After years of running an unlicensed restaurant, chef Alexandra Holt opens up about the crushing stress, the online hate, and her path to reopening legitimately.
For about 10 weeks this spring, one of the most talked about restaurants in the city didn’t really exist. Roxanne — the award-winning, Michelin-recommended, art-project-slash-fine-dining-restaurant from chef Alexandra Holt — was shut down by the city this past April when it was discovered that it was operating without the proper licenses and inspections. More accurately, Holt had never applied for or received a food preparation and serving license and, because of this, had never had a health inspection. For years, at both Roxanne’s first location on Christian Street and in its newer, fancier digs on Second Street in Queen Village, Holt operated off-the-books. And for years, she got away with it. Until she didn’t.
Holt doesn’t really want to talk about what happened. She’s guarded, cagey, defensive. When Roxanne was shut down, she absolutely took it in the teeth from people who were outraged by what she’d done. Most of this happened online. Most of it came from the comfortable anonymity of Reddit or social media comment threads. But she tells me that it was bad. On the one hand, there were the entirely valid concerns about restaurants operating without health and safety inspections and the run-of-the-mill worries about unlicensed food operations. But there were also threats against her, promises to burn down her house or her restaurant. The hate was visceral, personal, and she lived in the whirlwind of it for weeks while journalists (myself included) tried to figure out what had happened and how it’d all gone so far.
And for the most part, Holt talked to no one. She avoided calls, didn’t return texts. But I was annoying about it. And persistent. Because there was a part of this story which fascinated me that no one was really talking about. It was something small and personal and Holt was the only one who could explain it to me. So, when I did finally get her on the phone, I started off by telling her a story…