Generation Chef (20 page)

“I'm so glad it's you,” he said, in a hurry to get down from the chair.

The cases of beer went, the champagne went, and the party moved next door to Empellón Cocina. Serious drinking—what one server referred to as “frat party drinking”—was one aspect of the previous generation's kitchen culture that had endured, in great part because bars were the only places that were still open after a long dinner shift. It was difficult to go straight home and to sleep after all those hours of split-second effort, and yet it was important to go to sleep fairly soon because morning was going to arrive too quickly. A drink with other staffers was an efficient way to downshift, even if it got harder to remember to leave after every subsequent drink, and restaurants often adopted a nearby bar as their after-work hangout.

On a night like this, it could easily get out of hand. There was so much pent-up energy, almost six months of it, enough to blur the usual indicators that it might be time to stop, or at least to slow down.

Empellón kicked the Huertas crowd out just after one, and they stood on the sidewalk, some of them already well past reason in terms of alcohol consumption, and debated whether to look for a late-night bar where they could continue the festivities. The consensus was that it was time to go home, because they had to be back at work in the
morning and had no idea what kind of mob scene they might face. They drifted toward the subway or split a cab, hoping for a couple of hours' sleep before they faced twenty-seven dinner reservations and who knew how many
Times
-reading walk-ins.

Jonah might have lingered. There would be other restaurants and other reviews, but never again a great first review in the
Times
. Several of his friends from Maialino and its three-week-old sister restaurant, Marta, had shown up to help him celebrate, and the consensus was that the best way to acknowledge a
Times
review of this caliber was to continue the party. They were right, on some level, and he hesitated, but common sense prevailed, and he and Marina headed home. He had managed only recently to scale his schedule back by two hours, coming in at ten thirty instead of nine thirty and leaving closer to eleven, sometimes even ten thirty, than midnight. That was over, starting today. He was back to nine thirty to midnight five days a week, maybe six, until he saw what the crowds were like.

•   •   •

Jenni was a little apprehensive
when she saw the reservation list for Wednesday, the night after the review posted online, the day it appeared in the paper itself. They'd survived sixteen-hour shifts back when Huertas opened, but they were out of practice after a slow summer, and that first run had been a sprint. The coming onslaught was supposed to last, supposed to be normal from here on out. “The prospect of those days again, without stopping, there's a little fear. But we'll be fine,” she said, as much to convince herself as anything else. “We're putting out a lot of food.”

No one was prepared for how much food, or how fast. The kitchen usually marked time by the appearance of Antonio, the late-night dishwasher, who arrived at nine thirty, a couple of hours after the front room started to fill up. When he didn't show up on time on Wednesday
night, Jenni's anxiety spiked. It was nine thirty, the back room was packed, and the front room was a zoo. Why wasn't he there yet?

Because it was only seven thirty, she realized; it only felt later. Jenni had already put up so much food that she'd assumed she'd been at it for hours longer than she had. The kitchen had to duplicate the madness of the last two hours for two more hours before Antonio showed up, and then for another two hours of service after that.

Jonah tried to keep track of the parade of people to the dining room, to see if he could distinguish between the potential keepers and the people who ran from review to review. The first rush was older than he'd anticipated, “and not sort of old, but really old. Eighties. Canes.” Later on the crowd got a little younger, if still older than the people in the bar—but the point was, they kept coming. Every table in the back was full for four hours straight, until he left Jenni in charge of closing up the kitchen at ten thirty. People who made reservations for two showed up with three; parties of four became parties of six, and couldn't Huertas squeeze them in? The path out the front door narrowed, as clots of people lined the bar and the standing counter across from it, and anyone hoping to get in or out had to angle their shoulders to pass.

Before the review, he'd had Juan prepare 75 gildas for dinner service. Today he had asked for 110 or 115—and as he surveyed the scene, he realized that he would probably need more than that on the weekend.

“My biggest priority,” he said, with an enormous grin, finally, now that he saw the crowds, “which I haven't even done, is to put out an ad for a cook.”

•   •   •

Huertas had fifty reservations
for its first Saturday brunch after the review, but that was only part of the new order. Jonah received his first
unsolicited résumés, which with luck would make his search for another line cook easier. And the purveyors regarded him with a new respect: One of his standard orders arrived on Friday accompanied by free product samples—cornmeal and spices—and a seafood information sheet, in case Jonah wanted to spend more of the money he surely was about to make.

Wells's tweet had spawned a set of tweets and retweets, including one from Serious Eats's Ed Levine. “Pete Wells is right: Huertas is a terrific restaurant. The $55 prix fixe menu is a worthy successor to the original Torrisi concept. Go now,” he tweeted to his 134,000 followers, invoking the name of Major Food Group's hole-in-the-wall first restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties. It was a magical association. MFG's two chef partners, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, had been teen cooks like Jonah, but they attended CIA and landed at a run of famous kitchens owned by role models who included Marcus Samuelsson, Mario Batali, Daniel Boulud, and Wiley Dufresne. They opened Torrisi in 2009 and a year later joined Jeff Zalaznick—whose background was in investment banking and food website development—to launch Major Food Group. Its expansion model was based, it seemed, on equal parts skill, fearlessness, and speed—they now had four restaurants and profitable offshoots that included a bar and Yankee Stadium outpost—and not a small amount of audacity, including the decision to close Torrisi after five years and replace it with a new concept.

The company website referred to MFG as “a new breed of restaurant group with the aim to conceptualize and operate restaurants that are respectful of the past, exciting for the present, and sustainable for the future; restaurants that uphold the highest level of food quality and fine dining service in a fun and inviting atmosphere for the guest.” All that Jonah and Nate knew was that they seemed to do everything faster
and better than anyone else—that they had, at least for now, laid claim to high-energy fun. To be mentioned in the same breath with them was a compliment and a challenge, because MFG's restaurants had managed to become that most elusive, enviable, and profitable thing—they were irresistible. Nate marveled at the fact that even the partners' last names sounded cool.

The
Times
review seemed to blanket the known universe with goodwill. Peter Hoffman stopped by to congratulate Jonah. David Waltuck called with congratulations as well, and to let Jonah know that the
Times
review of Élan would run the following week. He only hoped, he said, that his review was as positive as the one Jonah had received.

Jonah was touched by the call. Waltuck had been more than generous to a couple of kids, a great teacher and mentor. The business about the pending review was sobering, though. For everything Waltuck had accomplished, he was waiting, just as Jonah had. His remarkable past would have no influence on whatever was coming.

•   •   •

Alyssa was on her third coffee
before Saturday dinner service even began, with a Gatorade chaser after the second one to make sure she stayed hydrated. To help her get through the night, she had set aside a second Gatorade, some Starburst candies, and leftover family meal cookies from Blue Smoke, the USHG barbecue place whose new chef had worked alongside Jonah at Maialino and had brought over food to congratulate the Huertas staff on the review. She raised her arms heavenward, part stretch, part supplication—she hoped she had stashed away enough caffeine and sugar to keep her going—as Jonah called out the first order of the night.

An hour later she was red-faced and sweating. Jenni was sweating. Jonah had rolled his pants up to his calves in a failed attempt to cool
off, exposing a pair of dark, striped, rumpled socks that lacked the resilience to do anything but puddle at his ankles. The stack of completed order tickets ran halfway up the spindle where Jonah speared them and it wasn't eight o'clock yet; as they piled up, conversation evaporated into a call-and-response, Jonah chanting nonstop, “Fire six skate, two menu, two menu, four menu, two menu,” and getting confirmation from his harried cooks. Jenni had started the evening using two spoons to make whipped cream quenelles to accompany the apple cake dessert, perfect little footballs of cream that she placed just so. By eight she had abandoned perfection for speed: She turned a single spoon against the side of the plastic container of whipped cream. It wasn't quite as elegant, but it was pretty enough, and faster.

Jonah kept an eye on Alyssa, not that he was worried about her but because the volume at her station could trip up even the most experienced cook—and once behind, it was hard to catch up. The roast and sauté station always bore the brunt when a crowd showed up. Forty people in the dining room times five courses, three of which were her responsibility, meant 120 plates of food, plus however many front-room orders came in for the four raciones she had to make. She could end up sending out 150 plates a night, easy, and they had to be on time and in sync with the rest of a table, allowing for special orders or slow eaters. The volume might be predictable, but the rhythm rarely was.

On the first Saturday night after the review there was a ninety-minute wait at the bar, for the first time since the opening. Instead of having six parties in the back, they turned most of the tables three times, booking even the fringe times of five forty-five and ten thirty. Sometimes Jonah ran out of room to lay out new order tickets on the pass.

Huertas made more money in one night than it had for the entire first week of September.

•   •   •

David Waltuck did not
quite get his wish for a review that was as positive as Jonah's. The
New York Times
review made a respectful nod to his four-star history at Chanterelle, and gave Élan the same two stars and Critic's Pick designation that Huertas had received, but not the equivalent level of praise. Jonah had gotten off light, with a ding for the shrimp and a wistful yearning for one more croqueta—hardly a complaint, to want more of something. The gist of the review was, Go to Huertas and eat, right now.

For all the compliments that Wells laced into his review of Élan, the summary judgment was not the kind that would necessarily spur the new generation of diners to rush right over: “Standing out in the open,” it read, “Mr. Waltuck's cooking is revealed to be as variable, as prone to peaks and valleys, as anyone else's.” The critic felt that the move from a four-star temple to a new, more casual place had “liberated” Waltuck, inspiring him to create successful new dishes like pot stickers filled with mashed potatoes and served with shavings of summer truffles, or sea urchin mixed into guacamole. But the results were inconsistent.

“Occasionally, what seems like a fun idea will land like a bag of wet laundry,” wrote Wells, referring to foie gras lollipops that he found a “grim treat.” General Tso's sweetbreads were “another game gone wrong,” although he admitted that he didn't like the dish when he found it at Chinese restaurants, either. He loved the signature seafood sausage with sauerkraut beurre blanc that Waltuck had brought forward from Chanterelle, which he judged one of the best items on the menu, despite the fact that it came out “looking hopelessly behind the times.”

It seemed that a sixty-year-old chef, even a legendary and beloved four-star chef, could have a little trouble finding his feet in a world
populated by chefs who were less than half his age and had new notions about what and how to feed people.

“At times,” wrote Wells, “Élan seems a little unfocused, as if Mr. Waltuck is hedging his bets by combining a grown-up bistro with a gastro pub in the crazed-carnivore style of the past decade.”

By Waltuck's estimation, “there was not much of a blip” in the weeks that followed the review, but he had his eye on a bigger prize. Late November and December were the important months, more for lucrative private holiday parties than for a general increase in the number of reservations: lots of people, lots of alcohol, guaranteed numbers in advance. Waltuck opened with a full liquor license, a nod to his distinguished history, and that would help to make the holidays an insurance policy against January and February, which were quiet no matter how popular a restaurant was.

•   •   •

In the midst of
all the post-review excitement, Jonah had to take a day to tape his
Knife Fight
episode at a studio in Brooklyn, competing in the first round against Einat Admony, an Israeli chef and cookbook author who owned three restaurants with her husband, a food-show veteran who had already won
Chopped
twice.

Jonah was uncomfortable from the moment he arrived. There had to be four dozen crewmembers and onlookers milling around, which wasn't conducive to concentration, and they wanted to record a lot of voice-over dialogue that they would cut and insert later on. They told him they wanted “brash and cocky,” which was not his style. “I won't talk shit about someone else,” he said, so he watched himself, hoping to avoid saying anything that could be edited into more attitude than he felt.