[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein, welcome to Side By Side.

My guest today thought he'd follow his dad's footsteps and go into the furniture business.

Instead, he followed his dad's dream.

His father always dreamed of owning a restaurant.

My guest did that and much more.

He became one of North Carolina's most notable chefs.

He's also a minister, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist.

He says, what's in my heart is on your plate.

Today, we'll meet Chef Jimmy Noble.

- [Announcer] Funding for Side By Side with Nido Qubein is made possible by.

- [First Narrator] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employ more Americans than any other furniture brand.

But none of that would have been possible without you.

Ashley.

This is home.

- [Second Narrator] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- [Third Narrator] Coca Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca Cola Consolidated.

Your local bottler.

[bright music] ♪ - Jimmy Noble, you are known across the state and beyond our state as a person who is a great chef, a great restaurateur, a business leader in your own right.

You have, what, seven, eight, nine, restaurants now, and I'm intrigued to know, how do you know when to start a restaurant, what menu should you have in that restaurant, and how do you know it's gonna work?

- Well, the first restaurant we had in High Point, the phone number was 889-DELI, it was gonna be a delicatessen and I had gone to New York and looked at deli's like Cat's and Stage, and I wanted to come back and do a big sandwich restaurant.

And halfway through construction, I changed it to a French restaurant.

I had been studying food and wine for probably two or three years before I got into the business, and probably because I really enjoyed dining a lot myself personally.

Growing up as a kid, my favorite time was Thanksgiving and Christmas, not for the gifts but because everybody brought that food together and we could spend time with family and sit down at a table and really have a great smorgasbord of food.

So, I kinda got into it because I enjoy food so much.

- And your dad was a well-known furniture sales professional, and you went to NC State, you wanted to study furniture manufacturing management.

Right?

- Yeah, I was in, I'm still an industrial engineer today, but it was for furniture manufacturing management.

- And you went a completely different direction and now seven of your nine locations are in Charlotte.

Charlotte is a dynamic city, does the location have a lot to do with the restaurant more than the menu, more than demographics?

What is it that makes a restaurant truly successful?

- All those things are important, but I would probably say the people in the restaurant, that's probably the most important thing.

There's restaurants in New York people take you to, you don't really know how you got in, it was unnoticeable, but you found a place and a way to get in, but here it makes a bigger difference.

And when we opened in High Point, there really weren't many fine restaurants in the day.

There were steakhouses and things like that.

But really, people is probably the most important thing.

I tell my chefs, you have a three part job.

It's like a three-legged stool.

Any one of these legs falls, you're not gonna make it.

You gotta know your craft, you gotta be a chef and know how to cook.

You gotta be able to manage money, which is labor costs and food costs.

But third and most importantly, you gotta be able to- - That's the chef's job?

- Yeah.

He's in charge of his funds, he's gotta make sure he keeps his food costs and prices right.

- I see.

- We always watching labor, and then which is from engineering, most in time study, but the people part is the most important.

He's gotta be able to raise up and build a team.

- People as in hospitality, as in hiring, as in service?

- Getting along with people and being a servant leader where you build a team to carry the vision.

When I was here last, I was asking you about this in your culture and how you changed it when you got here, 'cause we've been going through the last two or three years, just really changing and focusing on culture and vision for our company, and it makes a huge difference.

And when you say, this is who we are, this is our vision, when you haven't even started yet, so you always cast vision before you start.

And then, we got pretty, we've done some strategic operations, planning the last seven, eight years, which is a start up process by Tom Patterson, and we looked at where are we, where we want to go, how we gonna get there, what's right and what's wrong, what's missing, what's confusing?

Then we took an analytical look at ourselves and decided how we're gonna grow to 25 restaurants, that's our goal at some point.

But if you never make a plan, you just kind of drift through life.

So we started planning and they say if you plan your work and work your plan, your plan will work.

So, as we started doing that, I also heard something that Peter Drucker who said Tom Patterson's the greatest process thinker he's ever seen, he also said, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So, at the same time, this is what our culture we decided, here's our core values, that's what we believe, this is what we're doing.

And people said, well that's not who you are, this is where we're going, so you have to cast culture just like you do vision.

The people part, and people ask me, I always say I'm in the restaurant business, Candace said, why don't you say I own restaurants?

That's my wife.

Then I would say, well we're in the restaurant business, and we're really in the people business, 'cause it's about the people that we hire, the people that we serve, and for many years, I had ways I looked at the number one person, the most important person was the customer, then our staff, then our purveyors, then the community, then the investors last, 'cause if you put the investors first, you'll make decisions you shouldn't.

We opened, it's been a really, God blessed us with a barbecue restaurant and it's a pretty good size.

We have a smokehouse that's about 2,000 square feet.

I built it so people would wanna tour it.

And when we were getting ready to open, I brought the investors in and I said to them, I said, my goal here is not to make money, my goal here is to make the best barbecue we can in the southeast.

If I make great barbecue, the money will follow.

So, I changed that and I put my customer number two, my staff and my employee's number one.

We went through this process and the guy said, that was doing this, he learned it from Tom Patterson, he said the only other person that did that was Southwest Airlines, put their staff ahead of their clients.

If I take care of my staff, they take care of our clients and our customers that come in.

Again, it's a people business.

You can go to a restaurant, the food's great, the atmosphere's great, the service is great, but you go, eh.

Or you go to a place and it doesn't always click, but the people are nice, you love, and you go because of who the people there.

For us, I think, and I'm a chef and I hate to admit it, but the food's not the most important thing but it is important, but how you treat your staff and how they treat the customers is most important.

- Yeah, when I go to a restaurant, I guess I don't think about all the things that you think about, you're running the operations, so you have to think about all those.

I think first about the Maitre d', and the person who welcomes me.

When you go to cities like New York or Palm Beach, there's just tremendous demand for the restaurants, I watch to see how kind they are, how hospitable, whether they're smiling, whether they know me by name, whether they take some free minutes to find the reservation, whether they act like they're too busy and too preoccupied.

That's the first impression.

And then, the server becomes very very important, the best meal served by someone who's unkind, inhospitable, sorta ruins the evening for you, right?

And then of course, the meal is important.

But that's my experience as a customer.

Your experience is running these different operations all at the same time.

So, from a business perspective, I'm intrigued.

Do you act like chef in any of those restaurants now?

- I don't wear a chef coat anymore, I did for a long time.

My main focus is the food.

I've got a team, I've got a CFO and a COO, and I'll soon have a chief marketing person, and then I'll also have a chief culinary officer.

And the guys working with us is moving towards that way.

I need to get a little bit bigger before I could engage that.

But I'm thinking about that position, but my main focus is food and how it executes.

I'm looking at everything.

- How do you decide in these different restaurants, what the menu is gonna be?

Why do you have one that's barbecue, and one that is a cafe type of place?

One is a sandwich.

What makes you think that?

You do research?

Do you get consultants?

Do you just pray about it that it comes to you?

- I would say, barbecue, I grew up here in High Point, and there's Kepley's is right nearby, but Lexington was where I always wanted to go.

I gotten to know Wayne Monk and Ricky Monk and those guys.

I didn't work there, but I went to school there, and I asked questions that take me to smokehouse.

In fact, their mason helped us design our pits in Charlotte.

And I did it because I'd wanna do barbecue, I had wanted to do it for probably 30 years.

- How does a barbecue restaurant work?

Run me through the process of preparing barbecue.

- It's totally different.

I cook everything before they get here.

Otherwise, I've always, every other restaurant, I didn't cook it til the last second.

I wanted to cook it to order.

But in barbecue, you have to cook it in advance.

I have pits, we run about five or six meats, [clears throat] excuse me, and we load those meats twice a day, one for lunch, one for dinner, and we're all waiting for the brisket.

- Is it a whole?

- I do Lexington style or western style, pork, I use butts, not the whole shoulder.

- I see.

- And I did it, and I can get skinless butts because I want that bark, which is on the outside, which is my favorite one in Lexington, I always tell 'em, I want a course brown tray, which is that outside edge.

But when you have a whole shoulder, you only have that much, but if you skin it, you got the whole thing nice and dark.

So, we chop the course in there with it.

But it was hard to all of a sudden switch my way of thinking about doing barbecue.

When we opened, my son helped us, he was working there as a server, and he was training other waiters, and said now listen, if you go put your order in, you better turn your bar order in first because if you turn your food or bar at the same time, the food's gonna be at the bar.

'Cause it's ready, and we chop it to order, but we've set it up in a system.

- Or the salad and the entree come at the same time.

- Yeah.

- I've had that happen to me.

It's kinda crazy.

How did you deal with supply chain and with labor shortages in the post-Covid era, which is just a short time ago?

- For the major folks like my beef guy in Kansas, it's Creek Stone Farms, I stayed in touch with them all the time and try to stay ahead of the curve.

We always buy the beef or the brisket, which is not a normal barbecue in North Carolina, but it's great barbecue.

And we studied it and went to Texas and built tanks like they did there.

We had to, I stay in touch with them, and my chicken guy, and the pork folks, all that we use that smoke, noble smoke, is premium meats.

So our barbecue, I pay two or three times what the normal barbecue places pay for their local pork.

And we dealt with 'em, worked with 'em, if something ran out, if prices went up, there was a certain point I couldn't raise my price anymore but my price kept going up so our food cost got out of line for a little while.

But trying to stay ahead of it, and the good news is that during this time when we had to shut out restaurants down, our ministry side, which is our Kings Kitchen in the church in the Dream Center, we turned the restaurants into food manufacturing facilities and we started producing meals.

We did 170,000 meals within 12 months, keeping my staff working and going into the communities and neighborhoods we'd go to where the need was bad 'cause people lost their job, they couldn't work, so we started taking food to people.

- You were giving them the food.

- Yes, oh yeah, yeah.

My wife and I started a ministry in '98, which is mostly a radio teaching ministry, and around 2001 or so, we did a thing at the High Point Restaurant where we invited all the homeless folks in.

And we had more volunteers than we did homeless, but I realized the restaurants and the ministry could partner together, which became the King's Kitchen in Downtown Charlotte where a lot of the homeless population is visible.

And we opened it up, but the premise of, one, we're gonna do two things, our vision hasn't changed in the 14 years we've been planning for it, and when we opened, was to raise money through profits and solicitation to feed the pour, and then secondly, do a job training, faith-based discipleship program, where we teach them a skill, but we also take them through bible study and we teach them that the most, here's how I say it, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, the most overly mobile institution on the earth is the body of Christ.

So we teach them how to trust God, believe God for whatever problems they're going through, God usually has a promise in his word somewhere and we trust him to find it.

And so, that became the King's Kitchen, which later birthed the church, and then from that, we birthed the Dream Center, which is like the Los Angeles Dream Center.

- Yes, yes.

It's great work and we thank you for it, Jimmy.

So, the labor shortage, how did you manage that?

I heard from a lot of people that is very difficult to find people to come and work.

It's gotten a little better now but for awhile there, it was very difficult to do.

How did you keep your restaurants open?

- I would say, working on our culture probably made it better.

For example, if half the workforce is not working, that means that 50%, I mean all the restaurants will run 50%, but if your culture's better and you're pushing hard and you're training, we're getting the cream of the crop.

We had some tough times where we didn't have quite enough and we cut our hours a little bit, but we tried to stay open as much as we could.

When they said you can open up one table, I'm opening.

We were very cautiously aggressive about opening back up and I noticed that restaurants that opened real slow, they never got momentum back up.

And we opened two restaurants during Covid, and they were tougher to get started because we didn't have the momentum of a business.

Once a business is open, it starts running, it gets its own momentum and as long as you have great team members in there with it, it helps it run.

- Sure.

- Getting it started was tough, but I had in this culture thing, where we, like the book, get the right people on the bus, get the right people off the bus, we had some people that had to get off the bus and as soon as I got 'em off the bus, the person that came on and took their place, started hiring people and said we can hire 'em, we can do it.

Another guy said, we can't hire anybody, we can't open.

It's all about attitude.

- Attitude and mindset, yes.

Attitude and mindset.

So, Jimmy, give me a quick lesson in running a restaurant, to the extent that you're free to divulge some secrets of the trade.

- There's no secrets.

- I've always thought that food is about a third of the cost of the ticket, labor and other stuff is a third, and a third is sort of the general stuff, marketing, profit, etc.

Where am I wrong?

- Well, forever the labor cost is like 25%, these are just general restaurant rule-of-thumb, pretty much on all levels.

But for full service restaurant, 15% back of the house, which is the chefs, and 10% front of the house.

And then we try to run food costs, before 33%, but now our target's much less.

As things have changed and we've offered more services, we had to charge more.

When the food costs were going up, and labor costs were going up, those two numbers together is a very important number.

If you can get it 50-55 combined, you're doing great.

If it goes over 60, you're probably not making money.

So, when our laboring house went up, we had to drop our food costs a little bit, just to make that thing balance.

Otherwise, we wouldn't make it.

But it's always, and it's not tough math, it's just algebra equations, but really just managing your dollars.

- So, how does, I was in New York last week, and if you order steak in some nice restaurant, you could spend anywhere from $65 to $95.

- I've seem 'em $120.

- It could be $120.

I'm friends with a guy called, Chris Pappas, who owned Allen Brothers for a long time, which is a very very fine steak wholesale supplier to the finest restaurants.

And if you go online, just retail online to buy one of their steaks, it could be anywhere from $80 to $160, $180.

And I often wondered, is that for real?

I mean, is a $90 steak significantly better than a $50 steak?

Is it just a mark up or is it really the cut cost that restaurants so much more?

- Well, we're getting ready to open a steakhouse in a year, so, I'm gonna use prime beef, I'm gonna use a couple smaller farmers that raise their own cattle, and the ribeye, we had one of 'em last night, I cut 'em this thick, I call 'em goat head steaks, 'cause if you hold it, it looks like a goat head, but then we kinda cut 'em like beefsteak florentina.

That price on that beef now is at $20 a pound, before I go to yield and I may get 50, 60, 70% based on the cut of meat, so you may have $20, $30 in the steak, but you gotta at least mark it up, at least the highest you can go is 33%.

And a steakhouse is not as much labor, well I'm saying this and you have a steakhouse and I don't, but on campus, but your ticket is higher and you can run a little bit higher food costs and lower labor costs, because the higher the ticket.

- Takes less time, yeah.

- The labor goes down in percentage.

And I run everything off percentages.

But there are steaks out there that expensive.

I remember in High Point here, I was afraid to go over the $20 mark on an entree.

I'm talking about a full entree.

That was back in the 80's, right?

But now, they're 40 and 50 sometimes, some places.

- Yeah.

What about gratuities?

I mean, we as consumers, we as guests in restaurants, we wonder a lot of these things.

So, in Europe, quite often, they expect no gratuity or 10% gratuity.

Here, so many of them now, they bring the bill, and there's a service charge already there, then there's a additional gratuity line.

In many restaurants now, they give you the total and then they put 15, 18, 20, sometimes 22, 25.

- Suggestions, right.

- Yeah, you suggest it.

You see it in fast food restaurants sometimes, or what I call fast food restaurants.

If you go into a Starbucks for example, somewhere like that.

I've often wondered, and I'm gonna reveal something to you that you might hate me for, I've often wondered when I put that tip there, does it go to that person who served me well, for example, if I give them an extra tip, because they were, made it great experience, does it go in their pocket?

Is it divided up over the entire staff?

And so, I have been known to put the tip on the paper, but then slip a little cash with that, then say to them, that's for you.

And I never know that's proper, improper, does it cause concerns in a restaurant, does it cause the person to mislead, does he get in trouble for that?

- Well, I would think, restaurants do it whichever way they choose to do it.

Our staff gets their tips.

They do tip out to the bartender a little bit, and some other service.

- If you leave someone 20%, they get the 20%.

- They get like 18%.

- They might voluntarily tip a bartender.

- Yeah, well, it's directed on our side, because the bartender's doing work.

But like for example, the Chicken Shack, you walk up to the counter, it's like walking into Waffle House but you order here and you pick your chicken sandwich up down here.

And they have an option to tip, it would just happen, but it really goes to our staff, and they pool those tips.

And if you come to my full service restaurant and you tip your server, it goes to him.

But it's, I think it's a fair question, anytime you ask, do y'all pool your tips, or does your tip go to you, 'cause- - What does pool your tips mean?

You take it out of your- - One pool is splitted up evenly.

- Oh, I see, oh pool, I see.

- For the longest time, country clubs pooled tips and then they pay 'em an hourly rate and you notice that service was not as good at country clubs as it was restaurants.

And I was always vehemently against pooling tips, because you got a guy over here that carries weight, it's not fair for him to get the same cut.

- But then how does the person in the kitchen get tipped?

They don't get tipped.

- They don't.

Some restaurants, because of the last two or three years we've been through, they've added service for the kitchen, they've added service fees on top of, there's just a flat fee.

I mean, they're adding stuff I never add, I haven't done that, I just let it be like it was.

- What about the bus staff, the busing staff?

- They're part of the tip pool, they get a little bit of a percentage from the server.

- I see.

- So the server has a bartender and a SA who's helping him, so part of his tip.

- It's in their best interest to take care of them.

I see.

I see.

Very very interesting.

What's the most challenging thing that you have in your business now?

You said, culture, we know inflation has something to do with it, in the food prices, labor prices and shortages, what challenges you the most?

- Probably the culture and the people part and having the right people.

You can have a guy, we interviewed a guy for exec chef, and all the credentials looked good, you get down and you talk to him, he come in, do interviews, we flew him in, and then he leaves, and then you go, we're gonna offer him a job, then you really don't know until they show up and go to work.

People present themselves pretty well.

- Of course.

- Also, if we're hiring a leadership position, I get involved, but I let my team decide too, and I ask them, what do you think, 'cause you're gonna be the one that's gotta work with them everyday, and I want you to have input on this thing.

The people part, but at this point, in my career, it's the best it's ever been.

When we had one store, it was hard to run a store.

I mean, so what's two, three, four, five, you build a team and they help carry the weight with you.

But never, sometimes I get a lot of crib, but really, never forget, I'm just one of a ton of people that make it happen, and nothing great ever happens by one person, it's always a team.

- That's true, in any organization, right.

I've often wondered, I've seen it at many restaurants, usually fine restaurants, where if you come a little early or you just check in, you'll see the Maitre d' speaking to all the staff in advance.

Is that a routine thing in a restaurant?

Talking about the specials, going over who's gonna be there, or remind them to be kind and so and so forth.

- Mm-hmm.

A lot of stuff, like even the name Maitre d', comes from the French, maitre d'hotel, he was the guy that did run the floor.

He didn't serve you, but he ran the floor.

He wasn't necessarily the host or the hostess that sat you, but he was in charge.

He was like a general manager, but he was of a higher trained caliber than we see a lot of times.

But everybody on the team is, one of the things in our culture, what we're looking for in ideal team players, is we want to put a man on the moon, and this happened when Tom Patterson went to visit NASA and he went in the restroom and the man in there was mopping the floors, said how you doing today, sir, he said, we're doing great, just trying to get a man on the moon.

Everybody on the organization was trying to go for the same vision, you get a man on the moon, and we try to instill that with our staff too, that everybody knows we're all in this together, we're all working.

And if we all pull together in the right direction, it opens so many doors.

- Yeah.

That's the ideal.

I wonder if you see any differences among more mature members of your staff, versus young ones just coming in, asking for work-life balance and I want more, I want to do less.

Some of them, not all of them, but some in our society today, want to do less than but get paid just as much and so on.

How do you deal with that issue?

You just don't hire them?

- I won't, if they come to me with that.

I mean, we have one of our leaders who's been with me for 10 years, and he says, I don't want to change, I want to do more.

Then, you're probably gonna go from salary to hourly, and I'll work you back for what you were doing, but I can't have you as a leader because, I mean, restaurant business is demanding, and most restaurants, the professionals in there were working 70-80 hours.

One of our core values is we honor families, so I say we're gonna work 50-60, but that's it, after that, go home.

I got this great young man who has a tendency to want to keep working, I say go home, go see your son, go see your wife, go do it, 'cause then you're gonna enjoy life better.

- Well, that's part of your values, fundamental values for the organization.

That's why you're being blessed because you're a very successful business person, but you also care deeply about society and the community and people in need.

And you're doing it, and helping those among the least of your brothers and sisters, and for that, we honor you.

Jimmy Noble, thank you for all you've done, and best wishes on all you're yet to do.

- Thank you, sir, I appreciate that.

It's an honor to be with ya.

- [Announcer] Funding for Side By Side with Nido Qubein is made possible by.

- [First Narrator] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employee more Americans than any other furniture brand.

But none of that would've been possible without you.

Ashley.

This is home.

- [Second Narrator] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- [Third Narrator] Coca Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.