I'm not in the restaurant business, so take what I say with a grain of salt (heh), but from the people I know in that business there's a wide variance in the actual business knowledge they possess.

You need enough capital to actually open the doors - that means not leasing the space with knob and tube wiring, residential drainage and a leaky roof. If that's all that's out there, you could simply not open yet and keep looking. In the OP, it sounded like that money was burning a hole in the owner's pocket and he had to open now. Patience.

Then once the doors are open, you need detailed, ongoing knowledge of your costs. There is no $29 chicken if it costs out to $31. If no one is going to pay $35 so that you can make a profit, it doesn't go on the menu. But you don't, as the author put it, sell $40 in cost for $29 simply because no one would pay $40. Then you get into ordering and spoilage, where even me as a total outsider, could tell you there's often money rotting in the walk-in. Point is, you must know your real operating costs before you ever even stand a chance.

Then you have to go out there and not suck. For a chef opening a restaurant, this is probably the part they're focused on. Problem is, you could be sunk before you even get to this stage. The guys that are successful and worked under successful people for a long time probably learned quite a bit about running the business, and is why they have better odds.

tl;dr - Under-capitalization is a leading cause of failure for many businesses. You can't make up your operating losses in volume. Don't open any business if you aren't prepared to live and breathe the minutiae of your costs.