A couple of weeks ago, Alan Harding, the formerly quasi-famous chef, was conducting business on an old couch abandoned on the sidewalk near the Bedford Hill Coffee Bar in Brooklyn. The couch had been tossed out in the trash, but Mr. Harding had shamelessly reclaimed it as a temporary office. It was 9 a.m. and as curious coffee drinkers watched him from the windows, he sucked on a Dominican cigar and turned with a puff to the legal pad on which he had written a to-do list.
Fifteen years ago, Mr. Harding sat atop an empire of more than a dozen cheap but charming restaurants, feted as the man who helped create the funky Brooklyn bistro. Now he sat on the street, literally, mapping out a morning of mostly unpaid tasks.
He had planned a visit to the commissary he oversees for the Oaxaca Taquería chain, someone else’s restaurants. He had arranged to look at real estate for a former girlfriend’s coffee shop. He was thinking of dropping by at the vacant storefront in Bedford-Stuyvesant where he wants to open an epicurean hot-dog stand. He had to go to East New York to buy a load of steel to build a grill.
“I guess I don’t know what I am these days,” he grudgingly admitted, rising from the couch and entering his more-permanent workplace, a lumbering Chevrolet Suburban he picked up at small expense some years ago at a city-sponsored auction. “I don’t know what I would put on my business card” — not that he actually has one. “Celebrity chef without celebrity?”
Fame is sometimes an illogically distributed commodity, and in the restaurant world, only a lucky and talented few obtain it. Mr. Harding, who recently turned 50, never had the outsized eminence of household names like Wolfgang Puck or Bobby Flay. Even at its height, his fame was a quieter, more localized phenomenon. He didn’t get his entire 15 minutes; it was more along the lines of 13 1/2.
Nonetheless, in 1997, when he opened Patois, his flagship restaurant on Smith Street, he found himself acclaimed as the Johnny Appleseed of outer-borough eating, an innovative pioneer who had brought Manhattan menus (if not Manhattan prices) to gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Food blogs chronicled his exploits (a tiki bar, a barbecue truck), and he palled around with Mario Batali. He was rich — or rich enough. He even had a television show (albeit on PBS).
But then as it does, the tide began to turn. Starting, say, in 2008, the turf that Mr. Harding once had to himself was overrun by the very sort of amiable, off-the-grid places on which he had staked his claim. The competition cut into his business. He suddenly confronted a professional conundrum: How many trails were left to blaze when every other restaurant in Brooklyn seemed to have a deer head on its wall and a menu featuring duck confit and skate?
Then, after 11 years of marriage, Mr. Harding went through a divorce. He was subsequently sued by his former wife, Leslie Parks, a daughter of the photographer Gordon Parks, who charged in her complaint that he had cheated her on the profits they had made from selling their home. The settlement, he said, hurt his finances. His income had already been in free-fall, and he found himself responsible for supporting three children: his two sons with Ms. Parks and a third boy he was raising with a woman he had met after his divorce.
Earlier this year, Mr. Harding slipped and fell, breaking his leg, and was out of work for months. He couldn’t pay his gas bill. Con Edison cut him off.
It was around that time he traded in his toque for the legal pad and a freelance career as a consultant, which mainly means that he spends his time helping friends and colleagues achieve their gastronomic dreams. “I just don’t identify with chef’s whites anymore,” he said. “I’m much more interested in building and design.”
With that in mind, he arrived at his first stop of the day: a onetime auto body shop that now contains a commissary kitchen that produces food for Oaxaca Taquería, a chain of Mexican restaurants. Oaxaca’s owner, David Schneider, hired Mr. Harding a couple of years ago to act as a location scout and to help him build his business. “Alan’s a jack-of-all-trades,” Mr. Schneider said. “He’s got a great aesthetic and he’s very hands-on and he can follow through himself with the construction.”
As for Mr. Harding’s departure from the kitchen (and, of course, the headlines), Mr. Schneider said: “Look, we’re getting older now. When you reach a certain age, you don’t want to be stuck in a kitchen from noon till 2 in the morning. I think Alan’s happy doing what he’s doing. It’s kind of like a better lifestyle thing.”
Despite its changes, Mr. Harding’s lifestyle is still inflected with the outlaw air he perfected at Patois, where diners ate in winter beneath a makeshift heated tent and were secretly served wine despite the absence of a liquor license. These days, he spends hours in his truck, traversing the more-obscure streets of Brooklyn, smoking cigars and blasting classic rock. Necessity has turned him into a hustler — and a skilled illegal parker. As he approached his second stop, a store on Putnam Avenue where he plans to help a friend install her coffee bar, he blithely left his vehicle in the middle of a crosswalk.
Fifteen minutes later he was off to yet another person’s restaurant: Bluebird, on Flatbush Avenue, which Jimmy Mamary, his partner at Patois, expects to open this month. After double-parking his truck, Mr. Harding sat down at a table covered in construction dust to help his former colleague brainstorm items for his menu: potato-mushroom pierogies, molasses-smoked chicken wings, a pork belly B.L.T.
For all the time and effort that he spends on others, Mr. Harding hasn’t given up on his own ideas, each of which is different and somehow more intriguing and peculiar than the next. He would like to open a takeout joint, for instance, serving high-end hot dogs and a carbonated grapefruit drink. And he has visions of a beer-garden-bicycle repair shop built out of shipping containers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Nor would he mind, if it were possible, rekindling his fame. “Do I miss it? Yeah, I miss it,” he said. “I saw Anthony Bourdain on TV the day other day. I’m as erudite and witty as he is. All that I could think was: ‘Why isn’t that me?’ ”
He was, by that point, back in the Suburban, straw hat on his head, chewed cigar nub between his teeth. Pitkin Avenue was racing past his windshield, a Zeppelin song was screaming from the speakers. As the track faded out, Mr. Harding spoke as if awakening from a dream.
“What I’d really like to figure out is how to get paid for all of this,” he finally said. “Good ideas are great. But I’d like to, you know, actually make money.”
Correction: August 19, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a chain of Mexican restaurants for which Alan Harding is a consultant. It is Oaxaca Taquería, not Oaxaca Grill.
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