Photograph by Hailey Bollinger
Brian Young of Young Buck Deli and Brad Bernstein of Carlo & Johnny intimately understand the balance needed between business and artistry, and they’ve watched the scales tip to either side over the past few years.
Young: I’m kind of jealous of people who grew up in restaurants.
Bernstein: My family always had restaurants, so I’m a third-generation restauranteur. My grandparents had some really successful operations, and I grew up in the kitchens. I always tell people my first cooking experience was making cinnamon toast with my grandmother at Mike Fink and passing it out. I think I fell in love with the experience of handing somebody a piece of toast, something that was good, and seeing the gratification from it.
I think that still sticks with me to this day. It gets stuck in your blood.
My grandmother, always, she’s my heart and soul. She just had a gift for hospitality. She was a great cook, but not like a classic cook. She made one of her restaurants famous by doing this cheese bread. Same thing as like the cinnamon toast. She’d just make this cheese bread and pass it around. It was never on the menu, but she made it. And that’s kind of what their empire was built on, my grandmother’s cheese bread. Always been my inspiration.”
Young: Inspirationally for me? I guess I was always inspired by, like, old-school, tradesmen-style stuff. That’s how I got into butchering because I got into sort of idolizing old-school butcher shops. I definitely romanticized the trade of it. The sort of journeyman aspect of you learn by doing and the more you do the better you get.
Bernstein: I think in this profession you have to be romantic in some sort of fashion.
Young: That’s true.
Bernstein: You really have to love and be passionate about what you do. Butchery’s a lot of fun, but it’s tedious in its own right. It takes a lot of time and patience. The idea of charcuterie is something cool: something that you do nine months earlier and then you’re enjoying it that much later.
Young: It’s a fun exercise to think about. If it’s spring and I’m doing a coppa that I know I’m going to serve around Thanksgiving, when everyone else is thinking about baby peas and fresh vegetables, you have to put yourself in the headspace of warm spices and dried fruit. I guess I like the planning part of it.
Bernstein: I don’t know if I have an affinity for vintage stuff, but I maybe feel like things back then were better, simple. As a chef, getting down to that basic, kind of primitive form of cooking is real exciting. I always liked the concept of showcasing your ingredients, having the produce out. We used to have a grocery store down the corner from our house we used to walk to and get candy as kids. I always liked the little grocery store, and Cincinnati used to have quite a few of them. They’re not around anymore. Speaks volumes to how difficult it is.
Young: That’s the same thing that happened to butcher shops. The death of the butcher shop was the birth of the supermarket. Nobody was going to the baker or the butcher anymore because they could just go to the supermarket. There was no small grocer with specialty stuff. In a nostalgic way, similar to you, I felt like that’s what the world is missing.
Photograph by Hailey Bollinger
Bernstein: Yeah.
Young: If we could just go back and reconnect to that part of our city pride or neighborhood pride. Like, you go to the same butcher twice a week for 30 years. Maybe I’m too romantic about it because I always think people are going to care about it as much as I do.
Bernstein: I fell in love with that concept of slow food—the history, the process, understanding where food comes from, and knowing your location. That’s always been an inspiration point, but I don’t know if people care about it. Before COVID, everything was kind of moving towards local, sustainable sourcing, craftsmanship, artisan. Now we’ve come back and it’s all about convenience again. As a chef, it’s very frustrating.
Young: I definitely feel like craftsmanship has been missing. We need a course correction. I want people to back. You know what I mean? I feel like people didn’t come back after COVID.
Bernstein: Yeah. My son grew up in an era where he can Doordash whatever he wants. We buy stuff off of Amazon. I don’t know the last time I set foot in, like, a toy store. Everything I buy is pretty much off the internet now, so I’m part of my own problem.
Young: I guess I just like old stuff.
Bernstein: Even though we have all this convenience, the convenience just added more noise in many ways.
Young: It’s definitely like video killed the radio star. Convenience killed the craftsmanship.
Bernstein: It’s hard, because do I smoke my own corned beef, or do I just buy it and slice it? Will people care? It goes back to the whole nostalgia, slow food thing.
Young: I’m literally going through the same thing. Do people care? I want them to care.
Facebook Comments