Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Hey Food Fans! In this episode, we dive into the heart of family-owned restaurant operations, revealing the secrets behind hand-crafted, from-scratch, dishes and staying community and customer driven.
Join Chef Cal as he chats with Kathy and Charlew Byerly from Charlew’s Taphouse about the intricacies of running a family-owned restaurant and how they maintain quality and customer satisfaction amidst economic challenges.
- The evolution of Charlew’s, from a Mary’s Pizza Shack family franchise operation, to their current success as an independent third-generation owned Italian restaurant.
- How Grandma Mary started out in the restaurant business at 48 years old back in the 60’s, creating a legacy that inspires current operations
- Being family-owned and independent allows for adaptability and personalized customer experiences, unlike chain restaurants
- Navigating economic challenges and maintaining menu prices
- The importance of hands-on experience and unique recipes for aspiring restaurateurs
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Welcome Charlew and Kathy Byerly to the show to discuss all things restaurant.
05:53 High-quality service despite shopping area challenges.
06:55 Support small family restaurants facing challenges.
09:43 Hoping for revival of home-style restaurants.
14:57 Independent restaurants offer greater operational flexibility.
21:34 Adding Italian Gelato to the menu
23:43 Freshly made menu items ensure quality.
25:29 High-quality pizza requires overcoming business challenges.
30:17 Service is fulfilling and brings excitement, universally.
33:01 Prefer home-cooked meals over franchise food.
36:30 Support local eateries; enjoy loyalty program deals.
Transcript
Chef Cal:
Hey, food fans, welcome to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and me Mrs Chef, his wife Christa DeMercurio. We’re dishing out culinary intuition, insights and imagination to spice up your meals and make cooking more fun. On today’s episode, my Chef husband delves into the ins and outs of running an independent family owned restaurant with guests Charlew and Kathy Barley from Charlew’s taphouse. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio. Well, welcome, welcome, welcome to cooking like a pro. We’re going to be talking about restaurants and just why you might want to do it, why you might not. Some of the different difficulties, some of the blessings.
Chef Cal:
So I invited my friends Charlew and Kathy Byerly to kind of explain that side of it. Welcome to Charlew and to Kathy and appreciate you both being here this evening.
Charlew Byerly:
Thanks for having us.
Chef Cal:
You guys just do a tremendous job in anything Italian. And being Italian, what I appreciate is the quality of the product that you make.
Charlew Byerly:
Thank you.
Chef Cal:
I mean, from everywhere from salads to sandwiches to pastas, they got all kinds of things that are on there. They’ve got all kinds of specials and stuff. So first off, maybe Cathy, if somebody it’s listing, they want to just kind of go pull you guys up online or on their phone or on their laptop. What do they, what do they go to? Is it just Charlew’s dot? Dot?
Kathy Byerly:
Yeah. Charlew’s Dot. Yeah.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. So you can go there and get as much information as you want and give them a call. They also do the takeout. And there’s a better way of doing the takeout as opposed to the different companies that do that. I’ll tell you, if you’re going to do takeout, you’re always better off going down and picking up your own order. It’s going to save you in the long run. It’s by far the best way to go. Those outfits are, they charge a lot of money to drop your food off.
Chef Cal:
So, but we can start off with this is really just, you know, what is Charlew’s? When did it become Charlew’s? Because I know it started off as a Mary’s and then maybe just bring us, bring us through the, the history, so to speak.
Charlew Byerly:
You want the short version?
Chef Cal:
Yes.
Charlew Byerly:
Okay. I started working at Mary’s Pizza Shack as a pizza maker many, many years ago. And I grew up underneath, you know, Mary Fazio and Toto Albano and my mother Anna.
Chef Cal:
You’re Mary’s grandson? Yep. Yeah. The original Mary’s grandson.
Charlew Byerly:
I’m the youngest grandson out of about seven.
Chef Cal:
All right, about seven. Are you counting all of them?
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah, there’s definitely. Yes, there’s definitely seven grandchildren. So I’m the youngest one out of all of them.
Chef Cal:
And then. So she started this operation. Where and when? How long ago?
Charlew Byerly:
My grandmother started in Sonoma. It was boys hot Springs, a little suburb there, in 1959 by herself.
Chef Cal:
Oh, wow.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah. My mom had to stay at home for a little while, take care of some business, and my uncle went down there and helped her and thought she was nuts. Buying stuff at garage sales, pots and pans. And finally she got an oven and a stove. But she spent $750 in her first year. I think she did about ten grand in sales.
Chef Cal:
Oh, wow.
Charlew Byerly:
And then in the sixties, started getting bigger and bigger. And I was born in 64 and went to work for her because I was babysat down there, so I had to do, you know, Italian.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. I’ve had kids in the business. They start there chopping parsley.
Charlew Byerly:
Oh, no. Oh, no. I wasn’t allowed knives.
Chef Cal:
They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. Well, I don’t even know if they had plastic knives back then.
Charlew Byerly:
No, no, no.
Chef Cal:
I use those for. To train my children, which are now close to 40. But I never had them when, you know, I used real knives when I was nine years old.
Charlew Byerly:
No. We did dishes and made pizza to go boxes. We got two cent apiece for every box we made. My cousin Vince used to whoop me on it. And we decided to move out of Sonoma and move up to Anderson. We opened up our first restaurant. It was Mary’s pizza Shack, actually, our second restaurant, Mary’s Pizza Shack. And then we ended up.
Charlew Byerly:
That was about, what, 16 years? We were Mary’s pizza Shack, and we decided to split off and go as chore or lose because the family was starting to go through partitioning, which is a long story I won’t go into at all. But it ended up being, you know, we voted on the name. I didn’t vote on Charlo’s because nobody knows what the heck that means. But it’s basically.
Chef Cal:
Well, people do. I mean, people do, but it is, you know, it took a minute.
Charlew Byerly:
It took a long time.
Chef Cal:
Like, you have golden arches or something, but when did you become Charlew’s? In about how long?
Charlew Byerly:
A couple years ago.
Chef Cal:
A couple years ago.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah. We were in the same location. Anderson let reading go. We wanted to focus more on one store and that we can more, you.
Chef Cal:
Know, higher quality and fewer employees. Yeah, well, I’ve been in the business where it’s pretty. I mean, you. You know, getting retention is such a big thing to find people that’ll be loyal, and it will work for you, and when you get them, you hold on to them. Yeah. Sometimes that can become a problem, too, because it was easy. Easy.
Charlew Byerly:
And Anderson, I have Jason 17 or what, 14 years.
Kathy Byerly:
Yeah, 14 years.
Charlew Byerly:
14 years. He doesn’t want to leave. I got Dylan eight years. I mean, it goes on and on and on, but the Redding store was a challenge. But we. We said, you know what? We’re getting old. Let’s go down to one.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
And so we. We. We focused on Anderson, and Anderson’s back to where it used to be. I’m getting a lot of the good old customers back and excellent, and a lot of new customers every single night. I’m a table toucher.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
Tabletop.
Chef Cal:
It’s always getting. Getting the word out and, you know, the high quality and level of food and service that you have in a shopping area that I don’t know how much of it’s vacant, but maybe half. I don’t know. Well, just. But even just. Just to take a guess, you know, the challenge is, well, now you don’t have, you know, a movie theater. You know, that’s coming back a huge draw.
Charlew Byerly:
It’s coming back.
Chef Cal:
That’d be great to see. That would be great to see if that is, you know, happening and when that happens, because, you know, it’s dinner to movie, right? People go out to dinner, and they want to go to a movie. And it doesn’t have to be a movie. It can be great service. It can be sitting there watching someone toss pizza. It could be the wine service. It could be the food.
Charlew Byerly:
We got a lot of business from that movie theater. And the thing was, not only did they have dinner there before the movies, they would come back after and have a glass of wine, maybe a soda pop, then they would order dessert, and then we’d see them twice in one night, which was fabulous.
Chef Cal:
And what this leads me into is that a family restaurant. And I wish I could convey this to folks in the strongest manner, that when you’re a family restaurant, you are literally going against so many obstacles that some places aren’t, because they’re just large. They’ve got a big chain of them. Maybe they’re their purchase buying, and, you know, in bulk and train loads and such, and the mom and pops that really support the industry, you know, 80% of the economy in the United States comes from small businesses. Yeah, it’s, you know, and people need to see and support that.
Charlew Byerly:
So I agree 100% with that statement. Everything we do there is homemade, even the advertisement. Yeah. And we. We strive. I mean, our labor costs are higher, but our food costs. Or lower?
Chef Cal:
Low.
Charlew Byerly:
Lower. Because we. We make everything. We’re. We’re just one of those. We followed my grandmother’s coattails for. Rode her coattails for. Well, we’re still riding her coat.
Chef Cal:
Well, I know that I absolutely love your pizza. I mean, there isn’t anything there I don’t really like. But if I’m comparing it, and I judged enough pizza competitions, I’m not just saying this as some guy on the street here, but you guys really do a wonderful, wonderful job in that. In the end, the pizza area, they’re always flipping the padotta back there and everything else. So it’s a. Yeah, let’s bring it to Cathy. And so what’s your. What’s your favorite pizza?
Kathy Byerly:
Oh, so I like the all meat combo, the Charlew’s.
Chef Cal:
Oh, that thing.
Kathy Byerly:
That one’s a good one.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, that’s a good one. And what was the one that you made the other day? When I was down, there was a roasted garlic.
Charlew Byerly:
That one’s pretty popular. It’s on a. It’s on a high popular list.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. So. So, again, an amazing variety of pieces. But also, you have that. Make your own section, so you can really do whatever you want. I mean, if your gluten, you know, you have an allergy towards gluten. That’s one thing that they do.
Chef Cal:
What’s the base on that? On that gluten free pizza?
Charlew Byerly:
What do you mean by the base? Cauliflower.
Chef Cal:
That’s definitely the crust.
Charlew Byerly:
We don’t make it there. We can’t make it there because we don’t. We have too much flour flying around. But we do order that from. Used to be still writing, and now it’s a different company. It’s. I’m spacing it out. It’s a very good one, everybody.
Chef Cal:
It’s amazing that they commented on it, the different things they make the pizza, base, the dough out of.
Charlew Byerly:
You know, we get a lot of. We used to. We started off with maybe two a week when we first started serving it, and then we went to. Very shortly, quickly, when the word got out, we went to two cases a week, and there’s 24 per case.
Chef Cal:
Wow.
Charlew Byerly:
And that is one, like I said, one. One project we will not be able to take on to make it ourselves.
Chef Cal:
Well, I think that as the business has changed and what people are looking for, and I think that what I hope to see is a revival, because things always seem to go in a circle, but a revival of home style restaurants. And it’s just. It’s cool to see something from scratch when you know that the majority of other places are just pulling something out of the freezer, you know, and there is a difference in that, you know.
Charlew Byerly:
That’S very, very, very true. We just did an online course for 50 days, once a seven, five days a week. And when we show, it’s an inventory program for restaurants pros. And when he saw our list, he couldn’t believe it. It took us, what, six weeks to add all our product in there.
Chef Cal:
A lot of, that’s a lot of inventory. But, you know, that’s what it takes if you’re going to do it from scratch.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
You know, and, and now you guys got this, this new beer wall. But that is amazing. My wife loves it. Good. She’s not a beer drinker and she can always find something on there.
Charlew Byerly:
Ciders and.
Chef Cal:
Yep.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, a lot of guys are. A lot of the guys are doing the cider, too, now, which surprised the heck out of me.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
But we have twelve different taps. It’s self serve. Pour what you want. Yeah, you get a little card, like a hotel key card, and you slide it in there after you. You know, you got to hand your credit card over because, you know, ABC rules. But anyway, so, yeah, we got rotating beer. We have big beers, small beers.
Chef Cal:
You know, if you’re a beer aficionado, you like beer, you like trying things. The great thing about it is I can try, you know, an ounce or two, find out whether I like it and have a glass or go on to another one.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah, you don’t have to wait for someone to bring it to you.
Chef Cal:
Exactly.
Charlew Byerly:
Like, what I like to say is, get your own coffee. It’s right there.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, I like that.
Charlew Byerly:
It’s like my grandmother used to do. We followed her on that one. It was when she was really busy, she would tell the customer, hey, you know where the coffee pots at? And so now it’s like, you know where the beer walls at?
Chef Cal:
There you go. And, Kathy, how about other things that your business does and maybe even as simple as, like, hours of operation, you know, how do they. You said that they go to Charlew’s dot and they can get information on. What do you guys do? Events.
Kathy Byerly:
Yeah. So we’re open seven days a week. Sunday through Thursday, eleven to 830, and then Friday and Saturdays, eleven to 930. We do happy hour seven days a week.
Chef Cal:
Ooh.
Kathy Byerly:
Three to six.
Chef Cal:
And so you get the beer wall during happy hour?
Kathy Byerly:
Yep.
Charlew Byerly:
Yep.
Kathy Byerly:
Beer walls, 25% off a happy hour.
Chef Cal:
Then what? Give them a deal on appetizers or something? Yep.
Kathy Byerly:
Two meatballs for $7. You know how big our meatballs are?
Chef Cal:
Yeah, I think, yeah, meatballs. Or the meatballs are literally, like, close to a pound. If they’re not a pound, they’re. They’re. They’re really nice. They’re a knife and fork. I didn’t. No one’s going to get one of those in our mouth.
Kathy Byerly:
And our wings are $7. I mean, we got some really, really good deals.
Chef Cal:
Oh, you know, you guys, your wings are great. I know. I love our wings. If you are a chicken wing person, you need. You seriously need to go down and get their wings, because they’re the preparation and the way they do them, allow them to put together a product that really comes out so much better than what I see out there, because I’m a. I’m a wing fan. And most of the time, it’s just something that you could almost have gotten, you know, in a grocery store, know, behind the glass, you know, instead. No, these are, like, meaty and flavorful.
Charlew Byerly:
And we went through a time we can only get the little ones, and, man, boy, people were upset.
Kathy Byerly:
I was upset.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
I mean, I stopped serving the issue, so now we got the chunky ones.
Chef Cal:
So the chickens. The chickens grew up.
Charlew Byerly:
They let them grow.
Chef Cal:
I always thought if you could cross a chicken in an octopus or something so you could get all those extra legs off of there.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
You know, but there are. There are enough chickens for that. And now catering, banquets, parties of every size.
Kathy Byerly:
I mean, yeah, we do weddings, we do catering, we do events. We’re doing two weddings coming up this week.
Chef Cal:
Go ahead.
Kathy Byerly:
We actually are starting, hopefully next week if I get on it, I’m starting catering menu online so people can go in there and they can pretend or more people, so they can order our trays online.
Chef Cal:
That’s so nice for businesses these days because, I mean, when they’re trying to cut everything down. Okay, how can we, you know, get, you know, lunch down by. Well, bringing lunch in is a great.
Charlew Byerly:
Way of, you know, plus the price point. I mean, that’s got to be spoken about because I’ll tell you right now, we just did one. I looked at the price point on it, and I said, no, that’s 1095 a person. And there was a lot of food. Yeah. And I said, no, something’s wrong. I had everybody check it, and they go, no, that’s exactly what it is. So we fed 40 people at the in Anderson, and I kept looking at that going, man, something’s wrong with something.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Charlew Byerly:
But it works out. I mean, $10 ahead versus, you know, for a nice fat lunch with leftovers. People tore it up. Yeah, it’s a good.
Chef Cal:
Well, you know, I think that the thing that comes to mind for me is just the flexibility, and that’s what we can do. And as an independent restaurant, you have that. You know, when I work for places I know well, for a couple years for, like, black bear diner, they had to go by. I mean, there was, you know, a specification, a policy, and a modification for, like, everything. There was no room for a pancake to be a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, you know, and it had to be right. And even you don’t think about it. But one of just the simple things that I changed is, like, you could go to one black bear diner, and they were doing a chocolate milkshake with chocolate ice cream and then milk. And in another place that I traveled to, they were doing it with vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and milk.
Chef Cal:
Well, that makes two totally different products. And when you have a chain, you go one place. The people on the chain want to make sure it tastes the same when they go another place. So that was quite a challenge. In fact, that was when they went to trans fat dough, and I had to redo the California went trans fat.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
And they went trans fat free, which meant that, you know, if you have a corporation and there are stores outside the state, then they all have to offer the same thing.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
And that’s one of the real problems that we have.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, price of price of just fryer oil, it went from $22, $22 for 35 pounds to $45. Yeah.
Chef Cal:
And people don’t think about that. They’ll look in the store, say, oh, there’s some chicken with.
Charlew Byerly:
It’s just like bacon. I was $4.27 a pound for. For bacon, and now I’m at $7.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
What they charge me. And I’m thinking, Mike, I even called.
Chef Cal:
Nevada, and when you’re buying, and you’re literally buying member in restaurant folks, I mean, it’s not like you’re buying a half a pound. No. You know, you’re buying tons of this stuff. And so these pennies make a difference. And when you start talking dollars, and then that’s when you start seeing menu prices jump. But you know, what I’ve noticed is your menu prices are very reasonable. Matter of fact, when I looked at them, they’re less than any place else that I see. And I don’t go out a whole lot of places.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, we don’t just put a price on the menu. We do our research. I’ve done. Since everybody’s menu is online, I go through each one, and I go through each one, and I look at them, I say, well, yeah, I’m gonna keep. I gotta be around that area to be competitive. I want people coming through the door still.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. So you want them to have. I mean, the value has to be there. Right. They gotta say, oh, yeah, okay. That was worth that.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
This day and age, it’s kind of difficult to go out when, you know, you can go to fast food. And then somebody was telling me at church the other day, it was like, you know, he took his two grandkids out and was just a pastor and his two grandkids, it was $40 to go to McDonald’s.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
You know, and. Yeah. And I don’t even know how much of that stuff even falls in the food category. Yeah, probably not much. I think most of it falls in the cardboard.
Charlew Byerly:
It’s not homemade. It’s definitely not homemade.
Chef Cal:
We’re going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour for a couple quick commercials. Then we write back. Cooking like a pro here with Chef Cow and Charlew and Kathy from Charlew’s restaurant down in Anderson. Welcome back to cooking like a pro again. This is Chef Cal here with a Charlew and Kathy virely, owners of Charlew’s Pizza pasta. But you guys have steak, you guys got chicken breast, and you’ve got, you know, a variety of things that are more, you know, maybe fashionable for. For even a finer dining style situation, you know, with your sauteed items.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah, we do. We have a lot of pastas. We have a lot of chicken. Chickens are like, our number three mover in the whole restaurant.
Kathy Byerly:
Chicken parm.
Charlew Byerly:
Chicken parm is one of the best. We have salmon. Now. Salmon’s cooked to perfection by Zach. He’s an obsessive compulsive.
Chef Cal:
Those are good. Yeah, those are good people. Yeah. You give. You give them a good job and they work just on that. And then also, I know you have family special, so if you want to get on your mail, your text list or your email list, do they do that by going to the website and signing up?
Kathy Byerly:
Yeah, they can do our loyalty program.
Chef Cal:
Once they get signed up. And what. What’s the loyalty program?
Kathy Byerly:
So the loyalty program, the first time you sign into it, you automatically get $5 off the next time you come in.
Chef Cal:
Oh, very good.
Kathy Byerly:
And so a lot of people get that.
Chef Cal:
It’s pretty cool.
Kathy Byerly:
And once you’re on that, then I can send you all that, you know, all the special.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, I get. Your specials are going on. You have. Yeah. And then you have a family, a.
Kathy Byerly:
Family meal deal right now.
Chef Cal:
Family meal deals. So you got a family out there. And what’s that consist of?
Kathy Byerly:
So it’s a spaghetti with two large meatballs on it. And then you can choose from our house salad or Caesar salad.
Chef Cal:
Large. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt here, folks, but if you have, if you haven’t had their house salad, you need it. I mean, I copied it.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
I mean, that’s one of the highest compliments a person, a Chef can give is copying someone else’s stuff. And I did it when independent living, and they just loved it. It’s got egg and salami and it’s got us the tomatoes.
Charlew Byerly:
Nappy.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, the nappy on there. I mean, it’s, it’s literally, it’s like a mini Chef salad. Like a mini italian Chef salad. Yeah. You know, so I highly recommend. Recommend that one. So I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I thought that that salad mouth started watering, so. So for a family deal, you said they get the salad, they get the.
Kathy Byerly:
Pasta, they get the meatballs, and then they get a half loaf of garlic bread. Half loaf of garlic bread for $29.95.
Chef Cal:
Okay. And is there a pizza involved?
Kathy Byerly:
Not on that one.
Chef Cal:
Okay. I thought you had a different one. We did a different one with the pizza.
Kathy Byerly:
This one. This time we’re just doing pasta.
Chef Cal:
And is it? And what would that normally feed?
Kathy Byerly:
This could feed up to three to four because our meatballs are huge.
Charlew Byerly:
The pasta. There’s a lot of pasta in there. I think it’s a 1220 24oz.
Chef Cal:
I can’t remember.
Charlew Byerly:
It’s a big plate.
Chef Cal:
Huge. Huge oval. So. So you do specials periodically and then you. Because I get. I get them. They pop up on my phone. They pop up in my email.
Chef Cal:
It’s just, you know, you need to get that information out. You need to keep things fresh. Why don’t you tell me about your, your dessert that you showed me how to make the other day down there with your big machine.
Charlew Byerly:
Oh, goodness gracious. So I like gelato. I’ve had a lot of gelato in my life. Best gelato I have was from Italy. I was there for about 30 days, and I ate it every single day. Well, years went by and I started thinking back that time, and I go, I can make that stuff myself. So I got a machine. It’s a very big machine.
Charlew Byerly:
It does about four gallons at a time, but I only do a gallon, you know, what is it, a liter? Everything’s in metric. But I ended up starting off by scratch. Scratch. And I was. Thought I was killing it. And then I decided, this ain’t fun. So Kathy looked up something online, and we hooked up with a company in Italy that sends you the base of it, but we still add everything else into it. But we’re using their base.
Charlew Byerly:
It did get better because Mrs Byerly had to go stick her nose into my recipe and say, we’re going to fix this.
Chef Cal:
She did it.
Charlew Byerly:
She did it. Incredible. The other day, she made gelato. I did the bases and I put them in the walk in box and come back the next morning and she’s whooping out three. Three. Three batches, and she goes, you got to try this. And I tried, and I go, holy mackerel.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, I couldn’t believe it because she does everything great.
Chef Cal:
Well, the thing, you know, the thing about gelato is that it’s. It’s so much. I like it so much better than ice cream here. Pretty much all we get in the United States is ice cream.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
You know, and I went to Vivoli’s in Venice. No, no, I’m sorry. That was in Florence, Italy, and up in Germany, where we were competing, there was an Italian on every street corner selling gelato. So I just fell in love with it over there. And you come back here and it’s just not the same. And, and for someone to understand it, you know, you can actually sit there and grind, you know, with the hand crank and you can make ice cream. You have to have the machine that has so much horsepower that it can whip enough to get all that air in there so it doesn’t come out like ice cream, it just velvet. And you generally have about.
Chef Cal:
How many flavors do you generally have available?
Kathy Byerly:
Right now I have four. I have salted caramel, chocolate mint, vanilla and wild cherry.
Charlew Byerly:
And we also have a.
Chef Cal:
We do a. Oh, we have a peach.
Charlew Byerly:
The peaches. Yeah. I’m getting ready to make a different one. And the other one is a rocky road. Most popular is the vanilla. And then that’s an old fashioned France vanilla bean. And then. But the big one is the rocky road.
Charlew Byerly:
The rocky road sells out like you wouldn’t believe.
Chef Cal:
Well, I think that being able to just, you know, have something that is literally made, well, you know, right there where you’re at, you know, this isn’t something that people are buying. And obviously you can buy gelato from, you know, large, you know, manufacturers and have it, you know, shipped and such, but you’re not going to get the quality. Yeah, exactly. Just like, just like what you do with your, with your pizza. You know, what I want, I wanted to get back to that, too. Also pizza. And I noticed when I’m doing pizza, there’s something about the way it feels, you know, when you, you’re mixing it up and you can touch it and it, and you, and it’s just got that softness, it’s got that air in it and you don’t have, you know, any more of that stickiness and. Yeah, and when you make a pizza from scratch, you can do that.
Chef Cal:
You just pull something out, thaw it out, run it through a pizza press and then run it through a, you.
Charlew Byerly:
Know, well, a lot of people have frozen dough. They bring in frozen dough and then they let it proof we, we’ve made dough. Well, my grandmother started dough in 1950. No, a little after 59. Yeah, probably 62 or 63. And she started making her own dough. She had her own recipe and then, you know, just, we kept that same recipe. So we always, you know, we always use a mother dough and from the, you know, batch before and keep it straight and we make, so we make it all ourselves.
Charlew Byerly:
Probably equals to about ten to 15 boxes every single day just to keep up. We have on stock, we have 30 boxes. And then every day you have to replenish that.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, and for people that don’t understand, a box is fresh made dough rolled up in rounds that would make like a dozen pizzas each. Yeah. Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
So it’s twelve and mediums is eight and the largest six.
Chef Cal:
So that’s like, you know, when you think. Yeah, each and then there’s 30 of those. So you guys are knocking out, knocking out a lot of pizzas, but you’re knocking out a lot of high quality pizzas and that’s what makes, makes the big difference. So, you know, if you’re looking back at, just to reminisce for a minute back at your younger self going into this business, what are some of the things that if somebody was going into, you were talking to somebody and they were 20 or so and they wanted to get in the restaurant business, what would be your reaction to them and trying to explain about the business? Because it’s got some challenges these days.
Charlew Byerly:
It does. It gets tougher and tougher regulations and all this stuff. I would definitely tell them to go for it and come with. Work with me. Get paid to see what it’s really like.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. It’s like an elect apprenticeship or a journeyman. Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah. I’ve had quite a few people come to work with me, and in regards to being 20 years old, I feel like I’m 30 now and I’m actually 60. So the restaurant keeps you young. You’re moving all the time. You don’t need exercise outside of the restaurant.
Chef Cal:
I mean, 35, I look 25.
Charlew Byerly:
But I would tell a 20 year old right now, show me your recipes, because that’s going to be your biggest thing. People aren’t going to come to your place if you’re going to just unfreeze something and stick it in the microwave.
Chef Cal:
I know that I always give. I always gave my apprentices notebooks. I said, you write everything down. Because I found out, going through it, looking back, like, what was that? Oh, okay. I remember. So I had it all written down. But for me, I know that you really need to love two things for it to really be something that you’re going to get a lot of appreciation out of for your life wise. And I would say it comes down to, you need to love food.
Chef Cal:
You need to love working with food. You need to love touching and putting it on plates and making it pretty, and you need to love all that. And then the other side of that is you need to love people.
Charlew Byerly:
Yep.
Chef Cal:
And we talked about that. And because it’s a, it’s a. It’s a very much people pleasing, you know, industry.
Charlew Byerly:
Oh, yeah.
Chef Cal:
And I think if those two things, if you had that for love, for food, you know, you can’t just be the person that says, you know, everyone comes over your house and you make this particular dish that’s really good. And they say, well, you should open a restaurant. You should open a restaurant. That’s probably why, you know, six out of every ten restaurants close, you know.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah. My grandmother did that basically when she was younger, a lot younger. She was actually in her forties, started thinking about opening a restaurant. She was a babysitter amongst two other jobs, waitress and something else. And she ended up having her friends going, Mary, you got to open a restaurant. She was like, yeah, whatever. And then she decided at 48 years old to open a restaurant and she killed it. When she started, she was 48 years old.
Chef Cal:
But that’s a work ethic. Those people just come from a different.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, the Italians, they love people and they love making food.
Chef Cal:
There you go, people in food. All right, we’ll be back to talk a little bit more about people food. And again, cooking like a pro. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to cooking like a pro. Chef Cal. And again with my special guest, Charlew and Kathy Byerly from Charlew’s restaurant. Just the best pizza you’re going to find, folks.
Chef Cal:
And again, we talk about that amazing house salad they do. And variety of pastas. And you know that chicken, it’s the one that you put the sun dried tomatoes in.
Charlew Byerly:
No, that’s a chicken fettuccine, Alfred.
Chef Cal:
That’s saute. That’s nice.
Charlew Byerly:
We moved over to roasted, a nice roasted tomato, but we still have the sun dried. Sun drives a little tougher, got more, you know, more chewy, which is great. It’s a complex taste. It adds something to it. Texture.
Chef Cal:
Yep. And let’s see. So some of the difficulties we talked about that we don’t want to spend too much time on employees because I think anyone that knows what’s going on in the world probably knows the challenge that’s started at Covid and has continued on about just people, don’t it? To work.
Charlew Byerly:
It has gotten better. It’s gotten way better. We’re seeing a new generation coming up right now. That is incredible. Incredible.
Chef Cal:
Encouraging. Yeah, really encouraging. I haven’t been in the hiring market for probably a year and a half, two years now. And back then it was, you know, you set up 20 interviews and two people show up.
Charlew Byerly:
That’s what we had.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And we know. And one of them you hire and they walk. They quit the first day. I mean, folks, it’s really, I think, again, you need to be. You need to have what I call a servant’s heart.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
Because you are a servante, you know, you need to be okay. Because this is your job. And the old adage is, it’s better to give than receive. That is true. You can literally work in a restaurant, and there’s just this excitement about being involved in other people’s celebrations. You know, I mean, think about, you do a wedding and everyone’s just, you know, all dressed up and, oh, the food is great and this and that, and it’s an exciting thing. But anyway, so we’ve talked a little bit about cost, and it’s. But it’s across the board.
Chef Cal:
I mean, it’d be a little different if you could move your menu around a little bit, maybe say, okay, well, maybe we’ll sell, you know, I don’t know, half BLT. So they only have to pay for half so much bacon or something. I mean, you could at least have a chance to modify. But when it’s a blanket straight across the grocery shelf, man, everything has just gone up and. And it doesn’t matter what it is.
Charlew Byerly:
It wasn’t like that in the beginning. It was slow, slow. And then, you know, your major, your critical items went up little by little. Then all of a sudden, like you said, it blanketed out. And some of the things. It was weird because cheese went down. Our number one usage is cheese, and that went down to $1.68 a pound. And now it’s up to 280.
Charlew Byerly:
We don’t know why. Well, kind of know why, but I’m not going to go into it. But it, you know, things started ramping up. Now what I’m seeing is a few items are falling back. Not very many. Probably 2% to 4% are falling back down.
Chef Cal:
Well, I think it goes back to supply and demand. And if demand or supply, rather keeps going on these industries, you have to remember back when Covid hit folks, I remember I couldn’t get applesauce, and I was doing retirement, independent living. And applesauce is a pretty important thing. Right. But they had the applesauce, but they didn’t have the cans for.
Charlew Byerly:
To put it in pizza box.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Because everybody just went, you know, when Covid hit everything stop. Yep. And they stopped making it, even the containers. And. And it took a while to come back. So I think I can see where. What you say that as they start, you know, increasing the supply.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
You know, eventually, once your supply gets overabundance, that the cost has to come down or they’re going to start throwing stuff away.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, look at the shipping containers. I mean, those things that scared the you know what out of me. Yeah. When they said, then I go, here we go again. Even though we don’t get a lot of stuff from overseas, you’re still going to be affected by it.
Chef Cal:
Yep.
Charlew Byerly:
And so that was a big one. I’m so glad they settled that because that was freaking me out. We couldn’t get pizza boxes. I was going to offer.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Charlew Byerly:
During COVID I was going to offer, bring in your own pizza box.
Chef Cal:
I’ll give you a dollar off. Bring in your own. Bring in your box. Bring in anything.
Charlew Byerly:
Yeah, don’t throw it away.
Chef Cal:
Care if it’s a shirt box. Okay. I just think that, you know, again, I just really hope that this, that this whole circle thing of coming back with mom and pop restaurants and I was with somebody in the medical profession the other day for an appointment and, and he said, I’ll just, where do you go eat in this town? I said, well, usually I go to the grocery store and then I go, and then I go home to my kitchen because of price and stuff, but also from quality, the quality of foods when you come into something. And I’m not going to, you know, talk about, well, let’s put it this way. So let’s just put a blank franchise out there so it could be any franchise, okay? Any one of these restaurants that you see in this town that you also see in every other town. Folks, that food is mostly being made in a commissary. It’s being made somewhere else in a large factory. I’ve had been, it’s manufactured, then it’s distributed off like the soups or they come in a bag.
Chef Cal:
You just drop it in the water and then you got your potato chow, cheddar or something like that. And, and they are, that’s how they do these things because that’s the only way that they can get consistency because, you know, doing a, doing these massive high volumes of three, four, 5600, 700 people a day, these places, like, you know, like a, if you go to like an olive garden or something like that, where something is going to suffer in the making of that food and the production of it and that whatever that is, is going to make, have an effect in the final flavor.
Charlew Byerly:
Well, good example. We just had an individual needed extra hours, went to work for another company. I won’t name the name, obviously, but in town. And I says, how’s it going? He goes, good. He goes, I just wish I can create something like I do at your place. And I says, what do you mean? Goes, well, I’m opening bags. I go, so your job is a scissor man? I got, I call that scissor man. And he looked at me and started laughing.
Charlew Byerly:
He goes, but you know what, it’s kind of nice because I don’t have to, I don’t have to make 15 different items in one day. I just open the bag.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, so, so, you know, it doesn’t cost nearly as much, right?
Charlew Byerly:
It’s mass produced.
Chef Cal:
And I remember one time I was a sous Chef down in southern California and I just wasn’t getting enough money. Just got married. I just had my first child. And, uh, anyway, and so I took another job and it was at a Marie Callenders. This happened to be the number one Marie calendars in their chain down in Bakersfield. And I’ll tell you, I just I, all you did was slam stuff out. The volume was just crazy. And then one thing that I noticed is that I couldn’t find any seasonings because they don’t want you to season anything.
Charlew Byerly:
Our, our spice is, our spice line is 10ft long, two shelves deep. And that’s, it’s all just spice. I know it because I have to do inventory on it. It really, really stinks.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Well, when you take, you know, you have, you know, 150 different ingredients that are fresh and you’re putting those together, that’s what really makes a difference. So as we wind down here again, we’re talking with Charlew and Kathy from Charlew’s restaurant down in the factory outlet stores. Is that what that’s called? Gateway, right in front of a Walmart. Everyone knows where Walmart is. But anyway, they do lunch and dinner seven days a week. All kinds of deals. Go online to charlers.com and, and, and get on there.
Chef Cal:
What was the program, you call it? The loyalty.
Kathy Byerly:
The loyalty program.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, loyalty program that they send this, they have all kinds of deals. So that’s always a good thing. And again, we’re always looking for a good place to eat. And remember, folks, let’s support our mom and pops out there, you know, and really make a concerted effort because if not, you know, you’re, you’re not going to have any mom and pops, you know, and that’s just, that’s just unfortunate way that it goes.
Christa: Thank you so much for spending time with us. Until next time, we hope you’ll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen. So we’ll be with you again next week with food, flavor and fun right here on cooking like a pro podcast.
