Chef/Interviewer/Subject Elizabeth Falkner and Director Peter Ferriero talk to The Inside Reel about stakes, assumptions, parallels, approach and the future in regards to their new documentary film: "Sorry We're Closed" about the restaurant business during the pandemic.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 [dramatic music]
00:03 ♪ ♪
00:10 - What's normal? Do you really want to go back?
00:14 - This is a dress rehearsal for climate change.
00:18 - Okay, I shortened my life opening this restaurant.
00:21 - I'm sorry for your loss.
00:23 - Thank you.
00:24 - Is this the beginning of something crumbling,
00:27 or is it something that's gonna strengthen?
00:29 - I can't sit here and watch the whole industry
00:33 fall off of a cliff.
00:35 [horn blaring]
00:39 - Now, could you both talk about--Peter,
00:40 if you want to talk about this as well,
00:41 like, the--showing the emotional context.
00:44 I mean, one of the sort of crucial ones,
00:47 obviously, Elizabeth,
00:48 is when you're sitting down talking to Lincoln,
00:51 you know, after Ball and Temp, you know,
00:52 and it's just--we see-- it's like time slows down,
00:56 and we see what she went through.
00:58 Sorry to bring it up,
00:59 but what she went through in 2008 with Orson,
01:02 you know, versus him--Lincoln with Ball and Temp.
01:05 Could you talk about showing those moments?
01:07 Because only then do you get a perception of the stakes
01:11 of what is really, you know--
01:13 it's an emotional, it's intellectual,
01:16 it's everything, it's life.
01:17 But can you guys talk about that, both capturing it,
01:20 but also allowing yourself to sort of feel that on camera?
01:25 I'll let Elizabeth start.
01:28 [laughter]
01:29 Well, I mean, it was--you know,
01:31 that was really hitting close to home with Lincoln
01:34 and just being there in that space.
01:36 I'd been to that restaurant before,
01:38 and, you know, I like the industrial downtown aesthetic so much.
01:46 It's kind of like the way--
01:47 it reminded me a lot of my restaurant in San Francisco.
01:51 And then just knowing that this guy, you know,
01:54 similar background with both pastry and savory skills.
02:00 And it's just--you know, yeah, it was just--
02:02 we weren't expecting that moment later that we shot
02:07 when Pete said, you know, let's talk about that period of time
02:10 with Orson and stuff.
02:12 And I really--it was something I think that Pete crafted
02:16 really well that came out unexpectedly in the film.
02:22 And I think it's a really good point.
02:24 You know, it was--it's certainly something I've been wrestling with
02:28 and writing about and talking about, not so much in the public.
02:32 So it was, I guess, kind of unusual that it came out in the film,
02:36 but I'm really happy that it came out in the film
02:38 because I've been kind of wanting to talk about that for a while.
02:41 I think that film also is like--it was a bit of a discovery for us
02:46 in so many ways, whatever was happening politically,
02:51 day by day as we were, you know, out and just shooting.
02:56 And also the emotional arcs of each moment
03:01 sort of came out naturally.
03:03 I didn't know much about Lincoln before we went in there,
03:06 but once I saw the two of them together, there is almost--
03:10 they're very similar, just in the work that they did
03:14 and in their stories.
03:16 And so I was like, well, this is what we're talking about here.
03:20 This is a beautiful moment.
03:22 And so we took the moment to just say, hey, let's just chat
03:24 about what just happened.
03:26 You know what I mean?
03:27 And so that was not something that we planned out
03:29 a long time in advance or anything.
03:31 It was on the fly, in the moment.
03:33 And I think that's what this documentary really--
03:35 what I love about it is that it's happening as it's happening,
03:39 as we are learning, whether it be Trump said this
03:43 or Lincoln said this, you know what I mean?
03:45 It's really a discovery, I think, of everything
03:48 that everybody was going through.
03:49 I feel incredible responsibility to the people working for me
03:52 and making sure that they're going to do all right,
03:54 but I feel like we've been in some ways hogtied a little bit.
03:59 It's funny, I didn't realize how much of an impact
04:03 it had made on so many people until after we shut down
04:08 how many people reached out.
04:10 Because you're just seeing it every day.
04:12 Yeah.
04:13 And the hard part of this is all the stories of the people
04:17 that this doesn't tell you.
04:19 It's like I look at things and there's still some stuff
04:23 in place up there, and I remember the people
04:25 that put it there.
04:27 Yeah, I mean, you've still got all your pots and pans
04:31 hanging there.
04:32 These places are about the people.
04:37 I'm sorry for your loss.
04:40 Thank you.
04:42 Honestly, talking to Lincoln today reminds me so much
04:45 of this whole chunk of time that I went through
04:49 where I built this giant restaurant in San Francisco
04:52 and right the same year we opened, six months later
04:56 we get the stock market crash of 2008.
04:59 It comes down to questions.
05:00 It's the questions you ask.
05:01 It's the way you ask the questions and the way
05:03 the responses go, because using certain words
05:06 can trigger people.
05:08 I get that.
05:09 But you're talking about different things.
05:11 You're talking about race.
05:13 You're talking about gender.
05:14 You're talking about sexual orientation.
05:17 So many different things that come into play
05:20 that affect everybody differently.
05:22 Can you talk about coming up with questions,
05:25 or for you, Elizabeth, talking to them because
05:27 these are your friends.
05:28 You also want to ask the right questions,
05:30 but ask the very crucial questions.
05:33 Can you talk about coming up with those conversations,
05:36 or was it just sort of learning as you go
05:39 and as the film evolved as you did more interviews?
05:43 I actually came up with a bunch of questions
05:48 that I sent to each chef and said,
05:51 "We're probably not going to talk about all these things,
05:53 but we'll talk about some of them."
05:55 And then as we started in LA and then went to the Bay Area
05:59 and then to New York and New Jersey,
06:02 I could kind of, in my head, know that I had
06:05 checked off some of those.
06:06 I'd got enough sound bites about certain material.
06:10 And then the reality is that when we first started shooting
06:13 is when Black Lives Matter,
06:15 really all the protests started happening.
06:17 So then it was sort of like, "Oh my gosh,
06:19 now we've got to talk about all this subject matter,"
06:22 which was great because it's the reality of what it's really like,
06:29 almost like chaotic control in a restaurant situation
06:34 is an everyday thing.
06:35 And I felt like this is what we deal with
06:37 in restaurants every day.
06:39 We're not just making food and expecting customers
06:43 to come in and pay for stuff.
06:44 We're also having conversations about how to deal with this HR issue
06:49 or what's happening in the world and how that's going to affect us.
06:52 And then there's the climate change and blah, blah, blah.
06:54 There's so much stuff that we have to wrestle with
06:57 just to make food choices, not just the business.
07:01 So I felt like we were really kind of just talking in real time
07:07 in the same way that we were just discussing how that happened with Lincoln.
07:10 It's like this stuff is really what it's like in a restaurant.
07:14 We have this space to express ourselves,
07:17 and we're always talking about everything that's going on.
07:20 It's not like I was just dabbling in food
07:22 and this is my first little restaurant.
07:25 I already, like Lincoln, have been investing so many hours
07:29 in learning so many things and managing people.
07:33 And then all of a sudden it's just like,
07:35 "Whoa, I did not see that coming.
07:37 I did not see the rug being pulled out from underneath me,
07:41 and now I've got to try to scramble."
07:43 And I'm still pissed about it.
07:45 So when I see a friend of mine who's also got so much invested
07:48 into this place that I know he's been dreaming about for a long time,
07:52 it's not just your livelihood. It's like everything.
07:55 And then it's all these other people's livelihood.
07:57 So it's a lot.
08:00 But it's also an evolution. This leads to my last question.
08:02 Thank you.
08:03 I think that's sort of perfectly dovetails because, I mean,
08:05 I talk to a lot of chefs, a lot of owners and everything
08:08 about the psychology of eating, but it's more about the path.
08:12 It's about the path you're on and how that continues.
08:14 And right now we're on the continued path.
08:16 This was a moment in time which you guys unbelievably captured,
08:20 but now we're seeing how things are transforming,
08:23 both as you were saying with the young chefs,
08:25 but be with how we have to transition out of that
08:28 into the new sort of era of what restaurants can and have to become
08:33 just because of the way people have now become used to certain things being done.
08:37 Could you talk about that and look at the evolution of the restaurant business
08:41 in this way since the pandemic ended?
08:43 Because, again, it's where we're going.
08:46 We all know where we've been, and a lot of us even know more in detail
08:49 where we've been, but it's about where we go forward.
08:52 Can you guys talk about that, both from your perspective in terms of the film,
08:55 but in terms of obviously the industry?
08:58 Yeah. I mean, it's unbelievable how towards the end of making the film
09:03 we picked up some of those great lines by Chris Cosentino and Alice Waters
09:08 and Simon Kim, and these different pieces came into the film
09:14 about climate change and food choices and industrial food making and supply.
09:23 And it's remarkable to me how we're--I mean, because it does remind me
09:31 so much of what happened in 2008 in the stock market and then three to five years after,
09:36 and that's the kind of stuff that Paul Friedman, Professor Paul Friedman
09:38 and I were talking about too.
09:39 It's like it's not right now that's so scary.
09:42 It's these three or five years after some kind of crisis,
09:45 and then how many more crises are we going to experience
09:48 and how the food industry evolves.
09:50 And we've already seen this evolution going on now because we are seeing
09:56 constant dialogue about tipping and extra charges and credit card charges
10:01 on restaurant bills and the inflation and the cost of everything.
10:06 Suppliers are such a big thing now.
10:09 Yeah, and everybody got used to ordering food delivery or pickup,
10:15 and restaurants that didn't do that do that now.
10:18 And that's just much more of the commerce now.
10:21 It's very common for people to just order whatever they want and have it delivered.
10:26 So how that's going to keep evolving, I'm not sure yet.
10:31 It's probably another series of dialogue questions that I need to have with more chefs.
10:37 But it's definitely shaping and reshaping the industry.
10:43 And before you go to that, Peter, I mean, can you talk a little bit about
10:47 the transformation of the mental health?
10:49 Because the thing is that once that shift changes,
10:52 obviously the mindsets of chefs change in terms of their psychology,
10:56 or do they stay the same?
10:57 What have you seen since then?
11:00 I mean, I have seen a lot of people start restaurants and new restaurants
11:06 out of this, and they did reprioritize their own things in life that they felt were important.
11:15 And I mean, I've seen people open restaurants that are not open on the weekends
11:19 because the customer on the weekend isn't as savvy as the ones that go out during the week,
11:26 or they don't pay it -- they don't spend as much.
11:30 And we have so much evolution in cocktail culture and winemaking and ingredient sourcing,
11:42 and people are not -- it's kind of rare to see, unless it's like a share plate,
11:47 to see a massive amount of protein on a plate these days in a lot of independent restaurants.
11:54 And I think we're going to continue to have a battle with big food industry, fast food, for sure.
12:01 That's definitely the biggest -- that is the biggest hurdle right now.
12:06 It's really hard. It's like it's just -- I just feel it in my gut.
12:09 It kind of makes me nauseous, actually.
12:11 I didn't know what to do because I'd worked so many years to get there,
12:16 and then I didn't have anything else.
12:19 That was it.
12:22 I don't ever really think about it anymore, but it f***ing killed me, man.
12:28 Shutting down all the restaurants was the hardest thing I've ever gone through.
12:32 I can't sit here and watch the whole industry fall off of a cliff.
12:39 We have got to do better than this.
12:41 As far as the endgame, because looking at the film as a whole,
12:44 but then your evolution witnessing a lot of this and being involved,
12:48 can you talk about that, and then I'll let you go?
12:50 I think the only thing I would like to add is just that there are so --
12:54 you guys are just talking about all these sort of important topics
12:57 that could still be explored in future projects of restaurant documentary
13:04 or a series on a restaurant, whatever that is.
13:08 But we have to get beyond games and fun food stuff
13:13 and really allow networks to open up back to sort of teaching me how to cook
13:18 and learning something about a part of the industry that I wasn't aware of before
13:25 that I can help contribute or make better.
13:28 So I would just hope that more places allow for the kind of content
13:32 that Elizabeth and I made in this documentary and will continue to make.
13:35 I would hope that they would allow for more of it
13:37 as opposed to what we're currently being fed by --
13:40 literally being fed by networks, which I love all that stuff.
13:44 I love all that stuff. I love all the games and all that stuff.
13:47 But there's just so much more to talk about and so much more to explore.
13:52 I did want to ask a follow-up on that, Peter, is the aspect, though,
13:56 that it's about people. It's about being at -- I mean, I get so much being at these events.
14:01 I mean, I can see something on TikTok. I can see something on Instagram.
14:04 But there's a wall, you know, and it has to be said,
14:07 people need to go out and do these things.
14:09 That's what keeps these things going.
14:11 I mean, I know it's a tomato-tomato thing, but that's important too.
14:16 Versus the aspect of just seeing the real lives of these people.
14:20 Because people want to know their chefs.
14:23 They can't really know their chefs, but they'd like to know their chefs.
14:26 That's the sort of interesting thing about this.
14:29 Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree.
14:31 And I think that there's a want for --
14:34 like for fans of their favorite chefs or their favorite restaurants,
14:37 there's a thirst of not only knowing how the dish was made,
14:43 but more about the personal experience of what went into making it,
14:47 making the dish or making the restaurant and whatnot.
14:50 And I think there's a thirst for knowledge, I think,
14:53 from restaurant foodies or whatever we're calling them now.
14:59 Is there a balance in that, Elizabeth?
15:01 You know, as far as keeping the mystery versus, you know?
15:07 I think, you know, all you're making me think about is how there's been --
15:12 I feel like maybe a decade and a half of people that will show up at
15:17 whatever's trendy and just take pictures and not really care about the food,
15:21 just to have it on social media, like I was there.
15:24 And I kind of just help people get back into really just being present
15:31 with food and a chef's skills and experience and storytelling through food.
15:38 And really sit with that and taste and experience,
15:42 because that's really how I fell in love with the food business,
15:46 is just really tasting artistry in food making.
15:51 We're in all different parts of the world, all different kinds of cuisine.
15:55 I think that's just the most wonderful thing we have with so many ingredients
16:01 from around the world, is just to really go there and experience things.
16:06 Told through somebody's lens of their way of crafting it.
16:11 It's just -- it's the best.
16:12 And it pisses me off that I've been in circumstances in restaurants
16:16 where these conversations come up and people are like, "Oh, it's not that bad."
16:19 What are you talking about? It's not bad.
16:22 Like, what world do you live in?
16:23 Hundreds of years of oppression on top of a global pandemic.
16:28 And what does that look like? It looked like bad.
16:31 [Music]
16:42 (whooshing)