Generation Chef (26 page)

Stephanie Izard blamed her chronic bad back on her I-can-do-it mentality, which too often involved lifting a full stockpot onto a burner to prove that she didn't need help doing so. Not that it improved her status with her peers: When she worked for chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten at Vong, he chose her to accompany him to a food event as a reward for all of her hard work. She still remembers coworkers muttering about her being singled out because she was a girl.

It wasn't possible to have a logical conversation with someone who felt that way, so Izard worked even harder, as though she could put more mileage between herself and the accusation. Jenni had been comparatively lucky in her career choices so far—the kitchens she'd worked in were far less contentious—but it wasn't possible to legislate equality in a restaurant kitchen. There was no way to ensure that the next job, if it ever came to that, would be in as supportive an atmosphere as the one Jonah provided.

The conversation about women chefs had gotten louder over the past few years, punctuated by things like
Time
magazine's 2013 cover story, “The Gods of Food,” with three male chefs on the cover and not a single female chef on the list. Some women felt that stressing gender, accepting the label of woman chef, was a good way to highlight how few women ran kitchens, how far from parity the industry still was—even if they considered themselves chefs, not women chefs. Others felt as though women chefs, along with chefs identified by any race other than Caucasian, occupied a new half step on the American kitchen ladder, somewhere above chef de cuisine but definitely below chef. They heard an implied slight in their hyphenate status as a woman chef or an African American chef; they weren't full-fledged.

They agreed on one thing: It was harder to get ahead and, for those who did, to figure out how to handle success. The idea of a work-life balance hadn't existed when Silverton was coming up, not for anyone,
men or women, though for women it was perceived as more of a problem. Izard had only recently arrived at the belief that she could in fact manage work and family, but it required preplanning, the imposed discipline of an annual three-task list, and strenuous effort; her instincts still told her to be at her restaurants all day, every day, a vestige of her earlier determination to prove herself in a room full of men.

Jonah and Marina could decide to start a family tomorrow and it would have no bearing on him physically—and as the owner, he could craft an accommodating schedule without worrying that an unenlightened boss might regard him as less of a contender for a promotion. For that matter, he didn't have to wonder if an imaginary narrow-minded boss already had him on a secondary list based on gender. It wasn't the sort of thing a job applicant could inquire about in an interview.

Huertas was safe for Jenni because Jonah clearly didn't care about anything but ability; he'd had a diverse kitchen from the day the restaurant opened. Huertas was risky because it might not grow fast enough to allow her to have a life outside of the kitchen—and yet safer than the unknown. Jenni vacillated about the commitment a partnership required because she had not one but two timelines to consider—the chronology of a chef's life, a narrow, short path that was hard to maneuver no matter who you were, and the women's version, which could be narrower and shorter still, depending on where she worked.

F
riends congratulated Jonah on all the attention Huertas got—and it did, by any comparative standard, between the stories, reviews, and year-end lists. He knew that, and yet he felt as though he were still asking for attention rather than dictating, nowhere near having to fend off media inquiries like some of the marquee names who could generate a headline, it seemed, merely by getting dressed and walking out the door. Danny Meyer joked that all he had to do to start a website rumor about a new venture was to peer in the window of a vacant space within range of someone with a cell phone. Social media and dedicated food sites were the hungriest customers around, which in turn made traditional media scramble to be faster on the uptake: Anything that well-known chefs and restaurateurs did was worth mentioning simply because they did it, or mentioned that at some point in the future they might consider doing it, or announced that it was out of the question. They were news incarnate.

Newer, less famous chefs and restaurateurs hustled to find a headline-worthy tidbit to offer. Jonah's Valentine's Day menu had to be set a
month early not because he naturally worked that way but because the publicist needed it to show to website staffers. By February he had begun to wonder what story he could tell to avoid a repetition of the previous summer's soul-crunching quiet—but in the meantime, while he tried to come up with a worthy idea for a big story, he issued endless Instagram posts and tweets, as much a part of prep as roasting bones for stock or setting up a mise en place. Jonah, Jenni, and Nate perfected the cell phone hover and swoop, often in the middle of service, and posted photos of anything that looked like fun—finished dishes, happy staffers, sumptuous produce, the bustling front room—even though they had fewer than 3,000 Instagram followers and 2,000 on Twitter, in a world where David Chang had over 350,000 and 150,000, respectively.

The pintxo takeover—guest chefs doing their versions of pintxos, first Monday of the month starting in March—merited a brief announcement on Eater on February 18, which Jonah and Nate hoped would start a profitable cross-pollination with the visiting chefs' social media followers. They dreamed about having Mario Batali or David Chang accept an invitation someday, but for now they turned to friends who stood to gain as much as they contributed, in terms of exposure: Wilson Tang, the owner of Nom Wah Tea Parlor, who'd advised Jonah about the community board; Jean-Paul Bourgeois, Jonah's friend who was now the executive chef at Blue Smoke; Waltuck and Hoffman and a onetime Savoy chef de cuisine who'd opened and closed his own place and was between jobs.

That same day, Jonah got the kind of news he couldn't engineer: The James Beard Foundation included him on its list of two dozen semifinalists for the Rising Star Award, given annually to a chef under thirty who shows great promise. He scanned the list and figured he had no chance of making the finalist list, issues of talent aside; there were only three nominees from New York City, one a woman chef in
Brooklyn and one a much-lauded African American chef in Harlem. The rest of the list reflected the kind of New York City backlash that had led Gavin Kaysen—himself the Rising Star winner in 2008—to decamp for Minneapolis. One way or another, whether because of a demographic or geographic imperative, this year's winner was probably not going to be a white male chef from New York City, and Jonah couldn't quite argue with that, as nice as it would be to win.

•   •   •

Jonah's off-menu chistorra hot dog
had become so popular that he and Nate set up a meeting with their contractor, Nick Thatos, to talk about installing a new facade, replacing the horizontal windows with vertical ones that opened farther so that they could sell hot dogs all summer. Shake Shack had just ended its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of $1.6 billion, higher than expected, with a share priced at over $45, up from $21 the day before the launch. Jonah and Nate had no illusions about a Shake Shack–sized response, but they did have a hot dog, sales might translate into more people visiting the restaurant, and they had an opportunity to grab people's attention: Florence Fabricant, a veteran
New York Times
food writer, had asked if someone from the restaurant could drop off samples for her.

Three hot dogs, from the East Village to the
Times
on Eighth Avenue and West Forty-First Street, still warm, the Martin's potato rolls not soggy, the greens not wilted from sitting between the warm roll and the hot dog, the aioli and mustard not puddled together. Nate wasn't taking any chances sending a staffer, nor would he waste precious time walking blocks to the subway stop and standing on the platform. Jonah could wrap each element individually and pack everything up. Nate would take a cab straight to the
Times
and assemble the hot dogs at the last minute, in the lobby. He would hand them to Fabricant himself.

The only variables he didn't consider were street traffic, which made the subway alternative seem like a breeze, and the open design of the building's lobby, which wasn't conducive to prep work. A frazzled Nate announced himself at the
Times
security desk and convinced one of the guards to let him use the desk as a temporary workstation, to put the samples together before the columnist got downstairs. He worried that they hadn't traveled well—these were designed to be eaten immediately, not taken for a sluggish drive across town—but the buns weren't too wrinkled, the hot dogs weren't too cold, and it was all better than premade sandwiches would have been.

Fabricant's assistant appeared, whisked away the hot dogs, and left Nate in the lobby, hopeful, yet frustrated that he hadn't met the columnist herself and in need of feedback. He got an e-mail from one staffer who said only that the hot dogs had disappeared immediately, which sounded like good news even if it was secondhand.

•   •   •

“Add chistorra to
your hot dog lexicon,” began the short item in Fabricant's March 9 column, which dubbed the hot dog the “Basque dog” and went on to describe the pork chistorra and list the accompaniments. The only way to get the hot dog was to ask for it, because it wasn't on the Huertas menu. It was an insider special, set up that way to give it a bit of cachet, even if insider now meant the almost 2.2 million people who read the weekday
Times
in print and online.

Five days later food websites blared breaking news from the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: David Chang had introduced the prototype for his new fast-food crispy chicken sandwich, to be sold at Fuku, whose first outpost would soon appear in the First Avenue space previously occupied by his high-end tasting menu restaurant, Momofuku Ko, just three blocks from Huertas. He cited the Chick-fil-A
and In-N-Out Burger fast-food chains as the inspiration for the concept and an accompanying app—and blithely addressed the question of how well it would do, from the fairly unassailable perch of a chef with a strong brand that already offered diners a range of experiences.

“If the fried chicken sandwich is fantastic, and if the app is fantastic, great,” he said. “But if it bombs completely, great. Out of those ashes something amazing will happen.”

•   •   •

The agenda for the partners'
third off-site meeting was short, and Nate wanted Jonah to understand the stakes: They had to give up the menu del dia. If they did, they'd be okay. If they didn't, “Summer's going to be like the last two weeks,” he said, referring to a frightening dip, 125 fewer covers than they'd projected. “Times ten.”

There wasn't time to try to figure out the sudden dive, which failed to meet even their most conservative projections of a single turn on weekday evenings and a turn and a half on weekends. And the liquor license wasn't going to come fast enough to save them: The lawyer was trying to get them back on the SLA agenda, but the board was getting a new director, which meant scheduling delays, so Levey had started to talk about a possible return to the community board. Wherever they landed, they would not be serving cocktails for their first-year anniversary on April 22.

They could no longer afford to discuss whether to make the change. The question now was how to do it, and how fast. Jonah needed to expand the front room à la carte menu and serve it throughout the restaurant—and they needed to make this look like preference, not necessity.

They had no choice, even though Jonah wasn't sure that the à la carte numbers would work any better. “My fears aren't conceptual,” he told Nate. “It's more the bottom line. We're making a commitment and
a bet—that simplifying the menu will bring in more people.” He worried about how they'd compensate for losing the higher prices on the dining-room menu. They'd have to increase volume substantially to improve the numbers.

Nate had anticipated Jonah's concern and done some projections. If they eliminated the menu del dia they would have to raise the average check by $10, to $53, minimum, to make the same amount of money they were making now. And that wasn't really enough, as they both knew—they wouldn't be having this conversation if revenues were healthy. A jump of $12, to $55 for an average check, would be safer.

“Not insignificant,” said Jonah.

“Not insignificant,” allowed Nate.

“But possible,” said Jonah.

“Or we can raise it only to $50, not $55,” said Nate, “and then we have to add nine covers per service. Significant. Or raise to $52. That's six more covers a day.” He had run every conceivable permutation; they were not leaving the little East Village restaurant they'd chosen for their conversation until this was resolved.

“Possible,” said Jonah. He considered the obstacles: He'd have to figure out portion size for chicken breasts, for shared plates versus individual servings, and he might have to change the price on the duck. He worried about raising prices too high, and about how many dishes felt like enough of a choice, and about the impact on labor costs. People who liked to share small plates would be fine, but what about people who liked to have their own dinner? He wanted them to feel that they got enough food.

He tried to stick to the practicalities, but the timing was bad, and he wanted Nate to understand that. Jonah had just returned from a short belated honeymoon in Mexico that included dinner at Hartwood, a
restaurant on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula run by two New York exiles who had turned a strip of land between the beach and the jungle into a destination for diners who would go anywhere for a remarkable meal. They relied on a wood-burning oven and a grill, ran the place on solar power, and cooked what they wanted to serve, no social media chatter, no make-or-break reviews, no new competitors every ten minutes.

Jonah came back inspired and frustrated. If it were up to him, in a vacuum, he'd do even more ambitious food in the dining room, head in the opposite direction from where this conversation was taking them. He'd come away from Hartwood and a handful of Mexico City restaurants thinking, “I can fucking cook better than this.” But that was going to have to wait for a couple of years, if he got the chance at all.

Pete Wells may have extolled Jonah's ability to tell a story with the dining-room menu, to put together a meal that made sense from start to finish rather than indulge in showpiece dishes, but great food seemed to be bad for business, at least in this configuration, and they had to give it up.

Jonah was silent for a moment more. In truth, the menu del dia kept Jonah tied to the kitchen doing the kinds of things a chef ought to delegate to his cooks. It made no sense to teach Max or Alberto how to execute a dish if it was going to disappear when the menu changed a week later—it was faster simply to do it himself than to demonstrate, supervise, and intervene if it didn't go the way he wanted it to. That was a fundamental problem he hadn't seen coming: The dining-room menu fairly guaranteed that he couldn't back off to three days a week, which in turn meant that he'd never have the time to develop the next project.

“First-year anniversary?” he asked.

“Later in the spring,” said Nate, with relief. “And we make it a media
event. Blow-out tasting menus, get it while it lasts, blow people's minds for two months, and launch this after Memorial Day. You win the James Beard, and then . . .”

“Don't count on that,” Jonah said.

Nate ignored him. Now that Jonah was onboard, they could get the publicist involved. There ought to be a long feature that cast all of this in a positive light.

The decision wore both of them out, and they lingered over their coffee, knowing that in a few minutes they'd have to head over to Huertas to get to work. Jonah wanted to talk instead about a new large-format menu he had in mind, an homage to something Peter Hoffman used to do on grills he set up on the street behind Back Forty—and to the tradition that inspired it. A Spanish calçotada celebrated the seasonal arrival of the Spanish calçot, a larger, milder cousin of the scallion that was charred and served with grilled lamb, along with wine poured directly into the diner's mouth from a porrón, a large pitcher with a long, tapered spout. Jonah didn't have a grill, and he still didn't have a working wood oven, but he could slow-roast the lamb and finish it on the flat-top, and use the salamander to get a good char on spring leeks, which would serve as a stand-in for the calçot. It was authentic Spanish food that required finesse to get it right, a nice thing to contemplate as he prepared to abandon the idea that had propelled him since he'd carried it around in his backpack to show to potential investors.

Nate was more interested in a couple of other new ideas, including take-out lunch service later in the spring, or a cart outside the new Whitney Museum during the block party to celebrate its May opening. It was too late to be a vendor at the party, but they could set up at the periphery.