The urge toward empire is common to business titans and tin-pot potentates, but it’s a relatively recent phenomenon among chefs. Prior to Jean-Georges, Mario, and the rest of the preening super-chefs of the recently concluded go-go years, great cooks rarely opened more than two restaurants in a lifetime, and usually both were in the same town. During the boom, however, culinary moguls expanded their brands with a kind of lunatic zeal. They popped up on TV shows, spanned the globe in private jets, and lent their names to crackpot, overleveraged projects in Vegas and Dubai. Now, of course, many of these chefs’ empires are under duress. Some have quietly folded their far-flung outposts, while others’ operations are teetering perilously close to collapse. The next generation of chefs, meanwhile, have retreated meekly back to the kitchen, where their ambitions don’t extend much beyond cultivating new cheeseburger recipes and keeping their restaurants open from month to month.
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