This week's guest is Matt Hasen, who joins us for a Colona British Columbia. Matt has had over a 20-year career in the industry when he started out as a bar back and moved on to bartending, managing, and currently as a head bartender. Matt has successfully worked his way off to being one of the top 10 bartenders in Canada through Diagio World Class. Matt is also a recipient of a kidney transplant five years ago after living with kidney disease for over a decade.
Matt discusses how overcoming his health issues have helped him to focus on his career. Currently, Matt is working as the head bartender at Skinny Dukes' Glorious Emporium in Colona, and you can find it on Instagram at matt.tender and check out the show notes for the links of more information. Enjoy the show. We are back with another episode of the industry podcast.
My name is Kip Saunders. I'm your host, Dan Soretta. Is the producer extraordinaire of the show? What is happening, man?
Not too much. I'm not a standard recapitital in my life. Yeah. You want to talk about it at all?
Nope. Okay, perfect. Dan had a night on Friday night. We'll just leave it at that.
At my bar, in fact, Babylon Sisters, a wine bar, up down Waterloo, wine cocktails beer. All everything you need is that Babylon Sisters bar up town. We have a big New Year's event coming up featuring Mary Catherine Palazzo in the early part of the evening with a wine and food pairing deal there. And then myself and Dan are going to make a glorious return to our DJ roots and close out tonight.
We're going to want to check that out. Larry Warden and DJ Mittens. I'll try to take a little bit less out of your room. Good luck with that.
Yeah. So you want to check that out on the years? And then of course, if you're in downtown Kitchener, my other bar is Sugar Run, Speak Easy, that's in downtown Kitchener. And we also have a Ramen-Elise band playing on the years Eve.
You can check it out right for tickets coming up shortly for that. It's at Babylon Sisters bar and at Sugar Run bar. You can find out all the events that are happening there. And yeah, come support local business if you're in Kitchener Waterloo.
Okay? Because they got enough money. Yeah. They don't need your help.
So we have a great guest as always joining us in just a second. Matt Hasen will be with us from Kelowna BC. Before we get to him, we should mention if you like what we're doing here on the show, the best way to support us is to subscribe, rate and review. I keep telling you this because we really want you to do it.
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I'm good. How are you guys? We are all right. You know.
Thanks for the invitation. This is really kind. Appreciate it. Coming to us from Kelowna.
What's the scene in Kelowna BC these days for? Whether bars, however you want to talk about. Let's see. Kelowna is growing in the cocktail game the last five or six years.
A lot of bartenders have stepped up. A lot of places have actually got cocktail and mixology involved. A lot of bartenders are coming to Kelowna for the reaches of fruits, veggies, farms, all that sort of stuff. The wines, the distilleries, the breweries.
It's growing. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And you actually have been one of the top 10 bartenders in the Azure world class, right?
The last two years. Yeah. Two years. So how does one go without receiving an award like that?
Do people seek you have to do? Do people seek you better? Do you have to have a competition? Or how does that work?
Yeah. So it's a D'Azio world class is a global cocktail competition. There's three top competitions in the world. One being betrone, one being Bacardi and then D'Azio is the global front runner.
So it's an open invitation to any bartender in whatever country takes place. You get through the entry rounds and then you go to the regionals and then you get wired down to top five in east and west. And then they come together for the national finals somewhere in Canada. It's by either pure luck or or a fortuneality or humbling.
It's been named one of Canada's top 10 bartenders last two years. So it's pretty cool. It's amazing. Well, in my experience, that's very rarely luck.
You're humbling. You're humblin' this there. But it's okay. You're okay.
It's okay to say you're good. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about how you got into the business originally. Maybe give us the roots of your first couple of jobs, how you start in the business and we'll go from there.
Well, I got started with C-E-L-E-T-R-19. I figured getting into a bar would be a great place to meet girls. 19 years old. One of those key things, great place to meet people became social.
And that just kind of like worked my way through university. So I worked at a couple of pubs, like local pubs. And then when I was going to university, the bar up there, needed a bartender. So it was great to work there, a couple nightclubs, and then off and on, just kind of around the world, basically, it's helped open a bar in Nicaragua, which was really cool about seven years ago.
Okay. Let's stop you right there before you go. Any further? How does that come to be?
Like, how did you work in... Did you grow up in DC? I grew up in Vancouver. Okay.
So you grew up in Vancouver. How do you end up in a opening a bar in Nicaragua? What's the story behind that? Well, we were following...
I was looking on Vancouver Island and we were following this friend of mine. She has a yoga page and she lives in San Juan Del Centor. San Juan Del Centor, San Juan Del Centor. She had a posting come up on one of her blogs, saying her friend Jackson is looking for a restaurant manager for a boutique sur-hotel he just opened.
So I thought, what a really good opportunity. So I messaged her and I got his contact information and we spoke for a couple weeks, like what I did. So he came and said, I've offered me a contract to come down to help him open up an open up a bar in his boutique hotel. Right.
So, okay. What year was that? Sorry? That was 2013.
2013. So that was around the time that I started because I was the stretch where I was getting over the local bartending here and I wanted to get there. I was either going to open my own spot or I was going to go do some more international bartending and a lot of people were telling me about Nicaragua around that time. So you've seen us and just been developing around that time.
I was here in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and I bet in Costa Rica I love it. That's basically where my plan is to end up in my last few years. But people were just telling me about Nicaragua constantly. Like, like cheap standard of living and but also like it was starting to develop as a tourist destination but not as well known as like a Costa Rico or like going to places in Mexico or whatever.
Right? No, not at all. It's like I first went to Costa Rica about 2005 and then when I went to Nicaragua in 2013, it felt like Costa Rica was in 2000. Right.
Yes, exactly. And then on that come up of like, hey, we're interested in bars. I mean the national drink, Florida, Canada, if anybody wanted to open up a bar, they're contacts with one of the best rums in Central America. They were down to help out anybody.
They would put their name on stuff. They would purchase stuff for you because having Florida, Kenya, Rome is huge. Yeah. But they were really, really helpful in that.
Right. Yeah. We had Jules Ulyssia. She was a previously Florida, Canada ambassador and she was headed down to Nicaragua to go to the main distiller.
And she was talking about how awesome it is there with the volcanoes and crazy. Yeah. So how long are you there for? I was there for a year and a half.
A year and a half. Yeah. How did you say so long? Yeah.
So you do, you have to leave the border because it was just a tourist visa. You have to leave the border. So you just drop down to Costa Rica for a day and then pop right back. Oh, really?
Yeah. We eventually... We had a guest, but you know, we had a guy that was considered our security guard, our customs guy. He used to be ex-military.
So if I needed to like, if we wanted to renew our visa without actually like crossing the border, he would just drive into the nog one. He would just pay for it to get up. Yeah. Interesting.
And so basically, you're trying to bring like a craft cocktail scene to that scenario or is it just like straight bar? Like what were you mostly doing? Well, we were doing... You just wanted to have a bar that people had drinks they couldn't normally get.
So it was being at a boutique surf hotel. We're talking like one of the best ways is put boy out a wreath in Nicaragua and that's what the hotel was. So you had about four of like the world's best places to surf on the Pacific, right? Within like a half hour drive.
So people were looking at like basic cocktails, peanut coladas that weren't really known, but like, you know, we went to Menagua to pick up groceries from the grocery store or the grocery store and we saw... I saw Clonado, which really? Any Canadian you're like, Clonado, what's this? Talked the owner of the grocery store.
He's like, we had a Canadian guy ordered this about two months ago and never came back. It was a whole palette. We had Caesars on the beach. Yeah, I know it was indiduction.
The Nicaraguan workers were like, what are you doing mixing tomato water? It was pretty funny. But we had any Canadian who heard that there were Caesars up on it. We had a lot of people come through saying we heard you had Caesars.
So it was a really trap for Canadians to come up and say, yeah, yeah. Did you do a lot of surfing while you were there? Yes, I am a very bad surfer. I will never be very good, but you're there every day.
You're just in the water. You're having fun. You're knocking your shoulder out. But it was really fun.
It was a really cool experience. I literally knocked myself out when I was learning to surf. I was, you know how the board's tied to your ankle or whatever, right? I was down in Australia at Bonsai Beach and trying to learn with a couple of buddies.
We were all learning to get away and take lessons or shit. So we were just standing along the beach and talking to each other about what we were doing right or wrong, right? Just trying to learn together. I'm a hand-talker.
No one here can see except the two people I'm talking to. So I let drop my board to explain what I was doing to him. At that point, this giant wave came up and drove the board right into the bottom. I'm not fucking cold.
Yeah, it was a short surfing adventure. Okay, so the show is not actually about me. Let's talk more about, I see you come back from Nicaragua. Why did you decide to come back?
I came back. So I've had kidney disease since about, so I was 26. So when I got back from Nicaragua, I was 33. My kidney disease was getting worse.
So I had to leave Nicaragua to come back to Vancouver to go get with my kidney team. I went to a Soyuz, which is a southern interior town in BC. My folks are retired there. So I talked conversation with them about, you know, I've been either traveling or away for the last 15 or so years.
So I thought I'd get my kidney team meet with them, live in a Soyuzuz, my parents were a bit because I haven't really been around. And then just kind of connected there with the kidney team. And that kind of just stayed there for the last five years until I needed a transplant. Right, so that's crazy.
You needed a fucking kidney transplant. Like just talking to me a little bit about like where your head's at when something like, you've been dealing with this disease for so long and thinking you can probably just manage it. I'm assuming is what your thought process is. And then all of a sudden it's like, no more.
You're gonna have to get a fucking transplant. I must be scared of shit. It was, it was very scary. It was dealing with, I've been a type one diabetic since I was seven.
So health and watching myself over the years has always been at the forefront of what I'm doing. But kidney disease on top of that is very, very difficult. So when you have kidney disease, you're not allowed to eat. Anything healthy because your kidneys process everything.
So as a diabetic, you're eating whole grains, you're having whole wheat and healthy things. But you can't have those foods when you have kidney disease because your kidneys will overwork and then go downhill. Your kidneys are basically your batteries for life. So if I was doing a 10 or 11 hour gardening shift, that was all I had the energy to do to get home, go to sleep, wake up to do it again the next day.
It's a lot. And then the foods, it's a funny thing. When I met my girlfriend now, it was gonna so I used, and I wasn't allowed to eat basically anything. So my protein allotment for a day was one and a half grams of protein.
So what that means is basically the most protein I'm allowed is probably a half of a cheese stick. Jesus. Right? The book of stuff I wasn't allowed to eat, it looked like an encyclopedia.
You're not allowed to have anything basically. It's very tough. It's very, very tough. What do you eat, apparently?
So you're looking at like, so if I wanted a potato, like mashed potatoes, I'd have to boil them four times in order to get the potassium out in the phosphorus out. You're allowed 125 milligrams of sodium a day. Oh, I'm gonna say I'm gonna take those days. Yeah.
So like basically a piece of bread is 115 milligrams of sodium. So what you're in, what you end up doing is you have to make your own food. And then you have to make the whole food that you eat, because you know everything, you know, what's going into it. Avoiding salt.
And that was pretty intense for the last two years of kidney disease before it kept going down. So that was very intense. So like, I'm kind of curious about this because it's like I would feel like I would just get so fucking exhausted that I would mostly just not eat that much. Yeah.
It's, you need, as a diet that I need to eat. Right? So you need energy, you need to get through your long shifts. And if your blood sugars go low and you're crashing and you need to force yourself to eat.
And it was a, it's a very difficult situation because you have so much work, you have to do to very few things and then you have the same time you have to bartend for you know because he said he's for like 10 or 11 hours so it was really he was really fucking like bartending because it seems like almost the worst job that you could be doing because it does take so much energy and you do work long since deep into the company like yeah for me it was the way I just ride it to people in the last year when I was I was functioning on 11% kidney function for the last year before my transplant and that's what I'm functioning on a liver function but the way I just ride with the people was bartending was a great distraction so at work I'm making drinks I'm talking to people I'm being social and when I'm not at work I'm at home thinking about okay what are my next steps what are my next blood work when's all this sort of stuff so for myself it was just a great distraction to like get through the day and push myself to the next day yeah a bit of a beer or a bit of a drink some like every couple weeks or like that yeah so alcohol alcohol was allowed but you weren't I wasn't gonna take any chances on like damaging a kidney because I was I think my real fear was dialysis and that was my real fear because I had to go when you have a kidney disease we have to be diseased you have a when you go below 20% they take you to the hospital to get you to meet the dialysis way and to meet dialysis patients and like as a 37 36 year old having to go somewhere for three times a week for nine hours a day was very frightening and so when you get okay let's talk about the transplant we will talk about the service industry that's what the fuck is that but this is obviously super interesting yeah like when you are so in Canada you're now recognizing you need a kidney transplant someone's told you that's it you're gonna transplant right so like are you now on a list or how does that work so you go on a list they give you two options so you go on a list you go on the national transplant list or you can find a kidney donor so a living donor exactly so I it took me about two weeks after I got the news that I was down to about 12% when on social media and just said everybody hey I've done this for a while just letting you know that this is where I'm at with my kidney disease if anybody would like to step up to see if there are mass for it to be a volunteer here's a contact information info number in Vancouver I think a day later it's very humbling to me to think that like I have 14 people that I knew from my entire career that lived around the world asking how they can get involved in what they do to get tested it's a very humbling thing to experience that you've had an impression on people that they're willing to do what it's crazy it's absolutely crazy to think about and it turned out that I was driving up to Penticton once a week to bartend at a new craft cocktail bar that opened up from a soy use that was a 40 minute drive every Friday night would be that 30 Thursday Friday Saturday one of the guys that worked there his name was Josh I knew him for two months he stepped up and offered to donate a kidney Jesus Christ like that's incredible like you like you I've been a little bit overwhelmed by like somebody who you basically worked with for two months saying I will give you my kidney and we all know you can live with one kidney but still that's like most of us are a little nervous about something like that it was it's still to this day is my life I look at it as November 7th 2017 any day after that is this is all been extra and all because of Josh so I'm amazing yeah and so how has your life changed since you got the kidney like with regards to your kidney disease like are you still have you're still considered you're still considered that you have kidney disease okay I'm washed by my kidney team I've got blood work twice a month and they can just check the numbers with COVID they came around it was very good when you have a kid when you have a transplant you're on you know suppressants so your immune system doesn't wake up and realize that's not your kidney and try to take it out so cold it was a real scary experience for me because I have no immune system I avoided COVID for a year and a half and then last year got it while I was working and I was in the hospital for three weeks and almost died twice so shit man yeah like holy fuck and what about with your diet are you allowed to crazy like the second day after my transplant surgery they asked my girlfriend Caitlin if because my potassium numbers were so low because I was about to eat real food so they asked her to go downstairs to grab a bag of salt and your chips diet coke and a pepperoni stick three things I haven't allowed to eat eating for five years that's the greatest joy in my life well you should do is try and get really fucking fat now because that's a crazy story Matt well I mean congratulations on still being around and like and honestly from like somebody who's like the reason we do this show in in general and like the one I did again my life do is I like I really feel passionate about the service industry for somebody who's had to go through everything you've had to go through and still want to do this job you're clearly very passionate about it too so yeah thanks for sticking with us I appreciate it this is pretty cool yeah yeah I can be sometimes I want to go back to the bartending part but okay so now you you got your transplant you obviously the good news about the service industry is I'm sure during many these periods you had to be completely off work but you could like somebody who's got your bona fides and credentials can now probably find a job wherever you want so that's that's the bonus of the service industry it's not like you've got you're working in a bank and also you offer a year right yeah right so what like when you when you got the transplant you were back on your feet you were able to work again what did you do next I went to work in a so-called use my friends there's two bars and so I use my friend owns one of them so when I was was in van for two months getting healed up and then they allowed me to go back home to relax after a couple months of that they said you can go back to work if you like so my friend able to set me up at this bar because he needed to help so I did that for two years and then my partner wanted to move to Kelowna bigger city more spots a couple of my contacts in Kelowna we had some really good spots to work at so I was just pretty much you know go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do and I really my real focus after transplant surgery was you know trying to get better each and every day of for bartending and see what I can do and create a guest experience it's really unique and finding spots that can you know how can I take my game to the next level that's all it is and so what's your philosophy when it comes to like creating a cocktail list for a bar that you're like you're the head bartender or the GM of or running or different situation like what do you like to put into a list that you think best expresses your creativity but also serves the guest for me it's always been one of purpose and intent I think when you're creating a cocktail list for your space you have to understand your space you have to understand the menu have a real big thing with attaching story with menu to guests and a kitchen you kind of want to connect everything together we just launched a new menu at skinny dukes and that's what I told the bartender's there when we were designing it was everything has to have purpose and intent what is the purpose of this drink and what is the purpose of the garnish do you garnish and what is the intent of this drink how does it connect to the menu that's an easy way to relay that sort of story to the guest and story to the server so they understand why this drink is there it's more like nostalgia for me it creates an experience where someone says hey can you create something for my childhood and that's going to bring a guest back and keep bringing them back interesting and so what like when you moved to Colona like we touched on this a little bit at the beginning of the interview but like what I talked to me a little bit about this like I'm in the cologne in since I was in high school so what's the scene like and what's there was definitely no craft cocktail back then so talk to me talk to me about the bar scene in the cologne and how it's developing well the bar scene started there was two guys Dave Simpson and Jerry Joe at a cologne they work they're pretty much considered the like og's of cocktail bartending they were the ones that brought recognition from cologne at down to Vancouver Jerry Joe was the brown form and Jack Daniels rep for years in Vancouver really really good human being him and Dave really pushed the cocktail movement and there was kind of a dead space of about three years ish in cologne and then just kind of new new bartender for coming up and like there's already been a dog in cocktail competitions from a so used to cologne and brought some of the best of us into meeting the spot and show the oak and all the cocktails really are that kind of jump started the hey we need to actually do cocktails not something you know margarita based or anything that's really simple so unique flavors and using spirits that are around us there's there's really good spots and there's not a lot there's a handful of them but there's really talented bartenders and each one that are kind of bringing that to the game and showing people like how unique cocktail approaches can be seen and used and in cologne we've got access to wineries fruit vegetables all within 20 minutes to try it's crazy yeah go ahead so you focus on like sort of an organic approach of using the like sort of the natural resources that are around you yeah it's crazy and you you work with there's a lot of top chefs in the oak and all good value that you you've never even think we've got a couple that were on food network and they're like understanding of food and elements going drinks is one of the things that got me going when I was at opt-in pentecan at the craft cocktail bar that opened up the chef there James Holmes he he and I connected because he likes weird food and I like weird drinks and that kind of got me on the momentum of creating these crazy drinks you don't think exist or the flavors profiles that wouldn't exist but that's kind of what's happening now in cologne is you're getting this really great group of like young people like 25 to 33 they're just going crazy with with utilization of spirits amazing so give us an example of like something you consider like sort of a crazy out there cocktail you've developed a couple years ago I really tells the cocktail there's a bar turning Stephen and I'm gonna forget his last name but he created a clarified cereal milk punch after tales of the cocktail you know 2015 I think I really liked his approach it what he did was trying to grab that flavor of cereal milk and when I remember a couple years prior in New York going to David Chanks milk bar they're using corn flakes and milk so I really wanted to utilize how can we how can we take that approach and do something very different so one of the drinks that I've really really loved to make it for people is a golden grain clarified cereal milk punch using ruminate sherry I mean when you drink it it's completely clear but the flavor profile just in the back is golden grams and it really breaches and pulls people into some sort of child experience that's that's beautiful one thing I've been sort of discussing on the show more recently what's the number of the show again 136 so like we've had a few but like as the shows about we've been doing this for a couple years now it started during the first lockdown of the pandemic because we need something to do but one of the thing that's developed over the last couple years I found with sort of the proliferation of Instagram bartending that was necessary during the pandemic and now has sort of like veered onto a path of its own separate thing now that bars like open again is how far we can push this craft-dought-telling game before there's nowhere left to go do you have any concerns about this I think Instagram bartenders if they've never worked or stepped behind a bar I mean it's you can take a good photo of anything but you're never gonna take that right yeah right I think pushing what social media is and what it's doing for bartenders is is either either launching into something that'd be absolutely amazing or you're just making things that don't really work on a volume level sort of thing I don't know I was one of the people you've mentioned Kate being on drink masters I they messaged me before before they shot and they I went through the three interview process to be on that show oh yeah yeah I didn't make it through the last year they were like it was like we really appreciate you what public call you for season two or whatever there's a season two but I ended up watching watch straight masters for the first time last week and I was like I'm happy I'm not into the drama I think that's what it was yeah so for me I watching a bartender's what they were doing in the technique for me if there was more experience on technique of what they were utilizing to the drama it's great we have we have a Lisa done on regularly on the show who goes by the bad-ass bartender on Instagram she's from Phoenix and she was also we were talking about the show recently and what the the thing that we both agreed on is like they don't the judges don't spend and like the host don't spend enough time talking about what the process is of the drinks like some of them are doing some pretty fucking cool shit but they're not yeah but they're not but the the host isn't explaining to you what's happening yeah so like for people who like some of us now I've been bartending for 30 years and some of the stuff I wasn't really sure what they were doing at some certain points right so like so I can't even imagine how like somebody who's never worked in the service industry would have any fucking clue what they were doing so there needs to be more I don't know they need better hosts but I'm available at least it's all their stuff but but you know yeah I think it's funny I'm not a reality show guys why there's literally the first reality show I ever watched all the way through and gets it spoke to me but yeah but yeah that's enough you know but what I found was that like the way that they operate the reality show is obviously to heighten the drama to suck you in right yeah so I like it did suck me and I kept watching as a result there were so many tweaks I thought we could do with that show that like would make it better for us in the service industry but would it make it better to the average watcher that's just it I mean you're discussing like it most people behind a bar like what we get on a say a busy Friday Saturday service is I'm behind the well of my other bartender is beside me he's handling the wood people love to come sit right in front of the well and see me because they have no idea what's happening so when we're you know when you're making like unique unique things they like to watch and see what's going on but that's also a fairly small percentage of people I think Netflix has to work on what's the larger demographic and more about and of course I would love to pick the details of tau and the way he designs that in Montreal that's a great idea but I'll go to all those in at his bar and ask questions but what he was utilizing on that show is that Lloyd any of them were just crazy out the technique is what I really want to focus on right and yeah and I think that like yeah I focus a little bit more on that maybe it would it would be better to us but maybe not so much to the average viewer one thing that Lisa and I did discuss was that if you had like a speed round then I would explain to people a little bit more about what we actually do because then they would probably have to like batch some shit and I think people would be interested in that process as well right oh yeah it'd be crazy yeah I think that by teaching like there's some bartenders that don't know how to batch properly right in high volume spots so it's helping you to help our industry out of it but it's Netflix yeah yeah I know but I like to put myself in that category so where do you see your career going from here like like oh so I guess what kind of other thing I was talking about like where do you see the development of craft talking about going not just with the Instagram stuff and the garnishing and all that shit but like is there a limit to how far we can take flavor profiles as well or is there always do you feel like there's always gonna be a way you can stretch it a little further I think that there's it's just like that for me it's the analogy of technology I think it's always going to be growing moving I think utilizing bank earth is massive it has a bunch of weird stuff weird plants weird veggies weird weird things you can create flavor profiles that are unique you can utilize stuff that's that hasn't been used yet I'm not saying I know the future but I'm hoping that it keeps continuing I noticed over the last couple years that people have gotten away from you know 12 ingredient forever long cocktails and going to more of a simplistic approach but utilizing really really difficult technicality technical work to get those flavors so less ingredients but more of a flavor plan flavor profile yeah I like to call that that's what a error there was an error there and I was guilty of it too and my first bar where was I kind of liquid masturbation where you were just trying to put as many fucking ingredients in the same so you could put it on like in the description of the cot-downs like how many of us ingredients actually change the flavor profile exactly yeah yeah exactly like the key is to a good cot- on my mind is like when someone describes what's in it that you can taste every one of those fucking flavors right exactly exactly okay so what's next for you well you're happy with where you're at right now I know I'm not trying to get Matt out of the bar he's worked out currently you're bar looks pretty fucking cool and you should describe it to our listeners as well so it comes to you there but yeah like what's next on the docket as well National Docket for me is I've been saving since my transplant I've been saving up to open my own spot good for you that's always bad I don't do it everybody says don't do it it's like make me something that'll just make me get by happy as for us at the same time but like it's it's cologna such a it's an emerging market for cocktails but there it's not quite reaching the levels of outside so Vancouver is still you know Vancouver Toronto Montreal Edmonton Calgary they're all doing very great things with cocktails cologna is an emerging market shoot so it's a great space to be able to open something small that doesn't have a lot to do with it's just basic stuff but really unique profile so that's eventually what I want to do I mean I know only something is a nightmare I've got a lot of friends I own stuff and I watch their headaches consistently no I say there's a night all the time but eventually eventually my own place will probably be what I'm focusing on same as that at least awesome and okay so tell our listeners about the bar that you're currently working on while you're trying to save that mind so then come give you that money to do it it's important it's part of the Nixon hospitality group really great people local a lot of people they opened up a brewery called BNA their next location was skinny news glorious and poor him so it's kind of a 70s 80s kind of nostalgic feel it was how they had all their stuff growing up as kids they had you got stuff like Star Wars figurines we don't have a lot of it's really unique it's more like a 70s 80s record room sort of thing like your grandma's house you're feeling you go and sit down it's a brick very well done the food menu is unbelievable and it's just unique unique spot we don't have a lot of bottles of beer which are great we got another highlight for those great nights but pretty a pretty cool experience we got the champagne what else do you need well we checked it out on line before we interviewed you today and we were both saying it reminds us very much of like one of the classic bars here in Kishan Waterloo as well that we love so it looks like a dope spot to work yeah okay tell our listeners where they can go check out your shit on social media because that's the game you say it is I find on Instagram at map.tender so that's you that's Instagram that's all you're finding okay that's enough like there's too many yeah all right well thanks so much this was super fun to talk to you thanks for doing it really appreciate this is really cool yeah all right well thanks again and I'm glad you're doing well stay healthy my friend we need people like you in the industry appreciate it have a good day guys thank you so much