Nate grabbed his cell phone to call his father. Jonah winced, balled up his fist, and pressed it against his torso. “Kind of a knot in my stomach,” he muttered. More than a year after he’d first hoped for it, he had a full liquor license, the one thing that could yield a substantial, consistent improvement in Huertas’s profits.
In their excitement—and relief—Jonah and Nate had forgotten to ask when they could start serving liquor. They would figure it out tomorrow. Today was Jonah and Marina’s one-year wedding anniversary, and Jonah wanted to leave work early and meet her at Maialino to combine past, present, and future in one celebratory meal: spaghetti alle vongole and a side order of the tripe.
The walk back to Huertas was much quicker than the walk over to the board meeting had been, now that there was no longer a reason to be worried, and when they burst in the door Jonah hurried to the kitchen to tell Jenni, while Nate hugged the host and gave Stew the good news. It was an unusually busy Monday night, so there was no time to bask. An hour after the community board meeting, Jonah was back at the pass in his apron, instructing a new server on which plates were to be taken to whom, surveying an impressive row of tickets, and watching the door. He’d talked to a line cook at Per Se who seemed to want to make a change, a woman he’d love to hire as a sous chef down the line, a notion—down the line—that he was again prepared to entertain. She was supposed to come in to eat tonight; nice timing, as it turned out, and he wanted to be sure to spot her the moment she arrived.
Nate appeared at the pass with three short glasses and a bottle of Woodford Reserve whiskey that he’d stashed somewhere, and poured a half inch for himself, and for Jonah and Jenni. They sipped, but he drank it down in one gulp, yelled “Whoo,” and giggled.
“I am doing this illegally,” he said, and headed off to hide the temporarily contraband bottle.
18
HUERTAS
Pete Wells had laid in a coded message at the end of his Times review, back in October, although he doubted that Jonah would have wanted to hear it flat out at that point. He wrote, “Once the familiar conventions of the modern tasting menu kicked in, I did steal a few looks at the front room, where a tray of hot croquetas always seemed to be going around. Maybe I wanted more spontaneity. Or maybe I just wanted a croqueta.” The front room felt like more fun—but he understood that a young chef with his first place wanted to show that he could do more than great pintxos and memorable potato chips; more than charred octopus or his version of papas bravas.
And he could. Almost a year after his first visit, Wells still savored the memory of his two dinners at Huertas. What had impressed him about the menu del dia, he said, was Jonah’s ability to create “thought-out meals, rather than a barrage of separate recipes. I thought he was really good at that.” Good enough to remind Wells of Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, which, “has always had menus that were supposed to make sense and give you some variety, not become redundant and not fatigue you.” Jonah did that, too.
But the food wasn’t rarefied enough to warrant its own room—which was a practical assessment, not a criticism. “My impression was that this was a chef wanting to make a statement,” said Wells, “and not quite getting that he had made a statement in the front room.”
“It was clear to me that he thought the back room was really what the restaurant was all about. I thought that the front room was what the restaurant was all about. But I didn’t hammer that point. I kind of left it between the lines.”
• • •
Three days after the liquor license hearing, Jonah and Nate got the story they wanted, a long Q and A on Eater that ran under the headline, “For Huertas Owners Jonah Miller and Nate Adler, Change Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of.” They packed up the past in a box labeled “then,” and dismissed it: “We just had a cold, long winter,” said Jonah, “and our first summer was trying, but then we got our Times review, and I’ve never looked back.”
Nate seconded the message. “Being young, both of us are very eager to make changes,” he said. “Stagnation, complacency is not something that is in our bloodlines at all.”
They came off as two talented and ambitious partners who had figured out a better way to show people a good time, and were willing to upend the very concept they’d opened with, only a year earlier, in order to do so. They claimed the intersection of heritage and innovation for themselves—invoked their USHG legacy to prove that they were more substantial than their ages might suggest, and talked about making the bold move in case someone saw a similarity to David Chang or Major Food Group, both of them masters of the smart and profitable revamp.
They gave themselves credit for surviving in an unexpectedly difficult—sometimes hostile—environment.
“If you asked me two years ago, What would it feel like to have been open a year, I would have been like, ‘No big deal, we should be open a year, otherwise we’re huge failures,’” said Jonah. “But having been open a year, I understand now what the accomplishment is, and it’s tough.”
The first year’s success required that they set new goals for the second, because a static restaurant was as good as out of business.
“We’ve been on people’s lists,” said Jonah, in the hope that Eater’s readers would appreciate the brave overhaul and help propel Huertas forward, “but we want to inch closer to the top, and make sure we can’t miss.”
• • •
The new menu was a mix of front-room standards and dishes that might have appeared in the dining room in the old days: Jonah added a whole fish in a salt crust, a steak, and a foie gras pintxo; he created a dish of kimchi made with Spanish spices and served with chunks of jamón, and it sold as well as the fried rice had. He built a salad on his favorite seasonal green, which happened to be Italian, and stopped worrying quite so much about the provenance of what was on the menu. He made sure he had a chance to show what he could do—Huertas was not the pintxo bar that a worried investor had suggested a year earlier—this time with a nod to the way the current generation of restaurant-goers wanted to eat, a whole fish for the table to split, a bunch of pintxos, maybe one order of that kimchi rice, why not, to pass around. The permutations were up to the customer now; there were fewer rules, more ways to assemble a meal, and enough of a creative challenge to inspire the chef. Jonah might someday have the restaurant he dreamed of, where he got to show off exactly what he could do with a more challenging menu. Not yet.
There was no arguing with the daily numbers. The new menu did exactly what it was supposed to do—lured more people to Huertas and made this June the antithesis of the first June, a smooth and profitable transition past the dreaded Memorial Day marker and into a better second summer. This time around, the people who stayed in town came by to eat, and to have a cocktail. When Jenni complained about a slow weekend afternoon, it was because one table was empty, not because one table was full.
• • •
Jonah and Nate would never know if what made the difference was the new menu, or the simple passage of time, or Eater’s big story, or the hot dog. It could be a combination of all those things. They didn’t care. However they had gotten here, it was better, and it was more consistent day to day. They allowed themselves to assume that it would stick.
They sidled up to a renewed conversation about the future. Investors had stopped poring over the monthly reports and inquired, some of them, about what Jonah had in mind for his second project, because they were ready to write checks. Nate took Jonah at his word about wanting to do something different next time, and they started to consider a dramatic departure—not Spanish, not necessarily a traditional restaurant format, but one that combined a seated space with takeout and a delivery service. New Yorkers relied on takeout, which they wanted at breakfast and lunch as well as dinner, and while they could find it at every corner bodega or grocery store, the opposite end of the business, high-quality portable food, wasn’t as crowded. It was smart from a bus
iness standpoint because it saved labor costs; there were no servers for the take-out side, only counter help. Nate had seen the kind of operation they had in mind on his trips to the West Coast—homemade everything, sold by well-informed staffers who could engage millennials in the sort of microanalysis they enjoyed, about where the smoked fish used to swim or who grew the peppers. There wasn’t yet enough of it in New York to preclude what he and Jonah had in mind.
A great big space with seasonal American dishes, a market-restaurant that applied Jonah’s standards to takeout if a diner didn’t have the time to hang around, or brought it to the door when the weather was bad. New dishes all the time, based on a stronger relationship with the farmers at the market. They could do that.
They could probably afford Williamsburg this time, with its wall-to-wall clientele. If they put together a smart proposal, raising enough capital to buy a building would not be out of the question. They might as well start to look.
EPILOGUE: RIGHT-SIZED
Huertas’s first twelve months were the business equivalent of mood swings, and the first anniversary brought with it a sense of relief. Bleak memories had been eclipsed by life since the Times’s review. Now the dips were shallower and shorter, and they yielded more readily to the solutions that Jonah and Nate engineered. Less apocalypse, more daily challenges they felt able to address. It seemed as though the worst was over.
People who’d been around longer knew better. “The restaurant cycle is such that the real years that you need to focus on, the ones that either make it or break it, it’s two through five,” said USHG’s Richard Coraine, who in 1995 had opened a four-star restaurant in San Francisco that closed when it failed to sustain its early promise. “You’re always going to be the new person in year one, and people always want to write about what’s new and exciting. Years two through five it’s ‘Have you planted enough roots that are now starting to take?’ If you’re really good in year one and you’re very popular and you’re solid in years two through five, you’re probably built for a longer race. If after year three it starts to dip, whatever was getting people in the door in the first place hasn’t completely stuck, so there’s something that’s off about what you’re offering and what people want.”
A chef-owner always had to keep an eye out for a dip that threatened to become a trough, so that he could adjust on his terms and not in panic mode. He had to be able to “right-size,” as Coraine put it, “to make sure that the expenditures are commensurate with the amount of revenue you have coming in.”
“The trick in this business is reading the tea leaves,” he said, “to make sure it’s not like a cold shower. You don’t want to come in someday and go, ‘Wow, we need to not have four employees here.’ Maybe you say, ‘We’re going to right-size it with one fewer employee for the next three months and see where we get. Then we might have to lose another one, but everybody’s still busy doing what they do in the kitchen.’”
He thought that the decision to abandon Huertas’s menu del dia was a good one, because a fixed-price meal ran counter to basic notions of hospitality: “This is all metaphorical,” he said, “but it takes your wallet, because you have no stake in how much you spend; it’s what my menu costs. And it takes your watch, because dinner’s going to take as long as it takes me to serve the courses I’ve defined. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that people want to eat minus those two things on a regular basis.”
The new a la carte menu was a smart move, as was the accompanying Eater article about the partners’ willingness to embrace change. A restaurant’s identity lingered forever, online and in social media. Change it without controlling the message and some customers might feel betrayed.
“In year one, you go, ‘Here’s who I am, here’s who I am, here’s who I am,’ and then it’s ‘Guess what? Never mind,’” said Coraine.
Jonah and Nate had anticipated that reaction, though, and managed to get their story out. If they saw more trouble ahead, they had to find what Coraine called the “sweet spot” and continue to adjust, knowing that what was right-sized during the fall was probably not going to be right-sized after New Year’s unless they catapulted to the ranks they aspired to join, the short list of restaurants everyone had to go to all the time.
• • •
Striking the right balance concerned Elizabeth Briggs as well, far earlier in the process. The Culinary Institute of America launched a new batch of students every three weeks at its main campus in Hyde Park, New York, and Chef Briggs was one of the first instructors they met: She taught Product Knowledge, where students like Jenni and Alyssa learned what Jonah had learned in David Waltuck’s kitchen at Chanterelle, the basic vocabulary they had to master if they hoped someday to write their own menu. She taught her class how to identify high-quality ingredients, to distinguish a good onion from one whose appearance warned of rot, of mold, of age, of having been frozen, or to recognize different kinds of potatoes and understand how to cook each one. She taught them to transform a past-its-prime red onion into a marmalade to serve with a smoked beef tenderloin, because a smart chef didn’t throw anything out.
Of late, she had added another lesson to the curriculum: She talked about doing “damage control,” because a chef’s life bore little resemblance to what her students saw on television or read about in profiles of the famous, wealthy few. Briggs liked food television because it made a food career more accessible to more people, but the narrow focus on becoming a restaurant chef concerned her. Notions of empire worried her even more because the odds were so great against it. “I try to teach reality, because if you don’t, you set them up to fail,” she said. “They think it’s all going to be glory, and they go on an externship, no glory, and they’re disappointed. Not glory, not high energy, not big money. They can be disenchanted.”
Briggs wanted her students to appreciate at the outset that there were alternatives to the goal that drove so many of them to enroll—to own and run their own restaurants someday—and that the road to success was not an easy one. “Think about it,” she said. “You’re going to leave school with debt, do you really want to be a line cook? Maybe for a few years, but then you have to see.”
In addition to its two- and four-year programs, CIA had added degrees in food science and food studies, both of which were more popular than the school had anticipated they might be, as people who loved to cook looked for more stable environments in which to do so. A graduate whom Briggs referred to as “a phenomenal cook” added nutrition studies to the mix and went to work for a healthcare company. Others might choose to work for a hotel chain or open a butcher shop or be drawn to kitchens at companies like Google, whose employee food service operation prized quality and innovation. Cooks might not get rich and famous in a corporate kitchen, but they wouldn’t go out of business, either.
And yet she understood how difficult it was to abandon the notion of being a chef and owning a place. Somebody had to succeed, and a young cook who believed in himself would likely assume that he was going to be one of the chosen few who made it—and hardly be discouraged by the cautionary advice of someone who had been in the classroom for thirty years.
Briggs, a compact woman who wore wire-rimmed glasses and had her hair tucked tight behind her ears, looked back on her own life and saw “markers, little flags” of her early interest in food. She recalled her parents’ vegetable garden, the tin of sardines she liked for breakfast when she was seven, her grandfather’s homemade fudge—and her early appreciation of hot peppers, which she considered a sign of a sophisticated palate. She spent her college summer vacations working in a New England tea kitchen making tea sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres, although she was not allowed to work in the full kitchen, which was limited to men. She’d worked at golf and tennis clubs and as a personal chef who aspired to turn out meals “as good as Escoffier’s.”
She was a mainstay of the CIA faculty, but she wanted to be clear about what might have bee
n. Then and now: No one had encouraged her to pursue a career as a chef when she was growing up, but today she might have been one of the students who ignored the more practical alternatives and made a name for herself.
“I’m science-minded,” she said. “If I had been nurtured as a child I could have been Grant Achatz,” the Chicago chef who had been her student, graduated in 1986, and went on to open Alinea, one of only two restaurants in Chicago to have been awarded three Michelin stars.
• • •
David Waltuck never found his equilibrium at Élan, though not for want of trying. The post-review holiday season did not live up to his expectations, but the start of 2015 did—it was as slow as those winter months usually were. He had to use profits to cover costs. “We’d stashed money in the fall,” he said, “but we went through that pretty quickly.” He started to build up debt.
So Waltuck cut back on staff, watched food costs even more closely, and waited for things to get better in the spring—which they did, but not at a sufficient level to reverse things. Élan still wasn’t right-sized. He went back to his investors to ask for funds to get through what he hoped was a finite slump, but he raised only “some,” and the turnaround was not substantial enough to make up the difference.
Business was “really not great,” he said, and by July that had devolved into “not viable.” He had a great chef de cuisine and sous chef, but he didn’t have the money to support both of them and himself, nor enough confidence to promise them any kind of job security. The chef de cuisine, who had a pregnant wife, gave notice. The sous chef did as well.
At sixty-one, Waltuck was back on the line, running up and down stairs carrying five-gallon containers. “I was killing myself physically and stress-wise,” he said. He and his partner cut their paychecks in half.
Generation Chef Page 28
