Do restaurants have the responsibility to offer its customers healthy menu items and reasonable portion sizes? Discuss the issues regarding this controversy – which comes first, profitability or good nutrition, for a restaurant company.

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Bringing Elevated Food to the Masses I would not be hired by Chipotle because I'm not happy enough. This information was delivered to me--gently and kindly--by Joe Miranda, the chipper, plump, patient manager at the Los Angeles branch where I had spent the morning grilling pasture-raised steaks, peeling locally grown avocados and dicing antibiotic-free chicken. The rapidly growing restaurant chain has 13 official characteristics every employee must have, and four of them basically mean happy. But if Miranda thinks I'm not qualified to make burritos because of insufficient cheeriness, then there is no way Steve Ells, the founder and a co-CEO of the company, could get a job at Chipotle either.

Sitting at the unfinished-wood conference table at Chipotle's small, sparse, exposed-brick offices in New York City, Ells at 46 is skinny, fashionable, passionate, exacting, candid, digression-proof, smile-free and unwilling to suffer even fools who are writing a long profile about him. The reason his employee-incentive program works, Ells explains, is that it makes happy people pleasers behave more like him. Miranda is one of about 300 restaurateurs-- promoted from Chipotle's 1,300-plus managers--who get stock options, a company car and, most important, $10,000 for each employee they develop into a general manager. The program has spiked profits at the restaurateurs' branches. "That's because restaurateurs started firing their low performers," Ells brags. "And their mediocre performers. What fast-food place ever lets go of mediocre performers?" Seriously, Ells could never land a Chipotle lettuce-dicing gig.

Ells, however, is amazing at inspiring these shiny, happy people he has so little in common with. That's because he does not believe he is selling burritos, and his employees are eager to believe that too. Instead, they believe they are saving the world. Saving us from food without taste. Saving us from obesity. Saving us from chemicals. Saving us from ecological disaster. Saving us from torture of animals. Saving us from blandness. Saving us from unhappiness.

These are things people are willing to pay for. Chipotle has nearly doubled its number of U.S. restaurants since 2006 and tripled its revenue to $2.3 billion last year. There are now some 1,250 locations serving about 800,000 people a day in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and France. Its revenue grew 23.7% in 2011; its stock rose nearly 20% in the past year and 800% since it went public six years ago. Because the average tab at Chipotle is larger than at a typical fast- food place--$9 in 2011, or nearly double the average tab at McDonald's--Chipotle's restaurant- level margins, at about 26%, are among the highest in the industry, despite its spending more on food than its competitors do. Ells has created a new category of restaurants designed to bring elevated food to the masses, a strategy that has been copied by Five Guys burgers and fries, Chop't salads and Taco Bell's new, suspiciously Chipotle-like Cantina Bell menu, which is supervised and marketed by Lorena Garcia, a chef who appeared each week alongside Ells last year as a judge on NBC's America's Next Great Restaurant.

Ells' goal is to destroy fast food: no more frozen patties, no more microwaves, no more factory farms. That's partly because he's a chef. Not just a burrito chef--all of Chipotle's recipes are his-- but a high-end one. In college at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ells would throw oddly elaborate dinner parties. "Everyone was broke, and he'd make duck confit and meats with wine- reduction sauces," says Monty Moran, an attorney who went to high school and college with Ells and left a Denver law firm seven years ago to become Chipotle's president and now co-CEO. "He'd use the most expensive butter he could find. The best salt he could find on the shelf. He found a way to spend more at a grocery store than anyone else in history." After college, Ells attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and went to work at Stars, Jeremiah Tower's famous California-cuisine restaurant in San Francisco. Although Tower, who mentored rising chefs like Mario Batali, never liked working for other people, he says that if he had to, he wouldn't mind working for Ells--despite Ells' reputation for being relentlessly exacting.

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"I could never work for a wimp," Tower says.

In 1993, at 28, Ells quit Stars, planning to open his own high-end restaurant. To raise the money for it, he opened a burrito restaurant in a former Dolly Madison ice cream parlor in Denver, having been impressed with the taquerias in San Francisco, and named it Chipotle Mexican Grill after a smoked and dried jalapeo pepper. To launch the business, he got $85,000 from his dad, who made a lot of money helping start and then selling a pharmaceutical company. His dad wound up making a whole lot more from that investment in the burrito chain, which went public in 2006 and is currently valued at $12.2 billion.

Building a Better Burrito

Most fast-food chains focus their resources on an endless cycle of creating and marketing new menu items, hoping one sticks, as the McNugget did for McDonald's in 1983. But Chipotle hasn't made any significant changes to its menu because Ells thinks new items would make the place less authentic. The flavors are somewhat bold, but all the dishes are really simple--you choose a meat, a grain and some toppings. "We have developed a few items, and I said, 'Delicious! We're not putting that on the menu, because we don't add new items to the menu.' It's craziness! It's craziness!" Ells says of all the time and money he's spent on new items knowing he'll never add them.

He has, however, recently hired some high-profile chefs--Kyle Connaughton, a former head chef at Britain's Fat Duck, and Nate Appleman, one of Food & Wine's best new chefs of 2009--whose job is to take Chipotle's chicken burrito and make it a slightly better chicken burrito. Recent changes include rehydrating the chipotles differently so they're a little smokier, dicing the onions by hand since food processors removed too much moisture, roasting the tomatillos and charring the jalapeos a bit more. Other fast-food restaurants find ways to shave pennies from their food costs and then focus-group the results to see if customers notice the little differences that over time, argues Ells, make for a much worse-tasting product. "We're doing the opposite," he says. "Maybe you can't tell the difference this year, but down the road you will."

When Ells couldn't persuade his tortilla-warmer manufacturer to make a better machine, he hired some electrical- and mechanical-engineering friends to design a faster one that heats evenly and gives the tortillas a slight puff. His friends also made him new planchas. And an egg cooker that he believes will make a fortune, even though he's not going to use it because-- despite some experimenting at one airport that demanded that all the restaurants in the terminal serve breakfast--he, of course, decided that Chipotle doesn't do breakfast.

Another way Chipotle is different from fast food is that the people who work at its restaurants actually cook--which means some locations are better than others. In the morning I spent in a Chipotle kitchen, my co-workers were chopping lettuce, dicing onions, even pouring oil slowly into a blender for the salad dressings they make twice each day. No one lasts very long at Chipotle without acquiring fairly good knife skills. (There's a good reason everyone wears chain- metal gloves when they cut.) There's no freezer, so ingredients are delivered several times a week. Employees have to adjust recipes on the fly, depending on how big the avocados are or how hot the peppers are at different times of the year. When each batch of guacamole is made, all the employees have to taste it to see if it needs more lime, salt or cilantro. "We've got to be the only fast restaurant that tastes," Ells says. "What are you going to do to taste a Big Mac? Taste a squirt of that sauce that comes out of those guns? No one made it! So they're not going to taste it."

Ells knows a lot about McDonald's because in 1998, he wrote to its executives and asked them to buy a stake in his company so it could expand from about 15 locations to several hundred. They said yes, and McDonald's eventually became the majority owner. After eight years, he

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asked them for his company back. McDonald's divested and made $329 million on the deal. He says he learned a lot from McDonald's--mostly what not to do. Chipotle doesn't franchise; that way it not only grabs each restaurant's profit but also can promote people and keep them in the company. There are no dollar menus, no coupons, no employee name tags, no one asking you if you want to add fries. Though Ells says he gained a lot from his relationship with McDonald's, his animosity toward its system is clear. It was because of his experience with the company that he decided to build open kitchens so people could see where their meal is coming from. When I ask him if he learned anything else from his time there, he adds this: "Clowns are scary f---ers."

Twelve years ago, Ells found something else scary. He was unhappy with the quality of Chipotle's pork, which almost nobody was buying. He found a better product that cost so much more, it forced Chipotle to raise the price of carnitas burritos by a dollar, but it also increased them to about 8% of sales. Far more important to his company's future, Ells got freaked out when he saw the pig-confinement lots used by the supplier that had been providing Chipotle's pork. So he started buying free-range pork from Niman Ranch and came to believe that his goal of serving fresh food that tastes good was linked to ethically sourcing the ingredients. Chipotle is now the largest restaurant buyer--purchasing nearly 100 million lb. in 2011--of naturally raised meat, which the company defines on its website as coming from animals "raised in a humane way, fed a vegetarian diet, never given hormones and allowed to display their natural tendencies." Having trademarked such phrases as "Food with integrity" and "Fresh is not enough anymore," Chipotle last year released an animated ad, in which a farmer industrializes his operation, feels guilty and transforms his farm into one more akin to those found in children's books. The ad won a Grand Clio, pissed off industrial farmers and made it clear that Chipotle is selling not just food but an ethos.

Chipotle uses locally grown produce whenever possible. It bought some 10 million pounds of the stuff last year. The company also tries to use not merely organic beans but no-till ones, which do less damage to the soil. In June the company reached another milestone: 100% of its sour cream--and 65% of its cheese--now comes from pasture-raised cows. Although Chipotle has helped grow the market for poultry that isn't loaded with antibiotics and beef that doesn't come pumped up with growth hormones, the supply doesn't always meet the demand, and the chain lets customers know if it has to fill in the gaps with conventionally produced meat. But even as some market watchers remain wary of the company's stock, in part because of higher ingredient costs, Ells has been praised by sustainability maven Wes Jackson, animal-rights philosopher Peter Singer and novelist and vegetarian advocate Jonathan Safran Foer, who is in talks to write short pieces that would appear on Chipotle bags and boxes. Chief marketing officer Mark Crumpacker--who, like co-CEO Moran, went to college with Ells--says relatively few customers are aware of the chain's ecological and animal-welfare efforts. He figures "conscientious eaters" make up about 30% of Chipotle's patrons. "It's growing. I don't know what it was 10 years ago. I'm guessing zero. Will it be 60% in five years? I hope so."

A Whole New Menu

If Ells is going to change the way Americans eat, he knows they can't eat burritos every day. So he finally wants to introduce completely new dishes. And just as he thinks it's weird for a burger joint to suddenly serve fish sandwiches, fried chicken and barbecued ribs, he's decided to sell his new items at a new restaurant. Not a high-end one like he once dreamed of, but one more like Chipotle that can affect millions of people.

One of the challenges is that most of the fast-food chains that Americans like serve food that, for health and ecological reasons, Ells doesn't feel good about people eating every day-- burgers, fried chicken, pizza. Ells, however, has always loved Asian food, which he thought could work under the Chipotle system of giving customers a few choices to construct their own

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dishes. So he toured a bunch of Asian countries, took a lot of notes and went to Washington to open his first ShopHouse, which is named after places in which families live above their restaurants. The restaurant sells vaguely Vietnamese food; its customers choose from four ingredients (pork-and-chicken meatballs, chicken satay, chili-rubbed steak or tofu) and add toppings such as eggplant, papaya slaw, peanuts and curry. Everything is put over noodles or rice, and the result is surprisingly good--especially the pork-and-chicken meatballs--with bolder flavors and far better vegetables than Chipotle offers. Almost none of ShopHouse's customers have any idea that the place is owned by the same company that owns the Chipotle across the street (and is run by the same restaurateur, who emits a Prozac-ian level of happy).

ShopHouse, which is getting ready to open a second location in D.C. this year, looks weathered and casual, but it's meticulously designed. "Steve sweats very, very minor details," says Moran. And when Ells finds something he declares perfect--like a set of wineglasses he recently bought for himself--he insists that everyone he knows get them too. Right now Ells and his longtime boyfriend, who is a doctor, are moving a few blocks away in Manhattan. He's moving offices too, because the company needs more space, and he's very involved in the details. Just like at the restaurants. "A lot of people can be exhausted by his focus on the minor details, like how the lightbulbs screw into the socket, how the bathroom-door hinges close," says Moran. "He's a guy who's always on high alert. When you're around him, it always feels like everything is a bit of an emergency."

When I ask Ells about the ongoing criminal investigation into the chain's alleged hiring of undocumented immigrants and into its disclosures about the federal probe, he indicates his frustration with conflicting government rules that say you have to make sure employees have their papers but you can't be overzealous about asking for them. "We followed the letter of the law," he says. "It makes it tough to do business in this country when the rules aren't clear."

Another thing that made Ells not happy was being on America's Next Great Restaurant, a reality show that had contestants vying to launch a new chain restaurant; the winning concept, a soul- food chain, failed immediately. Ells says he agreed to be one of the judges, at Crumpacker's urging, only because he thought it would give him a platform to talk about sustainability. "I had not seen a reality show before that. I didn't know the format. I was a little naive," Ells says. (Neither fellow judge Bobby Flay nor anyone else involved with the show wanted to talk to me about the experience with Ells, and that was before Chipotle sank $2.3 million into the short- lived Soul Daddy chain.)

Done with being on TV, Ells is back at work perfecting his recipes, searching for local cilantro, trying to find a breed of chicken that can exist outside cramped coops while providing enough meat to be financially sustainable. "I used to want everything right away 19 years ago when I started Chipotle. Now I'm able to look at what the next 19 years are," he says. Ells might be serving customers in a fast-food, reality-show culture, but he's refusing to live in it. Eventually, he hopes, they'll notice he's right.