A maturing restaurateur, Tyler Anderson learns that being a celebrity chef doesn’t guarantee success

Tyler Anderson doesn’t want to interrupt your meal.

It’s not that he’s shy. The 42-year-old restaurateur, who runs Simsbury foodie destination Millwrights and the newly re-concepted Terreno in downtown Hartford, exudes a laid-back affability reflective of his Southern California roots.

He just feels odd leaving the kitchen to walk the dining room, greeting and talking to guests digging into their entrees.

“I don’t think I’m a big deal, so I don’t think there’s any reason for me to go out there,” Anderson said.

He knows that’s not how many other people see it, though.

Between his appearances on Bravo’s “Top Chef,” and shows on the Food Network, Anderson falls undeniably within the ranks of celebrity chefs, particularly in Connecticut. He debuted his first restaurant, Millwrights, eight years ago, and on the heels of its success has opened numerous other restaurants and bars and a catering business, run under his company, Tanda Hospitality. Anderson’s involvement in restaurants like Square Peg Pizzeria in Glastonbury and Hamilton Park in New Haven drew the kind of buzz you can’t buy.

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But celebrity status hasn’t immunized him from market realities and growing pains.

Last summer he and Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ owner Jamie McDonald shut down the highly touted The Cook and the Bear joint venture restaurant they opened less than two years earlier in West Hartford’s Blueback Square.

Meanwhile, Anderson’s Spanish tapas concept in Hartford’s Goodwin Hotel — Restaurant Porrón — never gained much traction, leading him to shift gears and transform it into the new Cal-Italian-style Terreno.

Those miscalculations taught Anderson and longtime business partner AJ Aurrichio that even name recognition and a top-quality product don’t guarantee business success.

It’s also led them to put a laser focus on appealing to the largest possible customer base, a necessity in Connecticut’s restaurant industry, they say.

As a result, Anderson is currently expanding Millwrights’ menu to also include Cal-Italian motif pastas and steaks, which will appear alongside the locally sourced fare like venison osso bucco and beef tartare.

“Millwrights has always been a real foodie restaurant, and that’s not going to change, but I think maybe one of our failures is that it’s too foodie,” Anderson said. “If a group of four people is going and three of them are into food, and one of them just wants a steak with some french fries, then that might not have been here for them. But now it’ll be here.”

In his younger days Anderson may have chafed at altering menus and dishes into which he poured his skill and creativity, but now he operates with a heavily customer-focused “yes-taurant” attitude.

Introducing new food to diners is great, he’s realized, but running myriad restaurants collectively employing 210 people and generating $15 million in annual revenue in a state with many eateries and far fewer people than neighboring Massachusetts and New York requires a clear-headed departure from a no-substitutions, chef-is-always-right attitude.

And with some nudging from his wife, Melanie Stepka, Anderson’s making more of an effort to meet and greet customers who crane their necks when he enters the dining room to catch a glimpse of TV’s Chef Tyler Anderson.

“Like the other night I was at Terreno, he came over and said ‘hi’ to me, and there was a table behind me that was freaking out, because he was there,” Stepka said. “[They were] like, ‘That’s Tyler Anderson!’ and he went over and said ‘hi,’ and they were so excited.”

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HBJ Photo | Sean Teehan

Terreno sous chef Jetzel Cruz chops onions before a Friday dinner service.

Creative type

In the kitchen, Anderson is a chef’s chef.

Late-afternoon on a recent Friday at Terreno, Anderson busied himself with the tedious task of caking pheasant breasts with a foie gras mousse, and rolling them into plastic wrap to poach later. Pans crackled and the smell of sauteing onions and grilled chicken and other assorted ingredients slowly saturated the 2,000-square-foot kitchen, as line cooks, sous chefs and other employees to whom Anderson refers as co-workers picked up the prep work for the restaurant’s 5 p.m. opening.

In the breezy calm-before-the-storm atmosphere of a kitchen prior to a hopefully busy Friday night dinner service, it’d be hard to single out Anderson as the top chef. He casually talked and joked with kitchen staffers who have worked under him anywhere from a decade to just a few weeks.

Terreno’s lead chef Alejandro Leiva, who’s been with Anderson since 2012 (and who proclaimed he’ll beat any challenger in a cook-off), said Anderson fosters an environment in which a passion for cuisine and a desire to learn are the main on-the-job requirements.

Conversations with staff, like 23-year-old sous chef Jetzel Cruz, reflect that.

“It’s about understanding food,” Cruz said while he methodically chopped garlic cloves. “How much story you can tell with just a piece of meat.”

Anderson treats his menus like a musician might approach a concept album; each dish is its own intricate artwork that tracks with the others, which collectively add up to a unifying theme.

With a bald head, red beard and sleeve tattoos on each arm, the 6-foot, 1-inch Anderson casts a figure like a bass player in a punk-rock band.

That’s part of the image that’s made him popular, but Anderson said he gives little thought to it.

“I don’t purposely brand myself,” said Anderson, a father of three, including two children from a previous marriage. “I just try to be authentic.”

Bottom of totem pole

Tyler Bragg Anderson was born in 1977, in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Entrepreneurial as a kid, his first business enterprise was a snowcone stand when he was about 6 years old.

“I was always hustling, selling food,” Anderson said. “That’s always what I did in life, whether it was working at a farmer’s market, or with a smoothie stand.”

His restaurant career began at age 15, when he got a job as a food expediter at The Hungry Hunter in El Toro, Calif. At the bottom of the totem pole, he made sure steak plates had their baked-potato sides, kept the soup hot and performed other support work.

Even doing mostly grunt work, Anderson felt like the kitchen was where he wanted to be. The camaraderie of back-of-house denizens coupled with the high octane of a fast-moving dinner service were hard to match elsewhere. There were pretty waitresses, too.

“I like the intensity of working in restaurants,” Anderson said. “Some people love it, some people hate it. I’m one of the people who loves it.”

His father Gregory, an aerospace engineer, thought the University of Southern California’s entrepreneurship program would be a perfect fit for Anderson. He had the grades, Anderson recalled. But, unsure of what he wanted to do for a career, and wary of racking up tuition bills on a degree he might not use, Anderson moved out of his parent’s house at age 17, and continued working at restaurants for two years.

That’s when he fell in love with cooking, and enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu culinary and hospitality school in Chicago.

Anderson honed his craft working in kitchens, and heeding advice from mentors, including chefs at the top of the industry like Sarah Stegner, an award-winning cook who owns the Prairie Grass Cafe in Northbrook, Ill. As he moved into the management side of the business, he also entered the world of corporate cooking via hotel restaurant jobs. He was working as a sous chef at a Marriott in Chicago when he met Aurrichio, his future business partner who then worked as a bartender there.

The two got along at work, and used to hang out together after hours at a sketchy “Road House” type dive bar in Chicago’s suburbs that was open late enough for restaurant workers to grab a drink after their shifts. That bar and those drinks cemented their friendship.

“The owner was like, ‘Hey guys, you’re here every night, do you want to make some money while you’re here? I’m looking for some bouncers,’ ” Aurrichio recalled in a recent interview. “That’s where we really became friends, while working with each other at Marriott, and bouncing together after we were done.”

They also shared a passion for restaurants, and frustration with working for a large corporation. The two would visit the best bars and restaurants in Chicago to see how they operated, but when they went back to the Marriott to share what they learned, the slow-moving nature of a large company made it impossible for them to enact timely changes, Aurrichio said.

Anderson, though, leaned into the corporate chef world, traveling the country to work at various hotel restaurants.

His first executive chef job was at The Equinox Resort in Manchester, Vt., where he oversaw more than 200 employees and a $12-million annual food-and-beverage operation with three restaurants, banquets and room service.

Being in charge of so many people and so much money and perishable food, Anderson learned to stay on top of a restaurant’s overall finances while still running the day-to-day affairs. The job also took him out of the kitchen more than he wanted. And the chance to run a restaurant as his own, rather than manage restaurants within a larger organization, eluded him.

That changed when the Copper Beech Inn in Essex, Conn., called Anderson to run their restaurant in 2007.

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HBJ Photo | Bill Morgan

Chef Tyler Anderson in the kitchen of Millwright's in Simsbury.

Anderson comes to CT

In terms of the size of the operation, Copper Beech was a huge step down. But being in charge of a standalone restaurant with about 15 employees allowed him autonomy he’d never before experienced.

“At Copper Beech, I was truly able to operate it like it was my own restaurant,” Anderson said. “I had a lot of practice when I came into it, but there’s still literally nothing like knowing it’s your own, and it’s a scary, terrible, freaky thing.”

So in 2009 he called Aurrichio, whose own rise up the ranks with Marriott had stagnated, and asked him to join as general manager.

The reunion proved fruitful, but a couple years in, Aurrichio said he noticed Copper Beech’s owner wasn’t paying all the bills, and the writing on the wall suggested they should start looking for their own restaurant.

Around that same time, Landworks Development LLC had bought a parcel of land in Simsbury to build apartments. As part of the deal with seller Ensign-Bickford Co., the developer agreed to also buy a three-floor, 8,200-square-foot building that served as a mill in the 1600s and restaurant in the 1980s.

By 2012 Anderson and Aurrichio had partnered with the developer and opened Millwrights, a fine-dining establishment serving New England-inspired cuisine sourced mostly from Sub Edge Farm in Farmington and Granby’s Holcomb Farm.

Anderson’s profile was rising at this time, having appeared on and won Food Network’s “Chopped,” a fact that’s mentioned in the first paragraph of a New York Times review of Millwrights, which called the menu “a brashly elegant take on … homey American classics.”

If it needs to be said, the New York Times doesn’t usually review new restaurants in Simsbury.

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HBJ Photo | Bill Morgan

Trials and tribulations

Sitting in Millwrights’ picturesque dining room overlooking a waterfall on a Tuesday afternoon last month, head chef Niles Talbot said he knew the concept was something special when he joined the staff as a line cook a few months after it opened.

“From the beginning, we knew that we were going to be a different kind of restaurant that Connecticut hasn’t necessarily seen,” said Talbot, who added that Anderson mentored and challenged him to expand his culinary horizons in the seven years he’s worked at Millwrights. “If I wasn’t intimidated and nervous every day when I walked in here, then it’s not the place for me.”

Anderson and Aurrichio barely left Millwrights for the next four years, Aurrichio said, a gestation period for the duo’s ambition.

That changed near the beginning of 2017, when they decided to branch out.

Anderson, Aurrichio and Bear’s Smokehouse owner McDonald announced a joint venture restaurant, The Cook and the Bear, which would open in West Hartford’s swanky Blueback Square.

Parking around the 50 Memorial Road location was difficult, and rent in the chic neighborhood was high, but none of the owners felt deterred.

“We thought, ‘Oh, we’re from Millwrights, and we’re partnering up with Bear’s Smokehouse, how could we fail?’” Aurrichio said of their calculation at the time.

They really did seem to have everything going for them: Name recognition — Anderson by this time was a regular on cooking shows, and in 2018 would appear on Season 15 of “Top Chef,” while McDonald was a local food celebrity in his own right; Media coverage — the announcement of the restaurant and eventual opening both made headlines; Reviews — professional critics and Yelp reviewers alike praised the menu’s seamless inclusion of down-home fare with high-end elements (like a brisket sandwich with a miso-herb aioli).

Even with all that, the restaurant never drew enough people to earn a profit. That will always bother Anderson.

The partners shuttered the operation last summer.

“I think that the restaurant was special enough for people not to have an issue walking to it from a parking lot,” Anderson said during a recent interview at his two-floor, colonial-style house in West Hartford, less than a half-mile down the street from the now-defunct eatery.

He sighed and shrugged.

“Who knows? That one will always be a mystery to me,” he said.

Closing The Cook and the Bear was difficult, Anderson said, but the numbers weren’t trending toward future profits.

“That one was kind of a humbler,” Aurrichio said. “It was like, what we thought was the equation to make a restaurant successful wasn’t.”

Around the same time, it was becoming clear that Porrón, a restaurant Anderson and Aurrichio opened in downtown Hartford’s Goodwin Hotel with partner Randy Salvatore in 2018, needed some retooling.

Anderson partnered with Salvatore to open and run restaurants and bars in the Goodwin and New Haven’s Blake Hotel, establishing Spanish-inspired Porrón and Bar Piña in Hartford, and the Hamilton Park restaurant and High George bar in the Elm City.

Porrón’s Spanish tapas offerings downtown made sense in theory. Located steps away from longtime institution Max’s Downtown, a restaurant in the Goodwin would either have to compete with Max’s, or offer something completely different. Anderson, who served as the U.S. culinary ambassador to Spain in 2017, chose the latter.

But highly specialized food is tricky in downtown Hartford, said Rob Maffucci, who owns V’s Trattoria nearby on Trumbull Street and has been a fixture in the city for about two decades. Hartford’s population is growing, but not enough for consistent traffic at a niche restaurant.

“If you’re too fine-tuned then you’re shutting out possible business,” said Maffucci, whose restaurants all serve Italian cuisine.

Last month Anderson opened the re-concepted Terreno, which serves burgers and spaghetti and meatballs alongside stuffed quail and swordfish piccata.

The more casual items already appear on the menu at Hamilton Park, and are debuting at Millwrights in the next couple of weeks.

“A big focus is driving top-line revenue into our restaurants, and how do you do that? You make sure you’re doing what people want,” Anderson said. “The mentality used to be, ‘well this food is delicious, they’ll like something,’ but if they don’t eat skate wing or monkfish or something weird, then there’s nothing here for them.”

And part of doing what people want is for TV’s Chef Tyler Anderson to play up his star power a bit.

Each night at about 8:30 his wife, Stepka, a nurse who works at an Avon med-spa and in the ICU at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, reminds him via text to walk the dining room and say hello to diners.

“There is some celebrity that comes with being a chef, because it’s been made on TV to be this celebrity thing, even though it’s not really that glamorous at all,” Stepka said to Anderson while the two sat in their living room. “So whether you like it or not, that now comes with what you do.”

Anderson smiled and rolled his eyes at her.

“Thanks, babe,” he chuckled.