Anyone who underestimates the wear and tear of a restaurant career should pay close attention to this list of industry stars who died during the past year. Is it a coincidence five were under age 60, with three of them yet to celebrate their 50th birthday? Two died while on vacation, and a third passed while running to decompress.
Wally “Famous” Amos
cookie czar
Long before there was a Crumbl or an Insomnia, cookie fanatics would indulge their sweet tooth by dropping into a Famous Amos store. The bite-sized chocolate-chip delectables they found were the brainchild of Wally Amos, a former talent agent whose clients included Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. He’d left the famous William Morris Endeavor agency to form his own stable of stars but found little traction. To console himself, Amos would bake chocolate-chip cookies, using a recipe from his aunt, and distribute them to friends and relatives.
They encouraged him to turn his comfort into a career. Backed in part by Gaye, Amos opened the first Famous Amos cookie shop in 1975 in Los Angeles. The place was such a hit that other units would quickly follow. So did other cookie upstarts, including Mrs. Fields and David’s Cookies. As the boom segment started leaning toward a bust, Amos sold out to Keebler, home of the famous cookie-baking elves.
He died this summer from complications of dementia at age 88.
David Bouley
chef at Montrachet, Bouley
David Bouley’s name was synonymous with fine dining in New York City for more than 40 years, cooking in such landmarks as Le Cirque and La Cote Basque. But Bouley would not become widely known among younger foodies until he teamed up with a then-unknown entrepreneur named Drew Nieporent to open a French restaurant called Montrachet in 1985.
The move seemed insane. The hottest culinary trend at the time was the celebration of regional American fare at places like Brendan Walsh’s Arizona 206 and Ark Restaurants’ America. Montrachet was solidly French. And it was located in what was then still a scruffy area of the city, a warehouse and factory-studded section called Tribeca. Yet the restaurant was an instant smash, in no small part because of earning a three-star rating from The New York Times. It helped to turn Tribeca into one of the city’s hotter nightspots and a desirable place to live.
Bouley would open his namesake restaurant two years later. Both it and Montrachet would remain popular for some time.
The chef died in January of a heart attack at age 70.
Solomon Choi
founder and former CEO, 16 Handles
The entrepreneur’s official obituary predicts he’ll be remembered as “the world’s best husband and daddy.” Fellow restaurateurs recall Solomon Choi as that nice guy who was always eager at industry events to learn about fellow attendees’ operations and share what he’d learned in starting up a pay-by-the-pound frozen yogurt chain while still in his 20s.
Choi sold 16 Handles to franchisee Neil Herschman in 2022, but he remained active in the restaurant business as an investor, advisor and supplier of disposables. He was a frequent participant in industry events. Indeed, he was scheduled to appear at one four days after his death. He reportedly died while on a run.
Marcel DeSaulniers
chef at Trellis, inventor of Death by Chocolate
The Culinary Institute of America grad first made a name for himself in the kitchen of Trellis, a fine-dining restaurant in Colonial Williamsburg, the tourist destination in Virginia. The restaurant became internationally famous as a leading proponent of the American culinary movement, a 1980s effort by domestic chefs to prove the regional fare of the U.S. was as good and artful as anything coming out of Europe’s kitchens.
Marcel DeSaulniers would enjoy a second wave of notoriety as a pâtissier, specializing in chocolate. He would author 10 cookbooks on the topic. Among the desserts he created was a layer cake he dubbed Death by Chocolate. It became a much-copied sensation, appearing on a variety of menus up and down the pricing spectrum (rights to the name is now held by what remains of the Bennigan’s casual-dining chain.)
The chef died in May at age 78.
Walt Ehmer
CEO, Waffle House
Waffle House fans can rattle off the chain’s nine varieties of hashbrowns, but few likely knew who’d been leading the quirky operation for the last 18 years. Like the brand he shepherded, Walt Ehmer wasn’t one to lunge for the spotlight. Joining the operation all the way back in 1992, when the ink on his college diploma may have still been drying, Ehmer was happy to function as an inside man, focusing on his charge rather than striving for industry stardom. Those who knew him well say Ehmer was a warm, funny and extraordinarily capable guy, fully content to work behind the scenes. He died this year from an adverse reaction to an experimental treatment for pancreatic cancer, after being diagnosed just last year. He was 58.
Tony Fortuna
maître d’ extraordinaire (Tbar, Restaurant Lafayette)
When the now-defunct Lafayette Hotel decided to make its restaurant a culinary landmark of New York City in the 1980s, it started with a wish list of personnel. Chef Louis Outhier, a talent often mentioned in the same breath as superstars like Roger Verge and Alain Sailhac, was lured from France to set up the menu and kitchen, whose day-to-day operations were entrusted to a promising young star named Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
The dining room was entrusted to a maître d’ who was reputed to be among the best in the world: Tony Fortuna. He elevated the mundane functions of meeting and seating guests to an art, helping to earn Restaurant Lafayette a rare four-star rating in The New York Times.
Fortuna would eventually move on to other restaurants, including his own. He died in January from pancreatic cancer at age 76.
Bill Granger
popularizer of avocado toast
Historical records show the Aztecs were mashing avocados onto tortillas for breakfast before Europeans set foot on the New World. But a modern-day version of the dish would not become a global a.m. staple for several hundred more years. Its surge in popularity began outside the U.S. in the 1990s, when Australian restaurateur Bill Granger started featuring a version at his Bill’s Restaurant. His recipe was a simple one: Chopped avocado blended with olive oil, salt, lime and coriander, all served on a slab of toasted sourdough bread.
Other nations took notice right away. Avocado toast would not take off in the U.S. until celebrities like Gwenyth Paltrow and Kyle Jenner started singing its praises as a wholesome a.m. option. Granger would not get his due until his death at the end of 2023. He was 54 years old.
Sam Hamra
franchisee of Wendy’s, Panera, Caribou, Noodles & Company
A lawyer by training, a politician by avocation, the longtime Missouri resident branched into the restaurant business in 1975 as an early franchisee of Wendy’s, an upstart then only six years old. His venture would grow along with the brand, and Hamra would expand out of the burger business by adding units of Panera, Caribou Coffee and Noodles & Company to his fold. Today, with 196 restaurants in operation, Hamra Enterprises is one of the restaurant industry’s largest franchise operators.
Sam Hamra, who was also active in Missouri’s Democratic Party, would step out of day-to-day restaurant operations in 2011. He surrendered the post of CEO to son Mike, another lawyer who traded his briefcase for a spatula.
The elder Hamra died in August at age 92.
Wayne Johnson
a force in Seattle’s FareStart skills-development program
After leaving the kitchen of Seattle’s acclaimed Andaluca fine-dining restaurant one day, chef Wayne Johnson was feeling a little lonely. He’d only been in the city for two months and had yet to make many connections within the local culinary scene. Eager to make the acquaintance of others in chef whites, he knocked on the back door of a local facility where he knew foodservice professionals were preparing disadvantaged youngsters from the area for culinary careers. Johnson asked if the FareStart program needed another teacher.
It was to be the start of a relationship that would run for years. Johnson, who’d move to the ultra-high-volume Ray’s Boathouse after leaving Andaluca, would spend his time outside of the kitchen in support of FareStart’s cause. In 2016, he gave up his own career in the kitchen to help FareStart enrollees start theirs.
He was still involved when a bacterial infection severely damaged his brain and took his life at the end of March. He was 66 years old.
James Kent
chef, Saga Hospitality Group (Crown Shy, Saga)
James Kent had the sort of resume viewers of “The Bear” might have dismissed as a stretch by the writers; it was too perfect to be real. The New York City restaurants whose kitchens he graced—celebrated fine-dining spots like Eleven Madison Park, Crown Shy and Saga—earned a veritable galaxy of Michelin stars. And he was about to open some lower-scale places in collaboration with LeBron James. It was all happening as Kent waited to turn 46. Sadly, he would never make it; the Johnson & Wales-trained chef died at 45 from a heart attack.
Gloria Jean Kvetco
founder, Gloria Jean’s Coffee
After Starbucks started dotting the nation with its green-awninged coffee shops in the 1990s, speculation raged as to what brand might emerge as the fast-growing sector’s No. 2 player—the Burger King to Howard Schultz’s McDonald’s, so to speak. One of the oft-cited possibilities was Gloria Jean’s, at the time a competitor that could hold its own against such aspirants as Caribou, Seattle’s Best and Peet’s. Indeed, Gloria Jean’s was the innovator of such now-standard features of the market as allowing patrons to flavor their joe with a shot of syrup, one of the add-ons that’s currently generating more than $1 billion in annual sales for Starbucks.
It was one of the ways Gloria Jean Kvetco tried to differentiate her brainchild from Big Green. She also opted to grow through franchising, a model Starbucks avoided until it saw there was no other way to penetrate alternative sites like airports, office buildings and colleges. The strategy worked well for Gloria Jean’s, propelling the chain to 220 locations nationwide, most of them in shopping malls.
But Kvetco could hear Schultz’s footsteps. Knowing her venture was about to be eclipsed by Starbucks, she sold Gloria Jean’s in 1993 to Florida-based Brothers Gourmet Coffee. It has changed hands several times since and has shrunk to 41 domestic locations.
Kvetco died in June from pneumonia at age 82.
Tamara Murphy
chef, Terra Plata
A mover and shaker within Seattle’s culinary scene, Tamara Murphy cooked her way to prominence in the kitchens of Campagne and Brasa before opening the acclaimed Terra Plata in 2011 with business and life partner Linda Di Lello Morton. The two were reportedly planning to open a second restaurant by the end of 2024. But Murphy suffered a fatal stroke while vacationing in Idaho. She was 63 years old.
Naomi Pomeroy
chef, Portland, Oregon’s Beast
The near-term future looked great for Oregon chef Naomi Pomeroy, proprietor of Portland’s celebrated Beast restaurant. She’d won a James Beard award, written a cookbook and was about to launch another restaurant, this one French, as well as an ice cream shop. But first she was going to decompress with a float down the Willamette River, lazy-river style.
The trip turned tragic when a surprisingly fast current caught her innertube and flipped it over. Pomeroy was drowned. She was 49 years old.
Bill Specht
co-founder and longtime CEO of Cousins Subs
Trained to sink enemy submarines as a torpedoman on a Navy destroyer, the East Coast transplant focused on building subs, albeit of a decidedly different sort, after relocating to the Midwest. He noticed that the area lacked the East’s multitude of delis and sandwich shops specializing in the oversized sandwiches known as heros, grinders, hoagies and subs. Bill Specht convinced a cousin, James Shepperd, to head west and open a store with him in 1972. Their relationship prompted the pair to call the venture Cousins Subs.
The brand readily found a following. Specht would run the expanding operation until 2015, relinquishing the CEO’s post to his daughter Christine. By then, the chain numbered 100 stores.
The elder Specht remained active in an ambassadorial sort of role with the brand until his death at age 80.
Jasper White
chef, Jasper’s, Jasper’s Summer Shack
Arriving in Boston with decidedly maverick tendencies, Jasper White would knock the starch out of the city’s stultified fine-dining scene. The city’s carriage trade loved the sauce-laden fare of old-guard places like Locke-Ober. White tempted the children of those Brahmins with simpler preparations that relied on locally sourced fresh ingredients for a cleaner, lighter taste. The favorable reaction turned the chef into a leading proponent of the American culinary movement.
He also had little reverence for age-old management practices that no longer made sense. He was among the first restaurateurs of prominence to take the bold step of providing his employees with health insurance.
The nonconformist died in early spring at age 69.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.