Caroline Styne Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine, and each week, I talk to the most interesting women and culinary creatives in and around the world of food.
Today's guest is Caroline Styne, a well-known figure on the Los Angeles restaurant scene. Caroline is an award-winning restaurateur and a sommelier, and she's the co-founder of the Lucques Hospitality Group along with Chef Suzanne Goin. They have A.O.C. in West Hollywood and Brentwood, Caldo Verde, Cara Cara, and Dahlias at the Proper Hotel in Downtown LA. There's also their work at the Hollywood Bowl, which we'll talk about, and maybe most importantly, there's L.A. Loves Alex's Lemonade, an event spearheaded by Caroline, Suzanne, and Chef David Lentz, that has raised more than eight million dollars to fight childhood cancers. The upcoming L.A. Loves Alex's Lemonade is taking place Saturday, September 23rd, and tickets are on sale right now.
Thank you to OpenTable for supporting this episode. We did a great event at A.O.C. last month in partnership with OpenTable and Caroline and Suzanne, and we had a wonderful time. Thank you to everyone who joined us. We will be in Philadelphia next for a Future Of Food Is You live podcast event on Thursday, September 7th, at High Street. Head to cherrybombe.com for tickets and more information. Thank you to Kerrygold for supporting our Future Of Food Is You tour. Caroline and I have a lot to talk about, so let's jump right in.
Caroline Styne, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Caroline Styne:
Thank you for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
We've been East Coast fans of your West Coast operation for a long time.
Caroline Styne:
Thank you. That means so much.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's jump in with some background on you right away because I don't know a lot about you pre-restaurants. Where did you grow up?
Caroline Styne:
I grew up in Beverly Hills.
Kerry Diamond:
You grimaced a little as you said that. Is that not a cool thing to say that you grew up in Beverly Hills?
Caroline Styne:
I don't know. I've always had that thing ever since childhood. It was, "Oh, I'm from L.A. Where in L.A.?" Drag it out Beverly Hills. It just sounds, I don't know, it sounds worse than it is.
Kerry Diamond:
Did “90210” make things complicated for you?
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, but when I was young, Beverly Hills was like Mayberry. It was a cute little area and it wasn't the mall that it is today, and it's different.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you come from an entertainment family?
Caroline Styne:
Yeah. Funny, my grandfather was a Broadway composer and he wrote many musicals and Christmas carols and things like that, and the music business was part of our family, and then my mother was a realtor, so we were music on one side, non-music on the other.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you tell us some of the songs? We have a lot of Broadway fans listening, including my mother. Mom, I'm asking this question for you.
Caroline Styne:
Well, he was a very, very prolific composer, but he wrote “Funny Girl” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” he wrote “Gypsy,” he wrote “Let It Snow,” and the “Christmas Waltz,” and countless musicals.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow. My jaw is on the floor.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, it's pretty impressive. Thousands of songs.
Kerry Diamond:
That is incredible. Yeah. Did you know him growing up?
Caroline Styne:
He lived in New York and I lived in Los Angeles, so I only saw him once in a while. Luckily, my husband got to meet him before he passed away, but I was not close with him. My parents were divorced, complicated family situation, but whenever I went to New York when he came to L.A., I got to see him for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, so you grew up here, and then did I read correctly that you created a baked tortilla chip company and sold it in your early 20s?
Caroline Styne:
Yes, I was very ahead of my time. It's a funny story because I was living with a roommate. We were both actually working in the art world. I was an art history major in college, but we had always been trying to figure out how to start our own business, and originally, we'd wanted to start a gourmet grocer. We were researching, we have all those artisanal products.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, my God, so ahead of your time. That's-
Caroline Styne:
So ahead, I know.
Kerry Diamond:
... so many now.
Caroline Styne:
End of the '80s, early '90s. Anyways, I went on a vacation with my now husband and we went to this very, very hot Mexican resort and the food was horrible, and the only thing I ate the entire time I was there were old tortillas that they must've just thrown in the oven and crisp up and put on the table. I thought, "Oh, this is great. It's like a non-fried tortilla chip," and I went home to my business partner/roommate and said, "Oh, we should make these as a great snack, locale, low fat," and she said, "No, this is a business we should start. What are you thinking? That's what we should do," and so I literally dedicated all of my time to perfecting the baked tortilla chip and we sold it in, it was Mrs. Gooch’s at the time before it was Whole Foods, and Bristol Farms, and grocery stores like that. We ended up connecting with a health food company from San Francisco and partnering with them, and then we ended up selling it off to them, but I was ahead of my time.
Kerry Diamond:
That is so cool. You must have learned a ton.
Caroline Styne:
I learned so much and it was all done out of the Yellow Pages because there was no internet back then.
Kerry Diamond:
Amazing.
Caroline Styne:
I know.
Kerry Diamond:
You had entrepreneurial leanings.
Caroline Styne:
I did, and it was all because of my mother, actually. My mother was a divorcee with four kids, and she moved from New York to Los Angeles, and she got her real estate license and she actually started her own realty firm, and she was the first woman in L.A. to have her own real estate company, and she was very, very successful and she worked like a crazy person, and so I think I just always knew I was not going to be sitting in a cubicle somewhere. I was going to have my own business. It was just figuring out what that was going to be.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you, mom.
Caroline Styne:
Her name was Mimi Styne.
Kerry Diamond:
Mimi Styne?
Caroline Styne:
Mm-hmm.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you, Mimi. How did you transition to working in restaurants?
Caroline Styne:
After we handed off the baked tortilla chip thing, my business partner/roommate and I started a couple of other different businesses, and one was a flavored tortilla. We had quinoa tortillas. I know, quinoa all the way back in early '90s, but we had flavored tortillas and we were selling that in grocery stores, and eventually, she said she wanted be the CEO of a larger corporation. She had those aspirations. I really just wanted to have some boutiquey little cool place on Montana Avenue or something, and so we decided to go our separate ways, and I got into catering and I had a little catering company of my own.
I just had a lot of little things of my own that I was doing as well as three part-time jobs just to keep it all going financially. Then I eventually got a job working with a restaurant group running their catering. It's an interesting woman to a woman's door because I actually went and interviewed for this restaurant management job, and the owner, a woman, talked me out of managing the restaurant. She actually said, which is funny because I could talk anybody out of that too, but she said, "Oh, you don't want to do that. You have to work holidays, you'll work late nights. You don't want to work in a restaurant. What you want to do is you want to run our catering division because you have catering experience," and I said, "Okay."
Kerry Diamond:
Was she doing you a favor or was she trying to talk you into a job she needed to fill more desperately than the management job?
Caroline Styne:
I think she probably thought, "Oh, this woman's done catering." If I think now, as the person interfering people, when you're desperate to fill a role, you think, "Oh, she's got catering. No, I'll push her over to this," and maybe she thought she was doing me a favor, maybe she thought I wasn't that kind of a workhorse, but I think once I took the job, she explained the job, "You just set up the catering information handed over. You don't have to go work at the events," but of course, I went to the event. Of course, I was there passing appetizers and doing whatever I had to do to make sure the event was right.
Kerry Diamond:
Because catering is so easy.
Caroline Styne:
Because catering is so easy. Anyway, she shocked me out of managing the job. Of course, I was there for about a year, and of course, I wanted to run a restaurant, and so I actually approached somebody I knew, Sean MacPherson, old friend of ours, and I said, "I really want to get a job managing a restaurant. Can you give me advice?", and he said, "Actually, we're hiring. Come on in and interview," and so I took that job and I managed that restaurant for four years, and it was a great experience.
Kerry Diamond:
That was Jones Hollywood?
Caroline Styne:
That was Jones Hollywood. Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, I read that Jones Hollywood was destroyed in a fire while you were working there and the restaurant was rebuilt in six weeks?
Caroline Styne:
Yes. It's so funny. I tell people this now and they think I'm lying because it was pretty amazing. I remember I lived not far from the restaurant and I got a call saying the restaurant's on fire, and I went, "Oh, my God," and I drove down, helicopters circling above.
Kerry Diamond:
Every restaurant person's worst nightmare.
Caroline Styne:
Yes. I actually started calling and trying to get a job at other places. I literally was like, "Oh, my God, I need to get a job." I was calling around.
Kerry Diamond:
Right, because when there's a fire, that's what happens. Yeah, you don't rebuild in six weeks.
Caroline Styne:
Oh, yeah. My job's done. We all hunkered down, and we did, six weeks, we were able to demo, rebuild, reopen, permits, everything. It was a different time, obviously. This was 1996, I think. We were in the city of West Hollywood, so it was a smaller city, you could get permits done. If only we could do this now, there's no way. It was an amazing experience and it was definitely a crash course in how to open a restaurant. That's actually what was the impetus for meeting Suzanne and for opening my own place.
Kerry Diamond:
You teed that up nicely. How did you meet Suzanne?
Caroline Styne:
I've been managing and we rebuilt, and I had told my good friends, "Now, I think I'm ready to go out on my own. I want to open my own place." I don't know what I thought I was going to do. I think I was going to be the chef. I was going to figure out the food.
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, stop. You did?
Caroline Styne:
Yes. I just had this thing I'm going to open a restaurant, and I can cook. I don't think you want to pay for what I cook right now, but I do know how to cook, so I think I figured I would figure out a menu and hire the chef and just do it. At the time, a good friend of mine had gone to college with a woman who was good friends with Suzanne and the two of them conspired to introduce us. They hounded us and hounded us for months. They would set up meetings for us and we would flake or cancel. Finally, I remember getting this phone call at work and my friend, Liz, said, "You're going to meet Suzanne tomorrow night at The Pearl on La Brea after work at 9:00. Sharon and I will be there. We'll chaperone you. You're going to meet each other and then we'll leave you alone, but until you meet each other, we're not going to stop bothering you, so just meet her."
I thought, "I should be networking. I'm in my own little tunnel vision. I should meet other people out there," and so I went and had a cocktail with her and we hit it off immediately. I remember going home to my husband and saying, "You're going to think this is nuts, but I met this woman and I actually think she could be a great business partner," and I told him all about her, and he said, "Wow, she sounds amazing," so we just started going out. We called it, quote, unquote, "dating". We would go out to dinner, talk about food, talk about... We'd pick up the dishes, "Do you like these plates? What do you think of that?," talk about our dreams and our visions for what our restaurants were, and they were frighteningly aligned down to the atmosphere, the textures, and all that.
We eventually said, "Well, I like you. Do you like me? Should we do this?", and we both said, "Okay, let's try," and so we started looking at restaurant spaces. It took us a long time to find the first space because we were incredibly picky. We gave our realtor a four block radius in which we could open a restaurant, and I actually had a baby in the meantime. I got pregnant, but my daughter was a year old when we got the restaurant open, so it actually all worked out. The space that we wanted, our dream space that we had had our eye on that wasn't available when we wanted it, actually came to us.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you decide who was going to do what because you were not a wine expert yet, were you?
Caroline Styne:
No, I was not. Well, at Jones Hollywood, I was very fortunate to work with a friend, a guy named Keith McCarthy, and he did the wine list. It was a very small all California list. It was not a complicated list, but he definitely had appointments with wine brokers all the time and he let me sit in on those meetings, which was so nice. I really just took to it. They would call me the nose because I have a very, very sensitive sense of smell, unfortunately, so I could put my nose in a glass of wine and pick out all of the nuances and the notes that I could smell, and I just really took to it.
When Suzanne and I decided to open Lucques, we brought in a friend of hers from Campanile to help us put together the initial list. It was a one-page, pretty not complex list, but a list of wines that he helped us assemble. We literally did a tasting of wines and it was like whatever wines we like the best, we put on the list. Then once we opened the doors, I kind of said, "Oh, wait, this is me. Okay, let's go," and I just started tasting wine constantly, reading, tasting, reading, tasting, reading, selling on the floor, and it just grew from there.
Kerry Diamond:
What was the list in the early days? All California?
Caroline Styne:
No, it was a mix of California, French, and some Italian. It was an interesting list and they were food friendly wines that were complex. They were great wines. We had a lovely group of wines initially, and we did things like instead of having a Chardonnay by the glass, we sold Muga White Rioja, Vira, something that could read a Chardonnay, but it wasn't Chardonnay. We wanted everything to be artisanal. We wanted everything to be organic. We wanted it to be small production. We didn't want to have mass-produced wines on our list. It was a very lovely curated list of gems.
Kerry Diamond:
Again, you're a little ahead of your time because not everybody was talking about organic wine back then.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, they were a little bit harder to find. Suzanne's background working at Chez Panisse and all of the working with local farmers and that relationship with the land and the environment just has always been on our minds. It wasn't until actually probably 2013 or 2012 when I dedicated our lists to only being organic, biodynamic, or sustainably farmed. That was definitely a mix, but now I definitely sift through that and make sure that everything is farmed responsibly.
Kerry Diamond:
Again, still very early in that. Tell us about early Lucques.
Caroline Styne:
Early Lucques.
Kerry Diamond:
That was such a big deal when that restaurant opened and you really had an impact on the restaurant scene here.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, we loved it so much. Unfortunately, we had to close in the beginning of the pandemic, but we just wanted that restaurant to feel like it would be lovely for a special occasion, but you could actually come every night, too. The room was warm. It had brick walls, and olive green banquettes and booths, and a fireplace, and a dark bar. We had this beautiful courtyard in the center of the building kind of modern and clean. We had no idea that it would take off the way it did. We just thought we'd be lucky if we can keep it going and break even, but let's just do it because the restaurant business is so tough, and people just took to it.
I think it was an interesting moment because in L.A., it was pretty much all formal dining or super, super, super casual. There wasn't that sort of mid-level, mid-ground. Campanile, I kind of broached that, but we wanted to keep that proper service, but in a comfortable atmosphere. It didn't have to feel so stuffy. We still had tablecloths then, but it wasn't... Just wanted to feel like when you walked in, everybody knew you, and it turned out to be just like that. We have longstanding relationships with our guests that used to come in there. It was such a special place.
Kerry Diamond:
We'll be right back with today's guest.
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. My name is Jessie Sheehan, and I'm a baker, author, and host of She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast on The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and the number one baking podcast in the country. Each week, I talk to the best bakers and pastry chefs around and do a deep dive into their signature baked goods. You'll learn the tips, tricks, and techniques that make their bakes the best around. Don't miss my interviews with Claudia Fleming, Zoë François, Joy the Baker, Natasha Pickowicz, and so many others. You can find She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and cherrybombe.com. New episodes drop on Saturdays. Happy listening and happy baking.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, let's talk about today. You and Suzanne jointly run The Lucques Group, which consists of four businesses, and I would love for you to walk us through the four and tell us a little bit about each. Why don't we start with A.O.C.?
Caroline Styne:
A.O.C. was our second restaurant. We opened it about four years after we opened Lucques. It was a wine bar. We really wanted to do something that could celebrate my growing love of wine and my desire to buy even more wine and sell even more wine, and also give Suzanne some more culinary freedom. She and I used to go out all the time to do just checkout restaurants. We'd go to New York and we would just do a crawl and we would go to five restaurants in a night and we would sit at the bar and we'd order a few things and we would share them. We thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could build a restaurant around this idea?" It was also a little bit of an ode to the bar at Lucques because there were only 10 seats at that bar, actually eight usable seats, but 10, technically.
People would come and there was a whole community there, and people would be talking to each other across the bar and they were sharing food, and people would wait on the sofas for a seat at the bar. Yes, for the tables too, but for a seat at the bar, which was really kind of a new idea then. We thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could build a restaurant around that?" Maybe it's not so much like you're sharing a giant entree, but maybe it's smaller plates and little bites like we do when we sit at the bar, and so we put together this menu of small plates and we got this mechanism called a cruvinet. It was this giant 50 bottle wine on tap thing.
Kerry Diamond:
What's it called again?
Caroline Styne:
It was called a cruvinet. I don't even know if they still exist, but they might. It was a big metal display case that we had on the bar at A.O.C. and with 50 spigots and 50 bottles of wine in there, and you connected it, and everything was on tap. It was so that we could create a menu of wines that you could have by the glass graph, half glass, so you could explore a lot of wines. I used to say the great thing about A.O.C. was that you didn't have to marry your veal chop for the night. You could taste everybody's food, which is what I'm always doing at dinner anyway. It kind of gave you free license to taste everything, and you got to taste a lot of things and experience a lot of things and taste a lot of wines, and not just be bound to that one bottle of wine that you chose for the evening.
It was just a lot about exploration and experimentation, and cheese, and charcuterie, and nibbles. We opened that in 2002 at a location on 3rd Street near the Farmer's Market on Fairfax. Then 10 years later, we moved to a new location where we are now. It's at the corner of 3rd and Hamill, which is close to Robertson Boulevard just west of where we were. We're in a building that's a little bit more in keeping with Suzanne and my aesthetic, it's got a beautiful garden, and it's Spanish architecture, and very homey, very residential. We like a residential feel in our restaurants.
Kerry Diamond:
And then you have a second location, right?
Caroline Styne:
We have a second location that's in Brentwood. It's a restaurant that we previously called Tavern, and then over the pandemic, we had already been thinking about how we wanted to change the restaurant. It kind of needed an update. When we were closed during the pandemic, we thought, "Well, let's just do it now," and so we changed it over to an A.O.C. because if you live in L.A., you'll know that if you live in Brentwood or Palisades, there's no way you're driving all the way across town to go to dinner, so we thought we'd bring it over to that side.
Kerry Diamond:
You run the food and beverage program at the Proper Hotel in Downtown L.A.?
Caroline Styne:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
You have two restaurant concepts as part of that?
Caroline Styne:
Yes. We have two restaurants. We have a ground floor restaurant called Caldo Verde, small plates, family style, local organic produce, Suzanne's delicious Mediterranean inspired cuisine, little hints of Portugal, little hints of Spain in there. It's a really beautiful restaurant. The interior designer who did the hotel is Kelly Wearstler, so it's really textural and beautiful, and it's colorful but not obnoxiously, so like muted colors and very old world feeling, the buildings from the '20s. She definitely paid an homage to that old L.A. architecture. We have a rooftop restaurant called Cara Cara as well. The roof has the most incredible view of L.A., 360 degrees, just stunning. It feels like you're not in Los Angeles. We have very lighthearted, fun rooftop food, and pizzas, and tacos, and burgers, and things like that. Then we also just opened another concept in the hotel, which is this very small hideaway speakeasy bar called Dahlia. It only has 18 seats in there, lots of tableside cocktail-making, back to the old world kind of style of spirit based cocktails, super charming, very secluded, and clubby feeling. It's amazing in there.
Kerry Diamond:
What's a cocktail that you make tableside?
Caroline Styne:
Oh, yeah, we do fantastic martinis tableside, and we do this delicious old-fashioned that is made with Japanese whiskey tableside as well. We do gin and tonic. We have a lovely cart. We brand our ice cubes at the table. Lots of just getting into that whole bespoke thing, and then of course, we make cocktails that are not on our menu, but just we can riff off of things, and we have a beautiful spirit selection.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Since you're such an expert in the wine world and the cocktail world also, but the whole low to no alcohol movement, it's been so interesting to watch that, and I do love a mocktail, and you drive so much in L.A. How is Dahlia responding to that, but also all of your restaurants?
Caroline Styne:
Yeah. Everywhere, we definitely have, I call them free spirited drinks. Look, not everybody drinks. Maybe not everybody might be in the mood to drink even if they do drink, so why not have some lovely options for people so that if you don't drink, you're not left out, you're not relegated to that soda with lime. Also, another way to celebrate local produce and what's seasonally available and change it up and make something really delicious for somebody.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, I fall into that category. I do drink, but I don't always want to drink.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes, you want something that, and maybe it's not even always sweet, you just want something that does for your palate what wine often does, which gets your gland salivating, gets you ready for something salty and delicious, and also something to enhance your meal that doesn't have to be alcohol.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, so that's at the Proper Hotel, Downtown L.A. Then you also have the F&B program at the Hollywood Bowl.
Caroline Styne:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
It's a two-part question. How'd that all come about and tell folks what the Hollywood Bowl is?
Caroline Styne:
The Hollywood Bowl is the most exquisite outdoor amphitheater. It seats 17,000 people. It's quite large.
Kerry Diamond:
I didn't know it was that big.
Caroline Styne:
Yes, it's huge. It's the home of the L.A. Philharmonic for the summer and the Philharmonic sponsors of full calendar of concerts, six nights a week, and they vary from jazz to KCRW does a series on Sundays. We had reggae night last night. There's classical. There could be also pop rock concerts all season long. Season goes from essentially beginning of April to end of November. It's all outdoors. It's in the middle of the Hollywood Hills. It's just picturesque location. In the theater, we have restaurants. We have three full service restaurants.
We also do food made to order to 3,000 box seats, full dinners, full meals with three course dinner or a feast, all sorts of options. We have three marketplaces that feature foods that we've made and had pre-prepared as well as snacks and cheese and lots of wine and beer and other kinds of drinks, candy, everything, popcorn. Popcorn is a big thing at the Hollywood Bowl. Then we also do all the food for backstage catering and events catering, and we advise on the concession stands, too. We just added a new Suzanne's Fried Chicken stand, which she makes the most insane fried chicken, burgers, all of that. We do all the food and wine there on the property.
Kerry Diamond:
This is so interesting so I have to ask. That sounds like both such an opportunity and such a daunting logistical challenge. Why did you and Suzanne decide to do that?
Caroline Styne:
We were approached when the Hollywood Bowl is looking for a new food vendor.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you have to bid on it?
Caroline Styne:
Yes. It was a bidding process and we have a financial partner in it, Sodexo Live, so we decided to partner up. It's great because they give us a lot of resources that we don't have, and they wanted to keep it local and have a local chef driving the program. It's very daunting. It's very big. It's a huge crazy operation. We have an incredible team that works with us that we've built up over the years, just the hardest working, loveliest group of people. When they approached us, we thought, "Oh, what an opportunity," first of all. We both are basically native Angelenos and we just felt so connected to the Hollywood Bowl, and it felt so much a part of us. We thought, "Oh, my God, we've got to do this," and we were fortunate enough to get the concession, but we kind of approached it like, "Okay, it's huge, but let's break it down into smaller parts and approach it that way." We approach it all like it's a restaurant. Each restaurant has its own menu, its own chef. We get all of our produce from Farmer's Market, too.
It's all local produce there, too, or as much organic as possible. We get all of the meats and the fish from our purveyors that we use at the restaurants. We're doing the same food that we do at our other restaurants. We're not dumbing it down or cheapening it. I think that's the biggest difference. Actually, it was a challenge for a lot of people involved who work on the scale to understand how they were going to do that. Over the years, they've seen that. Actually, you get the benefit of the quality of the food. We are not using frozen fish and all of that. It's really just the products are amazing and the food is amazing. I've never been to any theater anywhere in the country that has a program like this where you can eat dinner like you can there before the show. Of course, I've got a long list of a very deep wine list of lovely options in a multitude of price points. We love it. I get to spend my summer outdoors at the bowl, and the people that come to the bowl are incredible, too. It's just great.
Kerry Diamond:
Are the employees Sodexo employees?
Caroline Styne:
Yes, they are.
Kerry Diamond:
It still must have added to the employees that you have directly though. How many employees do you have overall now?
Caroline Styne:
Before the pandemic, we used to have a catering company and all this, and I think at one point, we probably had 600 employees, but now under our own umbrella, we're probably at about 300.
Kerry Diamond:
Then the last piece of the pie, the Larder Baking Company.
Caroline Styne:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
That's a wholesale operation.
Caroline Styne:
It is. It was born out of an idea that we had at one of our restaurants about making our own bread, and we started making bread for other people and other restaurants, and we finally said, "Why don't we turn this into a real business?", and so we have this facility and we have, again, incredible group of people that work there, and many of them have worked for us since the day we opened in 2013. Great team. We make, right now, I think we're at about 20,000 pieces of items a day. We do everything from bread to croissant to cookies and brownies, and we sell them to restaurants, hotels.
Kerry Diamond:
Where can I try some of these and are they labeled Larder or are they white labeled?
Caroline Styne:
It's more of business to business. We sell to hotels who use our products and we sell to restaurants that use our products.
Kerry Diamond:
Got it.
Caroline Styne:
We're not in any retail at the moment. We were in Whole Foods for a while. We'll be re-exploring that soon.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. If all of that wasn't enough, you are also co-founder of the L.A. Loves Alex's Lemonade event, a famous culinary event here in Los Angeles. Through that, you've raised more than eight million dollars to fight childhood cancers. That is just amazing. This year's event is September 23rd at the UCLA campus?
Caroline Styne:
Yes, at Royce Quad at UCLA.
Kerry Diamond:
Tickets are on sale right now. We will put the link in the show notes. Some of our favorite folks will be there. You and Suzanne, of course. Nancy Silverton. We all love Nancy. The Sarah’s from Kismet, Bricia Lopez, Mary Sue Milliken, and Susan Feniger, all the greats. How did you and Suzanne become involved?
Caroline Styne:
Suzanne and Chef David Lentz, the two of them attended, actually, participated at Alex's Lemonade Foundation fundraiser in Philadelphia where the foundation started. Marc Vetri, who's a chef from Philadelphia, started that event. They were so moved by the story of Alex and the family that they came home and told me all about it and said, "We've got to do something here." The foundation came out and met with us, and that is how we decided to do this food and wine event. I have to say it's my favorite day of the year, and it's been sad because we haven't had it since 2019, so this is our first one since the pandemic. Our fundraising would've been much higher than eight million dollars if not for COVID but-
Kerry Diamond:
You'll catch up.
Caroline Styne:
... we're going to catch up. We're determined. We bring in all of our chefs. We just said, "Let's bring in all of our chef friends from around the country, and have a ton of wine and cocktails, and raise money, and put together auction items." It was a hit from the first event, which was amazing, and I think this is our 11th year doing it. Yeah, it's so fun. We have chefs come from all over the country.
Kerry Diamond:
I saw some of my Brooklyn friends are on that list.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, it's an incredible list. I think I've got 40 wine vendors coming who will be pouring multitude of wine. Some of them are just individual wineries coming, some are wine distributors and brokers who will come with a lineup, and so there are hundreds of wines being poured. We have multiple mixologists as well making incredible cocktails. It just has such a fun vibe when you're there. The food is incredible. It's all outdoors. It was originally built as a chef's cookout, so we wanted it to not be fussy. We want it to be fun. We have a kids' area, and a live auction and a silent auction. In the live auction, we always have a men's chef dinner and a women's chef dinner, and the battle of the dinners, who can sell for more, and just really wonderful. We have amazing people in L.A. who really support this event every year. Jimmy Kimmel has been an incredible support. The superhero of the event for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
If folks want to support, but they're not in L.A., can you bid online for some of these auction items?
Caroline Styne:
Yes. I think there will be online bidding. We've done that in the past. It's always a new adventure with the auction each year, but stay tuned for that.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about the L.A. scene because you've got the writer strike and the actor strike, which has to be devastating for restaurants out here, so how's it going? Tell me.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, it's a mixed bag out there right now. It's a little bit of the triple threat of summer. I think our tourism is down in L.A. right now, and I'm sure it's because of crime rates up and our homelessness is a mess. I know a lot of people decided not to come to California for that reason. The world is traveling, too. Everybody is in Europe right now.
Kerry Diamond:
I think there's a New York Times headline that says, "Everyone's in Paris. What's going on?"
Caroline Styne:
Yes. It's crazy.
Kerry Diamond:
It seems like that from Instagram.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah. The writer strike is just horrible. Restaurants are slow right now. L.A.'s hard. L.A. is really hard. I think one thing that we have that's even more difficult in L.A. and California, I would say, than anywhere else is that our costs are incredibly high. Our labor costs are astronomical. Obviously, living wage is incredibly important. It's incredibly important. I'm not against that, but just it's a financial pressure when our minimum wage just went up again last month and our slowest month of the year, so that's a challenge. Then we have our labor laws are crazy, too, and our taxation laws are crazy, and the regulation. Not that I'm against regulation, it's just that we are saddled with a lot of it in California.
Kerry Diamond:
On top of that, you source so particularly at all your places.
Caroline Styne:
Our ingredient costs are very expensive. We're already going into it with that. In a moment when people are talking about inflation and financial pressure, I don't know what else to tell you. Everything's costing us more so I don't know how we... We've been fighting raising prices, but we're at a point where it's everyone's having to raise their prices now because otherwise, you're losing money, but it's-
Kerry Diamond:
And to be dealing with this coming out of the pandemic.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah. This is countrywide. Restaurants have been digging out since the pandemic. Everyone got into a tremendous amount of debt. Some people got grants, but a lot of people didn't. The buildup of business, you walk into restaurants and look busy, which is great, but it's still not enough. Everyone's still struggling.
Kerry Diamond:
At least they took busy. The ones that aren't-
Caroline Styne:
They look busy and people are out which is great. No, it's-
Kerry Diamond:
There's nothing sadder than an empty restaurant.
Caroline Styne:
No, I know. The fact that people are dining out again is amazing, and it's building back slowly, but it's a challenge for everybody countrywide. This is the independent restaurants' biggest challenge is that trying to balance that digging out, and the financial pressures, and the pressure that we all have to provide a livelihood for our employees and keep our guests happy, and then the writer strike is just killing everything, I know.
Kerry Diamond:
The two strikes, yeah, writers and actors.
Caroline Styne:
Then you have to remember, too, it's the writers and actors who are striking, but all the other crew are suffering, too. They're out of work right now. All of those others are on an involuntary strike.
Kerry Diamond:
That's rough. I'm sorry you all are dealing with that.
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, we're going to push through.
Kerry Diamond:
Yes, you are. I have no doubt. You've seen a lot. You've ridden a lot of the ups and downs of the industry.
Caroline Styne:
Yes. We went through this in 2007 and 2008 when we had the mix of the recession and writer strike, and here we are again lingering the potential of a recession plus this writer strike, and it's definitely... Yeah, we're feeling it.
Kerry Diamond:
Since you have done it several times over, what is your advice to listeners who maybe want to open their own restaurant one day?
Caroline Styne:
I usually say don't, but aside from that, I think you need to have your identity and know what it is. You have to be thoughtful. I think it's great to have a partner. I can't imagine not having Suzanne in my life, the two of us. First of all, just to commiserate with, to bang our heads against the wall with, to not feel alone, a restaurant is a crazy business because, first of all, your labor to revenue ratio is completely off. There are so many aspects to it, the food, the service. I don't know how single owners... I don't know how they do it because you need to have that person. It's so multifaceted. You can't have your finger on the pulse of all of it at once, so it takes a village for sure. I would make sure you've got the right people in your village and that you are really well funded because they're very capital intensive, and if you don't have enough funding from the get go, you're destined for trouble.
Kerry Diamond:
What is the secret to running a successful restaurant? I know there's not just one but-
Caroline Styne:
I'd love to know.
Kerry Diamond:
What's the first thing that pops in your mind when you hear that question?
Caroline Styne:
I would say that the secret is you have to have consistent good product, first of all. It's a given. I'm lucky Suzanne's food is excellent. She's so talented and her food is so delicious, and she's also smart and very open, too. I think you need to have outstanding service, and that's always a challenge. We have moments in our restaurants that are not outstanding, but I think you really need to provide your guests the reason to be there, which is you need to provide an experience for them, and you need to be willing to give it all and be generous and exude love to your guests even when you might not feel like you're getting it back. You need to be able to really just provide as much as you can to go above and beyond in every little moment, which is really hard, but we try, and I think being fiscally conscious. You want to do everything that you can and make it the most beautiful splurgy thing, but you may not be able to afford to do that, so how do you do that and operate responsibly?
Kerry Diamond:
How did you get to this point of financial acumen? Because you did not start with a finance background.
Caroline Styne:
It's just come over time. I started out working in art galleries, and that was a totally different scale of things. I think it was starting my own business with pennies and trying to figure out how to turn those pennies into dollars and how to keep the dollars. I think those little moments and all those little things that you learn along the way just stack up.
Kerry Diamond:
It goes back to something you said about common sense because sometimes, when you're not an expert in something, you doubt yourself.
Caroline Styne:
Those doubts come all the time. Suzanne and I still have moments where our gut instinct told us something and we went against that. We should just learn by now. Go with your gut because it tends to be the right answer, and you go the other way and you've gone down a road. We did that recently, too. I hate change in certain ways. I was with the same insurance broker for 15 years even though the guy was maybe not the right one, but I'm loyal. I still have an EarthLink email address. I'm really loyal. Sometimes, you got to make that change, and the change is painful, but once you do...
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, trust your gut, listeners. That's if you take anything away from this episode.
Caroline Styne:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Let's talk wine for a sec before we go to the speed round. Curious, what are you loving and recommending these days, wine wise?
Caroline Styne:
I'm a big Albariño fan right now, and I think it's because when we did the list for the hotel, we have a lot of Iberian Peninsula wines on there, and a lot of wines from Bacchus. I've just found a producer that I love. His name is Raul Perez, and his wines are just like acid leaven, beautiful wines, and so I went deep into Albariño. I'm always a burgundy person. I love anything that's crisp and mineral. Give me a great Chenin Blanc from summer and I'm thrilled. I'm a Cab Francophile. I love Cab Franc. I love anything that's got a savory note in there. I need acid. I need savory. What else? I've been doing a lot of research on canned wines lately because for the Hollywood Bowl, I have to have a wide variety of options, and I have wines and cans and lots of non-alcoholic things and spritzes and all that.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's do a speed round. Okay, what beverage do you start your day with?
Caroline Styne:
Water. Because of a little stomach issue I've had lately, I have not been allowed to have my morning coffee, and so I'm now about a weekend, and Suzanne Goin is going to hear this and die because she stopped drinking coffee a while ago and I keep looking at her like she's insane, but I have not had coffee in a week and I'm feeling pretty good. I'm kind of liking just the water in the morning, so we'll see how long that lasts. Otherwise, it would be brewed coffee.
Kerry Diamond:
What's a favorite food book? Could be a cookbook, memoir.
Caroline Styne:
“Blood, Bones, and Butter.” So good.
Kerry Diamond:
Gabrielle Hamilton?
Caroline Styne:
Yeah, Gabrielle is such a genius. I love that book.
Kerry Diamond:
Such a great book. Favorite food show or movie?
Caroline Styne:
I'm really enjoying “The Bear.” I have to say I saw the first episode of the first season and I turned it off halfway and I thought, "I cannot handle this. It's too stressful. It's reminding me of work," even though my work isn't really like that, but I thought, "No, I can't deal with this," and then I was like, "Okay, sucker, I'm going to go back," and I watched it, I loved it, thought it was great.
Kerry Diamond:
Since this is an entertainment town, what are you streaming in addition to “The Bear?”
Caroline Styne:
Oh, right now, my husband and I are watching “Hijack,” Idris Elba. We're watching that.
Kerry Diamond:
What's it about?
Caroline Styne:
It's about a hijacking.
Kerry Diamond:
Spoiler alert.
Caroline Styne:
You're not going to say I'm watching “And Just Like That” because I'm a long time “Sex And The City” fan. I can't help it.
Kerry Diamond:
One thing that's always in your fridge?
Caroline Styne:
Mountain Valley sparkling water, Greek yogurt, strawberries.
Kerry Diamond:
Dream travel destination?
Caroline Styne:
I've never been to Australia. I would like to go there. I've always wanted to go to the Maldives. It's so beautiful. Water just looks stunning. I wouldn't mind getting on a boat and being in the area of Croatia and doing that whole thing. I could do that, too. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Are any of those destinations related to wine? Is that why you want to go or just in general?
Caroline Styne:
No, I'm just thinking of travel. I love having wine and I love the ability to add wine onto that. I've been lucky and I've traveled for wine, and that's been great, so I'm thinking more of just the luxury vacation kind of thing, but for wine, I've been to Burgundy. I love Burgundy. I could go there billion times. I've never been to Austria, and I would love to go visit the Austrian wine growing regions for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
This is good travel bucket list that we've got going here.
Caroline Styne:
Copenhagen. Never been there.
Kerry Diamond:
If you were trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity and it cannot be Suzanne, who would it be and why?
Caroline Styne:
I think it would be Nancy Silverton. We would eat savory and sweet very well. She's super entertaining and resourceful, so she and I could probably figure out how to build a raft and get across while still eating some fantastically just oven-baked bread that she would've built in a wood burning oven somewhere on the island, and then we'd have a great pizza and some pasta, a beautiful vegetable, and then some gelato that she would've figured out how to make on the island.
Kerry Diamond:
You might never want to leave that island.
Caroline Styne:
Maybe we don't build a raft.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I've just loved talking to you and getting to know you better.
Caroline Styne:
Well, thank you. I feel so honored, really. Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
The honor's all mine. That's it for today's show. Want to stay on top of all things Cherry Bombe? Sign up for our free newsletter at cherrybombe.com. Learn about the week's podcast, guests, upcoming events, and fun news from the world of restaurants, cookbooks, cake artistry, and more. Don't forget we'll be in Philadelphia on September 7th. Visit cherrybombe.com for tickets and more information. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Our producer is Catherine Baker, our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial assistant is London Crenshaw. Thanks for listening. You are the Bombe.