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“Success is just a series of failures. If you didn’t experience failure, you would actually know nothing." ~ Brian Bornemann
This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I head to Santa Monica to sit down with Brian Bornemann, chef and owner of Crudo e Nudo and Bar Fortuna. A third-generation Angeleno, Brian shares his Five Rules for How to Break Out On Your Own. He talks about how growing up around his grandfather’s garden and the Pacific Ocean shaped his cooking, and how years of putting his head down and learning prepared him to recognize an opportunity when it arrived. It is a great conversation for anyone thinking about taking that first leap or finding the confidence to take another.
One of the things I appreciate most about these conversations is when someone puts words to a feeling I have spent years trying to work through. Brian’s perspective on imposter syndrome- that everyone is living for the first time and bringing their own experiences to the table- was great to hear. Working across television, podcasts, writing, and now documentary film, there is always another room to walk into where I can convince myself that everyone else knows something I don’t. I love his willingness to put that feeling aside and get on with the work, along with his belief that every failure gives you something you can bring into your next attempt. There is a lot of freedom in allowing yourself to learn as you go, and a lot to admire in someone who keeps showing up with enthusiasm for whatever comes next.
Photo by Catherine Dzilenski.
Introduction
Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I’m on the west side in Santa Monica, hanging out with Brian Bornemann, who is the owner and chef of Crudo e Nudo and Bar Fortuna.
He’s here to share his five rules for how to break out on your own. He talks about the importance of staying ready so you don’t have to get ready, ignoring imposter syndrome, and how success is moving from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm. It’s a great conversation about Brian’s journey from growing up in Santa Monica to owning his own restaurant and bar, and fantastic inspiration for anyone who’s ever wanted to strike out on their own.
Please take a moment to rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. So let’s get into the rules here on HRN.
Growing Up and Finding His Own Path
Brian, so good to see you again. Thank you for the incredible hospitality when we were in last time at Crudo e Nudo. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, man.
Such a pleasure to feature you and chat.
You are born and bred in Santa Monica. How much of the ethos of local cooking and ingredients inform your upbringing?
I started cooking at a young age.
I didn’t consider cooking to be a career until much later in life. Third-generation Angeleno here. So I had grandparents who grew up in the city.
We were lucky to grow up on lots of land with abundant fruit trees and chickens, plenty of room to garden. Beautiful. My grandfather was an avid gardener and horticulturalist.
He’s really the one who imbued in me from a very young age how to just enjoy things at their absolute peak and prime. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I mean, it was just normal to me eating figs or peaches or blackberries or sapotes or passion fruit or guavas the best day when they’re just shining.
In learning how to tend to vines, how to grow the best tomatoes, tend the soil, etc. was something that was just part of how I spent my weekends and how I grew up. What I love doing with Crudo and my style of cooking in general is focusing on what is good here and what we are already good at doing.
Bringing the food culture back to what we have around us. That really is what drives me and informs me. We grew up with this abundant huge ocean right in front of us and yet no seafood restaurants that would focus on local fish.
We have such good ingredients. It’s insane that there isn’t more readily available resources for buying local fish or buying proper ingredients outside of a farmer’s market. That’s really what keeps me going.
You cooked in some incredible local restaurants as well. The Tasting Kitchen and Michael’s. Did you always have it in the back of your mind that you wanted to open up your own space?
When I started cooking, I really put my head down and intentionally didn’t set any goals.
I just want to cook pasta. I just want to learn how to butcher. I did not go into it being, I want to own a restaurant.
Sure. When you put your head down and just focus and just try to improve a little bit every day, every week, new opportunities get presented. If you say yes, keep applying yourself well.
Eventually it gets to the point where it became obvious to me that there is a gap. If you don’t feel that way, you certainly shouldn’t open a restaurant. I see a different way to do things and I know that I can do them.
Opening a restaurant was not a question of like, oh, do I want to do this or not? It was more like, oh, I have to do this.
What eventually gave you that confidence, that catalyst to launch the Crudo e Nudo pop-up and eventually the brick-and-mortar?
I have always described it as I played a lot of football and rugby growing up and as a running back, sometimes you’ll get the handoff and you’ll be met with a wall of bodies and you can just see this one step here, this hole opens up and then I can just run straight through it. That moment was the pandemic.
If you had a lease, you were so focused on just trying to stay alive that nobody was thinking about, oh, let me open another location. I was lucky to not have a lease at that point and have the ability to see a hole of, oh, well, everybody’s doing this takeout food stuff in to-go containers. I was like, man, if I just sliced some fish and put it on the plate and made it beautiful, gave people something totally different from what they were having at the moment, they’ll be rejoiced.
I was lucky enough to have a good amount of food media in my corner already from the crudo program that I’ve built at Viale dei Romani. Being aligned with my goals and being from here, if I took that technique that I was now associated with and known for and applied that to a sustainable local product and be like, hey, I’m from here, this is from our ocean, here’s something you already know, look at what we’re able to do in this way that doesn’t exist yet. Everybody was so focused on Japanese fish or the best stuff from New Zealand or bluefin from Spain.
There was always this exoticism to fish culture. There was this feeling that fish was better if it came from somewhere else. It’s all kind of happened at the same time that the local Ikejime movement was really taking off.
We got timing, we got everybody else tied up, we got this quality of local fish improving to a world-class level. All these things just line up, I get to run through this hole. Being able to identify that opportunity, also being a native son of Santa Monica, along with understanding what it takes to honor the local ingredients, is why I’m so excited for you to share your five rules for how to break out on your own.
Rule One: When You See a Window, Sprint Through It
A lot of the times, people are presented with an opportunity but are afraid or not confident enough to take it. Your first rule talks about what to do when that moment presents itself. What’s your rule number one?
Rule number one is when you see a window, sprint through it.
Windows don’t open up every day, sometimes it takes a major pandemic or something crazy to create that opportunity. What is unfortunate is when folks want to break out on their own or take the risk but aren’t actually willing to grab the ball and run full speed ahead, you’ve got to be able to sprint to the gap because otherwise you’re not going to make it. If you have hesitation, if you keep a foot in the door, if you’re like, well, I’m going to try this over here but I’m really going to keep a couple days a week over here as a backup plan, you’ve got to let go of the backup plan, let go of the safety net.
Otherwise, energetically and emotionally, you’re not going to make it happen.
Rule Two: Stay Ready So You Don’t Have to Get Ready
Being in the restaurant industry for so long, you can probably count on one hand the amount of times that a real opportunity has come your way. Being in this mindset allows you to act when the right moment presents itself. What’s your rule number two?
Rule number two is stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. Exactly. I just applied myself daily and weekly to being like, all right, what can I do to get better this week? What can I do better than last week? Not worrying about the people around me or the other cooks or chefs.
I want to improve this because this is important to me, whether it was my butchery or my business acumen and understanding of P&Ls and food costing, etc. If you’re coasting, if you’re just, I’m comfortable here, I’m showing up, clocking in, clocking out, you’re not staying ready. No opportunity is going to come if you’re not pushing yourself and trying to improve.
And that’s fine. It’s totally okay. It’s not how opportunity is going to strike you.
Opportunity is going to strike if you are constantly working to be ready for the opportunity. Luck is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. I think that was Thomas Edison.
You create your own luck by working to be ready.
Rule Three: Don’t Give a Single Thought to Feelings of Imposter Syndrome
Even though the opportunity might come your way, even though the moment is right, you might still feel like you’re not ready to take on that moment because you’re afraid of what other people think. Getting rid of this feeling makes up your rule number three.
Rule number three is don’t give a single thought to feelings of imposter syndrome. Toss it. One beautiful takeaway from the pandemic is that it proved that we’re all trying to figure it out.
Literally nobody knows what to do or what the plan is. In that way, it’s refreshing. It’s like, the people that I thought had it figured out, we thought they knew what to do.
Everybody is living for their first time. Nobody’s set of experiences match up with yours. Somebody who you respect or admire probably had a wildly different set of experiences.
They have no real experience that is the same as yours. This can be this lightness to that realization of, oh my God, we all equally have no idea what we’re doing. Therefore, I’m not an imposter.
I’m just the real version of me alive and in this moment. Whatever decision I make is going to be the right one. It’s either going to yield something that you’re very happy with or it could yield something that you learn from.
Either way, it’s the right decision because you’re the one doing it. The only way you’re really an imposter is if you’re trying to make decisions in the mindset of someone else. Never feel like you’re not enough or you don’t have enough experience or you don’t know what’s going on.
That imposter syndrome feeling is something that is an external competitive structure that’s placed on you by society and it is the opposite of helpful.
Rule Four: Success Is Moving from One Failure to Another Without Losing Enthusiasm
By shifting your perception on this concept of being an imposter, there’s another perception that’s equally important, which is this idea of failure. For anyone who’s had any career for any amount of time, failure is a much bigger part of it than they teach you at the beginning. What’s your rule four?
Being able to do this when failure occurs makes it be rule number four. Honestly, I get emotional as we talk about this.
I can relate.
Rule number four is a quote that’s often attributed to Winston Churchill. Success is moving from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm. That really hits home for me because if you look at the words in order, success literally is not defined by this went right or we did this well.
Success is just a series of failures. The reason that’s true is because if you didn’t experience failure, you would actually know nothing. Success is learning from these things that we quote unquote call failures.
Every time that you sign the wrong lease or choose the wrong business partner or bring on the wrong employee or structure the menu in a way that doesn’t resonate with your neighborhood, whatever the version of that for you is, every time you do that, you walk away with real embodied knowledge that will inform the next thing you do that’s great. Success is not not failing. In fact, the success is how you show up to whatever it is.
If you’re able to show up enthusiastically and be like, wow, that is so cool what we took away from this pitfall is what to me defines being successful. It’s not about getting it right. It’s just about being present with your learning.
Rule Five: Practice Not Being Attached to the Outcome
Being able to find that success over and over again in your career from the pop-up to the restaurant to your new spot can give the impression that you’ve known what the outcome is going to be from the very jump. Your fifth and final rule talks about how even with the best intentions and the best foot forward, you don’t always know how things are going to turn out. What’s your rule number five?
Rule number five is just practice not being attached to the outcome.
You have no control. This is really, really tough for people who are passionate and people who work hard. You don’t set out to close a restaurant.
You don’t set out to fire somebody. You don’t set out to dissolve partnerships. You don’t set out to get sued.
You don’t set out with these things in mind. You set out with the goal of, oh, this is what will happen if it all works. I have found over time, the more that you’re attached, this is how this has to go.
The more you energetically grip on to that needing to happen, the narrower your vision becomes, your decision making, your emotional distance from your decision making becomes weaker. Even with this new project, I finally felt like I hit a place where I was like, oh, okay, I would really enjoy this going through. I would really like this to happen.
If it doesn’t happen, I have less work to do. That sounds good too. If you’re not able to be okay with all of them, you’re only okay if this goes one way, I would highly advise you don’t do it at all.
I can almost guarantee you it’s not going to happen that way. If you can be like, okay, I’m going to be okay with every version of failure here, every version of success here. I’m not going to try to make this happen.
I’m going to just live in the moment and try my hardest every day while being okay with whatever happens. That feels good.
Visit the Restaurants
Brian, I’m glad that the outcomes of your success have allowed many of us to experience some incredible fish and restaurants in the LA area. If people want to check them out, see what you’re up to. I know that you do quite a few events. Where can they go? How can they follow along?
Crudo e Nudo has @crudo_e_nudo and a website where you can learn a lot about what we’re doing there.
We’re announcing the launch of Bar Fortuna. So look out for Bar Fortuna. Check on Crudo.
Next time I’m on the west side, you know, I’ll be swinging into your spots. Great to see you. And thanks again.
Thanks for your time. You’re the best.
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