18 Years Later: Revisiting the 25 Reasons I'd Never Own a Restaurant
Back in 2008, I reposted a list on this blog. Twenty-five reasons a chef named Niall Harbison would never open a restaurant. I asked his permission, credited him properly, and then added my own little confession at the top — that 99% of his reasons were the same reasons I wrestled with the idea myself.
Here's what I didn't mention in that post: I wrote it from a ship.
I was serving as Executive Chef on the M/V Africa Mercy with Mercy Ships, anchored off the coast of Liberia in West Africa. And somehow, from that context — cooking for a hospital ship doing free surgeries for people who had no other options — I was emailing my architect friend Bobby M. back in the States about zoning regulations and building codes. Because the restaurant dream doesn't care where you are or what you're doing. It just shows up.
Bobby gave me good information. I filed it away. And then I went back to running a galley kitchen in West Africa and didn't open a restaurant.
That was 2008. It's 2026 now. Eighteen years, 30-plus years of professional cooking total, two kids, a Mercy Ships family voyage, and a whole lot of life later. I figured it was time to go back through that list and see how it holds up.
The ones that aged like fine wine (meaning: got better with time)
#3 — Over a third of restaurants close within the first year of business. This number hasn't budged. If anything, post-COVID data pushed it higher. The pandemic did to restaurants what the 2008 recession only threatened — it wiped out thousands of places overnight, and a lot of them never came back. Niall saw a recession coming when he wrote this. He was right about the recession. He just couldn't have imagined COVID on top of it.
#7 — I don't want to spend my life in fear of getting slaughtered in a restaurant review. In 2008, this meant a newspaper critic. Now it means Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, and a guy with 80,000 TikTok followers who had to wait 12 minutes for his appetizer. The surface area for public humiliation expanded about a thousandfold. Every customer is a potential reviewer. Every table is a potential viral moment. This fear was valid then. It's much more valid now.
#8 — Staff turnover. Bad in 2008. Catastrophic after the Great Resignation. The hospitality industry lost workers who left and just never came back. There are restaurants right now operating short-staffed every single week not because they can't pay, but because the labor pool changed. He was right. He was more right than he knew.
#18 — All my friends would be expecting freebies. This one is eternal. This will never change. This is as true as gravity.
#22 — Cooking can become a chore instead of something you love when it's mass produced. This is the one I care about most. This is the reason behind all the other reasons. I've watched it happen to people I respect. The joy gets ground out. You stop tasting because you're producing. You stop creating because you're managing. You stop loving it because you're afraid of it. I made a decision somewhere along the way that I wasn't going to let that happen to me, and not opening a restaurant was part of how I protected that decision.
The one that stings to read
#14 — If I invested the couple of hundred thousand needed in AAPL and GOOG stocks instead I would be considerably richer in 3 years time.
He said three years. He was being conservative.
Apple in late 2008 was trading around $10 a share (split-adjusted). Google was around $150. A $200,000 investment split between those two companies in late 2008 would be worth somewhere north of $4-5 million today. Not joking. Not exaggerating. That is the actual math. -- Of course, I did not have $200,000 to invest anyway...I was working as a volunteer in West Africa!
Nobody did it, of course. Because in late 2008 the financial world was on fire and putting $200,000 into the stock market felt like throwing it off a bridge. But Niall saw it coming. And I nodded along and filed it in the same drawer as Bobby M.'s zoning notes.
The ones I actually lived anyway
#25 — I would end up washing dishes/cleaning toilets/scrubbing floors when somebody phones in sick at the last moment.
Here's the thing about this one. I do this now. Voluntarily. Working in community. I show up, I cook, I serve, I clean, I haul groceries — and I am genuinely glad to be there. The difference is that it's not my livelihood. Nobody's reviewing me. No one's comp-ing their table because they didn't like the sauce. There's no mortgage riding on whether it was a good night. When you take the financial terror out of it, it turns out a lot of the things on this list become completely tolerable. Some of them become meaningful.
#9 — I don't want to spend 70% of my time in a place with no natural light. On a ship in West Africa when I wrote this, I spent a significant portion of my time in exactly that situation. And I don't regret a day of it. Context changes everything.
The one that was always the real answer
#15 — I love what I do at the moment too much to sacrifice that for anything.
Niall wrote this about his life in Dublin in 2008. I was reading it from a ship off the coast of Liberia. And I understood it completely.
The restaurant dream is a seductive thing. It shows up dressed as ambition and independence and legacy. It tells you that you've been cooking for other people's visions long enough and it's time to have your own. It's convincing. I've entertained it more times than I can count.
But every time I got close to taking it seriously, something else was already happening that I loved too much to walk away from. The ship. The communities. The cooking that meant something beyond the plate. The family that came first. The work that didn't ask me to bet everything on a Saturday night.
I still haven't opened a restaurant. I still get asked about it. Probably always will.
What's changed is that after 30-plus years in professional kitchens, I think I finally understand what I actually wanted — and it wasn't a dining room with my name on the door. It was cooking that mattered. Food that served something bigger than a bottom line. A kitchen where the work had a point beyond the margin.
I'm getting closer to that. Not through a restaurant. Through something different — something I didn't have a name for back in 2008 when I was on a ship in Liberia emailing Bobby about zoning laws.
Maybe I'll write more about that soon.
In the meantime — go read the original post. It holds up. Niall was onto something.
~ Tyrone
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