Food vs. a Food Program, Heavier Plates & Feeding the Future of Mobility

Podcast Transcript

‍_{Adam Landsman}

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the next episode of What's Working. I'm Adam Landsman, senior vice president of growth at Sharebite. I'm here today with our guest, Steven Catalano, head of culinary operations at Zoox, autonomous vehicle company. Very exciting stuff. Welcome, Steven.

_{Steven Catalano}

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

_{Adam Landsman}

So we're gonna talk a lot about food today. That's your background. You spent a lot of time thinking about food, eating food, making food. Let's go way back. What is your origin story of food? How did you get introduced to culinary, hospitality, and all things about food?

_{Steven Catalano}

Culinary started early on. My mom was the matriarch of the family and would bring everybody together for holidays to the big, you know, Norman Rockwell meal, the turkey, the stuffing, all the things, and that's where it all started. Get to see family. We'd only see him once a year anyway, so that was that was the big thing for us, bring everybody together.

Continued on in my journey. My dad was a fireman in Oakland. Come home and would try to cook things. We didn't have I didn't come from a lot. We never went without, but he would come home and try to make something out of nothing and, generally ended up a little less than savory, if you will. So I learned how to use a dry spice rack early and often as a child.

_{Adam Landsman}

There's a joke in here about what's a dry spice rack, but we won't go there. So you became a chef. How old were you when you became a chef?

_{Steven Catalano}

Twenty seven, so it was my second career.

_{Adam Landsman}

And where was your first experience being a chef, and and where did you go from there?

_{Steven Catalano}

So I used, I was a sales rep prior to becoming a chef. I was a sales rep for a snowboard company. I lived in Tahoe. And to attract people to come up, I worked for a ski brand. And to attract people to come up to try try the boards, I would let them come and stay at my house that I was renting at the time. And funny enough, you know, it was this was early nineties. I guess it was late nineties, so ninety five, ninety seven.

We would, have people come up. I'd cook them a meal, cook them breakfast, cook them lunch, take them to the hill, make sure they had food on the hill. They demo a board, go go skiing or go ride their board, come back, and then we'd go back to the house, and I'd make some sort of dinner, for them. We'd spend the night, and we'd go back and rinse and repeat the following day.

_{Adam Landsman}

I guess there wasn't a professional snowboarding career.

_{Steven Catalano}

There was aspirations of a professional snowboarding career. I broke my collarbone in three places early on in my, attempt to be a professional snowboarder, and that was, that sidelined me a little bit.

_{Adam Landsman}

Got it. Yeah. All right. So you you and I had a conversation once a while back, and, you told me that there was a story about someone who told you that you should become a chef. Yep. Who told you you should become a chef?

_{Steven Catalano}

One of the vendors that came up, you know, snow was getting it was a bad season. El Nino was great. After El Nino, sales started to slump. You know, I was having a conversation with one of the, people I was selling snowboards to, and they mentioned, you know, I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know if I was gonna stay in and get out, go back to retail. They mentioned that, you know, the burritos that you would make on the hill in the parking lot out of the back of your van were great. The dinners were great. You should become a chef.

This is all around the same time as the Food Network was, you know, Bobby Flaying and, you know, all the all the emeralds and all the, you know, pastas and bams and things like that.

Started watching that, and then when it was all downhill or uphill, depending on how you look at it from there.

_{Adam Landsman}

And so how do you go from burritos in a parking lot on the side of a a ski hill to corporate catering? Right? That's a pretty big shift. Tell us a little bit about the journey as you get into the corporate world and all things hospitality.

_{Steven Catalano}

Well, mean, it all starts in culinary school. Gave everything up in Tahoe, sold everything I own, moved to San Francisco, went to culinary school. Did that for about I think it was fifteen months.

Went to the CCA. Then after culinary school, they require you to go work in a restaurant for a period of time. Generally, it's ninety days for a paid internship or an externship is what they called it.

I used to get a cup of coffee every morning before class, and right there was a, right at the the line inside the culinary school was a bunch of cookbooks, and I would start flipping through books while I'm waiting for my drink.

I saw, Charlie Trotter's was the culinary book that I was looking through at the time. It was the it was the meat book, if you will. And so when you have to find an externship, I shot for the moon. I was twenty seven years old, so I figured I'd try to go to the Harvard of, culinary. I did some extern or stages at some other locations, but when I was in Chicago, that was really what sold me. Going there, you have to stash, so it was just try out.

During the tryout, you're there for anywhere from twenty four to forty eight hours. Showed up on day one. They're like, Thank you so much. We're really excited to have you.

We opened the door with a welcome mat on. It was great. And then about thirty minutes in, somebody came down and said, unfortunately, we've already filled this externship. We're not gonna be able to extend this.

We're we'd love to have you stay for the next forty eight hours and, you know, play with us in our kitchen, essentially. And I was disappointed, and I, you know, respectfully, let them know. Was like, Wow, I flew all the way to California. This is my this is the one spot I wanted to try out and work at.

About forty five minutes later, Trotter himself came down and said, Wow, we've made an we've made a clerical air. We'd love to have you. And it was fantastic. Went through two days, had a conversation with the chef at the end to, you know, make preparations for me to come back.

And, you know, he asked me how it was. What did you think? And I said, was a kid in a candy store and a deer in headlights all at the same time. There was ingredients I'd never seen before.

You know, I'm peeling salsify with a with a peeler and not paying attention to how everybody else is doing it, but trying to move fast so I look like I belong there, which at the time, definitely, I had no business being in that kitchen. But I ended up, like, essentially peeling all the way through a salsify for it's a stick literally looks like a stick or a pencil, if you will, and I peeled all the way through it thinking that I was doing a great job. And then they were like, Well, we're gonna move you on to the next task, which was breaking down a chicken. I had done one to this point and literally butchered that chicken, you know?

That that animal was didn't didn't resemble what what you see on a plate today, unfortunately.

_{Adam Landsman}

And and from there, how many years were you a chef?

_{Steven Catalano}

So I was a chef in at Trotter's for almost three years, met my wife, moved back to the Bay Area from Chicago, then worked at Menraiser in Los Gatos for roughly three years, and then got married, you know, had a conversation with the wife one morning and said, I I think it's time to find a job where we can actually, you know, move on and and kind of create a look create a life together. And I said, sure. So left that, went to some small restaurants thinking I was gonna be the executive chef and, you know but when you go to small restaurants, you start to there's some different personalities, specifically if there's an owner, and your vision doesn't necessarily match the vision you came from.

Right. So coming from three Michelin going to a mom and pop was a culture shock for them. I was talking to farmers and talking to meat purveyors and specialty thing, and they are looking to they the essentially, the restaurant owners were looking to stay with the meat and potatoes and the veggie, if you will, on the menu. And then from there, worked at another restaurant or two and then found corporate dining, after working in, Menlo Park.

Saw something online. You know, I was tired. Wasn't going to weekends at the at the father in law's house to eat barbecue because I was working on weekends. Had a new baby.

No Mother's Day. That wasn't a thing. I was cooking for everybody else's mother at the time. So had another conversation with the wife and answered a online ad on whatever website it was and then found Bon Appetit, which is a company I worked for while I was at LinkedIn and ended up at LinkedIn for seven years.

_{Adam Landsman}

So talk about that transition. So you started bon appetit. You're now working sort of with a huge company in LinkedIn. What was that transition like? And talk to us a little bit about what the experience at LinkedIn and really digging into the corporate dining program for a pretty major company with lots of employees. What was that like?

_{Steven Catalano}

So going into corporate dining, coming out of the Michelin world was a bit of a culture shock.

Going to the garden, seeing all the fun stuff that we're planting and pulling things up with kench, and then coming from Trotter where it's very militaristic and it's very, Let's go, push, push, push, you know, then going back to kench and surfing and doing all this stuff and having fun with him, then going into corporate dining. It's a cool it's definitely a culture shock. Lots of people, lots of meals. It's not just one hundred and twenty people a day where you prep one dish or two dishes. We're prepping multiple dishes for up to thirty five hundred people at the time. So learning that and learning scale was, I think, the biggest challenge that I faced. Food was not easy, but catering food and creating menus that everybody would like was a challenge, and then scaling them to large groups of people was definitely a challenge.

_{Adam Landsman}

Sure. I bet. So you're at LinkedIn for a number of years or bon appetit with LinkedIn, And then you joined Zoox. I think this is about eight years. Correct. So you continue on. What are some of the changes from LinkedIn time to over the last eight years at Zoox as it relates to the corporate dining program?

_{Steven Catalano}

I think the biggest change was going from the vendor side to the client side, getting to do things that I learned at LinkedIn and had the opportunity, but then doing it the way that I wanted to do it and bring past history of my past career of, you know, the Michelin restaurant and bringing that and really creating an experience along with the food. That was one thing when I interviewed with the founders of Zooks in my very early on, went through the thing we went through the interview and had a lot of great con it was a great conversation. We talked about food, favorite meals, things of that nature. And they're like, well, thank you so much. Do you have any questions for us? And I said, with this position, do you want food, or do you want a food program? And they asked me they looked at each other, and then they asked me, well, what's the difference?

_{Adam Landsman}

What is the difference in your

_{Steven Catalano}

To me, food is something that goes in goes onto a plate or a chafing dish.

There's really no passion and no culture.

Nothing behind it, really. A food program to me encompasses one, trust two, transparency three, culture, and there's also an experience element to it, whether that's just making it to the window and watching people have that, oh, wow, that looks delicious, but also having the conversations with the individuals that you're working next to or sitting next to or passing in the hallway or in the elevator with, hey, chef Steve, what's what's on the menu today? Or what are we eating next week? Well, what do you want to be on the menu?

And taking that and then putting it on a menu. So and so wants this selection today. Thank you so and so for your advice. Here's your menu item.

And watching them walk up to the counter to grab their plate or serve themselves going, wait. That's totally unexpected.

That that is what a food program is versus just food.

_{Adam Landsman}

Sure. I totally I totally agree with you. And and also, imagine over the last eight years I mean, one, Zoox has been a incredibly fast growing company. I've heard you say something, and I'll I'll butcher it a little bit, but you know, you feed the people that are responsible for the future of mobility. Really cool at Sharebite, we say something similar like we feed the people that, you know, power some of the world's best companies. I think we share that that similar ethos. But even in that eight years, what has changed with that food program from then until now?

_{Steven Catalano}

Well, I mean, there's been in my mind, there's been a few different transitions of the food program. One, the implementation. I had the opportunity to work. When I got here, one of the, employees that I worked closely with, Samantha, she was a nutritionist.

So I knew food from the ground from the seed to the ground to the plate. I didn't know what it did to the body necessarily. So working with her, I was able to understand what it did to the body, you know, glucose levels and more vitamins and, you know, additives and things like that. So she really gave me an education on that, so that allowed me to kind of formulate the program and add it add its creation.

Plus, one of our founders was adamant about not a lot of sugar, healthy food. Even our one of our cofounders, he loves he loves all things food, loves sandwiches.

He'll tell you all day long how he loves his sandwich, but that was the baseline of where we started. Okay? Then cooking food, creating this program, it was as small as one one cafe at the time.

Then when you we ran into COVID, another transition, almost a full stop at the food program. We did have some operators on-site, so we did have to source out or I sourced different vendors that could produce food and and deliver it. I would come into site every day to make sure that those individuals were fed in different manners, you know, mask and, you know, whatnot.

And then coming out of COVID, we created we got to recreate the program completely. You know, at that time I don't this is gonna sound very egotistical, but there was a little celebrity aspect of myself to stay relevant during COVID. I started cooking classes on Zoom, and the first one was what the heck's in my pantry and how the heck do I cook it? And then I let everybody send me an email or a Slack message that said, you know, go into your pantry. Tell me what's there. Risotto was the number one answer. So the first cooking class that I did via Zoom, which was recorded, was risotto, which then eventually evolved ninety videos later.

It evolved into cooking from home, which is a Slack channel I created, not just to stay relevant, but also to continue that culture while at home. You know, I would get Slack messages all night.

I got this in my refrigerator. I can't get out to the grocery store today. What should I have? I'm working with the team on there.

Then going now into coming back from that with return to office, was a slow it was a slow process. Started with one cafe. And then Zooks, during the time of COVID, didn't really stop. Just kept pushing and going. So I had to create programming that would allow for me to go into different buildings, not a cafe quite yet, but set up in a micro kitchen. And then from the micro kitchen, it blossomed into a cafe to now three cafes and up to in x amount of buildings. I mean, we're we're we're all over the place, which is great.

_{Adam Landsman}

That that's great. How do you think about the dichotomy between getting your employees great food, right, considering nutrition and and health and money. Typically, healthier food does cost more. How do you think about that balance from a company's perspective? Right? You're responsible for the whole program and so you wanna give people I'll I'll say the best, whatever that means from a health perspective.

But we all have budgets. How do you think about that?

_{Steven Catalano}

I think there's an opportunity to work within a lot of budgets.

I like to say that I'm a little creative when it comes to using budgets.

Know, we do partner with a vendor that produces a lot of our food for us, granted I have oversight to all of it now. With that being said, I've got enough relationships in I live in Gilroy, which is a fairly far commute from Foster City, and I drive through the farms every single day.

So I'm well aware of what a farm stand price is versus the commodity price. Similar mentality to growing it yourself as we did at Manresa, but creating that relationships. You know? One of the taglines from LinkedIn is relationships matter.

And as a vendor there, I captured that, and I truly firmly believe that that is the case. Working with local farmers, I would fill the back of my truck, or I think it was a Honda Fit at the time when we were, you know, small car, lots of corn. You know? But I would fill it up and then drive it in because it was a better price.

You know, that is the step as opposed to just pressing the easy button of ordering it from a, a commodity vendor, which is great, good products. I was working with local farmers, so I found that the budget itself would stretch. And we've continued that philosophy as our program scales, working with vendors that are able to grasp the vision, if you will, to help grow the programming and understanding where they can stretch a dollar, if you will.

But it's really about the brand of Kool Aid that you serve.

And I serve I think my Kool Aid's a pretty good flavor. It's purple.

_{Adam Landsman}

It's great. Perfect. Yep. We've talked a lot about hospitality. I remember one time you were talking to me about, your philosophy around hospitality and how it goes beyond just breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What do mean by that?

_{Steven Catalano}

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner is served in the cafe. It's consistent. We've got a website that says that, hey. Come on. It serves it x time, x time, the next time.

It's our job to make sure that when people walk in, the food is ready.

Could be a little bit slow. We have a code that we have a little sign that says error four zero four. Something's broken here, Trying to stay within the tech world. But that doesn't mean we're not gonna put something in that.

We're to get there. We have the just in menu or the just in case menu, where it's got to go to the well quickly, put something up in the window just so everybody has a meal ready for them. That's our job, but it's also an aspect of hospitality to make sure that they can trust us. You know?

Also, when you see people that are walking in, they're all wet.

Well, why can't we have, you know, why can't we have a towel for them there? Sounds pretty far fetched to, you know, doing that for thirty five hundred people, but when the team sees that, they're taking that extra step. It's that unexpected surprise. I like to call it the emotional deposit as well. So when we do have a bad day or we miss, they're a little bit more forgiving than, you know, a little bit more, concerned that we did miss. It's a typical restaurant.

This is just corporate. We're I've just scaled the restaurant mentality to a corporate setting, and it's not new. There's lots of people in my role at other companies that are doing this. But I think our hospitality aspect of, again, taking the email or the Slack message or taking the Slack message on Thanksgiving at five in the afternoon with somebody sending me a picture. Chef, is my turkey done?

Send me a picture. Let's talk about it. Let's figure out how to fix this. You know, those types of things.

It's going the exercise. It's answering every email. It's answering every Slack message. At scale, it gets hard.

But we're preparing for those at scale. You know, we don't work off of recipes. So if somebody requests a recipe, we create one for them with their name on it, the day that they created it, and it's and we put it in a folder that we share out to them. So not only are they getting one recipe, they're getting every recipe that go that we have created for the individual.

_{Adam Landsman}

You touched on two other things I want to dig into a little bit deeper. You talked about people, both the employees, which we've talked about a little bit, but more more importantly, the employees, other folks on your team or adjacent teams. What is their role and how do they help put on this this awesome food hospitality show?

_{Steven Catalano}

I mean, takes it really does take a village. You know, I have a direct report, Marissa Poses. She manages the Micro Kitchen for us, but she's also making sure I'm not missing Slack messages, just as I make sure if somebody if an ice machine is broken somewhere, I'm seeing that. And if I know she's commuting this direction or going to see another site, I'm actually working to make sure that I'm answering that for her.

It's a team. It it truly is. It goes back to the kitchen. It goes back to, again, the brigade system where it all starts.

If the dishwasher doesn't have soap, I can't get a plate. I can't put a meal out. So as a team, our facilities team, our finance team, our logistics team, our comms team, that's all we're all intertwined. Granted, I'm just a I'm just a, if you will, a a cog in the wheel, but we all work together towards a common goal to make sure, one, people are fed.

Two, they're taken care of, and they feel they feel the love, if you will. And it's not just in the food. It's just it runs throughout the company. And I think, truly, you know, not to toot a horn here, but I think it starts from the top and comes down just in a brigade system. Mission mission, goal all starts from the top, and then it starts from the bottom to work up to the top to make sure we're putting together a product that is, one, awesome, and two, that people are enjoying.

_{Adam Landsman}

That's great. The second thing is technology. You touched on it with your four zero four reference. How does technology play a part today in your food program and the way that you think about, manage, serve, analyze, iterate, adjust your food programs across multiple locations?

_{Steven Catalano}

Well, have a lot of locations. So there's a lot of information that's out there that I'm requesting. And this is another thing that, I learned early on in my career. It's understanding where, one, the dollar goes, but, two, what we're getting for the dollar and how do we optimize for that.

Making sure starts with making sure we're not throwing away, you know, chunks of fruit that aren't pretty, we put them in a spot water. You know? Also taking items that we're cutting that don't necessarily fit the mold, we're putting it on a pizza topping.

We're tracking everything that comes in our backdoor by weight, and and we've scaled, and we've identified that, for instance, a pork butt. If you cook a pork butt, you lose about thirty percent of its weight, and that's just historics. And that's what works for me in my head. And we've tracked that, and we've actually tested that to make sure when we're ordering pork butt for thirty five hundred people and an average of six ounces per person per take depending on what we're serving, we track that.

Pork ribs, that's a whole different thing. There's no way to there's no way to track how many ribs people are gonna take because it's we can never order enough. But on the way out, post consumer waste, we're also tracking that. That's very valuable to us.

We use it not just for, okay, a lot of money's going out in the in the in the waste. We track it to cut open a bag and say, okay, the bag's heavier than it was yesterday. And we know that because we track the weight of that compost bag, the post consumer waste bag. And then we'd open the bag and see what was in it and then identify, okay, this is not a group that loves Faro, or this isn't a group that loves, you know, summer squash at a that has, you know, whatever on it.

That's not then each building is different. We have engineers in a building. We have finance in a building. We have sales in a building.

We have, you know, a bunch of different groups. We have builders. We have all these people at different locations. They don't all like the same menu.

So what we've what we've done by taking all of this information in is we create menus that change every day.

We're not passing. Okay. Well, we didn't serve all the spaghetti today. We're not passing it to a new building. We're gonna either donate that, and we track how much we've donated.

And then we track how much we're shipping to different sites. Oh, we have one hundred and fifty people going to be here tomorrow. We track that. Okay.

This is what we prepped. So the next time we order for that hundred and fifty people excess, we know what that's going to look like. Holiday, you know, we track how many people show up on a on the day before the fourth of July. It's lighter than usual.

But on the backside, we've learned over time, there's generally a three day weekend associated with that. We know that we're going to the parking lot's going to be completely full. I mean, our team's even programmed to look at the parking lot to see how busy they're going to be.

And if we don't get that immediate rush in the beginning, we know to buckle down because it's coming.

_{Adam Landsman}

So you told me a story when I saw you a couple months ago about how you chose the specific plates that you use in your cafeteria. Do you remember that story?

_{Steven Catalano}

I do.

_{Adam Landsman}

How did you choose those plates?

_{Steven Catalano}

I mean, this is how the sausage is made here, but, plates are a little bit heavier. Helps people understand. People are used to seeing. You can see what's on your plate. But let if you have a plate that's heavier, they their body is telling them, this plate's heavy. I don't need to put more onto this plate. You can always go back for seconds, and I meet every new hire.

As we come through, I do a I do a thirty minute speech with them and then talking about the program and, you know, what to expect. And then I also take them on a tour of a cafe and give them the the the show, if you will, of this is what we do and why we do it. And we talk about that. Know?

The food at Zoox is noncommittal. We just ask that you commit to not wasting it. And by having a heavier plate, it generally it in my eyes and some of the information I mean, it's not scientific here, but by having a heavier plate, people automatically assume there's more food on their place. So it helps reduce the amount of waste or post consumer that's going into landfill or or going into compost.

_{Adam Landsman}

So talk to me about some advice that you would give first to someone who is passionate about food, wants to get involved in the culinary world. What advice would you offer that person?

_{Steven Catalano}

The culinary world's changed.

You know, when I started, you know, I still have scars from the first culinary job I had, you know, physical, and there's some mental in there too. You know? Obviously, joking around about that. But, I mean, it's not for everybody.

It's hard. You know? I think it's I people will probably be upset about this, but it's a little easier now. But in my mind, it's a little easier.

But, again, it depends on what level.

You know, corporate dining is not for everybody. You start from the bottom specifically if you don't have an education in food.

I like to find those people that don't have education in food and move them quickly. I mean, we've had some success rates. There's a gentleman that we had at LinkedIn, came came in, wanted a job.

We brought him from a prep cook, essentially, peeling carrots and potatoes and things of that nature. But in a year and a half, he was his life was changed because he was a sous chef and then into an executive chef. There's a lot that comes with that financially, and, you know, so it allowed him to essentially change his life. And but the culinary world is not very forgiving.

I mean, would I do it over again if you ask me that question and I'm gonna ask it for you? Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I wouldn't I wouldn't trade it because there's been a lot there's been a lot that goes along with it, but I've met some really great people.

_{Adam Landsman}

And what advice would you give to someone who is in the corporate world, they're thinking about either implementing a food program or modifying a food program? You obviously have a lot of experience doing that over the last number of years. What advice would you have for them?

_{Steven Catalano}

I think the advice I would give anybody that's starting a program, I'd go back to my first interview. Do you want food to keep people there because it makes it easy?

Or do you want something that not just the or do you want a program, a food program, where people are gonna be proud of it and wanna show it to their families? And it's a retention tool as opposed to, I just need you to stay here and work. You know, people come into office because there's three meals a day. They eat breakfast, they eat lunch, and if they're staying late to work, they get dinner.

That's an opportunity for them to actually button down. They don't have to think about, okay, I gotta leave now to go sit in traffic for however long, go to go get a quick bite and then go pick up the kids or, you know, whatever. It's already here. They don't have to think about that. So I think that, for me, that opens up a lot of time for them to think about other things, whether that's work. But, again, having a food program on-site, a lot of breaking bread with people, all of our seating in our cafes is communal. We want people to sit next to people they don't know.

Starts conversations, takes away that annoying first five seconds of a meeting. Hi, my name's Steve. I work with this team. I've been at Zoogs forever long. Takes away all that because everybody's kind of knows each other and bumps into each other. And it all starts on looking over across the table going, Where'd you get that?

And then they point over there, and then they come back. And then watching their reaction, it's similar to watching somebody take the first bite of something special in a cow in a restaurant. You get to see them go, oh, that's good. And then you watch them get up and, you know, go back or tap the person in the table next to them and say, go try this.

So I think I think a food program I think I think, for me, a food program is the way to go. Food is great, but but having a food program or at least culture around food shows that shows that the company truly cares.

_{Adam Landsman}

Awesome. This is great stuff. All right. We're gonna move into what I call the lightning round. Hopefully, that's okay. Quick answers. First thing that comes to your mind, feel free to elaborate how much is you'd like. What is your favorite meal?

_{Steven Catalano}

This is the question that every chef gets, and they laugh because it's just

_{Adam Landsman}

You're gonna say spaghetti and meatballs?

_{Steven Catalano}

No. For me, my favorite meal, if this is my death row meal type of thing, my favorite meal would be peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made by my next door neighbor's mom when I was, like, twelve, white bread, grape jelly where the jelly soaks into the bread, creamy peanut butter, although I grew into chunky, so, and a coffee milkshake with my great grandmother used to make, she used to microplane a coffee bean over the top of mint. Loved it.

_{Adam Landsman}

I'm now thinking about changing one of these questions to be death row meal. I don't know if that's gonna be good or

_{Steven Catalano}

Yeah, don't know why my mind just went there, but it did.

_{Adam Landsman}

All right, something much lighter. What is your biggest professional failure?

_{Steven Catalano}

This is one of my favorite questions. I when interviewing cooks, this is the, what is your biggest failure, and how did you come back from it?

Biggest failure, which actually was very eye opening, I was working the line at a restaurant, and it was New Year's Eve.

And, there was I had an a dish. It was crab. But, I mean, I'd spent all day cracking crab and pulling the legs out and doing all the stuff to prepare for this. But the dish required a a ginger, so a a shark skin covered ginger grater, and doing it with granny smith apples.

If anybody's worked with granny smith apples, as soon as they come into contact with any kind of oxygen, they brown or they oxidize quickly. So I was slice I was peeling with my, you know, tourniquet knife, slicing it, and then grinding it, and it had to go to the plate immediately. Well, it was just a very ambitious meal because I had twelve other components that weren't on a plate.

So to have that, it browned. And my chef at the time was like, you know what? This is my bad. Let's go. We'll let's go to a different a different way.

You know, we'll let the top oxidize, we'll scrape the top off and go. Well, long story short, I went down in flames, and Trotter came up and, you know, had a you know, had some constructive criticism. Let's put it that way. And, you I was told to get off the station.

And they moved me to instead of chastising me and moving me off and saying, just sit there and watch, they moved me to a station above me, which was the next step, which was there. There was an opportunity there to totally just deflate me. But for whatever reason, I think I think Trotter had a hot a soft spot for me. And he he pushed me up, and that was kind of that could have been the breaking point of my career at that point.

It was it was it was a rough going early on there. So that was that was definitely a moment, you know, where a failure turned into a success. And I see that, you know, not to get philosophical here. I I think there's at every failure, there's there's opportunity that comes along with it.

So it's just it's all about the mindset.

_{Adam Landsman}

I heard a great quote recently, and I forget who said it, but they said success is just failing upwards. I think that describes what you experienced. Sure. All right. What is your guilty pleasure snack?

_{Steven Catalano}

I've been known to eat a small pint. There's no such thing as a small pint. A pint of Ben and Jerry's in one sitting on a on a consistent occasion. That is my my wife goes out of town or, you know, to take the kids or goes out of town for work. First thing we do is I take the kids. We go get ice cream sundaes, and I take them to, you know, the local ice cream shop, and then I go get myself a tub of Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream and a Haagen Dazs tea, green tea ice cream. I eat half of this one one day and half of this one, half of this one, and then the next day, I finish it off.

_{Adam Landsman}

What is something that people often get wrong about chefs?

_{Steven Catalano}

All we think about is food. It's not who we are. Some people, it is. It's really about who they are, not everybody.

And I guess the other thing would the other thing would be is we don't have a specialty generally. There's things we like to cook, but the question of what's your you're a chef? What's your specialty?

It's yeah. I don't I don't necessarily know everybody's got a specialty, but it's my favorite question to ask because I I just chuckle because that is generally when people find out what I do. That is the that is the question I get the most.

_{Adam Landsman}

So this question's gonna sound like this is a, a two thousand and five episode of MTV Cribs. Sure. What's something that's always in your refrigerator?

_{Steven Catalano}

Oh, I think it changes. Well, it's it's I have condiment sauces.

You know, I am guilty of going to every yo. Go to the grocery store. Get the here's the list. My wife says don't deviate.

And as soon when I come back, it's I've got a new gochujang or, you know, new soy sauce or, oh, this is this new thing that everybody's talking about. You know, I found a I found, like, a black garlic, dehydrated black garlic. So now that's something I put on my rice, and, you know, I am I am a condiment. You know, it goes back to the earliest age of me cooking.

It's the dry spice rack. My dry I have a dry spice drawer, cabinet, and under counter. So

_{Adam Landsman}

Alright. Let's wrap it up with this one. Complete this sentence. People perform at their best when

_{Steven Catalano}

There's trust.

_{Adam Landsman}

There's trust. Alright. Well, thanks everybody for joining us on this episode of What's Working? Tune in next time.

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