Generation Chef (27 page)

“Maybe,” said Jonah, who seemed done with decisions for the day. “Sounds like a headache.”

•   •   •

Jenni's one-year anniversary with
Huertas was at the end of March, and when she pointed it out to Jonah he said it was time to make some moves, sat her down in the dining room, and, without preamble, handed over a box of new business cards for Jenni Cianci, executive sous chef. He announced the promotion at the afternoon lineup, and the response was unanimous: Everyone already thought that Jenni was the executive sous, but sure, congratulations, now that reality had caught up with consensus.

She was gratified, if not quite as happy as she'd anticipated. The fact that he'd had to order the business cards in advance—that he'd already made up his mind—slipped past her, because she was focused on the fact that she'd mentioned her anniversary before he gave her the box. It felt as though she'd had to ask.

The next day Jonah's forecast came true, and then some: None of the three New York semifinalists made the list of finalists for the 2015 James Beard Rising Star Award. The foundation saw the future in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.; in Brunswick, Maine, and Los Angeles and Los Gatos, California.

•   •   •

Alberto could feel
a busy night coming. The noise in the restaurant seemed to drop away, and all he could hear was “Fire, fire, fire,” fast, one order after another.

It's coming, he told himself. Go in, do it, don't talk. Jonah was off, which meant that Jenni was expediting, Max was plating and overseeing the line cooks, and Alberto was on roast and sauté. Alberto had made himself even more nervous, the first few weeks on roast and sauté, by thinking about just how busy it was going to get and how
many hours it would last—which bothered Max, who'd see the tight expression on Alberto's face, and tell him to relax, in front of everyone, which didn't make it any easier. Still, Max was right. Nerves were contagious. If Jonah thought that Alberto was competent to work the station, Alberto needed to act as though it were true.

It was hard at first, because it had happened so fast, and because he worked for three bosses with different management styles: Jonah, who got quieter when he was concerned; Jenni, who talked her way through a tense service, and Max, whose style Alberto thought of as “just get out of my way.” When Alberto felt Jonah looking at him, he sped up and waited to see if a correction was coming, and took a breath only when Jonah looked away. When Jenni talked at him, he tried to respond without losing his rhythm. When Max bulldozed past, he tried not to take it personally. He expended a lot of energy on accommodation, even as he tried to keep up with the pace. He was determined not to be the one who landed the kitchen in trouble.

On a rough night he did a lot of short sprints from the burners to the shelves to the cooling drawers or the counter, not yet having achieved Alyssa's economy of motion, his heart racing as he tried to go as fast as he could without making a mistake. By the end of March he slid into a regular schedule, working the station Thursday through Monday from two in the afternoon to close, with his weekend on Tuesday and Wednesday. Not that his heart stopped pounding; it didn't. But the frantic rhythm at least become somewhat familiar, and the fear of the unexpected yielded to a more manageable fear of falling behind, which was something a cook had to learn to live with—to turn into a positive force—forever.

Saturday nights were the worst, most of the time, but the last Sunday in March promised to be a logistical nightmare: There was a buyout in the back room, thirty-six people arriving at six p.m. for a birthday
celebration, and seven tables for the large-format dinner, and Jonah was off. Alberto could sense Jenni's apprehension, which seemed to him the only reasonable response to this kind of schedule.

Big parties were always a challenge—all that food at once—but the night started off with too many special requests, the sort of adjustments that could rattle a kitchen even when there wasn't a party of thirty-six. Jenni was calling volume orders—thirty-one duck croquetas—as the custom orders started to come in from individual diners scattered throughout the restaurant:

No fish for one of the women in the back.

No gildas at a table in the front.

No mackerel.

“Fine. Four croquetas and a morcilla tortilla,” said Jenni, refusing to be derailed so close to opening. “Allergies all over the place,” she muttered.

She stopped Max from using the wrong sauce to anchor an order of croquetas to the plate, encouraged the new fry cook to set out his empty plates in advance before the next batch came out of the deep fryer, and spun around to help Max with plating, even as she kept an eye on the ticket printer and wondered why two croquetas were still sitting at the pass, waiting either for a server to notice them or a cook to finish an order. Just as she was about to inquire, ten more appeared, and a server whisked them away.

Nate leaned over the pass to ask why two women at a front table said that they'd been sitting there for a half hour waiting for their food.

“Seriously, what did they order?” said Jenni, instantly on edge. She looked for the ticket in the row in front of her. “A tortilla and what, fifty dollars of food? Give them the food unless you think it's bad for business.”

Nate spun and headed over to the table, came back to the pass, studied the ticket again, and returned to the table, muttering to himself. It was
barely six thirty, the rush hadn't even hit yet, and the kitchen had taken too long on an order. One of the experienced servers, aware of how easy it was for a kitchen to fall apart on a night like this, gave Jenni a big smile.

“Look at you,” he said, proudly. “I mean, just look at you. Three chicken dinners and not even a bead of sweat.”

She smiled for the first time since service started and gestured at the row of tickets. “And everyone has an allergy,” she said, wiggling her fingers on either side of her besieged head. “Aaaaahhhh!”

Another server came back with a second bulletin from the dissatisfied two-top. One of the women had announced that they did not want to be interrupted by passed pintxos. They wanted their food to come out in courses, as it was supposed to.

Jenni put a new paper roll in the printer and stared, in horror, as a handful of backed-up order tickets spit at her. She glanced up and saw a man standing in the aisle looking lost and impatient, holding a credit card aloft, and dispatched a server to get him his check. She got the orders under control—food was flying out of the kitchen—and started to feel that she had found her rhythm, but satisfaction didn't last long. Nate returned with the two-top's final complaint of the evening: Their churros with chocolate dipping sauce were late.

She watched as one of them walked past the kitchen to the restroom and passed judgment: She did not like the woman's face, her expression, or her clothes, neither the top nor the pants. While she hated to reward the two women for what she considered to be excessive demands, they hadn't spent that much, and the easiest solution might be to comp the whole check and send them home happy at least about that. Nate agreed, but only up to a point: He dropped a check that showed no charge for several items, to let the women know that he'd registered and acknowledged their dissatisfaction, and perhaps to send a subtle message: We didn't comp the whole thing because we know, and you know,
that you overdid the complaints. It might make them feel too guilty to badmouth the restaurant.

The birthday party buyout had its own syncopated rhythm, which had nothing to do with a standard meal—there were toasts and more toasts, speeches and random interruptions, requests to hold a course or serve a course or drop the volume of the music or turn it up again. Everyone pitched in to keep the kitchen moving, including one of the bartenders, who between drink orders ferried a few stacks of dishes to the shelves under the pass, so that the dishwasher could stay at his station and catch up. Nate ran plates to waiting tables.

Still, carrots went to a table lukewarm. Fish came out less than done. Eight chicken dinners came out for an order of seven. The kitchen was so crowded with people trying to help that the dishwasher couldn't get from the back of the kitchen to the front with the next stack of clean dishes. He had to circle outside the kitchen and weave past customers to get to the shelves under the pass.

In the midst of it all, one of the hosts stationed at the front door approached Nate and Jenni: A woman was on the phone wanting to know if she could turn her party of seven into a party of nine. She knew it was late, she knew it was a squeeze, but please?

Nate pulled his hand sideways across his throat.

“No. We can't do it.”

“What do I say to her?”

“Tell her we can't do it. No. She's calling too late to ask for that.”

A server rushed up to interrupt: A customer with a crustacean allergy worried that whatever she had ordered might be cooked in the same oil as the octopus, and she didn't want to get sick. Jenni was in the midst of decorating a display birthday cake and answered without looking up.

Octopus isn't a crustacean, she told the server. It's a cephalopod. It doesn't matter what oil we cook things in. She won't get sick.

Then she countermanded Nate and told the host to accommodate the table of seven that had become a table of nine. Jenni was in charge of the kitchen, and if they could handle this much activity, they could handle more. She was not going to turn away business.

Things threatened to get out of hand at every turn. The dishwasher's arms barely came into focus, he was moving so fast, but clean cutlery wasn't the last step—before it hit the table it was supposed to be polished to eliminate any water spots. Nate had a box full of clean flatware that he couldn't polish fast enough to keep up with demand, so he grabbed a passing bartender by the elbow as he walked past and hissed, “
We don't have any silverware
” in an urgent whisper. The bartender broke away because he had orders for bottles of wine that in his estimation mattered more than spotless knives and forks. One of the servers stepped over to help Nate, in between running plates of food, and as soon as the bartender dropped off the bottles he joined them at a crowded corner of the pass.

Jenni madly portioned almond cake for the back room and stared at the plates; the cake might be delicious, but it was pretty plain to look at. She tried adding whipped cream around the slices, wasn't satisfied, added more sugar to the aerosol canister full of already-sweetened cream, and tried again. She spooned a dollop of Max's homemade bitter orange marmalade onto each plate, which added color and kept the whole thing from being too sweet, and sent out the cake just as the strains of “Happy Birthday” floated up from the dining room, at which point she went back to hacking up whole chickens for the large-format orders.

She reached over to grab the next ticket from the order printer, which she'd ignored while she decorated the cakes, and three tickets came out in one long snake. Jenni recoiled.

“My god,” she said, “I didn't think it was going to be that long.”

Nate took small revenge on the last-minute table of nine by seating
them as a party of five and a party of four and requiring that they order two large-format dinners, not one. The dinners were designed to serve a maximum of six, so even seven was a stretch. Nine people didn't get to hold down all that real estate to divide a large-format meal into appetizer portions.

They presented Nate with nine credit cards at the end of the meal.

“I'll take four,” he said, trying to remain polite. “Four. You figure it out.”

•   •   •

A few days later,
Jonah showed up for work with a side part in his hair, which was still not long enough to have a sense of direction but long enough to hold a part. In three weeks Huertas would be a year old. Eater had decided to do a long story on the big changes in store for Huertas's second year; the one-year minimum wait on a full liquor license was almost up; and Jonah and Nate were about to spend $20,000 of Huertas's post-review profits not only on new front windows but on new tables to replace the standing counter in front, a smaller counter to replace the table between the windows and the bar, and glass doors for the back wall of the dining room, to bring in more light. It was time to present a more mature profile.

“I figure it was a haircut for a very young kid,” he said, referring to the old $15 brush cut. “And now that I'm older I should have a part.”

T
here was something sobering about an anniversary. It forced a summary, a fill-in-the-blank finish to the sentence that began, Our first year was ______, and too many of the options tipped toward the negative. Our first year was unresolved, uncertain, unlicensed. Jonah was good at fending off day-to-day problems, but it was hard to evaluate a whole year. Could it have been better? Sure. That much better? Probably not, but that was small consolation. The high points that a more detached observer might have tallied—the
Times
review, the overall improvement ever since, the upcoming Eater story where he and Nate could control the spin on the menu change—looked too small, from Jonah's point of view.

He could quantify his success in all kinds of ways—he'd survived a scary first summer, the new menu seemed like a smart hedge against a repeat of that slump in a couple of months, and he had great reviews and lots of coverage for someone who didn't already have a brand to promote. By any objective measure, Jonah was about to celebrate a first year that had exceeded expectations—but he was having a hard time
accessing any sense of accomplishment. All the good news existed on a happy distant plain that he could barely make out from a kitchen that refused to align, no matter how hard he tried.

At ten o'clock in the morning, a week before Huertas's one-year anniversary, Jonah was alone in the kitchen, chopping carrots and celery for stock, which he had sworn he would not be doing by now but found hard to hand over to anyone else. His mood was in free fall. He was as unhappy as he had been since he started looking for a space—which didn't mean that he had been unhappy then, because he wasn't, but rather that none of the disappointments since then had made him as blue as he felt now. He confessed as much to Jenni when she got in and she pushed back, insisting that she'd seen him unhappier at various points along the way. He wouldn't be argued out of it. This was the low point of his short tenure as a chef-owner, and if she looked at the newly revised schedule for April 22, anniversary night, she'd understand why. Jonah was at the pass, Jenni was working the roast and sauté station, and Max had stepped down to fry because it was Alberto's night off and the regular fry cook had left unexpectedly, after some vague mutterings about how he needed to leave the country immediately. A year in, and he still didn't have the kitchen set up the way he wanted it.

Anyone driven enough to want his own restaurant by the time he was twenty-three was probably never going to be satisfied—and Nate was Jonah's front-of-house equal in terms of the age-success equation, so he walked around with a similar cloud over his head as the anniversary approached. They lost their compensatory rhythm, in which the happier one at any given moment talked his partner out of a darker mood. They agreed only on their shared dissatisfaction. Whatever their specific goals had been on the day Huertas opened, they had redefined success: It was more than they had at any given moment.

The unspoken tension finally bubbled over into an inevitable fight
about nothing, in the middle of service, at the pass, where anyone could hear them. Jonah forgot to fire a cauliflower puree, so the entrée went out without it. When he realized that a customer's dinner was missing its side dish, he yelled at one of the new servers, “Why didn't you take the cauliflower puree?”

Before she could say anything, Nate stepped in. “Because you didn't
tell
us,” he said. “I haven't even
seen
this dish.”

“I put it up on Monday,” said Jonah.

“We have four people here on Monday,” said Nate. The rest of the front-of-house staff needed to know about new dishes, because otherwise they couldn't tell if one of them was missing. That was a simmering gripe: Sometimes Jonah added a new item without letting all the front-of-house people know about it—and even if they did know, they didn't always get to taste it first, which meant that they couldn't sound as smart as Nate wanted them to.

“Should I have put it up
twice
?” Jonah shot back, struck by the impracticality of consulting the schedule to make sure that everyone got to taste a cauliflower puree. It was a side dish, not a new entrée they wanted to promote. “What about food costs?”

Nate didn't know what to say. From his perspective, how could they not spend whatever it cost to make another batch of cauliflower puree for the staff? He wasn't suggesting a steak for every server.

They weren't really arguing about cauliflower, but about partnership and direction and pace and mutual respect. Nate's head swam with unresolved concerns: The octopus portions were too small, Jonah spent too much time in the kitchen and not enough establishing himself as a chef people recognized—and Nate still worried that the food wasn't sufficiently smart and cool. Worse, Jonah had dismissed Nate's suggestion that they start the new à la carte menu after Memorial Day because he,
Jonah, thought it better to start in early May, and he'd done so in front of staffers, which to Nate skated close to insult.

On top of that, Nate had started up a conversation with a manager at a new place he'd tried out, and the guy had never heard of Huertas. The Eater reporter was coming in the day after the restaurant's anniversary to do a long interview for the stand-alone piece on the first year and the new plan, and yet people in the industry didn't even know it existed. There was no insider buzz, despite all the stories that had preceded this one. So what good was more coverage, after all? It wasn't as though a year's worth of stories had raised their profile.

That was Nate's all-encompassing gripe: Huertas was not yet on anyone's short list.

There was no place to go with that during service, and they could hardly keep bickering about cauliflower. Nate turned his back, charged downstairs, grabbed his bicycle, and headed out the front door to take a ride, too upset to do his job.

Jonah couldn't decide to storm out of the kitchen, so he kept calling orders until Nate got back, and then he took a quick break so that they could go downstairs to the office and talk things out before they got any worse. Yes, the new menu was going to make a difference, and yes, they had to sit down together to make sure they agreed on what they wanted to tell the writer from Eater. Yes, they would make sure, together, that the servers knew everything they needed to know about the new food. They agreed that anniversaries, by their nature, were tough, because such a milestone raised a second, more difficult question: Where did you think you'd be by now?

That was the one thing they agreed on: Further was where they thought they'd be. The idea that they'd be ready to open a second place in the fall of 2015 now seemed a naive joke, and any talk of paying off
investors in even four years seemed more wistful than likely. Weekly figures were back to exceeding their projections, but that was part of what frustrated them. They were in pretty good shape—very good, when compared to their first summer, and yet nowhere near Nate's list of the restaurant groups everyone talked about and followed. There was an obvious explanation—the groups on that list were years older, so it was an unfair comparison—but in truth, many of them had drawn crowds from the beginning. It was hard not to wonder if explosive success had a best-by date stamped on it, if after a while a decent profile became a permanent condition, and it was too late to aspire to more.

That skated too close to surrender. By the time they were done sorting out their grievances, they were back to questions of what to do next. The shorthand goal was simple: They wanted to be on what Jonah called people's “‘Oh, I really want to go there' lists,” and all of their coming decisions had to be based on that.

•   •   •

The sign went up
on the front door on Wednesday afternoon:
CLOS
ING AT
8
FOR FIRST ANN
IVERSARY
.

All soul-searching was put on temporary hold at the afternoon lineup meeting, when Nate showed up toting a porrón that was full to the brim with cava. He'd instructed everyone to show up for the meeting prepared to share a favorite memory from the past year—and as their reward, he held the porrón aloft, a good two feet above a kneeling staffer's head, and poured a slow stream of wine until the recipient made some indication that it was time to stop.

One server recalled the night when Jonah and the bartender had attempted to eject a drunken participant in the city's annual SantaCon bar crawl after he'd stumbled in to use the bathroom—only to get tangled up in the vestibule they'd bought to enclose the entryway during
the winter months, as Jenni fretted that the Santa was undoubtedly from a wealthy and powerful family and would sue, putting Huertas out of business. The server tipped her head back; Nate poured.

Max remembered worrying that Jenni hated him because the first batches of churros he tried to make kept exploding in the deep fryer, which was not only messy but dangerous. He smiled at Nate. “Porrón me,” he said.

One fairly new server was happy that people liked the playlists he put together; an even newer guy offered a memory from his previous job because he didn't yet have any from Huertas. Laura, a server who'd been at Huertas since the beginning, remembered how grateful she was to learn that she wouldn't have to work brunch service.

Nate's dominant memory was of his anxiety level in the moments before the
Times
review hit; on a happier note, he recalled dancing at the holiday party with Lance, the dishwasher, who was more than a full head taller than Nate. He fell to his knees, tilted his chin, and said “Porrón me,” as Stew cheered him on and someone started humming the theme from the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

When it was Jonah's turn, he thanked Nate first, sarcastically, for not giving him a heads-up about the assignment so that he could have been prepared. But he had an answer: One of his favorite memories was the first day of training, when he tried to show Jenni how to make churros and couldn't get the fryer to light. By then, with opening day so close, every glitch felt like an apocalypse, and his first reaction was to worry that the gas connection was the problem. He was already on the phone with the plumber when Jenni checked the connection on a tube that led from the main gas line to the fryer. It wasn't properly locked into a metal holder at the fryer end, so she simply clicked it into place—a minor but essential move from a sous who had helped her dad fix things around the house. They could start making churros.

“I had an idea of what I wanted, but no idea of how to get there,” he said. “I guess I've learned that things like the fryer happen every day. So Day One of training, that's it for me.”

A server approached him with the porrón and he gave her the boss's stare. “I am not kneeling,” he said, with a small smile. “You can get on a chair.”

They consulted the reservation list, which they'd cut off early to get the party started. The final table was booked for eight o'clock. The plan was to be celebrating no later than ten.

The restaurant was full of balloons, including an enormous pink pig balloon and an even larger white octopus that floated over the service station. Jonah was there but not there, at least at first: Jenni would run the kitchen while he devoted himself to party food, “so people don't drink so much they get sloppy.” He was making pressed sandwiches on baguettes the length of a sheet pan—pulled pork, cheese, piquillo peppers “to make it more Spanish,” and, he said sheepishly, “because it's what we have.” He separated the loaves of bread with rolled cylinders of aluminum foil, an old catering trick he'd learned to keep the filling from squishing out the sides when he pressed the sandwiches.

It wasn't a busy night, not with the early closure, so Jonah and Nate stood at the pass discussing the packaging for the hot dog window, which Nick intended to install in the coming week. Shake Shack put its hot dogs in cardboard containers inside rectangular paper bags with handles cut into them, but Nate knew a designer who said he could come up with something that looked more like a popcorn bag—just pop the hot dog in the bag—and they could save money by stamping the outside with their logo rather than pay for it to be printed. Jonah wondered if they might need some cardboard reinforcement in the bottom of the bag to keep the hot dog sitting right. Jenni, eager to have input, suggested traditional pleated-paper hot dog holders.

They talked about the new menu, too—Nate's victory, because it didn't include chicken. There were sweetbreads, and shrimp dumplings, and the pulpo orders would be three big pieces of octopus. The new duck entrée was on tonight's menu for a test run. Having vented all of their distress in the fight over a plate of cauliflower puree, Jonah and Nate focused on what came next and cheered themselves up with one eye on the clock. When Stew came by to ask what he ought to say to latecomers, Nate was adamant: Tell them we're closing early.

The last call at the bar was at nine fifteen. Five minutes later, Jonah raised his arm in a cutoff gesture and announced, “Two hot dogs, two duck, and I am done cooking for the night.” He took off his apron with a flourish and headed downstairs to change out of his chef's shirt.

Nate and a couple of servers ferried tubs of drinks and iced beer upstairs, and Nate filled the porrón with something he slyly called punch. Jonah set hotel pans on top of his trays of sandwiches, weighted the pans with cast-iron skillets, and loaded everything into the oven. Servers ran downstairs in drab work clothes and emerged in party clothes that ranged from bright dresses to a clean shirt over dark pants, followed by the kitchen staff once cleanup was done.

It was not quite as manic a party as the
Times
review celebration had been, as there was no suspense or relief attached to a day on the calendar. People drank too much and tried to remember to have a sandwich—and Jonah and Nate, mindful of the visit from the Eater writer the very next day, tried to modulate their behavior to ensure that they'd be at their clearheaded best for the interview.