Generation Chef (13 page)

•   •   •

“This is the longest day of my life,”
said Jenni, who had sent out two brunch orders and had nothing to do. She'd gone to sleep at one thirty the night before, only to wake up at five for no reason. She couldn't fall back asleep, which left her too tired to organize her morning, too tired to eat breakfast before she came to work, too tired to do anything but stay awake until brunch ended.

On a busy day, Jenni could work straight through from morning prep to the end of dinner service and not collapse until she was done. On a dead day like this, the most pressing item on her agenda was fighting fatigue. She tried to distract herself by paging through a Spanish cookbook with Joe, the extern from a local culinary school.

“This sounds delicious. We should make this. Sugar-coated fried bread,” she said, tapping a page with her finger until the sound woke up a couple of brain cells. “Oh. French toast. We're making it already.”

Chagrined, she allowed herself the smallest complaint aimed at anyone who might listen: She was hungry. She needed protein. Even a spoonful of peanut butter would help.

Chris, who seemed never to fade, dove into the kitchen's snack cache and produced a banana, which he deep-fried and put on a plate with a dollop of peanut butter. He plunked it down in front of Jenni, let her register how nice the presentation was, and cut it into thirds for her, Alyssa, and himself.

“Wait,” he said. “I have a better way to do this.” He grabbed another banana, floured it first, and dipped it into the deep fryer. Jonah wandered over as Chris started to slice it—new food drew everyone, no
matter what it was—and Chris ceremoniously handed the first piece to the chef. He plated the rest as Nate and Luke joined the group.

“You can't eat it,” Chris warned Nate. “It's floured.”

“I can eat it,” said Nate, who ate a gluten-free diet most of the time, except when desire occasionally trumped reason.

“And you don't even share,” said Luke.

“Dude,” said Nate, his mouth full. “There's more right there for you.”

But Chris had put the remaining three slices in front of Jenni, grabbed a bottle of a sweet reduced sherry sauce, and drizzled some of it over the top. Brunch service might mean two tables of friends in an otherwise dark restaurant, but he had standards. Nobody was going to get through a shift on a glob of peanut butter on a spoon, or even on a deep-fried banana that improved with a second draft.

•   •   •

Richard Coraine,
USHG's chief development officer, had told Jonah that the Huertas business plan was one of the best, most comprehensive proposals he'd seen—high praise from a man who had spent thirty years in the hospitality business, developing new restaurants or choosing not to pursue projects that failed to measure up. He knew every pitfall a start-up faced; he knew what was going on at Huertas without having to walk in the door. A young chef might have a notion of the food he wanted to cook and the space in which he wanted to cook it. Coraine had a fuller sense of just how much of their energy was about to be diverted from food.

“A cook cooks,” said Coraine. “But a chef-owner manages.”

Jonah's first management challenge was the fun part, as he looked for ways to help his staff build their skills and survive the opening rush. But their sense of mastery rose just as the number of customers dipped, and the sum of those two things was too many empty minutes. If people
felt that they knew how to handle their jobs and had fewer tasks spread over the same number of hours, they skipped right past relief and hit boredom, which in turn sat next to anxiety about job security.

That was a new problem for Jonah. Traffic was still too unpredictable to consider cutting shifts, which could leave him understaffed, and free time wasn't as valuable as a paycheck. He didn't want to risk losing anyone to a more reliable job, and yet he couldn't pay people to stand around. He had to find something more than promises about the fall to keep them engaged.

“It's hard to keep people focused when it isn't busy,” he said. “Much better when there's too much to do.” Pintxo pote helped, some, on Tuesdays. Soccer Sundays were sketchier, but he saw another opportunity there. On one Sunday the crowd was so small that he let the servers watch the game with everyone else, so in a way they were getting paid for doing what they might have been doing if they hadn't been at work. If he couldn't increase the tip pool, he could at least let them enjoy the afternoon.

The Eater review didn't yield an immediate bounce, though Jonah blamed the dead Fourth of July weekend for that as well as for the low brunch turnout. He tried to inspire people by example—showed up even when he could have carved out a little free time for himself, and tackled any chore, no matter how small. The handle on the walk-in refrigerator broke, not for the first time, so he took it apart, found a broken spring, and went to the hardware store to buy a replacement. He fixed it himself, a nice distraction from the fact that summer was turning out to be slump season after all.

•   •   •

The second brunch weekend
was as slow as the first, and Nate, who liked to be well ahead of trouble, started to look for explanations that
he could shape into a theory and, from there, a practical solution. He commuted on his bicycle from Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, and by mid-month he'd realized that the streets were deserted no matter what time he was out, which had to be a big part of the reason for the empty tables on the weekend—and, he had to admit, the dwindling numbers at night. He wondered if the competition was suffering as much as Huertas was. It would be reassuring to know that more experienced and successful restaurateurs were in the same boat, which meant that the problem was on the street, not inside the restaurant.

He approached the owners of El Rey, a tiny, popular spot several blocks south that was only six months older than Huertas, to see if they could put things in perspective, which they could. Everyone was suffering, in great part because the people who sustained restaurants weren't, anymore. When the economy was bad, as it had been for the previous five summers, people who could no longer rationalize a weekend out of town settled instead for a long, alcohol-fueled brunch or a couple of dinners out. This year, a healthier stock market had put money back in people's bank accounts, so for the first time in a while they took that monthlong time-share at the beach.

If they kept spending when they got back, business was going to be great after Labor Day, but for now it was way too quiet.

There was nothing Nate could do about the mass exodus, but he could try to improve things on a small scale. On an empty Sunday in mid-July, he stood in the doorway ready to will people to abandon a cloudless day for the cool, dark recesses of Huertas. One woman wandered up, talking on her cell phone, and stood in the shade of Huertas's entrance, glancing at the menu posted in the window while she continued her conversation. She hung up but didn't move, as though she were confused about what to do next, so Nate wandered over to ask if he could be of any help.

“What happened to Empellón?” she asked, referring to the restaurant next door.

“Nothing,” he said, “but they're not open for brunch.”

He waited. Huertas was clearly open for brunch. He smiled, but she was already back on her phone, heading up the block.

A half hour later his mood had improved, based on nothing more significant than two tables of first-timers, representatives of all the people who had yet to try Huertas, some of whom would find out about it from these newcomers. “This is the best brunch in New York City,” he announced to no one in particular. By mid-afternoon the window tables and three of the bar tables were full and there was one guy at the bar and a bigger party in the first booth. It wasn't good by a long shot, but it wasn't bad, and it was definitely a move in the right direction.

L
uke told Jonah they needed to talk, knowing that there were only two ways the conversation could go: Either Jonah would reassure him that he was making a valuable contribution, which Luke himself had begun to doubt, or he would quit, keep his small ownership stake, but lose his scheduled bonuses.

The couple who had waited at the bar for forty-five minutes back in early May had a dramatic effect on Huertas, but not the sort anyone had anticipated, no harsh online comments, nothing like that. For Luke, the incident was a sign that he was the wrong guy in the wrong place, a nagging feeling that refused to go away. The man who was always wary of the next-new-thing mentality felt out of sync, and he confessed his concerns to Nate a couple of times—who at first reassured him that everything was fine, but after a while acted more like a sounding board when he saw that Luke was getting frustrated or upset. Maybe everything wasn't fine; Jonah had yet to acknowledge that there was a problem or to reassure Luke about the value of his contributions. That was part of Luke's discomfort—he wasn't always sure that Jonah
and Nate were right about what increasingly seemed like a hurried agenda.

Luke got caught in a cycle: He felt that he ought to have more input, but Jonah didn't seem as interested in what he had to say as Luke thought he should be. He started to doubt that his participation was of sufficient value, got sidetracked by insecurity, and let his work suffer by not speaking up as often as he had in the past, which gave Jonah cause to be less interested.

But Luke saw himself as an essential link between the chef and the customers, because he was the one greeting them at the door and visiting their table or bar stool to see how they were doing. What he had to say about the menu ought to count, he thought, and yet it seemed not to. At first he told himself that he had to get used to working at a chef-run restaurant after Le Cirque, where the owner was from the front of house and the chef, an employee. In the end, he felt as though neither he nor Jonah had figured it out.

“I think communication has been trying for me,” he said. “For example, the development of the menu. For a chef that's incredibly personal. They put their heart and soul into it, and it can be hard for others of us to have input. But that's our responsibility, to have input. It's our job to have input. We look at the structure of the menu, and sometimes specific dishes. We try to identify problems with the business in any area. That's our job.”

So he came to Jonah, to give him a chance to say that Luke had misread the signals.

“When it gets to a year,” Luke began, “I don't want you to feel that I haven't earned my sweat equity,” which working partners earned once they'd been at Huertas for that long. He wanted Jonah to understand that he felt hamstrung, that he could do more if only Jonah would listen.

Jonah wasn't going to argue with him about his perceptions because they were accurate. He had started to turn to Nate rather than to Luke—and had come to think that having two comanagers was not a smart idea in the first place. There was no rationale for having both of them, and of the two Nate was a better fit. Luke was a sweet guy with what Jonah thought of as a “midtown, over-the-top showmanship background.” Nate was “more of a bulldog who takes things in his teeth,” which was better for the business in the long run. If Jonah had known that Nate was available when he started to look, he would have stopped there.

It was a painful meeting, but Jonah could not afford to be guided by emotion. This wasn't going to get any better. He'd be more relaxed, he realized, with just one managing partner.

He didn't ask Luke to stay. Luke gave him a month's notice, and they agreed not to tell the staff until two weeks before his departure, to give them less time to feel unsettled.

For an angry moment, Luke thought about asking for his $10,000 investment back, but he didn't let himself say anything about it. He prided himself on being a glass-half-full type of person, and it would have been a stretch for Jonah to write that check right now. Besides, Luke wanted Jonah to know that he still believed in the restaurant's potential and hoped to be helpful down the line, if there was anything that he or Nate needed. Leaving was a personal decision, not a change of heart about the business.

Still, he was upset about the outcome, if not entirely surprised. His priority now was to figure out how to present this as his decision, not as an indication that he couldn't hack it. He had talked about this opportunity nonstop since he first got involved—and it wasn't like he had a great next job lined up. People might think that he was giving up, or worse, that he'd been encouraged to leave.

“Lots of my friends know this place,” he said, “and they were excited for me. How do I explain it to friends, and professionally?”

More and more, Luke thought about the question he'd asked Jonah before he decided to become a partner: Did Jonah worry at all about starting a business without having any management experience? At the time, Luke had said that it seemed an unusual step to take—most would-be owners waited until they'd worked as an executive sous or chef de cuisine before heading out on their own. In his distress at Jonah's attitude, now, he decided that the skipped step, not his own performance, accounted in great part for what had happened.

He, Nate, and Jonah had plenty of energy and passion, but they were making it up as they went along, their ideas based too often on borrowed memories of places they'd worked or on philosophies of people they admired. It wasn't their own knowledge or experience, though it made him feel like an old fogey to think that way.

They didn't yet have a strategy. They had reactions, and Luke wasn't comfortable operating on the fly like that, or on what felt like the fly to someone who was used to a more considered pace.

“That middle step might've helped,” he said. “And neither Nate nor I have been the top guy. We took a chance. Chefs have unique personalities; they think they can do everything. We have all this confidence because we have nothing to tell us otherwise. We're in our twenties. There's no nuanced perspective. We think we can do anything. We operate on confidence and emotion.”

“We don't have perspective on anything,” he said. “We're too young.”

•   •   •

Nate was not
the sort to dwell—not when Huertas was “bleeding money,” in his urgent estimate, as losses increased in the first two weeks of July. Nobody was going to come out and say that it had been a
mistake to have three partners when the usual arrangement was two, one in the kitchen and one out front, but it had been an odd fit regardless of the personalities involved. He felt that he'd learned a lot from Jonah already, about technical proficiency and precision, and that the two of them operated on a similar high-speed wavelength. While he was sorry that Luke felt uncomfortable enough to leave, he had to admit that he was excited about the new arrangement, and hopeful that he and Jonah could start to turn things around.

“In the long run it's sort of what I always wanted, so I'm okay with it,” he said, his mind already a jumble of plans he wanted to discuss with Jonah, everything from menu changes to cocktail dreams to new promotions. If Luke was the most cautious of the three, Nate was the one who figured they had to take chances. He was aware that the transition wasn't going to be easy—as it was, he spent his two days off answering questions via text or phone call, and even that was about to evaporate. It was going to be a siege, at least temporarily. It was also his chance, two months shy of twenty-five, to be in charge of everything at Huertas outside the confines of the kitchen, which made him more excited than scared.

Luke saw the partners' youth and inexperience as a drawback, while Nate saw it as a plus: They were flexible, while an older restaurateur might be stuck in his ways. They were fast on their feet and open to suggestion. Nate networked like crazy, ate at restaurants he admired, took mental notes throughout the meal, and met more experienced restaurateurs for lunch or drinks to ask for advice.

“I want to say to Jonah, You go back to the kitchen,” he said. “Let me run the business.”

First, they had to resuscitate it. The first brunch shift brought in $550 instead of the thousands they'd projected; revenue for the first week of July was $11,000, when an average summer week should bring
in $23,000. Yes, it was a short week because of the holiday—but no, a single day would not have made enough of a difference. It was the worst week so far, and all the rationales in the world couldn't erase the fact that they were down from almost $35,000 per week in May. He and Jonah agreed: In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to launch brunch so quickly, over a holiday weekend in the middle of the summer.

All they could do was look for ways not to make it worse. Nate started freezing quarts of fresh orange juice when supply outstripped demand, because he was not about to waste it. He had ten quarts stored in the freezer downstairs. If a couple of tables filled up, he grabbed one and ran it under hot water, fast, to defrost it.

He quietly cut back on the size of the wine orders without mentioning it to Stew, ordering three cases of wine rather than five even though each bottle ended up costing more because he missed out on the volume discount. In the short run, it looked better to spend $300 less on wine. It ran counter to what Nate knew to be true—you had to spend money to make money—but you had to have money to spend it.

He and Jonah began to hope that the
New York Times
would take the summer off along with everyone else. They used to think that the only thing worse than a bad review was no review at all. Now they added a third circle of hell: a great review in the middle of the slowest summer in recent memory.

•   •   •

David Waltuck looked at dozens
of places before he found the one that most closely met his requirements, a space on a busy restaurant block across the street from the always-crowded Gramercy Tavern, surrounded by restaurants that would drive traffic but were different enough to make his new place, Élan, an alternative rather than a direct competitor. The space had been a restaurant, which meant savings of
both time and money: He needed to change the look in the front, but he could use the existing kitchen, which meant that he could be ready to open, and so to recoup his costs, more quickly. A vanilla box held no appeal for him: Waltuck was happy to inherit a useable space, recast the front in his image, and get back to work.

The rent was $30,000 a month, but the first three months were free, a standard reprieve in a restaurant lease to give the owner time to remodel or rebuild as necessary. The previous owner insisted on an additional $400,000 in key money to cover HVAC improvements—heat, ventilation, and air-conditioning—which Waltuck was willing to pay, if grudgingly, because that was time saved as well, upgrade work he didn't have to do, permits he didn't have to chase. He could devote his energies to making the room beautiful and to devising a menu that offered Chanterelle favorites, like a signature seafood sausage, alongside newer dishes.

He installed a twelve-seat bar in the front and a banquette anchored by a big curved booth, along with freestanding tables, in the forty-eight-seat dining room. It was all done in quiet neutrals, cream, gray, brown, and black, with cylindrical light fixtures descending from the ceiling in both rooms and a set of Chuck Close self-portraits that had hung at Chanterelle installed across from the bar. Waltuck intended Élan to be more casual than Chanterelle had been, to take a few chances with the food that he might not have tried at a restaurant with four stars to sustain. Today's diner wasn't as interested in the kind of dining experience that had put thirteen-year-old Jonah and Nat in suits and ties, and he had to acknowledge that.

Élan opened in late June, and while an immediate rush would have been gratifying, Waltuck had a more tempered perspective. He had his regulars, and it was summer, and he didn't have anything resembling a social media presence to let the uninitiated know what was waiting for
them. Despite his skepticism about hiring someone to wrangle publicity, he and his partner had brought on a publicist, at least for the early months, and he'd had some coverage on Eater and Grub Street, which was nice but felt tangential. Waltuck wasn't convinced that it paved the road to lasting success. He relied instead on Chanterelle's mailing list, thousands of loyal customers, many of whom were eager to see what he was up to this time. That would be his foundation until the fall, when vacationers returned to town and the street would be full of people who were used to coming to this neighborhood to eat.

One day, when the weather was particularly nice, he opened the floor-to-ceiling front windows to let sunlight cascade over the bar—and just like that, as though someone had cued the actors to walk onstage, people started to wander into the restaurant, attracted by the notion of a meal in the sun-bathed room. The front filled up with animated, happy customers, and Waltuck had his first optimist's glimpse of how the future might look.

•   •   •

Luke changed from a T-shirt
and baggy shorts into a dress shirt and slacks for the lineup meeting on July 23, as though he wanted to dignify what he was about to say, to make it more of an announcement than a concession. Jonah came in quietly and sat down, even though he usually skipped lineup. He needed to be there in case people got upset.

“How's everybody today?” asked Luke. No one spoke, the only sound the
click-click-click
of Luke's ballpoint pen.

As soon as the last person sat down, Luke launched into his speech. “I want to let everyone know that I've made a decision for myself, personally. I'm going to move on.” Several sets of eyebrows rose in surprise. “It's a decision I thought a lot about, and I have the full support of Jonah and Nate.”