Transcript
[00:00:00] Matthew Guelke: It’s been a mishmash. And, um,
[00:00:02] Leigh Balkom: that’s fun,
[00:00:03] Matthew Guelke: but I got into the restaurant business and maybe this is the more interesting part. Um, I have two older sisters and one of them, her brother in law. So her husband’s brother was a 40 year old doctor. And he quite sadly, um, he had two kids and his wife was pregnant with a third and he got cancer.
[00:00:25] Um, and he passed away pretty quickly within six months, you know, and, you know, so that was quite sad. I wasn’t super close with him, but it was still, you know, I knew him and it was kind of a sad situation. So my sister got my entire family to go to a health retreat. Uh, and this was when I was working in virtual reality.
[00:00:49] So I just moved from Japan to, uh, To San Francisco and, um, it’s a place called Hippocrates Health Institute. Oh, yeah,
[00:00:58] Leigh Balkom: Florida, right? I’ve heard of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:01:01] Matthew Guelke: yeah, you know the it’s it’s run by a guy named Brian Clement and his wife. I can’t remember her name. She’s a clinician and he is, I don’t know his background exactly, but I know he was one of the kind of, uh, you know, um, he was a student of someone named Ann Wigmore and Ann Wigmore.
[00:01:19] Leigh Balkom: Oh, of course. Yeah.
[00:01:22] Matthew Guelke: She brought wheatgrass to the world.
[00:01:24] Leigh Balkom: Yeah. And she used to treat
[00:01:27] Matthew Guelke: it. Yeah. Some pretty famous people, I think, including maybe a U. S. president or not, and she essentially cured, supposedly. Allegedly cured her cancer through plant based nutrition and, you know, and one of the things they teach is, um, it’s not just what’s good for you and your food.
[00:01:45] It’s also what’s bad for you and your food. So when you eat healthy food, it can give you nourishment and heal you. But the opposite is also true, you know, and so I went down there. Um, it was a three week Um sort of session and my mother and my father and my two sisters and my brother Yeah, and it basically was raw vegan Organic food and juices, but they showed you food combining, uh, you know, sprouting the whole bit.
[00:02:20] And did you have
[00:02:21] Leigh Balkom: access to like all the wheat grass you could stomach basically type thing?
[00:02:26] Matthew Guelke: Oh yeah, I could barely stomach. I do not like wheat
[00:02:33] Leigh Balkom: grass. It’s
[00:02:34] Matthew Guelke: pretty brutal.
[00:02:35] Leigh Balkom: Yeah, I have tried, I have tried, like I really, even moving out to California, I wanted to, but I just like, nauseating, so I’m like, you know what, body doesn’t like it, it’s fine, like your body’s telling you something, right?
[00:02:49] Matthew Guelke: Yeah, yeah, it’s not the greatest, I’m not a, I don’t like it very much, it’s not so bad when you add it to something, but, um, And we have wheatgrass, but I don’t drink it much. I have very super green juices, which yeah, but, um, so yeah, we spent three weeks down there and, you know, my mother and my father got.
[00:03:09] They got physicals from their individual doctors before, and then three weeks later, a month later, after having visited there, they also got physicals again, and both of their independent doctors were kind of blown away.
[00:03:23] Leigh Balkom: Really?
[00:03:24] Matthew Guelke: Yeah, I mean, they, they, all these different, you know, my dad had a rejuvenated prostate, whatever that means, exactly.
[00:03:30] Uh, you know.
[00:03:31] Leigh Balkom: Nice! Yeah. I
[00:03:33] Matthew Guelke: know all this stuff. And my, you know, the thing is, is you can eat healthy and you will be healthier. I think we all kind of understand that idea, but when you go to the extreme where only thing, the only thing you put in your body is something that’s really, really healthy for you, which I’m going to admit, I, that’s not my, I drink wine.
[00:03:51] You know, I like whiskey, you know, things like that. And, uh, and I, you know, eat things that aren’t good for me always, but, but, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a degree of, but if you do that to an extreme amount and you, you take away things that aren’t healthy for you, it has an extreme effect. Your, your immune system, according to Pocrates, and I believe it.
[00:04:13] After this, um, it goes from kind of wherever it was to a really optimal state, you know, and so, um, I also met many, many people there who had been diagnosed with terminal disease, cancers and, and such, who had gotten better, uh, even though they were supposedly You know, going to die or they were, there was nothing more that Western medicine could do for them.
[00:04:40] And so, um, it really inspired me. And I, I moved from virtual reality software to the food business, mostly because I didn’t really want to tell everybody what they should do. I just wanted to make it easy for them to access this stuff. And so, you know, it has a, it has a, you know, combination effect. One, it’s good for you too.
[00:05:01] It’s good for the planet. And three, it helps. The businesses that are trying to do the right thing offer healthier alternatives to grow and as opposed to massive agriculture, Monsanto, Roundup, you know, glycosaphate, all that kind of stuff that really shouldn’t be in your food and is illegal in places like Europe, that’s illegal there, you know.
[00:05:26] Um, and it’s really again. It’s profit dictates policy, especially in America on DSO. Unfortunately, the government, the FDA. They’re not really looking out for you. But I think a lot of people just think it’s okay as long as it’s on the shelf. So, um, anyway, I decided I came back and I, from this health retreat, I was so kind of blown away by the extreme, you know, healing effects of what I had seen that I, I told the, uh, the chairman of the board of the software company I worked for about it.
[00:06:01] And then he started eating similarly to how I did after that. And we decided to together to start a restaurant and the restaurant. idea, concept was everything should be 100 percent organic. So, you know, what’s not in your food, uh, should be heavily plant based, um, and juice based and, and juices that aren’t just juices, but, but
[00:06:25] Leigh Balkom: No fruit!
[00:06:26] Yes,
[00:06:27] Matthew Guelke: exactly. Yes, but are really, I mean, the whole idea of juicing is. You could eat a big salad and that’s got roughage and it’s got, you know, but juicing you, if you took three salads and put it into a juice, then it’s hard to eat three salads. So you can get the nutrients that way. But the fat of juicing is often, you know, the heavy water content, celery, cucumber, which are fine for you, but then also beets and carrots and juice and fruit.
[00:06:54] And that’s not so good for you because you really want the fiber. You want the fiber along with that sugar. If you’re going to have it.
[00:06:59] Leigh Balkom: Amen is your blood sugar. I mean, you know, it’s not cane juice, but yeah, I mean, you just have that on an empty stomach and your body is going to react. Right,
[00:07:10] Matthew Guelke: right. And so, uh, yeah, our idea was open one.
[00:07:15] With the intention for it to grow as big as we could grow it, you know, like my business partner used to make me cringe and you’d say, we want to be the McDonald’s of organic. And I just didn’t Yeah. But, but, you know, it’s true. You know, if people have easier access to food that is healthier, that’s better for the environment and the makes them feel good and has Causes less ailment.
[00:07:41] So they need less pharmaceuticals, which, you know, again, I’ve, I think, I think the world, especially America is way over medicated. You need a medication to treat the side effects of the first and second or third medication. So, um, this is a, this was, I’d never worked in the food business ever as a server, a bus boy, any of that stuff.
[00:08:03] Um, but it seemed like a good thing to do. So we started the first one and, um, grew it from there. And then I became aware of how difficult the restaurant business is…
