Generation Chef (4 page)

And then, whether inspired or threatened by the disruption, or both, the men who already had kitchen jobs stepped into the fray: Like the stifled children of authoritative parents, they rebelled. Jonah grew up in the shadow of the swaggering bad-boy cook, the expletive-spewing, drugs-and-alcohol-addled descendants of Anthony Bourdain. The anti-chef positioned himself as far from the austere French model as it was possible to do and still hold down a job; he might be talented, but he often showed up for a shift in an altered state and took pride in the fact that he could turn out great food while operating at a diminished capacity. Some members of the boys' club did not respond well to newcomers, behaving in ways that dared the faint of heart to walk in the kitchen door.

Change, however messy, had its benefits on the plate: A chef might be a somber man in a white coat and a tall hat who knew the classic French sauces, or a woman who knew them but was more interested in creating a dish around that week's bounty of tomatoes. In 1998 Nancy Silverton started grilled cheese night at Campanile, because she liked grilled cheese and could come up with lots of tasty variations, and suddenly that was a perfectly reasonable thing for a high-end restaurant to serve. Cooking was up for grabs, as was the notion of who got to do it—not yet a meritocracy, but not quite the closed society it had been for so long. That was the start; by the time Jonah started to look for a full-time job, chefs had turned their backs on geography and natural science as well. They might mix Asian and French ingredients, as Waltuck did, or go further afield to merge Mexican and Korean, because maps were nothing more than another set of restrictions. A chef could ignore the boundaries of solid, liquid, and gas and turn an olive into a quivering, olive-flavored bubble, because there was no reason not to.

•   •   •

The changes that came next,
the ones that defined the landscape Jonah stepped into in 2013, had more to do with life outside the kitchen than inside. In 2003 there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Eater or Grubstreet.com, no Instagram or Foursquare, no iPhone or Android. The debut of
Top Chef
was still three years away; Mario Batali might be gaining a following on
Molto Mario
, a dump-and-stir instructional television show, but the era of competitive cooking, with the lure of money, prizes, and national exposure for any talented comer, had not yet begun. The economy was good, so there was little need to rethink the spacious bricks-and-mortar model. The leading edge of the millennials had just hit twenty-one, most of them still too young to drive, not yet the kind of marketing force that defined trends.

Ten years later, nothing was the same: More people talked about food more often, in more ways, until the ability to make great food achieved celebrity status—which in turn increased the volume and frequency of the conversation. Cooking for a living developed cachet, and held out the double promise of profits and fame. Nick Anderer, who was only nine years older than Jonah, had been embarrassed to tell his professor father that he intended to be a chef, but shame was no longer an issue.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of chefs and head cooks in the New York City area more than doubled between 2003 and 2013, from just over three thousand to more than seven thousand, even as an increasing number decamped to escape the city's competitive job market. Restaurant openings were up, although closures kept pace, and Nick marveled that, as he saw it, “Anyone can have a 40-seat restaurant in the East Village.” From there a chef could catapult to empire, like Momofuku's David Chang, who had spun the neighborhood's Momofuku Noodle Bar, opened in 2004, into a global network
that continued to grow—five restaurants in New York City, with more in development; locations in Washington, D.C., Toronto, Canada, and Sydney, Australia; the Milk Bar bakery, involved in its own expansionist agenda; a quarterly food publication,
Lucky Peach
; an online market for products and souvenirs.

A chef might find herself at the happy intersection of effort and opportunity, a celebrity without seeking it, as April Bloomfield did when the man who would become her business partner, Ken Friedman, auditioned her to become the chef at his gastropub, The Spotted Pig. She was British and knew the food; he was already well into planning and needed a chef who could execute his idea. Suddenly Bloomfield was no longer an anonymous if well-regarded sous chef at London's River Café, but at twenty-nine the standard-bearer for a new dining concept—new to New Yorkers, at least—and in charge of a kitchen that would be the first of several they opened together.

Along the way, they upended accepted notions of time and space: Danny Meyer had waited nine years to open his second white-tablecloth restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, an eternity by current standards, and a model that chefs seemed in a hurry to leave behind. Nick Anderer, who worked in kitchens for eleven years before he got his name on a menu, created one at Maialino that was designed to bridge the gap between the dwindling number of orders for a traditional coursed meal—“composed appetizer, composed second course, composed entrée, composed dessert”—and the more fashionable shared plates. He imagined that the next place he'd open for Meyer's company, a Roman pizzeria called Marta, was the likelier model for the new age—no tablecloths, a big display kitchen, and pizza nudging entrées out of the way.

The familiar middle ground—a chef and his restaurant, a reservation, a meal—started to feel tentative if not shortsighted, an unreliable foundation for a long career.

Meyer, referred to as “the greatest restaurateur Manhattan has ever seen” by the
New York Times
, evaluated the scene as “good and bad,” and he wasn't equivocating. Too much had changed, too fast, to be able to predict how all of this would resolve itself, whether the antic pace would last or correct itself into more modulated growth. In the meantime, the generation in play—cooks on the cusp of a career—were not likely to hold still long enough to find out, lest they be left behind.

It seemed impossible to reconcile the impact of everything that had happened in a single decade. Social media was good, surely, because it helped a young chef spread the word about his new place, cheaply and quickly—and bad because it sped up the conversation. Chefs used to have six months to find their feet before a review, but now critics showed up in the first six weeks, and an opening without online coverage might as well not have happened.

Competition television was good and bad for the same reason—it promised a backstage look at kitchen life, which got viewers more interested in dining out and in the chef as media personality, but it drew people to the profession who would never survive a season of dicing vegetables in a basement prep kitchen, as Jonah had at Chanterelle. Chef Tom Colicchio, the head judge of Bravo's
Top Chef
since its 2006 debut, distinguished that show, which allowed its contestants to “shine,” he said, from shows that shamed contestants with challenges they'd never encounter in real life and loud, extended dressings-down, a difference seemingly lost on viewers who now watched cooks of any age cook under any circumstances. The Food Network alone had more than one hundred million viewers for what Michael Pollan, author of
The Omnivore's Dilemma
, called “gladiatorial combat” in a piece for the
New York Times
. Pollan saw food shows as sports television, and the analogy extended beyond cutthroat competition: Chefs could be rich and famous like celebrities in other fields.

Unless, of course, they failed, in an equally spectacular fashion. The economy was another element in the whiplash equation, with unexpected consequences no matter what it did. The healthy prerecession economy seemed at the time to be a gold mine—easy mortgages and plenty of places to rent—but it turned out to be a money trap when the recession hit and previously giddy chefs found themselves in over their heads. And the years of tight money rewarded ingenuity: A young chef might have trouble raising money to rent a space, but ambition couldn't wait, so he looked for an alternative, and the recession elevated the food truck from the ubiquitous ice-cream vendor to a gourmet outpost on wheels. Los Angeles's classically trained Roy Choi was the first food-truck operator to make the top ten on
Food & Wine
magazine's Best New Chef list, in 2010, with the Kogi Korean BBQ truck he'd launched two years earlier. Kimchi on a quesadilla made perfect sense, as long as people lined up to buy it.

•   •   •

Success started to look like
anything that got people in the door, or up to the truck window, and eager candidates lined up for their shot. USHG had for the first time received two thousand unsolicited applications in a single year from aspiring cooks, unprecedented for the sheer number—and for the speculative nature of the inquiries, which were not submitted in response to a specific job posting but sent just in case a position opened up. Some of those cooks intended to be the next Jonah, and he hadn't even found a space yet.

Richard Coraine was a thirty-year industry veteran who now supervised restaurant development for USHG, and he saw a sea change in how people got to the point where Jonah now was. The straightforward path to becoming a chef, based on “competence and sanctions,” was obsolete. In its place, more opportunity, and more disarray.

When Coraine started out, he said, “It was all logical, because you had come up through a very hierarchical and competence-driven format, and along the way you were sanctioned. You couldn't supervise somebody cutting up a chicken unless you had competence cutting up a chicken.”

Money had changed all that. “If you have a pile of money,” he said, “you can get a collection of recipes—yours, somebody else's—and open a restaurant, call yourself a chef. Chef is the label we give to anybody who's in control of the product that's coming out of the kitchen,” which meant that the chef might have fewer cooking skills than the people who worked for him. It didn't matter, as long as he had a profitable concept that someone on the payroll could execute.

Meyer liked Jonah's odds in great part because he was more of an old-school model—he might seem to be in a hurry, given his age, but he'd already logged a decade of experience. And he had survived several rounds; some of those two thousand USHG applicants would never get as far as a sous chef job at a big-name restaurant, let alone strike out on their own. But there was no way to predict how far that would take him, because the criteria for high-profile success were not yet clear. Customers at
Top Chef
winner Stephanie Izard's two Chicago restaurants often inquired about her season on television when they asked to have a selfie taken with the chef, but she had yet to have a single guest mention her James Beard Award for outstanding chef, Midwest region. Fame, the adulation of strangers, had replaced renown, the more circumscribed respect of one's peers.

“A celebrity chef today can be someone who's worked for twenty years,” said Anderer, “or someone who's got tattoos and worked at two places, and everything in between. Anyone can break in if they can work the loudspeaker, as it were.”

Jonah had a hunch that the city needed the kind of Spanish food he
wanted to make, an accessible cuisine that still had novelty going for it, and that the bar and dining room would each draw a distinct clientele and broaden his base. Those were his loudspeaker messages, if he could just get enough people to listen.

He wasn't prepared to contemplate the alternative, that somehow he'd get lost in the shuffle. He had to make Huertas work; at twenty-five, Jonah had narrowed his options to one. Being a chef, running his own restaurant, and from there a group of them, was all he wanted to do, and what he was trained to do. He wasn't going to be a “misfit asshole creative chef,” who in Jonah's estimation was his own worst enemy because he didn't understand anything but the food. That kind of chef might regard food costs and staff morale as beneath his dignity, soulless concerns of the sort that kept bean counters awake, but Jonah looked around and figured that the way to break through was to be both creative and responsible—to make beautiful food and stay in business. More than that: Make beautiful food, stay in business, and grow.

•   •   •

At fifty-nine,
David Waltuck again found himself among the hopefuls, like Jonah, about to embark for the second time on a new restaurant project, thirty-four years after he opened what became an exalted piece of the city's restaurant history. During the summer of 2009, just months before Jonah started at Maialino, the Waltucks had announced that they would close Chanterelle temporarily for much-needed renovations, to reopen in October, a few weeks before the restaurant's thirty-year anniversary on November 14. In October, they announced that Chanterelle would not reopen, ever, a victim of rising rents in a neighborhood that had gentrified around their once-isolated outpost.

Eater ran an item that attributed Chanterelle's demise to natural
causes: “It's always sad to see a restaurant go down after a long run. But the times, they are a changin', and it would have been an uphill battle for them to keep the old timer alive.”

For four years Waltuck consulted on other people's projects—offered his input on burgers and sports bar menus and tried to get used to having his creative suggestions politely declined. It was intolerable. He missed being in the kitchen, missed the French- and Asian-inspired dishes that he considered to be his signature; he yearned for a more active role. He needed a new strategy, though, now that there were no longer the kind of bargain rents that had enabled him to lease Chanterelle's original thirty-seat location for a monthly rent of $825. Cheap rent had meant that he and Karen could pursue their “very idealistic and very romantic” idea on the fly—which was how he saw it, looking back.

“It wasn't fraught,” he said of the scene in 1979. “There weren't as many rules.”