"It's good to take stock," says the 35-year-old chef, a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: South in 2023. "We're always pushing but don't always give ourselves the credit for what we've done. I think this is the first year I feel we really understand the ins-and-outs of the restaurant business. How things work."
After weathering storms both literal and figurative, from Hurricane Ida in 2021 to the COVID pandemic and the city's economically fraught summers, when tourism is typically at its slowest, Pierre feels like the page has turned. "The city is plateauing into a kind of normalcy. So now we figure out how we deal with that," he says. This summer wasn't as dire as last, but sales are still down since Fritai stopped serving lunch, which it paused while Pierre filmed Top Chef.
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