My background is actually an aviation.
I was an Army Air Traffic Controller.
“I was able to fly for free, tell all these different countries all over the world.”
That's where I really started to fall in love with the European market and the feel that you get inside of these markets where... Gregory Divaney is a visionary, hospitality-driven entrepreneur, culinary leader, and the founder of Lamar Shay. Drawing from his journey from military service to the culinary world,
he is creating experiences that bring people together through exceptional food, genuine connection. And the timeless art of casual elegance. We want you to come as you are and as you're comfortable, we want you to enjoy the best things in life,
but not have to worry about wearing a suit and be stuffy. It's like these missions to our restaurants. Our whole goal is to create the best guest experience for everybody that walks to do.
For most restaurants to get somebody in for the first time,
there's a 42% chance that they'll come back. If they come back a second time to a restaurant, there's only a 48% chance that they'll come back a third time. If they come back that third time, there's only a 78% chance that they'll continue to come. We've had such a good success with that first experience.
You come in one time, you're not going to suffer. It spans the goal. Like a super high school, internet elders. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the fall. It's our fall buff!
I'm telling how weird! The living your legacy podcast for those who live to live a legacy. Hey, welcome back everyone to another episode of "Living Your Legacy Podcasts". I'm your host again, Jay Slangen,
and we just finished up the World Cup weekend. No more World Cup madness over here at the Miami Beach Studios, but we are in our new studios here, and we've got a special host, another Floridian. And yeah, what's your name?
Where you from, and what's your business? Yeah, my name is Greg DeVanie, the owner of Laymar Shee, up in front of Nina Beach, and Emilie Island, and we're a European-style luxury market,
where we bring in Jesus from around the world. We bring in wine from all over the world, mostly French, Italian, Spanish, and South American. Wow. All right, how do you sound amazing? Yeah, so we didn't bring no samples?
Like, what's going on? I was talking about, I was like, oh, we should have, because we do a proprietary coffee blend, too. We have a giant style of espresso. Wow!
And we bring in Jolado from Florence, Italy, and we do... Going right off of Gato. Oh my goodness! This is amazing!
Jolado, I love Jolado, man.
It's always a hunt for the perfect Jolado.
I'm sorry, but South Beach doesn't cut it. You know, it's going to melt here. Yeah.
“But it's the key to a good off of Gato is balanced.”
So you got to have the right amount of Jolado, double shot of espresso, and it's got to be good espresso. It can't be too dark, can't be too light. Yeah. So we have a proprietary blend for all of that.
And it took me about 24 iterations to figure out exactly what's being blend, exactly the length of roasting time. Oh, okay. I'm very... Perfect temperature. Perfect roasted time. Yeah, it's a science.
Yeah, it is. You can geek out on coffee, honestly. Oh, yeah, so I literally have a scale with a timer on it that I put 18 grams of espresso in. Yeah.
I get 36 grams of liquid out, and it's got to be between 28 and 32 seconds. Okay. And that gives you the perfect creme on there, and it goes, I mean...
Yeah. I don't think people will ever go back anything. Honestly, it's... you can almost attune it to baking, right?
“You have to go perfect to the instructions to the exact way,”
to the exact time, you know, to get that exact fluffiness, and follow the specific instructions, right? Yeah. You can't put cold butter. You've got to put that room temperature butter.
Like, it's all a science. It's true, and that's why I actually like cooking more than baking. Mm. When I was in culinary school, I... Well, there's some art to cooking.
There is. Yeah. And there's a little bit more leeway with, you know, sauces and what goes well together. Yeah. You know, certain things have a perfect temperature, obviously, but with baking.
If you put too much of one thing or not enough of another thing, it won't rise, or it'll be flat, and it can be disgusting. Yeah. Well, how'd you get into all this?
I mean, it sounds amazing.
Uh, I wish that was my business. Like, you... Is... and I have so many questions. Yeah. But how'd you get into this?
It's funny. My background is actually an aviation. Okay. I went to college in the University of North Dakota. Yeah. I grew up among islands, so I went across the country for aviation college
because it was the cheapest option. All right. And this is from North Dakota. Operations CEO, so were you in the Air Force?
I was actually in the Army as a tactical controller.
Okay, okay. So, uh, went to the... went to college at UND. Um, learned about real college hockey because that's all they do up there. And, uh, so I went to school for air traffic. Yeah.
And, uh, I minored in space studies with, uh, basically, like, my focus in my minor was, uh, engineering for human space flight.
Okay. So, all those people listening, they're trying to get their kids into college.
“The major, but you major in what you do in life, right?”
It can be completely different. Completely different. Yeah. Yeah. So, my first love was aviation.
I started flying planes when I was 12 years old. Got my pilot's license, uh, senior year of high school. Nice. And, uh, so you like John Travolta, but the airport in your backyard, or? So, it's, uh, I don't have one of my backyard, but I've actually talked to John Travolta,
as an air traffic controller. Yeah. The air space that I worked in North Florida had his, uh, his airport, his private airport in underneath the air space. Wow.
So, he would call us up all the time and, you know, you get that, uh, that John Travolta
accent, that very distinct accent that he has, uh, going over to, he goes the same
speed all the time. All right. Yeah. So, back and forth from jumbo layer. That's a name of his airport team.
Okay. Okay. Jumbo layer. Yeah. Jumbo layer.
Right on. And, uh, I mean, yeah. That all sounds amazing. You know what I love? Uh, is there's like those, those bush planes or whatever.
“And they land on top of, like, hills in Montana or something like that?”
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they could land on pretty much anything. They could land on rocks.
They could land in stream beds. And they're, their rotates speed is so low that if you have a 30 mile an hour wind at your face, they're coming down the, the, the stream in between the, um, between the mountain passes. You can literally take off in 15, 20 feet, full power, be ready to go and you're up in the air.
Yeah. Yeah. Also, like, uh, paragliders, all that stuff, you know. Yeah. Um, so, uh, and we'll, plans to you fly.
So I fly single engine land. That's what I'm ready to fly. So anything, um, with a single engine, uh, not turbo prop and, uh, with wheels on end. So like, I don't have a sea plane rating.
It's like, we can just go on all these rabbit holes on fire. But we're trying to get back to how you got into that. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah.
Yeah.
I got, uh, a traffic control, get us back to your amazing cheese wine business.
So started out aviation and that allowed me to go into, uh, working for the airlines. So I started working for Northwest Airlines and, and then Delta bought them out. So then I was working for Delta, press and peace Northwest. I had all of my childhood flights on that, you know, my crans, my little pins, but they're gone now.
Okay. Just keep them. There we were. So I went from that and I was able to travel all over the world. So you fly for free when you work for an airline as, you know, as a legacy airline.
And so I was thrown bags. I was working in, or placing bags gently under the plane. Yeah. And I was not throwing them. And, uh, working in customer service, like we did everything in a small airport at Grand
Forks. And, uh, so I was able to fly for free. I don't know, when I, I had a weekend off or if I had a few days, I would check the flight loads. I'd be like, okay, there's an open flight to Singapore, there's an open flight to the Netherlands,
open flight to Italy. Wow. And so I would just go for a few days at a time to all these different countries all over the world. Yeah.
And that's where I really started to fall in love with the European market. And the feel that you get inside of these markets where you feel like you're at home. You feel welcomed. You feel like you have a seat at the table as soon as you walk in. They welcome you.
Especially if you go back three months later and you love to get in pressure.
“And they, sometimes they remember you, which is really cool.”
Yeah. And I fell in love with that traveling around Europe and, uh, you know, Eastern Europe, especially like the trip. It's so romantic. Yeah.
The old streets, the cobblestone streets, the skinny back roads where you don't feel sketchy. Yeah. It's just amazing. You know, I loved it.
And, um, so I went into the military. You know, I was an army or a traffic controller, um, more on the tactical side. And so, then I was, I went through the training, station in Hawaii, uh, deployed to Iraq, came back to Hawaii, did some other stuff I, um, played on the army rugby team. Um, I worked for criminal investigation division, doing some, um, helping them with
some undercover stuff. And then, went to Afghanistan, was there for 13 months, got back, uh, was injured in Afghanistan. So then, I was non-deployable after that. And, uh, so they sent me to Fort Rucker, which is the flight school for the army. And, um, all the Air Force helicopter, rodeo wing, uh, flight schools.
When I got out, I started working, uh, initially at FedEx, as a operations ma...
And then, I had the GI Bill at that point.
“I had already gone to school for aviation, didn't really see a need to further that side”
of it. So, with my GI Bill, I went to culinary school. Whoa, I'm not. Okay. Um, while I was working, so I went to culinary school on my, you know, I kept your time
on my day. Because I just loved to cook. I just loved the, I loved to cook. And I wanted to learn how they did it in France, how they did it in Italy. And, wow.
Um, a bunch of the places that I went in Italy, Calabria, uh, Florence. And I wanted to do culinary schools there, too. Yeah. So, I did shorter term culinary schools in France in Italy. And so, I learned from their perspective, I learned from our perspective, French cuisine,
Asian cuisine, you know, pretty much all the basics. And, uh, my lead instructor, um, ended up working at his restaurant over COVID.
And, uh, he's a really amazing chef, um, from Cyprus, culinary trained at Lacordum
Blue in France. He worked at a Michelin-Star restaurant in Nice. And so, I learned a ton from him, um, the higher-inside truffles, uh, different sauces, wine pairings. Yeah.
The importance of that, uh, you know, and then we played a lot off each other with, like, new ideas and in his restaurant, which was really awesome. And so, he, he kind of gave me that latitude to learn even more. Like, the cheese foams, and are you getting crazy or when you're trying new stuff, would he try and.
I would say, like, more casual, elegant, like, uh, that's kind of like our, our store. We coined the term casual, elegant, so that's, like, uh, luxury sliders, like luxury, like twagra, and caviar, which campaign, high-end champagne, but in flip-flops in the t-shirt. Uh-huh. So, no matter, like, our, you know, our, uh, mantra is, that's, like, elegant casual.
Right. That's that casual, elegant, yeah. Yeah. It goes, it goes both ways. But, you know, the thing for us is we, we want you to come as you are, and as you're
comfortable, we want you to enjoy the best things in life, but not have to worry about that we're in a suit and be stuffy, it, like, these mission star restaurants.
Like, we have amazing caviar from Marky's caviar.
We have amazing Champaigns, bologers, we have, um, you know, Henrios, like, we try to find stuff from smaller producers that are amazing, that may be a little bit less cost than not as much of a name brand. So we were able to do that, and I was able to do that because of my travels, and, and realizing like, we could do that.
We can find a smaller estate that goes back to 1725 where Thomas Jefferson went to negotiate for troops and supplies in France, and so we carry one of their borders. So that's kind of like a cool story to go along with that, with that line that we serve in our store. Of course.
And people love it. They're like, oh, this is a piece of history, and I'm so, I mean, you're talking, it's almost like, you know, because in America, we've lost that sense of like, you know, when you're in Europe, you go down the street, you get your meat from the meat people, you get your wine from, there's like, several wine people, several, you know, and then here,
it's just like these big box corporate, when people ask me, what's American food? I'd say corporate food, you know, everything's been corporatized, studied about maximum profits, you know, which could mean poor ingredients or whatever out in Europe, you know, you know your butcher's name, you know your, your cafe's name, you know, and you just
“kind of walk down the street, and that's how you grocery shop, you know, it's so nice.”
And you do it, and you do it on a more, either daily or every two days. So yeah, the fruit is fresher there. There's not as much preservatives, there's not some, there's no sulfites in the wine. There's stuff that they are not allowed to put in their food there that we have in all of our food here because of, it going to a big box grocery store.
Yeah. So the food there is way better for you. You process it better, the pasta's in Italy are made with 100% semolina flour, and you process that better because the weed germ is different because it's not genetically modified like it is here.
Yep. So when you have those ingredients, those high quality ingredients, that's what we're bringing to every lay Martia that opens up, bringing that to each community that we open up and so that people can go kind of go back to that. Lay Martia reminds me, I spent summer in Ibiza, right?
Okay.
“And I was a club photographer, so I was going to all the major of super clubs, right?”
And there was this one party called Super Martia. So when you said Martia, I was like, oh, right? But yeah, it was an intense kind of Spanish theme party. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I did two things. It was really intense. Yeah. Yeah.
It was basically a party the whole time.
Yeah. But wow.
“So you get all of these, is it means cheese, cheese, cheese, and cheese from everywhere?”
And how big is it a brick and mortar, or it's just online? Yeah. So brick and mortar, inferno need to be each downtown, and the community has really fallen in love with what we're doing because every time somebody would come in for the first time, they'd say, this is what we were missing.
This is what we were missing. And a lot of the people there did have travel to Europe. Yeah. They're well-traveled. It's funny.
I just was in Fort Lauderdale when I first moved to Florida about two years ago, and there was a specialty shop like that, right? And I just started talking to the guys.
And because I'm a list like, oh my god, this is amazing, right?
Just like introduce something to me like, what am I, right? And yeah, amazing pastas, amazing sauces, amazing wine cheeses, right? And their background was, they used to be working for, kind of like your background. They used to work for John George, right? Yeah.
Amazing chef.
“I mean, now he's all over the world, but my cousin also worked for John George, right?”
Yeah. He was the major D at his restaurant in Trump Towers, you know? And then so they had the book, and they were showing me the book, and I'm like, oh my god, my cousin's in the book, right? He's like, so I call my cousin.
He's like, oh yeah, you know, like, because it's funny, like I knew about in the, in the thank you that he was saying, he's like, oh, turn to page 85, there's a photo of me, right? But yeah, it just reminds me of your story where, you know, you've got that background in Michelin star chef, right, that European background, and just knowing all the combos, the fine foods, you know, entering a shop like yours, you know, for someone that appreciates
that. It's like, oh, thank God, you know? And people love that, and you know, we'll have them taste all the cheeses. It's not like, you guys do like a wine cheese night where they can come in, or any kind of special events.
We do a lot of special events that's been huge for us, people love them. So we did a caviar tasting event in December last year, and we did five different caviar each one paired with a different champagne, and obviously they have to go perfectly together because some people before you do that, if you don't line up five caviar and five different champions, and each time they came in, just got one of the, you know, one of each, you're
not going to notice the nuances of each thing. Yeah. So we did that caviar event, and it was phenomenal. So this year we're going to do that. And who at home is going to have five caviar and five champagne to, you know, just have
on the side when the friends come over for, you know, it's just pop, pop, pop, pop, right?
“Like that's why you have to experience that, you know, food is experiential, and we've”
come to know that, and yeah, to have experts like yourself, to show us the next level of our taste buds, to have an experience, you know, it's great. So I ask everyone, what do you most excited about currently? I think I'm most excited about our expansion project. So we are now, we're now franchise, and so we are opening up opportunities for other investors
and potential operator owner situations to open up their own landmark shades in their area. You got to have the right market though. Yeah. So when you're looking for the market, are you, what are you looking for?
So demographics wise, we're looking for, we, we kind of look at what worked well for us, what didn't work well, and the demographics are usually in a little bit of an upper middle class, the higher than that. Like you had to be like West Palm Beach, sure. I wouldn't say that high.
I mean, that works great, but if you have upper middle class with net worth of like
two to three million and home prices around one and a half and higher, one point five
and higher, that's like a perfect area for what we're doing because of the products that we carry. Yeah. And then you think they have to be year-round also because here in like, I'm thinking, okay, south of fifth, right, here in south Beach, but then you have a lot of snowbirds.
They come here seasonally, you know, but that would be another thing to look out for. Well, even with that, like my wife is from Montalk, Long Island, you know, the mountains, I grew up in Belport Village, which is also, you know, a little bit more affluent area south of the tracks, north of the tracks, a little different story, but the key there is if you can make, say, somebody wants to open one up in the Hampton, south Hampton, East
Hampton, Montalk, they might only be open from May to October and then they go to limited hours in the winter time, but they're going to make so much money in that time frame. You don't necessarily need to be open here. Yeah, you know, if you, if you, if you plan, right, if you plan for it, you have the plan
For it.
I'm sure you have the whole franchise model down. Yeah, everything is good to go. We have our SOPs, operating manuals down to how to wrap each cheese to give it its best shelf life, you know, in the fridge, you made a fine. And for the owners, are you looking for someone with chef experience? I mean, they have to have a good handle of explaining foods and stuff.
“I think that what's more important is the passion for good hospitality.”
So, we're not geared towards just food. The quality of the product speak for themselves that we bring in. You can't deny that. So, our goal is good guest experience.
Yeah, yeah, we're, I'd say that we're more of a hospitality brand with amazing food.
Gotcha. So, our whole goal is to create the best guest experience for everybody that walks to the door. And one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that for most restaurants, you get one person in, or you get somebody in for the first time, there's a 42% chance that they'll come back. If they come back a second time to a restaurant, there's only a 48% chance that they'll come back a third time. If they come back that third time, there's only a 78% chance
that they'll continue to come. For us, if you live in the area, we've had such a good success with that first experience that now we have, you come in one time, you're not going to stop coming. Yeah. So, that goes to show our hospitality mentality over turnover
“has been the most important thing that we could have done. It's like John Taffer on Bar Rescue.”
You know, he talks about, okay, the first time they come in, you offer them, you know, some coupon of the free chicken for the next time they come in. You know, and then they come in, they just chicken. He's like, hey, have you tried this? Okay, you come in next time. I'll give you this for free. You got to try that. You know, he's like at the third time, you know, you get them to come the third time. And then after that, it's like, they're
a repeat customer and you'll see them all the time. Yeah. And we do that. So, if there's somebody that's there for a special occasion, you know, birthday, we had somebody proposed to their, their girlfriend in there. You know, we do, we do something called Sabreng, the Bala Champagne. Oh, yeah. So, you cut the top of the, yeah, you cut the, what the, I have a big Italian saber that's like this big. Yeah. And that's kind of like our way
to say, thank you for coming in. And if they're celebrating something, we have them
Sabre the top of the champagne, which most people have never done. Of course, it's, it's
Instagramable. It's delicious, right? And then they get some champagne and they celebrate
“and we, you know, we toast to them. And that's important so that they know that their”
special occasion has been, you know, recognized. Well, it all sounds so exciting, so delicious and so amazing. But how do people find you? So, we're online, LayMarshakeco.com. And SpellMarshake for the people, L-E-M-A-R-C-H-E-C-O.com. And our Instagram is Lay.Marshake.co. See you. And my wife is in charge of the social media stuff and she comes up with some hilarious, absolutely hilarious videos. So we've actually gotten a pretty good following
since we've been open. We only opened last September 3rd. All right. And so we've had a huge increase in popularity from a lot of my wife's ideas with the social media. So there's some really funny videos I highly suggest you go check it out. I will. I'm definitely going to check it out. And I hope you guys do too. And thank you so much for joining us. You're going to have to hop into Studio One in our new studios. What do you think about the new studios
real quick? Oh, it's beautiful in there. You felt very welcome. You know, walking down the street, you come up to the building and like, oh, what's this? And then you walk inside and like, oh, this is phenomenal. And it's, uh, you have all the, you know, the legacy makers on the wall. You got all the
really, um, you know, cool, the full merch up there. You got some really amazing stuff. It's a beautiful
new studio. And everybody's very welcoming and I can't thank everybody enough here. All right. Well, we're going to get into it into his episode. But I mean, stay tuned for his episode where you can learn so much more. And it's also all these other stories he said, uh, he's like, oh, if we have time, talk about rugby, talk about water polo, you're to all kinds of cool stuff. I mean, I could sit here and talk to you for hours. All right. Yeah. But next time, bring samples.
Bring samples people, especially got wine and cheese. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, thank you for joining us. And thank you guys for joining us. And we'll see you next time. Cheers, everyone. Cheers. [Music]
