Big Burrito’s Bill Fuller talks navigating 30 years of change in local dining scene

For the past three decades, Bill Fuller has risen the ranks at Big Burrito Restaurant Group, starting as a sous chef and eventually taking over the role of president in 2018. The group’s holdings are vast and varied, including the iconic chain Mad Mex with nine locations, Shadyside’s Soba, the elegant Eleven and many more, with plans in motion to grow its Italian restaurant Alta Via into a local chain. The group also is celebrating a rare milestone in the restaurant business, as its Mediterranean-focused concept Casbah celebrated its 30th anniversary of operation in Shadyside at the end of last month.

You took over as president at Big Burrito two years before the pandemic, which fundamentally impacted the talent pool for the hospitality industry. Five years later, has that change course corrected, or was it a permanent shift?

We don’t really know what the labor market is like now either, but it’s still in recovery from Covid. Amazon hired millions of people to deliver things then because that’s what was going on. Year-over-year, they’re kind of letting go of some of those people as they refine their process, so those people are going back into the labor market. Robotics and AI are going to eventually put people out of work, and I joke around that because being a line cook is so complicated and you’re doing 17 different tasks at once, building a robot line cook would be really hard. There’s this post-apocalyptic world in my mind where everybody’s job has been taken over by robots except for the line cooks, and so everyone is a line cook, the lawyers are line cooks, the writers are line cooks, and they all just go to each other’s restaurants, and that’s the end of humanity.