Laurent Tourondel, Josh Capon, Dale Talde, And Alex Guarnaschelli Discuss Balance, Mistakes, And Opening In Miami At South Beach Wine & Food 2015

The uncharacteristically chilly weather meant a change of venue for the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival trade talks: from the rooftop of The Betsy downstairs to its stylish, velvet banquette-lined lounge. But there was nothing cold about the panelists. Founder and president of Bullfrog & Baum, Jennifer Baum led an open-ended discussion with chefs Laurent Tourondel (co-founder of the now-split BLT empire), five-time Burger Bash champion chef Josh Capon of  Burger & Barrel and Lure Fishbar, Food Network Iron Chef Alex Guarnaschelli and Brooklyn-based Dale Talde of Pork Slope and Talde (who now has a Talde in Jersey City and is opening one in Miami this summer). It was warm and open, and very funny. Topics ranged from where they thought their careers would go when they first started, failures, successes, advice on opening a restaurant in Miami, and chef Guarnaschelli teasing, "I am going to open another restaurant, but I can't talk about it yet." Check out some excerpts from one of this year's trade panels.

On whether she thought as a culinary school student that her career as it is now would have been a possibility...
Alex Guarnaschelli: "No. I picked a job where I thought I wouldn't have to be agreeable for more than two hours in a row. Restaurants are a really great place to hide. "

On how difficult his initial training was when he first started breaking in...
Laurent Tourondel: "It was rough. We would be training in the winter, during game season we would start at 6 a.m. and finish at 11 p.m. It was rough training for 10 years."

On why he got into cooking and how he became successful...
Dale Talde: "I had to stop a lot of really bad habits before I became a passable cook. I started cooking to party. I liked being able to sleep into until noon and not have to be in at work by one. When I stopped partying, and when I stopped smoking weed before I went in to work, that's when I started to become a passable cook. I wasn't self-motivated. No. My chef sat me down and said, 'You are high.' And I said, 'Yes, I am.' I was in garde manger for two years, and I finally asked, 'Why can't I be one of the fish cooks?' 'Because you suck,' they said. 'Get serious or stop cooking.' So I got serious."
Josh Capon: "I attended the University of Maryland. I went to college for two years, and it was fun. I partied. I didn't start as early as Dale – I waited until 5 p.m. But I wasn't getting very much out of it. And my parents pointed out that every job I had had since I was 13 or 14 had to do with food. And I'd like to say that I was very mature and I made this decision all by myself, but my parents picked me up and took me for a tour at Johnson & Wales, and two more years in college was going to get me nowhere. So I started as a dishwasher, and then became a line cook, and I kind of never looked back."

On maintaining balance...
Josh: "Be in whatever what you do. My wife says, 'As little time as you spend when you are home, you make more of it than probably most men who spend more time at home.' The thing about cooking is that the kids really get it. And they can be involved in it. They're more able to relate to it."
Laurent: "I don't have a normal life."
Dale: "For me, something always breaks and then I have to give up something else. I always push it to the extreme and then I go "Okay."

On working with colleagues, partners, and other cooks...
Alex: "I only have one restaurant. My goal is zero. Funny right? It's also true. I have just one restaurant, with the same staff that has been cooking together for a long time. And I see a group of people who like each other a lot. One day I came into the kitchen before service and everything was fine, all the cucumbers were diced, and I left the kitchen to go check on something and when I came back, everyone was cutting furiously. And I asked what had happened, but nobody would answer. So I asked the pastry cook, but nobody wanted to answer. Finally, someone told me that a glass had broken into all of the prep, and they had to throw it all out and start it all over right before service. And nobody wanted to say who had done it so they all just came together to help out. And I was like, 'You guys need to get things under control!' And then I was just all, 'Aw, you guys! I love you!"
Josh: 'I spend more time with my staff than my family so there has to be a trust factor. And I say we work together, not that people work for me because everybody is making a lot of sacrifices. And a lot of the cooks who work for me, they're young kids. And I ask them, 'What do you want to do?' And they say, 'I want to do this.' And I ask, 'But what do you really want to do?' And they say, 'Oh, I want to be a writer, or an actor, or a musician.' And I say, 'That's great, but this is what I do. So I need you to respect that and respect the work you do here too.' And then I delegate and empower people. Because my biggest struggle is not being able to be everywhere."[pullquote:right]
Dale: "You love your people, but when you fight you have to be able to get it out. You have to be able to say, 'I disagree with that thing that you did,' or 'that wasn't the correct decision.' And then when things start to get loud, we need to bring the volume of this discussion down. You have healthy fights."

On having partners...
Dale: "With the new restaurant in Jersey City we brought on a new partner. And for a while at the beginning it was difficult to adjust. Before, we were the decision-makers. And now, well I don't deal with design. I know what I do well. I cook. David does service, John does the bar, and when we added another partner he was now the design element of this project. My two business partners lost part of their control. But we were like, 'Hey, he's on TV for design. Why don't we trust his aesthetic?'"
Laurent: "I've worked on lots of different projects and with all different kinds of partners and it's not always easy. The key to a successful partnership is to know who is doing what, who is making the decisions. The worst partner you can have is someone who doesn't know the business and is involved everyday. Everybody has a role and has a job to do."

On their biggest failures or the biggest mistakes of their careers...
Dale: "I definitely failed by putting a restaurant so afar ahead of my life that I f*cked up a relationship really bad. And that sucks. To me, that's one of my worst failures: not putting my friends and family in front of the restaurant. What I can never get back is seeing my nieces grow up from two to four years old. I didn't see them. And that's gone. I can never get that back."
Laurent: I opened a restaurant with someone who was a great financial backer and they had no experience, and I had to shut it down."
Josh: One of the dumbest things I did was something I said when I was working for Charlie Palmer at Aureole. The air-conditioning broke and I saw him scurrying around trying to do everything he could to save the 400 covers he had on the books that night. And I said, 'Hey Charlie, at least you've got the hottest restaurant in town.' And he just looked at me. And I was like, 'That was the dumbest things you've ever said.' Other mistakes? Don't drink the box wine in the kitchen – it just gives you a headache. But the dumbest thing I ever did was when I was a young cook with big, thick thighs. I don't know if you know this, but sometimes when it gets hot in the kitchen, some chefs use something down there to help keep things fresh. Cornstarch. And cornstarch is what I should have done. But I grabbed a handful of flour. And you know, if you take flour and water and you mix them, you develop dough. I took flour. So I'm back on the line and I'm working and the next thing I know, I couldn't walk anymore. I went to the chef, and I said, 'Uh, chef... I've got a problem. I can't move.' It was like cement and I had to go home. So cornstarch is a good alternative, but you should really only use baby powder. I was using cornstarch and then something wasn't right and I went to the doctor because I had a rash, and the doctor asked, 'Are you a chef?'
'Yes.'
'Cornstarch?'
'Yes.'
'Well, you have a yeast infection.'
'Yeast infection? I thought only women could get those.'
'Dark pants, warm environment, and corn starch is actually food.'"

Advice for chefs opening restaurants in Miami...
Josh: "Don't. No, I'm just kidding."
Dale: "There's been a constant theme that everyone has told me, that the hardest thing in Miami is to your staff."
Laurent: "We need a great culinary school. I've been here with BLT Steak for seven years at The Betsy, and for seven years we battled. After seven years, we have a great team in place. But the challenge is to keep your cooks. Miami is growing. There are new hotels and restaurants always opening, and there's always a guy who comes and offers to pay your cooks two more dollars. And in the off-season, it's okay but during the season you need a good staff."
Josh: It's tough not being here. You have to hire a really good staff, back of house and front of house. Also, you have to take care of the locals. If you don't take care of the locals down here you're not going to make it."

On a success the chefs are proud of...
Dale: I'm a self-hater. I've hated almost everything I've done. It's never good enough. I got that from my mother. I'm proud of Talde. I've proud of how we turned a sh$tty New York Times review into a positive. I got one star, and we knew we were better than that. So I hung it up in the kitchen to use it as motivation, it was like the Fighting Irish. We knew if we worked hard that everybody would say we were better than this, and we turned it around. We fine-tuned some dishes and I was probably the most proud of this. After the tears and the crying and the screaming, it was like, 'Okay, how are we going to make it better?'"
Josh: We got a one-star review that was like a dagger in my heart. I worked for years to open my own place, and I read The Times reviews every week, and I had a stack of New York Times under my mattress to the point that it raised my mattress. And I walked into the kitchen the next day, and something I'm proud of, that particular one hurt, it was Bruni when he was the reviewer back in the day, but I got the monkey off my back. And Lure is on fire, and bigger than ever. Bruni emailed me about four months ago and says, 'Hey, I just want to come in and check out the restaurant, it will be a table for four if there's space.' And I say, 'Yes, come on in, we'd love to have you, and he loved it and he tweeted about the oysters, and I said a quick hello. And I said, 'Isn't this nice that we can talk, that I can come out and say hello?' And he said, 'I always hated that whole thing.' And he emailed me after saying that he had a great meal and that he'd like to come back in and really explore the menu more. So I said, 'Let's do it,' and he's been back in two more times. About four times now. And he comes in and before his guests sit down next to him, on the third or fourth time, I said, 'Hey, Frank. You've been in now what three or four times? I have a crazy idea. Why don't you guys review the restaurant and you can make up for the one-star review you gave me 12 years ago?' And he looks at me and says, 'Oh, really?' And I said, "Frank, you called my chowder a 'watery shipwreck.' And I had to taste that chowder every day that it came down the goddamn line. I had to taste it for six months after that.' And he sent me an email that said, 'Sorry if I every caused you any grief along the way.' That was tough and think about today and I think whole process is bullsh*t, but a whole load of people read these reviews. And if you want he business that's going to round out the tables to make your restaurant a success, it helps."

On doing social media versus having other people do it for them...
Alex: "I think it's the kind of thing where you can water the flowers several times a day and spend the rest of the day in the hammock."

Check out all of this year's coverage of the 2015 Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival coverage: Read More!