Travel Creel-The World's First Premier Pop-Up Fishing Lodge with Joshua Schwartz [EP 373‪]‬ Outdoor Biz Podcast

Today on episode 373 of the outdoor biz podcast I’m talking with Travel Creel founder and chef Joshua Schwartz. Joshua and his team love to fish! Their goal is to combine world-class fishing destinations with comfortable accommodations and outstanding dining experiences.
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Show Notes
How'd you get into cooking?
So, my grandfather owned a French bistro, so I kind of grew up in a restaurant as a kid, and he passed away when I was pretty young, and didn't really know how to deal with his passing.
Didn't really understand grief and everyone was really upset. My family, my mom, my dad, my sister were all upset and I didn't really know what to do cuz I wasn't feeling upset, but I didn't know how to deal with it. And my mom's like, you, everyone deals with grief differently, so you just need to choose what you wanna do and how you wanna deal with it.
And I said, well, I'm just gonna be a chef like grandpa was. Oh, cool. And that was really kind of like, I set my sights on it and I never looked back.
So tell us about your cooking career. You cooked at the French Laundry, Bouchon, and Per Se
Yeah, so I started cooking at 14 professionally and worked my way through some of local restaurants and met a chef when I was in high school, who was an instructor at the New England Culinary Institute, and he worked for Thomas Keller at his original restaurant in New York called Rakel.
He helped me get set up going to the New England Culinary Institute. Which, which is where I went to school in Vermont. And my first externship, from the way that school worked was you did six months at school, six months as an externship working in a professional kitchen. And then back to school for six months and then back out in the field for six more months. And then you graduated. So my first externship was in New York working for David Bouley at the original Bouley on Duane and Houston. And that was my introduction to fine dining.
When did you have time to pick up fly fishing?
When I was working at the French Laundry we started the project of Buchon and me and another chef friend Jeff Cerciello, we were going to be the sous chefs at Buchon. So we, we were helping with that project and everything was going really well, but it was kind of slow-moving, you know, building a restaurant out and starting it from the ground. , it was slow-moving. So we had, we had a lot of free time. I mean, not a lot, but more than normal. And he asked me if I wanted to go up and fish go fish with him up on Hat Creek. Which is, you know, a beautiful Spring Creek in Northern California. I had grown up fishing as a kid. My grandmother used to take me flounder fishing off the dock on Long Island as a kid. And, and then we moved to Pennsylvania when I was a little bit older and we had ponds in every corner. And I used to use my spin rod and catch bass left and right. And that was kind of like a normal summer routine for me. So I loved fishing. But I'd never fly fished before.
And I caught my first fish on a dry fly and that was it. I mean, on the way home, I overdrew my bank account and bought a fly rod a fly. waiters and boots at the fly shop in Redding. I remember it specifically cause I overdrew my account.
Right, right, right. But I was dead set on like, I'm gonna keep doing this. It's, yeah. So it's, it's a great sport to participate in. Yeah. And then that summer, like we took another, like, we, we all mountain bike and we took. A mountain biking trip up to Tahoe. And I remember one day we were, we were gonna do the Crest Trail and I was like, I'm gonna take the day off from biking and I'm gonna go fishing.
And I went out to the East Carson and, an