Kevin Boehm on Living in his Car to Running 35 Restaurants

Kevin Boehm co-founded the Boka Restaurant Group nearly 25 years ago and now runs 35 restaurants across Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. He and his partner Rob Katz won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur in America. He also lived in his car, wrote a fake resume to get his first restaurant job, and spent two decades drinking heavily to manage bipolar disorder before getting sober. His memoir, The Bottomless Cup, covers all of it. Mark and Kate talk with Kevin about what hospitality actually means, how trauma shapes restaurant people, and the note slipped into his menu that changed the way he thought about his career.

Here's what was mentioned in today's podcast:

The Bottomless Cup: A Memoir of Secrets, Restaurants, and Forgiveness, by Kevin Boehm: https://bookshop.org/a/18956/9781419775246

Pizza Spinello, Wellfleet, MA: https://www.pizzaspinello.com/

Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill: https://www.castlehill.org/

Salty Market, Truro, MA: https://thesaltymarket.com/

Subscribe to Food with Mark Bittman on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and please help us grow by leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts.

Follow Mark on Twitter at @bittman, and on Facebook and Instagram at @markbittman. Want more food content? Subscribe to The Bittman Project at www.bittmanproject.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.