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One thing I don't think a lot of people realize is that restaurants are investments and not pieces of a community or a way of live for small operators.
Licensing deals allow famous chefs to put their names and recipes on more restaurants but they actually have no ownership in the business. The financial structure for something like that usually breaks down like:
A management fee to the chef/restaurant group, they'll get a percentage of profit or revenue share or some combi of all or either. This allows a well recognized chef to scale their brand without having to wait for their own investors to find money.
You'll see famous chefs opening places in Vegas or NYC or Tokyo or wherever and it's purely them licensing their brand to a luxury hotel, they don't own anything.
The chefs will have to appear at those restaurants for meet and greets or to be present. Could be a week out of every month or two weeks out of a year but it's just to give the appearance that the chefs are there so the public buys it.
When a pandemic happens a lot of these restaurants temporarily closed and some have come back, Vegas is a good example. The likeness of these chefs are still used but the control of operations isn't theirs. They made a deal with the devil because greed.
You'll see this outside of hotels with well-known chefs expanding left and right across the nation. See Stephen Ross and the chefs he's invested in for a perfect example of that.
To the guest this is huge because a well known chef expanding to their market is amazing and they're fans but the reality is it's just investors looking to capitalize off of that. They don't give a shit about the community there.
When you saw a bunch of restaurants close immediately without even taking the chance to pivot or change a business model, guess what, big investors were there to shut that down. To them, a pivot isn't worth it and they have enough money to sit it out.
The employees that were left out were just casualties to protect the business/investment. This is why you see a lot of independent and small businesses go on and try as hard as they could because there is no money or option.
Seeing some of the larger groups wait it out, save PPP money intended for employees, and nod come back to doing things like elevated take out while still dangling their out of work employees is disgusting. They're back but the employees? Not so much.
Investors gave money to that operator to make money for them. So if there is a chance that's not going to happen that place will close, you're seeing a lot of that right now.
If properly funded, it's easier to close a concept permanently, wait the pandemic out, then open something if not the same concept up later. It costs money to care about employees and the community.
The next time you see a well known chef opening a restaurant just know that they probably don't own it, have a ton of investors pushing them forward, or have a licensing deal. When the going gets tough, they're out, fuck you.
I forgot to mention, employees that work at these places are employees of the hotel and not the restaurant group unless they are on the management team from the restaurant group so when the layoffs happen no big deal to the chefs.
