Restaurateur Jen Agg Dishes and Tells All in Her Powerful New Memoir, ‘Table Boss’

Jen Agg is brutally honest about the not-so-glamorous start of her culinary career.

While growing up in Scarborough, a suburban district of Toronto, Ontario, “My parents were terrible cooks. I needed to learn how to cook for myself when I was a teenager if I wanted to eat delicious things. I’m not saying I was some amazing cook as a teenager [at 13 or 14], but I did start to understand food and cooking at that age,” Jen admitted when she chatted with Food Network earlier this year.

Before most of us moved out of our childhood homes, Jen lived on her own for about a year “because I was a brat. I really learned to cook for myself then,” she continued. “It was nice that I could take care of myself.”

These days, Jen is certainly taking care of herself — as well as hundreds of employees and countless guests at her game-changing Toronto restaurants. Her empire includes nose-to-tail trailblazer Black Hoof, Haiti-inspired Rhum Corner, Grey Gardens wine bar and General Public, which Toronto Life named the best restaurant in Toronto in 2025.

Arguably the most talked-about restaurateur in Ontario’s capital city, Jen has come a long way from those early “make it work” days. With her new book, Table Boss: How to Build a Restaurant When Your Life Falls Apart (A Love Story), an instant best-seller, Jen hoped to be able to share some of the secret sauce.

“I’m a writer who had the good luck to be able to sneak into that world through the restaurant's back entrance,” Jen told us when we caught up with her days after the release of Table Boss. “Restaurants appealed to me as a way to flex many different creative muscles while not having a boss.”

By 2019, everything seemed to be falling into place for Jen. She “had a thriving restaurant group, a beautiful marriage to a handsome artist husband, and extremely good skin. If anyone could give advice on living well in your forties, it was her,” we learned on the back cover of Table Boss.

But then disaster struck — in multiple ways and almost all at once. Jen’s parents died. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to decimate her entire portfolio of restaurants. Then, Jen’s husband, Roland, suffered from a devastating stroke.

“It was a lot to deal with, and it changed how I thought about my life and my place in the world,” Jen recently told Toronto Life. “The book is mostly about how much I love my husband and how much I love building restaurants, with an emphasis on the art of good service and what makes restaurants special. The intensity with which I obsess over cheerleading my husband’s recovery is surely related to the same mental illness I have that requires me to find the perfect shade of green for a dining room.”

Describing herself as “almost 10 years older and arguably 10 years wiser” than when she penned her “scrappy underdog” 2017 debut book, I Hear She’s a Real Bitch, Jen told Toronto Life that with age came self-assurance. No wonder one of the major takeaways Jen hoped readers take away from Table Boss is how to build a business — and a life — on your own terms.

The huge hurdles Jen has had to overcome have inspired her to care less about the small stuff while devoting herself even more to what really matters: caring for loved ones through good times and bad. Speaking up to advocate for change when injustices arise. (This is nothing new for Jen. Her sold-out 2015 conference Kitchen Bitches: Smashing the Patriarchy One Plate at a Time brought folks together to take on sexism in the restaurant industry, and her New York Times op-ed, “Sexism in the Kitchen,” circulated far and wide after it ran in 2015.) Sharing what you know in an attempt to make the world a better, kinder place and help others win.

That latter value is one of many reasons why Food Network tapped Jen to co-host Restaurant Impossible: Last Call with chef Aarón Sánchez. Looking back, Jen told us she’s glad she signed on because the people — from the crew to the “restaurant owners who were just so kind, making me want to help them even more” — made all the work worth it and reminded her of how much good there is in the world. As she and Aarón visited everything from sports bars to historic Chinatown staples, Jen was able to use her generational knowledge about design, food and drink, and customer service to help other restaurants surmount daunting setbacks.

Even though it’s just the first season, we’ve already learned so much from the wisdom Jen has dished up during Restaurant Impossible: Last Call. So while we had her on the line, we couldn’t resist asking about a hot topic we’ve been marinating on lately as restaurant guests: how to offer constructive feedback (or praise!) after a dining experience.

“I always encourage diners to be up front about feedback while in the restaurant, so it gives us a chance to fix it! I would much prefer you tell me your chicken is over-seasoned than grimace with every bite, skulk home and type out 300 angry words about it on a public forum,” Jen explained. “I want you to leave happy, and I genuinely believe that a properly fixed mistake [whether it’s via a comped main course or a glass of amaro] has even greater potential to turn an unhappy guest into an ambassador than a regular old good dining experience.”

If there is a problem — “an actual 'it's not good' problem, not an 'I don't like it problem' — tell your server,” Jen urged. “There are protocols at good restaurants for this kind of thing, and ideally a manager will get involved and make it better.”

If you've had a great time and enjoyed delicious food, make a point of thanking the people involved, Jen suggested, “especially the cooks. And extra especially if it's an open or slightly open kitchen. They don't get told enough. They deserve to hear it, and they will really appreciate it!”

As for what’s happening in Jen’s kitchen these days, the MVP meal harkens back to the early days when she first learned her way around the kitchen. Her back-pocket meal is mac and cheese with cavatappi instead of elbows, "because that’s the only way to make it,” Jen asserted, true to her delightfully opinionated form. Honestly, it sounds worthy of a five-star review to us.