[00:01] Valerie Beck: Rise. Renew. Reconnect.
[00:04] Welcome to from the Ashes, a podcast where every episode ignites hope and healing.
[00:09] I'm your host, Valerie Hwang Beck, and I'm on a mission to help you embrace your unique potential and become the vibrant visionary you knew you were meant to be.
[00:28] Valerie Beck: Welcome back, everyone, to from me Ash's podcast. My name is Valerie Huang Beck. I am your vitality and vision mentor. And we're here today with Matt Miller.
[00:37] He is the owner of the bookstore Kitchen Lingo in Long Beach, California.
[00:42] I know that not only do you run a bookstore and you're talking to chefs and writers all over the world, but also you have had a very eclectic background, and I'm excited to dig deep into your story today.
[00:55] Matt Miller: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be on the show.
[00:58] Valerie Beck: Yeah. So give us a little bit of an idea of who you are, because I know you. You run nightclubs in Chicago that, like, you're in really, really into food. But I know that you have had a.
[01:07] Like, a path getting to where you are today.
[01:10] Matt Miller: Yeah, a path. A path is definitely one way to say it.
[01:14] Yeah. I mean, nightclubs in Chicago. And we're talking like, 30 years ago. I was a kid. What kid didn't do things like that? You know, I.
[01:24] I went to school for film, and with.
[01:26] With a degree in film,
[01:27] you can pretty much work in any bar in any city in the country.
[01:32] So that's kind of how I. Well, I mean, it's actually a little bit more than that. I started working.
[01:37] Do you want that whole story?
[01:38] Valerie Beck: Yeah. Okay.
[01:39] Matt Miller: Because that's a really interesting story.
[01:40] Valerie Beck: Is that your origin story?
[01:42] Matt Miller: That's one of them.
[01:43] Valerie Beck: Okay.
[01:43] Matt Miller: There are. I mean, there are a lot of origin stories. I think that. I think that figuring out who you are and what you want to do is.
[01:51] There are two paths to that. There's the go to school, graduate, go to school, graduate,
[01:58] go to school, graduate, take on a career, and then that's what you do.
[02:03] Anything from a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, somebody doing something in politics,
[02:09] or you're somebody who got out of college, got a job, and working at a company in a cubicle, and that's what you do.
[02:15] There are people who are risk takers and people who aren't. And there are people who are better at following rules versus folks who just sort of wing it and figuring out, figure it out as they go.
[02:27] And I've always been a figure it out as they go type of person.
[02:31] So the nightclub origin story was it goes back to the early 90s, actually,
[02:39] that's how old I am.
[02:41] It goes back to the early 90s when I was off at college and when I left, when I graduated high school and left, all my friends were really into hanging out in the park.
[02:52] And after my first year in college,
[02:54] everyone went, graduated from hanging out in a park to hanging out in a nightclub.
[02:58] And I came home and we all did our usual old thing like when, when you graduate high school and you meet your friends and you do the same old thing that you always did when you were in high school.
[03:08] And they went, great, this is boring, let's go and go and drive to this nightclub. So we went to this nightclub. I, I grew up, I grew up in Chicago.
[03:16] Valerie Beck: Yeah.
[03:16] Matt Miller: So we went to this nightclub in Chicago and I have always looked like I'm looked much younger than I really am. And at the ripe old age of, I don't know, 19, I looked like I was 12.
[03:29] So we got to this nightclub and three of my friends were of age and a bunch of the girls we hung out with weren't of age, but they wore very skippy clothes, so that made them of age, I guess.
[03:41] The girls got in, the guys got in. They took one look at me and said, nope. They said, well, they didn't say, he's with us. They just went by Matt and left me standing outside of this nightclub.
[03:54] So I decided, well, to hell with you guys, I'm gonna go get a job in my own nightclub. I'm not gonna let you in.
[03:59] And that's pretty much what I did. I, I went out and I knocked on doors and it took months and finally I got someplace and some nightclub that was going out of business to give me a job.
[04:11] I was bar bagging and day crew, which meant I cleaned up, I cleaned the club during the day and dragged garbage and liquor around all, all night. And it wasn't a very busy place.
[04:22] But then somebody took pity on me because I was so energetic that they got me a job in this new place, this new bar that had just opened.
[04:29] And it was the talk of the town in this person that got me the job was the girlfriend of one of the bartenders that, that I worked for in this nightclub.
[04:38] So I wound up working in this really, really popular bar and making way too much money as a 19, 20 year old.
[04:46] And then naturally when I turned 21, I was automatically a bartender and making even more money and had no idea that that was like such a unique situation to be in.
[04:57] The thing was, I was never really into drugs. I was know in that whole world,
[05:01] you. There's.
[05:02] There's the. The bar scene where everybody's kind of a drunk, and then there's the club scene where everybody's on. Everybody's really into something. It's a. Like a.
[05:10] I guess back then it was meth wasn't huge. Coke was in. Was huge. Of course, I was just. Wasn't in. I wasn't into drugs. I wasn't into going out and partying like that.
[05:19] I was more interested in the business end of it and understanding how that happened.
[05:25] So,
[05:26] you know, the. The nightclub that I had gotten a job in, I remember standing behind a bar after hours. The place was closed. And the manager goes here, standing behind the bar and give them whatever they want.
[05:35] And this girl says, I'll have a Courvoisier. And I looked at the guy, the manager, I said, I don't know how to make that. He goes, you don't make it.
[05:40] You pour it. I said,
[05:42] I don't know what that means. And he goes, pulls out a bottle of Courage cognac and shows me how you pour it into a snifter. And the way you tilt the snifter down and that's how you measure it.
[05:51] And.
[05:52] And four years later, fast forward. I wound up being the manager of a nightclub downtown,
[05:58] working for a gangster.
[06:02] So the nightclub was a really interesting situation. It was this. This.
[06:08] Anybody who's seen, like,
[06:11] Sopranos,
[06:12] it was this. It was a nightclub owned by a wise guy, a guy who was part of a crew, and he was connected to all these other guys. And there was just this sort of place.
[06:23] I got a job working there behind the bar. And the owner, the. The owner.
[06:28] Actually, this is a very much longer story than I thought because it's got multiple angles. Cause I. I was also an actor at the time.
[06:36] The only bartender in Chicago who was acting on the side for extra money and not the other way around.
[06:41] Working for an organization called Tony and Tina's Wedding, which was a dinner theater.
[06:46] And the dinner theater was also run by.
[06:49] By the mob.
[06:50] Valerie Beck: Interesting.
[06:51] Matt Miller: Yeah, So I was connected to that whole organized crime world as like an outsider.
[06:58] Valerie Beck: And this is because you. You found the nightclub scene very early.
[07:03] Matt Miller: And it was just. It just sort of happened. Yeah, it just sort of happened. Oh. So the thing was,
[07:08] the bar that I got a job in when I was 20, after the nightclub with a girl took pity on me and said, I'll get you a job here.
[07:15] I think I started working at the really popular bar. One of the girls who bartended there started dating this guy and the guy was connected.
[07:26] And then he started producing this show, Tony and Tina's Wedding in Chicago in the 90s, which was enormous. It was a very big deal. It was a franchise from a show in New York.
[07:36] And everybody who bartended in Chicago knew this gig because it was. You made staggering amounts of money. You were in at 5 o' clock, out at 10 o' clock, and it was, you know, you didn't have to work all night long.
[07:48] It was just an easy, easy gig. So everybody in the city wanted it. And this guy who was the executive producer whose family ran it, and I mean that literally and figuratively wanted me there because he wanted somebody that he could trust to get to watch the money.
[08:06] So I was plugged in as a, as a money watcher, basically as a bartender working with a guy who is the bar manager who worked for the Air Quote Investor.
[08:15] The investor was.
[08:16] It's a whole different story.
[08:18] But the, the guy, the bar manager was there to watch the money, the money on the investor side because there was so much cash going through the bar because it was basically kind of a money laundering operation.
[08:30] And I became really good friends with the bar manager who vouched for me to his guy who was the backer.
[08:38] So I was connected to that whole world, kind of.
[08:41] It's sort of like in the. There was a movie, Donnie Brosco, where he gets involved with this organized crime crew by being introduced as a friend of ours. And it was sort of like that.
[08:53] It was like, yeah, yeah, he's, he's a friend of mine. He's a good kid. Because I was like 21 at this point.
[08:58] Valerie Beck: Yeah.
[08:59] Matt Miller: So I started working,
[09:00] doing that.
[09:01] I left doing that,
[09:03] started working at a nightclub.
[09:05] And the owner there, well, actually I sort of bridged over. And the owner, this old guy there, kept going behind the bar and looking at my register and I couldn't understand what that was.
[09:14] So I went to the bar manager at this dinner theater and I said, yeah, I'm working at this nightclub and you know, my off nights, and this old guy keeps, keeps walking behind the bar and watching me and he goes behind the bar and he keeps checking my register.
[09:23] The guy, the bar manager that I was friends says, oh yeah, that was the owner. All that.
[09:28] That's the only reason somebody would do that. He was watching you because you're not like everybody else.
[09:33] So,
[09:34] so.
[09:36] And that's exactly what was happening. This guy who owned this nightclub,
[09:40] Mike just. Mike He. He had been watching, watching me, and realized that I wasn't hanging out with other people. And I. I just focused on tending bar, and I had ideas of things and all kinds of things I would talk about.
[09:54] And one day he says to me, look, I want you to. I have a meeting with this person. I want you to sit in.
[10:00] So I went into the nightclub early and I had a meeting with these. This promotion crew. And we shot some ideas around. And the general manager of the bar came in and saw me sitting there, not her.
[10:10] And then he fired her and gave me her job, which I kind of didn't intend to happen, but I think it was the fact that I was clean.
[10:19] And the bar went through a couple of interesting changes while I was doing that, working there full time.
[10:25] And he wound up getting involved in sort of a.
[10:29] A forced partnership, I guess, with this Colombian crew. Okay,
[10:36] There were a lot of people, we were very macho, smoking cigars, and everybody had a gun. That's all I kind of remember about that. And it was.
[10:42] It was a really dangerous place to be, and I didn't like it very much. And I turned to the guy I was working for and I said, look,
[10:48] if you want me to stay, I'll stay, but I really don't want to work with these guys. I don't. I don't. I'm not comfortable here. And he goes, you know, he give me one of these.
[10:55] You know, you see the gangsters, they always pat each other on the face. You know, they give you a little slap. He gives me a couple slaps in the cheek.
[11:01] He goes, you're a good kid. Pinches my cheek and goes, I'll call you if I need you.
[11:05] And I. Off I went, and that was it.
[11:07] So I started working in a couple of other bars and doing a couple of other things. And same thing happened in these other places. I got laid off because everybody was really into staying up until 5 o' clock in the morning and doing.
[11:17] Doing blow all night. And I wasn't into that. I wanted to make my money and go home.
[11:22] So they fired me because I wasn't part of that clique.
[11:25] And they wanted somebody who was really more of the crew. And I got fired.
[11:30] And a day later, my phone rings and it's Mike. He goes, hey,
[11:35] what are you doing? And I said, nothing. I just lost my job, looking for work. He goes, good, you're hired. I'm opening the club back up. I got a new, new partner.
[11:43] He's a recording artist.
[11:45] And, you know, I want you to come in. I said, you want me to. Oh, you got a bartending shift? He goes, no, I want you to run the place.
[11:49] So said, oh, okay.
[11:51] So I went down and I met his, his business partner, who at the time was sort of a.
[11:56] He had won a Grammy as best new,
[11:59] like best new artist Grammy that year was sort of a big deal.
[12:03] And had a couple of singles, I think.
[12:06] Met him, met a bunch of the socialite people that were kind of flocking around him because he had groupies and followers and met his musical director.
[12:16] We started.
[12:17] He says, okay, well, you know, you're, you're in charge. How are we going to open this place?
[12:21] So I came up with an idea to open it. I hired a, a couple of limousines to drive around the block, and I hired a bunch of people to stand outside and take pictures.
[12:30] And then the staff would just get in situ limousine drive around, get out and cover their heads and walk in. Because we had, we staged this as the, the private opening.
[12:40] Yeah. And then they change clothes and go out the back and the limo would pick them up and they'd come and do it again. We just had them looping the,
[12:46] the block while I was in, in the, in the nightclub with this guy who was. Actually became a pretty well known artist painting bathrooms.
[12:56] And it turned and it worked and it became sort of the talk of the town. And the place is still open today, actually.
[13:01] It was like going on 30 years now. But my job was to run the nightclub and to pay off all the gangsters that came in, because you had to pay,
[13:10] you had to pay the loan off and then you had to pay the vig. So it was like two different payments every month. Okay, yeah, we can edit all this out.
[13:20] But I, I wound up having to make a decision about what I wanted to do because I didn't really want to be in the nightclub business.
[13:26] Valerie Beck: Yeah.
[13:27] Matt Miller: Oh, did I mention that I own my own nightclub at some point? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So that. There's that too, But I didn't really want to be in that business. I wanted to be in the food world.
[13:35] I just sort of landed in the nightclub world. It wasn't intentional.
[13:40] Valerie Beck: Well, how so?
[13:41] You know, because. Because I know you as the food guy, but then there's the nightclub guy. How did you get into the food? Was that always there?
[13:48] Matt Miller: Yeah, it was. Well, there was always an interest and it wasn't like it is today, where culinary school is something you go to, you do because you want to be on.
[13:57] You want to be the next celebrity chef. You back then,
[14:01] cooking, working in a kitchen and cooking was. It wasn't a glamorous job.
[14:06] There are people who were cooks, and they were, you know, they were always cool, and they were. Yeah, but it wasn't. It wasn't something that people, you know,
[14:14] set out to do.
[14:15] There weren't cooking shows. There were stand and stir cooking shows,
[14:19] but, you know, like. Like the Julia Child, the Frugal Gourmet, that sort of thing.
[14:24] But there weren't cooking competition shows like Top Chef or documentary shows like A Chef's Table. There's nothing like that. So if you were lost and you didn't know what to do with your life at that time,
[14:37] you had two choices. You either got a real estate license or you went to culinary school.
[14:41] At least that's what was offered to me. But going to culinary school wasn't necessarily a glamorous thing you did.
[14:48] So I just kept doing what I was doing,
[14:51] running a nightclub, opened up my own place with a couple of people,
[14:55] and.
[14:56] And then after that fizzled out, I wound up managing a couple of other people's places again,
[15:03] and then wound up in a situation where I was in a car in a. In an old Bronco in the middle of the night that didn't have any license plates and had plastic on the seats.
[15:14] And I had a guy who I knew had been in prison, who was in jail for racketeering,
[15:20] which is very broad, but I. I knew what he really did. And he. He had met me outside of a nightclub that I was working in,
[15:27] told me to get in the car and wanted to drive me home,
[15:30] which was weird. And he wanted me to. To open a nightclub for him, but it was going to be all in my name. You wanted to make sure I had a clean Social Security number, and I'd never been arrested,
[15:40] and I had already been fingerprinted because in order to be in the liquor world, you had to be fingerprinted. So I was completely clean, and he trusted me. So he wanted me to launder money for him and open up a bar in my name, but he was going to launder the money through me to do it.
[15:53] And it. I just got the willies so bad. There was something terrifying about being in this car and the energy, and it was absolutely crazy.
[16:02] So I said, no, I'm. I'm.
[16:04] I'm getting. I need to get out. I.
[16:07] I'm getting out of the nightclub business. I'm not doing this anymore. He says, what are you going to do? And I said, I'm. I'm going to write a magazine in town.
[16:13] I want to do. I'm going to write about, you know,
[16:16] food writing.
[16:17] I'm going to start writing. I'm going to be a journalist. And he goes. He goes, yeah, I don't believe that. And I said, yeah, well, you know, that's what I'm going to do.
[16:23] And he goes, all right, I'll be. I'll be watching.
[16:25] And he. I. Tom talked him into letting me out of the car, and he let me out of the car.
[16:29] Off I went. And two days later, or, you know, a couple weeks later, I was writing a little. Little news columns for a. For a.
[16:37] An independent newspaper.
[16:38] And that's sort of how that transition happened. It was a fork in the road where I was definitely scared in one direction over another. Yeah. Years later, I found out through his brother's memoir that he was actually on a killing spree that night and was whacking guys that he thought had turned him into the FBI,
[16:55] huh?
[16:56] Yeah. So really scared.
[16:58] I mean, hindsight, I was. I was very young and very stupid and naive in every case in all this. It's not like.
[17:06] It's not like all those.
[17:08] That era of my life, working in nightlife.
[17:10] I was smart, and it's not like I was one of those people that knew what they were doing all the time. I was faking it the entire time. And I was so,
[17:19] so naive that I had no idea how much danger I was in all the time. Yeah, I was just stupid.
[17:25] But then I got out of it and I started getting. That's when I got into journalism for a short time.
[17:30] So I was writing for the Chicago Reader and another publication called New City. These were like, you don't. We don't have them anymore. And every city used to have independent publications, independent newspapers, and it was a great place to get started if you didn't really know what you were doing.
[17:45] And that was me through my entire life.
[17:48] So from there, I got a job.
[17:50] What I ended up doing,
[17:51] I don't know. Oh. And in that. In that spell, I was a cook for a while.
[17:55] I was a line cook for a while also. Yeah.
[17:57] Valerie Beck: So what did. So did you just, like, walk into these places and ask for a job?
[18:01] Matt Miller: I've never been afraid of asking for work.
[18:04] Valerie Beck: Okay.
[18:04] Matt Miller: I've never been afraid of admitting I don't want to do anything.
[18:07] And I've never been afraid of learning. And I think that a lot of people are afraid to learn. They're. Because they feel like if they don't already know something,
[18:14] then they're a step behind.
[18:17] A lot of people think you have to go to school to learn how to do something.
[18:20] And what I realized by watching all of my friends go off to college and get these degrees and things they didn't really care about because it was expected of them that,
[18:28] that they were learning things. They were learning how to do things in books, that I was learning how to do things in reality. Yeah,
[18:35] I think it started with my first job. Actually, I think the very first job I ever had right out of high school,
[18:40] I got by accident because I was very, very shy.
[18:44] You know, the other thing is, I was not.
[18:46] I was not particularly cunning and I was not particularly outgoing. I've always been very, very shy and awkward. Very socially awkward.
[18:55] I guess we'll jump back.
[18:57] Pause.
[18:59] When I graduated high school, my father told me, go out and get a job. He wasn't going to support me for the summer.
[19:04] So I walked around looking for a job.
[19:06] And anytime I walked into a place, somebody would say, what do you want? And I'd say,
[19:10] job.
[19:11] And they'd give me an application. That was it. I had a hard time speaking in front of people.
[19:16] And while I was looking for a job, I. I happened across a traveling circus that was in a parking lot in McCormick Place, the convention center in Chicago. And I wandered into the backlot,
[19:27] wandered around, wandered into the big top. Nobody seemed to be around. And somebody finally saw me and said, who are you? What do you want? What are you doing here?
[19:35] And I was terrified. So I said, job.
[19:37] And he goes, come on.
[19:39] Took me into an office, into a trailer that was a makeshift office.
[19:42] And they said, what do you want? And I said, a job. And they gave me a little application to fill out. So I filled it out because I didn't want to be rude.
[19:49] Give it back to her. And the lady goes, great.
[19:52] Be here on Tuesday at 4:00. We've got loadout. We're jumping.
[19:56] What does that mean? She goes, you'll understand. Bring extra underwear. And that was kind of it. So the next thing I knew, I joined the circus and was traveling from Chicago to Brewster, New York,
[20:05] and then spent the rest of the summer touring with the Big Apple Circus.
[20:09] Valerie Beck: Wow.
[20:09] Matt Miller: Out of New York.
[20:11] So. So, yeah, walking into places and just getting a job and figuring it out as I go has kind of always been what I've done. You know, from the circus to nightclubs, to owning my own nightclub, to becoming a journal, a makeshift journalist.
[20:23] I was never a journalist. I just wrote for an independent publication.
[20:28] And then.
[20:29] And then getting into restaurants?
[20:32] Yeah,
[20:33] because I. I loved restaurants. I had cooked for a while. I'd served a little bit, hated serving.
[20:38] I had managed places. And I came up with this idea for a restaurant. And sort of in the heat of the moment, while I was working in the open outcry, trading pits.
[20:46] You ever see Ferris Bueller's Day off where the guys are screaming and they open out cry pits and they're waving their hands and everything? So I worked down there before it was computerized for a guy I knew who was a trader.
[20:57] And one day we were talking about.
[21:01] I said I was gonna go and open something and I was gonna get a job and make a little bit of money and open this cafe.
[21:05] Cause I wanted to open a coffee house. And.
[21:08] And he goes, oh, well, that's great. Why don't you let me back you? I said, oh, okay, sure.
[21:13] There's more to it than that, obviously, but.
[21:16] And I found a location I really liked, and it couldn't be a coffee house. Cause it had already been a really well known coffee house. So I came up with a concept and ran with it.
[21:25] Because I figured you don't really need to know what you're doing, you just need to know what you want to do and you learn it all as you go.
[21:31] And that's what I did.
[21:32] So I taught myself the restaurant business in a crash course.
[21:36] And that year we were named one of the best restaurants of the year.
[21:39] Valerie Beck: Wow.
[21:40] Matt Miller: And we got four forks in the Chicago Tribune in one of the best restaurants of the year in Chicago Magazine.
[21:46] My original chef took all my recipe ideas and went on Top Chef and made them.
[21:52] It was. Yeah, it was fun.
[21:54] Sorry, I told you I can ramble.
[21:56] Valerie Beck: No, this is great.
[21:57] Matt Miller: Lots of stories. Lots of. Lots of reinvention stories.
[22:00] Valerie Beck: Well, it's. It's really incredible. I mean, the circus story in practice, particularly incredible because, like, I feel like whenever I go to the circus and watch things, I'm like, they must have done so many years of training to do some of the stuff.
[22:12] But, like, sometimes it's just about walking.
[22:14] Matt Miller: In,
[22:15] and sometimes it's not about being fearless. It's about being too afraid to say no. Mm.
[22:21] Yeah. And. And what I found is that, you know, I. I don't have the education I wish I had.
[22:28] I don't have the stability I wish I had. But I certainly have the experiences.
[22:32] And, you know, at the end of the day, I. I wonder what I would. What I would regret more.
[22:37] Having one solid job, my entire life,
[22:40] and only packaged vacations to remember or all of these different stories to sit down and tell about the time.
[22:49] The time I. I was wandering through the Berkshires at 18 trying to get a tattoo, but wound up meeting a barefoot girl on the street who is selling wires wrapped around a pencil and, and calling them earrings.
[22:59] And that's how I pierced my ear for the first time with. With a buddy. Because we were trying to get tattoos. Yeah. We were 19. That was cool. Then it was, you know, these.
[23:08] You don't have those kinds of memories if you spend your life staring at a cubicle.
[23:12] Valerie Beck: Absolutely. Yeah.
[23:14] So I want to ask you, because, you know, when you tell a story like this, it sounds sometimes like it's easy. And I know that.
[23:21] Not necessarily.
[23:22] So I want to ask you about any time in your life where it really got difficult, where you really did have to recreate yourself and, like, build yourself back up.
[23:30] Whether that was like a, you know, a challenge that was with the, with, with the external world or maybe within yourself.
[23:37] Matt Miller: I think it's always both.
[23:39] Yeah. You don't.
[23:40] At least, in my opinion, you don't.
[23:43] You don't find yourself in a situation where you have to reinvent yourself because of something that's happening internally. It's partially internal because of insecurity, and it's partially external because of people who are intensifying your insecurities.
[23:56] And one particular way,
[24:00] I have lots of. In particular. So there are lots of times I've, I've,
[24:04] I've done that.
[24:05] Valerie Beck: Yeah.
[24:06] Matt Miller: Yeah.
[24:06] Valerie Beck: What stands out to you?
[24:08] Matt Miller: You know, let's back up.
[24:10] So when I moved to.
[24:13] When I moved to Long Beach,
[24:15] I was working at Whole Foods in Torrance, and I was working at Whole Foods and Torrance because I got a job at a Whole Foods in Chicago intentionally so I could move to California because I knew I wouldn't be able to rent an apartment unless I had a job.
[24:28] And I was working at a Whole Foods in Chicago because I had met a kid who had gotten a job there while I was working at a bakery and learning to bake in Chicago.
[24:38] And basically it was like a bakery and a sandwich place.
[24:42] Now I was working there wearing a paper hat because I had lost my restaurant when the economy crashed in 2008, 2009.
[24:51] And I was doing that because I had been. I had been surfing and doing yoga on the beach in San Diego for two years.
[24:59] I had sold out of my restaurant company in Chicago, which had three restaurants,
[25:03] 150 employees, and was serving 17,000 people a month.
[25:07] I had a nervous breakdown because of constantly having to Put it back together.
[25:12] Because I was constantly being put in a position where I had to decide whether I wanted to be nice or be a business person. And it turned out I wasn't a very mean business person, which was detrimental to me.
[25:24] I didn't know how to draw a line between wanting,
[25:27] caring about what Bill thought of me.
[25:29] And that goes back to my first restaurant. But always having conflict and then rebuild. Conflict and then rebuild. And it was always trying to.
[25:37] I was so proud of what I created because I love the restaurant business.
[25:41] If you could. If. If I could be in the restaurant business and not have to deal with cooks,
[25:47] servers, or customers, I could be very happy.
[25:50] My. Like, those are the three things that I hate most about it.
[25:53] And. But everything else I loved.
[25:56] But I. I was living in San Diego after I sold my restaurant company to my business partner for not an awful lot of money. Like I said, I. I'd had a nervous breakdown.
[26:05] I just wanted to go. I wanted to get out because somebody had put me in one of those positions where I had to reinvent myself.
[26:13] I had a large restaurant company. I had a director of operations and turned down. My director of operations had been robbing me blind in giving me false numbers every month.
[26:22] When with reports.
[26:23] And I went to sleep one day with a net worth of 1.7 million and I woke up $600,000 in debt.
[26:33] It was just poof, Just like that. All of a sudden, the house of cards crumbled and eviction notices for restaurants were being served to me by the sheriff's department. Power was being shut off because every time I would write a check that I.
[26:47] I would sign a check, the check would get dropped into a drawer that would get locked and cash would disappear.
[26:53] I had an accountant who was talking to the director of operations and everybody seemed baffled.
[27:01] All the money had vanished. And then I caught the guy and discovered that the only way to save my business,
[27:09] not my business, but to save all these people who worked for me,
[27:12] was to sell the shares of the company because it was quite valuable.
[27:16] And I didn't think it was right to sell my investor shares because he didn't have anything to do with this big mistake. It was all me taking my.
[27:24] Following everybody's instructions. Everybody kept telling me I couldn't be.
[27:28] I had to listen to the people and I had to trust people to do the jobs that I hired them to do. Not micromanage everybody, because I'm a very big micromanager.
[27:38] I wanted everything my way,
[27:40] specifically so I could know what was going on.
[27:43] I Trusted everybody and got burned really bad.
[27:47] And I thought, well, since my val, my shares are worth a lot.
[27:51] I'm gonna sell. I'm gonna sell my controlling shares and I might as well sell all of them. So I sold my controlling shares to patch the financial hole in the company.
[27:59] And then with what was left, I just sold him my business partner and sit here because he was an investor, he didn't care about it. It was a widget to him.
[28:05] And I sold it all. I sold the rest of him for not a whole lot of money. It's just enough money to pack my car and moved to California.
[28:12] So after a couple years of surfing and doing yoga and considering being a yoga instructor and loving my life of doing nothing but just doing nothing and loving it,
[28:22] a chef called me and said, hey, I. I want to open a restaurant. I've got a backer and I want you to be my partner.
[28:28] I didn't have anything going on. I was broke.
[28:31] So I called up my old business partner and said, hey, yeah, I'm going to be coming back to town. This chef called me.
[28:36] Yeah, he wants me to be his partner. So I just want to let you know I'm coming back and, you know, maybe we can get together because we were still friends.
[28:42] And he goes, oh, you're coming back to open a restaurant? I said, yeah. He says, well, you know that one location we have in Bucktown, which is a neighborhood on the west side of the city?
[28:50] He says, you know, I sold that. But then they dropped. They defaulted on their payment. So I took it back. Now it's sitting empty.
[28:56] The insurance, there's insurance on it. There's all kinds of insurance liabilities. And just by. And your name is still on it. Your name is still in the liquor license, the lease, it's all yours, technically.
[29:05] Why don't you just take it back?
[29:07] So I did,
[29:08] and I didn't want it.
[29:10] I had concepted a new restaurant on my drive from San Diego to Chicago. It was brilliant.
[29:16] I got there and we started doing market research. And the chef turns to me and says, this is as good a time as any to tell you I've taken another job and I had to reinvent right there and figure out what I was going to do next and change the concept into something I could do by myself.
[29:31] So here I was in a city I didn't want to be in, in a career I didn't want to have,
[29:35] a restaurant I didn't want to own,
[29:37] running a business I wasn't crazy about that wasn't Very creative or interesting.
[29:42] And. And then the economy crashed a year later. You know, it was doing great. It did gangbusters business. And then the economy crashed and everything stopped.
[29:51] So I wound up having to sell it for all the debt that I had and then took a job at a bakery which taught me to bake and taught me all that stuff.
[30:01] And. And then that took me to Whole Foods, which took me to California, which where I started focusing on wine and got really interested since I was so close to wine country that I wanted to understand more about it, the science behind it from Whole Foods,
[30:18] started running a wine store, in managing a wine store in Venice beach where I was the buyer there.
[30:24] And I started, people said, hey, you want to take this exam? Because I was self taught.
[30:29] They'd say,
[30:30] here, here's the SOMLA test. We're offering it here, we'll pay for you. So I go and I get certified as a sommelier. And then they say, oh, here, this is the CSW test.
[30:39] We're offering this. And oh great, I'll go and take that. So I got certified csw and then, oh, we're doing the W set series. You want to go and go for the diploma program and the W sets and.
[30:49] Yeah, sure, why not? So I go and I take all those tests and get WSET certified. So I've got like three wine certifications.
[30:55] But my interest wasn't in having a curly mustache and standing next to a table and selling a bottle of wine. It was understanding what was actually happening. And all this, all the chemistry and the history of it.
[31:05] The history is fascinating about wine.
[31:08] That actually is how I met Bescher Riddell,
[31:11] who was the restaurant critic after Jonathan Gold left LA Weekly and went to the LA Times National. Riddell came as the restaurant critic in Jonathan Gold's place and was doing an article called Three Bottles One Shop, where she would go into a wine shop and they would get introduced to three different bottles.
[31:30] And I geeked out on them of course, and said, here, this is this, and this is this, and this is this, and this is why this is so cool. This is why this is so cool.
[31:38] And this is why this is so cool. And she looks at me and says,
[31:41] there's no way I'm ever going to remember that. You have to email me. So I emailed her all that information and when her article came out, it was, met Matt Miller at the shop.
[31:49] Here's what he had to say, quote my email to her, end quote.
[31:52] And then after that, and that's how I ended up having a column in LA Weekly,
[31:56] so writing. Writing a wine column for like a year and a half.
[31:59] But the thing was,
[32:01] the wine store was the absolute.
[32:04] I worked for the. Probably the worst person I'd ever met in my life.
[32:08] I've never met anybody who hated so many people so passionately.
[32:13] He hated women, he hated people of color. He choose. He hated everybody. He hated anybody that worked for them because if they worked for. For him and they weren't, they weren't smart enough to do anything on their own.
[32:26] He hated everybody. He was the meanest, nastiest person I've ever met. But I got paid really well and I had a, you know, and that was. And I had a column tied to my being there.
[32:36] And then after a while, I decided that being happy was much more important than making enough, making good money and being miserable.
[32:44] So I decided it was time for reinvention because I was put in a position where I had. He wanted me to sign.
[32:51] Sign a contract saying I would never sue him because somebody had just sued him for creating a hostile work environment and won.
[32:59] And rather than doing that, I decided to just quit and start a new life. So I. So I taught myself to become a coffee roaster and,
[33:08] and got really interested in coffee and how it's connected to agriculture and how it's connected to fermentation and how it's connected to.
[33:17] It's similar to winemaking in that a winemaker makes. No two winemakers are going to make the same wine from the same vineyard from the same grapes because they're going to make slightly different decisions at slightly different times, and that's going to affect the overall taste.
[33:29] With a coffee roaster who's not using computerized software, it's the same thing. They're gonna. Their ambient temperature, their elevation, the humidity,
[33:38] their drum humidity, their drum temperature, everything, how hot it is, how cool it is, airflow, all these little things are gonna make a difference in the flavor of coffee.
[33:47] So naturally, there was another rabbit hole to fall down too. So I started getting into understanding every coffee roastery within 50 miles and got a.
[33:57] Got a little bit of money together and bought a coffee small coffee roaster and launched a coffee coffee company that did really, really well.
[34:06] And I got it to the point where I was super happy with it, but I was. I couldn't take it any farther. I had taken it as far as I wanted to go because I didn't want to open a coffee house and I didn't have the money to go national and get a seat at that at that table.
[34:23] And I had. And I could see that. That some of my big accounts were about to start shift, shifting their financials. And I knew I was going to start losing a little bit of.
[34:31] A little bit of revenue.
[34:33] And I had all these people that were interested in buying it,
[34:35] so I took the opportunity to sell it while it was on top.
[34:39] And that was another one of those pivots that you just sort of. I remember sort of like being my last night roasting my coffee and my little roast, my little roastery and having those kind of tears in my eyes, being so sad that it was over.
[34:51] But it was like, you know, I made this decision,
[34:54] and you kind of have to figure out what next. So I sold it.
[34:58] Everything was gone. The new owner took over,
[35:00] and I stepped out and was like,
[35:03] what next?
[35:04] Valerie Beck: So you didn't know what you were going to do next before you let go of it?
[35:07] Matt Miller: Nope. Yeah, nope. I just started following all of my interests. Yeah. And I love reading about food.
[35:14] Not so much criticism. I must admit,
[35:16] I never really considered criticism. I mean, it's okay. But I think that I always felt that criticism was for me,
[35:23] certain people, not for me. I mean, Jonathan Gold wrote about places that were approachable at every price point. But a lot of people just write about really fancy, expensive places.
[35:30] Yeah. And that. But the idea of writing about, reading about a deep dive into how to build flavor, a deep dive into forging a deep dive into caviar, fig trees,
[35:45] milk, honey. I mean, that you can they. The history of restaurants,
[35:50] the history of restaurant culture, the history of criticism,
[35:55] memoirs, all these things about these people that made contributions.
[35:58] Suddenly I just couldn't. I obsessively read everything I could find.
[36:02] And I don't know, it just.
[36:06] It all kind of fell into place. I wanted to write about food. I'd always wanted to write about food. I always wanted to be involved in it.
[36:12] I guess a little backwards is. From the time I was a little kid, the only thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was a restaurateur.
[36:18] You know, some kids were really excited about athletes or music,
[36:23] movie stars. I was really. My hero was a guy named Rich Melman, who was a Chicago restaurateur.
[36:30] I was fascinated by. Always been fascinated by restaurants. That's why earlier when I said I never really wanted to work in nightclubs, I just ended up doing it.
[36:37] I always wanted to work in food. And so I took this opportunity to write about food a little bit.
[36:43] So I really enjoyed writing about wine up until the editor changed and I got a really bad editor and it stopped being fun because the editor was so terrible.
[36:52] So.
[36:53] Yeah,
[36:54] well,
[36:56] I'm sorry. I just realized I'm rambling on and you're nodding at me. No.
[37:00] Valerie Beck: Well, I'm listening. Because like you have a very, very rich story and actually your approach to life is really refreshing because there.
[37:06] I'm very used to people playing it safe.
[37:09] I'm very used to being around people who play it safe.
[37:12] And it's the norm. And it's the norm to tell. You know, I get a lot of advice from people who are like,
[37:18] you shouldn't quit your job before you have the next thing and blah, blah, blah, blah.
[37:23] Right. But it's the reality of the creating and if you have a paradigm of you're able to just make it happen,
[37:30] like that's very powerful.
[37:32] Matt Miller: Well,
[37:34] I think you have to.
[37:35] People are. With a think. I think the thing that most people are afraid of is failure.
[37:39] And,
[37:40] and that's the most important part of the experience.
[37:43] If you don't fail, then you don't know what it feels like to fail. Yeah. And, and not knowing that feeling, not knowing those consequences is what's really scary. It's the unknown.
[37:53] Yeah. All these, the story, this, this rambling, long winded story I've been telling as it zigzags. What I'm not saying is how many times I hit bottom. Yeah, I've made lots of money in my life.
[38:05] I've lost even more. I've had times where,
[38:09] where I,
[38:10] I was living, you know, all I could afford was 10 cents a day to, to eat, to eat ramen.
[38:16] Not even hot ramen because I couldn't make anything hot. Cause I had no electricity or hot water.
[38:20] You know, I, or, or you know, gas in my stove. I,
[38:24] I've hit bottom really hard several times.
[38:28] And what I realized is that you can only hit bottom so far before you bounce and you bounce back.
[38:33] But it's only if you want to keep going,
[38:36] you know, if you decide that you're going to give up after you bounce. Drugs play a big role in that. If you know that's,
[38:42] that's when you bounce. You don't bounce back or just getting completely emotionally drained and dry and you don't want to do it. You hit the bottom and you stay at the bottom.
[38:51] But if you really just constantly climbing and constantly hustling,
[38:55] you're going to hit the bottom a few times and,
[38:57] and then you're going to bounce back and, and hopefully you'll bounce back a little bit higher. Than the height you fell from.
[39:04] But. But failing is important because when you have a business or you have anything you're doing,
[39:09] you know what failure feels like. So even if a business is slow,
[39:13] you can see that it's not failing.
[39:15] Yeah. You know, there are. There are telltale signs of a real failure.
[39:20] Valerie Beck: How easy. Like,
[39:22] I think there is a point of pivot. Right. Where you know that it's not quite working how you want it to. And so you're going to radically change something.
[39:30] That pivot point.
[39:32] Have you trained yourself to know what that feels like, or was that something that you've always had?
[39:36] Matt Miller: I think you teach yourself that. Okay.
[39:39] I was never a good student.
[39:41] Never.
[39:42] I didn't find out until I got into college that I'm severely dyslexic.
[39:46] I actually see everything backwards.
[39:48] And I know now that I own a bookstore. That seems really funny. But.
[39:54] But I was always a bad student because of that. I don't learn the way that other people learn.
[39:59] And not having the ability to sit in a classroom and. And focus on what's actually happening, what a. What somebody's teaching. I couldn't appreciate school, especially younger, as a kid, high school, or even in college.
[40:13] I couldn't appreciate it because I need things in.
[40:15] I need to focus on one thing at a time and learn how to. I can learn everything about it,
[40:19] but I can't jump and I can't have a lot of stimuli around me.
[40:23] And I think being in that situation, I had to force my. I had to just. It's a survival thing. You have to.
[40:31] If you can't see letters the way that everyone else sees them, then you have to learn how you see them and read them,
[40:36] how to. You know,
[40:38] the time I was little, I didn't know my left from my right. People would say, it's easy. You just hold up your fingers. Fingers. The L is left.
[40:44] You know, you hold up your thumb and your first finger and you make an L. That's the left one. But they Both look like Ls to me,
[40:49] so it doesn't help me.
[40:52] But you sort of figure out little things.
[40:55] And I think that learning how to identify failure has to come from failure.
[41:02] And learning how to identify that moment when it's not working has to come from observation, and observation comes from the patients.
[41:10] To realize that you don't learn like other people or you learn. Everybody learns their own way. And identifying the way that you learn,
[41:19] you just have to sit back and watch some. Watch your own life happen.
[41:23] And that's when you realize It,
[41:25] My father once said to me that every decision that you make in the moment is the right decision.
[41:29] It's five years later that you look back and you figure out whether or not it was a good decision.
[41:34] And that's,
[41:37] I think about that all the time, you know, and that's.
[41:40] So when it comes like to, when it comes to my, my working in wine and realizing that this is not a good fit anymore and just taking a jump and going, yeah, that's,
[41:49] yeah, it's a calculated risk, but sometimes you just have to go for it because if you're miserable, you take it home to whoever you, to your partner and you're, if you're miserable all the time that somebody else has to sit there and witness you being miserable.
[42:01] With my coffee company,
[42:03] I could, I could see that I, I was making money, I was doing well.
[42:07] Some people wanted what I had.
[42:09] I, I could see that I, I played out all the, the factors and went, okay, this is the right thing to do. As sad as it is, this is the right decision right now.
[42:18] So I think this part of owning any business, I think restaurants, for restaurants, this is a really good example is you have to take yourself out of the equation.
[42:27] And most people, when they look at a life change,
[42:31] the life changes from their point of view. It's, they are, they're the,
[42:35] they're the part of the equation.
[42:37] And you can't have yourself as part of that equation because you're, you're the equals. You're at the end of it. You're not in the middle.
[42:45] Coffee.
[42:47] We'll say, I know this is scattered a little bit.
[42:51] I wanted to understand how to run a coffee company. So the first thing I did was I went out and I started buying coffee from all these different roasters within a 50 mile radius.
[42:59] And I started doing pop ups at farmers markets and selling everybody else's coffee as the middleman. That taught me margins on where I'm going to make my money.
[43:08] And I offered something that was a huge spectrum.
[43:10] And then I looked at the margins on green coffee and I walked around and realized that the only way I was going to actually go from doing okay to doing really well was to change my margins.
[43:23] And when I would, I would take long walks and I would think and I would carry a calculator, I never carried my phone, I'd always carry a calculator.
[43:30] And I would just run numbers in my head and use my calculator and come up with equations basically and just do it. Because everything's math. I mean, everything's math. And I would come up with all the equations on all my margins and.
[43:42] And where I was going to make money and how I was going to do that and how that could step off in different directions.
[43:49] And that's how I ended up making a decision.
[43:51] I took myself out of the equation. And I was saying, with restaurants, the biggest mistake people make is they have their ego involved.
[43:58] It's chef driven. This chef has incredible food. And you're going to want to eat this chef's food.
[44:04] That's the chef's name, the chef's part of the equation,
[44:07] which is fine for the chef, for the ego, but it's not great for the investor, the restaurateur,
[44:11] because the investor is the one who's going to have to pick up the pieces when the chef throws a tantrum or gets a better offer or goes on TV or whatever, because it's still a functioning business.
[44:22] Or you have your.
[44:23] Your grandmother's favorite, favorite pasta sauce recipe, and you want. You think everyone's gonna love that. So you come up with this idea based on your grandmother's recipes, and then you find a location and you retrofit your idea into this location.
[44:37] Well, now you've had. You've got your idea. Sorry, your ideas involved in that thought process.
[44:44] When you're. Nobody cares about. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody cares about your ideas. Nobody cares about your grandmother.
[44:51] It's a widget.
[44:52] It's what needs to be in this location at that time. And if you retrofit your idea and force it, you force that square peg into a round hole to fit in that location,
[45:01] then you wind up with just another restaurant that nobody really sees and nobody really cares about because you're spinning your wheels trying to get them to understand your grandmother's pasta sauce recipe.
[45:10] Nobody really cares. They just want your food to be really good.
[45:13] If you take yourself out of the equation and you find a great location and you look at that location,
[45:18] sort of like what I did when I wanted to open up a coffee house, but I found a location that couldn't be a coffee house because didn't make sense.
[45:24] I sat on a stoop across the street with a cup of coffee, and I stared at that location for hours,
[45:29] for weeks. I just stared at it, waiting for it to tell me what it needed to be.
[45:33] And that's how I came up with the concept that ended up being a winner.
[45:37] You take yourself out and you look at a location, and when you're changing your life and you're taking the next step,
[45:44] getting out of what you're doing and into something new that. That new proverbial chapter.
[45:49] The biggest. I think the biggest holdup most people have is they. They have to. Well,
[45:55] they have to take themselves. They put themselves in that equation.
[45:58] What they have to do is they have to fantasize themselves after the equation works and then work backwards and run the numbers and figure out whether. How those numbers make sense to make that equation work.
[46:09] And if you can prove the numbers, then you can prove the business,
[46:12] but you also have to not be a. Not be a part of that influence in the numbers.
[46:17] Valerie Beck: Yeah.
[46:18] Matt Miller: Is that making sense?
[46:19] Valerie Beck: It is making sense. I think as. As someone who recently started entrepreneurship,
[46:26] like,
[46:27] it's.
[46:28] It's have. It's actually having me think about and question a lot of what I'm doing because.
[46:34] Because of this whole, like, idea of, like, I think a lot of us do try to retrofit.
[46:39] It's like, I. I'm good at this thing, so I'm going to make this business, but it's not about what I'm good at, even.
[46:45] And something came up in my mind because I think at least what I'm hearing for myself is I need to keep trying and. And then see, like, just be honest of when it's not working,
[47:00] when I'm trying to provide a service to maybe a population that doesn't even need it or it can't. I can't, you know, or it just doesn't fit.
[47:09] So that's what I'm hearing from. From what you're saying to me.
[47:12] Yeah. So right now it's just like a lot of my wilderness as you're talking.
[47:16] Matt Miller: Yeah, I'm. I'm. I'm actually facing that here with, with this bookstore, with kitchen lingo. It's the idea is the. The name. It. It's about.
[47:25] It's about the words. It's about.
[47:27] It's about food as a language.
[47:28] It's about the discussion of food and the words that you use to discuss food.
[47:33] It focuses on cookbooks because when you say food writing, that's what people automatically jump to. They jump to cookbooks. They jump to restaurant criticism, I suppose.
[47:43] But the focus I really wanted to get into was the discussion.
[47:47] And what I'm finding here is that I'm. I'm critically successful,
[47:53] Financially successful. Yeah.
[47:55] Some months are good, some months aren't.
[47:58] And I have to constantly figure out, well, what's the missing piece?
[48:02] Like, is this the right city? Maybe. Maybe. I found.
[48:06] I had this idea that I wanted to do this. I found this Location.
[48:10] This whole concept had a completely different name and a completely different vibe when I was looking at a different location. But then I found this one and went this, that those don't make sense.
[48:19] Will what I want to do,
[48:21] will my bookstore work in this location? And I thought, yeah, an expensive location. But yeah, it, it worked.
[48:27] The numbers made sense at a certain point.
[48:30] And what I found is that there are a lot of people here that want to have this discussion about food,
[48:36] but nobody wants to do the talking.
[48:39] Everybody wants to be, everyone wants to say that they were,
[48:43] they were on the panel, but nobody wants to say that they actually said anything. Does that make sense? Yeah,
[48:48] I,
[48:49] I had Bessa Riddell here, the restaurant critic. She went on, I was talking about her earlier.
[48:54] She was at LA Weekly. She came from Atlanta. She went on to be a restaurant critic for the New York Times.
[48:59] She's a critic in Melbourne. She picks, she worked, she did the Food and Wine magazine, Best restaurant in the world. She would travel the world as an anonymous critic picking the best restaurants.
[49:09] And I had Bill Addison, the anonymous restaurant critic from the LA Times, come in to be in conversation with her.
[49:15] Every restaurant every year complains that they either dropped in ranking or weren't listed in the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles.
[49:23] And you never give me how you can ask the guy because he's anonymous for 1, 2. You'll never know if he's in your business because he's anonymous.
[49:32] I brought him here.
[49:34] I had two,
[49:35] actually three huge restaurant critics because the former restaurant critic of Los Angeles magazine was here also.
[49:43] I had this huge conversation, these two people talking about restaurant criticism. And I invited every restaurant in Long beach to come and sit. Send a representative. It's free. Just come and listen.
[49:54] This is your chance to ask that question.
[49:56] And when I found. And people came down from la,
[49:59] James Beard Award winning bakers and chefs and writers came down from la.
[50:05] People from restaurants came down from la.
[50:07] Nobody. Well, one person who does a pop up, but nobody who works in a restaurant in Long beach came.
[50:13] And that just,
[50:15] it sort of makes me get back to that drawing board and say, okay, well,
[50:19] is this the right place? Yeah, you know, I'm doing people, people who are involved in what I'm doing and are showing up, are appreciative and get it. But does the greater scope of this city understand what I'm trying to do?
[50:31] And if not,
[50:32] is it worth trying? Is it worth turning up the volume and screaming a little bit louder and trying to get them involved?
[50:39] Or is suit worth sitting back looking at those numbers again and saying, okay,
[50:45] what should I change?
[50:47] Should I go somewhere else?
[50:49] What's next? And if it's not this, then what?
[50:53] You know.
[50:54] Valerie Beck: Yeah. Which I have a lot of thoughts about,
[50:57] the Long beach thing, which I'll share with you later.
[51:00] I definitely see because, like, it's always an experiment, and it's always like you're trying to figure out so many different things, and it.
[51:07] It's really cool how you're able to kind of zoom out and see the patterns and, like, really be impartial about figuring it out,
[51:17] because I think what you said is, like, people get really attached to their ideas. I'm very guilty of that.
[51:23] So.
[51:24] Matt Miller: Well, it's fear. Yeah. It's not attachment. I mean, yeah, you're attached, but it's.
[51:29] Everybody wants to be the star of their own show.
[51:32] And the hard part is,
[51:34] is realizing that you're actually just in the audience because your show is for everybody else. Yeah.
[51:40] You know what. What's drawing them to you as an entity to you as. And. And if you're a. If you're a social media person, if you're an influencer,
[51:49] you're not showing you.
[51:50] You're showing a version of you that you want people to see, and that's what you're selling, because everybody's selling something.
[51:54] You're selling this image of yourself. You're selling an idea of what you can offer people, an idea of how you can guide people, an idea of the conversation you can get people to have.
[52:03] But you yourself aren't the star. You're just a version of yourself.
[52:07] You're actually in the audience watching it happen.
[52:10] And either you're enjoying what you're watching or you're not.
[52:14] Valerie Beck: Awesome.
[52:15] Well, this has been a very enlightening conversation,
[52:17] and I'm going to wrap it up, but perhaps for the last question or what we're going to leave people with, because we.
[52:24] Matt Miller: We.
[52:24] Valerie Beck: We went through, like, your entire story and we kind of got to how you got here.
[52:29] Let's wrap up that. That end, because I think you were. We were at Whole Foods.
[52:34] Matt Miller: Yeah. I'm sorry. I meandered quite a bit how I got to here. Yeah,
[52:41] I sold my coffee company and wasn't sure what to do next and saw an. And saw a call for a food. An article for a magazine looking for food writers to contribute.
[52:54] So I pitched an idea and the editor reached out and said, I love this idea. Can you do it by this deadline? I said, yeah, sure.
[53:01] Wasn't doing much,
[53:02] so I wrote it.
[53:03] Off it went and it was published in this magazine and then, and then I did it for another magazine and then another magazine and it was, it was fun.
[53:12] And then I started contributing to a very large magazine in the uk.
[53:17] I really, I was in enjoying the research, I was enjoying writing and finally felt like I was doing something because I loved writing this wine article years ago.
[53:26] My. One of my favorite things I've ever done. And. And this felt like that too because it was,
[53:30] it was leading the conversation. It wasn't reflecting it because that's all all food writing is now is reflective.
[53:37] This is the latest OG burrito wrapped in bacon, wrapped in cheese. This is the latest old OG restaurant that's been around for 50 years. And it doesn't say that it's good.
[53:47] It just says, you know, we like it because it's always been here. Yeah, it's always reflecting what's already happening. Nobody's. No. Nobody leads a discussion anymore. We don't have that type of food writing in our culture.
[53:57] We, I mean we do. It's just there aren't as many people doing it as there used to be. And I really love the idea of being able to explain something that I knew.
[54:07] And somebody suggested to me that I reach out to the Long Beach Post because they didn't have a food writer.
[54:13] So I did.
[54:14] And they said yeah, yeah, you want to contribute something? Great.
[54:18] So I did.
[54:20] They reached out and said,
[54:22] can you do another one? I said yeah. And I said well, I'd love to keep doing them. That'd be. This is a lot of fun.
[54:27] And then they gave me an editor and I said earlier when I had. I did the LA Weekly, I loved doing it until an editor got. Got hired on that ruined the experience for me.
[54:36] It was terrible.
[54:37] And started adding typos and changing facts and was embarrassing. And I had to ask her to take my name off of the article because everything was. I didn't want my name attached to it.
[54:45] It was so wrong. Factually wrong.
[54:48] So they same thing happened to the Long Beach Post I when they had the. The high low. The. The food culture. And I started contributing regularly and every time I'd send in an article that had no typos, I would see an article published with tons of typos with names.
[55:06] Changed that to the wrong names of the people I was talking to.
[55:09] It was just so frustrating.
[55:13] And then I had to deal with backlash of people who would see a post and then find a word that they didn't know and then they'd Google it and Jump on board and say, oh, this is terrible.
[55:22] You can't say that.
[55:23] If you understood what it was, you know, let's not talk about it. But there was no way to contact anybody.
[55:29] And then there was a local blogger who started attacking me,
[55:32] just ruthlessly attacking me from behind.
[55:35] Behind the curtain of social media that I couldn't access because I was blocked from it.
[55:40] And I couldn't say, hey, you know, this would be a great time to talk about these things.
[55:43] Why did you. Why did you say that? Why. Why would you think this? What would you have said differently? Yeah,
[55:48] but I got attacked, and then that person's online following started attacking me.
[55:54] So I had to get rid of my social media because I started getting trolled.
[55:57] So I stopped writing for the Long beach post and started writing for Eater,
[56:01] and that was great. And then the editor for Eater started reaching out to me saying, hey, we're gonna. There's this thing along. Which. Would you cover this for us? So I started writing regularly for Eater,
[56:11] and the same blogger started attacking me again.
[56:15] And it just. It stopped being fun,
[56:18] you know, between the Long beach editor giving me typos where there weren't typos. So I was getting chewed out, getting attacked for that,
[56:24] to doing something on a much larger scale and getting attacked for that. It just doesn't feel good to be made fun of or just trashed.
[56:35] So I was like, you know, I'm not going to do this anymore, but I want to stay in food. I want to keep writing, talking about food as a writing as a language and as a discussion.
[56:45] And then I got the idea for this and focusing on old antiquities, you know, like antique books, vintage books. The difference between being fifty and a hundred years old.
[56:57] Quirky little things, things that have moved the needle in the conversation.
[57:01] And that way I could have a place where people could come and there could be the conversation. There's a way to talk to people. One, if not in a. In a group, then one on one and say, oh, you like that?
[57:11] You'll like this. And if you like this, you'll like this. And then we can go back in time and follow that.
[57:16] And it gets people seeing food and seeing the discussion in a different way.
[57:21] So I found a low, found the location,
[57:24] and here we are.
[57:27] Yeah. And it's just been March, April,
[57:31] a little over two years now.
[57:33] Valerie Beck: Okay.
[57:33] Matt Miller: Yeah. And I absolutely love this place. This is. This is probably my favorite business I've opened. Wow. Yeah, this is probably my favorite. Yeah.
[57:41] Valerie Beck: Yeah. I remember when you first opened. It was very exciting for you to be here, it's like, oh, a cookbook store.
[57:48] Matt Miller: Well, food writing.
[57:50] Debbie Lancaster, a local chef. Local who's a. My God can do everything.
[57:56] She was a baker, she was a pasta maker, she was a cheesemaker, she was a butcher. She was. I mean, everything. And I. She was working as a professional baker.
[58:05] And I said, do you want to teach a class on how to shape? Because when I'm sure you've made sourdough before,
[58:11] the hardest part is actually getting that surface tension. Yeah. And I said, why don't you teach a class on how to build surface tension?
[58:16] And it turned out she was a natural teacher. So now she's been teaching regularly.
[58:21] We come up with all these ideas for classes for her to teach, and she's like a duck to water. And that's brought people in and brings more of a community in.
[58:28] You know, I've had a couple of big authors come and that brings people around. And yeah, I think the more people that get excited about little things,
[58:36] the more time, the more you can bring people together to talk about food,
[58:39] the bigger the conversation gets. And when you can bring people together around a specific topic,
[58:45] then it stops being reflective and starts being a real discussion. Yeah,
[58:50] yeah. We've got like, we did a butter.
[58:52] A cultured butter tasting where we. The idea was to just eat butter without shame and learn the difference between sweet cream butter that we have in this country and cultured butter that they have in Europe.
[59:02] Why they're different, both on a health level and a taste level.
[59:07] How they change, how they change during the year. Because, you know, spring versus fall,
[59:12] we're going to do a tin fish tasting on the 30th of this month.
[59:16] Yeah. So it's just getting people involved and having. Having that talk. And now I'm just trying to figure out how to make that conversation a little bit bigger to get more people involved and maybe get more people excited about being involved in and talking about and leading.
[59:31] Leading that discussion into specific directions, like leading it into tinned fish or into butter or into why you would.
[59:41] Into the nutritional value of.
[59:44] Of white processed flour versus.
[59:47] Versus heirloom wheat.
[59:49] Yeah.
[59:50] Valerie Beck: All very exciting.
[59:52] So if any listeners out there, if you are in Long beach,
[59:55] come check out Kitchen Lingo. It's on Retro Row and fourth street.
[01:00:01] And. Yeah. Thank you, Matt, for this amazing conversation.
[01:00:05] Matt Miller: Thanks for having me.
[01:00:09] Valerie Beck: Thanks for tuning in to from the Ashes. If this episode sparks something in you, I want you to know your evolution matters and we're rooting for you all the way for coaching community and resources to help you rise into your full potential.
[01:00:22] Visit intrepidwellness Life and check out what we have to offer.
[01:00:26] If you love the episode, please leave a comment, share it with a friend, or tag me on Instagram ntrapidwellness Val,
[01:00:33] because I'd love to hear what what resonated for you.
[01:00:36] Until next time, keep rising.
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