Hey there, it's Stephen Dupner.

This week we're playing an updated episode number 347.

Why you should not open a restaurant.

It features the best-selling food writer Kenji Lopez-Al, telling us all about his adventures

as a first-time restaurant tour.

And then at the end of the original episode, you'll hear a recent follow-up interview that

will give you even more reasons to never, ever open a restaurant.

One quick thing before we start, we are bringing Freconomics Radio live to Philadelphia on June

6th and London on September 7th.

For tickets, go to Freconomics.com slash live.

You'll also find information there for upcoming shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Again, Freconomics.com slash live.

And now, here's why you shouldn't open a restaurant.

Some people just can't leave well enough alone.

Consider for instance the case of the famous food writer, the one who used the scientific

method to take apart everything we know about cooking and put it back together.

If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust, you end up with a dough

that is much flakier and much lighter.

He investigated whether the key ingredient in New York pizza really is the water.

So I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water starting with perfectly distilled

water and then up to various levels of dissolved solids inside the water.

What we basically end up finding was that the water makes almost no difference compared

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