Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier

How a neighborhood restaurant became one of the best seafood restaurants in the country

How connecting to Ingrid Bengis, "Fishmonger To The Stars", and hiring Josh Weekly, chef de cuisine at Le Bernardin, made my neighborhood restaurant, F. Scott's in Nashville, one of the best seafood restaurants in the country.

Duration:: 9m
Broadcast on:: 19 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: aac

Welcome back to adventures of the Black Belt Sommelier, appreciate your joining us. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I owned a restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee called F. Scott's. It was a nice restaurant. We had aspirations of being more. It was in a little strip mall and Green Hills in Nashville. I don't did about... and think, you know, it was a nice restaurant. Thanks for going well, people. We got a lot of good reviews. And we'd been open about a year when I read an article in Connoisseur magazine entitled "Fishmonger to the Stars." This article was about a fishmonger in Stonington main ingrid Bengus, who had only five clients. Her clients were Thomas Keller, Daniel Bouloud, Charlie Trotter, Wolfgate Book, and Charlie Politen... No, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'll only call it that. So kind of the Mount Rushmore of chefs in the United States at the time. What made Ingrid really unique was the fact that she only bought fish from dayboats, so boats that went out and came back the same day rather than huge trawlers that packed the fish on ice for weeks at a time. And she, in many cases, went out on the boat with the fishermen, and she would call her clients from the boat as they were hauling the catch in and tell them what they were catching that day. She would put together an aggregate order for the five clients. And she would select if the aggregate order was 200 pounds, of wolffish, she would select the best, finest, most perfect 200 pounds of wolffish and pack it up and ship it out. And so her clients would receive the next day fish that had been suming in the North Atlantic the day before. So, you know, I had to be part of this equation. So I called Dunnington main information, of course, this is before the internet. So I called Dunnington information and asked Ringrid Bengett, Scott, her phone number called her. There was a answering scene message that this is Ingrid, thanks for calling. I'm in the Soviet Union right now. If you need to order some fish call, my assistant answer and gave me the phone number. As it turns out, I learned later Ingrid, it was one of the worlds of experts on Russian history. And she also wrote the feminist manifesto, which was one of the first books on female equal lip books. So she was a really extraordinary person with a lot of interest. But when I called, she was in the Soviet Union. So I called Nancy, and I said to him, I'm sorry to bother you. I know your phone's ringing off the wall because of this article in Professor magazine. She said, what article? I don't know anything about any article. Well, Ingrid hadn't even bothered to warn her that this article was coming out. They didn't know anything about it. So I'd told her that I would be glad to fax her a copy. She said, well, there only one fax machines at the city hall. So she gave me the number and FX, this article to her. And then I called back the next day and said, I'd like to be your sixth client. And he said, you know, we really can't handle the clients we have already. We don't need another client and she hung up on me. I called her back and said, you know, I'm not going to give up, I'm going to keep calling until you say yes. So you might as well say yes now. And I said, what about this? Why don't I send you a check for $2,000 and you send me $2,000 worth of a fish, whatever you think I would benefit from that day. So she said, okay, so I mailed off a check for $2,000 and then crossed my fingers that she would actually send me $2,000 with a fish. Two days later, three days later, I got a call from Delta Airlines that there was a box for me at the airport. Where since it's before FedEx delivered to your door. So I went out to the airport, picked up this box. When we opened the box, there was just kind of an assortment of things in there, but one of the fish was still alive, it flopped out on the floor. There were some scallops that were the most perfect things I've ever seen in my life. We actually ate them raw. They didn't even serve them. There were sea urchins live. Wolffish, they're always... She caught a lot of wolffish or what the French call lutomair. So we started doing some business, and it was a sensation. And I created a thing I called fishbacks. I would fax my customers a list of the fish we had gotten from Ingrid that day, and how we were gonna prepare them at night. They encouraged them to make a reservation in five minutes after I sent these faxes out my phone would start ringing and we'd fill up that night. It was amazing. Of course, at this point, I've never even met Ingrid. Ingrid came back from the Soviet Union and landed at, I think, John F. Kennedy Airport and called Hubert LeCose at La Bernadette. I'm sorry. I screwed up the list of shuffs. It wasn't really Paladine. It was Hubert LeCose at La Bernadette. And said, you know, I just landed, loved to come by and see you have a glass of wine. He said, "Well, why don't you come by and have dinner with me in the kitchen?" She said, "Okay. So, in the meantime, one of La Bernadette's shuffs had been to lunch at F. Scott's and had taken a menu, one of our menus, back on which it said that we were serving ingrid's wolf fishing or scholops, ingrid's lobsters, to all these different muscles, things that we served that we bought from her. We put her name on the menu with the items that she provided us. And so, when Ingrid walked into the kitchen at La Bernadette and she'll bare the coals handed her, our menu and said, Who the hell are these guys in Nashville? They're buying fish from... Well, she'd never heard of us. I'd been doing a business with Nancy. She called the restaurant, and I'd left for the night. She got our chef, Barber Braggle, who was not exactly the most socially adept person in the world on the phone. And Barbara Shorty, we called her Shorty because she was about five-one, said something to Ingrid that insulted her. So, she said, I'm never selling you fish in any fish, again, as long as I live. I called the next day and got that smooth over. And we continued to do a lot of business with Ingrid. We bought a lot of fish. We pretty much had a box coming everyday or every two days. I don't really know what Barbara said to her that offended her. But who knows? Barbara was difficult to say the least. Incredible accountant had been difficult. About six months into this and normal, a successful project, a friend of mine named Bill Danover came to lunch and with a friend. And at the end of lunch, he said, if you don't mind sitting down, I'd like to introduce you to my friend. And I did, and I introduced myself. And Bill said, this is Josh Weekly. He's a chef, and he'd really like to work for you. And I said, well, why? Well, I live in New York now. I'm working at a New York restaurant. But my wife's pregnant. I don't really want to raise our children in New York City, so she's from this area, and so where are you working now? He said, well, I'm the chef to cuisine at La Bernadette. So he's the number two guy undergeal barrel goes at the best restaurant, the seafood restaurant in the United States. And he's already cooking ingred bingus his fish. And ingred bingus his fish is the backbone of our success as a restaurant. So I said, well, why don't you just go and put on your wife in the United States, you can go to work right now. Let me give me a minute to check you out. Make sure that you really are the chef to cuisine at La Bernadette. If you are, you're hired. We'll figure out what your position is. And we'll figure out how much we'll pay you. Well, so he went back, you know, gave notice, and about six weeks later, he started with us. Sure, he kind of saw the writing on the wall. The chef, executive chef, for Lilith Fair, if you remember Lilith Fair. And Josh took over the kitchen. So, overnight, we were basically La Bernadine in Nashville, because we were serving the Soup du Pazón, we were serving the sea urchins, we were serving all those dishes, those famous, famous dishes, La Bernadine was serving with exactly the same recipes and exactly the same source for the fish. So, we went from being a little piddling little neighborhood restaurant of good quality to being a really truly, extraordinary seafood restaurant almost overnight. Thanks for tuning in to Adventures of the Bike Well Summit A. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Have a great day.