Last June, Steve Ells, who founded Chipotle and launched the restaurant industry’s fast-casual wave, carved out time for a vacation.
The entrepreneur–who for years poured every waking hour into chopping, grilling, and packaging his burritos into what became a $20 billion company by the time he left in March 2020–headed for the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, roughly 800 miles south of the North Pole. Traveling by boat from there, he made daily, five-hour outings, hiking up and skiing down a series of peaks.
No part of his trip sounds relaxing to me.
As we walk uptown through Manhattan’s clogged streets on a brisk and bright winter afternoon, the endlessly energetic, 57-year-old Ells recounts how he climbed each peak with a pounding heart, peeling off clothing layers and stuffing them into his backpack as he went .
On the way down, Ells–a Colorado native and experienced skier–navigated snow conditions that varied, he says, “from the texture of mashed potatoes to ice to smooth-capped surface to rock.”
As Ells arrives at the front door of Kernel, his new, plant-based restaurant on Park Avenue, surrounded by office towers stocked with hungry workers, he argues that what he’s doing now makes ski trekking in the Arctic seem like a day at the beach .
Four years ago, Ells left the company he proudly founded, a crushing conclusion to an episode marked by a series of food borne-illness outbreaks and criticisms about the treatment of workers. That led him to do a lot of thinking about his next act. Inspired by Bill Gates’s book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Ells decided to focus on serving sustainably sourced, healthy food. He spent $10 million of his own burrito bucks developing his latest venture, which opened in February.
In some ways, Chipotle and Kernel are siblings. Kernel charges about the same as Chipotle: A plant-based burger and side costs about $12. The first Kernel location is even the same size–about 1,000 square feet–as the first Chipotle Ells opened in 1993 in his hometown of Denver. Ells seems to want to follow an aggressive expansion plan by opening nearly a dozen restaurants in Manhattan over the next two years. He wants to reshape the fast-casual market he helped create with Chipotle, which today has more than 3,300 restaurants and a recent market cap of more than $65 billion.
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