[kweingar]

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?

[Conan_Kudo]

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.

[DrewADesign]

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.