What's Eating Steve Ells? What Steve Ells is Eating

The founder of Chipotle wants to shake up the restaurant industry again, this time with robot kitchens and plant-based food.

- By Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan. Photography by Benedict Evans

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 was ushered out of the company he proudly founded, a crushing conclusion to an episode marked by a series of foodborneillness outbreaks and critiques 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.