He figured he could continue like this until the fall, when things usually picked up, and once they did he could staff up again and catch his breath. He went back to his investors a second time to see if they would help him get that far—and then his second fall season let him down. “It was fine, good, okay but not what we needed it to be, not wonderful,” in Waltuck’s estimation. He was exhausted, and he saw the specter of another grim January just months ahead. He had to admit it: The contemporary restaurant scene was a foreign country that he was unable to navigate successfully.
“It’s very difficult right now,” he said. “Too many restaurants, costs are high, including labor, rents are high, margins are minuscule. And there’s a different kind of restaurant-goer than there used to be; it’s changed in ways I didn’t see before I got back. It’s hard to get beyond ‘Let’s go check this place out.’ They go, they’re done, they check you off the list.”
In February 2016, Waltuck and his partner announced their decision to close Élan. They would serve a fixed menu of favorite dishes for a few weeks, and that was that. By then Waltuck was in the midst of a very different kind of business challenge, as he tried to extricate himself from the space without further financial loss. If someone was willing to assume the lease or could negotiate a new one—and if Waltuck stayed current on rent payments through that process—he would recoup both his security deposit, four months of his $30,000 rent, and the $400,000 key money. But he’d already missed his February rent, which meant that one month of the security deposit was gone. If they burned through three more months of non-payment before another tenant appeared, he’d lose both the four months’ rent, $120,000, and the $400,000 key money.
He anticipated that renting out the West Village apartment where he and his wife had raised their family was not going to suffice to get him out of this hole. Once everything at Élan was wrapped up, he’d almost surely have to put it on the market. At the moment, it was his biggest asset.
February turned into June and the space sat, empty. Waltuck lost the four months’ rent and the key money and prepared to embark on the next phase of his life, as director of culinary affairs for the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, which offered six- to twelve-month programs as well as continuing education classes for professionals. In late June he started to audit classes, as any new instructor did. Eventually, he said, “I’ll be teaching, and some special events, mentoring, probably going to work on creating electives, optional classes.”
He considered the magnitude of the shift, which had its appeal. “It’s a very different life in terms of hours and stress,” he said, “and it enables me to do some other things. It’s not as all-encompassing as having a restaurant—certainly not as having one that’s not doing well.”
Waltuck was optimistic, if not quite ready to entertain the notion that he was done running a restaurant kitchen. “It could be good,” he said of his new job, “for a while.”
• • •
Gavin Kaysen got offers every week from all over the country, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, from hotels and independent restaurateurs, offers to open whatever he wanted or to run a project that someone already had in mind. In January 2015, the U.S.A. Bocuse d’Or team took the silver medal, second behind Norway, and the story of the years-long effort behind the victory made prospective partners all the more determined to go into business with him.
Rather than feel excited or inspired by all the possibilities, he complained about “how cloudy all of these things make me feel in my head.” It was too much random input for a man who did not like to jump into things. He needed to develop a filter, an efficient way to evaluate opportunities, so that he could get back to the business of feeding people.
His company was called Soigne Hospitality, but what were its priorities? He called a meeting of his chef de cuisine and some of his investors to discuss what they were about. “‘Community, culture and cuisine’ is our rallying cry,” said Kaysen, when they were done. Out of that came a set of basic questions that he and his group would ask about any potential project, including, Is it true to who we are? and, Is it financially responsible? If they couldn’t answer every question in the affirmative they would pass, because there was no reason to consider compromise. He was in the kind of position other chefs dreamed of: The restaurant was jammed, reservations were still two months out, and customers drove to Minneapolis with no agenda other than to dine at Spoon & Stable. At the outset Kaysen had endured a single “scathing” review, but he counseled his people not to change what they were doing. He figured it had to happen, in part because of the attendant noise when the restaurant opened. Expectations were so high; backlash was inevitable.
“We were on every list you could be on,” he said. “We could have served gold on a plate and it wouldn’t have been good enough. We could have given all the food away for free, and for some people it just was not going to be good enough. That’s okay.”
Kaysen missed New York and refused to join the chorus of ex-pats who occasionally suggested that the future was elsewhere. “Nothing will change how I feel about in terms of where I made my culinary chops,” he said. “It’s always New York City. I made my name in New York City, and there’s no way of getting around that. Sure, we may receive more press in Minneapolis, but the truth of the matter is that all of my relationships stem from New York City. It is still the most powerful food city in the world, for me.” Opening a restaurant there someday wasn’t out of the question, but for now he saw opportunity pretty much wherever he wanted to be.
“I think in America we’re going through this phase that Europe went through many, many years ago,” he said, “having all these great restaurants that are not just in these big cities, but that you have to drive to and go to.”
When he thought about expanding, he kept coming back to the notion of legacy. He took pride in being able to provide careers for the people who worked at Spoon & Stable—and if he opened more places he would be able to do that for more of them. “What inspires me is that eighty-two people work at this restaurant,” he said. “That’s eighty-two families that rely on our fiscal responsibility. It’s eighty-two families that rely on us to be busy, to be successful, to be responsible.
“I want to open up another restaurant, and I want to open more than just two and three and four and five—not because of my ego, and not because I want to be busier, and I can promise you it’s not because I want to make a lot of money,” he said. “It’s because I see a lot of really talented, hungry, passionate driven people who have helped, given up a portion of their lives to help me achieve goals in my life—and now it’s my responsibility to figure out a way to give it back to them in the same way.”
The one thing he refused to do was to pick up the pace, regardless of how fast other chefs opened one place after another. He’d found a potential second location in Minneapolis and had what he felt were great ideas for what to do with it. His team produced a presentation board that he happily judged to be amazing—and yet he couldn’t quite commit to moving forward because the floor plan wasn’t quite right.
That observation led to a flurry of e-mails the night after a meeting about the plan, and the next day Kaysen sent out an e-mail of his own. “I said, I want everybody to just walk away from it,” he said. “I want everybody to just stop looking at it right now, and I want us to come back to it in two weeks. Just step back. Let’s look at it from a different perspective after our break. After we’ve all had time to reflect.”
People who wanted to work at the current revved-up pace were welcome to do so. Kaysen, who had opened Spoon & Stable later than he had thought he should, in a city he turned to after months of looking in likelier locations, was more than pleased with the results of his own personal slow food movement. If he wasn’t convinced about the floor plan when everyone got back after break, and if no one came up with a new solution, they’d move on to the next prospect.
Which they did.
“The business we are in is not easy, everyone knows, but it is even more difficult when you lack or forget to be disciplined about things,” he said. “Ask a chef and he will tell you never to cut corners when roasting a perfect chicken. Why do anything different when it comes to your lease?”
• • •
A pregnant Stephanie Izard barreled toward the 2016 opening of Duck Duck Goat and pending motherhood with the determination that had defined her forward march ever since she picked herself up off the floor at Scylla. The restaurant opening was delayed more than once, not that it put a dent in her confidence. She was happy to open a few months late, she told Eater Chicago, because it gave her the chance to “tweak” the food, to invite industry insiders for a trial run and then incorporate their suggestions. The soup dumplings had more soup in them because she had time to reconsider, so waiting had worked to her advantage.
The restaurant was packed from the moment it opened and got a rave review from the Chicago Tribune before a month had passed. “I’m starting to wonder,” wrote the Tribune’s Phil Vettel, “if Stephanie Izard remembers what a slow night looks like.”
Izard was about to forget that even on her nights off, with her due date fewer than two months after the restaurant’s opening, but three restaurants and a cookbook and a new baby and whatever project came next felt as right to her as a more stately pace did to Kaysen. This time she was doing it right, with business partners who supported the expansion effort and conversations with her husband about what constituted a reasonable agenda. Success bred success, and she intended to enjoy it on all fronts.
She told Eater’s reporter that she hoped to be a role model as more women found work in restaurant kitchens and wondered how to achieve a balance between work and family. Izard couldn’t provide practical advice yet, but she could inspire them to assume that they could pull it off. Attitude might be all they needed, and on that level she was clear.
“I think you can do it all.”
• • •
Alberto reset his one-year clock for early 2016 when he started to work the roast and sauté station at Huertas, but months before that he started to wonder if he ought to make plans to leave. He got used to the station quickly and could stare down one hundred covers without flinching—and if he still aspired to Alyssa’s finesse, he knew how to get through a rough night without falling apart. The longer he worked with Jonah, the more he admired his boss’s calm, which in Alberto’s mind was synonymous with professionalism. He was going to be that good.
He was barely twenty-two; he could afford to hang around, but the voice in his head was impatient. A year was a year. It might be time to take the next step—a higher-volume place or a different cuisine, a learning opportunity in either case. Alberto had to stick to his plan or he’d end up idling. He had to work the station long enough to prove that he’d mastered it but not for so long that it began to seem as though that was all he could do.
And then, in October, Max confided to Alberto that he was going to leave, told him before he told Jonah or Nate, which left Alberto wondering how they would react. Could he be in line for yet another promotion, this time to sous chef? Jonah had sent him over to Marta to trail to give him a sense of what else was out there, and Alberto came back reeling at the sheer volume. A Tuesday night at Marta beat a Saturday night at Huertas, lapped it and kept going, and when he first arrived he’d looked in bewilderment at fifteen cooks prepping their stations, unable to figure out who the sous was or how many of them there might be. He came back humbled, wondering if it was too soon for a move like that; he’d never seen anything like it. It might be smarter to hang on—to take one more step up at Huertas and see what happened when the second place materialized. Jonah had already started to let Alberto handle some of the ordering, which might be a sign that he knew he could lose his senior line cook if he didn’t make life more interesting. A promotion wasn’t out of the question.
The offer came quickly, because Jonah was not interested in another protracted round of failed trails. He wanted Alberto to appreciate what the job of sous chef meant, not only as a promotion but as part of the team that would build the next restaurant, the people he could trust to maintain high standards once he and Nate were ready to move ahead. Jonah pointed out that he had been twenty-four when Nick Anderer promoted him to sous chef at Maialino. Alberto was twenty-two. He ought to be proud; he ought to say yes.
He did. He was intimidated, as he had been when he stepped up to the roast and sauté station, but this time it was different. Running the pass was a mental challenge more than a physical one. He’d have to manage the cooks, make sure that they were on top of all the orders, accommodate special requests from the servers, and figure out how to take care of diners who ate faster or slower than the average. He’d place orders and often be the one to close the restaurant. If the line cooks didn’t work fast enough or clean enough he’d have to figure out how to inspire them. He’d be in charge some nights, and he vowed to do it the way Jonah did—firm instead of frantic—no matter how nervous he felt inside.
• • •
Jenni was not frantic, but by her own estimation she was too often frazzled. The promotion she got at the end of March 2015, was it—no further mention of equity or partnership over the summer or into the fall. When she and Jonah finally started to circle around the notion of a promotion to chef de cuisine it was a tense conversation. The leadership qualities he wanted to see in her had not emerged at a level that satisfied him, and the person who ran the Huertas kitchen during the expansion had to have those skills. A promotion was no longer a warm inevitability but contingent on improved behavior. He couldn’t be worried that she might blame someone, front or back of house, when she should instead be looking for a way to correct and inspire. For her part, Jenni felt undercut by a lack of support from the partners; the more they criticized the more she doubted herself, until she got to the point where she began to wonder if in fact she was not ready for this much responsibility.
The strain showed. Jonah offered to send her to a leadership class and wondered privately if it would suffice. Jenni vowed to set more of an example even as she began to think that it was simply time to make a change. She had never seriously considered anything but a future with Jonah—and yet the best thing might be to take one of those sideways steps and continue her education.
Fall kept them too busy to make a decision, and Jonah suggested that they regroup in January to see how they felt about the chef de cuisine job. Jenni knew the answer before she got there. “It was taking too much effort to convince myself that I wanted it, which meant that I didn’t want it,” she said. “I kept trying to talk myself into it—find the motivation—and I couldn’t. I could see: I’m not ready.”
“If I’d felt more included in the partnership it might have been different,” she said. “Even though it was the four of us from the start—Jonah, Nate, Luke, and me—it slowly became Jonah and Nate. I needed growth. I needed to move on.” She wanted to cook more and manage less.
Jenni started to look for a new job and found one as a sous chef with Missy Robbins, a highly regarded chef who had run the kitchens at the Michelin-starred A Voce and A Voce Columbus and was about to open her own place, Lilia, in a warehouse space in Brooklyn. While it was a step down in the kitchen hierarchy, it was a chance to go back to Italian food under the tutelage of a chef known for her pasta. The other sous and the chef de cuisine were both men, so Jenni was the highest- ranking woman in the kitchen after Robbins herself.
Jenni explained the move in the same way both to her new employer and to Jonah: “I want to learn from another new chef,” she said. “It’s time for a transition.” But it was a difficult decision, and she told herself that this might merely be a profitable detour, not a permanent separation. She might come back around to her dream of a food truck as part of what would by then be Jonah’s far larger restaurant
group.
That left Jonah with yet another kitchen vacancy, and he rolled up to Huertas’s second anniversary facing the kind of hiring dilemma that had plagued him for more than a year, though for a far more important position. He had to find a chef de cuisine who could step in and take over, and the longer that took the longer they would have to wait to do anything else.
It was time to revise his definition of success again, to get it to align with reality. The second place they’d talked about opening late in 2015 had eluded them, and his immediate short-term goal was to make sure they had a second profitable summer. He started to wonder if they would even be able to put a project together by the end of 2016. They still didn’t have a business plan, though they continued to talk about the concept they’d discussed and to look for a name that conveyed either their regional roots or a local-and-homemade philosophy. Jonah suggested Sunchoke because they grew in the region and were more interesting than other tubers. Nate thought that Croft would work, because it meant a small plot of arable land on which a farmer lived, and would convey all the attributes they wanted to sell.
Jonah was fine with the pace for now; he and his wife were about to have their first child, and he had no interest in ramping up a new project in the first months of his daughter’s life. Nate, who despaired of ever having time for a social life, was in more of a hurry—if he was going to miss out on a chunk of his twenties he’d like to have more to show for it. Their natural rhythms diverged even further than normal. Jonah knew that multiple restaurants were a necessity when the time was right. Nate figured the time was right now, and they needed to get going.
• • •
Chris McDade showed up on Jonah’s doorstep to say that he was thinking about leaving his latest job, so Jonah pitched an idea that benefited both of them: Chris could be the new chef de cuisine at Huertas, which would free Jonah, finally, to get serious about a second place. Chris would have to tolerate a pay cut to align with Jonah’s budget, but that was a short-term problem. The promise of having his own kitchen to run made up for it.
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