Generation Chef (22 page)

When he got promoted to sous chef at Maialino, he figured that the proper style boiled down to expecting the same kind of commitment from anyone who was still a line cook, even though the executive sous was technically in charge of managing the crew. The notion of leeway didn't figure into the equation. If he could survive a trolley's worth of spilled chicken parts without a whimper, everyone else could handle an equivalent challenge at their stations.

Jonah was unyielding—not noisy, not theatrical, just insistent about results and uninterested in excuses. “There, if somebody wouldn't stand up to tough love, I didn't care,” he said of Maialino. “Get me someone else. I don't care about your personal life or about what happened on the way here.”

But that kitchen had a big staff that put out about five times the food Huertas did, breakfast through late night. He didn't spend every shift with the same handful of people, as he would at his own place. He believed that a small kitchen required a different approach, and defining—and refining—it turned out to be an ongoing struggle. “Managing people's happiness is the hardest part of my job, and my biggest concern,” he said. “I didn't used to care if people liked me. Now I do. Now they're going to do better if they like me. I have to think about that,” he said. “What can I do to get the best out of them? Riding them really hard may be the best way to get the best work out of them tonight, but long-term I have to be more nurturing. I don't want to be an asshole.”

He evaluated his managerial style, halfway to Huerta's first-year anniversary, as “much nicer and easier going” than he had been at Maialino, but it came at a cost. He kept up an ongoing dialogue with himself about everyone in the kitchen: Would Jenni be sufficiently pleased with a raise; would Max step up and prove himself worthy of the roast and sauté station; could he find a better candidate, and how
would that affect Max's morale; would Alberto prove to be the smart move at the fry station, and if so, what expectations would he have about the next step? He had to keep his eye on all of them, to evaluate not only how they were doing but how they seemed to feel about it—and at the same time watch the prep cook and the dishwasher for any early signs of dissatisfaction. He always had an eye on Juan, who essentially ran the prep operation downstairs, to make sure that he was content.

Occasionally Jonah got around to thinking about himself. He had retired the summer's sad notion of a deep-pocket stranger who bailed him out, but he still thought, sometimes, about how vulnerable he was. There were clear benefits to working for someone else. Now that Chris had started at Marta, he could build his résumé without having to hang on to uncashed paychecks, and he still had time to open his own place down the line. Jonah could probably sell Huertas from a less needy position at this point and retreat into a more insulated job as a managing partner with equity, but he tried not to think about that. He was supposed to be on his way, not looking for a safe haven. Still, it was useful to think about options, even if he didn't intend to pursue them. Possibility took some of the edge off of the day-to-day pressure.

Not quite enough, in the estimation of his wife and his mother, who wondered if his hair was starting to thin slightly at the crown. It would hardly be a surprise, given that his father was almost completely bald and had started to lose his hair in his late twenties, but if they were right—he didn't think so, but if they were—stress had to play an equal part. If that was true, he could slow down the process, however inevitable genetics might be, if he could just find a sous chef and a line cook, improve the brunch numbers, keep the business at its current level, decide what to do next and when to do it, make the investors happy, stop beating himself up for not paying them back yet, and be a decent guy but not a pushover through it all.

•   •   •

Jonah might not be ready
to think about a second place, but one of Huertas's brunch regulars was developing an upscale food court in the West Village, and he wondered if Jonah and Nate wanted to take a look. Gansvoort Market was going to open a couple of blocks away from Chelsea Market, which in 1997 had turned the ground floor of an old Nabisco factory into a square-block temple to food that now housed everything from a butcher shop and a bakery to a fish and seafood supplier and a Cambodian sandwich shop. Gansvoort was going to involve a smaller, more eclectic mix of food tenants just down the street from the new Whitney Museum, scheduled to open in the spring of 2015 at the southern end of the elevated High Line Park, already a magnet for tourists who descended its stairs hungry and thirsty.

After six months of being the needy ones—can we please get a liquor license, more customers who spend more money, return guests, a brunch crowd, a decent line cook?—Jonah and Nate were dizzy at their new role as the object of someone's desire, as speculative as it was. The location was so tempting. This was a “premiere spot,” said Nate, and Jonah agreed; he would have looked at the West Village in the first place if he could have afforded the rents, which were even higher than they were in the East Village. Names got made in the West Village, where people seemed to go out to dinner every night, and not merely to grab a burger—unless it was a Michelin-starred version, of which there were two, the $26 Black Label burger at Minetta Tavern, opened in 2008 as part of chef Keith McNally's downtown restaurant group, and the $25 burger with Roquefort cheese on April Bloomfield's menu at The Spotted Pig.

They decided to take a look. Donostia, the Spanish restaurant that shared the first Eater review with Huertas, had already signed on at
Gansvoort, so Jonah and Nate couldn't do tapas or pintxos, but the developer wondered if the partners had another idea they'd like to present. The stall he had in mind was only 200 square feet and lacked a gas hookup, so they'd have to come up with a concept that didn't require cooking. They had three months to put together a proposal, which he hoped they'd do.

Jonah and Nate had an idea before they got back to Huertas, or rather, they could see how to adapt an idea they'd had for a while, to make it work in such a limited space: They could do a vermút bar and serve meats and cheeses, sandwiches and prepared salads that they made at Huertas and cabbed across town, to the rhythm of repeated credit-card swipes from a new customer base. They'd never considered this kind of operation when they talked about a second place. They'd always imagined a full-on restaurant and not necessarily a Spanish one, although Nate was more wedded to Basque food as a brand than Jonah was. But the location was compelling.

“It's worth it from a branding perspective,” Nate told Jonah, “to have a foothold in the West Village near the High Line and the Whitney and the Meatpacking,” which was what the meatpacking district had been newly christened by the people who were developing it. It was worth taking the time to see if the numbers made sense.

The numbers that refused to budge, even with the first-week boost from the
Times
review, were brunch revenues, which had settled back down into disappointing if not crisis range. Jonah said what both he and Nate were trying not to think: They ought to cancel brunch and concentrate instead on being open seven nights a week, which they planned for some time after the first of the year, even though they both knew that dropping brunch was not an option, not now. They'd been singled out by the
Times
. The last thing they needed was a set of stories informing readers that Huertas had failed to make a go of brunch.

•   •   •

First Avenue liked to sleep in
after a late night. At midnight it looked like rush hour, the sidewalk clogged with pedestrians, plenty of cabs ready to lurch to the curb to take them home, but it was slow to come back to life in the morning. McDonald's opened at six, Cosmo's Launderama and the 7th Street Village Farm market at seven, and Subway at nine. Other than that, the street was lined with heavy metal pull gates held in place by big padlocks, with flattened boxes and garbage bags bundled up at the curb.

At nine thirty on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Jonah was by himself at the pass, no music, no distractions. He consulted the previous shift's to-do list, adding unfinished tasks to an updated list for the coming night's service:

Freeze squid

Squeeze OJ

Soak 2 qt chickpeas

Pickle carrots

Put stuffing bread in oven

Sear chicken legs and wings (salt and pepper)

Bread crumbs

Cook breasts

Roast bones/make stock

Cook eggs

Scallions

Arugula

Mixed greens

Almond cake

Duck rillettes

The stuffing bread wasn't for service but for a staff Thanksgiving project Jonah had come up with, a nice way, he thought, to show his appreciation for everyone's hard work. Huertas would be open on Wednesday, which would be slow, and Friday, which would be full of people who didn't want to cook, but Jonah was taking Wednesday off because an owner could decide to give himself a break. It wouldn't hurt to help everyone else have a decent Thanksgiving meal.

He'd put up a Thanksgiving sign-up sheet where people could buy whole turkeys at the restaurant's cost or order portions of prepared meals—slices of sous-vide turkey breast, braised leg meat off the bone, stuffing that only needed to be baked, all of it for $12 per portion to cover costs. Front-of-house people helped to chop vegetables for the stock and stuffing, Jonah turned out a stock that combined turkey and pork and mushroom stocks, and he planned a stuffing that included homemade sausage, bacon, fennel, “and then the usual suspects.”

Every morning, he roasted whatever bones he had on hand to turn them into stock. Chicken bones went into a pot with vegetables and water and were ready in a couple of hours, but pork or lamb bones went on last thing at night and simmered on a low heat until the first person arrived eight or nine hours later to open the restaurant. This time Jonah was the first one in, because it was his project, his staff meal, and he wasn't going to ask people for help beyond the slightly comic efforts of servers showing off their marginal knife skills.

•   •   •

The State Liquor Authority,
Zone 1, met on December 10 in a small office building just off the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and 125th Street in Harlem, across the street from Red Rooster, opened in 2010 by chef Marcus Samuelsson and named for a long-ago Harlem speakeasy. Red Rooster, all primary colors and bold style, was intended as a
place to celebrate the neighborhood's history and invigorate its food scene—while directly across the street the three members of the SLA determined a restaurant's fate in a room that was equally committed to bureaucratic anonymity.

The hearing room was not a hopeful space by any means, its low-slung ceiling lending an oppressive air before a word was spoken, the day's decisions made by political appointees whose tenure often ended with the election of a new governor, short-termers compared to the members of the community board subcommittee. Rows of folding chairs filled most of the room, and an aisle up the middle ended at a microphone that faced a wide wooden desk where the commissioners sat. Today there was only one, alongside an administrator who tallied votes. A second commissioner was absent. The third, the SLA's director, was in Albany, and his face appeared on a monitor to the applicants' right. A restaurant owner could make eye contact with the commissioner at the front of the room or with the image on the screen, but not with both, at least not simultaneously.

Jonah and Nate were the only men who weren't wearing suits, and they and their lawyer took seats toward the back, rows behind the other applicants and their lawyers, all of whom had the comfortable air of people who'd been here and prevailed before. One woman sat in the back across the aisle from them, clasping a stack of papers, but she was not there to ask for a license. She represented a group of small business owners who opposed one for Starbucks, which wanted to sell beer and wine as well as coffee at a new outlet near a wine bar and café that she owned.

The Starbucks representatives reassured the board that underage customers would not be able to purchase wine and beer, that they would watch out for older customers buying alcohol for younger ones, and that the combination of an early end to alcohol service and the chain's
sit-and-sip environment would discourage the dedicated drinking one might find in a bar. They dismissed the woman's concern about what this would do to local bars and restaurants that already existed on slim profit margins and might not survive having customers siphoned off by an outlet of a deep-pocket chain. Instead, they said, bringing alcohol to Starbucks would improve business for everyone by drawing more people to the area.

The director and the commissioner voted, and Starbucks got its license.

When it was Huertas's turn, Jonah, Nate, and their lawyer stood at an accommodating forty-five-degree angle to the desk, trying not to ignore either the board member or the director. They minimized the significance of the community board's no vote. Perhaps they had shown up a bit too early the last time, but three months had passed since then, and in that time they'd received a glowing review from the
New York Times
, with the attendant increase in business. Jonah was a responsible restaurateur and his customers were diners, not bar-hoppers, as the
Times
review attested. He'd like to be able to serve them a cocktail.

The woman in the room was sympathetic to his arguments. The director was not. Huertas had been open just over eight months, which still felt too early. He didn't want to set a precedent that encouraged other applicants to show up before their one-year anniversary. That was a “slippery slope,” he said, and he did not intend to venture out onto it.

If the third board member had attended the hearing, each vote would have carried equal weight. With only two board members, the director's long-distance vote broke the tie. Since there were no objections beyond the timing, he said, Jonah and Nate should simply come back in April. With that, the Huertas team was dismissed, and the board called the next applicant.