Jonah kept an eye on Alyssa, not that he was worried about her but because the volume at her station could trip up even the most experienced cook—and once behind, it was hard to catch up. The roast and sauté station always bore the brunt when a crowd showed up. Forty people in the dining room times five courses, three of which were her responsibility, meant 120 plates of food, plus however many front-room orders came in for the four raciones she had to make. She could end up sending out 150 plates a night, easy, and they had to be on time and in sync with the rest of a table, allowing for special orders or slow eaters. The volume might be predictable, but the rhythm rarely was.
On the first Saturday night after the review there was a ninety-minute wait at the bar, for the first time since the opening. Instead of having six parties in the back, they turned most of the tables three times, booking even the fringe times of five forty-five and ten thirty. Sometimes Jonah ran out of room to lay out new order tickets on the pass.
Huertas made more money in one night than it had for the entire first week of September.
• • •
David Waltuck did not quite get his wish for a review that was as positive as Jonah’s. The New York Times review made a respectful nod to his four-star history at Chanterelle, and gave Élan the same two stars and Critic’s Pick designation that Huertas had received, but not the equivalent level of praise. Jonah had gotten off light, with a ding for the shrimp and a wistful yearning for one more croqueta—hardly a complaint, to want more of something. The gist of the review was, Go to Huertas and eat, right now.
For all the compliments that Wells laced into his review of Élan, the summary judgment was not the kind that would necessarily spur the new generation of diners to rush right over: “Standing out in the open,” it read, “Mr. Waltuck’s cooking is revealed to be as variable, as prone to peaks and valleys, as anyone else’s.” The critic felt that the move from a four-star temple to a new, more casual place had “liberated” Waltuck, inspiring him to create successful new dishes like pot stickers filled with mashed potatoes and served with shavings of summer truffles, or sea urchin mixed into guacamole. But the results were inconsistent.
“Occasionally, what seems like a fun idea will land like a bag of wet laundry,” wrote Wells, referring to foie gras lollipops that he found a “grim treat.” General Tso’s sweetbreads were “another game gone wrong,” although he admitted that he didn’t like the dish when he found it at Chinese restaurants, either. He loved the signature seafood sausage with sauerkraut beurre blanc that Waltuck had brought forward from Chanterelle, which he judged one of the best items on the menu, despite the fact that it came out “looking hopelessly behind the times.”
It seemed that a sixty-year-old chef, even a legendary and beloved four-star chef, could have a little trouble finding his feet in a world populated by chefs who were less than half his age and had new notions about what and how to feed people.
“At times,” wrote Wells, “Élan seems a little unfocused, as if Mr. Waltuck is hedging his bets by combining a grown-up bistro with a gastro pub in the crazed-carnivore style of the past decade.”
By Waltuck’s estimation, “there was not much of a blip” in the weeks that followed the review, but he had his eye on a bigger prize. Late November and December were the important months, more for lucrative private holiday parties than for a general increase in the number of reservations: lots of people, lots of alcohol, guaranteed numbers in advance. Waltuck opened with a full liquor license, a nod to his distinguished history, and that would help to make the holidays an insurance policy against January and February, which were quiet no matter how popular a restaurant was.
• • •
In the midst of all the post-review excitement, Jonah had to take a day to tape his Knife Fight episode at a studio in Brooklyn, competing in the first round against Einat Admony, an Israeli chef and cookbook author who owned three restaurants with her husband, a food-show veteran who had already won Chopped twice.
Jonah was uncomfortable from the moment he arrived. There had to be four dozen crewmembers and onlookers milling around, which wasn’t conducive to concentration, and they wanted to record a lot of voice-over dialogue that they would cut and insert later on. They told him they wanted “brash and cocky,” which was not his style. “I won’t talk shit about someone else,” he said, so he watched himself, hoping to avoid saying anything that could be edited into more attitude than he felt.
The format was similar to Chopped, with a bit more leeway—rather than a new basket of secret ingredients for each course, the contestants got one basket, a half hour to figure out what to do with it before they started to cook, and one hour to transform as many ingredients as they wanted to use into as many courses as made sense to them. They could bring a couple of items with them, so Jonah came armed with the dry pasta they served at Maialino, figuring that he could turn almost anything into a pasta dish.
His first-round box contained salsify, maple syrup, and brisket, the meat impossible to cook in so short a time without a pressure cooker. There was nothing to do but get started. Jonah turned out pintxos for the first course, a shishito pepper wrapped in salsify, grilled, and dressed with lemon, sea salt, and maple syrup, and crostini with raw salsify, anchovy, and capers. Next, he made chitarra carbonara with salsify, pasta with a sauce bound together by a salsify puree that had a touch of maple syrup added to it. The only thing he forgot was to adjust for salt, which he forgot at home, too: He was used to making pasta at Maialino, where he had worked with a tank of water, so he added too much salt without realizing it until he tasted the results. He tried to compensate for the mistake by adding less cheese at the end, but he had to admit that the dish was on the salty side, and the judges agreed.
They said that Jonah’s brisket was the best dish of the day—except that it was tough.
For dessert, he turned out a salsify flan with sea salt and maple syrup standing in for the caramel.
The two chefs had a moment together while the judges conferred, and Admony told Jonah that she thought he had won, because the judges pronounced one of her dishes the worst of the round. Jonah thought that she had won because his pasta was too salty and his delicious brisket, too tough.
She was also far better known than he was, and one of only two women in the sixteen-round competition, which might mean something, he thought.
“I really hate losing,” said Jonah. “I just hope they don’t cut it in a way that makes me look like an ass.”
He did lose, whatever the reasons, and would have to wait until the show aired to find out how he came off in the process. He rushed to work after a seven-hour shoot consoled by one thing—at least he didn’t have to go back for another round.
When he finally got to Huertas, at six, the tickets were rolling and the restaurant was already half full. It felt weird—as though he were a chef who owned several restaurants and had trusted, talented employees who ran the kitchens for him. It felt the way he wanted the future to feel.
• • •
Alyssa saw her station like a chess game—there was what she was doing right now and what she knew she would be doing for each of the eight steps that followed. She saw the sequence of an order in her head, start to finish, and had been known to slap away a line cook’s hand if he got too close to one of her plates, even though all he wanted was to be of help.
“Don’t touch my stuff” was her work philosophy. She would find a way to get things done, no matter how busy the restaurant was, if people left her alone.
The last Friday of October was a test, though: There were seventy-six covers, a record for Huertas so far, and she simply ran out of room. She turned the two burners up high in the hope that the flames would extend to heat the four pans she’d crowded onto them, filled the flat-top with more, and perched two waiting pans on the piano, the steel rim that ran in front of the burners, which was hot enough to burn her if she di
dn’t watch out but not quite hot enough to cook the contents of those pans. They sat there until a space opened up, so that she didn’t have to waste seconds stepping away to get them: She lifted a finished pan off the heat with her left hand, shoved its replacement into position with her right, and kept moving in a counterclockwise half turn, to plate the contents of the first pan and send the dish on its way.
The shared rice dish for the dining room should have made the kitchen’s life a little easier, because more family-style dishes meant less plating, and two of the mini-paella pans would feed four to six people. They were supposed to sit on the flat-top for a half hour, filled to the brim with liquid at the start, ending up with a nice crust at the bottom. It worked as long as nobody touched the pans—but the slightest jostle early in the process sent liquid sloshing onto the flat-top, where it turned into a crusty little moat that got in the way of the sauté pans that were waiting their turn. At the evening’s peak Alyssa had fifteen little paella pans burbling away.
Antonio would have cleaned the flat-top when he arrived, but Alyssa was so frustrated by the end of the night that she started scrubbing, just to have someplace productive to put her energy. It didn’t help that she’d given notice as soon as the review came out; she was killing herself on her way out the door.
She was back at nine the next morning to work a double shift, brunch through dinner.
“How many tonight?” she asked Jenni.
“Seventy-five,” said Jenni, proudly.
Alyssa felt her eyes well up. She prided herself on her work ethic, but she didn’t know where she was going to find the strength to get through another shift like the previous night’s.
“I can’t do this,” she said, just as Nate walked up.
“What’s the problem?” he said.
Alyssa screamed, “We can’t do this!” and walked over to her station to start doing prep. She sang Christmas songs to herself to try to calm down.
• • •
The story served up with the late November opening of Gavin Kaysen’s Spoon and Stable was irresistible, in a city that had never been on the national short-list of essential dining locations: Local boy makes good, works abroad, wins awards and honors, turns his back on New York City, whose residents consigned the state of Minnesota to the category of flyover, and comes home to cook and raise his family. He had given up the life that many cooks dreamed of, and expected his old neighbors to embrace food the way they did in important food cities, which was a nice compliment. He had rejuvenated an office building built out of a stable, a fast walk from a dying sex strip, to become part of the city’s next phase.
A potent mix of Minneapolis pride and plain curiosity got people talking before the opening, and the opening itself clinched things. His guests included Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, one legendary chef from each coast making the trip to Minneapolis to celebrate their spiritual heir and Bocuse d’Or teammate. With Kaysen as team coach, they were training for the competition that would take place in January in Lyon, France—the culmination of seven years’ effort to put the United States in serious contention for the first time. That was the level of excellence Kaysen had brought home, and the city was eager to express its gratitude.
It was easy enough to find him, to walk over before or after a meal for a fast hello: Kaysen, a small, trim man in impeccable whites, stood at one end of the open kitchen and expedited, calmly but quickly, to a random chorus of “Oui, Chef” as one cook after another fielded an order. Behind the display kitchen, hidden like the wizard behind the curtain in Oz but far more productive, the prep kitchen staff readied the ingredients that enabled Kaysen and the visible cooks to turn dinner into performance art.
The duck, fed and dry-aged according to Kaysen’s specification, appeared as a laser-edged rectangle, its paper-thin, translucent skin as brittle as torched sugar on a crème brûlée, and in duck meat loaf sliders. There was spinach with cheese curds, a regional treat as channeled by the classically trained chef, and a version of his grandmother’s pot roast that involved chanterelle mushrooms and broth poured tableside; he wanted to incorporate home on the menu, but on his culinary terms.
No longer did a food-obsessed local have to find an excuse to drive to Chicago to eat. Soon enough, traffic would run in the opposite direction, and any hope of a reservation would be two months out. People stood in the snow in the hope of snagging a first-come, first-served seat at the bar.
13
SUCCESS
Success seemed definitive, back when it was out of reach: Huertas wasn’t yet doing enough business, but as soon as it was, as soon as it reached a tenable plateau, Jonah could do two things that he couldn’t do when the restaurant was empty. He could attract more talented cooks, which would ease the time commitment for the existing staff and stave off burnout, and he could think more seriously about what came next.
It was more complicated close up. First off, there was no depot; it wasn’t as though Huertas arrived and that was that. The October numbers were great, close to double the bottom of the summer: Revenues were $176,000 in October compared to about $88,000 in both August and September, compared, for that matter, to $120,000 for opening month. The average check was up to $50 from an initial $42.
The sheer volume was startling. “We’re selling so many cans of seafood, we just bought every one that our supplier had,” said Jonah. “We sold them out of scallops, clams, mussels. They get a big shipment from Spain and it’s a month until they get another, so we said we’ll take everything because we’re going to blow through them.”
Even a random dip on a midweek night seemed an aberration, corrected before anyone could get too worried about it. Jonah and Nate felt confident enough to cash their paychecks—they were holding on to a half dozen at this point—but they stopped short of cocky.
“If we could flatline here,” said Jonah, “I’d be happy.” He was too competitive for that to be quite true, but the staff understood what he meant. If life would just hold steady, he’d feel secure enough to make plans.
They wouldn’t know if they were safe for weeks yet. The consensus among more seasoned restaurateurs was that a Times review guaranteed a six-week window of opportunity: six weeks to turn the curious into return customers, that was it, before the easily distracted public moved on and Jonah got a better sense of exactly how successful he was likely to be long-term. The Times review had hauled Huertas back from the brink and given it the healthiest possible shove in the right direction. Now all that mattered was what they did with the fresh start.
With Alyssa leaving, Jonah wanted both a sous chef and a line cook, and the first batch of résumés after the review made him hope that the drought might be over. It didn’t take long for him to realize that the new applicants were as “underwhelming” as their predecessors; the only difference was that now there were more of them. He got a sous chef applicant who’d only worked in corporate kitchens and big food service operations, never in an actual restaurant. He got a line-cook hopeful who wasn’t a cook but a paramedic who wanted to change careers. Jonah was willing to give him a trail because a paramedic ought to be responsible and hardworking, and he could teach the guy what to do as long as he knew the basics. He didn’t.
Jonah knew people who could handle either job, but they worked at restaurants where he’d worked, and there was a firm no-poaching rule. If Jonah wanted to hire someone who worked for a chef he’d worked for in the past, he’d have to ask permission, and he preferred to find a cook who didn’t require that kind of favor. He didn’t want someone else to swipe one of his cooks someday.
The logical in-house solution was to move Alberto up from the wood oven to the fry station, full-time, and move Max, the fry cook, up to Alyssa’s station, because it was easier to find a beginner to work the oven than to find a cook with experience. It wasn’t the perfect answer, though, and Jonah was reluctant to make those two promotions if he had doubts going
in. Max didn’t work clean enough to satisfy Jonah or Jenni, even though he had an honorable explanation—if he faced the choice on a jammed night between getting food on a plate and wiping down the piano that ran along the front of the range, it was food on the plate every time, and Jonah couldn’t quite argue with that, even though he thought there was a way to do both.
Alberto made Jonah nervous only because he was a kid three months into his first full-time job, and yet everything he did suggested that he could handle a step up. He watched what Jonah did carefully and had no interest in kitchen drama; he didn’t raise his voice or get emotional or give anyone a hard time. Everything about him was precise, from his short dark hair to his disciplined posture to his kitchen uniform, which somehow always looked crisp. He was like Jonah in that way—he kept his head down and got the work done.
• • •
If minorities had more of a numerical presence in restaurant kitchens than women did, over time, it was in part because historically immigrants had filled the lowest-paying entry-level jobs—a downstairs community, literally, in New York’s upstairs-downstairs vertical universe, which of necessity separated a kitchen’s upper echelons from the prep cooks who supported them. When Jonah made braised tripe, he did so in the main-floor kitchen, because hot dishes had to walk fast from the pass to the dining room; when he spent summers on prep, it was in a windowless basement, the ingredients to be carried upstairs when he was done. Women might land in the basement, if they worked on the pastry side, but that, too, was a practical decision, if an ironic one; while the job of pastry chef was an upstairs position in terms of the hierarchy, most desserts were made in advance, so pastry could live downstairs and settle for a dedicated assembly space in a corner of the main kitchen.
A young, ambitious cook like Alberto faced a pervasive assumption about his destiny, a ceiling based on generations who lacked the skills—or access to the skills—to run a kitchen. He’d grown up cooking, like Jonah and Jenni, but his single mother couldn’t simply decide to send him to culinary school. It was too expensive; it wasn’t an option. If not for Richard Grausman, an author and educator who had devoted himself for thirty years to students like Alberto, he would not have become Jonah’s presumptive fry cook—or if he had, it would have been years from now, his progress dependent on employers willing to give an eager but untrained kid a chance.
Generation Chef Page 20
