This is what stood out to me. Margins on food are not spectacular, and this place's $4.5k/mo minimum on rent is very high. Alcohol's margins are high enough to where that's where a good chunk of the actual money is made - the landlord is making an absolute killing here given his fairly low rents to the city, and very much at the expense of the profitability of the tenants.

He's also paying 5k per month to lease the building and collecting almost 10x that much in rent from the others. A better solution might be to form some kind of collective/group to lease the facility at no profit. Like a condo association of sorts.

It's obvious these people are working for someone else.

But the issue is that putting together a collective to lease the facility at no profit plus take over everything else he's doing (finding insurance, handling janitorial and maintenance work, marketing, etc.) is a lot of work, and it's work that aspiring chefs don't necessarily want to focus their time on. That's why they come - he's providing a lot of value. Whether you think the amount of value is worth what they're paying is up to you, but the fact that he's still able to find tenants says that a lot of people think the tradeoff of not having to worry about all those ancillary things is worth the money.

The group could hire people for some of those things. The other guy certainly does.

Most dentists have had to figure out how to run a business. At some point these chefs have to decide weather they are owning a business or just cooking. This situation allowed them to confuse the two.