Fewer Restaurants Are Opening With Big-Name Chefs in the Kitchen. Here’s Why.
Celebrity chefs are, of course, still headlining restaurants. But increasingly, the person in the kitchen is becoming more irrelevant to diners.
By and large, at least in New York City, the age of the celeb chef is behind us, New York magazine’s Grub Street reported on Tuesday. A decade ago, chefs were synonymous with their restaurants—there was Momofuku and David Chang, Eleven Madison Park and Daniel Humm, and countless other notable cooks slinging dishes that were all-encompassing of their culinary ethos. Now, though, people are far more interested in a restaurant’s vibe, rather than its bona fides.
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“I came up in the era of, the chef is why you went, you went for the person cooking the food,” the N.Y.C. chef Bobby Hellen told New York magazine. “Now, it’s not like that.”
The reasons for this shift are manifold, but the unsustainability of the restaurant industry is one big factor. Kitchens are a notoriously difficult environment to be immersed in, and more and more people are opting out of the low pay, grueling hours, and verbal abuse that have come to define back-of-house work. Plus, diners have become more aware of the unbalanced power dynamic, thanks to rigorous reporting on the realities of working in a restaurant and shows like The Bear that accurately portray what it’s like to be a kitchen employee.
Plus, like many trends of today, the pandemic has played a big role in reshaping expectations and goals. During the height of Covid, restaurant workers left the industry as eateries were forced to shut down or lay off employees. And while some of those workers returned, others decided to explore alternative opportunities. As such, the overall pool of talent has dwindled.
“Basically, what happened is all these people who were super experienced in kitchens but never made it out onto their own … started private cheffing during the pandemic, and all these really great servers, floor managers, managers, great GMs, took the opportunity to be like, ‘I am no longer working in this hellish industry,’” the restaurateur Michael Cecchi-Azzolina told Grub Street.
So, we end up with more Bad Romans—restaurants selling an experience more than a standout menu—than we do Tatianas, which draws in customers thanks to its executive chef, Kwame Onwuachi. The vibe shift, it seems, is taking precedence over the old-school restaurant shift.
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