Kelsey Glasser Transcript

Kerry Diamond:

Hi, everyone. You're listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe magazine. Today's guest is Kelsey Glasser, the sommelier and owner of Arden Restaurant in Portland, Oregon. I met Kelsey for the first time the other week at our Summer Tastemaker Tour in Willamette Valley. A native of Oregon, Kelsey was bit by the acting bug as a child. She studied acting at NYU and headed to L.A., where like so many actors, she worked in restaurants. To her surprise, she started to fall in love with the world of wine and how much storytelling goes into each bottle. Fast forward, she's part of the vibrant Portland restaurant scene today, and loves educating people about wine. She's also the host of the Her Way podcast. She teaches a virtual class called Seven Day Sommelier, and she's working on a wine and travel TV show. Kelsey has had an interesting journey through the hospitality world, and she shares the ups and downs and what she's learned along the way. Stay tuned.

Today's episode is presented by OpenTable and Visa. If you love great restaurants and unforgettable food experiences, here's something to put on your radar. OpenTable and Visa have joined forces to launch the Visa Dining Collection, giving eligible Visa credit card holders in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico special access to prime time reservations and culinary events. We were thrilled to be part of the fun this season with our Cherry Bombe Summer Tastemaker Tour, made possible through the special partnership. We had an amazing time at Lutie's at the Commodore Perry Estate in Austin, Wildflower Farms in the Hudson Valley, and The Ground in Oregon's Willamette Valley. And we just wrapped things up at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. To everyone who joined us along the way, thank you. It was such a joy to meet members of the Bombesquad in each city and celebrate incredible women in food. Be sure to check out the other Visa Dining Collection experiences like Friends in Town, a series that pairs local hot spots with visiting chefs. Our friends from Don Angie and Osteria Mozza are getting together on September 30th in NYC. Now that's a hot ticket. Restrictions apply. For full terms and to see if your card is eligible, visit the Visa Dining Collection's special events page. The link is in the show notes and on the episode landing page.

Our next Jubilee conference is taking place in Los Angeles on Sunday, September 28th. If you're new to Jubilee, it's our conference that's all about connection, community, and celebrating the creatives who make the world of food and drinks so vibrant. We're thrilled to be heading to L.A. and to give the city the love it deserves. If you're a Bombesquad member, be sure to use the ticket link in your inbox for special pricing. Not a member, you can still join and receive the private link.

Last thing, our next Bombesquad member meeting is taking place Tuesday, August 26th, on Zoom. It's one of our book club meetings. And our guest is none other than Kristen Kish, the host of “Top Chef.” We'll be talking with Kristen about her memoir, “Accidentally on Purpose.” You can read Kristen's book, or you can do what I did and listen to it. Kristen is the narrator and does a great job. If you're a member, check your inbox for details. Not a member, there is still time to join. All of these links are on cherryBombe.com and in our show notes. 

Now let's check in with today's guest. Kelsey Glasser, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.

Kelsey Glasser:

Thank you for having me.

Kerry Diamond:

It's so nice to have you on the show. When I interviewed you last month as part of our Summer Tastemaker Tour, I asked if there were any signs that you would one day work in hospitality. Everybody in the audience loved your answer, and you know what I'm talking about. Like the kid with the lemonade stand, who grows up to be an entrepreneur, what were your signs?

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah, I think it was about being a host. I loved celebrating and I loved hosting. And any excuse to throw a party, I was there for it. My parents always had to have a can of pink frosting and some sprinkles. And I would put it on bread and invite the neighbors over if it was the cat's birthday, or if I finished my homework early, or if fall was turning into winter. Any excuse, I wanted to throw a party. So I guess that would be the sign early on.

Kerry Diamond:

I love that. I've noticed on Instagram a lot more people celebrating their pet's birthdays. Maybe that needs to be a thing.

Kelsey Glasser:

I was all about that from day one. I would get a little can of tuna fish and stick a candle in it. Sometimes they would wear clothes, if they allowed it.

Kerry Diamond:

Did you know that you were destined for a life in hospitality or not yet?

Kelsey Glasser:

No, absolutely not. I guess maybe another sign that I was destined for hospitality was that I loved theater and I love acting. And I think there's always a big correlation between those two worlds, I found out later.

Kerry Diamond:

Were you a child actor?

Kelsey Glasser:

I was. And it was not at the behest of my parents. It was more at the chagrin of them. They made the mistake of taking me to sea theater when I was like four or five years old. And we lived out in the country, out in wine country. They still live out there. And the nearest theaters were in Portland. Like an hour drive away and God bless them, they drove me in and out of Portland my whole childhood so that I could take theater classes. And I started doing professional theater when I was, I don't know, in middle school or something. And those would be rigorous rehearsal schedules. And by high school, I was doing multiple shows a year, and I would get to miss school for it. I would rehearse for a month, perform for a month, so I was very in the theater world.

Kerry Diamond:

Wait, tell us some of the things you did.

Kelsey Glasser:

Oh gosh. I was in “Frankenstein”. I was in a lot of musicals. I did “Crazy for You.” I did “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Oh, I did a lot of “Shakespeare” as well. I played Cressida, I played Celia, and eventually Juliet. I did whatever they threw at me.

Kerry Diamond:

And your parents were fully supportive of this?

Kelsey Glasser:

Yes. They like to say the best day of their life was when I got my learner's permit, and they were like, "Okay, bye, have fun."

Kerry Diamond:

So you were like a little kid. Your parents take you to see theater. And you're just like, this is the life for me.

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah. And I should say, I think there's probably, if I psychoanalyze myself, I was homeschooled when I was really young. And it's because my parents were hippies, and my dad said he never wanted me to associate learning with boredom. So I became a self-taught independent learner, I suppose you could say. But I also was, I think I wanted more interaction and socialization, and theater is the epitome of that.

Kerry Diamond:

You mentioned you were born and raised in Willamette Valley, which is Oregon State's wine country, such a beautiful place. What was it like to grow up there as a child?

Kelsey Glasser:

I really appreciate it now in retrospect. It was a very rural, wild running around, especially being homeschooled, because I would wake up and my dad would have a list of essentially homework. Like read this, do these problems. And I knew that the sooner I got my work done, the sooner I could go play. So I spent the bulk of my hours outside. I read constantly. I was always climbing trees or playing in a field. We had chickens, we had rabbits, peacocks, cats. My neighbors all had horses.

And it was beautiful because your parents never knew where you were. I loved it. At 2:00, I knew other kids would get home from school, and then we could all play together and no one knew where we were. You would end up at someone's house. And the rule was just like be home before the sun went down. I appreciate that now, looking at how different a lot of kids' lives are.

Kerry Diamond:

Oh yeah. I was part of that completely feral generation. I was telling my nephews and nieces that we didn't even have, I mean, no one cared if you were hydrated at all. I don't remember really ever drinking water except sometimes drinking out of a water fountain in a park or a hose in someone's backyard. Imagine today if you said to some of these kids with their giant Stanley things full of water that you had to go drink from a hose in a random neighbor's yard. I don't think that would go over so well.

Kelsey Glasser:

And no phones obviously. I got a phone when I was a senior in high school, and thank God.

Kerry Diamond:

For college, you move all the way across the country to NYU. Why NYU? Why so far?

Kelsey Glasser:

Acting. I had set my sights on it. I was always a little bit of an overachiever and a straight A student, and I was very ambitious. And when I was in middle school, I heard that NYU had the best theater program. And I just decided that's where I wanted to go. And I applied their early decision and had to audition, and was really grateful I got in because otherwise I had 10 other schools I was going to have to audition and apply for as well. But thankfully, I got in. And I think, because I grew up on five acres out in the woods, the city always called to me. And I had the experience of spending a lot of time in Portland as a teenager doing theater. And I just thought like, wow, this city is so fun. And I truly, from zero to 100, from five acres to Washington Square West and just got plopped into Manhattan, which was an adventure.

Kerry Diamond:

Did you love the city?

Kelsey Glasser:

I do, I do. I think my parents are sad I don't love the outdoors as much as they do. And I think it'll come with time. I think because I grew up with it, maybe it's like the grass is greener, or the city is always shinier. I really love people. And my favorite thing to do even today is if I'm visiting a city I've never been to, I just want to walk for hours and hours, and get the feel of it and see what life is like there.

Kerry Diamond:

Did you work in restaurants when you were in New York?

Kelsey Glasser:

I started to dabble in restaurants. School was a pretty crazy schedule. And I remember I took a job at Cafe Lalo on the Upper West Side that I knew of because it was in “You've Got Mail,” because he meets her on a blind date there. And I got hired there as a waitress. But in New York I would get off work between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning, and then I would try to go to class the next day and it was too difficult. So I ended up nannying part-time through college and worked with a family for the whole time I was in college and made some money that time. But it was really in Los Angeles that I started working in restaurants.

Kerry Diamond:

And that's when the whole idea of becoming a sommelier started to take hold, when you were in L.A.?

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah. Yeah. Wine was not on my radar. The plan was always go to NYU, then move to L.A. and become a movie star, as you do. And my aunt, who lived in Los Angeles my whole life, and she was a producer in the film industry, and so she was probably the reason I wanted to be an actor in the first place. I grew up going to visit her on set. And I think I just thought it was going to be easier than it was. I got to L.A. And I knew first step was get a restaurant job. I immediately just started applying in the West Hollywood area because that's where I was living. And I didn't really know where I was applying to, and I just got really lucky that the first place I got hired was the Bazaar, which was José Andrés's flagship place on the West Coast. I don't know why they hired me, but I'm really grateful that they did.

Kerry Diamond:

So what was José like back then? Had World Central Kitchen even started yet?

Kelsey Glasser:

I think it was just starting. He had his other group called Think Food Group. And I think that was the group that ran all of his restaurants. And he was a big deal on the East Coast. He had really made a mark in D.C. and he had already had his show, I can't remember the name of his TV show where he introduced America to tapas, but the Bazaar was his first restaurant on the West Coast. And it had made a lot of waves when it had opened two years earlier.

And so he was hopping around between. He already, he had four or five restaurants at the time, but he was at the Bazaar in those days at least once a month. And I always had the experience of just loving him, like everyone really loved him, and granted, I was the front of house, and so the back of house could get, they wanted to do a good job for him, and I'm sure he had higher standards for the back of house than the front of house because that was his domain. But he would roll in and just always had a smile on his face. He was such a pleasant sweet guy. And that really trickled down. I saw that you could be successful at a really high scale, but have a culture of joy, and of being excited to learn, and excited to move fast and learn things and be a busy restaurant, but truly have a good time doing it.

Kerry Diamond:

We'll be right back with today's guest. If you love all things Italy, you're going to love the next issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine. Every single page is inspired by Italy. Our covers, all the features, recipes, and photos. Flipping through the issue is like taking a virtual visit. We have features on lots of Cherry Bombe faves from Nancy Silverton to Hailee Catalano, Mimi Thorisson, and Tamu McPherson. Visit cherryBombe.com to subscribe, or buy a single issue, or pick up an issue at your favorite bookstore or culinary shop this September. 

How was the acting going at the time? You do have an IMDB page, so you did do some work.

Kelsey Glasser:

I need to figure out how to deactivate that. Yeah. I was simultaneously starting in this place where I knew nothing about this world of restaurants, but I felt so welcomed, so encouraged. I would learn something, and then I would get promoted. I started as a cocktail server, and then I became a server. And then in acting, I kind of expected to immediately be successful and I wasn't having that experience. In retrospect, I have so much compassion for that 19, 20 year old version. I guess I was like 22 by this point. It's such an industry of, I don't know, judgment for lack of a better word. At least that's how it felt then. And I was constantly just feeling like I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't well connected enough, I wasn't whatever enough. That was hard. And as the years wore on, I could feel myself auditioning less and wanting to put myself out there less.

But in restaurants, really making friends, finding my community again, wanting to learn. That was the thing I loved most about The Bazaar is that there was so much to learn, not only just about Spanish food and Spanish wine, but about hospitality, fine dining hospitality, and molecular gastronomy. What happens when you mix sodium alginate to make these purified olives? There was just a lot to learn. And I love learning. And so I just started moving more in that direction, and kind of sadly leading acting by the wayside.

Kerry Diamond:

Was it sad?

Kelsey Glasser:

It was sad. And I remember, I think I'd been in L.A. for three years at that point when I finally decided to pursue wine. And I remember thinking at the time, well, I can't do both. I can't be a sommelier who's also an actress because people in the wine world won't take me seriously. And I thought that I had to just completely forsake this part of my life, and it was a really bittersweet decision.

And I think I was 25 when I decided to become a somm, and I'm always someone, once I decide to do something, I just do it quickly. And I signed up and I did my first two levels within six months, and I got my pin and I immediately lucked into, I don't know, I feel like I've gotten lucky at a lot of points in my career. I got hired as a sommelier for a brand new restaurant that was opening. And within two weeks, the wine director who was also the GM got fired, and they gave me his job. So I went from becoming a somm to literally two months later running a pretty high-profile wine program. So that was a steep learning curve, and it really forced me to get myself in gear. But I also felt very intimidated and very outclassed. And all the more reason where I thought I can't tell anyone that I'm also trying to be an actress because one more reason people won't think I'm qualified.

Kerry Diamond:

Did being an actor though help you kind of fake it till you make it?

Kelsey Glasser:

100%. That's why actors are so often in hospitality. I mean, maybe in other cities that's not as prevalent, but if you're in L.A. and someone's waiting on you, chances are they're an actor. I think as actors, we are good at reading people and empathizing, putting a happy face on, or playing the role of what does it look like to be a wine director? I'm nervous, but I don't want people to see that. Or, okay, I'm going to go into a tasting with a big distributor, and I need to act tough or whatever those thoughts might've been. I do think that skill set lends itself to hospitality in a lot of different ways.

Kerry Diamond:

What was it about wine specifically that was so much of interest to you?

Kelsey Glasser:

I remember the moment I was still at the Bazaar, but I had also started working at a restaurant called the Eveleigh up on Sunset Boulevard. It was very California-focused. I, for the first time, got to go to wine country. We went up to Sonoma and we visited a winemaker named Sean Thackrey. I think we visited a couple of different places. But I remember going to Sean's place, and he was such a character. He had been an art dealer in San Francisco. He specialized in ancient texts, and he could read ancient Greek and Latin. And he had come across an ancient Roman winemaking manuscript. He was like, I'm going to teach myself to make wine from this. And he sold his apartment in the mission and went and bought a farm in Bolinas and taught himself to make wine from these ancient texts, and opened fermented under these eucalyptus trees and named all his wines after constellations. And he had a pet fox named Belle.

And I was so enamored with this story. And we came back to L.A. to the restaurant, and I was just so excited about that experience that I told that story to my tables. And they bought the wine. And I had this light bulb moment of like, oh, a bottle of wine is just a vehicle for stories. And if you can tell those stories, you get to invite someone into this world and this experience. And I think that's what food is in a lot of ways also. Yeah, that was my aha moment with wine.

Kerry Diamond:

It's so interesting that you say that because I always think that restaurants don't do enough storytelling on their menus. And sometimes the only way you find out what inspired a dish or what's behind this wine is your server. It always makes me crazy when folks at a table are like, oh, the server's talking too much. They just want the server to stop talking, go away. A, I don't like that. But then B, I just wish people put a little bit more on their menus to tell those stories. I mean, if I read about a guy who named his wines after the constellations and he had a fox named Belle, I would probably order that wine too. Same as when you find out why a chef put a certain dish on the menu, what inspired it? I love to know those things.

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah, I don't know. One thing I love about Arden is that our menu is very eclectic. And I know we're not talking about Arden yet, but one dish will be Italian inspired and another dish will have huitlacoche and another dish will have togarashi, and being able to say like, oh yeah, we are kind of inspired by this and this, and this, and this is in season right now, and this works really well with salsa macha. And even though you might not expect it, yeah, I think it gives an opportunity for the table to connect with their server, and also to relay maybe what the chef can't because he's up there cooking the food or she is.

Kerry Diamond:

Maybe there needs to be a QR code for the nerds. So it's like here's the basic menu for everybody who's just like, I just want to come in and have my food. And then for the rest of us nerds, here's the luxurious menu with all the stories.

Kelsey Glasser:

We love doing wine maker dinners at Arden. That's one of my favorite things to do it. And it's our chef Erik's as well, because it's an opportunity for us to use the story of the wines to create a menu inspired by that. We had a gal over from Barolo in Northern Italy in Piedmont a couple months ago. And I had actually just gotten to go to Barolo. And so I was like, oh, I had vitello tonnato and they have these amazing raw sausages, kind of like a spin on tartar. And so he and I got to talk about that. And we got to know the stories of the wines. And then he writes a menu based on that. And then the winemaker is actually there. And I kind of lead a Q&A where I get to interview them in front of the group, which I just think is a special experience that most people don't get when they come to a meal.

Kerry Diamond:

Let's talk about the jump to Portland. What made you decide to move to Portland?

Kelsey Glasser:

So I had decided, okay, wine is it. I'm not acting. And I had started dating a guy who was also in wine, and I always have to give him credit because I don't think I would've jumped so fully into wine if I hadn't fallen in love with a guy who was really into wine. And he started saying, "Well, we should open our own place." We were both running wine programs in L.A. And so we started looking in L.A. We wanted to open a bottle shop wine bar. And it was cost-prohibitive in L.A. And people kept saying, "Oh, I'll give you a million dollars." But it's L.A. And we're like, are you actually going to give us a million dollars?

Kerry Diamond:

Wait, you had people saying in Los Angeles they would give you a million dollars?

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah. But L.A. is just famous for people talk a lot. People talk a big game. And a liquor license is so hard to get. And so ultimately we decided on Portland because I was from there originally, and the food and wine scene was really blowing up. This was end of 2015. And I had come up for a friend's wedding and I was just really blown away by the food scene. And I was like, we should look. And so we started looking. We found a place within a month. And I think he and I were both impulsive enough to just be like, let's do it. And we quit our jobs. And a month later, we were in Portland, and he got a job repping for some local wineries. I started waiting tables. I was like, I don't need to manage. I don't need to run wine programs. I just need some cash.

And we really bootstrapped this little operation. It was the fact that we could do it with our own money, I think was really important because we didn't want to have to take another person's opinion into account. And we literally got this little live work space. It was like a split-level loft. And we lived upstairs, we opened a bottle shop downstairs. We had our cat there. It was so below the radar. We didn't have a full food license because there wasn't a commercial kitchen. But it became this kind of neighborhood darling spot. And within a couple months, we moved out. We turned that upstairs into a little seating lounge. And so this wine bar, it was called Thelonious Wines, and we had it for two years. And it was, that then allowed us to open Arden because then we met people who were actually interested in investing because we had proved ourselves.

They saw this place that we had built that people really loved. They could see we could keep a business afloat and that we knew wine. And the Arden space had become available two blocks away. And we were like, oh, great. There's a kitchen there. We could just have a restaurant. Within a couple months, it was not working out. Let's just say, there's no blame, but it just wasn't working. He and I ended up splitting the businesses. And so he kept the wine shop and I kept Arden. And he's still a dear friend. I spoke to him this morning. He has a wine bar in Portland, Maine now.

But point is I ended up with a restaurant sort of like all to myself within two months of opening it. And I was a theater major. I had never even taken a business class. And I had managed restaurants, but a full restaurant, running a restaurant is a different story. And the wine shop, we hadn't had employees. It was just he and I. And I had learned a lot about getting an LLC and all of the things you needed to do to file, but it was still, it did not prepare me.

And that first year of having Arden, I actually went to the hospital because I was having panic attacks. I was like, "Am I having a heart attack?" And I hired a new therapist and I hired a business coach. And I really was just like I need to figure out how to run a business. One thing I've always been able to cling to in my life is to tell myself you're smart enough to figure this out. I can always figure anything out. Right when I thought that I had it figured out, then the pandemic hit. So it's always something in restaurants. I've learned.

Kerry Diamond:

Oh my gosh, I can't believe you had to take it over on your own so early after the opening, and that you went through all of that. Oh my gosh. How did you keep it going through the pandemic? Arden's still around.

Kelsey Glasser:

Again, I had hired a business coach. I had learned a lot. I had read all these books on leadership and culture. And I think all of that was incredibly helpful. And one thing I had learned was you have to fall in love with your customers, not your product. You're there for them. You need to always be thinking, how can you add value to them, to your guests?

And so during the pandemic, I think it was to our credit that we were so young, we were two, and we weren't so set in our ways of this is how we've always done things forever. I think even if the pandemic happened today, it would be harder for us to react because we have systems, we know how we do things, and we were just figuring that out. And so with every regulation, it felt like we had whiplash. It was like, build a patio, eat outside, only do takeout. Okay, eat inside, six feet, the whole thing.

But at every turn it was like, okay, well can we add value now? How can we help them now? And what it really came down to, I think, was how can we bring joy to people's lives? I mean, I think that's what we try to do regardless. I did a lot of, I don't know, deep thinking about what is a restaurant to me. And you look at the original root of the word restaurant, and it's from the French verb for to restore. And the original restaurants were where people would take a break from their workday and be able to be sit down and taken care of.

And to me, that's always what Arden is. And even the name like Arden, the forest of Arden in one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, “As You Like It,” is where everyone went to kind of retreat from the stress and corruption of the city, and live off the land and write poetry in the trees. And so I just always loved that idea. And I thought, well, the world is a really stressful place right now. What can we do to give people a break from that? And so we started putting food in boxes, but we also, we tried to deliver that moment of you're not just getting takeout pizza or whatever. We would plate it nicely in the boxes. And we would do little cocktail mixes and we would do wine pairings.

And then also in the first week, I started live streaming virtual wine tastings. And I live streamed an hour-long virtual wine tasting every week for two years, and started a virtual wine club. That was the big gift of the pandemic for me because it was the point that I found out that the two loves of my life could come together, acting and theater, this thing that I had kind of forsaken, and wine. And I realized that there's this whole world of people out there who love the idea of wine, but who feel very intimidated by it, and that it's not for them, that it's a club they're not cool enough to be a part of that. They're not allowed to ask questions.

And I had so much fun talking about it. We would talk about the Canary Islands one week. I would have an excuse to learn all about Lanzarote versus Tenerife and Listan, all the native varietals, and then get to come on and tell these stories. And I would send them the wines and they would taste them. And I just saw, oh, wine education or wine entertainment, wine could be something that I could connect with people over, I suppose. I don't even know if that is what you asked me. I went on a big tangent.

Kerry Diamond:

Wow. I'm just so impressed. How did you hold it all together? I found myself with a coffee shop and kind of no idea how to run it, and I was so lucky to have some amazing people on the team, but boy, was it tough to hold it all together.

Kelsey Glasser:

Oh yeah. I think we had, it's a testament to how much I love, and I'm so grateful, so many of those people that were on the team during the pandemic I saw this morning at the restaurant. They're still there five years later. Our chef, Erik, I should say, we started with this gal from San Francisco, and then about a year later, Erik came on, and he's been there now seven of the eight years we've been open. And he's now a part-owner with me, which is amazing. Having this really small, close-knit group of people, I think if we hadn't leaned on each other and hadn't cracked jokes. And I kind of felt like my role was like keep everyone happy. And then I had my own therapist that I could go cry to.

But I did see my role as like, oh gosh, the world is feeling really bleak, and it feels bleak in a lot of times. And as a restaurateur, and as just a leader in general, I'm not a winemaker, I'm not a chef. So what is the role of a restaurant owner? And I've worked at restaurants where people don't like the owner, or they're not ever there, or when their name is brought up, everyone rolls their eyes. And I just swore to myself from day one, that would never be me. I don't know. Maybe my staff is rolling their eyes about me, but I hope not. And that's been a big challenge for me is how do you love and support the team, but also manage, how do you be friends with everyone but also be an owner? And I think I've gotten better about it over the years, but it's a hard line to walk.

Kerry Diamond:

Let's jump to the menu because we barely talked about food. And I looked at the Arden dinner menu and I really wanted everything on the menu.

Kelsey Glasser:

The food's really good, especially this time of year. It always changes seasonally. And I love summer, and we all do. I mean right now we have tomatoes and peaches are coming on, and we have zucchinis and squash blossom, and we're about to get peppers. And I love the way Erik cooks because he looks at what's in season around us in the Pacific Northwest. We're blessed to have so many amazing fruits and vegetables and fish and seafood. But then he's really playful with, oh, some Japanese ingredients here, some French technique here, some Calabrian chili, and a great pasta dish. Even after having this restaurant for almost eight years, people ask me what type of food we cook, and I'm like, seasonal, Pacific Northwest, new American. It's hard to define. It's just really good, and it manages to all go really well together, I think.

Kerry Diamond:

And then let's talk about the wine menu. Are you still responsible for the wine menu?

Kelsey Glasser:

So I am not actually. I ran the wine menu for the first five or six years we were open. And it was so much fun to run. But as you know, there's a lot to do as a restaurant owner. And I had started on this venture of this podcast and starting the wine club and running the wine club. And so somewhere in there I handed off the wine program to our wonderful wine director, Wesley, who's, again, he's been there almost the whole time Arden has been open. And so it couldn't be in better hands. And I love that I'm now sort of in the role of mentor, but I don't have to be the one worrying about whether or not we're out of Pinot noir by the glass. And he does such a great job.

But starting the wine program was a blast. And I had never built a wine program from the ground that was that large. And we really had a focus on wanting to give people a taste of things that they couldn't find anywhere else. So if it was local wines, we wanted to make friends, and that's one of my favorite things about the wine business, is you can meet these people where the wines come from, and you make friends with them. And we're like, "Hey, could we get six bottles of something from a back vintage?" Because we're not that huge. So just like a couple bottles of something older, or a special Couvert, or something that's not out in the general public. So we really love to serve wines that are ready to drink, that we've pre-ages for you. We now have an offsite wine storage and we get to age wines. So we really try to surprise people with small producers, interesting releases, older vintages, something that you won't find on other wine lists in town.

Kerry Diamond:

I know you've got a few favorite winemakers out there, and you've even interviewed them on your podcast. Tell us a few folks out there you admire.

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah, I mean, Maggie Harrison of Antica Terra is definitely one of them. Just the vision that she has had to create, I suppose what you could call, I don't know what she would think about this term, but a cult winery essentially in Oregon when that didn't exist. But beyond the prestige of what she's built, just the artistry of the space, the beauty, the way she presents her wines, she has the courage to not just pour you two of her Pinot noirs. She pours them alongside a Grand Cru Burgundy and a Grower Producers Champagne, and an aged allocated northern Rhone Syrah. I really admire her courage.

And there's a woman in Oregon named Kelley Fox, who was one of the first female winemakers here. She's just unapologetically doesn't care about social media and marketing, probably to her own detriment, but she has such a following. She makes beautiful wines. And there's so many women outside of Oregon. I was just in Napa shooting because we're turning this podcast into a TV series, and we're like halfway through shooting it. And we shot in Napa and Sonoma. And I got to interview Cathy Corison. She is really the first woman in American wine and one of the first women in wine period. She got to Napa in 1975 before the Judgment of Paris. I think she was the second woman winemaker ever, the first woman to own her own winery. She paved the path for so many other women to follow. And she's just this little firecracker of a woman. She's as sharp today, I'm assuming as she was then. And she's so humble. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of inspiring women in wine.

Kerry Diamond:

So wait, tell us, your podcast is being turned into a TV show?

Kelsey Glasser:

Yes. The quick backstory is that when I started this wine club during the pandemic, and I kind of had this aha moment of like, oh my gosh, I could do acting and I could do wine. And I had this idea, well, there's no wine travel shows. There's a million food shows. And so I thought, well, why couldn't I make one where you visit the wine regions of the world? And I actually shot a pilot back in 2021 using Willamette Valley as an example. And I was working on it with my uncle in L.A. who was in the business, and he passed away while we were working on it. And it kind of put a pause on it.

Kerry Diamond:

I'm so sorry about that.

Kelsey Glasser:

Thank you. It was a real treat to get to work on for those couple months, and I learned a lot. And it really planted the seed. But I was like, okay, I need to take a break. I'm kind of hitting some closed doors right now. And then just last year, a fellow restaurant couple, actually Olivia, who we had on the panel with us, Olivia and her partner Angel. Angel started a media company in Portland. It's called TODOS, and it's all about amplifying the voices of BIPOC LGBTQ+ women. And he and I and Olivia had all become friends over the years. Our restaurants are just a couple blocks apart.

And I had shown him my pilot, and I'm like, "How about we do this show?" And he's like, "Okay, but how can it fit this mold?" And I had already really started to notice that women approach wine, I think women approach everything differently, but there's the very biological fact that we have 43% more olfactory neurons than men, which makes us better at tasting things. That's not to say that if you don't train your palate, men can also be excellent tasters, but we are biologically wired to be really good at that. And we're so good at multitasking, and winemaking requires you're doing the creative part, you're doing the farming, you're doing the business side of it.

So I just started to see all these powerhouse women in the industry. He was like, "Well, how about this? Why don't we do a proof of concept? Let's do it as a podcast first." I was like, "Okay." So we did it as a podcast first, and I think we did 12 interviews with local Oregon winemaking women, and it was really well received. And so phase two was to shoot it as a TV show.

So now we're shooting it up and down the West Coast. So the first season is going to be two episodes in California, two in Oregon, two in Washington. And we have shot Napa and Sonoma. We've shot the Columbia Gorge. And then we're taking a harvest break and we'll shoot Walla Walla and too in Oregon. We're self-funding it. And so I'm out there hustling and working as a producer and going to regions and being like, "This is why you should give us money to make this happen." So I'm learning a lot. And now we're editing, which is a whole other tool. But yeah, I love all this part of it, which is why I don't have time to run the wine program right now.

Kerry Diamond:

I could tell now why. What is some great business advice you have, now that you've been through so much in the running of a restaurant, and it sounds like made a fair amount of mistakes, but come out on the other side, what are a few things that people should know who either want to open a restaurant or maybe who are at that place where you were back in 2018 where you're just like, oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?

Kelsey Glasser:

Yeah. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Find mentors. If I could do over, I would've done a lot more of that. I think I was so self-conscious about not being taken seriously in the wine industry. And then suddenly I was 28 and owning a restaurant. And I just thought, well, people already assume I don't know what I'm doing, so I can't ask. And I wish I had had mentors in the industry specifically. Because now when I meet people who are just starting, I'm like, please pick my brain. Let me keep you from making the same mistakes I did. So don't be afraid to ask questions. Because it's already such a tough enough industry as it is.

And I think another one would be to find the people who are good at the things that you're not, and don't feel guilty about the things that you're not good at. I'm really grateful now to have the management team that we do at Arden, because I've learned I am not the best manager. I've gotten better over the years, but I'm a Libra. I am a recovering people pleaser. I am not good at conflict. And it's really tough for me often to come down, and I'm saying management needs to be able to be mean or be hard on people, but you do have to be able to say the things that need to be said. And that's come easier to me over time. But I finally realized like, oh, I can hire people to manage also.

Because also if you're opening a restaurant, there's the whole shift before service where all of the other things need to be done. Everything from payroll to marketing to answering 1,000 emails to dealing with someone calling out to like, oh, the mixer broke. We have to pull up the warranty. And then service comes around. I mean, honestly, until the pandemic was over, for like four years, I was doing both. And it's exhausting. You're so burned out, you don't have time to recover, much less do things that bring you joy.

And so finally getting the restaurant to a place where I can work more 9:00 to 5:00, and I don't work services as much, has been a real blessing. And now I'm available to fill in or come in if someone is sick, or if we're short of hands. But I think people should just know, oh, do I thrive on service? Do I thrive in the bookkeeping aspect? The first thing I did was hire a bookkeeper. I don't trust myself. I'm better now, but find the things that make you nervous and pay someone else to do them.

Kerry Diamond:

Great advice. Do you have a motto or a mantra?

Kelsey Glasser:

I think just always reminding myself that we're here to make people happy. And when I feel stuck asking myself how can we bring more joy? How can we add more value? It's really easy to get caught up in what can feel like a popularity contest sometimes, especially in the world we live in now of lists. And we're constantly like how do we stay relevant? Why aren't we on this list? And it's very easy to think, well, something's wrong with us, we're not good enough. And then I'm like, wait, are people in the restaurant? Are we getting good reviews? Are people leaving with smiles on their faces? That's what matters. This person who I've never met, who doesn't think we're cool, doesn't matter. I don't know.

Kerry Diamond:

Focus on what's meaningful. Do you trust your gut?

Kelsey Glasser:

A lot more so now. If you think of it more of in intrapersonal situations, like with an employee, I can look at so many times where I knew early on that maybe they weren't the best fit, but I thought, oh, they'll change. It'll get better. And it never did. I think I've gotten quicker to notice those, and just be willing to deal with it earlier on. And also if there's a situation with a guest and it's like, what should we do to recover it or to make them happy, I always want to just, we're in the business of hospitality, dollars can never compare to someone leaving with a good experience. And that doesn't mean you should get taken advantage of, but I think I always lean into my gut of what's the right thing to do here? If we're in the wrong or even if we're not, we want them to leave happy.

Kerry Diamond:

Last question. If had to be trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be and why?

Kelsey Glasser:

This is the question I'm most stressed out about. I was like, you could be with your mom figure like Julia Child or Alice Waters and feel really taken care of, or you could just have a party and hang out with Anthony Bourdain. That was like going to be my first response. You could have your gay best friend and be there with Antoni from “Queer Eye.” But you recommended this book to me, “Tart” by Slutty Cheff. And I finished it this morning. I flew through that book so fast. And I was like, honestly, she seems like a lot of fun. So if she ever decides to reveal her identity and needs an American best friend, I would love to hang out on a desert island with her.

Kerry Diamond:

That is a very fun answer. I'm glad you liked the book. I would've felt terrible-

Kelsey Glasser:

I loved the book.

Kerry Diamond:

... if you bought the book on my recommendation and then didn't like it.

Kelsey Glasser:

I actually listened to it because there's something about the fabulous British accent. She has another girl read it, but I was laughing out loud. It's wonderful.

Kerry Diamond:

It's always such a different experience. I'm so curious what that would be like to listen to the audiobook version of that. I did a fun interview with her.

Kelsey Glasser:

I read it.

Kerry Diamond:

We have a Substack. I don't talk about the Substack that much, but we have a Substack. And I don't normally write for the Substack. But I wound up doing a Q&A with her because she wanted to stay anonymous, didn't want to do a podcast. And the publisher had offered to have her do a Q&A and I was like, hell yes. And her answers were as delightful as that book was.

Kelsey Glasser:

I bought the book as soon as I read the Substack.

Kerry Diamond:

All right. Well, Kelsey, you are an inspiration.

Kelsey Glasser:

Thank you so much. The feelings are entirely mutual. I feel so honored to be on here. So thank you for having me.

Kerry Diamond:

Aw, I can't wait to hang out with you at Arden, and we'll drink some wine by some of our favorite women from the region.

Kelsey Glasser:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Kerry.

Kerry Diamond:

That's it for today's show. Special thanks to Visa and OpenTable. And I would love for you to follow Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube wherever you listen, and leave a rating and a review. If you're already a follower, thank you. Check out the links in our show notes for our magazine, Jubilee tickets, and Cherry Bombe membership info. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Jenna Sadhu, and our talent guru is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.