Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  “That’s why it’s good to have slow brunches at first,” he said, “to get used to the process.”

  “We don’t anticipate busy,” chimed in Luke. “That was the intention.”

  • • •

  Coffee was an afterthought at dinner, when most people didn’t bother, but essential at brunch, when they ordered it before they even looked at the menu. Huertas had a $4,800 espresso machine, but the cup of drip coffee they’d been pouring at night—sorry, no decaf—was not a high-quality introduction to a meal, not in the midst of a post-Starbucks third wave that saw microbrewers and local roasters popping up all over town. If Jonah cared enough to make his own quince paste and to smoke and spice his own bacon, he had to think about coffee service—or rather, he had to let a couple of front-of-house staffers who had been baristas at Maialino do so, as he was still skeptical that it mattered as much as they said it did. He couldn’t argue with their logic, though: The coffee ought to be as good as the food that followed it. He wanted to encourage his staff to suggest ways to improve the restaurant, to feel that they had a personal stake in its success, so he agreed to spend another $1,000 on a drip coffee setup from the company that sold beans, sold and maintained the equipment, and trained the staff as part of the package.

  Espresso drinks were handled only by the two staffers who already knew how to use the espresso machine, but drip coffee was going to be everyone’s responsibility, and they had more to learn than they realized. A representative from the coffee roaster set up a Fetco coffeemaker in a nook at the bottom of the stairs, brewed a pot, and gathered the front-of-house staff around him. The standard Bunn coffee brewer was shunted off to the side, as obsolete as a landline.

  For a half hour the group sipped and listened. One of the two staffers who knew what she was doing explained that the pervasive approach—“get Italian roast and load it up with milk and sugar”—was as out of fashion as the Bunn coffeemaker. Coffee had distinct flavor notes, like wine, in this case based on where it came from and how it was roasted, and it deserved the same kind of respect. Fine coffee was a beverage, not a wake-up in a cup, certainly not the result of hot water indiscriminately splashed over grounds.

  There were rules:

  Rinsing out the basket that held the grounds between each pot was key. “If there are grounds left in the basket it’s like re-brewing coffee,” said the supplier’s rep, “and you wouldn’t re-scramble eggs you made yesterday.”

  Temperature was just as important, and hot was not the goal. “Coffee tastes better as it cools.”

  The recipe for fine coffee was precise, exactly 105 grams of coffee per pot, which one of the experienced staffers would weigh in advance and set out in plastic quart containers.

  The grind was everything, which was why the trainer was going to mark the proper setting. If the beans were ground too fine, the coffee would be weak; too coarse, and it would be strong but could be bitter. The way the ground coffee hit the basket mattered as well. “Give it a little shake to level the coffee, or the water will flow around it and not extract the flavors,” the trainer said, to looks of increasing alarm from servers who had thought that pouring coffee meant just that, and were trying to figure out where, in the midst of a busy shift, they were going to find the time for all this. “And don’t jam the basket in, or the coffee will shift to one side.”

  “Be quick,” said one food runner, with a baffled grin, “but not too quick.”

  They had to add water in two careful stages, a “pre-wet” before the full pour to moisten the grinds, and then the rest of the water, premeasured, to make a pot. They ought to throw out any pot that was more than an hour old because the coffee started to “degrade,” explained the trainer, but he understood the financial imperative. “We’ll find the happy medium between what’s good and what you can afford to waste.”

  And when brunch service ended they had to clean everything—carefully, completely, and using a food-safe cleanser instead of soap, which left a residue.

  All that for a cup of coffee, and they hadn’t even addressed whether to break down and offer decaf. A slow start to brunch service began to look more and more appealing.

  • • •

  Employees outnumbered diners for the first brunch shift on July 5, and the first table to be seated belonged to Wilson Tang, a restaurant owner who’d advised Jonah about the community board liquor license hearing, the kind of guy who brought his family to a brunch opening to show his support. Tang had left a job in finance to take over Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Chinatown’s oldest dim sum restaurant, from his uncle, who had gone to work there as a teenager in 1950 and bought the restaurant in 1974. He had been spared the permit hassles, nervous investors, and limitations of a shoestring budget; although he’d had to go through the process on a second place he’d opened just months before Huertas, he operated from a relatively secure position. He did what he could to encourage a young chef like Jonah, who operated without any of the advantages Tang had inherited.

  He and his family sat at one of the two round tables at the front windows, which caught some of the dwindling sunlight. The rest of the room was a cool, dark cave, and Jonah began to chafe at two things he could not change and had not considered when he was looking for a space: Huertas faced east, which meant that the sun was overhead and gone before even the earliest brunch crowd was done eating and drinking. If he’d been across the street, facing west, it wouldn’t be so dim—and it wouldn’t have mattered as much that First Avenue was an unappealing site for a sidewalk café, with trucks barreling north and a lot of ambient noise. Jonah hadn’t even bothered to inquire about whether sidewalk seating was merely unpleasant or forbidden, because he wasn’t interested. He couldn’t compete. The plum locations were on Second Avenue, one block to the west, and Avenue A, one block to the east. When the weather got nice, diners headed for the sun like lizards seeking a warm rock.

  It mattered more than what they ate, which was demoralizing. Jonah had hoped, even assumed, that people would defect from the open-air usual-suspect menus once they heard about the great Spanish fried toast with fruit compote, or all the new ways to consume weekend eggs, but the places with outdoor seating were jammed no matter what was on the menu. The definition of a great summer brunch seemed to include fresh air.

  Or maybe the day after the Fourth of July was a bad time to start serving brunch, because everyone was away for the holiday weekend, a theory that required him to ignore the mimosa drinkers a block away. Jonah couldn’t figure out exactly what the empty room meant. He thought and waffled; his rhythm was off.

  • • •

  “This is the longest day of my life,” said Jenni, who had sent out two brunch orders and had nothing to do. She’d gone to sleep at one thirty the night before, only to wake up at five for no reason. She couldn’t fall back asleep, which left her too tired to organize her morning, too tired to eat breakfast before she came to work, too tired to do anything but stay awake until brunch ended.

  On a busy day, Jenni could work straight through from morning prep to the end of dinner service and not collapse until she was done. On a dead day like this, the most pressing item on her agenda was fighting fatigue. She tried to distract herself by paging through a Spanish cookbook with Joe, the extern from a local culinary school.

  “This sounds delicious. We should make this. Sugar-coated fried bread,” she said, tapping a page with her finger until the sound woke up a couple of brain cells. “Oh. French toast. We’re making it already.”

  Chagrined, she allowed herself the smallest complaint aimed at anyone who might listen: She was hungry. She needed protein. Even a spoonful of peanut butter would help.

  Chris, who seemed never to fade, dove into the kitchen’s snack cache and produced a banana, which he deep-fried and put on a plate with a dollop of peanut butter. He plunked it down in front of Jenni, let her register how nice the presentation was, and cut it into thirds
for her, Alyssa, and himself.

  “Wait,” he said. “I have a better way to do this.” He grabbed another banana, floured it first, and dipped it into the deep fryer. Jonah wandered over as Chris started to slice it—new food drew everyone, no matter what it was—and Chris ceremoniously handed the first piece to the chef. He plated the rest as Nate and Luke joined the group.

  “You can’t eat it,” Chris warned Nate. “It’s floured.”

  “I can eat it,” said Nate, who ate a gluten-free diet most of the time, except when desire occasionally trumped reason.

  “And you don’t even share,” said Luke.

  “Dude,” said Nate, his mouth full. “There’s more right there for you.”

  But Chris had put the remaining three slices in front of Jenni, grabbed a bottle of a sweet reduced sherry sauce, and drizzled some of it over the top. Brunch service might mean two tables of friends in an otherwise dark restaurant, but he had standards. Nobody was going to get through a shift on a glob of peanut butter on a spoon, or even on a deep-fried banana that improved with a second draft.

  • • •

  Richard Coraine, USHG’s chief development officer, had told Jonah that the Huertas business plan was one of the best, most comprehensive proposals he’d seen—high praise from a man who had spent thirty years in the hospitality business, developing new restaurants or choosing not to pursue projects that failed to measure up. He knew every pitfall a start-up faced; he knew what was going on at Huertas without having to walk in the door. A young chef might have a notion of the food he wanted to cook and the space in which he wanted to cook it. Coraine had a fuller sense of just how much of their energy was about to be diverted from food.

  “A cook cooks,” said Coraine. “But a chef-owner manages.”

  Jonah’s first management challenge was the fun part, as he looked for ways to help his staff build their skills and survive the opening rush. But their sense of mastery rose just as the number of customers dipped, and the sum of those two things was too many empty minutes. If people felt that they knew how to handle their jobs and had fewer tasks spread over the same number of hours, they skipped right past relief and hit boredom, which in turn sat next to anxiety about job security.

  That was a new problem for Jonah. Traffic was still too unpredictable to consider cutting shifts, which could leave him understaffed, and free time wasn’t as valuable as a paycheck. He didn’t want to risk losing anyone to a more reliable job, and yet he couldn’t pay people to stand around. He had to find something more than promises about the fall to keep them engaged.

  “It’s hard to keep people focused when it isn’t busy,” he said. “Much better when there’s too much to do.” Pintxo pote helped, some, on Tuesdays. Soccer Sundays were sketchier, but he saw another opportunity there. On one Sunday the crowd was so small that he let the servers watch the game with everyone else, so in a way they were getting paid for doing what they might have been doing if they hadn’t been at work. If he couldn’t increase the tip pool, he could at least let them enjoy the afternoon.

  The Eater review didn’t yield an immediate bounce, though Jonah blamed the dead Fourth of July weekend for that as well as for the low brunch turnout. He tried to inspire people by example—showed up even when he could have carved out a little free time for himself, and tackled any chore, no matter how small. The handle on the walk-in refrigerator broke, not for the first time, so he took it apart, found a broken spring, and went to the hardware store to buy a replacement. He fixed it himself, a nice distraction from the fact that summer was turning out to be slump season after all.

  • • •

  The second brunch weekend was as slow as the first, and Nate, who liked to be well ahead of trouble, started to look for explanations that he could shape into a theory and, from there, a practical solution. He commuted on his bicycle from Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, and by mid-month he’d realized that the streets were deserted no matter what time he was out, which had to be a big part of the reason for the empty tables on the weekend—and, he had to admit, the dwindling numbers at night. He wondered if the competition was suffering as much as Huertas was. It would be reassuring to know that more experienced and successful restaurateurs were in the same boat, which meant that the problem was on the street, not inside the restaurant.

  He approached the owners of El Rey, a tiny, popular spot several blocks south that was only six months older than Huertas, to see if they could put things in perspective, which they could. Everyone was suffering, in great part because the people who sustained restaurants weren’t, anymore. When the economy was bad, as it had been for the previous five summers, people who could no longer rationalize a weekend out of town settled instead for a long, alcohol-fueled brunch or a couple of dinners out. This year, a healthier stock market had put money back in people’s bank accounts, so for the first time in a while they took that monthlong time-share at the beach.

  If they kept spending when they got back, business was going to be great after Labor Day, but for now it was way too quiet.

  There was nothing Nate could do about the mass exodus, but he could try to improve things on a small scale. On an empty Sunday in mid-July, he stood in the doorway ready to will people to abandon a cloudless day for the cool, dark recesses of Huertas. One woman wandered up, talking on her cell phone, and stood in the shade of Huertas’s entrance, glancing at the menu posted in the window while she continued her conversation. She hung up but didn’t move, as though she were confused about what to do next, so Nate wandered over to ask if he could be of any help.

  “What happened to Empellón?” she asked, referring to the restaurant next door.

  “Nothing,” he said, “but they’re not open for brunch.”

  He waited. Huertas was clearly open for brunch. He smiled, but she was already back on her phone, heading up the block.

  A half hour later his mood had improved, based on nothing more significant than two tables of first-timers, representatives of all the people who had yet to try Huertas, some of whom would find out about it from these newcomers. “This is the best brunch in New York City,” he announced to no one in particular. By mid-afternoon the window tables and three of the bar tables were full and there was one guy at the bar and a bigger party in the first booth. It wasn’t good by a long shot, but it wasn’t bad, and it was definitely a move in the right direction.

  8

  LOSS

  Luke told Jonah they needed to talk, knowing that there were only two ways the conversation could go: Either Jonah would reassure him that he was making a valuable contribution, which Luke himself had begun to doubt, or he would quit, keep his small ownership stake, but lose his scheduled bonuses.

  The couple who had waited at the bar for forty-five minutes back in early May had a dramatic effect on Huertas, but not the sort anyone had anticipated, no harsh online comments, nothing like that. For Luke, the incident was a sign that he was the wrong guy in the wrong place, a nagging feeling that refused to go away. The man who was always wary of the next-new-thing mentality felt out of sync, and he confessed his concerns to Nate a couple of times—who at first reassured him that everything was fine, but after a while acted more like a sounding board when he saw that Luke was getting frustrated or upset. Maybe everything wasn’t fine; Jonah had yet to acknowledge that there was a problem or to reassure Luke about the value of his contributions. That was part of Luke’s discomfort—he wasn’t always sure that Jonah and Nate were right about what increasingly seemed like a hurried agenda.

  Luke got caught in a cycle: He felt that he ought to have more input, but Jonah didn’t seem as interested in what he had to say as Luke thought he should be. He started to doubt that his participation was of sufficient value, got sidetracked by insecurity, and let his work suffer by not speaking up as often as he had in the past, which gave Jonah cause to be less interested.

  But Luke saw himself as an essenti
al link between the chef and the customers, because he was the one greeting them at the door and visiting their table or bar stool to see how they were doing. What he had to say about the menu ought to count, he thought, and yet it seemed not to. At first he told himself that he had to get used to working at a chef-run restaurant after Le Cirque, where the owner was from the front of house and the chef, an employee. In the end, he felt as though neither he nor Jonah had figured it out.

  “I think communication has been trying for me,” he said. “For example, the development of the menu. For a chef that’s incredibly personal. They put their heart and soul into it, and it can be hard for others of us to have input. But that’s our responsibility, to have input. It’s our job to have input. We look at the structure of the menu, and sometimes specific dishes. We try to identify problems with the business in any area. That’s our job.”

  So he came to Jonah, to give him a chance to say that Luke had misread the signals.

  “When it gets to a year,” Luke began, “I don’t want you to feel that I haven’t earned my sweat equity,” which working partners earned once they’d been at Huertas for that long. He wanted Jonah to understand that he felt hamstrung, that he could do more if only Jonah would listen.

  Jonah wasn’t going to argue with him about his perceptions because they were accurate. He had started to turn to Nate rather than to Luke—and had come to think that having two comanagers was not a smart idea in the first place. There was no rationale for having both of them, and of the two Nate was a better fit. Luke was a sweet guy with what Jonah thought of as a “midtown, over-the-top showmanship background.” Nate was “more of a bulldog who takes things in his teeth,” which was better for the business in the long run. If Jonah had known that Nate was available when he started to look, he would have stopped there.