• • •
Success started to look like anything that got people in the door, or up to the truck window, and eager candidates lined up for their shot. USHG had for the first time received two thousand unsolicited applications in a single year from aspiring cooks, unprecedented for the sheer number—and for the speculative nature of the inquiries, which were not submitted in response to a specific job posting but sent just in case a position opened up. Some of those cooks intended to be the next Jonah, and he hadn’t even found a space yet.
Richard Coraine was a thirty-year industry veteran who now supervised restaurant development for USHG, and he saw a sea change in how people got to the point where Jonah now was. The straightforward path to becoming a chef, based on “competence and sanctions,” was obsolete. In its place, more opportunity, and more disarray.
When Coraine started out, he said, “It was all logical, because you had come up through a very hierarchical and competence-driven format, and along the way you were sanctioned. You couldn’t supervise somebody cutting up a chicken unless you had competence cutting up a chicken.”
Money had changed all that. “If you have a pile of money,” he said, “you can get a collection of recipes—yours, somebody else’s—and open a restaurant, call yourself a chef. Chef is the label we give to anybody who’s in control of the product that’s coming out of the kitchen,” which meant that the chef might have fewer cooking skills than the people who worked for him. It didn’t matter, as long as he had a profitable concept that someone on the payroll could execute.
Meyer liked Jonah’s odds in great part because he was more of an old-school model—he might seem to be in a hurry, given his age, but he’d already logged a decade of experience. And he had survived several rounds; some of those two thousand USHG applicants would never get as far as a sous chef job at a big-name restaurant, let alone strike out on their own. But there was no way to predict how far that would take him, because the criteria for high-profile success were not yet clear. Customers at Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard’s two Chicago restaurants often inquired about her season on television when they asked to have a selfie taken with the chef, but she had yet to have a single guest mention her James Beard Award for outstanding chef, Midwest region. Fame, the adulation of strangers, had replaced renown, the more circumscribed respect of one’s peers.
“A celebrity chef today can be someone who’s worked for twenty years,” said Anderer, “or someone who’s got tattoos and worked at two places, and everything in between. Anyone can break in if they can work the loudspeaker, as it were.”
Jonah had a hunch that the city needed the kind of Spanish food he wanted to make, an accessible cuisine that still had novelty going for it, and that the bar and dining room would each draw a distinct clientele and broaden his base. Those were his loudspeaker messages, if he could just get enough people to listen.
He wasn’t prepared to contemplate the alternative, that somehow he’d get lost in the shuffle. He had to make Huertas work; at twenty-five, Jonah had narrowed his options to one. Being a chef, running his own restaurant, and from there a group of them, was all he wanted to do, and what he was trained to do. He wasn’t going to be a “misfit asshole creative chef,” who in Jonah’s estimation was his own worst enemy because he didn’t understand anything but the food. That kind of chef might regard food costs and staff morale as beneath his dignity, soulless concerns of the sort that kept bean counters awake, but Jonah looked around and figured that the way to break through was to be both creative and responsible—to make beautiful food and stay in business. More than that: Make beautiful food, stay in business, and grow.
• • •
At fifty-nine, David Waltuck again found himself among the hopefuls, like Jonah, about to embark for the second time on a new restaurant project, thirty-four years after he opened what became an exalted piece of the city’s restaurant history. During the summer of 2009, just months before Jonah started at Maialino, the Waltucks had announced that they would close Chanterelle temporarily for much-needed renovations, to reopen in October, a few weeks before the restaurant’s thirty-year anniversary on November 14. In October, they announced that Chanterelle would not reopen, ever, a victim of rising rents in a neighborhood that had gentrified around their once-isolated outpost.
Eater ran an item that attributed Chanterelle’s demise to natural causes: “It’s always sad to see a restaurant go down after a long run. But the times, they are a changin’, and it would have been an uphill battle for them to keep the old timer alive.”
For four years Waltuck consulted on other people’s projects—offered his input on burgers and sports bar menus and tried to get used to having his creative suggestions politely declined. It was intolerable. He missed being in the kitchen, missed the French- and Asian-inspired dishes that he considered to be his signature; he yearned for a more active role. He needed a new strategy, though, now that there were no longer the kind of bargain rents that had enabled him to lease Chanterelle’s original thirty-seat location for a monthly rent of $825. Cheap rent had meant that he and Karen could pursue their “very idealistic and very romantic” idea on the fly—which was how he saw it, looking back.
“It wasn’t fraught,” he said of the scene in 1979. “There weren’t as many rules.”
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.
3
THE HUNT
Someday, 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.
Generation Chef Page 4
