Cajun & Creole Cooking with Chef Joe Muench | Re-released from the archives!

SPEAKER_02 0:00

You gotta start off with your cookies in the morning. Um, stop at your local colour, get your jelly donuts.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey guys, it's like here with a little bit of a blast from the past Marty Gotstyle. Um in January of 2018, when the podcast was called Reduce by Half, we interviewed Chef Joe Matt. He's the chef owner of Black 2 Hospitality Group in Milwaukee. They have a couple restaurants, Max East, Blue Egg, and Story Hill 3, and just go to Codering. And it's one of my favorite places to go eat in Milwaukee, especially if you like coding Creole low-country cooking. We were able to interview Chef Joe and talk about what coding cooking is, where it comes from, what's different from code and creole food, lots of different topics. I think it's a great interview, stand to time, and I wanted to re-release it to everybody that's new to the podcast now that it's Twitter plus record. I'm obviously re-recording the introduction because the original one wouldn't make sense anymore. But the interview I'm leaving untouched, and we're gonna let you listen to it in its entirety. There's a few things that uh are references to times that obviously don't make sense anymore. But Max is still doing Mardi Gras stuff, they're going strong. You can check them out online or Basketball, go to the restaurant. It's great code. So thanks again to Chef TO for joining us, and uh hope you enjoy the interview. Without further ado, I'm really, really happy to welcome uh Jeff Gillman, um, the chef owner of Blacktooth Hospitality Group to the podcast. Joe, thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Welcome to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

So Black Tooth Hospitality Group has three fabulous restaurants in the Milwaukee area. Um Maxi's Blue Egg, and then uh Story Hill Bake BKC. And if people aren't familiar with them, really need to check all three of them out because they're all great. But today, um, as we're recording this, Marty Growth coming out. And Maxi's is a southern-inspired restaurant that, in my opinion, is some of the best Cajun food around. So um wanted to really kind of feature on Maxi's today. But first, Jeff, could you tell us a little bit about how you got into cooking, what your story is, what your background is?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Um well, I'm a um Wisconsin boy, you know, born and bred, grew up in the Milwaukee-Wawatosa area. Was fortunate enough to have my grandmother um live with us for a little over six, seven years or so. Um she you know was uh second generation German. And when she lived with us, it was kind of like I described it to people as kind of like Thanksgiving every night. She um, you know, big meals, full, everything from scratch, um, you know, all different kinds of cuisines, not necessarily German, but um a lot of German influence. And uh just kind of inspired, you know, watching her in the kitchen stuff. I was about eight years old or so when uh she moved in, so seeing her cooking around the kitchen, um just having the opportunity to kind of just watch her, maybe help once in a while. But with that, uh kind of you know, just speak piqued my interest and ended up watching a lot of the early PBS shows like um Graham Kerr or the um Fru Gourmet, kind of when PBS was in its you know, a little bit of Julia Child and Jacques Le Pen and stuff. So I used to watch a lot of those programs and that kind of just uh I think set a foundation. Um when I got into high school, I uh went to work at a pizza place and that was kind of the end of it. I or the start of it, I should say. We uh, you know, started working in restaurants and all through college and uh went to school um for culinary arts in the Milwaukee area at MATC.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

So did you get uh right into owning your own restaurants after you graduated from METC or did you start somewhere else and kind of work your way up?

SPEAKER_02 4:00

Well, I started um working, like I said, it was at Marty's Pizza in the at the time they were in the West Dallas area here in Milwaukee, um or up in Brookfield and in Delawarefield, I'm sorry, um, but uh ended up um going to going to college for a few years and then came back and just decided um talking to mom one day and it's like you know, I'm really kind of interested in cooking. I've been working, you know, in the restaurants for a little while. So I ended up going to MATC. When I was in MATC, I kind of had two jobs. I worked at a Perkins, but then I got a job at the Grenadier Restaurant in downtown Milwaukee, which was um a mobile four-star rated. Um at the time that was a pretty big deal to be rated by the mobile travel guide. And I worked there for roughly five years and uh moved myself up from a line cook to sous chef, and then opened Eddie Martinis in the Wawatosa area. Um this was in the mid-90s, and then um after that uh kind of wanted to get out of Milwaukee. I was kind of itching to uh see, you know, I had a family at the time, young kids, and really couldn't travel as much as I wanted. So kind of uh um had some family down in the uh Lake Geneva area. So I ended up down at uh Bigfoot Country Club down in Lake Geneva in Fontana uh for five seasons and then um came back to work for the gentleman who owned uh Eddie Martinis, uh the DeRosa Corporation, Joe DeRosa, which um owns the Chancery restaurants and uh Jose's Booth Sombrero and a couple other concepts around and came back to consult with um the Chancery Group right around 2005 or so. And um that's where I met my business partner, uh Dan Seidner. He uh was the director of operations. We worked for about a year and a half together, and then Dan had been looking for locations for a restaurant, and so he left uh the organization and I followed shortly after to open at Maxi's as the executive chef in uh 2017. So, I mean sorry, 2007. So we just accelerated our 10 year in 2017 here. That's kind of how in a nutshell, you know.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Yeah. Those are some really great, really great restaurants, but they're also kind of you know traditional uh American food, I guess, and you know, having your German grandma, even though you said you didn't only cook German. How did you get into southern food? You know, it's it's not none of those restaurants or you know, traditions are really necessarily things that would lead you to open a southern restaurant.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

I had an aunt that lived down in uh Lafayette, Louisiana for a number of years. And so was fortunate enough to visit her. And through high school, I had some friends and I jumped in the car one time and drove down, spent a week in Louisiana. So I'd been down there several times. We had some friends in Virginia and North and uh North Carolina area. So traveling into the south south was something that I was familiar with. Um didn't know at the time that it'd be leading into a culinary career. It really started with Dan Seidner, my business partner. He um had there's the original Maxis is in Ithaca, New York. And so um that um is called Maxie's Supper Club, and one of our original partners um by the man of named Chick Evans, he knew Dan through college and they were good friends. Um they both thought that a Maxis concept would go over really well. At the time, in the mid um, around 2005-2007, southern food was really kind of on the rise, the popularity of it. Um there was a lot of chefs that started, you know, becoming of age and really kind of going, making other cities down south, uh, you know, Nashville and the Raleigh, Durham area, and Asheville, Carolina uh North Carolina, and those cities, Charleston certainly really was blooming, you know, so much outside of the the New Orleans area. So that was where um with that idea of how you having a concept, kind of, you know, you have all the infrastructure, you have all the menus, you have all that kind of stuff there, um, I thought it would be a good way to open a restaurant in the Milwaukee area. I joined on and you know, really kind of did a lot of studying, kind of revisiting, did some travel down south again while we were getting ready to open. Um and the one thing, the curious thing is that it's amazing how you can take a recipe from somewhere and then apply it with ingredients that are only available here, say spice mixes and types of cayenne pepper, the strength of it, or different types of uh herb, dry herbs and stuff, and see how the the menu or the flavors change so much. So we really had to go through every recipe and rewrite them with new quantities to um match the the level and the spices that we were able to get here versus in Ithaca, New York. I've never really so that was a process that was kind of an unexpected process that really put a lot of extra work into opening Maxis. And Maxis was decidedly gonna be um different than the the original in the sense that we were gonna start, we were definitely looking at a wider range of seafood that we were gonna offer, um, a wider scope of the south we were gonna offer. And so that's really kind of, you know, the the concept was this was the starting point, the foundation, and then we built onto that. And if you were to go into Maxis or go into uh Maxie's Supper Club in Ithaca, New York or Maxie's in Milwaukee, they look similar but very different uh feel as far as uh uh the way the menu reads and presented and the items offered and and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

So at at Maxis, it you know, to call it a southern restaurant really encompasses a lot of different culinary traditions. I feel like in the South there's more American culinary tradition than you know in a smaller area or than anywhere else in the country. But for with Mardego coming up, um wanted to talk more Cajun. And um, you know, one of the things I I love Max is I love going in and I always have a hard time not getting jambalaya, although the um the brave pork peaks are a close second. Um could you give us just a little overview of what makes Cajun food unique? Because it it does seem like a pretty unique uh cuisine within America and really pretty localized to a small area of the country.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Yeah, I mean the kind of the misunder some of the some of the differences between you have Louisiana, you have the South, and then you have Louisiana itself, then you have New Orleans. And so um really the two differences between the cuisines in Louisiana is you have uh the Cajun and the Creole. The Creole essentially are the city folk. Um so the the educated, I mean, at one point New Orleans was a very international city, had a lot of different cultures uh melding in there, um, had a lot of different uh well-traveled people, well-educated people, a lot of different types of commerce going in and out of New Orleans, so it was a port city, um, very wealthy, and so it had a highly educated people, and they developed a cuisine that um really when you we today we take things like tomatoes for granted, but at the time the tomato was considered you know for the rich, and so a big difference between Cajun and Creole cuisine is the tomato. Um as you go, so when you have like um jambalayas in the New Orleans area, the Creole would have typically tomato in it, um and creole type sauce in it. But if you have a jambalaya out in Cajun country, which again is the bayou, once you get out of New Orleans, it quickly goes into, especially in the southern part, goes into the the bogs and the bayous and the estuaries and stuff. And that um, you know, is really a cuisine that was developed from the land. And so um you see um, you know, the base of a lot of the dishes is the the Trinity or the Holy Trinity, Trinity being um peppers, onions, and um celery. The holy trinity is the addition of garlic. And so that's the base for a lot of cooking when you think of different kinds of gumbos, different kinds of stews, different kinds of soups, certainly etuffetes and and uh um jambalaya's, um and the uh and just the amount, the bounty of seafood that comes from from uh that area is just that's such a huge part of you know the cuisine um so between oysters and crab and shrimp. I mean that just and then even some of the fish, the catfish coming from the freshwater side, and then you get into a lot of the snappers and groupers um on the on the uh ocean side. So you get that mix of those two um stu you know types of of offerings as well. It's a pretty fascinating area when it comes to culinary traditions and what's available and how that really shaped and formed the uh the cuisine.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

So to learn this, did you did you just kind of cook your way through a lot of recipes to get the different Creole versus the Cajun? Did you spend a lot of time down there? Um I guess I'm really fascinated that you know all that stuff. That's a very, you know, seemingly minor difference, but that flavor is you know a huge difference.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

The I mean, fortunately, I you know, again, had relatives in that area, and so getting some experiences young and seeing and actually going out into the bayou areas or going to um you know, Lafayette is right kind of at the cusp or the outer fringe of that area. So as you head south um from Lafayette, you really get to get into some of the interesting areas um that um you're basically walking up to someone's back door and they're selling fresh shrimp right from their from their driveway, the same way it's like a lemonade stand, but you're buying shrimp from them um and taking them back and cooking them. So seeing my aunt down there um really um kind of cooking and redoing a lot of you know, that kind of exploring to being able to, you know, 12 years old walking through the streets of New Orleans for the first time and then revisiting it a couple more times all the way through high school, um uh really was you know something that again, once I started getting into um the idea that we were gonna be opening a southern restaurant, it it was like just flashbacks sort of coming through. So I've had some experience there, and as my aunt kept visiting up, she would send cookbooks or bring products or hey, that we're gonna be making a touffe here in Milwaukee, or we're gonna be making you know crawfish boil, or we're gonna do blackened redfish or catfish, whatever would be available. So that kind of uh that kind of uh was present in you know my house, um not quite as much as I was living there, but certainly saw it more than I think most you know upper Midwest kids you know my age um got to experience. And so we also, you know, Paul Burdome started getting on the TV at that time too, and so his books were coming out, and so that was another you know fascinating. Um, you know, Jeff Smith at the time was kind of going around the different immigrants that made he had a series that had different immigrants and stuff, and so I really kind of was fascinated by that. You know, when I was going to college, I was in sociology studies, so that was part of it, you know, really studying culture and people and stuff like that. So that was another part that you know naturally drew my attention to uh or paying more attention, I think, to when I was traveling with my family, that we you know really um we didn't go to Disneyland, we didn't go to amusement parks, we went and visited people we knew, and they lived in the areas and they would take us to the local, you know, have the local experience kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

With Creole and Cajun food, you mentioned your aunt would send up cookbooks. How much of that cuisine do you think it's important to kind of just have a feel for, you know, we're gonna start with with the Trinity, we're gonna get that flavor base going, and then you know, we're gonna find what what's right for some food today. And just kind of make a dip that evokes that spirit, um, you know, the people. How much of that do you think is important to go off of recipes? Um, you know, some cuisines are a little bit more regimented with, you know, you follow the rules, and some are a little less. Do you think that you know capturing the spirit is more important or following recipes is more important?

SPEAKER_02 16:14

I think you really have to understand um the ingredients and know what the ingredients are going to contribute to the dish, and then you can start working on adjusting to your taste. Because the recipe, you know, gives you certain guidelines. Um it's certainly um, like I kind of back to what I was talking about with the spice mixes that we had to make our you know southern inspired dishes and southern classic southern dishes at Maxis, how they change so much with two different spice companies. And so again, not all andouis the same, not all Tasso Hams the same. I mean, not all peppers, onions, and celery are the same. And so you really kind of have to um understand, you know, how much bold flavors are coming out of, let's say, your your tasso hams and your andouille sausages. And then certainly all shrimp are not the same. I mean, a gulf brown shrimp versus a freshwater shrimp is like night and day, and a lot of people probably over the years have only been exposed to something like a freshwater shrimp, but if you really source out and get you know, a gulf shrimp that is really the sweetest, has that iodine flavor to it that is you know synonymous with what we think of as good shrimp. Um, that's something that again really lends to um making your dish superior than maybe the next guy's dish, even if you follow the same recipe. Um, there is an element of technique too that you have to understand. I mean, when you're cooking down something like the the Trinity, it's a base flavor for so many dishes. You know, it doesn't have to be necessarily cut pretty. It's and it's about slow cooking and sweating it down and really extracting those flavors out and letting them blend together as you're sweating down the vegetables. And then maybe toasting your spices in with that towards the end, then start building with your different types of roux, especially the roux is another ingredient that so many people overlook. Um and about 90% of the people that have made mac and cheese from scratch make roux. They just didn't know they make a curry of making roux by melting butter in a pot and adding flour to it and blending that together and then adding your milk, and that's basically you know the base, the flour, the equal parts of fat and flour is a roux. But taking that roux to the next level by toasting it um slowly in cast iron pan or even in the oven, developing that flavor closer to a nutty color or nutty flavor as the color gets darker, and then even going further than that and getting a point where the flour is just on the verge of burning and gets almost like chocolate color, but you get this bitterness. And so when you have that bitterness, it really kind of cuts into some of the richness. So if you're making a gumbo, you're using a lot of fatty products, sausages, and maybe you're adding some some rich shellfish or crab to it. Um, certainly adding maybe chicken that's on the bone, so those bone flavors are coming out and the skin is in there. So all those fatty, kind of rich flavors um are there, but then that chocolatey, kind of toasty, nutty roux has a little bit of bitterness. It's kind of like when you eat a walnut, you get or a even a pecan from raw, you get the skin, it kind of has that little bitterness and dryness on your your palate. Those same that same effect kind of comes out of toasting a roux to a nice chestnut or darker um level. So those are it's definitely a lot of techniques that you need to know to make it, you know, um, and understanding some of the basic techniques, and then once you kind of master those to move on to really coming up with some really incredible um, you know, more successful um variations of what you're trying to create just from a recipe.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

I love how you explain the roux process because you know, I can make a roux, but I've never really thought about that level of detail. And that's what I love about your restaurants is that level of detail and the sophistication of flavor that you know, like you said, anybody who's made macaroni and cheese from scratch at home has made a roux, but you don't think of, you know, how far do I want to take it? Do I want to get it to that level of bitterness to go against, you know, if we're doing uh like a chicken thigh stew, do we want to get a little bitterness to cut through that fat? That's really great. I love that level of detail. That's that's super interesting.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

I think I think that's one thing, you know, we talk about sweet and cooking, we talk about sour and cooking, but bitter is another flavor that really people kind of shy away from. But bitter is kind of that it's it's what really kind of when you go and grill a steak, the point where things are getting caramelized to the point where they actually char, like where the steak hits the the hot metal, that creates the sugars in the steak go to the point where they burn and they get bitter. And that really contra helps balance that flavor of the beef. I mean, if you just had steak that was just kind of browned a little bit in a pan versus thrown on a really hot iron grate or some kind of metal grate over a charcoal, you're gonna really get a different flavor. Um so again, that searing, and that's what makes like something like blackening so desirable. It's kind of a controlled burn. When you're taking a hot cast iron pan, you dredge your fish or your chicken into um the Cajun seasoning, and then you take that and put that on a lightly oiled cast iron pan. Smokes and you know, I wouldn't do that in the home in your home unless you had it well vented. But you know, a charcoal grill with a cast iron pan right on top of it really is a good way to sear. And so, you know, go out there and just pop that uh whatever you're you know, catfish is great because it's nice durable fish. You can certainly blacken something local like a whitefish, so great, you know, Lake Superior Great Lakes whitefish. Um, you know, chicken breast works well. You put blackened seasoning on a steak, and that just turns into what takes like a whole new level, and that blend of you know um Cajun seasoning. It's kind of the base of it, is you know, the paprikas and the chili powders. Then you get into the dry garlics and the dry onions, but then you have a herbaceous side that I think is another part that really lends um to what makes the Cajun and the Creole cuisines so intense is the level of of um dry um herbs that they use between oregano and marjoram and thyme and dry basil, and you blend all those together with you know the papricas and the chili spices and the cayenne peppers, that that really um creates that kind of balance between, you know, we we we say herbaceous flavors, and that's something that's the base for jambalaya and and gumbo as well, is those really strong, you know, when you think of like oregano on a pizza or an Italian cooking, but adding more of that with the addition of dry basil and marjoram and thyme, and a lot of that a lot of that comes from the African um influence in that area and the Caribbean influence. You know, when you have a jerk spice on chicken or on um goat or whatever you're gonna have on pork, there's so much dry herbs along with the chili spices in that rub, and then they blend in the sugars to help balance, but some of that that same type of basic or the base of those spice blends really is reflective of that jerk seasoning when you see it in the Cajun and Creole cooking.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

So if people want to make something at home that's fairly straightforward but really representative of Creole cooking, of Cajun cooking, do you have a dish that you'd really recommend? Um, you know, you you can get a little bit immersed into the culture of what it's like down there and really appreciate some good food that you can make with your family at home.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

I think one sauce that people should learn to make that could be used so many different ways and the base for a lot of other types of dishes, it's it's basically you know a creole sauce. And a creole sauce is very much like a marinero. Um it's tomato-based, it has um the peppers, onions, and celery, good amount of garlic in it, it has spices. And the one thing that people, you know, synonymous to Louisiana is is Tabasco sauce. I'm not a huge fan of Tabasco for myself when I put it on food. I like other types of hot sauces, but I think it's essential to use Tabasco in a lot of um Cajun and Creole cooking because that flavor um is one of those authentic flavors that you'll taste so much through um uh cooking. The creole sauce you can use as a foundation for making jambalaya, you can use it as a foundation for making a gumbo. It's a foundation for making different types of pasta dishes. You can certainly make it as the foundation for an etufe, you can make it as a foundation for making um a shrimp creole. So there's lots of different ways that you can use that sauce. So that's a that's a very important sauce to learn how to make. Um and it's great on pasta too. So you can make a you know, the same way you would be making a spaghetti sauce, you make that, and maybe shrimp creole pasta kind of thing you could do. Um the other thing I would I would say, you know, is um a jambalaya. That's a that's really I mean that's one of the number one dishes Maxi sells. You talked about having the jambalaya, that's something that I think um, you know, it's more than just rice and sausage. There's there's layers of flavor. Um you know, the the restaurant jambalaya that we make is probably one of the more basic jambalayas. When you look at other jambalayas that have you know whole bone or bone-in, whole muscle type products in their pork or or chicken. Um sometimes you're using alligator, sometimes you know, you have the different types of sausages that go in there, certainly a uh andouille type sausage, or then you're adding tasso ham, and you can just go on and on and on with the ingredients. And I think it's something that um learning how to and that's what's cool about you can make 50 different kinds of gumbo and there's still gumbo. You can make a whole bunch of different kinds of jambalaya adding to the different types of proteins you add to the jambalaya, and you come up with different results. So you can learn a lot of different dishes and a lot of different flavors, certainly, with the same basic technique. And so it's kind of the uh interesting part of that kind of cooking.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Yeah, for sure. So get a good creole sauce. And I always think uh, you know, having a having a good drink is uh is a great way to you know, you may not have gone to Disney Disney World growing up, but uh I like going to AFCOT and drinking my way around the world. I think it's a great way to get a bit of culture. What what is the drink of choice down in Louisiana?

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Well, the hurricane is probably the most um cliche kind of uh stereotypical. Um and the ones you get on Bourbon Street tend to not be much more than fruit punch and uh the addition of some of cheap booze. But um a good hurricane is something that um really is uh a fun drink. You know, it's something it's very much like a Mai Thai. Um, you know, it has the passion fruit flavor in it. Lots of rum. I mean, rum is certainly synonymous with um with New Orleans uh because of the the the Spanish trade and coming from the Caribbean and that kind of stuff. But the one drink I think that is a little more elegant and kind of sophisticated is the Sazerac. And the the Sazerac is a is a drink that um um the Sazerac Bar, um basically it is rye whiskey. Um the glass is basically quickly uh um basically you swirl absinthe in the glass, um, or herb saint, which is a anise flavored um liqueur. Um kind of originated in France, uh the Perinot, but Herb Saint was something that uh came back after World War I. Those flavors. They started making herbs saint in the New Orleans area, and that was a really um kind of uh uh unique flavor with the with the the ant Anna's flavor to it. So you kind of swirl that in there and then you discard that, kind of sort of perfuming the glass, and then you make the the Sazraq side of it with the rye and the sugar and stuff and shake that and then pour that into that glass, and it's a real elegant, kind of like a a Manhattan in a way, um kind of like an old-fashioned in a way. Um so that's one I think that is really a lot of fun. Um and something that I think is one of our more popular uh drinks, especially as the whiskey craze and the bourbon craze has gone on around.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

I forgot about those raps. Those are those are great drinks. So fat Tuesdays coming up. I'm sure you're gonna be very busy at Maxies. If you uh do you have anything fun going on at the restaurant? Do you have any Fat Tuesdays that you and the family like to do? What uh what do you do for fun with uh that time of the year?

SPEAKER_02 28:50

You gotta start off with your punchkis in the morning. Um you stop at your local Polish bakery and get your jelly donuts and maybe have some pancakes. That's another the French um kind of always have tradition of having pancakes, so you see a lot of um you know breakfast spots um you know featuring that kind of um those are items. But you know, we're we have a big party that goes on at Maxi's. We start we we start it on Monday, it's Lundegras, so Fat Monday. Um it's basically the um the epiphany um the after the twelve days of Christmas, the epiphany starts, and that's basically the start of the m the carnival season. And Lundegras and Martigras are the two days that wrap up that season. So before you head into the Lenten season, and so that's something that uh February uh twelfth this year is uh Lun de Gras, and that we have a band that comes in and kind of does a they kind of march through the uh the Maxis. We have two floors at Maxis, so they kind of march through, and then the big party is on um, so that's kind of like the precursor, and then the big party on Tuesday is uh Mardi Gras, of course, Fat Tuesday. And so um we set up a tent outside. Um we have a band, the a larger version of that band comes and they play with um a lot of people coming you know dressed up with masks and uh lots of beads and the tradition of uh of uh you know just kind of sharing beads and tossing them around and stuff. Uh we have a menu that's dedicated that night to um different types of foods from uh uh the different types of um creeled this we spoke about between jambalaya and shrimp creel, then we kind of get a little creative. We do a lot of uh kind of shareable bites. Um so we'll do like umdue corn dogs, and we do a lot of little fried fritters and some boudin sausage, which is kind of like a liver rice sausage that's very popular and um traditional of uh that area of the more the Cajun side of everything, and so those are fried into fritters, and we have lots of different seafood and oysters and shrimp, and so we're doing um uh shrimp barbecue and um Rockefeller oysters and fresh sucked oysters and all kinds of uh um uh types of foods, and so it goes from uh about two in the afternoon till um you know eleven or so at night, and um uh we have a king cake um in the uh in the evening, and that is uh um a traditional cake that's very much like a stallin, you could say, um the German Stullen. Um but what it is is decorated with all kinds of gaudy uh colors of of uh purple and uh green and gold. And then the tradition there is to have a um a baby or um a bean um in the cake, and as you cut around it, and whoever gets that, it's kind of a good sign of a sign of luck. And so we we have a few cakes that we bring out, and we kind of it's complimentary on the night, and we around that 10 o'clock hour, we uh cut the king cake and um have uh it's just a it's just for for being able to experience a party like that, you know, in the north here on a cool or cold uh February night to really kind of get out of the house and break some of that cabin fever, it's a great um event to do it. So it's our 11th year um this year, and so um it's something that uh we really uh look forward to every year. It's just a great night.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

That sounds awesome. Where can people find out more about uh Maxies and everything going on at Black Shoe Hospitality?

SPEAKER_02 32:19

Yeah, um Maxis.com. Um you'll see uh Maxis Milwaukee.com. It's uh um the we have a whole page dedicated to all of our events coming up. Um so we um there's some nice pictures and there's uh good description of what the night's like. Um it's just a lot of fun that uh the staff dress up in their little costumes as well, so it's just a party all around. Um we have great a beer specials and hurricane specials and um milk punch and all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

That's awesome. Uh I'll have to come up. I I gotta admit, I love Bouden sausage, and I cannot make it right. That's like the one thing that we've tried to make that I can just never quite get the consistency where I want it. So I'll have to come up and give that a try. But Jeff, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you for sharing everything about um you know Southern Cuisine, and I'd love to have you back on again. There's so much food in the south, and you guys do so much great. I'd love to be able to chat more sometime.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

Yeah, it'd be great. We'll have to travel a little bit east and go to the low country and talk a little bit about the Carolinas and Georgia and stuff like that. So that'd just be a lot of a lot of good uh talking.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Love it. Um, there we have it. Thanks again the chapel. Be sure to go check out Max's online. Probably tomorrow. So we have more to Lesson. That's gonna be a great interview as well. Thank you for the way.