Generation Chef (25 page)

“I'm very nervous about saying such things, but it does seem we've turned a corner here. Maybe we've finally gotten to a place where there are enough people who want to be here night in and night out.” He knocked on the nearest wooden table. If luck was part of success—and as the beneficiary of Pete Wells's two-hour wait at another place, Jonah had to admit that it was—then so was its darker side, superstition. He kept his optimism to himself rather than jinx everything, even as he resisted pressure from Nate to promote Max to sous chef and Jenni to executive sous just to be done with it. He had a couple of weeks, and he had a new line cook. He had a little more time.

•   •   •

And then,
without warning, he had no time at all: Lina e-mailed her resignation to Jonah at the end of January, after less than a month on the job, without the nicety of two weeks' notice. She would pick up her
stuff the next day. Jonah figured she had forgotten what it was like to work the line after three years as an executive chef—the sore feet, sore shoulders, another forearm burn, too many guests or too few, and the unyielding, split-second schedule, all of it on top of her family responsibilities. Nate wasn't interested in why she did it. Clearly she had “a shit attitude” and they'd be better off without her.

Jonah e-mailed her back. It would be wise of you to give us two weeks' notice, he wrote, because if you did you could list us as a place you worked. Without that, I can never help you out. Do not put us on your résumé.

Lina seemed not to care. She came in the next day, collected her tools, and disappeared, leaving Jonah exactly where he'd been almost four months earlier.

He had no choice but to do what he'd been avoiding for months—promote Max and hope for the best, and do it in a way that didn't rattle anyone else. They were adding the large-format dinners in a week, and he had to have everyone in place. He told Jenni first, because he also had to tell her that he wasn't quite ready to promote her to executive sous chef. If he'd hired someone from outside it would have been a necessity, to reassure her that she was in charge and to establish that she could tell the new sous what to do. With Max, what Jonah called “the leadership pyramid” was clear. Max had reported to Jenni when he was the senior line cook, and he would continue to do so as a sous chef.

She was a sous with no previous experience, nine months into her job, and she still had work to do on management skills. She knew it, particularly when it came to mistakes; Jenni tended to look for someone to blame for a problem rather than find a way to encourage a cook to do better so that it didn't happen again. She was on track and she was improving, so there was no need to worry, but Jonah didn't hand out promotions to make people happy. He'd promote her or give her equity when he decided it was time.

He sat down with Max next, to try to put his own philosophy to good use—not to bust him for bad habits but to inspire him to be a better role model, to help him find ways to build loyalty. Most sous chefs were promoted from within, which was good because the line cooks were familiar with their new boss, but bad if their shared history had any potholes. Max was obviously talented and had impressive skills, yet Jonah had written him up just a week earlier for not properly labeling food containers at the end of a shift, with both the contents and the date. It was hardly the first time he'd talked to Max about the need to work clean. Now Max would have to hold the other cooks accountable, which would cause resentment if he didn't lead by example.

Attitude mattered, too, as Jonah had learned after too many complaints about too little praise from the boss. Max sometimes adopted a pretty superior manner, and while he might be far more experienced than Alberto or Joe, the extern, he had to try not to flaunt it. “Your two favorite words should be ‘please' and ‘thank you,' and now I've added ‘sorry,'” said Jonah. “I should say these more than I can count. If people are doing their best, you should thank them.”

He reassured Alberto and Joe that he was aware of some friction between them and Max, he'd talked to Max about it, and he expected that Max was going to step up to the challenge of being a sous chef. If they thought otherwise, they had to come to Jonah with even the smallest problem. The last thing he wanted right now was to lose Alberto in the shuffle, so he gave him a bit of long-term good news—he could start training Joe to replace him at the fry station right away, so that he could finish his own training on roast and sauté.

Jonah wanted to be clear about the plan. Max was going to be Alyssa, with the title she hadn't had, and in a month or so Alberto would be ready to be Max, which meant working roast and sauté when Max was off, or when Max was expediting because Jonah and Jenni were off. By
March, Alberto would be working what he privately called the “make it or break it station.”

Alberto had come as close as he ever had to a setback when Lina got hired and bumped him down, his progress toward dinner shifts suddenly blocked by a newcomer, the sort of chess move that made cooks look sideways for a more promising ascent. Now the same person who'd obstructed his rise had provided an opportunity he hadn't seen coming. He hadn't spent as much time on the fry station, all told, as he had at his entry-level job working the wood oven, and Jonah had just promised him dinner shifts if he didn't screw up.

And what came after slow dinner shifts? Fast ones. Alberto was in line to run the roast and sauté station on a Saturday night, and his first thought was that his girlfriend could not come in for that first weekend shift, no matter how much she wanted to be there. It was too much stress.

But he was getting ahead of himself. He needed to focus on right now, which was as exciting as it was unnerving. Thanks to a bunch of strangers—an unreliable line cook and a parade of flaky or unattainable sous applicants—Alberto was headed for the senior line-cook station for dinner service. Before his twenty-first birthday; before he had any right to expect it.

“That was fast,” he thought.

•   •   •

With the new team
in place for barely a week, Jenni asked for another meeting with Jonah, to make sure, she said, that they were still on the same page. She was worried about Max's attitude, worried about Alberto's inexperience, and worried that any of it would reflect poorly on her leadership while she was still a promotion and equity away from her goal.

Her future, as she saw it, included the promotion to executive sous
and eventually to chef de cuisine, which would enable her to move out of the kitchen and into consulting just in time to have a personal life and a family. After that, she might have a food truck or open her own place, possibly as part of Jonah's company, which would make the start-up process much easier. She might even return to California for that step, although the possibility faded with every passing day. Wherever she ended up, the narrative she had in mind was one she'd been refining since the day she took the job at Maialino.

That was how Jenni saw her life—or at least how she presented it to Jonah. Privately she fretted over the consequences of getting what she wanted, because it would narrow her options. Jonah always said that she'd have to commit to five years before he'd consider making her a partner, which was where she got stuck, no matter how much she told herself that it was an essential part of her personal plan.

In five years Jenni would be thirty-one, which was fine if by then they had two or three restaurants and she was working anything close to normal hours. But what if they moved forward more slowly and she was tied to a business that ate up her time the way it did now? Thirty-one felt a little late to decide that she had to strike out on her own because things hadn't worked out as she'd hoped. It had taken Jonah two years to open Huertas, and he had the advantage of knowing people who were ready to loan him money. It would have taken longer if he'd had to go to strangers, which was what Jenni would have to do.

And thirty-one was too old to take a job at another restaurant because it could mean taking a step down to sous, or even to executive sous, by then, and having to work her way back up to chef de cuisine or executive chef, assuming that there was an opening. Something as simple as a boss who loved his job could keep her from moving forward, and she'd be stuck in a hierarchy that wouldn't budge, a salaried employee someplace else, her personal life still on hold. That was no progress at all.

It was so complicated. Jenni was in a hurry for proof—in part, she admitted, because she needed it too much. She assessed her self-esteem at “very low,” which made reassurance more important than it might otherwise have been, and Jonah was slow with a compliment. Everyone in the kitchen knew: If he didn't say you were doing a bad job, you were doing a good job. That was as close as he usually got to praise, which was tough for Jenni to take.

“It's a weird coincidence,” she said. “I have such a good job with a boss who doesn't compliment, when I'm a person who really needs a compliment.” A partner's stake would be a big compliment, if the accompanying restrictions didn't bother her so much.

She knew what she wanted, wasn't sure if she liked the terms, and figured she had to keep pushing for the next step in case it turned out to be the right move. She couldn't idle in place; that was the one thing she knew for sure. But at the moment, she wasn't quite convinced that Huertas was going to get her where she wanted to go.

“There's such a back and forth in my head,” she said.

•   •   •

The fraternity of professional chefs
did not hang up a sign to welcome women and minorities to their ranks when Nancy Silverton and her contemporaries started out; kitchen equality was not high on the social-change agenda in the 1960s and 1970s except in places like Berkeley, where everything was up for grabs. Aspiring chefs were, by their nature, in it for themselves, looking for a way to express an individual creative vision on a plate. If a kitchen outsider prevailed, it had more to do with personality than with policy.

Silverton gave birth to her first child in 1982, on her day off, as though she could have willed away any conflict between work and
home—and was back at Wolfgang Puck's Spago four days later, “obviously not full-time,” she said, “but I was so driven that I wanted to see what everybody else was doing. And we know now, as experienced mothers, that really what happens the first six months is, they sleep. All you've got to do is feed them and change them, and they're sleeping.” She had sacrificed “showers and sleep” when being the pastry assistant at Michael's meant getting to work at four in the morning, and she was prepared to continue to do so, and more if need be.

“Nothing is perfect,” was how she saw it. There was no point in complaining, or, for that matter, in thinking about how gender might affect her professional future.

She liked to tell the story of her decision to become a chef, which involved a crush on a cook in a dormitory at Sonoma State—she told him that she loved to cook, wanted to work in the kitchen, and was a vegetarian, none of it true—because to her it illustrated her disregard for limitations. Silverton proudly ticked off the list of family members who inspired her: Great-aunt Mary, a suffragette who chained herself to the White House and landed in jail; Mary's sister, Evelyn, an International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union lobbyist; her mother, Doris, a longtime television writer, “political and very strong,” as were her friends.

“It never occurred to me that I was a minority,” she said. “It never occurred to me that women could be mistreated or misunderstood or left out, because I just wasn't brought up that way. I could do whatever I wanted.”

Silverton attended Le Cordon Bleu in London and returned to Southern California after a stint at a Northern California restaurant, because it was the practical choice—a bigger restaurant scene meant more job opportunities. If the only available job at Michael's was working the computerized point-of-sale system at lunch, “a kitchen cashier,” as she
described it, Silverton would take it. Michael's was Santa Monica's answer to Chez Panisse, opened eight years later by twenty-five-year-old Michael McCarty, and Silverton wanted to work in his kitchen.

“I was old school,” she said, “in the sense that all you had to do was get your foot in the door, prove yourself, and you'll move on.”

The next opening was for an assistant pastry chef, which she took even though she had no desire to be a pastry chef. “Accepting that position was sort of similar to accepting the cashier's position,” she said, “meaning that I had no interest in the sweet side of the kitchen.” But Silverton worked with a chef who showed her how to maneuver in the “strict” world of desserts, to learn the science and then improvise without breaking the rules—which led to the job of pastry chef at Spago, and then to breads as well as pastries at her own La Brea Bakery. Eventually, she engineered a transition to the savory side.

She had come to think that having a balance of men and women in the kitchen “makes for a much more solid sort of cohesive, positive line,” but she didn't set out to create that environment. If she employed enough women to occasionally staff an all-women line, it was a scheduling coincidence, not policy. Discussions of gender as a political issue seemed peripheral to Silverton because it had not been a factor in her own life. She had been raised not to think about it, so she didn't.

“I'm more of the camp, Shut up and let me work,” she said.

As more women infiltrated the restaurant kitchen—once it became not a single chef and her forceful personality but a group of aspirants who wanted in—they bumped into backlash from men who had thought that the line was their exclusive province: Women often felt pressure to work harder than their male counterparts, to complete chores on their own when a man might reasonably have asked another man for help—only to be dismissed, if that work was acknowledged, by male colleagues who complained that women got special treatment.