Who gets to decide what “working” becomes?

A few people pushed back on the last essay.

Politely, mostly. But the pushback kept arriving in the same shape:

What about Danny Meyer?
What about Keller?
What about José Andrés?

They scaled. Opened restaurants in different cities. Took investment. Expanded teams.

None of them seem to have lost the thing that made the restaurants feel like theirs.

So if outside money changes incentives so dramatically, why didn’t it happen to them?

At first, I thought the answer was simply that they were unusually disciplined about growth.

I don’t think that’s quite right anymore.

Scale Isn’t the Problem

Meyer built Union Square Hospitality Group.

Keller expanded far beyond The French Laundry.

José Andrés built a global restaurant group.

Hundreds of restaurants between them.

So expansion alone clearly doesn’t destroy identity.

What’s more interesting is that they seemed unusually able to separate different kinds of growth early.

Shake Shack operated differently from the rest of USHG.

Keller never tried to turn every restaurant into another French Laundry.

Andrés’s restaurants feel more like parts of a larger system than isolated projects.

None of this seems accidental.

But I also think there’s another layer people don’t talk about enough.

Many of these restaurateurs started with advantages most chefs don’t have.

Better networks.
More institutional credibility.
More access to aligned capital.
More room to choose carefully.

That probably changes the conversation more than people admit.

It’s easier to protect the shape of something when you have the leverage to walk away from the wrong room.

The Misalignment Appears Later

People often use the same language to describe very different outcomes.

To a chef, success may mean: the food is good, the room feels right, the team is stable.

To an investor, success may mean: the economics improve, demand expands, new locations become possible.

Neither side is irrational.

But those incentives eventually start pulling decisions in different directions.

The strange part is that this usually stays invisible at the beginning.

Momentum hides a lot.

The restaurant is opening.
People are excited.
Everyone feels aligned.

The disagreement often only appears once the restaurant starts succeeding.

Which is later than most people expect.

The Leverage Paradox

Chefs often have the most leverage before anything exists.

The investors are there because of them. The room exists because of them.

But it rarely feels like leverage.

It feels fragile.

The money has finally arrived.
People are excited.
Nobody wants to jeopardize momentum by asking difficult questions too early.

So the conversation gets postponed.

Then the restaurant succeeds.

Now there’s payroll, press, expansion opportunities, expectations.

The conversation finally arrives.

But by then, the leverage has changed.

The strange part is that nobody has to be manipulative for this to happen.

The timing alone is enough.

The chefs who protected the shape of what they built often did one thing differently.

They used their leverage at the right moment.

Before the lease. Before the close.

Before momentum made certain decisions expensive to reverse.

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This Pattern Exists Everywhere

You see similar dynamics in startups, galleries, even relationships.

The partnerships that last usually aren’t the ones where both sides wanted identical things from the beginning.

They’re the ones where differences became discussable early enough.

How large are we trying to make this?

What are we optimizing for?

What are we unwilling to sacrifice?

Those questions feel abstract at the beginning.

They rarely stay abstract.

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Silence Sets the Direction

In the last essay, I argued that capital changes the definition of success.

I still think that’s partly true.

But now I think something else matters just as much:

who gets enough leverage early enough to decide which tradeoffs are acceptable.

The strange part is that nobody is usually lying.

People just realize too late that they were imagining different outcomes.

Till the next bite,
Hungry Helen

“They want to open a few more if this works.”
“We’ll probably scale it after year one.”
“They’re thinking about multiple locations already.”

None of this sounds unreasonable.

In fact, it sounds like success.

But listen closely, and something else is happening.

People are using the same word to describe two completely different outcomes.

Two Definitions of Working

For a chef, “working” looks like this:

The food feels right. The room is full. The team is strong.

For an investor, it looks like this:

There’s demand. The concept can expand. The brand can grow.

Both are valid.
But they point in different directions.

And most of the time, no one says that out loud.

Where It Starts to Diverge

At the beginning, it doesn’t feel like a problem.

Everyone is aligned around getting the restaurant open. Momentum carries things forward.

But once it starts working, expectations surface.

Growth enters the conversation.

New locations. More revenue. More scale.

Because for one definition of working, that’s the natural next step.

For the other, it isn’t.

Two Restaurants

Two restaurants opened in the same year.
Same kind of idea.

In the first, the structure was built for one place.

Patient capital.
An operator from the beginning.
A lease that allowed time.

When takeout came up: not yet.
When a second location came up: not until the first one could stand on its own.

Five years later, it’s still one location.

The team stayed. The food got more specific.

In the second, the structure was built for growth.

Larger checks. Investors used to scaling.
A longer lease with escalation built in.

When takeout came up: of course.
When a second location came up: yes, by year two.

Five years later, there are three locations.

The food is still good, but different.
The opening chef is gone.

Both worked.

But only one is still the restaurant the chef thought they were building.

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What Capital Actually Does

Capital doesn’t just fund a restaurant.

It decides what “working” becomes.

Some concepts have a natural ceiling, no matter how many locations you open.

If the structure assumes growth, then “working” eventually means expanding.

If it assumes specificity, then “working” means getting better at one place.

That decision isn’t made later.

It’s made at the beginning.

In any system, the person who defines what “working” means ends up deciding what gets built.

What Misalignment Actually Does

When those two definitions exist at the same time, misalignment doesn’t break the restaurant.

It redirects it.
Not all at once.

Just decision by decision.

A menu change. A format adjustment.
A second location that makes sense on paper.

Each one is reasonable.

Together, they add up to something else.

Not failure. Drift.

It’s Not Just Restaurants

The shape of this is older than restaurants.

A founder and a VC. An artist and a gallery.
A team and a board. Two people building a life.

In each, the same word is doing different work for different people.

In each, the structure built around the project quietly absorbs whoever’s definition got priced in first.

In each, no one notices until it’s late.

What People Get Wrong

When people say a restaurant “lost something,” they usually point to growth.

But growth isn’t the cause.
It’s where the decision becomes visible.

The real decision was made earlier.

When no one stopped to ask what “working” was supposed to lead to.

The Question Worth Asking

The question isn’t whether it will work.

It’s who gets to decide what “working” becomes.

Not on opening night.
In three years.

The outcome isn’t decided by who works harder.
It’s decided by who defines what “working” means.

Till the next bite,
Hungry Helen

Different cuisines. Different cities. Different food.

But the conversations tend to sound surprisingly similar.

The menu. The space. The feeling they want people to have when they walk in.

All the visible parts. Which makes sense — that’s what they’ve been working toward for years.

But underneath those conversations is something else. Something that carries less weight than it should.

Who’s actually investing.
Who’s running the business.
What happens if the restaurant works.

Nobody ignores those questions. They just don’t feel as urgent as the food.

That’s the trap.

The Quiet Assumption

The more I have these conversations, the more I notice something.

A quiet assumption that the first restaurant is just a starting point.

Open something good.
See how it goes. Figure the rest out later.

And maybe that’s true. But it also feels slightly off.

Because even before the restaurant opens, certain things are already being decided.

Not loudly. Not intentionally.

But in ways that are much harder to unwind later.

The Three Directions

Not all chefs are trying to do the same job, even when it looks that way from the outside.

Roughly, there are three directions a chef gets pulled toward.

The Chef: focused on craft. The food, the kitchen, the experience at the table.

The Chef-Operator: running the restaurant as a business. Hiring, managing, making the numbers work.

The Chef-Builder: thinking beyond one location. Brand, expansion, long-term structure.

None of these is better than the others.
But they lead to very different decisions.

And they require very different structures underneath them.

Where It Goes Wrong

The problem is that most first restaurants are built as if these directions will sort themselves out later.

They don’t.

A chef who wants to stay focused on craft takes on investors who expect expansion.

A chef who wants to build multiple restaurants structures things like a single-location business.

A chef-operator ends up without a strong front-of-house partner and carries everything alone.

At the beginning it’s manageable. Everyone is just trying to get the restaurant open.

But once the restaurant starts working, the mismatch shows up.

What the First Restaurant Actually Decides

The first restaurant ends up doing more than people expect.

It doesn’t just define the food.

It defines who has control.
What kind of growth is expected.

How decisions get made.
What role the chef ends up playing five years from now.

And those things compound.

Not dramatically. Just enough that over time the path becomes harder to change.

The Question Worth Asking Earlier

If I were opening a first restaurant, I’d sit with a few things before the lease gets signed.

What role do I actually want to play in three years? Not on opening night — in three years.

Who is genuinely responsible for running the business? Not on paper. In reality.

If this works, what will the people around me expect next?

Because those expectations don’t show up later.

They’re already being set right now.

What I Keep Coming Back To

The first restaurant feels like a beginning.

It is. But it also quietly narrows what becomes possible.

The structure gets decided before anyone knows what they’re building toward.

And by the time the mismatch becomes visible, the path is already set.

The expectations are baked in. The incentives are clear.

At that point you’re not deciding what to build anymore.

You’re operating inside something that was already decided.

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Till the next bite,
Hungry Helen

But most of what we crave we learned at a kitchen table, in grocery aisles,
from the foods our families made,
and the culture that told us what was worth wanting.

Sociologists call this cultural capital.
Pierre Bourdieu argued that tastes are codes we use to signal where we belong —
not just preferences, but social coordinates.

You don’t need the theory to have felt this.

You’ve felt it if you’ve ever nodded along to wine talk you didn’t understand.
Or relaxed when someone said honestly, I have no idea what pét-nat is.

Taste is a passport. It lets you into rooms that feel exclusive and locks you out when you don’t know the password.

The Performance at the Table

In New York, taste is its own currency.

People trade opinions on omakase, natural wine, heirloom tomatoes.
I’ve seen friends hesitate to invite someone to their favorite spots because they assumed that person wouldn’t get it.
I’ve seen others gush about a taco truck because a celebrity chef posted it.

The food becomes secondary.

What’s really happening is a quiet negotiation over who belongs in the room.

The person who orders confidently. The person who defers to the sommelier.
The person who says they’ll have whatever you’re having and means it without performance.

Each is communicating something about their position,
their certainty, their relationship to the room.

Most of us are doing this without knowing it.

Where It Gets Complicated

For those of us who straddle different worlds, taste can feel like a tightrope.

You learn to hide the strong smells you grew up with. You try to fit into new palates. After a while even eating can feel like an audition.

But if you zoom out, something becomes clear.

Taste is shaped by culture, not a measure of worth.
The person who loves instant ramen and the person who loves hand-pulled noodles are both right. They just learned different things in different rooms.

The judgment we apply to food is almost always a judgment about people.

Once you see that, it becomes much harder to use taste as a measuring stick.
And much easier to use it as a conversation.

What Taste Actually Reveals

The interesting thing about food as social code is that it cuts both ways.

When you understand what taste signals, you stop being trapped by it.

You can enjoy the natural wine without feeling like you need to justify it.
You can order the dish that isn’t on trend without apologizing.

You can ask the question that reveals you don’t know something,
which is always more interesting than pretending you do.

Real confidence in a room isn’t knowing all the codes.

It’s not needing them.

The most interesting people at any table are the ones who eat what they actually want and talk about why it matters to them. Not because they’re performing ease but because they’ve stopped auditioning.

The Table as Conversation

Taste evolves.

The things you loved at twenty you might not recognize at forty.
The ingredients that seemed foreign become familiar.
The familiar becomes interesting again when seen through someone else’s history.

That evolution isn’t inconsistency. It’s proof you’re paying attention.

The table can be a place of competition, where everyone is quietly positioning themselves. Or it can be a place of conversation, where taste is a starting point rather than a verdict.

The difference is whether you’re eating to be seen or eating to understand.

One leaves you full.

The other leaves you hungry for the right reasons.

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Till the next bite,
Hungry Helen

Because the greatest restaurants—
the ones that actually shaped culture, not just the ones that sold out reservations—have something to teach anyone trying to build something lasting.

They were masterclasses in survival:
How to create relevance that doesn’t expire.
How to evolve without losing your soul.
How to leave when it’s time—not when you’re forced.

And right now, the ones who learned that are the ones who are still standing.

The places we worshipped—and what we missed.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep into the icons—looking at who topped Zagat surveys, earned Michelin stars, won James Beard Awards, and shaped the World’s 50 Best lists over the last forty years.

Lutèce. Le Bernardin. Union Square Cafe. Jean-Georges.
The French Laundry. Masa. El Bulli. Noma. Osteria Francescana.

The places we whispered about.
Built trips around. Measured ourselves against.

But when you peel back the history, a harder truth surfaces:
For most of the last century, “greatness” was defined through a very narrow lens.

French, Italian, and Japanese cuisines were crowned as the highest forms.
Luxury wasn’t just about ingredients—it was about posture:
Foams, tasting menus, hushed rooms, white tablecloths.

Everything else—Thai, Malaysian, Korean, Indian, Ethiopian—was labeled "casual" or "cheap eats," no matter how technical, soulful, or sophisticated the work behind it was.

It wasn’t about the food.
It was about who was allowed to define “fine.”

The lens is cracking.

You can feel it—if you know where to look.

There’s a sense of quiet tension in the air—something's changing, and you can hear the whispers.

At Atomix in New York, where Junghyun and Ellia Park are writing a new language for Korean fine dining.
At Ikoyi in London, where Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale are pulling West African flavors into the future.
At Gaggan Anand in Bangkok, Indian flavors don’t get erased; they get deepened—louder, truer, and more fearless.

This isn’t “fusion.” It’s about re-centering excellence.

Food doesn’t have to look French to be elevated.
It doesn’t have to cost $400 a head to be sacred.
It doesn’t have to erase its identity to be recognized as fine.

🧠 Spirit over spectacle. Care over clout.

What dining’s evolution really shows.

When you trace the last forty years of dining, you see more than trends—you see human nature unfolding in slow motion.

1980s: Mastery and posture ruled. Lutèce, La Côte Basque, Paul Bocuse—precision so sharp it gleamed like armor. Meanwhile, Alice Waters (Chez Panisse) planted a quieter revolution: radical simplicity, local farms, real connection.

1990s: Rebellion cracked the surface. David Bouley sparked emotion through ingredients. Ferran Adrià (El Bulli) dismantled every rule about how food could behave. Charlie Trotter elevated American produce to fine-dining reverence.

2000s: Spectacle exploded. Thomas Keller made tasting menus pilgrimages. Heston Blumenthal (The Fat Duck) turned meals into scientific theater. Grant Achatz (Alinea) reimagined dining as physical, emotional art.

2010s: Memory and terroir reclaimed center stage. René Redzepi (Noma) made hyper-local foraging a movement. Massimo Bottura, Dan Barber, Virgilio Martínez (Central)—asking where food comes from, and who it belongs to.

2020s: The survival era. Spirit, community, and care. Mingoo Kang (Mingles), Sean Sherman, Monique Fiso, Kyle/Katina Connaughton (SingleThread).

Even the brightest stars—Noma, Eleven Madison Park, The French Laundry—are questioning if the old fine dining model still serves the future.

It’s no longer enough to be excellent.
You have to mean something.

The new hunger.

You could feel it last weekend at André Soltner’s memorial
—a room full of culinary royalty quietly saying goodbye not just to a man, but to a whole worldview.

Soltner didn’t build a stage.
He built a village.
One guest, one meal at a time.

He made you feel fed, seen, and held.

And now, a new generation is quietly picking up those threads again:
Care as a craft. Hunger as a compass. Spirit as a standard.

Who’s rising now.

The legends of the last era built greatness—
but inside systems that weren’t built to see everyone.

Their talent was real.
So were the blind spots.

Today, the old gatekeepers are starting to crack—
not because greatness changed,
but because the world finally sees wider.

The deeper question is:
Who else might have built something extraordinary, if only they’d been seen?

The circle that once defined excellence is breaking open.
A fuller story is finally being told.

Institutions are shifting, too.
In 2022, the James Beard Awards overhauled their process to recognize a wider field.
It’s a start.
But the future isn’t about new categories.
It’s about seeing greatness without needing it to explain itself.

Women head chefs still hold just 6% of Michelin stars.
But the ones rising now are reshaping what greatness—and leadership—can mean.
To name a few:

• Dominique Crenn (Atelier Crenn, San Francisco) ⭐⭐⭐—first woman in the U.S. with three stars, blending poetry and precision.

• Clare Smyth (Core by Clare Smyth, London) ⭐⭐⭐— modern British soul, plated with care.

• Hélène Darroze (The Connaught, London & Marsan, Paris) ⭐⭐⭐ + ⭐⭐— classic French warmth, across two cities.

• Vicky Lau (TATE, Hong Kong) ⭐⭐ — French finesse meets Chinese artistry.

• Adejoké Bakare (Chishuru, London) ⭐ — West African spirit, history in the making.

• Niki Nakayama (n/naka, Los Angeles) ⭐ — a modern kaiseki pioneer.

It was never just about stars.
It was about spirit, care, and the quiet hunger to build something real.

They’re not just building restaurants.
They’re building cathedrals—rooted in traditions the world is only now beginning to honor.

And behind them, a new generation is rising:
From Lagos. From Seoul. From Lima. From Kuala Lumpur.

The fire is spreading.

🧠 3 truths the greats (and the ones still becoming great) teach us:

1. Culture shifts without warning.
   If you can't feel it, you’ll get left behind.

2. What worked once won't work forever.
   If you can't evolve yourself, the world will do it for you.

3. Attention fades. Connection endures.
   If you don't make people feel something real, you’re already fading.

And here’s the real truth.

This hunger—the one that built cathedrals out of kitchens, memories out of meals—it isn’t rare.

It’s alive.
It’s in the ones still dreaming.
Still rebuilding.
Still risking heart for meaning.

Maybe it’s in you.
Maybe it’s in someone you know.

Your Hungry BFF isn’t here to chase trends.
It’s here to find those fires—and keep them burning longer.

Because after the stars dim and the ovations die down, the real question isn’t what you built. It’s who you made possible.

hope you’re hungry. the good stuff’s just getting started.

until then—stay hungry. stay human.

@yourhungrybff,
hungryhelen 🤌