By the age of 27, Harrison Cheney had already cooked his way through top kitchens in London and Stockholm and was running the show at two-Michelin-starred Gastrologik, pushing out 20-course new Nordic tasting menus made with hyperseasonal, local produce. In short, he wouldn’t seem out of place as a character on “The Bear.”

There was just one problem: His girlfriend wanted to move back from Sweden to San Francisco. 

“I’d always put my career first,” Cheney says. “But this time, I didn’t.” 

Taking a chance on love, he sent his resume to a handful of San Francisco restaurants and eventually landed a role as head chef at Sons & Daughters, a 12-year-old fine dining destination. Though it had held its shining Michelin star for a decade, the restaurant had mostly fallen off the radars of the city’s food obsessives. 

The girlfriend didn’t work out, but the job did. After Cheney joined the restaurant in 2022, Sons & Daughters shifted its menu to new Nordic cuisine, putting a California twist on the genre inspired by Noma, one of the most prestigious restaurants in the world. Gone were the quenelles of foie gras and filets of king salmon, replaced instead with elegant, technically meticulous dishes like black cod from Half Moon Bay, gently kissed with smoke and lacquered with lard, and roses made from rutabaga cooked in lactic fermented juice with smoked pork fat.  

Under Cheney’s direction, Son & Daughters became one of the best fine dining restaurants in the Bay Area — earning a second Michelin star last year. 

None of it would have been possible, however, without one thing: Cheney’s O-1 visa. 

Immigration is the lifeblood of the country’s restaurant industry. But it’s not just counter-service joints and casual chains that depend on it for the essential work of washing dishes, prepping ingredients, and cooking on the line. Michelin-level restaurants also rely on immigrants to round out their ranks. Typically, these workers arrive through short-term visa programs that allow aspiring, early-career chefs to intern at top restaurants like Atelier Crenn, Eleven Madison Park, and The French Laundry.

But as the pool of high-level culinary talent in the U.S. has gotten shallower, these top-level restaurants are looking overseas for people to take leadership roles in San Francisco’s high-stakes fine dining scene. It’s not isolated to the city. An industrywide labor shortage started when scores of experienced cooks left restaurants after the pandemic, and it’s only set to worsen in the coming years. According to the Department of Labor Statistics, the need for chefs and head cooks is on pace to increase 8% between now and 2033, even as culinary school enrollment has steadily declined. The result? An international pipeline of culinary all-stars coming stateside via an O-1 visa, essentially a rare golden ticket designated for those “individuals with extraordinary ability.” 

Although none would share specifics about how many chefs from outside the country are currently keeping the stoves hot in their kitchens, representatives from more than half a dozen Michelin-starred restaurants in the city confirmed they employ O-1 visa holders. 

In the past five years, it’s become increasingly common, a spokesperson for one fine dining restaurant group says, though they declined to be interviewed on the record over concerns about attracting scrutiny on the company and its staff. It’s not an unfounded fear, considering the Trump administration’s continuing crackdown on immigrants, including visa holders. During his first term, the number of O-1 visas issued dipped below 10,000 in both 2020 and 2021 due to a mix of policies and the pandemic. A similar downturn could be devastating to the city’s high-end restaurants.  

“They’re essential,” says one fine dining professional of these globetrotting chefs.  

Most commonly, foreign chefs make their way to San Francisco restaurant kitchens through work-study exchange programs, which require a J-1 visa. 

For ambitious young cooks, job opportunities for J-1 recipients are relatively abundant at places as casual as Australian-style coffee chain Bluestone Lane and as upscale as two-Michelin-starred Saison. But since the program is intended for students or recent graduates, restaurants are limited to only using it to fill entry-level positions with staff who can only stay up to a year. 

That’s where the O-1 visa comes in. Minn Kim, founder and CEO of visa consultancy Lighthouse HQ, says that while this pathway has historically been associated with entertainment and sports superstars — think athletes like Lionel Messi and musicians like Justin Bieber — the O-1 program has increasingly been applied to people across a broad swath of fields. And while it’s not cheap (between fees for filing an application, expediting its processing, and hiring an attorney to help with it all, costs range from $5K to $15K), there’s no cap on how many can be issued. 

“It is wildly underused,” Kim says, noting that while the number of O-1 visas issued annually has been steadily rising over the past two decades, the State Department still received just 20,669 applications in 2024, of which 19,457 were approved. Meanwhile, the department issued more than 300,000 J-1 visas last year. 

That contrast is due in part to a lack of awareness, Kim says. While the highly competitive process of obtaining an H1-B visa, the largest visa program for skilled workers like software engineers, has been widely covered, conversations about the application process for O-1 visas have only just begun to gain momentum. In tech circles, O-1 visa holders have started sharing advice about how to glow up their application, which requires building a case that an individual is at the top of their field. For an academic, that might mean compiling a list of books and papers that have cited their research. For an actor, winning a BAFTA would help. 

Outside of earning a Michelin star, it’s a bit trickier to show your work for someone who spends their days julienning vegetables and slow-roasting squab — essential kitchen duties, but not ones that usually attract accolades and outside attention. That means restaurant workers tend to rely on media coverage. 

Articles about the award-winning restaurants where they’ve toiled can be useful, but applicants need to be specifically mentioned by name. Sometimes that means somewhat shamelessly pitching themselves to journalists. “I am trying to reach out to publishers and writers to get a small feature, mention, or anything of that sort,” wrote an O-1 visa applicant, who worked at a Michelin-starred SF restaurant for a year while on a J-1 visa that expired earlier this year. They’ve already lined up a job at a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City — but need to secure a new visa to officially accept the job. Somewhat ironically, they declined to be interviewed for this story due to concerns it could jeopardize their application.

There are no hard and fast rules about soliciting coverage, according to Minn. One of the appealing features of the O-1 program is that applicants can essentially reverse-engineer an application that checks the boxes.

“You can build towards it, is how I describe it. Your candidacy is not static,” Minn says. “Everybody wants to go to Harvard, but not everybody’s eligible to go to Harvard. However, you can make yourself a better candidate.” 

Thomas Etheve is in the middle of a concentrated attempt to improve his chances to continue to cook in San Francisco’s most elite kitchens.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, he stepped out of the kitchen at San Ho Won and slid into a wooden booth, wearing a hunter green apron over a plain white T-shirt with his long auburn hair twisted into a messy top-knot. 

After being born and raised in a small port town on the French island of Réunion, Etheve moved to France at the age of 20 and started working in restaurant kitchens. It wasn’t long before he fell in love with the intense focus and artistry of fine dining, which led him to the United States in 2015. 

Back then, he was on a J-1 visa, which helped him land a job working at three-Michelin-starred Benu, under chef Corey Lee. When his training year was up, he journeyed to Hong Kong, learning to work the charcoal grill at a lauded yakitori restaurant in Hong Kong. 

Then in 2022, a manager from Lee’s restaurant group reached out to see if Etheve would be interested in coming to work at the company’s forthcoming upscale Korean barbecue restaurant San Ho Won, which has since won rave reviews and earned a Michelin star last year.

He had won the golden ticket as the sous chef de cuisine. Exemplifying San Francisco fine dining’s reliance on these highly skilled immigrants, he was able to work in the country under an O-2 visa, which is meant for support staff for O-1 visa holders. A musician on an O-1 visa might use an O-2 to bring along their producer, for example, or an athlete their trainer. 

In Etheve’s case, his permit was tied to San Ho Wan executive chef Jeong-In Hwang, an immigrant from Korea. As his O-2 visa is set to expire in August, he’s hoping to get an O-1 of his own. 

It’s his last, best effort to stay in the United States and continue honing his craft and creative voice as a chef. There are more opportunities here than if he were to return home to Réunion or mainland France. “If I go to France, I’m just a French guy doing French food,” he says. “Here, I’m learning different cooking techniques, different approaches.” 

The denial of his visa application wouldn’t just be a setback for his culinary career. It’d be another small loss for the city’s already dwindling talent pool of top chefs.