Jeffrey Saad - 2.5

A conversation with Amy Smilovic and Jeffrey Saad - Chef, Entrepreneur, Estate Director, and Author. Before Compass, where he and his wife Nadia were among the first six agents in California and now serve as Estate Directors in Beverly Hills, Jeffrey was building restaurants in San Francisco. He opened his first, Sweet Heat, at twenty-four, went on to become Chef/Partner of California's Pasta Pomodoro Italian Restaurants, and broke through nationally in 2009 as the first runner-up on The Next Food Network Star - a run that led to his own web series, Spice Smuggler, and later to United Tastes of America on The Cooking Channel. He's the author of the cookbook Jeffrey Saad's Global Kitchen, the host of The Circle Podcast, and his forthcoming book, The Reduction: How to Cultivate Joy and Build a Life Worth Savoring, arrives in a month.

Amy and Jeff grew up twenty miles apart outside Chicago, married partners who came to America from somewhere else, and built their businesses on the same philosophical scaffolding without ever comparing notes. They get into the personal constitution Jeff wrote at twenty-three and still reads every morning, the difference between first principles, opinions, and tactics, why the burnt edges are what make the steak taste good, and what it actually means to reduce - to distill a life down to the ingredients that matter and refuse the rest. They talk about the trap of storytelling, the gap between incident and reaction, the kind of leadership that refuses to be efficient with people, and what is gained by walking forward instead of looking back. It's a conversation about joy as a discipline rather than a disposition - and about what happens when two people who chose to reduce land at the same table.