Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  Every morning, he roasted whatever bones he had on hand to turn them into stock. Chicken bones went into a pot with vegetables and water and were ready in a couple of hours, but pork or lamb bones went on last thing at night and simmered on a low heat until the first person arrived eight or nine hours later to open the restaurant. This time Jonah was the first one in, because it was his project, his staff meal, and he wasn’t going to ask people for help beyond the slightly comic efforts of servers showing off their marginal knife skills.

  • • •

  The State Liquor Authority, Zone 1, met on December 10 in a small office building just off the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and 125th Street in Harlem, across the street from Red Rooster, opened in 2010 by chef Marcus Samuelsson and named for a long-ago Harlem speakeasy. Red Rooster, all primary colors and bold style, was intended as a place to celebrate the neighborhood’s history and invigorate its food scene—while directly across the street the three members of the SLA determined a restaurant’s fate in a room that was equally committed to bureaucratic anonymity.

  The hearing room was not a hopeful space by any means, its low-slung ceiling lending an oppressive air before a word was spoken, the day’s decisions made by political appointees whose tenure often ended with the election of a new governor, short-termers compared to the members of the community board subcommittee. Rows of folding chairs filled most of the room, and an aisle up the middle ended at a microphone that faced a wide wooden desk where the commissioners sat. Today there was only one, alongside an administrator who tallied votes. A second commissioner was absent. The third, the SLA’s director, was in Albany, and his face appeared on a monitor to the applicants’ right. A restaurant owner could make eye contact with the commissioner at the front of the room or with the image on the screen, but not with both, at least not simultaneously.

  Jonah and Nate were the only men who weren’t wearing suits, and they and their lawyer took seats toward the back, rows behind the other applicants and their lawyers, all of whom had the comfortable air of people who’d been here and prevailed before. One woman sat in the back across the aisle from them, clasping a stack of papers, but she was not there to ask for a license. She represented a group of small business owners who opposed one for Starbucks, which wanted to sell beer and wine as well as coffee at a new outlet near a wine bar and café that she owned.

  The Starbucks representatives reassured the board that underage customers would not be able to purchase wine and beer, that they would watch out for older customers buying alcohol for younger ones, and that the combination of an early end to alcohol service and the chain’s sit-and-sip environment would discourage the dedicated drinking one might find in a bar. They dismissed the woman’s concern about what this would do to local bars and restaurants that already existed on slim profit margins and might not survive having customers siphoned off by an outlet of a deep-pocket chain. Instead, they said, bringing alcohol to Starbucks would improve business for everyone by drawing more people to the area.

  The director and the commissioner voted, and Starbucks got its license.

  When it was Huertas’s turn, Jonah, Nate, and their lawyer stood at an accommodating forty-five-degree angle to the desk, trying not to ignore either the board member or the director. They minimized the significance of the community board’s no vote. Perhaps they had shown up a bit too early the last time, but three months had passed since then, and in that time they’d received a glowing review from the New York Times, with the attendant increase in business. Jonah was a responsible restaurateur and his customers were diners, not bar-hoppers, as the Times review attested. He’d like to be able to serve them a cocktail.

  The woman in the room was sympathetic to his arguments. The director was not. Huertas had been open just over eight months, which still felt too early. He didn’t want to set a precedent that encouraged other applicants to show up before their one-year anniversary. That was a “slippery slope,” he said, and he did not intend to venture out onto it.

  If the third board member had attended the hearing, each vote would have carried equal weight. With only two board members, the director’s long-distance vote broke the tie. Since there were no objections beyond the timing, he said, Jonah and Nate should simply come back in April. With that, the Huertas team was dismissed, and the board called the next applicant.

  Nate jumped on the lawyer as soon as the hearing-room doors closed behind them: Hadn’t he said it was pretty much a sure thing? Wasn’t there something he could have said or done to sway them? He peppered Levey with questions even as he wondered whether to replace him—while Jonah stood there, silent, sunk into himself, as disappointed as he had been thrilled when the Times review hit. A holiday season with drinks, gone. Big holiday parties, gone, at least some of them, because they’d decamp to a restaurant where they could drink. The added profits from cocktails that ran from $12 to $14, gone. The big, significant reason? It wasn’t time yet, and it would set a bad example, which had nothing to do with the merits of their application.

  Levey was philosophical. This was a disappointment but not a surprise, and perhaps the partners ought to accept, finally, that waiting until April was the realistic option. The director had said that the calendar was the only obstacle, as had the community board. It was time to take that seriously and to stop asking for what both sets of officials perceived as special treatment.

  The three of them shared an elevator, silent; the lawyer went wherever he was going next, and Jonah and Nate headed for the subway station at the end of the block. They rode from 125th Street downtown to the 14th Street station without saying a word, Nate too agitated to sit down, Jonah slumped on an empty row of seats, his head in his hands, his watch cap pulled down low, earbuds in to fend off conversation. They transferred to the shuttle to the east side in silence, as Jonah thought about how to tell a hopeful staff that they’d been stymied again. Basically, a guy on a TV set had just punctured everyone’s holiday dreams of bigger checks, a bigger tip pool, a bigger crowd at the door, the promise of stability even after the Times review wore off.

  He texted the news to Jenni and Stew so that some of the initial disappointment would wear off by the time he and Nate got back, and he did his best to put on his so-what face before he walked in the door. The rest of the staff would take their cue from Jonah and Nate, so they tried to seem more frustrated than angry, more irked by predictable, shortsighted bureaucracy—always a popular position to take—than anxious about the bottom line. They’d go back in April, at Huertas’s one-year anniversary, and until then they’d settle for being a popular restaurant in the happy wake of a great Times review.

  • • •

  The bad news wasn’t over. The wood oven had been cranky for the last few days, sending the occasional smoke hiccup into the room, but two days later it backed up completely. Smoke billowed through the restaurant, not enough to send everyone home but enough to force a decision. Jonah shut down the oven and shifted everything that usually came out of it to the kitchen, where he hustled to come up with a new way to char the octopus, as well as the mushrooms for the rice and mushrooms, two of the front room’s most popular dishes. The already crowded flat-top was about to be working overtime.

  The initial $40,000 savings on the ventilation system had bought them an alternative that didn’t work, at least not at the moment. Until they figured out a solution that wasn’t going to cost that much, the hulking domed oven was reduced to being a piece of the decor, no more useful than the wainscoting.

  Six days after they shut it down, a neighbor called to complain about the smoke that couldn’t have been bothering her because it no longer existed. Jonah forced himself not to point that out, because she was polite about it and had never called to complain before. There was nothing to be gained by antagonizing a neighbor. Maybe the smoke had bothered her when the ventilation system first acted up, and she had just gotten around to calling. He promised to take
care of it immediately.

  • • •

  Starting a restaurant requires a plan, a willingness to sacrifice to implement it, and optimism based in part on the anticipated behavior of strangers. Maintaining a restaurant in the face of setbacks requires an almost foolhardy resilience and a certainty that there is a way out of whatever is happening at the moment, that this isn’t the dead end. Definitive notions of victory and defeat are for businesses that revolve around something more concrete than making people happy at mealtime.

  Three days after the SLA meeting, Nate and Stew stood over a little saucepan of sugar, water, and juniper berries, which Nate referred to as “my alchemy.” They might not be allowed to serve gin, but no one could stop them from infusing a syrup with juniper berries, which give gin its flavor and aroma, to use in what Nate was determined to call “almost gin.” It would be the base for an “almost Negroni,” which in turn would be part of a new menu of cocktail imitators, classic cocktails made with wine and sherry instead of hard liquor. They’d market the lower alcohol content as a plus: People could drink more of these almost-drinks than they could the hard stuff.

  Jonah sampled the contents of the saucepan. “Use the regular name of the cocktail, but put quotes around everything,” he said. The SLA and the community board would have run out of excuses by the time Huertas reapplied for a full license in April. He was not about to give them any cause for complaint between now and then, and he didn’t want to mislead guests about what was in that Negroni.

  The new drinks boosted morale. They were a cautious battle cry, proof that Huertas was not about to be done in, not by bureaucrats, not by the ventilation system, not even by the pending gloom of January and February. An us-versus-them mentality was a good thing as the holidays approached, since nobody got to go home for them, not when the restaurant was open on Christmas Eve and, of course, on New Year’s Eve, when there would be two seatings and a special menu. The restaurant family was as close to family as many of Jonah’s employees got—and the more they felt like a tribe, the less they’d feel left out of the kinds of festivities most people, including their customers, enjoyed.

  Jonah wasn’t about to spend $50 on a wreath, but he okayed the purchase of some poinsettia plants and lights and encouraged the staff to be ingenious about the rest.

  They strung wine corks into Christmas wreaths, built a menorah out of cider bottles, and one of the servers transformed empty rice bags into Christmas stockings that she labeled, one for each employee, and strung the length of the kitchen. Everyone got assigned a secret Santa with a $20 spending limit for a present, and there would be a party after the restaurant closed on New Year’s Eve for anyone who wanted to hang around.

  Alyssa bought a one-way plane ticket back to California for January 15 and tried not to dwell on how drastically things were about to change. Her first food job, at eighteen, had been at a restaurant on the Disneyland property in Anaheim, California, in a mixed-use outdoor mall called Downtown Disney. The park itself had three fine-dining restaurants run by the Patina Restaurant Group, and the more Alyssa thought about her options, the better Disneyland sounded. Her mom lived ten minutes from there, which meant that Alyssa wouldn’t have to spend much money on gasoline. Her mom was going to buy a new car and bequeath her 2006 Lexus to her daughter, so no expenses there, either. No rent, no food costs—with the right job, Alyssa figured that she could make a sizeable dent in the debt in two or three years.

  The Disneyland restaurants paid well and offered solid benefits, but the prospect of going from a small independent restaurant to a massive corporation with a capital-C culture was a little weird, she had to admit. Disneyland restaurants were a long way from beer pong and too many plates on too few burners, and it was not where she’d imagined herself ending up at this point. Huertas was the first small restaurant Alyssa had ever worked at, and she liked the autonomy, which felt like a compliment: Once Jonah saw what she could do, she was pretty much on her own. But it was over, at least for the foreseeable future.

  “I’m having my quarter-life crisis,” she said. “I need to get my shit together and stop playing New York City.”

  She spent more than double her secret Santa budget on a Unicorn Magnum Plus peppermill for Joe, the young extern who’d become an increasingly valuable member of the kitchen team, because it was the sort of thing an aspiring chef ought to have. For the New Year’s Eve late-night staff party, she drafted Max to help her make big sandwiches on baguettes, full of leftover steak portions, cheese, mushrooms, and sauce, to go with the cava and beer, the tequila and Jell-O shots.

  • • •

  By the end of the year, Jonah was halfway to solving his staffing problems. He hired Lina, a line cook who had been an executive chef at a place he’d never heard of, unhappy enough to quit before she found another job—and while it was a big step down to accept a job as a line cook, they both knew that she had little choice. “Whether it’s fair or not,” said Jonah, “people in New York City want you to have experience at a good place in New York City.” He didn’t say that to her flat out, but he did say that Huertas was a good first step into a larger and more impressive network. She could look around for a sous chef position if she wanted to, but she’d end up at another anonymous place, which didn’t really constitute progress. He had no trouble convincing her.

  The elusive sous chef candidate, the one he really wanted, was Jeff, who was clearly overqualified and at his last job had earned more than Jonah did. He’d started cooking late, after a couple of years in finance, but had more than made up for the lost time—he worked at Eleven Madison Park after a culinary school externship there, and had landed most recently at Blanca, where he’d been a sous chef until he decided to quit and look for a less grueling job. With its two Michelin stars, Blanca was a famous anomaly—a tasting menu of over two dozen courses served at a counter at Roberta’s, a Bushwick outpost of pizza and trendiness. For eighteen months he worked eighty hours a week on the tasting menu, spending two or three days a week just testing dishes. Sixty hours would seem like a relative holiday to him, and he’d be an exciting guy to have around.

  “I bet I could learn some things,” Jonah said. “I hadn’t thought of that, to have somebody here who could be creative and bring ideas. That’s the kind of person I’d love to hire.”

  Other chefs around town, some of them with more elastic budgets, were just as eager to hire Jeff, who said that he already had an offer of a sous job at Betony, a high-end midtown restaurant run by an Eleven Madison Park graduate. Jonah could talk about the potential for growth and advancement and hope that he fell in love with Huertas enough to bridge the wage gap, but it was a long shot. Still, he looked for ways to meet the guy halfway, and talked about opportunities down the line when they opened more restaurants.

  The money was an ongoing dance. Jonah could offer Max $36,000 to $38,000 if he stepped up into the sous job, because that was a good raise in terms of what he already got—but an outside candidate would probably require something in the low forties, and someone like Jeff, even more. Jenni got $42,000, so Jonah couldn’t go higher than that without creating a new problem. Kitchen staff didn’t usually gossip about who made what, but she was involved in the hiring interviews; she was management, so she’d know, and be understandably resentful about being outearned by a sous who reported to her. Or he could offer enough to get Jeff to say yes, upset Jenni, and deal with the fallout. He figured that $50,000 would make this work, but that was what Jonah paid himself.

  If he already had another place it might make sense because the candidate was so strong, but right now Jonah couldn’t rationalize $50,000. They had decided to postpone opening on Sunday and Monday nights until they had a full kitchen staff, so they didn’t have that extra revenue. They didn’t have cocktail profits. It was not the time to spend too much money on a sous chef, much as Jonah was dying to hire him. Maybe Jeff would get nervous after too many weeks without a jo
b and compromise on less.

  14

  DETOURS

  Huertas rode into 2015 on a wave of year-end best lists, just the sort of lift it needed to survive the post-holiday slump in January and February. They still didn’t know if the man they had identified six months earlier as Adam Platt had in fact been Adam Platt, but New York magazine’s restaurant critic had been in at some point, because Huertas was the first place mentioned in the Bar-Food Revolution section of the magazine’s annual Where to Eat issue. Travel & Leisure magazine anointed a dozen places in its Best New Restaurant: 2015 Edition, and Huertas was one of only four in New York City, alongside Marta.

  “One of four,” was the subterranean mutter around Huertas, whenever anyone needed a quick spiritual boost. “One of four.”

  Grub Street put migas at number eighteen on a list of its twenty best dishes for 2014. Forbes included Jonah in its 30 Under 30 list of restaurant industry newcomers to watch.

  But in the midst of all the holiday list-making, a sobering rumor unexpectedly hit the online press: Peter Hoffman, who’d given Jonah his first full-time kitchen job at Savoy, might be closing his second restaurant, Back Forty, which he had opened in 2007.

  When Hoffman opened Savoy in Soho in 1990, he was ahead of his time in terms of both location and menu. The New York Times dubbed him “a locavore before the word existed,” and Jonah believed that his onetime boss would have been New York’s answer to Berkeley’s Alice Waters if he’d ever cared about promoting himself, which he adamantly did not.

  By 2011, Savoy was surrounded by competitors and facing a pricey new lease, which left Hoffman with a dilemma. He could make the restaurant more expensive, more exclusive—or he could head in the opposite direction and make it cheaper and more casual like its younger East Village sibling, Back Forty, the kind of place a customer might visit more frequently. The latter option seemed the practical one. He told the staff on a Wednesday that Savoy was closing, to be reincarnated months down the line as Back Forty West. Four nights later, after a twenty-one-year run, Savoy was gone.