THOMAS: When I was 21. It was one of those, again, you know, working for somebody else and then doing my own thing. I went in partnership with two other young men, and we opened a restaurant in south Florida.

HATTIE: Did it work?

THOMAS: It worked on certain levels. It didn't work on the financial level, which kind of after 18 months left us with empty pockets and broken dreams. But I think we all learned something from it. I certainly learned something from it. I became more focused after that and I said I understood that I needed to know much, much, much more.

HATTIE: So what did you do?

THOMAS: Six years later after leaving Florida and working in upstate New York, I worked in New York City, and then moved to Paris and worked and lived in Paris. I moved back to New York and became a partner with a gentleman who had a restaurant in New York. We opened a new restaurant in the city several years later. It was called Rakel, and it was a great restaurant. But then, bang, the stock market crashed.

HATTIE: Oh! So that was...

THOMAS: October 7th, 1987.

HATTIE: ...the summer it crashed, these were all your customers, and now they're broke.

THOMAS: Right. Now all of a sudden, we were blacklisted from all of the agencies that were there because the restaurant was considered too expensive, so they weren't allowed to go anymore. All the customers that we were drawing from Wall Street because we were relatively close to Wall Street -- I mean, there was a whole market that just fell apart.