Reverie Reborn: How Chef Johnny Spero Rebuilt His Dream Restaurant After a Tragic Fire

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk Bachmann: Hi everyone, my name is Kirk Bachmann, and welcome back to The Ultimate Dish. Today, we’re chatting with Chef Johnny Spero, born and raised in Maryland.

Chef Johnny began his culinary career at the young age of 16. Early on, he worked alongside James Beard Award-winning chef, Johnny Monis. Two years later, he was staging at Noma in Copenhagen, which revolutionized his understanding of sourcing and preparing high-quality ingredients.

Upon returning to the U.S., Chef Johnny worked at the acclaimed Town House with Chef John Shields before eventually finding a role as the executive chef at Jose Andres Minibar in D.C. During his tenure, Chef Johnny was celebrated as the Eater “Chef of the Year.” He also represented D.C. as one of ten contestants on the Netflix competition, “The Final Table.”

Never one to stop learning, he then returned to Europe to stage at a top-ten contender for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, [Mugaritz] whose playful presentation and creativity inspired Johnny to begin planning a restaurant of his own.

Opened in October 2018, Reverie is the result of more than ten years of daydreaming and an intimate and personal expression of his travels and talents. The restaurant earned its first Michelin star in the spring of 2022, just weeks before the opening of Johnny’s second independent venture, Bar Spero, a seafood bar and grill in D.C.’s East End.

Since opening in September 2022, Bar Spero was recognized as a James Beard semifinalist Best New Restaurant in 2023 and has been named Best New Restaurant by “Esquire,” and “Robb Report.”

So join us today as we chat about how Chef Johnny recovered from a tragic event that demolished his restaurant, lessons learned throughout his abundant career, and so much more.

And there he is! Thank you for being. I am so pumped to chat today. How are you, Chef?

Johnny Spero: I’m great. That was [a little like] how I read books to my children. That was very relaxing and calming. That was wonderful. Makes me sound really important.

Kirk Bachmann: We could replay that. Take a sip of coffee. Get a glass of wine. I don’t care! There’s a lot there. We’re going to unpack a lot of that.

First and foremost, welcome. We know how busy [you are]. I feel it. I know how busy you are. For you to take some time to chat with us and our students around the country, around the world. I’m so honored.

I forgot to mention when we were chatting earlier, we just had Chef Eli on the show.

Johnny Spero: Awesome.

Summer in D.C.

Kirk Bachmann: Right?! Such a small world. I just want to set the stage for everyone. You’re at Reverie, one of your restaurants. What’s going on in that part of the world today? A lot of humidity? Lots on the books tonight?

Johnny Spero: This is definitely the downtime for D.C., summer. It is humid and gross. The entire city is basically shut down right now for the NATO summit.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, yes. I didn’t know that about D.C. Summer’s not a big touristy [time].

Johnny Spero: It is for certain parts. The majority of the tours that come through here, we see a big pop during cherry blossom [time]. That’s huge for downtown. But then most of the tourism that’s coming through, they’re doing day trips from surrounding cities. They go down to the Mall. They’ll go to a bunch of the Smithsonian Museums and stuff like that, and they’re kind of out.

For the people that actually make up the population of D.C. and the DMV, they’re usually on vacation. August is terrible because Congress isn’t in session, and the majority of our city…. It’s still weird for me to look at a political calendar to see when Congress is in session because that will determine the ebbs and flow of how we move throughout the year, which is just kind of strange. D.C. – a lot of friends [say] “Oh, it’s a big city.” And it is, but most of it is offices and federal government, and it’s based around politics. Where if you look at population density of pure residents, it’s not that crazy. It does definitely dip pretty aggressively during summer.

But Reverie is a much smaller space. We have a handful of reservations on the books. Tuesday is always a nice slow welcome to the week, and by Saturday we’re fully committed. It’s up and down.

Kirk Bachmann: You’re right about a lot of different organizations being there. The body that accredits our school is based in Georgetown, and I think I have to go there at the end of August for a big meeting. I at least know where I’m going to try to get a reservation.

Johnny Spero: August will probably be the easiest to the best time to get here.

Authentic Transparency

Kirk Bachmann: That’s awesome. I can’t wait.

Can I just say, I try to do as much research as I can before. Oftentimes your reputation precedes you. I kind of already had a good idea of what’s going on. In the days leading up to our chat, I got back to your website. First of all, whoever does your website – Wow!

Johnny Spero: Oyster Sunday. They do a very good job with everything.

Kirk Bachmann: So beautiful. The seafood. It’s just really nice. The “About,” your story is really cool. But the thing that really caught my eye was as soon as you get to the landing page and you’ve got the reservation button, it says, and I quote, “A Michelin-starred Georgetown neighborhood gem, Reverie is an intimate, transportive dining experience from award-winning chef Johnny Spero. Bold, surprising and playful, our tasting menu draws from the local daily catch, as well as the finest global ingredients.” Love that. “The multi-course menu is entirely composed of seafood and vegetables, no other proteins make their way onto our plates.”

How important is it, Chef, to tell you guests exactly what they can expect when they’re about to have a dining experience with you? For me, it was like, “Wow! This is just transparency.” It’s honest. This is what you’re going to get when you come here. How important is that?

Johnny Spero: Very much so. Nowadays with reservations and Michelin Guide and things like that, it’s an amazing thing that people can find our restaurant and make a reservation. But if we are clear about what it is. Some people see the name. They see the awards. They see the accolades. They’re like, “Great, let’s go.” And they sit down, and they’re like, “We don’t like seafood. We have a shellfish allergy.” I think the more that we can give you in the beginning, [the better].

We give you a road map. This is the end, but the experience starts from the minute you start going on the website and booking a reservation. We want clear expectations of what you are going to have. There’s no Wagyu beef. There’s no duck. There’s no game birds. It’s all seafood coming from New England, some stuff from California. As long as it’s traceable and we know where it is. We want people to set their expectations. If you come in here and you’re expecting [something else,]  You’ve been to a one or a two-star in New York, you’re like, “Okay, I can probably expect there’s going to be some truffle, and there’s going to be beef from Japan,” well, no. We don’t do that. That’s not who we are. We want people to have a little bit more of a peek into what it is.

We’ve seen it before. When I was a chef at Minibar, we had people come in on a first date, had never met each other, and they’re in this fully immersive dining experience. It could be a little bit jarring, so we want to make sure we are the right place for you. We feel like Reverie is that fine dining experience that is built for everybody. Everyone deserves nice things.

Again, I understand with the price point of what we charge, there’s a threshold of what is comfortable financially for a lot of people. But as long as we can talk through and communicate, we don’t hide anything behind a curtain. The way I talk to you right now is how I talk to guests. Sometimes I put a chef coat on, but oftentimes I’m just wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and probably boots with an apron. I try to be me and be authentic, and I think that is the most important thing that our restaurants do. We don’t have a checklist of things that we do that we see everybody else doing around the world. We want to be us. And we want people to know when we come here, yes, we take our food seriously, but not ourselves. This is who we are. It should be fun for the guest and for us, right?

Kirk Bachmann: It’s such a good response. As you were talking, I was thinking to myself that we make so many decisions – or at least we’re influenced – by stuff we see on social media almost every single day. And a lot of it is staged. Even with our kids. “Hey, smile.”  My kids do it automatically now. They know I’m coming with the camera.

Johnny Spero: Yeah, they know. I think it’s been the biggest transition from how restaurants were back ten-plus years ago. Word of mouth and restaurant reviews and things like that were how everyone figured out where to eat. It wasn’t checking Instagram, looking at the geotag, and seeing influencers, how information travels so much faster and through a different stream of what we grew up with. We have to be accommodating to that. People are going to look at the geotag. They’re going to look through the entire menu. I think everybody has this desire for instant gratification.

In a way, it’s kind of cool. We mentioned that there are cooks who know what’s happening across the world. Back in the day, we had to try to find a book from some weird online or some kitchen of New York. They had some stuff. The way that we had to find things versus how more accessible it is now, which is awesome. I think it’s great. I’m sure there’s an argument for why it’s not, but I’d rather my cooks know what’s going on in South America and who’s on the Top 50 list because it’s kind of built now for everybody.

But also our guests know what we served to everybody last night if they wanted to check out the location and the stories that got posted. We treat the restaurant like everyone’s going to see what we do. We can’t hide anything, so why would we?

Inspiration for Reverie

Kirk Bachmann: And just like your website, I’m paging through your Instagram page right now. What I love is it’s about the food. The plating, the dishes. Really love it.

What’s the genesis of the name?

Johnny Spero: There’s a band called Saves the Day. They came up from the early 2000s, what the majority of people would call emo. Whatever it may have been. They had an album called “In Reverie,” and it always kind of stuck with me. Because when I was younger, I never really understood what it meant. Looking up the definition of being pleasantly lost in a daydream, lost in your own thoughts. That’s pretty much how I lived, and I still do live my entire life.

I feel like I’m physically here, but I feel like my brain races or goes somewhere else constantly. That would explain my upbringing. I went to summer school every year from the time I was in sixth grade until I barely graduated high school. I feel like I was always thinking about something else. I feel like Reverie, in that same way, is meant to be like an escape from the day-to-day. If you look at any of the pictures, we’re down an alleyway. That was why I chose this space was because it was down a cobblestone alleyway up on a one-way street. We have no street presence. Nobody has any idea that we’re here, which was the hardest thing about opening this restaurant. Might have been one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but it’s paid off now, a couple of years later.

As soon as you come down here, whatever you did before you walked up into this space, you should just let it go and just escape a little bit.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh my God, I love that! I just love that.

Johnny Spero: It’s one of my favorite bands growing up, and I’ll still listen to them. I think that’s how we discovered a lot of things in life early on, through music and skateboarding culture.

A Motorcycle Heist

Kirk Bachmann: I don’t ask every guest this, but many of the guests that we have are of course active chefs in the industry. It’s either music or motorcycles or both. I got the music. Motorcyclist too?

Johnny Spero: Yeah. I’ve got a little Ducati Scrambler that is actually parked outside in the alleyway.

Kirk Bachmann: I love it. I love it. I love it.

Johnny Spero: I know you mentioned Curtis Duffy early on. It’s not as nice as one of his bikes, but being in D.C., I grew up riding dirt bikes and four-wheelers and friends’ motorcycles that I shouldn’t have been riding when I was younger. Moving into the city, I had an old 1980s P200E Vespa. It was like a 200cc Vespa. It was the dumbest and most unsafe thing I’ve ever ridden, but during covid, I used that as an excuse to buy the motorcycle. We had my daughter, who was barely a year old at that time, and my wife needed the car to travel, and I couldn’t take the bus to work any more. I was like, “You know what would be the smartest thing for me to do in this time. We’re uncertain what’s happening in the world. I should just buy a motorcycle.” Somehow that worked.

Kirk Bachmann: Mine’s a BMW 650 GS. I’m old, Chef. It’s like a sewing machine on wheels.

Johnny Spero: This thing, it’s great. It’s like the smallest motors they have in these scramblers. The fastest I’ve ever gotten was 115 and that was going very fast downhill and I shouldn’t have been. Early on in my life, I was not afraid of anything. Now, especially with kids, you start recognizing your mortality a little bit. When do I need to go more than 40 or 50 miles per hour in a city? I leave it here, because it’s actually safer in this alleyway. It goes to show, nobody knows that this restaurant is here. They’re not going to come looking for my motorcycle. It got stolen three months ago out of my front driveway.

Kirk Bachmann: No way!

Johnny Spero: Oh yeah. It was literally five minutes. After going back through the security footage, it was literally five minutes before I walked out the door. They just shoved a screwdriver into the ignition to break the handlebar lock, and then just took it and left.

Clearly, on these new motorcycles, anything that’s got a computer in it, you’re not going to be able to jump it. You’re not going to be able to get it started, so a week later we found it behind a gas station next to my house, which I had actually looked [at] because I figured that’s where it got dumped. Five thousand dollars worth of damage. Insurance covered it.

My wife was like, “Listen, I know you love that thing. I was really glad it got stolen. I do feel bad.”

Kirk Bachmann: You almost want to leave the key in it so they don’t damage it when they steal it. Just be nice to it.

Johnny Spero: It sucked because it was the day before. I took it for a ride because I’d just got back from a consulting gig in San Francisco. I have the disk for a block on it, which is great. No one’s going to roll that through. They’re going to give up. I took it off, and I just didn’t put it back on. The one day. It’s not like they were probably looking for it. I’m pretty sure it’s the guys that work at the gas station who saw it early in the morning and just decided to drag it out.

If someone steals it again, they can just have it. Just take it.

Staying Out of Trouble, Getting into Food

Kirk Bachmann: And so the insurance, let them go with it.

Before we talk more about the restaurant and the bar, I’d love to talk more about you. Got into the industry at a very young age. Did you express interest in becoming a chef, or did your parents nudge you in that direction? What inspired you to go down that road?

Johnny Spero: I probably have a pretty similar story to a lot of chefs that grew up. I was terrible at school. I wouldn’t say I was wildly intelligent. I’m not dumb, but the system didn’t work for me, and I was lost most of the time. I really, truly didn’t care.

When I was fifteen, getting my learner’s permit, my parents told me that there was no way I was going to get my license for the car if I didn’t have a job. “Clearly, you don’t care about school, but if you don’t have a job to get to, what’s the point?”

I lived outside of the city. In this little strip mall, there was this restaurant called Henry’s American Bistro. It was between Safeway and, I think, a Rite Aid at that time. It had been five restaurants prior to this. The last restaurant I remember it being before it became Henry’s American Bistro was a place called Macaw’s. This guy had his parrot. Looking back at it now as an operator, I’m like, “You just let your parrot roam around this restaurant, chew on all your chairs.” It was the wildest place. The memories of that. Thinking about it now, why would you ever name a restaurant after a parrot and then let that live parrot cruise around your dining room. That is just the most disturbing thing ever.

But I walked in. They weren’t open yet. There was no Craigslist, so I saw a “Now Hiring” sign, so I went up there, applied to be a busboy. That was it. I worked with my parents. My dad was a pool salesman – still is a pool salesman. My mom worked at a tennis club. We did some odd jobs here and there just to do whatever. It was labor, cleaning the gym locker room showers and stuff like that with mom, or learning how to use a power-washer when I was thirteen was pretty cool.

My parents had no interest [in cooking]. We didn’t grow up in a family of culinarians. Realistically, my parents tried to get me out of it at one point because their impression of what cooking was and being a chef was that American Bistro. That was no good. I got into a lot of trouble growing up, but it was nothing that I ever tried to bring back to the house. I was never disrespectful to my parents, but I was a little wild. Working that restaurant was – I don’t know if it made me worse, but it definitely didn’t help. We were working the late hours. I was always drinking, partying and stuff like that. The amount of things we did in that space, I think about it now, as an owner, how could anybody have let any of that stuff happen. But it was a wild little space.

I eventually started getting a better idea of what the culinary world was. “Oh, outside of Baltimore, there are some pretty cool things happening in the world.” At one point, I wanted to go to school for graphic design because I always liked art. I wanted to do something with music. I played trumpet, and I sold my trumpet for a guitar, but I never had the discipline to take anything seriously. Until I started cooking, and that grabbed my attention a little bit more than the thirty seconds that I could actually sit down and play the guitar, go skateboarding, or do anything.

I realized that I needed to get out, get out of Baltimore and go somewhere else. My parents were always very hesitant to let me further and get an education in it because they saw no future in wearing mushroom pants, a chef jacket, and smoking weed behind the dumpsters. That was their impression of what it was, which was pretty accurate at that point.

A Naughty Kid Finds Fine Dining

Kirk Bachmann: The reverie that I’m having as we’re talking – where my mind’s going – it’s like a Hollywood story! With a name like Johnny Spero, you’ve got to be a little naughty, right? You’ve got to get yourself in trouble.

Johnny Spero: Yeah. I’m a triplet. It’s two boys and a girl.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, wow! Okay. All right.

Johnny Spero: I think there was always a little bit – we were growing up the same time, going through the same thing at the same time. We went to the same high school freshman year. Then I got kicked out, so I went to another school, which was kind of like –

Kirk Bachmann: Of course you did.

Johnny Spero: That was fun, but that was a turning point for me to figure out what I wanted to do. At that point, I had no idea of a future and how many jobs you can do in this world, and what you can do with a college degree. I just wanted to party and that’s it. But when I started to be on my own – me and my brother, we look different now, but if you saw him, you would have a double take. Basically, we grew up as Bobby-Johnny. There was always the two of us. Even if we weren’t in the same class, we were always considered to be – not the same person, people recognized there were two of us – but we had no separate identity.

I think me leaving was probably great because it was always us, and we had to find a way to define ourselves. I think I went really hard and tried to have a good time and party. Because I was my own person. At school, everyone knew I had a brother eventually, but I wasn’t compared to the other guy they saw walking down the hallway or whatever it may have been. That was definitely a turning point. That’s when I started working in restaurants. I could have gone in a really weird direction with my life, but yeah.

Diving into Dining and Denmark

Kirk Bachmann: That’s when you begin to seize these incredible experiences. One example, working alongside Michelin chefs at a young age. You ended up in Copenhagen. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about Noma and your experience with Rene and the whole vibe there.

Johnny Spero: That was probably the beginning. That was probably the most whole horizon experience. I worked at Komi here in D.C. K-O-M-I with Johnny Monis. That was my first real dive into tasting menus. There was no a la carte, pre-fixed option. It was just, “Take a station.” At one point, there were two options, but they changed it to one menu when I was there.

That’s when I really started becoming a huge nerd. I gave up wanting to do anything else except spend time reading every article I could about food, every book I could read. That’s when chefs still had blogs. I saw Laurent Gras in  New York over the weekend. We’ve never met before. This is when he was at L2O in Chicago. I was like, “Chef, I’ve just got to tell you. I’ve been a long-time fan. I used to read your blog. I’ve actually gone back and looked at a couple of things a decade later. He was blown away that somebody actually remembers that time.

I was buying books. I bought that “Fat Duck Cookbook” when it first came out. It was like $400, and I was getting paid like $8/hour. That was a lot.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s a commitment.

Johnny Spero: I dove into it. I felt like there was nothing else that I wanted to do other than cooking. Komi was a pretty small kitchen. Everybody was very much responsible for their own thing. You kind of get thrown into it. I ended up being the pastry chef for my last year there because they’d just gone through a couple different chefs.

They were like, “Hey, you like all this modernist stuff, and you’re measuring things. Do you want to be a pastry chef?” It had crossed my mind at that point, Sam Mason, who was at wd-50, and he had left to go do something else, Alex Stupak, Jordan Kahn, and obviously Albert Adria, everything I saw them do was the most inspiring thing I could even think of. I became obsessed with the idea of that. The last year I was there, I was the pastry chef. That’s where I really started realizing that I needed to see more.

Looking in a book or through a computer screen wasn’t enough anymore. I needed to meet those people, just talk with them and figure out how did they get there. Who they were. Recipes are recipes. You can read a book. You can kind of figure out how a technique works. But why did they write that recipe to be that way? That’s when I started thinking about where do I go next. I’d get this feeling that Komi was probably the best restaurant I’d ever been in D.C., so where do you go from there?

So I started applying for stages anywhere. D.C. is a small city. Nobody outside the Americas probably even knew what it was at the time. Again, because information didn’t travel the same. I wrote an email to Noma at the time. Matt Orlando was the chef de cuisine. He got back to me after like a month. This was before they were number one. They were still very high up there, and everyone knew who they were except for most of us in America. Their book had just started coming out. Rene was not [well known] in my small [town]. In New York, in California, I’m sure everyone knew who he was. But in my circle, it was still a very new idea, the new Nordic cuisine to be where it was.

They were like, “Hey, how long do you want to come here? When can you start?” It was very dry. Obviously it was just a copy-paste. “Tell us how long you can commit to.”

I was like, “Alright, I can probably be there for at least two months.” This was before you needed to get visa stuff figured out. I left Komi because they closed every August. August, like, I said, sucks here. I told him I would leave. My last day would be before break, and I’d go and do some odd jobs before leaving in January to go to Copenhagen.

I sold everything I had. I lived in a dirty D.C. bunkhouse. Got rid of some stuff to get a plane ticket. I didn’t really have much money. I made no money anyway, so saving – even now, saving is hard, being in our industry. I took over a little bit of money to buy food. I hopped on a plane. It was my first time traveling to Europe. I just jumped into it without really any idea of what to really expect. It was insane.

I met a friend through some New York connections who had worked with this guy who was originally from Denmark. He was in New York working at a restaurant called Fleming’s. He got his wife pregnant, so he moved back home because free health care in Europe is fantastic, but he stayed in touch with a lot of his guys. When I told all my friends in New York I was going to go to Copenhagen, they were like, “We can probably get you a room with a friend of ours. That way you don’t have to stay in a hostel.”

I was like, “Great, because I have no money. That would be wonderful.” I get over there. He meets me at the train station. It’s my first time on a flight that long. Public transportation is not new to me, so that was easy enough. I’d get to the stop. He’s just waiting there for me. He takes me to a bakery to get a slice of bread and some butter and coffee. I just feel like I am so far away from what I know. The most beautiful of ways. I always felt like if you put yourself in the most uncomfortable position, that’s the only way you’re ever going to learn anything. I didn’t have an international phone plan. I could barely pay my phone bill at the time anyway. I would connect to the wi-fi at the house. I got the directions. I have that one notebook still. I lost everything else in the fire, but I have two Moleskines that are still there. I have the directions that I wrote how to get from his apartment to Noma. I tried riding a bike.

Another story is I ended up having tendinitis in both my ankles and a partially torn Achilles tendon. I ran for two and a half months. Eventually: “You know, we have free health care in Europe. You could probably just go to a hospital.” Alright. You get there at seven. You’re already late. I showed up for my first day. It is just a machine. It’s also wintertime in Copenhagen. The sunup and sundown look exactly the same. You have really no frame of reference for what’s happening. It’s just like doom and gloom. I loved it. I hate the summertime. If I’m by a body of water, great. But if you can give me clouds and cold weather, I love it.

Also, Copenhagen, there must have been something in my Baltic blood came out, but it was the first time I ever grew facial hair. I grew a full beard in Denmark. I would wear a beanie, and an American tourist would talk to me and ask, “Do you know where this is?” “No, I’m not Danish.” They’re like, “Oh. Wow! You look like you’re from here.” I was like, “Oh! Alright.” It made me feel good that my body had camouflaged to keep myself safe in Copenhagen.

Learning on the Job

Kirk Bachmann: You said it’s a machine when you walk in. How busy was the restaurant for service every night?

Johnny Spero: It was lunch and dinner. It was lunch service almost fully committed almost every single day, and dinner service committed every single day. You get there, and depending on where you are – because they move you around in a stagiaire. I started off upstairs in the production kitchen, and some of the chefs were down in the main kitchen. I was one of ten stagiaires at that time.

But you do not stop at all during the day. It is a full-on restaurant. It is lunch, which is the same menu for lunch and dinner, so you’re running through. Shucking. They would probably do thirty or forty people plus at nighttime they would also have private dining. It was packed. You’d get there, you’d start working, you’d break down and clean. You’d scrub everything. You’d scrub the skillets, floors, tables. Set back up again, keep going, going, going. You’d have family meal. Then you’d go straight into dinner service. Every couple of days you’d have a pretty intense cleaning project where you’d pull out all the drawers of your station, put everything outside, scrub it down so it’s polished so it looks brand new, and then set it right back for service. It was probably one of the most physically demanding and exhausting jobs I had had at that point.

But I loved it because I had never seen anything like that before. It just made so much sense to me.  I loved the rush of never stopping. There was never idle time. The amount of hands that we had to do those things, it was insane. You would wonder, “Why are we blanching the lovage  leaves and then separating out every leaf individually onto a paper towel and then drying it overnight to then blend them into oil?” They were like, “This is why.” “Okay.” As long as you kept picking, you could ask questions, and I felt like they wanted you to learn, but you also had to keep your head down and shut up most of the time. Not in a bad way, but they are a professional kitchen and you’ve just got to go. It’s better to be a stage that is part of the team than getting in the way.

Same thing when I went to Mugaritz. I wrote down the recipes that I needed for mise en place. I didn’t ask for a recipe for a sauce that I made. I wasn’t even going to touch it. I’m here to work and I treated it like a job for a little bit over two months. I just wanted to embrace the idea of how a restaurant like that moves. And I did. It was insane.

Kirk Bachmann: You said something really important. Not to cut you off, Chef, but I want to capitalize on it. They filled you in on the why, right?

Johnny Spero: Yeah.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s important. Yeah.

Johnny Spero: To do things. Do it because we told you to is a pretty common thing, but hey, just so I understand. Am I doing this like this for this reason? Yes. It does this like this. Whatever it may be, there is always a reason. I’ve always learned, don’t be the guy that asks a million questions. You need to ask questions so you understand what you’re doing. That way they don’t have to explain to you how to fix it later.

That was one of the most important things I learned from there, too. There’s a time and a place to push and there’s a time when you can ask, but most of the time if I asked questions, it was so I could make sure that what I was doing was at the level of what they needed me to. At that point, I hadn’t touched food like that before. Komi was fine dining. I hadn’t seen food like Noma outside of a book or, you know, the blogs. It was probably an eGullet forum or something at that time.

Watching the way the product came in every single day. They had a forage who brought in wood sorrel, handed it to me one day. “Hey, this is for Rene. He asked for it.” He didn’t know I wasn’t a chef there. I was wearing the same brown apron and jacket. I made sure that I put it away where they’d want it to go. We were organized and ready.

I think the coolest thing about the restaurant, outside of systematically how it works, is where all those line cooks and stagiaires were the same as me. We’re all the same age. There’s a certain level of professionalism that you have in those kitchens that you have to have to operate at that level. Then you realize that we put everything on a pedestal when we don’t understand it. It’s this unattainable thing. But “Oh! These guys are just like me. We’re going to go out to the karaoke bar and get blacked out drunk, and then we’re going to eat this. Then we’re going to go back to work the next day.” It was kind of empowering. This is not out of reach if I wanted that. Obviously there’s a certain level of dedication and focus, but it made me realize that I was in this. Just because I came from Baltimore County, it wasn’t out of reach. A lot of those guys had worked in more professional kitchens because that’s just where they were from in their lives. It made me realize I didn’t make a mistake in my trajectory and where I wanted to go. I’m now on the path that I should be on to make this work.

Kirk Bachmann: Was Rene there often, all the time?

Johnny Spero: When he was there, he was only there for half the time I was there because he’d just gotten back from paternity leave. He was there from the moment that everyone got there to the moment that everybody left.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow!

Johnny Spero: That’s when they had their R&D kitchen on the boat out in the harbor. He was impressive, and he was a force, and he made sure he had eyes on everything. He would stop by every station where the stagiaires were with the line cooks. If something was wrong, they would know. He’s changed a lot over the years. It was aggressive, not in a weird, scary way. He was intense because this was the most important thing to him. Clearly, you saw the work-life balance. He cared about his family. He was with them for paternity leave, which was a wild thing, being from the States. I recognized what that was until now. It was wild.

It was him. He had a great team behind him. He had an amazing R&D team, but Rene was in it with them every single day.

Kirk Bachmann: Did you go to Spain after Noma?

Johnny Spero: I did Noma, back to the States to work for John Shields. Little bit of back and forth.

An Identity of Time and Place

Kirk Bachmann: I’m just curious. So that was your experience in Copenhagen, and then you’re in Spain. I’d love for you to talk about what it’s like to live in a foreign country. What lessons do you learn along the way? I’m sure that some of the way that Rene was omnipresent, I’m sure that’s really rubbed off on you in a really positive way. Were there some other habits, culture, the way you approach food that stayed with you and now helped define your cooking style?

Johnny Spero: Yeah. I think one of the biggest takeaways from going to all those places and coming back here and seeing some stuff is that I think a lot of restaurants in the States put this farm-to-table tagline on their restaurants, which at the end of the day should be what you’re doing anyway. The restaurants that were buying the frozen stuff from Sysco and putting it on a plate and they got some salad greens from a farm still call themselves farm-to-table. But you look at these places like Noma all throughout Europe, Michel Bras, all the stuff. When they focus on locality, it was something you’d only see a handful of restaurants doing, especially in a city at that point. Because we’re not surrounded by a lot of farms.

It brought me back to the idea that there is so much great stuff, and most of it probably hadn’t been utilized or used in restaurants. We were trying to explore what we had around here. We foraged a little bit, but it was just a different space. Where Copenhagen sits versus where we sit in D.C. or wherever it may be. I tried to not jump on a trend just because it seemed cool. I wasn’t going to go out and pick some stuff. But we do have a forager who picks the stuff now, and we pay him for some of the ingredients that I fell in love with. I entrust him to pick versus myself. I think the mentality of what grows around you is what you should showcase as much as possible. There’s always going to be an ingredient that you can get from somewhere else, but I feel like if you want to have a true identity of time and place, you have to focus on what’s around you.

I think Reverie’s identity has changed so much from 2016 when we started the project, to opening in 2018, to now 2024. The place, the location itself hasn’t changed, but time has evolved and grown. I think that’s the other thing, too. All these restaurants throughout Europe, wherever it may be, they’ve evolved. They’re not the same thing, unless you go to Bocuse. They’ll still serve the same food because that is what it’s meant to do. I feel like evolution and changing and growing. Mugaritz has the same ingredient list that probably comes through the Basque country,  but their menu is different almost every single year.

Place can stay the same, but time is the one factor that we can’t control. Using that as a tool to grow our menus and develop the identity of a restaurant.

John Shields

Kirk Bachmann: In your travels and working with all these different individuals, whether they were stagiaire or a chef or a sous chef or whatever, were there some mentors that really stood out to you that you’re still in touch with? How did that translate into you being a mentor now in passing the torch, if you will?

Johnny Spero: I think the person that I probably would say was my mentor and probably one of my best friends is John Shields. When I left, I was still in Copenhagen. I think that’s when Facebook Messenger, when people were still connecting on that. I sent a friend request to John Shields because I followed his blog. “If I go back to the States, I’m going to go work for him.”

John is probably, I think, the most talented chef in the United States. I think I sent him a message. He was like, “Hey. I see you’re in Noma. Where are you headed next?”

I still need to find this message. “I’m going to go work for you.” It was a positive keyboard warrior at that point. “With confidence, I can say I’m going to work for you.”

I moved back to D.C., and after a couple of months I was working a part-time job so I could go down there and work for John for free on the weekends here and there. It’s a six-hour drive from D.C. to Chilhowie. I was doing whatever I [could] to show him that I wanted to be there so that he could hire me. Eventually, at one point, one of the cooks left.

It was only a kitchen of three of us by the time I got down there. He did whatever they wanted there, but they were actually very tight on labor. Coming from restaurants where I staged. I went from Noma, and then I staged for a week at Alinea just to see it. These kitchens were kitchens of like thirty people. Now, three cooks and a chef. But I think John’s focus and attention to detail, showing what you can do with the product that you have and the people that you have. We were doing food at the same level that I saw in Copenhagen, but with a handful of us versus an army.

John’s attention to detail. What he showed me, it was the bigger picture of everything. We didn’t have a dishwasher. If you Google Chilhowie, you’ll look at him and say, the talent pool was probably pretty slim down there. We would run the dishes. We did all of our dishes during the day. We did the plates. John would make sure that we were lining up our Cambros and our alexians. All the measurements lined up together as they were drying. We stacked like-minded things. You do this. You do that. If you can pay attention to that and make sure that happens, think about how that translates into everything else that you do throughout the day.

That’s exactly the way that I feel about things. The first time I really was in a kitchen with a chef that I felt like we had similar ideals on how things should work, how things run. We looked at how he taught me to think and touch food. That was his thing. Every time we had a stagiaire down there, because we had a lot, because John, I think at that time, was one of the most talked about. Now, again, still one of the most talked about chefs in the States. Everybody was coming down there for a day. You’d watch how they touch food. There is a way that you can be firm and gentle at the same time. It’s hard to explain how, but you do it. There’s moving with intent. What I learned from John, how that translates, me showing these cooks that were there for like two days, how to do something the way that we would do it at Town House. It’s not the way that I wanted it done; it was the way that restaurant needed to be done. It’s intentional, it’s thoughtful. We know why we do something, and they can ask why. I can explain the reason why we don’t pick wood sorrel with tweezers is because it bruises it. Why we make sure the [00:39:32] water [is not]  too cold because you’ll kill the flowers.

The Responsibility of Owning a Restaurant

Kirk Bachmann: Those are such eloquent memories and thoughts. I love the way you phrased that. I wrote down a couple of things, just some of the little things. The way he lined up Cambros. If you do that, it’s kind of like the French Laundry green tape that you see a lot. Is there a big difference between taking a pair of scissors to cut the tape versus tearing it? That’s not the point. The point is that if you’re sensitive enough and diligent enough and focused enough to use a pair of scissors to cut and be that detailed, then imagine how good you’re going to be with other things.

I’d love to get into how you knew you were ready to branch out on your own. I don’t want to forget about the mentorship thing. That’s just so important. As you branched off on your own, did you find yourself really wanting to help your team in the same way that you were helped, from a purely mentorship? When people leave your restaurant, is it important to you that they’re better because they spent some time with you and your team?

Johnny Spero: I want them to absorb everything. I want them to know why we do things the way we do. And why there are a million other ways to do it, but I want every person here. We’ve always said, if somebody gets a job offer from line cook that could be a sous chef somewhere else, I don’t want everybody to ever leave here and make a lateral move. I want them to always progress and be better because they spent time here. Which is important.

We also want to make sure that we can be a part of that, making sure they land somewhere safe where they can go to another kitchen and be treated the same way. We want to make sure that we can balance that out. Especially working with John. You can be in a healthy kitchen environment and still push the culinary boundaries of what’s possible and feel safe doing. Be in a place where you can ask questions and learn and you’re not just going to get yelled at for asking, “Just shut up and work” kind of thing.

We want to make sure that, as a mentor, we are teaching. All the things that I’ve done and all the places that I’ve gone, not everybody [gets to do that.] I gave up everything to go do a lot of those things, whether that’s for a month or a year. I don’t have a lot of money. It was a financial decision on my end to put myself into more debt than I already was. I think we were talking before we started recording. Anything that I’ve learned or any mistake that I’ve made, or any success that I’ve had, if I can share that with all of my team so they can either learn from that or grow from that or not have to do what I did, I’d rather share that experience with them. Because I want that to spread to when they’re running their own kitchens. I want them to force their team to go out and spend a weekend at a restaurant just because they can. Not to steal recipes, but to understand what it’s like to be in another space. If you stay with me for ten years, you’re limiting your scope of what you can do.

I want to be a launchpad, a space for people to keep moving forward and upward. If they want to. If they don’t want to, I think we’ve had people who have worked. “Yeah, we like working with you. We just don’t know if we want to jump into another fine dining kitchen.” That’s fine. Whatever you want to do. We’ll support you in any way. But I hope that the mentality and the approach that we have in how we lead and how we teach can translate into any space, whether it’s a tasting menu, a la carte restaurant, quick service. I think the attention to detail like lining up your Cambros, you’ve got to do that in any kitchen. Clearly writing tape, you’ve got to do that in any kitchen. I think being able to openly communicate and ask about ingredients and talk through things can be a form of invaluable conversation in any space that you’re in. Providing that is super important.

I Don’t Chase Stars

Kirk Bachmann: Well said. Appreciate that.

How did it feel, Chef, when you received that Michelin star? I’m sure that’s a question you’ve heard a couple of times.

Johnny Spero: A little bit. You always know when they’re going to do the calls. The day before we talked to the team. At that point, we were still dealing with covid. I forget what variant came through that January. It took all of us out. The restaurants hadn’t really fully sprung back. We were pushing hard to do tasting menus, whether it was for five or eight people a night, whatever it may be. We were just pushing.

The day before, during the line up, I told all of our team, “Listen. With or without a star, we’re still going to do whatever we do. We’re not going to change our menu. We’re not going to change our ethos. I don’t chase stars. I don’t chase clout. It’s not that I don’t care. As a small business owner, I appreciate what it does, but I don’t have an ego. Everyone has an ego, technical, but it’s not blown out of proportion.” I wanted to make sure that they knew we weren’t chasing anything. We [didn’t have] a checklist for how we accomplish something. If we get rewarded for being ourselves, for playing some D.C. hardcore music and doing a tasting menu, that’s cool. But if we don’t, just keep being us. I recognize that I’d rather – especially during covid – if we succeed or fail, I’d rather it be doing what we want to do versus what we think everybody else wants us to be. Again, there’s financial decisions you have to make when you do that kind of stuff, but we’ve got to bet on ourselves because if we don’t, there’s no hope that we’ll be able to succeed.

I had this long-winded conversation. Then the next day, I’m sitting at the counter at Reverie. We had a counter with seats, and that was like my office. I was waiting by the phone. I get a call. An hour beforehand, where I’m sitting right now – we still deal with it sometimes – we had a massive leak just pouring down from the upstairs. Just water was pouring out there on the floor. It was leaked out for such a long time. I got the phone call, and I’m beyond irritated because the wood on our floor is warping. There’s a hole that we can’t fix. There’s water coming in from the upstairs apartment. I’m just sitting there.

“Hey, this is so-and-so from Michelin. Just calling to let you know that your restaurant is receiving your first Michelin star this year.”

I was like, “Great.”

They were like, “Okay?” It was [probably] not the wow, enthusiastic, tear-jerking moment that every chef probably expects. They’re going to cry and fall to their knees. “We did it! We made it!”

“Well, can I use that plaque to patch the hole that has the water poured down.”

I think that’s been telling of who we are and who I am as a person, too. Those awards and accolades, they serve a very specific purpose. The Guide is great; it literally does guide people down this alleyway to find us. We get a lot of recognition for what we do. But it doesn’t fix your problems. You will still deal with employees. You’ll still deal with labor. You’ll still deal with supply chain. Still deal with broken ovens. None of that stuff is going to make anything disappear. Does it make it easier? Does it give you the means to hopefully change, have some financial stability to fix that? Yeah. Absolutely. The industry is so volatile. Not really knowing when it’s going to be a good month or a bad month, especially at that time.

It was kind of wild, but also we went from doing a couple of covers a night – we were only open four days a week at that point – to being fully committed for almost three months was a sigh of relief. At that point, I went through opening a restaurant, almost losing it during covid, almost losing it to the bank, not knowing if you’re going to get any kind of financial assistance from the government. It’s me. I have no partners. I don’t come from money. I don’t have a trust fund that I can pull from. I wasn’t paying myself through the restaurant; I was doing private dinners. I was supporting my wife and my daughter. We had another kid during covid as well. Now we have three. The pressure to survive. It was to the point where, “When can I start living and not surviving?”

We’re still in that. To be a hundred percent honest, it is still super hard, with or without the attention we got from the fire, the Michelin Guide, with Bar Spero. Honestly, we don’t have it easy. I don’t think anybody does, but there is a point where you’re just like, “Could we just breathe for a second? Can I just come up for air for a moment?” And enjoy what we have before I get buried by another water like, or whatever it may be.

It’s definitely not been easy. I love what I do, and I feel like at this point, it probably shines through because most people probably would assume you’d walk away. There was a moment where I almost did. It’s a wild thing where the fire happened pretty quickly after the star. It was a very short-lived breath.

Climbing from the Ashes

Kirk Bachmann: Celebration. Yeah.

So appreciative of you sharing that. Do you mind talking a little bit about [how] shortly after the star, you have the terrible, terrible fire? What was that like, and how do you rebuild from something like that?

Johnny Spero: With Reverie being where it was, even before the star, I had signed a lease for Bar Spero downtown because I thought I was going to lose this restaurant. “What am I doing down an alleyway in Georgetown? Am I just asking to fail?” There’s no foot traffic. There’s nobody coming to Georgetown during that time. It was devastating. I was like, “I need to provide for my family.”

We did a Bar Spero pop-up on the patio when we couldn’t do them in dining. We wanted to present a different style of cooking. Reverie found its voice during covid. We realized it wasn’t a burger. It wasn’t a roast duck. It was a thoughtful seafood-focused tasting menu. Bar Spero still fed this other side of my cooking.

Then we found a space that was much larger than Reverie. Reverie is barely two thousand square feet. Bar Spero, we could probably fit three Reveries in total in Bar Spero’s space. For most people, it is probably like a regular-sized restaurant. For me, it was daunting.

In tandem with trying to keep the restaurant open, paying for everything, we also were building a live-fire kitchen downtown. Before covid, it’s where you thought you had to be to succeed. It was busy. It was moving. It was kind of bustling. In Georgetown at that time, it hadn’t really gotten its legs back under it. It was still not a culinary hotspot. This is where Michel Richard had a Citronelle. It was like the landmark fine dining restaurant in D.C. for such a long time.

It just felt like things slowly started to come together. Reverie was pushing really hard because we were creating for Bar Spero. I had two buckets to play in. Super pumped with where Reverie was going. Bar Spero was exciting because it was unlike this project. I was like, “Okay. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I feel like this is where I can live and stop surviving.”

I leave service that night in August around 10:30 at night. The rest of the team is probably out by midnight by that point. I drive home, and at 3:30/4 o’clock in the morning I have thirty missed calls and a couple text messages from neighbors upstairs, landlords, everybody. “Hey, you’ve got to get down here. There’s a fire in the space. You just need to get here right away.”

At that point, I had moved my family out to Maryland right on the line. I got priced out of D.C. very quickly. Having soon-to-be three kids, we needed more space. We lived within our means and figured out what we could do. It should have taken me thirty minutes to get here without traffic at that time. I got there in fifteen. I grabbed whatever clothes I had. I opened a restaurant when I was 26 and closed it when I was 27. I feel like sometimes I’m the square peg and D.C. is the round hole. I fight so hard to keep things going and moving, and we finally see a moment when we’re like, “Okay. Maybe we’ve figured out how to make this puzzle work.” And then I just get kicked in the teeth again.

On that day, I was like, “Okay. I’m going to give myself this one day.” I sat in the alleyway. I just sat on the cobblestone. All these adjusters were coming in, all these insurance guys. I was like, “You’re a vulture. Let me decompress and figure out what I’m going to do.” The neighbors, they were down here. “This is my life. This is how I pay for my family. This is how I buy them food. This is how I pay our rent. This is it. This isn’t like my fun thing I do on the side. This is my career. This is my baby.” That was tough.

Then, I had two options. It was either do we walk away from it, I start over and focus on just Bar Spero? My wife was a month away from having our third kid. Or do I just dive in and just rebuild because I’m too dumb and stubborn to stop?

I didn’t know how to navigate it. Luckily, a lot of friends – because I think I probably still have text messages that I did not read from that day. Good friends called me. “Hey. We had a fire at the restaurant years ago. Can I tell you what you should do? I’m sure everyone is going to give you advice.” These are people that I respect more than anything in D.C. They’re like, “You need to hire this third party adjuster. You cannot do this by yourself, not now. They’ll help you get more money. They’ll take a lot of it, but use it because there’s no way you can navigate all this by yourself. It’s too much.”

So I was like, “Okay.” That day, I went on a ride on my motorcycle. I drove around. The next day, I had the cooks come pick up their knives. Luckily, their knives were in a toolbox that got water damage. You could buff it out. All my knives got destroyed except for two. A friend of mine set up a GoFundMe.

We had just paid off – literally, a week before – paid off a bank loan. We were solid on all of our vendors except for a handful. We had no money left in the account. Okay. We’ve got a busy week. We’ll do payroll. We’ll do all this.

A friend of ours without telling me did it and started a GoFundMe, so we got all of our employees two more paychecks, which was awesome. Having them go through unemployment again after covid would have been such a hassle.

It happened on a Thursday. By Friday, I’d spoken to Jose – I don’t know how to say his last name – Jose Andres about finding a way to do some sort of a residency at Minibar so our team had a place to go. We could just keep the momentum going. I’m not one to stop. I feel like once I stop, I start feeling too many things, and I don’t like to feel stuff.

Also, to mention this, I’m also six years booze-free. That was also the scary part, too. Do I just give in and start drinking a bottle again and go numb? I was like, No. Keep pushing forward. That was also probably a reason why I was able to clearly think about what decision to make next. Okay, we’re not going to stop. I knew the damage was bad, but I didn’t know the timeline of how to recover all this. Alright. Let’s start with the Minibar residency, and that will buy me time to figure things out.

By that Saturday, Jose was over in the Ukraine, and we called and talked through some of the details of it. I had already spoken to his team here about it, too. We’ll split the menu in half. We’ll bring the team over. They’ll work there for September. We’ll do October, November, and then December, we’ll depart. That was it.

The team that wanted to go to Minibar went there. We took a couple of guys to Bar Spero. We opened Bar Spero three weeks after the fire, which, to open a restaurant driven by live fire after losing a restaurant to one – my wife, who was two weeks away from having a kid at that point, was like….

The fact that we even got Bar Spero open and at the level that we did, one, is a testament to the team that I have, but also we just didn’t stop. Some of the team went over to Minibar. We got Bar Spero open. My wife had our third kid. I took two weeks off because I needed to spend time with my family. Then I ran back and forth between Minibar and Bar Spero as much as possible. During that time, as well, I was navigating the insurance, I realized it was going to take a lot longer. So we started to plan our “world tour” essentially. There were a lot of dinners that we had talked about doing before covid and during covid that we had to cancel. I think my way of dealing with the fire was doing this. Just creating the most unhealthy balance of traveling abroad to maintain the restaurants at home, to trying to be there for my family.

Everyone, on paper, it probably looks like it was so much fun. And it was. I got to work with some of my best friends, but I overdid it. It was probably not [good]. It was my way of coping. Just bury myself in that.

We started in January, went for basically six or seven months straight. One week or two weeks out of every month, we were traveling to go into California, San Francisco, Oakland, South Korea, Kyoto. All over the place. I wouldn’t let myself stop planning things and moving things forward because I just didn’t want to stop. I felt like I had something taken away from me that I wasn’t ready to give up.

The best thing about it, Bar Spero got the best – not the best of me – I’m still dealing with it. I was there every single day to work the hearth, to figure out how we wanted things cooked. I just dove into it.

The Final Table

Kirk Bachmann: If we can backtrack just a tiny bit to your time on the Netflix show, “The Final Table.” I don’t know how you fit this all in in one lifetime! While we were doing some research, there was an Eater article that came out entitled, “Johnny Spero could become a Netflix star, but he’d rather be a regular guy.” What you said in the article was so profound for me. You said, “It doesn’t feed my ego. I want to use the show to break down barriers between diners and chefs.” Can you elaborate on that just a little bit more?

Johnny Spero: I still don’t know to this day who “they” talked to to get me to go on the show. Anne Donny was a guest judge. I obviously probably talked to Jose, but whoever recommended me to go on it. We were working alongside chefs that I looked up to. Timothy Hollingsworth, Mark Best, all these guys. In my head, I think I still have imposter syndrome. I still work at this. We’re talking about my resume and my time. I still see myself as a twenty-two-year-old line cook, which I know is not the case.

We filmed it the year before the restaurant opened, because I recognized there was never going to be a time where I could disappear for eight weeks and do something like that. I think I was still trying to navigate my life and what I wanted, how I was perceived by customers, cooks, and chefs around the world. What is that? Am I going to go do “Top Chef?” Am I going to do “Chopped?” Am I going to do this stuff? I feel like a lot of the chefs I saw with a lot of success outside of John Shields and René Redzepi and these guys that I admired, a lot of the chefs now were putting themselves out there on these competition shows. I’m competitive, but I like to make sure that whatever I do is truly representational of how I cook. A quick-fire challenge is not it. Don’t give me a bag of gummy bears and tell me to make a souffle. I’m not down with that.

But the way that “The Final Table” was presented to me, it seemed like they were trying to make it more of a serious cooking show where we thought we had more time to do some stuff. Again, when it was an hour, it was an hour; that’s all you got. Our goal was to cook the best that we could in that hour with one of my best friends as well. I was like, Okay. This will be a good way for me to get exposure and hopefully make the restaurant as busy as it possibly could be from the get-go. There was a little bit of bigger picture of stuff. There was an angle. I wanted people outside of D.C. to know who I was. I wanted people in the neighborhood to know who I was. I figured Netflix at that time and still is one of the most popular streaming things. It was a no-brainer to do it.

After we did the show, I think I have this moment when I don’t know who I am and where I should be in the culinary world. I like to talk, obviously. I’d love to do more TV; there’s just got to be another way. I don’t want to do those challenges and do the guy’s grocery game and stuff. It’s not for me, and I think there’s a way that I could do it, and I’ll figure that one out later.

Shortly after that, I was invited to be a guest judge for a family food showdown, and I wasn’t invited back. I think they thought I was too mean. I was like, “I don’t know if this is how I want to define myself.” Again, we look at the path that I want to take. Do I chase this influencer life, competition chef stuff, or do I? I know there are a lot of chefs who balance it very well ,and they can do both, and I don’t think I came. I’m not digital; I’m analog. I’m on and off. There’s no in between. I think I have to fully focus on the restaurant, or I can’t do anything else.

What I really want is kind of the same reason we built the restaurant the way that we do. It is entirely open. I can see my entire [team]. I’ve watched my entire team prepping while I’m sitting in this corner. We want them to know there’s not a team of thirty people behind us and we’re all just going to be dropping plates. Every person that you see, me, everybody on my crew right there in front of you. Open kitchens are not a new thing, but I think how close we are in proximity and how engaged we are during service, you don’t see that in a lot of restaurants. One of the biggest things at Reverie is that the cooks deliver every single dish. The servers don’t describe the food. The team in the front of house understands what the food is, but their line is service. We’re the food, but we all work together on the same goal. We like to blur those lines front of house/back of house dynamics.

A Presence in the Restaurant

Kirk Bachmann: It’s a skill set you have. You definitely have a presence. You reminded me [that] I’ve been daydreaming a little bit. You bring back so many memories when you were talking about the cooks dropping the plates. Before I got into education, years ago in the ‘80s, I had a restaurant in the mountains of Colorado, a small restaurant. I was obsessed with hot food hot, cold food cold. There was no Instagram. I was writing to Charlie Trotter. That’s about it back then. George Mahaffey at the Little Nell. There were very few inspirations. Those plates would go up into the window. I just couldn’t sit there, for me. That meant me taking it out. You know, what I realized is that a lot of our patrons, a lot of our guests loved it when a cook would bring the dinner out, oftentimes keeping them sequestered at the table for a while because they asked a million questions. I absolutely love that that’s part of your concept. You’ve got to work as a team, right? You have to work as a team.

Johnny Spero: It’s funny because we got rid of the counter, one, because we needed more space for us to cook, but it was also insanely distracting because a lot of our cooks would just talk for thirty minutes straight. I’d have to go nudge them in the foot. “Hey, you’ve got to shut up, man. You’ve got to let this guest eat. We have four tables that just sat. Yeah. I love that all of our team can just be a part of the conversation. They care about their space. They’re clean. They’re organized.

Kirk Bachmann: And they’re clean. Yeah.

Johnny Spero: And they love that they can be a voice of the restaurant. They’re not just a cook. They are part of the team. I think titles are meaningless at a restaurant like this. We have sous chefs because they’re on salary and they have some more managerial responsibilities for things like that. We want everyone to feel like they are on the same playing field. A line cook doesn’t have seniority because they’ve been there for a year, or they’ve worked for me. We’re all in it together.

I also love having cooks come out of their shell a little bit when they come here. For whatever that does in their personal life, I doubt I have that much influence on how they actually leave this place. We’ve had cooks that couldn’t even talk to me directly, and then by six months in they’ll be pulling up a chair with a table. Not having a glass of wine, but a table will offer a taste of wine, but bring it back. “Hey, Chef, this table.” I’ll be like, “You can taste it after service.” But I feel like it is cool. It is unique to us.

Recognizing, again, I don’t have an ego. My name’s not on the door, as often as I’ve made that [clear] but this is my space, and I’ve defined what it is, but I’m still a control freak. The food is still very much mine, but we are a team. Every person here has a role to play in that. One of our sous chefs is actually getting ready to leave to move back home, so we’re going to have a meeting directly after this to talk through who takes on this role as this person during service. Who does what? Every time somebody leaves, we have to rethink our entire service because not one person serves alike.

Kirk Bachmann: They’re such a part of it. Yeah.

Johnny Spero: Yeah. They’re not alike. Everyone’s a little bit different.

Johnny Spero’s Ultimate Dish

Kirk Bachmann: It is cool. It is beautiful.

Hey Chef, what an hour we’ve spent! But I’ve got to tell you, the name of the podcast is The Ultimate Dish. I can’t let you go until you tell me: what is the ultimate dish? It could be a memory or ten-courser. Whatever.

Johnny Spero: My grandmother was a refugee from Latvia during the war. She came back to the States with my grandfather. This is my dad’s parents. They were in D.C. but moved to Baltimore. That’s where my dad was born and raised, essentially. But my grandmother would always cook very simple food, a lot of it being peasant food that she would cook from home. There’s still one dish that my mom has learned to make. It’s very simple. It’s roast pork, potato conato, like a potato or bread dumpling, and gravy. That’s it. There’s nothing [else]. It’s a whole pork loin roasted, sliced, covered in gravy, and then a dense potato dumpling with caraway seeds in it and stuff like that. That’s the one dish that I remember. When I would work, if I was able to get off on a Sunday, we would have that at the house. My grandmother would cook it when we were younger. That was the dish that brought us all together on those days.

I don’t eat a lot of pork or red meat these days, but we did a version of it at Bar Spero for Restaurant Week at one point. Because if there’s any time to do it, just roast a whole bunch of pork, perfectly roasted, sliced, warmed in the hearth. Essentially, it’s almost like a massive gnocchi with really intense jus. I would never feed it to my parents because my dad would just be like, “It’s not as good as my mom’s.” And I already know that it’s not, in its own way. If I had one meal that I could ask anybody to cook for me again, it would be to do a version of that.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh my gosh! Can I just tell you, I’m getting chills through it. I think we have some shared DNA coming from Germany. My family called that Schweinebraten. Pork roast. Quite honestly, a little known story: before sous vide was even a thing, my dad and I would roast the pork, make the sauce, do the dumplings. We would put the pork in the sauce in these little Dazey Seal-A-Meals that they used to have. Then we’d freeze it, because we would have these big bus tours that would come in. You just drop it into the water and warm it up. That was very manual sous vide a hundred years ago.

What a beautiful story! If you ever come visit in Colorado, in Boulder, I’d love to show you the school, introduce you to the students. And I will make you pork roast, and we will have pork roast with a nice Gewürztraminer. Well, I’ll have Gewürztraminer. You won’t. We’ll have fun.

Chef, thank you so much. You are a storyteller. You’re a professional. I’m so glad that you spent some time with us.

And thank you for listening to the Ultimate Dish podcast, brought to you by Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Visit escoffier.edu/podcast, where you’ll find any materials mentioned during the podcast, including notes, links and other resources. And if you can, please leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, and subscribe to support our show. This helps us to reach more aspiring individuals ready to take the next step toward their dream careers. Thanks for listening.