Generation Chef (6 page)

In return, Jonah would get his lease approved, a partner who understood city bureaucracies, and Nick's team of seasoned plumbers and electricians and drywall guys and painters, all of whom would work simultaneously on bigger projects. Jonah had to admit that the economics were good: The bigger jobs supplied steady paychecks, in case Jonah's cash flow lagged in a given week, and with luck and good calendar management, those jobs wouldn't get in the way of progress at Huertas.

Nick had been around restaurants long enough to know that equity
might not be worth anything for years, but a more immediate reward came with the handshake: He insisted on the right to design the space, to use it as a showcase for his notions of how a restaurant ought to look. He had to support Jonah's concept on a practical level, and the look had to make the chef happy, but Nick would be in control of the aesthetics, after years of executing other people's ideas.

Nick's $133,300 design and contractor's fees would have been out of Jonah's range if he'd been paying Nick for the work—so Jonah made himself focus on the benefits, even though this felt a little bit like somebody trespassing on his turf. He was getting a bargain up front in exchange for money down the line, and once Huertas made enough profit to repay investors it wouldn't hurt quite so much. In the meantime, he could add the market value of Nick's work to his fund-raising total and tell people that he'd raised almost $700,000 because, in effect, he had. He contacted the realtor to give him the good news. Jonah was ready to set up another meeting.

The realtor told him to fax over his bank statement first.

With that, Jonah was plunged into a universe he hoped to visit as rarely as possible for the rest of his life, surrounded by realtors and lawyers and inundated with e-mails and margin notes and questions. He listened to them go back and forth and wondered, not for the last time, when he was ever going to get back to cooking.

The landlord had agreed to hold the listing off the market for thirty days, but the clock ran out without resolution, so Jonah wrote another check to keep the listing off the market for thirty days more. His lawyer and the realtor told him not to worry, that the deal was going to happen and the pace was not at all unusual. Still, they got to within days of the second deadline without a deal, and Jonah, not eager to write a check for another month of what was starting to seem like dithering, wondered loudly how they could wrap this up.

•   •   •

A liquor license
was the last thing that stood between Jonah and a signed lease. With a restaurant's wholesale costs at between 20 and 30 percent of the menu price—a $10 glass of wine cost the restaurant $2.50—alcohol was the best insurance policy a new restaurant could have, a reliable profit center that made up for the slim margins on food and helped to reduce Jonah's risk, which in turn made the landlord happy. The bar at Huertas took up a third of the space, and the dining-room menu featured beverage pairings, so there was no question of opening without a license.

New York was an open state, which meant that there was no cap on how many liquor licenses a county or city or township might grant, as opposed to a closed state like New Jersey or Pennsylvania, which issued a finite number of licenses and required frustrated applicants to purchase from an existing business or wait for the occasional auction. New York State regulated the process not with a cap but with a tougher application process designed to weed out questionable candidates—and New York City required an applicant to navigate more of an obstacle course than anywhere else in the state. To get approval from the New York State Liquor Authority, Jonah had first to convince a local community board that he deserved a license.

There were fifty-nine community boards in the five boroughs of New York City, each with a subcommittee that had the right to grant, defer, or deny a license request—and if the license committee said no, the applicant had to appeal to the SLA, which meant weeks if not months of waiting for a second chance. Community Board 3, which ruled on applications in the bar-heavy East Village and Lower East Side, had a reputation for being either legendary or notorious, depending on who was talking. Longtime East Village residents looked to the board to protect them from
the effects of gentrification—franchises that replaced mom-and-pop businesses, wealthy potential residents with gut renovation on their minds, what locals saw as a creeping upscale sameness that threatened one of the last unique neighborhoods in Manhattan. Business owners more often saw the board as obstinate, waging a futile battle against change, as though progress were an act of aggression. But board members were political appointees with no term limits, so diplomacy was essential.

Jonah knew that the board could be difficult, so he decided to ask only for a beer and wine license, not a full liquor license, because he'd been told that it would improve his odds. His predecessor in the space had a beer and wine license, and his lawyer, Joseph Levey, had warned him that an unproven chef who asked for more would have what he described as “an uphill battle.” The words “dive bar” hovered ominously at the edge of any negotiation that involved alcohol, and neighbors worried that a restaurant would fail and sell all of its assets—including a provisional transfer of the liquor license—to someone whose business attracted loud, late-night drinkers. It wasn't a serious threat, because the SLA could revoke the license of someone who said they were opening a French bistro to disguise their dive-bar intentions—but it was the kind of concern that people raised at community board meetings, and it could get in the way.

If somehow the board were to grant a full license to a kid with no experience, it would likely come with too many strings attached, like an early closing time to reduce the chance of rowdiness, in case Jonah had his own secret plan for a late-night bar. Given that possibility, Jonah preferred to ask for a limited license on his terms, which included closing at midnight during the week and one a.m. on the weekends. He wasn't giving up but being strategic, playing the community board's game. Better to ask for less up front and come back for an upgrade in six months.

Jonah and his dad attended the September committee meeting to
get some firsthand intelligence, which was not reassuring. The board members looked like they were north of fifty, maybe sixty, and it seemed to Jonah that they felt “assaulted” by newcomers to the neighborhood. A couple of applicants in their twenties wanted to invest their technology riches in a club and restaurant on the Lower East Side, asked for a full liquor license, and got turned down in a fast vote. The project was exactly what the board seemed to fear—people with lots of money and no experience disrupting their neighborhood.

In the weeks between that meeting and his October appearance, Jonah worked on a tailor-made pitch. “I'm a native New Yorker, very sympathetic,” he intended to say. “Grew up in a building with a restaurant in it, and now I have a very, very contentious relationship with a bar next door to my building” in Williamsburg. He knew the difference between a restaurant that fit in and one that didn't, though he had to be careful not to sound like he was bragging.

“If you're too confident and composed when you speak,” he told himself, “these are people who will think, ‘Cocky kid.' I've got to tread the middle ground. I'm a local guy.”

•   •   •

He never got to say so
. The lawyer, who specialized in liquor licenses, made it clear: He was to introduce himself, speak very briefly about his plans for Huertas, and turn the presentation over to Nick, who was ready to impress the board with his decades of experience on completed projects.

Jonah reminded himself not to bristle if a board member took the same condescending position as the lawyer had, and dismissed him even though it was his restaurant. He was not going to get pissed off—or if he did, he was not going to let it show.

He had more of a chance than he'd anticipated to show how calm he
could be. The committee had to resolve a roster of applications for upgrades or changes first, so new applicants weren't scheduled to start until eight thirty, and Huertas was at the end of the list. Levey advised him to go get coffee or a glass of wine and come back after eleven thirty, but he stayed to see what he could learn. Representatives of a pizza place popular with NYU students endured an hour's grilling over their application for a full liquor license and a four a.m. closing, as they tried to placate neighbors who complained about having to tiptoe around piles of vomit and discarded pieces of pepperoni. The first vote was a stalemate that yielded to approval only when a board member raised the specter of a worse tenant moving in if the pizza place relocated. At least these applicants promised a security and a cleanup team.

Compared to that, and facing a tired committee near midnight, Huertas looked like an easy approval. Jonah did as he was told, made a little speech and deferred to his older partner, but a board member came back around to ask him one question: Was he content with a beer and wine license, or was he going to ask for an upgrade?

Had the man read his mind? Of course he wanted an upgrade. The question was how to tell the truth without making the board feel that he was manipulating them.

“We'd like to have a full liquor license,” he said, carefully, “but we understand we have to prove ourselves as good neighbors.”

“That's a good answer,” said a surprised committee member. “Never heard that before. Most people ask for a full liquor license right away and then balk when we say okay, but close by ten p.m.”

Jonah got his beer and wine license and so, his lease: Ten years at $14,000 a month rent, the first three months free, with an option to extend for another five years at whatever the market rate was in 2024. Having an option at all was a plus, since extensions were hard to get starting out, but Jonah did not intend to wait around until the last
minute and get hit with a big increase. He figured it was smarter to go back to the landlord five or six years from now, when Huertas was a solid enterprise and not the only place Jonah had going—when Jonah was no longer the punk kid without portfolio but rather a sought-after tenant—and get him to sign another long-term lease.

E
xperience changed the pace immediately. Nick had pulled permits in anticipation of a signed lease and was at the site with a demolition crew even as the final set of comments flew back and forth, and the asbestos inspection was set before the question of who would pay for removal was resolved. The first of four thirty-foot Dumpsters sat in front of 107 First Avenue, and Jonah took the L subway shuttle in from Brooklyn twice a day, first thing in the morning and again at the end of the workday, to see how much progress Nick's crew had made as they took the space down to the original brick. There was nothing for him to do, but it was his space, and he wanted to be there in case there were any decisions to be made.

Nick was used to moving fast, and his goal was to have Huertas open before Jonah started writing rent checks on February 1. In the first weeks his workers filled the Dumpsters with layer upon layer of old plaster and got rid of the second wood-burning oven, working without electricity rather than waiting for Con Edison to turn the power on—
they jury-rigged a lone naked bulb on an extension cord from the basement and kept at it until it was too dark to see.

He made short work of Jonah's design, particularly the reproductions of vintage travel posters that Jonah had brought back from Spain.

“Nah,” Nick said. They were too predictable. “You open Greek you put up a Greek poster, open Italian, put up Italian.” There would be no Spanish posters in this Spanish restaurant. No maps. No big octopus unless it was part of a mural Nick envisioned, etched on zinc and mounted behind the bar. Nothing that approached what he considered to be a design cliché, but lots of decorative touches that made the place feel as though it had been around forever without seeming run-down or old. Nick was tired of the budget-driven minimalism he saw in too many small restaurants, blank walls, industrial design, spare rooms that weren't as welcoming or as much fun as he thought they ought to be. He wasn't going to do what Jonah had envisioned, and he wasn't going to do what everyone else was doing—but he didn't draw to scale, unlike most designers, so Jonah would have to take his vision on sketches, verbal descriptions, and faith.

There was no point in arguing until he could see something, so Jonah dug in, instead, on a few things that were more about him as a chef than about design—or at least that was the position he took, to keep Nick at bay. Jonah had a logo already, a pig standing on its hind feet with one front hoof resting against an apple tree, a reference to the symbol of Madrid, a bear leaning against a berry tree. The font for the lettering resembled the street sign for Calle de las Huertas, where Jonah had lived during his undergraduate semester, and evoked memories of the late-afternoon tapas crawl through the neighborhood—a few tapas and a short glass of beer, a caña, at one place, and then another, a moveable feast. Jonah refused to budge on it, even though Nick had hoped to change the image and the font. This was not a design dictatorship but a
partnership, and that required give-and-take. Jonah felt that he'd done a lot of giving since the meeting at the realty office. The logo stayed.

Dishware was not open for debate, either, because a plate was an extension of a finished dish, an element in the way the food looked. He was willing to talk to Nick about the physical relationship of the kitchen and the remaining wood oven to the bathroom and the bar, but the kitchen itself was his call.

Within weeks, they had what Jonah described as “some passive-aggressive tension boiling,” balanced out, at least, by a shared commitment to speed—Jonah because he was frustrated by how much time he'd already spent to get here, Nick because he couldn't collect equity until Huertas was open and making money. Privately, Jonah worried about ideas he couldn't see, which spiraled into a larger worry that Nick wasn't used to dealing with chef-driven restaurants. “He's used to bringing projects in on time,” was Jonah's analysis, “used to making executive decisions without getting approval, and he saves money by getting things done early.” Collaborating with a chef like Jonah wasn't part of his résumé.

•   •   •

By early December
they had abandoned hope of opening before Jonah had to start paying rent in February, thanks to three obstacles they could have anticipated if they hadn't been so obsessed with speed: They were done in by accrued delays, a predictable day here and a day there; by Thanksgiving, which slowed the pace before and after; and by a multilayered city bureaucracy that seemed sometimes to have inspectors inspecting other inspectors, as well as sets of overlapping requirements that made Jonah's head ache. As frustrated as he was, though, he couldn't imagine how long this might have dragged on without Nick, who was good at maneuvering through the maze.

Jonah felt a little lost. His early-morning and late-afternoon visits had
merged into full days on the job site, where he set up his office atop whatever pile of building materials was at the proper height for his laptop—a stack of drywall, boxes of tiles, any flat space within range of a lightbulb. Nick's crew was everywhere, framing and running gas and electric and plumbing through the new interior, while Jonah spent too much time in idle, surveying the scene and wondering when it was going to be done.

As far as he could tell, there was almost nothing left of his original design, so he sat in on meetings he didn't have to attend, including one with the muralist, to have some input on the placement of the octopus, the pig, and a crocus flower. One morning he rode the subway two extra stops and got off at the Union Square farmers market, to see where he might want to buy his produce. There were people in kitchen clothes everywhere, pushing big trolleys loaded up with produce, but most of them were porters picking up an order, a couple of sous or executive sous, not many chefs. Jonah intended to do his own shopping, to make sure he got exactly what he wanted and to take advantage of any unexpected ingredients, but he didn't introduce himself to any of the farmers. It was way too early for that, though he wondered if any of them would open an account for a new restaurant the way they did for established ones.

He obsessed about the kitchen, measured and remeasured the space and tried to envision it up and running with all the equipment in place. He got someone back at Maialino to measure the kitchen aisle, and went over himself to take photographs and check the measurements, because he had the sense that the Huertas kitchen was going to be too wide if they used an existing interior wall to define it. Having to take an extra half step for each task could slow a cook down dramatically. Jonah wanted the right pivot width, so that a cook could work at the flat-top, pivot, land at the opposite counter to plate the contents of a sauté pan, and turn back before anything overcooked. On a busy night, the hot line would be a row of cooks executing repeating half-spins, if the space was right.

Moving the wall a foot farther in would make a big difference. Moving it sixteen inches, he figured, would be perfect. Every professional kitchen he'd worked in seemed to have a built-in flaw, one the chef clearly hadn't seen coming, and Jonah kept a log of them in his head, to keep from making similar mistakes. Here was one he could avoid.

The more Jonah thought about it, the better a new wall looked. They could add six seats in the expanded dining space, which meant $150,000 to $180,000 in added annual revenue. He presented the Maialino measurements to Nick and made his case—would it be a big, expensive deal to move the wall?

They couldn't add the seats, Nick explained, because they were at the city's seventy-four-person occupancy limit, figuring sixty-five seats and nine employees. Anything more required adjustments to the existing sprinkler system, which could mean having to run an expensive new water line to the street, and a second means of egress, which they didn't have. Still, Nick was perfectly happy to move the wall, even without the promise of more customers. It was an easy fix.

Life got better from there. The wood-burning ovens did not comply with codes for venting exhaust, but Nick found a way to upgrade rather than replace the existing system, to retrofit the welding and insulate the ductwork. He would have to drop the kitchen ceiling and a section of the dining-room ceiling eighteen inches to cover it, but the plan met code specifications and cost only $4,000—a huge savings, since the cost rule for a new vertical vent system running to the roof was $10,000 per floor, and this was a four-story building.

Jonah cheered up with every sheet of drywall that went up and every decision easily made, and eventually he and Nick became partners in adversity: When the building department threatened to hold up a set of permits the plumber needed, they made a frantic dash to the permit office, and Jonah drove Nick's car around the block while Nick darted
upstairs to straighten things out. When Nick got a discount price on boxes and boxes of kitchen tiles that weren't the custom sizes he wanted, he set Jonah up in the basement at a massive tile cutter, showed him how it worked, and left him there, wearing a construction mask, cutting hundreds of tiles into three different sizes and happy to do so, because it kept him occupied and saved thousands of dollars.

For the time being Jonah had a day job, which he'd never had before and would not have again once Huertas opened, and he didn't mind the normal hours or even the mindless tasks. He drafted friends to help him stain new wood to look battered and old, for wainscoting in the dining room, and when he found barely used chairs and bar stools at a bargain $20 and $30, respectively, he grabbed two more friends, rented a van, and drove out to get them. Chairs at Maialino had run $600 apiece, “but they know they're not going to be out of business in a year,” he said, which was as close as he got to entertaining the possibility that he might be.

Maialino operated in a far more protected universe inside the Gramercy Hotel, which absorbed some of the operating costs, and as part of USHG, which benefited from economy of scale and decades of experience. Jonah had no such buffers, so he settled for what he could afford. The chairs and stools were the wrong color, but all he had to do was rub them down and paint them, and congratulate himself on having saved thousands more. He was able to recycle table bases from the pizza place for the dining room, which freed up money for custom tops, and Nick recut and reupholstered an existing booth so that he needed only two to be built from scratch.

Kitchen equipment was not as open to compromise. “There's a huge disparity between good and shitty things,” said Jonah, and he was determined to buy as much of the good stuff as possible, starting with the ovens. He knew exactly what he wanted: a Jade range like the one he'd cooked on at Maialino, in a slightly different configuration—a
six-burner model outfitted with two open burners on the right, where a right-handed chef wanted them to be, and a flat-top that took up the remaining two-thirds of the space, heated by one long burner that ran underneath it and took an hour to heat up and another to cool down. It was the kind of range he'd have forever, he said, a vote of confidence in his future. Next to it he'd put a combi oven, which let him cook three ways—convection, steam, and a combination. It was expensive, but nothing else had the range a combi had. He wanted a gas one because it was cheaper to run, but the supplier happened to have a prefabricated electric model that someone had ordered and then canceled, for $8,000 instead of $14,000. It would take three years of constant use before Jonah came close to spending the $6,000 on utility bills, at which point he could upgrade and sell this one to the next newcomer.

Jonah's ideal kitchen would be full of All-Clad skillets, which cost about $120 for a twelve-inch and $90 for an eight-inch, five or six times more than the cheap ones from China. He splurged on a couple of them, and then he searched online and found a store outside Pittsburgh that sold All-Clad irregulars, and grabbed eight more for $500. He haunted Fishs Eddy, a store that sold both vintage dishware and sturdy new patterns, and picked white dinner plates with a raised, leaf-patterned edge, $1 apiece for unused Syracuse China originals from the 1950s, before the company merged and moved its production to China, enough new reissues to fill out the order. He bought plates shaped like scallops, and mismatched vintage plates for pintxos and raciones.

He listened to pitches from local dishwashing companies that leased equipment to restaurants, from basic machines to a computerized model that gave each employee a log-in number and enabled Jonah to evaluate who used the cleaning chemicals most effectively. And he thought, We'll both be in the kitchen. Can't I just watch? He chose a cheaper option.

The big decisions made, he sat down with Nick and Nate and Luke in mid-December to see if they could pick an opening date that would stick, preferably one that would keep him from having to pay a second month's rent on a dead space. Nick predicted that the plumbing and gas work would be done before Christmas, even with the holiday slow-down. The combi oven could be there whenever Jonah said he was ready for delivery, and the Jade took two weeks to arrive once he notified the supplier. There was more done than there was yet to do. March 1 seemed like a reasonable target.

Jonah put a publicist on a full-time retainer to help with the launch, an expense that seemed as essential as rent, now that there were so many potential outlets for stories, each with a voracious hunger for copy. A single restaurant that was satisfied to be a singleton could probably assign a staffer and get good-enough coverage, but if Huertas was the first brick in a brand, he needed someone who already had contacts and knew what to send to each of them. The publicist on the pop-up project he'd participated in had generated an impressive amount of coverage, and he could always cut her back to part-time once he was under way. Together they decided to give Eater an exclusive early heads-up, as much to gauge interest as to get coverage.