Generation Chef (2 page)

The need to keep busy was contagious, so there was a flurry of nervous hygiene right before the doors opened. Jenni made sure that her long ponytail was tucked out of the way, even though it already was, and the line cook took notice and pulled her ponytail into an even more disciplined braid. Nate, whose downtown style involved a fitted button-down shirt and narrow chinos with hems rolled to expose his ankle boots, darted into the bathroom to brush his teeth and then continued to prowl the space. Luke put on a sport coat and used his electric razor to eliminate any shadow that might have appeared since he shaved that morning.

Jonah watched a server make wipe towels, a precise ritual that seemed tonight to be two-thirds necessity and one-third superstition. First she trimmed a small edge off a set of paper hand towels, and then she moistened the slightly shorter towels so that they were neither too dry nor too drippy. Satisfied with the moisture content, she rolled them as tightly as possible and stacked them in a dish so that Jonah could wipe the rim of a plate before it went out. On opening night, this chore required an experienced front-of-house staffer, not some kid doing it for the first time. A properly rolled towel was a totem that said, This is a professional kitchen. A loose or uneven towel could be a sign that the whole place was about to unravel.

•   •   •

The last minutes
before five thirty were somehow very long and very short all at once, and Jonah had an extended moment, right before the first customers came in, when he let himself reflect on what was about to happen, unspooled the future like a kite on a breeze. Someday he'd split his time between Huertas and his other places—plural—with a system that enabled him to develop new concepts while his dependable kitchen staffs handled the day-to-day operations. Someday his restaurants would be an incubator for talented cooks who moved on to open their own places.

He dreamed of creating the kind of kitchen that people in the industry talked about with admiration—venerable ones like those at Meyer's USHG restaurants; kitchens run by chefs just a half-generation older than Jonah, like David Chang and April Bloomfield, who served pork buns and cheeseburgers and dismissed the need for tablecloths and distinct courses and even reservations; anyplace that the three principals of Major Food Group decided to open, after four successes in as many years. The usually fickle opening crowds didn't move on from
these places, unless it was to check out what the owners were doing next.

There were a handful of such companies in New York City, groups that grew exponentially, their openings always mobbed, the crowds never dissipating. At the moment Jonah might be rolling trays of cod croquetas like some first-year line cook, but it was all in the service of his long-term plan. Some young chef with an irresistible menu was going to be the next phenomenon, and he had to believe he had as good a chance as any to be the one.

Nate broke the spell to give Jonah the latest news. Ryan Sutton, just named the lead New York City restaurant critic at Eater.com after a stint at Bloomberg, had tweeted about Huertas's opening.

“That means he's coming,” Nate told Jonah, assuming that a critic wouldn't bother mentioning a restaurant he intended to ignore.

He was hardly the only one paying attention. In the days leading up to the opening there had been announcements on Zagat, Tasting Table, UrbanDaddy, and Gothamist. On April 18, Huertas showed up as number ten on Grub Street's weekly Restaurant Power Rankings,
New York
magazine's list of the city's hottest restaurants—based on nothing but advance noise, since the restaurant wasn't yet officially open. The phone was ringing like mad, and a third of the opening-night reservations were for people Jonah didn't know, “which would have been more if family and friends hadn't booked earlier,” he said. He'd had to post a sign on the front door on the final two nights of the five-night soft opening, a friends-and-family trial run, saying that Huertas was closed for a private party, because strangers who tracked openings came by hoping for an early glimpse.

It was exactly what Jonah had hoped for, despite the occasional twinge of anxiety about living up to the advance press, because the alternative was to be one of those chefs with little neighborhood places
nobody discovered for six months, if at all, and nobody reviewed, ever. He'd much rather get noticed.

Nate tried to achieve a similar enthusiasm, and failed. He was fixated on the fact that this was the first critic to weigh in.

“It would be nice,” he muttered, “if somebody would let us open before they blew us up.”

•   •   •

An hour into service,
Jonah had decided that the homemade potato chips for the boquerones plate needed more salt, that his homemade setup for order tickets was a mess, and that the people at seats three and four at the bar should get their papas bravioli for free because they'd waited too long, which meant that the fryer wasn't hot enough. He riffled through the cooler drawer of micro-greens to replenish the small tray at the pass with the specific varieties he needed, and in between orders he picked flecks of Super Glue off his fingers. He'd successfully repaired the food processor earlier in the day, but now he couldn't feel the food to make sure that crisp was crisp enough or that a piece of protein was cooked through.

He checked every plate that went out, even as he kept an eye on the big digital clock on the wall and waited for reinforcements to arrive. Jonah had set up an insurance policy for himself, three guys to help out at the start who had more experience than the rest of his kitchen staff combined. He stopped holding his breath when the first one walked in at seven, after a day that had begun at five thirty in the morning with a catered breakfast for four hundred. Dan Dilworth shrugged off his exhaustion, carved out a little space for himself at the end of Jonah's pass, and began peeling lemons at warp speed, so that slivers of peel could be candied and used as a garnish for the rice pudding.

By eight the bar stools were full, people were standing at the counter across from the bar just as Jonah had imagined they would, the three
booths across from the kitchen were full, and a steady stream of people walked by the kitchen on the way to the dining room. It was gratifying, but it was an illusion, and Jonah knew it. The opening crowd, most of it, was a fickle bunch that prized new over good, and a percentage of the bar crowd would likely never come back because they were on their way to the next new place, loyal only to being current.

It was easy to spot them—funereal chic on the women, whose cut-out clothing had a mysterious chicken-and-egg relationship to their tattoos, and big shirts over little pants on the men. Silver studs on their shoes, belts, backpacks, and in their earlobes, unless they had a day job where it was acceptable to wear gauges, the earrings that opened a hole in the lobe. Anyone who was that committed to a look was not going to stick around to become a regular, because the whole point of their existence was to be wherever the next scene was.

The customers who walked past the kitchen to the dining room were older, probably more likely to settle in, potential regulars—and if this worked the way it was supposed to, regulars who came in more than once a week, because sometimes they opted for a lighter meal at the bar. But there would be attrition there, too, diners who decided that they wanted more choice on the menu or less of something Jonah couldn't even speculate on.

There was no time to dwell, because the dominant noise, in Jonah's world, was the mechanical bleat of the little gray order printer that sat on the counter to his right. Jonah and Dan danced the experienced dance of cooks who'd worked the line in a crunch, somehow managing to do what they needed to do, fast, without colliding, and with an urgency that made everyone else try to stay out of their way rather than break up the choreography. Jonah reached up to a top shelf next to the combi oven for a bag of almonds as Dan dipped out of his way and dove for a quart container of chocolate pieces from the cooler drawer. Without a word, they set out
two little saucers of almonds and chocolate chunks for bar seats three and four, with the chef's compliments, a final apology for their late potatoes.

As the pace in the back room picked up, Dan silently stepped over next to Jonah and started plating cod entrées. This was how a kitchen was supposed to work, how Jonah hoped the Huertas kitchen would work once everyone got used to the rhythm and traffic patterns. Jonah had always loved working the hot line and had nothing but admiration for Dan and the other members of his special crew, one an executive sous chef and one a sous, who had some free time between jobs and would arrive in mid-May and early June, respectively. “To be able to show up in the middle of service, help out, not be in the way, roll right in without even knowing what's on the menu is a unique talent,” he said. In his kitchen, a great cook was the one who got the work done without taking up a lot of psychic space.

When Nate came over to ask how it was going, the question barely registered.

“Great,” said Jonah, preoccupied with what was on the plate in front of him.

“Doesn't sound convincing.”

Jonah shot him a distracted but managerial smile; he had to remember that people looked to him to set the tone. “It's great,” he repeated, more loudly. “Dining room pacing's good.”

The bar was moving a little too fast, but that was a good thing. The pintxo runner skidded toward the pass and asked for any pintxos at all, because he had a slew of new customers, including people who were drinking and eating in the middle of the front room, balancing their drinks and little plates in their hands because there was no space at the bar or the standing counter against the wall.

“Ten chorizo, eight shrimp, eight scallops,” called Jonah over his shoulder, without stopping to turn around.

•   •   •

The final order of the night
meant that housecleaning could begin, as much a daily ritual as the preparations that preceded service. Jonah wanted his kitchen as clean at the end of the day as it had been on the day they connected the kitchen appliances; it was a matter of self-respect as well as a smart habit, given the constant threat of a surprise city health inspection. Breaking down the kitchen was hardly a glamorous aspect of his job, not the kind of thing people saw when they watched food shows on television, and someday he'd graduate from having to participate. For now, he intended to work as hard as everyone else did, to establish a baseline standard that would survive when he took his two days off.

Food went into plastic pint or quart containers, the date and contents written on a piece of blue masking tape. Cheeses and ham and half-sheets of pintxos were covered with food-grade plastic wrap as tight as a trampoline. Cooks ran up and down the narrow stairs at an angle, one with a half-sheet held overhead, another carrying a hunk of cheese tucked close like a football, to store bigger items in the basement walk-in refrigerator. The bartender decided whether the citrus wedges would last another day, stashed what could be stashed, and wiped down every surface.

The dishwasher sprinted back and forth as though he were being timed on relay legs, darting from each cook's station to the sink at the rear of the kitchen and back again to return clean plates and platters and equipment to their rightful spot. Lance Hester-Bay had informed Jonah during his job interview that he would take a dishwashing job only if there were a chance for him to move on to the line someday. In the meantime he made sure that his new boss saw how hardworking he was, no matter how menial the task.

Once the food was put away, the kitchen staff started to clean up—leaned hard against a cooking surface and scrubbed, balanced on a
counter to reach the exhaust fan, got on their hands and knees to soap down every surface. The smell of cleansers quickly smothered the smells of cheese and ham and wood-oven char, and after a half hour the space approximated a kitchen that had never been used. The front-of-house staff, like any good dinner-party hosts, bused the last tables, adjusted vases, and wiped every surface clean. Well after midnight, the last exhausted staffer left for home, or for a nearby bar to decompress.

Jonah slumped into a booth with Nate and Luke to try to make sense of what had just happened. They had sold so many pintxos that the servers had lost track of the numbers, which meant that they needed a better tally system right away. Runners were supposed to circulate with a tray until it was empty and then come back to the pass to record who took what, but things had been too frantic and they forgot how many they served and to whom, which meant that the restaurant lost sales. The dining-room menu worked, though they all knew, without saying, that Dan's speed and efficiency had kept them from falling behind. The kitchen staff had tackled the nightly kitchen breakdown with inappropriate good cheer, emptying and cleaning every drawer and cabinet and surface, something to be grateful for until the novelty wore off.

Jenni had found her rhythm and recovered from her opening-night jitters, and the cook at the wood-burning oven burned her arm only once. They'd used up all of the prepped ingredients except for a cup or two of pre-sliced potatoes, which Jonah took as a very good sign. The better his volume estimates, the fewer the leftovers, the less money he threw away on unused product.

But before the partners went home, they had to address the missteps. They needed a “soigné” list to alert the staff to VIP customers and their preferences. They needed the food runners to keep an eye on the pass and grab hot plates as soon as they appeared rather than wait to be called over. The bartender had to stay off his cell phone.

Most important, in terms of building a decent total check, they had to bus pintxo plates as soon as they were empty. If plates sat on the table, customers felt that they'd eaten enough. If they disappeared, customers stared at the empty space in front of them and were likelier to order from the next circulating tray.