Restaurant stress almost destroyed a Greenville chef. Finding his way back to kitchens took years
GREENVILLE — Grazeland, a deli and build-your-own charcuterie board eatery that opened last month, marked Chad Gangwer’s official re-entry to the restaurant world.
But preparing to open the restaurant was a scary place for the chef. It marked the end of a three-year hibernation from an industry that he’s been a part of nearly his entire life. An industry that nearly destroyed him.
In mid-2020, Gangwer reached a point of desperation as the COVID pandemic disrupted the world. He had to make a choice, and it was to leave the industry he’d spent more than 30 years in. His sobriety, family and livelihood were riding on it.
When he looked at his new venture, he saw an opportunity to do it differently.
“I have a good feeling about this, just because I feel like the more I better myself the better success I’ve had,” Gangwer told The Post and Courier prior to Grazeland’s opening. “I do better things, I act in a better way, I’m a better human being. And for whatever reason, it reflects in my business.”
He used to drink vodka to numb his anxiety. Now, he writes and he hikes.
“Hey man, if that’s what it took, I should have done that a long time ago,” he said.
Not all are taking another chance.
The industry — with its physical demands, fast-paced nature and late-night and weekend hours — has always been stressful, but COVID and all that it wrought put those stressors under a magnifying glass.
With more than 12 million people, hospitality is one of the largest employers in the U.S. It also has one of the highest rates of substance abuse, according to the U.S. Dept. of Health. The food service and hospitality industry has the highest rates of substance use disorders and third-highest rates of heavy alcohol use of all employment sectors, the 2015 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration showed.
Thousands of people have left the restaurant and hospitality industry, some altogether, but others have found a path outside of traditional restaurants.
Anthony Gray, who spent his life as a chef and restaurant owner, quietly stepped away from running professional kitchens last year — a decision made in part due to the changing restaurant world and the needs of his family.
“After COVID, because there was such a limited resource for cooks and for passionate folks that shared those same kinds of feelings, it turned into more of a survival game versus an artistic expression,” he said. “It was ‘Can we just get through today and survive it?’ versus ‘Oh man, I got these incredible ingredients, I can do this and that.’”
Countless kitchens are reckoning with burnt-out staff, climbing costs and an uncertain industry. The reckoning has potential to reshape the industry — and lose significant parts of it.
“Restaurants are a part of everybody’s lives,” said Lindsey Brown, executive director of Southern Smoke Foundation, an industry advocacy organization. “That’s where you go to celebrate, that’s where you go to mourn. That’s where you go for family get-togethers. What would our society look like without them?”
Suffering in silence
For years, Gangwer suffered in silence.
Then, with COVID-19 shutting restaurant doors temporarily, he sat still for the first time in years. The stillness provided clarity, but also an unease.
As he watched his then 10-year-old daughter jump through a sprinkler in the backyard, he felt joy at the beauty of everyday life. He also felt sadness that it took him so long to notice.
At the time, Gangwer was a partner in three restaurants, Southern Culture Kitchen, The HabiTap and LTO, but the partnership with his co-owners became more and more strained.
The stress of the pandemic contributed, but Gangwer admits it was also because of his own self-destructive behavior. He was drinking a lot. He knows now it was a way to numb his mental load and his depression, even if only temporarily.
But COVID gave him a chance to reflect. And once he had stopped working 60-plus hours a week managing his restaurants, it was like he couldn’t find the will to start up again.
“My brain reset when COVID hit,” Gangwer said. “It’s like if you run a marathon every day and then stop for a week and you see these joints tightening up and your body is deformed.”
He talked about the equipment at Southern Culture, now-shuttered, breaking because it wasn’t used for four months. “That equipment broke, and so did I.”
That’s when Gangwer stepped down from Southern Culture Hospitality. He started his custom charcuterie boxes concept, Chadcuterie, both to challenge himself and make some money. He launched in December 2020, designing boxes with high-quality meats, cheeses and homemade spreads and dips, serving them in pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers.
The business was a holdover until he could open his own restaurant concept.
It took him about another year before he realized his mental reckoning would never be complete unless he addressed his relationship with alcohol. On New Year’s Day 2022, he didn’t drink anything. He did the same on Jan. 2. Day by day, he tested out sobriety.
Without the numbness of alcohol, he had to face his floundering mental health.
Two-plus years later, Gangwer continues to work on his health, but he is in a much better place to do so. He goes into nature as much as he can. He writes. He began sharing his sober journey on Facebook until he realized he had a lot more to say about the industry that raised him and his quest for balance.
The accountability of sharing kept Gangwer going and exposed how many people are also struggling.
“I put it out there so even one person can see it and say ‘I’m thinking the same exact way and now I don’t feel as alone about it,’” Gangwer said. “I don’t hold back. I want people to see. I don’t put it on a pedestal. No hyperbole. I just write out, ‘This is what happened.’”
He is wary of giving people specific advice but hopes that sharing his experience might help someone else.
With Grazeland now open, he wants to use the space after hours for support gatherings. Nothing formal, but maybe just to provide a place for people to connect and to pause.
What’s going on with the food industry?
There was a moment before he left his restaurant when Gray felt an internal shift.
It was a busy Saturday night, the third night in a row the dishwasher had called out. To keep service going, Gray filled in. It meant he had to cancel plans with his family again.
As he stood there scrubbing plates and silverware instead of being at home, he had a moment of clarity.
“It just kind of hit me, ‘What’s really important here?’”
Gray quietly stepped down from his executive chef role at Stella’s Southern Brasserie in October 2023, capping a 30-year career in professional kitchens.
Gray’s own experience was part of the inspiration for the doctoral thesis research of his wife, Melissa Gray. She is exploring the reason so many hospitality veterans are leaving the restaurant industry, and what it means for food and dining. Her research is centered on employer attractiveness and employee values. Gray’s research focuses on the present, “way post-COVID.”
“What has changed? Because, obviously, something has,” she said. “Something is crumbling and unfortunately, we don’t know the glue yet.”
During COVID, restaurants were in survival mode, but it felt like there was a purpose to the added work and stress.
The landscape that has emerged since the height of the pandemic is, in some ways, more difficult. Costs have risen. Worker retention and hiring is much harder.
Gray doesn’t place blame on any one thing, but the act of being a chef began to drain him.
When he helped start Bacon Bros. Public House in 2008, Gray and his partners helped push forward a new local food movement in Greenville. The restaurant, with its whole animal butchery, local sourcing, on-site cure chamber and scratch-made approach to everything, was a leader in the farm-to-table scene. It had a mission.
Gray stepped down from Bacon Bros. and joined Stella’s, also known for its passionate approach to local sourcing, in fall 2020. There, he continued to push the creative envelope, innovating the menu.
But you can’t create something great without a team of like-minded people. And the staffing challenges and stress of balancing costs had created a nearly impossible work-life balance for Gray.
“I knew the moment I felt what I was doing was a job, versus feeding my fire, that I had lost something,” Gray said. “And it was taking a toll on me in more ways than one.”
COVID provided a pause
COVID is the pause still felt around the restaurant industry.
While diners have returned and new restaurants are opening every day, overall staffing remains a top concern for restaurant owners, according to the 2024 state of restaurants report from the National Restaurant Association.
More operators are thinking about employee retention in a different way. Average pay for restaurant workers is up, and there is more discussion around providing employee benefits.
Table 301 Restaurant Group is at the forefront of many of the industry innovations.
The group, which now has five restaurants with another on the way, has been growing its benefits offerings. These include a 401K, medical, housing assistance and mental health support, as well. This year, the company added short-term disability to its benefits offerings.
“Our view has been, if it’s anything that we have the financial wherewithal to add to our benefits program, we’re going to add it,” said Steve Seitz, Table 301’s vice president of operations.
Charleston-based The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which has 33 restaurants in six states and opened Indaco and O-Ku in downtown Greenville last year, takes a multi-pronged approach to creating a positive work culture. Benefits are one part of that.
In 2016, Indigo Road owner Steve Palmer, along with industry veteran Micky Bakst, started Ben’s Friends. The organization, which now has 29 chapters across the U.S., offers support to those in the industry struggling with substance abuse.
Palmer hopes to launch Ben’s Friends in Greenville, but needs two things to do so: a restaurant that will open its space for gatherings and an industry person who is sober. It’s all about finding a community who can lift one another through the turbulence, or just when a kitchen is “in the weeds.”
“Eight o’clock on a Saturday night is 8 o’clock on a Saturday night,” Palmer said of restaurant schedules. “But I think if you’re doing it in a more positive environment, then it’s going to ultimately feel better, which is better for mental health.”
Mental health support is a growing need
Southern Smoke launched in 2017 providing emergency relief grants to those in the industry facing economic and medical hardship, but efforts expanded to mental health support in 2018 after the suicide deaths of several prominent chefs, including writer and television host Anthony Bourdain.
“We had a closed-door discussion in 2018 and our big takeaway was that mental health was a very big issue in the restaurant industry,” Brown said.
In 2020, Southern Smoke launched the Behind You program, which partners with medical universities to provide one-on-one free mental health counseling to those in the restaurant industry. The program has grown with the need, Brown said. This year, it launched in South Carolina.
“A lot of people have told us the program has kept them in the food and beverage industry,” Brown said of Behind You’s success.
Behind You will partner with MUSC in South Carolina, but Brown and her team, with the help of Pay it Forward, an emergency relief agency for food and beverage industry workers that formed during COVID-19, are looking for another medical program to partner with as applications for Behind You grow.
“The hospitality industry has a high turnover rate and so does therapy, so the fact this Behind You program is free and still has a high retention rate just shows how strong the need is,” Brown said.
Reframing restaurant life
Teryi Youngblood Musolf’s eyes glistened with tears as she listed all the things she loves about being a chef. The creativity it takes, but also the chance to make people happy.
For years, those rewards kept the chef in the industry. And her star rose. She began at Bistro Europa in downtown Greenville before moving to Table 301 Restaurant Group, where she held the position of pastry chef at Soby’s on the Side, and then Soby’s, for over a decade. It was a prestigious position, and for years, Musolf was one of the few high-ranking women chefs in Greenville.
When she got the chance to oversee the opening of Passerelle Bistro in 2013, the restaurant she helped design from the ground up, she thought she had reached a pinnacle.
But after the birth of her second child a year after opening the restaurant, Musolf could feel herself breaking down. Even though she was at the top of her career, she couldn’t shake the feeling of never doing enough — at home or at work.
“You know you’re not living up to expectations at work and you feel like you aren’t living up to expectations at home with your kids and the connections are going away and then you’ve got nothing,” she said, taking a breath before she continued, “You feel like you’re floating in limbo with nobody and nothing. If you’re not strong enough, it’s gonna implode and you’re gonna disappear.”
She left the restaurant industry in 2017.
Musolf managed rental properties, then sold restaurant equipment. The jobs allowed her time at home but left her unfulfilled.
It was in 2022 that she connected with the owners of M. Judson Booksellers, who were seeking someone to run the bookstore’s café, Camilla Kitchen, and grow its food programming.
Today, Musolf oversees the pastry and baking programs for the cafe, but she also handles M. Judson’s catering and special events.
At 52, Musolf said she found where she was meant to be.
“For some people, it’s a job. For some people it’s an existence,” she said. “This is how I exist.”
For a true chef, the art of cooking is hard to leave completely.
In the months since Gray stepped away from professional kitchens, he’s stepped back into his personal life. This past winter he coached his son’s basketball team. He makes his family breakfast on the weekends. He picks his sons up from school. And he’s found an unexpected joy in daily walks with the family.
Reconnecting with his culinary passion is also bringing him joy. While food sales are far different from cooking, he appreciates the chance to engage with chefs and spend time in restaurants, imparting his experience and knowledge.
He and Melissa are also stepping back into the food industry with EAT LLC. Every Appetite Transformed is a custom catering and private chef service that will serve events like weddings, backyard barbecues, tailgates, graduation parties and birthday parties. They want to take it a little further with guided foraging hikes and private chef dinners.
It’s a chance to “be able to recreate myself,” Gray said.
Gray still has anxiety when the phone rings, worrying he’ll be called to quell some kitchen issue, but, slowly, he is finding his way again.
A new chance
Gangwer knows that level of anxiety well, and he’s using that awareness to push him forward, instead of a block that breaks him down. But the anxiety is still there.
Ten days after he got the keys to the space housing Grazeland, Gangwer wasn’t as far along as he’d hoped. It made him anxious.
Building a restaurant is well-tread territory, but this time, he did it differently. He culled all the lessons he learned over the years — but mostly in the past three while outside the industry. He wanted to build something that feeds his soul, nurtures his creativity and won’t kill him in the process.
Restaurants almost destroyed him. This time, it won’t.