Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1676 - Jesse Griffiths
Uploaded: 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1676 - Jesse Griffiths' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1676 - Jesse Griffiths' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1676 - Jesse Griffiths

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
What's up, Jesse?
How are you, man?
Doing really well.
You are one of the many people that are cool as fuck that I've met because of
Steve Rinella.
I need to give that guy like a gift just for introducing me to cool people.
I've met at least a dozen really cool people because of Steve Rinella.
Yeah, I can believe that.
He's a powerful person, and I'm honored to be included in that group.
I really am.
He's done a lot for us.
His ability to get out there and support people and his knowledge of his reach
and just wanting to get out there and promote people, it's very, very kind.
He's a very generous person.
He is, and he's so smart, and he's so important to that world, the world of
wild foods.
I heard you on the podcast, on his podcast, a few years back when you guys were
talking about cooking
and Dai Due, your restaurant here in Austin.
You could tell right away that what you're doing is very much like a passion
project.
You're a guy like when you talk about food, when you talk about cooking, when
you talk about the ingredients that you use,
and it's like I fucking love when someone's really into what they do.
When I hear you talk about Dai Due, when I hear you talk about cooking in
general,
and, of course, you've got a new book out.
It's out right now, The Hog Book.
Go get it.
Chef's Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Pigs.
But it's very inspiring.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, I love food, and most of my life revolves around gathering it in some way
or another.
Whether, I mean, I like to go pick blackberries a lot, and that translates to a
lot of other things.
I mean, I obviously like to kill pigs.
I also like to buy carrots, things like that.
I like to serve food, and it's honest work, and I'm glad that you appreciate
that.
Yeah, it's, you know, I learned from Anthony Bourdain that what food really is.
It's like it's an art form that's temporary.
You know, I used to think of food as just being delicious, and then I watched
that No Reservation show,
and I'm like, oh, these are artists.
Oh, it was like a shift in my head.
I had to, like, rethink what it meant to be a chef.
Right.
I don't know.
Sometimes I might disagree a little bit with the artist label, and more that,
you know,
sometimes I'll tell our staff is, like, we're plumbers.
Like, we're more craftsmen than artists.
Now, there's some chefs that are artists that are out there that are way
smarter than me,
and they can make a foam, or they can compose a dish with things that just,
like, will blow your mind.
You're like, I don't think that's going to be good, and then they put it
together, and it is really good.
I think of being a chef got really hip.
I don't know.
I mean, Bourdain had a lot to do with that, too.
But I like to tell our staff particularly just to kind of keep everybody's, you
know, egos within limit that we're more craftsmen.
You know, that we're like plumbers.
You know, we do something that's needed on a daily basis because, you know, you
eat a really good meal,
and you're hungry the next day, and so I think that some chefs are certainly
artists, and I really admire them.
I, however, am not one of those.
You're being humble.
I get it, though.
And I like what you're saying about keeping the other people in check.
Good move.
Very smart.
Tell them they're plumbers.
Right.
I mean, no offense to plumbers, either.
I mean, they make a hell of a lot more money than cooks do.
Well, yeah, and you're fucking, you know, when your sink's broken or your
toilet's backed up, you need them.
The thing about it is, though, like, there is an art to cooking food correctly.
It's not simple.
And there's also an art to being, like, a carpenter, right?
You know, like, there's a lot of craftsmen that you, for sure, a Finnish carpenter,
that's an artist.
But there's something about food that, for whatever reason, I think until Bourdain
came along, people didn't really look at it like an art.
Now I think they do.
I think a lot of folks do.
Like, you know, when he would go and, you know, travel to France in some
strange, you know, restaurant that was in the middle of some farm.
And they have, like, farm to table.
These incredible chefs are all running around cooking these little things.
You're like, wow, this is a strange little project that these people are doing.
And they're composing these foods, these dishes, based on local ingredients and
everything.
It just gets you excited about what you're eating.
You know, it's a different way of looking at food.
At least it was for me.
Right.
And it changes every day, especially if that's how you're sourcing your food.
Everything is a little bit different.
The tomatoes are blowing up because there's been too much rain or there's no
tomatoes because it's too hot or something like that.
You're dealing with things like that every day, and you can deal with that in a
positive or a negative.
You can look at that as an advantage.
And so I do, yeah, I'll concede that, yes, there is a bit of an art to dealing
with food like that, too.
How long have you owned Dai Due for?
As a brick-and-mortar restaurant, seven years.
Now, it's been in business since 2006 when we started and basically going to
farms and setting up outdoor dinners and doing these big dinners outside.
We called it a supper club.
And we would serve at our heyday, we're serving 80 people every week, once a
week, and just sourcing everything locally.
A lot of times just from one farm.
And then, you know, getting fish out of the Gulf or freshwater fish, local
olive oil, local dairy, local cheeses, local fruit, everything.
And whatever was available, that's what we'd do.
Now, these days, I don't think that's entirely novel.
But in 2006 to, you know, 2010, it was still a little bit novel.
Not to say that eating like that is a groundbreaking idea because it's probably
the second oldest idea known to humans.
And so, but to kind of do it, well, I would say doing it in Texas was harder.
And no one had ever really attempted that with ingredients here because it is
such a rough space.
It can be.
I mean, the weather is very extreme.
And the growing seasons can be great or are terrible.
We have, you know, weather events, things like that.
So when you started out in 2006, were you coming right out of culinary school?
Like what were you, what were you doing before then?
I had just been working in restaurants.
I never went to culinary school or any school beyond high school.
And just, I just loved cooking.
And I'd always worked in restaurants.
But I did start to grow a little bit tired of this disconnection with food that
I saw in restaurants.
I traveled to Mexico and I traveled to Europe.
And I saw in those two places that their cuisine was based on their local
ingredients.
And to put it in a really extreme way, in northern Mexico, the food was
wonderful.
But it was very much austere.
We were looking at onions and chilies and beans.
I'm talking about the high desert.
Meat.
I mean, no seafood whatsoever, obviously.
They're a couple hours from the coast.
And they were still able to pull off this really beautiful food there.
And that was just, it was meaningful.
And then if you go someplace like Europe where it's like, oh, well, there's a
lot more resources there, like in southern France or Italy or someplace like
that.
And you saw what they were doing.
You know, here we use walnut oil and duck fat as our primary cooking fats.
And they base a whole cuisine on that region of France off of that.
And what I saw where I'm from is that we had nothing like that.
Whenever we wanted asparagus, we would order it.
Whenever we wanted a beef tenderloin, we ordered it.
And we get in these boxes full of, you know, random nameless animals and out-of-season
produce from across the world.
And I just thought that what if we could represent the bounty of this area a
little better.
And I saw what you could do with an austere space like in northern Mexico.
And I'm like, certainly we can do that in central Texas because we are very
uniquely poised between the coast and north Texas.
We have prairies.
We have hill country full of game, south Texas full of citrus and mangoes,
things like that.
We have everything we need here.
I don't know what austere means.
Do you?
Not bountiful.
Do you know what it means?
Like very...
I was pretending I knew what it meant for a while.
I was like, I better ask a question.
Yeah.
You know, not necessarily poor, but not an enriched environment.
Severe or strict in manner, attitude or appearance.
An austere man, okay, of living conditions or a way of life, having no comforts
or luxuries, harsh or aesthetic.
Ascetic?
Is that a word?
Ascetic?
How do you say that?
Conditions in the prison could hardly be more astore, having an extremely plain
and simple style or appearance unadorned.
The cathedral is impressive in its austere simplicity.
There you go.
Okay.
So when you...
Did you get out of high school and then immediately start working in
restaurants?
I worked in restaurants all through high school.
Did you always know that you wanted to be a cook?
No.
I mean, I worked in the front of the house.
I was a waiter and a bartender.
It was just a good way to make cash.
Cash, you know, I loved it, you know, as a young man.
And I, you know, I spent it on...
I tithed most of it at a...
No, I did not.
But I enjoyed being in the front of the house, but I knew that it wasn't a long-term
thing for me.
So I took the pay cut and went to the kitchen and just started working in kitchens
when I was about 20.
And then I was born in North Texas and kind of just worked my way south to
Austin and got here in 98.
Is going to culinary school the normal path when someone becomes a chef or is
that?
Yes, yes.
And I mean, I think it can be great.
It really depends on the person.
I've known a lot of people that came out of culinary schools that have done a
wonderful job in their career.
And also a lot of people that, you know, it didn't work and, you know, they're
on to massage school next.
Right, right.
Well, that's like with everything, right?
Sure.
It's hard for people to, like, stick to a path and just grind it out.
Yeah.
And I think the chef world is a lot of grinding, huh?
Yeah, it's tough.
You know, and attitudes are changing these days.
But, you know, back, you know, 20 or so years ago, it was still kind of that
system where you had to really work your ass off.
You still do.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, it's a lot of hard work.
But, you know, working your way through that will really let you know if that's
what you want to do for the rest of your life.
And I knew that it was.
I just, something about food just took me.
So when you first started working, just took the pay cut and went to the
kitchen, you knew right away?
Yes, and I stayed in the kitchen from there on.
I never left.
And then when I started traveling, and that's when I really got excited about
it and, you know, just saw food in its real way.
You know, I think, like, a formative meal for me would be in Venice.
I was able to travel there, but I was also able to work in a kitchen.
It was in the off season.
Nobody was there because it was between, like, the sunny season and carnival.
And so the chef took me literally on a gondola.
Like, I mean, you can't get more romanticized than that.
He's like, we have to go to the seafood market.
Well, how do you get to the seafood market?
You get on a gondola, and the guy takes you across the canal, and then we went
and bought the most beautiful sole, you know, like a little miniature flounder,
these tiny little flatfish.
And then we go back to his kitchen, and he's got a reach-in cooler, and it's
the depths of the off season.
So there's not much going on vegetable-wise.
And he's got three sizes of arugula in there.
He's got small, like, medium, and large.
And then he's got some lemons, and he's got some olive oil.
And this guy takes this sole, and 