Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  It was a painful meeting, but Jonah could not afford to be guided by emotion. This wasn’t going to get any better. He’d be more relaxed, he realized, with just one managing partner.

  He didn’t ask Luke to stay. Luke gave him a month’s notice, and they agreed not to tell the staff until two weeks before his departure, to give them less time to feel unsettled.

  For an angry moment, Luke thought about asking for his $10,000 investment back, but he didn’t let himself say anything about it. He prided himself on being a glass-half-full type of person, and it would have been a stretch for Jonah to write that check right now. Besides, Luke wanted Jonah to know that he still believed in the restaurant’s potential and hoped to be helpful down the line, if there was anything that he or Nate needed. Leaving was a personal decision, not a change of heart about the business.

  Still, he was upset about the outcome, if not entirely surprised. His priority now was to figure out how to present this as his decision, not as an indication that he couldn’t hack it. He had talked about this opportunity nonstop since he first got involved—and it wasn’t like he had a great next job lined up. People might think that he was giving up, or worse, that he’d been encouraged to leave.

  “Lots of my friends know this place,” he said, “and they were excited for me. How do I explain it to friends, and professionally?”

  More and more, Luke thought about the question he’d asked Jonah before he decided to become a partner: Did Jonah worry at all about starting a business without having any management experience? At the time, Luke had said that it seemed an unusual step to take—most would-be owners waited until they’d worked as an executive sous or chef de cuisine before heading out on their own. In his distress at Jonah’s attitude, now, he decided that the skipped step, not his own performance, accounted in great part for what had happened.

  He, Nate, and Jonah had plenty of energy and passion, but they were making it up as they went along, their ideas based too often on borrowed memories of places they’d worked or on philosophies of people they admired. It wasn’t their own knowledge or experience, though it made him feel like an old fogey to think that way.

  They didn’t yet have a strategy. They had reactions, and Luke wasn’t comfortable operating on the fly like that, or on what felt like the fly to someone who was used to a more considered pace.

  “That middle step might’ve helped,” he said. “And neither Nate nor I have been the top guy. We took a chance. Chefs have unique personalities; they think they can do everything. We have all this confidence because we have nothing to tell us otherwise. We’re in our twenties. There’s no nuanced perspective. We think we can do anything. We operate on confidence and emotion.”

  “We don’t have perspective on anything,” he said. “We’re too young.”

  • • •

  Nate was not the sort to dwell—not when Huertas was “bleeding money,” in his urgent estimate, as losses increased in the first two weeks of July. Nobody was going to come out and say that it had been a mistake to have three partners when the usual arrangement was two, one in the kitchen and one out front, but it had been an odd fit regardless of the personalities involved. He felt that he’d learned a lot from Jonah already, about technical proficiency and precision, and that the two of them operated on a similar high-speed wavelength. While he was sorry that Luke felt uncomfortable enough to leave, he had to admit that he was excited about the new arrangement, and hopeful that he and Jonah could start to turn things around.

  “In the long run it’s sort of what I always wanted, so I’m okay with it,” he said, his mind already a jumble of plans he wanted to discuss with Jonah, everything from menu changes to cocktail dreams to new promotions. If Luke was the most cautious of the three, Nate was the one who figured they had to take chances. He was aware that the transition wasn’t going to be easy—as it was, he spent his two days off answering questions via text or phone call, and even that was about to evaporate. It was going to be a siege, at least temporarily. It was also his chance, two months shy of twenty-five, to be in charge of everything at Huertas outside the confines of the kitchen, which made him more excited than scared.

  Luke saw the partners’ youth and inexperience as a drawback, while Nate saw it as a plus: They were flexible, while an older restaurateur might be stuck in his ways. They were fast on their feet and open to suggestion. Nate networked like crazy, ate at restaurants he admired, took mental notes throughout the meal, and met more experienced restaurateurs for lunch or drinks to ask for advice.

  “I want to say to Jonah, You go back to the kitchen,” he said. “Let me run the business.”

  First, they had to resuscitate it. The first brunch shift brought in $550 instead of the thousands they’d projected; revenue for the first week of July was $11,000, when an average summer week should bring in $23,000. Yes, it was a short week because of the holiday—but no, a single day would not have made enough of a difference. It was the worst week so far, and all the rationales in the world couldn’t erase the fact that they were down from almost $35,000 per week in May. He and Jonah agreed: In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to launch brunch so quickly, over a holiday weekend in the middle of the summer.

  All they could do was look for ways not to make it worse. Nate started freezing quarts of fresh orange juice when supply outstripped demand, because he was not about to waste it. He had ten quarts stored in the freezer downstairs. If a couple of tables filled up, he grabbed one and ran it under hot water, fast, to defrost it.

  He quietly cut back on the size of the wine orders without mentioning it to Stew, ordering three cases of wine rather than five even though each bottle ended up costing more because he missed out on the volume discount. In the short run, it looked better to spend $300 less on wine. It ran counter to what Nate knew to be true—you had to spend money to make money—but you had to have money to spend it.

  He and Jonah began to hope that the New York Times would take the summer off along with everyone else. They used to think that the only thing worse than a bad review was no review at all. Now they added a third circle of hell: a great review in the middle of the slowest summer in recent memory.

  • • •

  David Waltuck looked at dozens of places before he found the one that most closely met his requirements, a space on a busy restaurant block across the street from the always-crowded Gramercy Tavern, surrounded by restaurants that would drive traffic but were different enough to make his new place, Élan, an alternative rather than a direct competitor. The space had been a restaurant, which meant savings of both time and money: He needed to change the look in the front, but he could use the existing kitchen, which meant that he could be ready to open, and so to recoup his costs, more quickly. A vanilla box held no appeal for him: Waltuck was happy to inherit a useable space, recast the front in his image, and get back to work.

  The rent was $30,000 a month, but the first three months were free, a standard reprieve in a restaurant lease to give the owner time to remodel or rebuild as necessary. The previous owner insisted on an additional $400,000 in key money to cover HVAC improvements—heat, ventilation, and air-conditioning—which Waltuck was willing to pay, if grudgingly, because that was time saved as well, upgrade work he didn’t have to do, permits he didn’t have to chase. He could devote his energies to making the room beautiful and to devising a menu that offered Chanterelle favorites, like a signature seafood sausage, alongside newer dishes.

  He installed a twelve-seat bar in the front and a banquette anchored by a big curved booth, along with freestanding tables, in the forty-eight-seat dining room. It was all done in quiet neutrals, cream, gray, brown, and black, with cylindrical light fixtures descending from the ceiling in both rooms and a set of Chuck Close self-portraits that had hung at Chanterelle installed across from the bar. Waltuck intended Élan to be more casual than Chanterelle had been, to take a few chances with the food that
he might not have tried at a restaurant with four stars to sustain. Today’s diner wasn’t as interested in the kind of dining experience that had put thirteen-year-old Jonah and Nat in suits and ties, and he had to acknowledge that.

  Élan opened in late June, and while an immediate rush would have been gratifying, Waltuck had a more tempered perspective. He had his regulars, and it was summer, and he didn’t have anything resembling a social media presence to let the uninitiated know what was waiting for them. Despite his skepticism about hiring someone to wrangle publicity, he and his partner had brought on a publicist, at least for the early months, and he’d had some coverage on Eater and Grub Street, which was nice but felt tangential. Waltuck wasn’t convinced that it paved the road to lasting success. He relied instead on Chanterelle’s mailing list, thousands of loyal customers, many of whom were eager to see what he was up to this time. That would be his foundation until the fall, when vacationers returned to town and the street would be full of people who were used to coming to this neighborhood to eat.

  One day, when the weather was particularly nice, he opened the floor-to-ceiling front windows to let sunlight cascade over the bar—and just like that, as though someone had cued the actors to walk onstage, people started to wander into the restaurant, attracted by the notion of a meal in the sun-bathed room. The front filled up with animated, happy customers, and Waltuck had his first optimist’s glimpse of how the future might look.

  • • •

  Luke changed from a T-shirt and baggy shorts into a dress shirt and slacks for the lineup meeting on July 23, as though he wanted to dignify what he was about to say, to make it more of an announcement than a concession. Jonah came in quietly and sat down, even though he usually skipped lineup. He needed to be there in case people got upset.

  “How’s everybody today?” asked Luke. No one spoke, the only sound the click-click-click of Luke’s ballpoint pen.

  As soon as the last person sat down, Luke launched into his speech. “I want to let everyone know that I’ve made a decision for myself, personally. I’m going to move on.” Several sets of eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s a decision I thought a lot about, and I have the full support of Jonah and Nate.”

  Servers and runners came and went all the time, but Luke was a partner, and his departure fairly guaranteed further disruption down the line because he’d brought in some of the front-of-house staff, who might not be as eager—or as welcome—to work here without him. Shaky work schedules and empty seats were bad-enough signs on the barometer of restaurant health, but a departing partner was a big deal.

  “I want to say how incredibly proud I am of what we’ve done,” Luke went on. “We’ve opened a successful restaurant, so far, in what is probably the most difficult restaurant environment in the world. And this is a family affair—no big investors, no corporate backers, just friends and family. Hard work, a great concept, smart people, and a value system that others will model after.”

  The staff sat there, silent, for too long, so Nate broke in to ask Jonah to review the new menu items. There was a dish with what Jonah and Chris called burnt eggplant, but a server asked if they should call it charred eggplant instead, because a guest hadn’t liked the idea that he was about to be served a burnt vegetable. Jonah settled happily into teacher mode, a nice refuge in the wake of Luke’s speech.

  “It’s not okay to burn a steak, you want to char it,” he said, “but with eggplant you actually burn the skin. Inside it’s still creamy, and then you puree the whole thing to get a smoky, earthy quality. But if you keep getting weird reactions let us know. We can always say charred.”

  With that, everyone got up and went back to work. There was never any time to linger between lineup and the start of dinner service.

  • • •

  Jonah usually left the intelligence work to Nate while he focused on the food, but as the summer droned on he started to solicit opinions about how pervasive the slump was, in the hope that it would help him maintain the proper steady managerial air. Alex Stupak, the chef-owner of Empellón Cocina, said that they were slow, which made Jonah feel better. Peter Hoffman had advised Jonah to wait to launch brunch in the fall—and even though Jonah had ignored him, he took comfort now in the notion that brunch was a timing error and would pick up along with everything else at summer’s end. He paid more attention to Nate’s reports and concluded that this was a phase, and not one that was in any way specific to Huertas.

  Jonah kept telling himself that a quiet summer had its advantages—they had the rest of July and all of August to get in shape for the fall, and by then all the big staff changes would be out of the way. Luke was leaving. Chad and Chris were leaving in early August. Jonah got Alyssa to come on full-time as the lead line cook, with the promise of a promotion to sous chef once they opened for lunch, and hired a line cook to work the fry station. He’d already seen how self-sufficient Alyssa was, how she managed outward calm no matter how crazy it got or how overwhelmed she might feel, and the new cook, twenty-four-year-old Max Loflin, had an impressive amount of experience. He’d worked at a pizza place during high school, found a mentor at a French bistro, and then bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, where he worked at a hostel in exchange for food while he learned about the cuisine. He worked at one of John Besh’s New Orleans restaurants on his return—and had built up a set of practical skills that were good enough to get him trails at Eleven Madison Park, The Modern, and Jean-Georges. Huertas was the oddity on that list, smaller, far less formal, but Huertas promised a tutorial in how to open a restaurant, and Max wanted to know that as much as anything. He wasn’t quite as buttoned-down as Alyssa was, but he knew his stuff.

  The real kitchen, the one Jonah would have moving forward, would be in place a couple of weeks before Labor Day. The outside help had stabilized the kitchen while they got under way, but now it was up to the full-time staff, plus the one additional cook Jonah would have hired already if every delayed extra shift weren’t money saved.

  He knew what customers were spending down to the dollar, and the $42 check average at the bar gave him reason for hope; it kept a bad summer in the back room from devolving into a catastrophe. He wanted to do two turns in the dining room every night—at their peak, in the early weeks, they beat two turns—but the room didn’t even fill on weeknights and turned only a handful of tables on the weekend.

  The dicier things got, the faster Nate fired ideas at him: They should do the family-style large-format dinners sooner, or try a five-course tasting menu with no choices instead of the current four-course with options for two of them. Smaller, nicer proteins. Jonah resisted it all, or at least thought about it more slowly than his partner might have liked.

  The dining room was Jonah’s pride, the place where he showed people what he could do as a chef, while the front room was not that much of a creative challenge. He considered half steps—they could use the back for private parties and push that aspect of the business. They could try to find new ways to lure customers who were, as he saw it, “really serious about the dining experience.” He sensed some resistance to the set menu, but he wasn’t prepared to consider a wholesale shift this soon. There was always the danger of changing too much too fast. Better to see if September lived up to their expectations, which he continued to assume it would.

  He and Nate talked instead about ways to save money in August, which meant a judicious pruning of labor costs, a move he’d been unwilling to consider only weeks earlier—nothing that would unnerve staffers and encourage defections, but a reasonable trim that would only last until Labor Day. He knew who needed to work and who wouldn’t mind having an extra day off, and they ought to be able to navigate for four or five weeks without creating a new crisis. He could improve his already economical food costs, and Nate had already found ways to minimize the outlay for liquor.

  Jonah was not going to let himself panic, or even spend too much time worrying about the daily
reports. Disappointment had only crept into his brain since Memorial Day, after all, and had little lasting chance against a dream that had seniority by more than a decade.

  He preferred to think about his second restaurant, a useful, pleasant distraction that was always on his mind. Jonah used to say that it wasn’t much harder to open seventy-five seats than forty, but now that he had to fill almost seventy seats, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe the next place ought to be forty seats, a vermút and pintxo bar, or a bar that served tortillas and papas. He thought about Maialino and Marta, both of them bigger but both of them in hotels, and wondered if that was the smart move, if the pluses of shared risk compensated for added responsibilities like room service—not that any hotels had come calling, but a worthy debate in case they did down the line. He thought about taking a space in a food hall, should anybody ever offer him one, because it was another way to have someone else foot part of the bill.

  Jonah saw a piece on Eater about the way in which David Waltuck prepared General Tso’s sweetbreads, a version of a Chanterelle dish that Waltuck had retooled for Élan, and it made Jonah think about how risky that venture seemed. Thirty-five years after Waltuck opened Chanterelle, the new place was, as Jonah saw it, “still him and his food,” and he wondered if that would be enough to survive in the current restaurant climate. More than one restaurant was an insurance policy. If Jonah were selling drinks and pintxos at some crowded little bar on a more densely trafficked street in the West Village, or in Williamsburg, it might take the edge off of Huertas’s July.

  Whatever the project, Jonah wanted to work with Chris, and thinking about that possibility helped to restore his equilibrium. They’d been talking about it since they cooked next to each other on the line at Maialino. They might be on different paths at the moment, Jonah striking out on his own, Chris working his way up inside a large company, but there was a reunion on the horizon; Jonah knew it. He figured he’d give Chris a year at Marta and then they’d talk seriously about what they might do next.