& Sons Ham Bar — André H. Mack

André Mack’s career has been repeatedly punctuated with moments of “Oh shit, is this all there is?” followed by big, life-changing moves, bringing him closer to creating the life he really wants. He currently owns and operates Maison Noir Wines, Get Frâiche Cru design studio, & Sons Ham Bar, & Sons Buttery, VyneYard Wines and is in the process of opening up a bakery under the & Sons umbrella.

Here, we chat about his winding career path, the search for creative fulfillment and design as a tool for creative empowerment.

Shelby: So you worked with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry and were the Beverage Director at Per Se before leaving to make wine, then you opened up the ham bar, buttery and wine store all in your neighborhood, right? But you also have your original finance experiences and your design studio. I'm really curious to hear, first, how you got where you are. And then dig a little bit into your design work, how you got into it, how it’s evolved. And then I would love to just chat with you about the restaurant industry, the wine industry and your experiences in general.

André: I got into wine I guess wine and food from like I said was kind of in food. I always worked in restaurants, even though if they were like shitty restaurants was kind of my thing, you know, food was always used as a reward. I love to go out and eat like my parents and report card days were celebrated at restaurants. And it was never that thing I thought I was ever going to gravitate to, to work in the food industry. It was just, college came around and it was one of those things that was, you know, how do you make the most money? You know, how do you make the most money for the shortest period of time? And everybody was going on to bigger and better things. This wasn't their life, it was just a moment of time being a waiter and, lo behold, my bigger and better thing came along and that was working in finance.

I went and did that, and it sucks. I just felt like there just wasn't the excitement. And I was like, wait a minute. So this is what I've worked for this whole time?? Now that I'm here, this is what the rest of my life looks like? This kind of sucks. And also, not being patient, right? It's about two years, and you're kind of like, it's not what I thought it would be. It’s always that that thing that grass is always greener, and I quickly realized that I missed the interaction of being with people and talking to people.

And so, I quit. I went back to working in restaurants. But that was still one of those things where it’s going on to bigger and better things. And then I discovered wine by watching old episodes of Frasier.

That propelled me into a different category. When I found out what a sommelier was, it was one of those things, like, wait a minute: So, it's the person that's responsible for all the wine and beverages in the restaurant? I already know about restaurants. I've been working in them for years, but this is another facet of it that held my attention and that was it. It was at that moment.

I read everything that had to do with wine. And then I started to work at better restaurants. I kind of had reached the top of the food chain, in San Antonio and in Texas. I got an opportunity to work for Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. So, I moved to California and I worked there. And then I moved to New York to run the beverage department at Per Se. And that was kind of it. You know what I mean, it's like, the New York restaurant scene was legendary, just legendary, beyond my belief of something tangible that I could touch or achieve working in a, not just a restaurant, but the most anticipated restaurant in the last 25 years.

You know, so that was it. And then you start to realize that the restaurant scene wasn't just all of these New York Times four-star or Michelin three-star restaurants, there were all these other little mom and pop restaurants that made it special. And somebody that just specialized in this. Or the guy who's in the neighborhood, has been in the neighborhood forever, all he does is make pasta. He's got a little 200 square foot place and he does pasta. I was always intrigued by that and all these tiny places that we've walked into, the running joke with my wife is, we would walk into a place and I’d look around and I kind of shake my head and I say, “You know what?” and she's like, “Yeah, I know. I know you could own a place like that.”

And so it was always this dream of seeing it. I want to just open up a little tiny bar; me and my wife met in the restaurant and it’s something that we love to do and that's what we want to do. I ended up leaving the restaurant because I came to that same moment in my life of, wow, this is really great. This is probably one of the top five jobs in the world for what I do. But this can't be as good as it gets. For me, it just couldn't be. And I was like, I'm gonna leave. You’ve got to give up the good in your life to get the great.

So I decided to leave. I wanted to continue to learn about wine. I felt like the only way to do that was to make my own, and by going off to make my own, I could scratch several other issues that I had personally like, wanting to be an entrepreneur and wanting to have more creativity in my life.

I felt like being a sommelier is more akin to a curator, right? We don't make anything, we made a list of other people's wines and we talked about other people's stories, but we didn't physically make anything. A bartender is more like a chef. They actually concoct something, and I felt like I was missing that part, right along with always wanting to be an entrepreneur. So, I decided to leave a very secure job — top in the field — to start making wine. And that was a long, windy road. But it's been 13 years later, and it's been a big part of our success and the things that we've done, the wines are sold all over the world.

So that was kind of it. We all spent a lot of this time in France, and when I came back to New York, I said, “I think it's time.” And she's like, “What are you talking about?” “I think it's time for us to open a place,” I said, “No one's moving anywhere. Our neighborhood is changing, and I want to be able to contribute to the narrative of our neighborhood. And this is what we know how to do. So, let's do that.”

One thing led to another. It was one place, this space that I'm in now, the Buttery. It was actually going to be the original ham bar. I was with a friend and he was like, you got to take the other place. Dude, it's like you can put mailboxes in it. It doesn’t matter. Like, rent is great, you should take it and so we took the other side, the landlord gave us a deal. And so we switched them. And then we, like everyone else in life, hit roadblocks. It was all kinds of shit happening. We couldn't find a contractor ba, ba, ba, ba. And before you know it, it took us three years to open, but in the meantime, something told me that the whole idea of restaurants and all that is changing, right?

It's all about lifestyle now, and it's about experiences, so when I first started my winery, we didn't move to Oregon. We didn't have a tasting room because it was less about experiences. It was low overhead for me as someone who was a startup that didn't go raise any money or anything like that. And what I started to realize is that, when you saw other industries encroach on the restaurant space, something was happening.

When you saw Urban Outfitters bought Mark Vetri’s pizza chain as a driver to get people in stores because people weren't going in stores anymore. They were shopping online. Restoration Hardware started to put restaurants inside their places. It was a driver. It was the last thing that they did. When I started to see that, I recognized that in our portfolio of things for our neighborhood, you were missing a wine shop. So there was a wine shop some friends of mine had opened, maybe two years ago on the same street and I texted them one day saying “Hey, if you guys are ever looking to sell, I'm your guy,” and they were like  “We should talk.”

I tell people, when you talk about a restaurant portfolio, when you're a hospitality group, you can't leave that sitting on the table anymore. That's a trend where restaurant groups and restauranteurs are including wine shops into their repertoire, because they've already built a fan base. You’ve got a captive audience; they look at it like you’ve poured those things they like and they want to continue to shop with you and support you. There's trust. So they'll go down to the shop and buy.

And I just realized that it was all about lifestyle. And I started to look at the opposite, where retailers like the Gap actually had an Airbnb house. And that blew my mind. I was like, oh, okay. Now we're getting back to experiences. So you think about a place like the Gap where they pay rent, and they pay a lot of money in advertising to get people to come into the showroom. But we will eventually live in a time and place where you, the consumer, actually pays to stay in the showroom by the Gap having their own Gap House, or whatever, that you can sleep in and hang out in that’s designed all by the Gap. It allows you to live in their fantasy, or in their world, and you paid for it, and then everything else is for sale. I was fascinated by that, and I said you know what, we can do it on a smaller scale.

We picked Prospect Lefferts Garden. We live right here, I think it's like a minute walk to my house from here and we've always loved the street Rogers Avenue and it was this thing of saying, hey, let's see what we can do. It started from the Ham Bar space to now the provision space, and we have the wine store. During the pandemic, I had read this article where they were talking about how there was more bread making than baby making. And I was like, I probably should open a bakery, then.

That was really one of the pillars that was missing from our neighborhood. There's not a place to get really good bread. It's really strange because some of the great places that make bread in Brooklyn, even though they're five miles away, it's out of their delivery range. And so, we decided that we would start to make our own bread. We found a cute little storefront and reached out to the owner, and here we are. Now we're just waiting on the ovens, the ovens are backordered. But it was just something that, like, I think I was drunk during the pandemic, like in July. No, June! And I bought three ovens. We didn't even have a space. I bought three ovens and I bought a big, 26-inch stone mill to make our own flour.

And we were like, “Okay, I don't know where we're going to put this shit at if we can't find a place, we’ve got to find a place. But we found a place and we're just putting the finishing touches on that. We're interviewing bakers later this week and early next week. And so that's coming to fruition, and then I needed a place to house all of these people. Before, my assistant and one of their employees to work in my studio, which is the basement level of our brownstone and since COVID happened, no one’s in the house anymore. And so, we just rented an office space here.

You know, with a backyard and a basement. We're actually going to be turning the first 50 square feet of it into a breakfast taco spot. You know, I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, so like an Austin style breakfast taco joint with cold pressed juices, Topo Chico water, bone broth. We're right next door to a coffee shop, and we like them. So we're not going to do coffee, going to do a little bit of bone broth. In the summertime it'll be soft serve ice cream. But it's so it's going to be a window. And then on the back part there’ll be a partition wall and on the other side of that is our office.

We’ve just been taking it one step at a time. And laying down these building blocks for the neighborhood. Tons of people are like, “Is a sandwich really $13?” and you're like, “Yeah, but there's tons of other places around here that you can get a $9 sandwich, but ours is $13.” It’s been good. We've been well received by the neighborhood. It's been really great. Just building the momentum. We’ve seen it from the start, when it was just me here in the Buttery, and it was only pickup, to selling 40-something pies and a whole bunch of turkeys for Thanksgiving. It's starting to come along. A lot has happened, I guess, since the last time, we met.

S: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it sounds a lot like you're laying the groundwork for a community. And reminds me a lot of, I used to live in Bushwick, and there was a guy who lived in Soho who opened up a bar in my neighborhood. He had this idea of it being a community space, but because he wasn't immersed in the community. It just kind of dissolved into a typical bro bar. So, I think it's really amazing the way that you're sort of creating this network, or community.

A: No, it feels very great, and I feel like for the last 10 plus years I've gotten on an airplane almost every single week. And so, you know, I didn't really know my neighbors. The people who live in our neighborhood know my wife, and she knew them. But I didn't really know them. And this has really been a great opportunity for me to get to know them. The best way to get to know your neighbors is to feed them. And for us it's been great, and we've been through it.

We've seen it where it's like your kids got accepted to college and you're coming in tonight to celebrate. Or you’re meeting with a confidant, looking for some advice because you got an offer at another law firm to be a partner. You know what I mean? Or it's your birthday, and we're closed. But we’ll open for you. Those are all the things that I wanted for this place.

It's casual. It's very casual, but, you know, it could be a place that you would go to celebrate and have an amazing glass of champagne. Or, just sneak in on a Tuesday night and have an amazing couple bites of lamb neck and a beautiful half bottle of wine. That kind of thing. And so, I feel like it reaches on all those levels.

And now it’s like, I'm walking down the street and people are like, “Oh my god, hey, you're the ham guy! What's going on?” Or the guy says, “Hey, man, I saw an empty storefront down there. What are you putting in there?” I go “Where’s that?” He goes and told me the number. I said, “Oh, you know what, that's not me. I looked at that space like three months ago, we passed on it.”

A: You see that there's some excitement wherever you go. You know you're in a neighborhood, everybody's always peeking around. They see stuff happening. And they're like, what are we getting next, what's happening next. And it's cool to be the person that's kind of creating that for them. And, like I said, to feed them, to get to know them.

I've lived in the neighborhood for over 10 years and, I didn't know a lot of them. So I'm excited to finally get to meet them. It's been fun, it's been it's been really interesting for us. 

S: I love seeing like all the developments that have been happening for you. It's really exciting.

A: Yeah, no, it's cool.

S: So in your book, 99 bottles, one thing I really admire is — you're obviously deeply knowledgeable about wine — but you present all this information in such an approachable manner. You have a quote from, some other article that wine isn’t a beverage reserved for the elite, but can and should be enjoyed by everyone. I'm wondering if you can tell me who are some people or some experiences that helped influence you to have this behavior or this attitude towards not only like food, but restaurant spaces and wine and, I mean, even design mixed in. 

A: I think it's a combination of just everything and being around, you know. It's so funny, my wife talks a lot about how we don't have a TV in our house and that it's evil and all these things. And I said, for me, TV allowed me to dream. It like showed me that there were other places out there that are not the place that I was at. You know what I mean? I was a military brat and being able to travel all over the world. I saw lots of different things, I interacted with lots of different people and cultures.

And I think the wine industry — from the outside looking in, and in marketing — people who drink wine have like ascots and all that. But when you actually get there, that's not it. And when you travel to Europe, everybody has wine on the table. I say wine belongs on the table next to your salt and pepper shaker. It's not the centerpiece of your table. It's not something that should be put on a pedestal and marvel at that night.

It's like, no, it's not, it's just part of the meal. And when I started to see that, I realized it was just different here in America, like the perception was that when people would drink wine, it looked like this. And it was about this. And for me, I was a was a walking contradiction to that. Here I was, you know, sommelier at one of the best restaurants in the world. And you might see me walking down the street with a Sanford and Son t-shirt on and beat-up Vans.

I think for me it was like, I was into being in wine. I wasn't into wine to be pretentious, and so, for me, I tried to find the humor in things. And to me, that's always been the foil to pretension, humor. And I think also just believing that you can do it. New York gave me that confidence, being around the energy of the city and being around people gave me the confidence to do it. Everybody's kind of in this rat race but like, fuck yeah I could do that. Everybody's doing something in New York, right? Everybody’s special. You know what I mean, like, the person sitting next to you like won a Nobel Peace Prize and she’s like eating some asparagus and shit.

I can't tell you if there was one person who influenced that, but I think a lot about my great aunt who had strict things. She was a single woman, had boyfriends at times. She was a big-time feminist. And she smoked cigarettes, drank gin and tonics, ate steak and eggs for breakfast. She was this amazing woman. She traveled and I would spend the summers with her. I'd fly back from boarding school to go to New Jersey and be in the, like, straight up hood. And she was amazing. We’d go grocery shopping, and I’d ask for frozen pizza. And she's like, “Oh no we don't get frozen pizza we're going to the pizza place. We didn’t get a lot of TV dinners. We ordered from the Mexican restaurant. And I think it was that she had style and class. I think she was a big influence on my mother who obviously was an influence, you know, an influence on me.

But I think just traveling and dreaming and realizing that the world was bigger than where I was at, and it wasn't just about where you were from. In that moment in time, this is where I am. I tell people that if you want to change your life, the quickest and the easiest thing to do is just move, just move somewhere.

S: I'm not a military brat, but my parents, brother and I moved every two years. So this feels very familiar to me. 

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's kind of been my thing with that. Like I had an Architectural Digest. I mean, dude. I had so many; it's me, just flipping through and dreaming and seeing what people thought was cool and forming my own opinion and you know that's when I was like 25 years old. A lifetime ago but I think from that I just understood being able to put it all together. But then design graphic design came later.

It took getting to New York to understand that I was a creative person, and that came from someone saying you're creative. And I was like, I didn't think so. But then you start to look back at it, and I worked at a Red Lobster. And there's a guy, the expo. You know, little skinny white guy, long hair, wears the black headbanger T shirts and shit. One day he came to work and was so excited because he got CorelDRAW Number Three or whatever. And he was so fucking happy, so much so that I was uncomfortable that I didn't know what the fuck it was. I was like, what is that? “Aw man, this is great design software blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I was like, “Oh cool, when you’re done with it could you let me borrow and I can rip it. You know, I used to copy the CDs to get new software. He goes, “Yeah, you know what, man, my new computers not coming for a while, so I'll just bring it tomorrow and you can use it.”

And I remember loading it up on my computer and every time it would load, he's like, now this is powerful software. I was like, dude, it takes 10 minutes to load, and when it finally loads there’s one fucking toolbar at the top. And then I started to realize that that in some ways you were only limited by your own imagination. And the idea of sitting there, looking at this blank screen didn't help me. I mean, I could never write fiction, because there's no boundaries.

So I guess that's where my interest in design really first started, messing around with that. At one point, the waiters were upset at management. So we called a managers meeting, and, I scanned the logo and changed it to Dead Lobster. I put X’s on the eyes, and we put the design on t-shirts and put them on in the restaurant parking lot to go in for the meeting. And that was like my first foray into design.

And I dabbled a little bit here and there, and even at Per Se, we would have one piece of paper that was the wine department’s, and it was made every day in our meeting. I found myself putting 45 minutes in a day on it, just the layout the verbiage. I was doing, like, magazine layouts in fucking Microsoft Word. And I remember someone asking if I went to school for this, that looks pretty good. To like, when I had left the restaurant and doing this startup, I didn't raise any money. And I needed a designer to help me design labels. After getting a recommendation and some quotes from people, it's like $25,000. I don't even have 25 grand for corks! What do you mean?

So I bought an old iMac off of Craigslist for 200 bucks. One of the Maitre D's boyfriend worked for Adobe and they got me that crazy Adobe Creative Suite. It's like 3,300 bucks, but they got it for me for $75. I spent almost every night from like 10pm to 4am just trying to get the ideas out of my head and learning how to do it. And that's what started it all. Two years later, I started Get Frâiche Cru, and we started designing all kinds of stuff for other people in the industry.

A: I felt like being able to do my own graphic design allowed me to move much faster than a lot of other companies my size because they had to send it out, and some things got lost in translation. For me it wasn't that I was a great designer. It's just that I had more wine wit and actually could make some shit happen on a computer. But I have to tell you that I feel the most like myself when I'm actually creating something, building this kind of stuff [gestures towards the interior of & Sons Buttery] is really fun and great, and there's a love for it. But there's something different about a project that's been online for years, I finally was on it. And it's just bringing something to life. It's an amazing feeling to put something out in the world that's in here and to have people get it.

On the wine side it’s going in a different direction compared to the stuff that we've been doing before, which was stark black and white block letters kind of thing. This is more like Instagram. I mean, that's exactly what it is. We’re on Instagram, talking to artists saying, hey, we love this piece. We would love to use it on a bottle of wine. And that part's been really fun, but when I get off the phone, I gotta go do payroll. That's not fun. But sitting in front of my computer to design something, create something, it's a real amazing feeling.

And I try to explain to my sons the idea that like you could be working on set and create an amazing body of work, and it'd be documented. You know what I mean, like a laptop’s not just a laptop. It's a crazy creative tool; you can make movies, or you can do science. You can design things and create these things. You start to look back and you're like, man I designed this t-shirt in 2009, and people are still ordering it. It's very fulfilling in a way that most people don’t see.

S: No, I totally hear that. I work as a designer, but mostly for clients. I feel like it must be like really satisfying to create a wine and be able to create a label for it. Whenever I do work, I can’t know exactly what my clients are thinking, or exactly what they want. It’s really cool that you’ve been able to hone your creativity that way. 

A: Yeah, you know, that's what I've been trying to do my whole life. I guess right now it's like aligning all of your passions together. Then it's never like work. What's been interesting now is that the office is a 45 second walk from my old office — my home. And now it might be a little bit easier for me to turn it off for just a little bit. There've been two nights last week that I didn't bring my laptop home. I do have another computer downstairs; we haven't moved everything out. But I wasn't on it and something about that feels like I have a little bit of separation.

But I'm always on it. I feel like when creativity strikes, you just gotta ride the wave. And I've loved being able to build spaces. It hit me in a way where it's like, oh, wow, this is really fun, really cool. And being able to change it up at the drop of a hat, while serving a purpose for our community, support friends that we've worked with and met over the years and be a part of helping them grow their business. It's amazing. It’s really, really cool for us to be in a position to work with companies that I’ve admired over the years. And being able to have some creative input and do shit like that. Every day there's something new. And that feels great. Whether you know it's something new, whether it's good or bad. Yesterday was something bad. Something went wrong with the sewer at the office and you know I was shoveling water out of the toilet, I mean, it was horrible. [laughing]

S: I mean, it's still new! 

A: So yeah, we're just, we're just having, having a good time. I feel like I'm back. I feel like my strong suit is to create. I used to post a lot on social media, I suppose about four times a day on social media. And now I probably maybe post for four times a month. But I've done like all the art direction, all the design for that stuff and I've missed it. I feel like the biggest way to help all of my businesses is to get back to that and the marketing stuff that I was doing. The computer juices are flowing, and these are things that have been on my list for a long time. I'm getting back to it.

I’m designing a wine in the box, but remember that candy Nerds? And how they had the two different flavors? We're doing a wine in the box like that. One flavor and turn to the other side have the other flavor. Some cool projects. One friend, had me design a three-liter boombox wine in the box. It was like an old school boombox and I had always wanted to do this wine in the box like Nerds. And I was like, I gotta stop talking about doing it before someone else does it.

S: What does that process look like? Do you connect with a vendor to do the packaging, or do you sketch it out and send it in for the vendor to lay out?

A: Generally, we would just, I would just get to the you know the design layout and then we would send it back to see if we can get a couple prototypes. I kind of go down that whole path. Like, I designed and made the world's first culinary coloring books activity book called Small Thyme Cooks; I walked downstairs, I had the idea, I turned right back upstairs and started working on it. Design, the layout, all of it. I go down the line until I'm exhausted. Starting with the different ideas and then I start working on it. Like, we started working on building the website, and all of that stuff happens in a flurry until I hit a roadblock.

But for something like the Nerds box of wine, we will get the template from the manufacturer who makes the boxes, and we'll just say that ours will be a little bit different. Because we'll have to put an insert in the middle and we'll have to have two holes, one on each side. So, it needs to be a special run that they'd have to do for us. But that's what's fun. It's a cool idea. What's not to like? Let’s say that it can be done and that it's fun and less about being a home run or a money maker.

A: It's just something that's fun, and as I see the world. And it goes beyond just me because now I can get friends to put their wines versus mine, even if it's just battling Rosés. Or you can have an over-the-top Chardonnay with oak, and then you have another one with stainless steel in two different containers in the same box. And I just thought that would be a really great way to do that. It’s kind of a collaboration that we would do with different people. And I'm in it for that at this point. Being able to just create to show people that wine is not this elite thing and for all the other people in the industry to have fun with.

I mean, I have a video game I made a video game. No one else has one. And we’ve got a couple more coming out, but like the idea like being able to do that. It was so much fun. We’re going to create this thing that doesn't exist. I feel like all those games that people play, like Candy Crush, are just — I wouldn't call them time wasters or escapism — but escapism is more meaningful if it's something that you connect with. So if you're in the wine business, a bottle flip challenge with water bottles is cool. But a bottle flip challenge is better if it has wine you connect to. For me, that's where we started, we said, hey, let's you know let's do some very simple stuff that's fun. I think somebody tried to buy it from me once. I didn't even write back, just like whatever, you guys can go build your own.

And now we have the next one coming. We’ll charge for it because it's a little bit more intricate, but it’s still just for fun. It's just an investment. Who cares if it's 12 grand, we chalk that up to marketing budget. And we put something out in the world that uplifts and tells everybody that like just because you're in the wine business doesn't mean that you only can make it this way.

They don't understand. They don't understand that the Guinness Book of World Records was invented by Guinness, the beer. People don't know that. And it's the same thing if you think about Michelin, like, three-star Michelin restaurants, the top of the world, it’s the tire company. People forget that like you can create other things, it's just an extension. Like, we just ordered some lights from Casper, the mattress company and somebody was standing behind me and surprised that they make furniture now. But it's a next natural progression. You make this stuff to actually put like the sheets to go on the bed, blah, blah, blah, blah, all those things and I think of it in the same way when we market. Now we're stuck in this thing, but you should be creating other things alongside of it as well that are ancillary because they make sense.

And so for us to make the world's first coloring book featuring chefs and food personalities was on brand for us. It was something that we said we should do. And I feel like other people will slowly start to get it and understand that part of it. So that was like, hey, I want to make a video game. We started looking for developers, had the concept and some of the background layouts. And we made it happen. It was so ridiculously easy, it took less than two weeks. But it was cool, and for me, I just want to create things that make other people say, oh wow, I didn't even I didn't know that we were even allowed to do that. It's like, of course, you are.

You spend money on other stupid shit, so spend it on something that feels innovative within the space. So that's what we've been doing. We've just been trying to have as much fun as possible, especially now that we have a creative space with people in it now.

S: I mean, it almost feels like world building in a sense. Like building this entire space with the idea for people to just create.

A: I want to work with artists, you know, I don't want to work with anybody in the wine business. Fuck that. And it's not that they suck. It's just that that a lot of them are ingrained or entrenched in a certain way. And for me, I'm inspired by looking at other industries and working with them and working with artists and designers. Just something cool and interesting. And that's it. And at some point, I'm gonna hit you up and ask you if we can use some of your artwork.

S: Oh my god, yeah, of course!

A: Alright, but yeah, that's all we've been doing is just trying to get these things up and running. And it's happening. And it's scary. We're doing the total opposite of what other people are doing. I signed two leases in the pandemic. It's like are you fucking crazy? And I might. I might be.

But like, I have this hunch, that we can do it. We can make it happen. And we just got to keep pushing.

S: Yeah, I love it. I'm here for it. I guess like even my whole going back to school. It's similar to what you're talking about. It’s like, you get somewhere and you're just kind of like oh okay, what's next. Like, is this just my life for the rest of time? So the next three years in the school will be me figuring out like how I can do the same for myself. Thank you so much for your time. I really, I really, really appreciate it. And this has been so much fun, truly.

A: When you feel comfortable coming out to the restaurant, you should come out. Cheers.