“Los Angeles, it’s a little bit different,” the chef Alvin Cailan recently said about his former home. “When the sun’s out, you kind of just want to lounge around and like, drink.” However, Mr. Cailan, 35, has always preferred more of an adrenaline rush. In 2017, after years of running his West Coast microchain, Eggslut, Mr. Cailan went bicoastal, dividing his time between various restaurant projects and serving as the host of “The Burger Show,” a web series. This past April, he and his girlfriend, Angela Gomez, 27, moved to Manhattan permanently with Dashi, their American Bully. They are now living together in an apartment in NoLIta, with Mr. Cailan’s general manager, Kim Trac, 31, a block away. And in early July, Mr. Cailan will open his first New York restaurant, The Usual, in the Nolitan Hotel, at 30 Kenmare Street. He plans to serve, as he told The Times recently, “the food we all crave,” prepared by “the children of immigrants.”

SLOW START I like to roll out of bed around 8:30, 8. I usually just like to have a real slow start, like sit, lounge on the couch. I love hip-hop, but I can’t listen to hip-hop in the morning. I hate the news; I don’t like aggressive things as I wake up. Even like my girlfriend, if she tries to wake me up, she has to like, slowly do it because it’s like if someone wakes me up by yelling, I jump out of bed and I’m already like, “What is going on?”