Generation Chef (14 page)

Servers and runners came and went all the time, but Luke was a partner, and his departure fairly guaranteed further disruption down the line because he'd brought in some of the front-of-house staff, who might not be as eager—or as welcome—to work here without him. Shaky work schedules and empty seats were bad-enough signs on the barometer of restaurant health, but a departing partner was a big deal.

“I want to say how incredibly proud I am of what we've done,” Luke went on. “We've opened a successful restaurant, so far, in what is probably the most difficult restaurant environment in the world. And this is a family affair—no big investors, no corporate backers, just friends and family. Hard work, a great concept, smart people, and a value system that others will model after.”

The staff sat there, silent, for too long, so Nate broke in to ask Jonah to review the new menu items. There was a dish with what Jonah and Chris called burnt eggplant, but a server asked if they should call it charred eggplant instead, because a guest hadn't liked the idea that he was about to be served a burnt vegetable. Jonah settled happily into teacher mode, a nice refuge in the wake of Luke's speech.

“It's not okay to burn a steak, you want to char it,” he said, “but with eggplant you actually burn the skin. Inside it's still creamy, and then you puree the whole thing to get a smoky, earthy quality. But if you keep getting weird reactions let us know. We can always say charred.”

With that, everyone got up and went back to work. There was never any time to linger between lineup and the start of dinner service.

•   •   •

Jonah usually
left the intelligence work to Nate while he focused on the food, but as the summer droned on he started to solicit opinions about how pervasive the slump was, in the hope that it would help him maintain the proper steady managerial air. Alex Stupak, the chef-
owner of Empellón Cocina, said that they were slow, which made Jonah feel better. Peter Hoffman had advised Jonah to wait to launch brunch in the fall—and even though Jonah had ignored him, he took comfort now in the notion that brunch was a timing error and would pick up along with everything else at summer's end. He paid more attention to Nate's reports and concluded that this was a phase, and not one that was in any way specific to Huertas.

Jonah kept telling himself that a quiet summer had its advantages—they had the rest of July and all of August to get in shape for the fall, and by then all the big staff changes would be out of the way. Luke was leaving. Chad and Chris were leaving in early August. Jonah got Alyssa to come on full-time as the lead line cook, with the promise of a promotion to sous chef once they opened for lunch, and hired a line cook to work the fry station. He'd already seen how self-sufficient Alyssa was, how she managed outward calm no matter how crazy it got or how overwhelmed she might feel, and the new cook, twenty-four-year-old Max Loflin, had an impressive amount of experience. He'd worked at a pizza place during high school, found a mentor at a French bistro, and then bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, where he worked at a hostel in exchange for food while he learned about the cuisine. He worked at one of John Besh's New Orleans restaurants on his return—and had built up a set of practical skills that were good enough to get him trails at Eleven Madison Park, The Modern, and Jean-Georges. Huertas was the oddity on that list, smaller, far less formal, but Huertas promised a tutorial in how to open a restaurant, and Max wanted to know that as much as anything. He wasn't quite as buttoned-down as Alyssa was, but he knew his stuff.

The real kitchen, the one Jonah would have moving forward, would be in place a couple of weeks before Labor Day. The outside help had stabilized the kitchen while they got under way, but now it was up to the
full-time staff, plus the one additional cook Jonah would have hired already if every delayed extra shift weren't money saved.

He knew what customers were spending down to the dollar, and the $42 check average at the bar gave him reason for hope; it kept a bad summer in the back room from devolving into a catastrophe. He wanted to do two turns in the dining room every night—at their peak, in the early weeks, they beat two turns—but the room didn't even fill on weeknights and turned only a handful of tables on the weekend.

The dicier things got, the faster Nate fired ideas at him: They should do the family-style large-format dinners sooner, or try a five-course tasting menu with no choices instead of the current four-course with options for two of them. Smaller, nicer proteins. Jonah resisted it all, or at least thought about it more slowly than his partner might have liked.

The dining room was Jonah's pride, the place where he showed people what he could do as a chef, while the front room was not that much of a creative challenge. He considered half steps—they could use the back for private parties and push that aspect of the business. They could try to find new ways to lure customers who were, as he saw it, “really serious about the dining experience.” He sensed some resistance to the set menu, but he wasn't prepared to consider a wholesale shift this soon. There was always the danger of changing too much too fast. Better to see if September lived up to their expectations, which he continued to assume it would.

He and Nate talked instead about ways to save money in August, which meant a judicious pruning of labor costs, a move he'd been unwilling to consider only weeks earlier—nothing that would unnerve staffers and encourage defections, but a reasonable trim that would only last until Labor Day. He knew who needed to work and who wouldn't mind having an extra day off, and they ought to be able to navigate for four or five weeks without creating a new crisis. He could
improve his already economical food costs, and Nate had already found ways to minimize the outlay for liquor.

Jonah was not going to let himself panic, or even spend too much time worrying about the daily reports. Disappointment had only crept into his brain since Memorial Day, after all, and had little lasting chance against a dream that had seniority by more than a decade.

He preferred to think about his second restaurant, a useful, pleasant distraction that was always on his mind. Jonah used to say that it wasn't much harder to open seventy-five seats than forty, but now that he had to fill almost seventy seats, he wasn't so sure. Maybe the next place ought to be forty seats, a vermút and pintxo bar, or a bar that served tortillas and papas. He thought about Maialino and Marta, both of them bigger but both of them in hotels, and wondered if that was the smart move, if the pluses of shared risk compensated for added responsibilities like room service—not that any hotels had come calling, but a worthy debate in case they did down the line. He thought about taking a space in a food hall, should anybody ever offer him one, because it was another way to have someone else foot part of the bill.

Jonah saw a piece on Eater about the way in which David Waltuck prepared General Tso's sweetbreads, a version of a Chanterelle dish that Waltuck had retooled for Élan, and it made Jonah think about how risky that venture seemed. Thirty-five years after Waltuck opened Chanterelle, the new place was, as Jonah saw it, “still him and his food,” and he wondered if that would be enough to survive in the current restaurant climate. More than one restaurant was an insurance policy. If Jonah were selling drinks and pintxos at some crowded little bar on a more densely trafficked street in the West Village, or in Williamsburg, it might take the edge off of Huertas's July.

Whatever the project, Jonah wanted to work with Chris, and thinking about that possibility helped to restore his equilibrium. They'd been
talking about it since they cooked next to each other on the line at Maialino. They might be on different paths at the moment, Jonah striking out on his own, Chris working his way up inside a large company, but there was a reunion on the horizon; Jonah knew it. He figured he'd give Chris a year at Marta and then they'd talk seriously about what they might do next.

July 2015. By then, July 2014 was going to be the kind of wreck they joked about from a far better vantage point.

Jonah lifted his hand and traced an ascent in the air. “Labor Day should be like this, and then—” He raised his hand farther, let it float along at that new level, and smiled.

•   •   •

The one-story building that
Gavin Kaysen found in Minneapolis started life as a stable, and then became a warren of small offices with a warehouse at the rear. He would have to gut the space and start over—first create a vanilla box and then start the build-out—but the location made the effort worthwhile. The building was in the city's North Loop, a warehouse district where old industrial buildings woke up one morning to find that they'd become stylish condominiums with faded photos of the original carriage works lining the walls, and a fledgling coffee bar took up residence diagonally across the street from a short row of gentlemen's clubs. Another nearby club was slated to be transformed into a boutique hotel—and The Bachelor Farmer restaurant, which opened in 2011 in an old warehouse a block in the opposite direction, had shown that the neighborhood could sustain an ambitious restaurant. The momentum was reassuring; this was not going to be the kind of byzantine challenge chefs could face in New York City. Minneapolis clearly welcomed the upgrade.

The prices, given what Kaysen had seen during his New York City
search, were ridiculously low: Rent on the 6,400-square-foot space was under twenty dollars per square foot, including taxes—less than half of Jonah's rent for more than three times the space. That kind of rent changed everything; it enabled Kaysen to spend more on food and staff and decor without getting anywhere near the perilous edge. The warehouse space would turn into storage and prep facilities, and at the back of the dining room he would build a showcase display kitchen that ran the width of the room—with a counter providing front-row seats for a handful of diners who could watch his kitchen staff cook and plate every course. He would have a bar up front, booths along the opposite wall, and tables throughout the room, 120 seats with space left over for a 40-seat private dining room.

And he would have two things that were hard to come by for a first-time chef-owner in New York: enough space, and not too much noise. Rent would have precluded the former, and style dictated the latter, if he'd stayed put on the East Coast; a jammed, loud restaurant had been the epitome of New York dining fun for several years. Kaysen was going to have room between tables for people to walk by without turning sideways and apologizing, and just enough noise to make the place seem like everyone was having a good time, all because he was in a position to define his terms.

He signed a twenty-year lease, ten years at the current rent with two five-year renewal options that came with a comforting price cap. He would call the place Spoon and Stable—spoon, because he liked to collect them, including the ones his brother would turn into a wall hanging for the dining room, and stable, a nod to the past.

At thirty-five, Kaysen was months from opening his own place, eager to think about the menu and the ways in which he could utilize local products. It was more complex—and satisfying—than simply ordering from vendors. He wanted to talk about duck with the guy who
owned the Wild Acres game farm, not only about acquiring some but about what they were fed and how they were stored once they were killed and cleaned. Plastic bags, came the answer. Kaysen thought that dry-aging them might work better, the owner was willing to give it a try, and from there, Kaysen had a supplier of exactly the kind of duck he wanted, and Wild Acres had a standing order for sixty to eighty ducks per week.

So much of the project was reassuring: the proportional costs, the matter-of-fact process, the kind of reasonable behavior that was not so common in New York. The flip side of that was that everything was so straightforward. The calm was unnerving. Kaysen had anxious moments when he missed the manic excitement of restaurant life in New York. This was light-years from what he remembered: dining out as a popular competitive sport, everyone in a rush to be able to say that they'd been to the next new place, so many times that they had little trouble landing a table.

It remained to be seen if Minneapolis locals would support what Kaysen intended to do, or if anyone might take a drive up from Chicago, say, to check him out—or if food just didn't generate that kind of excitement here. Kaysen's wife reminded him of what he'd said when he first took the leap and made his decision: If he concentrated on great food and great service, people would seek him out.

J
onah and Nate stopped cashing their paychecks in August. They cut the checks so that no one would notice and inquire, and then they tucked them in their wallets rather than deposit them. For one month—it had better not be more than a month—they would have to live off of savings that had now become further personal investments in Huertas, and, in Jonah's case, off of his wife's paycheck as well, which he hadn't done since he'd been out looking at spaces, a rather substantial step in reverse. Nate monitored daily numbers to see if they'd need a bank loan to manage payroll, and a couple of concerned investors wondered if Jonah ought to turn the whole place into a bar that served pintxos and raciones, and abandon the menu del dia altogether.

It was a reasonable enough question from people who read their monthly statements, because the bar continued to be busier than the dining room, which wasn't saying much at this point. Jonah felt he owed them a response he did not quite have. He still wasn't ready to give up the dinner menu, but Nate summoned him to a meeting off-site, no distractions, to talk about what they could do to stop the free fall. It
was too easy to get sidetracked at the restaurant, to get caught up in immediate tasks—and as the sole front-of-house partner, without pay at the moment, Nate felt compelled to take a more assertive role in Huertas's future. He urged Jonah at least to make the menu flashier, and fast, in case a critic was planning his fall calendar.

“Stop thinking about food costs,” Nate told Jonah, “and let's get a kick-ass review.”

Nate had a point: They weren't going to get a great review for being economical, and the current dining-room menu was hardly drawing crowds. Jonah agreed to come up with a five-course tasting menu, no choices, to replace the four-course version. He'd change the added course frequently to encourage customers to come back, he'd spend more on ingredients, and he'd stick with the $55 price, which ought to be an additional draw.

The investors' suggestions about a bar was the safer bet, but it felt too much like giving up, so Jonah and Nate agreed to go bigger instead, and hope that the results were impressive enough to draw a crowd after Labor Day. They added a happy hour, not because either of them cared about happy hour but because it made economic sense without turning Huertas into a full-time bar: The staff was there anyhow getting ready for dinner service, the lights were on, so they might as well serve drinks and a small menu to try to wring some profit out of the late afternoon. And they agreed to hold off on lunch service for now. It seemed like too much of an effort on a street that came to life at night.

Jonah wanted to launch the new menu right after Labor Day, but he was voted down by Nate and the publicist. Part of the point of a revamp was to draw media attention, and there was too much competition in September. August was dead for websites as well as for restaurants, and they, too, needed to draw traffic every day. If Huertas launched the new menu in late August, it would be that much easier to generate coverage.
People who were away but wanted to be up on the latest food news could read about it on their phones and tablets and laptops and make plans to check out the menu on their return.

Jonah agreed to start serving a new menu quietly, mid-month, with the official debut on August 28.

•   •   •

It was hot and muggy,
brunch was dead again, and dinner didn't promise to be much better. Late in the afternoon, a host and a server sprawled facedown on the bench seats of the first booth, their heads against the wall, their feet wriggling in the aisle. A muffled moan rose up.

“It's soooooo slow,” said the server. Between the weather and the scant reservation list, being snappy and attentive was going to be a struggle.

In the kitchen, Jenni picked individual leaves of purslane from their rubbery branches while Alyssa sliced eggplant in half lengthwise, and then sliced each piece into half-rounds. Nate was away for the weekend, and Jonah, at Jenni's urging, was at a family friend's annual party, both of them gone before anyone focused on the fact that this was Luke's final shift. It was an odd night before it ever got under way—Jenni running the kitchen alongside a manager who was most of the way out the door.

“I feel like I'm behind,” said Jenni, even though she knew she wasn't, and that there wasn't much of a pending crowd to prep for. “I know I'm not—but you know how sometimes you get that feeling?”

Alyssa, preoccupied with the eggplant, muttered a supportive “uh-huh” and kept cutting. She knew that Jenni's nerves came in part from being in charge, so she joked about it being a women's kitchen for the first time and consulted the reservation list to make sure they knew what was coming. There was a party of eight in the dining room, always a challenge, because it meant eight sets of four courses that had to go out simultaneously, and who knew what kinds of curveballs they'd see
in response to the standard allergies-and-aversions inquiry. They tried to comfort each other: No matter what, that table would be out before the next back-room reservation even ordered.

The front-of-house staff was jittery as well—no Nate, no Jonah, and no idea what to expect from Luke on his last night, since Jonah had failed to inform his soon-to-be ex-partner that he'd be away and hadn't said anything official about the departure to the staff. Luke and Stew did an afternoon ice-cream run to keep spirits up, carrying back treats that were puddles after only a block's walk. When it was time for lineup everyone took their seats quietly and waited.

Luke rattled off who would be the dining-room captain, who was in charge of running pintxos, who the new guy was who would arrive at six thirty. If anyone got into trouble, he, Luke, was there to bail them out.

He reviewed the menu and the previous night's performance, notable for several dishes that had gone out late. “A cheese plate went out twenty-five minutes late,” he said. “It could be a fast item, but it hadn't even been made. Twenty-five minutes late.”

He looked around the room. “What's an internal clock?”

For a long moment no one spoke, until Stew said, “Be aware to make sure dishes go out on time.”

“One minute to us is three to a guest,” said Luke, with a nod. “It's a different perception. Not everyone complains. I don't, but if I'm pissed I won't come back, and I'll tell people what happened.”

The memory of the couple Luke had left sitting for forty-five minutes hovered in the air for a moment, until the kitchen staff appeared, as a group, to say good-bye. Jenni stood behind Luke, her hands on his shoulders, while the dining-room captain made a little speech about how much everyone appreciated Luke's contribution. He had created an organizational system for the front of house that was still in place, and they were all grateful to him for that legacy.

He thanked them in turn for their hard work and reminded them that “the vast majority” of online comments were positive, which meant that people were still happy after they'd paid the bill, gone home, and had time to think about it.

“I want to thank everybody,” he said, “who put ideas into action.”

Stew presented him with a bottle of whiskey, and everyone applauded. Luke asked Jenni if she wanted to add anything, and she wrapped her arms around him and kissed the top of his head.

“I hope everybody has the chance to do this at least once,” said Luke. “It takes so much energy, but you learn so much about other people and about yourself.”

That was it. Everyone went back to work as though Luke weren't leaving permanently at the end of the night. Jenni tied her apron on and looked over at Alyssa.

“Al,” she said, trying to sound authoritative. “How're you doing?”

Alyssa surveyed her station. “Good.”

Jenni tried a small joke about Dad not being around tonight, and the first orders started to pop.

•   •   •

A new five-course,
less frugal menu.

Food was where the fun started, after all, and for the first time in months Jonah found himself thinking about it before he was fully awake, in the moment before the alarm on his cell phone went off: Instead of duck with chard and carrots, he might serve duck with carrots, no chard, but three kinds of duck, the breast, a homemade sausage, and the heart. That was more impressive than duck breast with vegetables. With four courses he had to stick to a more traditional duck entrée, but five gave him a separate slot for vegetables. His brain was doing what it liked best, before he was conscious that it was. He woke up happy.

He'd already worked up a stuffed squid with pork sausage and pepper rice. They had two new pintxos, one with a duck mousse and one with bluefish inside a thin cucumber wrap. After much trial and error, they had an almond ice cream that they'd developed with Davey's, the ice-cream shop up the street. Jonah had made batches and batches of almond paste until he got one that was smooth enough to keep the ice cream from being granular, and then the owner of Davey's had turned the paste into ice cream using his homemade base. It was the dining room's new dessert, a Spanish riff on an Italian affogato, which was gelato with espresso poured over it, with Huertas's version using ice cream to replace gelato, a reduction of Pedro Ximénez sherry instead of espresso, a couple of Marcona almonds, and two small lengua de gato cookies.

When Jonah got to work he told Nate, with some surprise, of how pleasant the morning had been. It had been a while since Jonah woke up being the chef rather than the owner. He liked thinking about the duck as duck, rather than as a revenue source.

Nate pronounced it the best news he'd heard in a while. If Jonah would do what he did best—run the kitchen—and let Nate do what he did best—crunch the numbers and lob solutions—they might just head into the fall in good shape.

The mutual good mood didn't survive the day. Two of the servers who'd come in with Luke had left with him, but that was only the start. The real blow was defections from two people who'd been at Huertas since the start. Stew gave unexpected notice, as did the line cook who'd started at the same time—Stew, for a bartender's job that paid more than either Jonah or Nate made, and the line cook for a promotion to sous, a job “that she was smart enough to get but not smart enough to turn down,” said Jonah, with uncharacteristic bitterness. Both departures felt to him like a personal betrayal, because he'd asked Stew if he was interested in a promotion to manager and he'd said no, only to take
a better-paying job someplace else. Jonah thought he'd been clear with the line cook about opportunities to advance, but somehow she'd missed the message—and didn't seem to feel any obligation to a chef who had hired her when she lost her previous job on a day's notice. He felt anxious and hurt. At a restaurant as small as Huertas, it was impossible not to feel that they were leaving him, not the company.

Having Alyssa full-time was a big help, but now he had to hire and train another line cook rather than rely on a dependable cook who already knew the food. Nate was going to have to step in to bartend when he should have been focused on the community board, which had just put Huertas on the agenda for September 8. Everything was lined up—the new menu, the likelihood of a full liquor license—but people he relied on had abandoned him, and Jonah berated himself for not having been a good manager, a good coach, a supportive presence.

Starting immediately, he announced, Saturdays were pintxo audition day: Any cook was welcome to create one, and if the staff liked it, it would go on the menu. He vowed to give everyone more positive reinforcement.

“Not like they're fucking perfect,” he told himself, “but they're good. I should have said more.”

He had to hire a new line cook, fast, which became a convenient outlet for his frustration. Jonah was blunt, and hardly alone in his appraisal: There were no line cooks of acceptable caliber out there—or if they were capable, they were in too much of a rush. They wanted to trade a culinary school diploma for a job on the hot line, or to jump straight to sous chef after too little time on the hot line. True, Jonah had spent only a year on the line before he got his promotion, but he'd already spent eight years in professional kitchens. He had yet to see that on a résumé, whether it came from a culinary school graduate or someone who'd learned on the job.

Jonah had already run some ads, not anticipating the line cook's departure but hoping that he'd need another body in the fall, and the responses had by now reached joke level: Applicants with barely enough experience didn't show up for a trail, or showed up without their knives, or late, or sloppy, or with their knives and on time but with rudimentary skills. It took Jonah about ten minutes to figure out whether a candidate had potential—some of them doomed themselves halfway through a diced onion without even realizing that the trail was effectively over.

One promising candidate impressed Jonah, worked for ten days at the wood oven, said he had to miss his next shift because of an out-of-state court date, and never came back, even though he'd left his knives at the restaurant. Another applicant showed up armed with little beyond attitude—and an immigration issue Jonah could solve if he'd hire the guy, which Jonah would not, given the cook's inability to roll an acceptable tray of croquetas.

It got so bad that Jonah started scheduling two trails at once, on the assumption that one of the cooks wouldn't show. And then, suddenly, he had too much choice: a twenty-year-old kid who was a couple of classes shy of a degree from Monroe College's culinary program, and a cook who'd worked for eight months at chef Fabio Picchi's Il Cibrèo in Florence, Italy, which for three decades had served refined regional Tuscan cuisine. Jonah considered culinary school a “parochial” experience and was wary of graduates, although Jenni and Alyssa were exceptions to his rule. The Monroe student, Alberto Obando, might be, too. He had a work ethic: He was a scholarship student who had held down a part-time job and been a teaching assistant, so someone—multiple someones, clearly—thought he had potential. Monroe had overhauled its program a few years earlier when the new dean, Frank Costantino, rerouted the advertising budget into financial aid and embarked on a national recruitment program with a simple goal: to offer minority
students a rigorous culinary education without the prohibitive costs of more high-profile schools. Costantino wanted to build a team for statewide and national culinary competitions, to turn out graduates who could compete for top kitchen jobs. Alberto was one of his stars.