Generation Chef (8 page)

Early in the process, Kaysen found a beautiful space downtown, across the street from Mario Batali's Otto, a popular, informal place known for its pizza and pasta—but the NYU crowd was too young, too casual, too fleeting, and probably, at least some of them, constrained by an undergraduate's budget, and Kaysen lived on the Upper East Side. When he imagined his future, he walked to and from work.

It was too soon to compromise.

He devoted more energy to the search, looked at dozens of spaces in Manhattan and even a few in Southern California, and rejected each one. Then one morning, as he walked his dog, a new question came to him. Why was it so important to stay in New York City? He loved the city, but he'd started to wonder if he loved it because it was the best place for his family to be, or because he was supposed to, because success there was supposed to mean more than accomplishments anywhere else.

He had an epiphany, standing on the street with his dog: He didn't have to open a restaurant in New York. He wouldn't fall off the face of the culinary map if he did it somewhere else. He could go anywhere; in fact, he could go home and have a restaurant in Minneapolis, where he grew up. If his reputation survived the self-imposed exile, he would have a chance to distinguish himself in a way he couldn't in New York City. He'd have a higher profile the minute the doors opened, and he'd have a better family life for himself, his wife, and his two small children. Real estate was cheaper, so theoretically he'd get to spend more on food. It felt risky, but it might be a bigger opportunity.

People in the Midwest ate. “If I cook good food and deliver good service,” he told himself, “they'll find me.”

Kaysen announced his planned departure from Café Boulud in March 2014, a month before Huertas opened, as Jonah sat mired in
inspections and delays. The news caught the New York restaurant community by surprise, and Kaysen quickly became a symbol of a threatened culinary diaspora. If he had the confidence to turn his back on the restaurant capital of the entire country, other chefs might consider doing the same. If he thought he could find reliable, enthusiastic diners in a place where the cost of doing business was far lower, where there were fewer openings each week to distract those diners, and so, less competition for media attention—if it was in fact possible to build a business from an outpost like Minneapolis—then a young chef could reasonably ask whether fighting to succeed in New York was worth all the trouble.

•   •   •

Early April slid too quickly
into mid-April, but finally, it was time. Huertas still didn't have a front door, although it had columns of steel-rimmed horizontal windows on either side of a wooden slab that served as a temporary door, and a round table set to the left and right of the entrance. The host station was to the left as a guest entered, across from a long rough-hewn wooden bar that had been finished with a deep sheen. The mammoth zinc mural, hung behind the bar, with shelves in front of it to hold bottles of wine and, not soon enough, hard liquor. On the opposite wall, a counter for the standing crowd, and behind it, a row of high tables that ended at the service station midway through the front room.

Farther back there were three big booths, wide enough to hold six, easy, maybe eight in a pinch, the best seats in the house for diners who loved theater, because they faced the open kitchen. People there could check out the eggs being slow-poached in the immersion circulator, or consider a departing tray of pintxos, or watch the team of young cooks at work. The dining room took up the back third of the space, dark wood
and gray paint, exposed original concrete floors and dark acoustic ceiling tiles that looked more like the strands of Jonah's huevos rotos than like the usual cottage cheese. The booths were trimmed in etched glass set into thin welded steel frames. The lights above the bar were custom made.

Huertas was going to open on Tuesday, April 22, after four days of friends-and-family tryouts that turned into five as the date got closer, because there was no such thing as too much rehearsal. Bad news didn't last any longer than good news did: The correct oven stand arrived, the flipped placement of the flat-top and the burners seemed less significant as time passed, and there was daily evidence of progress, from the delivery of dry goods to the first batch of chef shirts and kitchen towels. There weren't any big decisions left, of the sort that led to disagreements or large amounts of permit paperwork, and a comforting inevitability descended. The date was official; an e-mail announcement had gone out to investors. Everyone was in completion mode, though it looked like a race to the finish for the electrician, who was setting up the lights over the bar.

When an expensive midtown Spanish place closed its doors with only one day's notice to the staff, someone else's failure became Jonah's good luck, and he inherited a line cook who'd gone to culinary school in Spain as well as Stew Parlo, an experienced, unflappable bartender who would be the perfect person to develop cocktails with Nate and launch the expanded bar menu once Huertas got its upgrade to a full liquor license. Jonah and Jenni worked on the menu and figured out what they needed to order to get started; he intended to ramp up one step at a time during the soft opening, first offering drinks and a couple of pintxos, then the full bar menu, and then, on the last two nights before the official opening, the dining-room menu as well.

Jenni had watched Jonah make the staff meal at Maialino when he was a sous, so she took that on as one of her first managerial tasks, and
on April 1 she set out trays of food along the kitchen counter even as Nick's crew cleaned up construction debris and remnants of their own lunches. She was going to help transform the staff into a family, and giving them a great meal before they started a shift was a smart way to start. This first meal set the tone: Huertas took care of its employees.

They were just finishing up when the Department of Health inspector arrived for a final preopening inspection. Health Department inspections were always a surprise, in terms of the exact time, but this was worse: Jonah drew an inspector who was legendary for her attention to, and criticism of, the smallest detail. On a good day, he did things that attracted an inspector's heightened scrutiny. The Health Department was nervous about sous vide because it involved cooking vacuum-packed proteins for a long time at lower-than-standard temperatures, and the fact that Jonah was one of the few chefs in town who'd taken a safety course to get certification didn't do much to offset the concern; prepared incorrectly, sous vide ingredients could harbor botulism or salmonella bacteria. He kept the jamón on display, which increased the risk that its temperature could rise above the acceptable 41 degrees Fahrenheit. As he watched her jot down notes, he wished for that predictable kind of trouble. She wasn't going to bother him about eggs or ham today, not with so many other infractions staring her in the face.

He stood by, helpless, as she took in the scene: trays of food perched on the kitchen counter, construction dust, and general disarray. She went downstairs and found mouse droppings, because the restaurant still didn't have a front door or a basement door to close off the delivery ramp that ran to the street.

She tallied the violations and let Jonah know that an inspector would have to come back before the soft opening to confirm that he had resolved what he swore to her were temporary problems. He ought to
take this very seriously: She wanted to be sure he understood how much trouble he could have been in.

“If you'd already been open for business,” she told him, “I would have shut you down.”

•   •   •

One of the things that
sustained Jonah was a little movie that had played in his head for years, in which he spoke to the assembled staff of his first restaurant on the first night of service, which for Huertas would be the first night of the soft opening.

He used to wonder who the staff would turn out to be, because until now they had been fantasy stand-ins for people he would meet down the line. He had arrived at down the line: His front-of-house staff, most of whom he had not known three weeks earlier, all of whom played a role in what he hoped would be his success, were folding napkins and checking glasses for water spots, while his cooks ticked off the items in their mise en place. As the chef-owner, he had to say something to them, which he did not like to do.

The place was as hectic as he expected it to be, but right before the doors opened he gathered everyone together and stood on a chair so that they could see him. “Here we are. Long time coming,” he said, with an unexpected catch in his voice that made him speed up a bit to get past it. “Long time coming. Still getting to know some of you, great kitchen staff, and Luke and Nate have put together a solid team. This is my fourth time opening service. We're going to be busy, we're going to make mistakes, that's what this is for. People tonight are family, loved ones, people who want us to succeed. Make a mistake, don't hang your head—just fix it and we'll talk after. Anything you need from me, Jenni, Luke, Nate, let us know, and if I'm too busy, I'm sorry, I'll get to you later.”

They waited to see if there was anything more. “I want you to be happy, to be around for a long time,” he said. “So have a good service. We'll have a beer and talk it over in a few hours.”

•   •   •

The next three nights
were a parade of people who wouldn't sit down because they wanted to congratulate Jonah or one of the cooks, or had to take photographs, or saw friends across the room and detoured to say hello. Nat, the long-ago bar mitzvah boy, was there, having taken a job in restaurant development—his business card had a purposefully ragged edge, designed to look as though someone had taken a bite out of it. Other members of the original Maialino sous chef team showed up to wish Jonah well and suggest that he figure out some way to brighten up the flavor of the rotos with a bit more acid, which was what he needed them to tell him. His parents held court and shared memories of Jonah cooking at five, at ten, as a teenager.

On the fourth night they opened the dining room in back for the first of two full-service rehearsals before Tuesday's opening. For the first time in a year and a half, Jonah was going to feed people not just pintxos but dinner; for the first time, at all, in his own restaurant. He hurtled downstairs, and when he came back up he held a bouquet of skillets in one hand.

He waggled them in Jenni's direction.

“Tonight we get to cook,” he said, with a weary and hopeful smile. “Pans and everything.”

S
lammed didn't begin to describe Huertas's first week of business. “Slammed” was a good word to toss around after a busy night, but not for a ninety-hour week that was a continuous loop of prep and service and cleanup, interrupted by something that barely qualified as a long nap before the cycle began again.

That single week beat Jonah's projections for the entire first month of business—$34,800 in sales for a week, compared to anticipated first-month sales of $32,200. He and Nate looked at the sales numbers every day, because they believed that vigilance made the difference between a successful restaurant and one that might seem healthy, only to slide off the rails too quickly to save. They had based their projections on losses at the start, possibly straight through the summer, because that was usually how it went; investors commonly had to wait as long as five years to see a first return on their money. Friends and family had broken even when it was supposed to lose $8,000, but that was a partisan crowd. Their first reaction to the week's numbers, to real sales, was to assume that they had made a mistake.

They had anticipated a $5,000 loss over the first two months. The way things were going, they might not lose anything at all. Best of all, they were making “sick money” in the dining room, in Jonah's giddy estimation. Pintxos were fun, and they got people in the door, but the menu del dia was his brand, his chance to show that he could refine and expand Spanish food without getting fussy about it—and by extension, that he could do the same with whatever cuisine he tried next, not Spanish necessarily, not at a Huertas sequel and so, not a partnership based on necessity. Just Jonah and Nate and Luke building their business.

The trick was to achieve great numbers without sleeping in a booth between shifts, which Jenni had jokingly mentioned as an alternative to her hour's commute to Queens, where a sous chef could afford to live. There wasn't a straightforward fix. Restaurant profit margins were notoriously slim, about ten cents on the dollar, and there were frustratingly few ways to improve them. The rent was set. There was little leeway on the other two fixed costs, labor and food, because past a certain point they couldn't trim their way to profitability. If Jonah looked for profit in even cheaper ingredients or a staff that was leaner than was practical, he ran the risk that the food wouldn't seem special enough, and the service, cursory. The better way to reduce ninety hours a week to a tolerable sixty or seventy was to make Huertas a place where people craved two more rounds of pintxos or had to try the wine pairings. An increase of a couple of dollars per check, multiplied by checks per year, could subsidize a bigger staff without putting a dent in the profit and loss statement that Nate planned to produce every month.

Check-building was the long-term answer, but the immediate challenge was to get more help, fast, because they couldn't sustain the grueling schedule. Jonah had underestimated the number of bodies he needed, figuring that he could expedite—call the orders, monitor the timing, check each plate before it went out—while Jenni handled the
roast and sauté station and the line cook took care of fried foods and pintxos. One more person at the wood-burning oven, and a part-time culinary student to pick up the slack a couple of shifts a week, and he thought he had his staff.

Even that didn't last the week. The cook at the wood-burning oven, overwhelmed, announced after four days that she was leaving three days later, and Jonah, incensed that she quit without giving proper notice, had her come in the next morning to train the culinary student and then told her to pack up her stuff and get out. Joe, the student, was suddenly in charge of a station he'd never worked before, which meant that a new chunk of Jonah's day was devoted to teaching and supervision.

Jonah was pitting olives when he should have been fielding interview requests, and Jenni was asleep on her feet. He quickly installed a cousin of one of the Maialino prep cooks in the basement prep kitchen, laboring over garlic and onions and carrots and shallots the way he had at Chanterelle. Jenni got her roommate, Alyssa, to agree to work on the nights Joe was in class, in addition to her job as a private chef.

Dan didn't have many night shifts available, but Jonah's next two temporary stand-ins would arrive starting in two weeks, and they had plenty of time on their hands, stuck in a chef's purgatory between projects that didn't pan out and new jobs that might not start for months. Chad Shaner had left his job as executive sous chef at Union Square Café to pursue a project in Southern California, but it didn't turn out to be a long-term position, so he was back trying to figure out his next move. Chris McDade, who would arrive at the end of May, had worked alongside Jonah at Maialino and, like Chad, left town for a job that didn't pan out. He came back to be the executive sous chef at Marta, but the opening was delayed. They both needed a job between jobs—and while Jonah had to pay Chris more than he paid Jenni, he wanted to have both of them around for what he hoped was an extended packed house.

They would bail him out if it stayed this busy. If, on the other hand, the crowds subsided—and he had to be realistic, because openings were never the same as the day-to-day—his kitchen habits would keep him out of trouble. Jonah enjoyed the challenge of transforming what another chef might throw out, and showed off his latest effort at the afternoon lineup meeting, what he jokingly called his “garbage pintxo,” made up of the fat trimmed from the jamón and the two-inch-long potato cores left over when they spun out the thin strands for the huevos rotos. He deep-fried the potato until it was slightly crisp on the outside and had absorbed flavor from the fat, and then he wrapped it in a charred ramp. The potato already earned its keep in the rotos; the jamón, on the list of meats. The only food cost was the ramp, for a pintxo that sold for $3. He couldn't get more economical than that.

Jonah tried to be reasonable about his expectations, to be prepared for whatever happened after the initial rush, but the problem with making money at the start was that it made losing money seem like failure. He reminded himself that losing money, was the norm at this point, and if it happened it didn't necessarily mean that he was doing anything wrong.

He was aware of niggling front-of-house problems—he had to be, much as he preferred to let Nate and Luke handle them—but he told himself that they were primarily a function of being new and inexperienced, nothing of any lasting concern. Nate was already getting resistance from the occasional guest who wanted a cocktail, which was going to be an issue only until they got their upgrade in six months. In the meantime, they had to make the wine and beer lists too tempting to reject. To that end, they had tasted dozens of Spanish wines, until Jonah's palate went numb, and decided to make their own vermút, which required more sampling and multiple trips to a nearby Indian spice store for inspiration. They looked for beers no one else served, or
beers that were great deals, and offered traditional Spanish combinations like the kalimotxo. Jonah weighed in on all of it—no one was going to consume anything he hadn't blessed—but that would calm down with time, as they solidified the list.

Luke faced small, irksome problems that were easy to fix—they found a receptacle for wet umbrellas and would figure out what to do with coats that at the moment hung off of the bar stools onto the floor. Much of the crew was entry-level, aside from a couple of experienced servers working the dining room, because someone with a solid résumé was likelier to head for a place where the size of the tip pool and the number of shifts were more predictable. More training would help with that: One of the servers had already come in on his day off to practice busing tables, which meant that Nate and Luke had figured out how to inspire rather than demoralize the guy.

Canceled reservations were a bigger and more troubling issue, endemic to the business and less likely to resolve with time. Jonah knew, from places he'd worked and people he talked to, that no one had the perfect solution for diners who made reservations and didn't show up. They could call everyone on the list the day before, to confirm, but some people said they were coming and still didn't appear. As the new kid on the block, Huertas was getting more requests for reservations than they could accommodate—so if someone bailed, they lost money on a table they could have filled, a table that might have turned into regulars.

OpenTable, the online reservation service, tried to police users who racked up multiple no-shows, but people with commitment issues knew their way around the rules—they changed their e-mail registration and continued their last-minute defections under a new name. High-end restaurants like Per Se and Eleven Madison Park tried penalties—EMP charged $75 if a party failed to cancel forty-eight hours in advance and then didn't show up—but that could backfire, especially for an unproven,
far more informal place like Huertas, because it seemed punitive to diners who were used to changing their minds without consequence. During the recession, when every reservation seemed that much more precious, overbooking had become a popular answer, even though it increased the possibility of long wait times and was tougher to calibrate at a small restaurant. The easiest solution was to hold back a number of tables for walk-ins rather than take reservations for all of them, but finding the right formula was impossible, really, until Luke had a better sense of several variables—the no-show rate, the speed with which he could turn a table, and the number of tables he could seat simultaneously without putting too much pressure on the kitchen.

“I figure a table of two needs ninety minutes to an hour and forty-five, a table of four, two hours minimum,” he said. “And part of this is keeping a table in my back pocket. I need wiggle room, an emergency plan. That's part of the system. Not every table is available on OpenTable, and usually it's me or Nate answering the phone, or Jonah, who will ask me.”

Luke didn't have a formula yet, but he didn't expect to, so soon. “It's a matter of understanding our space as we go on,” he said. “It's a nuance I haven't figured out yet, what I can accommodate. It'll just come.”

Jonah was less sanguine. The nightly percentage of cancellations took its place on the roster of numbers he kept in his head, alongside the food-cost percentages, the number of pintxos sold, the media inquiries, the wine pairings, the overtime hours, and the nightly check averages, which could always be a little higher.

He tried to set all of it aside when he was in the kitchen, because he had an ambitious agenda. Jonah wanted to make as much of the menu in-house as he could, even though it was a lot of work; he took pride in the fact that the quince paste that went with the cheeses was homemade. He wanted to change at least one dish on the menu del dia once a week, maybe more often than that—another labor-intensive exercise,
because it meant that the kitchen had to master a new dish and prep a new batch of ingredients.

He figured that the best time to introduce a dish was on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, when things were marginally calmer than they were on the weekend—but he knew he was in trouble as soon as he looked at the reservation list for what should have been his second manageable Tuesday night. Luke had booked five large parties at the same time for the menu del dia, three groups of six and two of seven, using all three booths and two of the dining-room tables. It didn't matter if the kitchen was on top of things as thirty-two people took their seats at once, and he took little solace in the fact that someday they'd be able to handle this kind of rush. Two weeks in was not someday, and this wasn't one of Alyssa's shifts, which meant that Jenni would be doing more cooking than plating.

Jenni was responsible for all the back-room dishes at her station, but the only way to get fourteen egg courses out simultaneously was for the line cook to help her out, which meant that she, in turn, had to stop making pintxos. The runners could keep circulating the cold pintxos that were already prepared, but the croquetas and the homemade potato chips were on hold. As the orders hit, Nate helped run plates to the dining room, while Luke stood at the host stand to greet the guests and keep an eye on the book. No matter what they did, though, service was a nightmare that they could have avoided if only they'd staggered the reservation times.

On a night with a better rhythm, Jonah might have time to encourage a hustling cook or acknowledge a server who jumped in to run plates or clear dishes at a table that wasn't in his section. Not tonight, which made for a new problem. When the shift ended, Nate reported that some front-of-house staffers had started to complain: Jonah was difficult to approach, they weren't getting constructive feedback, he seemed so disapproving. A couple of them came up to Jonah the following day to
apologize for whatever they thought they'd done wrong, a preemptive confession of failure before he got around to criticizing them.

He came to the afternoon front-of-house lineup meeting to say that apologies weren't necessary, he appreciated how seriously everyone took their work, and he wanted them to understand that a one-word reply wasn't him being curt. It was him being focused in the middle of a difficult service. As Huertas got busier, there would be more one-word replies. Everyone had to get used to it and not take it personally.

It was not yet time to pass out compliments. The worst thing they could do, he told them, would be to believe their early press.

“We haven't done anything yet,” he said. “Hype is hype. We have to continue to get better.”

•   •   •

Jonah was happier
in mad-scientist mode, a paper coffee cup in one hand and a whipped cream canister in the other, huddled with Jenni in front of a microwave oven they were about to use for the first time. He wasn't satisfied with the rice pudding dessert on the menu del dia, and he had seen a recipe for an almond cake developed by Albert Adrià when he was the pastry chef at his brother Ferran's famed El Bulli on the coast of spain northeast of Barcelona, which had drawn pilgrims lucky enough to get a reservation until it closed in 2011. The cake was a good fit for Huertas because it was a spin on a more traditional cake, and it would work with a range of other flavors; if it came out well, he could put his own stamp on it. Jonah aimed for plates that looked appealing, not aggressively artful; he wasn't going to serve an aerosol-powered, microwaved almond cake unless it tasted better than a basic almond cake. Still, he liked the idea of a new technique with a weird edge. He was all for experimentation if it yielded something that was delicious, first, and fun on the plate, second.