Right. Your chef should be able to work anywhere that needs a chef.

I don’t think it’s fair if they leave you without a chef and open a new restaurant selling the same kind of cuisine down the bock tomorrow.

That seems more like a spite restaurant. And I’m ok with putting a simple time/distance limit on that. Next year? Nearby city? Different kind of food? Go for it tomorrow.

What do you mean, it’s not fair? I genuinely don’t see anything wrong with a “spite restaurant”.

I’ve tried to come up with a comparable situation where the roles are reversed. Suppose that you owned a restaurant. If you fire your chef and buy your local competitor, can the chef argue that this purchase shouldn’t be allowed because he can’t get a job in the local market anymore?

It still applies even if the chef in question creates their own restaurant. This is literally how startups are born. Here in CT, a lot of pizza places are spun up by pizza people leaving a pizza place and creating their own.

That's always been the way the restaurant business worked, but big chains actually have been using non-competes for a while. They claim their training, even for the front of the house, is that unique and valuable. Absurd.