What exactly happens when one jumps ship and goes from working on the floor to distribution? This week I had the pleasure to catch up with a tour de force in the Santa Fe Community, James ‘by the glass’ Selby. This episode explores what kind of life you can expect as a wine and spirits rep.
Expect to learn just how powerful a trip to the Loire Valley can be. How much you might expect to work as a liquor rep. What kind of service James actually gave at the compound, and how James sees the future prospects of the industry as a whole.
If this sounds like your kind of conversation, please like, subscribe, and share—it really helps!
Some links for things we mentioned in the show:
San Francisco Street Bar and GrillAldo Sohm
And…that’s it for this week! Thanks for listening! My name’s Andrew.
I record strange, fun things and try to make sense of this weird, beautiful life. You can find more of my written work at my blog. All of my social links are at the bottom of that site. You also have a contact page there. Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or notes for improvement!
I’m just here, taking notes as I go, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers!
Transcript
ANDREW: Welcome to Serves You Right. This is Andrew and I’m glad you can make it. If you are a server, a bartender, backhouse warrior, this is the spot for you. Follow me as we try and work out one fundamental question. Whether or not you can truly be happy working in the service industry.
With everything involved in working in service, the alcohol, late nights, low wages, restaurants and bars offer a very strange blend of challenge and opportunity to a large under-service portion of the population. Are they flawed and ugly in some ways?
Absolutely. The service industry does also serve a deep and fundamental human need though that drive for fast flexible work environments, the thrill of quick money and the appeal of the slightly dangerous. Again, my name is Andrew and I’ve worked in restaurants and bars for about 20 years now. I’ve done everything from dish washing and bar backing all the way to being a general manager. This is my record of what I’ve learned imperfectly, slowly, painfully and hopefully you find that interesting and you have an easier time at it than I did. Alright, let’s do it.
Thank you for tuning in again. My name is Andrew and today we got to talk to James Selby. So James Selby and I worked together for years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. James was always one of the best wine distributors and wine reps that I ever knew. Expect to learn in this conversation what kind of hours you would expect to work in a wine distribution job. We talk about 40 hour work weeks and how they’re kind of the thing of the past.
I really particularly enjoyed his discussion of how much his journey and exploration of the Loire Valley really impressed him and changed his career trajectory. We don’t shy away from talking about the darker side of hospitality too, the addiction, the burnout, redemption. It’s not all bad though. We do talk about some of his proud moments at the compound, including a moment when a couple highly praise his service, some of the best they’ve ever had, his words and not mine. We do talk about why he quit working in restaurants in the past and some of his thoughts on the nobility of service and some of his hopes and dreams for the future. Mentoring the next generation and seeing the next generation of young rising stars come up. So really fantastic conversation. This gentleman is as real as they get and yeah, without much ado, let’s get into it. This is Andrew Roy and I hope you enjoy Serves You Right.
ANDREW: Oh, that’s soon. Yeah. So what have you been up to the last couple of years? I haven’t really talked to you probably in seven years until you’re there on Facebook.
JAMES: Because yeah, well, I retired in the beginning of 2022 from favorite brands or now called L&F named after the Texas group, the mother group of the company. And I was fine. The last two years went by and a young colleague of mine, somebody like you, I admire and has worked hard and focused on their career, started a new local distribution company called Muse Fine Mind. And that would be Mikaela Maestis. You may have, I think she, you know, she was with you from time.
ANDREW: She was in La Casa Cina originally, right? That’s where I met her.
JAMES: She works a lot of places and I first met her and she was at Rancho and Contado for seasons or I think it was the other hotel at that time, but out there bartending.
And I remember walking in and saying hi to her, greeted her, waiting to meet with somebody. And I thought, man, this woman has her lights on and turns out flash forward 20 years, well, maybe 15 years. She ended up being the GM at Maze, which was Charles Dale’s restaurant downtown. And then she worked for several other restaurants and she went to work for a local distributor here, Fiasco, both as a salesperson and later moved to the back of the house, all within the goal that she had to start a distribution company. So she approached me fall of 23 and asked if I would consider helping her get the company started. And because I admire her, as I admire you, and I’ll stop blowing smoke up. You know, I do, and that’s why I’m on this podcast with you. And that gets to some of the things I want to talk about, about the, in terms of the joy of watching people like you and Mikaela grow as professionals in hospitality, which I think is, as you have aptly named your podcast, serve you right. Anyway, I agreed and I said, I’ll give you at least a year. And that was about quite a year and a half ago. And I’m going to, I’m about to start stepping back from it a bit now that she’s established. And, you know, I am old and I’ve got things I need to do and want to do, should do.
ANDREW: Things your wife expects you to do.
JAMES: Yeah, my wife expects me to do. And the joke was originally is, you know, this is going to be part time and it is. And we can get to that later when we talk about the realities of the business. But my wife looked at the first paycheck I got and she said, you put in a lot of time for this. And I said, look, for me, 40 hours a week is part time. So anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. And it’s been a lovely journey because of watching her take on the world because she’s pretty much a one person band outside of, you know, I think of her as Donna Coyote and I’m Poncho, you know, she’s she has done everything. You know, she will receive pallets of wine and put them away by herself. She was the one around to get in her way or hurt myself and have to pay me for working as a cop. I don’t know which that is, maybe both. But so that’s what I’ve been up to.
ANDREW: Yeah, hopefully less fighting windmills, but yeah. Yeah. And so so far on the podcast, I’ve talked to several bartenders, chef, also an advocate for mental health in the restaurant industry, but no distributors. So I was going to ask what do what do distributors do? What was their job like and what is it like with this new spot?
JAMES: It’s. And this I can only speak about. Working in New Mexico as a distributor because I did other things, bartending and serving and managing and owning in other states. But we are what is called a three tier state. I don’t know if that’s similar to what you’ve got in Nebraska or Oh,
ANDREW: Nebraska is wild. It’s the Wild West out here. You can do whatever they let little kids at the bar. It’s yeah, don’t quote me on that, but.
JAMES: It’s too late. So three tier state basically is the distributors, the middle person, and they work with either an importer for European wines or global wines. Or a supplier broker, who a broker may work with multiple wineries. And he’s sort of the go between between the source of the wine and the distributors. So there’s another tier in a way or a winery directly. Generally, that would mean something domestic. Muse now works with a wonderful winery in Oregon called Hundred Sons. I don’t know if they’re available. Like like Evan Martin with Martin Woods winery in the Blemann Valley, the young and up and coming stars of the region. So a distributor will sell to. Restaurants and on off premise. So on premise is restaurants, in case people don’t know. And off premise is where you go and you got to drink it off that premise. You got to go someplace else. Wine shops, dependent, grocery stores, etc., etc. So that’s the general gist. And. And then the distributor has to have salespeople, which is what I’m always. And I remember when I started distributing, I started everything late. You know, I had a different whole different career into my late 30s and. I sort of fell into working in restaurants, etc., etc. Here I am. So I was working as a manager and a wine director at a restaurant here. When I was approached by a company, one of the large ones to become a salesperson. At that time, my daughter was in middle school, I think. So she was coming home at four, you know, and in the restaurant I was going to work at four. And I thought, well, here’s a day job. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha. We’ll get to that later in terms of should we work as a distributor?
ANDREW: Well, on paper, it was a day job, right?
JAMES: Yeah, yeah. And for most part, it can be. But. So, yeah, that’s that’s how I got into distributing.
ANDREW: Yeah. Well, that’s that’s the question that emerged as you as you were talking about it. Yeah. You know, I do need to put a quick aside all the all you can probably hear me in the background go, oh, yes, and yeah, so I’ll do my best in the show notes to write down all the lines that you’re mentioning that I used to buy from you. So I’m hearing the Martin and all that.
JAMES: The player that was one. Yeah. And then we talked about mezcal some to keyless. This was another aspect. So, yeah, and then some distributors, you get different licenses. And the one I work for now, Mewes has a. Wine and spirit. But then some distributors do wine spirits and beer, etc. But I focus on wine. That’s been my focus pretty much all along.
ANDREW: Well, I mean, it’s such a such a broad topic. It’s something that if you’re good at, you can really nail down and do it well.
JAMES: And yeah. Well, yeah, wine is by itself is a broad topic. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You are an example of of those up and coming. So it’s like, well, up and running up and already doing professionals that have trained with that goal of mine. For me, it was kind of like, oh, I’m managing restaurant. Oh, you need me to order one. Oh, OK. Yeah. So I kind of, as I mentioned, as we were discussing earlier, sort of learned by working the ropes rather than even organized programs and certifications, which, if I were. Had this knowledge and went back to that square, I would have definitely done what you and Mikhail has done to. And we have a young man in in Tals, Tice, who runs the cellar wine shop up there. And he’s also going for his third. And I would have done that. But by the time that became a thing, I was already gray haired and somewhat pretended to have some knowledge anyway. But. And I know this may be jumping around to different questions you had, but
.
ANDREW: No, please.
JAMES: One of the great satisfactions of working in the wine industry is. Wine. Not drinking it, excluding it, but the study of it. And the study of that never stops. And even as I retired and I was doing some weekend wine tastings at a row of, you know, really fine wine shop and restaurant here. When I retired, the owner of Brian Box, and said, well, why don’t you do our Saturday tastings? We’re going to, you know, the pandemic is over and we’re going to start this up again. I said, OK, so every Saturday, almost for three years, I’ve been doing a consumer tasting for a couple of hours at the wine shop there. And what’s great about that is I’ve got homework to do every week, you know, got to study each one. And even though I may have already studied that wine some months ago, I’ve got to restate that one. And then there’s nothing else to study. You know, there’s soils. Well, that’s a huge topic, right? And then whole cluster and stem inclusion. I found out not that long ago that it’s not just stem inclusion. There’s there’s the main stem, you know, that comes off of the the vine, you know, the main vine. And then there’s the stem that goes to the bunch. And then there’s the little individual stems that go to each grape. And each one of those provides something different in the grape in the wine, you know, in terms of the permutation. So like I said, it’s a lifelong study. And, um, especially if you’re passionate about it, it’s fascinating and continuous.
ANDREW: Yeah. No, and there, there is something that’s really lovely about wine. There’s a communal aspect to it. You know, the other beverages, you know, you have spirits, it’s like a cocktail. And there can be some conviviality at a bar with that. Beer is kind of an individual. You get that bottle, but something about wine. No one sits down and drinks a whole bottle of wine. Right. Because you have to share it. Yeah. You can roll it on the table.
JAMES: That’s a good point. And then with booze, you know, it’s communal until you get to your third drink and then have a high root or a high root. And beer, you got to go pee a lot. So I, I don’t know. And I used to love all those things. I was a beer and taquita guy before I fell in love with wine. In my late, my early thirties, had to go to France to do a job. And I thought, well, I’m going to France. I better drink some wine, which I hadn’t been doing, you know. So I started about a month before I left, I started drinking a glass a day. And then I increased it to two glasses a day. So when I got there, I’d be able to handle my share of wine. And that worked. And then I did a driving tour of the Loire Valley just because I had time and money to do that. And that’s what did it, you know, people talk about their aha moments. It was driving on the Loire in late fall. So harvest was over. And but you drive along this magnificent river through this. Countryside, this, well, they, there’s a reason why the kings built chateaus along the Loire Valley, because it’s beautiful. Have you been?
ANDREW: I have not. Yeah.
JAMES: Well, the other thing that excited me, having been a former actor, which is why I went to France first place was. Joan of Arc, that’s where Joan of Arc was eventually captured and burned at the stake. And I kept imagining her riding her horse over these beautiful metal rolling hills and vineyards that lead down to this gorgeous river, which is maybe two thirds as wide as the Hudson River, but still quite wide and flow so quietly that time of year. Through this valley and this six hundred mile valley, it’s three distinct regions of wine. Climate in tomorrow, basically anyway. So then I kept stopping at these little signs as they’re wine tasting. And it could be a little shack on the side of the road. Yeah, that’s good. And buy a bottle and open it, put it between my legs and drive to the next one. Because in in early 80s, you could do that. You could drive around with a bottle. Well, I don’t know if it was legal, but you know, that’s.
ANDREW: You still can’t. It just may not be legal. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s actually the perfect region for you to get your inspiration. Because when I think of you, I often think of this like nice, food friendly, kind of more refreshing wines. I feel like that was normally what we would taste or talk about together.
JAMES: You know, when you were and was this when you were at Ferole?
ANDREW: Well, yes. Yeah.
JAMES: Yeah, and that was. You know, that. It was funny, I was we were just beginning to work with really some extraordinary Spanish portfolios at that time. And I was discovering. You know, wonderful wines from Galicia and the Northwest of Spain. Certainly the classic regions, Rivera de Duro and Pryorat and Rioja. But then the new Spain wines, you know, from down in Humia or Lom. We just bought this, you know, Alborino was not always what it is now. It was like a what?
ANDREW: That’s been a phenomenon over the last 20 years or so.
JAMES: Yeah. Yeah. So. Plus, you mentioned La Playa and South America and what was coming out of Argentina and Chile are very exciting. Wine regions have been making wine since. Mission. Clerics arrived there as in New Mexico and California hundreds of years ago. But there’s excitement in that region because. I think a lot of it is not just the passions that obviously we share, but winemakers share, but also just high rent districts, you know, you know, you’re getting wines made in Monterey. Even in suburbs of Los Angeles and San Diego and. That are out of the, you know, the, the Gold Coast of California, Napa, Sonoma. And even the Laman Valley, when I worked at the compound. As the wine buyer and that would have been. 2000 mid 2000s. I worked for a general manager that would not allow wine. And I’m a valley wine on the list because he thought they were inferior. And he said that if you wanted to drink Pino and Chardonnay, if you wanted to drink those, get them from Burgundy. We don’t want anything from. When I’m at ballet, so the day he was fired, I put six on the list. And. And have a look back because I lived, I lived in Portland for a number of years and worked there and spent a lot of time in the wine valley and with wine makers at that time. Is all I follow a. And blog newsletter from the Valley now when I left the Valley in 2003 to. Move back to Santa Fe because I left New York. Ended up staying in Santa Fe, intending to go to Los Angeles to do the same crap I was doing in New York, which was working in restaurants and trying to get acting work. But I stuck stuck in Santa Fe and. That’s where I met my wife Leslie and our daughter was born a few years later. Still a bit antsy being the New Yorker that I had turned into for a while. We moved to Portland.
ANDREW: And then got into Santa Fe’s answer to New York.
JAMES: Yes. Right. And, you know, there’s sort of an underground railroad of people who’s I’m going to move to Portland and they go, Portland is rainy. I’m going to move back to Santa Fe. Santa Fe is kind of quiet. I’m going to be back to Port or, you know, other places like Tulsa. And which is. I know a coming place. I grew up in Kansas, but it didn’t spend very much time in Oklahoma because. We had Kansas and you had Oklahoma. You know, they’re kind of the same semi square. Hot humid.
ANDREW: Right in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, Jim, you know, you’ve mentioned a couple of times some past jobs and things you’ve done. Is there any way I could ask you to kind of give an overview of what you’ve done in the past? You know, some of your jobs, places you’ve lived. I’m very interested. I don’t remember depth, what all happened with the acting career.
JAMES: Oh, yeah. I’m here at this long ago. I forget who’s joking. It is. Somebody’s joke was I started out as a child. And then. Yeah. Well, I grew up in a farm branch in Kansas. And as soon as I was able to get it to avoid the draft, because I was, I was in the first draft for Vietnam and I got a very low number. So had I not had a problem with my physical, I would have been over there. And. As soon as I could, I. Graduated from college and had a car packed and went to New York to study and work as an actor. And I did. And. Yeah, you know, I had some good success and. I like to say I went to New York to become a star, but I got there. I wanted to become an actor. And that’s kind of what it was. I mean, a star would have been. A different route. And I, you know, I flew pretty close to the sun a few times. I. Worked. And. Mostly made my living as an actor for over 20 years there. And people don’t really understand what that means. But basically it means. It’s called a working actor. You know, you do what you can to make money. Sometimes it’s a TV commercial. Sometimes it’s a touring show. Sometimes it’s a. A soap opera. Sometimes it’s a resident theater in another city. Anyway, that was going along. We don’t have time to get into what changed my mind, but. You start out at 20 with one set of desires and wishes and you wake up at 40. And you think. I don’t know that I still have that same. Desire and wish. So I said, oh, try stop stopping acting and see how that goes. And it went fine. I miss much of it. Mostly the literature. As when I retired from selling wine, I missed the steady of wine. So something like that. One of the questions you were thinking of addressing was. What I love about the business and. Or hate about the business of distribution, particularly was what I love is the people. You know, and the people that make the wine. The people that buy the wine. Like so people that are passionate about wine. That’s that’s the big part of it. So yeah, I happened to work in a play and when it closed the producer. Owned a couple of restaurants in New York and he said, do you need a job? So yeah, I’m a job. And thank God for employment. That is the that is the. The lifeline for for an actor that goes in and out of jobs over the years, because you can keep that perpetually rolling, at least in my day, you could. And, you know, as long as you work for 20 weeks as an actor in a year minimum, then you could keep your unemployment going. And that’s kind of whatever do, you know. But he said, well, I’ve got a bar in Grinch Village and I’m going to go to get your job there. I’ll go teach you how to bartend. So. I feel so sorry for the bartenders that had to like teaching me how to bartend. Because here I was the sort of golden boy of this producer owner of the restaurant. And they were stuck teaching me how to bartend. Anyway, I did that. Worked. Actually, with Tony Bourdain there and then another restaurant. The same producer owned in Tony and I worked at that more upscale restaurant. And it was fine. I really liked enjoyed bartending because it was like show business, you know, you put on your uniform, you get in front of the audience, you have your backstage, you’re chasing girls around, whether it’s backstage at the theater or, you know, waitresses, you know, you’re doing all that stuff. And it’s a similar livelihood in a way. And then. Um. And then, yeah, and then I made the break altogether from the theater and I stuck around New York for a while. I found a, I had done some summer stock in upstate New York and I found a little getaway place that I would go to on my days off. And I thought, well, if I’m spending all my days off in my little summer fall spring place, um, I’m still in New York. I’m not acting. I don’t need to be in New York. I could be anywhere. So I, um, but I did while I was in New York and my last job was at the, at that time, maybe ever the largest wine bar in the world is called the Soho Kitchen and Bar in Soho. And it had one of the first places to use crew name machines. Those are those machines where you can plug a bottle of wine into to scout the cork and plug in the cork of the crew name, which has a tube into the bottle. And that’s attached to a big tank of nitrogen and pull the little lever and out comes wine. And we did flights of, um, wines. We had 110 wines by the glass that doesn’t even count the sparkling wines. Um, that’s where I, and by then I’d already been to the law. So I was enjoying wine and learning about wine.
ANDREW: And it sounds like a sink or swim sort of place.
JAMES: Well, yeah. And, you know, we were all bartenders, we’re all assholes and drinking, you know, they would have a flight of famous death or flight of pomerols and, you know, some not first gross, but we had, we did have, you know, Riyazak and other sultans, you know, Sattu Yicam, you know, so we don’t want my shift drink. I’ll pour a little glass of Sattu Yicam. Well, that didn’t last very long. And they kind of dumbed down some of the wines on the machine for a while. But at that point, I was just a bartender. I wasn’t really thinking of a wine career. And traveling on my way to LA, I stopped in Santa Fe and was offered a job. And then it became a little more serious about wine because part of that job was buying wine.
ANDREW: And was this straight at the compound?
JAMES: No, this was the San Francisco Street Bar and Grill in the old days. I’m going to stand in the stairs. It’s just a bar and grill. I didn’t start, I kept that job until we left, moved to Portland. And it just so happened that the owner of the San Francisco Street Bar and Grill called me in before I left, already giving notice, we were already going to leave. And he said, oh, I got to, you sent a resume to a guy that used to work for me. This guy’s in Portland. He was a GM of fine dining restaurant with more an extraordinary wine list. They had been, the chef had been a finalist for a beard award. And the list, I don’t know, I think we had like 11,000 wines. It would take four of us three or four days to do the inventory, because there were so many wine ruins. Anyway, so I ended up working there. And that really was, yeah, I know we would have, those were the heydays of the dot com. And we had some dot comers come in and spend $20,000 on a meal for six people. There’s some DRC and vintage sports. And suddenly I was like, okay, I’ve got this $3,000 bottle of port. I’ve got to get down. Anyway, so, you know, again, learn on the job how to decant and how to get a car count. And then just to finish my career progress, as a podcast in the cell, they opened up a little cafe restaurant. And that was hard. It was satisfying. And one of those things I miss, I missed our food, but it was a challenge. We had our first anniversary, just as 9-11 hit, and things kind of, you know, the bloom was kind of off enjoying yourself out on the town, across the whole country, not the world. So that lasted a few years. And eventually you sold it and had a chance to come back to Santa Fe to open the new San Francisco Street Bar and Grill upstairs. Excuse me. And that’s what I did, came back. And from there, later, I went to the compound. So came back in 2003 and by 2006, I was working at the compound. And then started just distribution work, probably the fall of 2007, early 2008.
ANDREW: Now, between that whole progression, is there one that you enjoyed more? Were they all different in their own unique ways? Kind of hard to say.
JAMES: All those positions and…
ANDREW: Yeah, yeah. You’ve done a little bit of everything, sounds like.
JAMES: Yeah. Well, I loved bartending, especially in New York, because they know how to drink and they know how to treat a bartender. And I always said, if I found the perfect bartending job, I would have done that all my life. And I remember I was in Los Angeles trying to get some acting work. And we went to the Formosa Cafe, which was a famous Chinese restaurant right across from the original Paramount Studios. And those bartenders looked like me and I looked like you. And I thought, oh, shit. There was two old guys and in there, three deep at the bar and the place is jammed. And it was a hotspot for young people to go have a drink. I thought, I would do that. But that never quite happened. Plus, who knows, my feet would have legs would have lasted that long. I don’t know. Yeah, I’m sure. So the thing is, I have enjoyed hospitality all the way through. I have, I think part of that, I think because I started later. You know, most of the people you talk to, you know, started, I think when they were 14 or 15, and now they’re 35 year old servers in a bar and grill, and they’re not happy. Well, that’s their problem. And I can. Sorry. No, you know, but so I started a little later and, you know, the career, the hospitality stuck. And again, I love the people I’ve worked with for the most part. Yeah. Of course, the other side is a famous classic movie called The Night of the Hunter, where Robert mentioned, and he plays this escape serial killer, basically. And at one point he shows his knuckles. And that’s where the original love, hate, you know, he’s got tattooed on his knuckles. That’s, I think, we’re creative now, the meme now you see all over the place. But so some of the hate side of hospitality is the people. Yeah. It’s the people you have and the people you never want to see again. Who need their medications or they’re, you know, abusing other things. And you had mentioned talking about that aspect of it. It’s, yeah, in hospitality, it’s available, you know. I mean, I think there are people that are addicting, addictive, and abusing substances in any profession, you know, whether they’re teachers or human beings.
ANDREW: Longings are going to be human beings.
JAMES: Yeah, they’re going to be there. But it is, you know, it’s cheaper if you’re in the restaurant business, because it’s available for the most part. Or, and yeah, I’ve had my issues where I felt like I’ve got to stop. And so there’s a couple of times when I’ve stopped in biving. And one time it wasn’t because I was having any problem. I was at a wine festival. I mean, I was just enjoying myself. I wasn’t like, you know, I’m second, get kind of loose and wild. But I came back for him and thinking, you know, nothing really tastes good to me during that whole festival. You know, there were some great things. And then as the days went by, why just did not appeal to me? So I stopped drinking almost, almost a year, maybe even longer. You know, I would taste and spit if I had to or needed to. But then eventually it came back to me and I was just enjoying it and started again. But yeah, there’s been times when I’ve had to check myself into an institution. No, I know people.
ANDREW: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, me too. No, it’s a unique thing. It’s something I’ve been trying to figure out and kind of explain. I think it’s partially the low barrier to entry to where you can kind of go and get a job at any point, if you know.
JAMES: Yes.
ANDREW: So the barrier and concern about messing up the job you have kind of drops out too. So if you miss a few days because you’re hungover, like that is a little bit less of a stick stigma. I think I saw more in Tulsa and more in Omaha than in Santa Fe, thanks to Santa Fe being so small.
JAMES: But maybe. Excuse me, I always found it odd that the same mess ups, if I’m not using the F word, that have a job, a new job every three to six months, continue to be hired here in Santa Fe. When everybody knows, I guess you just need a warm body behind the bar or on the floor. So you hire this person and it’s like, what are you thinking? So there is that area of, I guess, almost forgiveness or what is it when you help an addict along? What’s the word they use?
ANDREW: Enabling.
JAMES: Enabling restaurant owners that just hire these people.
ANDREW: Well, I think there’s also something about the restaurant owners themselves, occasionally. I feel like some people get into the restaurant industry because of the atmosphere. It’s easy to sit around and have a couple of classes, one at the end of every night, if you own a restaurant, less so if you own an insurance firm or something like that. You know?
JAMES: Yes. Yeah. Like I say, it’s available and it’s at your fingertips. Yes. And again, those are the bills. These are some of the negative things, but I do want to address absolutely some of the positive things because.
ANDREW: Oh, sure. Yeah.
JAMES: I mean, I know you do too. And I made some notes because there was a lot of positive things. But I don’t know. You know, I made some notes because there was a lot of positive things. But you know, just especially with distributing because you asked one of your free questions was, you know, talk about your typical week. And I see in general, there’s not a typical week. There might be an outline to the week. And you think again, you got a day job many through Friday. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn’t count wine dinners. That doesn’t count in-store tastings, consumer tastings when your best liquor wine shop says, can you do a three hour tasting on Saturday? It gets you out of yard work in the brand which I used to like. And then there’s just distributing particularly to focus on that was, to me, was always been a concession. It’s like you can put your hot dog cart on the corner of 57th and Fifth Avenue by Tiffany’s. And you know, if you show up for a couple of hours, maybe you’ll sell a few hot dogs. But if you’re there throughout the day, you’re going to sell a lot of hot dogs. And that’s the way it is with distribution. You get out of it what you put in. And to me, that meant, and I say because it wasn’t particularly talented. In a lot of ways, I spent more hours to make up for that lack of any real serious knowledge or ability or talents. And maybe that just came across well. But I spent a lot of time. I was probably working when I was at that sort of peak earning and success, I guess, in my years. I was putting in 70 to 80 hours a week. And some of those would have been, I get up early. So I’d be on my computer from my cup of tea from six to nine. And then take a shower, be dressed, and work the market from 10 to six. And then maybe have to make a stop or pick up something here or there or drop off something here or there and get home at seven. So right there is what, 13, 14 hours? And that’s just a normal day. And then that just came on Sundays where, okay, I got Monday coming up. So I got to figure out what I’m going to do and who I can hit the tastes. And if I’ve got a rep in town or a wine maker or a distributor or a importer, because they come to town. And depending on who you work for, with favorite hands, we had a lot. And they wanted to come to Santa Fe. They because people wanted to come to Santa Fe and be because, you know, they want more wine to be sold. So they show up and you have to escort them around during your week. So you have a normal week and then you have your week with the, so you’re working kind of two jobs. You’re the host to the guest wine maker and you got to make a nice, you want to make a good impression. You want to get them to the good accounts. You want to hopefully sell some of their wine. You want to introduce them and get your customers excited about their wine and meeting this wine maker. So yeah, it’s a lot of work. But the more you put in, the more you get back. And yeah, I don’t know what an attorney’s life is like. I know when I was particularly in New York bartending, served a lot of attorneys because it was sort of in the downtown area near Wall Street and City Hall. And I cannot tell you how many lawyers came in and would say, man, I want to be a bartender. This will all work. And I think, you know, there’s, it kind of depends on where you are in your career as a lawyer. If you’re starting out as an associate, you’re going to work your 80 hours, 90 hours a week too. And it’s the same, you know, as you get more experience, you can kind of control some of that and funnel it into knowing your accounts.
ANDREW: And I do think, you know, I really like what you said there, you know, the variability of it and all those examples we gave, that is a big plus. That’s something, you know, my wife, she wanted me to say hi, so I didn’t want to forget. She got out of restaurants and she’s actually production coordinator for a casino now, works from home. But there’s this regularity to her hours and what she does. And she’s 40 hours a week and that’s it. Like, you shall not pass the lines. And it’s remote, right?
JAMES: My wife does for an attorney and that she still works for her, she worked for her when she lived in Portland. But you got to be disciplined to do that. I’m sure Anne is. And Leslie is, yeah, she’ll spend her 67 hours, but then she’ll jump up and do a lot of laundry or she’ll jump out and, you know, do a lot of gardening and get back or she’ll run in and do an errand and come back. Or she’ll get down on her yoga mat and do exercises, you know. I probably, that would be harder for me to do. So.
ANDREW: Well, I see myself the possibility of future where I didn’t end up in restaurants, but I ended up as like an accountant. And I could see that that, you know, something intellectual that is a lot of reading and math and just kind of boring.
JAMES: What about consulting?
ANDREW: I mean, maybe, but.
JAMES: I don’t know if that’s as much of a thing as it used to be, but. And it requires, you know, also some travel and also some time, depending on the jobs. But I’ve worked with several people who were restaurant consultants, you know, and they would come in, help a restaurant get launched, you know, help, help build out, design a bar, for instance. I always, sometimes that was the worst part about taking a bartender job in any restaurant. A new one was that somebody obviously never worked behind a bar when they built this bar. You know, just complete mess. So I had an old bartender friend that did that for a number of years. He would design consultants and building bars. And there’s other kinds of consulting, but.
ANDREW: Well, I was more saying I could see a future if I’d never worked in restaurants there. I would have worked a job without human interaction, without variability. And
JAMES: oh, I see.
ANDREW: Like ended up a very boring. You’re not not reading in that direction. No, no, no. Or Indians, you know, being an accountant.
JAMES: Yeah, I don’t know. Whatever. I mean, that was that was a crossroads because it’d been focused as, you know, careers and acting. And then there was that you were right. I thought, you know, I’m tall, well spoken, I can get a job anywhere as a bartender. And that’s pretty much what I did, you know, and then got more serious about it.
ANDREW: Well, there’s something inherently exciting, I think, and fun in restaurants, even if they do have the long hours and all the extra stuff that comes along. It’s true. Where the other jobs, I mean, every job has its own thing, right? There’s something that’s not going to be good.
JAMES: But yeah, you can say it’s kind of like show business, you know, you’re on stage for several hours. And then you can go back to the waiter station and say, oh my God, you know, I just got ripped off. And those people don’t know what you’re doing, but they won’t stop. Anyway, you know, and it can be fun. And yeah, it can be long. And again, if you’re a server, there are a few of those. And I know I met a couple of them when I was recently in Atlanta. I went to one of the classic diners that, you know, Martin Luther King would go to and Jimmy Carter would go to. And that waitress seemed to have the right end of the stick because she seemed, she wasn’t, you know, she was joyful and helpful and cheerful. And you know, she’s been working in that place since she was probably 18 years old. And now she’s probably closer to retirement age. And that’s great. That’s one of those jobs. You know, but if you’re working doubles, yeah, you think about doubles as you’ve got to change your shoes between the shifts. That’s what I would recommend. I found my doubles, like the compound in those years, they had a tile floor. So now they have carpet. Those days, tile floor for, you’re there from 10 in the morning until 12 at night. Yeah, your shoes.
ANDREW: Yeah, I do the 10 hour shifts in dress shoes. I don’t know where I would keep a chain of shoes.
JAMES: Well, yeah, you got to find time to just do it. Um,
ANDREW: is there, is there anything that ties together the people that you’ve seen do wellness industry? Ties together the people I what have seen do well in this industry. Oh, common characteristics or Passion is one, but it doesn’t have to be.
JAMES: I mean, you can have a career in hospitality and just have a business mind, you know, like like, honey Meyer, I don’t know if he’s passionate about restaurants or not, but you know, he’s got that mind for business. Yeah, enjoying. Again, I think you’ve got to enjoy people because it is a people business. And I, I think there’s another aspect that you brought up about the nobility of service. I follow Aldo Sohm, who’s the wine director, La Bernardin and has his own wine bar in New York. He’s on his program. He does every Wednesdays. He does the, you know, wine lesson Wednesday. He does about a 45 second blurb about how to decamp or how to read a German wine label or how to store wine. And he’s, he seems to be the real deal. Well, he is the real deal. He’s at the top of his profession. But also he’s a biker and he goes to Europe and he bikes around Europe and he bikes around, you know, and so he has a life as well. And that’s the other side of a long career is you got to find something to, you know, release the pressure. Besides drugs and alcohol and sex and things like that. And for me at one point it was, it still is a bit, but writing, you know, I was back here opening a new restaurant and pressure was immense. I think the hardest thing in the industry is to open a new restaurant. It can be,
ANDREW: for some reason I’ve done it several times. I don’t know why.
JAMES: And do you find it as difficult as choosing?
ANDREW: Every time I remind myself I shouldn’t do it again and then I do it again.
JAMES: Yeah. Yeah. Really sometimes you have to.
ANDREW: It’s exciting.
JAMES: Yeah. It can be exciting and especially when you get launched. But I would, so I find if I got up, you know, 45 minutes earlier and spent some time just jotting down some things just for my personal self, that helped. And I would, I find that you, and it’s the exercise too, you know, and it’s hard to, it’s hard to get that lesson across to sometimes young people who don’t necessarily need to exercise because they’re young, you know, they’re 22 or 23. They can drink up my head, you know, drink all night long, get two hours of sleep, go to an exercise class and go work a double and do it all over again. But, you know, she’s those days. They take it, she’s fine. Yeah. But, yeah, you know, take care of yourself mentally and whatever. Yes, whether it’s, you know, exercising or meditating or going to an art museum, do something, you know. Hold up to you.
ANDREW: Yeah, that’s really cool. Actually, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about this, but a couple years ago, I read a book, Story Worthy by Matthew Dix, and he actually recommends a daily writing practice. It’s story worthy. Matthew Dix. So he, really good storyteller. He describes it as doing your daily homework, and I was always good at school, so that didn’t scare me away. Yeah. I just write a couple like quick nonsense things and sometimes long-hand, but. Just take those,
JAMES: take that time to record some, this is a creative business, and, you know, when you’re working on it, you gotta focus your creativity mostly on the business, whether you’re a server or you’re a song or a manager. And it’s nice to be able to apply that creativity imagination and you know, the spark of life, you know, the spark of the human spirit, you know, life force.
ANDREW: Not only that, sometimes the emotions that arise from interacting with other humans and a few of the notes are like, you know, Sarah said that Jamie’s in. It’s all the things that I couldn’t say out loud to co-workers or colleagues. Yeah, yeah. There’s a record of that present somewhere.
JAMES: Bouncing around now as we are. I mean, I also just, you asked me about proud moments in.
ANDREW: I was gonna ask you.
JAMES: Yeah. And one of them was just simple. I did, I was working at the compound as wine director and I was, I had this couple that would come in pretty regularly. I think they traveled, but they would be in once a month and twice a month, maybe. They always requested the same table. And actually, when I first met them, I was, I was just a captain. I wasn’t doing the wine service yet, but they always requested me. And this went on, you know, a year or so and I would serve them. And at one point I had become the manager and wine director, which was too bad. The best was when you were, I was just the wine director. That was a golden, golden period. But then when I had to both be the GM and the wine director, that was quite as much fun. It went to work. But I was serving them one night and they liked Burgundy. Some kind of premier crew, maybe a grand crew. And I was serving them and just chatting and, you know, we’d chat briefly when they would come in, but, you know, nothing out of the ordinary. And they were world travelers and the gentleman, he kind of reminded me of, of Harry Dean Stanton. If Harry Dean Stanton were a gentleman of the world, I suppose, to, you know, the kind of gravely artist that he was. And she was quite a beauty, a little bit younger than he was, but both just lovely human beings. And he said, you know, we eat all over the world. That’s what we do. We travel and we dine in restaurants. And he said, we’ve never had a server or better service from anyone better than yourself. And I thought, wow, you know, I’ve had some experience at fine dining and other things. And of course, you know, but that to me was, I’m choked up not because of that, well, a little bit. But to me was a really proud moment of having received that kind of, they didn’t have to tell me that, you know, they always got a good tip and whatever. And I enjoyed that. But that was, that was a moment that I continue to carry with me because that’s the thing about this business, hospitality business. And whether it’s Aldo Song, who’s Austrian, I think originally, and probably went to, went up the ranks through that kind of schooling that they, you know, it’s a respected profession and it can be here too. And I, I get sorry and disappointed sometimes when I see people, I understand not choosing it as a profession. You know, when you’re just trying to get through college and get on to something else. But I guess I was pretty disappointed during the pandemic when there was such a backlash of from servers about working in restaurants and about how badly they were treated and poorly the industry treats people, etc., etc. There are instances of that and there certainly are instances of abuse, sexual and otherwise. But I thought, wow, here you have a chance to work six or seven hours a night if you’re a server and maybe longer, eight or 10 for your bartender. Make a really good living, working three to four, maybe five nights a week if you need more money, then we’ll come back. Yeah, you know, maybe you don’t have insurance, you know, like that, you know, unless you’re in a management position, but you also don’t have many other restrictions or ties to it. It’s, it’s an opportunity, you know, you don’t have to do it, you know, you know, but it’s paying your rent and allowing you to go to school or to ski during the day. That’s what your passion is. But I don’t know if you were, were you in Oklahoma during the height of the COVID?
ANDREW: I was in Tulsa.
JAMES: Did you, did you experience that kind of lashing back, especially on social media?
ANDREW: I saw a lot of it. I think that from what I could see, a lot of it was a little more intense in Santa Fe, because at least I had the benefit of having a lot more Texas and Oklahoma in my feed, just because I grew up there and then lived in Oklahoma at the time. I think in New Mexico, there’s kind of a sense that that’s largely the only option for a large portion of the population, because it is so tourist driven. A lot of the other industries don’t have a lot of options, you know?
JAMES: That could be true. And also, I don’t know what the minimum wages was in other states. It was pretty low. So, you know, but your tips, the system was your tips would amount to more than a minimum wage. So you were earning more than a minimum wage. Anyway, I, there were, I saw a restaurant, some restaurant owners sort of vilified or in places I thought that it was unfair.
ANDREW: And just to be fair, I did have even my share of people that had issues or a little trepidation, a little hesitancy coming back. And like, I hit it. It was a period. So I got into the advance test during that same time and I canceled because it wasn’t clear what was going to happen. And you know, so I pushed it back a year because, wow, because you’re beginning to be around. Yeah. Well, they were having it, I think it was May or June and I just, you don’t know. And everything was shutting down. I didn’t know if I’d have a job at the beginning. Like most people, you know, there’s a lot. I think people fear uncertainty more than a lot of things. And if there’s one thing about COVID, it was a lot of uncertainty for a long time.
JAMES: Certainly in the hospitality business, yeah. But anyway, I don’t disregard the sensitivities and have a lot of people who went through difficult times. And as you said, you know, if you’ve got few options, it’s hard.
ANDREW: I do have a lot of, you know, a lot of joy and hope for the future because I feel like every generation has some weird thing and we got COVID. So hopefully that’s it. No more news. No more, no. We’ll see.
JAMES: As they say in New York, from your mouth to God’s ear.
ANDREW: I do want to say the story you told about the couple and the compound. I love that. Thank you. I feel like a large portion of the modern air is just looking for people to actually pay attention to them for someone to see them and actually be there with them. And so I feel like they see someone like you, you know.
JAMES: Have an equal exchange in a way of humanity. That’s my new thing of calling people a good human. But thank you.
ANDREW: Even more today, 20 years later, we’re all so in our heads and we’ve got our iPhones right here. It seems like just getting out a little bit and paying attention to the other person is half the battle.
JAMES: Yeah. And I think that goes for not just our work or anyone’s work, but also when you’re in the grocery store or you’re shopping for a t-shirt or something to…
ANDREW: Well, I don’t want to be disrespectful to your time. Do I have time for one more
question?
JAMES: Sure.
ANDREW: I was wondering, where do you think you would have ended up? Or do you think things would have been different had you not met your wife?
JAMES: Oh, that is… Obviously, someone should do a podcast called That’s a Good Question. Maybe somebody asked. Probably. Everything’s been thought of. I got really lucky meeting the woman I met, Leslie. She is a human dynamo. She’s brilliant. She’s funny. She has been an amazing mother to our kid. She’s still a bit younger, so she’s still working full-time. That’s why she’s important at a law firm. And it’s hard. She’s working hard. But she wakes up generally cheerful if she’s had a good night’s sleep and just dives into it. To be more specific, if it hadn’t been Leslie, you know, I’ve been lucky in my life gravitating to good partners and who knows. I don’t expect it would have changed my career at all, whether I would have stayed in Santa Fe or come back after I had relapsed. I don’t know. I really enjoyed Portland, but I know the pandemic and you know, the political scenes for the last few years there has changed the, certainly, the downtown area. The downtown in those days was wonderful. I’m really spectacular to spend time in a downtown of the city, not that long ago. But yeah. And then I became, at one point, remember asking her, again, she was younger and just over 30 and when we met, and turned 30 after we met, and I said, well, do you want to do some traveling? Because you hadn’t done much traveling. And I hadn’t done that much. But where do you want to have a kid? And she thought for a while, she said, I think I want to have a kid. So that, you know, who knows if I’d been a father, which has been really satisfactory, the greatest privilege in life. And there’s many privileges to be had in any life, but this has been one of them. So I don’t know. I don’t think…
ANDREW: It’s hard to… Can’t split test life, right?
JAMES: Yeah. Well, I have another compliment in my career is having you contact me and say, hey, I want to talk to you. Me? You sure? I mean, I don’t know.
ANDREW: You may go back over this. No, I feel like, you know, I’ve always had the greatest respect for you. So thank you for making the time.
JAMES: It’s been mutual because, again, that’s what excites me about having achieved this amount of a certain age, as my nephew says, and seeing people like you, Mikyala, and others, as a young guy, your name Simon, who’s doing the right thing, you know? And that’s, you know, you’re the professionals, you will be driving the profession and the industry from your own. And that’s very gratifying to see. And good for you for achieving it, because it takes work.
ANDREW: Well, all the tastings that you held definitely helped, especially with studies back in the day. All the times you sat at the bar at Elf roll and had a bite to eat definitely definitely helped out too.
JAMES: I know those are some good connections too.
ANDREW: Yeah. Well, all right, I’m not going to hold on to you all day. So I’m going to let you have a good day.
JAMES: Is it? Hold on to who?
ANDREW: You know, sir. Hey, if you ever want to talk, feel free to reach out and thanks for taking the time to sit down and chat with us.
JAMES: We’ll keep the connection going.
ANDREW: Thanks. I’ll see you soon, James. I’ll get it.
JAMES: Okay. Thank you for taking the time to listen.
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