Generation Chef (23 page)

Nate jumped on the lawyer as soon as the hearing-room doors closed
behind them: Hadn't he said it was pretty much a sure thing? Wasn't there something he could have said or done to sway them? He peppered Levey with questions even as he wondered whether to replace him—while Jonah stood there, silent, sunk into himself, as disappointed as he had been thrilled when the
Times
review hit. A holiday season with drinks, gone. Big holiday parties, gone, at least some of them, because they'd decamp to a restaurant where they could drink. The added profits from cocktails that ran from $12 to $14, gone. The big, significant reason? It wasn't time yet, and it would set a bad example, which had nothing to do with the merits of their application.

Levey was philosophical. This was a disappointment but not a surprise, and perhaps the partners ought to accept, finally, that waiting until April was the realistic option. The director had said that the calendar was the only obstacle, as had the community board. It was time to take that seriously and to stop asking for what both sets of officials perceived as special treatment.

The three of them shared an elevator, silent; the lawyer went wherever he was going next, and Jonah and Nate headed for the subway station at the end of the block. They rode from 125th Street downtown to the 14th Street station without saying a word, Nate too agitated to sit down, Jonah slumped on an empty row of seats, his head in his hands, his watch cap pulled down low, earbuds in to fend off conversation. They transferred to the shuttle to the east side in silence, as Jonah thought about how to tell a hopeful staff that they'd been stymied again. Basically, a guy on a TV set had just punctured everyone's holiday dreams of bigger checks, a bigger tip pool, a bigger crowd at the door, the promise of stability even after the
Times
review wore off.

He texted the news to Jenni and Stew so that some of the initial disappointment would wear off by the time he and Nate got back, and he did his best to put on his so-what face before he walked in the door.
The rest of the staff would take their cue from Jonah and Nate, so they tried to seem more frustrated than angry, more irked by predictable, shortsighted bureaucracy—always a popular position to take—than anxious about the bottom line. They'd go back in April, at Huertas's one-year anniversary, and until then they'd settle for being a popular restaurant in the happy wake of a great
Times
review.

•   •   •

The bad news wasn't over.
The wood oven had been cranky for the last few days, sending the occasional smoke hiccup into the room, but two days later it backed up completely. Smoke billowed through the restaurant, not enough to send everyone home but enough to force a decision. Jonah shut down the oven and shifted everything that usually came out of it to the kitchen, where he hustled to come up with a new way to char the octopus, as well as the mushrooms for the rice and mushrooms, two of the front room's most popular dishes. The already crowded flat-top was about to be working overtime.

The initial $40,000 savings on the ventilation system had bought them an alternative that didn't work, at least not at the moment. Until they figured out a solution that wasn't going to cost that much, the hulking domed oven was reduced to being a piece of the decor, no more useful than the wainscoting.

Six days after they shut it down, a neighbor called to complain about the smoke that couldn't have been bothering her because it no longer existed. Jonah forced himself not to point that out, because she was polite about it and had never called to complain before. There was nothing to be gained by antagonizing a neighbor. Maybe the smoke had bothered her when the ventilation system first acted up, and she had just gotten around to calling. He promised to take care of it immediately.

•   •   •

Starting a restaurant requires a plan
, a willingness to sacrifice to implement it, and optimism based in part on the anticipated behavior of strangers. Maintaining a restaurant in the face of setbacks requires an almost foolhardy resilience and a certainty that there is a way out of whatever is happening at the moment, that this isn't the dead end. Definitive notions of victory and defeat are for businesses that revolve around something more concrete than making people happy at mealtime.

Three days after the SLA meeting, Nate and Stew stood over a little saucepan of sugar, water, and juniper berries, which Nate referred to as “my alchemy.” They might not be allowed to serve gin, but no one could stop them from infusing a syrup with juniper berries, which give gin its flavor and aroma, to use in what Nate was determined to call “almost gin.” It would be the base for an “almost Negroni,” which in turn would be part of a new menu of cocktail imitators, classic cocktails made with wine and sherry instead of hard liquor. They'd market the lower alcohol content as a plus: People could drink more of these almost-drinks than they could the hard stuff.

Jonah sampled the contents of the saucepan. “Use the regular name of the cocktail, but put quotes around everything,” he said. The SLA and the community board would have run out of excuses by the time Huertas reapplied for a full license in April. He was not about to give them any cause for complaint between now and then, and he didn't want to mislead guests about what was in that Negroni.

The new drinks boosted morale. They were a cautious battle cry, proof that Huertas was not about to be done in, not by bureaucrats, not by the ventilation system, not even by the pending gloom of January
and February. An us-versus-them mentality was a good thing as the holidays approached, since nobody got to go home for them, not when the restaurant was open on Christmas Eve and, of course, on New Year's Eve, when there would be two seatings and a special menu. The restaurant family was as close to family as many of Jonah's employees got—and the more they felt like a tribe, the less they'd feel left out of the kinds of festivities most people, including their customers, enjoyed.

Jonah wasn't about to spend $50 on a wreath, but he okayed the purchase of some poinsettia plants and lights and encouraged the staff to be ingenious about the rest.

They strung wine corks into Christmas wreaths, built a menorah out of cider bottles, and one of the servers transformed empty rice bags into Christmas stockings that she labeled, one for each employee, and strung the length of the kitchen. Everyone got assigned a secret Santa with a $20 spending limit for a present, and there would be a party after the restaurant closed on New Year's Eve for anyone who wanted to hang around.

Alyssa bought a one-way plane ticket back to California for January 15 and tried not to dwell on how drastically things were about to change. Her first food job, at eighteen, had been at a restaurant on the Disneyland property in Anaheim, California, in a mixed-use outdoor mall called Downtown Disney. The park itself had three fine-dining restaurants run by the Patina Restaurant Group, and the more Alyssa thought about her options, the better Disneyland sounded. Her mom lived ten minutes from there, which meant that Alyssa wouldn't have to spend much money on gasoline. Her mom was going to buy a new car and bequeath her 2006 Lexus to her daughter, so no expenses there, either. No rent, no food costs—with the right job, Alyssa figured that she could make a sizeable dent in the debt in two or three years.

The Disneyland restaurants paid well and offered solid benefits, but
the prospect of going from a small independent restaurant to a massive corporation with a capital-C culture was a little weird, she had to admit. Disneyland restaurants were a long way from beer pong and too many plates on too few burners, and it was not where she'd imagined herself ending up at this point. Huertas was the first small restaurant Alyssa had ever worked at, and she liked the autonomy, which felt like a compliment: Once Jonah saw what she could do, she was pretty much on her own. But it was over, at least for the foreseeable future.

“I'm having my quarter-life crisis,” she said. “I need to get my shit together and stop playing New York City.”

She spent more than double her secret Santa budget on a Unicorn Magnum Plus peppermill for Joe, the young extern who'd become an increasingly valuable member of the kitchen team, because it was the sort of thing an aspiring chef ought to have. For the New Year's Eve late-night staff party, she drafted Max to help her make big sandwiches on baguettes, full of leftover steak portions, cheese, mushrooms, and sauce, to go with the cava and beer, the tequila and Jell-O shots.

•   •   •

By the end of the year,
Jonah was halfway to solving his staffing problems. He hired Lina, a line cook who had been an executive chef at a place he'd never heard of, unhappy enough to quit before she found another job—and while it was a big step down to accept a job as a line cook, they both knew that she had little choice. “Whether it's fair or not,” said Jonah, “people in New York City want you to have experience at a good place in New York City.” He didn't say that to her flat out, but he did say that Huertas was a good first step into a larger and more impressive network. She could look around for a sous chef position if she wanted to, but she'd end up at another anonymous place, which didn't really constitute progress. He had no trouble convincing her.

The elusive sous chef candidate, the one he really wanted, was Jeff, who was clearly overqualified and at his last job had earned more than Jonah did. He'd started cooking late, after a couple of years in finance, but had more than made up for the lost time—he worked at Eleven Madison Park after a culinary school externship there, and had landed most recently at Blanca, where he'd been a sous chef until he decided to quit and look for a less grueling job. With its two Michelin stars, Blanca was a famous anomaly—a tasting menu of over two dozen courses served at a counter at Roberta's, a Bushwick outpost of pizza and trendiness. For eighteen months he worked eighty hours a week on the tasting menu, spending two or three days a week just testing dishes. Sixty hours would seem like a relative holiday to him, and he'd be an exciting guy to have around.

“I bet I could learn some things,” Jonah said. “I hadn't thought of that, to have somebody here who could be creative and bring ideas. That's the kind of person I'd love to hire.”

Other chefs around town, some of them with more elastic budgets, were just as eager to hire Jeff, who said that he already had an offer of a sous job at Betony, a high-end midtown restaurant run by an Eleven Madison Park graduate. Jonah could talk about the potential for growth and advancement and hope that he fell in love with Huertas enough to bridge the wage gap, but it was a long shot. Still, he looked for ways to meet the guy halfway, and talked about opportunities down the line when they opened more restaurants.

The money was an ongoing dance. Jonah could offer Max $36,000 to $38,000 if he stepped up into the sous job, because that was a good raise in terms of what he already got—but an outside candidate would probably require something in the low forties, and someone like Jeff, even more. Jenni got $42,000, so Jonah couldn't go higher than that without creating a new problem. Kitchen staff didn't usually gossip
about who made what, but she was involved in the hiring interviews; she was management, so she'd know, and be understandably resentful about being outearned by a sous who reported to her. Or he could offer enough to get Jeff to say yes, upset Jenni, and deal with the fallout. He figured that $50,000 would make this work, but that was what Jonah paid himself.

If he already had another place it might make sense because the candidate was so strong, but right now Jonah couldn't rationalize $50,000. They had decided to postpone opening on Sunday and Monday nights until they had a full kitchen staff, so they didn't have that extra revenue. They didn't have cocktail profits. It was not the time to spend too much money on a sous chef, much as Jonah was dying to hire him. Maybe Jeff would get nervous after too many weeks without a job and compromise on less.

H
uertas rode into 2015 on a wave of year-end best lists, just the sort of lift it needed to survive the post-holiday slump in January and February. They still didn't know if the man they had identified six months earlier as Adam Platt had in fact been Adam Platt, but
New York
magazine's restaurant critic had been in at some point, because Huertas was the first place mentioned in the Bar-Food Revolution section of the magazine's annual Where to Eat issue.
Travel & Leisure
magazine anointed a dozen places in its Best New Restaurant: 2015 Edition, and Huertas was one of only four in New York City, alongside Marta.

“One of four,” was the subterranean mutter around Huertas, whenever anyone needed a quick spiritual boost. “One of
four.
”

Grub Street put migas at number eighteen on a list of its twenty best dishes for 2014.
Forbes
included Jonah in its 30 Under 30 list of restaurant industry newcomers to watch.

But in the midst of all the holiday list-making, a sobering rumor unexpectedly hit the online press: Peter Hoffman, who'd given Jonah
his first full-time kitchen job at Savoy, might be closing his second restaurant, Back Forty, which he had opened in 2007.

When Hoffman opened Savoy in Soho in 1990, he was ahead of his time in terms of both location and menu. The
New York Times
dubbed him “a locavore before the word existed,” and Jonah believed that his onetime boss would have been New York's answer to Berkeley's Alice Waters if he'd ever cared about promoting himself, which he adamantly did not.

By 2011, Savoy was surrounded by competitors and facing a pricey new lease, which left Hoffman with a dilemma. He could make the restaurant more expensive, more exclusive—or he could head in the opposite direction and make it cheaper and more casual like its younger East Village sibling, Back Forty, the kind of place a customer might visit more frequently. The latter option seemed the practical one. He told the staff on a Wednesday that Savoy was closing, to be reincarnated months down the line as Back Forty West. Four nights later, after a twenty-one-year run, Savoy was gone.

Now Back Forty was closing as well. The final night of service was even more abrupt—the rumor came a day after what turned out to be the restaurant's last night, confirmed by Hoffman in a written statement a day after that. He cited a “difficult landscape and lease uncertainty” as the reasons for his decision, and expressed the hope that customers would continue to visit Back Forty West.

The space was on the market two weeks later. The key money, the amount a prospective tenant was expected to pay up front to secure a location, was $250,000.

•   •   •

New York
magazine
laid the single-restaurant model to rest in a multipart story called “How the Restaurant Game Is Played,” part of the same
Where to Eat issue that mentioned Huertas. Item 3-d on a list of survival rules was, “The More Restaurants You Own, the Easier It Gets,” and writer Alan Sytsma told the story of chef Andrew Carmellini, one of the chefs for whom Jenni had worked, who surveyed the scene from atop a network that included seven restaurants, the food concession at The Public Theater, and brand licensing agreements at area airports and Madison Square Garden. Carmellini was a long way from his early days, when he had to sell $75,000's worth of musical instruments and recording equipment to finance the home stretch on his second restaurant, and he had a simple lesson to impart from his new, improved vantage point: More is better. The old model—a Chanterelle, a Savoy, which had endured for seventeen years without a sibling—was no match for higher rents and more competition. In his experience, not even a second restaurant was enough. Things started to get better once there were at least four. A singleton was as unstable as a unicycle.

Jonah understood the advantages of a larger staff from his time at Maialino—one USHG restaurant could draft help from another in a crisis, one accountant or human resources person could handle more than one place—but it was more than that. Four established restaurants gave a chef the credibility to raise speculative money before he had a space or even a firm concept, because people with discretionary cash wanted a piece of whatever he was about to do. That was real progress: eager investors who would offer him the money to find a space and then let him tailor a new restaurant to live in it; no more trying to find a space that fit an idea.

As for the right concept, the current buzzword for outsized success was “fast casual,” even though that was difficult to pin down, like any nascent trend: It could be a locally sourced burger made from cattle raised on non-GMO feed and topped with small-farmer tomatoes and lettuce, or it could be a place with a menu but no tablecloths, or a place
with small plates, or one with family-style meals. There weren't always servers; fast casual often meant lines and trays and either pick-up windows or runners to drop orders at a table. What mattered was quality and easy access, and the role model for that, sitting at the top of a heap of contenders, was the little hot dog cart that grew, past understanding: Danny Meyer had just filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering for Shake Shack, which had started out in 2001 as a cart that sold hot dogs, hamburgers, crinkle-cut french fries, and frozen custard in Manhattan's Madison Square Park, a side project for the high-end employees of Eleven Madison Park. They weren't just any burgers but a custom formula developed with Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors; not any buns but Martin's potato rolls, all of it now served with wine or beer for a meal that sat squarely on a new frontier between takeout and sit-down. Shake Shack had grown to 63 outlets worldwide, with plans to expand, eventually, to 450. The IPO was designed to raise $100 million, and the company's valuation was predicted to be about $1 billion.

Something of that magnitude was almost surely a onetime phenomenon, which discouraged no one from imagining that it could happen twice. Even a sliver of that kind of success could protect a restaurateur from ever having to worry about rent spikes or difficult landlords or a delayed liquor license. The distilled lesson of Carmellini and Meyer and Waltuck and Hoffman was clear, without having to line up any more examples of single restaurants that teetered and fell: A successful neighborhood restaurant was not a survival strategy.

But when Nate asked around, it seemed that a single restaurant and a tiny offshoot were not the answer, either. As much as he and Jonah wanted to figure out their next move, it would not be the stall at Gansvoort Market. One of Nate's advisers cautioned him not to jump at the first offer, however flattering it was to be asked. The smart next
move was not to be a tenant in someone else's business dream but to come up with a concept that he and Jonah could control, another place of their own. Jonah agreed. It made sense, even though he had to admit that somebody else paying the utilities, and being responsible for opening and closing, had its appeal.

•   •   •

Nate met Luke for drinks
at Henry Public in Brooklyn Heights, closer to Luke's apartment than to Nate's—an appropriate accommodation, as Nate was the one trying to put together an agenda for another meeting with Jonah. Luke had been right about his role at Huertas: Nate was in what he called “constant conversation” with Luke, usually at Nate's instigation, because his departed partner provided a useful corrective to his admitted impatience and was more forthcoming than Jonah, who tended to do most of his debating inside his head.

And in the end, it was Jonah's restaurant, which made Nate feel the need to be even better prepared than he would have been if they were equal partners. He'd insisted on a second off-site meeting because he'd reached his limit again; he saw a crossroads where Jonah saw process, and he needed Luke to help him build a coherent case for change. In doing so, he also hoped to alter the dynamic of his partnership with Jonah, to start having the kind of input a co-owner had, regardless of the single-digit size of his equity stake. His day-to-day concerns—and proposed solutions—were part of a strategy to help Jonah define the company's future.

Nate and Luke worked until two in the morning, ordering boulevardiers until Nate swapped to hard cider to keep his head clear, talking about appropriate next steps as he scrawled notes on a lined yellow pad. He was jittery from a mix of exhaustion and excitement by the time he met Jonah for lunch in Williamsburg—at Reynard, a role-model
restaurant owned by Brooklyn restaurateur Andrew Tarlow, who since 1998 had expanded from one place into a network of restaurants as well as a market, a clothing line, and the hotel that housed Reynard. Nate laid out three pages of notes and a graph that tracked weekly gross and net sales, and launched into his presentation.

The first page had two columns of handwritten entries under the headings “Nabe,” and “Go for it!,” which he saw as Huertas's only options, a nice neighborhood place or the first of many, the former obviously unacceptable. Nate had also generated a decision tree under the heading “We achieved a lot . . . we can't stop,” and at the side of the page had scrawled “Do you want to be in this?” for both of them to answer. The second page was the “Go for it” plan, with the word “Energize” set in a circle marked with big X's for emphasis. The third page was a list of a dozen businesses worth studying—including Momofuku and Major Food Group—either because they had a huge first success that put them in a better position to move forward than Huertas was, or because they'd already become the kind of company that he and Jonah wanted to have.

Nate also had drawn up what he called “my thesis,” a summary of three kinds of contemporary success stories that he wanted to present to Jonah. If a restaurant didn't fit into one of the categories—and at the moment, Huertas didn't—it was never going to spawn offshoots, never going to be the cornerstone of even a small restaurant group.

The first kind of success was what Major Food Group had pulled off with Torrisi, which sold “exclusivity and cachet.”

“You had to come here twice to eat here once,” he said, referring to the small space and long waits, which seemed only to increase people's desire to snare a table. “Twenty-five seats, a midrange tasting menu, and each of their subsequent restaurants is so well thought out. What brings New York foodies? A flamboyant menu and design, down to what the servers wear.” And the partners weren't afraid of change,
willing to revamp the format, or even shut down the space and start over with a new project, eager to try out a new cuisine. At Huertas, daring existed on a much smaller scale, and Nate chafed at it.

The second kind of success relied on celebrity to draw a crowd, whether it was Danny Meyer's name attached to a restaurant or a chef like David Chang or Mario Batali, but that was more a Catch-22 than an option. Jonah couldn't be more successful until he was more famous, which he couldn't be until he was more successful.

The third model relied on having a popular brand. Chang's small chain of Momofuku restaurants shared the same brand name and little peach logo—Momofuku meant “lucky peach” in Japanese—from the high-end Momofuku Ko to Momofuku Noodle Bar. They served Asian-influenced food up and down the price ladder, even if random dishes from somewhere else appeared on the menu. The people who lined up outside the noodle bar up the street had an expectation based on that brand—but Chang was a half-generation ahead of Jonah and Nate, who couldn't simply decide to be a big brand any more than they could decide to be famous. There was only one path left for them, which Nate had listed as a subhead under “exclusivity and cachet”: They had to be “coolest mother—,” and hope that fame and branding options followed.

The year-end lists—not the ones they made but the ones they missed—made a strategy more urgent. Nate's big disappointment, the thing that motivated him to call this meeting as much as anything else, was that Pete Wells and Adam Platt had left Huertas off their best-restaurant lists. For weeks before the lists came out he had reread the year's reviews from both critics, adjusted Huertas's odds as he read, and provided Jonah with a running commentary on his research. When he counted up the number of stars and considered the level and amount of praise, he figured they were in the running.

When the lists came out without Huertas, he reread the reviews of
the chosen few. Some of them were not as glowing as Huertas's review, which was the point he wanted to make today. Those places had an indefinable something that Huertas didn't have. He and Jonah needed to address that, or face the possibility that they presided over nothing more than a comfortable local spot.

Jonah, who'd remained silent throughout Nate's initial presentation, looked at the “Nabe” column on Nate's yellow pad and shrugged. “Not much use for this side,” he said. “You pay back investors after eight years and have a safe place? No.”

That was all Nate needed to hear. Encouraged, he rattled off what he considered to be the right moves, all of which should be embraced as quickly as possible:

They had to stop vacillating and hire a sous chef, even if it meant paying the guy from Blanca $50,000 a year. The new line cook would take some pressure off, but a highly qualified sous was a long-term investment because he could replace Alyssa and assume the kinds of responsibilities that would free up Jonah to think about the next place. They could promote Jenni to executive sous chef, which would make her happy and cement the kitchen hierarchy. If they limited themselves to the applicant pool that was willing to work for under $40,000 for a chef who wasn't yet famous, they were always going to come up short.

They had to spend even more on food to achieve what Nate called “the wow factor,” whatever Jonah decided that ought to be—more creative pintxos with more expensive ingredients, press pots of broth poured at the table, anything he wanted to do. Frugality was false economy, because nobody went home talking about a memorable piece of cod. They could raise their food costs a still-reasonable percentage point or two. They'd make more money if they did.