'Playing With Fire's' Koch Brothers Talk Love/Hate Relationship

When E!'s Playing With Fire premieres on Sunday, March 17, viewers will get a taste of the high stakes business involved with being a chef or restaurateur in the Big Apple. The Koch Brothers, identical twins with larger-than-life personalities, allowed the cameras to film the opening of one of their latest high-profile establishments, Toy, and follow their lives as they attempt to build their budding empire. If their restaurants are half as entertaining as this interview (which definitely veered on the fun side of crazy), it's easy to see how they've achieved success by the age of 30.

Daniel Koch: We’ve been approached in the past a lot. Derek and I went to film school and we learned a lot about that. With that comes a reality check, which is paying the bills. We worked from the bottom up. We learned everything in the restaurant business and then at the age of 25 we opened our first place and since then formed Dual Groupe with Michael (Wainstein). Five years later, here we are. However, in the meantime,we’ve been approached by every network to do this and that but five years later I’m like, if it’s not E! I’m not doing it with anyone. So it was perfect. We couldn’t be more excited about it. We understand the lengths you have to go to shoot and make something come to life.

OK!: How did you go from Ohio to New York?

Derek: We went from a small town of about 5000 people to a small school in college and we just found every place we went to we became a big fish in a small pond. Everybody knew our business so we were like, let’s go somewhere where it’s big. Let’s go somewhere where we don’t know everybody and maybe we won’t see the same person twice every week. We ended up in Brooklyn in 2002 at the age of 20. Our parents weren’t too happy about us leaving college but I told them we were going to go pursue our lives and figure out who we were. We had no clue.

Daniel: I knew who the hell I was. You were the one running from your girlfriend. As soon as that happened I was like, “Okay, I can grab him now. Let’s move to New York.”

Derek: We tried modeling with the novelty of being a twin. We did some Cosmo stuff. We did some runway shows in Bryant Park. We never made any money. I think we got a check for $1.57. And we hung it on the wall. We were told no by everybody. We gave it a couple of years but we realized sooner than later, at 22, that we needed to find jobs. We went out to bus tales and swallow our pride to pay our bills and school loans.

Derek: At the end of the day we balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I run the business day-to-day together with Michael and Daniel runs the business from night to morning.

Daniel: In our world in New York there’s a lot of backstabbers and people you can’t trust so the closest thing we have is loyalty and that supercedes any form of relationship you can have in this business. When we share bank accounts and we see this and that there’s trust. There’s a lot of loyalty here. There’s just as much love as there is hate. But the hate is out of love and therefore it works.