Why So Many Chefs Don’t Want Restaurants Anymore

THERE WERE SEVERAL tall, prickly cactuses over Seamus Mullen’s left shoulder and, beyond them, a range of low-lying mountains. He wore a cowboy hat, which I would’ve considered an affectation but for the Southern California sunshine beating down on him during our Zoom call. Nearby, he told me, were three cows, six horses, six goats, six sheep and about 30 chickens. Mullen, like Old MacDonald, had a farm.

This threw me. I remembered him as the quintessential It boy of the New York City dining scene just a decade and a half ago — young, handsome, charismatic and savvy enough to carve out a niche by countering the craze for Italian cooking with the traditions and tapas of Spain. He did that in such busy Manhattan establishments as Boqueria and Suba, each of which I gave two stars when I was The Times’s restaurant critic from 2004 to 2009, and Tertulia, which he opened in 2011 and where I ate all the time. I followed him from restaurant to restaurant; I followed him even to the woods of eastern Pennsylvania, where he took me hunting for wild birds, one of which he cooked for me, buckshot and all, at Tertulia the following night.

But Mullen left New York in 2019, by which point he’d either shuttered or severed ties with all his restaurants. He moved to the Los Angeles area and never looked back, in part because he found that a chef can do and earn plenty without working 90 to 100 hours a week while sweating over stoves and staffing and profit margins and seating charts. He has consulting gigs, sponsorship deals, educational projects and, now, a health-focused, protein-forward meal delivery service that’s based on (and named for) his 2017 cookbook, “Real Food Heals.” He also has the farm, which is really a ranch, located in Topanga Canyon and established not as a business interest but as a way of life. Talking about all of that, Mullen, now 50, professed unsullied satisfaction.

I, in turn, professed skepticism. Didn’t he miss the adrenaline of a frenzied Friday dinner service, the exhilaration of lordship over a sanctum where, on any given night, Jay-Z and Beyoncé might pop in? What about those precious stars that critics lavished on him?

“I loved it when I was in it,” he says. “But the last thing I’d do right now is open a restaurant.” The last thing? He made it sound like a punishment — like a ruinous dare taken only by masochists and fools who don’t know any better.

It’s not just him. It’s all sorts of talented, enterprising, creative cooks who used to run restaurants in New York City or will never run restaurants there or have consigned restaurants to minor roles (cameos, really) in culinary careers that sprawl in other, gentler directions. Over recent years, they watched restaurants become more difficult and expensive to operate, while the food world diversified and presented easier incomes and new routes to respect. Back when I was reviewing restaurants, there seemed to be no steppingstone to kitchen glory as reliable as stewardship of a place that self-regarding epicures flocked to and food bloggers gushed over. And it seemed that no one in culinary circles enjoyed the bragging rights — the divinity — that the top restaurant chefs did.