When One Kitchen Isn't Enough Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Tony Maws in his new restaurant, the Kirkland Tap & Trotter in Somerville, Mass. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - When Tony Maws designed the open kitchen at Craigie on Main, the celebrated restaurant he opened here five years ago, he positioned his workstation to serve as a kind of welcome mat. "You walk in the door, and three feet in front of you, I'm supposed to be standing there," he said. If I'm not here, the dining public knows. That was deliberate. The plan seems to have worked. Diners regularly line up outside Craigie before its doors open for a variety of reasons. But whether they come for the tasting menu (a locally legendary showcase of haute cuisine technique, often applied to the off-cuts Mr. Maws has long championed) or for the marrow-enriched hamburger that was on the cover of Bon Appétit, Craigie's customers expect to see its owner in the kitchen. That sight is increasingly rare for an American chef with the kind of attention Mr. Maws has won: a James Beard Award, a TV cooking duet with Martha Stewart, a book profiling him as the embodiment of the obsessive chef. These days, big-name cooks are often everywhere but the kitchen, tending to culinary empires large and small. For the few with a single, signature restaurant, the urge (and often the pressure) to create others can be irresistible. Mr. Maws gave in, opening a second restaurant, a gastro pub called the Kirkland Tap & Trotter, in September. The decision, which he says came after much soul-searching, ensured that he would no longer be omnipresent at Craigie. "I'm sure people are going to call me a hypocrite," said Mr. Maws, who has long held up his single-minded devotion to Craigie as a mark of professional integrity. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the idea myself. I used to butcher literally every piece of flesh that came into my restaurant. It was a matter of pride. I'm a control freak. Most chefs are. Mr. Maws is not the lone name-brand chef to recently reconsider his longstanding devotion to one spot. Wylie Dufresne opened a second restaurant, Alder, in the East Village this year after spending the better part of a decade focusing his considerable creative energies on WD-50. In the midst of similar transitions are Michael Cimarusti, the Los Angeles chef and owner of Providence and the new Connie and Ted's; Sue Zemanick, the chef at Gautreau's and chef and co-owner of Ivy, both in New Orleans; and Bill Telepan, who this month plans to open a TriBeCa spinoff of Telepan, his eight-year-old restaurant on the Upper West Side. Chefs branch out for any number of reasons: the added revenue or the fresh publicity in a business enamored of novelty and grand openings. Many crave a new creative challenge or a way to tap loyal customers who may not be up for fine dining every week. It is no coincidence that all the new restaurants just mentioned, including Mr. Maws's, are more casual and less expensive than their flagships. Mr. Maws said he wanted to give his employees a chance to grow professionally, lest they start seeking opportunities elsewhere. And giving them more responsibilities, he said, will allow him to get out of the kitchen more often. "I'm adamant that I'm not going to be that chef that loses his family," Mr. Maws said, sitting at a corner table in Craigie. Last night was my anniversary, which for many years I celebrated with maybe a glass of champagne right before service. Last night, I went and had dinner with my wife. There are holdouts, like Gabrielle Hamilton, whose acclaimed East Village restaurant, Prune, just marked its 14th anniversary. "I'm not opening anything new," said Ms. Hamilton, a best-selling author who has extolled the satisfaction of "keeping a place fresh and alive after the second year, after the honeymoon fades." Then there are those who believe, as Mr. Maws once did, that "real" chefs ought to spend most of their time with hands on pans. "I think there's a difference between a chef in the immaculate whites who walks around greeting customers and one who actually does some cooking," said Greg Higgins, the chef and owner of Higgins Restaurant and Bar in Portland, Ore. He has been attending to his restaurant's garden since it opened 20 years ago, and still butchers pigs every Wednesday - neither of which he believes would be possible if he operated more than one restaurant. "You can't replace diligence and hard work and focus," Mr. Higgins said. It makes my boat float that I practice what I preach. Another single-restaurant chef, David Kinch, calls the "relentless, day-to-day nature" of cooking the inventive food at Manresa, his Michelin-starred restaurant in Los Gatos, Calif., "draining," and says he can't imagine trying to duplicate it at a second location. Still, he said he appreciated how a more casual restaurant could provide a refreshing outlet and higher profit margins than haute cuisine, without necessarily requiring a chef's undivided attention. "You might say the reason I don't have a second restaurant yet is I'm not smart enough to figure it out," Mr. Kinch said. But it is on my mind. Mr. Maws, 43, built a national reputation in the early 2000s with his first restaurant, Craigie Street Bistrot, a seductively cramped spot that compelled the Boston Magazine restaurant critic Corby Kummer to write in 2003, "Maybe I don't need to miss Paris after all."