"We sunk everything into it. It came close to going under several times"

The words land with the weight of a maritime metaphor: total immersion, ballast jettisoned, no safe harbor in sight. “We sunk everything into it” signals more than financial commitment. It suggests time, reputation, relationships, and identity poured into a single venture until the boundary between person and project dissolves. The absence of a Plan B intensifies both the audacity and the peril; when the project falters, the self trembles with it.

“Came close to going under several times” carries the rhythm of repeated storms rather than a single crisis. The cadence hints at cash-flow droughts, spiraling costs, quiet staff departures, regulatory snags, experiments that failed publicly and privately. Each near-submersion forces a recalibration: tighten menus, renegotiate terms, pivot suppliers, ask more of a tired team, rethink the story told to guests and to oneself. From such acute pressures, operational discipline and creative clarity often emerge, not as romantic flourishes but as survival techniques.

The pronoun matters. “We” spreads the victory and the risk. Teams, partners, families, and early believers become unwitting collateral to a founder’s vision. Loyalty hardens through shared danger; so can fatigue and quiet resentment. Leadership here is less about grand gestures than about absorbing volatility and giving meaning to the grind.

There’s an echo of economics in the phrasing, but not the fallacy. Sunk costs are irrecoverable; clinging to them is irrational. The sentiment points instead to adaptive persistence: learning quickly, shedding what doesn’t work, reinvesting courage and ingenuity rather than merely doubling down on past expense.

Spoken by a chef renowned for radical technique and theatrical dining, the line also demystifies the glamour. Innovation at this level demands a tolerance for uncertainty that borders on the monastic: patient iteration, rigorous testing, and the humility to rebuild after each near-drowning. It reads as both caution and invitation, excellence requires stakes high enough to hurt, and the will to keep sailing when the keel scrapes the reef.