THOMAS: Right. No one would lose a lot if the business...

HATTIE: OK.

THOMAS: ...went to failure, and no one could tell me what to do.

HATTIE: And that's working?

THOMAS: That's working very well.

HATTIE: Now, are they getting some...

THOMAS: And they're all very proud of it, and they get a lot of satisfaction out of being one of the owners of The French Laundry. Our first year, which was really only six months because we go--our fiscal year is also the calendar year, so our first year was six months. We opened in July, we finished out in December. We lost money the first six months.

HATTIE: Of course.

THOMAS: And then the first year--our first full year, we broke even. I think we made $6.

HATTIE: I love it. `We made $6.'

THOMAS: Six dollars. We all worked extremely hard, and we made $6. And then our second full year, we really started to realize what the restaurant could do, and we started distributing money....to the investors. And we became pretty solvent after our first year and a half.

HATTIE: And you wanted the experience more than a bunch of money. THOMAS: Yeah, the money part of it, from the beginning of this project, was never the most important part of doing it.

HATTIE: I mean, you want to make a living.

THOMAS: Well, I had to be responsible to my partners. I had to be responsible to the bank. I had to be responsible to the SBA. I had to be responsible to my employees. But it's not what drives us. It's not what drives my cooks, it's not what drives the people that work in this restaurant. What drives us is the fact that we are able to do something that's gonna make a difference for us in our lives, and because it makes a difference for us in our lives, it's going to make a difference for the people who come to our restaurant.