Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  “My sensibilities are to stay away from novelty,” he said, even as he absorbed the obvious lesson of the fried rice, which he refused to call paella on the menu, because it wasn’t. He had to get out of his head and factor in his customers’ reactions to the food, because the consensus was clear: They liked to be knocked out a little bit, and they clearly didn’t mind a tasty surprise. They were a little numb from all the choice, these days—within two blocks of Huertas a hungry customer could choose Mexican, Spanish, Filipino, Japanese, Italian, vegan, Greek, or Polish food, as well as a place that specialized in schnitzel. Novelty clearly helped to get their attention, as ambivalent as Jonah might be about it.

  “People would rather eat exciting than delicious at this point,” he said. “Not to say it can’t be both, but you have to think about what will be exciting, and putting that first is what you have to do.” So he piped trout mousse into little puff pastries and topped it with trout roe, another pintxo he wouldn’t have found in Spain. He wrapped leftover New Year’s Eve filet mignon around pickled vegetables. He created a lamb dish that felt more French than Spanish to him. He put fried, battered calamari on the dinner menu and tried to drag it toward Spain, for the sake of his own self-respect, with a piquillo pepper vinaigrette and fried olives.

  Someone else could have concocted an entertaining narrative about the fried rice, a story that started in a windowless Chinese restaurant in Madrid, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the memory bank of a young food-obsessed New Yorker, and landed on a plate at his first restaurant in the East Village, and the publicist probably could have placed it on one of the food websites. It wasn’t as though anyone was going to contact the Chinese place and have them scroll through their credit-card records to see what Jonah Miller had eaten on his single-digit visits during his semester abroad.

  He would never do such a thing. Jonah had boundaries, like his food, like David Waltuck and Peter Hoffman. He’d always thought that was an asset; he had a clear sense of what he would and wouldn’t do, and his skill and ambition existed inside that frame. His mentors had made their names on the food, not the personality behind it, and Jonah aspired to do the same—a sensible position, he figured, as he was by his own measure too low-key to sell wacky, more interested in creativity on the plate than in promoting an attention-grabbing persona. “Look at me physically, and my background,” he said. “I’m not half-Asian, I don’t come from a mixed family. Even the Carbone guys have that Italian American thing going, their names scream it,” referring to two of the three partners in Major Food Group and Carbone, their latest restaurant. “My name, not so memorable. The Bloomberg website even had me as Jonah Hill for a few moments,” mistaking a tall, half-Jewish kid from Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a short, rotund character actor.

  “I’m not eccentric enough, and I have a little too much self-respect to pretend,” he said. The publicist always told him to be bubblier on television. Jonah considered himself to be bubbly enough—or as bubbly as he could manage and still feel like himself.

  He was clear on what his brand would never be: huge, unpredictable, driven by personality or surprise. To improve his mood—it was a bit demoralizing to see how much people liked something he wasn’t sure he wanted to cook—he took refuge where he always did, and thought about the next dish he wanted to develop. He would keep the fried rice on the menu, but he wanted to add a version of cocido madrileño as winter dragged on, a Spanish stew of chickpeas, carrots, chicken, blood sausage, and braising cuts like pork shoulder. The traditional way to serve it was with the broth as a first course, followed by the vegetables and then the meat. Jonah considered serving the vegetables and meat together, but he didn’t want to tinker much beyond that. The chickpeas produced the most beautiful liquid. It would be a very nice broth.

  In the meantime, an emboldened Nate kept lobbing ideas: guest chefs who invented pintxos in whatever style of cuisine they cooked, house-label vermút bottled by a woman in Brooklyn, an off-the-menu chistorra sausage served like a hot dog to make the customer feel like a cool insider, a whole rabbit, a customized button-down shirt for the pintxo runner. Hearth, a ten-year-old restaurant a couple of blocks up the street, had a thriving daytime business selling take-out cups of homemade bone broth from a kitchen window that opened onto the street, in the hours when the space wasn’t in use. Nate eyed the front windows of Huertas and wondered how to monetize them. He urged Jonah to consider what seemed to be the defining question, because quality clearly wasn’t enough to make the difference: “What is the cachet piece of the puzzle?”

  • • •

  Part of it involved getting people to talk about Huertas, and not just the off-work chefs who might show up on Sunday and Monday. Jonah was in Williamsburg having brunch with Marina when he got a text from Jenni: Chef Bobby Flay, one of the first wave of chefs to become television celebrities, had just walked into Huertas. Jonah paid his check, dashed to the L train shuttle from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and got there in time to saunter over and greet his guest.

  • • •

  Alberto had to take a half step back when the new line cook started, and he tried to be philosophical about it. Lina had far more experience than he did. She ought to work the fry station and be the one who filled in at roast and sauté, and he would show his willingness to do whatever he was asked to do, on any shift they asked him to work.

  His considered calm lasted about a week, until Jonah inadvertently left him off the schedule on a day when he was supposed to work, which sent him to Jenni, his direct boss, to find out if he’d done something wrong. She reassured him that it was a mistake. There was going to be plenty for him to do, even with the new line cook and the sous they hadn’t yet found, because Huertas was going to open seven nights a week on February 8. He’d be bouncing around for now, filling in on other cooks’ days off, but Jenni wanted him to understand the hidden advantage to having the new line cook: It would be easier to find space on the roster for more training shifts for Alberto. He’d already worked the roast station for the occasional brunch. The next step, once everyone was settled in, was to train him there for dinner, when the menu was far more extensive. That way, he’d be ready to step in for a dinner shift on a quiet night.

  A sous chef continued to elude Jonah. The candidate from Blanca lost interest in the wage debate. One of Peter Hoffman’s sous came over for a trail that Jonah pronounced “perfect,” so he offered her a job and told himself that Peter might be relieved to let her go now that he had two sets of cooks and only one restaurant. He never had to have that delicate conversation, because she took a sous chef job at Roberta’s. Jonah refused to get too nervous about it, though, despite Nate’s urgency about the need to make big changes, because when he caught his breath and thought about more than this week or this month, when he took a longer view, Huertas seemed to be in pretty good shape. They were on track to make even more money in January than they had in December, which might be an indication that they’d survived the worst.

  “I’m very nervous about saying such things, but it does seem we’ve turned a corner here. Maybe we’ve finally gotten to a place where there are enough people who want to be here night in and night out.” He knocked on the nearest wooden table. If luck was part of success—and as the beneficiary of Pete Wells’s two-hour wait at another place, Jonah had to admit that it was—then so was its darker side, superstition. He kept his optimism to himself rather than jinx everything, even as he resisted pressure from Nate to promote Max to sous chef and Jenni to executive sous just to be done with it. He had a couple of weeks, and he had a new line cook. He had a little more time.

  • • •

  And then, without warning, he had no time at all: Lina e-mailed her resignation to Jonah at the end of January, after less than a month on the job, without the nicety of two weeks’ notice. She would pick up her stuff the next day. Jonah figured she had forgotten what it was like to work the line after three years as an executiv
e chef—the sore feet, sore shoulders, another forearm burn, too many guests or too few, and the unyielding, split-second schedule, all of it on top of her family responsibilities. Nate wasn’t interested in why she did it. Clearly she had “a shit attitude” and they’d be better off without her.

  Jonah e-mailed her back. It would be wise of you to give us two weeks’ notice, he wrote, because if you did you could list us as a place you worked. Without that, I can never help you out. Do not put us on your résumé.

  Lina seemed not to care. She came in the next day, collected her tools, and disappeared, leaving Jonah exactly where he’d been almost four months earlier.

  He had no choice but to do what he’d been avoiding for months—promote Max and hope for the best, and do it in a way that didn’t rattle anyone else. They were adding the large-format dinners in a week, and he had to have everyone in place. He told Jenni first, because he also had to tell her that he wasn’t quite ready to promote her to executive sous chef. If he’d hired someone from outside it would have been a necessity, to reassure her that she was in charge and to establish that she could tell the new sous what to do. With Max, what Jonah called “the leadership pyramid” was clear. Max had reported to Jenni when he was the senior line cook, and he would continue to do so as a sous chef.

  She was a sous with no previous experience, nine months into her job, and she still had work to do on management skills. She knew it, particularly when it came to mistakes; Jenni tended to look for someone to blame for a problem rather than find a way to encourage a cook to do better so that it didn’t happen again. She was on track and she was improving, so there was no need to worry, but Jonah didn’t hand out promotions to make people happy. He’d promote her or give her equity when he decided it was time.

  He sat down with Max next, to try to put his own philosophy to good use—not to bust him for bad habits but to inspire him to be a better role model, to help him find ways to build loyalty. Most sous chefs were promoted from within, which was good because the line cooks were familiar with their new boss, but bad if their shared history had any potholes. Max was obviously talented and had impressive skills, yet Jonah had written him up just a week earlier for not properly labeling food containers at the end of a shift, with both the contents and the date. It was hardly the first time he’d talked to Max about the need to work clean. Now Max would have to hold the other cooks accountable, which would cause resentment if he didn’t lead by example.

  Attitude mattered, too, as Jonah had learned after too many complaints about too little praise from the boss. Max sometimes adopted a pretty superior manner, and while he might be far more experienced than Alberto or Joe, the extern, he had to try not to flaunt it. “Your two favorite words should be ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ and now I’ve added ‘sorry,’” said Jonah. “I should say these more than I can count. If people are doing their best, you should thank them.”

  He reassured Alberto and Joe that he was aware of some friction between them and Max, he’d talked to Max about it, and he expected that Max was going to step up to the challenge of being a sous chef. If they thought otherwise, they had to come to Jonah with even the smallest problem. The last thing he wanted right now was to lose Alberto in the shuffle, so he gave him a bit of long-term good news—he could start training Joe to replace him at the fry station right away, so that he could finish his own training on roast and sauté.

  Jonah wanted to be clear about the plan. Max was going to be Alyssa, with the title she hadn’t had, and in a month or so Alberto would be ready to be Max, which meant working roast and sauté when Max was off, or when Max was expediting because Jonah and Jenni were off. By March, Alberto would be working what he privately called the “make it or break it station.”

  Alberto had come as close as he ever had to a setback when Lina got hired and bumped him down, his progress toward dinner shifts suddenly blocked by a newcomer, the sort of chess move that made cooks look sideways for a more promising ascent. Now the same person who’d obstructed his rise had provided an opportunity he hadn’t seen coming. He hadn’t spent as much time on the fry station, all told, as he had at his entry-level job working the wood oven, and Jonah had just promised him dinner shifts if he didn’t screw up.

  And what came after slow dinner shifts? Fast ones. Alberto was in line to run the roast and sauté station on a Saturday night, and his first thought was that his girlfriend could not come in for that first weekend shift, no matter how much she wanted to be there. It was too much stress.

  But he was getting ahead of himself. He needed to focus on right now, which was as exciting as it was unnerving. Thanks to a bunch of strangers—an unreliable line cook and a parade of flaky or unattainable sous applicants—Alberto was headed for the senior line-cook station for dinner service. Before his twenty-first birthday; before he had any right to expect it.

  “That was fast,” he thought.

  • • •

  With the new team in place for barely a week, Jenni asked for another meeting with Jonah, to make sure, she said, that they were still on the same page. She was worried about Max’s attitude, worried about Alberto’s inexperience, and worried that any of it would reflect poorly on her leadership while she was still a promotion and equity away from her goal.

  Her future, as she saw it, included the promotion to executive sous and eventually to chef de cuisine, which would enable her to move out of the kitchen and into consulting just in time to have a personal life and a family. After that, she might have a food truck or open her own place, possibly as part of Jonah’s company, which would make the start-up process much easier. She might even return to California for that step, although the possibility faded with every passing day. Wherever she ended up, the narrative she had in mind was one she’d been refining since the day she took the job at Maialino.

  That was how Jenni saw her life—or at least how she presented it to Jonah. Privately she fretted over the consequences of getting what she wanted, because it would narrow her options. Jonah always said that she’d have to commit to five years before he’d consider making her a partner, which was where she got stuck, no matter how much she told herself that it was an essential part of her personal plan.

  In five years Jenni would be thirty-one, which was fine if by then they had two or three restaurants and she was working anything close to normal hours. But what if they moved forward more slowly and she was tied to a business that ate up her time the way it did now? Thirty-one felt a little late to decide that she had to strike out on her own because things hadn’t worked out as she’d hoped. It had taken Jonah two years to open Huertas, and he had the advantage of knowing people who were ready to loan him money. It would have taken longer if he’d had to go to strangers, which was what Jenni would have to do.

  And thirty-one was too old to take a job at another restaurant because it could mean taking a step down to sous, or even to executive sous, by then, and having to work her way back up to chef de cuisine or executive chef, assuming that there was an opening. Something as simple as a boss who loved his job could keep her from moving forward, and she’d be stuck in a hierarchy that wouldn’t budge, a salaried employee someplace else, her personal life still on hold. That was no progress at all.

  It was so complicated. Jenni was in a hurry for proof—in part, she admitted, because she needed it too much. She assessed her self-esteem at “very low,” which made reassurance more important than it might otherwise have been, and Jonah was slow with a compliment. Everyone in the kitchen knew: If he didn’t say you were doing a bad job, you were doing a good job. That was as close as he usually got to praise, which was tough for Jenni to take.

  “It’s a weird coincidence,” she said. “I have such a good job with a boss who doesn’t compliment, when I’m a person who really needs a compliment.” A partner’s stake would be a big compliment, if the accompanying restrictions didn’t bother her so much.

  S
he knew what she wanted, wasn’t sure if she liked the terms, and figured she had to keep pushing for the next step in case it turned out to be the right move. She couldn’t idle in place; that was the one thing she knew for sure. But at the moment, she wasn’t quite convinced that Huertas was going to get her where she wanted to go.

  “There’s such a back and forth in my head,” she said.

  • • •

  The fraternity of professional chefs did not hang up a sign to welcome women and minorities to their ranks when Nancy Silverton and her contemporaries started out; kitchen equality was not high on the social-change agenda in the 1960s and 1970s except in places like Berkeley, where everything was up for grabs. Aspiring chefs were, by their nature, in it for themselves, looking for a way to express an individual creative vision on a plate. If a kitchen outsider prevailed, it had more to do with personality than with policy.

  Silverton gave birth to her first child in 1982, on her day off, as though she could have willed away any conflict between work and home—and was back at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago four days later, “obviously not full-time,” she said, “but I was so driven that I wanted to see what everybody else was doing. And we know now, as experienced mothers, that really what happens the first six months is, they sleep. All you’ve got to do is feed them and change them, and they’re sleeping.” She had sacrificed “showers and sleep” when being the pastry assistant at Michael’s meant getting to work at four in the morning, and she was prepared to continue to do so, and more if need be.