Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

  We rushed to the emergency room. There was more bleeding. Four hours later, he was discharged with a hefty supply of gauze and medical tape and his thumb still intact. Which was useful, because later that week, we were finally going to use the kitchen at Delancey for something other than storing Doritos. We were going to host a private charity dinner, our first for paying guests.

  For a couple of years, our Boat Street friend Olaiya had been running her own small catering company and in her spare time cooking charity dinners out of her house, sending the proceeds to help women survivors of war. Olaiya had been helping us with various Delancey-related tasks that spring and summer—setting up our accounts with produce vendors, researching aprons for the servers, making sure we were occasionally eating a proper meal—and at one of our meetings, she suggested that we do a charity dinner together at Delancey. It would be a low-pressure way for Brandon and me to get some practice before the official opening. So she rounded up twenty guests from her mailing list, and we were on.

  It was a relief—a relief and a small terror—to actually cook again, instead of mixing concrete, moving equipment, or matching wits with inspectors. We were exhausted, but the adrenaline forced us on—and for me at least, so did the fear. I wanted the restaurant to succeed. I wanted people to like our food. I wanted someone to tell me that we weren’t total idiots.

  On the afternoon of the dinner, Olaiya set the tables with giant sunflowers. I went to the farmers’ market and bought whatever looked good—bundles of small carrots, broccoli, bags of yellow potatoes, and a fat bunch of parsley—and we turned it into a wood oven–roasted starter. I cut the broccoli into florets and tossed them with olive oil, cumin, coriander, and salt, and when Brandon pulled them out of the oven, they were charred in spots and frizzled at the edges, so that they crunched softly, like water chestnuts, between your teeth. We drizzled them with a little lemon juice, and that was it. We left the carrots whole and roasted them quickly with olive oil and salt, so that they caramelized without turning to mush, and then they too got some lemon and a pinch of ground hot chile. And when the potatoes were crispy and browned, we sauced them with a parsley salsa verde. Olaiya’s boyfriend poured wine, and Brandon made pizza after pizza after pizza, and then Olaiya and I scooped homemade vanilla malt ice cream into cups, until everyone was full. I stood at the dishwasher until 1 a.m., grinning like an idiot at the empty plates.

  14

  About three weeks out from our projected opening, we began hiring a staff. I guess it seems risky to wait so long, and it probably was, but it’s not uncommon in the restaurant industry. You don’t want to hire someone too far out, because unless you’re a big corporate gig, you probably don’t have a retainer to offer, and anyway, we were too busy with inspections and the last details of construction to think about anything but building codes and margaritas. Restaurants are works-in-progress even as they serve their first customers; that’s why there are soft openings. You can train all you want, but a restaurant is unpredictable by nature: a refrigerator will break, or twenty-five customers will arrive at once, or a ten-person reservation will pull a no-show, or the table of drunks that you cut off will dump their water glasses on the floor in protest as they leave. (But if you’re lucky, one of the drunks will slink back an hour later, apologize to the host, and slip her a twenty.) The only way to work out the kinks is to smooth them as you go—and send a complimentary dessert to the next table over while you dash for the mop.

  Neither of us had ever hired anyone. Because we lived in an apartment with a fairly upstanding landlord, we’d never even had to hire a plumber. We were always the ones being hired. We had always been employees (and sometimes, in my case, a mediocre one). Now we had to figure out how to be bosses, a tall order in any situation and an especially awkward one in ours, since we would likely be the same age as most of our staff. All we had going for us was gut instincts and Susan the Oracle.

  We would likely need two servers and one host to run the dining room, which seats about forty people. The kitchen would need three cooks: a pizza cook to stretch the dough and put on the toppings, another cook to work the wood-burning oven, and a pantry cook to make starters and desserts. I would be the pantry cook, so that was taken care of, and Brandon has, from Day One, manned the oven. The baking of the pizzas is the trickiest part, he says, and like Domenico DeMarco of Di Fara, he wanted to do it himself. (That’s why Delancey is open for dinner only, five nights a week; any more than that, and he’d burn out quickly and spectacularly, like a pizza left a minute too long in a 750° oven.)

  We didn’t have to put out a call for a host or servers. Our first host, Erin, lived in the neighborhood, heard about what we were doing, and stopped by one afternoon with a resume. She’d never worked in a restaurant, but she was articulate, well mannered, and pretty, a strawberry blonde with freckles across her nose. I also liked her outfit—a red-and-white polka-dotted blouse, I think. These were the kind of rigorous, painstaking criteria we used. She wanted to work five nights a week, and that was handy for us, because we wouldn’t need to hire a second person for the job. If she was sick, maybe Olaiya could fill in, or Sam.

  The first server we hired was Nicole, a friend of a friend of Olaiya’s who had come to the charity dinner as a guest. She’d worked in a number of restaurants and was a natural server, able to simultaneously charm babies, key in an order on the fancy point-of-sale system, and tell Brandon a dirty joke. We hired her immediately. She brought in our second server, Tiffany, one of her coworkers from a previous restaurant. Nicole wanted to work three days a week, and Tiffany wanted to work two. Few restaurant servers want to work what most people consider full-time. This is often because they’re serving only to pay the bills, saving the rest of their time for doing the work they really want to do: writing, playing music, painting, acting, whathaveyou. Occasionally, and particularly at a busy restaurant, a server is able to make a lot of money with only a few shifts. In any case, we needed a third server in order to cover all the shifts each week. Toward the end of July, just as we were drafting an ad to post on Craigslist, an e-mail came in from a woman named Danielle. A longtime server and restaurant manager, she’d been reading my blog (at the suggestion of her friend David, who would also later work for us), had followed the progress of Delancey, and, on a whim, decided to send a resume. We brought her in for an interview and liked her from the start: she was warm and well spoken, with a broad smile and a tattoo of a tugboat on her forearm. She would wind up staying at Delancey for nearly four years—a decade in restaurant time, where employees generally come and go like cars through a tollbooth.

  Finding a pizza cook was more complicated. Actually, to say that finding a pizza cook was more complicated is an understatement along the lines of Michelle Obama has arms. We posted an ad on Craigslist and expected two or three dozen replies, but this was smack-dab in the middle of the recession, so the responses totaled just under a hundred. Reading through them, we focused on two pieces of advice from Susan. First, there was the thing about hiring artists over trained cooks. It had worked well at Boat Street, but we had to ignore it: we didn’t have time to teach someone to cook. Even after two years of testing his dough and practicing with a variety of ovens, Brandon was still only beginning to feel confident in his ability to make the kind of pizza he wanted to serve. We needed a cook who was already competent, who could contribute without requiring a lot of training. Of course, there’s a balance to be struck, and Susan had mentioned that, too: we shouldn’t hire someone who knew too much, who was overqualified for the position. For example, if you’re looking for someone to stretch pizza dough, you probably shouldn’t hire the guy who was the head chef of a fine dining restaurant for seven years. Nobody transitions easily from running his own kitchen to slinging dough for a couple of newbies. He would be bored stiff. He would probably try to take over the place, or, just as likely, quit within a month.

  We whittled down the ninety-something applicants to four or five, and one by one, we bro
ught them in for interviews. The most promising cover letter came from a cook named Jared. Actually, the fact that he had written a cover letter at all was promising; though we had specifically requested it in our ad, only a small number of people actually paid attention. “Serious Cook,” read the subject line of his e-mail. Magic words! (Craigslist job seekers, NB: the subject “HIRE ME!!!!!” tends to produce a result opposite to the one intended.) Jared’s first job had been as a pizza cook, he explained, and from there he went on to cook in kitchens around the country, mostly restaurants specializing in local, seasonal ingredients. Nice! He already had a job that filled his mornings, he confessed, but he wanted to do more. A hard worker! He even thanked us for our consideration. We were impressed.

  The resume, however, was a problem. He had a BA and a culinary arts degree from one of the top schools. He had not only been a lead cook at two highly regarded restaurants in the Northwest, but he had cooked at the French Laundry—I recommend taking a moment here to let that sink in—and he had owned his own restaurant. Why would this guy now want to toss pizzas? He wouldn’t even get to cook.

  Despite these misgivings, we brought him in for an interview. Somehow, it seemed dumb not to. You never know. We wound up asking him about these crazy potato chips I’d seen in a magazine article about the French Laundry, potato chips with a sage leaf woven through each one. I can’t explain what they’re like without drawing a diagram; that’s how complicated they are. Jared explained how he had made them. We did not offer him the job.

  Instead, we offered it to a guy named John. He’d been stretching pizza for years. He looked to be a few years older than Brandon—in his early thirties, maybe—and he’d been stretching pizza since Brandon was in high school. He was tired of working for big restaurants that ran like machines, he said. He wanted a smaller place, one where he could feel like part of a family. The day after his interview, he and Brandon spent the afternoon making pizza together, trying it out. John made it look easy. He was perfect. He also, as Brandon learned, happened to write music for a hobby. They hit it off right away, shooting the breeze about instruments and editing software, the kind of things that people who write music shoot the breeze about. I remember feeling truly confident about Delancey after that day, feeling that we could safely open the doors now, that Delancey was actually going to be what Brandon had hoped it could be, because we had John on our team, and he knew pizza the way Jared knew sage-woven potato chips.

  We asked him to come back for a second practice session about a week later, a Wednesday, the day before our first night of soft opening. My mom was in town to help with the last big push, and that Wednesday afternoon, she and I went to run errands. John was due to come in at three. I was having a few friends’ photographs framed for Delancey’s walls, so Mom and I went to pick them up, and then we went to Cash&Carry for some odds-and-ends supplies, and a little after four o’clock, we were at the grocery store, picking up baking powder and yeast and a bunch of sunflowers for the bar. I had just finished paying when my phone rang. It was Brandon. John didn’t show up, he said. Brandon had tried calling him three times, and he hadn’t answered. He’d also sent an e-mail, and in desperation, he’d gone to John’s Myspace page (!) and left a note there.

  I guess we could have kept hoping. We could have assumed that there had been some emergency, and that he would turn up shortly. I can’t explain how we knew that he wasn’t coming, not later, not anytime, but we did. It was July 29, which happened to be our second wedding anniversary, and we were due to open Delancey to its first paying guests, all of whom had made reservations weeks before, in approximately twenty-six hours.

  I was reminiscing about John with Brandon last summer, if reminiscing is the appropriate word for an activity that makes you feel like driving a pencil through your eye. Even with the buffer of nearly four years, my throat tightened when we got to the phone call. I remember the disbelief most clearly. I couldn’t believe that someone would do that to Brandon—this man who had quit school to go after the thing he most wanted, who had put his entire savings and ten months of physical labor into it, and now it was one day away from becoming a reality. I had had plenty of qualms about Delancey, and I had had plenty of quarrels with the man behind it, but even in my most Chicken Little hour, I had never thought of abandoning him. I had considered a number of possible outcomes, but leaving was not among them. I threw myself into the restaurant because I didn’t want him, whether intentionally or not, to leave me. There were supposed to be three people in the kitchen at Delancey. Now we were down to two, and that’s how we would open.

  We were right about John: He never showed up. He didn’t call or e-mail. We know he’s alive, at least, because about a year later, a customer introduced himself to Brandon, saying that John had highly recommended the pizza at Delancey.

  It was 103 degrees in Seattle on the day that John disappeared. The Pacific Northwest heat wave of July 2009 was so extreme that there’s a Wikipedia entry for it. Like most buildings and homes in Seattle, the building Delancey is in has no air conditioning. Brandon made practice pizzas on his own for a couple of hours while my mom and I finished our errands. Then she took us out to dinner, for consolation and for our anniversary, and never before and never since has a cocktail been so necessary.

  POPPY’S BOURBON SOUR

  We went to dinner that night at a restaurant called Poppy, and this is the drink that I ordered. It’s a classic, of course, and you might have a recipe for it already, but I think Poppy’s version is particularly well balanced: bright, refreshing, and not too sweet. Jerry Traunfeld, the chef-owner, kindly agreed to put me in touch with Hideki Anpo, the restaurant’s excellent bartender, and Hideki taught me how to make it.

  A few quick tips:

  • Don’t worry about getting exactly three-quarters of an egg white. Just eyeball it, taking care to leave a little behind in the shell with the yolk.

  • I recently saw a local grocery store selling tiny bottles of simple syrup for $7, and rather than responding as I wanted to (by smashing the entire display), I will just say this: There’s no need, ever, to buy simple syrup. It’s dead-easy to make. Poppy uses a 1:1 sugar-to-water ratio for theirs, and you can make it by combining 1 cup (200 g) granulated sugar and 1 cup (235 ml) boiling-hot water in a jar. Stir to dissolve the sugar, cool thoroughly, and it’s ready to go. Store it in the refrigerator indefinitely.

  • Lastly, Poppy serves their bourbon sour in a wine-tasting glass, but since few of us have those at home, I recommend a rocks glass.

  3/4 egg white from a large egg

  2 ounces (60 ml) Buffalo Trace bourbon, or whichever brand you prefer

  1/2 ounce (15 ml) freshly squeezed lemon juice

  1/4 ounce (7.5 ml) simple syrup

  1 dash Angostura bitters

  Ice cubes

  A cherry or a slice of orange, for garnish (optional)

  * * *

  Combine the egg white, bourbon, lemon juice, simple syrup, and Angostura bitters in a shaker. Put on the lid—note that you’re not adding ice at this point—and shake vigorously, counting to 13. Remove the lid, add a generous scoop of ice, put the lid back on, and shake again, counting to 13. Strain the drink into a glass, and add ice until the drink reaches the rim. Garnish, if you like, with a cherry or a slice of orange.

  Yield: 1 serving

  15

  The next day, we cooked dinner for thirty people. Brandon, my mother, and I were in the kitchen. It was 96 degrees outside and, according to the laser thermometer gun that we bought for the wood oven, 105 degrees on the kitchen wall. The servers arrived in mid-afternoon to arrange the dining room into three long tables, and we propped open the doors while we worked. The ceiling fan was on high, spinning so violently that it blew out the candles as soon as they were lit.

  My mother and I went to the farmers’ market that afternoon and bought big beefsteak tomatoes, meaty green beans, fingerling potatoes, and farm eggs. For a first course, we made a composed salad, a basta
rd cousin of the Niçoise. We plated them on top of the reach-in refrigerator, the small prep table, the dish rack, any horizontal surface we could find—a game of Twister with beans and potatoes and arms everywhere. We cut the tomatoes into thick slices and put a couple on each plate with a pile of blanched green beans on top and a spoonful of basil-shallot vinaigrette. Next to that went a fingerling potato with olive oil and crunchy salt, and next to that went half a boiled egg with olive oil and a single anchovy draped over the top. It was the kind of dead-simple salad I like to eat on a sweltering day, and our customers seemed to like it. Maybe they were just grateful that the ceiling fan was working and that the food wasn’t hot.

  Or maybe it’s that our customers were mostly family, friends, and friends-of-friends. This was our very, very soft opening.

  * * *

  As new business owners go, we were lucky. I had a blog that was widely read, and my book had made the New York Times bestseller list. We were opening a pizza restaurant, and everyone, everyone loves pizza. We were getting a fair amount of press. On the one hand, this was thrilling. We were opening in a recession, but we had the immeasurable luxury of not worrying about whether people would come.