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 th
ere 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.
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.
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