. And for us, you can't just do the cocktail. It was a conversation we had with our editor again and again is the what percentage of drinks versus food we're going to be in there. And we strove for 50%. I think it ended up being about 60% drinks, 40% food. And you strove meaning the two of you or the editor? As a team, we all decided like, it would be great to have a 50-50 split. I think that was probably driven by our editor a lot. Or at least at the beginning this is why I think you guys should do that. And we said, that's a great idea. And so we very much tried to shoot for that. And when you look at Hot and Alpine as a personality, as a space, the food is integral to that. And it very much kind of lends this extra conversation piece, this extra character, this extra angle, particularly when it comes to Brianna's heritage, that we'd been drawing from for Hot and Alpine from the beginning, whether it was design, whether it was branding, whether it was the drinks, whatever it was, a lot of it tied back to her Finnish heritage. And a lot of that is represented in the food. And so we always, we say skin and avian inspired, where I would never say that we're authentically Finnish or that we're authentically skin and avian food. But we take a lot of inspiration from that. And a lot of the flavors are driven by that for various reasons. But we definitely wanted to make sure that food was as prominent as drinks in the book. And some of the food I felt like I needed a pronunciation guide. There was something at the end. Now I can't remember what it was. And I might have started with an F. And I had a lot of syllables. There's another Able Skavers in there. Able Skavers is the salmon soup, the lohikaito. There are a number of things in there. There's a couple. But when they reprint it, I think you need to have Brianna saying names. I'll do a web series on that. I'll just pronounce skin and avian food names. I think you've kind of just answered this. But there's so many recipes on the internet. Why do we even need a cookbook? Can't I just Google whatever? What's the point? Oh, absolutely. But, you know, I think it goes back to I still, and maybe I'm at that cusp of a generation where I grew up with the internet. And I grew up, you know, I have an iPhone and iPad and all those things. I still like picking up a book and having a book open on my counter and getting a recipe from that. That was my preferred way to make something new and learn about something. I'm tactile and I physically want to hold things. And I think people still do. Yeah, I mean, and I would almost turn the question back to you and to everyone, like why do you buy cookbooks? And it was something that we talked about a lot. Like, sure, we could just put all these recipes out there on our website, on the internet. But so much of writing Northern Hospitality for us wasn't like the recipes were definitely important and definitely a core part of it. But it wasn't the only core part. Part of it was wanting to have something that somebody came in on an Alpine, enjoyed themselves and wanted to take some of that home with them or take that and share it with someone else and say, Hey, I love this place. Here's something that you can, you know, instead of taking a coaster or a menu or whatever, they can or a painting. Exactly. Maybe you want to elaborate for those who don't know a painting we've had since we opened. Hunt was stolen a couple of weeks ago. You see it if you see a beautiful painting of Crater Lake and anyone's house, that's probably mine. And for years before it was in Brianna's family's home, and it was a gift to us when we opened and feel not back. But we wanted to give people the opportunity to purchase something and not just steal something that that was, you know, essentially hunting Alpine. And so cookbooks are, yes, they're recipes, but they're also pictures and they're also design. And we certainly spent a majority of our time in writing it on the actual writing, but we spent a lot of time on the photography and on the design of the book and making sure that it felt like the business and the restaurant and the bar that we'd been running and living in for five years. And you're in a number of the photos. What drove that decision? How, why can't afford to hire any models for a book? No, I mean, I think a lot of it is is showcasing what our backgrounds are and kind of what we do and and and who we are day to day, which has really driven the brand of hunting Alpine and what hunting Alpine is and has become. And so I think it makes sense to tie it made sense to tie into the book. It made sense to, you know, I mean, bring our kids into it because, I mean, when we open hunting still now, like, our kids come to staff meetings and they come in at night and come to events and stuff like they they live this life with us too. And I think, you know, especially being in the industry, you know, now for Andrew for 15 years and me for close to 10 and owning hunt for six, like we've really seen this kind of sea change of people who own bars and restaurants and want to have families. And it's not an either or but there's also this, you bring your kids with you, you you go to, you know, they watch you work late nights, they help out in the kitchen, they do those things. And so I think it's integral to part of what our identity is. Oh, I can't I don't think your son was in the book, wasn't it? What's the picture? There's like a tiny picture. He's a baby. He's trying to understand, like, does she look at the picture and think, oh, yeah, she brought it to school to show her friends. She she likes pictures of herself. So I have a I have a bunch of pet peeves about recipe writing, no, I'm just curious, like, if I were going to write a cookbook, I would, I would, I don't know, I hate the phrase if desired, because I think it's your cook, it's you're the one in the kitchen. Everything is if desired. That always seems pretentious and irritating to me. And I, I don't like inverted word order, you know, how recipes often will say in a big bowl, put the eye of Newton and squid tentacle, which is done in for any of you who are a recipe or cookbook food kind of geeks, because the idea is you need to reach for the bowl first. But as someone who loves words, I find it incredibly irritating that they are writing the sentences, though they're native German speakers rather than and serve. I always hate serve, because I think, well, you've just cooked the whole thing. The phrase serve. So what else are we going to do? You know, obviously, you're going to serve it, you're not going to throw it in the trash now. But anyway, I'm just wondering if you had things that you either knew, like, we don't want to do that, or we definitely do want to do this. Here are the things that recipes really do need to have. I mean, I think we were really guided by our editor in the recipe writing, because neither of us really had any experience in doing that in this sort of context. You know, we write we've written recipes for ourselves. And I think early on, he got some pretty lo-fi recipes where he was like, where's the detail here? Sort of especially with cocktail recipes. And I have I have a lot of pet peeves when it comes to cocktail recipes in particular. But one would I've outed myself here. No, no, that's absolutely fair. There's, there's a lot of sloppiness when it comes to cocktail recipe writing in particular that I've learned a lot over the course of writing this book of all of the standards that you do get. And we got a whole literally a guide of how our publisher wanted our recipes written. I didn't read it, but I read it. I fought back on some of it. But we did push on certain things in particular. But when it comes to cocktail writing and whether you're reading cocktail recipes on the Internet, or you're reading them in books, there's a lot of, there's not a whole lot of standards, which makes a lot of sense because if you look at like my personal cocktail recipe book is in an old Moleskin and there's pictures of it and an old Moleskin address book, then I would keep them in the back of my pocket. And I'd learn a recipe in the middle of a shift and scribble it down and it literally like, I can't read some of them. And I don't have good handwriting, but but like it's one of those. It just says 2T something, something, one, oh, something, something. And with cocktail recipes in particular, there's not a whole lot of direction that is given. And so I know our editor, when I first sent him all of like just a file dump of the cocktail recipes, I'm sure he said, what is this? But getting into with cocktail recipes in particular, like there's a lot of steps that sometimes are assumed by a cocktail recipe, writer, that you need to add. Like you need to say, add ice to, which is is one of those things that you generally don't think about because you're just doing it. And that was actually one of my questions of having the recipes for a restaurant. If that needed translation for a whole book, yeah, hugely. And for I think for us for writing the recipes, one of the goals and one of the hurdles that we overcame was making sure because we wanted to be a very accessible book that you could open up and say, I get it. I know exactly what I'm doing. If I follow what is written in front of me, I'm going to be able to produce the thing that's in this picture. And certainly there are cocktail books and cookbooks that I read. I'm like, you forgot to tell me to do this. I know to do this. But you forget. And so for cocktails, in particular, we had to very much. I had to when I was writing those recipes, slow down, take a minute and say, like, literally think of my head. What am I doing next? I have to write that down before the next thing that I do before the next thing that I'm doing. When you're putting you put drinks into a shaking tin, you have to add ice. And then you have to close the shaking tin before you shake it. And like to me, that's that is so ingrained in 15 years of bartending that I didn't think, oh, yeah, you got to tell people to put the other top on. Otherwise, it's just going to spill. Did you so you wrote the cocktail recipes? Did you write all the finished recipes? What was what was the late division of labor? I mean, so I think the food recipes were between myself and then our chef sat at hunt. Andrew did most of the cocktail recipes. We pulled a couple from other bartenders, our bar manager in there. But, you know, I really think the division of labor felt pretty 50 50. She's being modest. She wrote most of the book. I mean, a lot of the recipes, I think, came from from my notes and in one form or other, the food and the drink. A lot of the family stuff was was yours. But then, you know, I we'd compiled recipes from our chefs and compiled drink recipes from our team. And I kind of put like the big information in there. But then when it came to massaging them, and when it came to actually like writing all those specifics, and then the introductions, Brianna took on a lot of that. And did you have, you know, you own restaurants together, obviously, but do you have, are the tensions, are there arguments? Did it bring out? We've never argued once the whole time we wrote the, I mean, there are of course tensions. You live with someone, you write with someone, you work with someone. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there's just general frustrations, but I mean, yes, sure, but not not in any terrible way. Certainly not in any way we're going to talk about. I think, considering most days we spend all of our waking hours together, like working and living and raising kids, we get along very, very well. So I have no complaints. Sort of along the lines of do you have to write recipes differently for cooking at home versus, you know, just knowing them in your head is that, are there things from entertaining? Like the book has a lot, talks a lot about entertaining. Are there things from the restaurant world that you sort of know, you know, in a way you're entertaining people every single night in your restaurants? Are there things from that that you take and, you know, for the rest of us having a party and being anxious about it that we need to know? I mean, one of the, I think the things we try and hit on repeatedly there, and we've hit on a lot since the book's come out, is what you see in a restaurant takes hours and hours and hours of preparation. And if you ever want to do that, you're like even a small bit of that at home, preparation is huge. And there are so many shortcuts that you can take. And we try and list a bunch of them there from creating what we call a mise en place, which is just, you chopped everything and you have it in front of you. And you've prepared, you know, if you're bartending for your friends at your house, you have all of the things that you're going to need for that entire night, ready to go. Like you've cut a dozen limes, you've squeezed all your juice already, you've, you have a peeler and an orange next to the place that you're going to make girl fashions. To something like to batching where, you know, we try and take some of the things that we do in the restaurant, which is you take a seven or eight ingredient cocktail and you take the three ingredients that are shelf stable and you mix them together in a bottle ahead of time and you do whatever math that is, that there's a half an ounce of this, there's a quarter ounce of this and there's a half ounce of this. And all of a sudden you're just pouring an ounce and a quarter of that into a jigger instead of measuring three things, which literally cuts down a third of your time. The batching and preparation just is one of those things we try and talk about again and again and again, that when you're having a party at your house and when you have, when you run a restaurant, like when your guests are there, you need to be focused on making sure they're having a good time and not making the food or making the drink. You want to do all that other work ahead of time and there's, we always talk about like running restaurants is this show that when guests are there, you are on stage and you don't want people to see behind the scenes and when you're hosting a party you're on stage in a sense and you don't want people to see you chopping things and you just do it, you can do all that ahead of time and thinking about all those things, kind of slowing down and thinking about every single step and doing everything you kind of have time is a huge, huge thing that we talk about a lot. Yeah, I mean I also think when you're entertaining at home, you should be having fun too, like not watching everyone else have fun. And I mean one of the recipes we have in the book is how to batch old fashions where you can literally put them in a bottle and pour them on ice and serve them, so you're not even making each drink per person and I wish we were just talking to someone recently who threw a party and did that and was like, I literally spent half the time behind the bar I normally do because I was just pouring them and I'm like, that's the whole point is you should, like if you're having a party, you should be having fun too, it shouldn't be, I mean your guests hopefully are having fun but I always hate going to a party and seeing like one of the hosts or both, I was like stuck in the kitchen the whole time and then to like pop out and like eat food as fast as possible to then go back in and keep doing things like that's not a party to me. Maybe you can talk a bit is also something that was sort of a theme of the book and you touched on it a little bit Andrew but the sort of Scandinavian Maine, Northern, since it's five degrees out, Nexus. Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I mean I grew up in a very Scandinavian small town on the West Coast. My first language was actually Finnish that I spoke and we have, still have a large Scandinavian festival every year. I remember being a little girl saying I was gonna grow up to be Miss Finland for that didn't happen. There's still time. I don't think there's time for it anymore. I'll put the pressure on my daughter now. But I mean, and you know, and there's, we're Scandinavian restaurants, Scandinavian bakeries that still exist there and it's very tied into the community and moving from there to living around the country to then settling here in Maine just has a lot of that same feeling, has a lot of the same energy. I think, you know, it's interesting coming from the West Coast where people are very hands-on and will hug you and like, even if they just met you and, you know, it's just like everyone's like, oh, everyone on the West Coast is so open. And then like moving out here, I was like, oh, people are kind of like quiet and reserved but it reminded me of my Scandinavian family where once you're in, like you're in and that's it. But people aren't gonna be outwardly immediately as, you know, wildly open as they are sometimes when you meet people. And like there were food kind of, you know. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think. Certainly, I think structurally, just when you look at Maine and when you look at Northern Europe on a map, they're at similar latitudes. We get a lot of the same, you know, not exactly the same species, but we get a lot of the same kind of food. We have similar seasons and, you know, that a lot of Scandinavian food is what is coming from the ground when you can get it. What is coming from the sea when you can get it. And for us in Maine, it's the same thing. We're, you know, we at Hunt and we have farmers pulling up every other day with this is what I grew this week and this is what we have. And, you know, we're buying through the fish mongers right on the, right on the wharf that are driving up and telling us what is available this week. And so that approach to cooking is I think inherently is somewhat Scandinavian of just this is, you know, that whole farm to table movement. It's not, and it's not just Northern Europe. Certainly it's all over the place. But to be able to say, like we know where the food's coming from, it is of this place was very much an approach that we wanted. And I also think it's not only not being afraid of the seasons and that very cold winter seasons exist, but actually embracing those and finding enjoyment. I mean, you know, like, I know in Finland, like my relatives, they spend their winters out and they'll go foraging and doing all those things. And I know people who do that here too. You know, and I think that comes in with the food and the drink that you're doing. Another thing, which again, we've touched on a little bit, but as someone, the daughter of someone who loved to entertain but never had any fun, just always seemed stressed out beyond belief. Mom, I hope she won't hear this. I hope you're not recording this. But you talk a lot about having fun. Like, why that is a theme? And what? I mean, you know, and touching on what I mentioned before, like entertaining should be fun. Like it should, you should be, you're entertaining people because you want to have a good time too. I think, I mean, that's why I entertain people. It's like, I want to be social. I want to have a good time. I like having people in my home. You know, and I think that's, you know, and why we open restaurants is we want to do that too, but on a different scale. It's, you know, we like those interactions. We, so it should be fun. And I think that when your guests see you enjoying yourself, they have a better time. They're more relaxed. I mean, as a daughter of your mother, I would imagine that if she was more relaxed, you might have enjoyed yourself more. They just did that feeling of, so often when you're the host, your guests are looking to you for cues about how they should be behaving and how they should be enjoying themselves. And if you are relaxed in enjoying yourself, they're going to be relaxed and enjoy themselves. Yeah. And speaking of restaurants and why you open restaurants, I don't actually know if it's open or not yet. At the end of the week. Friday, yeah. It's Friday? It's Friday, yeah. So, I mean, we own Portland Hot and Alpine Club, which this book is based off of, which has been open for six, coming up on six years over in the Alport. And then two years ago, opened Little Giant in the West End on Clark and Danforth Street. And next, at the end of this week, part of Little Giant is becoming a cafe in the West End called Giant at 81 Clark Street. And open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. Backwards should the restaurant be giant on the cafe being Little Giant? It's a little tongue-in-cheek. I mean, seriously, we had that conversation and it's a small cafe. It's a small spot. The West End's a small little neighborhood. And Little Giant for us has a name very much kind of embodied the space. It's not a huge space, but I think it kind of punches above its weight class, as we like to say. But also very much kind of embodies Portland, Maine in general, that we're a town of 66,000 people that was just named Food City of the Year by Bon Appetit. That's huge. I mean, we beat out how many more cities that are bigger than us? Dozens. I think that idea of bringing a lot more to the table than you'd expect is what we want to convey at Little Giant, but also what I think Maine has to offer in general. And then the idea of giant is just tongue-in-cheek. And why, it has been a store until now. Yeah, it's been a market for a little over two years. What made you think, know what we really need is a cafe or? I started doing monthly pop-ups in there where we've been changing the theme and doing different wines that I'm super into each month and watching the place totally get packed on those nights was super fun. And then having people in the neighborhood come up and say they really want this. That if it was something they were looking for having espresso and a bakery and somewhere they can take to go dinners and do those things that made us decide we wanted to do that. With the bar, we've always talked about how bars can be this gathering point, this community point. And coffee shops are so much the same thing and cafes are so much that same thing. And in the West End, there's for as big as it is and for as much as that's going on in town, there's not a whole lot of places that people can walk to that live in the West End that they want to just sit and hang out. And there are a number of great places and I love them all, but to be able to offer that something that we found ourselves kind of, so I think surprisingly in the position that when we opened the market, we didn't say oh it's gonna be a cafe in two years and it's evolved into that and it makes a lot of sense for us that I think it makes a lot of sense for where the West End is right now. Yeah, absolutely. We're gonna have a bunch of baked items. The bakery's actually gonna kind of start touching on like Northern European, so some short breads, scones, really good pudding. Breakfast sandwiches. Breakfast sandwiches, we're gonna. The good pudding? And you've got, I think it's the pudding, I think our pastry chef asked if she could use the pudding recipe that's in there. I think she's using the Boudina one. And then we're doing some fresh made sandwiches and then some case sandwiches and we're gonna have like soups and salads to go and then a bunch of like rotating dinners and stuff depending on the season. We're eventually gonna have soft serve ice cream which I'm also really excited about. Pudding and ice cream from right here. Pudding and ice cream. The two major foods. Apparently. When you have a two year old and a five year old, they are the two major food groups, yes. So, are you thinking another cookbook? Just to return to the cookbook theme? Is the giant gonna get a cookbook? I don't, I mean, I don't know if Little Giant's gonna get a cookbook yet. We haven't gotten there. I still feel like Little Giant's still in that like forming and getting comfortable and getting at sea leg stage. I mean, had someone approached us two years into hunt to ask us to write a cookbook, I would have said no off the bat. So I think you need to be a little more established and have some more identity. But we are in the early stages of working on a new cookbook that's gonna be just us writing. Are you allowed to tell us anything? Sure, yeah. I mean, it's kind of going back on the entertaining theme. It's about making large scale meals, whether it's for dinner or for parties or whatever. So, larger format things. And are you sticking with your publisher and editor? We'll see, we're... Conversations, yeah. They said we're in conversation, very early enough. It's not a no, it's not a yes, it's just a, we're talking about it. Is a cookbook, we touched on this a little bit too, but is it sort of good marketing? I mean, is it useful in terms of getting the name of your restaurant out? I mean, I think so. I mean, and that was part of the reason, you know, one of the things we thought about when writing and putting this together was we have this marketing tool that literally gets to go out in the world and people can gift it to people and whatever. And so, I mean, I absolutely think when done correctly, it's a great marketing tool, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that when we were looking at our cookbooks, there are certainly ones that we grab, or that I grab at least, that remind me of the meal that I had at that restaurant. But, and you know, one of the things we talk about a lot is just any sort of tangible item that you can, as a guest, refer back to later. You know, I know people, a lot of restaurants are big pens and people are taking pens from restaurants because they want to remember a great meal. They want to remember a great drink and to be able to grab something that reminds them of that great experience. I think it's a throwback, remember? Yeah, it's all, I love it. But maybe some people in the audience do, you know, matchbooks and we have both matchbooks and pens at Little Giant and who's fast. And pens at Hunt and Alpine too, oh yeah, they do. And they're supposed to, we want people to take them. We make them so people take them. We always talk internally at both Little Giant and Hunt and Alpine in that we're trying to create an experience for people. And you know, there's a lot of things that go into that experience from before they walk in the door through, they're walking in the door through their meal, their drink, and after they walk out. But you know, part of that is also extending that experience to a point of a week later or a month later or a year later to be able to pick something up tangibly and say, remember that great drink we had at Hunt and Alpine? And you flip through the book and then maybe you tell your friend about it. And then, so you know, I don't think we necessarily approach the book as a marketing tool. But we definitely are aware of the, you know, that this is all part of the experience. It's just really interesting because you think, I think that a lot of people who wanna start restaurants, they think, I just wanna cook. This is my vision for my food, this is what I wanna cook. And that would be, that seems like great advice for someone who has a opening a restaurant fantasy to be thinking about creating the entire experience. Yeah. I mean, oh, sorry. Yes, definitely. Anybody? So one of the things I love about both Hunt and Alpine at the moment is that they're very distinctive, cohesive atmosphere, but they both, but they do feel the same. And I'm just wondering how you guys went about deciding kind of branding but having few unique but that people walk as a set of homes. That's all you. You know, I mean, one of the things that, you're totally right, Peggy, to pick up on what you were saying and answer your question. A lot of people when they think about opening a restaurant it's, I wanna cook. I wanna, opening a bar, I wanna make drinks. And there's so much more that goes into that. And my personal background is sort of the day-to-day running service and how to make drinks and making sure everything, like the product is great. But a lot of what Brianna has brought to Hunt and Alpine and Little Giant is exactly what you're talking about. Is that feel that whether you wanna call it branding or experience or whatever, so much of it is, it's very intentional. And it's all you. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just what I'm interested in and what I really love and hoping other people love it. You know, I wish I had a really straight line answer for something like that. It's, I mean, and if you walked into our house you would look around and go like, oh, okay, this makes sense. As many people do when they do. But yeah, I mean, a lot of it stems back from just me growing up Scandinavian and the Scandinavian design I grew up and loved and really liking clean lines and really liking something that feels simple but put together. It's a lot of mood boards and going through architecture magazines and things like that to find, kind of find those pieces I like. And then there'll generally be like a thing or two that like really jumps out that I stick to and keep going back to and kind of develop around that. And, you know, for Hunt and Alpine it was I wanted like my dream 1960s finish ski lodge vibe and then for Little Giant was like, I want like Scandinavian meets Palm Springs maybe 1970s colors feeling sort of, yeah, super weird. But like, I kind of started from there and like pulled things and that's kind of where we're in. Anybody else? I guess at what point did you have that aha moment when you were like, okay, you would open Hunt and Alpine things are going well, you were pregnant and having children. And then, you know, like, we're doing a good thing. Why not open another place in a market in the hospitality industry? It seems like to do one thing and do it really, really well with staffing and late nights and raising a family. How did you get to a point like, okay, we maybe have this under control or don't or... We're crazy. We're absolutely crazy. I mean, having children and opening restaurants is never something I would suggest to anyone. It's not an easy thing. And everyone in Port Puglia. And yeah, we're all doing it. Yeah, it's, I'm not sure that with Little Giant it was necessarily just a, oh, things are going great. Let's do it again. It was, it is sort of for both Brianna and I were very, we like working, we like being busy. I don't think that it was, oh, we're not busy enough let's do something, but we're always kind of talking about things that excite us, things, what would be, we would be excited about doing. And for us, for restaurants, it's always been where do we wanna spend time? Well, how do we wanna spend our time? And if we're gonna be working 10 hours a day, six days a week, seven days a week, we certainly better enjoy the place that we're in and kind of enjoy the experience that we're creating. And Little Giant came along as an opportunity that was frankly a little unexpected it wasn't. We didn't for years ahead of time say we're gonna open a West End neighborhood restaurant. It, you know, the whole thing kind of happened very, very quickly and very fortuitously. But it was, you know, I think we probably, we're always talking about what are fun ideas. You know, when we go out to dinner we brainstorm like, wouldn't this be a great bar or wouldn't this be a great restaurant? And we have a list of probably 10 concepts that we're never gonna do. But, but- Little Maynard, would you ever think so? I mean, they're- Going opening one in Oregon. I mean, they're never like a place or a location. It's, hey, wouldn't it be great to open like a cool, I don't even know. I wanna open a Sherry and Sardine bar, so that's not gonna happen. I mean, I like it, right? You know- You can come over, I'll do that in my house. So often it's not necessarily like, oh, it needs to be here in Portland or it needs to be in Vermont or it needs to, this should be really exciting to do. Could it fit? And do we have the time? Can we find the resources? Is this, is there a right location and- Do we actually wanna be spending seven days a week? Could we actually wanna be spending seven days a week? You know, and I think, I mean, with Hunt, it really started with us seeing that there wasn't a dedicated cocktail bar in town and having those conversations. And, you know, we lived in Portland, Oregon when the cocktail scene started happening there and Andrew was part of that. And so we saw all the other things lining up that we saw happen in Portland, Oregon. And, you know, at one point it was like, well, if we don't do it, someone else is gonna do it. And it might not be the bar we wanna hang out in. So we created Hunt for that. And then, you know, the evolution of having children and having, being pregnant with more children, you know, seeing little giant as going like, we want a place where like families can hang out and have, but have like really good food, but they feel comfortable coming in with their kids. It feels a little more neighborhood-y. It feels a little more out of the way. But you can also come in and sit at the bar at night and totally have like a really nice drink. And there are places we've been to in the evolution of our relationship that exist and we didn't see anything quite like that. So we really kind of almost create places selfishly, to be honest. But I mean, just in seeing that we wanna spend time at and we wanna hang out. There is a selfishness because we have to spend a lot of our time there. Clearly that's not the only, you know, the end I'll be all to it. Some of the, I think you had a question as well. So here you are, co-owners of free restaurants. Yeah. And book writers. And here you are today talking to us. Thank you for coming by the way. Question is, how do you manage your time in the restaurants? Do you spend most of your time in the back room managing or do you spend time in the kitchen cooking? How does it all work for you? Certainly you have to have the staff who you trust to kind of take over when you're not there or for you to manage the restaurant. Sure. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure, absolutely. And also thank you all for coming here. We're happy to do this. It honestly changes every day that our schedules are very much what needs immediate attention. When you were saying that a lot of people wanna open restaurants because they wanna cook, one of the first things when I talk to a person to tell them about opening a restaurant is that you're not gonna cook, you're not gonna bartend nearly as much as you want to. The more you get into it, the more you are at your computer doing inventory or payroll or all of these other things that nobody else is gonna do. You know, we're small business owners and so we're doing everything conceivable that needs to be done. When it comes to creating the food and the drink, we are very fortunate that we have a phenomenal staff that does a lot of the day-to-day chopping the food and creating the recipes and we sit down on a weekly basis at both restaurants and talk about whatever those things are and if there's new food or new drink, we have conversations about them and it's the great thing that they get to bring it to us and say, what do you think of this? And we get to try it, which is that's one of the better parts of running restaurants. A lot of our day-to-day is helping other people do their jobs really well and making sure that they understand how we expect them to do their jobs. And so that means at night, we are at one or both restaurants making sure service is going well and everybody has the tools they need to succeed and making sure, and a lot of it is, just making sure people are equipped to do the job you ask them to do and outlining what that job is. I mean, I can tell you very specifically an hour before we got here, I was up a little giant fixing electrical stuff because it's not my staff's job to understand where the circuits are, that's my job, or I have to bring an electrician in and so it really depends on what the need is and I got that message half an hour before I went up there that said, hey, this isn't working right and I kind of called and figured out what was going on and went right up there and fixed it because you do what you need to do to make everyday work and to put your staff in a position to succeed and make sure, because they're there, the biggest asset is your staff is the people every day that are making sure every single guest that walks in is having a good time. Do you have any recipes in this book that perhaps is the most memorable to you or you feel the most passionate about and can you tell us a little bit about those? Yeah, I mean, I'll start. We have the, what's been the Hunt Albin's household fashion since we've opened which was also the old fashion. Andrew and I met in Portland, Oregon when he was working behind the bar at a restaurant called Cly Common which friends of mine who I worked with, her husband owned the restaurant and the first drink Andrew made me when I met him was this old fashion and we started talking pretty much right away and so yeah, so it's like the first thing we met and the first drink he ever made me and we just actually were interviewed for something else about what your last drink ever would be and I picked the old fashion because of that. I think there are a lot of the recipes in this book in particular are personal in some form or another. You know, there's been a lot of people when you come to Hunt Albin more often than not you get a bowl of popcorn in front of you and the popcorn recipe is one of the first recipes in there for those of you who haven't been it's a green chili and Parmesan popcorn that we make fresh and people really, really like it and I really, really like it too and it's been on the menu since day one. Drink wise there are so many that have personal connotations and in one form or another certainly the old fashion one is one we both love but the heading of each recipe there's a lot of personal stories which is very much how we wanted the book to be used if you wanted to like understand a little bit more about what we do and what Hunt Albin is. I hope this is not a line up. I'm kind of a neighbor of you guys and therefore I have to know that you required a house during this somewhat occupied period you had and there was falling down and created perhaps a Scandinavian one but I'm a master piece of that. So I'm going to get some folks over to give you your free time. Yeah we did, we bought a abandoned foreclosure and fully gutted and renovated it in between Hunt and Little Giant and our kids. If you get out of this restaurant thing you have a second career. If anyone wants to hire me to do design, I'm in. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you, thanks everyone for coming.