Behind the Plate Episode 2 - Part 1 - Allen Burger Venture -Dino Debell

Dino DeBell shared his journey from working in his family's restaurant to becoming a successful chef. He detailed his early experiences at Mama Mia's in Denver, his transition to fine dining, and his move to Hawaii and Vail. Dino discussed the challenges of opening Allen Burger Venture in Buffalo, including raising $100,000 and adapting to COVID-19 by reducing burger sizes and prices. He emphasized the importance of classic culinary techniques and his favorite burger, the Jiffy burger. Dino also advised aspiring chefs to gain experience in high-end hotels for better training and professional development.

Transcript

Antonio Howell  0:02  
Perfect.

Hey, there. 

Dino DeBell  0:20  
Hey, can you hear me all right? 

Antonio Howell  0:23  
Yeah, I can. 

Dino DeBell  0:25  
Don't get too don't get too complicated with the computer, because 

Antonio Howell  0:31  
Absolutely.

Dino DeBell  0:40  
All right, can you hear me? Allright, 

Antonio Howell  0:41  
yes, I can.

Dino DeBell  0:43  
Okay, cool. Thank you. Thanks. Amanda, don't forget, Richard, what's

What's going on? 

Antonio Howell  0:54  
Not much. Thanks for hopping on.

Dino DeBell  0:58  
Yeah, no problem. It took me a little, took us a little while. Yeah, thank you. 

Antonio Howell  1:02  
I figured out it's perfect.

Dino DeBell  1:05  
So I kind of briefly went through your questions. But if you just however you want to handle this, it's fine with me.

Antonio Howell  1:10  
Yeah, so I just wanted to know your story. How'd you get to this position right now?

Dino DeBell  1:18  
Well, I think you're familiar with quite a bit of it, but your grandfather and my father were good friends. And, you know, I grew up in me and my brothers all grew up in my father's restaurant at Mama Mia's back in the day in Denver. 

Antonio Howell  1:38  
Okay, 

Dino DeBell  1:39  
So, you know, when I was like 12, 13, years old, I would spend the summers going into work going into work with my dad and setting up the kitchen. My older brother was Tony, was waiting tables and kind of running turning house. And it just became, kind of came more of a family obligation, yeah, work there, you know, I think for us, you know, when we turned 16, our car payment was two nights a week without punching in the clock. And that was, that was our car payment to our dad. So I really enjoyed it. My grandmother worked there with me, you know, my brothers, my dad, my stepmom, and then also on my mom's side, my mom's, you know, the, you know, Italco food products I'm sure. Are you familiar with that? 

Antonio Howell  2:19  
Yeah. 

Dino DeBell  2:21  
So that's my mom's side of the family, so that's a wholesale food import company. So, I also worked for my uncle, you know, making fresh pasta pestos. And, you know, when I wasn't working for my dad, I worked for them in the warehouse, and, you know, it's just really interested in all this amazing product that they were pulling in. And I would drive, I would drive those deliveries to these great restaurants and go in the back doors and see all the professional cooks in there. And, you know, I knew how to make pizza really well. I knew how to basically do all the recipes that were at my father's restaurant, because I did it for a seven years, but I didn't really know how to cook. So, you know, I had my dad, I was told my dad, I'm like, you know, he didn't want to do the restaurant anymore. And I'm like, can you sell it? Because I'd like to try to get into, like, a fine dining restaurant. And at that point, I did. There was a restaurant, I think, on Broadway, called Pomodoro, and my cousin Chris Larita was the chef there. 

Antonio Howell  3:14  
Oh yeah. 

Dino DeBell  3:14  
So basically, how I got started there was I had to what they call Expo, and you don't really cook you're just kind of working the line. The food's coming up, you you know, figure out the tickets. I'm sure you're familiar with it. 

Antonio Howell  3:26  
Yeah. 

Dino DeBell  3:27  
So I started Expo, and just to try to get a pantry position in there, and I finally got there, and, you know, it's just basically in your pantry. You're just. You're doing cold, cold prep and desserts and things like that, 

Antonio Howell  3:38  
absolutely,

Dino DeBell  3:39  
 But I was always a good worker, and my cousin Chris knew that, and we had a situation within our family that another one of our uncles bought and his friends bought a restaurant in Hawaii, and this is in 1989 I think it was because it was 19 years old, 

Antonio Howell  3:56  
Wow! 

Dino DeBell  3:56  
And they recruited myself and my cousin to go to Hawaii and open up this restaurant for them. So we did that. It was a, it was kind of a Tex Mex slash Hawaiian ingredient restaurant. So we're combining Mexican food with all these tropical fruits and putting a little more flair, you know, versus a traditional Mexican food that you sold, get to enjoy that I don't enjoy because we don't have Mexican restaurants out here, yeah, but so we did that, and once we completed that, Chris had already previously worked at the lodge at Vail in Vail, Colorado, and Chris, you know, had a lot of experience there, and very talented chef, so he recruited me to go up to Vail and work with him. The problem is I still did that was really high end culinary. We had chefs from Italy, Austria, Germany

Antonio Howell  4:48  
My gosh, 

Dino DeBell  4:49  
...and I'm just this 19 year old, you know, pizza slinger. You know that knew how to work and I could clean real good. So basically, what I did there with Chris was I was also pantry in the Wildflower which was at the Lodge at Vail back in the day. and my shift started at two o'clock in the afternoon with Chris started at 930 10 o'clock in the morning. So I would go into work with Chris at 930 or 10, work for free, six, seven days a week, basically four hours a day, and sit elbow to elbow with him, and learn how to butcher, learn how to make stocks, learn how to make soups, you know, learn how to use the scale. So basically, I did that for, you know, a year. And you know, if you put that time in that, that was my school, really. And I'm surrounded by all this great talent. So another, another way, I kind of got, you know, I was way over my head, for sure. And the guy that I worked with here in Miami and in Nantucket, he had just graduated culinary school that year and started the same year that I started there, and he kind of took me under his wing. And you know what I didn't know, he said, you know, just say Yes, chef, and I'll show you how to do it. And ironically, 35 years later, we're opening up huge companies, you know, and traveling, doing the same thing, and still working together. 

Antonio Howell  6:07  
Yeah. 

Dino DeBell  6:08  
So anyway, I just really enjoyed it and and put my head down and learned as much as I could, and try to be respectful to your other your your brigade, your team. And if you can do that, you know, they'll, they'll show you, they'll teach you. You know, I used to clean their stations at night just so they wouldn't get, you know, so that I'm like, Okay, I'll clean your station, but show me something cool tomorrow. 

Antonio Howell  6:31  
Yeah, that's cool.

Dino DeBell  6:32  
 So, basically, took myself to school and I climbed the ladder at the Lodge at Vail. Couldn't really move anymore. There were still, like, three people ahead of me, and I was going to take a job. I was thinking about New Orleans, because we at the for the hotel and Vail. It was owned by Orange Express hotels, and they had probably 30 hotels worldwide. And some of the hotels that we had in the United States was Charleston Place in in Charleston, we had the Windsor Court New Orleans and the 21 club in New York. 

Antonio Howell  7:03  
Okay

Dino DeBell  7:03  
So I was thinking about going to New Orleans and the chef that I worked for, Jim Cohen. He was like, "No you at 22 years old in New Orleans. You'll be dead in a year." You know, chasing girls or whatever drinking like. He's like, stick with me another year, and I'll get you where you needed to go. So within that year, he had taken another job at the Phoenician at Scottsdale, and I got a phone call from Michael Chiarello in Napa Valley, who, I think he was also selling product to Italco. Oils and vinegars is brilliant. And so I think he was talking to my uncle about me, and he offered me a job. So I sold everything that I owned, got like $1,400 in my pocket. I went to Napa and started cooking there, and did that for two years, ended up going back to the hotel, became Executive Chef, and that's just kind of where it went from there. 

When the hotel sold to the ski company, I really didn't like working for that, that company. And so, sorry. And so Boz, who I work with now, was consulting in Buffalo, New York, and he asked me to come out and help him. And that's just kind of how I ended up in Buffalo. He left. I took over his job and and, you know, got married, had a child, and I had to figure something out. So, you know, the culinary was not that great in Buffalo, and I was consulting for some people in the partner that I have now, asked me if I wanted to open up a restaurant with him, if I could get some money. And I'm like, Well, what do I need? Was like, 100 grand. I don't know, pretty impossible, but somehow I got it done. And so we bought the property that we have now. And I was like, What do you want to do with it? He's a he's a craft beer connoisseur. You know, back 10 years ago, craft beer was just all over the place, and if you're familiar with that in Denver, so we have, right now, six craft beer bars in Buffalo, Allen burger ventures, probably the best one, although the city's kind of tanking right now. But I said, What do you want to do? And he's like, burgers. Are like, burgers. I can cook anything. Why do you want to do burgers? He goes, I want to call it. We're in Allentown, on Allen street. So he's, like, I want to call it Allen burger venture. It's a play on words like alcohol by volume. So we'll do craft burgers, beers and bourbon and whiskey. And that's what we do. 

Antonio Howell  8:43  
Wow. 

Dino DeBell  8:43  
I mean, I've gotten to a point where my daughter's running it. She's 20 years old. She's my GM there, and the chef's been there since day one. And so I take off and open up these, you know, in flight operations, where we're catering, just to private jets, and I do a lot of high end social catering in West Palm and Nantucket, weddings for like Beyonce crew and stuff like that. So,

Antonio Howell  10:03  
Oh my God, what's that like? Is that, is that fun?

Dino DeBell  10:07  
It's, it's really fun. It's, it's nerve wracking, but yeah, you know, it's, it's the fun part is, is every day is different, like Saturday, I've got to go up to West Palm and handle some big functions for them, just because their leadership short. And it's the same company I work for in Nantucket, and I know of all the crews, so I'll just go in there and run, run it a night for him. That's fine, because it's a nice it's a nice change.

Antonio Howell  10:32  
And I have so I've been interviewing some other restaurant owners, and one of them, he owns a restaurant here in Denver, and he wants to start catering as well, and it was just like, how did you get into catering? What is? What's that?

Dino DeBell  10:48  
So for me, it was, it was pretty natural, because when you're when you're operating in a hotel, you're obviously doing you have a ballroom, oh yeah, two to three back. So in summertime, we'd shut down one of the two restaurants, and we just did strictly catering out of that restaurant. We had three different smaller venue, meeting places, meeting rooms. You know, any hotel you go to, it's all convention driven and food and beverage and banquets, weddings, you know? So I've been, I've been doing weddings and functions my entire career. Napa Valley was full of a lot of catering where we'd be catering in a vineyard. So you're doing off site catering, where you need to bring equipment and have all your prep done. So it's a pretty natural thing for me. And so how I really got into the catering aspect with in Nantucket was they had taken on some really large Same, same situation. A restaurant owner wanted to, you know, his property is super expensive out there, so he obviously needed to figure out a way to maximize dollars. So he started his own catering company, and started to grow really fast. I think it's only like six or seven years old now, and I've been with them the whole time. But it started out, can you come out for two weeks? We've got an event for 2000 we've got this, we got this, we got this. And now I pretty much live in Nantucket, in the other see. 

So that's, that's really where the money's at. But, I mean, it's, it's a high cost startup, but you you have more control over controlling your cost, your labor, because you're setting the prices you're getting, your guarantees. You know what you're ordering, you know what you're prepping versus a restaurant. You know you're going to, you're going to look at trends, and you're going to be like, Okay, I sold, you know, 13 salmon last night. I sold six tuna and 24 Tenderloins. So that's what you're prepping, but you don't know what people are going to order until they sit down and order. 

Antonio Howell  12:36  
Yeah,

Dino DeBell  12:37  
 Where here with catering? You know exactly what you because you sold it to them? 

Antonio Howell  12:41  
Well, that's nice,

Dino DeBell  12:43  
 yeah, unless they're on a buffet, and you just kind of have a standard, you know, look at the demographics. Are the kids, are they really old? You know? What is the situation? And then that's kind of how you buy and charge for that. But we have, what we do here with this company, is we have, picture, a food truck. We've got four food trucks, two refrigerated box trucks, and on those food trucks, we don't we basically, they're mobile kitchens for us. So we'll pull up to a museum. We'll be in the back parking lot. We can do either all the food out of that, or usually the food trucks will just do all the past hors d'oeuvres. So we'll have two trucks doing, they'll each have 10 different kinds of hors d'oeuvres. So you're putting out 20 different transport, you know, hor d'oevres. And usually we'll try to hopefully have a kitchen, you know, that we can use in a museum. And if not, we have equipment that is operated with propane. So we have those box trucks, we can bring those that equipment in with the propane. And, you know, we, in addition to that, we charge them a rental fee, because for our own equipment. So they paying for that. Otherwise, if we didn't own our own equipment, they would have to run it from a rental company for us to use. So now we're getting double the profit. 

Antonio Howell  13:57  
That's awesome. 

Dino DeBell  13:58  
Because we own the So, yeah, I mean, if you're smart, there's a lot of money to, you know, that's in it, and it's not as, you know, with like, my restaurant in Buffalo, I'm open seven days a week, lunch and dinner, you're married to it, you know, my phone's on 24/7 the roof is leaking. The whatever happened, somebody just shot somebody, and that's happening. You know, it's not all glamorous. It's not it's not great. You know, you're you got bums coming in, you're trying to kick them out, and your customers are telling you you're an asshole because you're not nice to the homeless. And I'm like, lady, that ain't homeless, that's a crackhead, and it's gonna spit on you or me or steal your money. It's a different story. So, yeah, I'm kind of over that aspect of it a little bit as far as Buffalo goes. You know, at my age, I'll be 55 in May, and this is a perfect situation for me, where we open up these companies, build the kitchens, we set the menus, we train the staff, and then we leave. And it's not as physical, I guess it's mental. But they're using everything that, all the knowledge that you've gained over the course of 30 years. I say 50, because in 30 years, most of my shifts were doubles compared to what most people work. Because in a kitchen, you're going to work a lot more than the nine to fivers out there. And you to be good and be successful. You gotta, you just gotta, kind of suck it up and do it, you know, to a degree.

Antonio Howell  15:21  
Yeah, no, I get what you mean. So leading, kind of back into you said, you, you pulled out the $100,000 and you got the land, and you're setting up your restaurant. Well, did you like, so you did the burgers, and did you help, like, plan how the kitchen was going to look, how the building's going to be?

Dino DeBell  15:41  
And, I mean, the interior, yeah, I designed the interior. I mean, obviously my partner had a lot of say so in it. But, you know, he's the kind of guy that's never really lifted a hammer in his life. And he's not a, you know, he can line cook, but he's not a chef. So for me, you know, I was thinking, well, if I'm going to do burgers? These gotta be the best burgers that you've ever next year. You know, take all this. You know, at first I was really like, man, here I am, you know, selling myself out. You know, I got a five star chef, and now I'm resorting to cooking burgers. Like, what am I going to do with burgers that I'm going to be like, proud of and satisfied and still want to cook. So, you know, I, when I first sat down and started writing burgers, I probably wrote 100 150 different design burgers, and then I looked back on them, and I was just like, well, that's really gimmicky, that's really gimmicky, that's stupid, you know, you're just putting shit on there, just to be weird. Just like, you know, I need to stay true to my culinary self. So basically, when I designed the menu, I went and take every classic steak dish from any region in America or France or Italy or wherever the Asian, what is classic? Because classic food is classic for a reason. It will stand the test of time. So if I take classic steak dishes and I try to put them into a handheld burger, how is that going to how is that going to work? And so that's, that's basically how I wrote my menus. It's all classic food. It's classic food combinations put in a handheld even with the alternative burgers. You know, with the salmon you're doing, like a salmon, BLT or a tuna tataki burger. So it's all those flavors that you would have in a tuna tataki roll, but in a deconstructed burger. So that's the, that's the method to my madness. I don't want to gimmicky and be like, you know, Captain Crunch crusted cream cheese on whatever, you know, yeah, not just, you know, it's weird. So that's kind of how I did that.

Antonio Howell  17:45  
So you you learned all this from culinary school, and just like being in many experiences and everything, went

Dino DeBell  17:51  
Neverto culinary school. 

Antonio Howell  17:53  
Oh, really, 

Dino DeBell  17:53  
Surround yourself and people better than you all the time, you'll always be better. 

Antonio Howell  17:57  
Yeah, 

Dino DeBell  17:58  
And I tell my daughter all the time to learn, learn from the people that are really shitty, that you can learn as much from them as you can your best your best mentor, your chef, because remembering how you were treated or spoken to, positively or negatively is going to mold you. And when you become the chef or the maitre d or the general manager, remember those times when you were young and somebody was just a complete, you know, asshole to you, and you're thinking to yourself, that lesson could have been taught a different way. I didn't need to be spoken to like that. And so, you know, and that's played a big role in my career, because I have such a loyal staff. My chef's been with me 16 years. Wherever I go, he goes. I don't have turnover. I don't have, you know, I'm not constantly retraining, which costs a lot of money. It's so it's, it's about being the person that you are. You always have to teach, you know, if you, if you have nothing left, to teach somebody, it's probably time for them to move on, for their for their own, you know, growth.

Antonio Howell  19:00  
Okay, yeah. So going into, like, just the stock of your food, you prep for, like, someone's gonna eat salmon tonight or something like that. So what if, like, you prepped completely wrong, and you have a bunch of wasted food? What goes on there? Has that happened? 

Dino DeBell  19:22  
Oh,sure, it happens. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's what freezers can help you. But, you know, yeah, I mean, it's really knowing, knowing your rhythms, you know, you're watching the weather, knowing the events that are going on in your in and around your street, or your or your city, knowing your trends. You know, study your numbers. There's so many, there's like, I can go on my phone right now and see exactly what I sold today, yesterday, for the last month. I can do it for a week or a month or a year, and you'll see the percentage of, you know, if I put out 300 plates, how many of those are salmon, How many of tose are Tuna. And that's just kind of how you prep. And,

Antonio Howell  19:58  
Okay, 

Dino DeBell  19:59  
You don't. You don't prep more than you typically would sell.

Antonio Howell  20:04  
And then so with going back a little bit like, I'd say six years or so, it's in COVID 19, what was that like for your business? Was that a big change? Like, what were the challenges to adjust?

Dino DeBell  20:20  
Or, how did I adjust? There's either, when we're done with this, there's an article you can read on that from, okay, you know, it's, it's pretty interesting, and that, that'll give you more of the story, but in a nutshell, so, you know, I'm in it, um, you know, $200,000 in debt, you know, buying the property wheeled out. You know you're in it. And you know, I don't, I don't come from money. So you can't, you can't fail. You know, in my mind, I'm thinking, Oh my God. You know, I've worked so hard my whole life, and this is going to, this is going to bury me. I can't fail. So the first week, you know, New York State shut down, except for essential workers, which means cooks can go cook. And you know, your industry can stay open because people need to eat. And I'd never really done takeout before, because I really felt like putting food into the box would compromise the food, yeah. So I wasn't really versed or practiced at it, but that's the only thing you know, we had to do takeout. And so in my mind, you know, I'm thinking, Okay, people are going to be unemployed. They're not going to have a paycheck. They're not in my burgers are 17 to $21 yeah, so how are they how are they going to feed themselves? Why would they want to come and enjoy one of my burgers if they don't have the money to do it? So basically, I was on eight ounce burgers on a grill. So what I did was I pulled my grill out, I bought a flat top. Cost me seven grand to take that space of five feet on a grill, pull that out, put a flat top on because the flat top, you can cook faster on it. And I went from eight ounces, eight ounce burgers to six ounce burgers. So I'm trying to save my food costs on it, and then I also dropped my prices to a flat $13 across the board, no matter what you got, no matter what burger you got, was 13 bucks. That's all and all I really my goal there was to keep my bills paid, my doors open, keep retain my staff. I don't want to lay anybody off. I laid a bunch of people off the first week, and then by that that Monday, by that Friday, I had to close my, shut my phones off and shut my my online ordering off, because we had 400 burgers we had to cook, and there was only, like three of us in the kitchen. So by seven o'clock, we were still cooking until 10:30pm

Antonio Howell  22:41  
That's insane. 

Dino DeBell  22:41  
We couldn't cook this fast. It was tickets just, it was like in that movie The Bear without, you know, the where all the tickets were just hitting the floor. So I call up, you know, my cooks. I'm like, bro, I need you back. They're like, No, weI don't want to come back. New York State's giving us like, $270 a week, you know, stimulus money. Why would I come back? Because they're probably making, you know, after taxes or whatever, they're probably netting $350, $360, $400, but if they're given $300 a week, why would they go to work? 

Antonio Howell  23:11  
Yeah, 

Dino DeBell  23:11  
So, you know, I'm like, alright, well, here's what we do. You can, you can work up to 20 hours a week and you'll still get that stimulus check. So punch in for 20 hours, and then keep track of what you work after that, and when this is all done, and said, I'll just pay you out, right? So I got like four of my key cooks back, and, you know, after three months, yeah, I'm writing checks for like, eight grand a person, but I needed those bodies to stay open, yeah? So another thing that I did, too was, like, family meal preps, you know, so making big batches of like bolognese, and so you can buy a quarter bolognese, a pound of pasta, like a kit, so you could come grab some burgers, and then tomorrow you can make Bolognese at home. 

That's it for part one. Stay tuned for part two. Coming up next you.