When Randall Restiano left Gramercy Tavern as beverage director to open a place of his own last year, his first instinct was to look somewhere in Manhattan. Then he ran the numbers. “The expense, return on investment, and volume of investors needed to make it a reality did not make sense,” he said. “I thought, ‘maybe it’s time to do something new.’”
Restiano took a space in the Westchester suburb of Bronxville with chef John Poiarkoff, another Union Square Hospitality Group alum, to open La Chitarra, a pasta bar and wine studio. “When I was deciding to do this it was an emotional battle,” said Restiano. “I thought, ‘am I ready to give up the city? What does that mean for me?’”
The promise of lower blood pressure and lower costs was a tonic more powerful than his ego. “The amount of money you need to run a restaurant in Brooklyn or Manhattan at this point is so crazy. If you fail, the loss is massive,” he said. “Here, we were able to do a major renovation, we have a 100 bottle wine list, and we can use the ingredients we want and serve them at a decent price point because our overhead is not as bad.”
Big cities are great places for a chef to step into the spotlight and garner press and accolades. But they’re also places of high burnout, mounting costs, and staggering rents. Which is why a lot more big city chefs—from New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia and beyond —are opting to jump ship and swim in a smaller pond, many moving back home where they can turn the volume down on the chaos. The return has become such a phenomenon, it’s even got its own slang, “boomerangs,” a term coined by food writer Adam Reiner in Bloomberg on the changing face of Buffalo’s dining scene.
“I think that people are getting real about all the hard work this business takes,” said chef Joe Cash, who cooked at Per Se, Noma, and The Pool before returning to his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina to open the MICHELIN-starred Scoundrel in 2022. In the spring, he will open Dootsie’s, an Italian restaurant named for his grandmother. “There is no profit and so much blood sweat and tears and people are reaching a breaking point. Gavin [Kaysen, who left NYC in 2014 to open Spoon & Stable in Minneapolis] had wisdom. He understood the future was not in Manhattan.”
The Money Pit
Less stress and more reward (and the birth of her third child) led Tía Pol’s Mani Dawes to return home to New Orleans where she opened Cafe Malou late last year. “There is no way to do an independent mom-and-pop restaurant like we did at Tía,” she said. “The math does not work.”
