Generation Chef (29 page)

H
uertas's first twelve months were the business equivalent of mood swings, and the first anniversary brought with it a sense of relief. Bleak memories had been eclipsed by life since the
Times
's review. Now the dips were shallower and shorter, and they yielded more readily to the solutions that Jonah and Nate engineered. Less apocalypse, more daily challenges they felt able to address. It seemed as though the worst was over.

People who'd been around longer knew better. “The restaurant cycle is such that the real years that you need to focus on, the ones that either make it or break it, it's two through five,” said USHG's Richard Coraine, who in 1995 had opened a four-star restaurant in San Francisco that closed when it failed to sustain its early promise. “You're always going to be the new person in year one, and people always want to write about what's new and exciting. Years two through five it's ‘Have you planted enough roots that are now starting to take?' If you're really good in year one and you're very popular and you're solid in years two through five, you're probably built for a longer race. If after year three it starts to dip, whatever was getting people in the door in the first place hasn't
completely stuck, so there's something that's off about what you're offering and what people want.”

A chef-owner always had to keep an eye out for a dip that threatened to become a trough, so that he could adjust on his terms and not in panic mode. He had to be able to “right-size,” as Coraine put it, “to make sure that the expenditures are commensurate with the amount of revenue you have coming in.”

“The trick in this business is reading the tea leaves,” he said, “to make sure it's not like a cold shower. You don't want to come in someday and go, ‘Wow, we need to not have four employees here.' Maybe you say, ‘We're going to right-size it with one fewer employee for the next three months and see where we get. Then we might have to lose another one, but everybody's still busy doing what they do in the kitchen.'”

He thought that the decision to abandon Huertas's menu del dia was a good one, because a fixed-price meal ran counter to basic notions of hospitality: “This is all metaphorical,” he said, “but it takes your wallet, because you have no stake in how much you spend; it's what my menu costs. And it takes your watch, because dinner's going to take as long as it takes me to serve the courses I've defined. I could be wrong, but I don't think that people want to eat minus those two things on a regular basis.”

The new a la carte menu was a smart move, as was the accompanying Eater article about the partners' willingness to embrace change. A restaurant's identity lingered forever, online and in social media. Change it without controlling the message and some customers might feel betrayed.

“In year one, you go, ‘Here's who I am, here's who I am, here's who I am,' and then it's ‘Guess what? Never mind,'” said Coraine.

Jonah and Nate had anticipated that reaction, though, and managed to get their story out. If they saw more trouble ahead, they had to find
what Coraine called the “sweet spot” and continue to adjust, knowing that what was right-sized during the fall was probably not going to be right-sized after New Year's unless they catapulted to the ranks they aspired to join, the short list of restaurants everyone had to go to all the time.

•   •   •

Striking the right balance concerned
Elizabeth Briggs as well, far earlier in the process. The Culinary Institute of America launched a new batch of students every three weeks at its main campus in Hyde Park, New York, and Chef Briggs was one of the first instructors they met: She taught Product Knowledge, where students like Jenni and Alyssa learned what Jonah had learned in David Waltuck's kitchen at Chanterelle, the basic vocabulary they had to master if they hoped someday to write their own menu. She taught her class how to identify high-quality ingredients, to distinguish a good onion from one whose appearance warned of rot, of mold, of age, of having been frozen, or to recognize different kinds of potatoes and understand how to cook each one. She taught them to transform a past-its-prime red onion into a marmalade to serve with a smoked beef tenderloin, because a smart chef didn't throw anything out.

Of late, she had added another lesson to the curriculum: She talked about doing “damage control,” because a chef's life bore little resemblance to what her students saw on television or read about in profiles of the famous, wealthy few. Briggs liked food television because it made a food career more accessible to more people, but the narrow focus on becoming a restaurant chef concerned her. Notions of empire worried her even more because the odds were so great against it. “I try to teach reality, because if you don't, you set them up to fail,” she said. “They think it's all going to be glory, and they go on an externship, no glory,
and they're disappointed. Not glory, not high energy, not big money. They can be disenchanted.”

Briggs wanted her students to appreciate at the outset that there were alternatives to the goal that drove so many of them to enroll—to own and run their own restaurants someday—and that the road to success was not an easy one. “Think about it,” she said. “You're going to leave school with debt, do you really want to be a line cook? Maybe for a few years, but then you have to see.”

In addition to its two- and four-year programs, CIA had added degrees in food science and food studies, both of which were more popular than the school had anticipated they might be, as people who loved to cook looked for more stable environments in which to do so. A graduate whom Briggs referred to as “a phenomenal cook” added nutrition studies to the mix and went to work for a healthcare company. Others might choose to work for a hotel chain or open a butcher shop or be drawn to kitchens at companies like Google, whose employee food service operation prized quality and innovation. Cooks might not get rich and famous in a corporate kitchen, but they wouldn't go out of business, either.

And yet she understood how difficult it was to abandon the notion of being a chef and owning a place. Somebody had to succeed, and a young cook who believed in himself would likely assume that he was going to be one of the chosen few who made it—and hardly be discouraged by the cautionary advice of someone who had been in the classroom for thirty years.

Briggs, a compact woman who wore wire-rimmed glasses and had her hair tucked tight behind her ears, looked back on her own life and saw “markers, little flags” of her early interest in food. She recalled her parents' vegetable garden, the tin of sardines she liked for breakfast when she was seven, her grandfather's homemade fudge—and her early appreciation of hot peppers, which she considered a sign of a
sophisticated palate. She spent her college summer vacations working in a New England tea kitchen making tea sandwiches and hors d'oeuvres, although she was not allowed to work in the full kitchen, which was limited to men. She'd worked at golf and tennis clubs and as a personal chef who aspired to turn out meals “as good as Escoffier's.”

She was a mainstay of the CIA faculty, but she wanted to be clear about what might have been. Then and now: No one had encouraged her to pursue a career as a chef when she was growing up, but today she might have been one of the students who ignored the more practical alternatives and made a name for herself.

“I'm science-minded,” she said. “If I had been nurtured as a child I could have been Grant Achatz,” the Chicago chef who had been her student, graduated in 1986, and went on to open Alinea, one of only two restaurants in Chicago to have been awarded three Michelin stars.

•   •   •

David Waltuck
never found his equilibrium at Élan, though not for want of trying. The post-review holiday season did not live up to his expectations, but the start of 2015 did—it was as slow as those winter months usually were. He had to use profits to cover costs. “We'd stashed money in the fall,” he said, “but we went through that pretty quickly.” He started to build up debt.

So Waltuck cut back on staff, watched food costs even more closely, and waited for things to get better in the spring—which they did, but not at a sufficient level to reverse things. Élan still wasn't right-sized. He went back to his investors to ask for funds to get through what he hoped was a finite slump, but he raised only “some,” and the turnaround was not substantial enough to make up the difference.

Business was “really not great,” he said, and by July that had devolved into “not viable.” He had a great chef de cuisine and sous chef, but he
didn't have the money to support both of them and himself, nor enough confidence to promise them any kind of job security. The chef de cuisine, who had a pregnant wife, gave notice. The sous chef did as well.

At sixty-one, Waltuck was back on the line, running up and down stairs carrying five-gallon containers. “I was killing myself physically and stress-wise,” he said. He and his partner cut their paychecks in half.

He figured he could continue like this until the fall, when things usually picked up, and once they did he could staff up again and catch his breath. He went back to his investors a second time to see if they would help him get that far—and then his second fall season let him down. “It was fine, good, okay but not what we needed it to be, not wonderful,” in Waltuck's estimation. He was exhausted, and he saw the specter of another grim January just months ahead. He had to admit it: The contemporary restaurant scene was a foreign country that he was unable to navigate successfully.

“It's very difficult right now,” he said. “Too many restaurants, costs are high, including labor, rents are high, margins are minuscule. And there's a different kind of restaurant-goer than there used to be; it's changed in ways I didn't see before I got back. It's hard to get beyond ‘Let's go check this place out.' They go, they're done, they check you off the list.”

In February 2016, Waltuck and his partner announced their decision to close Élan. They would serve a fixed menu of favorite dishes for a few weeks, and that was that. By then Waltuck was in the midst of a very different kind of business challenge, as he tried to extricate himself from the space without further financial loss. If someone was willing to assume the lease or could negotiate a new one—and if Waltuck stayed current on rent payments through that process—he would recoup both his security deposit, four months of his $30,000 rent, and the $400,000 key money. But he'd already missed his February rent, which meant that one month of the security deposit was gone. If they
burned through three more months of non-payment before another tenant appeared, he'd lose both the four months' rent, $120,000, and the $400,000 key money.

He anticipated that renting out the West Village apartment where he and his wife had raised their family was not going to suffice to get him out of this hole. Once everything at Élan was wrapped up, he'd almost surely have to put it on the market. At the moment, it was his biggest asset.

February turned into June and the space sat, empty. Waltuck lost the four months' rent and the key money and prepared to embark on the next phase of his life, as director of culinary affairs for the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, which offered six- to twelve-month programs as well as continuing education classes for professionals. In late June he started to audit classes, as any new instructor did. Eventually, he said, “I'll be teaching, and some special events, mentoring, probably going to work on creating electives, optional classes.”

He considered the magnitude of the shift, which had its appeal. “It's a very different life in terms of hours and stress,” he said, “and it enables me to do some other things. It's not as all-encompassing as having a restaurant—certainly not as having one that's not doing well.”

Waltuck was optimistic, if not quite ready to entertain the notion that he was done running a restaurant kitchen. “It could be good,” he said of his new job, “for a while.”

•   •   •

Gavin Kaysen got offers every
week from all over the country, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, from hotels and independent restaurateurs, offers to open whatever he wanted or to run a project that someone already had in mind. In January 2015, the U.S.A. Bocuse d'Or team took the silver medal, second behind Norway, and
the story of the years-long effort behind the victory made prospective partners all the more determined to go into business with him.

Rather than feel excited or inspired by all the possibilities, he complained about “how cloudy all of these things make me feel in my head.” It was too much random input for a man who did not like to jump into things. He needed to develop a filter, an efficient way to evaluate opportunities, so that he could get back to the business of feeding people.

His company was called Soigne Hospitality, but what were its priorities? He called a meeting of his chef de cuisine and some of his investors to discuss what they were about. “‘Community, culture and cuisine' is our rallying cry,” said Kaysen, when they were done. Out of that came a set of basic questions that he and his group would ask about any potential project, including, Is it true to who we are? and, Is it financially responsible? If they couldn't answer every question in the affirmative they would pass, because there was no reason to consider compromise. He was in the kind of position other chefs dreamed of: The restaurant was jammed, reservations were still two months out, and customers drove to Minneapolis with no agenda other than to dine at Spoon & Stable. At the outset Kaysen had endured a single “scathing” review, but he counseled his people not to change what they were doing. He figured it had to happen, in part because of the attendant noise when the restaurant opened. Expectations were so high; backlash was inevitable.