Hey, hey, hey, welcome to another shot, everyone. This is Darren Carp coming to you live from New York City, except I'm not live at all, right, John?

Do you like how I'm here? You're more alive than you've ever been. I mean, I've never heard an intro like that in my life.

Thank you so much. Thank you. You know, every week I try and get to see if you're paying attention. Yeah, and I felt like it was going to wake you up. It was going to wake our guest up.

Oh, yeah, this is probably drunk somewhere. Well, obviously, he wrote a book. I'm stuck in a closet so I can.

Oh, John, get yourself out of there. You know, I was stuck in a closet for many years and now I'm out and I'm feeling good about it.

It's so nice and quiet in here though. That's true. No COVID in that closet, right? Well, that handsome voice is John DeBerry. He's back. He's doing his thing.

And I wish we could have a little sound applause, but just pretend everyone's like standing up cheering for you.

They're taking their bras off, throwing them at you, John. This is major. This is very major. Yeah, welcome to the show.

Good to have you back. Thanks so much for having me back.

Well, you're on because you created a lovely, lovely book called Drink What You Want, which has been my philosophy since I was old enough to drink.

Right.

And it's a book full of delicious recipes. What made you want to create this book? And did you, did you, when did you start writing it?

Like, how long did it take to fully develop? Oh, well, the process of writing it was actually a really long time.

Say like probably two and a half years, if not longer. Wow.

Yeah. From the early stage of like, oh, I want to write a book to like the book just like sitting in my hands.

Yeah, maybe like four years. So it's been a long time coming and it sort of was the result of another period of many years of working in bars and restaurants in New York City.

And I worked for the Mungfuku restaurant group for nine years. I opened about 10 restaurants over the course of my time there and trained tons of people.

How to bartend, train managers and staff. How to talk about drinks. How to think about drinks.

People who had like no experience at all, no familiarity. We had to get them up to speed really quickly.

So I kind of applied that sort of way of talking about drinks and giving people confidence very easily and very quickly.

So they can get the kind of a foothold that you can build on.

And also working for a restaurant group that has such a wide kind of variety of styles.

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