The Quiet Work of Belonging in Hospitality with Marina Baronas and Chef Carl Riding

You've saved carefully for your future, your plans, your peace of mind. Now there's good news. FSCS Protection for your savings and current accounts has risen to £120,000 per eligible person at UK authorised banks, building societies and credit unions. From the very first pound, right up to £120,000, it's all protected. So you can focus on what matters with confidence. See what it means for you at fscs.org.uk. Your savings, FSCS protected. Call my wife. Calling UK wildlife. Voice assistance not working for you. BlackRock Investment Trust has a lot working for you. Get to know them at blackrock.com. Capital at risk, marketing material. BlackRock Investment Management UK Limited. Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. You've just stepped inside the Walk and Talk podcast. Number one in the nation for food lovers, chefs and storytellers. I'm Carl Fiedini, your host, shining a light on the flavour, the hustle and the heart of the industry. Where the official podcast for the New York, California and Florida restaurant shows. The Pizza Tomorrow Summit, the US culinary open, Adnafem and the North American media platform for the Burnt Chef Project. Recorded at Ibis Images Studios, where food photography comes alive and I get the first bite. Find out more info at thewalkandtalk.com. The story of Marina Baronas begins before hospitality ever became her profession. It begins in grandmother's kitchen. And the discipline of setting a table with care. In winter shaped by endurance. And in a life where food was not performance, but devotion. Raised across Lithuania, Russia and Azerbaijan. Hospitality was not something Marina learned, it was something she inherited. At 19, she came to the United States with more questions than certainty. Crossing not just borders, but language, identity and belonging. She entered hospitality the only way possible, by working. Kitchens, dining rooms, housekeeping. Long nights and early mornings that shape more than a career, they shape a soul. Over time, her journey through restaurants and hotels became less about service and more about presence. Leadership came, motherhood came, reinvention came. And so did burnout, heartbreak and the quiet resilience required to continue. Marina does not romanticize the industry. She names the invisible labor, the dignity built in unseen moments. And the cost of giving so much of yourself to others. Her book, A New Life, A New Menu. It's not a manual, it's an almanac of belonging. A story of exile and arrival. Of carrying routes across borders. Of learning that home is not a destination, but a practice of returning to oneself. Joining Marina in studio, is Chef Karl Reigning. Who also grew within hospitality. Working in hotels and kitchens before choosing a different expression of the craft. He stepped away from chefing to build crab island seafood. A small independent, chef driven company producing elevated crab dips. Not as an exit from hospitality, but as a redefinition of it. Today, front of house and back of house meet not to explain the industry, but to speak honestly about dignity, identity and what it truly means to belong. Mr. Reigning, Chef. Well, a little program, thank you. I mean, how was that intro? That was great. How was that? I mean, people don't understand what it takes for this. I'm telling you. Yeah, I want to have a podcast. I want to have a podcast. Okay, go ahead. Go, go babies. Go. All right, look. You came here today and you produced a couple of bangers. Okay. Let's talk about what you did today. You little pepidou, you. I think pepidou is very unrated too. So I did a artichoke and spinach crab stuffed pepidou with a coconut curry, cream sauce and toasted coconut. Elevated, but simple. Very simple. Jumping into this new entrepreneurial odyssey, you have to think about this. You went from the kitchen life and now you're in production, you're in manufacturing, you're doing all these crab dips, you're doing great, great work. I love the product. Everybody loves the product. Thank you. But people think it's like, oh, it's crab dip. It's like I need a Dorito and you crab dip. No, you can cook with this. And the whole purpose for you coming on the show, and you're doing these elevated dishes, even though it's a simple elevated dish, this is something that goes on the menu. Absolutely. Okay. Why can you cook with this? So the reason why you can cook with our dips versus everybody else is because there are cream cheese based. So the cream cheese is, you know, anything you can put cheese on, you can use this dip in. Yeah, but what about quality of ingredients? What else is in there? See, I like the jalapeno popper. It's still one of my top favorites. We use fresh bacon, fresh jalapenos that we roast and it blended all through. The better the ingredients, the better the product is going to be. What made you pick pepperdus? Well, I love pepperdus. Like I said, it's a very underrated pepper. It's sweet, a little spicy, and you can use it in jams, sauces, stuff it like this. You can fry them just like my dips that are reversible. Second dish. Second dish was a mixed skin streetcourt crab dip stuffed into a Spanish style flank steak. And then we served it with yuca steakhouse fries and saute corn. I forgot the chimichurri. So when somebody tunes in and they see our Instagram and you look at the photography work and they're like, wow, this is really great. See, I always say this, I say it a lot. People don't understand what it takes to do real content. And I don't mean to disparage anybody with their phones because as John will tell you, Mr. Photographer, he'll tell you, they make great content. iPhones are good, but they're not professional level, just not. Well, that said, today we had a couple of mishaps. Chef fired the dish. We're plating, we're filming, we're doing all this cool stuff. By time we got ready to go to food photography. The curry sauce was mud sliding into the coconut roasted coconut flakes. And you know, truth is we had to replay. But it took extra time and extra love. And everybody at the table here had something to say about it to make it beautiful. And it was beautiful. Chef, tell me about the chimichurri. It's your basic chimichurri. It's got parsley, cilantro, vinegar. I put honey and serrano peppers, garlic and shallots. Salt and pepper. I try to keep it pretty basic and it goes very well with the mix of street corn. The acid, the vinegar goes well with all the other spices and the crab and the sweetness of the honey and with the crab. And that was executed flawlessly. I'm just saying everybody did a great job. It turned out really well. Yeah. This is our for the foodie segment. If you're new and you're tuning in, the first part of this podcast is about the food. And it gives you that like, okay, this is serious sort of vibe. Because the people who are going to listen to this program are either people who love food or they're people who are from the food industry, which coincidentally typically love food. And that leaves me to our featured guest today. Medina, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm excited. Also, chef, great job. I really enjoyed trying the chimichurri and the steak. Everything looked wonderful. John, the photography top notch. Thanks for having me here. Pleasure was ours. I just want to do a big thank you to chef Michael Thrash over at the Tampa ACF. Guy's awesome. And Andy Caniglia, one of my best friends who actually made this happen for me, chapter 18 in my book describes his characteristics pretty well. He made the book? Yes, he did. He's one of my most favorite chefs I've ever worked with. Well, I guess we're going to have to have him on the program too. Absolutely, you should. Okay. And you too, Michael, I'm just saying, chef, just saying. I knew from our conversation that you were going to be a big ball of energy. I was not wrong. Even though you tried to shield it, you tried to veil it. I knew, Medina. I knew. I knew. All right. Well, I curved it during our first conversation just because I wanted to come off as a professional individual. I am a professional individual, but I also am sarcastic, kind of like Sophia from Golden Girls, which is how I learned a lot of humor in this country is watching Golden Girls in Frasier. So it impacted me. You're the Russian, Sophia. Picture it. Sicily, 1925. Moscow, 1925. Support for Walk and Talk Media comes from Metro Food Service Solutions, trusted by kitchens that need storage and workflow that actually does the job. Learn more at Metro.com. You're right about hospitality as something you inherited rather than chose. How did the kitchens and tables of your childhood shape the way you later kind of found your way into the industry? You know, all my life, I actually wanted to be a lawyer, and then I realized that's not the path I want to take. And I wanted to, when I wrote the book, I wanted to unpack why I ended up in hospitality. And it all came down to the fact that I spent so much time with my grandmother, who had almost secret devotion to food and to how she nourished people. She was a person that hosted parties, cooked with soulful music. She was the one who canned and jammed and had a garden that she tended to. And I think that way of making people feel well taken care of or giving them sense of belonging is what ultimately brought me to this industry, because that's what I think our industry is. I would love to see analytics of how people get into the business. You know, we talk about this a lot on the program. One of the main questions is like, hey, hey, chef, how did you get into this? And a lot of times it comes from the grandmother or the mother. And after like, distantly is the father, which is very strange to me. Because for me, my love of food really, well, you know what, my grandmother first and then my father. I don't know. It's really what grandmothers have a clutch hold on that emotion. And I don't think you know that when you're little. When you're young, you don't understand that whatever your grandmother is doing at the stove or at the kitchen table is going to resonate with you 30 years later, 20 years later, whatever. So love your grandparents and your mom. Don't forget your dad's either children if you're listening. That she was my dad, actually really pushed help me pushed into more of the culinary because it was right around the same time as the food network coming out. And you know, he loved watching that and you know, we used to do stuff together. But first off, it was my grandmothers. Yeah, same way. When you reflect on leaving home and arriving in the U.S., you were 19. When you're doing a shift like that, you lose yourself. There's something you lose. Was there a part of you that silently you didn't think you were going to make it? I think culturally, Russians are very resilient people. What I lost when I moved here is certainty, right? Language culture. But one thing I didn't lose, I think is my adaptability and my resilience. So I never doubted that I will make it. It just took a long time to realize how am I going to make it? And I think, again, culturally, we are so focused on delivering results and succeeding that the backbone helped me through the transition. Even though I didn't speak a lick of English when I moved to this country, I could say my name is Marina, where the boats live. That's how I introduced myself. Still have a t-shirt with that from my friends. But I knew that I had to make it. I had no other option because failure is not an option in our culture or in my family. You said something that I think was very profound. You were talking about those who work until they're unseen. Describe what that means. I think in hospitality, a lot of times we disappear, right? People come to celebrate birthdays, holidays, and everything just happens. But people behind the scenes are the ones that make it happen. During pandemic, I watched six seasons of Downton Abbey. Just bench watch that. And we always celebrate the family of Downton Abbey and how they live this wonderful life. But for me, was I opening to see all the people that service them. The butlers, the housekeepers, the cooks, people that did all of those things to make things happen. That's what happens in the hotels. We are unseen, but people experience amazing things. One of my favorite books is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Gerarda. But what he describes in his book is the front of what people experience from all that work. Writing my book, I wanted to showcase all the invisible work and all the people that make it happen. The dishwashers, the cooks, the servers, the housekeepers, those are the people that make incredible experiences happen at their own expense at times. We can definitely feel lost or forgotten about in this industry. If not for a handful of close comrades, if you will, in your restaurant or hotel that you can confide in. If not, it's come in, pre-shift, balls deep work. You got to do your side work, you want to get the heck out of there. That's just the nature of it. It's grueling on the mentality. I mean, listen, for me, it's hard work, but it's not like you're paving a driveway or tarring a roof or something like that. It's not the same. But there's a lot of loneliness in it and you can easily be forgotten. What made you go from advancing within the upper levels of hospitality and saying, you know, I'm going to write a book? What brought you to that? You know, when I told my mom I wrote a book, she said, Dostoevsky probably turned in his grave because I've never written anything in my life and I really struggled with writing in Russian. I loved reading but not writing. And I told her, no, I wrote a book. She said, I can't believe that. And I'm currently translating into Russian because I wrote it in English. But I think we all come to certain points of our life where there is tumult and difficulty. And no surprise, I was going through a very difficult time personally and professionally. And I needed to find joy and I needed to find the reason I am still here and I love people. So I decided to write a book. I wrote a book about my journey. But during that process, I also realized how many amazing people impacted my path. And I wanted to celebrate them within my book and acknowledge their contribution, not only to me, but to people at large. Ultimately, you became a statistic, a food industry statistic, married, challenges, divorce. How did that help you establish putting pencil to paper on the book? I think I decided that I wanted to share my story so other people could relate to it. Because you're right, this is statistically very common in our industry. And it is because we sacrifice time with our families. We work all the holidays, nights, weekends, I'm sure chef can attest to that story. And I wanted people to be seen. I wanted them to know that they have ability to go through things like this and still succeed and still find joy on the other side. They also gives them permission to falter and to be vulnerable, which is not something easy to accept because it was hard for me. What I always thought was interesting is that, I mean, look, your first year, second, third, fifth year in the industry, tenth year in the industry, your friends and family are always shocked on a birthday or holiday when you're like, well, yeah, I'm going to come late. What do you mean you're coming late? Well, I got to work. Well, what time are you coming? I don't know when I get there. But that nobody, even after long periods of time, they don't do the math and they don't get like, nobody knows. I don't know what I'm going to, are we going to be busy, not busy? I don't know. To me, that's always been an interesting bellwether of people from the food industry versus people who just go and dying, the guest. Yeah, because they think it's so, it's easy, right? I'm doing my favorite joke, which I already shared with you, but I'm going to share again, is people think it's so easy to work on a restaurant because they've eaten in one. I always say, well, I've seen 17 seasons of Grey's Anatomy. I still cannot perform an open card surgery, even if I tried. And I think that's why we gravitate towards people that work in the industry, because it's camaraderie, we understand each other. And people I've met in this industry are one of the best people. They have the heart, they're breaking their own heart every day, giving them pieces of it to other people that come there to celebrate. We cry when people celebrate someone's life. We cry at the weddings. We are there and our emotions are there. So it's a tough industry. It's not for everyone, but it also has a lot of great things in it. Seeing someone getting married, their most important day, or somebody celebrating the birth of their child, those are emotions you can't replace with anything. For those who actually respect the trade, there's something that's selfless. About the job, there's a romance to this work. You can look at substance abuse challenges. You can look at bad choices that a lot of people make that are from this industry. But the truth is, it's still selfless. Because when the average person is out celebrating one of these benchmarks of their life, somebody's working, whether it's a Friday night, a Saturday night, a Sunday night, whatever it is, Thursday for Christmas, Thursday for New Year's Eve, whatever it is, people have to understand that. It's silly for me as a 51-year-old to talk about this sometimes. I almost feel silly because how the hell don't you just understand this? And other people, and they're typically older people, who don't get it. Like you should just get it. You should just understand. In the book you write, that service is not performance but humanity. Expand on that a little bit. I think to me, service is to make sure people know there is scene. When you come somewhere and you stay at the hotel or you come to dine in a restaurant, you're not coming there just to eat. You're a guest of my house. And to me, that's a human experience. But because when you gather with your family for holidays or you visit your friends, you're coming to their house, you're their guest. So the human element is sometimes lost in our industry. And I try to remind people that we're all people. We all have feelings. We want to be seen. We want to be known. And I have a story that kind of shifted my perspective on that a little bit. At one of the hotels that I worked at, a lady came up to my hostess and she was yelling at her, visibly upset. So I pulled her aside and I said, may I speak with you? I asked her, how can I help you? And she said, well, I tried to get a cup of coffee here early in the morning. And your hostess told me to go to a cafe. And they didn't have the coffee there at that time. So I came back very upset. After my conversation with her for a little bit, I found out that she was here and she was supposed to be here with her husband celebrating his milestone battling cancer. But he passed away two weeks before that. So she wasn't mad about coffee. She wasn't mad about my hostess. She was grieving and we were there. So I had two choices either I meet her where she is and I let her be in her grief and be there with her. Or just brush it off. I chose the first. We made her stay amazing. I personally, you know, sent some amenities to her, called her to follow up, offered her to go for a walk. And that made a huge difference for her because she lost someone so dear to her and she was just grieving. It's never about what you did. It's really about where people are at and how do you meet them there? And that touched you. You'll never forget that. No. So it's not always bad news. It's not always negative news. These are just things that you deal with in a lot of different industries, not just the hospitality. And it's what you make of it. So sometimes our conversations on the show, they go a little dark. But the truth is, it's not because the guest that comes in who's grieving from a loss, the very next guest is celebrating their 21st birthday. And the excitement is just, you know, you can't contain that. I always look at people who have stayed in the food industry long enough. It's almost like a course in psychology. Because you need to be able to read somebody in a situation immediately and then switch to another person and read their situation immediately. And then do the proper work. You know, whatever the adjustments are, whatever it is that you need to do to accommodate that guest, that's something that's overlooked. And I don't think people talk about that. I agree. Absolutely. I agree too. I think sometimes in the amount of emotional intelligence it takes to switch from that grieving lady to the now celebrating the 21st birthday, everybody is happy, champagne is flowing. That takes toll. And I think that goes back to the fact of the statistics because it takes such an emotional toll on you to be able to adjust on and on and on and on. You're always on stage, on Broadway, but in the food industry. For front of the house, you only get that couple of minutes when you're placing an order, when you're at the computer and you're plugging in the order. That's your time when you're just alone. That's your moment. Right? There's really not a lot of quiet places or quiet, especially during service. It just doesn't exist. Look, people, there are exceptional people that work in this industry, but then there's people, but then there's the others, the ones who are dead behind the eyes. Like there's plenty of those too. So this isn't something where, you know, like you're listening to this episode and you're thinking that, hey, we're all going to fall on our sword because it's to food it. Now, there's a lot of dummies out there. And unfortunately, we've got to hire them. They interview well, and then they turn out to be a bag of rock. Happens in every position, whether it's in the kitchen, front of the house, management, ownership, like it happens everywhere. Manina, you've reached burnout in this business, in your life. What truth did you find out about yourself during your worst time, during your worst process? That nothing can break me, even though I did reach a very difficult time in my career, specifically while also battling my personal life, nothing can break me, just say. I mean, this brings me back to 1986 and, you know. And a really nice, great movie, Rocky, you know what I mean? And I must break you. I just, sorry, I'm tying it in, you know? And thank you for that. Honestly, as a Russian person, our culture demands heroic behavior at all times. And I think what happened to me during the time where I was struggling, I had to accept that sometimes you falter, and I had to allow myself to be vulnerable, and I had to allow other people help me through the difficulty. And that's the people that came back to my life from before, Andy being one of them, several of them are mentioned in the book, your tribe, the people that you collect throughout your life that will stand with you even when you falter. So I think burnout brought me to a place where I had to accept that sometimes not muscling through is a win, that you can falter, that you can allow yourself to be seen as a weaker person, because in Russia we don't cry. Nobody cries if they do cry, but not when you are struggling. Let's talk about Dauph London for a second. You know who this is. You've seen Rocky? Oh, yes. Okay. The big tall Russian? Yes, yes, he's not Russian. But your Russians love him? Yes. I was looking for something more climactic, but fine. I'll take that, I'll take it, I'll take it. Medina, your journey stayed largely within hotels and leadership. Chef Carl, you stepped away from chefing to build a small independent food company. When did each of you realize that staying in hospitality did not mean staying on the same path? I think to me hospitality is ever changing. It doesn't mean you can't go from one role to another or do one thing or another. Hospitality at large, it's not just hotels and restaurants, it's the way of life. To me, it is how you meet people, where you meet them, and being hospitable and being kind to other people in common industry. To me, I love people. I have to be with people during pandemic. I got my MBA and analytics. And although I really love business, I couldn't be behind computer all the time. So being with people, engaging is where I find joy. And it could show up in every different way in any different industry. You could sell cars, you could do furniture building, you're still going to be with people. And how you treat them and how you treat each other is what hospitality is really. Well, for me, after 30 years of being in the business, constantly in the kitchen, I truly just wanted a better life only for myself and make my own money for me, not for somebody else. I still get to do what I love. I still get to create. I still get to play with food. And doing this podcast, I get to do that even more so on a bigger scale. And now I get to be a part of the reason why people can play with food, because I have a product they can do different things with. This session of Walk and Talk Media is made possible by Citrus America, delivering fresh Florida citrus and juice solutions to food service professionals nationwide. Learn more at CitrusAmerica.com. You can almost say that both of you can experience greater depths within hospitality, just by nature of your current trajectory, your path. Medina, your writing speaks to dignity. You could say it's built through the unseen service, right? Chef, your crab dips come from hands-on craft and control over the product. Where do each of you find the dignity now compared to earlier in your careers? I think to me, dignity in the beginning of my career was working hard, being dependable, providing results to the company I worked for. Now, to me, dignity is how people are treated when nobody is looking. How do I make space for those that need me, even maybe when it's not convenient for me, or where I have other priorities? People come first. I will always find time for my team because they deserve it. And I think that's part of where dignity lives for me now. It's amazing how dignity and character go hand in hand. And yeah, what do you do when nobody's looking? I can only hope that the young people coming up today, embrace those two words simply. That's very true too, and I absolutely agree with you. Dignity comes with integrity, absolutely. For me, nowadays, trying to bake the best product I could possibly put out, and even beyond, we're all early in the career, just like you said, Marina, is doing stuff for other people. And say like, for example, making sure that the dishwashers are actually happy, you know, so they don't walk out. But it's not just because of that, they are human beings. And just trying to take care of my crew in the past. And right now, my customers and my business partner, you know, I'm trying to make sure everybody's taken care of. Carl, leaving the kitchen meant redefining who you were without the daily identity of chef. Marina, leadership and authorship reshaped your identity as well. How did each of you grieve who you used to be while becoming somebody new? Well, for me, I don't personally grieve anything from the past. You know, you said that, you know, I left chefing and whatnot, which really, I think, up to down a different level of being a chef. It's not the same as being in a restaurant, but I still am. I still do what I do. I might not have a crew yet. But I still try John and... But you don't miss, you don't miss the camaraderie. If there's anything I miss, I don't ever miss being in a restaurant. Like, like there's hardly anything of that today. But one of the things I do miss is the camaraderie with my people, the people who I was close with. That was cool because, you know, shifts over, it's one in the morning. You're ever happy band is going somewhere, you know, and you're going to hang out, you're going to hang out until six in the morning. Like, granted, you're doing debauchery stuff, and it's probably not the best lifestyle. I understand that. But those people, that energy and action, hard to not miss that. I see where you're coming from, but I don't miss that because I still have that. Not only with Tom, but I still get to see my old crew, you know, not all of them, but you know, some of them, I still have a lot of camaraderie with the people I do with the farmers markets that I do as well. And not to mention, I still keep in contact with a lot of people from my life. So what you're saying is you made a responsible transition, right? I think to me, leadership and authorship reshaped who I was in many different ways. I was reluctant to publish my book because I was always perceived a perpetual optimist, energetic person, but I had to be very vulnerable in what I wrote. And it was raw, retrospectively, maybe a touch more than I wanted to. But I had to accept that. I had to figure out, do I want to take that risk? And I was afraid that people will see me differently. And as one of my friends said after reading the book, people would see me for who I am and respect me more for being open. Because my book is a little bit raw, as I've alluded earlier, talking about the difficulty that we go through when we enter this industry. But I wanted also to celebrate how wonderful this industry could be. I started as a dishwasher, not the glorious job, and a bus girl, and a server eventually. That taught me what it means to work hard. The heart of the house is the stewards, the unsung heroes. And now when I talk to my team and go to stewards first, I say hello, and they all respect me more because they know I wash dishes. Because a lot of them read my book, which is humbling. But I think taking myself on this journey was for people that are unseen and show people that may want to enter this industry, that it could be both celebrated and hard. And if they are prepared, they will love the camaraderie. They will have so much fun. But they're also going to struggle in some moments. See, I can see you having this internal struggle when you're writing your book. I can see that your emotions come out. You're feeling vulnerable. And then all of a sudden your Russianness comes out and says, I'm Russian and Russians don't cry. Am I wrong? No, you're not wrong at all. I'm 100% accurate. 100% accurate. And that is one of the battle that has never stopped and never will. Because culturally, I'm in two places at the same time. I embrace both pieces. Make no mistakes. I am Russian to a core, and I embrace that part of me. But I also had to learn how to be American Russian and accept that I am not perfect close enough, but not perfect. And I allow myself a little room for mistakes. Slavic people are a certain breed. I know them very well. Very, very, very well. And everybody's tough on the outside. There's layers of brick. But when you get in there, there's humanity. It exists. It's alive there. I think it's more than you think because when you visit any Slavic home, not specifically Russian, but I'll speak of experience, we will do, we'll give you everything we have. The table will be gone with food. Even if we don't have it, we'll go to our neighbors and get it for you because hospitality in Slavic countries means nobody leaves hungry, and you belong. This is your home too. Even if you don't like the person. Absolutely so. Because you still are a guest in my home. And I think that kind of continuum of my career. I love when people come to the restaurants or to the hotels that I work at because they're guests in my home. I want them to have the best time. And the difficult people, I take it as a personal challenge to turn around, make them fall in love with our spaces and come back and become the best client we have. That's a great question. I've had a few hundred moments of that for sure. But it's my love for this industry and the love of cooking and just feeding people to see the way they look when they eat your food. That's kept me coming back more and more, always. Is it as simple as that though? Yeah, for me it is. I like to see the smiles on people's faces when they eat something really good. It's like OMG. It doesn't have to be so deep, I guess. Right? It's simple human stuff. Like, hey, I make something, slap me on my back. I want to feel good about it. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Especially when there's a process to learning what it takes to produce something that's... Let me put it this way. Okay, so for most people, the happiest times that they can think of always revolves around food. Period. Oh, it's like that for me. Yeah, it's for me, it's for my family, my friends. Almost every culture has something. I couldn't agree more, Chef. I think feeding people and seeing their smiles. But also to me is creating belonging not just for the guest, but for my team. People come to work to make money so they can support themselves outside work. Why not have fun? Why not have the best environment you can? Why not become a family? Because you spend more time together than with our families outside. And that is the theme in our industry. We spend a lot of time together. So to me, it's creating an environment where people feel seen. I love to know my team's kids' names, Pat's names, what their interests are. I make it a point to spend time with people because we are all humans and we want to be seen in one way or another. And then we do the same thing for our guests. We make them feel well taken care of. How do you define that? You can't. How do you make someone feel something? It takes a special person. So I hire for character trained for skill always because if you're a good human and you want other people to be happy, I can teach you how to serve or cook. Amen to that. Absolutely. Could be good people. And I feel like food is, it could be, I feel like food is the catalyst that can bring people together and get over some of their issues, let's say. And there's tons of issues out there today. We don't get into politics and all that stuff on this program. But guess what? Big part of everybody's life now where it shouldn't be. And food, I think at home, to squash a lot of that stuff. Because the truth is, if you think somebody's not cool for whatever the reason, I bet you if you go out to dinner, maybe there's a cocktail. Maybe not. It doesn't even matter. It could be an ice team, eliminate who cares. You're going to find common ground and then you're going to move on. And it'll be something positive. And you forget some of this negative junk. I'll tell you something. John, we all know, doesn't talk on this program. I don't know why. He has a voice, I promise. But he's a photographer. He creates. I have that same spirit. This whole program, the filming, the photography as a sphere of media, I feel the same way, creating this and plugging John into the end, doing all of these different things, and with Pooch too, the whole thing. It's a creative outlet for me. And damn, I feel great. I had the chef of Harvard University reach out to me last night. Wow. That's awesome. So cool. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. Just to be like, Hey, I love what you're doing. How cool is that? That's my slap on the back. And that's my atta boy. I feel terrific because, you know, listen, maybe not everybody's gonna be like, Oh, I want to hear or listen to a food show, a food podcast, or I don't really care about any of that stuff. That's fine. And it's not for everybody. But the people who actually have a skin in this as a foodie or food professional, farmer, manufacturer, distributor, any, anybody in the supply chain, this is, this is for me beautiful. And I know he feels the same way. He'll never say it though. That's my mic drop. We're done. Now we can, all right. Marina, after everything you've lived through, migration, burnout, reinvention, and staying, what does belonging actually feel like to you now? And how do you know that you are truly home? I think state of belonging is a feeling. And to me, it's the feeling of existing fully without pretence, allowing myself to be who I am. I love silly dances. I love making jokes. I also like to be tough when it comes to business. And being myself is what sense of belonging is. Being in a company that embraces me for who I am and what I do, I think is the sense of belonging. It's not so much a place anymore, but state of being. And I try to emulate that for my team as well, or people in my life, because we all need that. We all need to feel that we belong to a group, to a space, to nationality, whatever it may be. And it's harder, I think, for immigrants, because we are always in two different worlds. You kind of belong to this culture, but also into this. And I hope that people reading my book find a little piece of themselves in that regard and understand that they can belong. It doesn't matter if you're in this country or other country, you belong. Well said. Well done. Guys, I had a blast today. You are a fireball, Laena. Thank you. You're just a ball. I'm kidding. I love you, Medici. You're a round cut. Yes, me too. We're both there. Listen, I seriously love today. Really spectacular. I think we're going to, we might redo this again sooner than later. Nice. How do we find you, Laena? Please follow me. I'm pretty famous on LinkedIn, Marina Baronas. And on Instagram, not as famous by getting there is Baronas 1001. And Marina spelt like the boat place where the boats live. Jeff, you can follow us on all social media with crab island seafood dips. Okay. That's even simple. Keep it simple. Well, hey, listen, everybody, it's the end of the year. Let's rack porcelain, metro, Aussie select, crab island seafood. There's so much. There's a bunch. There's tons. Our friends at restaurant events, LLC, the burnt chef project, the US culinary open, Citrus America, so many more. Listen, everybody, we are out.