Skift Take
After 32 years on the restaurant scene, you couldn’t blame Rick Bayless for kicking back. Instead, he’s rolling up his sleeves, minding each of his businesses — from airport locations to Chicago flagships — with care.
Rick Bayless, easily one of Chicago’s most famous chefs, was supposed to spend 2018 working on a memoir.
Instead, he opened another new restaurant. And he finally admitted something that generations of customers at his Mexican-inspired restaurants already knew.
"Only within the last year I would allow anyone to call our enterprise a company," Bayless said.
Despite building a collection that now takes in $20 million a year, with about 300 employees, Bayless said, "I only wanted us to be a restaurant."
That enterprise includes four restaurants on Chicago’s North Clark Street, including his original restaurant, Frontera Grill, which opened in 1987, and two on West Randolph Street, in the bustling West Loop area.
There are also three licensed Bayless operations at O’Hare Airport, two outposts in Chicago-area Macy’s stores, and one each at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and at the Disney Springs resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Around the time he opened his latest place, Bar Sotano, which focuses on mezcal- and tequila-based cocktails, he knew it was time to “cross the line,” and become “a company with values, a company with vision.”
A Hands-On Approach
Bayless, who turned 65 last fall, is at the age when many chefs become figureheads, rarely don
