Whether you live in Boulder and know its restaurant scene well, or rarely make your way there and are restaurant-curious. this is the podcast for you. In this episode of the In Good Taste Denver Podcast, we visit with Jessica Benjamin, founder of First Bite: Boulder Restaurant Week, and Dakota Soifer, Chef and Owner of Cafe Aion, a participant in the annual event that happens October 8-17, 2021. Even beyond talk of Boulder Restaurant Week, the podcast provides great insight into the world of being a restaurant owner and chef, especially during the pandemic. 

To hear the podcast, click on the player below (our podcasts are also available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and various other listening services). You can also read excerpts from the podcast, in the transcript, below. But we encourage you to listen, too, to hear more great information, personalities and the passion in the voices of our guests.

 

We’ve got everything you need to know about First Bite: Boulder Restaurant Week in our previous article. But the most important thing to know is that reservations are strongly recommended at any of the participating restaurants. And, they are offering three, fixed price points and special menus that vary with each restaurant.

 

In Good Taste Denver /  First Bite: Boulder Restaurant Week Podcast Transcript

Courtney, In Good Taste Denver: After a year like no other and learning how to adapt and what unfortunately seems to be our new normal of life during a pandemic, a popular food and restaurant event gets ready for its 16th year. I’m Courtney Drake McDonough, the publisher of the In Good Taste Denver blog and host of the In Good Taste Denver podcast. My guests today are Jessica Benjamin, who’s the owner and producer of First Bite Boulder Restaurant Week, and Dakota Soifer, who’s the chef and owner of Café Aion, a Spanish focused restaurant in Boulder that’s been around for more than 11 years. Dakota is also a previous contestant on Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen. Thank you both for joining me today to talk about this fun event coming up.

Jessica Benjamin, First Bite: Thanks for having us.

Jessica Benjamin of First Bite - Boulder Restaurant Week
Meet Jessica Benjamin, founder of First Bite: Boulder Restaurant Week. Photo courtesy First Bite.

IGTD: Jessica, I’m going to start with you. Tell me what First Bite and Boulder Restaurant Week are, and also throw in, if you wouldn’t mind, because I know it’s a fun story, how you and Dakota know each other.

JB: Sure, absolutely. Well, I can actually start with Dakota and I. Dakota and I work together about 15 years ago, he was a chef at the kitchen- he can share more about that. And I worked as the hostess and worked in the marketing department as well. And, as most restaurants go, you get to know each other, everyone becomes one big family, and we stay touch. Even when we left working for them, we stayed in touch through the years and worked together with events here and there. And when I took over First Bite in 2019, we obviously started working together a lot more. So, First Bite is the Boulder County Restaurant Week. We have been running for 16 years now. We are hosting this year, we are back. It was last year we took a break for Covid, but we are back on October 8th through the 17th and are excited to be hosting, at this moment, 30 different restaurants who are presenting chef-curated menus at a variety of price points to celebrate our local dining scene.

IGTD: Dakota, what’s your involvement in the event both this year and in the past?

Dakota Soifer, Chef
Dakota Soifer, Chef and Owner of Café Aion. Photo courtesy Café Aion.

Dakota Soifer, Cafe Aion:  So in the past, we’ve, we being Café Aion, participated in First Bite. It was running previous to Jessica taking it over. And it was always a really fun opportunity to showcase some unique items or some of our tapas menu staples here at the café and get to reach some folks who might not venture up to Café Aion otherwise. Then last year, during the COVID break, we were thrilled to be a part of the cookbook that Jessica published and put out. It was a really, really great opportunity for us and a fun way to interact with the public in a different way. And this year, we’re looking forward to participating again, both Café Aion, which is the restaurant, as well as our ghost kitchen, which we started over COVUD: Brasserie Boulder. We’ll be participating and putting out menus for folks to enjoy.

IGTD: And Jessica, as Dakota alluded to, I know First Bite’s been around a long time, as you mentioned, 16 years now, but you’re somewhat new to it. Can you explain how that came to be?

JB: Absolutely. I took over in 2019. The previous founder and owner was actually a woman that both Dakota and I had worked with, Kate Lacroix at the kitchens where we all met. And as I said, everyone becomes family. So we have stayed in touch through the years, and she had reached out to me knowing that I was involved in the industry a bit and did event planning and marketing. So I came on and 2019 was our first year in production and kind of shifting things a bit. And then, as Dakota said, we had to pivot last year like everyone else and decided to publish A Bite of Boulder.

 

IGTD: Tell us some of the ways this year’s going to look different than previous years.

JB: This year really is a continuation of what COVID started for us, which was diving deeper into what was my mission when I took over, which was to really tell those stories in a deeper way. As you do in your blog and your podcast, we really have found that people are more interested in finding out the back, behind-the-scenes, story and getting to know chefs and restaurants on what they’re doing and where their food comes from, and it’s less…dining out has just becoming less transactional. So that’s our desire is building a community of people who are engaged and excited about that. And last year, writing that cookbook really gave us a deep dive opportunity to tell that longer story about some of our restaurants and about our community. And so this year, we are just riding the wave still and transitioning more into featuring these restaurants and these chefs as they are. Typical Restaurant Weeks have an appetizer, entree, dessert, and there’s a lot of rules around it.. So we are still allowing chefs to offer multiple courses or multiple choices, but we’re really trying to take the rules out of it. The only rule is they have to stick to one of our three price points. And other than that, they can include whatever items, whatever variety, wine, anything that they’re choosing to include to really present themselves in their most authentic selves.

Food on a table for First Bite.
An example of the kind of meal you can enjoy at Café Aion. Photo courtesy Café Aion.

IGTD: And I know we’re going to be talking a little bit more about how people can get information at the end, but because there’s going to be a little bit of variance in what restaurants offer, will those details be available on the website?

JB: Absolutely. They will each have a feature page on our website, which is www.firstbiteboulder.com and you can explore their menus on there. You can click through the links to make reservations and just read more about each restaurant.

JB: Dakota. Do you want to share a little bit about how you built Café Aion, because I think that story’s fantastic.

DS: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I had about 10 years of running restaurants from the kitchen behind me and a lot of experience and felt very comfortable with food. But, no business experience, so I somehow talked the owners of Burnt Toast, the little cafe that was in the space Aion is now, to pass the restaurant on to me and, at a reasonable price, we were able to bootstrap it and I got a couple of friends to help me. And we built the bar and, you know, Jessica got us business cards on our Staples accounts. She was instrumental – she’s like, oh, “you’re going to need like pens and paper.” I was like, what? What? “Have you thought about what you’re going to print a menu on?” So we are really piecing it together and doing it on a shoestring. And it was myself and three other friends did everything from painting, to building and hammering and tasting and canning. And, we were literally out of money and we’re like, OK, we better open up because we need some money to flow in rather than out at this moment. So it was cool. It was fun to do it like that rather than in the corporate-managed way.

IGTD: And why did you decide on a Spanish focus in particular?

DS: I really had two main reasons that I fell in love with going that way. At first, there’s actually quite a bit of carryover ingredient-wise. I love being able to work with local farmers and things like that. And what is grown here in Colorado is actually a lot of crossover of traditional ingredients in Spain. So peppers, eggplants, you see a lot of lamb, onions, all of those things we can find here at our farms that you see in traditional dishes in Spain. Obviously, the seafood piece is missing, but that ingredient crossover… It would be tough to do a farm to table Thai restaurant in Colorado. Not a lot of coconut here. Secondly is the style of eating. I spent a lot of time leading up to Café Aion  working in “fine dining” restaurants with white tablecloths and slightly more formal service. And at that point, I was in my late 20s and I wanted to make my own mark and bucked the trend, and I was like, no, I love this informal style. I love sharing with my friends and everyone just sitting around a table with a big mess of bottles of wine and, you know, kind of snacking throughout the night. And to me, Spanish cuisine really lends itself to that informal style of eating with, a variety of tapas and everyone sharing a big paella. I just kind of fell in love with everything it represented.

Paella
Paella from Café Aion. Photo courtesy Café Aion.

IGTD: Well, Dakota let’s talk a little bit about Covid, because, obviously, it was and still is a terrible thing. But I know you took some of the first really big, bold steps to support and maintain the restaurant business in Boulder. So can you tell us what some of those things were that you’ve done?

DS: After last summer, in which there was some outdoor dining and things like that, we were headed towards the Fall. Kids had gone back to school for maybe a month and CU came in quickly, went remote. And it was clear that the fall and winter was not going to go smoothly, that we realized that we needed to get some other things going for us to make it. And that made sense for us in opening a couple ghost kitchen concepts. One of the two was Lil Bub’s Family Meals. My wife and I had just had a son last March, so COVID baby, right at the beginning. And our nickname for him was Bub. So Lil Bub’s Family Meal was sort of family sized meals that people could order for takeout and delivery. So it’s kind of like sheet pan size lasagna and paellas and fried chicken baskets, a salad bar for your family, things, cassoulet, all meant to feed four to six. And at that time, moms and dads were balancing kids at home all day and everything else. So we thought that that might be a fun offering for folks who just wanted to place one order and feed the family. The other ghost kitchen concept was Brasserie Boulder. Now, at the beginning of COVID, a Boulder institute, Brasserie Ten Ten, also a French restaurant, closed down for good. They decided that, well, for whatever their reasons, it just seemed like the right time for them to shut their business. And that was right at the beginning of COVID. So six months later, there was really a huge hole in Boulder’s culinary scene. And, people were still mourning it, as was I. They had this amazing happy hour. It was really a cool spot that had been around for a long time. So we thought, hey, maybe that would be a great spot. Maybe people are missing some brasserie classics and French comfort food. We were headed into winter – it made sense to us. It wouldn’t be too difficult with our current set of skills and ingredients and techniques that we had honed at Aion cooking Spanish food. The French food didn’t seem like too big a stretch versus if we had started Japanese food or something like that would require a huge, huge pivot for us. And interestingly, it was popular, or not, maybe it shouldn’t even have been, but having not run a French restaurant to cook French food in quite some time, it was popular. People really loved it.

JB: I still dream about those Haricots Verts.

DS: [laughing] Oddly enough, or maybe not, some people were felt like it was unfair for us to do a French restaurant because their favorite French restaurant had shut down six months prior. And somehow we were dancing on their graves .It provided for some entertaining emails and Facebook posts. But, yeah, those were the two ghost kitchens. And over that winter when Cafe Aion, being such a small restaurant for inside dining, we were doing just takeout and delivery over last winter. And these two ghost kitchens really were what got us through.

IGTD: So you were basically running all three concepts at once?

DS: Exactly. It was kind of funny. You know, the kitchen we had, I believe it was like 14 iPads or something set up because we would have three, for Uber Eats: for Cafe Aion, Lil Bub’s, and Brasserie Boulder. Three for DoorDash, three for Grubhub. Nosh, a local Boulder delivery we participated in. So it was it was kind of like a very bizarre work environment for us to be, to be honest. Rather than looking out and seeing guests come in and sitting down and waving at folks we knew, we were staring at a bank of screens that would ding at us. And it was it was surreal. It really was. But it allowed us to pay employees and keep our core staff on and make it through the winter.

IGTD: Have you kept both of those ghost kitchen concepts going?

DS: Lil Bub’s never took off in the way that Brasserie Boulder or Aion did for online kind of delivery takeout sales. So that one’s kind of fallen by the wayside. We still do offer large format paella and cassoulet, because it kind of carries over with Brasserie and Aion. But Brasserie Boulder continues to be our top selling for takeout and delivery.

And what’s kind of exciting is this spring we did reopen for dining in, and we have brought some of those French classics that we had so much fun cooking: Duck Confit, Coq Au Vin, Cassoulet, onto Aion’s menu so people can come and dine here and choose between a paella or a cassoulet. And previous to this, our wine list was 100% Spanish, and I was very, very particular about that. And now we offer a few French wines by the glass, so. It’s kind of fun. I guess the silver lining is I gave myself a chance to cook some food that I really enjoy cooking and eating and that maybe we wouldn’t have expanded to include those dishes and flavors, had it not been for the need.

IGTD: Right! Dakota, for those who might be unfamiliar with the term ‘ghost kitchen’, can you define for us what that means?

DS: Ghost kitchen refers to a place that you could order food from for delivery, but that you can’t actually visit. Brasserie Boulder has its own website, it has its own Instagram account, it has its own Uber Eats delivery page and DoorDash delivery page. But there’s no Brassiere Boulder that you could come and sit in. It kind of exist in this virtual world where you visit it online, click some buttons, and then the Brasserie Boulder food shows up at your doorstep.

IGTD: I see. That makes sense. I know another thing you did that made you a leader in the restaurant community in Boulder was your vaccination requirement.

DS:  I can’t take complete credit for these ideas. You know, I’m lucky enough to be in this small, great restaurant community in Boulder, and a lot of the benefits are just having these groups and people and mentors and colleagues that I can reach out to and bounce ideas off of and, just kind of pick their brains and see what they’re posting and know. Ghost kitchen came from a few other people talking about, geez, what can we do to increase revenue and how are we going to handle the indoor dining restrictions that are coming. And the same was with the vaccination, actually, the woman, Kate Lacroix, who Jessica mentioned earlier, who used to own First Bite, was talking to me about concerns around Delta Variant, how are we going to handle this? Like, are restaurants are going to be prepared? Is there going to be another dining reduction? And that really kind of spurred me to take this action. That and, in talking with my wife and my daughter, who’s in high school, they both have really felt the brunt of COVID life. You know, my daughter missed the end of middle school and not getting to do a lot of sports and activities and sleepovers that she otherwise would have. And my wife having to be that rock for our family at home and making sure everyone’s on their Zoom classes and things like that, both really thought this was an important step to take. I guess the main reasons why I decided to ask people to be vaccinated to dine indoors at Café Aion is that restaurants are a lot different than other retail establishments, other places that people might spend their day. If you’re shopping at Target for some shampoo or something, you can complete that whole errand with your mask on. And that really does a lot to protect yourself and the people you’re around. It’s easy. The problem with restaurants is people are inside with their masks off, more or less the whole time. And that can be tough for the staff.

Yes, we can wear masks and do, but it’s also the other diners are then taking a risks. Especially, you know, we’re a smaller restaurant and even at reduced capacity, it’s riskier, and that’s one of the few things, one of the things we learned over the past year and a half – two years, is that indoors is riskier than outdoors. We have a huge patio at Aion, and we’re not asking for vaccination verification or anything like that. If you want to sit outside, outdoors is pretty darn safe. Indoors is riskier, so we’re just asking that folks who want to dine inside have been vaccinated for their own protection, as well as the other diners. Last Fall when things went so poorly and were really rough, especially up here in the university neighborhood, there are a lot of hot spots and flare-ups due to just so many students and living conditions and things like that. There is a huge community outcry to CU to require vaccines should they return this Fall. And they heeded that. They do require vaccines for staff, faculty and students. So I feel like it’s really kind of only fair to then ask the same for our business as we did to others.

And then there’s also just the piece of trying to get out ahead of something. It feels like they spent the last year and a half trying to adapt to something new or trying to pivot or change and always being a little behind the ball and what’s coming next.

JB: Absolutely.

DS: And to me, as we head into Fall, it’s kind of clear that things are trending in a less-than-positive way and a reduced capacity mandate or something like that would just be so difficult for restaurants and businesses and why not do something now that might prevent that? Proactive rather than reactive is kind of the thinking.

IGTD: You’re so smart to do that, and I think, the more people that do that and are bold about it, it will become the norm. But, you’re doing the right thing, and everyone needs to do the right thing. And, you know, it’s the folks not doing the right thing that are keeping this going.

DS: No, it is, it’s a really interesting spot that I feel like restaurants find themselves in. I mean, there’s so much media attention and public love for the celebrity chef and, countless cooking shows. And, I won Cutthroat Kitchen and that was really cool and know my personality and public visibility grew of that. All the bad boys, not that I was, but there are the bad boy chefs. Or you know, the bad girl pastry chef or whatever. All these great personalities and saying these racy and provocative things. But restaurants, I feel like maybe right now are just in a position where it’s so difficult to make a stand and implement something we believe in because of being afraid of public backlash. It’s been such a difficult year and a half – two years that I think restaurants are pretty darn scared to piss people off is what it comes down to.

A lot of people don’t feel like they can afford to. So it kind of feels like an unfair double edged sword… I feel like it’s pretty rare that restaurants have much of a public stance on, say, politics or policy.

IGTD: And yet the irony is, there’s never been a more impactful time to be a restaurant and yes, you do have good reason to be afraid of pissing people off. In the end, what a horrible and ridiculous reason to have to close your restaurant, potentially, because people wouldn’t do such a simple thing.

DS: Yeah. Yeah. There may be a little bit of resentment down in there.

IGTD: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about First Bite and you and Cafe Aion. What are your plans menu-wise and how are you feeling about it this year? Because this is an unusual year to be doing this.

DS: We’re thrilled. We always feel like we get a great response to First Bite. We get a lot of first-time diners, which is always really fun. Again, coming from running this business from a kitchen side rather than any sort of real marketing or business side, being able to reach new customers always feels a bit magical to me. And that’s something that First Bite always delivers on and we love. So we like to keep a lot of our favorites on the First Bite menu. We’ll be crafting a menu that revolves around a shared plate, a paella. So people have their choice of a couple tapas, and then they’ll have to decide on a paella to share: meat or vegetarian paella. And then they can split up and have a few choices for dessert. And we’re excited this year that Brasserie Boulder, our ghost kitchen, is kind of coming out of the afterlife. And joining us here for a dining in experience will be featuring some of our favorite classic French dishes like Bouef Bourgignon. It’ll be fall time and we love bringing that dish around and Moules and Truffle Fries and Crème Brûlée, so it’ll be a really fun, more traditional three course menu offered for Brasserie Boulder.

IGTD: So you’ll have sort of two tracks of offerings going for both of the concepts.

DS: Yes, the shared Cafe Aion menu and also the more traditional French three course with Brasserie Boulder. We’re also really excited to offer these menus for takeout and delivery. That was one thing that we were able to dial in and feel really comfortable in offering. And I think people love the idea, even if they’re not comfortable dining out, being able to do something special at home.

IGTD: For sure. That’s great. And Jessica, is that that ability to do carry out, is that going to be available with everybody?

JB: I hope so. We definitely are encouraging our chefs this year to either create a separate menu that is more adaptable for takeout delivery or to offer whatever is on their dine-in menu as well. We also found a way to kind of connect all the pieces. As Dakota mentioned, there’s a great organization in town called Nosh Boulder. They’re a delivery company that is actually owned by some local restaurants. And unlike some of the other delivery companies, they cap their fees towards the restaurant. So it’s a lower expenditure for restaurants, and the owners do get investment in it. So we have partnered with them so that during the entire week or the whole ten days, really, if you dine with them through any of our restaurants, as well as all of their restaurants that they have, they’re going to be donating 10% of proceeds to EFA, which is the Emergency Family Assistance group here in Boulder. And they do an amazing job and obviously have been in super high demand this year, helping out our neighbors who have been struggling with either food insecurity or rental assistance or any of those sorts of needs. So Nosh is really stepping up and continuing to show how much of a community support they are by also supporting the delivery and takeout game.

DS: I do just want to echo how great Nosh is. You know, being a small restaurant, running our own delivery service on top of everything else is just completely out of the question. And unfortunately, the larger corporations like Door Dash and Uber Eats and Grubhub, they charge a restaurant 30%. So off our hundred dollars, they’ll take thirty three dollars. And Nosh has a much lower rate at 15%. So I just can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have local players that are really invested in their community participating and get the support that they deserve.

IGTD: Yeah, definitely. Jessica, you mentioned when we first started talking that the chefs were going to have a little bit more leeway this year in the format of things. Are there any other ways in which they may be doing things differently?

JB: Yeah, I mean, Dakota, for example, they’re doing the shared plates and kind of making it a more shared, truly tapas style meal. We have a few other restaurants that might be doing, at that price point, dinner for two. Similarly, we have some that are including whiskey tastings or other pieces of pairings with theirs. And we have one restaurant that is actually doing an all-you-can-eat tacos and margaritas for 90 minutes. So, we’re just trying to welcome chefs to be who they truly are. One of the other things we’re doing this year is brunch for the first time. So we offer to our restaurants that are open or if they wanted to join, if they were a brunch restaurant, to feel free to join in. I love brunch and I wanted to include those amazing restaurants as well. So we have a few of our restaurants are going to be providing brunch options on that first weekend.

IGTD: That sounds great. So, Jessica, from the standpoint of you being the organizer of First Bite, what do you hope the restaurants get from this experience and what do you hope the diners get?

JB: That’s a great question. I think, for the restaurants I have worked so deeply and intimately in the last few years with them, and I hope that they feel the love from our community. You know, we more than ever as a society, we’ve realized how interconnected we all are and how much we truly appreciate these small independent business owners, Mom and Pop shops. That’s what gives each city and each county its culture and its personality. And I think that we should be really celebrating who they are and what they’re doing in our community. As you heard from Dakota, he does so much for our local community and really just celebrating that we’ve made it through this far. I want to throw a party and hopefully we have an even bigger party to continue to celebrate as this continues to pass.

 DS: Yeah. Cheers to that.

JB: The second part of your question of diners, you know, similarly, I think, as a diner myself, there was heartbreak as we watched our restaurants close and shut down and adapt and see those heartbreaks of having to fire all their staff and maybe throw their whole dream away, unfortunately. And you kind of felt helpless. You know, there’s only so many to-go margaritas you can order that makes you feel like you’re making a difference. And so I really hope that the diners feel that excitement to come back out and come out as a community. You know, there’s nothing like that feeling… that you feel like you’re part of something and you get to go experience that true, authentic, ethos of a restaurant. So I’m excited for diners to get that and I’m excited for people to try something new. I think a lot of people in the last year, you know, everyone reverted to what was safe and what we trusted. I knew Dakota did amazing food and he did these amazing paella kits that I knew that I could go get seafood from him and it would be well-sourced and fresh ingredients from the farms and that he could lead us in the right direction for a great meal – that something my husband and I could share and feel a little bit better than, you know, cook pasta again for the fourth time that week. I hope that diners do that and experience this amazing culinary scene. As Dakota said, we have such a really amazing group of restaurants and owners and food suppliers in Boulder and Boulder County.

IGTD: Wonderful. Now in terms of trying something new, that leads me into my next question about the price points. Can you explain those a little bit? Because I know here in Denver with Denver Restaurant Week, one of the big selling points of that is that in the case of certain restaurants with the price points they have, you can try things at a price point much lower than you normally would if you went, you know, any other time of year. So can you explain how that might work for people and in taking advantage of certain price points?

JB: Sure. The price points there are $29, $39 and $49. That may not be per person. It might be for two people. But really, it’s a known quantity for you to sort the restaurants and look at what you maybe can afford or want to spend that night. Some restaurants at that price point, it’s actually higher than what they typically offer. And they can put all kinds of food and pairings and stuff in at that price point. And other restaurants, they might pare it down. It might be a smaller taste of what they provide. I tried to make sure that we can have a diversity of restaurants and a diversity of some more casual places and some more fine dining, as well as different cuisines. And hopefully there’s something in there for everybody at those different price points.

IGTD: Do you hope that people go multiple times, like take advantage of a variety of restaurants during the course of the week?

JB: Absolutely, I mean, if that’s something you can do, we definitely encourage that. I think the hardest part is always deciding where to go. And then the second part is getting the reservation.

IGTD: OK, so before I’m going to ask you to kind of walk us through, how it works as we conclude. But before that, Dakota, will you tell everybody how they can learn more about? Your restaurant beyond Boulder Restaurant Week, but any time of the year, how they can learn more about you and your concepts.

DS: Yeah, yeah. Just visit us at www.cafeaion.com. I do my best to keep menus updated there. And on the first page, updates on what’s going on in our neighborhood, events. There is going to be ways to make a reservation or shoot me an email, as well as Brasserie Boulder. And then Instagram and Facebook we have pages for as well. Again, we’re just a small restaurant and I handle all of our social media and web presence and things like that. So if you reach out, you’ll get a response from me.

IGTD: That’s good to know. And I applaud you for doing that, because that’s a challenge. But good for you. What a great way to really keep your finger on the pulse of what you know.

DS: Well, thank you.

IGTD: OK, so Jessica, tell us, we go to the website and when are the restaurants and menus live?

JB: www.firstbiteboulder.com is the website. Certain restaurants might be waiting to know what’s a little bit more coming out of the farms at a certain point. So as soon as we get them from the restaurants, we’re posting them. And, each restaurant has its own reservation link. And we will have on each of their pages how to do that. We’ll have pictures included and then we’ll also have the takeout links included. So if one of the nights rolls around and you’re not feeling like going out, certainly going on and finding someone’s to go menu is also an option from there.

The dates are October 8th through the 17th. It’s Friday night through Sunday, the following week. So ten full days.

IGTD: Thank you both so much for taking the time today. And Dakota, it’s always very fascinating for me to get insight into the brain of chefs, because I just find that really fascinating. Obviously, it’s why I do what I do, talking to all of you about it. So thank you for sharing that and thank you for everything that you’re doing to help keep restaurants alive and keep people alive. And Jessica, this is a great program, I’m so glad that you became part of it because, in the couple of years I’ve known you, you’ve done wonderful things with it. Good luck with the event this year, good luck with the restaurant business this year.

 

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