Now Back Forty was closing as well. The final night of service was even more abrupt—the rumor came a day after what turned out to be the restaurant’s last night, confirmed by Hoffman in a written statement a day after that. He cited a “difficult landscape and lease uncertainty” as the reasons for his decision, and expressed the hope that customers would continue to visit Back Forty West.
The space was on the market two weeks later. The key money, the amount a prospective tenant was expected to pay up front to secure a location, was $250,000.
• • •
New York magazine laid the single-restaurant model to rest in a multipart story called “How the Restaurant Game Is Played,” part of the same Where to Eat issue that mentioned Huertas. Item 3-d on a list of survival rules was, “The More Restaurants You Own, the Easier It Gets,” and writer Alan Sytsma told the story of chef Andrew Carmellini, one of the chefs for whom Jenni had worked, who surveyed the scene from atop a network that included seven restaurants, the food concession at The Public Theater, and brand licensing agreements at area airports and Madison Square Garden. Carmellini was a long way from his early days, when he had to sell $75,000’s worth of musical instruments and recording equipment to finance the home stretch on his second restaurant, and he had a simple lesson to impart from his new, improved vantage point: More is better. The old model—a Chanterelle, a Savoy, which had endured for seventeen years without a sibling—was no match for higher rents and more competition. In his experience, not even a second restaurant was enough. Things started to get better once there were at least four. A singleton was as unstable as a unicycle.
Jonah understood the advantages of a larger staff from his time at Maialino—one USHG restaurant could draft help from another in a crisis, one accountant or human resources person could handle more than one place—but it was more than that. Four established restaurants gave a chef the credibility to raise speculative money before he had a space or even a firm concept, because people with discretionary cash wanted a piece of whatever he was about to do. That was real progress: eager investors who would offer him the money to find a space and then let him tailor a new restaurant to live in it; no more trying to find a space that fit an idea.
As for the right concept, the current buzzword for outsized success was “fast casual,” even though that was difficult to pin down, like any nascent trend: It could be a locally sourced burger made from cattle raised on non-GMO feed and topped with small-farmer tomatoes and lettuce, or it could be a place with a menu but no tablecloths, or a place with small plates, or one with family-style meals. There weren’t always servers; fast casual often meant lines and trays and either pick-up windows or runners to drop orders at a table. What mattered was quality and easy access, and the role model for that, sitting at the top of a heap of contenders, was the little hot dog cart that grew, past understanding: Danny Meyer had just filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering for Shake Shack, which had started out in 2001 as a cart that sold hot dogs, hamburgers, crinkle-cut french fries, and frozen custard in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, a side project for the high-end employees of Eleven Madison Park. They weren’t just any burgers but a custom formula developed with Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors; not any buns but Martin’s potato rolls, all of it now served with wine or beer for a meal that sat squarely on a new frontier between takeout and sit-down. Shake Shack had grown to 63 outlets worldwide, with plans to expand, eventually, to 450. The IPO was designed to raise $100 million, and the company’s valuation was predicted to be about $1 billion.
Something of that magnitude was almost surely a onetime phenomenon, which discouraged no one from imagining that it could happen twice. Even a sliver of that kind of success could protect a restaurateur from ever having to worry about rent spikes or difficult landlords or a delayed liquor license. The distilled lesson of Carmellini and Meyer and Waltuck and Hoffman was clear, without having to line up any more examples of single restaurants that teetered and fell: A successful neighborhood restaurant was not a survival strategy.
But when Nate asked around, it seemed that a single restaurant and a tiny offshoot were not the answer, either. As much as he and Jonah wanted to figure out their next move, it would not be the stall at Gansvoort Market. One of Nate’s advisers cautioned him not to jump at the first offer, however flattering it was to be asked. The smart next move was not to be a tenant in someone else’s business dream but to come up with a concept that he and Jonah could control, another place of their own. Jonah agreed. It made sense, even though he had to admit that somebody else paying the utilities, and being responsible for opening and closing, had its appeal.
• • •
Nate met Luke for drinks at Henry Public in Brooklyn Heights, closer to Luke’s apartment than to Nate’s—an appropriate accommodation, as Nate was the one trying to put together an agenda for another meeting with Jonah. Luke had been right about his role at Huertas: Nate was in what he called “constant conversation” with Luke, usually at Nate’s instigation, because his departed partner provided a useful corrective to his admitted impatience and was more forthcoming than Jonah, who tended to do most of his debating inside his head.
And in the end, it was Jonah’s restaurant, which made Nate feel the need to be even better prepared than he would have been if they were equal partners. He’d insisted on a second off-site meeting because he’d reached his limit again; he saw a crossroads where Jonah saw process, and he needed Luke to help him build a coherent case for change. In doing so, he also hoped to alter the dynamic of his partnership with Jonah, to start having the kind of input a co-owner had, regardless of the single-digit size of his equity stake. His day-to-day concerns—and proposed solutions—were part of a strategy to help Jonah define the company’s future.
Nate and Luke worked until two in the morning, ordering boulevardiers until Nate swapped to hard cider to keep his head clear, talking about appropriate next steps as he scrawled notes on a lined yellow pad. He was jittery from a mix of exhaustion and excitement by the time he met Jonah for lunch in Williamsburg—at Reynard, a role-model restaurant owned by Brooklyn restaurateur Andrew Tarlow, who since 1998 had expanded from one place into a network of restaurants as well as a market, a clothing line, and the hotel that housed Reynard. Nate laid out three pages of notes and a graph that tracked weekly gross and net sales, and launched into his presentation.
The first page had two columns of handwritten entries under the headings “Nabe,” and “Go for it!,” which he saw as Huertas’s only options, a nice neighborhood place or the first of many, the former obviously unacceptable. Nate had also generated a decision tree under the heading “We achieved a lot . . . we can’t stop,” and at the side of the page had scrawled “Do you want to be in this?” for both of them to answer. The second page was the “Go for it” plan, with the word “Energize” set in a circle marked with big X’s for emphasis. The third page was a list of a dozen businesses worth studying—including Momofuku and Major Food Group—either because they had a huge first success that put them in a better position to move forward than Huertas was, or because they’d already become the kind of company that he and Jonah wanted to have.
Nate also had drawn up what he called “my thesis,” a summary of three kinds of contemporary success stories that he wanted to present to Jonah. If a restaurant didn’t fit into one of the categories—and at the moment, Huertas didn’t—it was never going to spawn offshoots, never going to be the cornerstone of even a small restaurant group.
The first kind of success was what Major Food Group had pulled off with Torrisi, which sold “exclusivity and cachet.”
“You had to come here twice to eat here once,” he said, referring to the small space and long waits, which seemed only to increase people’s desire to snare a table. “Twenty-five seats, a midrange tasting menu, and each of their subsequent restaurants is so well thought out. What brings New
York foodies? A flamboyant menu and design, down to what the servers wear.” And the partners weren’t afraid of change, willing to revamp the format, or even shut down the space and start over with a new project, eager to try out a new cuisine. At Huertas, daring existed on a much smaller scale, and Nate chafed at it.
The second kind of success relied on celebrity to draw a crowd, whether it was Danny Meyer’s name attached to a restaurant or a chef like David Chang or Mario Batali, but that was more a Catch-22 than an option. Jonah couldn’t be more successful until he was more famous, which he couldn’t be until he was more successful.
The third model relied on having a popular brand. Chang’s small chain of Momofuku restaurants shared the same brand name and little peach logo—Momofuku meant “lucky peach” in Japanese—from the high-end Momofuku Ko to Momofuku Noodle Bar. They served Asian-influenced food up and down the price ladder, even if random dishes from somewhere else appeared on the menu. The people who lined up outside the noodle bar up the street had an expectation based on that brand—but Chang was a half-generation ahead of Jonah and Nate, who couldn’t simply decide to be a big brand any more than they could decide to be famous. There was only one path left for them, which Nate had listed as a subhead under “exclusivity and cachet”: They had to be “coolest mother—,” and hope that fame and branding options followed.
The year-end lists—not the ones they made but the ones they missed—made a strategy more urgent. Nate’s big disappointment, the thing that motivated him to call this meeting as much as anything else, was that Pete Wells and Adam Platt had left Huertas off their best-restaurant lists. For weeks before the lists came out he had reread the year’s reviews from both critics, adjusted Huertas’s odds as he read, and provided Jonah with a running commentary on his research. When he counted up the number of stars and considered the level and amount of praise, he figured they were in the running.
When the lists came out without Huertas, he reread the reviews of the chosen few. Some of them were not as glowing as Huertas’s review, which was the point he wanted to make today. Those places had an indefinable something that Huertas didn’t have. He and Jonah needed to address that, or face the possibility that they presided over nothing more than a comfortable local spot.
Jonah, who’d remained silent throughout Nate’s initial presentation, looked at the “Nabe” column on Nate’s yellow pad and shrugged. “Not much use for this side,” he said. “You pay back investors after eight years and have a safe place? No.”
That was all Nate needed to hear. Encouraged, he rattled off what he considered to be the right moves, all of which should be embraced as quickly as possible:
They had to stop vacillating and hire a sous chef, even if it meant paying the guy from Blanca $50,000 a year. The new line cook would take some pressure off, but a highly qualified sous was a long-term investment because he could replace Alyssa and assume the kinds of responsibilities that would free up Jonah to think about the next place. They could promote Jenni to executive sous chef, which would make her happy and cement the kitchen hierarchy. If they limited themselves to the applicant pool that was willing to work for under $40,000 for a chef who wasn’t yet famous, they were always going to come up short.
They had to spend even more on food to achieve what Nate called “the wow factor,” whatever Jonah decided that ought to be—more creative pintxos with more expensive ingredients, press pots of broth poured at the table, anything he wanted to do. Frugality was false economy, because nobody went home talking about a memorable piece of cod. They could raise their food costs a still-reasonable percentage point or two. They’d make more money if they did.
And they had to generate buzz, which meant opening on Sunday and Monday nights as soon as possible, preferably by the end of January. Those were the nights that chefs usually had off, which for many of them meant eating at someone else’s restaurant and posting photos of the food on Instagram. Huertas needed to be part of that.
Jonah hadn’t stopped him yet, so Nate pushed ahead with the one idea he assumed Jonah would resist: Maybe they ought to get rid of the tasting menu altogether, even though it was essential to Jonah’s original notion of what Huertas was going to be, even though Pete Wells had made a point of saying what a great deal it was. As far as Nate was concerned, the tasting menu was part of the fundamental problem—the front room and the back room were so different that people didn’t know what to expect, or whether to make a reservation, or why they couldn’t sit in back and still have some of the cool food that had flown by on trays as they walked to their table. He referred to a list he’d drawn up of successful, enviable restaurants and made his point: None of them had what he considered to be Huertas’s competing formats.
Jonah looked at the list. He didn’t want to argue; he was prepared to listen to Nate, but they had to consider the benefits of the menu, too. A set menu meant less craziness in the kitchen, which saved money because they could get by with a smaller staff. It meant less waste because they used the same list of ingredients for a week at a time. It was easier for the servers because the story stayed the same night after night. It was part of Jonah’s original concept, the place where he got to show people what he could do—and the Times loved it. That ought to count for something. What was the hurry?
Nate had a single answer to everything Jonah said: They needed to make their message simpler, to build a brand that would multiply. Going for it, in his mind, meant a more varied menu, more choices no matter where a guest sat, not two separate concepts. The more he talked, the quieter Jonah got, the more Nate talked to fill the silence. Luke had mentioned a steakhouse whose food costs were an unimaginable 40 percent, but they made $2 million the previous year, which to Nate was proof that they needed to spend money to make money.
Jonah sighed. Steakhouses were different. They charged a lot more.
“Then what do you think?” asked Nate.
“It’s not hard to expand the food,” said Jonah, as though he were figuring it out as he spoke. “It does take more energy and more bodies in the kitchen to do more intricate things.”
Nate took that as encouragement and circled back to the hiring issue. “You need to come in later than ten and not worry so much about maintenance,” said Nate. “You need to trust other people in the kitchen, but I know that’s not your MO.”
“Maybe I need to change,” said Jonah, “but that’s how I lead. I work harder than anyone. I lead by example.”
Nate persisted: Jonah should think more about the menu and less about daily kitchen tasks. He should change the pintxos more often and make them more interesting, and they could keep the tasting menu for now as long as it was “a really bombing menu.” If Jonah needed more time to come up with new dishes, they could change the menu less often. Whatever they did, they ought to pay the publicist for more time and have some serious conversations about how to define and promote the Huertas brand.
Jonah took it all in, but he didn’t jump to any conclusions, not yet. He’d delayed thinking about a lot of this, he knew it, but the longer he and Nate worked together, the more he thought it was important not to rush into things. They were a good balance: Jonah worked hard to compartmentalize his life, to spend time with Marina and his friends on his two days off, and not think too much about work, while Nate couldn’t stop the conversation inside his head, which meant that it was Nate’s job to push and Jonah’s to resist until he was sure. Jonah was the principal owner. He had to distinguish between what was broken and what had to evolve, to fix the former and let the rest work itself out.
Jonah agreed with Nate about opening seven nights a week, though he saw no difference between the last week in January and the first week in February, and refused to consider an earlier opening unless he got the kitchen straightened out. He was happy to stretch the menu a little bit, but not to dismantle it, not yet. As for becoming the next Major Food Group—if it were possible simply to devise a
plan to accomplish that goal, more people would be doing it. They would do their best, they would try to innovate, but being big was a cumulative process that seemed to involve timing and luck as well as a bombing menu.
• • •
A few nights later, Jonah sold what he described, with a touch of incredulity, as a ton of fried yellow saffron rice served with scrambled eggs and aioli, shrimp and peas and bacon—paella meets fried rice, was the way he saw it. He watched in bewilderment as serving after serving flew out of the kitchen, at $14 for ingredients that had cost about ninety cents. If Nate thought that worrying less about authenticity was a good idea, Jonah was prepared to try it, but he hadn’t anticipated the crazy response to what he considered a “little bit silly dish.” Yes, it was delicious, but it belonged on the menu at Mission Chinese Food, one of the restaurants on Nate’s aspirational list, not here. The allure of Mission Chinese depended in great part on its disregard for geography or culinary legacy; the original San Francisco location offered kung pao pastrami and salt cod fried rice, and in New York, brisket qualified as what chef-owner Danny Bowien called “American Oriental food.” People seemed to love his willingness to mix things up—Mission Chinese, a different kind of stutter-step success, had survived a Department of Health shutdown with its popularity intact, and had reopened in a new space on New York’s Lower East Side, soon to be joined by the nearby Mission Cantina, which took on Mexican food with a similar irreverence.
If Jonah had a fledgling brand, it definitely wasn’t fusion; Wells had acknowledged that he merged Spanish food with “the seasonal Greenmarket aesthetic,” but it was still Spanish. Jonah had eaten at too many places that he considered “vaguely Spanish,” back when he was doing research for the Huertas menu, and he’d always thought that it was a shame to mess around with the food. Better to do it the way it was supposed to be done. Huevos rotos felt authentic to him because it was still a plate of egg, potato, and chorizo, even though he transformed the basic ingredients into something he never would have found in Madrid. Fried rice? Friends of his had hung out at a Chinese place in an underground parking garage in Madrid, and Jonah joined them a couple of times, but it seemed a waste of time. He had one semester in Spain, so he ought to be eating Spanish food. He felt the same way about the Huertas menu—he much preferred a smart interpretation of an authentic dish to what he considered to be a culinary mash-up.
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