Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  He couldn’t afford to provide health insurance stipends, which would have drawn a better level of employees. He hadn’t raised enough money to insulate himself for five years, the way a big company could. And the money he had came from people he knew well, and liked, which had seemed like an advantage at the start but now grated on his nerves.

  “I would caution people not to take money from family and friends,” he said, in a reversal of his initial desire to work with empathic investors. “Not that I had other options—and I felt incredibly competent, but now I feel an incredible weight. It’s people I know.”

  In August he’d imagined what he might do if a phantom buyer walked in with $2 million and offered to put Jonah out of his misery, to stake him to the kind of smarter second chance that had propelled Chang, Bloomfield, and Izard. By mid-September his imaginary price had come down to what it would take to pay back the investors, his own contribution a wash, though he had no idea if such a bailout were possible at this point.

  “I’m not even sure that deal would come to me,” he said.

  He wondered if he had passed a fail-safe point without realizing it. “Failure has crept into my mind the way it never has before,” he said. “I never thought I’d fail. But I’m a very rational person. It’s within the realm of possibility. Having that even in my mind is a new thing for me.”

  • • •

  Nate watched the reservation list for anything that might provide a clue to another Pete Wells visit, although some of what got his attention would have seemed unremarkable if he hadn’t been on the lookout. A table of four was more interesting than a table of two, because the word was that Wells paid three visits to any place he was going to review, and he needed enough people to order a range of dishes. A very early or very late reservation piqued Nate’s interest, because some people said that a critic might eat two dinners in one night. An odd e-mail—a broad category that at this point included anything other than the common first initial and last name—caught his eye.

  The guy who’d supplied the stubble intelligence told Nate that recently Wells had opted for more dramatic disguises and a wider range of dining companions to try to stymie vigilant chefs and managers. The same friend said that when Wells’s predecessor, Frank Bruni, was spotted at Eleven Madison Park in 2009, the kitchen sent six extra courses to everyone in the dining room, to impress Bruni without it looking as though he had received special treatment.

  Six extra courses on the fly. Nate could barely imagine a kitchen that operated like that.

  And then odd little things began to happen. Nate approached a woman at table one, at the window in front of the bar, because he thought she was a regular at Abraço, the coffee place around the corner, and he wanted to thank her for signing the liquor license petition. Halfway through the brief conversation, he realized he was wrong. He recognized her from somewhere else.

  “You’re in the industry,” he said.

  She was, in a way: She wrote about food for the New York Times, where there was great buzz, she said, about Huertas.

  “Yes,” said Nate, thinking like his speedy self and not like Jonah, whose internal brakes would have kept him from saying what Nate was about to say: “We may have had a special guest.”

  “I can’t confirm or deny,” said the writer, and Nate, who could not think of what to say next, found a quick excuse to go back to work.

  The next night the man who’d eaten with Wells showed up at the bar, and Nate moved in for the strategic hover. It turned out to be Jeff Gordinier, the Times’s Food section writer who had suggested pintxos to Wells as a smart way to fill the time before dinner.

  Nate retreated to the service station by the kitchen and watched as Gordinier sent out a raft of texts or photos, surely to Wells, or at least Nate wanted to believe that. When it felt right, not intrusive, not too blasé, he went back for another chat, hoping that the writer might convey a message to Wells: They ought to try the dining room, Nate said. The wine pairings were a great deal.

  Pete decides on his own, came the reply.

  The night after that, a restless Nate had drinks with a friend who worked at the NoMad, the second restaurant from the team who in 2011 had bought Eleven Madison Park from Danny Meyer. Chef Daniel Humm, who’d won his first Michelin star at twenty-four, and his business partner, Will Guidara, had opened the NoMad restaurant and bar in 2012, in the hotel of the same name, and in only two years had arrived at a point where they’d transcended mere mentions on Eater and Grub Street and were, as Nate saw it, “all about reviews and San Pellegrino ratings,” the annual list of the top fifty restaurants in the world. It was a far different universe from the one where Huertas lived, in terms of food and ambiance and cost, but NoMad had survived Pete Wells’s multiple visits, prevailed, in fact, and Nate wondered if his friend had any advice on how to prepare, short of six extra courses for the entire house.

  Simple, his friend replied: They changed the entire menu the day after Wells’s first visit, reinvented it overnight, so that there was no chance he would have to repeat a single dish.

  Nate’s head started to spin. He and Jonah wanted Wells to eat in the dining room, of course, to experience the new five-course menu del dia. That way, Jonah was in control of the menu. But what if Wells sat in the front again? They couldn’t come up with a completely new set of pintxos and raciones every single night. Jonah decided to look at the itemized check from the first visit, which was tacked up on a bulletin board in, the basement office, to see what Wells and his friends had ordered. At least he could make sure that the server passed new pintxos first.

  That night Nate dreamed that Wells came in and he seated Wells at table forty, the best table in the dining room, the one at the back of the room, alongside the glass doors. That was the dream: Wells came in, and Nate seated him. Clearly, table forty was going to be it, if they got their chance.

  • • •

  Jonah and Nate called a managers’ meeting and issued a mandate that hearkened back to Luke’s service mantra: For the next six weeks, starting today, they were to treat every one at every table as a potential critic, in case the cryptic enthusiasm of the two Times writers was a coded message. Jonah would make sure that servers got to taste everything during the day, not a few of the dishes in a hurry at lineup, so that they could better answer any questions. He and Nate intended to consider all the beverage pairings and make substitutions when it seemed right—though right, given their heated debate on whether cider worked with the huevos rotos, might prove to be a bit elusive. As an experiment, they would put two different bottles of cider on a table with the instruction, “Drink as much as you want,” Nate said, and then they’d see if the sweeter or the funkier cider prevailed. At that point they could argue some more, since no one was about to let customers dictate what got poured the next time Wells came in.

  In the meantime, they debated where to put the critic, since a dream about table forty didn’t quite qualify as a strategy. They had no idea how many people would be in his party, or whether he would reserve for the back dining room or visit the front a second time, so they considered every variable. Table six, the two-top right in front of the service station, was the nicest front-room table, but whoever ate there could hear too much of what the servers might have to say about the customers—which would mean that Wells would hear too much about how they intended to care for him. The front tables by the windows were nice, but it could get crowded and noisy. Table forty in the dining room really was the best, but it was a four-top. What if he came in with only one other person? They couldn’t seat him at a table for four, because it would look like special treatment, or maybe they could, if the rest of the room was full. They reconsidered the two tables by the front windows, but no, only the one on the south side of the restaurant. Under no circumstances was he to be seated on the north side, which was too close to the bar.

  • • •

  Nate got
to work a little early on September 17 and announced, out of nowhere: If there’s a dining-room reservation tonight it’s Pete Wells. Nate had been checking the list for days—there weren’t many dining-room reservations—and had already announced, more than once, “If it’s Pete Wells it’s this one,” based on nothing more than hunches, or names that caught his eye, or a combination of those two things and an early booking. Everyone took him seriously, even though his pronouncement was little more than congealed nerves, because that was the newly announced policy, to treat every guest like a critic.

  Wells walked in the door at six forty-five, alone, told the host he had a reservation for four people at seven o’clock, and went up to the bar. Stew was busy with other customers, so Nate, who had been near the door and saw Wells get out of a cab, handed the critic a menu, walked behind the bar, and pretended to be busy at the computer until Stew came over to input an order.

  “Pete Wells is right over there,” muttered Nate.

  Without a word, Stew turned to wait on the critic as though he weren’t the most important guest imaginable. Nate, who at that moment idolized his bartender, tried for an air of capable nonchalance as he walked back to the pass to give Jonah a fast heads-up.

  “Well,” said Jonah, who’d been reviewing their accounting on his laptop, which was what he did when the restaurant wasn’t busy. “I guess I’ll go to work.”

  He had fifteen minutes to prepare before the rest of Wells’s party arrived at seven, and a few minutes more while they sat down and thought about whether to try the beverage pairings. The menu was the menu, no latitude there, but the execution, for this table on this night, was all Jonah.

  The three men who were joining Wells arrived at seven, and as they walked past the kitchen on the way to the dining room Jonah recognized Ed Levine, founder of the website Seriouseats.com, whose son had played youth basketball with Jonah—and who was part of a table for five on the following night. The challenge increased exponentially: Jonah had to cook the best meal of his life, and when he was done he had to revamp the menu del dia to avoid any duplication for the ballplayer’s dad, who undoubtedly would report back to Wells on his meal.

  First out, the pintxos, which on any other night would barely have caught Jonah’s eye: the gilda, which they always served; some charred Padrón peppers; garlic shrimp on toothpicks.

  The egg course was a bit showier. A fried egg white sat under corn and tomatoes cooked with chunks of homemade, pimentón-cured bacon. A raw yolk perched on top of that. When the diner poked the yolk with a fork, it ran down into the warm corn and tomatoes and thickened the oil the vegetables had been cooked in, creating a sauce.

  The fish course was skate served with turnips in a sauce of pureed turnip greens and fennel, a little flourish that made the point about Jonah’s low-waste philosophy. He saw no sense in discarding the turnip tops if he could turn them into something delicious.

  The meat course was Jonah’s homemade chistorra sausage, this version made with lamb instead of the traditional pork or beef, flavored with garlic and pimentón and served with a slow-cooked bean stew.

  For dessert, a goat-cheese cheesecake, a dense little puck topped with candied almonds and served with a nectarine sauce.

  At each step, Jonah, Nate, Jenni, and the dining-room captain and servers huddled over the plate like surgeons and operating-room nurses considering the specifics of a patient’s anatomy, Jonah bent almost double as he arranged even the smallest element on the plate. There was no time for discussion, and no one was about to contradict Jonah as he adjusted a sprig or a bean or wiped the already-clean rim of a plate, but hovering seemed the supportive thing to do.

  As the egg course headed to the back, one of the servers reached over to nudge the corners of Nate’s pursed mouth at least up to even, if not into a smile. “The boys are nervous,” was the subterranean chatter, as staffers reassured them about how great the food looked and how happy the table seemed. Caleb, one of two servers attending to Wells, measured the collective angst of the knot of people at the pass and reassured them.

  “This isn’t my first rodeo with him,” said Caleb, who had served Wells at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. Wells never reviewed the place, for whatever reason, but Caleb saw no need to share that part of the story with his coworkers.

  Faced with the need to appear very calm, staffers siphoned their nerves into their cell phones and texted friends to say that Pete Wells was back. Those friends tended to be in the business, given the no-weekends off, late-night schedule of most restaurant people—who else socialized at two a.m. on a weeknight?—which was why the front room suddenly got very crowded. Animated customers ate and drank and craned their necks toward the dining room, even as they tried very hard to look as though they weren’t. Several restaurants operated without their general manager or bartender or sommelier that night, because they had no idea what Pete Wells looked like and intended to sit at their tables until they got a glimpse. They told the Huertas staffers that they were there to support the gang and fill the place up, and then they admitted their ulterior motive.

  It was all peripheral noise. The only talk that mattered was what the host overheard as Wells and his friends headed out the door: Empellón Cocina served what they called a cheeseburger taco, he said. It was right next door. Was anybody game?

  With that, the men headed next door for more food, leaving Jonah and Nate to read several courses’ worth of empty plates as though they were tea leaves. It could be a very good sign, an indication that the group had liked every single thing they were served. Or it could mean that the portions were too small. The cheeseburger taco could be nothing more than curiosity mixed with convenience, or it could mean that Wells was still hungry—but not interested in more food from Huertas.

  There was no way to tell and no time to dwell on it, because Jonah and Nate had to figure out a new menu and get the food orders in by eleven. Wells might as well be eating at Huertas two nights in a row, even though he wasn’t, because of his friend, who was.

  They slid into an empty booth to discuss their options, with no idea of what was available.

  Jonah considered putting chistorra sausage in the egg course, but Nate vetoed that. Wells had tried the chistorra. It was too similar.

  Nate suggested fish for a main course, maybe throw in a shared tortilla with pan tomate and serve chistorra migas without an egg. Jonah didn’t think that was good enough, so Nate backtracked: What were the best dishes Jonah had done so far?

  For a moment Jonah thought about inventing a new dish, but this was hardly the right time for an experiment. They agreed: Diners loved Jonah’s duck, and the scallop crudo had gotten raves. One customer had said it was the best crudo ever, so it went on the list along with duck served with turnip and fennel migas.

  Jonah had a goat’s milk cheese from northwest Spain, the Leonora, which he could turn into a pintxo on top of bread. Nate gave him a thin smile.

  “You’re going to put cheese on toast,” he said, imagining how that would sound in a text from Wells’s friend, no matter how good the cheese turned out to be. They agreed on a smoked trout pintxo instead.

  For dessert, the Spanish version of an affogato. Nobody else in town had that almond ice cream.

  They agreed to add a shared tortilla to the list, placed the necessary orders, and headed home, confident that they’d come up with a great last-minute menu—the only items that would show up twice were the gildas and the complimentary plate of chocolate and almonds at the very end. But on his bike ride home Nate had another idea, so he pulled over to send Jonah a final text. They should stick with the egg dish Wells and his group had just eaten, the one with corn and tomatoes. That way they could make what seemed like a spontaneous offer when they saw their returning guest, as though they hadn’t known in advance that he would show up. They’d make an order of huevos rotos for him, while everyone else at his table got the eg
g dish that was on the menu, which sent the right message: “‘We can do something on the fly for you because you were just here,’” was the way Nate saw it. “It’s incredibly hospitable. It’s the Danny Meyer ethos: We want to cook for you.”

  11

  ANXIETY

  Olivia, who had been a host at Huertas for a week, was making calls to confirm reservations for the last Friday in September. About halfway through the list, she got to a table of two.

  A man picked up the phone.

  “I’m confirming Friday at seven for two,” she said.

  He asked her to remind him of the name the reservation was under.

  Bianco, she said.

  He mentioned that his dining companion had a shellfish allergy, and Olivia reassured him that the chef would create an alternate dish for the scallop course.

  Olivia might be new, but she had quickly become as alert for possible clues as everyone else. Had Mr. Bianco asked what name the reservation was under because she had interrupted him in the middle of something important—or because for a moment he’d forgotten which fake name he used when he booked the table?

  As soon as she hung up she looked at the e-mail address he provided when he made the reservation, a weird and seemingly random assortment of letters. Huertas’s reservation software allowed her to search contact information to see if a customer had been there before. She stared at the screen. Mr. Bianco had in fact been there before. He was the party of four in the dining room, seven days earlier. He was Pete Wells, and he had just confirmed that he would be back tomorrow. And she, with her brand-new review antenna, had picked up on it from a moment’s hesitation on his part, just long enough for her to wonder, Doesn’t this guy know his own name?

  She ran back to the kitchen to tell Jonah and Nate.