year, and we’d love to start a second project soon. We’ve built a foundation for ourselves with a solid team that has been with us for a number of years, so we’re now at a point where we can start to focus on other ambitions.
Clockwise from top: Chef Duffy presents a new course during pre-shift. Every dish plated is a work of art. Duffy and Muser host aspiring chef Evie Murphy, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, in the Grace kitchen.
40 JAN UARY/ F EB RUARY 2018 M A K E IT B E T T E R
For Grace is a deeply personal and honest account of your journey to opening the restaurant — and so much more. How has participating in it shaped your own understanding of your story? The interesting thing is, we never set out for it to be a Netflix documentary. It started as a way for us to capture the moment of opening the restaurant because we knew it was going to happen so quickly. But about eight months
How do you find work-life balance these days? I’m not any closer to having balance today than I was when I opened the restaurant, but I’m closer to the acceptance of not having balance. My love of food and wine is very personal to me, so I almost see it as a very beautiful marriage. There are choices you make, and you can either live with those choices or change them, and I choose to live with them because they make me very happy. And yet, you have some scheduling boundaries. How do you ensure time together with your daughters on a weekly basis? Regardless of the day, I pick them up and take them to school at 7:45 every morning. It’s an important part of my life because if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t see them until my days off on Sunday and Monday.
PREVIOUS PAGE: GRACE TEAM PHOTO BY MICHAEL MUSER. THIS PAGE: TOP LEFT AND RIGHT PHOTOS BY MICHAEL MUSER; BOTTOM LEFT BY SARAH EVANS
into filming, Kevin [Pang] came to my house and started asking me more personal questions about how I became a chef and why. That’s when more of my story came out — it was a really therapeutic process for me.