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.
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.
Jenni made a batter out of sugar, egg white, ground almonds, and a little bit of flour, which Jonah spooned into the aerosol canister. He cut a slit in the bottom of the coffee cup to give any accumulated steam a vent, shook the canister, and filled the cup one-third of the way up, a cautious guess. The recipe he’d seen said halfway, but he was a little worried about how much the cake might puff up, as the batter was shot full of air. He placed the cup inside the microwave, turned the oven on, and he and Jenni leaned close to the door to watch.
“It’s working,” he said, as the batter poufed to more than twice its original size, a dome of batter rising above the top of the cup. After a couple of minutes he removed the cup and cut it away to expose a slightly gooey cone of almond cake. Next time he’d leave it in the microwave for a few more seconds, to make sure it set, but this was going to work. They had an almond cake that tasted good and resembled a loofah sponge, two or three portions per coffee cup. All that remained was to figure out what to do with it.
“Chocolate and goat cheese,” said Jenni.
“Not goat cheese,” said Jonah. “Maybe almond crumble, almond cream.”
A sous chef was supposed to have opinions. “I don’t like almond extract,” said Jenni, a vote against almond cream, which required it.
“Almond puree,” said Jonah, to acknowledge her opinion.
“Almond cream,” said Jenni, backtracking. She did not want to seem obstinate; it was Jonah’s menu, after all.
He was stumped. A puree might not have enough flavor or the right consistency, so he gave Jenni a new task to add to her to-do list. Between now and the start of service she had to make a puree and a cream, try them both, and figure out the answer. Almond cake in some form was going on the menu.
The more pressing task was to get someone to dash out and buy a second canister, to make sure they had enough batter ready to go.
Jonah cooked to satisfy himself, in the end, not for the six people in the first booth, not even for the critics whose arrival was the subject of constant speculation—or rather, he figured that by cooking for himself he cooked for all of them. If he cooked instead based on assumptions about what people might want, he’d pull his punches, and the food wouldn’t be his anymore.
He was hard to please and felt compelled to move on as soon as he was happy with a dish. Jonah never cooked the same dish twice at home, because that was where he got to try new things, to stretch past the constraints of Spanish food, which already felt to him like a one-off. If he could make great Spanish food, he owed it to himself to master something else next time. And he balked at food truisms, which he considered a creative challenge. Nate said that they shouldn’t put chicken on the menu because people didn’t go to restaurants to eat chicken, which they made at home or bought to go. Jonah, always with an eye on the bottom line, figured he could make chicken work by pairing it with small amounts of more luxurious ingredients, like morel mushrooms. Nobody was going to tell him what he could or couldn’t cook. He was, after all, the cook who got the New York Times’s attention with cow’s stomach.
One of his first responsibilities at Maialino was making braised tripe, a mainstay of classic Roman cooking but not an easy sell. Jonah didn’t care. He made the best tripe he could, tripe that met his exacting standards, day in and day out for months, working alongside Chris to turn out two batches every week, about seventy-five pounds of it. First he had to blanch the tripe multiple times, and then simmer it in stock and cook it down in a tomato sauce. When he got lucky, he got the one oversized pot with a spigot, which he opened to release the blanching water into the floor drain. The other big pot was too heavy to carry over to the sink, and there wasn’t a strainer big enough to handle a batch, so when he got stuck with that pot he resorted to siphoning, which worked—except for the day when he sucked in on the hose for a moment too long and ended up with a mouthful of foul-tasting tripe blanching water while Chris, grateful not to be Jonah, lay on the kitchen floor and laughed.
Jonah didn’t care, or he didn’t care once he read the reference to it in the Times’s January 2010 review, which he had memorized: “Mr. Anderer’s tripe is served in a tomato sauce with pecorino and mint,” wrote then-critic Sam Sifton. “It’s light, delicate even, slightly sweet, with a backbeat. You can dance to it.”
Mr. Anderer was Nick, and the recipe was his. The execution was Jonah’s, though, at least
half of the time. A backbeat you can dance to. He thought about that line, sometimes, when the talk turned to Huertas and reviews.
• • •
Nate lived in a state of constant preoccupation with how to do things better, and if exhaustion overtook him in mid-thought, late at night, he woke up wherever he’d left off. He was never not thinking about Huertas. It occupied him on his bicycle ride in from Brooklyn, on the ride back home, on his day off, when he was out with friends. He was not about to let anything about the business side get by him.
Luke, in contrast, had worked for a restaurant group that defined success in terms of decades, not weeks, which suited his less antic rhythm. He kept a notebook in which he jotted down every idea he had for how to improve service, no matter how small. He talked about getting good over time, in incremental steps.
At a Friday afternoon lineup meeting, heading into what promised to be a busy weekend if the reservations showed up, Nate introduced a new moneymaking special, the “can and conserva,” $12 for a can of beer, probably one that wasn’t on the menu, to make it seem even more special, and a tin of seafood, which had already proved itself a popular item. The cheapest tinned seafood on the menu was $10, so Nate instructed the staff to describe this as a free beer. It was a great deal.
“It should be an easy sell,” said Nate, a note of imperative in his voice.
When it was Luke’s turn, he consulted his notebook and recited a list of slang phrases he’d heard the servers use, none of which he wanted to hear in the future:
“No problem.”
“Hey, how you guys doing tonight?”
“What’s up?”
He preferred a list that included “You’re welcome” and “How are you?” without the “hey.” When he looked up from his notebook at the incredulous expressions on a couple of faces—were speech patterns really the key to Huertas’s success?—he did his best to explain.
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