“It doesn’t mean that we’re a formal environment,” said Luke. “We want to have a friendly environment—but not be the customer’s friend.”
The traffic hierarchy was next on his list. Right of way in the narrow restaurant went, in order of priority, to guests, hot food, and dirty dishes. It didn’t matter if a server had a set of hot plates resting on his forearm. A guest always had the right of way.
Posture mattered, too. Luke exhorted the staff to stand up straight, and on this one, Nate backed him up. If someone felt the need to stretch an aching muscle, they should slip out of the customers’ line of sight into the stairwell.
“And if someone’s headed to the bathroom,” said Luke, “get out of their way. Don’t rush, but move quickly. This is like a Broadway stage. Every movement you make gets noticed.”
Nate agreed with this, too, but he was mindful that the first tenet of USHG’s philosophy was to make sure that the staff was satisfied. If they didn’t come to work happy, they weren’t going to take good care of the customers—and this was starting to feel too much like a grown-up lecturing the kids. He wanted them to think of him and Luke as experts, but accessible ones, who not so long ago had been on the receiving end of all this information.
He decided to confess to his own set of nerves.
“Look, just think about something bad you do and work on it,” he said. “I bite my nails. That’s pretty gross. ‘Look, a partner in a restaurant biting his nails.’ That’s really gross. I’m working on it.” All he wanted was for everyone in the room to work as hard on whatever their equivalent bad behavior was.
“Verbiage, posture, table maintenance,” he said. “That’s our focus this week. We’ll add more next week.”
• • •
On his way into work on Saturday, Jonah stopped at a little secondhand store in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he lived and couldn’t afford to work, to buy a couple of dozen butter knives. It hadn’t taken long to realize that people who ordered the menu del dia came in hungry, anticipating a four-course menu. They could get impatient waiting for the pintxo first course, but if Jonah gave them something to nibble on they might order a glass of wine or vermút in addition to the wine pairings with the meal. He’d decided on radishes served with flavored butter, which they’d tried for the first time the night before, precipitating a knife crisis. The dishwasher had to wash batches of them in the middle of service so that the servers could dry them for subsequent courses, which made everybody crazy. Jonah liked vintage dishes and cutlery, which contributed to the we’ve-been-here-forever vibe, so he bought a bunch of mismatched little knives.
He came to work feeling that he’d made progress this week. He’d survived the Tuesday service, their worst yet in his estimation, and he thought he’d done a good job of addressing his supposed snappishness without backing down about standards. He had a new, seasonal pintxo with grilled asparagus and ramps, and bunches of broccoli rabe flowers and purple chive flowers to use as garnishes. The weather report wasn’t promising—threatened cloudbursts could make people skittish about going out—but there was a benefit to that, too. It’d give everyone a chance to work on the suggestions that he and Nate and Luke had made.
Chad had arrived in town and had a reservation tonight, to check out the food before he started work in the coming week. In the meantime, Alyssa had turned out to be a workhorse, efficient, precise, and fast, just what he needed until the next wave of reinforcements arrived. She had gone through the four-year program at the Culinary Institute of America’s main Hyde Park campus on nothing but loans, so she had a pressing need of a paycheck; he could count on her to show up. Between her three days, and Chad, and Chris right after that, the fourth week of Huertas’s life promised to be a relief, and possibly a pleasure.
The shift started on a forgiving note, able hands in the kitchen and a steady stream of customers rather than a flood. Jonah had the pintxo runner take over the job of adding garnishes to the pintxos, which made the runner that much prouder of what he was selling and saved the line cook some time. He moved the Spanish ham up to the wood-burning oven station to make more space for the order tickets. The front-room staff got better at the endless loop between the kitchen and the bar, so the food never stopped flowing. The inexperienced server who thought she should stand at the service station across from the kitchen until someone beckoned her over, rather than step up to the pass whenever she saw a plate, was encouraged to find another job.
The first hiccup was an order that sounded as though someone who knew Jonah was playing a joke, making special requests designed to drive him crazy. The server leaned over the pass and explained the order ticket in a lowered voice, as if sharing a terrible secret:
No asparagus in the migas with asparagus, which reduced it to a bowl of toasted bread crumbs and egg.
No fish or shellfish in a restaurant whose menu was built on them, requiring the kitchen to substitute a dish Jonah would have to make up on the spot.
A hard-boiled egg instead of a slow-poached egg for the huevos rotos, even though the soft egg was supposed to thicken the vinaigrette into a sauce.
One diner at the table had what the server described as “issues” with octopus and would prefer something else.
Jonah had to customize an array of dishes and somehow sync them with the regular orders at the table, and he was in the middle of it when another server appeared with a plate of lamb, minus a single bite. The customer didn’t like it.
Five people studied the plate. Jonah was mystified; it looked fine to him.
“Are we telling them anything about the lamb?” he asked. “If the guy had known it was going to be this pink, he might have ordered something else.”
“I told him medium rare,” said the server. “He just wants it a little more done.” Clearly the customer’s notion of medium rare was less pink than the chef’s.
“Well?”
“No. Just a little more done.”
Jonah grimaced. They would have to figure out a description that better conveyed how the lamb was going to look.
“He’s making a big mistake,” he said quietly. “It’s perfect medium-rare.” He handed it off to Jenni with a request for a minute more. When the server came back to retrieve it, Jonah held the plate in his hand for a moment before he relinquished it, as though debating whether to send out something he wouldn’t eat.
It was painful to turn out what was essentially the wrong food: If the migas had been a balanced dish without asparagus, if a hard-boiled egg achieved the same texture as a softer one, if overcooked lamb were any good, he would have offered the dishes that way in the first place. There was nothing he could do about taste preferences and allergies, about an aversion to shellfish or fish or octopus, but the interpretive requests grated. He was the chef. The idea was to sit down and enjoy his best efforts, not revamp them and, in doing so, throw a dish out of whack.
And yet hospitality seemed to demand accommodation, except for the few chef-owners who made a no-substitution policy part of their brand from the start, transforming the formal absolutism of the European kitchen into a T-shirted but no less definitive stance about what people should eat. David Chang and April Bloomfield hardly wanted for customers, even though he refused to make substitutions at his Momofuku restaurants, and she insisted that it was Roquefort or no cheese at all on the hamburger at The Spotted Pig in the West Village. That wasn’t how Jonah wanted to operate. He’d rather a customer was happy with his meal—or at least he had thought so before this evening. Right now he wasn’t so sure.
The best thing to do, he figured, was to make inside jokes to keep the cooks’ spirits up. Another diner sealed her fate and credibility when she complained loudly that there was no decaf.
Nate conveyed this to Jonah with a sly grin, and Jonah replied just loud enough for Jenni and Alyssa to hear.
“Tell her to go back to the U
pper West Side,” he said, the neighborhood where Jonah, Nate, and Luke had grown up, known for a great number of mediocre restaurants that might not care how bad the decaf was. “We’re below Fourteenth Street. We don’t have decaf here.” Downtown had standards and was proud of it, was the way he felt.
By nine the bar was packed and the tall front tables, full, even if several of the parties qualified as extended family—friends of Jonah and his parents, the line cook’s parents, Chad. A party of three, people Jonah didn’t know, sailed past the kitchen on their way out, and the man stopped just long enough to tell Jonah that he’d been looking for a pintxos place and clearly Huertas was it.
It took Jonah a moment to process the stranger’s compliment. “Well,” he called at the man’s departing back. “Thank you.”
• • •
It was after ten when a couple passed by the kitchen on the way to the dining room, but the reservation sheet said that the last table was at nine thirty. Jonah beckoned Luke over to the pass to find out why a nine thirty reservation was ordering at ten fifteen.
“Why did these people wait forty-five minutes for a table?”
“Table fifty wasn’t ready,” said Luke. “They sat at the bar.”
Jonah’s features flatlined: His eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth turned into grim horizontal lines, and he looked as though he was trying very hard not to say what he was thinking.
He pointed to the first booth, directly across from the pass, which had been empty for hours. “Why didn’t we put them there?”
It was a trick question. There was no good answer, because they should have used the booth, and Luke didn’t even try to respond. He’d been anxious about getting everything right, as Jonah and Nate were, but he came from a world of rules, not improvisation. At this point in Le Cirque’s long history, he’d learned far more about gracious, codified hospitality than about putting out fires. The couple had a reservation for the menu del dia, which they served only in the dining room. He simply hadn’t considered putting them anywhere but there.
“How many drinks did we buy them at the bar?” asked Jonah.
“They had hard cider,” said Luke.
Jonah hardly considered that much of an apology for a forty-five-minute wait. Luke should have put them in the booth and comped them a glass of wine or sherry. Jonah forgot that he was in an open kitchen three feet from customers and raised his voice loud enough for anyone to hear.
“But how many fucking drinks did we buy them?” he asked. “Forty-five minutes is amateur hour. We ought to buy their whole fucking meal.”
He turned away from Luke, asked a dining-room server what the couple had ordered to drink with their delayed dinner, and said, “Good. Comp them,” without even registering what the answer was.
“They’re really happy,” she said, to try to calm him down.
“I suppose that’s all that matters.” He gave her a plate of complimentary pintxos, the special tuna quenelles on cod-skin chips, and went back to work, too angry to speak either to Luke or to Nate, who had zoomed over to quiet things down.
Luke retreated to the host station to make sure there was no more trouble brewing and came back to report that there was in fact one more reservation at ten thirty, and that another nine thirty was clearly a no-show. Jonah brushed past him without making eye contact to run dishes to someone he knew. He simmered for fifteen minutes, not talking to anyone, until a hapless new runner asked a question he should have known the answer to.
He refused to talk to the kid.
“Get me a manager.”
When Nate came over, Jonah addressed him as though the runner were not standing right there, with guests as close as they’d been for the previous outburst. “This clown comes over to me,” he began, pushing on the word “clown,” but he was too upset to talk, and instead let himself be distracted by the final ticket of the night.
The runner darted back to the bar to make sure the problem had been resolved, and then meekly approached the pass again, to report that everything was okay. Jonah ignored him and pronounced sentence as soon as he walked back onto the floor.
“Either he wants to work here or he doesn’t,” Jonah told Nate, who was hovering nearby. Nate could educate the kid, fast, or fire him.
• • •
The people who’d been left at the bar for forty-five minutes were the kind of mistake that could do damage if they didn’t leave happy—on a small scale, if they decided never to come back or mention Huertas to a friend, or on a viral plane, in a Yelp review that got traction and inspired other anonymous diners to exaggerate their discontent. There was no room for blunders like that.
There was no time, either, not in a world where Huertas hit the Power Rankings before it opened and the review window was much tighter than it had been. The last generation of chefs had used the early weeks at a new restaurant to fine-tune the operation, but more media outlets meant more competition, and everything had sped up accordingly. In his first three weeks, Jonah had fed food magazine editors with voracious websites to fill, television producers who wanted to check him out for a morning-show feature, and bloggers who ranged from well-informed to self-promoting, even as they prepared to move on to the next new place.
Nate was already tracking reviews; Gato, TV chef Bobby Flay’s heralded return to the kitchen, got a review in New York magazine only six weeks after it opened, which meant that the magazine’s critic, Adam Platt, had to have eaten there during the first month of business. By that count, a critic could walk in the door at Huertas tomorrow, if he hadn’t already done so, unnoticed, two days earlier. Jonah and Nate and Luke always told the staff that they had to behave as though everyone were a potential critic. For all they knew, they had just offended the New York Times’s Pete Wells, here for an early visit to see if Huertas deserved his attention, by making him wait—or if not Wells himself, then his next-door neighbor or best friend or dentist, someone whose offhand negative comment could damage their chances of a review.
The only thing worse than an early review or a bad review—the latter a notion they refused to entertain—was no review at all, and the math there was daunting. The Times ran a weekly restaurant review, and New York magazine had switched to a biweekly publication schedule the month before Huertas opened, effectively cutting its review output in half. There would be about fifty reviews a year in the Times and just over two dozen in New York magazine, not counting special issues and lists of the best this or that. According to the Zagat Guide’s annual survey, 111 restaurants had opened in New York City in 2013, which meant that most of them would never get reviewed. Some got a first visit that didn’t warrant a second, some got the standard three visits, and of that second group, some got reviews that drove business and some got reviews that made them yearn for benign neglect.
There was no way to affect the process, except to be as ready as possible, immediately, always. So Jonah blew up at Luke, on the chance that a ten-year-old dream had just been derailed by a couple stranded at the bar.
• • •
Nate was angry at both of them, at Luke for a silly mistake and at Jonah for a leadership gaffe, so he cornered Jonah in the basement office before they left for the night. “If you want to get angry at people,” he said, “do what you have to do. But don’t vilify Luke or me in front of the staff. Do it behind closed doors. I can handle it. But we have to get the most out of the staff—and if they see you belittle us, it doesn’t work.”
Jonah showed up at lineup again the next day, when he should have been getting ready for dinner service. He had to address what had happened without caving in—had to make the front-of-house staff feel more comfortable without yielding to some kind of feel-good compromise. He told them that several guests had complimented him on doing a good job “for only being open three weeks,” which stuck in his head and had the opposite of the intended flattering effect. To him, it meant that they’d
noticed mistakes they were willing to forgive because Huertas was less than one month old.
What he wanted to hear, he told the staff, was, “Amazing—and only open a couple of weeks.” He did not apologize for demanding the kind of effort required, nor for blowing up at Luke.
“I’m very disappointed in what I saw,” he said, “but I know we can do better.”
6
THE FAVORITE
Grub Street’s Restaurant Power Rankings made sure that Huertas opened to a crowd, and on May 1 Eater extended the streak by including the restaurant at number seven on the Heatmap, a monthly list of the twenty New York City restaurants that were generating the most buzz. It was the best kind of publicity, an endorsement without any of the qualifiers that might show up in a review, one based more on anticipation than on experience. Restaurant-chasers could hardly ignore a restaurant that was on both lists, even if it probably discouraged some diners from checking out Huertas until the early rush subsided—the ones who functioned at a more modulated pace, the potential regulars. A slowdown, with luck an almost imperceptible one, was inevitable and would likely happen as soon as the June Heatmap came out and the crowd that followed its recommendations moved on. In the long run, that could be a good thing: Just as the trendier customers gathered their miniature leather backpacks and shrink-brimmed fedoras and left, the next wave would muster its courage and venture out, reducing the odds of the dip in sales that the partners watched for, warily, in each day’s sales totals.
For now, Huertas was on the short list. By mid-May there was a ninety-minute wait at the bar on a Friday or Saturday, and better still, people waited rather than head up the street to look for an alternative. Stew was in his element behind the bar, his eyebrow perpetually cocked in amusement, the constant patter droll enough to entertain but never a real conversation, which would disrupt his drink rhythm. People got a half-smile that said, Have a good time, but remember, I am not your best friend or confessor and I have to take care of everyone. He served the bar customers, handed off drink orders to the servers for the tables and the booths and the dining room, and did it all with enough of a flourish to make it look like fun. A passerby who hadn’t seen the rankings saw a knot of people on the sidewalk, or glanced in and saw the wall-to-wall crowd, and figured that a place he’d never heard of must be worth a look. The crowd built itself.
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