It’s a long-held belief that if a restaurant makes it past its first year, it’s already beaten the odds. The exact numbers are murky, but in an industry defined by thin margins and high turnover, every year of survival feels like a milestone. Ten years in business, then, is a small miracle. Especially when that decade is defined by not just surviving, but thriving.
Nobody understands this more than Kevin Fink, chef and partner of Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group. “Growing up, we fought against ‘What are you going to do for a real job? Oh, you’re a server, you’re a cook, that’s great. When you grow up, what are you going to do?’” he says. “And now today the question is like, ‘Oh wow, you run a restaurant, congratulations. Good luck — I hope it stays open.’”
AUSTIN, TEXAS – NOVEMBER 05: Chef Kevin Fink attends the Austin FOOD & WINE Festival at Auditorium Shores on November 05, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images) Getty Images
AUSTIN, TEXAS – MAY 23: Chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph participates in ‘Nite Moves’ at Assembly Hall during Hot Luck Festival on May 23, 2025 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images) Getty Images
Fink and Tavel Bristol-Joseph, also a chef and partner at Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group, opened the eponymous restaurant on Rainey Street in 2015. The idea was simple but relatively new to Austin, a city then in the midst of its shift from a beer-and-a-shot college town into a growing metropolitan hub with a food scene to match. The restaurant leaned on Texas farmers, in-house grain milling, and experimentation, earning Fink and company national attention, including Food & Wine’s Best New Chef honors in 2016 — the third year an Austin chef would take home the award. Fink says the national attention didn’t signify an immediate pop in business, in was gradual. “We grew about 10 percent a week, but over the first year we were like 340 percent busier than when we started,” he says.
Bristol-Joseph says that the central question they wanted to answer with Emmer & Rye was what exactly Texas food is — beyond the simple answer of Tex-Mex and barbecue — and how to showcase it in the best possible way. “From our experiences working with local farmers and vendors, we knew that the food coming from a place and what we eat in season is a representation of that place,” he says. Emmer & Rye’s philosophy is more informed by terroir than genre. “The first year we did 400 unique dishes. Year two, we did 250. The consistent thing was the farmers and the ranchers,” Fink says. “The inconsistent thing was the dishes.”
Pullman Market in San Antonio Robert Lerma
The early days were marked by 14 to 16-hour shifts and 20 to 30 covers a night. “We were proud of the food and still hemorrhaging cash. You keep going,” Fink tells Eater. The chefs themselves (along with Fink’s wife and hospitality group partner, Alicynn Fink, and former chef de cuisine Page Pressley) were answering phones to book reservations those days because they were so thin on staff. “When you are faced with challenge and struggle and that push, the belief in what you’re doing is so strong that every single day you wake up so excited to prove why you exist,” Bristol-Joseph says.
Now, Emmer & Rye has expanded into a powerhouse hospitality group, with spots in Austin, San Antonio, and soon, Houston. Three of its restaurants, Hestia in Austin and San Antonio’s Isidore and Nicosi, hold a Michelin star — Emmer & Rye has a Green Star and is a Bib Gourmand. Each restaurant has its own identity, too. “We start every concept by asking what is missing. If it aligns with our why, we build it,” Bristol-Joseph says.
Canje, is a personal project for Bristol-Joseph, as it draws from his Guyanese roots, celebrating the wider Caribbean; Hestia comes from the chef’s aching desire to cook with live-fire after being saddled by Emmer & Rye’s constraints; Ladino and Ezov lean into the Mediterranean; Kalimotxo channels Spainish tapas and its convivial ethos; and the ambitious Pullman Market complex in San Antonio is a playground for food lovers with specialty grocer, a whole animal butcher, bakery, a chef supply shop, and nine restaurants spanning fast casual to full service. If a certain flavor of adult longs for trips to Disneyland, the type who has Saveur, Eater, and Bon Appétit tote bags might call the 40,000-square-foot market paradise.
A party at Canje Emmer & Rye Hospitality
Nicosi, a 20-seat eight-course dessert-only tasting menu that bans cell phone photography, doesn’t scream something that’s missing on surface-level, but Bristol-Joseph would emphatically disagree. “There wasn’t a space that celebrates a pastry chef that has worked their whole life to be the best version of them, and knowing that they will always stand behind the executive chef. So there was something that was missing, not necessarily in the community, but in your career. And we got to fulfill that.” Way back in 2015, Bristol-Joseph was Emmer & Rye’s opening pastry chef — so Nicosi seems a bit personal too.
That instinct to build what’s missing or tap into lived experience is what’s sustained Emmer & Rye for ten years, even after the pandemic threatened to level the hospitality industry. “Running restaurants is really vulnerable,” Fink says. “You have to have a long view in something that demands immediacy every day.”
A decade in, after playing a crucial part in defining what Texas dining can look like in Central Texas, the team is setting its sights on Houston, widely considered an iconic global food city, to open a new restaurant in 2026. The plans aren’t solidified. At one point, the plan was to open another Canje or something like Ladino, but they never took. “We’ll never arrive in a city to fix it,” Fink says. “We go to listen first — to the growers, to the community — and build from there.”
Whatever they do land on, congratulations, good luck — we’re pretty positive it’ll stay open.
It’s audacious to ban cameras from capturing Nicosi’s showstopping plating, but the dessert bar’s chef-partner, Tavel Bristol-Joseph, is concerned about shutterbugs interrupting the dining experience. To keep newbies on their toes, the restaurant eschews posting its three-month menu online or showing finished dishes on social media. The dishes are all over the place, but they tend to sneak in flavors like za’atar, bean and cheese, and other thunderbolts of bitter or umami that challenge conceptions of what desserts can be.