Generation Chef (10 page)

The best thing to do, he figured, was to make inside jokes to keep the cooks' spirits up. Another diner sealed her fate and credibility when she complained loudly that there was no decaf.

Nate conveyed this to Jonah with a sly grin, and Jonah replied just loud enough for Jenni and Alyssa to hear.

“Tell her to go back to the Upper West Side,” he said, the neighborhood where Jonah, Nate, and Luke had grown up, known for a great
number of mediocre restaurants that might not care how bad the decaf was. “We're below Fourteenth Street. We don't have decaf here.” Downtown had standards and was proud of it, was the way he felt.

By nine the bar was packed and the tall front tables, full, even if several of the parties qualified as extended family—friends of Jonah and his parents, the line cook's parents, Chad. A party of three, people Jonah didn't know, sailed past the kitchen on their way out, and the man stopped just long enough to tell Jonah that he'd been looking for a pintxos place and clearly Huertas was it.

It took Jonah a moment to process the stranger's compliment. “Well,” he called at the man's departing back. “Thank you.”

•   •   •

It was after ten
when a couple passed by the kitchen on the way to the dining room, but the reservation sheet said that the last table was at nine thirty. Jonah beckoned Luke over to the pass to find out why a nine thirty reservation was ordering at ten fifteen.

“Why did these people wait forty-five minutes for a table?”

“Table fifty wasn't ready,” said Luke. “They sat at the bar.”

Jonah's features flatlined: His eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth turned into grim horizontal lines, and he looked as though he was trying very hard not to say what he was thinking.

He pointed to the first booth, directly across from the pass, which had been empty for hours. “Why didn't we put them there?”

It was a trick question. There was no good answer, because they should have used the booth, and Luke didn't even try to respond. He'd been anxious about getting everything right, as Jonah and Nate were, but he came from a world of rules, not improvisation. At this point in Le Cirque's long history, he'd learned far more about gracious, codified
hospitality than about putting out fires. The couple had a reservation for the menu del dia, which they served only in the dining room. He simply hadn't considered putting them anywhere but there.

“How many drinks did we buy them at the bar?” asked Jonah.

“They had hard cider,” said Luke.

Jonah hardly considered that much of an apology for a forty-five-minute wait. Luke should have put them in the booth and comped them a glass of wine or sherry. Jonah forgot that he was in an open kitchen three feet from customers and raised his voice loud enough for anyone to hear.

“But how many fucking drinks did we
buy
them?” he asked. “Forty-five minutes is amateur hour. We ought to buy their whole fucking meal.”

He turned away from Luke, asked a dining-room server what the couple had ordered to drink with their delayed dinner, and said, “Good. Comp them,” without even registering what the answer was.

“They're really happy,” she said, to try to calm him down.

“I suppose that's all that matters.” He gave her a plate of complimentary pintxos, the special tuna quenelles on cod-skin chips, and went back to work, too angry to speak either to Luke or to Nate, who had zoomed over to quiet things down.

Luke retreated to the host station to make sure there was no more trouble brewing and came back to report that there was in fact one more reservation at ten thirty, and that another nine thirty was clearly a no-show. Jonah brushed past him without making eye contact to run dishes to someone he knew. He simmered for fifteen minutes, not talking to anyone, until a hapless new runner asked a question he should have known the answer to.

He refused to talk to the kid.

“Get me a manager.”

When Nate came over, Jonah addressed him as though the runner
were not standing right there, with guests as close as they'd been for the previous outburst. “This clown comes over to me,” he began, pushing on the word “clown,” but he was too upset to talk, and instead let himself be distracted by the final ticket of the night.

The runner darted back to the bar to make sure the problem had been resolved, and then meekly approached the pass again, to report that everything was okay. Jonah ignored him and pronounced sentence as soon as he walked back onto the floor.

“Either he wants to work here or he doesn't,” Jonah told Nate, who was hovering nearby. Nate could educate the kid, fast, or fire him.

•   •   •

The people who'd been left
at the bar for forty-five minutes were the kind of mistake that could do damage if they didn't leave happy—on a small scale, if they decided never to come back or mention Huertas to a friend, or on a viral plane, in a Yelp review that got traction and inspired other anonymous diners to exaggerate their discontent. There was no room for blunders like that.

There was no time, either, not in a world where Huertas hit the Power Rankings before it opened and the review window was much tighter than it had been. The last generation of chefs had used the early weeks at a new restaurant to fine-tune the operation, but more media outlets meant more competition, and everything had sped up accordingly. In his first three weeks, Jonah had fed food magazine editors with voracious websites to fill, television producers who wanted to check him out for a morning-show feature, and bloggers who ranged from well-informed to self-promoting, even as they prepared to move on to the next new place.

Nate was already tracking reviews; Gato, TV chef Bobby Flay's heralded return to the kitchen, got a review in
New York
magazine only six
weeks after it opened, which meant that the magazine's critic, Adam Platt, had to have eaten there during the first month of business. By that count, a critic could walk in the door at Huertas tomorrow, if he hadn't already done so, unnoticed, two days earlier. Jonah and Nate and Luke always told the staff that they had to behave as though everyone were a potential critic. For all they knew, they had just offended the
New York Times
's Pete Wells, here for an early visit to see if Huertas deserved his attention, by making him wait—or if not Wells himself, then his next-door neighbor or best friend or dentist, someone whose offhand negative comment could damage their chances of a review.

The only thing worse than an early review or a bad review—the latter a notion they refused to entertain—was no review at all, and the math there was daunting. The
Times
ran a weekly restaurant review, and
New York
magazine had switched to a biweekly publication schedule the month before Huertas opened, effectively cutting its review output in half. There would be about fifty reviews a year in the
Times
and just over two dozen in
New York
magazine, not counting special issues and lists of the best this or that. According to the
Zagat Guide
's annual survey, 111 restaurants had opened in New York City in 2013, which meant that most of them would never get reviewed. Some got a first visit that didn't warrant a second, some got the standard three visits, and of that second group, some got reviews that drove business and some got reviews that made them yearn for benign neglect.

There was no way to affect the process, except to be as ready as possible, immediately, always. So Jonah blew up at Luke, on the chance that a ten-year-old dream had just been derailed by a couple stranded at the bar.

•   •   •

Nate was angry at both of them,
at Luke for a silly mistake and at Jonah for a leadership gaffe, so he cornered Jonah in the basement
office before they left for the night. “If you want to get angry at people,” he said, “do what you have to do. But don't vilify Luke or me in front of the staff. Do it behind closed doors. I can handle it. But we have to get the most out of the staff—and if they see you belittle us, it doesn't work.”

Jonah showed up at lineup again the next day, when he should have been getting ready for dinner service. He had to address what had happened without caving in—had to make the front-of-house staff feel more comfortable without yielding to some kind of feel-good compromise. He told them that several guests had complimented him on doing a good job “for only being open three weeks,” which stuck in his head and had the opposite of the intended flattering effect. To him, it meant that they'd noticed mistakes they were willing to forgive because Huertas was less than one month old.

What he wanted to hear, he told the staff, was, “Amazing—and only open a couple of weeks.” He did not apologize for demanding the kind of effort required, nor for blowing up at Luke.

“I'm very disappointed in what I saw,” he said, “but I know we can do better.”

G
rub Street's Restaurant Power Rankings made sure that Huertas opened to a crowd, and on May 1 Eater extended the streak by including the restaurant at number seven on the Heatmap, a monthly list of the twenty New York City restaurants that were generating the most buzz. It was the best kind of publicity, an endorsement without any of the qualifiers that might show up in a review, one based more on anticipation than on experience. Restaurant-chasers could hardly ignore a restaurant that was on both lists, even if it probably discouraged some diners from checking out Huertas until the early rush subsided—the ones who functioned at a more modulated pace, the potential regulars. A slowdown, with luck an almost imperceptible one, was inevitable and would likely happen as soon as the June Heatmap came out and the crowd that followed its recommendations moved on. In the long run, that could be a good thing: Just as the trendier customers gathered their miniature leather backpacks and shrink-brimmed fedoras and left, the next wave would muster its courage and venture out, reducing the odds of the dip in sales that the partners watched for, warily, in each day's sales totals.

For now, Huertas was on the short list. By mid-May there was a ninety-minute wait at the bar on a Friday or Saturday, and better still, people waited rather than head up the street to look for an alternative. Stew was in his element behind the bar, his eyebrow perpetually cocked in amusement, the constant patter droll enough to entertain but never a real conversation, which would disrupt his drink rhythm. People got a half-smile that said, Have a good time, but remember, I am not your best friend or confessor and I have to take care of everyone. He served the bar customers, handed off drink orders to the servers for the tables and the booths and the dining room, and did it all with enough of a flourish to make it look like fun. A passerby who hadn't seen the rankings saw a knot of people on the sidewalk, or glanced in and saw the wall-to-wall crowd, and figured that a place he'd never heard of must be worth a look. The crowd built itself.

On some weekend nights Jonah had to wait until twelve forty-five to break down the kitchen, and he kept one burner going even then, in case somebody wandered in late and hungry. The front-of-house staff started to shake itself out—one server quit before he got fired, another hurt his hand and showed up anyhow—and the kitchen kept its rhythm, with Chad and Alyssa to help. One night Antonio, a dishwasher from Empellón Cocina, wandered in to size things up and look for opportunity, told Jonah that he was using the wrong dish soap, and landed a Huertas shift from nine at night to one in the morning on top of the afternoon shift he already worked next door. Suddenly everything got that much smoother; adding Antonio was, Jonah said, “a godsend,” because Lance, the original dishwasher who wanted to cook, was a first-timer whose enthusiasm outweighed his experience.

Grub Street, Eater, and Zagat ran a brief item on the percebes on their websites and caused what Jonah called a “mini-stampede,” which required him to order more of them and turn what was supposed to be a
small treat into a temporary big deal. The conserva-and-beer deal was more of a draw than he or Nate had anticipated. He got people who ordered the menu del dia to eat chicken, despite Nate's reservations, by piling on morel mushrooms and asparagus, as he had planned—and he got them to order a cod entrée, the economical fish equivalent of chicken, by serving it with beets and emergo beans, a large white bean with a creamy texture and sweet flavor.

He didn't get as many people in the back room as he wanted, though—occasionally a dining-room table sat empty all night, and frequently the ones that did fill failed to turn a second time. Cancellations were still a problem, so much so that Nate endorsed overbooking by 15 or 20 percent, which was about the percentage of no-shows. If they were wrong on any given night, if fewer people bailed and the tables backed up, Nate knew how to finesse a wait.

“I can get out of a sticky situation by smiling and buying them drinks and then they're impressed with the operation,” he told Jonah. He wasn't going to leave a party stranded at the bar, as Luke had in the incident that so enraged Jonah, but would find a way to make the wait so enjoyable that people didn't mind. If the occasional party got irked and gave up, they'd still fill more tables than they were with the current system.

Luke, still smarting from the confrontation over the people he'd left at the bar, found himself reluctant to get in the middle of the debate—his credibility had sustained a sizable dent, or he worried that it had, although Jonah hadn't brought it up again. Jonah's silence was difficult to parse. They might be past the incident, or they might not, and Luke felt imbalanced, not knowing. The fact that the staff hadn't said much in the wake of the blow-up made things worse, somehow.

All of that aside, Luke knew that his perspective on reservations would frustrate both Jonah and Nate, should they ever ask, because it still boiled down to wait and see. Luke simply needed time to be able to
figure out how many of the dining-room tables they could hold back, and he thought it foolish to rush into a new plan until they fully understood the existing one.

Jonah agreed on that point: They needed to clarify their reservation policy rather than worry about how to manage the confusion. They didn't take reservations in the front room, to encourage people to walk in on the spur of the moment. They took reservations in the back, to accommodate people who wanted a more formal dinner and didn't want to wait for it—but given the current imbalance, he wanted to seat walk-ins in the dining room when there were empty tables and let them order pintxos or raciones from the front-room menu. Jonah didn't like to see empty tables in the back, not after a party had walked through the crowded, noisy front room to get there. On an off night, the room felt like purgatory. They had to communicate that it was available to people who got discouraged by the wait in the front.

Nate had a solution that he wasn't quite prepared to share, not yet, because it required them to tinker with Jonah's basic concept. He thought they might need to blur the distinction between the front and the back menus, not emphasize it, because people just didn't get it. Other restaurants had a bar room and a dining room—Gramercy Tavern, where Jonah had spent a summer, was one wildly successful example—but when Nate thought about it, front and back at Huertas were “radically different,” maybe too much so to make sense. The front and back at Gramercy Tavern were conceptual siblings, with more casual dishes served à la carte in the tavern room and a set of fixed tasting menus in a more formal setting in the dining rooms. He worried that Huertas was more like two distinct Spanish places cohabiting in a single space. A person in the front couldn't really cobble together a full meal, and a person in the back couldn't access the bustle that made the front feel like more fun. Nate was in more of a hurry than Jonah and Luke were to push the
issue if the back room didn't improve, but it was too soon to insist on any kind of official change.

They spent an increasing amount of time trying to figure out how to fill tables, to be one of those places that was booked solid from five thirty until after ten. Some of the most popular restaurants in town simply didn't take reservations and had elevated the long wait into a bustling outdoor scene, when the weather was good, or a stint at the bar, or even at someone else's nearby bar, when the weather was bad. They took cell-phone numbers and contacted people when their table was ready—or if a place was too popular to require such niceties, simply took names and left it to the diners to monitor their own progress. A surprising number of people accepted the policy as part of the fun, as reassuring proof that they had made the right choice. Jonah didn't want to do that. He talked a lot about the “experience” he wanted to provide, which involved making a diner feel cared for but not smothered. A guaranteed and untended wait was not part of his welcoming formula.

Whatever they did, the priority, for now, was to get through a crowded night without any large-scale glitches and hope that momentum carried Huertas through the traditional lull between Memorial Day and Labor Day—or rather, hope that they continued to attract the kind of media attention that sustained the momentum. Opening Huertas, opening any small place that wasn't part of an existing restaurant group, was like balancing on a set of stones to cross a stream, one step, one mention, at a time. So far they were luckier than many: Just as the May Heatmap expired and Huertas fell off the list for June, Zagat notified Jonah that he'd made the dining guide's 30 Under 30 list of young industry leaders in New York City. It was a nice nod, but the official announcement wouldn't come until early July, a potentially helpful coincidence for the midsummer launch of brunch service, useless as
long as it had to be kept secret. July was halfway to the other bank, the more secure footing of the post–Labor Day season; they needed coverage in June.
Food & Wine
was interested in featuring huevos rotos in their “Anatomy of a Dish” feature online, but that wouldn't run until August. Jonah appeared on a local cable show not because it would necessarily draw a big audience now but as an audition tape to show to larger outlets. He doubted that anyone saw it.

Jonah was invited to appear as one of sixteen contestants on Esquire TV's
Knife Fight
, a cable competition show among professional chefs run by Ilan Hall, the
Top Chef
winner in season two, and accepted with trepidation. If he'd felt he had a choice he would have said no, because there was nothing about it that appealed to him—he didn't see himself as a performer, winning seemed beside the point, and losing, an unnecessary humiliation. There certainly wasn't time to make anything that represented what he could do, and even if there were, mystery-box ingredients seemed chosen to stymie, not inspire. The only things the show had in common with his life were knives and raw ingredients and sources of heat, but turning it down was not an option, according to the publicist. When a cable show offered exposure to a chef with a new place, the only acceptable response seemed to be sure, thanks, even though it had the longest lead time of all the opportunities. By the time
Knife Fight
ran, Huertas would be a year old.

To get more attention now, the partners came up with two new promotional ideas for June, one authentic, the other an opportunistic nod to the popularity of sports bars. Pintxo pote was a tradition at many Spanish bars—bargain prices on nights that were otherwise too quiet—so Jonah decided to launch his own pintxo pote night on Tuesdays, every pintxo $1, when they usually cost between $2 and $4 each. And on Sundays during the World Cup they'd set up a big-screen television
in the dining room to show soccer games, and serve cheap drinks and cheap food in the style of the competing countries, with a Spanish twist: beer or a wine-and-Coke for $3, and dishes like Swiss rosti potatoes with the garlic sauce from Jonah's papas braviolis for $5.

Both ideas ought to merit at least an announcement on Eater, Grub Street, and some of the smaller local food sites, and the soccer afternoons would help to ease the staff into daytime weekend shifts, in advance of brunch service. That was the far more important announcement: Brunch launched on July 5. Too late, Jonah realized that they may have overdone it, putting out three announcements in barely three weeks. There was nothing to be done—he couldn't reel it back in—but he worried that bargain pintxos and soccer might eclipse brunch coverage. It was hard to know how much news was enough and not too much.

The challenge was not to think about any of it, since it was too late to fix, but to focus on the day-to-day and the fact that he and Marina were getting married in Sonoma, California, which required him to disappear for five days. Had Huertas opened on any of the opening dates it had missed, Jonah's long-planned wedding would have taken place after the restaurant had settled in, maybe even after it had been reviewed. He might have stayed away for more than five days including travel time. He and Marina might have had a honeymoon, which was out of the question for at least six months. The best they could hope for, instead, was to be left alone long enough to have a fast good time.

Nate and Luke swore they wouldn't bother him, Chad had settled into a routine in the kitchen, and Chris was set to arrive the day Jonah left town, and both of them had cooked in far bigger kitchens for many more people, under the kind of pressure that made even a rough day at Huertas look easy. They were there to exude calm, keep the collective spirit high, and maintain standards, all the while being careful not to step on Jenni's less experienced toes.

•   •   •

Nate calculated the May figures
before Jonah walked out the door and gave him an impressive pre-wedding present: Instead of losing $25,000, which was what they had projected for their first full month of business, they had made $20,000, a $45,000 swing in the right direction. It was exceptionally good news, and they allowed for a moment's euphoria before they forced themselves into a more sober and businesslike frame of mind. As Luke said, it was always better to under-promise and over-deliver, whether they were dealing with investors or customers. People had come in the first time because of all the media attention, but what if the press so far had been too positive? If it over-promised, if it made Huertas sound even better than it was, people might be disappointed and not come back.

Luke liked to say, “The only way to get a great review is to be great every day,” but they weren't there, not yet. He also liked to talk about how important it was to be humble, and if they were being humble, they had to ignore the very coverage they were chasing. Publicity was like a business suit one size too big; they didn't quite fill out their image. It wasn't that they were making big mistakes. They were inconsistent from one shift to the next—but they were new, that was all, and it could take a while to adjust to the variable of a fresh batch of customers every night. They needed a little time, and the airspace between reality and what people said about them made them hope that the media would neglect them for a couple of days, because they'd never had to operate without Jonah around. They wanted critics to catch wind of Huertas, even as they hoped no one would bother until the chef-owner got back from California.