Emery Whalen Has Nine Restaurants and One Big Mission

Some guests walk into a conversation and immediately make you feel like you've known them forever. Emery Whalen is one of those people.Emery is the CEO and co-founder of QED Hospitality, a nine-restaurant group with locations across New Orleans, Nashville, and Kentucky that is doing something increasingly rare in the hospitality industry: Putting people first, actually meaning it, and building a business around that belief that has lasted a decade.QED stands for "quod erat demonstrandum,” Latin for "Thus it has been proven." It's a punctuation mark at the end of a mathematical theorem, and for Emery and her co-founder Chef Brian Landry, it was a declaration: They weren't going to talk about doing things differently. They were going to prove it.In this episode, host Sarah Perkins sits down with Emery for a conversation that covers the full arc of a remarkable life in food, hospitality, and community. From growing up in New Orleans with a mother who accidentally served potpourri-garnished fish, watching Hurricane Katrina reshape her entire future, teaching French and Spanish in New Orleans public schools through food, and co-creating a culinary scholarship program and micro-loan fund for Louisiana farmers, Emery arrived at restaurant ownership not because she wanted to, but because she realized it was the only way to do things the way she believed they should be done.QED’s first restaurant Jack Rose is a love letter to New Orleans—maximalist, warm, full of sequins on a Saturday night. And when COVID hit, instead of closing the doors on their team, Emery spun up a telehealth customer service operation in less than a week to keep every single employee working. The image of a sous chef navigating electronic medical records, and a grandmother in New Jersey sending cookies to a Nashville bartender who helped her reset her iPhone, says everything about the kind of organization QED is.In this episode, we cover:Growing up in New Orleans with a grandmother whose house always turned into a partyWhat makes New Orleans cuisine unlike any other regional food in AmericaHurricane Katrina, Princeton, and the city that shaped everythingTeaching French and Spanish through food and why leaving teaching was one of the hardest decisions she's ever madeMINO (Made in New Orleans): the culinary scholarship program she co-createdMicro-loans for Louisiana farmers and the milk farmer who started it allMeeting co-founder Chef Brian Landry and being wooed into entrepreneurship she didn't wantWhat QED stands for and why they chose the nerdiest name possibleSpinning up a telehealth customer service company in less than a week during COVIDThe "be nice or leave" policy and how she enforces it gracefullyNine restaurants in ten years and what comes nextBrian Landry's upcoming cookbook: Recipes paired with profiles of Bayou Bar musiciansWhat people get wrong about Southern food and why it deserves more respectHer advice for women and minority founders being underestimated: take great pleasure in itThe best advice she's ever gotten: Ask people outside your industryFind Emery and QED Hospitality:Instagram: @emerywhalen, @qedhospitalityWebsite: www.qedhg.comVenues throughout New Orleans, Nashville, and KentuckySubscribe to The Perfect Bite podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen! Want to watch the entire episode? Head here to our YouTube!You can follow us on social media @perfectbitepod and sign up for our newsletter!