In 1990 Grausman piloted a cooking program in New York City public high schools that led to the formation of C-CAP, the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, designed to provide culinary training to underserved high school students, and college scholarships for those who distinguished themselves in an escalating set of cooking competitions. As a high school senior, Alberto’s future hung on a two-course dinner he had two hours to prepare from classic French recipes he’d had to memorize: Sûpreme poulet chasseur avec pommes château, or hunter’s chicken with turned, sautéed potatoes, and crêpes sucrées with crème pâtissière and sauce au chocolat, crepes with pastry cream and chocolate sauce. He won a $7,000 scholarship; recipes from the past would help to pay for opportunities he otherwise might have missed.
In addition to his classwork at Monroe, Alberto became a teaching assistant. He helped the culinary dean open the program’s dining lab, a small restaurant that was open to the public and staffed by culinary students, and ran the lab even as he kept going to class. He completed the requirements for a two-year associate degree while he held down a part-time job, including two classes he finished online, and then he saw the ad for a position at Huertas.
Alberto was only three classes shy of his bachelor’s degree, but there were days when he didn’t see the point, as it made little sense to think about homework when he might profitably invest that energy in his career. His girlfriend and the dean tag-teamed him—he was too close to the end to blow a degree now—and he promised them that he’d get it done, even though he wasn’t sure when, or how.
He was more focused on his future. Alberto believed in the one-year-and-out rule, a common philosophy among young cooks: If there wasn’t progress or the firm promise of it after a year on a job, it was time to move on. If he ever felt stuck at Huertas—spent too much time at the wood oven or the fry station, or even at Alyssa’s roast and sauté station down the line—he’d have to leave. A great job, by definition, had forward motion, because he saw himself doing exactly what Jonah was doing, someday. He wanted his own place, too, but he wanted to learn about other cuisines, particularly Asian food, and he wasn’t going to get that here.
Patience and impatience; it was hard to find the balance. Alberto had a lot to learn, so he had to be careful not to get ahead of himself, even as he kept his eye on his long-range goal. Huertas was part of his continuing education. The Monroe classroom kitchens were old-school, and he had been screamed at by his share of instructors. He was intrigued by somebody who seemed able to manage without too much drama, and he tried to emulate his boss’s approach on everything from his mise en place to his calm demeanor in the kitchen.
“Jonah’s so attentive to detail,” he said, “and it’s not, ‘You have to do it this way,’ but, ‘It’s better if you do it this way.’”
Alberto already worked the fry station on Max’s days off, and he knew that even a seemingly simple task like making potato chips was trickier than it looked. “The hardest part of the fry station is balance,” he said. “Pintxos, and orders with things I have to fry—balancing space and time. I’m going to be as efficient as possible.” If he got the chance to be in the main kitchen all the time, not up at the oven, he would have more opportunity to watch Jonah, to learn how to handle himself once he had his own kitchen to run—and to prove his merit, which with luck would mean another promotion before he hit the next one-year mark.
• • •
Once the post-review euphoria subsided, Jenni found herself in an unexpected and equally outsized funk, at an uncomfortable emotional distance from the rest of the staff. The review, the crowds, and the accompanying crazy hours reminded her that she was, after all, a salaried employee—still a sous chef, not yet the executive sous, and too often the one who stayed late to close the restaurant. She’d been there since the beginning. No one could say that she’d devoted any less energy than the partners had to making Huertas a success—but she didn’t have her own money to invest, as they did, so she didn’t have the status. It was time for Jonah to more fully express his appreciation to her, and she let both Jonah and Nate know how she felt: She was not being compensated sufficiently, financially or emotionally.
“Everyone says I should be a partner,” she told them, because in fact that was what some of the staffers said when she complained to them. At the same time, she didn’t want to push too hard and precipitate an unnecessary crisis if they weren’t ready to promote her or give her equity. “I just deserve to be compensated,” she said, and left it to them to figure out how. They could make her a partner, give her a deserved promotion, or give her a raise with a specific timetable for promotion and equity down the line. They should figure it out and come back to her. Jenni didn’t have a plan if they balked, because she wasn’t going to quit in a huff and look for another job. She assumed they’d do the right thing.
The easiest answer, to Nate, was to find the second sous chef who had so far eluded all of their efforts, which would enable both Jonah and Jenni to cut their workweek by ten hours. Jonah was more willing to discuss a partnership, because he wanted Jenni to be happy. She’d taken a big gamble on him—and now that it was starting to pay off, he wanted to find an appropriate way to thank her. A partnership meant that she stood in line for payouts with the other partners and the investors, so it wasn’t money out of pocket today. Once they were in a position to write disbursement checks, they could include Jenni—and they could use the partnership offer to insist on a five-year commitment. That had advantages when they opened a second place and needed a reliable person to run the Huertas kitchen.
Nate was blunt: He reminded Jonah that Jenni was a sous chef who had never managed a kitchen before, and restaurants weren’t in the business of giving equity to sous chefs. If Jonah really wanted to, they could slice off a percentage or two of equity shares, which could mean a few thousand dollars for Jenni after the investors were paid off, but that wasn’t a real partnership, and it might not mollify her. Better to give her a big raise immediately, he told Jonah, $5,000 or $6,000 a year and a monthly stipend so that she could go out to eat. She’d feel better, and they’d buy some time to see how she handled added managerial responsibilities.
Or they could tell her that she would get equity at Huertas’s one-year anniversary, which would provide them with the same window of time to reflect on the decision. They could hold off on a promotion until they hired an additional sous chef, because at that point it made sense: They couldn’t expect her to have the same title as someone new who reported to her. There were all sorts of appropriate ways to do this, and no reason to rush ahead with wrong moves just because Jonah felt an emotional debt to her.
They settled on a $4,000 raise, to $42,000, and a stipend to communicate how important she was. She needed to spend more time checking out other restaurants so that she could contribute more to the ongoing development of this menu and of whatever menus they developed for future locations.
• • •
Jonah had always been proud of his work ethic, as a teenage kitchen volunteer and as a line cook. If Maialino needed him to oversee the sous vide chicken, he would bag up 120 pounds of chicken, get them into and out of the circulator, and have them ready to be finished on the flat-top. When the circulator balked, he loaded the bags onto a wheeled cart and pushed it a couple of crosstown blocks to Gramercy Tavern to use their machine, and accommodated the Tavern’s cooks if their machine broke down, without ever letting himself fall behind. On a day when the cart’s wheel caught the curb and dozens of bags of chicken splattered on the ground, he cursed privately at the guy at the nearby halal food cart who didn’t step over to lend a hand—weren’t they in the same business, after all?—but all that a passerby saw was a tall, skinny kid righting the cart and reloading the bags. A small tantrum might have been an appropriate response, but Jonah preferred outward calm.
When he got promoted to sous chef at Maialino, he figured that the proper style boiled down
to expecting the same kind of commitment from anyone who was still a line cook, even though the executive sous was technically in charge of managing the crew. The notion of leeway didn’t figure into the equation. If he could survive a trolley’s worth of spilled chicken parts without a whimper, everyone else could handle an equivalent challenge at their stations.
Jonah was unyielding—not noisy, not theatrical, just insistent about results and uninterested in excuses. “There, if somebody wouldn’t stand up to tough love, I didn’t care,” he said of Maialino. “Get me someone else. I don’t care about your personal life or about what happened on the way here.”
But that kitchen had a big staff that put out about five times the food Huertas did, breakfast through late night. He didn’t spend every shift with the same handful of people, as he would at his own place. He believed that a small kitchen required a different approach, and defining—and refining—it turned out to be an ongoing struggle. “Managing people’s happiness is the hardest part of my job, and my biggest concern,” he said. “I didn’t used to care if people liked me. Now I do. Now they’re going to do better if they like me. I have to think about that,” he said. “What can I do to get the best out of them? Riding them really hard may be the best way to get the best work out of them tonight, but long-term I have to be more nurturing. I don’t want to be an asshole.”
He evaluated his managerial style, halfway to Huerta’s first-year anniversary, as “much nicer and easier going” than he had been at Maialino, but it came at a cost. He kept up an ongoing dialogue with himself about everyone in the kitchen: Would Jenni be sufficiently pleased with a raise; would Max step up and prove himself worthy of the roast and sauté station; could he find a better candidate, and how would that affect Max’s morale; would Alberto prove to be the smart move at the fry station, and if so, what expectations would he have about the next step? He had to keep his eye on all of them, to evaluate not only how they were doing but how they seemed to feel about it—and at the same time watch the prep cook and the dishwasher for any early signs of dissatisfaction. He always had an eye on Juan, who essentially ran the prep operation downstairs, to make sure that he was content.
Occasionally Jonah got around to thinking about himself. He had retired the summer’s sad notion of a deep-pocket stranger who bailed him out, but he still thought, sometimes, about how vulnerable he was. There were clear benefits to working for someone else. Now that Chris had started at Marta, he could build his résumé without having to hang on to uncashed paychecks, and he still had time to open his own place down the line. Jonah could probably sell Huertas from a less needy position at this point and retreat into a more insulated job as a managing partner with equity, but he tried not to think about that. He was supposed to be on his way, not looking for a safe haven. Still, it was useful to think about options, even if he didn’t intend to pursue them. Possibility took some of the edge off of the day-to-day pressure.
Not quite enough, in the estimation of his wife and his mother, who wondered if his hair was starting to thin slightly at the crown. It would hardly be a surprise, given that his father was almost completely bald and had started to lose his hair in his late twenties, but if they were right—he didn’t think so, but if they were—stress had to play an equal part. If that was true, he could slow down the process, however inevitable genetics might be, if he could just find a sous chef and a line cook, improve the brunch numbers, keep the business at its current level, decide what to do next and when to do it, make the investors happy, stop beating himself up for not paying them back yet, and be a decent guy but not a pushover through it all.
• • •
Jonah might not be ready to think about a second place, but one of Huertas’s brunch regulars was developing an upscale food court in the West Village, and he wondered if Jonah and Nate wanted to take a look. Gansvoort Market was going to open a couple of blocks away from Chelsea Market, which in 1997 had turned the ground floor of an old Nabisco factory into a square-block temple to food that now housed everything from a butcher shop and a bakery to a fish and seafood supplier and a Cambodian sandwich shop. Gansvoort was going to involve a smaller, more eclectic mix of food tenants just down the street from the new Whitney Museum, scheduled to open in the spring of 2015 at the southern end of the elevated High Line Park, already a magnet for tourists who descended its stairs hungry and thirsty.
After six months of being the needy ones—can we please get a liquor license, more customers who spend more money, return guests, a brunch crowd, a decent line cook?—Jonah and Nate were dizzy at their new role as the object of someone’s desire, as speculative as it was. The location was so tempting. This was a “premiere spot,” said Nate, and Jonah agreed; he would have looked at the West Village in the first place if he could have afforded the rents, which were even higher than they were in the East Village. Names got made in the West Village, where people seemed to go out to dinner every night, and not merely to grab a burger—unless it was a Michelin-starred version, of which there were two, the $26 Black Label burger at Minetta Tavern, opened in 2008 as part of chef Keith McNally’s downtown restaurant group, and the $25 burger with Roquefort cheese on April Bloomfield’s menu at The Spotted Pig.
They decided to take a look. Donostia, the Spanish restaurant that shared the first Eater review with Huertas, had already signed on at Gansvoort, so Jonah and Nate couldn’t do tapas or pintxos, but the developer wondered if the partners had another idea they’d like to present. The stall he had in mind was only 200 square feet and lacked a gas hookup, so they’d have to come up with a concept that didn’t require cooking. They had three months to put together a proposal, which he hoped they’d do.
Jonah and Nate had an idea before they got back to Huertas, or rather, they could see how to adapt an idea they’d had for a while, to make it work in such a limited space: They could do a vermút bar and serve meats and cheeses, sandwiches and prepared salads that they made at Huertas and cabbed across town, to the rhythm of repeated credit-card swipes from a new customer base. They’d never considered this kind of operation when they talked about a second place. They’d always imagined a full-on restaurant and not necessarily a Spanish one, although Nate was more wedded to Basque food as a brand than Jonah was. But the location was compelling.
“It’s worth it from a branding perspective,” Nate told Jonah, “to have a foothold in the West Village near the High Line and the Whitney and the Meatpacking,” which was what the meatpacking district had been newly christened by the people who were developing it. It was worth taking the time to see if the numbers made sense.
The numbers that refused to budge, even with the first-week boost from the Times review, were brunch revenues, which had settled back down into disappointing if not crisis range. Jonah said what both he and Nate were trying not to think: They ought to cancel brunch and concentrate instead on being open seven nights a week, which they planned for some time after the first of the year, even though they both knew that dropping brunch was not an option, not now. They’d been singled out by the Times. The last thing they needed was a set of stories informing readers that Huertas had failed to make a go of brunch.
• • •
First Avenue liked to sleep in after a late night. At midnight it looked like rush hour, the sidewalk clogged with pedestrians, plenty of cabs ready to lurch to the curb to take them home, but it was slow to come back to life in the morning. McDonald’s opened at six, Cosmo’s Launderama and the 7th Street Village Farm market at seven, and Subway at nine. Other than that, the street was lined with heavy metal pull gates held in place by big padlocks, with flattened boxes and garbage bags bundled up at the curb.
At nine thirty on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Jonah was by himself at the pass, no music, no distractions. He consulted the previous shift’s to-do list, adding unfinished tasks to an updated list for the coming night’s service:
Freeze squid
Sq
ueeze OJ
Soak 2 qt chickpeas
Pickle carrots
Put stuffing bread in oven
Sear chicken legs and wings (salt and pepper)
Bread crumbs
Cook breasts
Roast bones/make stock
Cook eggs
Scallions
Arugula
Mixed greens
Almond cake
Duck rillettes
The stuffing bread wasn’t for service but for a staff Thanksgiving project Jonah had come up with, a nice way, he thought, to show his appreciation for everyone’s hard work. Huertas would be open on Wednesday, which would be slow, and Friday, which would be full of people who didn’t want to cook, but Jonah was taking Wednesday off because an owner could decide to give himself a break. It wouldn’t hurt to help everyone else have a decent Thanksgiving meal.
He’d put up a Thanksgiving sign-up sheet where people could buy whole turkeys at the restaurant’s cost or order portions of prepared meals—slices of sous-vide turkey breast, braised leg meat off the bone, stuffing that only needed to be baked, all of it for $12 per portion to cover costs. Front-of-house people helped to chop vegetables for the stock and stuffing, Jonah turned out a stock that combined turkey and pork and mushroom stocks, and he planned a stuffing that included homemade sausage, bacon, fennel, “and then the usual suspects.”
Generation Chef Page 21
