The Math Doesn’t Work

And every chef in New York knows it

I have a game I play when I walk past a closed restaurant in New York City. I try to guess how long it lasted. Butcher paper on the windows, a faded sign, a phone number that now connects you to a nail salon. How long did someone’s dream survive in that space before the city quietly swallowed it whole?

The average, if you’re curious, is about three to five years. That sounds okay until you realize most of those restaurants never made their money back.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you before you open a restaurant: the goal isn’t really to make money. The goal is to lose less money than you thought you would. If you can do that consistently, for long enough, maybe, maybe, you come out the other side with something resembling a sustainable business. This is considered a success. We hand out James Beard Awards for this.

I spent years as a chef in New York restaurants and I can tell you with complete confidence that the math has never worked. But it really, genuinely, almost comically doesn’t work right now.

Let me give you some numbers.

A decent sized restaurant space in Manhattan, not a flagship, not a destination, just a normal neighborhood spot with forty to sixty seats, is going to run you somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand dollars a month in rent. Before you’ve bought a single onion. Before you’ve paid a single line cook. Before the grease trap backs up at eleven pm on a Saturday, which it will, and you’re calling a guy who charges you eight hundred dollars to show up and another four hundred to actually fix it. He will also be very judgmental about the state of your grease trap, which you did not need on top of everything else.

Labor is thirty to thirty-five percent of your revenue on a good week. Food cost is another twenty-eight to thirty-two. Rent, utilities, insurance, credit card processing fees, the small mountain of permits the city requires you to obtain and renew and obtain again, that’s another fifteen to twenty. You do that math and you’re already at a hundred percent before you’ve considered that your chef de cuisine just got poached by the new hotel opening on the Lower East Side because they’re offering health insurance, which you cannot afford to offer, because you are too busy paying the grease trap guy.

The window for actual profit, and I’m talking three to five percent on a genuinely good month, is so narrow that a single bad week of weather, a single mediocre review, a single health inspection that goes sideways, can wipe it out entirely.

And yet every year, chefs open restaurants in New York City. Because we are, as a group, profoundly delusional optimists. It’s practically a job requirement. I have a restaurant in Fort Greene called Strange Delight, which tells you everything you need to know about my relationship with self-awareness.

What’s changed recently, though, is that the delusion is harder to maintain.

Minimum wage increases, which are good, let me be clear, I’m not complaining about workers being paid more, have hit restaurant margins in ways that were genuinely difficult to absorb. The price of ingredients has been quietly catastrophic. Olive oil. Eggs. Butter. The stuff that used to be cheap because it was just, you know, food, is now expensive because everything is expensive and restaurants can only raise their prices so far before the neighborhood decides they’d rather order in, tip the app thirty percent instead of us, and eat it on their couch in the dark. Which, honestly, I understand. I’ve done it myself. I’m a chef.

And then there’s the other thing nobody wants to say out loud: New York diners are more fickle than ever. A restaurant opens, gets a moment on Instagram, gets reviewed, gets a reservation waitlist, and then, six months later, people have moved on to the next thing. The cycle has compressed. You used to have a couple of years to find your footing. Now you have a season, maybe, before the conversation moves on without you. Strange Delight opened and had a great moment and I spent the entire time waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is a very fun way to experience success.

So chefs are leaving. Or rather, they’re not leaving exactly. They’re diversifying, which is a polite word for hedging.

The smartest people I know who came up in professional kitchens are doing the same quiet calculation: what if I took the credibility I built over years of standing over a stove and applied it somewhere the margins aren’t actively trying to kill me?

Cookbook. Substack. YouTube channel. Podcast. Brand partnership. Corporate consulting. Private dining. Any combination of the above. I have personally done all of these things and I am telling you that

2026 Chef

Substack has a better profit margin than the restaurant, which is either inspiring or deeply depressing depending on how you look at it.

I’m one of them. I wrote a cookbook, Hello, Home Cooking, and I’m not going to pretend that the decision was purely creative. It was also practical. A cookbook advance, modest as it often is, represents something a restaurant almost never can: guaranteed money, paid before you’ve served a single plate. Nobody calls you at midnight about the advance. The advance does not have a grease trap.

The chefs building audiences on social media aren’t selling out. They’re surviving. They’re taking the knowledge that used to live only inside a professional kitchen, real knowledge, hard-won, genuinely useful, and finding ways to share it that don’t require them to sign a fifteen-year lease and hope for the best.

Here’s what I actually believe: the restaurant is not going anywhere. People will always want to sit down somewhere beautiful and have someone cook for them. That experience is irreplaceable and New York will always have people willing to attempt to provide it, consequences be damned, grease trap guy and all.

But the idea that a chef’s entire creative and financial life should run through a restaurant, that the kitchen is the only legitimate place to do this work, that idea is finished. The chefs figuring that out now are the ones who are going to be okay.

The rest of them are standing in beautiful rooms, doing math that doesn’t work, hoping this month is the month it finally turns around.

I’ve been that chef. I am, in some ways, still that chef. It’s a hard way to live but the food is usually pretty good, and if you’re ever in Fort Greene, Strange Delight is worth the trip. We keep the grease trap very clean.

Hello, Home Cooking is available for preorder wherever books are sold. Out on March 24th!