Generation Chef (28 page)

I
t was just past six o'clock on an indecisive night in early June: The clean afternoon sunlight had congealed into a flat sky and thick air, and the humidity made people linger outside because they figured they might get caught in the rain later on. They sat on stoops, or meandered toward home with none of the urgency that marked the centers of finance and business to the north and south; even if locals worked there, their pace seemed to slow once they hit the neighborhood. Clots of longtime residents stood in front of the corner produce market or the Laundromat. Dogs dreamed of autumn.

Nate and Jonah sliced across East Fourth Street like visitors from an alien planet, dressed as though it were, in fact, September, which was as close as they got to business attire—dark cotton pants and darker-still shirts, Nate's a deep maroon, Jonah's navy verging on black. On an easygoing block, they vibrated with anxiety.

They were item 27 on the community board licensing subcommittee's agenda for Monday, June 8, the last on a roster of eight applicants for liquor licenses, except that they'd been told to be ready at the start
of the six thirty meeting. The numerical agenda, it seemed, had little to do with reality.

This was the first step in a two-step strategy that Levey had devised to get them approved without further delay, one way or another, even though it required a short wait past the one-year mark for the local and state schedules to align. If the community board approved the application, the SLA would rubber-stamp it. If the community board balked again, which they shouldn't, he had Huertas on the SLA agenda a week later and was ready to inform the new director that the previous one had as much as promised a license at the one-year mark, which had already passed.

Jonah and Nate had been courting regulars for weeks, encouraging them to show up to speak on behalf of the full license—and this time they had cherry-picked supporters who lived or worked in the area, or both, mindful that last April they'd imported speakers from the Upper West Side, which only reinforced their carpetbagger status. They had collected petition signatures, letters of support, and an information packet that ran close to one hundred pages, one copy for each committee member.

All of which either meant something or nothing, depending on how they felt at any given moment. They had been turned down by this committee and by the SLA, ambushed both times by resistance they hadn't seen coming. What if it happened again? The rational part of Nate's brain was sure it wouldn't, because they'd passed the one-year mark. The irrational part kept him from making so much as a list of what he might order, let alone a list of specific cocktails. He didn't want to jinx things.

Nate stood outside the community board office and chewed on his thumbnail while Jonah took advantage of his height and focused straight ahead, which made it easy to avoid eye contact. Nate confessed
to one Huertas regular that he wished they had some sense of what was about to happen, and she reassured him that surely their lawyer would have a take on things before the meeting began.

Nate was hardly going to ask Levey what it was. He remembered how angry he'd been after the SLA meeting and tried to focus instead on the simple logic of today's meeting. It was six weeks past the year they'd been told they had to wait, and that ought to be that.

When Peter Hoffman arrived, Jonah broke away to talk to him, comforted by the surprise presence of his ex-employer, who was there not because of Huertas but to support another applicant—the restaurant that was moving into the space previously occupied by Back Forty.

“You here for the upgrade again?” asked Hoffman. Jonah nodded, and the two men engaged in a quiet conversation while around them Huertas supporters introduced themselves to each other and Nate instructed them on how to sign in so that they were registered to speak. Once the doors opened the short rows of seats filled quickly, but Jonah and Nate hung back in the doorway, too antsy to sit down. They were last in a trio of applicants scheduled for six thirty on the revised agenda. It wouldn't be long.

The first applicants were back with a sidewalk café application a month after a stymied first appearance, having addressed all of the committee's concerns, and they got their permit quickly. The next applicant didn't show up on time, so suddenly Huertas was the second item on the agenda, not the third.

Jonah, Nate, and their lawyer hustled up the aisle and stood to one side of the long table where the committee members sat. They listened while the chairwoman synopsized their liquor license history: beer and wine granted in the fall of 2013, full liquor license turned down by Community Board 3 in September of 2014 “because they'd only been open for six months,” turned down again by the SLA in December of
that year. The committee had the packet the lawyer had distributed, a petition with over 120 names, and the letters of support. Was there anything else the applicants wanted to add?

Before Jonah and Nate could find their voices, Levey spoke up: Yes, the board had turned down Huertas's first request for an upgrade because it was too early. He wanted board members to appreciate that Huertas was back here, not at the SLA, because “it seemed like the right thing to do,” to come back to the community for approval. He pointed out that there was no opposition. He mentioned that the
New York Times
had given Huertas a rave review.

That shook Jonah loose. “Press is great,” he said. “But what's most gratifying is the response from the neighborhood.”

The chair consulted the sheaf of speaker requests and started to read off names. One by one, regular customers stood up to testify.

The first speaker, a young man in rumpled survive-the-heat clothes, said that a full liquor license would help Huertas survive.

The second, a man in a suit, announced that he had taken his sister to Huertas to celebrate her engagement. “It's really an asset to the community.”

A young woman said, “The beverage program even now is impressive, but I'd like to see what more they can do.”

A young man said that he went to Huertas all the time with his girlfriend. “It's good for the community.”

A woman from Northern Spain who had lived in the East Village for forty years praised the restaurant's authenticity. “It represents a happy, jovial people. The mix is wonderful,” she said, glancing at the previous speakers, all of whom were young enough to be her children. “Seniors like me. Young people.”

A soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old resident took a more practical stance: “They've shown success so far,” she said, “but the atmosphere is
competitive. A liquor license is a tool. I'd like to see them here for the long haul.”

At that, the committee chair asked her colleagues if anyone had a motion. The lawyer broke in, nervously. There were more speakers. Didn't the board want to hear all of them?

“I think that you've made your point,” said another committee member. Her colleagues laughed. Jonah and Nate allowed themselves a short, nervous chuckle and the lawyer, a hopeful smile.

Just like that, it was over: A motion that included language about Huertas having “established itself as a high-quality restaurant,” a fast second, a unanimous vote to approve. Jonah and Nate and the lawyer and the group of supporters, who made up almost half of the audience, rushed out the door in a scrum of congratulatory hugs. The others scattered quickly, leaving Nate and Jonah alone on the sidewalk, staring at each other. Levey handed them a form to sign and peeled off as well, and in a mutual daze they started across East Fourth Street toward Huertas.

Nate grabbed his cell phone to call his father. Jonah winced, balled up his fist, and pressed it against his torso. “Kind of a knot in my stomach,” he muttered. More than a year after he'd first hoped for it, he had a full liquor license, the one thing that could yield a substantial, consistent improvement in Huertas's profits.

In their excitement—and relief—Jonah and Nate had forgotten to ask when they could start serving liquor. They would figure it out tomorrow. Today was Jonah and Marina's one-year wedding anniversary, and Jonah wanted to leave work early and meet her at Maialino to combine past, present, and future in one celebratory meal: spaghetti alle vongole and a side order of the tripe.

The walk back to Huertas was much quicker than the walk over to the board meeting had been, now that there was no longer a reason to be
worried, and when they burst in the door Jonah hurried to the kitchen to tell Jenni, while Nate hugged the host and gave Stew the good news. It was an unusually busy Monday night, so there was no time to bask. An hour after the community board meeting, Jonah was back at the pass in his apron, instructing a new server on which plates were to be taken to whom, surveying an impressive row of tickets, and watching the door. He'd talked to a line cook at Per Se who seemed to want to make a change, a woman he'd love to hire as a sous chef down the line, a notion—down the line—that he was again prepared to entertain. She was supposed to come in to eat tonight; nice timing, as it turned out, and he wanted to be sure to spot her the moment she arrived.

Nate appeared at the pass with three short glasses and a bottle of Woodford Reserve whiskey that he'd stashed somewhere, and poured a half inch for himself, and for Jonah and Jenni. They sipped, but he drank it down in one gulp, yelled “Whoo,” and giggled.

“I am doing this illegally,” he said, and headed off to hide the temporarily contraband bottle.

P
ete Wells had laid in a coded message at the end of his
Times
review, back in October, although he doubted that Jonah would have wanted to hear it flat out at that point. He wrote, “Once the familiar conventions of the modern tasting menu kicked in, I did steal a few looks at the front room, where a tray of hot croquetas always seemed to be going around. Maybe I wanted more spontaneity. Or maybe I just wanted a croqueta.” The front room felt like more fun—but he understood that a young chef with his first place wanted to show that he could do more than great pintxos and memorable potato chips; more than charred octopus or his version of papas bravas.

And he could. Almost a year after his first visit, Wells still savored the memory of his two dinners at Huertas. What had impressed him about the menu del dia, he said, was Jonah's ability to create “thought-out meals, rather than a barrage of separate recipes. I thought he was really good at that.” Good enough to remind Wells of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, which, “has always had menus that were supposed to make
sense and give you some variety, not become redundant and not fatigue you.” Jonah did that, too.

But the food wasn't rarefied enough to warrant its own room—which was a practical assessment, not a criticism. “My impression was that this was a chef wanting to make a statement,” said Wells, “and not quite getting that he had made a statement in the front room.”

“It was clear to me that he thought the back room was really what the restaurant was all about. I thought that the front room was what the restaurant was all about. But I didn't hammer that point. I kind of left it between the lines.”

•   •   •

Three days after
the liquor license hearing, Jonah and Nate got the story they wanted, a long Q and A on Eater that ran under the headline, “For Huertas Owners Jonah Miller and Nate Adler, Change Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of.” They packed up the past in a box labeled “then,” and dismissed it: “We just had a cold, long winter,” said Jonah, “and our first summer was trying, but then we got our
Times
review, and I've never looked back.”

Nate seconded the message. “Being young, both of us are very eager to make changes,” he said. “Stagnation, complacency is not something that is in our bloodlines at all.”

They came off as two talented and ambitious partners who had figured out a better way to show people a good time, and were willing to upend the very concept they'd opened with, only a year earlier, in order to do so. They claimed the intersection of heritage and innovation for themselves—invoked their USHG legacy to prove that they were more substantial than their ages might suggest, and talked about making the bold move in case someone saw a similarity to David Chang or Major Food Group, both of them masters of the smart and profitable revamp.

They gave themselves credit for surviving in an unexpectedly difficult—sometimes hostile—environment.

“If you asked me two years ago, What would it feel like to have been open a year, I would have been like, ‘No big deal, we should be open a year, otherwise we're huge failures,'” said Jonah. “But having been open a year, I understand now what the accomplishment is, and it's tough.”

The first year's success required that they set new goals for the second, because a static restaurant was as good as out of business.

“We've been on people's lists,” said Jonah, in the hope that Eater's readers would appreciate the brave overhaul and help propel Huertas forward, “but we want to inch closer to the top, and make sure we can't miss.”

•   •   •

The new menu was a mix
of front-room standards and dishes that might have appeared in the dining room in the old days: Jonah added a whole fish in a salt crust, a steak, and a foie gras pintxo; he created a dish of kimchi made with Spanish spices and served with chunks of jamón, and it sold as well as the fried rice had. He built a salad on his favorite seasonal green, which happened to be Italian, and stopped worrying quite so much about the provenance of what was on the menu. He made sure he had a chance to show what he could do—Huertas was not the pintxo bar that a worried investor had suggested a year earlier—this time with a nod to the way the current generation of restaurant-goers wanted to eat, a whole fish for the table to split, a bunch of pintxos, maybe one order of that kimchi rice, why not, to pass around. The permutations were up to the customer now; there were fewer rules, more ways to assemble a meal, and enough of a creative challenge to inspire the chef. Jonah might someday have the restaurant he dreamed of, where he got to show off exactly what he could do with a more challenging menu. Not yet.

There was no arguing with the daily numbers. The new menu did exactly what it was supposed to do—lured more people to Huertas and made this June the antithesis of the first June, a smooth and profitable transition past the dreaded Memorial Day marker and into a better second summer. This time around, the people who stayed in town came by to eat, and to have a cocktail. When Jenni complained about a slow weekend afternoon, it was because one table was empty, not because one table was full.

•   •   •

Jonah and Nate
would never know if what made the difference was the new menu, or the simple passage of time, or Eater's big story, or the hot dog. It could be a combination of all those things. They didn't care. However they had gotten here, it was better, and it was more consistent day to day. They allowed themselves to assume that it would stick.

They sidled up to a renewed conversation about the future. Investors had stopped poring over the monthly reports and inquired, some of them, about what Jonah had in mind for his second project, because they were ready to write checks. Nate took Jonah at his word about wanting to do something different next time, and they started to consider a dramatic departure—not Spanish, not necessarily a traditional restaurant format, but one that combined a seated space with takeout and a delivery service. New Yorkers relied on takeout, which they wanted at breakfast and lunch as well as dinner, and while they could find it at every corner bodega or grocery store, the opposite end of the business, high-quality portable food, wasn't as crowded. It was smart from a business standpoint because it saved labor costs; there were no servers for the take-out side, only counter help. Nate had seen the kind of operation they had in mind on his trips to the West Coast—homemade everything, sold by well-informed staffers who could engage millennials
in the sort of microanalysis they enjoyed, about where the smoked fish used to swim or who grew the peppers. There wasn't yet enough of it in New York to preclude what he and Jonah had in mind.

A great big space with seasonal American dishes, a market-restaurant that applied Jonah's standards to takeout if a diner didn't have the time to hang around, or brought it to the door when the weather was bad. New dishes all the time, based on a stronger relationship with the farmers at the market. They could do that.

They could probably afford Williamsburg this time, with its wall-to-wall clientele. If they put together a smart proposal, raising enough capital to buy a building would not be out of the question. They might as well start to look.