Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  Before she could say anything, Nate stepped in. “Because you didn’t tell us,” he said. “I haven’t even seen this dish.”

  “I put it up on Monday,” said Jonah.

  “We have four people here on Monday,” said Nate. The rest of the front-of-house staff needed to know about new dishes, because otherwise they couldn’t tell if one of them was missing. That was a simmering gripe: Sometimes Jonah added a new item without letting all the front-of-house people know about it—and even if they did know, they didn’t always get to taste it first, which meant that they couldn’t sound as smart as Nate wanted them to.

  “Should I have put it up twice?” Jonah shot back, struck by the impracticality of consulting the schedule to make sure that everyone got to taste a cauliflower puree. It was a side dish, not a new entrée they wanted to promote. “What about food costs?”

  Nate didn’t know what to say. From his perspective, how could they not spend whatever it cost to make another batch of cauliflower puree for the staff? He wasn’t suggesting a steak for every server.

  They weren’t really arguing about cauliflower, but about partnership and direction and pace and mutual respect. Nate’s head swam with unresolved concerns: The octopus portions were too small, Jonah spent too much time in the kitchen and not enough establishing himself as a chef people recognized—and Nate still worried that the food wasn’t sufficiently smart and cool. Worse, Jonah had dismissed Nate’s suggestion that they start the new à la carte menu after Memorial Day because he, Jonah, thought it better to start in early May, and he’d done so in front of staffers, which to Nate skated close to insult.

  On top of that, Nate had started up a conversation with a manager at a new place he’d tried out, and the guy had never heard of Huertas. The Eater reporter was coming in the day after the restaurant’s anniversary to do a long interview for the stand-alone piece on the first year and the new plan, and yet people in the industry didn’t even know it existed. There was no insider buzz, despite all the stories that had preceded this one. So what good was more coverage, after all? It wasn’t as though a year’s worth of stories had raised their profile.

  That was Nate’s all-encompassing gripe: Huertas was not yet on anyone’s short list.

  There was no place to go with that during service, and they could hardly keep bickering about cauliflower. Nate turned his back, charged downstairs, grabbed his bicycle, and headed out the front door to take a ride, too upset to do his job.

  Jonah couldn’t decide to storm out of the kitchen, so he kept calling orders until Nate got back, and then he took a quick break so that they could go downstairs to the office and talk things out before they got any worse. Yes, the new menu was going to make a difference, and yes, they had to sit down together to make sure they agreed on what they wanted to tell the writer from Eater. Yes, they would make sure, together, that the servers knew everything they needed to know about the new food. They agreed that anniversaries, by their nature, were tough, because such a milestone raised a second, more difficult question: Where did you think you’d be by now?

  That was the one thing they agreed on: Further was where they thought they’d be. The idea that they’d be ready to open a second place in the fall of 2015 now seemed a naive joke, and any talk of paying off investors in even four years seemed more wistful than likely. Weekly figures were back to exceeding their projections, but that was part of what frustrated them. They were in pretty good shape—very good, when compared to their first summer, and yet nowhere near Nate’s list of the restaurant groups everyone talked about and followed. There was an obvious explanation—the groups on that list were years older, so it was an unfair comparison—but in truth, many of them had drawn crowds from the beginning. It was hard not to wonder if explosive success had a best-by date stamped on it, if after a while a decent profile became a permanent condition, and it was too late to aspire to more.

  That skated too close to surrender. By the time they were done sorting out their grievances, they were back to questions of what to do next. The shorthand goal was simple: They wanted to be on what Jonah called people’s “‘Oh, I really want to go there’ lists,” and all of their coming decisions had to be based on that.

  • • •

  The sign went up on the front door on Wednesday afternoon: CLOSING AT 8 FOR FIRST ANNIVERSARY.

  All soul-searching was put on temporary hold at the afternoon lineup meeting, when Nate showed up toting a porrón that was full to the brim with cava. He’d instructed everyone to show up for the meeting prepared to share a favorite memory from the past year—and as their reward, he held the porrón aloft, a good two feet above a kneeling staffer’s head, and poured a slow stream of wine until the recipient made some indication that it was time to stop.

  One server recalled the night when Jonah and the bartender had attempted to eject a drunken participant in the city’s annual SantaCon bar crawl after he’d stumbled in to use the bathroom—only to get tangled up in the vestibule they’d bought to enclose the entryway during the winter months, as Jenni fretted that the Santa was undoubtedly from a wealthy and powerful family and would sue, putting Huertas out of business. The server tipped her head back; Nate poured.

  Max remembered worrying that Jenni hated him because the first batches of churros he tried to make kept exploding in the deep fryer, which was not only messy but dangerous. He smiled at Nate. “Porrón me,” he said.

  One fairly new server was happy that people liked the playlists he put together; an even newer guy offered a memory from his previous job because he didn’t yet have any from Huertas. Laura, a server who’d been at Huertas since the beginning, remembered how grateful she was to learn that she wouldn’t have to work brunch service.

  Nate’s dominant memory was of his anxiety level in the moments before the Times review hit; on a happier note, he recalled dancing at the holiday party with Lance, the dishwasher, who was more than a full head taller than Nate. He fell to his knees, tilted his chin, and said “Porrón me,” as Stew cheered him on and someone started humming the theme from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  When it was Jonah’s turn, he thanked Nate first, sarcastically, for not giving him a heads-up about the assignment so that he could have been prepared. But he had an answer: One of his favorite memories was the first day of training, when he tried to show Jenni how to make churros and couldn’t get the fryer to light. By then, with opening day so close, every glitch felt like an apocalypse, and his first reaction was to worry that the gas connection was the problem. He was already on the phone with the plumber when Jenni checked the connection on a tube that led from the main gas line to the fryer. It wasn’t properly locked into a metal holder at the fryer end, so she simply clicked it into place—a minor but essential move from a sous who had helped her dad fix things around the house. They could start making churros.

  “I had an idea of what I wanted, but no idea of how to get there,” he said. “I guess I’ve learned that things like the fryer happen every day. So Day One of training, that’s it for me.”

  A server approached him with the porrón and he gave her the boss’s stare. “I am not kneeling,” he said, with a small smile. “You can get on a chair.”

  They consulted the reservation list, which they’d cut off early to get the party started. The final table was booked for eight o’clock. The plan was to be celebrating no later than ten.

  The restaurant was full of balloons, including an enormous pink pig balloon and an even larger white octopus that floated over the service station. Jonah was there but not there, at least at first: Jenni would run the kitchen while he devoted himself to party food, “so people don’t drink so much they get sloppy.” He was making pressed sandwiches on baguettes the length of a sheet pan—pulled pork, cheese, piquillo peppers “to make it more Spanish,” and, he said sheepishly, “because it’s what we have.” He separated the loaves of bread with rolled cylinder
s of aluminum foil, an old catering trick he’d learned to keep the filling from squishing out the sides when he pressed the sandwiches.

  It wasn’t a busy night, not with the early closure, so Jonah and Nate stood at the pass discussing the packaging for the hot dog window, which Nick intended to install in the coming week. Shake Shack put its hot dogs in cardboard containers inside rectangular paper bags with handles cut into them, but Nate knew a designer who said he could come up with something that looked more like a popcorn bag—just pop the hot dog in the bag—and they could save money by stamping the outside with their logo rather than pay for it to be printed. Jonah wondered if they might need some cardboard reinforcement in the bottom of the bag to keep the hot dog sitting right. Jenni, eager to have input, suggested traditional pleated-paper hot dog holders.

  They talked about the new menu, too—Nate’s victory, because it didn’t include chicken. There were sweetbreads, and shrimp dumplings, and the pulpo orders would be three big pieces of octopus. The new duck entrée was on tonight’s menu for a test run. Having vented all of their distress in the fight over a plate of cauliflower puree, Jonah and Nate focused on what came next and cheered themselves up with one eye on the clock. When Stew came by to ask what he ought to say to latecomers, Nate was adamant: Tell them we’re closing early.

  The last call at the bar was at nine fifteen. Five minutes later, Jonah raised his arm in a cutoff gesture and announced, “Two hot dogs, two duck, and I am done cooking for the night.” He took off his apron with a flourish and headed downstairs to change out of his chef’s shirt.

  Nate and a couple of servers ferried tubs of drinks and iced beer upstairs, and Nate filled the porrón with something he slyly called punch. Jonah set hotel pans on top of his trays of sandwiches, weighted the pans with cast-iron skillets, and loaded everything into the oven. Servers ran downstairs in drab work clothes and emerged in party clothes that ranged from bright dresses to a clean shirt over dark pants, followed by the kitchen staff once cleanup was done.

  It was not quite as manic a party as the Times review celebration had been, as there was no suspense or relief attached to a day on the calendar. People drank too much and tried to remember to have a sandwich—and Jonah and Nate, mindful of the visit from the Eater writer the very next day, tried to modulate their behavior to ensure that they’d be at their clearheaded best for the interview.

  17

  NEXT

  It was just past six o’clock on an indecisive night in early June: The clean afternoon sunlight had congealed into a flat sky and thick air, and the humidity made people linger outside because they figured they might get caught in the rain later on. They sat on stoops, or meandered toward home with none of the urgency that marked the centers of finance and business to the north and south; even if locals worked there, their pace seemed to slow once they hit the neighborhood. Clots of longtime residents stood in front of the corner produce market or the Laundromat. Dogs dreamed of autumn.

  Nate and Jonah sliced across East Fourth Street like visitors from an alien planet, dressed as though it were, in fact, September, which was as close as they got to business attire—dark cotton pants and darker-still shirts, Nate’s a deep maroon, Jonah’s navy verging on black. On an easygoing block, they vibrated with anxiety.

  They were item 27 on the community board licensing subcommittee’s agenda for Monday, June 8, the last on a roster of eight applicants for liquor licenses, except that they’d been told to be ready at the start of the six thirty meeting. The numerical agenda, it seemed, had little to do with reality.

  This was the first step in a two-step strategy that Levey had devised to get them approved without further delay, one way or another, even though it required a short wait past the one-year mark for the local and state schedules to align. If the community board approved the application, the SLA would rubber-stamp it. If the community board balked again, which they shouldn’t, he had Huertas on the SLA agenda a week later and was ready to inform the new director that the previous one had as much as promised a license at the one-year mark, which had already passed.

  Jonah and Nate had been courting regulars for weeks, encouraging them to show up to speak on behalf of the full license—and this time they had cherry-picked supporters who lived or worked in the area, or both, mindful that last April they’d imported speakers from the Upper West Side, which only reinforced their carpetbagger status. They had collected petition signatures, letters of support, and an information packet that ran close to one hundred pages, one copy for each committee member.

  All of which either meant something or nothing, depending on how they felt at any given moment. They had been turned down by this committee and by the SLA, ambushed both times by resistance they hadn’t seen coming. What if it happened again? The rational part of Nate’s brain was sure it wouldn’t, because they’d passed the one-year mark. The irrational part kept him from making so much as a list of what he might order, let alone a list of specific cocktails. He didn’t want to jinx things.

  Nate stood outside the community board office and chewed on his thumbnail while Jonah took advantage of his height and focused straight ahead, which made it easy to avoid eye contact. Nate confessed to one Huertas regular that he wished they had some sense of what was about to happen, and she reassured him that surely their lawyer would have a take on things before the meeting began.

  Nate was hardly going to ask Levey what it was. He remembered how angry he’d been after the SLA meeting and tried to focus instead on the simple logic of today’s meeting. It was six weeks past the year they’d been told they had to wait, and that ought to be that.

  When Peter Hoffman arrived, Jonah broke away to talk to him, comforted by the surprise presence of his ex-employer, who was there not because of Huertas but to support another applicant—the restaurant that was moving into the space previously occupied by Back Forty.

  “You here for the upgrade again?” asked Hoffman. Jonah nodded, and the two men engaged in a quiet conversation while around them Huertas supporters introduced themselves to each other and Nate instructed them on how to sign in so that they were registered to speak. Once the doors opened the short rows of seats filled quickly, but Jonah and Nate hung back in the doorway, too antsy to sit down. They were last in a trio of applicants scheduled for six thirty on the revised agenda. It wouldn’t be long.

  The first applicants were back with a sidewalk café application a month after a stymied first appearance, having addressed all of the committee’s concerns, and they got their permit quickly. The next applicant didn’t show up on time, so suddenly Huertas was the second item on the agenda, not the third.

  Jonah, Nate, and their lawyer hustled up the aisle and stood to one side of the long table where the committee members sat. They listened while the chairwoman synopsized their liquor license history: beer and wine granted in the fall of 2013, full liquor license turned down by Community Board 3 in September of 2014 “because they’d only been open for six months,” turned down again by the SLA in December of that year. The committee had the packet the lawyer had distributed, a petition with over 120 names, and the letters of support. Was there anything else the applicants wanted to add?

  Before Jonah and Nate could find their voices, Levey spoke up: Yes, the board had turned down Huertas’s first request for an upgrade because it was too early. He wanted board members to appreciate that Huertas was back here, not at the SLA, because “it seemed like the right thing to do,” to come back to the community for approval. He pointed out that there was no opposition. He mentioned that the New York Times had given Huertas a rave review.

  That shook Jonah loose. “Press is great,” he said. “But what’s most gratifying is the response from the neighborhood.”

  The chair consulted the sheaf of speaker requests and started to read off names. One by one, regular customers stood up to testify.

  The first speaker, a young man in rumpled s
urvive-the-heat clothes, said that a full liquor license would help Huertas survive.

  The second, a man in a suit, announced that he had taken his sister to Huertas to celebrate her engagement. “It’s really an asset to the community.”

  A young woman said, “The beverage program even now is impressive, but I’d like to see what more they can do.”

  A young man said that he went to Huertas all the time with his girlfriend. “It’s good for the community.”

  A woman from Northern Spain who had lived in the East Village for forty years praised the restaurant’s authenticity. “It represents a happy, jovial people. The mix is wonderful,” she said, glancing at the previous speakers, all of whom were young enough to be her children. “Seniors like me. Young people.”

  A soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old resident took a more practical stance: “They’ve shown success so far,” she said, “but the atmosphere is competitive. A liquor license is a tool. I’d like to see them here for the long haul.”

  At that, the committee chair asked her colleagues if anyone had a motion. The lawyer broke in, nervously. There were more speakers. Didn’t the board want to hear all of them?

  “I think that you’ve made your point,” said another committee member. Her colleagues laughed. Jonah and Nate allowed themselves a short, nervous chuckle and the lawyer, a hopeful smile.

  Just like that, it was over: A motion that included language about Huertas having “established itself as a high-quality restaurant,” a fast second, a unanimous vote to approve. Jonah and Nate and the lawyer and the group of supporters, who made up almost half of the audience, rushed out the door in a scrum of congratulatory hugs. The others scattered quickly, leaving Nate and Jonah alone on the sidewalk, staring at each other. Levey handed them a form to sign and peeled off as well, and in a mutual daze they started across East Fourth Street toward Huertas.