 I can go into Walmart. Heck, I don't even have to wear pants. Nobody wears a mask at Walmart. I can go get a pink cockatoo for my Christmas tree, but I can't go and dine outdoors at a restaurant. In early December, restaurateur Andrew Grewle responded to California Governor Gavin Newsom's statewide ban on outdoor dining with a video that went viral. I can go to Target, Amazon's making tons of money. All big business is getting rich. Okay, outdoor dining does not lead to any of that. Therefore, screw that. Work's staying open. Outdoors. It's that simple. I'm not an asshole. The governor is. Grewle is the founder and owner of Slapfish, a growing, fast-casual restaurant chain based in Huntington Beach, California. He's a widely recognized culinary innovator and a familiar face on the food network and other cooking channels. Why don't you name your restaurant Slapfish? It's fish so fresh it'll slap you. During the pandemic, he's gained prominence as an unabashed critic of arbitrary rules that put small business operators at the beck and call of hypocritical politicians who ignore basic science. Reasons sat down to talk with Grewle about what it's been like to run a business with government at all levels arbitrarily flipping the on-off switch, why innovation is central to both capitalism and cuisine, and why he'll never open another franchise in California. Andrew Grewle, thanks for talking to Reza. Thank you for having me. Summarize how difficult this year has been. Running a food business. It's been all about the extremes, extreme highs and extreme lows. The interesting thing, though, is that it comes in phases, right? So what we saw in California in phases was the first two weeks, four weeks, six weeks of the lockdown. We frankly were all living the cliche that we were in it together. I mean, you know, I was supporting the lockdown to some degree within the restaurant space because we all didn't know what was happening, right? So it was this fact-finding mission for a few weeks, right? We all know, flatten the curve, et cetera, et cetera. And everybody was kind of in it. So our first pivot, once we got shut down, was, okay, what can we do as a restaurant? And this is how our mindset goes as business owners. What can we do to help the community? So we opened up for feeding all the kids who couldn't get school lunches, all first responders. But then over time, right, we started to learn a little bit more and then it was more lockdown, more restriction, more, really it was about crushing the mindset of the consumer, not intentionally. I'm not saying that was the intentional goal, but after about a month, it really, it was the fear set in and then it just starts to germinate in the community, right? In the behavior of people within the community. Meaning that they weren't coming out for food or the- No, they weren't coming out. And if you just do a general sample across social platforms on a hyper-local level, that's where you can really kind of see through the conversation how scared people were to actually go out. What we saw time and time and time again is with every lockdown, there was a massive sect of people who were losing their jobs. And it was just this glib, ho-hum attitude from the governments locking us down, you know, because people over profits, right? These sound bites were just constantly being masqueraded around to make the business owners and the workers within the industries that were being vilified feel guilty. So specifically the restaurant industry was being vilified as a vector of spread for coronavirus. When the Health Department of America's most populous county, Los Angeles, banned outdoor dining in late November 2020 ahead of the winter holidays, policymakers offered no evidence that eating outdoors was a significant source of COVID spread. When asked if there were any known COVID cases that could be attributed to outdoor dining, the county's public health director dodged the question. I don't have those numbers in front of me, but I will be happy to, you know, work with our communications team and we'll get those numbers. County data showed that restaurants were highly compliant with COVID health guidelines. And the industry didn't make the county's top five list of COVID exposure sites. Really has to do with the goal of trying to keep people at home, not a comment on the relative safety of outdoor dining. Multiple judges ruled against state and local bans, though the decisions it had little practical effect. Most California restaurants, including grouals, were limited to take out only for months. Visually it makes sense. You've got these small spaces where people are on top of one another and therefore they have to be these vectors of spread, right? But then when you actually pull apart the layers and you think about it, we're trained to be safe and sanitary. Every single restaurant worker has a food handlers card. Within that food handlers card and that certification, you learn everything from various steps of entry, service, et cetera, through the restaurant from bacteria, material data safety sheets. We are basically on the front line of trying to create environments that are safe and sanitary. That's what we do. But yet we are now being vilified as the vectors of spread when frankly the data didn't show that. How do you respond when you get shut down for outdoor dining, which is not a cause of spread? And that's like the thing that's keeping you afloat. Here in Southern California and actually across the nation, you started to see a lot of investment in things like outdoor dining patios and expanding patios to outside. But then you also did see a deregulation on things like having alcohol outside. Now you were allowed to take alcohol out. You were allowed to drink outside whereas before perhaps you weren't based upon the ABC rules. So you start to see restaurants effectively spill out into parking lots on the streets. And it was great going into the summertime. Everybody was given everyone else a high five about this. We saw it in cold climates and hot climates. Now going to fall wintertime, Southern California is positioned to be the restaurant mecca by virtue of our weather here. Outdoor dining, you started to see restaurants pick back up again, the economic simulation. And then they shut down outdoor dining. No data, no science. And the minute they did that, I said this vocally, I said, watch within two to three weeks of shutting down, you're going to start to see a spike because the unintended or intended consequence of shutting down outdoor dining is you're going to drive people indoors. And I have anecdotal evidence of so many people saying, hey, we had plans to go out and dine with our weekly dining group, outdoors at Javier's or whatever restaurant it is. And when they shut down outdoor dining, we all just ended up going inside and having a house party. We all got COVID, right? Cases spiked when they shut down outdoor dining. And still to this day, they will not admit the mistake associated with that. Nobody was expecting anyone to shut down outdoor dining. That's just insane. So people had hired to be able to serve through the wintertime. And when they shut down outdoor dining, it was the last week of November here in California. It was every restaurant tour's nightmare to have to let go of the majority of their staff. That's when the survival mode then kicked in because we were already just hanging on by a thread. It was in a moment of desperation following the second mandated closure of the majority of California restaurants that grew unloaded on Governor Newsom. And every single juncture along the way here from the beginning shut down to today, we've listened to all of the advice from our government officials only to be shut down over and over and over again and then not compensated for the elements that we put in place in our businesses in order to protect our customers. Newsom now faces a recall election after a petition drew more than two million signatures. People creating rules that are crushing businesses and crushing local economies, not following their own rules and being on display, then flaunting that behavior and having a real smug response to it is the epitome of elitism. And that's what we all talk about and we joke about how there's two categories of people. You've got the elite and then you've got the proletariat, if you will. You've got the workers and it couldn't be more it couldn't be couldn't be more clear than the past four or five months, I would say because there's almost been a bubble of safety around our elected leaders when it comes to coronavirus from having, you know, the best healthcare, the best testing, immediate access to vaccines, right? Every single piece that's rolled out, every kind of lever that's supposed to help when it comes to the pandemic, celebrities, the uber wealthy and our elected officials always get first dibs at. Grewl says Newsom has targeted him for political retribution. So about four or five days after my little social media ran against Newsom, we got served by the labor commissioner a full blanket investigation on every single business that I'm associated with. Absolutely no trigger, no specific complaint. We've never had a labor law violation. There is no basis in this random investigation and furthermore, the investigation is happening at a time where everybody knows the restaurant industry is crushed, right? So this investigation comes down. We've had to spend now well over $20,000 on legal fees in trying to provide three years of documentation on every single business they've asked. We've turned that around within five, six days, hours and hours and hours of work still to absolutely no responses to what triggered the investigation, what have you. It's political targeting. How long will it take for that to be resolved? You know? I have absolutely no idea. And it's been looming. I mean, it keeps us awake at night because of the fact that there is absolutely nothing that we can do. There's no logic, no reason behind any of this. And furthermore, if they just toss it to the side, it's not like my legal fees are going to be covered. It's the bureaucratic red tape that they use if you speak out against the institution of government here in California. Your Twitter feed is fantastic and I recommend everybody check it out. But you were talking about how the enhanced federal and state unemployment benefits also made it hard for you to staff your restaurant. What was going on there and what was the unintended consequence of giving people, you know, more money for unemployment? In the very beginning, when the government offered it, I think it was $600 on top of what the state was offering for unemployment, it worked out here in California. It was about $1,100 a week. I think you could get max, right? So we did have a lot of team members who initially we did lay everybody off because we didn't know what was going to happen. They told us we could be in the shutdown for X amount of days, what have you. But right away, as we started helping out with the community and building some business, our business came back and we also needed those employees back. So we started reaching out to everybody and a lot of people were like, look, I'm making $1,100 right now, not working. I've got books I want to read. I've got classes I want to take online. I'm going to really wait this thing through. I'm going to take the money as opposed to coming back and working. And what was hilarious was that when I posted that little anecdote, right? Not using names. And I'm not targeting these. Look, if I was 19 years old and I was a server in a restaurant and I could make $1,500 as a server, working 50 hours a week or I could make $1,100 sitting at home, reading books, learning in an instrument, all the things that you always say you want to do. Heck, I would do it too. No shame on them at all. It was just the kind of framework that was established. But when I talked about that, everybody's response to me was, well, you're not paying your employees enough. That's because you're a greedy business owner. The only reason they're not coming back is because maybe you should pay them more. No, no, no. That's not the point, right? Like I said, even if it's $2,000 that they were making by working here versus $1,100, it's merely the fact that people are being paid a significant sum of money to not work. It incentivizes that. And that's what we saw. Became virtually impossible for months to hire back employees. And this was across all of our stores. What do you think the long-term damage will be to the kind of food service industry? We don't know what the long-term damage is going to be yet and I think it's way too early to start counting casualties. So this is, you know, articles right now that say, oh, well, you know, it's all over and the restaurant industry didn't do as poor as everybody thought that they were going to do and stop feeling sorry for them. That's akin to counting casualties in a plane crash, right? The plane is crashing. Two people on the plane have a heart attack. The plane hasn't hit the ground yet. And everybody's saying, look, only two people died in this plane crash. Well, wait until the plane hits the ground because we're free falling right now. And we don't know the effect that all of these regulations, all of these lockdowns and all of the economic manipulation is going to have on micro-industries but or the economy as a whole in the long run. And, you know, long run short run, we could be looking at certain effects in six months, 12 months, 24 months, but it is my contention that we haven't seen the worst yet. Gruhl has made it big in California, but he's a garden state native, working some of his first restaurant jobs on the Jersey Shore. He moved into fine dining after working as a chef at a Boston Ritz Carlton and other high-end restaurants. Gruhl's Jersey roots have led him toward the kind of messy, fast but high-quality food on offer at Slapfish, which started as a food truck before growing to a national chain of two dozen establishments in 10 states and the UK. My first job was working with the Short Hills Hilton, dishwasher, prep cook, outdoor pool boy, you know, working and dining in New Jersey restaurants certainly establishes the right DNA, if you will. And one would hope, yeah. Now that's translated to sloppy sandwiches, although, you know, having spent years working in the world of fine dining as well, it's now my mission to combine the quality of fine dining between two pieces of bread. Who are your kind of chef heroes or cooking heroes? Definitely Bourdain, of course, you know, little Jersey feel right there. Carl Ruiz, who recently passed, who, you know, was a phenomenal chef burgeoning star in the food network scene, but also just a good down to earth Jersey, New York chef. You know, when I look at some of the culinary heroes beyond, you know, Jacques Pepin, we had talked about with the Howard Johnson's connection. Can you talk about how innovation in cooking and in preparing food, how does that intersect with regulation coming down from public health authorities or whatever? Talk to any chef and all they're going to come back to are fundamentals, right? Cooking is all about fundamentals and fundamentals of French mother sauces, fundamentals of basic technique and then fundamentals to even kitchen, hierarchy, sanitation, flow of service, right? It's always about the fundamentals, but the primary piece of food is the ingredients that go into the food. So when you look across the landscape, the culinary landscape and you see what's hot and what's popular and there's a lot of kind of cliches and there's also a lot of people trying to be a bit avant-garde going over the top just to get that quick flash in a pan, pun intended, but really the chefs that are doing something new are only focusing on ingredients and they're getting the highest quality ingredients but they're also getting the freshest and the newest ingredients and it comes down to the soil. So when we bring the idea of regulation into the growth of food, new cuisines, quality of food, it's all about having high quality food that's unadulterated, right? It doesn't have to go through the system of government which effectively pulls not just flavor out of the food, it pulls art out of the food and you're left with cardboard and what we've seen over the decades is we've seen the quality of food and let's use an apple as it just gets constantly modified, genetically modified in many cases in order to make it more transportable in order to make it more approachable, right? I mean we think about shape when it comes to food is we've actually lost not just the nutrition but the quality of the food, right? Compared to 20 years ago you know much less 50 years ago American food offerings at every level is just so much better or more varied I mean there's bad stuff but there's great stuff what is what's driving you know that kind of renaissance and revolution and you know it's a perpetual revolution in new interesting weird fun stuff sometimes it's a return to basics sometimes it's coming up with something totally different what's driving that in America? Nowadays what drives a lot of food innovation is media and social media and that's somewhat of a a vanity arena and that's good and bad, right? It gets people to be more aware of their food it gets people to go out more to basically say look where I am look what I ate look what I did but at the same rate it's very surface level so I think that we're seeing a change across the food landscape because of that element of it but I still think once again deep down I come down to the fundamentals and I come down to the ingredients and what's driving chefs who are artists to be able to create new dishes and create new genres of food is trying to find new ways to take high high high quality ingredients and present them to the diner in a different literally a different vessel and figuratively a different arena his experience working with seafood on the west coast drove gruel's interest in ocean conservation he serves as director of a non-profit project at the aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California called Seafood for the Future where he aims to combat overfishing by developing sustainable open ocean aquaculture techniques or fish farming in the Pacific Ocean well the ocean is everything right I mean you can take any topic and you can bring it back to the ocean okay we are going to work on the Manson family murders and the Kennedy assassination maybe later but so talk about the ocean well psychosis and depression are a result of not having enough omega-3s and DHAs and your diet which specifically come from seafood let's talk about the oceans talk about the ocean economy number one it's still the wild west all right it is not regulated the same way that terrestrial farming is or and by that I'm referring to both aquaculture and wild capture fisheries what we also saw over the past 50 years is the most positive and amazing display of ocean resilience so when I talk about overfishing right which is really simple it's it's basically taking a specific seafood species to virtual extinction or commercial extinction because it can't reproduce anymore we overfished it and we saw that in the 80s with cod Atlantic cod fishery which was the biggest fishery in the world at one point we saw it with swordfish right if you remember that campaign gives swordfish a break so a lot of government agencies and this is where government can do can do good they came in and they started to do a lot of science on the ocean they said okay we understand that the biomass of this particular species is x in order for it to hit its maximum sustainable yield we can only catch y amount each year and then there are these fishing quotas right and you have these private fishermen who go out and then obviously they can only catch a certain amount which then force them to digress into other fisheries right it really diversified the fishing industry and that was a great thing and what we saw was success right now that particular swordfish fishery is at its maximum sustainable yield Atlantic cod the fishery has been refreshed that is about ocean resilience we don't use the ocean enough in order to you know solve some of our environmental problems that we've created on land those are success stories but instead we're just browbeat and day in and day out with this fear that we're going to run out of seafood by 2050 there was a study it was a Boris Worm who did this seafood is going to be and Ted Danson did a huge huge piece on it and it was about how we're going to over fish the ocean we're going to be eating jellyfish by 2050 well the study was junk it was junk science never even came close to it and it didn't happen the reason it didn't happen is because of the presence of aquaculture 55-60% of the seafood consumed worldwide is because of aquaculture and specifically open ocean aquaculture behind oil and automobiles one of the largest trade deficits in the United States is actually seafood we import 80 plus percent of the seafood that we consume here in the United States well why do we do that is because we're importing farmed seafood well why are we importing farmed seafood because we don't have the framework for an open ocean aquaculture policy and so that's like that's creating farms that are out in the ocean and so that solves a lot of problems right the farming of fish it decreases the pressure off the wild stocks so you still now have the economic viability of a wild fishery wild capture fisheries right and then you've all because they're catching a lot less now there's the innovation the technological innovation associated with farming fish and being efficient at farming fish in the open ocean so when they started farming fish in the 80s right the amount of feed that you needed wild fish in order to feed farm fish the ratio was like for every pound of farm fish you would grow it was five pounds of wild fish you'd have to catch right that feed conversion ratio is incredibly inefficient why farm fish if you're taking more wild fish to feed the farm fish well nowadays the feed conversion ratio is like 0.5 to 1 I mean the efficiency that we've reached is unbelievable this is all being done outside of U.S. waters open ocean aquaculture is controversial among certain types of foodies right is that merely personal interest or or economic interest masquerading as a public health concern or is there something to that both it's both so it's just mainly it's misinformation that the hysteria the sensationalism in the press related to the fear of you know the danger of aquaculture and farm seafood is unbelievable and there was billions of dollars that have been poured into a demarketing campaign to demarket aquaculture and I don't want to point out any particular agencies that's done this that would be nice if you did though name names just follow the money in the beginning of the Alaskan Seafood Marketing Institute was putting tons of money into demarketing farm seafood because their number one export of course wild salmon was now competing with a farmed Atlantic salmon which was being farmed at a cost much lower than it takes to capture process and sell the wild species now as a chef they're two totally different species Atlantic salmon farmed Atlantic salmon compared to a wild Alaskan fish is an apple to a banana right two totally different species no reason to be demarketing one versus the other if you actually had invested in promoting farmed Atlantic salmon all you know all boats rise with a high tide right higher seafood consumption but I will say this because of that and all of the fear mongering and the fact that farm seafood is going to kill you and then furthermore PCBs and mercury and all of these sensationalized stories are per capita consumption of seafood in the United States is one of the lowest of most countries as a result of that what do we eat chicken beef what do they eat corn soy high in omega-6 fatty acids having an overabundance of omega-6 fatty acids in your diet leads to things like hypertension heart failure all of these health deficiencies because we're eating junk food we're putting junk into our bodies there's a lack of DHA omega-3 fatty acids that can only be found in high quality seafood six of the eight leading causes of death in the US can be alleviated through regular consumption of the right omega-3 fatty acids so these headlines have now forced people to eat less seafood they're so confused about it they get up to the lunch counter it's like well just give me the chicken right give me the chicken so we now have the real pandemic that's underneath the pandemic we're in right now is the health crisis in America obesity what's in our diets the lack of nutrition in our food the hollow food that we're eating and that's been perpetuated by an over-regulated food system and the food system is now being consolidated into the government right so it's basically corporatism at its worst done through food and that's what's being fed to kids that's what's being fed because it's economically more viable to and financially for the economy to be able to mass produce crap food then to buy something locally from a local farmer's market right and I've heard on many occasions economists make the argument about comparative advantage well if I buy this tomato locally and it costs three dollars to grow and sell this tomato here locally or I could buy the same tomato that's shipped in mass produced in Mexico for a dollar technically doesn't that mean that I can have the tomato and still have an extra two dollars to spend in my local economy so that actually helps the economy well that argument is flawed and the reason why it's flawed is because of the quality of the tomato they're bringing in is not the same quality in addition to the fact that the social element of buying local eating local commingling locally by going to the farmer's market right when's the last time you saw somebody at an Albertson sitting around having a political conversation sipping on an espresso how do you have fresh seafood in Missouri most if not 99% of all seafood is frozen at sea so there still isn't regulation associated with fresh versus frozen all all sushi has to be frozen that's how they kill the parasites so once again the idea that frozen seafood is a bad thing has been implanted in our minds so I always look for frozen seafood I'll take the frozen seafood any day because it's been pulled out of the water flash frozen right and when you thought it's basically unfreezing time do you want that or do you want the piece of fish that's you know three weeks um yeah I just let the cover in yeah Andrew Grew what what kind is your real name lip shits like where does that name come from I wish my last name was mayonnaise or ketchup so I'm something in the condiment category so so gruel is a German name French German they don't know exactly where it started and you know I just I can only imagine at some point in my in my family we were just we were scooping porridge for soldiers somewhere do you uh do you get a lot of jokes made about that oh god it's the culinary school was the greatest yeah um uh so you know chef gruel that was uh Johnson and Wales Proud Johnson and Wales yes yes once Johnson Wales before I went to Johnson Wales I went to a small liberal arts college up in Maine Bates College oh yeah um and uh you know protested capitalism and smoked pot so what well what flipped you then was it the pot or was it owning your business that made you become a capitalist well I mean my first my first real foray into understanding business was marijuana because in Maine you've got an agrarian economy and then you have three incredibly expensive liberal arts colleges Colby Bates and Bowdoin all within this uh you know kind of 45 50 mile radius and the incredibly wealthy kids that go to school there mind you I went on a running scholarship and uh I was just a jersey kid blue collar jersey kid and you have all these kids who they want to smoke pot and Maine has always been very decriminalized if you will so what was the first thing I saw was I saw a need in I was a long distance runner I wasn't a pot smoker at all right but I saw a need and the greatest thing was you know you don't get high in your own supply so I was the prime candidate to be able to address their business needs amazing um you know as we final question um you know as as we seem to be coming out of the pandemic one of the problems with crises is that they institute a lot of policies that last forever so you know there's a reason why we're taking our shoes off you know 20 years after 9 11 you know and oftentimes the policies have nothing to do with safety or anything what are a couple of regulations that you really want to see go away that were implemented over the last year yep well that's a great point that you bring up and I'll like really quickly before I answer that I'll also ask another question back um more just pose it but are there any scenarios with policy whereby there's been regulations put in place in our everyday lives hundreds of them thousands of them and then they've been removed you talk about the shoe thing I just don't know a story so well this here's a question for you know you mentioned before the kind of takeaway liquor sales and the idea you know that stores would sell pre-made cocktails or you would be allowed to drink out on the sidewalks and stuff and in many cases you know the laws governing alcohol consumption go back to the colonial period do you think there's do you think some of those laws that kind of loosened things up do you think they'll stick around or will those be pulled back and the old laws put in place yeah I think that the areas where the laws have now been loosened they're going to get tightened up again right so specifically alcohol sales the ability to take out alcohol this gray area now between the various types of liquor licensees here in California where you can do some things that you otherwise weren't able to do that's all going to go which is also something that I don't think I know I don't fully understand when I talk to restaurant tours the gradations of alcohol licenses in every state in the country and they're different sometimes county by county of what you're allowed to sell you know even within a restaurant it's just bewildering when you have a beer and wine license here in California you actually have you cannot serve just rice that doesn't count as food you actually need something that's been cooked over a specific device that requires a hood right so if I have pokey and rice and that's my meal that doesn't count as food by the California standards and I wouldn't be able to have my beer and wine license that's amazing so what are the what are the worst laws that you hope do go away that have been put in place just in the past year well first and foremost I think that the you know one thing that's been great for restaurants through the pandemic has been the access to capital right and one of the reasons why we're seeing a destruction of small independent restaurants throughout America before the pandemic was just there was no access to capital the only people had to capital with a big private equity firms or family funds you know SBA does nothing for small businesses when it comes to restaurants the only way you can get an SBA loan is if you actually have the money to back it right so then you don't need the SBA exactly so the access to capital that's been huge and I hope that that remains because that will help small independent restaurants where is that coming from it's just all been loosened up I mean whether whether it's through the PPP itself specifically or any of these new stimulus programs that have been introduced through the restaurant or the the rescue relief plans those have been helpful and I think will continue to be helpful now the only fear that I have is all of this money has been earmarked but it's being distributed through government agencies and what we know is is that it's like you know I make the joke is that you take a you take a cup of mayonnaise right and you eventually want to transfer it from one cup across to 10 cups well by the time you get to that final cup you got half the mayonnaise in there because it's stuck to the sides of this cup that's government right the money is going to stick to the sides of government very quickly and we're not going to actually see all of that money so I go back to the I'm bouncing around here but you asked about the fund we raised we've raised almost $400,000 and we've distributed it within 24 hours of receiving it every single penny if not more because we've been matching some of that my wife and I as we kind of go through week by week you look at unemployment who the hell knows where that money is going right I mean you've got some jabroni in jail up here who's getting you know unemployment checks and my employees are some of them are still waiting on their checks from when we laid them off in April so if we can start to see some of this money that is being printed which really is you know where's this money coming from but if if that money actually is distributed directly to businesses and to people as opposed to going through government agencies then I actually think that it will be helpful to the economy but that doesn't seem to be the case all right we're going to leave it there Chef Andrew Grohl proprietor of Slapfish thanks for talking to reason thank you so much