Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  She tabled any notion of having her own brick-and-mortar restaurant or food truck, although she was careful to tell Jonah that this was a one-year commitment, in case going home proved too strong a lure. At the same time, she couldn’t help but wonder what new options she might have if Huertas was a success. Sous chef to executive sous to chef de cuisine; she could run the Huertas kitchen when Jonah and Nate opened a second place. Her food truck dream might even end up a shared project. In any case, she’d be part of the story they told when they looked back: Jonah, a passionate young chef, had bet on himself and traded a safe ascent for a start-up; Nate and Luke had created a business model that enabled them to expand; Jenni had taken a chance on them and been the reliable presence who helped the company grow. She might not have the resources to invest her own money, as Nate and Luke had, but she could see equity for herself down the line, a reward for being essential. It all made sense.

  Jonah had been Jenni’s “go-to guy” at Maialino, the one who would always listen if she had a problem or a complaint. Now he’d hired her for a job she wasn’t quite qualified for. She intended to repay that trust by being the best sous chef he could have wanted, erasing the memory of the friends he couldn’t afford.

  • • •

  Jonah was on the flight to California when a man who might be New York magazine’s Adam Platt walked into Huertas, alone, and took a seat at the bar. The longtime critic had abandoned his anonymity the previous December with a cover photograph and article in the magazine’s annual “Where to Eat” issue, writing, “I would like readers to know what restaurateurs around town have known for years. Adam Platt is a tall, top-heavy, round-faced gentleman who often dresses for dinner in the same dark, boxy, sauce-stained coat he bought off the rack at Rochester Big & Tall thirteen years ago.”

  The man at the bar wasn’t wearing a jacket, but he fit the rest of the description, and he looked like the man in the cover photograph. Or maybe he didn’t; in the midst of a collective anxiety spike, none of the staff trusted their senses. It was absolutely Adam Platt, unless, of course, it wasn’t, a possibility they couldn’t afford to consider. They had to operate on the assumption that one of the city’s major critics was about to order some of the passed pintxos and might even try one of the raciones. Whatever he did, they could not acknowledge that they knew who he was, or even thought they did, because those were the rules of the game. They had to pretend that he was about to get the same level of attention they would shower on an out-of-town tourist whose opinion mattered to no one. Another man walked in and joined him; no clue there.

  Among established restaurants that had already been reviewed, there might be gracious acknowledgment of a powerful guest—whether it was overt, an extra course that appeared unbidden, or covert, an obsessive attention to that guest’s experience. For first-timers, obvious moves were out of the question. Nate could not walk up to the man at the bar to say how glad he was to welcome the first critic of any significance, nor could the bartender comp him a drink, lest they offend him or scare him off.

  It was an odd bit of etiquette: They could and would treat him like a god, which in their universe he was, as long as they pretended he was nobody special.

  None of the principles had ever been in charge when a critic walked in; not Jenni, whose eyes widened at the news, not Luke, who felt the need to text Jonah despite the communications embargo, not Nate, for whom the man at the bar was a lightning rod: Six weeks after Huertas opened, at the dawn of Nate’s entrepreneurial life, a man who could nudge the restaurant toward success or failure was at the bar, and the chef wasn’t here.

  Nate wasn’t worried about anything specific—Jenni knew what she was doing, Chris was there to enforce calm if she got rattled, and it wasn’t as though Platt had booked a table for six in the back and was about to dig into the menu del dia cooked by someone other than the chef-owner. He wasn’t concerned about the experience; he was overwhelmed by the simple fact of Platt’s presence. Huertas had just been plucked from the pack for a shot at one of New York magazine’s twice-monthly reviews, which could catapult them higher or put a lid on their progress. Either way, it was out of his control, and that was the killer: He couldn’t change the menu, ask Jenni to add a dish or tweak a presentation, or alter the drink list. There wasn’t any time.

  Nate turned the corner in front of the kitchen pass so that he was out of the bar’s line of sight and scrabbled his fingers against the tile wall as though he could find something to cling to on that shiny, slick surface. He leaned on the pass with his head down, looking wobbly enough that one of the servers came over to make sure he was okay. Nate shook him off. He didn’t know what else they could have done, but what they could do suddenly seemed wildly insufficient. There was a very important loose cannon sitting at the bar—or a man who got great service all over town because of his striking resemblance to the critic. The probable Platt could fall in love with the place and show up in the dining room next week, or just talk about the bar menu, or decide that Huertas wasn’t worth a full review, or turn out not to be Platt. They wouldn’t know for sure until they saw something in print, or didn’t.

  • • •

  Luke was 99 percent sure that the man at the bar was Adam Platt, which made it his job to ensure that everything ran smoothly—but that was always his job, so there was no need for anything beyond a degree of added vigilance. He prided himself on his perspective, developed at his fortunate first job at Le Cirque, where he’d had a short stint in the kitchen before he decided he was meant for front of house. Legendary cooks had run that kitchen, Daniel Boulud among them, and for four decades the restaurant survived everything from changing menu trends to the 1993 loss of its fourth star from the New York Times, when critic Ruth Reichl compared the dismissive service on an early visit to an exquisite experience on her return, once the staff knew who she was. Luke arrived late in the game, when memories contributed much of the glow, but he’d learned a methodical rhythm there, a level of service that he believed could be translated to inform any new setting, no matter how casual.

  He knew that Jonah and Nate were skeptical about some of what seemed important to him, but he insisted that certain practices translated to any restaurant, no matter how downtown the vibe, and he clung to his set of priorities. Nate had already announced that there was no need for a manager to be at the host stand to welcome guests; the hosts they’d hired were able to do the job, and it felt kind of fussy to have Luke up there when he could be putting out small fires during service. Luke stayed put, because the host stand was a guest’s first impression of Huertas, and he wanted it to feel important. While he was not about to suggest that an aging bastion of fine dining like Le Cirque was anything to emulate, he liked to think that he was in charge of taking the long view at Huertas. If he increased the volume of cross-country texts now that a critic was at the bar, it wasn’t nerves as much as an appropriate desire to keep the chef-owner informed.

  Luke figured that a modulated approach was the best way to avoid two common mistakes: the restaurant group that grew too fast, opened multiple outlets before the first one was settled, and went out of business at two out of three outposts before the principles knew what hit them, and the high-profile group whose cocky attitude translated into endless waits or imperious service, because “people don’t like that, they like personal attention.” Once Huertas was a success, bigger companies and investors would show up at the door with new concepts and the money to implement them, and he and Jonah and Nate had to be careful not to let a bad idea turn their heads. Hotel partnerships were big right now because the hotel absorbed some of the costs, but collaborating with a hotel from his old stomping grounds, the Upper East Side, would be foolish no matter how much money someone waved in front of them.

  “That’s not in line with the East Village,” Luke told himself. “We’re homey, not glitzy and glam. Sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself, Is this the right thing to
do?” It was his job, he figured, to make sure that the partners were selective about the opportunities that would surely come their way.

  He wasn’t going to be satisfied with one restaurant any more than Jonah and Nate were. A chef couldn’t work in the kitchen forever, so he needed a network of places where he could step into an advisory role as he got older. The same was true for him and Nate; it was fine to be closing up at one thirty in the morning when they were in their mid-twenties, but they didn’t want to do it forever. They all agreed that Huertas was the first step, not the destination. The issue was how fast to take the next step. Luke was starting to think that it was his responsibility to make sure they didn’t get ahead of themselves.

  “We’re in the culture of the next big thing,” he said, “and worse, all the media are trying to find the next big thing. We’re still racing, not pacing, ourselves.”

  • • •

  The next day, at lineup, Nate apologized to the front-of-house staff for his behavior. He had not led by example, he had let his nerves get the best of him, and he vowed not to let it happen again—even as he exhorted the staff to be on the lookout for the next Platt visit, and to study the few photos he’d managed to find of Pete Wells, the critic at the New York Times.

  • • •

  Huertas got its needed mid-June publicity when it landed at the top of a Village Voice list of the ten best places to watch World Cup soccer, just as Jonah learned of a much bigger pending story: Eater wanted to send over a photographer because the site was running a review by a critic who had managed to visit unnoticed. It appeared on June 28 as the second half of a double review by Robert Sietsema, who led off with Donostia, another Spanish place a few blocks away from Huertas. Not a place to go for a full meal, he wrote, “but as a place to snack and explore the alcoholic beverages of Spain, Donostia is unparalleled.”

  Huertas, in his opinion, was both more and less, terrific overall, particularly in the back room, but inconsistent on a couple of dishes he felt compelled to warn the reader to avoid. He disliked “the spongy hake croquette resting in a puddle of indifferent garlic mayo,” and he dismissed the percebes as an overpriced novelty act. He quibbled with the idea of a prix fixe meal in the back, which he found “faddish,” having nothing to do with Spanish tradition, found the third course too small to be an entrée, and the vegetarian option “grease-sodden.”

  And yet the migas were “brilliant!” and the rest of the back-room menu, memorable. Huertas got two stars to Donostia’s three, which rankled, but not enough to stick, because of the quote that was pulled out of the review and highlighted alongside the text.

  “Lucky for us,” wrote Sietsema, “the four-course feed via chef Jonah Miller verges on the superb.”

  7

  BRUNCH

  For the first time—or finally, if Jonah was being a realist—Huertas lived up to its new-restaurant budget projections and lost about $5,000 in June. It was a smaller loss than he’d estimated, and no surprise. If anything, the solid numbers for late April and all of May were the shockers. He should have reacted with a shrug and a bit of gratitude that it wasn’t worse, but the good opening numbers—no, the ridiculous opening numbers—had spoiled him. Any loss at all seemed a more precipitous drop than it was because, until now, Huertas had been the exception to the start-up rule.

  The competitor in him did not want to slip into a lower gear. “I want to make money all the time,” he said, disappointed that he hadn’t been able to sustain the numbers.

  Jonah lectured himself: He knew the summer was going to be slower, and maybe that was a blessing, a chance to get used to brunch and get ready for the fall, when he planned to open seven days a week and add weekday lunch service and, at some point, a special family-style dinner on Wednesday and Sunday nights. He could see the table in his head—a big platter in the center, a whole chicken or fish, or a pork roast, with a bunch of side dishes and hard Spanish cider. Summer was for refinement and planning, and the first item on that agenda was brunch.

  Spaniards might not eat brunch, but New Yorkers did, religiously, with the under-thirty crowd devoting hours each Sunday to drinks that took the edge off of Saturday night’s hangover, a stabilizing plate of food, and conversation to put the previous night into focus. Brunch was an imperative debrief with a menu, and Jonah felt compelled to offer it. The challenge was to figure out a menu he could live with, one that didn’t stray too far from what someone might eat midday in Spain—retooled raciones alongside dishes that put a Spanish spin on a more typical American brunch. He wasn’t a purist, but there were limits, and he had a shorthand for what he wouldn’t do: This was not a mimosas-and-hollandaise menu. He could walk out the door at Huertas, walk five minutes in almost any direction, and be staring at a mimosa and a plate of eggs Benedict, or a mimosa and a three-ingredient diner’s choice omelette, or, for the vegetarian, a mimosa and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with fresh fruit.

  “It’s a good neighborhood for brunch,” he said, taking a swipe at the competition. “Lots of mediocre places open.”

  A couple of days before the first brunch service, he laid out samples of his efforts for the front-of-house staff, minus the hake croqueta that Sietsema had described as spongy. Jonah wasn’t so vulnerable that he’d kill a menu item because one critic didn’t like it, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He wasn’t arrogant, either; maybe the execution had been off, or maybe it could stand a little improvement. He retired the croqueta until he could figure out which it was.

  A jamón and queso sandwich was a standard in Spain, but Huertas customers weren’t going to settle for plain ham and cheese, so it became a pressed sandwich on a roll ordered for that sandwich alone, the warmth to bring up the flavor and the roll to distinguish it from anything else on the menu. Spaniards ate rice pudding, too sweet for a main dish, so Jonah worked instead on a porridge that combined Calaspara Spanish short-grain rice, for a traditional element, with farro and red quinoa, a nod to current tastes, all of it cooked in milk and served with slivered almonds to bring it back to Spain.

  Jonah had an instinct about where to stop, in terms of accommodations, and he explained the parameters to the staff. Sure, they would add fresh fruit to the porridge, $6 for a side order. No, that did not include fruit that might be a staple of an American brunch menu but didn’t show up in Spain.

  “If someone asks, ‘Can I have a banana?’ No. We’re not a hotel,” he told them. “You say, ‘Every fruit we have this weekend is fresh from the greenmarket.’”

  The bocadillo de calamares, battered and deep-fried squid piled on a roll, was as popular as jamón y queso in Spain, but in the East Village it posed a challenge, a double negative for the growing number of people who avoided gluten, between the white-bread roll and the battered squid. Jonah put it on the menu anyhow, because people liked fried calamari, and because anyone willing to eat eggs Benedict was likely to be unrepentant about the bocadillo.

  “Tell people it’s fried calamari on bread,” Jonah instructed the servers. “It sounds like a po’boy. It’ll work.” He planned to put a mound of mixed greens on the plate as well, not that anyone in Spain ate a salad like that. New Yorkers seemed to regard a small side salad as their virtuous due, and it made the plate less beige.

  One of his favorite dishes was what he called Spanish French toast, because that was the only way to convey what it was: eggy bread flavored with orange and cinnamon, deep-fried until it was crunchy on the outside but still custardy on the inside, served with whipped cream and fruit compote.

  “We can sell a ton of these,” said one of the runners. Crisp, sweet, topped with whipped cream and fruit; who wouldn’t prefer it to hollandaise?

  “It’s the most kid-friendly dish we have,” said Jonah. He asked only that the servers downplay the availability of maple syrup. Good maple syrup was very expensive, and frankly not part of the dish. They had to have it on hand because people expected it, but
they didn’t need to be aggressive about selling it.

  “Doesn’t need it,” said Luke, supportively.

  “What if someone wants it not deep-fried?” a server asked.

  Jonah deflated for a moment, trying to imagine the diminished nature of the dish without the contrasting textures. It wasn’t as though he could turn cream and sugar and eggs and white bread into health food simply by avoiding the fryer, and the trade-off was substantial: no crust, and just as fattening.

  “I just wouldn’t advertise the fried part of it,” he said.

  The important focus, for the servers, was the list of side dishes at the bottom of the menu—bacon that Jonah spiced and smoked in-house, homemade sausages, and slices of jamón. He wanted to change the way people ate brunch as well as what they ordered, to get away from the one-person, one-plate model. The Huertas brunch menu was built on sharing, with a main dish for each person and then, if it worked as he intended, little plates to pass around, so that the person who ordered the porridge could sample a strip of bacon, a chunk of sausage, maybe even a sliver of the tortilla that someone had ordered for the table. It wasn’t the old notion of brunch, but it wasn’t the current small-plate model, either, not quite. Too many small dishes could disrupt the experience, as a constant “Want some of this?” replaced conversation.

  He anticipated two built-in problems that would be easy to fix as long as the servers stayed sharp. Churros with chocolate sauce came five to an order, so a server had to alert the kitchen if a party of six ordered them; an extra churro for free and everyone at the table would feel special. An expensive item like the homemade bacon or sausage meant a small extra charge, with the emphasis on small. There would always be people who wanted “one egg done this way,” Jonah warned, which he’d be happy to do.