From Growth to Goodbyes: The Nominate Experience Unpacked

I'm Chris Lindstrom and this is the Food About Town podcast.

Rochester.

Well, why Rochester?

Chris Lindstrom was a hoot.

He was just so much fun.

He never stopped talking.

I mean, it was great.

Here's a good idea.

Have a point.

It makes it so much more interesting for the listener and we don't need.

Any characters around to get the joint atmosphere.

Is that clear?

Because I'm a pro.

That's what pros do.

I'm a professional.

Look it up in the book.

But now, yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.

And we're back talking about our transition and nominate from the historic German House to our next place.

So we had a great run at the German House.

Biggest challenge is we only were so big and it was a.

It was tough for.

For Chris.

Even though he had done an amazing job helping us out at the end.

It wasn't really fair for to Chris to have to open up the German House just for us.

Yeah.

And it wasn't, you know, unless we really hit a higher volume than we were at, it wasn't going to end up working out.

So we ended up pivoting to our new home.

And I can't thank the team over at Three Heads.

Three Heads beer.

Three Heads brewing.

Enough.

I walked in, we were going to run an event the next week.

I walked in on a fly you.

And I to text.

You're like, hey, we need to find a new place for next week.

We had TV cameras coming that next week.

You and I went to Three Heads on a Friday at 4pm yeah.

Not a great time to go to Three Heads to talk about business.

No.

We walked in and I asked the bar manager there, so shout out to Dave Coniglio, who was working that day.

I said, hey, I'm in a bit of a situation.

I need a place to hold an event next week on this date.

Told him a little bit about what we did and the only question he asked was, is it good for Rochester?

We said, yes.

He's like, yeah, we'll see you next week.

That was the discussion.

The rest is history.

And it was.

That was.

That was also a question that changed the way I thought about a lot of things, which was, is it good for Rochester?

Was the question that they cared about more than anything else.

Told me a lot about Three Heads too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whether they were going to make more money or anything else, that's what they cared about.

And they followed up on that the entire time we worked with them.

And I do have to say we also sold A good amount of beer there.

We also drank a lot of beer there.

Sure did.

But very self conscious about the choice I just made to your fridge.

So we had, we had so much great beer there, but we also had amazing events.

So again, shout out to Dave Coniglio for really driving the day to day.

But also to Jeff Dale who was our like part of the owner group.

That was our, our contact there.

He is, he is one of those people that, he embodied that ethos of if it's good for Rochester, we're going to do it.

And they, they kept that up the entire time and we captured that as well for everything we did from then on.

So I got to say also like we had so many, so many beers at Three Heads and all of them like to an end.

Like we just, you know, we might personally not love that style but their quality at that time was just so fundamentally fantastic.

It's all we could talk about.

Every event is what a crazy good deal the spear is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well it, I remember it, our starting there coincided with a new brewer.

Starting.

Yeah, he'd started like a few months before I think.

So like I hadn't given Three Heads a shake like the pandemic had happened.

So I really tried anything new from them.

Right.

The kind would always pop up once around.

But otherwise staples.

Right.

Yep.

And I always.

What's what.

Yeah.

Last time I drank beer here was not this.

Yeah.

And I gotta say, like they hit every style right on.

And we just had, we had an amazing time like just enjoying the beer.

But we also got a chance to do beer pairings for every event going forward and what a blast.

They always had different stuff.

It's a lot of fun.

Yeah, I know for me personally too, like I, I know I had brought this up in meetings before we were even considering like doing a long term pick deal that I just, I'm.

I thought, I always thought Three Heads would be a great location.

That was our first plan is like, hey, if we did pick up, where would it be?

And this was months before we even started the German House.

Yeah.

We all think Three Heads.

We had a spot, right?

Yeah.

And another benefit too that was at Three Heads.

It wasn't just people coming for us.

We got, we got to kind of do some boots on the ground marketing to strangers that just walk by.

They see the table, they see the runner.

What's this?

What do you guys do?

Chris could give them the spiel.

We actually, for those who don't know, we started carrying every event probably two to three Just extra meals, just that we could sell on site.

And they always sold.

I was going to say too, is that was the big difference from the German house, is that we could do that.

We had a more public face.

People would walk and say, oh, what's this?

I'm hungry, I'd like some food.

And we can say, hey, we have some food for you.

Yeah.

And that was a blast.

We walked around, gave out samples and, you know, we.

It was.

It was really an amazing experience and brought us more visibility, like everybody said.

And speaking of visibility, also want to give a shout out to our social media person, Sapphire Corshane, for working with us over the course of like two.

Years and dealing with us and dealing.

With our amateurish abilities when it came to marketing and remembering that marketing mattered.

Um, so she was an amazing help and best wishes to her new effort.

Secondary.

Make sure you check her out for all of your holiday oddity needs.

If you're into weird stuff, go out to some of the markets around Rochester and grab something from her and her business partner.

They're doing really cool work around Rochester right now.

We had her do a couple of our demo meals too, didn't we?

Oh, yeah, she came out for.

She came out for a lot of those.

And that was actually a great thing too, is I stopped doing the demo meals because I might know the food, but I wanted somebody that didn't know the food to taste it.

And having somebody who was around the industry but, you know, maybe hadn't tried that specific food before, you know, made a lot of difference.

We got real feedback on quantity.

It was fed to her family and that was.

It was really great to have that kind of extra, you know, extra pair of eyes, extra pair of, you know, people tasting the food.

Yeah.

And I think it also allowed her to prep social media in advance as well.

Like she could get pictures during the day demo meal.

And then when we did our event, all the stuff's already ready to go.

Yeah, that definitely is.

You know, throughout the whole thing, we were constantly improving process and we learned so much about, you know, what it takes to do that.

Right.

Like the demo meals.

Let us post pictures of the meal presented well instead of styrofoam container, takeout container.

Right.

And.

And like, immediately hit social media with it.

Well, and speaking of the social media side, that's something Raf, you were pretty involved with too.

On the graphic design side, you came up with this really interesting way of getting the word out for the events.

Kind of ended up going down a kind of a color Splash kind of way.

You talked about that for a second.

I looked forward to seeing Raphs every single week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I needed a way to kind of almost not really hint, but kind of make something unique for each event that was something easy to do.

A little splash of color to kind of kind of separate the event from all the other ones.

So I did those small like digital splash watercolor, like paint splashes really well.

Like a self branding thing too.

You didn't even need to put Curate or nominate on there and you would still know like, oh, this is a graphic for a curate event.

A nominate event.

Yeah.

I think even every fifth month or whatever when you changed direction, it was.

Still like, I loved it.

I love those days.

I looked forward to us.

Oh, yeah, see, he rotated.

It's like watching like the, like the, the DVD thing.

Which corner is it going to go in?

Yeah, you know, as, you know, the rest of us are here in Rochester, rafts in.

In Buffalo.

So, you know, it was different with different, frankly, because it was all software based and all web based.

So it was a different kind of interaction.

But, you know, having Raph contributing to, you know, the graphics for social media and helping out with pictures and helping out with other things like that was a constant in these events.

Like, our prep continued to get better because of those efforts and keeping, you know, keeping all that stuff fresh all the time because otherwise, you know, we all get.

You all get bored.

Looking at the same things over and.

Over was often eyes in the sky while we were at Three Heads or at the German House, dealing with people face to face.

Like, oh, Raph, hey, we forgot this.

Can you check on this for us?

You're the only person in front of a computer right now.

Yeah, it did make a big difference.

So, yeah, I.

Speaking of Three Heads, I do want to bring up what was, I think one of the, like top three highlights of our entire run with Curate Nominate was Homegrown.

Oh, Homegrown Water.

So amazing.

I still remember that to this day.

So I just want to like really directly thank Jeff Dale and Leslie Ward from.

From Love and Cop and Henrietta for including us in Homegrown that year.

I think that was the last one they've run since.

Since far as I know it was.

Yeah.

And that was.

That was kind of the culmination of all the work that we had done to go out for, you know, essentially Three Heads festival that they were running every year.

This is the first one back from the Pandemic.

That was their birthday person.

Right.

Essentially, I think it was A like a birthday party kind of thing.

And it was.

It brought so many different brewers together and different people.

And this was held out in Henrietta at the Loving cup site.

And there were so many people that came out.

This is the first one of the first big events after, you know, full.

Full lockdown and stuff that everybody was out for.

And we, we brought so many, so much great food to that event to share with all the people.

But the thing that, the thing that hit me, I remember, you know, going and talking to, you know, Leslie after was how much that emotionally hit me.

I was.

I was surprised at how emotional that day was because that was, you know, you're in work mode all day, but at the end of that, the reception, the positivity, six hours of solid positivity.

Yeah, it's really good for a morale.

It was overwhelming, I think, in many ways, not just the day, because the day's long, but man, that hit me hard that day.

I.

Yeah, I was to give everyone.

An idea of how much food we brought is.

It was six hours and we brought two restaurants for two hours at a time.

And we served hundreds of people while we were there, just samples, everything else.

And most of the food was so good that people were coming back for fourth, fifth, sixth samples, just asking us, please, can I have some more?

Yeah.

And it was.

We did people come back from the first session.

They come back for the second session and the third session.

We should.

Some of the restaurants come out and serve too.

Shout out to Magusta, the whole team over there, for bringing like, some amazing food.

So this was the restaurants that participated in that.

They also donated the food for.

This is the only time we ever took food for free.

It was a free event for everyone.

So, yeah, so shout out to.

To Namaste.

One of you know, that was our Indian food partner for so many events, Cocoa Garden, Malaysian food, which we're going to talk about when it comes to absolute favorites.

So we had, we had the Malaysian food, we had some Ethiopian food from Zometa.

It was really just just chicken.

The Peruvian food brought.

Brought the heat too.

Like, these were some of our, like, stone cold favorites that we had over the entire run that we got to bring to everybody.

And that was one of the biggest highlights of the whole thing for me.

Yeah, something you kind of touched on, Chris, but something I really liked about the way we did that was we actually brought like the chefs and owners of these restaurants to serve their own food and to customers.

And I think that really embodied what we did as Curate nominated Which is we're highlighting the restaurants.

It's about them.

It's not about us.

Yeah.

For those that have never done an event, every time you picked up your food or was delivered, we gave you a sheet that was almost entirely written by Chris.

Every single event told you about the restaurant, about the cuisine, about the food you were getting, about the pairing, if we were doing one.

And we always, always, always encouraged you, please go back to the restaurant on your own and patronize them.

Yeah.

That made.

That made all the difference, is we wanted people to go back.

We didn't want to keep that information.

Wanted to tell everybody.

This wasn't about opaque.

This was about transparency.

This was about helping.

We were trying to do a few.

Variations of it, but, like, our tagline or website for our whole run was some version of, you know, find your new favorite restaurant.

Right.

Yeah.

Your next favorite meal.

Yeah.

We didn't want to be like those delivery services out there, taking advantage of these restaurants.

We really wanted to be their partners.

Yeah.

We had restaurants, you know, shout out.

One that comes to mind is Nash.

Like, very successful restaurant, does pretty good.

Like, middle to high.

Our typical point.

They wanted to work with us.

Yeah.

They wanted, like, we.

That.

That was the first time.

I mean, I always felt good about what we did.

That was the first time.

Like, man, we have restaurants approaching us like, hey, we want to work with you.

And that was.

We don't catch good meal, too.

We don't care if we.

To lose some money on our normal food.

Like, we just.

We love what you're doing so much.

We want to be a part of it and work with you.

That's.

Also.

Yeah, we ate there last night.

Great restaurant.

Yeah.

Shout out.

Which.

Shout out to, you know, chef at the time, chef and owner Joe Zolniorowski, from Nash now purely at old Playboy Grill.

And to Giuseppe over at Fiamma for being two of our partners that did, you know, bend their prices to help us out run these amazing events.

That was really amazing of them to.

To do that and to be a part of that whole experience.

That was the Paul Guglielmo event.

Yeah, that was a big old event.

We served a ton of food that.

Paul brought a lot of that highlights back.

You know, we kind of jumped through that period, but, you know, that period where we were trying to figure out exactly what kind of meals we wanted to serve, what we wanted to bring in the community.

Right.

What kind of experiences we wanted to provide.

And, you know, both of those restaurants, Nash and Fiamma, were probably outliers.

In the rest of certain restaurants we worked with.

And we're definitely part of, you know, an attempt of, an attempt to sort of what if we did this sort of thing?

Right.

And what if we, you know, offered a chance for restaurants to experiment?

Right.

So we always toyed around with variable pricing, but at the end of the day, we always found consistent pricing was better for people, you know, participating in, you know, curate and nominate, you know, if we were still going, and we'll get into why, you know, we're here we are today.

But I think we would have ended up in a place where we did have a more flexible pricing model, working with more expensive restaurants, more, you know, experimental restaurants and everything in between.

It definitely speaks to, you know, some of the diversity in our customer base too.

Right.

Because I think a lot of our regulars had different motivations for being there.

Some of them, it was like a, you know, bi weekly ritual and, and.

And others, some had family and kids, were like, this is just a great easy meal on a Wednesday that I don't have to think about.

Thank you.

You could serve me anything and it'll be great.

Yep.

And others were really there for the exploration.

Yeah, yeah.

And that was, I think that was the big reason why we ended up having it be a real mystery and we didn't tip it too much, was we didn't want people not buying when it was a food they weren't familiar with.

And we didn't want people buying more because we were working with a restaurant where we were getting fancier food.

Oh, dude.

I wouldn't even tell my own parents what the meal was going to be.

That you wouldn't tell your own wife.

So what's funny about that is my wife wanted this surpr, though, like when we'd be having our meet, when we started doing remote meetings like we used to do in person meetings when we moved to remote, I would have to tell my wife, okay, we're about to talk about the restaurant if you want to like, get out of earshot or something, you know, because she, she genuinely enjoyed the experience and the surprise.

We wanted to limit any preconceived notions about what the cuisine would be like if you knew it was West African.

Like, you might go Google that and see something and maybe you're turned off by something or you're afraid because you've never had it.

We didn't want that to happen.

We wanted you to come in and just accept the meal as it was.

Try it.

You paid for it, right?

Yeah, try it.

You're Going to love it.

Yeah.

And I think that was the other thing is we.

We told people straight up that you might not love every meal you get, but we know, like, one out of every three or four you'll never stop talking about.

Right.

That.

That was our promise, is if you're open, you're gonna find something you didn't know about and that you adore.

Now.

Yeah.

Once in a while, we definitely have people like, hey, this cuisine wasn't to my liking.

Yeah.

But we could still stand by the fact that this was a perfect example of this cuisine.

It was delicious.

You might not like it, and that's okay.

We'll see you next time.

Yeah.

And I.

I gotta say, for.

To the customer's credit, almost all of them came back the next time because they were part of, you know, learning about that thing, part of learning about the food.

So before.

Before we go to the next phase, I do want to shout out.

So we did eventually have more locations open up.

Want to say thanks to Fatty Beer in Rochester, Jeff Bauman and Zach Kadar for, you know, allowing us into their space.

We met them at Homegrown.

We eventually started with Black Button.

So shout out to Jason Barrett, the owner of Black Button, helping us out there.

Yeah.

So we had three rotating pickup locations in Rochester.

Yeah.

Which was really something.

I'm just going to throw out a few other names of places just to keep everybody's mind fresh.

So we also had Levantine Syrian Cafe.

We had French Quarter New Orleans cuisine, which just killed every time we worked with them.

So good.

Pulsicada and Swan Market with German and Polish food mentioned.

Cocoa Garden.

We're going to talk about them.

I'm sure at the end.

Tajada for Thai food, just chicken, the Peruvian food.

So so many more.

You can still see all the places on nomineemeals.com to look at.

It's still up there.

Perfect.

Good.

I looked.

I literally checked before we came here.

So it doesn't have some of the last events.

Oh, shit.

Is it still up?

The rest of them are still there.

But what I did.

Yeah.

What I did want to pivot to was eventually we started running.

Running events in Buffalo too, which was.

Was a pretty big deal for.

It was a pretty big deal for me, to be honest, to run events in, you know, the place where I grew up.

Like, not in the city, but to run events in Buffalo.

Most of us are from Buffalo.

Yeah.

Between, you know, obviously Raph, myself, you and Alex grew up in, you know, classic Cheek to Vegas.

I grew up in Boston.

New York.

You know, Rafter Nate is the only person here that did not grow up in Buffalo.

Yeah.

Shout out to.

I technically grew up in Massachusetts.

I've been in for floods ever years now.

You got a room of us growing up.

It was fun to bring it back home.

Yeah.

My wife grew up down the street from Stromi, so I feel like that counts.

It really was.

It was special to do that.

And before we dive into low Buffalo experience, I did want to thank our initial partner, Southern Junction.

Ryan Fernandez, by the way, getting a James Beard nominations.

Really?

Yeah.

He deserves it.

That was such a good meal.

That was a good meal.

Yeah.

Brian got a James Beard nomination.

Got a lot of.

He's gotten a lot of national press.

He's just riding really high right now and like, just completely killing his own little.

In the old Black Sheep location in Blackrock.

I've even seen him on a couple like, TikTok influencers nowadays.

So he was gracious enough to do our first event.

And Jason Wood from Nowhere Lounge in Kenmore was our pickup partner in such a cool spot.

Please go.

Yeah, it's really amazing.

Jason did an amazing job doing that.

He agreed to host our events without having met us or knowing what we were doing.

And before he was open.

Yeah, I was going to say that before the place was even officially open, he allowed us.

He hosted us graciously.

And I want to thank so strongly my friend Krista Glenny for introducing me to them and basically just saying, you need to work with Chris.

You need to work with this team.

Her word goes farther than most anybody else I know.

If she says, you want to do this?

They're like, yep, okay.

She.

She asked Ryan, she's like, hey, like, you to work with them.

And Jason, like, you should work with them.

He's like, okay.

We walked in, put up with us and put up with us for, man, well over a year.

He makes a damn good cocktail.

Yes, he does.

Sure does.

And, you know, basically said yes sight unseen.

And then once we came in and started doing it, he was fully on board doing, you know, custom cocktails for events.

You know, hosting our events there was really fantastic.

And I gotta say, that first event with Southern Junction was amazing.

That was great.

Yeah.

Somehow went off without a hitch.

Yeah.

For our first event in Buffalo, I was for.

For pretty much every Buffalo without a hitch.

Yeah.

Like, oh, yeah, you guys.

Was that the one that you and I showed up half an hour plus late?

Oh, yeah.

Because was that the first one or is that the second one?

No, that was the first one, I.

Thought it was the same.

Yeah, there was.

It might have been the Burmese place.

There was a specific type of accident on 90 that I'd rather not talk about.

It is not a sad accident.

It is a hilarious accident.

Oh yeah, it's hilarious.

Which, yeah, if you can say that no one was really hurt.

But yeah.

Where Alex and I showed up to one one of the first Buffalo events easily half an hour late, if not more.

I will say the.

Especially for just kind of being a bunch of dudes from Rochester that hopped in the Buffalo scene.

The Buffalo community showed us so much love.

Like all of our events there were popping people like, oh, I drove from all the way out here for this event multiple times.

We got a lot of people from.

The south towns came up for us.

Yeah.

Which was awesome.

Thank you.

All the way up to Kenmore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know, shout out to Andrew Garno who was at the Buffalo News at that point, now running his own.

His own writing and multimedia platform for Bytes.

Definitely subscribe to that on Substack if you want to learn about what's really going on in the Buffalo Foodstein.

You know, he really popped us big on that first event.

We also had the delightful pleasure of getting a cease and desist email that first night after our first event in Buffalo.

I was gonna ask if we're gonna talk about 100 talking about before we go there.

I just want to point out that when Chris said check out 4 bytes and substack, 3 phones appeared on the table.

Yeah.

I was gonna ask before we started, are we going there?

Oh yeah, we are going there.

So we had our first event in Buffalo and I in there.

And at the time we were called curate meals.

Curate meals.com.

we were pretty fond of that name.

And I am sitting with my family eating dinner on a Friday night and I get an email from a law firm that is a cease and desist for the use of Curate Meals in Buffalo.

And this was the day after our.

Event, one day after.

So this was.

This was already planned that we had gotten that the day after and like we could run.

Just.

It was an amazing day.

Like we.

This was.

We were on a high.

It was so good.

And then we get that and we had to, you know, we knew right away that we weren't going to fight this.

It was very frustrating.

I just want to say it was incredibly disappointing.

From another local restaurant, another local business in Buffalo.

Yeah.

With a similar name.

Also working with, you know, a lot of minority owned businesses and trying.

Trying to do Something good.

As far as I could tell, that they didn't come talk to us.

I think we had even heard from your friend Chris that we should speak to them about, like, collaborating.

Yeah.

Somebody had brought it up that we should reach out to them to do, you know, a different kind of pop up or something like that.

And the reality is that's how I like to do business.

That's how we like to do business.

We like to work together.

We don't.

We have no interest in being oppositional.

We have no interest in, you know, hurting their business.

Yeah, they apparently did.

Yeah.

And I will never forgive them for just sending us a cease and disassist from their law firm rather than just shooting us a message and saying, hey, we have a similar name in Buffalo.

Do you mind operating under a different name in Buffalo?

We would have had zero problem with that.

No, it would have been fine.

It would have been a perfect, perfectly fine ask.

We wouldn't have done even the same if someone came to Rochester to do something similar.

Yeah, but what a shitty move to have your law firm send a cease and desist to us on a Friday night.

Yeah.

After our event.

Yeah, I.

And not reach out to upsets me.

We were visible.

We're.

We're transparent.

We're happy to help and work with people.

And I gotta be.

I gotta be honest, like that.

That kind of hurt because I.

All we wanted to do was do good things in the community and that all we wanted was to be reached out to What.

What I know we can say for sure is that that was an unfortunate down, but it did offer us the opportunity to rebrand.

I got to say, what we ended up with, the rebrand worked out.

It was better and it worked out.

But it was a huge pain.

It was a big pain.

Big pain.

And I got to say, once again, thank you to Raph for ending up coming up with a better, you know, an even better design, taking the name.

So while a new name, guys, remember.

We come up with a new name.

Interesting.

You know, we talk to a lot of our mentors to talk to, you know, Matt Foley, who I mentioned, you know, our, you know, our, our startup coach and a couple other people.

We have a friend, you know, in startup law in the area that we've talked to that we've worked before just to get their opinion, really.

And you know, we ended up changing the name.

We did have a lot of great, A lot of great ideas that I'm gonna run across people right now.

You saved them.

You still remember.

I know Some of them.

I'm so glad.

Yeah.

I know the ones I came up with that I felt really strongly about because, I mean, we already got seasoned assistant once.

Why not get seasoned assistant multiple times?

Trying to get a record.

Let's go.

So the ones I was very fond of were WEG Meals, Whole Meals.

Whole Meals.

I was very fond.

Wake meals was the one.

I'm like, man, how fast could we get season desisted?

I'm pretty sure Wake meals was right on top.

I think it would be less than a day we would get seasoned.

They might actually shoot us a message before cease and desisted us though.

Did we.

Did we have.

Because there's five of us.

I think we tossed around five guys meals.

Five guys meals.

Yep.

Five guys meals was another good one.

Yep.

So we.

We had some real.

She had some real winners there.

I think those were the three loot plate.

Yes.

So we just had a lot of great ideas that would get us, like, actually sued.

But in the end, I.

I'm actually really happy we changed to nominate.

It gave us a chance to even go further with what we did.

Some new things to toy with.

Yeah.

And the design, again, design was better.

The branding was better.

It was the right move.

But I do want to linger in Buffalo for a second because this is where Raf, you got to.

You got to really jump in and shine too, by going to visit a lot of these restaurants, doing the demo meals.

Because, like, before this, I was kind of separated from the entire process, basically, so I hadn't really been talking because, like, I didn't have the same experience as you guys.

I was until 100 miles away.

But yeah, when you started doing Buffalo events, I definitely got a better feel for the actual process of getting the meals like that.

Physically going to places, testing things out.

It was so helpful having you actually physically in Buffalo, man.

Yeah.

For.

For a while, I think.

I think for God, it had to be the first year and a half of a year plus of doing pickup events.

I had done every reach out to every restaurant.

I'd picked up every single order that brought to the events.

And, you know, we had started implementing rotations on stuff like that to, you know, take that load off.

And when we're running in Buffalo, having you there, you know, forced our hand in many ways and not in a great way to have you, you know, take point on that, go visit these places, test them out.

Because I was doing research just on websites.

I was doing research on Google Maps, you know, finding all these places that.

I had never been it wasn't reasonable for any of us to drive from Rochester to Buffalo to do a demo meal and come back, report on it.

Yeah.

Then go back a week later.

It didn't really work.

I would go out for a day and Raph and I would bounce to like, five different places that day to go talk to them and pitch and taste food, and.

That was a good time.

They were.

They were.

They were.

They were a blast.

And we got.

We.

You know, to be honest, we found some really amazing places that you didn't know about, I didn't know about.

And we got to learn so much about the Buffalo food scene through this experience.

And I want to shout out at least three different spots that we worked with.

One was family Thai, which was Burmese food.

And I gotta say, for me, that.

That's in.

That's in my top five.

That first.

That first meal from family Thai was so.

So they.

The place that did the tea leaf salad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was so much food.

Like, we got so much food that night for everybody.

It was.

It was astonishing how much food we were able to serve to people.

But they were so gracious.

The food was amazing.

And, you know, for a city, you know, Buffalo is wildly high percentage Burmese compared to what people understand.

It's such a core part of what Buffalo is today.

And the fact that that was the second event we did was bringing that food.

It was almost a problem because they gave us so much food and that was so many people's first time that they came to expect four people's worth of food, which was not realistic, unfortunately.

We did deliver it two times in a row.

We did, we did.

Then it.

Then it varied a bit because that family time meal was amazing.

Then we used.

I think it was Casa de Sabores was, you know, Dominican food.

That is also a lot of food.

They crushed it.

And then we got to try some things that, you know, we hadn't really done enough in Rochester.

So with the Burmese, then we got to serve.

I want you to talk about this a little bit, Rafa.

We got to serve Filipino food, which.

Oh, yeah, I was super excited about that one because, like, for years I've been waiting for a Filipino place, you know, come on, Buffalo.

Or at least Western New York, Lawson.

You know, Toronto.

But finally we got.

We got.

I think it was actually one of the.

Our guys at.

At a Nowhere Lounge that suggested it when we were doing the event.

And I was like, no way.

We have to go check this out.

Yeah.

And it's amazing.

Like, you Know, and it was part of our.

It was part of the eternal struggle and something, you know, we, you know, everybody be busting my balls about it, you know, because we're, you know, we, we could, we could certainly come across as, you know, visually come across as, you know, four bearded white guys and Raph at events.

And that's how we would come across.

And we were, we were very, I mean, I was always very conscientious of.

That was how we portrayed ourselves as, you know, not the arbiters of authenticity, that we were coming from the perspective of people who really cared about, you know, showing the different cultures and talking about these things from.

From the perspective of people that are passionate about this.

But when we had the opportunity, you know, I want to make sure you had the opportunity.

You wrote that one like I write that one because I wanted, I wanted you to write that because that's, you know, part of your background, and that meant a lot to me to have you write that because, you know, hey, we have that.

We have that in front of us.

That makes a big difference.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any Albanian food to serve.

We did have the chance to do.

Yeah, we did have the chance to do Korean food at least a few times.

That's not the same thing.

Just so you know.

What's that?

What?

Oh, my.

There.

There are a couple ways you could amend that.

Well played.

But anyways, I hate all of you, as usual.

So anyway, the Korean food.

Yes.

Which is not Albanian food.

No, to be very clear.

But we did have a chance to do that, too.

And that's, you know, we get a chance to serve that here in Rochester.

We didn't have a chance to do it in Buffalo, but we got a chance to serve Korean food here, too.

And, you know, I was always really happy to, you know, get input from you, Nate, on that too, because it was, you know, it's a different.

You know, I know some things, but I don't know everything.

And I'm always learning, too.

It's always good for me to learn more.

My, My Irish adopted Korean father really instilled a deep understanding of Korean cuisine.

No, but I, I definitely, you know, I, I, I liked to explore it prior to.

To nominate.

Although, I will say, you know, my explorations were usually more limited than where you pushed us, so.

Yeah, well, I think that's the fun part too, is I would learn something and you would always.

I think everybody pushed in different directions, like, hey, we want to try something different.

We want to try this.

And that got us A chance to do many things.

And sometimes, yeah, it was me pushing the limits of how far we would go with the food.

And I think one that pushed pretty far was we did an event in Buffalo with a Nigerian place, Buffalo Suya, which I adored that food.

It was one of my favorite places that I had gone and done a sample meal.

Do you remember what the menu was.

The menu we served?

I think we did suja, which is kind of a skewered meat served with hot spices.

I forget what the other dishes.

Did we have a goat with that.

Oh, it might have been goat with them.

Yeah, it was something like that.

And that.

That was one where, you know, they.

I wouldn't say they were the most timely of the places, but also when I went to go eat there ahead of time, you know, it was a long.

It was a long meal, but I got to sit there and really enjoy it in person.

It was a little bit of logistical challenge that day, but I think in the end, like, the people that got a chance to have it really enjoyed the food, and that was one of the places that, you know, inspired me to cook more of that food at home, too.

It was indeed pepper goat, by the way.

Yeah, that was pretty awesome.

I would definitely say that was one of our adventurous meals, for sure, because it was very different.

Pretty much any I never had.

Yeah.

And I.

I mean, I love that place, but I think that was an example of a place that, hey, you know, just like Kamara's.

We had some.

We had some logistical challenges, but with places where we really loved the food and we never wanted to shy away from.

Yeah.

Sometimes we had ups and downs with places, but in the end.

Am I going back to Buffalo, Suya?

A hundred percent.

I'm going back again.

I'm gonna go sit and drink some palm wine and eat some.

So that was so awesome, the number of nights I spent, you know, trying to get one of my daughters to fall asleep while salivating over the, you know, stories and pictures you were staring.

Sharing from Buffalo.

Did you never make it out to Buffalo?

I never made it to Buffalo.

Wow.

I.

Like, my.

My life had, like, just stabilized enough where I'm like, oh, yeah, I can make it to Buffalo when we stopped.

Yeah, basically.

Yeah.

No, I want to.

I want to go to that now.

So I did want to mention, like, we had a lot of lessons learned over the time, but considering how many events we did and how many different cuisines we did, we had such small amounts of food that didn't live up to our standards.

Can I call out one restaurant that wasn't actually ever in one of our meals.

Procurate or nominate.

Yeah, but you and I went to one night in Buffalo.

La Divina.

Oh, God, no, no, we.

No, no, we did use them, didn't we?

No, no.

Oh my God, I love that place so much.

We never used La Divina.

We were going, but you and I.

Went there after because we didn't get to have a meal for some reason.

So we just went there after.

Yeah, at like 9:00 at night.

And those were some of the best tacos I have ever, ever had anywhere in the world in my life.

Oh, yeah.

And they were like that place absolutely amazing.

And I gotta say, like now on my way back from Buffalo, there's La Divina Dos Ongo.

I didn't know that.

So it's on Transit Road, right past the, the temple of Russell Salvatore.

So it's right past there.

So you can bypass that and go to an amazing local restaurant.

So many lawsuits from this podcast.

So you can, you can go there and have that.

It's, it's really fantastic.

So now on my way out of Buffalo, if I hadn't really eaten a lot and that's where we're going to eat.

So.

Yeah, that's awesome.

So we, I thought we had a great run in Buffalo.

I really loved doing events there.

It changed my view of all, all the different foods in Buffalo.

But to go on to.

What Nate was bringing up was, you know, we did this for three years and a lot of things changed in our lives over that time that made the process of doing events become more and more challenging.

And four kids were born.

Over the kids were born, there were.

Multiple houses were bought, there were four.

Five new jobs or promotions.

Right.

Like, yeah.

I always laugh when I looked at my, when I Look at my LinkedIn to this day, I'm like, wow.

I've been, I've been at, frankly to curate Nominate that technically the same company.

Technically the same company.

I've been doing that through like four actual real life job changes.

Like kids.

Nate's had two kids.

I've had two kids since we started.

And it.

Your priorities change.

Yeah.

And it, it was, you know, we could see the growth in, you know, the families and growth in people, you know, you know, I know.

You know, Alex, you had worked through a lot of different stuff over that time.

You had been growing as a person, gone through, you know, ups and downs and.

Well, Nate's making fun of mental health here.

Yeah, he's making fun of your Downs.

That's.

That's what he's doing.

Yeah, they really going for the throat.

Was actually just questioning the highs, to be fair.

When we started, like, I had just met the woman who is now my wife of five plus years.

Like, I was still living alone in an apartment on Alexander Street.

Like, a lot of changes there I've been through.

We started, frankly, because we all hated our jobs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's at the end is, you know, we knew who we were more than when we started for the best.

I think.

I think at the end, you know, we.

We had all grown in different ways.

And, you know, you were driving around the country before, you know, before you had a kid and you had, you know, two kids during the time.

And you know, Brandon, with.

With the two kids.

And like I said, you know, Alex, you were working through so many different things over the course of that time.

And that did take away from the time that everybody had to participate in everything.

And so this isn't like my, like, oh, you know, I did all the work kind of thing, but it, you know, the way it ended up, because this was a legit.

You did.

We, you know, especially since I think none of us are natural people people, but, you know, one of us has done something about it.

Yeah, it's.

It is a.

You know, and I, I don't.

I don't regret.

I don't regret the work that went into it.

I don't regret any of the parts of the process of doing this.

And yeah, I, I did have to pick up because it was a logistics thing and it was, you know, we had lots of thoughts about scaling.

Lots of thoughts about making this big.

And the thing it always came back to, to me was I don't know how to scale this without more people.

Yeah.

We have conversations about it.

Like, even with partnering with Fatty, they have locations all over Buffalo.

One in Rochester and they had somewhere.

Somewhere in the Midwest.

Yeah.

Because we.

Cleveland somewhere.

I think it was Columbus, actually.

Somewhere in Columbus.

And we're like, oh, great, we can continue partnering with Fatty and we can start a Columbus branch.

Yeah.

Or south towns in Buffalo or this.

And then start to essentially, lack of a better word, kind of, you know.

How do we move?

How do we move east?

Right.

Expand like.

Expand like Yelp almost.

When they had outposts all over and almost franchise what's going on to Syracuse and Albany.

And that was.

The concept was going to, you know, midsize cities and then going to Pittsburgh and trying there and stuff like that.

Yeah, we had That I remember we had.

We had briefly talked the concept of, like, somebody in another city.

Like, we could vet them as, like, food knowledgeable and, like, you could be actively.

The Yelp model.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'll provide you with the platform that we've built.

And obviously it never went anywhere, but I did try to design a lot of our backend data with some of that in mind, at least.

Like, you know, how could we scale this to multiple cities and multiple people and.

Yeah.

Things.

I don't think the idea was wrong either.

I think it was.

It was a good idea, and I think it was.

It's viable with more time, with more money, with more effort.

I think it was all doable.

And we were talking about, you know, being the catering partner for universities and doing those kind of things.

There was.

There was a lot of opportunities in.

Front of us, a lot of breweries and bars without food.

You know, we could be a solution for them.

Yeah.

And I think when I'm going to talk for a bit here because, like, it was such an emotional process for me.

Like, I remember our last events.

Just see, like, our last event, we lined people out.

It didn't help that it was probably one of our biggest, if not our biggest event.

Yeah.

The last two events were, I think, the two biggest events.

They're in both in the top five biggest events we ever did.

The last two events we did, when.

I told people like my friends, family, like, hey, we're calling it quits, essentially, it was always the same, like, oh, I'm so sorry, like, what happened?

And I kind of thought, like, I think our priorities as human beings have just changed.

Like, Brandon's had two kids now.

Nate has two kids.

You started your podcast network, which has many shows on it.

And for me, it was kind of just.

Nothing went wrong.

Like, I didn't walk away from this project thinking, darn, we didn't hit our goal, or we failed.

Like, no, man, that was a great run.

I'm going to remember this for a long time.

We did, like, people in the city are going to remember this a long time.

It didn't.

We didn't stop it because it wasn't working.

It was working.

We were obviously talking about expanding.

Yeah, we.

We ended on a high.

We did just.

Our personal priorities changed.

And, you know, it really.

It was difficult to fit into our lives.

And the phrase I used when I wrote my, like, personal Facebook memoir about it was, I said, sometimes good things run their course.

And I think that's what happened with Nominate.

Like, I don't think any of us is upset.

Maybe some of us miss it a little bit because it was fun.

But it ran its course.

It brought us together with a lot of really cool people.

It introduced me to a lot of restaurants I still eat at regularly.

All I ate at Cocoa Garden last weekend when my wife was busy and I just wanted something.

Before we started this, I couldn't name 60 restaurants in Rochester.

No, couldn't.

Yeah.

And so for, for all those, for all the things, just.

There's a lot of memories there.

There's a lot of good things that happened there.

And I think, I think we ended things at the right time.

I think we did it on our own terms.

We didn't wait till it crashed and burned and things got bad.

We ended on a high note.

It was good.

And we all have different priorities in life now.

Yeah.

And I think it was, you know, we did end up on some of the biggest events, but I think I felt the ups and downs very viscerally.

They were certainly there during, during the whole run.

We talk about, you know, we, we.

We're doing fine.

Yeah.

But there was definitely a lull that we hit as I think certain things changed around us.

Right.

Yeah.

We found patterns there.

Well, there were, there were some patterns, seasonal patterns that we identified and then hit some of.

Didn't hit others.

And then there was just the, the general.

You know, there was a general post Covid.

Economic sort of condition where restaurants were necessarily raising their prices.

We had to adjust ours accordingly.

Yeah.

The one and only price increase we ever did.

And meanwhile like people were becoming much more comfortable going out.

Right.

And, and I think we, we hit this point where we weren't doing the, the consistent banner events we had been doing.

We were still, you know, steadily doing.

Doing enough business, but definitely not.

It was different.

Yeah.

Marketing change.

High as we'd hit.

Right.

Like I remember, you know, personally the last time I was like truly completely excited was shortly after Buffalo where like we saw this all its potential before us because Buffalo had really gone well and we were still hitting highs in Rochester.

And then things just started to slow down a little bit and you know, the changing priorities of my life had.

Which had already kind of cemented themselves.

That's when they started to really kind of, you know, become a parent and, and really take influence in my life.

So I know we're getting to sort of the end here, but also when we moved to Buffalo, we never really.

We didn't talk about this quite yet, but it's when we stopped delivery too.

Yeah, that, that was, that was a big deal.

Stopping it was a big decision.

We weren't sure about it.

We lost a few customers, unfortunately.

Yeah, unfortunately.

Right, Regulars.

We had a few really great regulars who just, you know, for one reason or another, couldn't, couldn't make the drive up to, to the city, which, like, is very understandable for a lot of people.

Yeah, unfortunately, we just, with our model, we couldn't even break even on the delivery.

Yeah.

So that's another point I wanted to stress too, like at the outset of this all, unless the rest of the group is hiding something, you're like, I never took a penny of money.

No, I mean, we, we operated on very narrow margins.

We all did.

I mean, this was very much a passion project, I think for all of us.

The only thing any of us got out of it, other than the experience, and it was all, it was amazing.

But we did demo meals and sometimes we got to eat right.

And it was worth it to me.

Like we said earlier, all of us had full time jobs.

We're all gainfully employed.

This was something that was really important to us.

It was important to us.

It was something we felt passionate about.

You know, driving to Buffalo once a month, doing all the test meals, sitting there bagging food for an hour, you know, just to help, help introduce people to new meals.

Yeah.

None of us ever took a dollar out of what we, what we made from Nominate and pretty much anything we made was put back to our delivery folks.

Sapphire, who you mentioned for social media.

Some press releases we did with other folks.

Yeah.

Shout out to Tiana Mano.

I couldn't remember.

Thank you.

But yeah, that was, you know, for, for every event, like, I'd say I averaged three touch points for every event, most of them in person.

Even for the Buffalo events, I probably averaged three in person touch points from Rochester.

And yeah, it, it does burn you out a bit.

And I ended up there as well.

And I mean, Brandon knows.

I mean, the, the calls, the calls I would make.

Yeah.

To him sometimes.

Hey, can you talk?

That was the text was, hey, can you talk?

Because I was, I was burning myself.

Out, especially with a number of events going.

We were doing one event a week.

Yeah, we were doing an event every week.

We ramped up, then ramped down for a bit.

Right.

We, there was a short couple months point in time.

We had an event between Buffalo and Rochester every single week.

Oh, no, we did like six months of that.

Yeah, we, that was a little while.

It was six months of every single week.

It was exhausting I mean, we did a long run doing every week, and it was.

Yeah, I was burning myself out pretty hard.

And it's because, like, I.

I never wanted to disappoint the people who are spending their hard earned money with us.

I never wanted to disappoint the restaurants.

I never wanted to disappoint, you know, you guys, you know, my friends who were, you know, involved with this project.

I never wanted to be that person who left something undone that we could have done and, you know, bring it back.

To bring it back to the end is, yes, we saw the path.

We knew where we could go.

But I also knew at that point that if we were going to keep on going, we couldn't do the same thing.

We had to, we had to change, we had to expand.

If we were going to do it, we had to get into catering, we had to get bigger.

And I didn't have it in me to do what it took to get to the next level because we had to.

I don't think we could have kept with the floor we had.

And that kind of brought us to that point.

And yeah, I mean, in the end, I kind of called it, but we, we had to.

I think it was the right time.

Because if we talk about it a lot.

Yeah, back and forth, whether do we do it, do we not, do we ramp it down?

And just.

We had the do we ramp down?

Discussion quite a few times, you know, because, you know, you were burnt out.

A lot of us were other priorities and also burnt out.

But at one point I think we just said, you know what?

Ramping down is not helping anybody.

No, I think this was a, you know, we don't want to fade away.

Let's just, let's go off on a real big positive and leave everybody thinking they wanted more at that time because we knew what the next wave was going to be.

We're going to see the downs.

But I, I think in the end that ended up better that way versus, versus doing the other thing, which was waiting till a down and then feeling worse about it.

I'd rather feel better at the end than worse.

And I think we did.

I think we can all feel good about the effort we did over three years.

And going back to the beginning, over 2,500 meals, over $65,000 we put into small restaurants.

And we did it for over three years and we touched over 60 restaurants.

I never think we did enough, but I know we did as good as we could during the time we did run it.

Everybody's broken in this room.

Except for me.

Where's the professionalism?

Wait a second.

Professionalism?

Yeah.

Quiet.

Stop it.

Stop whining.

All right.

So sorry.

We're all texting inappropriately.

Yeah, I can tell.

Do we want to, like, we kind of.

We.

We kind of told the story of nominate.

Do we want to.

We talked about this at the break a bit.

Do we want to reminisce on, like, some of our favorite restaurants?

Oh, that would be awesome.

So, yeah, I know, Alex, you've got some real strong favorites on this group.

Well, I.

I was joking because.

So as the person that packed probably 95% of the meals between Buffalo and Rochester over the years, we did this along with Nate.

I would joke that I would.

I would have two ratings for a restaurant.

One, how good their food was, and two, how packable their food was, how convenient it was.

Am I crawling around on the floor, grabbing two small bags here and one box of this and three bags?

No.

Some restaurants, I think, like, Pulse Kachada was really good.

They would put, like, one meal is one bag inside of the thermal bags.

You're like, you take this and put it in there.

Boom.

So easy.

Love that.

Whereas with Nate, I'm like, I need two squares, one circle, one big.

So we had a huddle before every event.

Again, thanks to Grocky about doing pre prep.

Yeah, thanks, Crocky.

Another thing we learned.

We should talk about what we're going to do.

Thank you.

We didn't know that.

Turns out, plans help.

Yeah.

Who would have thought we would have Chris tell us whoever picked up the food, usually Chris, like, hey, what did you pick up?

What are we putting in every single bag?

And the way we would talk about how we packed the bags was, all right, one square, one big square, one small square, one circle.

Yeah.

That's literally what Nate and I would like.

You would come over and over, and you're like.

You'd hear me and Nate shouting to each other, like, nate, like, I need a circle.

Like, what does that mean?

We know what it.

Every restaurant would, like, package differently, too.

Right.

Like, sometimes we'd get everything in sort of one takeout clamshell.

Sometimes they would do us, you know, a favor, basically, and load individual items in, like, one thermal bag.

Right.

So it's one from this bag, one from that bag, one from that bag.

Right.

And other times it was like, oh, they.

They package things together.

Right.

So you had to take a stack out of a thermal bag.

And.

And every.

Every place was different.

Right.

That was one of those things that we never Figured out by the end is like, how do we get the restaurants to, to package things in a way that works for our repackaging basically at.

At.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And although we're.

Although we're definitely in favor of the change away from, you know, styrofoam and everything else, going to the recyclable packaging and everything did make some things more challenging with the cardboard packaging and the paper packaging because they steamed real good.

The cardboard packaging was.

Every once in a while too, we'd open a thermal bag and something spilled all over here.

Somebody will get soup in the thermal bag.

I do, I do remember.

I mean, this is a very visceral thing.

I remember that you were doing.

Alex was, you know, you'd empty a bag and then I just see you like dive in headfirst and just slurp, slurp, slurp up all the juice inside the bag.

Poor memory, man.

In front of the customers, you're just.

Like, listen, I was dedicated to my craft.

You know, the show must go on and you can't leave any stone unturned.

The more often the, the real distraction was Alex darting across, you know, the, the room at the German House with dripping hands to a bath.

There was a lot of paper towels.

Yeah.

I forget what restaurant it was, but their food was just so.

It was very juicy meat with like, kind of marinated and it was just seeping out all over the side, like the clamshell packaging.

So I'd pack two customer orders, like, all right, gotta go run to the bathroom to wash my hands because no.

Amount of paper towels.

And Chris now would just apologize to every single customer.

Sorry.

It's juicy.

See you.

The one time grocky was like, hey, man.

Like, I normally, like, reserve that bathroom for customers and guests.

Like, dude, I'm not running downstairs every.

Every two bags I packed.

Well, you kept, you kept wiping and wiping and wiping, and your hands never got clean.

Correct.

Yeah.

There's always more.

This is, this is going back to what I always did.

What I always did with our one shot videos we did before the event.

We did, we did try.

One of our social media exercises would.

Was Chris and I would try to record at least one real short whatever for every event.

And it would always be one take.

Yeah, one take Lindstrom.

And my goal every time was, can I do something that's going to break the guys behind the camera?

The answer was usually when you sang.

The Mr.

Rogers theme song is the intro for one of them.

That was pretty good.

That was great.

It's One of the better ones.

That was pretty good.

Usually the laughter was more.

More cringe.

Laughter than I feel like that was.

Yeah, it was usually, like, authentic.

We can't really post this, but we're gonna post it anyway.

I love that we got into this by me asking what our favorite restaurants.

Yeah.

We haven't talked about that.

We have not named a single restaurant.

Yeah.

All right, so what I think a good starting point is, so when it.

When it came to.

When we all decide, like, yep, we're calling it an event.

Like, we're.

We're.

Do.

We're.

We're done here.

Let's pick our favorite restaurant for our last event.

Last one.

I.

I guess, like, I have my thoughts.

I want to hear from everyone else, too.

How.

How did we arrive at Cocoa Garden for our final farewell?

I mean, Cocoa Garden was the.

Like, they were the ones that, like, everyone did a great job at Homegrown.

Right.

But Coco Garden, man, like, they.

They gave us, like, it was just so giant.

Right.

Like, professional kitchen pots.

Right.

That we were scooping stuff out.

Ladles, everything.

Yeah.

And.

And oh, my God, like, that was the one that I think most people came back to, like, in.

And it was all delicious.

And every restaurant we worked with was amazing.

But Coco Garden stood way above just in their uniqueness, how they worked with us.

And we all still go back there really often.

Yep.

I gotta say, that was.

That might have been the biggest surprise for me.

I mean, I.

I remember writing about it in City, you know, a decade ago and writing about it then and, you know, doing that review at the time.

And when we started this, I'm like, yeah, it was kind of.

One of my moonshots was to.

Was to use Coco Garden because I.

I didn't know if we could pull it off.

I didn't know if we could bring that to the people and have them enjoy it like I did.

And it was.

I'd say, probably the biggest surprise of the whole time was how much everybody immediately, like, completely bought into Malaysian food and just loved it, like, to.

So, like, not a single person had anything other than wildly positive things to say about that place.

Yeah.

And as far as we know, I think it's the only Malaysian restaurant in upstate New York.

Is that right?

That I'm aware of.

Yes, we're aware of.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean that, like, I've said multiple times throughout this show that I ate there a couple nights ago, and I still love that place.

It's great.

What were some of the other restaurants we were considering for our final.

I know Paul's.

Sorry.

Swan Market was definitely up there.

We were considering them.

I mean, Zameta was on there.

Shout out to Barry Fisher from Swan Market for being a great partner.

Whenever we had.

We needed food and we didn't have time to plan, he'd say, yeah, you can.

You can call me at 8 o'clock that morning and I can give you 100 people of food, no problem.

And that made one of our backup restaurants.

Yeah.

One of the things we.

I know we didn't touch on this.

One of the things we learned is that I don't know if we ever had to actually exercise this is.

We needed to have backup restaurants because what happened if, you know, we booked a restaurant, we gave them the, you know, the invoice, everything.

We showed up to pick up the food and they were closed.

This was a disaster scenario.

Right.

That we.

It never actually happened, but we had to prepare for it, which is pretty.

Amazing, by the way.

That never happened in three years.

Yeah.

Not even close to it.

Right.

We never had to call in a backup.

The closest to a disaster situation we ever had was the Camara situation that we talked about earlier.

That was our fault mostly.

Yeah.

And.

So.

So we had a couple restaurants that were like, we know that we can call them 45 minutes before people start showing up and they will have food for us.

Right.

One of those places was Swan Market.

Yeah.

And, you know, they also crush it every time we worked with them.

Their.

The food was always consistently great.

Yeah.

You know, great partners there.

You know, I think for me, you know, I loved working with the Jamaican places.

I'm, you know, Jamaican aficionado and work with Marlene at Pepper Pot was.

They were also a backup for us.

Always.

So good.

Shout out to Livy's too.

Yeah, Livy's was amazing.

Another great Jamaican restaurant.

I think the most impactful one.

I mean, you know, Coco Garden meant a lot to me.

I think Camaro's was the.

The signature meal for me that, you know, changed so much for me personally.

It was that and Family Tie, that first family tie event in Buffalo.

Yeah.

So good.

Those are the two that just like, completely blew my mind.

And, you know, I had the great pleasure of, you know, getting you guys to try some of the stuff you hadn't tried before.

I was pretty familiar with most of it, but when I ate those things, I mean, Raph, I forget if you were there for that first one at, you know, Family Tie, but, like, I remember when we ate that the first time and we got to try that, it just like it just blew me away completely.

That place was so amazing.

Yeah.

I think I wasn't there for the demo meal.

Okay.

Yeah, I think that was me and my buddy Brian at the time we went out.

But that was, that was a.

That was pretty special.

I think those are the two for me because they were new to me and it's.

It's a little rare for me now to try something that's new.

That got me so excited.

Like I always want things to be good.

I hate, I, I really hate when things are bad and it's hard to get excited anymore because the level of execution people need to get to on things I already know is really high.

And this was, it was so amazing to try something new.

That just blew me away with quality.

I don't know if you had a different one, Brandon, but.

Or if Coco Garden was your place too.

It was not funny but like we all came to the same conclusion of at least the top three to five restaurants that we considered for our last meal.

And then we all said Coco Garden and kind of nodded like yeah, that's the one.

That's the one.

That, that is.

Dude, everything there is good.

A rest.

I'm looking through our list just to make sure I didn't miss any ones.

You know a restaurant I loved that we haven't mentioned at all.

Seasons Noodle.

Oh man.

Seasons Noodle is so good, man.

Yer is just.

He's a gem of a person.

He's.

He's a really nice guy and he's trying so hard.

I.

I really hope if you haven't tried that place you go visit it because it's location is tough and you know, he's a single person operation so it's not always the smoothest but man, his food is so good every time.

Is it the only hand pulled noodles in Rochester?

Yeah, he.

He's the only one doing Asian style noodles.

Fresh.

It's really phenomenal stuff.

And hell he even made food for my.

For my 40th birthday party too.

I ate so much food.

That was awesome.

We.

We already talked about just chicken and magusta and what they meant to us.

Another favorite for me that we didn't talk about.

Halal and out.

Oh my God.

Yeah, we still get them all the time.

Love it there.

It's great there.

Tayada.

I.

I used to eat.

Can I tell a funny tiata story?

So when I used to work for local company Visual DX located in the old Cadillac building downtown right across the street from Tyata, I Would get lunch in there probably two to three times a week because I want live right.

This is the before times, before COVID And because I was just afraid to be on the phone.

I'm kidding.

Usually I was busy working.

You're a millennial.

That makes sense.

Yeah, that's true.

I couldn't always just pick up my phone and calls.

Like, I would place.

I wanted to place an order online to pick up, but the only thing they had was.

Was like, grubhub or whatever.

So I'd place an order, and I got to know them because they're like, hey, can you call us, please?

Or reasons that we all probably understand why we do.

So anytime I called, I would.

My.

My Thai food order is pad.

See you chicken.

And I would always say, like, I would.

Like, when I was doing the grubhub pick up, I'd say, as spicy as you can make it.

I'd call them on the phone, like, as spicy as it'll possibly go.

And every time I walked in, the chef would be like, hey, like, was that spicy enough for you?

And I'm like, no, not really.

And one day, I kid you not, fireman, so I kid you not, he walks out with, like, a big old plastic cup container just filled with Thai.

Like, roasted Thai chilies.

And he goes, hey, next time you call, tell me how much of this you used.

Okay?

Like, so that restaurant's always got a special place in my heart, and they're just darn good Thai food.

Yeah.

Great.

What about you, Nate?

Did you have any specific.

Anything, you know, different from that group or anything that really hit you?

I don't.

I don't.

I don't think so.

You know, Coco Garter, Cocoa Garden, Kamara's.

Zemeta was a big one for.

For my family, more than.

Yeah, just me.

Like, my wife is not always the most adventurous eater, but, like, she, like, She's German.

Her family's German.

And something about Zemeta is like, she just.

It turned her on to Ethiopian food, and now she just, like.

That's probably our most frequent sort of post.

Nominate.

Takeout from Nominate.

Yeah, there's something special about that place.

I mean, Nathaniel and Zamat are also just great people, and there's something about that just feels so comforting.

It feels.

It feels very home to me.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

That place, that.

That's a comfort food for me now when I.

When I'm, you know, burned out or something else, I just need something comforting.

And when I go back home for Thanksgiving, that's the food I buy.

That's the food I buy to bring home for Thanksgiving, because that's what I eat that day is I eat Zometa.

That's my food that I bring home.

One of the restaurants, I know we've mentioned them already, but Pulska Chata.

Growing up in Buffalo, it's a heavily Polish community.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's Polish restaurants everywhere.

Polska, as far as I know, is the only Polish restaurant in the Rochester area.

Yeah.

And I didn't know they existed until we found out about them through the process of.

During doing nominate.

It's something we get all the time now.

You know, the best fish fry in Rochester, in my opinion.

Yeah.

Because that was another Buffalo thing.

Right?

Like, you grow up in Buffalo, like, oh, everyone just gets fish fries.

There were so many things that until I moved to Rochester, I didn't realize.

Were like, oh, that's a Buffalo thing.

Oh, you don't all just eat fish fry every single Friday.

Every single person eats fish fry every Friday.

Yeah.

Wait, you guys thought that was a Buffalo thing?

Just, I mean, it's.

It's more of a Catholic Lent thing, but, you know.

Yeah, Buffalo.

True.

Yeah.

Because, you know, that.

That place also does such a good job.

And they were, they were so welcoming.

To us in the early days when we were just doing delivery.

Yeah.

And they were, you know, they crushed it basically every time we worked with them.

What about you, Raph?

I mean, you know, you were mostly involved in the Buffalo ones, but you had a chance to try things a few times.

The Filipino boy place, that was good.

Southern Junction.

Yeah, Southern Junction.

That.

That Indian flavored Texas barbecue food, man, that brisket biryani is like, like one of the best things I think we had the entire run.

Sadly, we never got to do it.

But Chin Hills, because we went there.

Oh, my God, I.

I felt so bad we didn't get to do that because that.

Yeah, that food sounded so good, actually.

I lived just up the street from it now.

Doxing yourself.

Well.

Yeah, I need to come out.

I'm gonna come out and just eat there and, you know, come out with Carrie and we'll go have a meal there.

Because that's.

That's a place I do regret we didn't get a chance to go.

Do I think, you know, if anything, that's the greatest.

You know, we couldn't have.

We couldn't do more.

We couldn't do better for the restaurants.

Because when I.

When I think of, you know, to me, my failure was, you know, we never.

We didn't do enough.

But I know we did what we could do and that was.

It was enough for what we could offer and that, you know, we all have these places that now count amongst our favorite places in Rochester that weren't before in our favorite places in Buffalo.

Places we all frequent all the time.

And I really hope our customers do as well.

Yeah.

And now like every time I find a new favorite restaurant, I'm like, oh, man, I wish this would have been so good.

This would have been a perfect nominate place.

Yeah.

No, and that's always.

That's the, that's the part two I'm always thinking about.

Well, we could have used this place.

We could have done that.

And it's.

I'm glad I'm left wanting more in many ways.

So I think what I want to do, I want to, you know, edge towards our closing, but I just want to get, you know, each person's final thoughts on the whole experience.

So, Raph, I'm gonna start with you and we'll, we'll go around.

So what's your final thoughts about the whole nominate experience?

Because you, you live through lots of different phases of it in different ways.

Yeah, it was definitely an eye opening experience as far as.

Yeah.

Like, because we came from Frank.

Right.

So having kind of like my own thing to kind of work on outside of work was nice because I felt that kind of pushed me to learn new things and, you know, have something of my own that was attached to like my actual job.

And I thought that the curate nominee was such a good idea and I'm so happy that we got to do it.

But.

But yeah, like I said, it's definitely like, oh, wow.

I wish we did more than this restaurant.

Wish we could find a way to push it to more people.

But I thought it was a great experience overall.

Yeah.

Well said.

My turn.

Yeah, go for it.

Yeah, sure.

I ranted a bit earlier about what this experience meant to me, but to talk more about what it meant to me individually, for starters, I can't express how much working on this, like, really helped my career as a whole.

Like my day job and everything.

Like, just like kind of like Raf said, having something I got to work on outside of work, work on, do what I wanted, how I wanted, that really grew me as a software engineer and then running the business side of things grew me as a person a lot too, with how to interact with people, how to know how to market things, a whole bunch of different sides of the business that I just, like I said I'd never Run a business before.

I'd never been part of that experience, so it was really huge for me to get that experience.

And I, it's hard to say.

It's, it's emotional for me in weird ways to see that it's that we're done.

Because like, like, like we all said, I, we all wish we could have done more, more restaurants, more for the community, all these things.

But you know, good things run their course sometimes.

And I'm happy we went out on a high note.

I definitely want to thank everyone that we already said, especially want to thank my wife for being so loving and supportive during all the years we did this.

There were a lot of really late nights, we were out working long weekends.

A lot, a lot of working weekends.

A lot of time away from, you know, doing what I should be doing probably as, as a husband and someone who owns a house and has chores to do.

Yeah.

You know, they say it takes a village and it's really true.

Just all of our family and friends that supported us and my wife, like I mentioned, meant a lot to me during all this.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny, it was such a constant for me for a long time.

My wife and I got Wednesday.

Yeah, it was every Tuesday for years.

Right.

And.

And you know, my wife and I got.

Got married shortly after we, we started working on frankly and then we made the decision to sort of sell our house in the city, buy a camper and travel the country for a year.

And, and then we, we, you know, came back home and, and started a family and you know, through that all like there's always frankly slash curate slash nominate that I had to go back to which was, you know, it provided a lot of benefits similar to what Alex said.

Right.

That it was also a part of my life where I, I was transitioning from, you know, hands on keyboards every day to more sort of leadership or advising roles at work and definitely helped keep some skills fresh in that regard at least in the frankly years.

And yeah, it was just, it was a good way also, you know, through as Covid started and you know, not to bring it too down but like my wife and I struggled with fertility issues like it was, it was good to have that constant to go back on and have something sort of fresh and exciting amidst this, you know, really like dark time to, to go back to.

So.

Yeah, so my turn.

So what Alex said.

Right.

I had innate touched on this too.

But a lot of you know, time over the past six, seven, it's been quite a while, almost 10 years, right.

To develop, you know, existing skills and improve on them, you know, create new skills that I didn't even know I had or I definitely didn't have, you know, started a business and, you know, learning what goes into that and, you know, how filing sales tax is, you know, horrible.

And I never got one more year left.

Brandon.

Yeah, Still.

Still some close out to do.

Right.

But.

Right.

It was a constant, you know, something we've all alluded to that I don't think we'd said out loud.

But, you know, we met weekly, whether it was in person at the Sibley building, when Nexcor and High Tech Rochester, where they're.

They're still there, you know, while we were there.

Temporary office there, like, man.

Oh, yeah, we had.

Yeah, we had.

We had space there that we use relatively, at least weekly.

And then when the pandemic hit, we went to, you know, virtual calls, even though we're all local.

Right.

Whatever.

We still just went virtual and.

But it was still a constant to just talk to everyone every Tuesday night and have a beer.

Right.

While we, you know, quote unquote, worked.

Or did it to Rock Brewing.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

R.I.P.

Yeah, yeah.

Lots.

Lots of nights there, for sure.

But no, it was.

It was a constant.

Right.

And in that time, you know, you know, my wife and I, we bought a house, we've had two children, and, you know, like we alluded to earlier, priorities have changed.

Right.

And I don't regret anything we did with nominate.

I.

Are there things we would have done differently?

Probably.

I don't think anyone couldn't say that about things they've.

They've done, but I'm really happy with what we did and, you know, the way we went out and where we are now and, you know, I've got a lot of new places to eat.

At the very least, that's a pretty good thing.

So I'm going to say too many words, as per usual, but I think.

I think you all really captured a lot of the emotions that I have about this, and it's.

It's a different feeling to stop something.

I'm.

I'm stubborn to a high level of fault, and I won't let anything go, I won't let anything die that I care about.

And this is one of the first times I've actually said we need to not go forward.

And it was really hard to say that.

And it was also really easy to say that because I'm different than when I started this, than when we started this together.

This.

This was.

This is I say it was such an inflection point, you know, the pandemic was brutal.

I got.

I was burned out at my day job.

I had done, you know, tons of travel and I had finally gotten back to Rochester.

And then we started this and having something positive to look forward to, you know, every other week or every, you know, month or, you know, then every week for a while that we were going to serve people that day, that we were going to do something good for a restaurant that made their week better matters.

Having, you know, four people that I can now call friends, that we got to talk to every Tuesday, that we got to talk every Tuesday night.

And, you know, I.

I was.

I was the new person into the group when.

When I came in, during, frankly, and that's not the case anymore because we've spent so much time, so many nights, so many weekends, so many.

Everything that we spent together, you know, that mattered a lot to me.

And in the end, this set me up for everything else that I'm doing now.

And it's because we chose to do this with a set of ethics.

First, that this wasn't about us first.

This was about the restaurants first.

This was about our customers first and that we were serving others.

This wasn't about us.

And that.

That's the message that has changed so much in my life.

It lined up everything I'm doing now with the podcast network.

It lined up my, you know, my relationships with people in the arts community.

And all the directions I'm going now are because I met you guys because of a curling relationship I had with fucking Andrew Nosley.

Say his name again so he.

His name.

And he'll never appear.

But because of that happenstance, that changed my entire direction of what I'm doing in Rochester and where I'm going.

And I can't thank all of you enough for being a part of, you know, the curate to nominate experience that has, you know, brought me further in what I want to do and feeling like I belong in making a difference in Rochester.

And I gotta say, we did our part to make things better in the best way we could for three years.

Three years.

And that's the other part I want to take a second to think about.

We did this for three years, not three months.

We could have done it for three months and it would have been a success.

We did this for three years and it was a lot.

It was a lot.

I think we said not to interrupt you.

This is quick.

I think we found other businesses that were doing similar things around when we started and we outlasted them by so much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'm really proud of how much we did and I'm really proud that we got to do this together.

So thank you.

Thank you, Raph.

Thank you, Alex.

Thanks, Nate.

And thank you, Brandon, for answering my panicked phone calls when I was falling apart at the scene.

Still will, don't worry.

Thank you, Chris, for.

For being the one to, you know.

Thanks for doing all the brunt of doing everything most of the weeks.

Right.

Like, you know, it's funny, you're.

Somewhere in your talk there, like, I.

It struck me that nominate probably saved, frankly, in a way.

Yeah.

Because at the end of frankly, we were friends hanging out every Tuesday, maybe getting some token work done.

Right.

And then.

Yeah, let's be honest, we didn't really.

We didn't always do work every Tuesday.

And then.

And then we started up nominate and we had those, you know, sort of people outside of us that were dependent on us in some way and definitely was hopeful to, you know, get moving again, basically.

So, yeah, makes a big difference.

I didn't get to mention this too.

I was gonna, but I don't like either of you, so it's like, it's hard to compliment you.

Like, I'm about.

We just had to get to this podcast.

Then we can part ways.

Of course.

Yes.

But no, like, when we started this, I was like 23, 24.

Like, I was really young in my career.

Please don't remind me of that.

I mean, listen, and like, I saw the pictures.

I know, I've seen the pictures too.

I'm embarrassed.

But like, getting to work with you two is like technical mentors.

Like, like as a software engineer, like, getting to be mentored by both you who are much further along in your careers.

That helped me so much.

It really did.

Did we do that?

Not.

Not definitely not on purpose.

Not on purpose, no.

I don't know.

But you know, like, getting to work with Brandon about, like, how a lot of back end service build and paid.

That at one point you were, how'd that go?

We all left that job.

But now that.

That that part of that experience too, then it occurred to me, like, I was always asking Brandon or Nate, like, how do I do this?

How do I get this done?

And then when we came to Frank or excuse me, like curate Nominate, I'm like, yeah, sure, I can design this whole cloud system by myself with zero help and I don't need anybody to input anything.

Like, it's funny because, like, yeah, you were younger than the rest of Us.

But I feel like that was true for me moving into Nominate too, where like we had less of a focus on.

We faked it.

What's this cool thing we can do?

What's this new technology we can learn, right?

What's this, this thing that we can use, frankly as an excuse to, to.

To better do, right?

Like, and then we hit nominated.

We're like, oh, that's, that's, that's just do it live, right?

Like, yeah, yeah.

I think that was a sign of like our maturation not just as people, but like as, as professionals too.

Like, like we don't need to play around with all this.

Like, just deliver the thing, you know.

Just do something good.

Yeah, just do something good.

Deliver it.

And yeah, we had a lot of fun doing it.

That's the tagline, nominate just do something good.

So are we gonna get another lawsuit if our tagline is just do it?

We won't, we won't get the opportunity to remove, you know, do no evil from our, our corporate charter.

So that's true.

We, we always have more opportunities to do terrible, terrible things.

So thanks guys for coming over and doing this.

I've, I've, I'm really excited we got a chance to do this.

And thanks for having us, Chris.

Yeah, thanks again for, for doing this.

Thanks again for being a part of Dominate.

And if you enjoyed listening to this two part episode, make sure you go to nominate.org nominate.org geez.

Lunchadore lunchadore.org to check out all the other shows on the Lunchadore Podcast network.

By the end of this year, we're have 14 different shows covering all.

So many positive things going on in Rochester and the reason we're able to do that is because of all the things I learned during nominate.

So thank you again guys.

We'll be back next time with more on the Food About Town podcast and keep nominating all the great places in Rochester and Buffalo.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchadore Podcast Network.

Yes, we're coming up on a major election, but what I really want you to do, I want you to join the nomination.

It's the only thing that matters.