According to Eater, Hall reflected on the failure of her Brooklyn restaurant, Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen, during a 2017 talk at Nation’s Restaurant News MUFSO conference, sharing the lessons she learned from the experience.
One key thing she came to realize was that, because of her busy schedule on The Chew and other varied obligations, she didn’t leave herself enough time to launch a new restaurant. “What I’ve learned is that being famous does help, [but you] still need to physically carve out the hours on the ground to execute your vision, and a vision doesn’t build itself,” she admitted. “Even though I’m doing all of those [other] things, I had a restaurant and I still needed to be there.”
Another lesson she learned is to focus on the here and now, not on a potential future that may never materialize. “Because of my notoriety there was a tremendous amount of focus put on the restaurant’s branding from day one,” she said. “We were creating a brand that would become a future chain… so, we weren’t even working on the present. We were working in the future.”