YouSaid · the spoken record

Ted Xenohristos

lines on the record: 88
first: 2023-11-27
most recent: 2023-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like, can I get a gallon of that? Like, what are people doing with a gallon of hummus or Zatziki? Right? Right. And Eventually, you know, we had a customer who came to the restaurant all the time, Kenny Mates, who said to me, Why don't you guys sell it in the grocery store? Said, well, I'm not really sure how we're going to do that. I don't have any experience doing that. And so we decided to do it because everything that we had done in the past, we had no experience doing. And it's found a way to work itself out. So we started doing that whole business.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we didn't take into account that once we cooked that octopus off, that 40 pounds became eighteen pounds. And so all the loss in that, we didn't capture that in the pricing. So we were really giving away octopus for way less than you could buy it anywhere in the world, probably. And we did the same for scallops and lamb chops. And we were kind of getting busier and busier and losing more and more money.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“plates exactly and so I went back out there and I said I'll figure it out I'll make him happy and he got up and left and we didn't have another customer for two more days And again, we thought we were going to fail there. And so, like, as we kind of got busier and busier, we didn't really know what we were doing. We were bringing an octopus. And let's just say the octopus weighed 40 pounds. We would divide that by the ounces that we served, and we were like, great, we can serve octopus for six bucks.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think in the restaurant industry, and maybe it's just, I don't know, maybe it's in our blood, but every single day you feel like the restaurant could fail. It's kind of a crazy feeling. Even that first day of opening. We had one customer come in. I remember he came in, he sat down. I was the waiter and I went up to him and I said, this is what we're doing here. We're doing this Greek concept small plate shared. And he said, well, I want big plates. I want a dinner. I came to have a meal. And I try to be as charming as I could. I love talking to people and I love making people happy. And I went into the kitchen. And I think it was Ike that pointed out that we had only purchased small plates. So there were not even any big plates in the restaurant. Literally, you only had small plates.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, restaurant is a very risky business, right? I mean, anyone who's been in the business knows that you're more likely to fail than succeed in the first three years. I mean, once you factor in the cost of labor, the cost of rent, the cost of food, there's very little margin left. I mean, it was just a three of you, so you didn't have presumably you didn't have to pay employees, but were you bringing money in? Were you losing money?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything. We were writing it on a ticket, and then we were going in the kitchen and transferring that order onto yellow sticky notes. And, you know, I remember one of the early moments. Of those sticky notes. You know, I think the common theme has been we didn't have a lot of money and we were trying to save money and everything we bought. And I remember we bought the knockoff brand of the 3M sticky notes and walked into the kitchen. We had a packed house. I'm looking around. I'm wondering where the chefs have gone. I'm wondering where all the food is. I looked down and they're all on their hands and knees kind of looking through these tickets. It was so hot in the kitchen that the glue was melting on the back of these knockoff sticky notes and they were all falling down on the ground.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had some friends and family who came in just to kind of help us practice and things kind of went wild. We didn't really know what we were doing and we were trying to figure that out because we didn't have a POS system, we didn't have any way of tracking orders. We were handwriting everything. We were using all these.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had some of the basics. Again, it was like all small plates. We had chicken soulaki. But we also, you know, did these beautiful U-10 scallops that we sauteed in our Greek olive oil. We did lamb chomps. We did grilled meatballs. A lot of the recipes came from Dimitri's mom and just doing it in the way that Greeks would do their food or treat their food or their cuisine and have the best possible products. and create food out of that.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there was no collateral except for the restaurant itself. So there was a lien on the restaurant, which, like I said, I mean, we built that place for 10 grand. So the collaterals less than the loan was going to be. Was impressive is how quickly we also got that loan. I mean, it was probably a week, maybe 10 days later. The check came in.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a nice, it was my first interaction with a bank or a banker because I never even had any money to put in a bank. So I kind of thought it always worked like this. You meet a guy, he gives you money and you build your business. But, you know, obviously as we've been in business since then and we've learned that that was actually pretty miraculous moment. Yeah, very lucky break.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember talking to my uncle who had recommended we talk to a banker he knew. And so we met with this banker and he met us. He came into that restaurant and sat down. By the way, this restaurant at the time had no sign on the outside. So it was hard enough for him to find it, let alone what our customers were going to experience down the road. So he comes in and he's like, where's your sign? And we start to tell him our story about the money and how we've run out and the hood. He kind of looks around and he sees the space and he's like, well, how did you get it to this point? And, you know, I told him the story that I've been telling you about all the work we had done ourselves.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was one moment where it felt insurmountable because where was this money going to come from? Our credit was already down the tubes, by the way, because we were not paying those credit cards we maxed out. So nobody was really going to give us another credit card.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just remember we were sitting in that restaurant, it was all built out, the candles were lit, we had the tables. Tables and chairs were all set. I mean, there was, we were just ready to go, and we thought we were done right then and there because I don't know. We just didn't know how we were going to find that money to put that hood in.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it took, I think we were working on it in the summer of 2006, and we eventually got to opening day was in November of 2006, a few days before Thanksgiving. And I remember right around October, we went for final inspection and the fire inspector came in and he looked at us and he said he was there to test the answl system, Ansel system in the restaurant is basically what puts out fires on your grill or fryer if you have one. And he said, where's your grease hood? And we said, what do you mean? It's just, there's the hood right there. And he said, well, this is a baker's hood. Call me when you have a grease hood. And we went out and we got a quote for this and it was going to cost over 20 grand. It was like 23 grand to remove that hood and put a new one in.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I was literally at the doctor and in the hospital. Hours later, I was just, I could not breathe. Wheezing. I had blood was dripping from my nose, and you know, you were supposed to be wearing goggles and a mask and gloves, and there I was just literally just pouring that stuff out. But it worked. We got the glue up and we can move on.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we tried to hand chisels with this stuff up. We tried to get it up with machinery. None of the tiles would come up. Once we hand chills led it all off, there was about an inch of glue underneath them. I don't know why anyone would need that much glue, but for some reason it just was there. And we could not get it off. And I remember asking people what they recommended. And someone said to me, you know, you should try muriatic acid. And I said, okay, that sounds cool. I head over to Home Depot. I buy some muriatic acid. I remember mixing it with my flip-flops and a t-shirt and shorts. It starts kind of, you know, steaming up. The vapors are coming up. I pour it all over that glue. And I'll tell you what, that glue was gone. Myriadic acid works miracles.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to plead the fifth on that. You know, it's okay. I got you. Not everything was done by the books, I will say, for the build out. And everything's up to code today. So we resolved any issues we had. But before it was a Russian bakery, it was a tile shop. So the person who was selling tile there had tiled every part of this place in different color tiles.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you know, they saw the center and they were like, are you going to even have any business here? Yeah, they weren't happy about that, but they did help Ike's dad, Ike's uncle, my dad, Dimitri's dad. They all really helped us bring it together. But I'm telling you, we built this thing for right around like 10 grand. Everything was from Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Target. We would go into these to Target or Walmart. We would open up the credit card so we could get that extra 10% discount, you know, when they offer that at the point of sale. And we did everything ourselves. There were crazy stories that happened along the way. I mean, we did our own electricity.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And So, the rest of the money came from us working during the day, during the evenings, I should say. We worked at night at a Lazzo restaurant and Dimitri worked at his restaurant. And during the day, we would build and we would do all the work ourselves.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything. Dimitri is going to cook. I was going to run the kind of front of the house with Ike. He would use his time to focus on the finances. But that was the plan that we would own and work in this restaurant for the rest of our lives.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea was that we would do Meze, which many people know as tapas or small plates, shared plates, because that's how they eat in Greece. When you go. Yeah. You order a bunch of these plates and you kind of share them so the idea was that we would create these dishes, Tsatziki. We had crazy feta, which was feta infused with jalapenos and shallots. We had baby lamb chops over French fries, but we would handcut them every day, fry them in olive oil, top them with oreganoso, the way that we had them in Greece, right, with real fresh potatoes. And so.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cash. I think we turned it all into a cashier's check, but the story would probably be much better if we did walk in with a suitcase of cash. Here's the 20 grand. It's all there. It felt like it did feel like that.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure what the actual rent was per month, but I knew that she owed about $20,000. And so we were going to find this $20,000, right? None of us had 20 bucks in our pocket. So I think I always prefaced it with like, this is what you shouldn't do when you start a business. But we took all our credit cards, our personal credit cards, and we just pulled money off them. With your cash, we basically max them out, and we were able to come up with that money to pay the landlord off.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just spade all the equipment. Yeah, just the equipment and everything inside, which I later came to find out was worthless because we couldn't use any of it. When we met with the landlord, the landlord actually said no because some of the same things we ran into in the past, our finances weren't there. We didn't have the personal guarantees. We didn't have any cars or homes to put up. So he didn't want to give us the space. We were 26, 27 years old. He just didn't want to do it. So we eventually come up with this plan, we had found out through conversations with the woman who owned the Russian Bakery that she owed back rent. And so we went to the landlord and we said, well, what if we paid her back rent? Would you give us the space then?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, we didn't have any money. You're right about that. We just had the will to want to do something different. And I remember, you know, Dimitri got a call from one of his distributors who said there's this Russian bakery going out of business and this is probably 40, 45 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. in Rockville, Maryland. And we went up and we looked at the spot. And I mean, this shopping center was just barren. There was no cars in it. We went into this kind of Russian bakery. It looked like a subway, if I could best describe it, you know.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we grew up visiting Greece. We grew up visiting our villages. We grew up really seeing what Greek food was about, whether it was our parents cooking it or those experiences in Greece and in our villages. And, you know, Greek cuisine was never technique-driven like the French or the Italians or Japanese, right? It was always about the quality of ingredients. So even when my mom cooked here, she didn't need Greek tomatoes or Greek rosemary. She just needed the best version of those from here to make amazing Greek food. So that's really what we wanted to kind of bring here to open a restaurant.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was called actually Tel Aviv Cafe was literally right around the corner from where we were at. And I remember we would kind of grab coffee and talk about doing our own restaurant one day and talk about doing a real version of a Greek restaurant that really represented what Greek cuisine was.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both Ike and myself work there, and I really loved it. I did everything there. It's where I really learned and started to understand the restaurant business, started to understand what it meant, you know, to have a P&L. And they really let Ike and myself kind of entrench ourselves in that business and do a lot of like the wine ordering, the food ordering, the menu creation. Ike, who is an accountant by trade, was doing a lot of the bookkeeping for them. So it was an awesome opportunity to learn”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, mainly as a server, I did work on the line a few times in the kitchens. I would bartend. I managed a little bit. A good friend of mine opened up an Italian restaurant called Alazo in Bethesda, Maryland. Still there? Still there? Bethesda, I think, yeah. They do a great job.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know that you did a couple years at the University of Maryland, but you obviously grown up watching your mom in the restaurant business. And I guess you in the early 2000s, you dropped out and basically started working in restaurants as a server, right?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We met at the church. I mean, one thing about there were so many different churches around us, all Greek churches, and you got to interact with the kids from all over, right? So I met both Dimitri and Ike through that church system. And we were a little difference in ages. I was the oldest. I was one year older than Dimitri, two years older than Ike, but we hit it off as soon as we met through those church programs.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my mind, it seems like it was yesterday where I opened my lunch at school and the smell that came out of the tinfold container was of Spanacopita, which is, you know, spinach and feta cheese sitting in my lunchbox for a few hours before I opened it kind of smelled up the whole cafeteria and people were like, what is that? What are you eating? And I was always embarrassed to explain what that was, right? I was a young kid and I was trying to explain what Spana Copita was. And it was really, really hard kind of growing up being so different. Now I obviously really appreciated and love it. Any chance I get to eat my mom's food is a treat.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is literally all I ate. I mean, I was truly amazed and I am more amazed today because I know how difficult it is to have a family and have work. Then my mom would go to work and still have time to prepare these elaborate amazing meals, you know, whether it was like a whole leg of lamb or stuffed tomatoes or spana copita that she would make from scratch. I mean, I tried to make.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit of everything. My uncle actually still cooks breakfast there every single day, so it's whenever I get the chance to stop by, I do. But I remember her dragging me there. And I fell in love with it. I was able to wash dishes. I would bust tables. I'd loved interacting with the customers. It's really where I fell in love with the restaurant business.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my mom worked at Tally Hill Restaurant, which is actually her sister's restaurant. So my aunt and uncle owned it. And she used to take me all the time because she couldn't afford child care. But I loved it. I loved being there.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did jobs on his own. It was a company, but he was the only employee, right? So it was called JX Contractor. And my dad would come home pretty late from those construction days. And I remember him dragging me to a few days of work with him, whether it was a construction site or roofing job or whatever that was. I remember a day where he said, I need you to move all that wood from this side of the room to that side of the room. And I did it. And when I was done, I said, what's next? He's like, I need you to move that wood back to the other side of the room. So he was definitely testing me. And I just remember it being so hot. And I was like, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. I'm going to have to figure out something to do.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their Greek culinary heritage. Ted Senocristos Dimitri Moshebides and Igrigropolis all met as kids in their Greek Orthodox youth group. They grew up eating things like lamb meatballs, Suvlaki, Tsatsiki, and fresh salads with fetishies. And as adults, they all ended up working at restaurants. So when they came together in their twenties to open a small Greek taverna in suburban Washington, DC, that was the plan. Run a restaurant, be a gathering place for the community, and maybe earn enough to live off. What they didn't plan for or anticipate was for Kava to become a national chain of fast casual restaurants, a chain of more than two hundred eighty restaurants across the US. But to get there, the three friends had to go through a lot of pain, permit violations, near bankruptcy.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We kind of got busier and busier, we didn't really know what we were doing. We were bringing an octopus and let's just say the octopus weighed 40 pounds. We would divide that by the ounces that we served and we were like, great, we can serve octopus for six bucks. Well, we didn't take into account that once we cooked that octopus off, that 40 pounds became 18 pounds. And so all the loss in that, we didn't capture that in the pricing. So we were really giving away octopus for way less than you could buy anywhere in the world, probably. And we did the same for scallops and lamb chops. And we were kind of getting busier and busier and losing more and more money.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT