If you’re like me, you take pride in putting a few home-cooked meals on the table each week. After all, cooking can be a most healthful way to eat, and it’s rewarding to savor something you put some elbow grease and TLC into. It can even be cathartic.

But let’s face it. Schedules are increasingly demanding, out of the office doesn’t necessarily mean off the clock anymore and planning a menu, going to the grocery store and actually assembling a meal can seemingly take forever. Sometimes it’s just easier and more fun to eat out. So try as we might to relegate restaurant outings to the weekends, it doesn’t always happen.

Recently while settling onto a bar stool at what’s become a regular spot for my husband and me, I had a funny thought. Do professional chefs ever feel that same food fatigue that we of the at-home variety do? Sure, it’s their job, but preparing food for hundreds of diners on a given night must be exhausting. So I wondered: Where do chefs like to go when they want someone else to do the cooking?

To answer the question, we polled 10 top chefs with restaurants in 17th South’s neighborhoods about where they like to eat when they’re off the clock. In our cover story, “Off-duty Eats,” you’ll learn where star chefs, including Steven Satterfield, Todd Richards and Diana Presson Eller, go when it’s time to hang up their whites, plus the dishes that keep them going back for more. My advice? Tear out the story or hang on to this whole issue—you’ll be hungry when you’re done reading, and the story doubles as a handy mini-dining guide.

On a closing note, as we were sending this issue to press, a string of powerful hurricanes devastated islands throughout the Caribbean, including Turks & Caicos, the featured destination in this issue’s Out of Town story. Despite damage that the islands sustained, we decided to run the story because we know that, eventually, the islands and the many resorts that call them home will rebuild and open again for business. And when they do, we hope you’ll be among the first visitors to return there.

Lindsay Lambert Day
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF