If you're willing to put in the hours and put in the work, you have a good shot at figuring it out and making it happen. Because I'd never run a restaurant before. I'd never done a food truck before. I just figured it out. Feel to burn baby? Oh yeah. Is a slam dunk? Absolutely breathtaking. Welcome to the Bike de Bites podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Bess. This is a companion podcast to the Bike de Bites television series, and you could check out the links in the show notes to find out more information about where you can watch the series. In today's podcast, we're going to be revisiting Austin, Texas, where I stopped at four different restaurant locations along my bike route. And my guest today is Bryce Gilmore, owner and executive chef of Barley Swine. Now I'm excited to get into this episode, but before I do that, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor plus for their support of the Bike to Bikes podcast. When your tomorrow's are built on technology, you need to partner with Superior Insight, with expertise in cutting edge innovation across AI security cloud and workplace transformation. E plus is on the frontline of today's modern enterprise e plus where technology means more. Okay, so I'd like to take a moment to recap my Austin Texas bike route. It was a 24.4 mile ride in total. I think my highest elevation gain was around 780 feet and that was right up near Mount Bonnell State Park. And you take the bike up there, you get these unbelievable, these spectacular views of Lake Austin from that point, totally worth the ride up there. Made it a little bit easier. I was on my Parley Z zero disc bike, so it was a little bit light and supple. Getting up that climb didn't create too many problems for me. I think my highest grade was like a 4.5% grade that Shimano drive train with that electric shifting makes it super easy. This ride was really a spectacular ride around the city of Austin. We really covered a wide berth, if you will, making our way through and around the entire city. And one of the most spectacular for me views was this downhill section coming down Congress Street looking, staring right at the Texas State House, which is the sixth largest state house in the United States. I say that in the episode, but it's pretty spectacular when you get the viewpoint on two wheels coming down, Congress Street, staring right at it, and in fact, it's actually higher than the United States Capitol, so it's worth the ride going down there and checking that out. Now we started our ride in Austin, Texas, right smack in the center of town at the Canopy Austin downtown. And from there we ventured to our first restaurant for breakfast. It's a vegan and vegetarian restaurant called the Boden Creek Cafe. I sat down with Leslie Martin, the owner and boy did she take me on quite the journey of a culinary adventure. We started out with our first dish, which was a tofu scrabble with a blueberry cornbread. And the cornbread in and of itself is worth just making a visit and going there because it was incredible. And if that wasn't enough, we switched into a potato leak omelet. Now I love potato leaks. This one, this omelet was pretty cool. It had a black pepper sour cream on top of it, but what made it really unique was the fact that they baked hash browns right smack into the center of the omelet and it was delicious. And then of course the Chipotle pecan pesto dip with fresh chota bread. This was a fantastic way to start the ride. Carb up a little bit. We got back on the bike and we headed to our next destination, which was the sour duck market. I sat down with Brian Cortez, which is the Chef de cuisine, and also Sean Flanagan, who is the bakery manager Now, what makes this place really cool? First of all, it's kind of got a beer garden. They've got a stage out in the back. You can sit outside. They do live performances there, but it's a bakery and a restaurant connected. It's a scratch kitchen. Everything they do, they do from scratch right out of this place. And I will tell you what we were treated to was mind blowing first the sourdough bread. Now I've had a lot of sourdough bread and I know San Francisco will state claim to being the best sourdough bread in the country. And by many people's standards it is. However, the sourdough bread that I had at the Sour duck was just delicious. And I would say in a contest with one from San Francisco might give it a run for its money. I also had something that I will tell you is in my top if you love cheeseburgers or hamburgers, but I'm going to say cheeseburgers, you must try the double cheese Smashburger at Sour Duck. It had pimento cheese on top pickles, a secret sauce. Of course, nobody ever wants to share their secrets on the bottom of a fresh made cha bread bun. And I will tell you it's in my top five burgers I've ever had. It's worth going there just for the burger. We had a cold cut Chota sandwich with some southern chow chow, smoked ham, bologna, salami, provolone cheese and lettuce. I mean, if you want an experience, you have to try the cold Shabbat sandwich there. It was just and everything. Like I said, everything there is made from scratch including their sauces. And then to end the entire experience there, we had a honey cake. I can't even tell you how many layers it was, but it was like, I think it might've been 15. I have no, it was ridiculous. And the honey cake baked fresh there in the bakery. And I love the fact that there's this relationship between the bakery and the restaurant and everything that is being served on a bun or on a roll or as a sandwich. Everything is baked there and all of the baked desserts and the coffee, just so you know, I didn't have one, you didn't see me have it on camera, but I will tell you in this special podcast that we are doing, you must check out the coffee. They have one with some cayenne pepper if you ever thought of coffee with some cayenne pepper in it. I don't know what it was, but it was mind blowing. Alright, so we filled up, we had a nice lunch there and we made our way to the final, or not our final destination, our next destination, which was a restaurant called Barley Swine and Barley swine. All I can tell you is it was fantastic, and in fact, we're going to be talking to chef owner from Barley Swine in just a second. So I'm not going to dive too deeply into what we ate in this particular one. I want to save that for when we introduce our next guest and we'll talk more about it. But I will then tell you that our final destination after Barley swine was Verina. Now Chef Paolo Gamma, who is the chef at vea, incredibly talented, the vea restaurant is located right back where we started our ride, which is at the canopy Austin downtown. And we don't always feature restaurants inside the hotels that we stay at, but I will, I must say this restaurant was something special. And the chef's passion, you can't even describe how passionate he was. He kind of mixes some of his Mexican, his upbringing in Mexico and those influences into the dishes that he does. They would call it southwest cuisine, Southwestern cuisine. And we sampled a kochi fish with asparagus covered with mole sauce. And the mole sauce was both, it looks like a design of marble on top of the fish, and it's a combination of a chocolate and a vanilla, not really the color-wise or like a dark colored chocolate and a white vanilla. It looks like something that you'd eat for dessert, but it wasn't and it was just savory and delicious and wonderful. And then of course, we had a quesadilla with corn beans, squash in a cheese mole sauce. Fantastic. Now all that said, I mentioned to you that we stopped at Barley swine, and that is our guest who's appearing with us today on today's podcast. Bryce Gilmore is the owner and executive chef of Barley Swine located in Austin, Texas. That opened with a commitment to support regional farmers and ranchers. And Gilmore has been honored by James Beard as a semi-finalist, rising star chef and multi-year best chef Southwest finalist. On top of being extremely supportive of local businesses, barley swine is a carbon neutral restaurant making efforts to reduce their effect on the environment. Bryce, welcome to our podcast. Thank you enough. Thanks for having me on. Well, I'm super excited that we're going to have this opportunity to kind of talk a little bit more about some of the things that we touched on when we were together at the restaurant. And as you know, you can only cover so much in an episode of television that's only 23 minutes long after you take out all the commercial time. So this gives us a good chance to really talk about some of the things that I was really excited to learn about when we were together. So thank you. Yeah, yeah, happy to chat and share any knowledge, anything you want to talk about. I want to rewind the clock a little bit in terms of you as a chef, as a restaurateur, come back for me and our listeners and our viewers and talk to me about when you think you first got that bite, if you will, that inclination that this is what you wanted to do. Yeah, my father's a chef, so I was raised in kitchens. I have memories of visiting him at the restaurant and I never really thought about it until I started working at the restaurants when I was 14 and I started doing busboy type stuff and I kind of hated it. I didn't enjoy it. I just liked having a job and earning money when I was 14. So I respected that and tried to have a work ethic and stuff. But as far as getting into the restaurant business, no desire to do that at that age. When I was probably 17, I started getting more into the kitchen and that's when I really started to kind of enjoy the job. And. What were you doing at that time at 17 in the kitchen? Just working the pantry station, making salads and desserts and things kind of like an entry level position in the kitchen that I had no cooking experience obviously. So it was an easy kind of transition into the kitchen on that station. So I really liked creating and the energy, the vibe in the kitchen was just really, I don't know, it was contagious and it was fun. I really started to enjoy it. So. The hustle and the bustle was you basically. Cut off? Yeah, so I think it was senior year of high school when I started doing that, and I just really started to fall in love with it and started looking around at what my options were to grow in the culinary field and spent a year after high school working for my dad. He was the chef of a restaurant that had multiple locations, so I got to travel with him and help train people on different stations. I was going to ask you what kind of restaurant it was. It was kind of southwestern cuisine is what they were calling it. So down here in Texas, Southwestern and Tex-Mex cuisine is very popular. If we had a culture for cuisine, I would say Tex-Mex is it. So it was a lot of that stuff. So yeah, I mean I spent the year after high school doing that and decided to go to culinary school and I went to San Francisco for that, which was a huge eyeopener being raised in Austin. And Austin was a smaller city at that time. We didn't have a lot of great restaurants and things to learn from. So it was a huge exposure for me to see just what a really good restaurant could be and different cuisines from all over the world represented there. And. Did your dad encourage your kind of foray into this world or was he trying to say. Stay away? Not quite the opposite. Okay. Yeah. My father, he is an old school chef, he worked his butt off and my memories other than kind of visiting him in the restaurants was basically he would come home after we had gone to bed and by the time we got up to go to school, he was already gone to start his day. So there was a lot of that. He tried really hard to do right by us, coached our soccer teams on the weekends and he would be working brunch service and leave in the middle of it to come coach our soccer game and then go back to finish brunch. So he never had a wrestle moment. He was very committed to his career and trying to grow as a chef and while still trying to take care of his family. So I think he did it right. He did it. So. I grew up. What was that conversation like when you told dad, I think I want to go to culinary school? I think as soon as he started seeing me interested in it, he had his chef buddies talk to me. They just reiterated how hard it is and wanted to make sure I understood what I was getting into. And I knew, I mean. Oh, you lived it. I think I've always just kind of, I've appreciated working hard and I've never shied away from it. And so it's one of those things was really my passion was really growing and there wasn't anyone that was going to talk me out of it. And I think when I went to San Francisco, which just kind of furthered that passion and opened my eyes to more. How long were you in San Francisco in culinary school? I was there, well school was like a year, and then I think I spent a couple months after that there and then came back to Austin for a little bit, went back out there to work at a place. And then. Did you sta at all or what was. A little bit. Yeah. A little bit. I didn't know a lot when I first went out there, I didn't know what all these great chefs were, so I had to learn and figure out what the French laundry was. I remember getting the French laundry book I back in the early two thousands and just like, wow, this is okay. This is what food can be. And I had no idea when I moved out there what any of that was. So this opened a whole new world to you, and yet you're in that world and now you make a decision after you're done with your schooling to come back to Texas. Now, when you came back to Texas, did you say, okay, I'm getting into the restaurant business, this is what I want to do, I want to continue this, and where. Did you go from there? Yeah, part of why I wanted to go to San Francisco was the in the heart of it. And so I could work in restaurants while I was going to school, which was nice. And then I think I just kind of started to get homesick and wanted to come back to Austin. I was 20, 20 years old when I was done with all that, and I think just turned 21 when I got a job in Austin and just worked at a couple places here and started to get the itch to see what was going on in other cities again and got a job at a great restaurant in San Francisco and went back out there, spent a year there and then kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I'd always been intrigued by Aspen, Colorado, just thought it'd be kind of a cool experience to live there for a little bit, not. Too shabby, a place to go and. There's good restaurants there and I had never worked in a hotel before. I thought that would be a good experience to get. So I found a chef that had his own, he was a partner in a farm and the farm would bring produce and the restaurant would just have to figure out what to do with it every day. And that was really cool to experience. And we did a lot of whole animal butchery, charcuterie things. It's stuff that I wanted to learn. So that's why I went out there and spent about a year out there doing that. And after that I started just feeling the itch to kind of do my own thing. I was still very young. I think I was 26 or so and. Married at this point. Still single. Not yet, no. No. But I think I just always had this entrepreneurial spirit and I felt like I had a lot to learn still. But you were ready? Capable enough of trying to do my own thing and figured I could just figure it out as I went. How'd you pull that together? Go ahead. How did you pull that together? Now you're at 26 and you've decided. Okay. I want to open my own place. That's not an easy thing to do at any age. No, it's not. Not. Luckily at the time, food trucks were real big in Austin, so I kind of looked around and saw that a farm to table concept for a food trailer would be unique and something that Austin didn't have. Austin was at a point of a real big growth, but still not a lot of great restaurants. I don't want to say not a lot of great restaurants, but they needed more options. What. Year is this roughly for frame of reference? This was 2009. So this is really before Austin exploded in terms of the food scene. Yeah, this was right at the beginning of all. That. I think. So you decided. A lot of It was great timing for me. I think I got in into the scene when other people were doing it, and really it was part of that big boom that we got. But yeah, so I figured I can do a food truck that's a lot cheaper than a restaurant. So I started looking into it. I was telling everybody at the I worked with in Aspen, like, Hey, I'm going to do this, and you're crazy. What are you doing? You're nuts. It's not going to. Doesn't that motivate you even more sometimes. When. People tell you you're nuts. I. Think people. Have told me I'm nuts, and I'm like, yeah. Well. Okay. No, I got it set in my head and I wasn't going to back away from it. So I moved back to Austin and started the process looking for a trailer, seeing what my options were. I wanted something kind of unique and that had character there a lot of places, A lot of people were kind of going the big white box trailer route, and there's a lot of cool airstreams that were being turned into food trailers, and I thought that kind of direction would be cool. So I found this old 1980 Fleetwood Mallard travel trailer on eBay for four grand in Wisconsin that had been converted into a catering truck for festivals and stuff. It was called Laura's Wiener Wagon. Sold hot dogs out of it. That's pretty cool. Though. It was actually painted a big hot dog. And so me and my brother drove up to Wisconsin and looked at this thing and I was like, oh boy, the pictures on eBay made it look a little better. So you got there and you're like, this thing needs some work. It's going to. Need some. TLC. Yeah, I thought. Consider it already been kind of gutted and converted into somewhat of a kitchen that it would be an easy project. Now. You mentioned your brother. So your brother went up there with you. Was your brother involved in getting this enterprise launched at this stage of the game or is it. Just you? Yeah, so 2009, my brother graduated from college with a finance degree, not the best degree to have. Not at that year. He didn't really have a job, so he started, I was like, Hey, you want to help me build this trailer and do all this stuff? And 15 years later we're business partners and he does all the finances for all the restaurants and he's kind of a jack of all trades. He can fix anything and do whatever. I mean he worked a little bit in the restaurants too in high school, but didn't pursue that as a career. So he is very helpful and it's very nice to have your brother. I. Was going to say, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about working with family? Because with my family, my daughter works here and my wife works with me and my future son-in-law works here. So it's interesting. I love it. I'm curious to know. People go, that's really difficult to work with family, and I'm like, yeah, well, it might be difficult, but there's so many other benefits I think that come with it. Yeah, I think it's nice. I think we get along fine enough. I mean, honestly nowadays I don't see him a whole lot at the restaurants. He's kind of on his own schedule and I'm doing my own thing. And so it is nice to have to share that kind of connection restaurant, and he does the things that I can't do and I do the things that he can't do. So we work well together, so it. Works. Then we have my father who has got his own restaurants doing his own thing, and whenever we get together we talk shop and I think it's cool. I think it's great to have that. Did you have a business plan when you started this little food truck venture? Did you raise money? Was this all coming out of money that you had saved for yourself? How did you It's not easy to get a venture going. My parents gave me a $15,000 loan, which I used to buy the trailer. And then so we brought it back to Austin, and then I spent about three months gutting it and redoing the whole thing, which my brother helped me with my dad a little bit, and our neighbor who had some experience building would help us a little bit. But. So at this point, dad's all in, dad's fully supportive of the direction that you're taking and. He is, yeah, I mean, but he's got his own thing with his restaurant. So I mean he helped where he could, he gave us advice where he could and he was very supportive. Very supportive. Awesome. And so the rest of the money I put on my credit card and just maxed out my credit card. You really believed in yourself? Yeah, I mean at this point I was like, well, I'm doing it. I'm going to do everything I can to make this work. And I really believe that with anyone that has their own business, if you are willing to put in the hours and put in the work, you have a good shot. You have a good shot at figuring it out and making it happen. Because I'd never run a restaurant before. I'd never done a food truck before. I just figured it out. I learned what I could and just trial and error. What was the hardest part during that time for you? What was the most challenging or the most difficult obstacle to overcome at that stage of getting it up and running and ready to go? I mean finding, securing a place to park it. I went through a couple places and talked to a couple landlords. At the time, Austin had a lot of empty lots, so this was before a lot of the high rises and big apartment buildings were built, so there were a lot of food trailer parks around town. There were just empty lots. People would park their trucks on. And then after a couple of years, a lot of those lots started getting sold and developed. So now our food truck scene is still very booming and there's a lot of 'em, but they have to be a little more strategic on where you can park it. So just trying to find a lot that made sense and convincing a landlord that he should choose me to park my truck there and then setting up electricity and getting the truck into a spot where I could get it inspected by the health department and get my license and all that stuff. And we were able to use my dad's restaurant as a commissary so we could do some prep there. But man, it felt like the wild West back then cooking, cooking out of a 20 foot wood box. What were you serving? So the other crazy was that I had a wood fire grill. So everything that's the only cooking surface that I had was a wood fire grill. So we did everything on that and I would get a half a hog every week from one of our farmers and just create base off of that. We get ducks, rabbits, whatever, the go to the farmer's market every Saturday, see whatever was there. And that's what we would create our menu from every day. And I would just write it on a chalkboard and I have five or six, seven items. Changing constantly. They were. Smaller servings. Changing constantly. Yeah, it was smaller stuff. So people, a lot of people would come in and order the whole menu and get to try everything they were doing that day and they could come back the next week and get something totally different. And it was a lot of work. I was working a crazy amount and it was very stressful to figure out how to do all the logistics of cooking and bringing food to the trailer. I mean, we had big coolers in the back of our pickup trucks just full of food with ice on it because we couldn't fit it all in the trailer and we just cook as much as we could until we sold out every night. We were very fortunate to start to get a following. This was back when Yelp was. Coming onto the scene way to. Advertise, and we got a good following and I soon realized that I shouldn't look at Yelp anymore. It was really frustrating. So you learn a little things like that along the way. And then we were on Anthony Bourdain and couple shows on Travel Channel and Food Network, and it just exploded for us where we were selling out every night and keep hiring people to help out and it was great. It was. So the food truck was booming. And how long were you doing that in Austin? So you started right at around what, 2009 you said, right? 2009. Yeah, end of 2009. So it was like December and then in 2010, middle of the year started just casually looking at small restaurant spaces and found one right down the road from where the trailer was and it was small, was like a thousand square feet. Just started the process of figuring that out, was able to get a lease signed and raise a little bit of money from family friends mostly. And so basically a year after opening the trailer, we opened Barley Swine, the first iteration down on South Lamar in. Wow. So it was December of 2010. Now did you shut trailer, did the food truck down or did you keep that up opening, running at the same time that you were opening the restaurant? So we decided it was, I kind of assumed we might just close the trailer down so we could focus on the restaurant, but my brother decided that he could keep it going with the people that we had working there. So he ran it pretty much by himself with the other guys for the next year. We stayed open for another year. And. That's when the landlord ended up selling the lot that we were on and to develop it. And if that didn't happen, I don't know how long we would've stayed open, but my brother did a great job of keeping it going for a year while I focused on barley. So Barley swine opens in your original location, and then how long were you at that location before you moved to ultimately take me through that process. You opened Barley Swine in your first location. How long were you there? I think, well almost six years. So we opened in 2010 and then after a year or two we were like, okay, I think we want to do a bigger restaurant, something a little more casual than what Barley SW has started to go into a more higher end direction. So along with some of the guys that were at Barley, we opened up Odd Duck actually at the location of where the food truck food trailer was. So they developed that lot with an apartment building this kind of restaurant space. As soon as I figured that out, I hounded the landlords to let me open a restaurant here. This would be a good story. And so 2013 in December, so three years after Barley, we opened Odd Duck, which was a much bigger restaurant than what Barley. Was. So you had Barley swine at this point, food Truck had been retired. You open up Odd Duck Barley Swine was a little bit more fine dining you would call it, I guess. And then Odd Duck was a little bit more casual. Casual. Right? Yeah, that's how we looked at it. Even though people call Odd Duck Fine Dining, I don't know what the definition of that is anymore. That changes constantly. So you're running now both restaurants at the same time, and then what happens from there? So at that point, I think it was around 2015 I knew that I needed, so I was no longer going to be, I didn't have any further of a lease at the original Barley after 2016. So I started the process of looking at moving it somewhere. I wanted to kind of separate it from Odd Duck because at that point, odd Duck and Barley swine were pretty close, just right down the street from each other. So I thought it'd be good to kind of spread 'em out in the city. A little more geography between. So went up, we went up north on Burnett Road and found that space and it was comparable in size and demographic and everything to what Odd Duck was. So I thought we had a good chance to do something good up there. And this is where we met when I came to see you. Yep. Yeah. Now do you still own both? You own another restaurant as well, right? Yeah. So what happens after Odd Duck and Barley Swine now moves to the new location then? So it's 2016 at that point where we move up there and then with my partners at Odd Duck kind of started talking about wanting to do something else, and one of my partners, mark, is very passionate about baking, and we did a lot of baking sourdough and all kinds of things at Odd Duck, and we started looking maybe a bakery space and we found something that was pretty cool and it had a couple buildings on there and we ended up tearing a lot of it down and renovating one of 'em. But so basically the concept turned into bakery beer Garden Cafe kind of thing on an even lower scale from what Odd Duck was doing more just sandwiches and baked items. Now, full disclosure, when we were doing our research for the show, we were looking at all these great restaurants that we bike route in Austin. And in addition to Barley Swine, a name popped up that we felt like, oh, we have to go to this place. And unbeknownst to us at the time did not know that this was yet another restaurant that you have an interest in, which is. Yeah, sour Duck. Exactly. Sour Duck Market, which is this bakery concept that you're talking about now as we're talking through. Right? So it's like Odd Duck's Little Sisters kind of what we looked at it as. And so I Odd Duck was just, we were just going crazy and just really needed more space. So part of it is like Sour Duck is a little bit of a commissary for us too, where all of our baked stuff comes from there. We thought maybe even other things could be prepped there. This is a little bit bigger kitchen and space to do things. So. I will tell you, we're going to talk about food in a second, but I will tell you, having eaten at Sour Duck, first of all, probably in my top five hamburgers I've ever had in my whole life, I kid you not, I mean, I've had a lot of hamburgers, it ranks up there because everything, they're scratch, kitchen, everything including the bun that the burger has served on. Amazing, amazing. But yeah. I'm glad to hear. Yeah. So yeah, we opened Sour Duck in 2018, so that was a little over two years from Barley and then the pandemic hit, that was the next project and trying to figure all that out. Here we are now. So currently now do you own all three or is it just the two now? Which restaurants do you still own all three of them? Yeah, I'm a partner in all of 'em. Them the Barley swine experience was something, I'm going to just describe this for the listeners and the viewers was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before and I've been to some really great restaurants and I'm going to tell you the reason why I say that, unlike something I've never experienced before. We got there, before you opened that day our crew was loading in, we were getting ready to set up and do our interview with you, and I had the distinct advantage of sitting at the bar while the crew was loading in and I was watching what I would basically best described as a ballet. It was something like I've never seen to the degree in which the attention, the meticulous attention to detail of everything that was happening, getting ready for opening, it was like the curtain's about to open, the show's about to go on and everything has to be perfection. I'm talking about wiping down hoods and counters and just moving food storage trays from one little position that was position that it was supposed to be in every little detail in that restaurant and at the front of the house, the same choreography was happening at the front of the house. Everybody was moving, getting the table set, making sure everything on the table was set perfectly. It was a show in and of itself. And what I really loved and I took notice of when I walked in is your restaurant is a big restaurant and the fact of the matter is it is dominated predominantly by the kitchen. The kitchen is the biggest thing in the restaurant. And I think I want to talk to you about that because I think when we spoke clearly by design and it kind of fit with the theme of what I was experiencing as this person coming in before opening, I felt like the kitchen was the stage and it was the place for the guests who were seated around the kitchen to be able to watch this performance of putting out unbelievable dishes. And just talk to me about the architecture of this restaurant and this choreography that I'm describing is this standard operating procedure every day. And was it intentional the way you built that restaurant? Yeah. Well thanks for noticing all that. I certainly glad to hear that you appreciate all the little details and stuff. We can still be better at it. There's still a lot of things that we can get better at. I'm a big fan of open kitchens in restaurants. I think it adds a really cool energy to the space. As a chef. I've always liked working in them because you get to watch the guests eat your food, you get to see the reactions from it firsthand, and I think that really keeps you going to see people enjoy. If they enjoy it, you could see it on their face and it's like, cool, I did something good. I think just from the kitchen aspect, it is cool to have that interaction with the guests and then for the guests to be able to see and interact with the kitchen, it's just kind of added bonus to the atmosphere. That's just who we are. If you want to go to a restaurant where it's just all about the dining room and you don't have to worry about the sounds and the heat and all that stuff coming out of the kitchen and cool, that's not us, it also keeps us honest. We can't hide anything from people. We got to keep everything clean. We got to keep everything sanitary. We are not tasting food with our fingers. People are watching us. So I think for a lot of reasons, the open kitchen makes sense as far as the architecture goes. It is funny. I was as a kid, always intrigued by architecture. I was kind of thought that I'd be an architect someday. One of my hobbies growing up was designing houses, just drawing 'em on. I've got tons of notebooks of just house designs and was always into that. I think I like cooking so much is because creating something with your hands and architecture is kind of the same thing. If you can see it all the way through from design to build. Well, it's clearly your passion for design and architecture clearly is demonstrated in the way. I just unfortunately had no desire to sit in front of a computer at a desk all day. And with food and cooking, it's kind of instant gratification. You cook something, people eat it, they like it. It's like, okay, move on to the next thing. So it was kind of cool that I got to, I mean, I was very involved in the design and layout of all the restaurants. Barley particularly I knew when you know that you're going to be spending a lot of time in a place, you're going to design it in a certain way. And it all starts with, okay, we need to have a certain amount of seats so we can do a certain amount of guests every night and make a certain amount of money. So once that was kind of figured out and I was able to design the kitchen around the amount of space we needed, I know it does feel like when you walk in there, the kitchen is half of the restaurant, if not more. But I love it though. It's definitely a higher percentage than a lot of restaurants would devote to a kitchen, but I knew that I wanted it to be able to accommodate the things we wanted to do there. One of 'em being that when we opened in 2016, we were doing an a la carte menu and a separate tasting menu out of the same kitchen, and that was definitely a big part of how and why I designed it that way. Just allowed for proper flow and a lot of bodies helping out. We rely on a lot of teamwork. You play your thing and when you get a lot, someone's going to come and help you. When you're done plating your thing, you're going to move over and start helping someone else play their thing and just kind of allow it for that. As a guest. It's kind of like dinner theater, honestly. It truly is. I had a real appreciation being in there when service was just getting ready to get started and you couldn't help but notice it was like theater and it was beautifully choreographed theater. It wasn't chaotic. There was no screaming. Everything was calm and elegantly moving from one place to the next, and it was truly watching a ballet. It was wonderful. And like I said, I think we've got years of experience of doing it in an open kitchen. We can't, as much as I would like to yell, we don't want to disrupt the guests that are sitting right there. We got to be mindful of that. How would you describe the cuisine there? So we've, I mean all the restaurants are the farm to table concept. We start with that, what ingredients are available to us and then we try to create food that we think that we enjoy to eat, things that we think are cool and interesting flavors that are bold and exciting, familiar, but a little bit different textures that are intriguing and enjoyable, but we don't have a certain genre of cuisine that we stick by. We bring in influences from all over the world. I grew up in Texas, so I think I've kind of gravitated towards more of the Mexican inspired things or smoked meats and things. But then we collaborate together too. So I mean, it's cool when you have a kitchen full of people from all over the place and they're bringing things that maybe they grew up with and we're just kind of it melting it all together. Do you love that part of it? I mean the collaborative art part of it, because what I do is a collaborative art. People always say, oh, when we've had accolades for the work that we've done, people will come up to me and congratulate me. And I'm like, it's not just me like this 30, 30 other people that make this happen. And without any one of them, it wouldn't be the same thing that we put out. Do you feel the same way? A hundred percent. I mean, I don't create every single recipe cook, every single dish that leaves the kitchen. We definitely rely on a lot of people doing all the day-to-day stuff. And my role now is basically just kind of helping facilitate certain ideas into things that I think makes sense to go on the menu tasting with people and giving feedback. But I still will create recipes and things that I want to put on the menu, but it's definitely not as imperative that I do that and not part of my day-to-day stuff now. But I always tell people, if you enjoyed something on the menu, then I'll take the credit for it. If you did not enjoy it, it was this other guy. Yeah, that's. Great. You have earned a huge reputation, both as a culinary artist and restaurateur. You've been nominated multiple times for the James Beard Award. I don't quite understand why you've not yet clinched one, having been at your place and experienced the delight of what you are putting out. It's mind boggling. But that's a conversation probably for another day. You have also become known for your commitment to local, your commitment to sustainability, your commitment to doing things with low carbon footprint. Talk to me a little bit about some of those passions that you have and how it plays into the daily operation of the restaurant. Yeah, I mean, I didn't grow up on a farm or a ranch. I didn't have any strong connection to growing food or raising animals when I was a kid. But as a young chef, I was so focused on learning cooking techniques and the basics of being in a kitchen. And then after a while I started, I started to gravitate more towards the sourcing side of the food that we were cooking and just kind of slowly developed a passion for it. I think just going to the farmer's markets and talking to the farmers and seeing and meeting the people that are responsible for all the work that goes to growing our food just furthered it. And the more relationships I formed with that and the more time I spent learning about what it took to grow the food that we cooked with, it was just like I didn't want to do anything else. I didn't want to. I wanted that to be who we were about. And you start to understand that we rely so much on farms and the small farmer is what is keeping this world together, and I just wanted to be a part of supporting it. Think we all need to do that more. We tend to take our food for granted. And I think just having that connection with the people that are doing all the work to get food to us is imperative. And I just wanted our concepts at the restaurants to be that. When you run a restaurant, you have to compromise. I can't do everything that I want to do and still stay open. I have to use plastic wrap I, things like that. So we try to be as sustainable as we can, make the right choices with what we're buying. And I think a lot of people appreciate that. I think they appreciate when they go out to eat, knowing that the food that they're eating was sourced responsibly. And for some people they don't care. It's just a bonus. It's like, cool. I want our food to be great. I don't want you to come here just because of our sourcing, but just know if you're enjoying it. This is all from these farms around here and the rancher. You can go talk to the guy who raised the beef that you're eating right now on Saturday at the farmer's market if you want to. You. Were so passionate on this subject matter though, that you went and bought your own farm. Literally. Yeah, I've had a dream for a while of having my own farm. I've gotten more interested in doing the physical work myself, whether it's a small garden at my house or at the restaurants or whatever, and got an opportunity to buy some land that I thought maybe someday it could turn into a farm. And I think it was just one, this was 2022, maybe the weather can be weird here. So I think it was just a time of the year where it was hard to get a lot of produce and because at the restaurants we need a lot of volume, so we're usually trying to buy a lot of stuff from a lot of farmers, and sometimes it's not easy. Maybe the weather didn't allow for them to have a good harvest that week or whatever. I was like, man, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to go ahead and just start getting this land ready and do my best to try to start a farm and hire someone to manage it and we'll see how far we can grow it. So that's kind of the stake that we're in right now. In our first winter, we started planting back in April or May of last year. So we had some stuff through the summer and we're learning a lot, making a lot of mistakes, wasting a lot of money. But I love it. I love figuring it out. I love what's cool about this industry too, is whether I got into farming or not, there's always something to learn and get better at. And if you're somebody that's always striving to learn and grow as a person or in your craft, the cooking industry, the restaurant industry is definitely a place to do that. What percentage now of what you're using in the restaurant is coming from your own farm? It fluctuates right now. I don't have a lot, honestly. We had a freeze last month that wiped a lot of it out. I think we got down to 15 degrees for a little bit. Not a lot of things in Texas, like 15 degree weather, and we weren't quite prepared for it, so we lost some stuff. So I mean, I've got a lot radishes and turnips and a little bit of broccoli. We're planning real hard right now for the spring and getting ready for the summer. So we have a lot of seedlings that are starting to sprout peppers and tomatoes. Nice, nice. Yeah, we'll see how, I mean, we're trying to go big for this year and just keep growing. It's one of those things of you want to learn and get better at, but you have one shot every year. I want to grow better peppers this year. I've got one shot at it, so we'll. See. Yeah, nature's fickle that way. So you get another round at it the following year. when you draw something and just crumple up a piece of paper and say, no, I'll just start with a clean sheet. It doesn't. Work that you have to have a lot of patience, which is something I'm learning and we want, when you have all these ideas and things you want to implement that you learned, and it's like, well, you just got to sit there and wait for the earth to rotate around the sun so you can get to a point where you can do it. Yeah. Let's talk about the food experience that I had when I was with you. You brought some things out of the kitchen, which were just incredible. I don't know if you remember, but I can remind you, but do you remember what you brought out? I think a couple things. Yeah. Okay. So I think we had the farm raised yellow tail wrapped in ota, am I saying it correctly? Oh, Santa. Ota. So we had the farm raised yellow tail wrapped in Oja Santa. We then went and had a bite of fried okra, sliced okra, slice of copa. Right. Then you had the shiitake stuffed pasta. Oh my gosh. Over scrambled eggs with shiitake chips and slice of banana peppers, and then lemon and semi fredo cookie and caviar on top. Am I saying all these things correctly? I think I am. Yeah, I think so. You could correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, that one was a little mini ice cream sandwich with caviar on it. It was incredible. And then brown beta with melon ice. I mean, these were bites of heaven. That's the best way to describe 'em. Where did these ideas come from, and of these dishes that I just mentioned, talk to me about these. Where does the inspiration for these come from? I know we talked about the collaborative effort, but some of these are your own brainchild, right? Yeah. I think at this point we've cooked a lot. We've put a lot of dishes on the menu over the years at all the restaurants, and we're always trying to do something new. The more you do it, the more difficult it gets to totally create something that's absolutely a hundred percent unique to what we've done before. So I think a lot of it is kind of just recycled kind of ideas. Maybe it's a new ingredient or maybe a slightly new technique paired with something we've done before. So I think that's what you're getting now is we've done iterations of a lot of these things over the years and just kind of tweaked them a little bit throughout the seasons. And so you were there over the summer. Correct? Yeah. So we have a little garden in the back of barley where we have the OTA growing, and it's a perennial, so it comes back every year and it spreads a lot. So our whole back garden is just full of OAS Santa now. So we're like, every year we're like, what are we going to do with all this? So we're able to put a dent in it by cutting it larger pieces of it and wrapping it around the fish. So that was nice. Speaking of the fish, I mentioned the word farm raised yellow tail, and people look at me like I have five heads, like farm raised yellow tail tuna, and you told me while we were together, a unique story about this particular purveyor in which you procure the farm raised yellow tail. Can you tell us a little bit about that? This is kind of something that's unique. So yeah, I mean, farming fish is obviously not new, but I think doing it in a sustainable way that is best for the fish and the environment is not always the way that it goes. So it's nice to find, I mean, seafood is, we all know, I mean, the oceans are not going in the right direction, and who knows where our seafood supply is going to be at the end of our lifetime. And I think that if you could find sustainable sourcing options for your seafood, then we're going to do that. We don't have a lot of great seafood in the Gulf to pull from. I enjoy our shrimp here and some of the fish, my favorite is red fish, but that might be because I grew up fishing it and eating it. But if we want to do really nice quality stuff, we're looking outside of the Gulf of Mexico. And so our second choice is like, is there something that's farm raised that we can agree with the standards that they go by? Yeah, and I'm not an expert at this by any means. Understood. So I don't want to say something wrong, but this yellow Tail, it is similar to the Achi that you might see at a sushi restaurant. It's very good quality. And I think the technical name, it's a Hi Masa, I believe, but they do the pins in the ocean. So it's as much of a natural environment as possible done in a way that's not disrupting the natural habitats and stuff. So it's a good product. It's a great product. It was delicious. We love it. It was. Absolutely, it was very good. It was absolutely the way it was prepared. It was absolutely delicious. I mean, I have to ask this question and I want you to try to answer if you can. Why do you think this James Beard Award has been so elusive for you? I mean, I would love your perspective on it because I off record, how many times have you been nominated? I think seven official finalist nominations. I've been to the Beard Awards seven times, sat in the chair and watched as someone else's name was called. You. And I share that in common. By the way, I've been not seven times, I was there once, nominated once for. It's great to be recognized, huge. Honor. To be in the Top Honor final list of names. I can't complain about that at all. Why? I was never officially chosen. I could give you a couple reasons. I don't think I particularly want to share that on here. Understood. Because I don't think it would. Be appropriate when you go through that process of trying to understand, do you ever question, is there something I should be doing differently? Is there something, why am I, or are you still confident in what it is that you're doing and you're just going to keep doing the great work that you're doing? In other words, does that Elusiveness lead to you to question what you're doing and what do you take with that? What do you do with that information? Well, I'm not naive to the fact that politics plays a part in everything like this. So I feel like there's going to be certain level of things that are out of my control. But at the end of the day, these awards are nice, but they're not why I do what I do. Understood. So every time I would lose, I remind myself, Hey, you made it this far great, but let's go back to work tomorrow and keep doing good things mean. And the proof is in the pudding. Your seats are full every single night. If I was there, the restaurant was packed. Sour duck was packed. You know what I mean? I don't think customers are disagreeing with what you are doing. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what it comes back to is like, look, I am very fortunate to have successful restaurants that are still open. People enjoy them. And that's why I got into this. I didn't get into cooking to win awards. I mean, I knew what the Beard Award was when I was younger, but it never crossed my mind that I would be sitting in that amphitheater with the potential of getting called up there to give a speech about winning it. So it's cool, but I really, what makes me happy is knowing that the guests that come in to the restaurants are having a good time. I mean, if we can bring people happiness and create positive memories for people, that's worth more to me. Than any award. Yeah. And you're absolutely doing that. What's next for you? You've accomplished so much. You've built such a great reputation, such a following. I'm just curious as to, I know, you've got the farm now and you're getting that going, but in your mind, you're still a young guy. You know what I mean? Where do you go from here? I always have the itch to, I love opening restaurants. I love conceptualizing and seeing them go from that stage to the designing and just having my hand in all that, and then opening day and figuring out all the stuff that comes with the new restaurant. I love that. I really, as hard and stressful as it is, I really do enjoy it. So I don't have any plans right now to do another restaurant, not opposed to it. It's just I think we've got all of us, me and my partners at the places have enough going on. If something comes up and we want to pursue it, we'll talk about it. The farm is very much a, I can spend as much time on it as I want. There's never ending projects out there. And then I've got two little boys that I want to be a good father to, and my dad did an amazing job of providing for us as a chef and building a very, very good career himself. I would like to do that and try to learn from what he did and try to be maybe around a little bit more if possible. So that's kind of my focus right now is just trying to be a good dad and a good husband and figure it out this farm, and if another restaurant or another food related project comes along, we'll see what happens. You're mentioning your family, and I remember the conversation that we had when we were together, which I thought was very, very endearing, which is I asked you, do you cook at home when you're not? And you shared with me a story about your. Children and what they like most when you cook and talk to me about that. They're very picky eaters. You told me. Yeah. Yeah. I envy the chefs that have their, they cook these nice meals and the kids try everything. I mean, we get parents bring their children into barley swine, and they do the whole tasting menu. I'm just like, God, that's cool. That's really cool. I can't get my son to eat anything other than roasted potatoes and chicken or steak. I mean, I do steak night every week. My two boys love the steak, but anytime I try to switch it up on the vegetables or whatever, no luck. No. Luck, are they. God forbid it touches stuff. On, so they're a little bit pickier in terms. Of, yeah, I'm hoping that, well, one of 'em is only two, but my eight, almost 9-year-old hopefully will open up a little bit more and enjoy a little bit more than what he's eating right now. If your two sons fast forward, we started the conversation with a rewind. Fast forward if your two sons, when they're older, come to you as you did to your dad and say, dad, I want to be a chef. What's the advice that you're going to dispense in that moment in time? I mean, I'll probably do what he did and make sure that they have all the information they need to know what they're getting into. I think I assume that they will not be having that conversation with me without any prior experience working in the restaurant. So at least with my dad, I had worked in the restaurants for a couple years when it came to that realization, so I kind of knew how restaurants went because if you've never worked in a restaurant and you think you want to be a professional chef, you have another thing coming because it's totally different. It's not as glamorous as maybe television makes it seem. A lot of hard work. You got to work in a kitchen in a restaurant, and you got to like that first before you start thinking about pursuing that as a career. So that would be number one is have you worked? I don't know. I don't know if they're going to want to work in one of my restaurants when they're older or not, so we'll see. But that would be number one. And then just, yeah, I want to be supportive because. You obviously you've built, I mean, the Austin food scene has exploded since you started as a food truck operator back in 2009. The city has become a destination that people want to come to. You have the South by Southwest Festival, you have all these great things that are happening in the city, this great food scene, and you've been a big part of that. And I guess my last question to you is how does it feel to know that you, and please, I know you're a humble guy, but take a little credit where credit's due. You've been a big part, I think, of this kind of renaissance, if you will, of the food scene in Austin, Texas. How does that make you feel now being able to look back and say, wow, look where we started and look where we as a company have come as a restaurateur have come, but look where the city has come. Yeah, I mean, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. I think that I was born and raised here. Not a lot of people living in Austin were born here, and a lot of people moved here from other places, so I'm very proud of the city. So just to be a part of anything like that, to be a part of its growth is awesome. And it feels good to talk to people and find out that what we've done at the restaurants has impacted them in a positive way. Again, that's just one of the things that keeps us going as chefs is knowing that we're creating positive experiences for people. And I think a lot of it honestly was right timing too for me. Had I been a couple years later or a couple years earlier, who knows where we'd be right now? So luck always plays into that. But I don't know. I've worked my butt off and I've surrounded myself with great people that worked their butts off, and we've been able to do some good things, and I'm just really happy that if we've had any positive influence on the city and the people in it, in the community around us, then I mean, I feel very proud of that and just want to keep that going. Well, you've been doing things unbelievably, right, so Bryce Gilmore, I can't thank you enough chef for being part of this podcast. How do people find you? Should they come visit Austin? If you could, maybe this is a chance to kind of promote the restaurants. Where do we find you on social media? Where do we find you? Talk to us about how people can locate you and get a reservation and get a seat at one of your tables. So you came and visited me at Barley Swine, which is off of Burnett Road in Austin. It is on the northern side of downtown. A quick 10 minute Uber from your hotel room if you're visiting, but we do a tasting menu there featuring local ingredients, what's in season, so it changes with the seasons. And Odd Duck is on South Lamar and we've been there for 10 years now doing an a la carte menu. Again, there's just food that is created from local farmers and we encourage people to share plates there. I wouldn't say they're small plates, but they're definitely plates that we don't really believe in. The app and entree kind of thing, everyone gets their own plate of food. We try to encourage people to order as much as they can and share it with their table and get to try all the different things so you're not stuck to just one plate of food. That's kind of always been our concept there, just trying to encourage people to share and try everything. And then Sour Duck is a bakery beer garden. Bring your kids to run around and. You got live music there sometimes. What's. That? You've got live music there sometimes. Yeah. So I don't know if you noticed, but In The Yard is the old. So that's the stage. Trailer. So the old Odd Duck, that's. The stage. We gutted it, dragged it out there and opened up one of the sides so people can, when there's nothing going on in there, the kids go up there and play. I think we painted chalkboard paint on there so they can write all over it and stuff. That's. Very cool. And how about social media? Where do we find you on social media? Yeah, I mean everywhere. Odd Duck, Austin Barley, swine Sourd Duck Market should be easy to find. Awesome. Bryce, I can't thank you enough. It's been a real pleasure sitting down with you today. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you and coming to visit us and can't wait to see the show. For more information on this episode as well as other episodes in this series, head over to our website at Bike to bytes podcast.com. You can also find us on YouTube at Bike to Bytes. Be sure to give us a like and subscribe while you're there. And if you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, we would appreciate a five star rating and a glowing review. It really does help spread the word. Check out our Instagram at Bike debits tv and be sure to follow my personal Instagram at Garrett Abe where I post shots of my daily rides and interesting places I visit. If you're interested in watching the Bike de Bites TV show, please visit bike de bytes.com. We also have some really cool stuff of Bike to Bites, apparel and some other things that you can check out while you're there. Our podcast today would not be possible without our great sponsor Plus, and I'm so thankful that they've been along with me on this Journey. Plus helps organizations harness the power of technology for truly transformative results from AI and security to cloud and workplace transformation. Plus, brings you the right solutions at the right time, in the most efficient way. Plus is on the front line of today's modern enterprise. Check them out@eplus.com. Well, that about does it for this episode of Bike de Bytes podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Best. We'll see you next time. And remember, pedal Eat and Repeat. I.