The Gangrey debut of Amanda Heckert: Chris Hall’s eyelids droop behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He crosses his brawny arms and lowers his jowl to his chest, dangerously close to nodding off. In the two weeks since his restaurant, Local Three Kitchen & Bar, opened, the chef has averaged 130 hours a week on the job. That’s left five and a half hours a day to sleep, to shower, to remember that his dog, Maxine, is more than a picture on his iPhone. Hall can talk rapid-fire on barely a breath—about Georgia Tech football; bourbon; which Def Leppard album is better, Pyromania or Hysteria. (It’s Hysteria.) But as he sits in one of Local Three’s private rooms for a quiet moment, his words have dwindled to a necessary few.
The phones at Local Three still aren’t working right. Incoming calls can’t transfer beyond the host stand, and at this point on a mid-December morning, when the prep cooks are chopping butternut squash for soup and servers are sweeping up last night’s crumbs, no one has time to run out and answer it. Ring, ring! Ring, ring! Hall cringes.
“What sort of restaurant can’t pick up their fucking phone? I wouldn’t go there.”
Hall has already threatened to firebomb the president of the phone company’s house and, if he ever sees him, to punch him in the face for good measure.
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