Generation Chef (7 page)

On December 18, they contacted an editor at the website to say, “We wanted to let you guys know first” about an anticipated March opening.

“We'll see,” came the brief reply. Nothing happened.

•   •   •

Jonah couldn't hire
his friends any more than he could buy $600 chairs; they had as much experience as he did and their own trajectories to map, which did not include taking a cut in pay or position, not even to work alongside a friend. He would have hired any one of a number of guys he knew to be his sous chef—but they were already sous
chefs at bigger places, so the next step for them was as significant as it was for him. They were looking for projects that gave them a better title or more money or both, or aiming for their own places, just like Jonah, whether as a chef-owner or in the shade of a larger group's corporate umbrella. He couldn't compete with that. He was going to have to hire people who weren't quite ready, hope that he could mentor them into shape, fast, and be grateful for the weeks here and there when he was going to have temporary help.

He couldn't hire anyone, for that matter, until he had an opening date that stuck. It turned out to be a good thing that Eater ignored the March announcement because the date evaporated over the holidays. Revised estimates ran from four to eight weeks more, which put him in a hiring bind: He couldn't ask anyone to give notice on an existing job until he could put them on payroll, but he didn't want to throw away money putting someone on payroll too many weeks before opening.

Jonah had stayed in touch with Jenni, a Maialino line cook who started there as part of the extern program at the Culinary Institute of America's Napa Valley campus in Northern California. She wasn't ready to be a sous chef—they both knew it—but she was good, and after three line-cook jobs at three restaurants in three years, she was motivated to take a chance.

Any step up in a restaurant kitchen was a game of musical chairs, and always had been, because the number of positions declined as a cook moved up the ladder; there were fewer sous than cooks on the hot line, fewer executive sous than sous, fewer chef de cuisine jobs, and, perched on top of the human pyramid, the executive chef or, definitively, the chef. The difference for this generation was that more contestants jostled for a spot at every step of the way. It had become crowded enough at the entry level for both teachers and students at CIA to voice their concern: In 2008, the teachers' union issued a no-confidence vote
in the then president, citing slipping academic standards, and three years later a group of students filed a lawsuit charging that the school was accepting too many students, diluting the program in the process. There was no guarantee that someone Jenni admired would be looking for a sous, and would choose her, at the moment she decided she was ready, but there was surely the promise of plenty of competition: One national study reported that the number of culinary school graduates had increased by 25 percent between 2006 and 2010; in 2013 the number of schools offering culinary programs was up 30 percent over 2009. It might be slightly early to try her hand at a sous position, but it might not be a moment too soon.

Jonah worked on his sales pitch even as he hoped he was right about her potential. Jenni had an undergraduate degree in business because she wanted to own her own place someday, so he appealed to her entrepreneurial side. Yes, coming to Huertas was a speculative move—but if it worked, she was that much closer to her goal. She could end up running this kitchen when he opened a second place, and that was invaluable experience for a would-be owner, experience even he didn't have.

“This is different,” he told her. “If you want to open your own place, honestly, this is more useful to you than working at a place someone else opens. It's a relevant learning experience. With security.”

She said yes. Jonah had his sous chef—and she could start at the end of March, which gave Jonah time to work through the menu with her for what now looked like a mid-April opening.

He made one more kitchen hire, for continuity as much as anything. Juan Peña had been a porter at Maialino until Ruvi, the restaurant's master butcher, had taken him under his wing. Juan could butcher anything, which meant that he could learn to make sausage. He could also assemble pintxos, help out in a prep crisis, or fix electrical problems. When Jonah found out that he'd left Maialino because he needed
more hours and had not landed well—he was working as a parking attendant—he offered Juan a job being Juan, whatever that turned out to mean at Huertas. He was Jonah's talisman; when Juan walked by the pass on his way to being capable, in one way or another, Jonah felt that much more confident.

As for the rest of the kitchen staff, he'd wait until right before the opening and save a little money by procrastinating.

Jonah had a good balance in the front of house, though he hadn't planned it that way. Luke was his first hire as general manager, another high school baseball player who might have pursued sports had he not injured his knee, once in high school and again in college, requiring him to find a new outlet for his competitive drive. He'd had a tutorial in high-end European hospitality at Le Cirque, but Jonah's restaurant offered equity and a promotion and the chance to have some less formal fun. Luke was twenty-six, too young to turn down a promising adventure.

Then Jonah heard that Nate was looking to make a move, and it made sense to talk to him as well. He was Luke's polar opposite—a twenty-four-year-old with dual degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's school of arts and sciences and from its Wharton business school. Nate had opened a take-out and delivery food service for students as part of an independent study in hospitality, started at USHG after graduation, and was blunt about his approach to his work: “I continually need to prove I'm at the top, no matter what I'm doing.” He was a good fit, given his background, possibly better than Luke, so Jonah took him on as a second general manager and partner, even though that was one more than the standard model. Jonah could take advantage of their differences: Luke would focus on making sure that the front of house ran smoothly, while Nate monitored the day-to-day finances and developed the beverage program, at least for starters.

Luke and Nate were old school and new guard, respectively, which
might be just the right blend for Huertas. And they were as eager as Jonah was to own something, to be in charge of their fates: On top of investing their own money, they'd each taken a cut in pay that seemed even worse than it was, at first, because of the long hours. Still, Jonah had imagined the future often enough to make them a promise that was intended to compensate for all of it: This wasn't a job but a career.

•   •   •

The delivery of
the kitchen equipment would have been a shining moment—the day on which the emphasis shifted, appropriately, and all the design elements took a backseat to function—if the specifics of the delivery hadn't been so infuriating. Jonah glared at the shining steel Jade oven, which had the burners on the left and the flat-top on the right, the opposite of what he wanted, and was the wrong proportion as well: Instead of standard burners next to a flat-top that occupied two-thirds of the top, he got oversized burners that took up half the space and a flat-top that was smaller than what he'd envisioned. The stand for the combi oven was not the one he ordered, so it couldn't be installed. He couldn't help but wonder if suppliers made mistakes like this on orders from bigger chefs. He assumed not.

Worse, the supplier seemed singularly unconcerned about the impact of his error with the oven stand. They'd have the right one sent out. Mistakes happened. The fact that Huertas was opening in early April—absolutely—and that Jonah needed to take the kitchen out for a test drive didn't seem to concern him. The stand would go out immediately, though he wouldn't get specific about exactly when immediately was.

Jonah found the lack of empathy appalling. “I had hoped to work with them down the line,” he said, “but now I hate them. I spent forty-five thousand dollars with them. I understand that's a blip on their radar, but they act like they expect thirty percent of things to go wrong.”

That wasn't all. When he and Nick agreed to narrow the kitchen by sixteen inches, neither of them took into account the gas line that ran from the front to the back of the kitchen, behind the ovens and the deep fryer, a line that sat three inches out from the wall. Jonah's perfect aisle was now three inches narrower than he wanted, which made it that much harder for cooks to get past each other. He was the proud owner of a mistake that his employees would recall, as he recalled errors at places he'd worked, when they opened their own places and swore they'd get it right.

Jonah liked to say that he was good at not stressing over things he could not control, and when he did blow up—it was March; how much longer was this going to drag on?—he preferred hyperbole to a noisy explosion.

“If we fail I'm going to leave town and never come back,” he said, as though he meant it. “I'm not kidding. I wouldn't be able to handle it.”

•   •   •

When Gavin Kaysen
was Jonah's age he drew up a list of life goals, and one of them was to open his own restaurant by the time he was thirty. By then he had appeared on
Food & Wine
magazine's annual list of best new chefs and won the James Beard Rising Star Chef Award, but he still didn't feel ready. He revised the list and decided to open his own place when he was thirty-five.

Kaysen was just a year younger than Nick Anderer, only eight years older than Jonah, but his experience—a classical education at what might now be considered a stately pace—more closely resembled that of his mentor, fifty-nine-year-old chef Daniel Boulud, who had built a global business on the success of two Michelin-starred restaurants, Daniel on Manhattan's Upper East Side and its more casual sibling,
Café Boulud. Anderer used “jailhouse” to describe the atmosphere in the kitchens where he had learned to cook, places where advanced degrees were rare and the early Anthony Bourdain—the confessional renegade cook, not the television host—was an object of admiration. Kaysen followed the more formal French training model: After he graduated from the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, he worked at the restaurant at Domaine Chandon, on the grounds of the Northern California winery opened in 1973 by Moët et Chandon, and then made his pilgrimage overseas, first to L'Auberge de Lavaux in Switzerland and then to the venerable L'Escargot in London, an outpost of French cuisine since 1927. He returned to the States to become executive chef at El Bizcocho in San Diego, which landed him on the
Food & Wine
list; five years after that he moved to New York as chef de cuisine at Café Boulud, where in 2008 he won the Rising Star award.

Kaysen and his contemporaries might have knife skills and personal ambition in common, but his conversation was peppered with words like “legacy,” and, like his older role models, he found freedom in kitchen discipline. His restaurant, if and when he had one, would be built on formal technique and professionalism; he was part of an effort to build a competitive team for the international Bocuse d'Or cooking competition, a biennial contest named for chef Paul Bocuse in which the United States had yet to place higher than sixth, and had created a foundation with Bocuse's son, Jerome, and Boulud and the chef-owner of The French Laundry, Thomas Keller, to support and train the team. He was at dinner with Boulud and Keller in 2010 when Keller asked Kaysen, who was about to turn thirty-one, about his plans for the future.

“What's your goal?” he recalled Keller asking him. “Do you want to have a restaurant someday, or what are you thinking? I'm not trying to get you out of Daniel's world. I'm just trying to understand.”

Despite his list of life goals, Kaysen had begun to wonder if thirty-five was too late—if in fact thirty-one was too late and he'd already missed his chance.

“I feel like I might be past it,” he confessed.

The two older chefs disagreed. Keller pointed out that he was forty when he opened The French Laundry. Boulud was thirty-nine when he opened Daniel. Kaysen knew it but had forgotten; it seemed so late, when he considered the ages of chefs who were opening places now.

“What's the difference between now and then?” he asked them.

“Nobody wrote about it then,” said Boulud. No one had clocked his progress; there was scrutiny within the profession but not this constant, urgent level of chatter, which made maturity seem suspect even to Kaysen, who knew better. The notion of too late was a new phenomenon.

It was part of his hesitation, though—the stories he anticipated, the attendant hype or worse, the lack of it, the questions about timing that surely would surface in the narrative about him, and not with the collegial affection that informed Keller's question. And yet two of his mentors said that age was irrelevant. If Kaysen stopped pushing himself to align with some imaginary schedule, if he thought about having his own place without putting a time stamp on it, he could do it when he felt ready, and not before, a realization that allowed him to relax and wonder if he ought to look around a bit, just to see what might be available.

He did, not a concerted effort but an occasional inquiry, and then, in the summer of 2013, he stepped up the effort. Kaysen loved New York City and respected the prevailing notion that a serious chef had to make his mark there. He had a following that he could turn into investment dollars, so it would not be as much of a stretch as it would be for a younger chef—but he also had a reputation, between his work at Café Boulud and the Bocuse d'Or team, and that sense of history. He wasn't interested in a little space where he could start the next part of his
career. He wanted a substantial location where he could build something that would last.