Christophe De Lellis is chef and partner at Mamani in Dallas, a French restaurant with an Italian accent that earned a Michelin star in 2025, less than two months after opening, and kept it in the 2026 guide. Before Dallas he spent 13 years at Joël Robuchon Las Vegas. He arrived in 2010 as a cook who could barely speak English and was running the kitchen as executive chef by 27. He still asks what can come off a dish before he asks what can go on.

The Robuchon kitchen he walked into was nothing like the Paris bistros he came from. Asparagus peeled with a paring knife, micro arugula dressed by rubbing oil between the fingertips, a ruler for the brunoise, and a cook counting the dots on a plate. He says he was hooked right away. Then the executive chef left, his mentor asked if he was ready, and the answer he got was no, you are not ready, but you are going to have to be.

• How a chicken jus built from 180 pounds of wings, water, and shallot, with no salt, becomes about 70 percent of the sauce on his meat dishes
• Why he removes an ingredient before he adds one, and why he says better sourcing fixes half the problem
• How a duck dry aged for 14 to 19 days becomes one dish that blends French and Persian cooking, with the breast in an orange sauce and the legs as kebab

André Natera and Christophe De Lellis cover why he walked out of a finance program on day one and went to cooking school in Paris, the visa call that came in the middle of a Tekken game, the year he left Robuchon to work for Shawn McClain at Sage at Aria, how a random message from Brandon Cohanim brought him to Dallas, why Mamani is à la carte with 100 seats instead of a tasting menu, how he balances a menu, why he does not want servers telling the chef’s story, and which station he says is the mark of a restaurant.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, plus the line he would build with Joël Robuchon on the pass.

Guest

Christophe De Lellis Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christophedelellis/

Mamani : https://www.instagram.com/mamanirestaurant/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef’s PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef’s PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Paid partnership with Toast. This episode ends with a sponsored bonus segment on menu pricing, built on data from Toast's Menu Price Monitor and their free Menu Checker tool. Check your menu against the market → https://biz.toasttab.com/us1XN

Sarah McIntosh is the chef-owner of epicerie in Austin, open on Hancock Drive since 2012 and running 450 covers on a busy Saturday. She came out of Louisiana, cooked at Bouchon and Ad Hoc, and has spent 20 years in and out of the Austin industry. Last year she flew to Argentina to cook alongside Francis Mallmann. None of that is why this conversation matters. She is one of the only chefs in the country who has worked out how to own the dirt under the restaurant instead of renting it.

In 2008 she bought a house on the east side of Austin for around $219,000 at under four percent interest. Her payment was $600 a month, less than the apartment she had been renting. She still lives in it. It is paid off. During the pandemic it crossed a million dollars. That single piece of math is why she now structures deals where she owns the property and the business, and why when a developer offered her a percentage to recruit tenants for a project down the street from her restaurant, she turned it down and asked for ownership in the development instead.

- The ownership structure she learned from Sam Hellman-Mass: buy the property, borrow against it to build, and the investor's money is protected by an asset that outlives the restaurant

- What to actually look for in a lease, in her words: MEP, tenant improvement money, triple net, CAM, percentage rent, and why a landlord covering mechanical, electrical and plumbing is the signal that a deal is real

- How she writes a proforma on purpose at 60 to 70 percent of what she thinks she will do, in three versions, with someone hired to pick it apart

Andre Natera and Sarah McIntosh cover why most chefs put a million dollars into a building they will never own, the difference between leasing and buying when you have no backers, the brokerage math on a commercial deal and why she refuses to get a license, how a 20 year network produces deals that never hit the market, paying 100 percent of staff health insurance instead of raising wages and the staff revolt that followed, being quick to fire before a one person problem becomes a five person problem, and why her empathy has grown to the point that she now hands the firing decision to her team.

It ends with the only award she says she needs. Butts in the seats, 450 of them on a Saturday, and a restaurant that is making money

Sarah McIntosh on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/sarahmcgrams/

epicerie on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/epicerie_austin/

epicerie → https://epicerieaustin.com

Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Bonus content sponsored by Toast.

Abraham Salum has one rule he wishes every restaurant would adopt. A friend of his makes everyone pile their phones in the middle of the table before dinner starts. First person to reach for theirs pays the bill. Nobody ever touches their phone.

That same instinct for reading a room runs through the whole conversation. Salum opened Salum in Dallas 21 years ago on a block his own realtor questioned and a commercial broker publicly predicted would fail. He ran into him years later. The broker told him he had taken his foot out of his mouth a long time ago.

• Why he banned the words no problem in his restaurant and trained every server to say my pleasure instead
• How servers at his restaurant made more money in 2020 than they did the year before, even as the restaurant itself brought in 40 percent less
• The exact leverage he used against an insurance company after a flood to make sure his servers still got paid

Andre Natera and Abraham Salum cover growing up between Mexican, Lebanese, Italian, and Spanish grandmothers who all wanted to feed him, running 300 staff across seven restaurants in Cancun by his mid twenties, the kitchen design mistake from opening night that he is still working around two decades later, a storm that punctured his roof and shut the restaurant down for four and a half months, and the two year process of writing his first cookbook, A Spoonful of Everywhere, a project he kept completely secret from his own business partner.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

salumrestaurant.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/salumrestaurant/

https://www.instagram.com/asalum/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books: https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Nick Walker is an FSR 40 Under 40 chef who oversaw the James Beard nominated Meridian and now leads 11 Whiskey Cake locations across Texas and Florida. He started in a kitchen at 15, under the table, and cut his thumb open on his first real shift when a slamming office door caught his hand mid cut. They poured kitchen whiskey on the wound, duct taped it shut, and he finished service.

Why he believes a cook can cook food, but a chef has to manage people and run the numbers, and why so many talented chefs never make that jump

The line he still thinks about from a mentor who caught him publicly berating a cook over garnish, telling him to be the sous chef he always wanted

Why he says followers do not equal dollars, period, and what actually separates a viral line cook from restaurant success

Andre Natera and Nick Walker cover what kitchen culture looked like before HR existed and why some chefs still cannot accept it changed, the real staffing crisis behind restaurants paying 28 dollars an hour and still coming up short, the formula behind a menu item that actually sells versus one built for a chef's own ego, and why Brussels sprouts and hamachi keep showing up on every menu in the country.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

@chefnickwalker

Links

Lead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Get the Books: https://chefspsa.com/books

Shop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/

Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/

Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Tim Laielli will not call himself a chef. He is clear about it every time someone assumes otherwise, including his own father, who is one. Eighteen months after posting his first cooking video, Tim was on set cooking against professional chefs for Gordon Ramsay on Next Level Chef.

He built Bare Food Tim, over a million followers, without ever working a line, and he explains exactly why. His father worked two jobs his whole childhood and told him constantly not to follow him into restaurants. Tim listened, then found a way to work with food anyway.

Three things worth hearing straight from him. Why he thinks most chefs make content for other chefs instead of the person actually watching, which is usually a tired parent looking for dinner ideas, not a technique lesson. The real numbers behind brand deal income, and why capping sponsored content around 10 to 20 percent is the difference between monetizing and losing your audience's trust. And the two paths he tells struggling restaurants to choose between when they want to go viral, an oversized showstopper dish or full personality driven content, because trying to do both at once usually does neither well.

Andre Natera and Tim Laielli also get into the friction between chefs and content creators, why lighting matters more than the camera you shoot on, which dishes reliably perform online and which never do, and the moment Tim realized the platform had started driving him instead of the other way around.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

Bare Food Tim on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/barefoodtim/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books: https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Matt Lambert earned a Michelin star at The Musket Room in New York in four months, a goal he'd given himself three years to hit. He describes what followed as treating the star like a religion, the Church of Michelin, and says he's never felt that emotional high again, chasing it in different forms for years after.

Why he thinks the tasting menu has lost the plot.

The moment he realized every chef on Instagram was making the same tart with a different color, and what he did about it

Why moving back to New Zealand after New York hit him harder than the original move to America ever did

André Natera and Matt Lambert cover 75 Hard and the 30 kilos he lost once he finally started taking care of himself, winning a major international chef award a week after his brother's funeral and feeling nothing standing on that stage, the moment his own chef de cuisine's face told him he didn't want to be the best anymore, why hospitality matters more than the food itself, and building Return in Auckland as his own answer to what The Musket Room used to be.

Guest

@chefmattlambert

@return_restaurant

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books

Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/

Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/

Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Bryan Caswell has cooked inside three very different kinds of rooms. Jean-Georges Vongerichten's kitchen in the early 2000s, where he learned that a quiet, organized kitchen beats a screaming one. Seventeen restaurant openings of his own, roughly half of them his own concepts, from Reef to his new restaurant Latuli in Houston. And, less known, rooms full of policy people deciding how the Gulf actually gets fished.

• Why he thinks the redfish fishery is in the best shape he's seen in his career, and why almost nobody outside the industry knows it
• A real proposal for cutting aquaculture's biggest cost problem in half, using something shrimp boats currently throw away for free
• The specific menu-writing rule he still uses today, learned running R&D inside one of the most systemized restaurant groups in the country: count every move a dish takes to plate

André Natera and Bryan Caswell cover what it was actually like working under Jean-Georges before he was a household name, why talent alone breaks the moment a chef has to build a kitchen from nothing instead of running an established one, the Gulf Coast bycatch program he pioneered at Reef that's now industry standard, why he hasn't touched red wine in a sauce in over two decades, and his return to Houston with Latuli, his first restaurant of his own since Reef closed.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

@wholefishLatuli Houston

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Rosana Rivera runs three businesses under one roof: a bakery storefront, a wholesale bread program, and a catering and events company called Gatheria Studio. Most operators would guess wholesale wins on volume alone. It doesn't. Catering does, by a wide margin, sometimes 30 to 40 percent margins in a good season, more than either of the other two combined at the bottom line.

She's also the first Latina chef to ever beat Bobby Flay on television, and the casting process that got her there is worth hearing before you ever get a similar email yourself.

• The one piece of advice from her producer that won her the Beat Bobby Flay episode, and how she practiced her signature dish for exactly the time she'd be given
• What it actually costs to open a restaurant right now, and why the number most people quote is too low
• Why she runs a monthly AI audit on her own online reviews, and what it caught in her matcha program before it became a real problem

André Natera and Rosana Rivera cover why most influencer marketing for restaurants doesn't move the needle, whether kitchen robotics are actually worth the investment, the one ingredient that wrecks her food cost every single year no matter what, why a bakery's margins are thinner than most chefs assume, and the full breakdown of why her events business outperforms both her storefront and her wholesale account.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

@chefrosanarivera@chefandthebaker

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/