Generation Chef

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Karen Stabiner

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eBook ISBN 9780698195806

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stabiner, Karen, author.

Title: Generation chef : risking it all for a new American dream / Karen Stabiner.

Description: New York : Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016026428 | ISBN 9781583335802

Subjects: LCSH: Miller, Jonah. | Cooks—United States—Biography. | Huertas (Restaurant)

Classification: LCC TX649.M56 S73 2016 | DDC 641.5092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026428

p. cm.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.

For Sarah
Ivria

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. OPENING NIGHT

2. THE DREAM

3. THE HUNT

4. THE BUILD-OUT

5. STAMPEDE

6. THE FAVORITE

7. BRUNCH

8. LOSS

9. GHOST TOWN

10. THE CRITIC

11. ANXIETY

12. THE VERDICT

13. SUCCESS

14. DETOURS

15. THE RISING STAR

16. FUN

17. NEXT

18. HUERTAS

EPILOGUE: RIGHT-SIZED

Acknowledgments

Author's Note

About the Author

J
onah Miller bounded up the steep narrow stairs, each tread worn at the center from more than a century of use, the only reminder that this place had ever been anything but his. In fifteen minutes, when the doors opened for the first time, it would be Huertas, a Spanish restaurant that had the twenty-six-year-old chef almost $700,000 in debt before he sold his first beer—on paper, at least, as restaurant investors knew how bad the odds were of repayment, let alone profit, anytime soon. Everything but the stairs was new, a practical compromise between the dream Jonah had carried in his head since he was sixteen and the realities of building codes and water lines and oven vents and his partners' input and, always, the budget. He had managed to erase the storefront's past as a pizza place that simply stopped paying rent and gave the keys back to the landlord, a Korean place that preceded it in failure, and before all that, a vague something else. Now all he had to do was not fail as his predecessors had, in a business where it happened all the time.

Jonah was ten pounds lighter than usual on an already beanpole
frame, skinny enough to catch his mother's attention and inspire his fiancée to make sure there was always takeout in the refrigerator for a late-night meal. His professional kitchen philosophy boiled down to “keep your head down and do the work,” and he wasn't a screamer like some chefs, so the stress of opening his first restaurant turned inward, instead, and eroded his appetite. He referred to the space that way, as his first restaurant, because there was no chance he'd stop at one.

At six foot two, he'd developed a slouch in deference to kitchen soffits that might want to knock him in the forehead or coworkers who preferred eye contact to staring at his chin. He was, he said, too tall to be a chef—which made him laugh, because he had never really wanted to be anything else. The slump was part of an overall concession to the fact that cooking always came first. Jonah had gone to the same East Village barbershop for the last five years for a $15 adult version of a kid's buzz cut, because it spared him having to make aesthetic decisions or to engage in mindless conversation with someone who considered himself not a barber but a stylist. He had no tattoos, even though they were as ubiquitous as clogs in a restaurant kitchen. He wore anonymous dark cotton pants that were baggy enough to be comfortable on a fifteen-hour shift, and equally nondescript T-shirts and hoodies; no outlier colors or styles that required him to devote conscious thought to what he put on in the morning. His shoes were broken in and built for comfort.

What stood out was his new chef's shirt, blindingly white, its creased short sleeves not yet softened into shape by repeated washings. Jonah could have worn a more formal and more expensive double-breasted chef's coat, embroidered with “Huertas” and “Executive Chef Jonah Miller,” but he chose the same shirt that the cooks and dishwasher and porter wore, and told them not to call him “Chef.” Better to lead by example, he figured, than to insist on respect before he'd shown them what he could do. Hierarchy didn't mean anything. He was going to earn their admiration.

He took his place at the pass, a marble counter at the front of the narrow open kitchen and a particular source of pride—six old pieces of marble set into a steel frame, held in place with some adhesive, twelve and a half square feet of work space for $200, the price of a single square foot if he'd insisted on a pristine new slab. He checked the inanimate objects that hadn't budged since the last time he looked, because he had to have something to do: a large Spanish ham on a metal skewer set into a wooden frame; little mismatched vintage dishes, one of Maldon salt and one of lemon wedges; a canister of tasting spoons; a metal spindle to hold completed order tickets; a jury-rigged rail that wouldn't last the week, to hold tickets that were still in play. He checked the fill level on his squirt bottle of olive oil, retied his long apron, and refolded and retucked a towel at exactly the right position on that apron tie, just behind his left arm.

He walked back past the roast and sauté station and the fry station, peered inside the refrigerated drawers at the mixed greens and portioned proteins, and headed up to the wood-burning oven to survey the prep work of the one cook Jonah couldn't see. The oven had been there when he leased the space and he wasn't about to spend money to move it, so they'd ended up with a bathroom between it and the kitchen. Until everything was running smoothly, he'd shuttle back and forth to keep an eye on things. While he was up there, he reviewed the glass jars of citrus wedges that sat on the bar, to make sure they looked good enough to suit him.

Jonah had played high school baseball, starting out as a pitcher until a chipped bone in his shoulder exiled him to shortstop and third base, and the pitcher's habit of minuscule last-minute adjustments—once the microscopic repositioning of fingers on the ball, now the equally fine placement of a knife on a cutting board—had stayed with him. It was a nice, familiar way to dissipate some of the tension.

If Jonah was right—and he had bet his professional future that he
was—Huertas was exactly what a healthy range of people were looking for, from the East Village millennial crowd that cruised First Avenue to serious diners old enough to be their parents, to neighborhood residents looking for a regular haunt. He was going to serve them Basque food because he loved it and because it had newness going for it, offered in two distinct formats that gave people a range of choices, from a drink and a snack to a multicourse meal.

In the front room, where he expected the younger crowd to gather, he'd serve pintxos, little one-bite appetizers that would fly by on trays like dim sum, an endless array of impulse purchases served with Spanish beers and wines and traditional drinks like the kalimotxo, which was red wine and Coca-Cola. The pintxo list led off with the gilda, named for Rita Hayworth's character in the 1946 film
Gilda
, a skewered white anchovy curved around a manzanilla green olive at one end and a guindilla pepper at the other. There would be some type of croqueta, jamón or mushroom or fish, depending on what he had on hand, and a slice of bread topped with egg salad and a single shrimp—which might not sound as good as it tasted but was going to look alluring enough to get people to take a chance. He could build a pintxo around a chunk of octopus or some homemade sausage; the point was to have a half dozen every day, and to change the list frequently, so that repeat customers had to start all over again once they got past the gilda, which would always be on the menu, no matter what else he made.

He would offer conservas, tins of Spanish seafood—Spain put its best seafood into tins—and serve them with bread, aioli or lemon or pickled peppers, and homemade potato chips. There would be a few raciones, midsized plates, but for the most part the front room was a place to drink and snack and chat, either at the bar or at a table or standing up, which was what people did in Spain.

The dining room at the back was for what he called the menu del dia,
four courses, pintxos through dessert, with choices for the entrée and dessert. Jonah planned to change some portion of that menu every week, at least, to keep people coming back for what qualified as a fine-dining bargain by New York City standards—a $52 fixed-price menu, with wine pairings at $28.

His signature dining-room dish was the egg course, huevos rotos, or “broken eggs,” which summed up what he was trying to do—have fun with refined, reconsidered versions of Spanish classics. He'd tried the original at a Basque place in Madrid, a fried egg plopped on top of a batch of fried potatoes with a side of chorizo or chistorra sausage or jamón. Jonah's version had only the basic ingredients in common with the original. He used a hand-crank machine to spin an impaled russet potato into strands as slender as spaghetti, which he flash-fried, dressed with a chorizo vinaigrette, and topped with a slow-poached egg and slivers of fresh scallions. As soon as the soft egg broke, it turned the vinaigrette into a richer sauce.

It was “carbonara with potatoes, like al dente pasta with chorizo Bolognese,” he told the food writers who had already started to hover, because more of their readers understood Italian references than Spanish ones. It was also about a dime's worth of Idaho potatoes and a quarter's worth of chorizo, total cost per serving about $2. Jonah prided himself on his ability to wrangle food costs below the stiff 28 percent industry standard in New York City, which was lower than the national figure of 30 percent because other costs in the city were so high. He knew how to be frugal without sacrificing flavor or quality, and he'd already explained his philosophy to his sous chef, Jenni Cianci: “If there's something left over, use it.” The chefs he'd worked for had taught him not to waste food long before it became a politically correct stance, so he repurposed things that a more wanton kitchen might discard. Duck trims landed in the croquetas, and cod skin became crispy chips he could use instead of a cracker as the base of a pintxo.

His version of migas, which meant “crumbs,” was another mix of style and economy. In Spain, people made migas to use up old bread, toasting coarse bread crumbs and mixing them with an egg or sausage and some greens. Jonah mixed his homemade crumbs with a slow-poached egg and bent the rules from there—he planned to add whatever vegetables were in season along with whatever protein felt like a good match.

If he splurged, it was with a specific purpose. For the opening he indulged in an order of percebes, stubby little sheathed gooseneck barnacles that clung to the rocks in Galicia, in northern Spain, and were harvested by divers who had to cut them off with knives, still attached to the smaller rocks that sustained them—$20 a pound, probably twice that if he subtracted the weight of the rocks, but “a cool experience,” said Jonah. “If you want to talk wild, this is wild.” He steamed a small batch in water and white wine and showed the dining-room servers how they worked, amid jokes about how they resembled little penises wearing little condoms; he snapped the soft part of the barnacle from its base, removed the sheath, and ate what was inside, which was supposed to be an aphrodisiac, or at least that was the legend. It was a good story to tell about something people weren't going to find all over town. He planned to offer them to some of the back tables, but only if he had the time to go back there and eat one with the guests.

•   •   •

He had thought about it all,
and rethought, endlessly, in the twenty months since he walked away from a sous chef job rather than bide his time waiting for a promotion to executive sous. He still had little idea of what to expect. The big variable at Huertas was experience, or the lack of it. No one, not Jonah or his two general manager partners or his sous chef, had ever done their jobs before—each of them had leapfrogged over a step or two on the career trajectory to be here, skipped jobs that
might have given them a more seasoned perspective. Jonah had been a sous chef for just over a year when he left Maialino, the Roman restaurant owned by Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, where he had worked since he graduated from NYU; he had never been an executive sous, never managed a kitchen team. Luke Momo had worked both front and back of house at the elegant forty-year-old Le Cirque, and Nate Adler had been a beverage director at USHG's popular group of barbecue restaurants, briefly, but neither of them had ever run a front-of-house operation. Now they were general managers—and partners, because they'd wagered on Jonah's ability to pull this off, a $10,000 investment from Luke and more than $20,000 from Nate, in exchange for small chunks of equity. His sous chef, Jenni, was a line cook only three years out of culinary school when he offered her the job. Still, the four of them had in common an impressive set of skills, given that their average age was barely twenty-six, and an impatient ambition. Jonah reassured himself: The people who were opening Huertas were green but smart.

If they were a little insecure, maybe that was a good thing, since they would be motivated to work that much harder. Luke took every detail seriously, and at the moment had three servers with him in the dining room debating the proper seat-number rotation, which had plagued him for days. Identifying diners by number enabled servers to put each dish in front of the person who ordered it, and to avoid messy tableside queries like “Who has the duck?,” but any system required consensus about how to number. Luke placed diner one at the southeast corner of a table and counted the rest clockwise, which left everyone confused about whether the two tables at the far side of the room should work the same way or be a mirror image of the others.

It wasn't an idle concern. In the worst-case scenario, the diner in seat three, who was allergic to shellfish, mistakenly got the plate intended for
seat two, took a carefree bite, and ended the evening in the emergency room. As more people wandered in with an opinion, though, it became a lightning rod for anxiety. Nate listened just long enough to be exasperated, worried that he and Luke weren't exuding a suitably managerial air.

“We'll figure it out,” he said, signaling that the conversation was over. “For tonight it's the southeast corner for everyone.” That resolved, he went back to his own way of coping with opening-night nerves, which involved never standing still. He checked the bar, he looked at the reservation list that was Luke's responsibility, he adjusted the music level up and then circled back a moment later to adjust it down.

Jenni had nothing to do until an order came in, because her way of coping was to get ahead. She took pride in her exacting mise en place, the double row of small steel containers that held every seasoning and garnish and sauce she needed for the night's menu, a setup worthy of a sous and an example to anyone who worked for her. It was almost enough to make her feel ready. She stepped over to review the line cooks' setups, and that helped, too. To bridge the rest of the gap between her experience and her new job, she chattered. She couldn't help it, and in between commenting on almost everything she apologized for doing so. No one seemed to mind, as her running commentary balanced out Jonah, who tended to get even quieter when he felt stressed.