‐ There's very few people that think about
the actual shape of pasta like I do.
I wanna create the most comprehensive pasta program
in the United States.
I want you to eat everything.
The geometry, the actual shape of pasta,
it all has meaning.
‐ Just probably one of the best pasta makers
in America, definitely handmade pasta.
‐ [Evan] How far can you push the hydration?
How far can you restrain it?
‐ Just like he does, I want people to be able to see
like, how much work went in to this bowl of pasta.
Like, but sometimes, to people, it's just a pasta.
‐ [Evan] When you dunk it,
I want the water to move in very uniform way.
‐ I mean, Evan's like, crazy.
When you have a guy who's that invested
and that singularly focused,
you end up getting a really, really great product,
but you also get like a little bit of insanity with it.
‐ It can't just be all about the romance of pasta.
It has to be a modern approach
to how to make the shape taste like
and feel like it's made by a machine,
but still have the soul of all that history
and all that work and all that technical knowledge.
You can't just make dough and throw it in the hopper
and sheet it out and make shapes.
‐ [Man] You've got a guy who refuses to comprise
and is coming back to reclaim what was
sort of taken from him.
‐ Fusilli, garganelli, caramelle, malloreddus,
briganti, casarecce, orecchiette, pappardelle, gorgitas.
With my hands, I can make 188 of the 365 documented shapes.
Passion's not the word.
I'm fucking maniacal about pasta.
‐ Evan's like this big but lovey, sweet guy.
You know, very quiet.
I'm sure as he progressed through the ranks
in his own kitchen, maybe he's a little more vocal
but ultimately Evan was a really quiet,
very astute type guy.
‐ First, we're gonna make well.
Take your hand and very simply spread the flour.
So mixing is simple.
You wanna take a fork, crack those yolks
and just start scrambling, gradually folding in
the flour from the inside of the walls.
And what we're looking for is similar
to creaming egg yolks and butter.
And now we fold.
Now it gets a little messy.
‐ Evan fits in the top one percent of the people
who've come out of this kitchen that have great raw talent
and great raw ability.
‐ What you really wanna look for is a smooth, elastic dough.
When you put your finger to it,
it's gonna spring right back.
That's what you're looking for.
‐ [Interviewer] You'd put Evan in the top one percent?
‐ Yeah, Evan's good.
Evan's successful because he's good and he cares.
‐ This is a Mattarello.
It's a rolling pin, a very large one.
I got this one in Bologna.
Now, there's a saying in Bologna.
There's a church on the hill, it's called San Luca
and my teacher always used to tell me
never stop rolling the dough until you can see
San Luca through the pasta.
You can see my hand through that.
You see how thin that is?
That's what we're looking for in this pasta.
‐ There's a lot of people who have great skill
and there's a lot of people who have great heart
but seldom you come across someone
who has great skill and great heart
and those are the ones that make it to the next level.
‐ And there we have it, our .
The second I set foot in culinary school I said to myself,
I'm gonna have my own restaurant some day.
That's the dream, right?
It smells the same.
Fuck me.
You ever seen a sumo match?
The sumo wrestlers through salt into the ring
to rid the ring of bad spirits.
And before we opened Bucato I came in here
and burned sage and I threw salt around.
Didn't work.
That was us, Los Angeles, Bucato.
I wanted to be the best pasta restaurant
in the United States.
‐ Bucato opened in 2013 and I think that it was,
without a doubt, one of the most important restaurants
at the time.
It was one the first restaurants
where it really felt like everybody
was talking about this place.
It built a sort of mystique
that you don't see with restaurants that often.
High minded pasta palace right in the heart of Culver City.
White walls and blonde woods.
The one little map of California,
the outline with knives on the wall.
They had a pasta lab upstairs.
‐ Best pasta in the city.
Go to Bucato, you know?
It's like, wow, I gotta go try that
and it certainly was the best pasta in the city.
‐ This was clearly a devotional restaurant.
This was clearly a restaurant where he was trying
to bring the type of craftsmanship
that he had seen in Italy and bring that to LA.
‐ [Farley] You used to hear details
about what was happening there.
A guy from Japan that he knows
who helps make pasta.
Then you'd get these clips of him making pasta upstairs
in this oddly triangulated room that's just full of light.
And it was like a Bruce Lee movie.
Like, he just is a zen master making pasta all day long.
‐ It was the perfect, perfect team.
I'll never put another team together like that
ever again.
There was this family bond.
‐ The fact that most of us had either worked together
or all worked under Evan at one point.
It was like cult‐like almost,
the amount of passion everybody put into it.
That brotherhood and that synergy
was pretty much instantaneous.
‐ It would take a while to get a seat sometimes,
like 45 minutes.
It's just like, and even for family it was like
we don't have any tables.
You know, the place is packed.
‐ [Evan] Let's go.
As it is, as it comes, let's go.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.
‐ And literally every 15 minutes there was five, $600
of food going out.
Like, making a lot of money and yet where's all the money?
‐ Yeah, I actually have a little portrait book
of all the employees from the first year.
So, that's Ed Keebler.
He was the other managing partner.
And, of course, Evan.
‐ We were about nine to 10 months in
and Julio and I were talking because we had one
of our paychecks bounce and we were busy
every single night and we're like, this is impossible.
‐ Cooks are getting angry and dishwashers walking out.
Vendors always calling, asking, you know, where's the money?
‐ I don't think he was oblivious.
I think he knew something was happening.
I think that for a long time he was in denial
and we would constantly be like, look,
you need to look into this more.
Oh, we were busy.
He came up to me and told me
we did 3.5 million dollars in the first year.
I don't understand what happened to the money
at that restaurant.
Nobody can figure that out.
‐ Money was mostly in the control of Ed.
It was really hurting our relationship with people.
Farmers we hurt a lot of.
I mean, any of our purveyors from the city.
‐ When no one else is gonna extend credit to you,
it was literally impossible to buy product.
When I saw the sheer volume of subpoenas implicating me
it was literally one of the most terrifying moments
of my life.
I sought counsel and that counsel's advice,
separate yourself immediately from this person
in order to protect the rest of your life.
‐ I found out somewheres around the end of service
the night before.
All the employees got an email
and literally everyone in service just stopped.
If they hadn't checked their phone, someone told them stop.
Check your phone.
I looked at it.
I was just like, what the fuck?
What in the entirety of fuck just happened?
‐ All right, well we've been together for like six years.
Like, we consider each other family
and they I couldn't, I heard nothing.
So I was like, oh yeah, he abandoned us.
It definitely felt like that.
‐ If you're gonna take the position of captain,
executive chef, you're responsible for your crew 100%.
You asked these guys to follow you.
They followed you.
If your ship's going down, you're the captain,
you go down with it.
That's the only way it goes.
If you can't do that, there's no honor in that.
The captain should never be the first guy to jump.
‐ Damn.
I don't know why I'm looking in this shit.
I know there's nothing in there.
I'm looking for where the bodies are buried I guess.
You know, this room was my sanctuary.
‐ [Interviewer] Where's your sanctuary now?
‐ It doesn't exist, I don't have one.
‐ [Man] Most of the investment
was Evan's friends and family.
‐ [Evan] Investing in the restaurant, those people
were investing in me.
‐ [Interviewer] How much did you invest?
‐ All told,
the tally is $123,000 of my own money
into Bucato.
I can't freak out about it anymore.
I've done my freaking out over all these years
of it all happening so.
‐ [Evan] The people that invested in that restaurant,
I can never get their money back.
All I can give back is my craft,
leaving something behind that is better and bigger than me.
‐ We had been in contact with people on the ground at Joe's.
We knew that Joe's was gonna be changing
and possibly closing all together.
Out of nowhere, Evan Funke's name came in.
And that's when it was like, all the pieces really clicked.
‐ We need to open with a smash.
All this planning and all this designing,
the devil's gonna be in the details.
‐ [Reporter] Massive Westside news today
is it's just been confirmed that Evan Funke will take over
the now defunct Joe's on Abbot Kinney.
‐ Breaking news, start demo on the 22nd.
I'm just excited to get back in the kitchen, man.
‐ Mmm hmm.
‐ I'm going fucking nuts.
‐ [Reporter] The move's a joint collaboration
between Funke and Gusto 54.
‐ I'm an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur,
you cannot be risk adverse and you throw the dice
and you go for it.
So there's a little bit that makes me feel alive
when I live a little bit on the edge.
Fingers crossed.
‐ She described my food as
which means the housewife style.
I would never describe my food in public
as but that's precisely
what it is.
They channel my inner grandmother so when Janet said,
hey, you're cooking is
and I was like you got a deal.
‐ [Reporter] Funke says that if all goes well
he'll be cooking inside by summer.
Soon enough, one of LA's most celebrated chefs
will be making pasta once again.
‐ I cannot wait to build a kitchen in this space.
‐ All of my restaurants that I've opened
have been super successful.
It's not only serving food.
I'm passionate about food.
I've lived in Italy for eight years.
A little vino, a little .
Overlooking piazza.
My father was essentially a chef.
‐ Jacamo brought the first espresso machine to Canada.
They had no appreciation or understanding
what an espresso was and Janet worked for his company
at selling coffee.
She helped create that with her father.
‐ I had this connection to eating well
that is in my genes.
This is .
It took us like three minutes to get it,
an amazing experience.
It looks fantastic.
‐ She's got her MBA.
She lived in Rome.
Janet is one of the first women in Canada
to be certified by the Neapolitan Pizza Association,
which is amazing in a male dominated industry.
She's a certified pizziola.
‐ So there's one thing to open your doors
and sell food but can you make money doing that?
This is Kiin.
It's our opening night tonight.
And that gets me creatively very, very stimulated.
‐ [Juanita] She's one of the most successful
restaurateurs in Canada.
‐ Luigi, busy night right?
So I haven't had, let's call it a failure, yet.
‐ So we've got five restaurants opening in one year.
‐ Welcome to Chubby's Jamaican Kitchen, opening soon.
I'm funding this all cash by selling pizzas in Toronto
and using every penny to open up Felix.
Such a beautiful sky.
What do I need to create to actually survive
on Abbot Kinney, which is the best street in LA?
Backing somebody and building an entire brand
around somebody I essentially don't know at all,
again, is a risk, but you don't know
until you work with someone.
So again, it's a roll of a dice.
I feel good about Evan and I think
that we're gonna have a long
and fruitful working relationship
and that's what my gut tells me.
I don't have red flags.
‐ Ransom, polenta burger, medium.
We require pork bellies.
‐ [Man] Coming.
‐ Order in, a chicken branzo.
86 the branzino, papa.
‐ I remember in the beginning he worked so many hours
that he crashed his car and his mom, I think, called us
and was like, you need to work my son less.
Like, we tell him go home.
Let your sous run it for today.
Like, you know?
But he was really committed and dedicated.
‐ I was a maniac,
driven purely by the fear of failure.
That fear, that motivation,
is a very powerful driving force.
‐ To vent his anger, he took a half sheet tray
and bent the shit out of it.
‐ Grabs me by the shirt, pushes me into the corner
and tells me to unfuck my station before he kicks me out.
‐ [Man] We would have ran into a wall for him
at any point in time.
Knowing that you would die for this guy, like,
that's how much you wanna work for this guy, you know?
‐ I worked at Rustic as if I was the owner.
This was the entirety of my pursuit in life.
I wanted partnership in Rustic Canyon.
I would have been perfectly happy to stay as chef partner.
Unfortunately, that was not on the table.
‐ [Zoe] When Evan chose to leave Rustic Canyon
and not tell us anything,
it was really, really hurtful
and it really, really sucked.
‐ What?
They were like blindsided.
Everybody was blindsided.
‐ [Josh] This was something that he had
in the works for a while.
Secretly.
He didn't have to be secret about it.
‐ And I was just so surprised when he didn't like us
because I felt like we were so close.
‐ [Farley] When he split off to do Bucato,
it made all the sense in the world
that he was gonna be a star.
‐ I'll give my absolute best this last night.
Good to be off.
Thank you very much.
‐ Thank you.
‐ My pleasure.
‐ [Josh] There was a sweetness
and there was a tremendous insecurity
that's at the core of who he is.
I do think it's been his‐‐
‐ [Zoe] Angel and devil.
‐ [Josh] Angel and his devil.
I think it's what provides the vulnerability
in his food and the ability to get in touch
with the subtleties of certain dishes.
And I think it's also gotten him in a lot of trouble
where he's needed some kind of validation
and that's made him make decisions
that are not necessarily the best for him.
‐ I think the stakes are always high in a restaurant,
especially with a guy like Evan.
You've got him on Abbot Kinney in one of the busiest
and highest rent areas in all of Los Angeles
and you've got him who's as uncompromising as ever.
If it doesn't succeed, what you end up with
is another failed enterprise.
‐ [Interviewer] Where are we?
‐ This is Joe's.
This is not yet Felix.
Joe was very successful here
but now is my time.
This is my restaurant now.
My hiatus was a little bit like a medieval catapult.
You see the guys like cranking it and cranking it
and cranking it and cranking it and cranking it
and pulling back and pulling back.
I'm like right fucking here.
And demo is gonna be the day when we release.
This restaurant is a manifestation
of all the hard work since I set foot in culinary school.
It wasn't Bucato.
It was this restaurant.
‐ [Interviewer] What if it doesn't work?
‐ See, here's why I don't think about that
because I've already died.
You see this fire damage right here?
At some point in time they had a grease fire.
It's like carbonized.
‐ [Janet] Right now I think we're probably
at least a week behind.
‐ [Evan] This space is absolutely rotten down to the bones.
‐ We lost two weeks, $65,000.
So we've got all these delays and that sucks.
Have guys been in the restaurant
in the last week or two?
‐ No, we haven't even started.
It's a little frustrating.
‐ In any demo, you don't know exactly
what you're gonna find.
‐ [Evan] Secret water damage, fire damage, dead pipes.
‐ You have a plumbing delay and you're at a standstill
for five weeks.
‐ This is a fucking piece of plumbing.
That's insane.
‐ [Janet] We just keep, we just keep paying money.
‐ We really don't know what's underneath there.
‐ [Interviewer] How's it going so far?
‐ I think it's going well.
‐ Missy.
Missy.
He would come out in the kitchen and help me
at a very tender age of like three, two and a half
and be very inquisitive about what I was doing.
And, when I would put him in a high chair,
he'd try everything and it was,
he'd sit there with a big smile on his face.
Evan was always interested
and he liked the flavors of things.
But he was the only one that would pause over his food,
you know, and mmm.
Taste it, taste it.
Mmm.
It's good, mom.
‐ You mean I wasn't just inhaling it?
‐ No.
You were also, you were inhaling it too
but you were working on what was it tasting like.
‐ The family didn't fall into any neat category
and everybody's doing something creative.
Graham's doing crazy DJ life.
I'm doing music stuff
and my sister went to fashion school
and Andy's into all this vintage eyewear stuff
and they weren't the normal kids growing up.
♪ My dog has fleas ♪
It was always like, yeah, the Funke family is just,
they're a little strange.
‐ I went to art school when I was 11 years old.
I sold vitamins.
I was a towel boy at a gym.
I joined the Marine Corps.
All of these things that I did in my life
never made me happy.
‐ [Jens] I always kinda knew Ev was gonna come back
to the food at some point.
He liked food growing up, there's no doubt about it.
‐ He's made a couple, he entered a pie contest
one time with me and I don't remember‐‐
‐ [Evan] What?
‐ Oh yes you did.
Evan decided he was gonna make a cherry pie.
I said, cherries are out of season.
No, I'm gonna make a cherry pie.
It was horrible.
‐ It was horrendous.
‐ [Emily] It was horrendous.
‐ It was so bad.
I remember that.
‐ You were no baker.
‐ Thank goodness I found pasta.
I'd be up shit creek right now.
‐ [Emily] Yes, you would.
‐ There's a lot of chefs that I respect
but there's no one that I ever wanted to be like
except for my dad.
Because my dad is a true master of his craft.
‐ [Woman] And the Oscar goes to.
‐ [Man] And the Oscar goes to.
‐ [Woman] Alex Funke for the Lord of the Rings,
The Return of the King.
‐ [Man] Alex Funke for Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers.
‐ As you're watching your old man like in person
walk up there and get an Oscar, it was like, wow.
This is really something.
You know, you're supposed to, you know,
not be better than your parents
but your parents are providing you with life
so you can surpass them.
You know, and that's a really, really tough thing
like looking up my dad, like, I'm never gonna get that far.
‐ I'm the last person to say, yes, I'm a perfectionist
and you have to do it perfectly
but I like to encourage them to think
that that's a great goal.
It's a wonderful goal.
‐ He's the best at what he does.
That's what I want.
When you think about pasta,
I want you to think about Evan Funke.
These are all my mom's recipes
so if you're talking about how long
you've been cooking for all of us, 43 years?
‐ Mmm hmm.
This is not about what I cook though Evan.
‐ Oh yes it is
because what you cook ultimately inspired what I cook.
In my memory of my childhood,
there's certain iconic images that I remember
and it was this Morwear Paint Manual
and I knew this was where mom held the gold.
You know, like I would see it in the kitchen
and be like, that's where the gold is.
I knew that there was love in this book.
When I would pass by it in the kitchen,
when I saw my mom open it up, read a recipe,
and make us something.
I knew that there was love inside of this thing.
It still holds that same,
it still has the same gravity to me.
It's a time capsule from where I first started to
develop a personality, an openmindedness of food.
‐ I think when he went to Italy and studied there,
I think that was a kind of magical transformation
where he said,
this is the most important thing in the world.
We can't explain why it happened
but suddenly he became this messiah of pasta.
‐ When I went to Bologna, I had never traveled
outside of the U. S. by myself.
In LA, I was this guy.
I was a cook, whatever.
I was a chef.
But in Bologna, nobody cared who I was.
I'm just some American there to learn how to make pasta.
So I could be whoever I wanted to be.
This type of pasta, the pasta
and Bologna is very special.
Not very many restaurants make this type of pasta.
It was a very liberating experience
to be on my own and not speak the language whatsoever
but somehow, some way, still communicating
very effectively through the emotion behind making pasta.
It was never you're doing it wrong.
It's more about communicating with the pasta
and allowing yourself to find your own way.
‐ I had a special techniques.
I taught the techniques to Evan
but other student, no, I didn't.
He was so polite and a funny guy, shy, you know.
He has big body but the heart is so warm.
He learned pasta so quick, so fast.
Alessandra loves him.
Yeah.
‐ She really made it easy in learning this,
unfortunately dying craft, of handmade pasta,
pasta .
It was Valentine's Day, 2008.
I don't know, it was like so effortless.
Everything was in unison, everything was fluid.
I looked at the pasta and it did exactly
what I wanted it to do.
I held it up to the light and‐‐
‐ [Alessandra] Bravo.
Perfecto.
‐ [Evan] And it was perfect and that was it.
There was no turning back.
The centuries old process of making pasta by hand,
everything went out the window.
It just became my whole life.
It penetrated my whole life.
‐ You walked into Joe's.
You take a look at an existing restaurant
and you say, we're gonna paint the walls.
We're gonna, you know, rip out the carpeting.
He had carpeting .
You know, can we save a hood?
We can save a hood.
So we just do an analysis
and at that point we thought $600,000.
‐ [Juanita] Here we are, Janet.
‐ Well, it looks like two weeks of work has happened in here
and I know it's been weeks of work but‐‐
‐ 11 weeks.
11 weeks in.
‐ Yeah it looks like, I mean, fine,
they did demolition but to say that they're gonna
hand the keys over to us in a few weeks
is absolutely unrealistic.
‐ So what's interesting in the evolution of this project
is initially our intent was, we have an existing restaurant.
We're buying an existing restaurant.
We're gonna put lipstick on a pig,
for all intents and purposes and before we know it,
we're rebuilding from the ground up.
‐ We salvaged zero.
When we thought we could salvage a few things,
we just gutted the entire place,
which guts to me to gut a building that's not mine.
I normally come in and purchase the real estate
and then I have no problem dumping millions
into my own building.
This is something new for me.
Every project is is it gonna make us our money back
in three years?
Like, it has to make sense financially.
‐ [Juanita] Yeah.
‐ And I think this will in the end,
especially Evan is projecting bigger sales
than we are right now, which is great.
So I hope that happens.
‐ Yeah, I'm not using his projections for our forecasting.
I'm using our projections.
‐ [Janet] Yeah, yeah.
‐ We'll keep that between you and me right now.
‐ You have to just keep finding more and more money,
more and more time, more and more money
and that kind of stuff is stressful.
‐ It is and at some point it doesn't make sense
so I'm keeping a close eye on what that looks like
so that this doesn't become a vanity project.
‐ [Interviewer] Is there still a point
where you pull the plug?
‐ Pull the plug and don't open Felix?
No, no.
Failure's not an option.
No way.
No.
No, not gonna pull the plug.
No.
‐ The value of doing a collab with Nancy Silverton
and Ryan of Chi Spacca, it's huge.
On many different levels.
It's amazing for PR.
It puts us in connection with the national stage.
Gain recognition with the people who frequent Chi Spacca,
which tends to be a higher end clientele.
Ugh, my God.
‐ You take a double or if anybody else wants one.
‐ Just, yes.
‐ Go for it.
‐ Thanks, dude.
Thanks Ryan.
I appreciate it, Chef.
It gives me an opportunity to see how Fred and Andrew
work together in a real restaurant setting
around real professionals.
Don't worry about the edges
because we're making .
We have plenty, plenty of dough.
Just make sure that it's uniform.
Don't worry about it being round.
Just uniformity is where we're going.
‐ [Interviewer] What prompted you to invite Evan
to Chi Spacca?
‐ Well, firstly you have to remember
that he was between restaurants.
I knew that he had a following
so it would be be a hard sell.
‐ First course we're gonna do a Tagarene
with white truffles.
It's very, very rich.
Very, very delicate.
Rolled out by hand and also cut very, very thin.
Second one, the agnolotti is a very special shape to me.
It's the first shape I ever learned at Spago.
It was the shape that drove me to go move to Italy
to go study handmade pasta.
My shape, it's like my own fingerprint.
I can tell my agnolotti from every other pasta maker
in the entire world.
‐ I knew that it would be great for our staff
to be influenced by somebody that's as passionate as he.
‐ Machine made pasta is like pound cake.
Handmade pasta is like a wafer.
You got the difference?
‐ Close your ears.
Paul, it's not true.
Machine made pasta is fine.
But also, I like him and I wanted to help him
and I had been talking to him
and he was complaining how bored he was not doing anything.
So.
Let's all welcome Evan Funke.
Is anybody an investor in Felix here?
‐ Nope.
‐ That's good because none of you
will ever make your money back.
He has been rolling pasta out all day long
because it's so much easier to put it in a machine
but, you know what, he's a purist.
I'm a capitalist.
‐ I'm finally done.
‐ And he's finally done.
‐ Chef Ryan, we're ready.
Obviously I want to be known as the best pasta maker
in the U. S., of course.
Once it has cheese, please go.
Via.
I want that recognition.
I want that justification.
I want that accolade.
I don't go looking for it.
It comes looking for me.
Pull it, pull it, pull it, pull it, pull it.
Fred, 90% in the water.
10% in the sauce.
Make sure there's enough jus in there.
Add some water to it.
Don't overwork it because it'll get too cold.
‐ [Nancy] Have you been ever fired?
‐ I've been fired once.
I got fired from teaching culinary school,
all of that.
‐ Why, too passionate?
‐ [Evan] Yeah.
‐ Too particular?
‐ Basically I can't talk to people that way
and there's no place for that
in the Le Cordon Bleu curriculum
and I was fired for being a little bit too aggressive.
I was just out of Spago so I was full of piss and vinegar.
Go, go, go, go.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.
‐ It's unreal.
‐ Thanks.
‐ It's like, I mean, you are such a master.
‐ It's the last 10 years of my life devoted to that so.
She understands this business as much as any veteran
of this business can understand it.
If you take the approach of making everything by hand,
it seems as if financial success is unachievable.
Okay?
Thanks.
So her saying that, I totally get it.
I get where she's coming from
but I disagree.
With everything going on in Venice,
restaurant building and the delays and everything else,
taking myself out of that environment,
very much a re‐centering of energy.
It's back home.
The culinary archeology associated with pasta
is my life's work.
‐ That's incredible.
It's incredible.
Rather hypnotizing.
The only way for me to study the technique
is to watch her hands repeatedly go over the same point.
It's like a machine.
I mean, this is the reason why this whole city
comes to the Arco Basso to buy orecchiette.
Wow.
Ah.
The ridges on the knife create this texture
on the inside which would otherwise be smooth.
She's tearing the gluten to create a very ridged texture
in order to grip sauce.
All of these little torn pieces are gonna come off
and help emulsify whatever sauce you're gonna put this into.
It's brilliantly engineered.
‐ So just tell me where the budget's at today
and then taking us through to opening.
‐ The overall budget is sitting at 2.7
and this does not include the opening operating cost
which would be neighbor and opening inventory.
‐ When you're opening a restaurant,
if you're not nervous then you really have a problem.
No matter how many you've opened,
how many experiences you've had opening a restaurant,
it's like whenever you're putting yourself out there
you should feel a little anxious, a little nervous,
a little bit scared.
‐ The restaurant business is the riskiest business
to get into in the world.
You know, you have such a high likelihood of failing.
‐ Hey, I got this opportunity to invest in this restaurant.
I always tell 'em the same thing,
if you're willing to invest in a restaurant,
be willing to know you're never gonna see the money again.
‐ John and I won one of the biggest awards
in our profession last year.
‐ John Shook and Vinny Dotolo, Animal, Los Angeles.
‐ [John] We won the James Beard award.
It's been the slowest year we've had.
Isn't it crazy?
'Cause most restaurants, in most cities,
like count that as like almost a million dollars in sales.
LA it's like, people don't even know
what James Beard is here.
They don't even know what it is.
‐ There's no restaurant growth in Los Angeles
with restaurant death too.
You see places every single day that disappear.
‐ Willie Jane just shut down.
Like, just shut down within our little parcel
of real estate so they're three doors down from us.
It's like overnight shut down.
‐ The statistics are alarming.
Like, 60% of restaurants will not survive the first year.
You can understand why because the margin of error
is so small.
For every dollar that is being spent
30% of it goes to labor.
30% of it goes to cost of food and drink.
Six percent of it goes to rent.
Six percent of it goes to utilities.
Another 10% goes to admin and general.
Another six percent goes to debt management.
Two percent to advertising and marketing
and at the end of the day if you're lucky,
you'll have anywhere from five to 10% left
to put in your pocket.
‐ [Interviewer] Explain to me what this would be used for.
What is that?
‐ This, this is to roll out pasta.
‐ You go back to the story of Occhi
and the first time I went to Occhi's workshop.
This is it.
He grabbed my hands, felt them,
gave me a super hard slap and he said,
come back tomorrow.
They take the wood and they dry it
in the over at 90 degrees for a month.
Mmm hmm.
These are all Mattarelli.
Each one of these is gonna be
turned into‐‐
‐ The famous Mattarelli of my father.
‐ This is what mine looked like when I got it the first day.
It's like totally raw and over time
the fat from the yolk and oil from the hands,
it changes the color.
There was a time where everyone made pasta by hand
and then the machine was invented
and people went away from making it by hand.
‐ When you go to Italy now and especially when you go
to the big supermarkets, I mean, the freezer shelf
is filled with frozen pasta.
It's convenience, just like every where else in the world
and Italy is no different.
‐ Vinny and I are looking to invest in this company
that like everything's made from a machine.
You dump the ingredients in.
It not just makes the pasta
but it also portions the pasta.
‐ [Vinny] It's the antithesis of Evan.
‐ It's gonna be interesting to see how he balances that,
you know here on the second restaurant.
‐ [Evan] But then, for some reason there was a revolution
back to making it the traditional way.
‐ What most restaurants do that make fresh pasta
and they are sheeting their dough
is they use a hand cranked mechanism.
You get something done maybe in five minutes
where this could certainly take 20 plus minutes.
‐ You work so hard kneading all these beautiful
air pockets into your dough and then what do you do?
Put it into this machine.
It smashes all the life out of it
just so you can make it flat.
No way.
That's what the Mattarello is to me.
You can capture the life with the Mattarello.
You capture life by spreading the air pockets
with the Mattarello instead of smashing them out.
‐ [Nancy] You're gaining a better texture
and a better flavor.
‐ Perfectly straight.
There's no variation in the wood.
There's nothing.
That's the difference between what Occhi does
and what everybody else does.
That's why you can't buy a Mattarello online
and hope that it gets to you straight.
‐ [Evan] Making pasta with her, it's a total gift.
‐ She's so busy now
and she's got so many things going on.
Alessandra's skill is literally priceless.
She's been making pasta since she was six.
She cooks like a chef but she thinks like a mama.
She is the best cook in the .
I'll put her up against anybody.
She's like the prize fighter.
She's like the heavy Mike Tyson of Bologna.
And if it wasn't for the Maestra,
I don't think that I would have followed this same path.
‐ A lot of people are used to looking into a restaurant
and say, okay, pasta, it's over 10 bucks?
I can go get a $10 pasta anywhere.
Pasta that you make by hand might only have
a few ingredients semolina and some of it has
a lot of egg yolks but it's the labor
that's very expensive.
‐ [John] You know, in Bucato, everything was handmade.
‐ Super.
‐ Super labor intensive to be doing the hand rolled stuff.
In my mind, it's like you think you would learn
from the first time.
‐ The type of pasta that I make is readily available
on the street.
You can walk by here and you can study these techniques
and they've been doing it this way
for hundreds and hundreds of years.
But you see how small it is.
Like this is like the size of my lab at Felix.
This is like 150 square feet.
If they can do it, I can do it.
‐ From the day that we start selling Evan's first pasta,
what's gonna be the total of the budget?
‐ [Juanita] We must round it up to three million.
‐ Right.
‐ And the big priority is moving the funds
from your bank account to the Gusto 54 account.
‐ When I start hearing about you need
to put your house on the line to open up this restaurant,
that may affect me for a little while,
a couple of days of not sleeping.
This is the crown jewel of Felix.
This is the pasta lab
and you're gonna see hand rolling out,
all the different pastas
that we're making for the restaurant.
‐ Just a concept on paper of hand rolled pasta
on Abbot Kinney, I wouldn't invest.
Oh it's like taking your child to get Christened,
baptized, for her to use it.
It's like the ultimate blessing.
I mean, come on.
It's near perfect.
She kneaded it less than five minutes.
She does it so fast
but it's really, she can do it in three motions.
One, two, three.
But I have to do in like four.
I could study my whole life and not get it, you know?
‐ Okay, perfecto.
‐ I think the Maestra saw something very different
in Kosaku and it didn't have a place in her school.
He was the one to teach me,
you have to pay attention to every single detail,
from the selection of the flour
to the weight of the eggs to the hydration
to the temperature of the room.
Everything has a compounding effect
on your ultimate product.
His method of kneading the dough
changed the way I look at pasta.
Imagine that your body is a machine.
Think of your hands and your shoulders as a piece of metal.
There is no move that insignificant.
Kosaku thinks of his body as a machine
because machines are very precise.
Precision leads to excellence
and excellence leads to perfection.
The strictness and the unwavering standards
of Kosaku versus the soul and heart, love and tradition
of Alessandra.
Those are the fundamentals that define the way
that I make pasta now.
The art and the science.
The soul and the technique.
‐ You know, you're coming into the building.
We're not quite finished but this has been one year
working kinda around the clock to create this brand
and this is a restaurant built around Evan Funke
and his cooking.
I know that we have something super special
and I know that you are the guys that are gonna
bring it to life.
So, it's a honor and I'll get a chance
to meet you all individually
but thank you for being here.
I'm honored that you chose to come to Felix.
Thank you.
‐ As far as we know right now,
we're gonna be opening the last week of February
so this is an impending day that is upon us
and we're going hard.
So, make sure that you guys show up focused
and you guys are ready to go.
All right?
This training is gonna fly by.
All right?
Anybody nervous about that?
I'm am.
It's good.
You gotta harness that stuff.
At Felix, we're going to create our own traditions.
We, as a group, are stewards and guardians
of the traditions of Italy.
Mezze maniche.
Mezze is half.
Maniche, what's maniche?
This is a maniche.
So it's half sleeve.
Mezze maniche.
‐ [Man] Balanzoni.
‐ Balanzoni.
‐ [Man] Balazoni.
‐ Balanzoni.
It's okay.
Yes.
‐ [Evan] We're storytellers through food
and that's it, as simple as that.
That's what this restaurant's about.
‐ Ultimately the way that things go
with restaurants in Los Angeles is that time and money
become your enemy, frankly.
The city has a multitude of ways to make your life hell.
‐ [Man] Health Department requirements,
Building and Safety requirements
which include ADA requirements.
Evan is dealing with the Coastal Commission
in how close he is to the beach.
‐ Turn on our gas so we can start cooking.
Like, this restaurant I keep walking in.
We're done, we're done.
The restaurants done.
Turn on the gas.
Help us out.
‐ I didn't anticipate opening a restaurant
in California to be this bureaucratic.
‐ It's so frustrating.
You get told one thing when you're getting in plans check
and then when the inspector comes out,
it's a completely different story.
‐ We, last week, did not pass
in part because some of the items were not ADA approved
which is obviously very important
but we had to move things around
and it wasn't matching the floor plan.
So now we are MacGyvering a little bit
of our floor plan now.
‐ Between three and five we're gonna
get the Health Department out here.
Everybody have their fingers crossed.
Good energy, good thoughts.
Let's make sure we get this, Jessie, the grease that's here.
Everything.
It's gotta look like we were never in here.
I'm just looking for violations.
Just keep it where it is.
‐ If we don't pass, I don't know.
I don't know what will happen.
I don't know.
‐ Every time I open another restaurant,
I'm like, I'm never doing this shit again.
But here I am.
I'm doing it again
because this is what I love to do.
‐ [Interviewer] How did it go?
‐ I'm sorry?
‐ [Interviewer] How'd it go?
‐ Oh, it went well.
No problems.
‐ [Interviewer] Great, thanks man.
‐ We've passed the final marker.
We've jumped through the last hoop.
‐ Let's do it guys, let's do it.
Oh boy, oh boy.
‐ Now the actual work begins.
Now the real work begins.
We've got to open this restaurant in less than six days.
If this was my restaurant and I had to incur
the costs that Gusto has eaten,
I would be out of business.
I'd have to sell this place.
I would never open.
It would be impossible.
Impossible.
‐ [Interviewer] Did you know that when things
started running over, she put her house up
against the restaurant?
‐ I didn't know that.
I do know that,
yeah.
Serious.
That's obviously an amazing thing.
It shows her resolve and her faith in me
but she's betting on this restaurant
just as much as I am and that's a real partnership
and if she wins, I win.
And if I win, she wins.
That's what it's about
and that's what I was searching for.
Someone to go at it with the same intensity as I do.
‐ You know, obviously there's a lot of things
going on in the world and this is not huge tragedy
but it's just emotional for me
because when you put your all into something,
that's when you get emotional about it.
I could be detached if I didn't put 1,000% into this
but I put it all in and emotionally and creatively
and then also financially,
just absolutely to the max.
‐ Fire rigatoni orecchiette.
Fire Gemma, fire Mark.
Runner.
Three, four, five, six.
‐ How you enjoy your diablo pizza?
‐ It's very good.
‐ Buena.
‐ Table 91, focaccia, blood seat one, ricotta seat two.
Table 91, go.
Seat two, 74, go.
What is this?
Don't call me expo, call me chef.
Where's the fucking Post‐it?
Put it right here.
Is the information on the Post‐it?
Put it on the fucking Post‐it.
Let's go, come on, come on.
Everybody listen, everybody listen.
Everybody in this room, I need to see up tempo.
Up tempo, okay?
Otherwise, I'm gonna lose my shit.
Sense of urgency, okay?
If you don't train as fast as you're going to go,
you will be slow.
Okay?
Let's fucking move.
‐ [Man] Yes, Chef.
‐ Runner please.
All right, who's excited to actually talk about this food
and get this going?
Tutta la pasta fatta in casa which means
all pasta is made in house.
I've been waiting years to make these pastas
in a true authentic manner.
Okay, first off, pappardelle.
This will be rolled on this singular table in the front.
So this is Masetra Alessandra's bolognese recipe.
It's over 200 years old.
This is like a star.
People are gonna be ordering pappardelle
through the roof here.
And any Ragu bolognese that you've had
that is red, it is not Ragu bolognese.
That's meat sauce.
Or gravy as those guys call it
over on that side of the country.
We're using the finest black pepper that we can find
from Southeast Asia and Pecorino Romano.
I spent a little over three weeks
eating just this.
I ate it about 32 times.
In order to completely saturate myself
with this simple dish.
It's super impolite to look at people
when they eat spaghetti.
Don't look at me.
In Bari Vecchia there's a street called the Arco Basso.
I spent some time with a woman,
an amazing woman named Nunzia who can literally
make this shape 100 times a minute.
Orecchiette, which means little ears.
Very, very simply spaghetti .
The magic of this pasta.
Is the essence of the ocean.
Super delicate.
Very simple.
Look at that smile on DiMezzio's face.
He knows.
This is your pasta eaters pasta.
Trofie is a twisted pasta that's made
with the side of your hand.
Anybody take a stab where trofie is from?
‐ [Audience] La Giulia.
‐ La Giulia.
Pesto Genovese.
So this pesto is very, very close to my heart.
This is one of my first culinary memories.
I can go back until I'm like years old.
I've eaten this pesto my entire life.
Rigatoni .
One chile, cured pork cheek, pomodoro,
and Pecorino Romano.
Everybody say it.
Means sponge.
This is a focaccia, typical of Sicily.
Everyone needs to realize, this is the reason
why put this lab in front everybody,
one of the reasons anyway, is that I want people
to have a connection with what's on their plate.
If they have a plate of trofie with pesto Genovese,
they can see there's like 100 of them on the plate.
That means that this guy or that guy
has to do that 100 times just for you.
‐ Today Eater LA dropped one
of the most beautiful profiles‐‐
‐ Boom!
‐ I think anybody has written on any new restaurant.
‐ [Tyler] The title of the article
is Evan Funke Chases Pasta Perfection at Felix in Venice.
‐ Lofty goals, I tell ya.
‐ If there's a more compelling Italian restaurant
in Los Angeles than Felix at the moment,
good luck finding it.
Felix is, frankly, a game changer
for the modern Italian movement in Los Angeles.
Funke has been out of the consistent day to day
restaurant game for two years since departing Bucato.
His comeback tour now includes a stand alone
temperature controlled pasta laboratorio
that acts as a focal point
for the entire primary dining room.
‐ You know, the truth is it's absolutely taking away
table space for a restaurant that could desperately use it.
‐ That seat is worth $70 a night
times seven days a week times 30 days a month,
365 days later this is how much that seat needs.
‐ For me, it's a no brainer.
To do 144 square feet exactly,
which is around 20 seats.
20 seats for me times 50, that's a lot of bread per year
but‐‐
‐ Right.
20 seats, $51,000 a seat.
I don't have a calculator.
‐ I don't want to do that.
‐ Ding, ding, ding, da, ding, ding.
‐ As great as it is to walk in there and see that
and kinda that wow factor,
it doesn't make the food taste any better.
That pasta could be made in the corner of a kitchen.
‐ But it sets us apart from everyone in the United States.
Nobody has this.
I think the value is worth the real estate
that we've dedicated to it.
‐ We both walked into this restaurant
and we saw Joe's wine storage.
‐ [Evan] Wine storage.
‐ And you know‐‐
‐ [Evan] It was immediate.
‐ We were like‐‐
‐ It was immediate.
‐ Pasta lab.
‐ You would lose a little bit of the heart
of what Evan has always been about
if you didn't have that room in the restaurant.
‐ You know, it's also an education.
‐ We always wanna drag this
this way.
‐ Some people might think that pasta
grows on trees, you know, and so,
I think at the same time he's also educating people.
‐ Even pressure, roughly 60 degrees.
Pull back, invert.
If we're all three of us making orecchiette,
they all have to be the same size.
‐ And, if it's something that doesn't work,
I mean, we can change it.
I'm just saying, like.
I'm gonna hand you the hammer.
Take it down.
‐ [Evan] Call Juanita.
‐ [Siri] Calling Juanita.
‐ Dee?
‐ [Dee] Yes sir?
‐ Did you check your email?
‐ [Dee] No.
What happened?
‐ [Juanita] Hi Evan.
‐ Hi.
Today's been very interesting.
What the actual fuck?
This is like a kick in the face.
Fred crashes his bicycle this morning.
He fractured his collarbone.
He's got three stitches in his face and now this.
I don't know where it's coming from,
whether it's coming from the community
or whether it's something else.
Wrap our heads around what our contingency plan is
because we're completely booked through the entire weekend.
If that happens, we have to call like 400 people
and say, you know, guess what?
We're not opening.
Thank you.
What the fuck?
‐ What the fuck is going on?
But okay, they're complaining so we can't open a restaurant?
‐ The city's saying we can't open
because he's gotten additional complaints regarding Felix,
the city's not going to allow the restaurant to open.
‐ This is bad.
This is really bad.
‐ Let's just keep this between this circle
so that they don't freak out.
I need them focused tonight.
‐ [Man] So, in your experience,
if you're in violation, what happens?
‐ [Man] Um, I guess the fire marshal could come
and potentially shut the place down
and then people would have to leave
and I think that would be the absolute worse case scenario.
‐ This whole project has been like one step forward,
kick in the balls.
Another step forward, kick in the balls.
And it's been like that
and I thought we were out of the woods.
‐ Yeah, we don't know what the complaint is.
Somebody in the neighborhood complained.
‐ We have everything in order so it's the weekend
and nothing is stopping us from opening
so I don't even wanna hear any more of that.
We're opening.
‐ Someone or some people don't want us to be here.
I mean, listen, they can't stop the progression.
We are going to open no matter what.
This restaurant is unstoppable at this point.
They're just fucking with my money now.
‐ Chef said I was out for a month.
Yeah, he came up to the hospital and was like,
oh, it's all good.
We'll open the restaurant without you.
I'm not having that so.
I still got one good arm.
I can make pasta with one arm.
I got the codeine.
Never taken codeine before.
It's pretty good.
‐ [Interviewer] First in line?
‐ First in line.
I came here at 4:30.
‐ [Interviewer] But why?
‐ Because I'm a huge fan of Chef Evan Funke.
I ate at Bucato two years ago for my birthday dinner.
It blew my mind and I'm just so excited
to have him in Venice and to have this restaurant
on Abbot Kinney, adding to the whole food scene here.
You know?
‐ Okay guys, 30 minutes.
This is our first shot so let's make it a good step
in the right direction.
Creating a group of people that are all on the same page,
that all understand the philosophy.
It's team, it's family, it's community.
That's what we will have here.
Love each other and love our guests
and we'll be totally fine.
‐ 19 minutes until those doors open.
‐ There's this like palpable energy
that you can feel the calm before the storm.
Just like pushing to get all of the prep done.
Everybody's getting hopped up on caffeine,
smoking their last cigarettes.
Everybody's in their own mind.
Getting their focus ready and you walk up
to each and every line cook and you look 'em in the eye
and you say, show me something tonight.
Let's go.
‐ [Man] Number one!
‐ Longing to start cooking again
is not the correct phrase.
I've been through so much fucking shit
the last two years.
I'm lusting after
the moment when I get
to begin,
when I'm allowed to begin.
First ticket in guys, listen up.
Fire .
All right, Santi, moment of truth my man.
‐ Down here we have the spaghetti.
This is gonna be done with oil and garlic
and shaved with targa.
‐ A lot of these chefs in LA, they haven't had failures.
They've had wins.
But they haven't tasted what I've tasted.
Hey I need a vodka and a cacio with a chicken right now.
‐ And then orecchiette.
‐ Orecchiette.
‐ The wolf that's climbing the hill is way hungrier
than the wolf at the top of the hill
and I'm fucking starving.
‐ After what happened to Bucato,
I would never be surprised if Evan just got up
and left again.
‐ Is this where Marty fucking went down?
‐ [Man] Yeah.
‐ Nothing like a nice kick in the teeth
in the beginning.
‐ [Farley] The worst mark for any chef
is to have the greater population
start to feel like you're the guy
who goes and closes places down.
‐ Get in that box.
Somebody get in that box.
Two ori, one spaghetti, one trofie,
one big and one vodka.
Let's go.
We gotta push.
Failure gives you a very unique perspective.
I'm going down on the fennel parm, guys.
On why, what, and how you failed.
That's who I'll be here.
A little older, a lot more wise.
L22.
More black pepper.
But way more intense.
I need a fucking meatball my way right now, right now.
How long?
‐ For Evan it's been about pasta for so long.
‐ This is balanzoni with crescenza inside
with .
A la Maestra Alessandra.
‐ [Farley] Chasing seems like a really big
and important part of that story.
‐ Butter and gold.
The Bolognese called the pomodoro gold
because they only make it one time a year.
‐ And to create a restaurant that truly feels like his,
I think he's searching for perfection, absolutely.
I don't know if he'll ever find it.
‐ There is a part of him that really wants
a lot of attention and obviously that part
derails all of us when we get wrapped up in it.
‐ I've never had a
as good as that and this one is definitely
as good as that.
‐ I like it. ‐ Yeah.
‐ Awesome.
‐ So, if he focuses on his craft
and he focuses on what he does well,
people love it and he's really good at it.
‐ But that's where he's so happy
when he's just doing his thing
but then he's got like the hype of it.
‐ This feels like home. ‐ Thank you.
‐ Congratulations. ‐ That's the best compliment.
Thank you so much.
‐ A full restaurant actually doesn't mean
that it's a profitable restaurant
so don't let that fool you.
You probably hit your best stride
when you're six or seven years old,
if you even make it six or seven years.
‐ I came tonight to see Chef's vision
fully realized, you know?
The guy deserves everything that's happening in there.
That's what Bucato should have been in every single way.
‐ He wants to make food that people will enjoy.
I think he finds a lot of frustration
because there's always the business part of it,
the finance part of it, all of the things
that have to be gotten over in order to do that.
That was brilliant.
I mean, it's just, everybody's having such a fantastic time
and it's just so cool.
‐ I'm glad you're here, man.
‐ I am very glad to be here.
‐ I think that the dream is easy
but to sustain the dream, that's the work.
‐ Handmade pasta dies
if you don't pass on the knowledge and the technique.
But maybe one day if you look through the glass at Felix
and you see the pasta maker, you see me in there,
maybe you'll ask me a question.
Hey, what's the story behind this shape?
Tell me something.
Then I got 'cha.
And you'll never look at pasta the same.