A Multi-Course Conversation With a New York City Restaurant Lawyer

John Reed [00:00:00] Picture your favorite restaurant. Why is it your favorite? The food? Well, hopefully, but what about the service, the people, the decor, the ambiance? All of these things translate into the experience you enjoy when dining there. For the best restaurants, delivering an unparalleled experience, frequently at a premium price, it transcends the food, and it requires creativity, often from a visionary chef.

When you peel back the layers of the onion or its fancier cousin, the shallot, you see that a restaurant is a complicated business. From the real estate on which it sits, to the staff it employs, to the fare served at your table, there are laws and rules and regulations. And as a restaurant’s and chef’s notoriety grow, so do new opportunities and risks. Sounds like a job for a sticky lawyer.

Jasmine Moy is my guest today. As an attorney in the hospitality industry, much of her work focuses on chefs and restaurateurs, some very accomplished and recognizable chefs and restaurateurs, as well as real estate developers, hoteliers, food and beverage businesses, and up-and-coming talent and entrepreneurs. Based in New York City, her practice extends across the US, but there's much more to her story. And I'm excited to talk with her.

Welcome to the podcast, Jasmine. My name is John, and I'll be taking care of you today.

Jasmine Moy [00:01:27] Thank you for having me, John.

John Reed [00:01:29] I'd like to start by having you talk about your path to the law, when and where, you know, that calling reached you, what your initial attraction was to the practice, and what you thought you'd be doing as a lawyer.

Jasmine Moy [00:01:43] Well, I 100% went to law school for the worst, most wrong of reasons, which is I was graduating from college, and I had an arts management major, which sort of was a business degree, but focused on the arts because I really loved theater and dance and things like that. But I'm not talented in that way.

It's how can I be closer to the arts, maybe being the business side of the arts. But sort of the more I learned about it, the more I was like, oh, you know, this is going to be sort of a thankless job that's never going to make me any money. And we never grew up having much money. So, I think I was really trying to prioritize finding a career that would make me more comfortable than my family was.

John Reed [00:02:24]

Jasmine Moy [00:02:25] So, going to law school, you know, you've got this idea that all lawyers are really rich, and they all make money, and it's so easy to get any number of jobs when you're a lawyer, which honestly is not super far from the truth, I think, even today. But I had no lawyers in my family or anything like that, so I didn't really understand what the practice of law was. And while I enjoyed law school, then when I got out of law school, the market was a little tough.

I took the first job I could get, and it was in litigation, which it turns out I hated. It's pretty soul-sucking work, to be honest. And during those years, if I had ever been able to go back and talk to my younger self, I just would've been like, don't go to law school. Literally, just don't do it. Find another thing.

John Reed [00:03:01] Disclaimer: we like lawyers. We like lawyers who work in litigation who work at big firms. They're doing important work.

But I know for me, Sunday nights were just the worst, that I have to go and do this again tomorrow. What were you thinking at the time?

Jasmine Moy [00:03:17] It was hard because I was also working at least six days a week, and I was working at least ten hours a day, so I just didn't even have enough time to really consider what might be next. And also, I was finding that once you are on a path, it's not the easiest thing to do to switch out of that path.

And I wasn't sure. I just was feeling very aimless. I was thinking I was going to quit the law altogether. But when I was working all those long hours, the one thing I was doing to make myself feel better was taking myself out to eat.

And I was eating a lot at really fancy, nice restaurants in New York City. It's one of the joys of being in the city. There's an amazing amount of incredible restaurants.

Some people like to buy themselves purses. I was buying myself omakase, sushi dinners, or whatnot. And I have always loved restaurants. I worked in restaurants all through high school, all through college, all through law school. I had always waited tables and really loved the atmosphere and camaraderie that exists in a restaurant.

I had started writing about food on a freelance basis just as a hobby because I just needed something to do with my time that actually made me feel good. And I thought this was a fun thing to do, but I was meeting a lot of chefs and restaurateurs that way. One of them sort of offhandedly was like, you should just be a lawyer for restaurants.

John Reed [00:04:38] Was it because you were going late hours after work that you got the opportunity to talk to chefs and meet people? Or was it the writing that was the outlet to actually get to have these conversations with chefs and understand them and their creativity and their spark?

Jasmine Moy [00:04:54] It was the eating first, I think, because when you are spending obscene amounts of money at a restaurant and become something of a regular, the good places remember you.

They're kind to you. They know you, and they know what you do and don't like. So, you know, I was sort of a regular at a few different restaurants, and the host knew me. All the bartenders knew me. The chef would come out and say hello. It was the kind of thing where if you're a good enough spender, they come, and they try to treat you better.

And then, when I was trying to figure out what was my next career move or what I was going to do, the thing is that I was reading Timeout Magazine and Food and Wine Magazine, and those magazines always have little, they call “front of the book" stories. Stories, And it's the first 15, 20 pages of the magazine. They're little columns sort of live on the side of the magazine. Here's this hot new liqueur that people are putting in cocktails. Here's this interesting new type of pork that is showing up on menus. And I was eating out at restaurants so much that I was trendspotting, you know, I was seeing new things show up on menus.

If you want to be a food writer, all you have to do is know what those things are. You write to the magazine, you write to an editor, and you say, hey, I want to write an article about this because this is a new ingredient showing up on all of the menus.

Can I write a fun piece about it? They would always say yes. If you have a trend, they want to know about it, and they'll pay you to write about it. You don't even have to be a good writer. Honestly, this was 300 words. 500 words. You don't even have to be talented or good at it.

Then, the minute you start writing, you can then just reach out to anybody and say, Oh, I'm with Esquire Magazine. Oh, I'm with Timeout Magazine. So, you're able to do that name-dropping.

And then you're given access to people to do interviews and things like that. So, having the association with the magazine enabled me to meet more chefs and do more writing. So, I was meeting exponentially more people in the food world once I started food writing.

And then it was someone in the food world who didn't know I was a lawyer. They just thought I was a freelance writer.

And when they found out I was moonlighting as a writer, but actually a lawyer as a paying job, it was somebody then who was like, you should really be a lawyer for, you know, restaurants. And I was like, is that a thing? And I went home and started looking it up and found out that there was a very sort of niche industry of attorneys. You know, I'm talking three or four of them who were sort of well-known in the city for specializing in hospitality. And serving restaurateurs. And so, I was like, oh, I think this is probably what I should be doing. It just felt like a marriage of all of the stuff that I had wanted out of my future, basically.

John Reed [00:07:25] How did you build that practice and, I guess, build your knowledge around that practice?

Jasmine Moy [00:07:30] Well, so I reached out to the folks who were doing this work and one firm who was, I think, maybe the most prominent of the firms doing this work.

I went to them, and I was very honest. I was like, listen, I don't know how to do any of this work, but I know a lot of people in the industry. I could be a rainmaker. I have a lot of connections. And they're like, well, if you're a rainmaker, we'll hire you, but prove it to us. Send us a list of clients. And I did.

And their response was, oh, thank you for those clients. But it turns out we don't really have the budget to hire someone full-time. Do you maybe want to write a marketing newsletter for us? Um, to which I responded emphatically, absolutely not. Take a hike.

John Reed [00:08:10] Although there's nothing wrong with legal marketing newsletters, I just want you to know, so.

Jasmine Moy [00:08:14] There is not, but that was not the

John Reed [00:08:16] Not for you though

Jasmine Moy [00:08:17] promise.

And that was not the exchange that was contemplated as part of this contractual agreement wherein I fulfilled my end of the bargain. So, then I was in New Orleans hanging out with a good friend who worked for a prominent restaurant group in New Orleans. And I was, you know, sort of bitching and moaning about, oh, can you believe these jerks, la la la.

And uh, she's like, you know what? She's like, I know another guy. We were at a conference. So, she introduced me to him, and he was like, you know, a little played fast and loose.

You know, he was part of a small practice, but what he did was really on his own. And it was just him and this one other guy. And the other guy who he was working with had just quit to sort of move in-house for the restaurant group. So, I sort of called him at, I think, exactly the right time.

He was drowning in work and needed someone. He knew I knew people because we then had been introduced. And I truthfully, you know, I wish this didn't have to happen this way, but it did, is I was like, I will prove my worth to you. I will work for you for six months for free. So basically, I'm 30, however years old, you know, making a decent living. But I was like, I'll be an intern, mm-hmm, so that I can prove to you that I'm not an idiot. I can get stuff done. So, I did work for six months to sort of get myself in the door. And, you know, not everybody has a luxury of doing that.

So, when people call me, and they want to take my path, and they want to get into the work that I'm doing, I was like, I had to sacrifice, and this is how I sacrificed, is that I not only worked for free. But then, when I started getting paid, it was, you know, a huge pay cut even then. But that sacrifice was worth it to me because it was the thing that allowed me to eventually go on my own, which is where I'm making a much more comfortable living on a schedule that is, frankly, very luxurious. So, it paid off in peaks and valleys.

John Reed [00:10:02] You wouldn't actually have made that sacrifice if you didn't think that it was a great fit for you, that there was promise for your future. Whether you want to call it destiny or fate or just a really, really good idea that makes sense, it seemed like the stars all lined up for you, and that was the appropriate path to take.

Jasmine Moy [00:10:19] When I saw the work that he was doing and the people he was working with, I was like, oh, this is really fun and interesting. I had not previously been able to wrap my mind around what kind of legal job I would think is fun and interesting. So, you know, it was sort of revelatory to me to say, oh, this would be so neat to be doing this kind of work, which is less time-sensitive, less stressful just from a workflow perspective. Because I do only transactional work. So, somebody emails me the contract, I review it whenever I feel like reviewing it within the bounds of, you know, reasonableness.

And then I send it back. So that kind of flexibility was really nice. Um, and then knowing chefs and being able to see a project from the nothing but the little, you know, a smattering of an idea of something to then however many months later or years later, being able to go and sit down in a chair and eat the food that I've been hearing about. Being able to interact with my work and with those clients in that way was just magical. And it remains magical. It's still amazing to go and sit down in a restaurant that I helped work on, even if it was just a small bit of it.

John Reed [00:11:24] I won't ask you the last time you paid for a meal, but that's a different question.

Jasmine Moy [00:11:27] No, no, no.  I try to pay for all of my meals, but what may happen is they may send out an extra appetizer, or they may send out champagne when I sit down, or they may buy a dessert.

The only time you really don't ever pay for food is when they have what's called friends and family, which is the first couple of nights you open a restaurant. And then those friends and family dinners could be very messy and very slow, and the food is off, and they're testing things, and the servers are learning, and those dinners are free because they're a little bit clumsy.

It's not fit for public consumption yet. But those are the only free, free dinners. I almost pay for everything, you know, but I get little extras. And the nicest thing sometimes is just even being able to get a reservation because sometimes these places are very difficult to get into. The real benefit is getting in sometimes.

John Reed [00:12:13] If somebody asks you, Hey, Jasmine, what's restaurant law? And what do you do? How do you describe not only what it is but what you do within that space?

Jasmine Moy [00:12:21] Yeah, for sure, restaurant law or hospitality law, it's a total branding sort of gimmick situation. But when people ask me about it, um, and I get a lot of messages from law students who's like, I want to be a restaurant lawyer. And I was like, well, it's not a thing, it's just this is branding. I said, but if you want to service restaurants, here are the things they need.

They need leasing help. They need corporate help with their operating agreement with their investors. They need liquor licenses sometimes, or very often, they need some intellectual property help if they're going to trademark the name of their restaurant, which they honestly probably should, or at least they should know enough not to choose the name somebody else already owns.

And I think maybe one of the most important things is labor and employment. There are so many lawsuits around tipping, around the hourly, around how you properly compensate people between tipped work, which is at a different rate, and sort of the hourly rate work, which is what you need to pay someone who's doing what they call side work —refilling salt shakers, folding napkins, and all this other stuff that's not actually service that you don't actually get tipped on. You need to be paid a different rate for that. There are a ton of lawsuits around that, people doing that wrong or making mistakes.

Or, you know, restaurants are started by creative people. They're sometimes not inherently very good businesspeople, or they're sometimes thinking so fast and moving so fast that they haven't dotted every I and crossed every T. And that is when you can really get yourself in trouble. Yep. And there are plaintiff's attorneys who do nothing but go restaurant to restaurant to restaurant, stopping busboys, asking for pay stubs, and trying to find errors in those.

And then a whole lawsuit is brought around the idea that you made this mistake, your time clock was off by 10 minutes, or whatever the situation is. Labor and employment and having a good manual, making sure you've made every disclosure you need to make— so important. So, when people come to me, they're like, I want to serve restaurants.

And I'll probably get into labor because that's a huge deal, an ongoing need. And also litigation, honestly. ADA lawsuits are rampant, and you know, someone eats an oyster that they thought was bad. Insurance should, by and large, cover these things, but you know, that doesn't mean you're not sort of being subject to various claims every year probably. A restaurateur has something that they need a labor or litigation attorney for the ongoing life of the restaurant.

So those are sort of the overarching groups of practices that I would say, these are the things. You're not going to ever be able to do all of that, so pick one or two and then just try to find those clients. You know? And some of this is self-feeding. If you do really good work for one restaurant client, they're going to work for you to their friend, to their friend, to their friend. Which is how I get most of my business.

John Reed [00:15:02] Perhaps more than a lot of other industries, referrals are probably more free flowing that way. It kind of sounds like if a chef has a great experience with you, they're more willing to tell their other chef friends about you and not fear any sort of competition or, um, "no, no. She's my Jasmine. You can't have her." Kind of being protective. It seems that that's one of the great things about your practice is the people you work with are willing to share you.

Jasmine Moy [00:15:28] Yeah, and my time with them is sort of limited, right? They'll come to me when they're raising money and signing their lease.

I do that, and then I don't hear from them for another year, and then all of a sudden I get an invite being like, friends and family is like, in two weeks, put it on your calendar. So, you know, I'm like so over and detached from the operation at that point. And also, I think restaurateurs do like to help each other.

This is a supportive community. They all want to see each other do better. You know what I'm saying? That, but you know, if there were two competing restaurants next door to each other, that might be a different situation. But by and large, I do feel like this is collaborative. People do enjoy getting along, talking to each other, referring vendors to each other, and things like that.

I mean, for as many restaurateurs as there are, it still remains a small community. And also, my clients tend to be more chefy chefs. I'm not really representing Irish pubs. I'm not really representing pizza joints or, you know, slice joints or whatever. I am representing more higher end chefy restaurants or restaurants that have a chef who's named and on the website and on the menu.

And so that community is like, you know, a lot of them worked together at one point or another. So, there's a lot of overlap and things like that. But they're all quite open with each other, and they're constantly sending my name out. And in fact, I just don't even, I can't even do 80% of the work that comes to me, honestly. I refer a ton of work out.

John Reed [00:16:49] Well, that's a good problem to have, huh?

Jasmine Moy [00:16:51] It is, yeah.

John Reed [00:16:52] You talked about not doing litigation. What other things do you not do within this restaurant law context?

Jasmine Moy [00:16:59] I don't do labor. I don't do IP, and I don't do liquor.

John Reed [00:17:03] Okay.

Jasmine Moy [00:17:04] And you know, I really feel like those things are truly best left to the experts. And, you know, I explain labor, but those rules are always changing.

The required disclosures are always changing. And because litigation is such a huge component to that. I don't do any of that. The intellectual property work requires a lot of upkeep. Um, so I really truly feel like if you want to have your IP, you know your trademark done well and protected well, you really need to only go with someone who's practice is really solely the IP because of how much ongoing maintenance is required to sort of continually protect that mark that you've spent the money to register.

And then the liquor work, I just. So, in New York, there is a process, and they have these community boards, which are made up of members of the community, and every borough has, uh, segmented little geographic regions, and they all have their own community boards. I served on the community board for several years, and that experience I did not particularly enjoy.

I liked being involved in my community, but it turned out it was just a lot of nimbyism. It was a lot of angry people showing up to yell at each other. I was up in Washington Heights in New York, which has a huge Dominican population and also a huge Jewish population, and it's sort of divided on Broadway.

So, the east side of Broadway is one, and the west side of Broadway is the other. And these people would show up and just yell at each other. And there was so much hatred. And not every community board is like that, but when you are in New York applying for a liquor license, you need to go in front of these boards.

I decided very early on I was not interested in any of that process. But I think part of that was born by the fact that I was on the community board, and those meetings just were endless and very fraught, and I didn't enjoy it because I don't enjoy fighting, which is also why I didn't ever work in litigation.

John Reed [00:18:48] What has unfortunately become an issue with celebrity chefs is there's more of a focus on what happens in the kitchen. Sometimes, the not-so-nice behavior. That happens, um, that clearly falls in the litigation realm, but is that something you are seeing, hopefully not with your clients? But is that more prevalent now because of the Mario Batali’s and working conditions being exposed and those types of things?

Jasmine Moy [00:19:10] You know, I will say that by the time some of the abuse, both physical and mental abuse and sexual abuse stuff started coming out, um, I think a lot of that behavior was sort of relegated to people of a certain age group. I think that there were people, I must be frank, it was mostly men, um, who sort of came up in this, oh, well, I was beat up, so I'm going to beat you up.

And it was a cycle. But I think that there was a whole set of younger people who were like, That's crazy. I don't have to do that. It doesn't have to be that way. And I will say that when I started my own practice, I very intentionally only brought on people who were younger, most of whom were people of color, as many women as I could find.

And so, amongst my clients, it's really just not something that I was worried about happening or seeing. It was sort of an old-guard situation. And that's not a, you know, fast and true, that's not 100% of the time. But I do think the culture was already shifting quite a bit. Um, but the way that all of that changed my job is the bad boy clauses, the termination clauses for bad boy acts or whatever, got much more exhaustive.

And also, when we saw how hard it was for the Mario Batali group to sort of extricate him from that group, there was really no way to get him out. They really had to probably spend a ton of money to buy him out. The prevalence of clauses in your partnership agreement that allowed basically for termination expulsion.

Now, that is part of every single document. We're, we're not messing around anymore. If we found out that you have assaulted someone, we are making sure that we can very easily, very cleanly remove you. We're not going to go to litigation about this. We're not going to spend a lot of money to do it. So, the way that that has changed my job is that all of the contracts that I'm doing now have very robust behavioral termination rights or expulsion rights.

John Reed [00:21:04] So, your terms of agreement are informed by all the bad things that preceded them.

Jasmine Moy [00:21:09] Which is sort of how contracts just generally are formulated. You know, I laugh when I look at leases because every lease in history from 1924 up until this point, you know, every lease now has this one clause because this one guy did this one thing and got away with it. Now we've got to add the clause to make sure that nobody else gets away with that one thing that that one guy did that one time. That's sort of why contracts are 60 pages, a hundred pages. It's full of nonsense that it's protecting you from stuff that probably is never going to happen.

John Reed [00:21:35] It's like warning labels on. Yes. You know, consumer appliances. It's like, please don't take the toaster into the bathroom. You know, because somebody did it once, and you got to put the warning out there.

So, this is kind of an off-the-wall question, and I'm thinking of the movie Chef: Do you ever have to deal with defamation?

Jasmine Moy [00:21:50] Um, you know, so this is the kind of thing where if I did, I were to refer that out because I consider that really more litigation territory. But I mean, I did very recently have a chef client. Um, someone was making accusations against them, and they called me. And I had to find sort of a crisis defamation litigator sort of referral source for this person to deal with the person who was saying all of the things that they were saying.

So, you know, it's something that has happened. Not often, thankfully. And it's also not something that is part of my practice is dealing with that really.

John Reed [00:22:26] I have to imagine the full-time job just because of social media. If you like something, tell one person. If you don't like it, tell the entire internet.

Jasmine Moy [00:22:34] Yeah. You know, there's, um, related, but not in the same way as I'm thinking of Google reviews or Yelp reviews or things like that. Mm. You know, these things are sort of a scourge, you know, you'll find a review, and it'll be ten paragraphs long about how much they hate the restaurant, and at the end, they'll be like, and by the way, I try to get a table, and the hostess wouldn't even seat me.

So, it's like this terrible review of the restaurant from a person who admitted they didn't even sit and have a meal there; they're just mad that they couldn't get in. You know, I think because we are now getting information from so many places, that kind of thing used to be really, really horrifying and also very annoying for restaurants. But now, you know, you get your restaurant reviews from Instagram influencers, and from TikTok, and from all of these places that people are reviewing, like relying on Yelp less, Google reviews less, and things like that.

But that used to be a thing where clients would call me, and they would say, somebody left this terrible review. Yeah, it's not even true. What do I do about it? And you know, unfortunately, there tend to not be a lot of things you'd do about it. And then Yelp was doing all these shady things, or if you paid them extra money, they would hide reviews for you.

So then there was this whole sort of extortion sort of situation happening. But I do feel like that does not happen nearly as much as it used to. And I think it's just because of the diversity of sources of information now.

John Reed [00:23:49] There are different players in the restaurant space. There are owners, there's investors, there's chefs, restaurateurs. By and large, who do you represent? You said chefs, and I just want to make sure we give you the opportunity to define who most of your clients are.

Jasmine Moy [00:24:04] When I say chefs, I mean chef-owners and operators. A lot of times, it's a chef who's partnered with someone who does front-of-house work. General management work, people who work with your servers and your bartenders and, and things like that because a lot of chefs don't really understand how the front of house works and, and how to schedule servers and things like that.

So, a lot of times it's that, or a couple of people who worked in restaurants and who know how to run the restaurant, and they're getting sweat equity, and then they're raising money from investors who by and large are probably going to be silent investors or investors who have limited voting rights in the management of the company.

From time to time, an investor will email me and say, I'm thinking about putting money into a restaurant. Would you help me negotiate this operating agreement? And from time to time, I'm happy to do that. Um, I have to pay a lot of attention to conflicts in that way, who are the managing partners, et cetera, et cetera.

To make sure that I haven't done any work with any of them. But yeah, and I think because I have prioritized, like you mentioned, and it's not even something I've really thought of before, getting back to working with creatives and also that's the referral source, right? It's one chef talking to another chef, talking to the GM, talking to their sommelier. The somm is going to open a wine bar.

The somm calls me, hey, we're opening a wine bar. So, it tends to be the creatives because that's the network, that's the community that my clients are among.

John Reed [00:25:19] What do you think most people get wrong when they think of chefs and their relationships with their restaurants, their relationships with their business partners?

Jasmine Moy [00:25:31] Well, first, I think even though I'm telling you that all of my clients are chef owners-operators. I think— I'm going to put this number out here, and I have no idea if it's accurate, but I would guess that 75% of all restaurants are not chef-owned. In most restaurants, it's a person with a lot of money or a person who owns a building who's always wanted to put up a restaurant. They pay for it, and then they have to hire a chef and pay them a salary.

In most cases, majority of cases, a chef is not the owner. But I actually think that without some sort of profit interest or profit participation, I think that that relationship makes very heartless restaurants. You know, they've got the owner who then has this idea of what he wants. Oh, you know, my mom is Greek, and my dad is from Lithuania, and I want this Greek, you know, Lithuanian restaurant and hires a chef who came from an Italian place and be like, okay, yes, sure, I'll make up your menu.

But where's the soul in that? You know, the chef probably doesn't care that deeply about the food. The owner is probably micromanaging that menu. And when you go to a place, and you go to a restaurant, you're like, eh, this food's fine. That's probably what the situation is to the restaurant. Because I do feel like you get a different quality, a higher quality of food, when the person who owns it is the person who's doing the menu. When the person who owns it is the person who's decided what that restaurant looks like and has decided, you know, everything from the lighting to what kind of soap they're using in the bathroom.

I just think that you can feel, yeah, there's a more cohesive vision. There's just a better mood. And I think it's hard to get that kind of success in a restaurant where their creative people don't really have the control over the way it looks, the way that it feels, the way that it tastes. So, you know, I think that the best restaurants have, the owner has a real incentive to make it successful, to control costs, to do all the things. And it's hard to do that if they're not an owner of some sort or a true profit participant in a not insignificant way.

But there are a lot of restaurants that don't work like that. You know, like, oh, I want to be a restaurant owner, and I'm just going to hire some random chef, and I'm just going to pay him $60,000 a year.

Or her. Um, and then they, they're going to get a very mediocre menu, and that's the way a lot of restaurants are. So, when people talk about, oh, restaurants close at this alarming rate, I was like, yeah, well, maybe those restaurants, they just weren't good. They weren't connecting to their community.

They weren't offering something the community needed. They weren't giving somebody something that felt interesting or innovative or had heart or soul or any of the things.

John Reed [00:27:55] So, there's a reason for restaurant Darwinism, is what you're saying?

Jasmine Moy [00:27:58] I think so. And you know, someone came to me and said, I'm building this restaurant. I'm, I'm hiring a chef. I'd be like, well, you should make them invested in whatever way that means. Maybe give them equity, give them profit interest, make them care about whether it's successful or not, and also give them the freedom to do what they have the expertise to do.

Like you, Mr. Banker, who has extra money to play around with, doesn't really understand these things, so stop telling this chef that they need to do X or Y or Z with the menu. You're going to kill this restaurant if you do that. So, I do think that there has to be a certain level of trust in this relationship.

That's why I think people really need to choose their investors wisely or choose their partners wisely because the diner will feel if there's a disconnect, I think.

John Reed [00:28:37] There have been famous chefs for decades, but it seems that the rise of the celebrity chef has been more pronounced over the last 15, 20 years.

Why do you think that is? And what about your practice caters to that celebrity chef, or the more visible chefs, the TV chefs, those types of creatives?

Jasmine Moy [00:29:00] Well, I'm going to push back a little bit on that because I actually think that we are coming off of the celebrity chef thing. While I do think that there are a lot of chefs who are celebrities, there still is a real market for being close to or being involved with chefs who are famous because you see them on TV and feel connected with them because you've seen them on TV.

I think some of the best restaurants that are opening are maybe not so reliant on the chef itself but are the restaurants that are creating what I just talked about: a great vibe, a great feeling. They want to be in places that feel good. And I don't want to say that the food is the, um, that it doesn't matter because it does. But I talk about different prongs of what it's like to have a restaurant experience, and it has to look good, feel good, taste good. And I really think if you have two of those, you don't need all three.

If you have two, you're going to have a very successful restaurant. And if you have all three, then you know, maybe you have an incredibly successful restaurant, but I think you could maybe drop one of those out, and one of those things could be food, and people will still go, and it'll still be popular.

So, I do think people are prioritizing now being in a place where the service is lovely, and you feel nice, and it is relaxing, or it is, you know, hypey or hot or whatever it is, the mood that you're looking for. Um, and I think sometimes the food can be a little incidental, and you can still have an incredibly successful restaurant.

Sometimes there is a famous chef involved, and sometimes it's not. But I do think we're coming off a little bit, and I do think the younger group of chefs are not; some of them are doing a lot of television work still. I don't think it's as much of a priority as it used to be, and I don't think it's also the fast track to success that used to be being on Top Chef, for example. Um, you could be on Top Chef, but it doesn't mean you're going to become famous just because you were on it anymore. When it, I think it used to be that way, but now we've had so many seasons of that show.

John Reed [00:30:52] Well, there used to be a time when it meant something to go to a Wolfgang Puck restaurant. Now all you have to do is go to the airport. Right. So, where's the experience there?

Jasmine Moy [00:31:00] Exactly. I mean, some chefs have licensed their stuff out to such an extent. I mean, I think the reason why I have, again, a certain number of these folks who've done a lot of television work is because of the referral network. The chefs who do a lot of TV work know the other chefs who do a lot of TV work, and they refer me that way. But the work that I'm doing for them is primarily not restaurant work.

It is licensing work. It is sponsorship. It is, you know, Makers Mark wants you to do a bunch of sponsored Instagram posts. We're going to do two recipes. We're going to put them on their website. We're going to pay you $40,000 to do that. You know, Les Creuset is calling. They want you to, whatever, make a couple of videos with that.

So, a lot of the work that I'm doing for those TV chefs is sponsored branded content stuff. And it's just me making sure that these big companies aren't abusing the use of the name, image, and likeness that the chef has maintained as part of that contract.

John Reed [00:31:49] You're not doing the, let's say, traditional intellectual property work of the trademarks and things like that, but there's this new area of, you know, if this were athletes name, image, and license kind of stuff, it's their brand they're leveraging, whether you call it sponsorships or endorsements or brand, uh, partnerships, you're, you're doing those types of things. When you do have clients that are going to be on TV, are you involved in their contracts with the production companies to make their appearances?

Jasmine Moy [00:32:17] Yeah, I mean, I've reviewed a certain number of Top Chef contracts, and sometimes, this all comes down to how badly that production company wants that chef to be involved. Sometimes, they are open to my changes. Sometimes, they will take zero of my changes, and that is really about how badly they need this specific person on this specific season. And how close we are to filming. But I will do those.

But you know, it's funny because if they do well on Top Chef, or if they have the personality that lends to being very good on camera, they will get approached by agents after that. And from that point out, the agents are the ones dealing with their ad work and their television work, and then everybody has a separate literary agent for when they do cookbooks or memoirs or things like that.

So sometimes I do the beginning amount of that work, but by and large, then it's at somebody else's hand, their agent, or their manager. And um, you know, I'll continue to get the very food-specific good documents or contracts afterwards.

John Reed [00:33:15] We've talked about your brand as “restaurant lawyer,” but of course, the other part of your practice is hospitality law, again, another one of these blanket brand terms. What does that involve? Tell us about what is involved in your hospitality law practice.

Jasmine Moy [00:33:31] I would consider that really the hotel work, and when you were talking about the hotel work, there's always the hotel owner which owns the building. Then, very often, they hire a separate hotel manager, which is the one running the hotel.

Sometimes, you've got a brand involved, which would be like Hilton or Edition or, you know, name your brand. And then sometimes, if I think they're smart, they'll engage someone else to be the food and beverage operator who will run the restaurants at the hotel, banquets, and room service. The reason why I think that they're smart to engage someone else is just because you know how to run a hotel and change sheets and towels and have concierge service doesn't mean that you really know anything about building a good restaurant or a cool restaurant or a delicious restaurant.

So, um, I think the more enlightened owners will engage someone to really know restaurants to make the restaurant in the hotel. And then also then that's something that draws people to the hotel, not just, you know, people in the community who will go to eat at that hotel. But also, I prefer to stay at hotels that have good restaurants.

I'm the kind of person who will choose a hotel based on how good or not that restaurant might be in it. And so, what I'm representing in those contracts mostly is the food and beverage operator, although I have on occasion represented the owner in that contract.

John Reed [00:34:50] Does this go back to your six-month internship? Were you starting to see hospitality law issues then, hotel issues then, or did this evolve later in your practice?

Jasmine Moy [00:35:00] Yeah, I would say the one I talk about is being very careful about picking your partners and picking your investors. This is sort of similar. It's like having four cooks in the kitchen. Do you know what I mean?

All of these parties are involved, and so it's a very complicated dance. And those contracts are, again, about acknowledging that you, the food and beverage operator, do not own this restaurant. It is in a hotel. You know, this is an amenity at the end of the day. The hotel owns this. You can't do this If you have any ego about what it is that you're doing.

If you think you're too good to make eggs ten different ways in the morning, this is not the deal for you. So, the hotel contracts are very specific. They're only for a particular group of people who are willing to sort of suck it up and do a bunch of things that they might not enjoy doing or that they might not otherwise do because they're in a hotel.

However, those deals can be very lucrative for an F&B operator. When the F&B operator comes in, they typically don't have to contribute any money to the project. So, they come in, and they get a free restaurant, they're getting paid based off a percentage of revenues.

So, these are very good deals for the people who are up for the challenge of doing those arrangements. But they're tricky. They're complicated; they're not always fun. They're not for the faint of heart, and again, they're not for people with ego. So, a lot of times with me trying to talk someone out of doing an arrangement like that, if I really think that it's not going to work for them and they're, they're going to be miserable, there's a lot of advising on knowing how these things play out. And having seen a number of these relationships, I am, to a certain extent, a relationship counselor for some of my clients as they're entering into various, you know, business arrangements.

John Reed [00:36:40] Was the entree into this that you had a chef-client that was being approached for a restaurant situation, or again, did this date back to that early foundation of work that you cut your teeth on as your practice started out in this particular direction?

Jasmine Moy [00:36:55] Yeah. I would say that when I had started with the man who I did the internship with and everything, we had done a couple of those together, and I actually really enjoyed it. I mean, it was very futzy work, but I liked making those pieces fit together in interesting ways. I thought it was fun. So, I think I have been attracted to that kind of work because I think it's maybe the most fun of all the things that I'm doing. The partnership agreements are pretty standard. The leases are such a slog. So, the hotel management is something that I actually really enjoy, which is why I have continued to keep it as part of my practice and sort of actively search that stuff out.

John Reed [00:37:30] You are an advisor with the James Beard Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. You serve on the New York City Small Business Services Mentorship Board, and you're on the advisory board of the Women in Hospitality United. And you've got a real estate brokerage license. And you are also involved in other activities. Tell us about that other part of your life and what draws you to do these other things. Some of them make sense; they're in your industry, I get that. But you don't have to do all these things.

Jasmine Moy [00:38:01] Kind of like, you know, the thing is when someone asks, um, I'm always trying to make room for it, especially if the service is trying to help people who might not be able to afford me otherwise or things like that. And listen, as a lawyer, I can't be giving legal advice to people who are not clients. But there's a lot of advice I can give that's not legal in nature. Again, it is about picking your partners and why you need a partnership agreement and why you need this or this or that. Things that you should know before you hire a real estate broker. And you know, there's just pitfalls that I see or accidents. You know, mistakes that I've seen people make, and I want to help people avoid making that accident. And, you know, I am priced out of helping a lot of people, so this is sort of helping people, giving back a little, trying to keep people from making very expensive mistakes on a very limited level. But the James Beard and Women at Hospitality United, um, I, I do a lot of conference speaking as well. And I'm always happy to do that because, at the very least, I could say, if you're ever approached to do X, don't do it. You need to hire a lawyer before you do Y

Never sign a lease without engaging a lawyer. I know a lawyer's expensive, but don't ever, ever, ever sign a lease, and here's why. Here are the 400 things that can happen. So sometimes it's just me going around trying to scare people into engaging someone, even if it's not me, and it's probably not going to be me. But please don't skimp on these things because you doing that can cost you so much more money later.

Even though I don't practice intellectual property, it's me being like, don't pick your restaurant name before you search the test database at the very least. Make sure someone doesn't own that name. Because there's this conception that, oh, if I was able to form the LLC or if I was able to get the domain, I own it.

And I was like, no, that's not the way that works. None of that is true. So, some of it is me just trying to drop very basic 101 information about very simple things to do and very simple mistakes to not make so that I can hopefully save you so much money and pain later.

It just breaks my heart to see a young person make a mistake that costs them a lot of money, and I'm just trying to keep that from happening in any way that I can, and sort of doing the mentorship stuff is a decent way to just bring awareness to certain pitfalls.

I want these people to do well. You know, they're scrappy and doing the rest, and it's hard enough to run a restaurant as it is. Let's not add 15 other difficult things to the table. You're going to run into problems all day, every day. Let these five things not be one of them.

John Reed [00:40:23] What's the best movie depiction of a chef's life based on your experience with your clients?

Jasmine Moy [00:40:30]  It's not a movie, but I think The Bear. We've watched the Bear, and I can't remember ever watching something that felt so much like being in the middle of a working restaurant before; I just think it's really incredible. It's stressful, and yeah, bad things happen all the time. It's not that things happen all the time; something's always going wrong, and that is a very clear depiction of how it sort of really feels like.

John Reed [00:40:53] And it's a great depiction of a healthy family.

Jasmine, this has been a delight. I enjoyed the conversation. We'll put up all the links to where people can find and learn about and follow you on our website. And I just want to thank you for taking the time to tell us your story today.

Jasmine Moy [00:41:10] Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

John Reed [00:41:13] If this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, I hope you'll take a minute to subscribe and download other episodes.

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Until next time, I'm John Reed, and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.