Baxtrom ran his Brooklyn restaurants from 2016 until 2025. He still operates Five Acres in Manhattan.
Photo: Courtesy of the subject
The restaurant Olmsted opened in Prospect Heights in 2016, but in some important ways it could have been a million years ago. “Chef-driven” restaurants appeared at a regular clip, prices weren’t anywhere near as high as they’ve become, and Anthony Bourdain was still alive. That last detail might feel out of place when discussing the business of one specific Brooklyn restaurant, but two years later, in June 2018, the gastro-intellectual’s demons caught up to him. Four years after that, in 2022 — as the industry was attempting to get back on track after COVID — The Bear premiered. Christopher Storer’s series dramatized the behind-the-scenes chaos, stress, and anxiety many real-life chefs experience in and out of their jobs. It’s difficult not to think of that show when talking to Olmsted’s chef, Greg Baxtrom, who is from Chicago, the city that is basically a co-star to Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri. Baxtrom grew up about 25 miles south in a small town called Frankfort, Illinois, raised by parents with the same South Side accents and blue-collar ethics as many of the characters on The Bear. I’ve never met Baxtrom’s father, but since I grew up with a family from the same part of the Windy City area, I can picture the way one of his most important life lessons looked, sounded, and felt. That was when Baxtrom, still a kid, tried to quit the Boy Scouts.
“My dad said the only way I was allowed to quit after being there for 12 years was I had to go up to everyone — and there were 90 people — thank them for their time, shake their hands, and say that I was leaving.” Baxtrom says he tried to work up the courage to do that, but couldn’t: “I just sat in the car. Eventually I just went back in.”
We’re sitting in a private room of another of Baxtrom’s restaurants, Five Acres, and his eyes begin watering as he tells me about his dad. For a moment I think it might be allergies, but as a sufferer myself, I track the pollen count carefully and know that’s not the case on this day. Instead, the longer we talk, the more I come to understand that Baxtrom, one of Brooklyn’s most successful chefs and restaurant owners of the last decade, is trying to get his life together. Anybody who has done that knows it’s a painful process with no predetermined end date, and Baxtrom has to face a lot of uncomfortable truths in order to move forward. “I’m a little bit of a cliché,” he says without flinching, “in that I’m a bipolar alcoholic.”
The stated reason for our meeting is to discuss Baxtrom’s first cookbook, Nothing Matters … But Delicious. He says there likely could have been an Olmsted book at some point, but he doubted anybody besides locals and a few chefs would have bought it. Instead, his book is collection of recipes that showcases his balance of high-end and lightheartedness — including recipes for a cheese-and-pepper meatloaf; cauliflower okonomiyaki I always ordered at another of his restaurants, Mason Yaki; and his take on perfect chicken fingers — as well as a testimonial. As the subtitle says, it’s a “radically honest cookbook.” In it, Baxtrom tells his story, about his alcoholism and mental-health issues, how he let people down, and how his family saved him. He tells me he doesn’t want to make recovery his thing; instead, he is focused on telling his truth. Some people go on very public redemption tours because their failings were made public. In Baxtrom’s case, he seems intent on making amends because he realized the person he’d been, and moving on means coming to terms with radical honesty.
After growing up knowing he wanted to be a chef, Baxtrom spent years working at some of the best restaurants in the country — Per Se, Alinea, Blue Hill at Stone Barns — and it wasn’t exactly overnight success when Olmsted was a hit right out the gate. It also wasn’t a surprise when that restaurant’s renown gave way to two more businesses in the same neighborhood. Living there at the time, I had a perfect view of the rise of what I would jokingly call “Baxtromville,” with Maison Yaki (later rechristened Petite Patate) opening in 2019 across the street from Olmsted, followed by Patti Ann’s about two blocks away in 2022. That sort of success can mess a person up, the whole gilded-cage-of-one’s-own-making phenomenon. Some can’t cope with the pressure to keep it going or follow it up, while others might feel boxed in by all the success. For Baxtrom, it was the lack of boxes that made him unravel.
“In all those other restaurants where I worked, each night before the train ride home, I’m writing down: brown-butter sauce, chives,” he explains. “I’m writing not just what I have to do, but the order in which I’ll have to do it the next day from ten in the morning till five o’clock. Then the restaurant opens and a chef or an expediter is telling you what to do, in the order you should be doing it. I was in this box following these rules; I just knew what I had to do with my time.”
Once Olmsted became successful, and the other restaurants opened, after all the years of working to be a chef, Baxtrom found himself not at a crossroads but in the middle of an avenue. “I can remember being in the middle of Vanderbilt, and I’m looking at Mason Yaki, which had just gotten GQ Best New Restaurant, along with all the shit that Omsted had gotten, and, like, being incredibly lost,” he says, adding that he likely had a beer in his hand at the time. “I was standing there wondering, Where do I fit in now? I wanted to be involved and I wanted to be cooking, but both restaurants had to be staffed with expediters and chefs,” so each could run while Baxtrom was at the other. “I felt less required,” he says.
Things had been unraveling for a while. Baxtrom’s drinking had gotten to a point where he’d passed out in the kitchen one night in the middle of a rush and had to be snuck out the back door so nobody would see him. “Once, when I got drunk, I remember having a really uncomfortable conversation with my chef at the time,” Baxtrom recalls. Ducks needed to be butchered and he told his chef he would do it. “I would take them all out, and then I would just go into the employee bathroom and keep drinking,” Baxtrom says. “He didn’t believe I was going to do anything I said anymore — I just wasn’t reliable.”
He’d tried getting sober, going to rehab, and going back to work. When COVID hit, Baxtrom started drinking again. Things became so bad — suicidal thoughts he’d entertained before began to return — that he decided to get away from New York. He went back to Chicago to stay with his family. There, the feeling of having nothing to do, of being unmoored from the career he’d built, almost did him in. One night, cops pulled him over and arrested him for drunk driving. Baxtrom, ashamed to face his father, whose own brother had been killed by a drunk driver, got out of jail and tried hiding out in a hotel until his sister showed up and convinced him to get a psych evaluation. He agreed. After a few weeks, the doctors diagnosed him as bipolar. From there, Baxtrom tried to piece himself back together with the help of therapy and medication. He says a lot has changed since his first attempts at sobriety and now (he’s been sober for seven years) but admits, “I still don’t know how to do it.”
It is finding the right work-life balance. It’s June when we’re talking, but Baxtrom is worried about December. “What am I doing about the holidays? I own a restaurant in Rockefeller Center,” he says of Five Acres. “I have agreed to be responsible for one of the most Christmas destinations in the country.” He wants to take some time off for the holidays, “but my staff will be here and they’ll be working,” he says. “So that will make me uncomfortable. Do I work 90 days straight until then to feel okay about going home for Christmas? I don’t know how to balance that.” He says he’s not sure what to do in situations like this: “Do I just take care of Greg?”
He’s also thinking about the future in different ways. When he talks about closing Olmsted just shy of a decade in business, he sounds mostly rueful that he won’t be able to show it to the kids he hopes to have someday. For a guy who often thinks about his dad’s stipulation for getting out of the Boy Scouts when he was just a kid, shutting down the restaurant that made him a success had to sting deep. He does have Five Acres, of course, and he’s content to be running that for now. “The restaurant is built mostly for tourists, but I still can’t believe I have a restaurant in Rockefeller Center,” he says. Initially, the idea for Five Acres had been “Olmsted, but fancier.” He ended up adding crowd-pleasers like Caesar salad and burgers to the menu, moved the wine glasses to the bar so it didn’t look like the sort of place where diners had to order an expensive bottle, and put condiment caddies on the table with ketchup and salt so people walking by might feel like it was a place where they could take their kids. But the concessions started piling up and Baxtrom needed to make a change, adding fine-dining touches — like “making the Caesar dressing from scratch and blending a pound of basil into it right before service so it’s bright green” — that have helped put his mind at ease: “So now it’s nice.”
Still, Baxtrom does seem like a chef in a transition phase. At some points, his candor is surprising — such as when he says “I don’t think I’m doing my career the way I want to be doing my career right now” — but that’s in line with the radical honesty he’s invested in these days, waking up on the other side of his second attempt at getting life right. He spent years working to get to a point, checking off all the boxes, trying to do everything perfectly, only to realize how many details he’d been ignoring. Now that he’s had success as a chef and restauranteur, and, more important, with the clarity of sobriety, he’s thinking about how to recreate something like Olmsted. “I’ll open up another restaurant that’s a little bit more in that vein at some point, whether that’s here or in Chicago. It’s still sort of …” he pauses for a moment. I think it’s to compose himself again, but he instead flashes a slight smile. “I’m trying to figure that out.”
