Scratch most talented chefs and they will share their dream: the perfect neighborhood bistro, the freshest ingredients, food that is creative and worthy of national note. Seats filled by locals who come in night after night, know the servers by name, and have no problem telling the chef when the special just isn’t. It’s an enticing scenario: in Boston, almost every month a chef makes the transition from employee to owner. He or she throws open the doors and waits for the hungry hordes. Rarely is the new owner disappointed, at least for the first year or two. But it isn’t an easy go, and there’s a lot to learn when the checkbook, the recipe binder, and the marketing manual are all stacked on the same desk. Says Jeremy Sewall, chef/owner of Lineage: “There’s no passing the buck.”Lineage has been open in Coolidge Corner for about six months. On a sultry Friday night, a summer evening when many food lovers are stuck three miles from the Bourne Bridge, Sewall’s place is two-deep at the bar, with a waiting list of walk-ups who hope for a last-minute table. Four of us order drinks and dinner — a scallop dish, a moist salmon teetering on a bed of heirloom cherry tomatoes, a perfect steak. It is a stupendous meal. The prices are right, too: our bill with tip is under $200. Sewall makes this neighborhood-bistro thing look easy.
“Opening your own restaurant is all about finding your voice on the plate, and recognizing that there’s no one to run to for cover,” Sewall says. “At the end of the day, it’s all about you.” After a high-profile career in Northern California — and most recently as the executive chef at Great Bay — Sewall is as seasoned for ownership as a first-timer can be. Still, he’s barely had a day off since opening Lineage’s doors in March, and even with all his culinary accolades, Sewall is humbled by the challenges of chef/ownership. “All the guilt, the blame, and all the glory is on your shoulders,” he says, though on the plus side, “it’s fantastic that you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission.”
Still, Sewall misses the collaborative aspect of cooking in a kitchen owned by someone else. He sits by himself more now, coming up with new menus and staff changes without the benefit of bouncing things off the owner or team of owners. (Sewall’s wife, Lisa, is a chef and partner too, but the couple have two small children, and these days she’s spending more time tending to them.) Sewall finds himself juggling multiple roles constantly; on his drive in to the restaurant, he alternates between obsessing about the halibut and the payroll.
For Sewall, food is his comfort. “Cooking is the one thing I am really good at,” he says. “If I could just sit there and cook every night for 20 people, it would be a snap, but it wouldn’t be a business. My favorite thing is working with my staff in our small kitchen, grinding it out every night — but I have to carve out time to run the business.” He figures that each week, he spends as much time on the cooking line as he does on financial and administrative tasks. That’s typical for a chef/owner, especially one who has borrowed most of the money for the restaurant from the bank. “Your house is on the line, the car, the kid’s education,” he says. “Either you are on top of the money, or it is on top of you.”
