For the fall issue of our food magazine, The Sauce, I wrote a feature about the pros and cons of Seattle’s chef-owned empires, including how well-known business owners like Tom Douglas and Ethan Stowell have more access to desirable locations because developers prefer them over first-time restaurateurs, as well as how high-profile chefs like Renee Erickson are setting a higher standard for employee wages.
While looking through the comments on the piece, I was struck by this question: “I was hoping to hear how these chefs manage to spread themselves so thin across so many restaurants…what does ‘Ethan Stowell,’ for instance, even mean anymore when he’s rarely behind a stove?”
It’s a great question—one that several chefs touched on in our conversations, although their answers didn’t make it into the final piece.
For better or worse, Seattle’s cuisine is largely defined—both locally and nationally—by Douglas and Stowell, as well as Erickson: local, seasonal, artisanal, more casual than fine dining. Douglas and Erickson both own farms that currently or will soon supply their restaurants with produce and beef, while Stowell, whose empire is built on smaller, neighborhood restaurants, features handmade pastas and as many seasonal, local ingredients as possible.
When I interviewed Erickson in May, it was clear that moving into the role of chef and owner of multiple restaurants was something she was still getting used to. She was obviously proud of her restaurants, her company Sea Creatures, and her employees, but admitted that not being in the kitchen everyday still felt “really weird sometimes.” I think the strength of her two full-service restaurants—the Walrus and the Carpenter and the Whale Wins—is their very consistent and clear vision: rustic, French-influenced food that is firmly rooted in the Pacific Northwest, particularly its waters. From what I can tell, that same vision will apply to her next two restaurants, Bar Mesuline and Bateau.
Both Douglas and Stowell, whose “empires” are significantly larger than Erickson’s, seem much more comfortable with being entrepreneurs and business owners who spend less time in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, when you own more than 12 restaurants, as both do, there’s more variation among them. What struck me is that some of that variation comes, not directly from Douglas and Stowell themselves, but from the chefs who run those restaurants day-to-day. Both chefs were proud to tell me that many of their restaurants run similarly to independent, owner-operator businesses.
“Our restaurants run fairly independently,” Douglas told me, noting that all of his restaurants benefit from a company-wide human resources and accounting department. “But outside of that, the chef and GM (general manager) run those restaurants on their own.
“Ask my chefs and they’ll say the same thing,” he continued. “We always say to them, ‘This your joint, run it the way you see fit.’ It’s so expensive to run restaurants, the margins so small, so if you don’t run it like a mom-and-pop shop, you’ll probably go under. Some [chefs] go off to open their own places. Some like to stay also because it’s more stable.”
“The best thing that we offer up-and-coming chefs is that we actually let them run the businesses,” Stowell told me. “I worked in restaurants for years, but never actually managed the business. If you’re a chef and suddenly also small business owner, going into that blind that can be startling.”
Stowell says he and his wife and business partner Angela “teach structure, the importance of value, how to manage books, teach them what a profit-and-loss statement looks like. Before I owned a restaurant, I’d never even seen a P&L. With my first business I struggled. I would prefer that people didn’t struggle with their business.”
