Earlier this year, Mr. Harding slipped and fell, breaking his leg, and was out of work for months. He couldn’t pay his gas bill. Con Edison cut him off.

It was around that time he traded in his toque for the legal pad and a freelance career as a consultant, which mainly means that he spends his time helping friends and colleagues achieve their gastronomic dreams. “I just don’t identify with chef’s whites anymore,” he said. “I’m much more interested in building and design.”

With that in mind, he arrived at his first stop of the day: a onetime auto body shop that now contains a commissary kitchen that produces food for Oaxaca Taquería, a chain of Mexican restaurants. Oaxaca’s owner, David Schneider, hired Mr. Harding a couple of years ago to act as a location scout and to help him build his business. “Alan’s a jack-of-all-trades,” Mr. Schneider said. “He’s got a great aesthetic and he’s very hands-on and he can follow through himself with the construction.”

Image Mr. Harding at a branch of Oaxaca with David Schneider, the chain’s owner, who hired him to scout new locations. Credit... Brian Harkin for The New York Times

As for Mr. Harding’s departure from the kitchen (and, of course, the headlines), Mr. Schneider said: “Look, we’re getting older now. When you reach a certain age, you don’t want to be stuck in a kitchen from noon till 2 in the morning. I think Alan’s happy doing what he’s doing. It’s kind of like a better lifestyle thing.”

Despite its changes, Mr. Harding’s lifestyle is still inflected with the outlaw air he perfected at Patois, where diners ate in winter beneath a makeshift heated tent and were secretly served wine despite the absence of a liquor license. These days, he spends hours in his truck, traversing the more-obscure streets of Brooklyn, smoking cigars and blasting classic rock. Necessity has turned him into a hustler — and a skilled illegal parker. As he approached his second stop, a store on Putnam Avenue where he plans to help a friend install her coffee bar, he blithely left his vehicle in the middle of a crosswalk.

Fifteen minutes later he was off to yet another person’s restaurant: Bluebird, on Flatbush Avenue, which Jimmy Mamary, his partner at Patois, expects to open this month. After double-parking his truck, Mr. Harding sat down at a table covered in construction dust to help his former colleague brainstorm items for his menu: potato-mushroom pierogies, molasses-smoked chicken wings, a pork belly B.L.T.