EP:69 - Entrepreneur Inspiration - Jimmy Everett: Culinary Success from Humble Beginnings

Jimmy Everett is the culinary genius behind Driftwood Restaurant in Boynton Beach, Florida. Jimmy's journey began in high school, where a supportive culinary instructor set him on the path to success. From humble beginnings in local Florida kitchens to prestigious roles in New York and international locations, Jimmy's dedication to his craft has made Driftwood a must-visit culinary destination .

Jimmy shares with us his inspiring story, from his early days in the kitchen to owning and operating Driftwood Restaurant. We explore the challenges he faced, the lessons learned, and the pivotal moments that shaped his career. This conversation is a treasure trove of insights for anyone passionate about culinary arts and entrepreneurship .

L Listeners interested in the culinary world will gain valuable knowledge on starting and running a successful restaurant, the importance of community connections, and the impact of quality and consistency. Jimmy’s experiences in top kitchens and his dedication to fresh, local ingredients are sure to inspire aspiring chefs and entrepreneurs alike. 

Connect:

• Driftwood Restaurant: Driftwood Boynton
• Instagram: @eatdrinkatdriftwood
• Facebook: Driftwood Boynton Beach

Potential Listener Questions:

1. What are the essential steps to start a successful restaurant business?
2. How can aspiring chefs gain valuable experience in top kitchens?
3. What are the best practices for sourcing fresh, local ingredients for a restaurant?

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Transcript

0:23

I was lucky and I had a culinary instructor at my high school, my second high school. I got kicked out of the first one, but the second high school I went to. Hey everybody in the OWL community. Welcome to another amazing episode here on the OWL Podcast. Every week we bring you some of the most impactful people in the world coming to this studio talking about how they're making an impact to the next generation of folks joining us out there in the business community, joined by my co-host, Ellie Santra, one of my favorite musicians to my left over here. Ellie, what is happening in the musician world before we get into our guest today? I mean, the musician world in general, I'm not keeping that much track of, I'm just focused on myself. I'm working on an album right now when I'm not here at the office, I'm in the studio getting ready so I can go on tour, so we can go on the OWL tour when we blow up. We'll have the OWL tour one day. We'll have the OWL house, which will be called The Nest, and we're going to tour the United States and go state to state talking about the impact of relationships because everything's going down the direction of no relationships, AI, TikTok, Instagram, and we need to fix that by talking to one another once again through the OWL app and technologies like OWL. Do you agree? I agree. When we're going to have the OWL theme song coming soon, it is done, I just have to produce it. That's exciting. Before we get into our guest, we have a big announcement. On June 25th, we are starting Tech Tuesdays with South Florida Tech Hub. What that is going to mean is that Nikki, who is the CEO of South Florida Tech Hub, is going to come to the studio with her team. How cool is this? From 10 to 12, you could call her team right through the OWL app, 101 for a dollar, and then from 12 to 1, there'll be a new host of this show, and there'll be a tech trailblazer from South Florida. Then every hour after that, there'll be another host of the show. Then at 5.30, we're heading over to a happy hour sponsored by South Florida Tech Hub, and we are partnering with them, and they will be on the top line of the app. We've never done this before. They'll be the first group recognized in our local area, which is awesome, and we're really going to promote just connecting with one another through the OWL app for Tech Tuesdays. How do you feel? That goes well. That being said, if you guys are listening and you have a large group, a community that you think would be a good fit to have its own category on the OWL app, please reach out to us. We are open to your ideas. Okay. Let's get into our guest today. Ellie, do us the honors. Today we have Jimmy Everett. He is the owner of Driftwood Restaurant in Boynton Beach, a place that I've passed by many times, and now I'm excited to go. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Jimmy, how you got started in the restaurant industry to where you are now. First of all, it's great to be here. I do hear that a lot. We are the place that people pass by a lot, unfortunately. Is it a good or a bad thing? We get the same thing with the mobile app. Everyone is like, another app, another restaurant. Often you have to draw people in. It's all marketing, and it's reviews, and eventually you have that breakthrough moment. We know exactly what you're speaking about. For us, word of mouth is always the best. I was actually born about a mile from Driftwood. Going way back, that's where it starts. I am very much a local, but I moved out of Florida when I was 17. After high school, I did move out of Florida to go to culinary school. I had a rough patch in high school, so I had a little bit of trouble. I was definitely not going the route my parents wanted, not to the traditional college. I was lucky, and I had a culinary instructor at my high school, my second high school. I got kicked out of the first one. The second high school I went to, I had a culinary instructor that really helped me. At that point, I was working in restaurants. I was already in restaurants since I was 15. When it was coming time to finish up high school, my culinary instructor convinced me to, rather than just go to the Florida Culinary or one of the smaller local culinary schools, to apply to the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America. At the time, there were two big schools in the country. It was NECI and then the CIA at the time. She helped me figure that out. That got me out of Florida, which was honestly one of the biggest steps. Amongst kids my age, that was always the hardest thing, just getting out of Florida. I was gone for about 12 years. I obviously completed my associate's degree. I went on an externship throughout that time on Nantucket Island. I spent some time up there, came back to finish up at the CIA, and graduated. Then I took some time off. I went to California. I went to eat at the French Laundry in Bouchon. At the time, that was the best restaurant in the country at the time. I saved up all my money, spent it all, and then had to figure out how to make money to get back. Why California? It was just because of those restaurants? Or you just had always wanted to go there? I had family. My sister and brother-in-law, they moved out there. That was the initial. They were like, we want to come out and stay with us. There was the convenience of that. Once I made it out there, I was there for about three or four months. I wanted to look for a job, but I don't think I really got too far because I was just busy. This was my first time in California. Exploring. Exactly. Then I ended up making it back to New York, but went to the city. Again, with not much money, but I was sleeping on people's couches and stuff like that, the way a lot of people started in New York. One of my friends whose couch I was crashing on, he was working at a restaurant called Tabla. It's no longer open, but it was right next door to a restaurant called Love Madison Park. He said that he had heard that Love Madison Park was number one in the world multiple years. I think it's currently the first fully vegan restaurant to receive three Michelin stars. It was not vegan when I was there, just to be clear. Essentially, that was the beginning of their very long path to greatness, I suppose. I was a part of that, which was exciting. The reason I initially moved to New York, though, was to work at a place called WD-50. That was 2005. They were known as the molecular gastronomy. That title, I guess, think of like spherification and foams and all the weird stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The hip, kind of interesting. Hip, but very scientific. It wasn't just a trendy thing. Wiley, he's definitely one of my— That restaurant, that was the one restaurant that really jump-started my career as a chef rather than a cook. I'd already been cooking for quite a few years at that point, but that was where I was starting to think like a chef. That's what that restaurant taught me, because everything— Some stuff was very technical, down to like the tenth of a gram. The technique was very specific for different things. For me, I just wanted to learn how to do those things. I'd eaten there in culinary school. That's what kind of triggered everything. There was a carrot and coconut Sunnyside Up, where it was like a— You just get a plate that looks like a Sunnyside Up egg, but the white is coconut. The yolk that you can pierce with a fork and it spills. You're making us hungry over here. Me and Ellie are trying to be good on our diet over here. Every day, we're like, no more unhealthy food, but every day we want it, of course. We're always getting introduced to amazing restaurants locally. We have a lot of restaurants on the show. Of course, there's great food down here. New York is hard. I'm from New York. Every corner, there's a spot with good pizza, good Chinese food. You can never say no. How about you got into these bougie restaurants, though? You were just like, sure, I'm going to just get on— It's funny because I have these conversations with my cooks all the time. I have a cook that I recently sent to New York. Honestly, it came down. I never asked how much I was getting paid. I never asked what the hours were. You just want to learn. Can we talk to that in more detail? Because so often, I find that everyone just goes after the money. They chase it, and then the result is they don't get the opportunities because they try to get hired, and they're selling themselves too much. But you just referenced it was never about the money. You just went in. How did you really do that? Did you call up? Did you ask a friend for a referral? Then when you started working, how did you get further along within the restaurant? I kind of jumped a step. When I first moved to New York, I was sleeping on a friend's couch. But before that friend came and told me that they were hiring at Eleven Madison Park, like I said, I moved to New York to work at WD-50. It was about, I think, 26 days in a row in the snow. I went there with a paper-printed resume and waited for somebody to show up. That's hostile. It's good for you. No one does that. But you can still do that to this day. I didn't get hired. No one gets hired. Everyone just throws resumes up on Indeed, and everyone just waits. There's no jobs. No one's reaching out. Or I submit 300 applications. It's like, well, if you're doing that, it's not working. You have to change the formula. No, I went there with my knives. I was ready to work every single day. How long did it take, 26 days? No, it didn't work. After 26 days, that's when I was like, okay, I have to. I already stopped paying my phone bill. I was just bumming it on my friend's couch. Once I had to find something, that's when he basically told me that a new chef came in, fired half the sous chefs, sent the other half home to shave, and fired half the kitchen crew. They were hiring. I was like, well, that sounds like a good first. I was 19 at the time. Yeah, exactly. For me, it was like, this is an experience I want to have, just to have it. It turned out to be, again, if I was looking for the money, I didn't know what I was going to pay, like 12 bucks an hour. This is after, at the time, a $55,000 culinary school bill. But that's what I wanted to do. It wasn't even like there was a question about it. How did you afford to live in New York City then? Was your friend just letting you continue to live on his couch? Did you have side jobs or help from family? I was working 80 hours a week. I couldn't have a side job. My ex, who I was there with, we moved there together. I was staying with my friend on his couch, and then she had a friend whose couch she was staying on. At some point, we did find an apartment together in Bed-Stuy. I think you have to have a roommate at that point or something. It's impossible. Somehow, we found a $700 a month apartment. Not an apartment, but a room in an apartment. Obviously, that's very reasonably priced. It was a little troublesome. I was definitely harassed numerous times. I got robbed at gunpoint with my mom on the phone, my cell phone. Then they took my cell phone and scared the crap out of my mom. This is before Brooklyn was hip. This is Bed-Stuy. I've hung out in Bed-Stuy a bunch of times. You've been a little naive. It's dangerous in certain parts of it. Also, you're not going there sometimes when he gets out of the restaurant. It's 12 at night or 1 in the morning. He's getting off a subway and he's all by himself. Versus with a group of 10-15 people at times. For me, at that point in my life, I was 19. I always just wanted to travel. I always wanted to see other things. When I was living in Florida, I desperately wanted to get out of Florida just because I had seen a lot of Florida already. For me, that was all just part of the experience. I'm not saying I was smiling when I had a gun in my face. I feel like this is almost just supposed to happen to a white guy living in this neighborhood. Walking through this neighborhood at this hour of the day. You kind of expect it. I wasn't taking any precautionary measures to avoid it. I'm still here. I'm alive. Well, they know you were good with knives. Unfortunately, I didn't have my knives on me. What happened? I kept them at the restaurant. I think I had like 30 bucks. I argued with them a little bit about letting me keep my driver's license. I was like, come on, man. You don't need my wallet. I had like 30 bucks. Then as they were leaving, one of the friends of the initial kid that had the gun, he's like, get his phone, get his phone. I'm like, I'm on the phone with my mom right now, guys. They're like, give me your phone. Then you just grab it. I remember I went to... The phone's the most expensive thing you had, of course. Those iPhones are $1,000, let's say. Back then, it wasn't an iPhone. It was a flip. But the flips were still a lot of money back then. It was like a Razr phone. Motorola back then, yeah. The worst part was I had to go figure out. I had to go borrow like, whatever, 25 cents to use a payphone. Call my mom back. It was actually worse back then. Because back then, it was like, you lost all your contacts. Nowadays, everything's stored in the iCloud. Back then with the flip phones, you were screwed. I remember when my phone fell in water once. It's like, game over. It's hard to get a phone back again. And then contacts. It was a different world back then. That time for me, whether it was the neighborhood I was living in or the restaurant, I was young. I wanted to get those things out of my system. I wanted to experience those certain types of things. I love Madison Park. That was the type of place that stuff got thrown at you. Sometimes your own knife. It was that very intense, I guess, chef's training. Expectations. The bar was set up here. If you were not hitting those things daily, they weren't going to tell you. I liked it. It's kind of sick. It's one of those things you kind of wanted to do. That's why you went to New York. Exactly. To get punched. What shifted you down to South Florida? When did that occur? There was 11 Madison Park. Then I ended up getting a job at WD-50. I had a friend that ended up getting me in there. I was at WD-50 for about a year and a half, both of those restaurants. Then I opened up a restaurant called Marea as the executive sous chef with a friend of mine that I knew from 11 Madison. Marea ended up... That was my first management job. I was very young. I was always the youngest person in the kitchen. I think I was 23 at Marea. We ended up getting a Michelin star first year, two Michelin stars our second year. Won all the James Beard awards you could and all that. Then I left to go to Hong Kong because essentially I was ready to leave New York. I was tired of just the city. The grind, the hustle. Honestly, it wasn't the grind. I still do that here. I understand what you're saying. That was ingrained in me, but it was more of the fact that I couldn't... It was the nature thing. I grew up going to the beach every day here. I grew up fishing, surfing, skiing. I'm with you because I was born in the suburbs. Then I lived in New York City for about 10 years and I was just done with it. I was like, enough of just walking everywhere. I just want to drive somewhere. I just want to drive to the beach. I didn't want to drive an hour to the beach and then deal with Jones Beach or Long Beach or the Jersey Shore traffic. I just want to go five minutes to the beach and park somewhere and just walk out. I understand what you mean. For me, New York got to that stage where it's like, you know what? I feel like I did get what I needed to out of this. Because at that point, I had worked at three very successful restaurants. One, two, and what came to be three Michelin star restaurants. They were very different experiences. It wasn't like it was all the same. I felt like I got a lot done in those seven or eight years that I was there. I was also casually dating a girl that used to backpack around the world. She spent a year just wandering around Southeast Asia. There was those ideas in my head. I was also thinking, well, this is the age to do it. I put in my notice with my chef, who was actually my best friend. I was actually sleeping on his couch. I ended up going through a breakup as Moray was opening. That was part of the deal. If he wanted me to be a sous chef, he had to give me a place to stay. What started off as giving my six months notice, it turned into, well, actually, we're working on some restaurants in Asia right now. Would you want to go do that? I went and opened up a restaurant in Hong Kong. Other side of the world, serious language barriers and all sorts of challenges. That was probably the most challenging time in general of my life. Can you share with our audience the shock when you arrived? It's a whole different culture. I know we could probably have an hour talk just about Hong Kong. Just talk about your first two weeks, let's say. The first two weeks was fun because when I first got there, there's just so much to see. You're going to places where you have the wet markets. You just see all this crazy seafood. They love live seafood. You're going places where it's live sepia like this that change color when you touch them. Just that sort of stuff was really cool. I had a few months. The first few months, I was working a lot, but I would go in the mornings before work or whenever I could and just explore around. What got bad, or when it got bad, was a few months in. Granted, I did go about three or four months without a day off, but I never minded that. Once I started to understand what the reason I was there for was not exactly what I understood to begin with, but it wasn't really a chef-driven restaurant group. They weren't really focused on quality like Michael White was. That's who I was working for in New York. All of his restaurants, he was the chef. The restaurants were successful because he was doing his thing. This was definitely not that. I didn't have the support to be able to do the level of quality. For me, this was my first chef job that I was in charge. It was my first real chef job. I was taking it very seriously. Once those things started to collide, once I started to realize, I'm not going to be able to do the best I can, that's when I started to take it really hard. It started hitting me mentally. I would have anxiety attacks a lot and stuff like that. You're in a different country. Exactly. It's not like, hey, I'm in New York. I just switch. Even making a phone call is hard because you're 13 hours apart. You have to time it up. There's a point. Obviously, I had tons of support from the New York team. After a few months, it's like, okay, he's doing his thing. He's good. Priorities change a little bit. All in all, it was a good experience. I'm not upset that I did it. There's definitely days, some of the toughest days I've had since then, I can look back and, you know what? It's not Hong Kong. What was your next chapter after Hong Kong? When did you come back? What year? That was 2012. I came back. At that point, I was burnt out from the corporate world. I decided I wanted to get back cooking. I was 25 or 26. You were all managing all of that, right? Yeah, it was more of a clipboard chef job. Most of my days, I was just creating special menus, and costing stuff out, and inventory, and all that stuff. It was like I wasn't cooking. There would be days that would go by and I'd be like, this is not what I love to do. This is not why I got into it. After Hong Kong, I went back to New York. Actually, I met my... I skipped a part, kind of important part, but at Maria, the last restaurant I was at in New York, I met my now wife. We were casually dating, and she ended up coming out to Hong Kong about four months after I was out there. We've been together since then. When I left Hong Kong, she was with me. We came back to New York and settled things up with Michael White and Amas, the owners of the Altamere Group, who I was working for, because they also had a lot of questions. They're great people, great people to work for. They really wanted to have a good understanding of what things were and what went wrong, what went right, and all that. I settled things up with them. We traveled around. We went to spend about two months between Mexico, Puerto Rico, pretty much any beach we could find that we could sit back and have a beer and just chill out on. We went camping for three weeks in Mexico on a beach just in a teepee. Then we went to go visit my brother in California, in L.A. This was my first time ever being to L.A. I'd been to Northern California prior to that. I was not expecting to like L.A. In New York, we had sayings about cooks from L.A. They were just always slow. They were on L.A. time. No offense to any of my good friends out in L.A., but we ended up loving it out there. We were visiting my brother. Our initial plan, I think, was to move to Hawaii after that because we could and we wanted to just go there and see, find a job. Not everyone thinks that. Move to the beach, Hawaii. Why not? We ran out of money, so we stayed in L.A. I just got a job at a restaurant my brother was working at, a small farm-to-table market-driven restaurant. They pick up their food from the market, then they go pick up their fish from the fish market. They go, they cook it. It's an open kitchen, so you're actually serving people. That was my first time ever actually working in a place where you could see the reactions when people are eating your food. That's a big deal because usually I'm in the back of the kitchen, so you're just going by. You're getting the thing that people send back. This is undercooked. That was similar to the place I was telling you that I worked, the open kitchen. It was handed to you right there. It has a really big impact. I couldn't believe I never experienced that before when that was happening because it's like, this is really— That was new back then, though. That's true, yeah. There was a period where everyone wanted the open kitchens. That was a really big thing, whether it was lack of trust or for whatever reason. Yeah, it was a small— It was called Cantele. It was just a small, very small, I think, probably 20, 30 seats. I was getting paid fairly for what I was doing, but I was probably bringing about $300 a week. I didn't care. It was one of those things like, you know what? My wife was working at a restaurant, too, probably getting paid about the same, and we could make it work. We were very simple people. We didn't really need much until she got pregnant. Then we had to figure out— We had to figure something real out. I was just— A friend of a friend of mine was in the process of putting together a restaurant called Sonny's Hideaway in Highland Park, like a small, kind of speakeasy vibes, gastropub-type food. Initially, it was supposed to be a consulting thing because it's kind of setting up the menu and hiring and kind of sorting things out, but I ended up staying there for about two years, a year and a half, I think, about a year and a half until we— My son was about six months old, and we decided to— We needed to be around family because anyone with kids, if it's literally just two people is not enough to raise a kid, comfortably. It's hard. It's expensive, these days. Absolutely. Because if you're both going to work and you have to hire someone before they enter school, everyone forgets. Kindergarten will come, but before kindergarten, you have to send them to nursery school. It's $1,000 to $1,500 a month, but lots of times, that's only half a day or nine to three. You need help and support or stay at home mother. Exactly. That could do it. Completely understand where you're coming from. Our son was the first grandkid on both sides. There was also that sort of pressure from our parents. We ended up moving back. That's what got us back to Florida. That was what, I guess, got us thinking about coming back to Florida. I was speaking with somebody about— This was the Royal Blues Hotel in Deerfield Beach. This was right around the time I actually moved here to be opening that up. I forget the exact year that was, but that didn't end up panning out. Things didn't work out after about three weeks. It was clear that wasn't the right direction for me. Again, it just didn't feel right. I've always been— Like I said, the first job I ever had that I asked how much I was getting paid was when I was moving across the world to Hong Kong. Before that, it was like, if this is what I want to do, if this feels right to me, then I'm going to do it. Then here I am. We drove across the country in a Volkswagen Jetta. My wife, my six-month-old son, and our little chihuahua at the time, Taquito. We literally drove with three weeks' notice. We spent all of our money doing that and a down payment on an apartment or whatever, just depositing in an apartment and just getting settled. Then all of a sudden, it's like, okay, now we don't have a job. I called a friend of mine, Giovanni Rocchio, that I knew from New York. He used to stage around in New York at all the high-end restaurants. That's how he just kept in touch with people. That's how he staffed his restaurant down in Fort Lauderdale. I called him and he was like, yeah, I could use some help. I didn't think I was going to be okay with commuting that far, but it ended up being great. Giovanni's a great friend of mine to this day. I spoke with him last week. That was at Valentino in Fort Lauderdale. I actually ended up replacing the chef to cuisine that I replaced at Valentino was the same person that replaced me at Marea when I left New York, as ironic as that is. Luke Bergman, very talented chef that actually- Well, this is like the sixth borough down here, right? Yeah, kind of, yeah. Everyone up there, they shift back and forth so often, right? Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, at Valentino, that's when I had- I mean, Giovanni was great. He was honestly the only person I trusted. I interviewed with a lot of people. I spoke with a lot of restaurant owners, a lot of chefs, both corporate and independent, but it was just so sketchy. What you would see in Miami and even Fort Lauderdale scene and the way the restaurants operate there, I just did not want to be a part of that. Nothing seemed secure. Nothing seemed trustworthy. I just was like, you know what? Giovanni didn't pay great, I'll be honest, but I already told you what pay really means to me. It's definitely not at the top of my list. I was always looking for that reason. I was always looking for something else that would make more sense for me, but at the end of the day, it was like, why am I doing this when I can't trust anyone and I really trust Gio? Like I said, he's a great friend of mine. I trust him, and I can make this work. I was comfortable enough there and I was able to give myself the time for my wife and I to be able to start working on what is now Driftwood. It did allow us, there was that six-month period where it allowed us to be able to focus on our own thing. For Driftwood, are you the full owner? I guess the bank would be. But yeah, you don't have any partners or anything? We have some family involved. Throughout the years, my wife and I, because we had both been working in restaurants since we were 15, so we had learned, we had at least seen the common reasons why restaurants fail. That's usually the landlord, number one, or number two, the partners. One of those two things just don't fail or don't work out at some point. What made Driftwood's location really special when we came across it was, A, the land was for sale. Granted, we didn't have money to buy the land, but we were able to figure it out. We were able to figure it out without big partners. We had some family involved, like I said, but anyone that we are, that is involved with Driftwood, we made it very clear that the final decision goes through us. Whether it's technicality, the way me and my wife operate, if we're going to have partners, we need to be able to really trust and understand each other. It's more so than just the financial aspect of it. We have a friend of mine named Freddy, Freddy Schwenk. He did help us with the bar program and he did help us through some very early on financial situations to become a partner early in the game. Aside from that, it's family. It's not easy that way. What we're going to do is we're going to showcase your restaurant right now on the TV so everybody listening live and in the future. We're going to show everyone it. Here you go. The big thing with Driftwood is we didn't want to restrict ourselves to a specific cuisine. We wanted it to be able to evolve as it made sense. My training, I definitely had plenty of classic French, lots of Italian. The last rest, the Marea and Al Molo, the restaurant in Hong Kong, those were both Italian, especially Italian seafood or coastal Italian focus. I don't like being restricted. That questionnaire, I checked off every single cuisine, every box for all the foods. I'm sorry. I like food. I like to be able to... I think it's nice to also... This looks good. What is this? That looks like a spaghetti with clams, like a spaghetti vongole. I think it's nice to have the variety so there's something for everyone on the menu. It changes up. That right there, that's the sweet and sour cauliflower. That originated as we were making a vegan cauliflower steak and all the little bits kept falling off. When we had too many pickled, we started doing a sweet and sour cauliflower. That's our biggest seller for the last four years now. It's been our biggest seller. What is this thing right here? That's been on the menu since we opened. That is the warm cornbread. It's a really good cornbread recipe. We crisp it up in a little butter. We toast it in a little butter and then it's buttermilk ice cream and some wild blueberries on top. We do a little bit of everything. We really do focus on as much as possible anything that's local and good. Not just local, but it has to be the good local products. That's usually where we prioritize or how we prioritize things. We look at what's readily available around us from our farmers, our fishermen, our producers around us. Then what do we want to do with it? We definitely aren't thinking a specific cuisine, which is hard. I remember when I started working in Italian restaurants, it was very hard for me because I was coming from a restaurant like WD-50 where you're making carrot and coconut sunny-side up eggs. I had to come up with tricks on how do you make this Italian. Sometimes we'd come up with really great dishes, but they weren't Italian. You'd have to throw a Cipollini onion or something to make it Italian on there. Are you open for lunch and dinner? We're not. We're open at four. We're open from four to nine Wednesday through Sunday. It is kind of unique hours, but it's a unique area. The cocktails, we make our own tonic. We make our own ginger beer that we have on tap. We make everything in-house. Is the bar vibe there more quiet, more dining? If I went with friends, we could get around? Absolutely. You could definitely go with friends. I would not call it quiet. It looks kind of fancy. It's not going to be like a club. It's small. I could go and be loud. We want people to be able to be themselves anywhere in the restaurant. That's a big thing. We never wanted it to be we didn't want that formal feeling. We didn't want that uptight anything. The idea was to be able to serve the food that's from my training that I was kind of trained to do. One, two, three Michelin star level restaurants. The same thought process, the same level of ingredients, the same quality, the stuff that goes into it. Sometimes we will take three months creating a dish. Sometimes it just takes that long for us to really piece it all together. We invest a lot into everything that we do. I'm excited. I'm moving to Boynton in a few weeks. I'm like, yay. You better come check us out. Definitely. We want to be the neighborhood spot. I grew up. This is my backyard where I grew up. There was a big part of why I needed to leave Florida was the fact that there was no good chefs or good restaurants. There was nothing for me to kind of farther my career, my education, what I wanted to get out of it. We wanted to be a place where you can have that. I'm very big on mentoring young cooks. We actually have two high school students that have been working with us for about two years now. One's going to be going to the CIA next month. The other one's going to be going a few months behind her. I have one of my cooks that we got. He was working at McDonald's or very super, not McDonald's, but super casual type place. He started with us, worked with us for three years, and now he's working at two Michelin star restaurant in New York. He's planning on going to France, planning on traveling around. That's what really, nowadays, that is so much more fulfilling than creating a really awesome dish. I want to be able to have, do my part, I guess, in providing those sorts of resources for people. That's why you're perfect on the app. We have Mentorship Mondays where all the people professionals lower their price to a dollar. It's Segway. You go live, and people from all walks of life can call you, get advice, mentorship, whatever, any questions they might have on the restaurant industry or anything. I'm always an open book. I have no problem sharing anything that I know with anyone. If you start the job at Driftwood, you have access to every single one of our recipes that we've ever created. I'm not worried that somebody's going to go and open up a seal. Trust me, it takes a lot more than a recipe to do this, especially nowadays. I think it's cool, though, that I'm sure over the years, you've seen South Florida develop. I love living here because I feel like it has the feel of a smaller beach town, but you still get a lot of international people. Even Delray, there are some really nice high-end restaurants that might feel like you're in New York, but you're still in this beach town. I don't know if it was like that back then, but that's one of the things that changed. That's one of the things that really drew me to living here is where I was in L.A. before, but it was so huge and everything's so far away. You still get that beach, but it's just smaller. That's a big part of why I felt like it was okay to open my restaurant. It wasn't until probably two years before we moved back here that that was even a thought in my head, just because I have a picture my dad paved Atlantic Avenue. I have a picture of me one years old on the paver. I got my first haircut when I was probably two or three on Atlantic Avenue. My grandmother, I used to go, it was not what it is today. It was very, very different. You're in a great location. William Beach is on the up. Everyone knows that Delray has spiked it with cost. Of course, Boca has always been expensive, but Boyne Beach has really revamped a lot of their main street. I lived in Casa Costa for a little bit. Right on the waterway, they've redone a lot of the waterway there. There's boats that come in and out of there all the time. Charter boats, if you want to take one out with your family, for example. I've done it before, but a lot of the restaurants over there, like that main drag, they've really revamped City Hall. I've taken tours of it and they're putting restaurants in City Hall and Delray in that lower section. It's beautiful. Most people don't even know that exists over there by City Hall and the open field. You have a good opportunity to capture a lot of people moving down to Boyne Beach. Her parents just moved out west by the canyons over there. There's just so many more people moving and then they're all going to go east, of course, try out new restaurants. As that slowly started to happen, as we saw this slowly happening, honestly, Boyne is more my vibe than Delray, at least Delray now. Obviously, when we were first looking, the first place we looked in this area was Atlantic Ave. We're looking at restaurant spaces. We're looking at what's available. It was just ridiculous. Absolutely. Not that it was, I don't want to say unfair or anything, but it didn't make sense for us. It was to the point where you're forced to, in my opinion, I guess, if we would've gone that route with finding a space on Atlantic Ave., we essentially would've been forced to do whatever it takes to pay the rent. That's not what I want. Absolutely. That's not what I ever wanted. No, you don't want that pressure either. Yeah, exactly. A lot of times, you're signing a five-year agreement to break a lease. A lot of times, you have to do one year to break the lease and all of a sudden, you're like, wait, I got to put up $100,000 to get out of this lease, for example. A lot of pressure in Delray. Everyone wants to be there right now. They know there's a lot of foot traffic, but it comes with a big responsibility, of course. What we're going to do now is we're going to segue. The cool thing about this app is sometimes you're just calling people, saying, hello, who shall we pick? Let's see if there's any Floridians on the app right now. She's a Brooklyn person. That'd be interesting. Boca Raton. Yeah, let's call Sabrina. Hello? Hey, Sabrina, it's Jason Hill. You're live on the OWL Podcast. How's everything going? It's going so good. How are you? We're doing well. We're here with the owner of Driftwood, a restaurant in Boynton Beach, Florida. Have you been there by chance? We'll start with that. I have not. I have not either. Well, Jimmy, tell her quickly about it, and then Sabrina, we'll want you to ask him a question if that's cool. Jimmy, floor's all yours. Tell her a little bit about Driftwood. Hi, Sabrina. Hey. So, yeah, we're, I mean, I like to say small, but medium-sized restaurant that's just myself and my wife, owner-operated. We, I guess mom and pop, but I'm a 39-year-old pop, so not necessarily, you know. Still, we have fun. We love cooking. We love just having fun with fresh, local ingredients. I mean, we make everything in-house. We make all of our own fresh pastas, breads, burger buns, desserts. Sabrina, check out his feed. If you look at the Owl Lab on social media, he's the last post, and then just click his handle on the post, Driftwood. I was actually looking him up online. He's gently, nicely saying this stuff, but when you look at the food and his bio, you'll see it looks absolutely amazing and your mouth might water. I absolutely love that. We haven't been able to do the podcast. We're just like looking at the food and we're like, we need to go there. I love that. How long have you been in business? A little over six years. No kidding. Is this like you have to get dressed up or is it more casual? No, it's casual. I mean, it's both. We definitely have people. I mean, we have people sometimes in shorts and flip-flops, you know, sitting next to somebody in a full-on suit. That happens. I love that. Yeah. Is this a lifelong dream? Whose dream was this? Myself and my wife. I mean, it was, I guess, for the last 10 years or so. It was 10 years ago when my wife and I kind of decided that we wanted to kind of have our own restaurant. You know, we've both been working in restaurants since we were 15. So it's kind of all we know. We've worked in high-end restaurants in New York City. That's where we met. And then, you know, traveled around, also working in restaurants between Hong Kong and Los Angeles and, you know, back to where I grew up, which is Boynton Beach, pretty much. So that's... Wow. Is this the original location or did you guys solely move up? No, this is the... It's the original. Wow. Yeah, we took over... It was a diner called Scully's. So, you know, it was kind of like a slow... Like a work in progress for us because we bought the property. So, you know, and we're not part of a big company. So we could not always afford things to be perfect. So we kind of did a lot of stuff ourselves as we could afford to. But we always just focused on the, you know, the quality and those are certain things that we weren't willing to kind of, you know, compromise, you know. So sometimes there's some paint chipping off the walls, but we're making sure we're buying the best possible products we can. You know, that's kind of... That was like kind of my approach for a few years. But over the few years, we've definitely grown and evolved. And, you know, we do have a full bar, you know, cocktail program, kind of like the same thought process as the food. Like I was saying earlier, we make our own ginger beer that we serve on tap. We make our own tonic. Oh my God. We infuse a lot of our own spirits and stuff like that. A lot of local products. We, you know, we do a lot. Like right now, it's a lot of tropical fruits coming around. So... Mango season. Yeah, mangoes. Sabrina, you coming with me and Ellie to dinner? We're going to go next week. You coming? You coming? Dude, it looks freaking phenomenal. I'm on his Instagram feed right now. It looks so, so good. Now you know why it's been difficult for us to do this podcast today. We just keep looking at the food. Okay, wait, last question. Why Driftwood? Why did you name it Driftwood? Well, honestly, like we were... It's something that I kind of touched on earlier. You know, we wanted to make sure that it was something that did not restrict us. So... Because again, knowing that we were buying the property, this is a very long-term thing that we were... Had in our heads at least. So we wanted to... We were trying to think of a name that made sense. That was not five syllables, you know, something that was kind of, you know, easy to remember and something that didn't restrict us. So we didn't want it to be like, you see that and, oh, it's got to be Italian food or, oh, that's got to be French or that's got to be something, you know, and then it took us about a month of just like going back and forth and I actually proposed to my wife on a big piece of driftwood in Tulum, Mexico on that two-month hiatus. I was saying we were... How this all makes sense. Why this would be a long story. So it all kind of... And it was like, you know, I guess there's not a word. My wife's from Puerto Rico. So we had a conversation where it's like, oh, how do you say this? And it's like floating wood, you know. Yeah. So that was always like, you know, so it was like one day like when we were trying to think of a name, she was like, what was that word for that wood that floats? Yeah. And I was like driftwood and then we just stopped and we're like, that's it. That's awesome. That's it. That's so cool. I freaking love that. Well, congratulations on all the success. Thank you. Hope to see you soon. Well, Sabrina. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for joining us on the OWL podcast. Always appreciate it. Yes. Thanks for calling Jason. Later. Bye. Okay. Jimmy, that was your first OWL call. Now we get to leave Sabrina with you. Of course, you know, we weren't asking her that many questions, but we'll put great call. But that's the power of the technology. It's really just connecting with people. No different like when you got to New York. I got to connect with people and just make stuff happen. I think it's like in those early restaurant days when you're on the couch, you could pull out OWL and search like restaurant chef and you could call somebody. They were on mentorship money. Hey, I just moved here. I'm literally like I'll work for anything. Like it would have been a great. Oh, of course. Yeah. Well, it's like when Instagram when I first got like on Instagram and all that, like I would start, I was like, wow, I can actually like look at like did you see like chefs and restaurants where like I used to have to wait and save up my money to buy their cookbook, you know, wait for them to make the cookbook. You know, now you're seeing what they did last night. Yeah, you know, and that's that was like a game changer for that. I mean, this is who you spoke to, by the way. So look how cool this is. Like she's a past TEDx speaker, founder of her nation, creator of her mastermind. And then we could see all the different things. Five years podcasting, interviewed 600 plus female guests. So you can imagine like a lot of times people go in technologies and just think like, what is the sale? Like is someone buying from me? Right. But often it's collaboration, which is the bigger part of this app. Like you just spoke to someone who has a huge pool of female, you know, guests that have been on her show, 35,000 followers and all these podcasts that she's completed. So she could just say, I'm going to go to this restaurant. And then before you know it, she's like, hey, could I could I do an event at your restaurant or just talk about it? Just naturally post, of course. So I just there's just so many, you know, she has networking events and different things, too. So that's the power of the app. Just like the like the old days, just communicating and seeing where conversations go. Not always, you know, worrying about shared resources, not about the metrics. Everyone's so attached to metrics today on social media, like, you know, posting, going viral or this is just, you know, the metrics are reviews. But other than that, it's just, you know, just having good old conversations. Yeah, because I feel like the, you know, for me looking through, you know, it's going to be very different than what you might be looking through. If somebody else, you know, there's going to be different things that stand out and different things that kind of make sense. And you could type in chef in the top, you know, and bring up other chefs. And, you know, of course, you could filter down and you could say, OK, well, you know, is there any chefs in the state of Florida? Right. And you could try to find out if there's folks like Eric. Great example. He was on my other podcast, The Shrimp Tank, and he has floor scotch. Right. And they just entered the South Florida market. Right. And then, you know, it's like you guys can stop by my restaurant. Yeah. Right. And he's trying to create relationships with more restaurant owners down in South Florida, but really connect to a lot of people in actually New York. He's forget the brand, but one of the top five vodka brands is his partner behind the scenes. And he's the first veteran owned scotch brand in the world. And then you have Eric Peterson. You probably know this restaurant. Evo Italian. Yeah. He's big, a little further north, but you kind of see the point. Right. The point is you get in there and talk to like minded individuals. But additionally, you could say, hey, I just need, you know, to connect with people about marketing. Right. You're trying to get more people through the front doors. Right. And you just want to talk to somebody about creating Facebook ads. Right. And then you have Adam Nelson who happens to live in Delray Beach and he runs a marketing agency. Little blue plane. Right. So example is like for everyone out there, like we all need help in different things. And the app just enables you to kind of connect instantly without waiting around. Just call anyone who's available. Of course, like that. So I'm definitely I mean, I just I just got onto it last last night when I was getting on. But I was just looking through between last night and this morning. I was like, I wish we had something like this sooner. Oh, yeah, definitely. Very, very. It's a very useful tool, you know? And of course, like if there's someone that you do want to talk to and they're not live, there's a little button you can click. They'll get a text message that says request. Yeah. Right there. And it's cool because like I've reached out to people even like through Instagram and said like, hey, I would love to talk to you on the owl app. And I feel like it just shows them that you're more serious, like I'm willing to pay you for your time where like you might be getting 20 DMs, but they say, oh, this person wants to pay me for it. So like I'm going to prioritize them over the other 30 people that are DMing me. So it kind of helps even if it's a dollar or five dollars. But it's still like some sort of a boundary that I don't have on like Instagram or something like that, you know? Yeah. OK, our last part of the show. Ellie, what is it? Bat time. So I don't know if you I know you said you watched some of the episodes. You might not have gotten this far into the show. Don't worry, it's not that scary. Basically, it's just a wager. We ask you to do something. If you complete that, you get something from us. If you don't complete it, we get something from you. So I'm going to make this easy. We already talked about this, about Mentorship Monday. Sounds like you might have off on Mondays because the restaurant is closed. I mean, you never have off really, but probably. Some Mondays, yeah. So I don't know if you're free this Monday, but I'm just going to say for to go. Basically, I'm going to ask you to go live on the app this Monday for, let's say, three hours. So that doesn't mean you have to be actively on calls for three hours, but just set your timer to three hours. Make sure that your ringer is on and just see if you get calls. So, yeah. And then, so we're just asking you, we'll check, make sure you're live for three hours. And then if you do that, then you get something from us. So it could be, I don't know, what could he get from us? You're in charge. We'll put a cap, though. He says three hours and he gets the more than, because to be fair, just in case, before you know it, it's like you get 10 different people calling and you're like, okay, that's a lot of calls. So we'll say go available for three hours, but if you hit more than five calls, then you could cap it and turn yourself offline. Okay. Because I don't want to kill like a full three hours of your day on Monday. Three hours typically will mean three to four people will call you, to be fair, like one or two an hour. I'm not expecting people to be flocking towards me. Well, you never know. I mean, people get excited when someone new gets on the app and we have a lot of like super fans and super users that just are always on and they're like someone new and they just love to call new people and network. So you know, I have no problem with it being a full three hours. I do have some, a few things going on, but I might have to pause it. Well, yeah, we're just saying if you get to five calls and you want to log off, that's fine. So, okay. So if you do that, then... What would you like to win? So if you complete the task, you get, you could make up anything. You could, you could make us promote you more on our owl app feed on social media or a newsletter. I like that one. I like that one. You could say, hey, try out this new restaurant, not new restaurant, but check out this restaurant. Or we could even... So we could obviously promote you know, I could, we could promote. I got an idea that we will be there that night. How about, how about that? Well, not that night because we're closed Monday. But the night that we're going to go. Like I'm saying, if you win, then on the newsletter, come join us. You know, we're not paying. Yeah, maybe we could do like a networking. We will be at the restaurant, you know, and you know, if you happen to be in town, swing by for a drink or a bite. We could do like, yeah, a little like networky kind of thing there. That's a fair deal. That is fair. Now, if you lose... As in if I don't do it. If you don't do it, what do we get, Ellie? I think we get... A free meal. We get a free meal. That's fair. Yeah. Everything under the sun. We get to do a tasting. I want a tasting. That's the deal. A tasting. I want a tasting. Because often what happens is I want everything on the menu. I mean, not everything. I'm the same way. But then you get Florida portions and it's like, yeah. Yeah, I like small plates. Me too. Most of our menu is small plates. Oh, cool. We definitely have a few things that are kind of a little bit bulky, in my opinion, but appropriately bulky. But for a lot of our menus, it ends up being like the small plates or like three quarter plates sort of thing. That size. Cool. Sounds great. It's a deal. Shake on it. Awesome deal. Well, Jimmy, thank you for joining us here on the OWL Podcast today. For our audience listening, of course, we were showing the Instagram handle, but what are the best routes to get in touch with you? What's the website? What's the social media handle? And of course, I want to call you right on OWL app itself. You can call anytime on social media. We have eatdrinkatdriftwood on Instagram or driftwoodboyntonbeach on Facebook. Our website's driftwoodboynton.com. Okay. But usually, if you just, you know, ask Siri to look up driftwoodboynton, it's usually going to pull it up. That's usually what I do with myself. Perfect. And it's all connected right there you see on his profile. He's got zero followers. So go ahead and follow him. I was your first follower. And I will push out notifications to your followers, of course, to call you on Monday. So that wraps up today's episode on the OWL Podcast. We'll see everybody next week. Take care.