Mike Bausch | Andolini’s Worldwide, Owner

Mike explores his love for Tulsa’s vibrant food culture, his passion for building systems and leadership in his restaurants, and the innovative practices behind Andolini’s success, including earning a Guinness World Record for the largest pizza party. Mike emphasizes the value of local connections, perseverance, and providing unique culinary experiences.

Show Notes:

Guests: Mike Bausch | Owner at Andolini’s Worldwide

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Mike’s path from the Marine Corps to launching Andolini’s Worldwide.
• The role of leadership and systems in running successful restaurants.
• How Tulsa’s food culture influenced Andolini’s growth.
• Behind-the-scenes of earning a Guinness World Record for the largest pizza party.
• Insights into Prossimo, Andolini’s fine-dining concept, and its focus on unique experiences.
• Why Tulsa is a thriving hub for food, entrepreneurship, and culture.

Key Moments:

• [00:01:30] Mike shares his journey to Tulsa and the inspiration behind Andolini’s.
• [00:07:15] The importance of training, leadership, and community in restaurant operations.
• [00:15:45] Earning a Guinness World Record and overcoming the logistical challenges.
• [00:30:30] Exploring Tulsa’s culinary culture and why it’s a perfect place for restaurateurs.
• [00:36:00] Mike’s take on the importance of creating memorable customer experiences.

Connect with Mike Bausch:

• Website: Andolini’s Worldwide
• Instagram: @MikeyBausch

Visit Andolini’s Locations:
Explore Andolini’s pizzerias, Prossimo, Metropolis Cheesesteaks, Sasa’s, and more at Andolini’s Worldwide Locations.

Transcript:

Mike Bausch Andolini’s Worldwide | Tulsa Is Home Podcast

[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the Tulsa is Home podcast. I’m really excited about today’s guest. We have Mike Bosch and with Andolini’s Worldwide. And so we’re going to get into all the things, uh, Andolini’s and Crossimo, which is one of my favorite restaurants for sure. And the different areas and locations that you have going on.

I think you have some great stories and maybe more stories on the Andolini side. But, uh, no shortage of stories and we’ll get into all that first thing personal. Just, you know, tell us a little bit about you, family, how long you’ve been in Tulsa. Yeah. Uh, been here right now, 20 years before that. Grew up in a Marine Corps family on the East coast and West coast.

I went into officer Canada school, the Marine Corps myself and found that I have juvenile diabetes and then it was like, well, what am I going to do with my life? So it’s a very roundabout story how we got here. Yeah. Currently got a family, her son, Henry is seven years old, goes to the school of St. Mary.

And it’s been great being here in [00:01:00] Tulsa. Tulsa’s where I think the American dream still can occur. And it’s been great to us. But on the flip side of that, I think there’s a lot of things that people don’t realize that we have more restaurants per person here than New York. And it’s a very food focused city, very culture focused city.

A lot of places to hear live music. It’s like Austin without traffic. I feel like Tulsa, a lot of, there’s a lot of complaints about Tulsa traffic, but Oh my, if someone complains about Tulsa traffic, it’s you’re like, I was at a light five minutes coming from the Bay area where I went to, where I went to college was a bedroom community, but to get to a convenience store, which is Was a 13 minute drive.

So look at that compared to here where everything’s drive thru easily accessible. What, I mean, where’s your traffic, 20 minutes from everything, 20 minutes from everything. Cause also it’s a very smart system. We have, you know, uh, essentially a [00:02:00] four, you know, four paths around the city and they go everywhere.

You have so many lines that again, going back to like California, there’s a lot of times where you’ll have one. One freeway. And to get to the town, you got to go through a town, through a town, through a town. It would be like if 169 didn’t exist and to get to Broken Arrow, you had to go from like this, the jank 75, that’s most of the world, especially in America.

And here we’ll have that other, you know, creek. Or the one 69 so that you could just get on anything and drop off anywhere. Yeah. And then, so you said like with diabetes, how did that impact you just kind of growing up and direction of life? And. I didn’t know I had type one, again, I have type one juvenile diabetes.

So not like BB King diabetes. I like Mary Tyler Moore diabetes. So, uh, I went into the Marine Corps, not like boot camp, like you classic thought it’s officer candidate school. You go in summers while you’re in college. And. I was like losing [00:03:00] weight because it was diabetes was eroding my fat. That’s what happens when you have no insulin.

And then as I’m in there, I started to erode my muscle. So other people are like building up muscle. Everyone’s kind of losing weight, but I’m like losing a lot of weight and losing at first, once you run out of fat to lose, you lose muscle. So then I got down to like 133 pounds and everyone kind of knew something’s wrong, but another part of that is you’re being judged on your leadership potential.

So you’re not like, Hey, I feel sick. Um, Like what’s wrong with you? Yeah, don’t say that so I just kept moving and I couldn’t feel my face I had neuropathy but like I don’t know it’s fine It’s just there’s so many things different about that environment and your head gets so hyper focused on just move There’s nothing depressing about it to me because it showed me how far I could push my body Push my mind that when I got out and was like, oh, I can’t go back What can I do with my life?

And people are like, are you going to open? How could you open a restaurant? That sounds hard. I’m like hard. I know hard. It’s something I could deal with. It’s figuring the rest [00:04:00] out, the marketing, the HR. I think most people say restaurant have great food. Absolutely. But that’s the price of entry. Yeah.

Price of entry. It’s truly leadership, marketing, and an awareness of people to pull it all together and systems, massive amount of systems. And being able to not have an ego about it. In the pizza world, I’ll go to a pizza expo every year, and there’s a lot of great restaurants, or rather, a lot of great pizza makers, who will win at pizza expo, or make an impeccable pizza, and they’ll have an empty restaurant.

Because it’s not the defining quality. I’m certainly not saying the food doesn’t matter, it’s the number one thing, but all the rest of it is what makes you a success. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I mean, definitely you guys have nailed The food. I mean, for sure. I can attest to that. Thank you. Thank you. So with systems, did, did you, did it take a long time to figure that out?

Or is it trial and error? Did you go to school for any of it? Did I have a poli sci degree. It’s, [00:05:00] uh, which in one way absolutely prepared me, because you have to understand the human dynamic, dynamic of people and what their motivation is and things of that nature and conversationally. But System creation.

I probably learned more from seeing other restaurants. And again, that little time with that little blip of time I was in the Marine Corps, you see how much you can train people to do stuff. Like no one walks in there knowing how to disassemble their weapon, but you’re like, this is how you do it. This is, and the assumption is like faster and faster and faster that you’re going to get yelled at in our world.

It’s let me, let me do it. Now you do it. Here’s what you did, right? Here’s what you did wrong. And. Most, um, when you go to a restaurant, like, why does this suck? Why are they, why are they so poorly trained? It’s like, typically they were trained with just follow me, learn what I do. And they’ll say, Hey, so you do this, this, this, this.

Do you get it? And the person will nod, not trying to feel dumb. And that’s why they don’t know. And that’s why they’re screwing up and knowing how to affect. That’s just one system though, how to do that across the board for everything. We just built and [00:06:00] iterated and iterated and never fell in love with ourselves.

We’ve got a lot of awards and. Our culture is probably positive and negative that when we get in the world, we’re like, okay, and we should probably stop and spell the roses more. But we got a top tenant, uh, pizzeria in America based on reviews by TripAdvisor. And I put that out to the threads and all we got back was like, they spelled this name wrong.

It’s like, that’s about right. All right, cool. So how do you train? So if someone comes in, if they have no experience and they want to work. One of your restaurants, what does that look like? I absolutely don’t care about experience. It’s way more about their maybe it’s better. Yeah It can be it’s almost like i’ve been making pizza for 20 years alone Okay, probably not the way that we’re gonna do it and it’s you have all these built in things That happens with sales guys like people I know a lot of sales forces would prefer untrained sales people than overly trained sales people with the wrong tactics in our way I can get further with a [00:07:00] bartender that knows nothing, but has a welcoming spirit and attitude that someone who like knows all about tannins, lager, and fermentation, but they’re too cool for school.

I can get way further with person A. So the training is obviously the knowledge, but the ethos, the values and support, do they feel that we give a crap about them? Cause there’s nothing that’s going to replace that. And being local being here with all of our stores here within a drive of 15 to 20 minutes at any moment in time to anything that we own helps that significantly.

Yeah, for sure. So how many locations do you have? We have 12 things at this point and it’s, you know, uh, Anne Boleyn’s pizzeria is the. Mamma jamma of it all the food truck, catering prosimo restaurant, a two food hall concepts, a location at the Tulsa airport that we run our catering arm. So we got a lot of stuff.

The airport things fun because that’s not normal. Most of the time you [00:08:00] give your like a licensing fee to someone else to do your thing at the airport and they staff it with their people. So when you go to Tulsa, O’Hare or DFW, you’ll see on your receipt, it doesn’t say Chili’s. It says HMS host. That’s the company that has employed people and they’re using Chili’s likeness and recipe with their people.

The airport gave a bid away, the bid got it, but they had an extra spot. And then I had a friend who was like, hey, we got this extra thing. Do you want to do something there? It got put out to the public to bid on it. No one did. We did and we put in there. Something that sells pizza, but also just what we were selfish.

You’re like, what do I want at the airport? Yeah. I want a big ass water, king size Snickers, maybe a beanie or some local merch that we can take that I would like feel proud to give to a family friend that I’m visiting and pizza and bagels and coffee and like aggressive coffee. So we put a pack of coffee in there and it’s been a huge success for us.

Awesome. Yeah. I love hearing that. What year was that? 2019, like [00:09:00] a few months before the pandemic. Okay. Okay. And so it was like this roller coaster of like, Oh, no sales. Okay. And then when I started to light off again, it’s, it’s a percentage wise, our most profitable location. Awesome. Yeah. The world is now defined between pre and post COVID.

Yeah, very much so. So the other locations, when did you launch those? Was that recent? I mean, Owasso started in 2004. We got the LLC open January 8th, 2005. Okay. Okay. There was six years of sucking and learning and getting our ass handed to us and then opened Cherry Street, which was like fish in a barrel in 2011, so six years.

And then it was like, wow, you, Cherry Street, if you go to 2010, it was kind of a ghost town. It was like just Kilkenny’s. That was it. Yeah. We opened and Smoke opened around that time and then I was like, wow, Cherry Street could be this cool thing. We increased property value, brought more people to Cherry Street.

So at that point, Broken Arrow was trying to fix up Rose [00:10:00] District. They advantageously sought us, which was a lot easier because when we were one store trying to go to Tulsa. We were trying to find a location and everyone was like, well, a WASO that’s cute. Yeah I’m sure that you do great in a WASO, but this is Tulsa and I don’t really want to take a chance on this location So yeah, we did not get sites easily.

We don’t get people calling us back getting alone Interesting was really hard being yeah being early There’s a risk in there, right? And that’s probably what they look for. At what point, especially with banks or financing, do they view you more as a safer? We have a lot of banks that want to give us money now.

The only bank that took a chance on us, and I will vouch for them all day, is Security Bank. It’s a family run bank at 169 and 51st. All the other banks that we did business with, they’re like, here’s all the things you need to do and show us. And we showed it to them, like, you have to have these numbers.

Here’s these numbers that are profitable. And then most loans go to what’s called [00:11:00] committee where they’re basically, okay, we got all the information. Do we want to do it? I don’t think restaurant. Yeah. They took a chance and they have benefited financially very much so from saying yes to us. And that’s a big advice thing.

I say is if you want to get a loan, don’t go after a global bank, go after a local, you know, family based bank that is going to believe in your story. And, you know, with that said, we still had to back the low with the SBA and the T to Tulsa Economic Development Company Corporation. So we backed the heck out of that loan and then got another store and then that was successful.

It was successful day one because we had a waso, if you could survive a waso, it’s really hard market. People would say like, it’s a great, it’s really hard. You have to be all things blue collar. Cause you’re really feeding like Sperry and Katusa and Collinsville Monday through Thursday. And then become a white collar hub for all the people that work Tulsa that are coming home to their bedroom community Friday and Saturday and Sunday.

Has that changed or [00:12:00] become more drastic in the last few years? If you look at Owasso, when we opened, it was nothing there either. And then about 40 restaurants opened of which around 37 closed within four years. Us being one that survived it. We’re talking big names, Fuddruckers up and down, Monterey’s up, open and closed.

Just open. Everyone was like all this influx because we moved to Owasso because Capital One, Verizon, National Rent A Car, Alamo Rent A Car, Honeywell, all of those companies came into. What’s technically North Tulsa, but really is a Wausau West in 2004. So this 10, 000 body influx into the Tulsa, mainly a Wausau market, we thought to capitalize on what, what no one else really had, which was a classic pizzeria, a pizzeria is a place that’s going to have pizza, but also maybe pasta and bread and be a family run place, which is something I’m very used to seeing growing up on the East coast.

And my family is all New Yorkers. There was no pizzeria in [00:13:00] town, so we wanted to fulfill that. And we’ve just grown it from that and learned a lot more about pizza making. Mm hmm. In that time, like, the first pizza we had was definitely the best pizza in Olaso, but we wanted it to be the best pizza in America.

We have done our due diligence and best to make the best product we could possibly create. Yeah. Has every aspect of the ingredients changed over since it started from the cheese and the sauce and the bread? Certain things, and certain things haven’t at all. Like there’s certain items on the menu that haven’t changed since day one.

Truly. Our first menu was this insanely large, like stupidly large menu. We were doing everything we could do instead of all killer, no filler. Yeah. Then we had like six sizes, which is incredibly dumb operationally. Now it’s three. We, uh, from a product perspective, we bounce with different flowers and then we have a Shawnee mills, Oklahoma flower, which I stumbled upon.

It’s not really designed for pizza. And I was like, this works really, really well. It’s a very unique [00:14:00] taste. It’s soft, but durable, chewy, but. It’s a really unique thing. And I was like, if you put me in Canada tomorrow, I’m going to still buy Shawnee Mills, Oklahoma flour. It is that good. And so that was one thing.

Our sauce pretty much has always stayed the same. And truth be told, I went and took a professional pizza course two and a half years in with like the best pizza makers in the world. And after that, I was calling up the store, like, Hey, change this, change this, change this, change this. And then I got invited, those guys who were having that first time.

This is the first time a college level course in pizza had ever been brought to America. This guy named Tony Gimignani, who is on the Tonight Show, he’s done all sorts of stuff, written all sorts of books about pizza, was holding it. I became friends with him, he asked me to be on his competitive pizza team, the World Pizza Champions, and we’ve nurtured that relationship and done all sorts of stuff across the world, competing in Italy, Paris, and all of my World Pizza Champion teammates I eventually became the president of that team [00:15:00] and we brought them all here when we won the Guinness award.

Uh, last year we had the world’s largest pizza party and all my pizza friends were here. Oh, that’s awesome. And then we made a pizzeria cookbook called the pursuit of pizza. If you buy it on Amazon, it was number one on Amazon and cooking. You’ll see that it was all filmed here in Tulsa. Sweet. You mentioned the Guinness Book of World Records.

Yep. So let’s get into that. How, how did that, for that idea first, did someone say, hey, you should do this or? We knew we wanted to do a book. Uh, so we were going to do a cookbook. I’m like, well, all the guys are going to be here. Let’s do something big with it. And our charity is Make A Wish. I’m like, what could we do that could benefit Make A Wish?

A few people on the team had done Guinness. I had won a Guinness award as a part of a separate group’s, the world’s longest pizza. Yeah. I was like, what else is there? We saw the world’s largest pizza party. So I’m like, all right, this can’t be that hard. The record was a thousand people. I can get a thousand people to eat pizza, but to be clear.

The Guinness experience is incredibly difficult. They do not [00:16:00] mess around. It’s not lighthearted. Like they’re not even easy to reach. It’s, it’s a kind of a nightmare. You got, you got to do a lot of due diligence, a lot of verification. The rules have to be set in stone and then logistically you have to be incredibly tight.

So that contest to beat that record had failed that year alone in New York city, in Chicago, in LA. With a YouTuber with millions of followers who had Young Gravy performing, backed by YouTube, backed by Pizza Hut, with millions of dollars, and they failed to get a thousand, appropriately by Guinness standard.

So, what were some of the nuances? It had to be every single person in the audience has to be accounted for. You have to have one judge for every 50 people to verify that they eat two slices of pizza and fully consume their beverage. Cause Guinness is fanatical about not having any food waste. So there has to be a full, and they have to be verified that they ate it all and they have to stay in place for 15 whole minutes, they can’t leave.

If you have [00:17:00] 10 percent fail, it’s a complete fail. So what that would mean is if we have 2000 people and 200 of them don’t complete it, Like just walked away or, Oh, I’m, I’m too full. I can’t eat it. The whole thing’s that even though you got 1800, which beats the record, it’s a DQ. So knowing all that, we’re like, okay, how do we get everyone in not have them eat the pizza open and also abide by health department standards to have that much pizza prepared, cooked, ready in line at their seat and have that many bodies that are willing to do this and play ball because you can have all the money in the world.

You gotta have people to be cool. I feel like Tulsa is really good for that. I completely agree. It was like, Hey, this is for charity. Don’t open it. We’ll feed you more pizza afterwards, but be cool. And also it had to be just enough pizza that anyone could eat it. But then we’re like, well, there’s not a lot of pizza for a pizza party.

So we had an actual pizza party after. Yeah. It was like, Hey, eat as [00:18:00] much as you want. Here’s more pizza. But so didn’t kids come to the, I had to say no to kids. I was like, bring your kids. We could even give them pizza. We just can’t count them as a participant. Cause I can’t deal. So I’m like, if your kid’s nine, God help you.

They better have an appetite. My, at the time. So it’s 2023. Five going on six year old. So five year old son at the time, Henry. I was like, you gotta eat, you gotta eat. You can do it, but you better, I’ll eat daddy. I’m like, all right, you can’t not eat this. It’s like two Costco size slices. That’s big. Oh, no, no, not like Costco sample.

Oh, I was thinking the full, okay, no, so it wouldn’t have worked. So that’s the logistics of it. And we had, the record was 1, 049. We had 3, 357 out of 3, 399 or 78 people. So what percent is that? So we, we totally, oh, we tripled the record. Yeah. And we had only like, 2 percent [00:19:00] fail rate. That’s awesome. So yeah, you feel pretty good about that one.

It was one of the greatest profession is the greatest professional day of my life because here I have all my pizza friends in the world, the greatest pizza makers ever completing a book. We sent seven kids on their make a wish wish. That’s cool. So we did that to you before game. That’s how we had the bodies in January.

Cause we’re like, how are we going to pull this off? We were looking at different venues outdoor. We’re already. Um, we’re already not going to make it cause people don’t want to be outside in January. So the logistics, everything came together that day. I was like driving around, freaking out that nothing had gone wrong.

And then I started to have this overwhelming feeling like I’m on a mission from God. Nothing can go wrong today. I’m like, I was going to go through this red light right now. I just did. I’m like, okay, nothing can go wrong. That’s hilarious. I don’t advise that. That’s the feeling that, cause it was freaky.

The logistics of that much. Yeah. Something should go wrong. Oh yeah. And also that YouTube event [00:20:00] to add insult to injury. They failed. They decided that they wanted to do theirs. And they did theirs three days before us. So they were like, Hey, they know yours was scheduled. They heard about ours and they’re like, we want to win.

We don’t know what they’re going to do. So let’s try and get the record. If they beat us four days later. Great. At least they can claim it. Yeah. So they did that record. They also did the world’s largest pizza simultaneously To go in tandem with the Super Bowl, which people will remember that you won’t see anything about their world’s largest pizza party attempt because the second I failed, it was like scrubbed from YouTube and who is YouTube Google.

You can’t find anything about it. It’s fascinating. And So it was just this weird thing that I was freaking out, like, hold on, how many bodies are going to get, if they get 2000, we could beat that. If they get 3000, can we beat that? If they get 4000, I don’t know. That would be more nerve wracking than just pulling out the event, because then you have this unknown factor that you don’t even know, it’s a moving target.

To put in perspective how nerve wracking it was, [00:21:00] I was like, I have 40 pizza makers, all these making 40 pizza makers. I had a plan to get to around 30. My goal was to beat 3000 for sure, potentially 3, 500. We had enough pizza for 3, 500. If they had breached 3, 500, I was going to have to like figure out more pizza, figure out more bodies.

And then if they breached 5, 000, I had a full, not panic attack. I don’t want to downplay it, but at that, it was like Wednesday, the night that they were doing it, I was like, if they break this, we could create a new contest. We have all the pizza. And this is a real thought, I’m not, I really, at that moment said, what if we create the most amount of people eating pizza and playing the kazoo at the same time, no one’s ever done that.

I can get that. And I was legit like, where can I find 5, 000 kazoos? And I was doing the due diligence and they’re like, there’s a place in Dallas. Yeah. And I was like, Hey, I might need you to drive to Dallas tomorrow morning to pick up 5, [00:22:00] 000 kazoos. And I couldn’t ship that many. Yeah. From like oriental trading, that like crappy new thing that was like, that has bric a brac party favors.

So my backup plan. Oh my gosh. Failure was not an option. And I think that’s a lot of what the restaurant industry is. You have to get into this mindset where I’m going to set up for every conceivable thing to go wrong because failure is not an option. Yeah, I like that. What were some of those periods of time in the restaurant?

Where you had to make a, it was a pivotal moment of, we’re either going to shut it down or we got to persevere through this. The first year had a lot of those and there was times where I was like Getting up at 5 to make dough to be in the restaurant to be there till like 11 30 There are certain nights where I’m like, I got to work on the changing the POS throughout the night Mm hmm, and it’d be 3 and And I got to make the, I was like, I’m just going to sleep here and get two hours of sleep on the floor.

Like that’s the first year. And there was one time where my dad, my dad had come out here [00:23:00] to visit and he, now he lives here, but he was like, well, what are you, what do you do after this closes? What do you, I looked at him and I said, let’s get that, that notion. We don’t have that in this building. And then he said, okay, I understand.

And that was the mindset that it had to be. It’s a mix of, it’s mostly confident, shy of cocky. Cocky is like, we’re going to be successful. Day one confidence. Like, I believe we could do this and driving the first day there. We were like, all these other people have figured this out. Yeah. Why not you? Why not us?

Yeah. So that’s again, not a good base to just have that alone, but if you could add to it, some level of acumen and then a lack of ego, like if it wasn’t working, we were like, no, there. It’s going to work. Like, no change it. Yeah. We changed the menu a lot, learn more, go to California to learn from these other pizza makers, cut the menu down, that’s working.

Do more of that. And then another big epiphany we had, we were selling frozen ravioli. [00:24:00] We found a really niche frozen ravioli. It was selling very well. It’s a spinach and artichoke little medallion frozen ravioli. And people are buying it. Great. We’ll sell a bunch of frozen ravioli. It’s cool. Easy peasy.

And people love them. Then it got popular enough that another Italian restaurant opens in Owasso called Napoli’s. It’s no longer in business and they’re like, yeah, we have frozen, uh, we have the spinach artichoke ravioli too. They just found what we bought. Yeah. We were first to buy it in Oklahoma, but again, it’s like we had a proprietary deal and they started selling it.

Yeah. And I was like, oh crap, we’re selling big nuggets. They’re selling me nuggets. We’re both saying we’re not McDonald’s. Mm hmm. So then took the freezer filled with all that donated all the product and everything and the freezer itself to the food shelter and just said, we’re done with that. If we don’t make it, we don’t sell it.

Yeah. Cause that’s the only way we’re going to survive. I like that. Where did the name and Delaney’s come from? Well, [00:25:00] my Italian name is Carlucci. I saw Joe Carlucci on the food network right when we were opening. I didn’t know who he was. He had a pizza place. I’m like, He had Joe’s famous. I was like, I don’t want to get sued by that guy.

I typed it. And then I was looking for an a name. I mean, my brother, like we have to find an a name. My brother was like, let’s call it al dente. I was like, we’re going to have every jerk. It’s like, it’s not al dente. So then I just, I didn’t have, I didn’t have cable at the house. I was staying at that summer in California.

As I was coming up with one week before I was going to move out. And I’m watching the Godfather part two on DVD and I’m like, Vito Corleone’s real name is Vito Andolini. And I was like, let’s just call it Andolini’s. Why an a name? Why do I care about it being an a name in 2004? Well, 2004, is that when they’re still doing phone books?

Still the phone book. Here we go. It’s like, we need an a name. And then, uh, interestingly enough, in that pizza class that I took two and a half years later, Joe Carlucci was in that class. Nice. And now me and Joe are great friends. And [00:26:00] he was like, I wanted to shoot you. I’m like, well, I didn’t know that.

Yeah. Cause his name, so we’re like, we consider ourselves pizza brothers with the same Italian last name. But, uh, you know, it’s an interesting ride. I like that name though. So going off of names, Prosimo, where did the name Prosimo come from? Prosimo just means next door in Italian. Okay, so there we go. Like, what can we come up with for this thing?

For this restaurant that’s next door. Did that come after Cherry Street at the same time? Oh, I mean, Cherry Street opened in 2011. Okay. And then, that was, that had been like a boutique, and then a juice thing, and it was a salon called Dolce that was next to us for the longest time. And then the salon was, their lease was ending and they wanted to move.

Okay. And the juice place was looking to get out of it. And the property owners were like, we want to get out of this too. So maybe, so it was a whole big old deal at the time. And we just said, great, we want to take both spots. And Lucky’s had closed, which was a very popular restaurant for a very long time on Cherry street.

But again, Lucky’s was [00:27:00] more wine driven, more, a little bit nicer dining, more. Feminine and base. You didn’t feel like as much beer and pizza and brick, which a lot of the street was like Kilkenny’s beer, pizza, and brick and Roosevelt’s beer, pizza or beer and brick. And we’re like, let’s have something that’s a little bit offsetting to that.

So we came up with Prosimo, which was a high focus on Prosecco. And then all the things we like in Italian dining that are both Northern and Southern focused with a lot of experience in doing this for 20 years. We always had a food focus, but we’ve been to Italy many times. We’re like, this is cool. This is cool.

It’d be great if we could have that. And then we had our menu pretty set, but we went to New York to go to 12 Italian restaurants within like two days, which there’s no breakfast. So it was like lunch at noon and then at three o’clock and then at six o’clock and then at nine o’clock and did that for two days hard to see the forks, the chandeliers, the menus, the reservation [00:28:00] systems.

Did all that and I’m like, okay, great. We have a very good idea of all the things we could pull and also our own ingenuity and then that’s what we created. So was that, was that design focused or were you like trying food out? We had the food, the food menu was pretty much set. There wasn’t too much to be modified from that point.

Who comes up with the, the food menu? The, that menu was, Mostly my brother and I, we have a chef who’s in the mix now who takes it up a notch. The design, the name, the feel, the vibe is typically me. Now, all things Andolini’s, like the pizza, I’m a certified master pizzaiolo. I, I could train someone on all things fermentation of dough and, and I do that for our staff.

From that side of it, the pizza side I’ve always had a very big focus on and I do a lot in the pizza community. So the culinary side of it, super, super, super matters. But again, once it’s set, it’s set. It’s just execution at that point. So the caveat is where people are like, you make a great steak. You should own a [00:29:00] restaurant.

Like you should absolutely just keep making steak at home. Yeah. The one time a week, it brings you joy. Cause once you do this, you have to systemize to get an 18 year old to do it your exact way with your exact specifications, dependably all the time with you potentially not doing it. Yeah. It’s not what I suggest for people when they’re like, we shouldn’t.

I don’t, like, watch Law and Order and think I should be a lawyer. But people go to restaurants and think they should be restauranteurs, and I always find that interesting. Well, I heard somewhere that someone said something about, you know, I want to own a restaurant, and the restaurant owners are like, No, no you don’t.

And if you want to own a restaurant, if you really want to own a restaurant, Go, you know, two, three times a week and tip really well, and you will own that restaurant. You get all the benefits with, uh, with none of the headache. It’s a tough business from an outsider looking in. I’ve got no desire to own a restaurant.

I just feel like it takes a special individual or group of people, yeah, to do that. Yeah. The love of a restaurant is you love the [00:30:00] experience of providing people. You love the game of the systemization and the motivation and all that. And it can, you know, but it’s a profit, very slim profit margin. And you have to always win every day with a inventory that is deteriorating in front of you.

Like if it were a copy and print shop, the paper is not going bad. Hmm. The basal is, so you have to be super tight. And also if you have that copy of print shop, people aren’t expecting you to have it printed into their house in 20 minutes. And you don’t take 30 people to do it. People are like, I can make this at home.

Like with this though, like, so you always have all these factors that really, really compress it. And I don’t say that to complain. I say, it’s just the nature of the beast to get good at it is leaning in on the individualistic nature of the industry. Doing two things that I think all good businesses, especially B to C businesses have to do, which is increase purchase pride and decrease purchase [00:31:00] anxiety.

Like, is this going to suck? It’s not, because I trust the reviews. I trust all this social proof. And do I feel good about myself that I came here? The feeling more than the fullness. The feeling is what’s going to permeate. And that even comes down to, like, we’ve got really gorgeous pizza boxes. So that when you walk out, you’re like, I have this.

I feel stoked about this. Just like if you were walking out of Rodeo drive or Saks Fifth Avenue, as opposed to Ross. Well, you might feel pride of the, Hey, I got this so cheap, but we want them to feel pride. Like I have this awesome item. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah. With prosimo the, what is the, uh, the bone marrow.

Oh my gosh. That is so good. Have you ever had bone marrow before that? No. Okay. No, I hadn’t. I mean, so I don’t, I mean, it is, yeah, it is really good. It’s It was interesting that I saw it on the menu. I don’t know why I ordered it just because I, like I said, I’d never had it before. Yeah, but it is really good.

That’s the greatest thing on [00:32:00] earth. Yeah. Oh my God, this is so damn good. I’m a fan too. Like, like bone marrow is just this incredible, very avant garde thing that if you haven’t, then when you have it, you’re like, come on. Like it’s so rich and yeah. Yeah. It’s really good. The, uh, and then the mozzarella, you guys make that there, is it just for prosciutto or is it for Andolini’s too?

Well, we’ve been making, it’s, the mozzarella is a very interesting thing because I, when we opened Andolini’s, me and my brother were like, wouldn’t it be so cool if we could do, you know, New York pizzas with fresh mozz, and then we were seeing the price of mozz, like, we can just stretch this, right? So we, I learned how to stretch before YouTube existed.

Hmm. And then when I went to that pizza school, I was, they’re like, so what do you do? They’re all, we stretch our minds. Like you stretch mops, which is like a five star dining Michelin thing to do. And we were doing at a pizza place in Owasso, Oklahoma. So we had been doing that since very early on, but we were doing it.

And then we were trying to do it to order, but it’s like, you can’t really at a [00:33:00] pizzeria, walk out of the kitchen to do that. So it was this dream, like, well, it would be so cool if we did that. Maybe we’ll do it at cherry street. We have a cherry, we had cherry street. It’s just. It was so packed, it was impossible to pull it off.

And it was just the main, one of the biggest things, like when we opened this fine dining restaurant, we could finally do mozzarella at the table. And it was like, what else can we do at the table? It was like, well, we could make the fettuccine alfredo in a wheel. And personally, I almost get offended eating at Italian restaurants where it’s like, this is pre made pasta.

Most Italian restaurants have that. Like now, at a pizzeria, it’s Cool. But at a fine dining restaurant, like I expect that you’re going to bring me an experience just like with that frozen ravioli thing. So we were like, here’s a hard rule at anything that happens here, only fresh pasta. And so that’s one of the hard rules of an experienced driven dining, a robust Prosecco menu.

But to that same point of developing, we had a bartender who knew so much about whiskeys was [00:34:00] bringing in this incredible whiskey program. That we weren’t going to say no. Yeah. I’m like, great. And then people were loving it. So developing into things over time is another big part of us is being able to pivot and say, it’s cool.

Matches brand. Keep going. Yeah. Awesome. What’s your favorite either meal or dish at both of those, you know, the DeMarco at Andalini’s is the most like any day of the year, no matter what feeling light, feeling hungry. It’s the. Well straight up pizza there is like it’s a that’s the most popular I’d say from a other than like kids There’s pepperoni of combination and very popular to Marco’s probably the most and certainly most brand popular Mm hmm.

It’s San Marzano tomatoes instead of classic, California tomatoes So imported Italian DOP San Marzano tomatoes with fresh mozzarella that we stretch in house With extra virgin olive oil poured on and [00:35:00] on before and after The sauce after the sauce, pecorino Romano, which is, uh, sheep’s milk imported from Italy as well.

Grated placed on it. Very strong cheese, salty cheese, bake it, pulls it out. More pecorino Romano, fresh basil, like Dom DeMarco who started DeFara and Brooklyn in the late sixties and only died recently. Very, very popular pizza maker. Brayton’s able to pour more olive oil at the table. So it is, uh, Super experience driven and we’ve learned that when we go super experience driven super like, oh, wow, it does what I said before increases, purchase, pride, decreases, purchase anxiety from a objective business standpoint.

And then it delivers this thing that people want to tell others about. And that’s why we leaned into that so much with Prossimo. Prossimo, the fettuccine Alfredo, the spicy piccari all day. I also really enjoyed the meatballs and the polenta. And again, all of it though, there’s [00:36:00] nothing on the menu that I was like, ah, see it’s not for me.

But everything on there we absolutely love ’cause it’s so much easier. To solve it. Oh, yeah. If you’re passionate about it, it’s so much easier for staff to be a part of it. If it’s all killer, no filler. It’s not just a phrase, like it just became significantly easier to try to be the best mm-hmm . Than it is to fight 200 restaurants being mid.

Yeah, that makes total sense. I like the phrase, I hadn’t heard that, that phrase before. Which one? All Lindo filler. Yeah. Is that a restaurant thing? I don’t, I, I said it one. I think I actually, I got the name from a rock song. I think a rock band named their, Sum 41 named their album All Killer No Filler because it only had like seven songs on it.

And I was like, that’s what we’re going for with this menu. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a good, I really like that. And then, you know, keeping with the Tulsa is Home theme, you touched on it a little bit at the beginning, what you like about Tulsa and just kind of geographically, but why would, why is somebody who doesn’t know anything about Tulsa Why is [00:37:00] Tulsa home to you and, and what are some of the, the great things about it?

There’s so many. I’m not from here. And I, I think I aspire to be Tulsa’s proudest adopted son, because I am not at all from here in any way, sense or the word, just like, you know, there’s probably more beloved as the adopted son of Tulsa is Danny Boy O’Connor. Like both of him and I were like, can you believe this?

There’s so many things. Here’s the most basic thing. When I moved here, We, I went to Taco Bell, I was getting here really late and went to Taco Bell, it was like one in the morning and I ordered a taco at Taco Bell, but one of the morning and I got a taco and nothing else happened. If you’re from here, that’s a very boring story.

If you’re not from here, you’re like, holy, really? Nothing else happened. You didn’t like get a Chalupa or people were fighting in the parking lot or someone, something was like, it was one of the morning and you just got food and they were pleasant. Oh, wow. Was it weird? They were like weird, pleasant. Like they had no teeth.

No, just normal. [00:38:00] But you be, you’re riding like a horse to work, right? No, it’s a straight up town. It’s a rock and roll town with cool. Or I went to like WWE event with my son last week. I parked, I walked three blocks. We saw the show, nothing happened. It was pleasant. It was awesome. And then we were out of there and in bed 20 minutes after the thing ended.

That doesn’t happen in California, New York. Yeah. The, the, the boring event is almost the, the highlight of what separates it. That’s so, and then on top, like you could, tonight is a Thursday. This, there’ll be a concert downtown, maybe at the cage, maybe at the Vanguard. There’s going to be the Bob Dylan art show.

And you got. Art in the Park, more restaurants per person in New York, good restaurants. Like, I’ll put McNally’s bar up against the New York bar any day of the week for, for that type of beer, put Valkyrie’s bar up against anything in Brooklyn any day of the week. Sushi. I’ll throw that in the [00:39:00] mix. I think our pizza speaks for itself.

Fine dining. I’ll put Prostable right in the mix of what you could have in New York and can, cause there’s nothing proprietary. About it. Proximity is not an indicator of greatness. I think people will be like, well, I had it in New York at two o’clock in the morning in the village. I’m like, yeah, that was the village at two o’clock in the morning, doing all the work, not the pizza.

So from that perspective, Tulsa is this really cool city where you can actually be an entrepreneur and have things grow. It’s not looked at as a negative. You can own a house, a nice house. For 300, 000, a nice house while a house to put it, I mean, and now I’m going a little far, but in San Francisco, if you go to SFO, I went back home and then I went to go get gas at SFO before I brought the car back, I’m in an area where everything is like boys in the hood with the bars on the windows and it’s just a surly environment and I’m like, let’s look that up on Zillow while the plane is [00:40:00] flying over it, bars on the windows.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Grass growing out, drug deal over there. I’m like, what’s that price? 1. 2 mil. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So, I mean, just do the math. I’m like, well, it’s asinine to not live here to me at this point. There’s other cities like, you know, Kansas City and Austin and other ones, but I think there’s a underdog, underdog vibe here.

I think people are genuinely more earnestly cool. I think even politically, it’s a pretty even keel city. Like there’s not a lot of crazy here. It’s just what you think. Like, can’t people just be normal? That happens here. Show normal stuff happens here. And that’s why I like it a lot. Awesome. So how do people connect with you?

Do like social media, website, just come to the restaurant? If you are looking to enjoy, whether it’s Andolini’s, Prostimo, Metropolis, Cheesesteaks, Saza’s, any of our stuff, go to andolinisworldwide. com or order direct at andopizza. com. If you find me to be interesting in any way, [00:41:00] shape, or form, I am active in the pizza community and just the restaurant ownership community on Instagram at Mikey Bausch.

Awesome. And that’s a wrap. So appreciate you watching and go visit any of the restaurants and have some bone marrow at Prosimo. That’s amazing. So, all right. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.