One Year of 'One Year In' Interviews

One Year In is a feature in which Eater chats with the chefs and owners of restaurants celebrating their first anniversary. Here now is a recap of all of the One Year In interviews that took place in 2013, covering topics like the secrecy in Chinatown kitchens, equipment failures, the importance of hospitality, neighborhood love, and more. Hit up the tipline if there's a restaurant nearing its first anniversary that you'd like to see featured in the coming year.

· Lone Star Taco Bar: Co-owners Max Toste and Aaron Sanders talked about opening day illness, the design of the space, and food pricing. "If you think that our food is expensive, you're wrong - you just are - because you don't know what goes into it. There's so much labor and love in the food that it's really fairly priced. So if anybody talks about price, I don't really give a shit."

· PARK: Owner Patrick Lee talked about converting Redline to PARK, dealing with a sudden breakage of glass shelving on Friday the 13th, and starting to feel like things were going well. "But then in September, we received a lot of positive feedback, so we really felt like our systems were in place, people were coming back, they liked us, and we were onto something good."

· West Bridge (Part 1, Part 2): Co-owner Alexis Gelburd-Kimler, chef/owner Matt Gaudet, and bar manager Josh Taylor talked about the vastly hyped up egg in a jar, the evolution of the menu, and loyalty to the customers. "So there's a loyalty and responsibility we all have to this space and building - at least for the next year or two, or three, five, seventeen. I want everybody to have the same experience that someone else wrote about."

· City Landing: Chef/owner Bill Brodsky talked about taking over the old Sel de la Terre waterfront space, opening a restaurant for the first time and how it relates to his previous experience operating a seasonal restaurant on the Cape, and teaching great service. "We actually have a program called 'City Landing University' where we have one-on-one classes for each position. We talk about all the technical proficiencies that are an important part of our service, but we also focus on the philosophy of hospitality and reading our guests to make sure we are anticipating their needs and providing the customized service that really is going to be the best solution for them."

· Shojo: Co-owner Brian Moy talked about how he grew up at China Pearl and basically hasn't had weekends off since he was 10, how Chinatown has changed since then, and how the food industry in the neighborhood is more secretive than other more collaborative parts of the city. "Chinatown always has been a very secretive industry. We have chefs that will tell their sous chefs to do a certain part of the process, then they turn their backs and start measuring and pouring different things, so they will never fully teach you their recipe."

· Belly: Co-owners Nick Zappia and Liz Vilardi talked about the history of their first restaurant, The Blue Room, and how it evolved into a little group that includes Belly as well as Central Bottle. The Belly space was originally an underutilized part of the Blue Room. "Energy is a big conversation in restaurants, and we realized the back room sucked a lot of energy. You could walk in the door and it was kind of like walking into an empty restaurant, even though behind, you could be totally full...It felt like the step-child's part of the bar."

· DooWee & Rice: Owner Duy Tran talked about his future projects, building a restaurant at Wonder Bar and expanding to London. A few months after the interview and first anniversary, Tran closed his Somerville shop to focus on those other projects. On Wonder Bar: "That's where I am going to really perform a lot of my recipes that I've been holding back because we don't have the space and we don't have the manpower [in Somerville] to do it proficiently."

· Lincoln Tavern & Restaurant: Owner Eric Aulenback, executive chef Nick Dixon, and general manager Mike Shaw talked about why they love being located in Southie, how they developed their popular pizza, and what happened when they decided to stay open for the big blizzard. "The front walkway looked like a ski resort, and we were checking cross-country skis, and people were wearing snow goggles."

· Steel & Rye: Chef/co-owner Chris Parsons and co-owner/general manager Dan Kerrigan talked about recognizing an opportunity in a cool space outside of the city, working on introducing a wood-burning oven and grist mill, and using modern tools without creating molecular gastronomy-style food. "The tools and techniques just help us be faster, better, smoother, and more consistent. We do sous vide quite a lot, but you wouldn't know it. I have a vacuum machine and combi ovens which let us be more consistent with our bread program."

· Puritan & Co.: Chef/owner Will Gilson talked about everything breaking, a world without internet, earning the approval of the neighborhood, and how he wishes people would just say something if there's a problem. "That's the hardest thing as a restaurant owner, seeing somebody passive-aggressively write something on the internet when if they had just said I didn't like this, we wouldn't have made them pay for it, you know? And those are the things that it takes awhile of coaching your staff—and also coaching your guests—to be able to do."

· All coverage of One Year In on Eater [~EBOS~]