Tipping & Wages Series: Restauranteur's Dilemma of Balancing Equity and Economics with TJ Callahan

TJ Callahan transformed neighborhood eateries into thriving “go-to” destinations with his acclaimed farm-to-table restaurants in the heart of Chicago. He is the co-founder and owner of Farm Bar and is the farmer at Brown Dog Farm, the Farm Bar farm in Southwestern Wisconsin. With an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago under his belt, he's stirring the pot on a topic affecting thousands in the hospitality industry: eliminating the tipped wage. 

From the fields of his farm to the forefront of financial debate, we explore the pressing issue of fair wages in the hospitality sector. 

The “Distinguished” podcast is produced by Boston University School of Hospitality Administration.

Host: Arun Upneja, Dean
Producer: Mara Littman, Director of Corporate and Public Relations
Sound Engineer and Editor: Andrew Hallock
Graphic Design: Rachel Hamlin, Marketing Manager

Music: “Airport Lounge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Transcript

Arun: Welcome to Distinguished. Today, we are slicing into a topic that's sizzling on the grill of public debate. But first, let me introduce a guest whose story is as rich and layered as a fine dining experience. Imagine this, a young, ambitious spirit armed with nothing but a dream and a degree in hospitality management embarks on a journey through the bustling world of hospitality, only to find himself at the crossroads of technology and culinary excellence. This isn't just any tale of success, it's the story of TJ Callahan, a visionary who not only transformed neighborhood eateries into thriving go-to destinations while claiming five-star reviews, TJ stayed grounded in the principles of scratch cooking and fresh ingredients. He purchased a farm that breathes life into every dish served across his four acclaimed farm-to-table restaurants in the heart of Chicago. But TJ's appetite for innovation didn't stop at the kitchen counter. With an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago under his belt, he's stirring the pot on a topic that affects thousands in the hospitality industry, the campaign to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped employees. So as you settle in, prepare your palates for a conversation that intertwines the layers of economics, equity and the epicure and delight that defines TJ Callahan's journey. From the fields of his farm to the forefront of financial debate, we are about to explore the pressing issues of fair wages in the hospitality sector. I'm Arun Upneja, Dean of the Boston University School of Hospitality Administration. TJ, welcome to the Distinguished podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you with us today. 

TJ: I don't know who you were talking about, but whoever that guy is, I'd like to meet him. 

Arun: It's you. 

TJ: Well, thanks so much, Arun. I'm thrilled to be here. Your program has a warm spot in my heart, despite the fact I was not lucky enough to go to BU for hospitality, but my wife is a proud alumnus of the business school there, and I'm always happy to talk to you guys. 

Arun: Great. Now, if you didn't have that MBA, I would have said come here for a master's degree. So, your journey is nothing short of remarkable. From managing restaurants, food service, technology, economics, and then diving headfast into the world of gastronomy and finance, you've seen the restaurant industry from angles most can only imagine. So, before we sink our teeth into the meaty discussion of today's wage debate, could you share a bit about what drives your passion for the farm to table movement and how this philosophy is baked into the essence of your restaurants? 

TJ: Sure, Arun. So, why do we do what we do? Why do I go through all the incredible effort to plant, grow, nurture, harvest, haul, transport, and grow things on the farm and bring it to the restaurants? Well, there's a unique feeling of satisfaction to grow things at the farm and then bring them to the restaurant and see guests, enjoy them and see how much this resonates with them. If you think about what farm-to-table restaurants actually mean, really all restaurants are farm-to-table, right? At one point, the product was on a farm. In a lot of ways, it's kind of a throwback to what the restaurants were in the 1800s and the early 1900s before the massive multinational food manufacturing companies got involved. 

Arun: Very good. I just came back from a week in Paris and freshness and everything is just so good. Industrialization of food is a pet peeve of mine, but we'll dive into that in another day. Let's dive into our topic. Let's start with Chicago. As of July 1, 2023, the minimum wage in Chicago is $15.80 an hour. Tipped employees can be paid as low as $9.48 per hour. The catch is that employers must make up the difference if they earn less than the minimum wage. Last year, Chicago City Council passed a measure phasing out subminimum wages in five years. So just some overall thoughts from you on this issue. 

TJ: ok. So let's start from the 40,000 foot level tipping. So there's all kinds of research created by marvelous hospitality academics from programs like yours about tipping. You know, what its history is, it goes back to the days of slavery, and it goes back to the Pullman car porters. The research has proven that it's sexist, it's racist, it's lookist. I've also seen research that says that there's no correlation between tipping and the quality and caliber of the service provided. So there's many ethical things wrong or potentially wrong with tipping. On the other hand, the American restaurant industry has been structured around tipping as part of the financial structure which drives the industry and what the guests expects. So, you know, when people have heartburn around tipping, I understand the thoughts. On the other hand, you know, the restaurant industry is not a lucrative way to make a living unless you're a very lucky individual who has gotten lightning in the bottom. Your ability to make a ton of money as a restaurant entrepreneur and owner is fairly unlike, right? You guys know more than I, but the number of restaurants that make more than a few percentage points on the bottom line is a relatively small share of full-service restaurants. Now, there's part of the reason why fast food and quick service restaurants do as well as they do is because they're structured, and they have the benefits of big balance sheets and pricing power and all the rest of it. But for independent restaurants, for those neighborhood restaurants that make living in a city like Boston or Chicago special, very few of those places make a ton of money. I shared with you guys the actual performance of one of my restaurants. And the 2022 performance of a restaurant that did almost $2.2 million, I think was 1.5% was my bottom-line profitability. So this is not a lucrative way to make a living. And our restaurants are predicated on the fact that we're allowed to assume that our front of the house servers, bartenders, bussers are able to make a chunk of their income from gratuities or tips. In my restaurants, it's 75% of their take home compensation, roughly, is gratuities and tips. So even though I can understand the viewpoint around tipping, you know, from all those reasons we just covered, if I wasn't able to take advantage of the tip credit law, then I'm deeply in the red at that point. So that's why we do what we've done. Why don't I stop there and let you? 

Arun: Right. Yeah. So that's, you've said so many different things and we'll unpack them one by one. But just one thing that I did want to start off by saying that this measure is putting all tipped employees in one category. So a server working at a diner and a server working in an expensive high-end restaurant, they are facing two different situations, but this is going to force everyone onto that minimum wage. I suspect that a server working in a diner with low average check is going to benefit with this extra income. But if you force a server in a high-end restaurant, because there's another thing associated with it, which is to be pulling and across with the back of the house staff as well. So that's going to hurt the servers in the high-end restaurants. Do you agree? 

TJ: Do I agree? Let me put it this way. The coalition that is formed to attack the tip credit law in Illinois were told numerous stories about evil owners that take money out of the pocket of their service employees and do not pay the full minimum wage if the server, bartender or busser did not make enough gratuities. Now, I'm sure there are such bad actors out there, but to me, this feels like a 50-pound cure for a one-pound problem, right? A vast overreaction to something that is politically hard to fight, right? Everyone wants to make sure that everyone can make this a good income, you know? So I can't speak to whether the fact in some economically challenged location, an owner of the restaurant is not paying the full minimum wage to a tipped employee when they don't make at least the minimum wage and gratuities. I can't speak to that. I can speak that in my restaurants, which are positioned as casual upscale restaurants in decent neighborhoods, my servers do extremely well. They average $40 an hour in compensation between what we pay and the gratuities and they're working 30-ish hours a week and they're making $56,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year. So I think that's a pretty decent living. But as I said, I can't speak to what might be happening in some other spot. 

Arun: Perhaps that's a question of enforcement of laws. 

TJ: Yes, enforce the law. Enforce the law rather than blowing up the economic model that supports American restaurants. You know, it's, to me, it's a gross overreaction to what may be a problem here and there. I'm like, OK, fine. If there's bad actors out there, let's attack the bad actors. 

Arun: So I know you talked about that sharing of that financials. I really appreciate your sharing. It gave me an insight into what an actual restaurant and financials for the entire year. But you kind of did a thought experiment. Well, yeah, not a thought. You actually did a real experiment in one of your restaurants. So can you describe what that experiment was and what did you learn from it? 

TJ: In one of my restaurants, I had a farm to table restaurant in Evanston, Illinois, across from Northwestern. I believe it's the fourth or fifth largest in the state of Illinois. And for a variety of reasons, I decided to reconnect the restaurant away from the kind of rustic farm to table concept that we had, looking to do something much more polished and upscale. So I invested with my investors a whole lot of money, a reposition of the restaurant, moving it upscale. And as part of this, I've long believed that it was likely that Tip Credit would eventually get attacked and eliminated in the state of Illinois. So trying to be proactive, I said, okay, well, if that's the case, what can I do about that? So I took a look at what's been going on out in the industry. And this whole topic has been fascinating for the last five, six years when you have industry thought leaders, like Union Square Hospitality in New York City, and many others have tried to eliminate tipping, or had the tipping included in the price of the restaurant, or gone to a service charge model, or done various approaches to try to do this, you know, and with very mixed success. But at any rate, we looked at all these things, and we implemented and developed a program that we thought would make sense, right? So given that we thought we were in a very, very progressive and highly educated and affluent trade area, we thought that our guests would support a service charge model. Now, for those listeners that are out there, there's multiple ways you can do this, right? For example, we can eliminate all tipping and just increase the prices of all the food by 20%. That's one way you could do it. So a burger that was 10 bucks is now going to be 13 or 14 bucks, and you have a note on your menu that says, you know, no tipping at all. All right, you can do that. You can do a service charge model. Now, a service charge model would say that a service charge is not voluntary to the guests. They can always tip on top of that, but a service charge is just like we charge for a cup of coffee and we charge a service charge. We opt it for, in many cases, it's 20 percent. In many cases, you'll find a model like this in chef-driven, high-end bucket list kinds of restaurants, you'll find this. And another way to do this is we could eliminate tip credit and then legally, under those circumstances, I can take the gratuities and deploy them to the most, in my mind, some of the most deserving people in the restaurant are the people who work in the kitchens. And legally, I could take a third of the gratuities or whatever and give it to enhance the compensation for the line cooks, the dishwashers, those folks in the back. As long as not one penny of that goes into the restaurant's pocket, right? Okay, so that is an option. 

Now, what we opted to do, for right or wrong, is we went with the service charge model. One of the things we were hoping to do was, when it's service charge, we can allocate this as we choose. You know, and legally, if we want, legally, as far as the law is concerned, I could have kept all of it, right? You know, we obviously didn't do that. We used the service charge. We took out the credit card discount and we kept that, but all the rest of it went to the front of the house, or the servers, the bartenders, the bussers, and the line cooks in our restaurant. So, how did this work? Because obviously, the next question was a massive spreadsheet exercise on our part, and how did it work with the guests? Well, it was on our website. It was on their reservation communications. It was on their checks. It was on the check that was presented. There was a separate flyer that was put down on every table where we sat the guests about what we were doing and why we were doing it. 

Now, I'll just say that the serve, there was a lot of reasons why that restaurant is no longer with us. Some of these are self-inflicted. Well, a lot of these are self-inflicted about mistakes we made from strategic positioning, menu structure, all kinds of things that we did. But I will say that without a doubt that the service charge was a contributory factor for the reason why I had to close that restaurant. Guests hated the service charge. We got reviews that accused us of being a socialist restaurant. Okay. Say, well, you know, if you want to do this kind of thing, you should look somewhere else. You know, it was amazing, the vitriol that this generated with some guests. You know, we were, that restaurant was located in a hotel. I did have a certain chunk of my segment of my guest population that was from the state, you know, coming in from the Oklahoma's and the Arkansas's and what have you. But people did not like this. And they would argue that they like the ability to decide what the guests, what the server bartender were tipped, you know. And, you know, what is interesting is that the tipping percentage that we saw as farmhouse was 22 or 23 percent of sales. And then when we opened up as Thomas & Dutch, the new restaurant with the service charge in place, the overall between service charge and the additional incremental utilities, it dropped and dropped down to 21 percent, you know. So there was a lot of anger built up. Well, I don't know if I'm overstating it, but people really did not like this model. 

Arun: Yeah, obviously so many questions spring to mind. But one is that, you know, whenever we go with a party of five or six, most restaurants have a mandatory service charge or a gratuity that's already built in. So I'm very surprised that there was so much vitriol, so much anger about this policy, where all you were doing it was you were imposing it on, you know, not just parties of five or six or more, but even, you know, all of them, right? So if you had a party of six, what's the issue? I mean, most restaurants already have this built in. 

TJ: Well, you would know better than I, but I remember four or five years ago, we eliminated the mandatory gratuity for larger parties because we got some feedback that there was, that there are some legal issues associated around that. So I know a lot of restaurants have eliminated the mandatory gratuities for larger parties. One thing about the whole service charge thing, I think it was a barrier to trial for us. When people are when I'm on open table and I'm looking for a party of seven, or party of four, whatever, on a Tuesday night at seven o'clock, I think for a lot of people, the fact that we had a service charge in place was contributed to their reluctance to try our restaurant. I can't know that. That's just an impression we had. But yeah, honestly, I would have thought the same thing as you. Really, what's the difference? If you're going to tip 20% on a $100 bill or I'm going to charge you $120 with a 20% service charge baked into it, it's the same amount of money coming out of your bank account. But I think the reality of it is, is guests don't think that. Economists tell us all the time that if you expect rational behavior out of consumers, you are irrational. That's just the way people behave. Right? One of the things that always comes up, my primary business partner is from Ireland. He always talks about the European restaurant models, and no one expects retuities over there, and everyone is on salary and all that. We actually kind of looked at trying to do something like that, but we kept running into American labor laws that made that kind of model problematic here in the US. Where if somebody works a 45-hour work week and they're in a salary position, if they're not in a supervisory position, then you have to pay them overtime. It's like I kept running into those issues when we were trying to explore other models. 

Arun: TJ, there are many other things that are different about Europe. Health care is one of them. Everyone, regardless of their salary level or wages level, is guaranteed health care. We don't have that in the US. Then the public transportation is so... Like I said, I was in Paris, and it's just incredible public transportation. You can go live anywhere in Paris or outskirts of Paris and reach your destination efficiently and at a very low cost. So you really can compare... People who compare and say, how are they doing this in Europe? It's very hard to compare. But I want to go back to... One of the concerns I've had is, with the lack of a lot of restaurants and a lot of service employees, a lot of service establishments are not able to find enough employees to work. And this was, you know, exasperated during the COVID. And coming out of COVID, you know, pretty much everyone has had, okay, jobs are available, please apply. And service employees don't get usually paid very highly. 

And so we are going to continue to have this problem for a long time. And so one concern I've had is that, you know, Americans are used to tipping and how do we make use of that tipping to elevate the service level, the compensation level of all the employees. So the one model that you spoke of where, which you did employ in this restaurant, which is, okay, let's impose the service charge and let's distribute the tips all around, the kitchen and everyone. But when you remove that and you went to traditional tipping, you didn't try out that experiment where you said, okay, no one will be paid the subminimum wage, but we will share the tips regardless. So with that average of 21% that you mentioned might have flown up to 22%, 23% at the end of the day achieving what you wanted to achieve anyways. 

TJ: You know, when we pulled the plug on the service charge, the restaurant at that point had become a financial bloodbath. So I needed to do whatever I could to reduce the cash burn. So at that point, I was not in a financial position to pay the full minimum wage rather than the tip credit rate. And I ended up closing six weeks or two months later. But in hindsight, being 2020, would it have worked better if I just said, okay, we're going to eliminate, we're going to pay, what do they call it, a living wage, right? And we're going to pay the full $15.80. And you Joe diner can tip whenever you want. I've seen people do a separate line item for additional amounts. For the kitchen folks, I've seen folks do things like that. And maybe that would have worked better, right? Because under the, if I had done that, I could have legally taken some of the gratuities and give it to the kitchen guys.  

Arun: But you know, the interesting thing is that real life is never as neat and clean as academic experiment, thought experiments we can do in our labs or in our research papers or, you know, so we can dream up all of these amazing experiments. But real life is messy. You know, real investments are at stake and real people's livelihoods are at stake there. But one other very quick question since you've already done a whole lot of, given some thought into this. If you are raising all the server in front of the house staff to minimum, full minimum wage, and then you are able to share with everyone back at the house as well, is there some element of cost saving that you can do by paying your back at the house staff a little less than what you were paying because now they are getting the share out of tips? 

TJ: Yeah, that's a great thought and I'm not sure maybe that could have worked. For us, the way it worked is that they were getting us two to three bucks an hour, right? Which was their effective share of the service charge. Could we have paid, I don't know what the average line cook brings to Boston these days, but I'm paying 22, 23 bucks an hour for line cooks, right? Could I have paid them 19 and offset it with a share of the tip pool? I can't know with that score. 

Arun: Right. But again, the question is, if you mentioned that your servers are making $40 an hour, so they are essentially with the subminimum wage, so they're making almost $30 per hour in tips, but now if you were to take all the tips and divide it equally between front and back of the house, the back of the house would make considerably more than the $3 or $4 per hour, right? 

TJ: And in theory, right, a lot of your servers, bartenders would support that. In reality, what happens is if I cut their compensation by 20%, they go looking for another job somewhere else where that doesn't happen, right? I mean, that was, if you look at the postmortem on Union Square Hospitality's tipping project, and they have, okay, that's what happened, right? It's like, in theory, they love the idea that the line cooks were going to make 32 bucks an hour or whatever worked out. But you know something? My monthly rent payment in New York City is $2,500 a month. And they end up going and finding a job where that was, where their tips were going to be cut. So, you know, could it work? Sure. In some places, in some circumstances, you know, could it have worked if we launched the Evanston restaurant under that? Perhaps. Maybe we just picked the wrong choice. But it's always one of the things that's always bugged me as a restaurant entrepreneur, who's we're fighting to have any kind of bottom line in our restaurants. There’re always people slicing away at our ability to make money. And one of the things that has always made me crazy is that if the guests pay a hundred dollars in tips, okay, I turn around and give a hundred dollars in tips to the servers, bartenders and bussers. But Arun, I don't get a hundred dollars from the guests. I get 96.50. Right? So I am paying the servers, bartenders and bussers, money I never got from the guests. I am fronting them that money. Right? And this always seemed vastly unfair to me. And I've known some restaurant companies that have the pricing power with their employees, that they deduct the service charge from the tips. Right. I mean, the credit card fees from the tips. Right. Yeah. And so that was part of the reason why we went to the service charge model, because then I could legally reimburse myself for the credit card fees. Right. But, you know, hindsight is 20-20. 

Arun: Yeah. But, you know, it's very interesting that there are some states where you're not allowed to deduct the credit card fees. Whereas if you go and talk to any ordinary, any, you know, consumer on the street, they'd say, yeah, that makes sense if, you know, you get $100 in tips, but the credit card takes $3, then you give out $97. And I think by giving that $97 or $96.5 and deducting only the credit card commissions, you are actually being very, very fair by saying, okay, this is what the customers gave you. And, you know, minus the credit card fees, here it is. 

TJ: In Chicago, there's a couple of higher-end restaurant companies that are able to, multi-unit restaurant companies. And I haven't looked recently, so I don't want to say which ones there are. But they deduct the credit card fees from the gratuities that get out to the servers and bartenders. And to me, that seems more than fair. But, you know, it's when you're competing for staff, you do not want to do anything that puts you in a more challenging position to recruit, talk to your people. 

Arun: I guess one way around this, I mean, I know that if you have servers that are very good at their craft and they are able to increase the average check per person, and if you stand to lose them, then obviously you're not going to adopt a model where all the tips are being shared across because that server is the one that is getting a whole lot of revenue. I guess there have to be different models in which the people taking the order are on salary and then there is some sort of a distributed service model. But that's what I wanted to ask you there's a lot of disruption in the market right now, in the restaurant market, and a lot of models have to change. I mean, just for a simple thing, that Chicago city council measure has passed. And so in five years, there's a phase in period. 

TJ: Well, it actually may happen faster than that because the state of Illinois is now looking at an extremely aggressive implementation of the elimination of TIP credit. And that will supersede the city of Chicago if it does in fact pass. You know, when I think about what am I going to do, you know, when they eliminate TIP credit completely and I guess three and a half, four years, you know, I don't know, right? You know, what is my ability to continue to raise pricing or eliminate costs or eliminate jobs? You know, will I go to a model where guests are watering for themselves? You know, a lot of the point-of-sale technology is improved dramatically where the guests can order off of their phones for your QR code. And, you know, am I going to be put in a position where in order to stay in business, I have to eliminate jobs from servers and folks like that? I don't know. I hope not. But there's only so many things I can do. You know, is the guest willing to pay $26 for a cheeseburger? You know, I'm at $20 right now. Right. How? Yeah. Well, it's well, it's an extremely good cheeseburger. But that's a very special cheeseburger. But you understand the point, right? You know, how much can I keep pushing that price point? You know, we run meanish restaurants and part of our model with the restaurants is we run a tip pooling model. Right. So all the gratuities go into a bucket. So and the way it has worked historically in our restaurants is we have bartenders running food and expediting and doing everything they can to make sure that the restaurant as a whole succeeds. Right. You know, so, you know, the obvious downside that can be thereof with a tip pool model is, you know, you can have free riders, people that are not as good at their craft as others that are taking advantage of the increased skills of the better servers and bartenders. But for the most part, we've ended up kind of a second self-regulating team where the people that don't perform seem to get edited out of the staff by themselves. Right. So, you know, but that that that model allows us to run a little leaner labor models than many of the competitive full-service restaurants might be able to do. And that offsets a little tiny bit of what's going on in the city of Chicago. 

Arun: So, when you mention, I mean, you know, it always sounds terrible to most people when you said, OK, I might have to shut some jobs, and I'll have to go with this leaner or maybe a more palatable term. OK, I've got to go with the leaner staffing model. But, you know, there is another fact, which is that restaurant industry has trouble finding enough employees. So if you're able to work with a leaner staffing model, that may not be a bad thing. 

TJ: Because they make more money. The ones that actually work there. You know, it's like if I'm running four servers or two servers on a typical model, right? Yeah. As long as the guests are getting the quality of the service that you want with two servers, you know, then, you know, the two servers are going to make a heck of a lot more than they would have made otherwise. We, yeah, so, you know, it's, yeah. 

Arun: So, how about leveraging technology? So, you know, if you have two servers now and they're going to have trouble going into the kitchen to get everything, but you have a robot that brings in the food from the kitchen to the main dining room and then the server places it on the table so that you maintain that final step of personalization and final step of actual service, but you eliminate, you know, the thing. And again, robotic bartenders where you just, you know, program it in and the drink is made, but the service is done by the bartender. So, now, instead of serving, you know, 15 people, you can serve 20 or 25 people. 

TJ: You know, my knee-jerk reaction is like, my guests wouldn't like that kind of stuff, but, you know, something if you think about it, how the guest journey has changed over the last 10 years, that things that would have been anathema to the guests, you know, five years ago is a well-accepted math. You know, let's talk about your robot food runner, right? So, that's pretty mechanical function, when you think about it. All you do is transporting, well, you got to make sure you have the right plates. So, when you're transporting plates from point A to point B, right? So, how would that go over with the guests? I think, for the most part, that would probably be okay. Now, what if the guests, if the cocktails coming from the bar were being made by a robot bartender? Well, if the guest sees that, that's not going to go over particularly well, at least not now in 10 years, 20 years, maybe the guest would react differently. You know, one of the things I'm working on right now, because the labor sensitivity is becoming higher and higher and higher every time we work on things, is, we're, in one of my restaurants, I have a roof deck with a full bar, and we're creating a new restaurant concept for the roof. So I'm not trying to do the Farm Bar concept on the roof. We're going to do something different. And one of the things we're looking at doing is a hybrid service model, where I have just a couple of servers with hand-held taking orders, but the guests can, by scanning a QR code, can access their own check and order additional items going. So, you know, maybe I can eliminate one or two servers that way, right? You know, so I'm looking for ways to not destroy the traditional business model, but perhaps enhance it to make it a little more labor efficient than it would have been otherwise. 

Arun: So, at this point, what I want to do is ask you some fun questions. So, can you name up to four people living or deceased you would like to have dinner with? 

TJ: Let me think about that. So, I'm forgetting the guy's first name, but I just finished watching Masters of the Air, which is the HBO Max night part series about the Air War in Europe. And the author of the book, fascinating guy, I believe he was involved in Band of Brothers and some of his other books. I would love to sit down and talk to him. I find that fascinating. I would love to have dinner with Danny Barrett. I mean, it's like I consider him to be one of the smartest restaurant guys that has ever been in the United States. And you think about what he's done by putting aside the restaurants in Manhattan and what have you. He created Shake Shack too, which I think is probably a billion dollars. I don't know how big it is now, but a billion dollar group of restaurants. So there's a couple of folks. I would love to meet Frank Lloyd Wright and have dinner with him. My farm is near Tell Jason, his summer home in Wisconsin. And almost every year we visit Tell Jason. It's just an amazing place and a gorgeous part of the world. And I would love to meet him. I understand he was incredibly arrogant and had very little patience for people that weren't as smart as him. So maybe he would slap me down. But there's a couple people I would love to talk to. 

Arun: Since you're a restaurateur, at this dinner, what's on the menu? 

TJ: It would probably be as much as I could from my farm. So that means apples and asparagus and honey and garlic and horseradish and raspberries and blackcurrant. It might end up being a vegan menu simply because I don't grow livestock. Unless you want to call my honeybees livestock, which I don't.  

Arun: Restaurant industry is absolutely chaotic and frantic and just so much is going on. And you've heard the phrase, keep calm and carry on. Can you substitute calm with your word? 

TJ: You get something positive done every day, right? You know, that moves the ball forward, right? This is a game of inches, right? It's getting the little things done every single day is what keeps your restaurants progressing. So little things done all the time every day. 

Arun: I love that. I'm muddling through the days in which I feel that I'm just muddling through the days. So, TJ, thank you so much. You shed so much light and so much more nuance into this discussion of subminimum wage. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your thoughts. I always enjoy talking to you and today was really special. So thank you. 

TJ: It's a pleasure to have this conversation. Always, as I said, have a warm spot for the BU Hospitality Program. And, you know, hope to see you next time you come out to Chicago. 

Arun: I would love that. And thank you all for listening today to our Distinguished podcast. If you like what you're hearing, be sure to follow up and give us a five-star rating. If you want to join the conversation and share your thoughts and suggestions, email me at shadean@bu.edu.