Generation Chef (5 page)

Thirty-five years later, there seemed to be nothing but rules everywhere he looked, which he tried to navigate in his usual reflective, soft-spoken way. Waltuck was determined to get back into the kitchen, although he and Karen faced a painful level of sacrifice if he was going to pull this off: They would have to rent out the West Village apartment where they had lived for thirty years and move to a far cheaper place in the Bronx, where David had grown up, to minimize expenses and bring in rental income. Karen now worked with a job placement group for people with developmental disabilities, so David needed a front-of-house partner. He spoke with Chanterelle's onetime general manager, who was as antsy as David was, and they worked up a plan for a new place to be called Élan, French for energetic style and enthusiasm, all of the things he intended to bring to a slightly more casual yet still refined menu.

Waltuck's four-star past meant that he would have less initial trouble than Jonah might with fund-raising—he was a legend, not a newcomer—
but he was going to have to spend more to get the kind of space that his regulars and their descendants would appreciate. To hedge his bets in a world tuned to the next young phenomenon, Waltuck decided to look at blocks where there were already established restaurants, where he might catch an opening crowd of diners who'd forgotten to make a reservation nearby and noticed Élan, the new place across the street. That would give him a bit of a head start this time around, even if he had to pay a premium for it.

He wanted a space that was already a restaurant. The story of how he and his wife had transformed a bodega was specific to its time, and the current equivalent, the warehouse space turned into a big, noisy restaurant, was not how he envisioned the next stage of his life. Bravado and naïveté, and not quite enough money, were enough to get started in 1979, but this time he had to take a more measured approach. If he got really lucky, he could assume the lease of a faltering business, move into the kitchen, and spend money only on the parts of the space that customers could see.

He was eager to take the chance, because as he saw it, there was no acceptable alternative. Waltuck had run a restaurant kitchen for all but the past four years of his adult life; he had not spent his days talking about other people's cooking or concepts, but had cooked, created dishes, trained a team to execute them. It was what he did. It was, after a well-intentioned stab at consulting that turned into an exercise in frustration, what he felt he had to do. He wasn't quite comfortable anywhere else.

S
omeday, when he was successful, Jonah would be able to hunt for a location first, money in hand, and then figure out exactly what to do with it. Once he found a space he liked, he could install the right restaurant from a collection of ideas he already had in his head, waiting their turn like eager students hoping to be called to the front of the classroom. Investors would commit up front to be part of the next project, whatever it was, because they didn't want to miss out on a good bet, and Jonah would step into the real estate market with ample funds to compete for the good places. Someday he'd lease a vanilla box, which was what chefs called a vacant space—not the remains of a previous restaurant with a sad story to tell but a blank canvas waiting on his vision of what it ought to be.

That scenario would cost at least $1 million, too big of a wager on an unproven kid, even a talented one with a fast-rise résumé; he had no traction as a business owner. Jonah aimed for half that and so far had just over $400,000 pledged. If he lucked into a great location, he figured he could raise another $100,000, which ought to be enough.

He needed a space that satisfied a seesaw set of requirements: It should be in a neighborhood where there were already restaurants to attract customers, but not too many, on a street that drew both the drinks-after-work crowd and their older, bigger-spending siblings, one that lent itself to his design ideas but didn't require extensive repairs. One that he could afford, although cheap was pointless if it failed to meet the other criteria—low rent on a dead block was no bargain.

He assumed that he'd find such a place in Brooklyn, so he set out to look in the fall of 2012. Week after week, his fiancée went to work—Jonah joked, ruefully, that at least someone in the family was making money, aware that Marina did not want to be a corporate lawyer forever and was making her own investment in his future, one not tallied on the spreadsheets. Jonah hit the street with his backpack full of sketches and plans, to look at listings.

He spent the fall looking and got nowhere, so he hired a realtor in January and fired him four months later for not paying close enough attention to Jonah's parameters. He spent the next five months on his own again, looking at what must have been fifty sites, all the while reassuring his investors. No, he didn't need the cash yet, just the promise of it, but yes, he might need it any day, and sure, he assumed that he would find the right space, even as he went out day after day and didn't.

There was a fine line between a young chef on the brink of something big and one more unemployed sous chef, and it had been a year since Jonah had worked a restaurant shift. He did what he could to promote himself—worked catering gigs, participated in a pop-up restaurant downtown with a rotating set of chefs—but this was taking longer than he ever imagined it would.

There was a nice space in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, one of a string of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods that ran south of the gold mine that was Williamsburg, where the streets were gridlocked on
good-weather weekends with people either walking to or waiting outside of restaurants. That kind of business had to spread, so this might be a good time to get an advantageous lease in a less developed area, but the space he looked at had no basement, which meant not enough room for storage or prep. It was so close to right, though; he felt more inclined to take the next decent candidate in nearby Carroll Gardens. He offered less than the asking price, to buy a little time while the landlord considered the offer, and then he went to dinner at a local restaurant.

It did little to increase his enthusiasm, because there wasn't much foot traffic. He called a manager at a nearby place to get advice, a woman he'd worked with at Maialino, and she warned him that it was a family neighborhood, “not a hip, young crowd, less adventurous eaters, a quiet corner.” Not the kind of place where diners might want to eat little bites standing near the bar, or clamor for charred octopus, or linger late into the night. He decided not to proceed.

He began to feel as though he'd looked at every available space in Williamsburg, the neighborhood that was still his first choice, but they were all too expensive, as Brooklyn prices started to outstrip some Manhattan neighborhoods. He added Manhattan's East Village to his map, although he was skeptical that he'd find anything he could afford, and was walking out of an unpromising space with a listing broker when Peter Hoffman rode up on his bicycle. Just like that, everything changed: Hoffman knew the realtor, vouched for Jonah, and headed off, and the realtor, suddenly more enthusiastic, wondered if Jonah might like to look at another place nearby. He'd just gotten the keys, hadn't been there himself, and while there was a for-lease sign in the window, it wasn't yet listed online. It was on the market but not really on the market.

They walked over to 107 First Avenue, a transitional space on a transitional block whose storefronts alternated between then and now. One
door to the south was Empellón Cocina, the second of three restaurants owned by chef Alex Stupak, who had been a pastry chef at wd~50, Wiley Dufresne's temple to molecular gastronomy. Stupak gave up pastry to concentrate on Mexican food that was as different from traditional Mexican fare as his desserts had been from pie and cake and ice cream, and he went on to do what Jonah wanted to do, expanded from a West Village taqueria to this place, with a third on the way.

One door to the north was the Polish G.I. Delicatessen, owned by an Israeli who had bought it from the original Polish owner, whose initials were G.I.—a lineage that accounted for the hamantaschen in the display case in the spring, followed in the summer by a handwritten sign announcing that it was time for homemade cold beet borscht, place your order inside. Across the street, an entrenched fast-food row: Dunkin' Donuts, 31 Flavors, Subway, and a massive two-story McDonald's with a huge banner. Around the corner, an uncompromising espresso bar built for quality, not comfort.

Only three blocks up, a line formed daily during the short break between lunch and dinner service at David Chang's Momofuku Noodle Bar, as dozens of people, many of them consulting guidebooks and maps, gathered in the hope of getting a seat when the restaurant opened at five thirty. After that, the wait time grew in proportion to the attractiveness of the hour, and by eight o'clock it was possible to spend as much time waiting as eating. The noodle bar was the most famous destination on a strip that ran with dwindling intensity from the 14th Street L subway station at the top, past the block Jonah was looking at, to the Houston Street trains just below First Street. The neighborhood had easy access going for it, and south of Houston there was a growing number of smaller, scrappier places. Eventually, surely, the two restaurant rows would gobble up the blocks in between, and Jonah would have himself a prime location.

There was no way to know what lurked behind the plaster or under the drop ceiling, no way to anticipate plumbing or electrical problems in a building this old. But the space was the right size and had a full basement and two large wood-burning ovens, which was one more than he needed. Jonah was tired of looking. The landlord asked for a monthly rent of $15,000 and agreed to $14,000, at which point Jonah asked the realtor to get the listing taken off the market while they negotiated. He didn't want an established restaurateur coming in to overbid him, and he was prepared to pay for the privilege for thirty days. The realtor scheduled a meeting so that Jonah could meet the head of the realty office, who stood between any applicant and the landlord; once Jonah had his blessing, they could move ahead.

•   •   •

Jonah got there an hour early
and sat on a stoop across the street from the office. He was about to play the supplicant in a drama where he, of all the people in the room, had the most at stake, not a comfortable position for someone who'd always had a plan and been able to execute it. He needed to collect himself, to retrieve the positive feelings that had made him think he'd be in business by now—his faith in himself and in his talent, a healthy ambition, even a slight sense of destiny, given that he'd spent half his life in professional kitchens. If he could just get on with things, he'd get to the part of the process he could control.

The realtor obviously thought this was a good match, or he wouldn't have wasted his boss's time on this meeting. The landlord, whom Jonah had met on one of his visits to the space, seemed to like him well enough. He had solid investors, people he knew, family and friends, because he wanted investors who spent with their hearts—eager to recoup their investments and more, someday, but equally happy to support what he did. He might have gotten closer to that $1 million if he'd gone after
wealthy investors who spent money on restaurants the way they bought art, strictly business, but that made him a little nervous. He didn't want to be considered an appreciating asset.

His original plan had called for a capital budget of $500,000, but the people he shared it with—a restaurant development executive, a chef he'd once worked for, his dad—said he was cutting it too close, so at one point he had revised the figure up to $900,000. As he'd anticipated, he couldn't come close, though he was convinced he could make this location work with the $420,000 he now had, plus an extra $100,000 from the more skittish prospects. Several potential investors were holding back because Jonah didn't yet know where Huertas was going to end up—which limited his ability to look because he wasn't sure exactly how much he could spend.

“You need a certain amount of money to sign a lease,” he said, “but people don't want to sign on until they know the location. And the less experienced you are, the more money you need up front to make a deal.”

He refused to be demoralized. He tweaked the numbers again and told people he was going to find a way to make his place look like a million dollars on less than half that amount. That's how good a business head he had—rather than lose another six months to fund-raising, he had tightened up the plan until he could see how to make it work on what he had, which the realtor would have to admire.

He started to feel better. He was sitting across the street from the official start of his restaurant future, after all, with a preliminary set of drawings for a generic twenty-five-by-eighty-foot city storefront. This space was longer, which gave him even more options, possibly room for more seats, more nightly checks, greater profits. All he needed was a yes, and he'd hire a contractor to start demolition.

He headed across the street at ten, back to believing that this was going to work.

•   •   •

An hour later
Jonah was on the street, fuming, blindsided by the broker's boss, who seemed only to want to know, Who the fuck does this punk kid think he is? At least that was the message Jonah got. The man didn't care how much Jonah had raised or how much more he thought he could get, and he wanted Jonah to know that he had been in construction himself and was a part owner of a restaurant, so he understood the business. No kid was going to put one over on him.

The broker had advised him not to haggle on terms, but haggling was an aspiration at this point. They were layers of credibility away from haggling. Jonah had controlled his temper and managed to ask how much more money the head realtor wanted him to have on hand to make this work, but the man didn't have a figure at first because dollars were not the issue. Jonah's inexperience was. He might know how to cook. He knew nothing, as far as the boss was concerned, about management and running a business and surviving the construction and permit process.

The proposed solution was simple: Jonah had to raise that extra $100,000—and he had to find a partner, somebody older, somebody with experience who knew how to finesse a liquor license hearing and navigate the building department with authority. If Jonah insisted on going it alone, the realtor would insist, in turn, on a three- or four-year guarantee on the fifteen-year lease to minimize the landlord's exposure. Whether Huertas stayed in business or not, Jonah would owe the $14,000 monthly rent for thirty-six or forty-eight months—$504,000 minimum, $672,000 maximum. Given the amount, the realtor wondered if Jonah had a deep-pocket investor who could act as guarantor.

That was hardly an option. Jonah could either find more money and a partner, which meant giving away a chunk of equity in his nonexistent
restaurant, or he could find another location and hope that this realtor was an anomaly, that the next person in charge of the next listing would approve a lease application without making this kind of demand.

It was common enough to take on a construction partner, but Jonah had wanted to have a signed lease first to put himself in a better position to bargain, to avoid having need be part of the formula. This scenario put him at an obvious disadvantage: Asking someone to be his grown-up partner so that he could get a lease was hardly the way to launch a negotiation, because it gave the contractor too much leverage. He'd have to give a prospective partner equity, but under these circumstances, he might have to offer more.

Still, Jonah was not going to waste time being angry, not with a deal so close. The East Village location turned out to be a big selling point for the investors who were waiting to see where Jonah landed, and in eight days he raised the additional $100,000 he needed. He and his dad talked to a handful of contractors and ended up at lunch with Nick Thatos at a restaurant he had designed. They came away with a handshake deal to go into business together on Huertas. Nick and his partner would waive their contractor fees and defer their design fee—gamble, essentially, on Jonah's ability to repay them for the design work and include them in equity distribution once Huertas was profitable. They also wanted equity in any future project that used the Huertas name.