Generation Chef (15 page)

Alberto was impressive on his first trail, and Jonah was prepared to have him come in for a training shift, but he hesitated when he heard from the cook at Il Cibrèo, who clearly knew what he was doing. It wouldn't be fair to Alberto to offer him a training shift—essentially a job offer, unless it was a disaster—until he saw what the other cook could do.

If both of them were capable, it came down to a question of fit, of who provided the skills he needed the most. Alberto would cook whatever Jonah asked him to cook, in whatever way Jonah asked him to do it, while the guy from Il Cibrèo would be more creative. Alberto was likely to stick around, while his competitor might be more ambitious, in more of a hurry, as the departing line cook had been. Jonah hadn't thought about this aspect of a candidate's profile before, but now he realized that it mattered at a small place like Huertas. Hiring Alberto would take more effort from Jonah because of the training required—but in the end, he'd have a custom-built line cook.

Jonah gave Alberto one more trail, brought in the other candidate, and managed to give both of them a job—Alberto as Huertas's new line cook, the more experienced applicant dispatched to Marta, where Chris was working in advance of a September opening.

He and Nate successfully doubled up on their effort to retain Stew with promises of more money—although they couldn't match what he said he would get at the new place—and more authority for that pending cocktail program. The opportunity to create a cocktail menu once they had a full license was too tantalizing for Stew, who sometimes spent his break at the Indian store down the street, thinking about inventive combinations of herbs and spices. The promise of more places
down the line didn't hurt, either. Like them, he believed in the promise of life after Labor Day.

•   •   •

The five-course menu
launched on August 28, which happened to be the one-year anniversary of the first time Jonah set foot in the space. He showed up at the Wednesday lineup to talk about Thursday's launch and to give everyone a much-needed pep talk. He told them they were going to be fine. They'd weathered a slow summer and a lot of staff changes, but fall was going to be busy and fun. He knew it.

A server asked Jonah what he was going to do to celebrate the anniversary.

He shrugged. “I guess I'll spend the whole day in the space,” he said.

And then nothing happened. The days after the menu launch were as dead as the days that preceded it, and Jonah found himself surrounded by staffers who were holding their breath—and worse, looking to him to keep their spirits up. He tried hard to act as though relief were mere days away, to sound eager for the fall rush and excited about the new food, but the extended effort finally took its toll. For the first time in his life, he lost out to dismay. Planning the restaurant was more fun than this. Opening the restaurant was more fun than this. Running the restaurant was turning out not to be much fun at all, at least not this summer, when he tried every smart move he could think of and none of them worked. The one fix that might work, the new menu, was eclipsed daily by disappointments that had nothing to do with food, and it was getting harder to tell when, or if, he was going to catch a break.

“This is the first time,” he said, “that I haven't wanted to do this.”

Although he wouldn't confess any of it to his coworkers, and told himself that this was a temporary dark mood, Jonah began to dream not of expansion but of rescue.

“If someone came in today and said he'd buy the place for two million dollars,” he said, which was enough to pay off his investors and suppliers and have something left over to underwrite a smarter second chance, “I'd say okay. I'd probably do it again, but differently.”

•   •   •

Restaurants fail all the time.
The unluckiest ones disappear overnight, missed only by the too-few customers who frequented them, the lease sold to the next hopeful candidate or the landlord left without a tenant. Eulogies for more illustrious restaurants like Waltuck's Chanterelle, ones that at their peak had been booked weeks in advance, speak philosophically of their glorious heyday, their contribution to culinary history, and their regrettable if unsurprising end. Restaurants age quickly, like the chefs who run them, and twenty or thirty years is an enviable run. The end is sad—they will be profoundly missed—but mortality is inevitable.

The few that last longer are historical landmarks as much as anything, frequented by regulars who enjoy the clubby attention and one-timers who want to say they've been to The Four Seasons or Le Cirque. Industry veterans summarize the process with a shrug and a range of failure statistics, from one in five to 80 percent to the hyperbolic and unverified nine out of ten. Feeding people for a living has always been for the foolhardy and passionate—or, more and more, for someone with an unassailable concept and multiple outlets, as stories of exponential growth bully closure stories out of the way.

The
Zagat Guide
tracked openings and closures based on their subscribers' reports, a consistent if flawed methodology, as it relied on anecdotal reports from the field and couldn't possibly catch everything. Still, it provided a sense of the landscape, and the most recent numbers were unnerving: While there were 160 openings in 2014, compared to 111 in 2013, 82 places were reported to have closed, which was a four-year
high. Tim Zagat told Eater that high rents were part of the problem, and in fact real estate prices were an equal-opportunity scourge: Danny Meyer had already announced that Union Square Café, the eldest sibling in the USHG empire, would relocate at the end of the year because of a rent increase. According to the
New York Times
, the initial rent on the space, in 1985, was about $48,000. It went on the market a week after Meyer's announcement at an annual rent of $650,000.

But that was a change of venue, not failure. If Meyer had the resources to relocate rather than close, newer restaurateurs had far less choice. Jonah's month started with a $14,000 rent bill, followed by food costs, payroll, utilities, and a publicist. If he didn't make enough money to cover costs, he had to find extra funds—and if he ran out of resources like uncashed paychecks, he was going to be out of luck.

In the midst of a decade's frenzy, though, the definition of bad luck changed, from an absolute state to a potentially temporary affliction. Restaurants were no longer a binary system, either open or closed; bad business, properly processed, could pave the way for bigger success.

It was even possible to succeed, fail because of it, and then succeed again.

Chef Stephanie Izard got famous fast as the winner of season four of
Top Chef
, which she parlayed into two Chicago restaurants—but only after an earlier, lesser-known phase of her career that involved a success unwieldy enough to land her in the hospital. The first time she passed out at work, she was at the host stand of Scylla, her first Chicago restaurant, midway through a call to confirm a reservation—which would have been someone else's responsibility if there had been a someone else. She woke up on the floor with the phone still in her hand, so she got up and called the person back.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “I was trying to confirm your reservation. I just happened to faint,” at which point she passed out a second time.

When she came to she was on the floor again, which was how a staffer found her.

“Can you please call back that reservation so they're not freaked out?” asked Izard. After that she let the staffer take her to the emergency room, where the doctor pronounced her dehydrated and exhausted, a sobering if not quite surprising diagnosis. Izard, who by the time she was twenty-seven was the owner not only of a restaurant but of the building that housed it, had taken occasionally to crashing on a couch at the restaurant, still in her kitchen clothes, rather than waste time getting home and into bed. Wherever she slept, she was at work at seven a.m., six days a week, through the dinner shift and kitchen cleanup before she headed for a nearby bar to drink her adrenaline down to a manageable level. Dehydrated and exhausted made perfect sense.

Izard was done in, she came to believe, by a boom mentality in restaurants and real estate, the kind of giddy, anything-can-happen atmosphere that crushed common sense: The Eurocentric past was giving way to a populist food riot, and people with money wanted to be part of it, to invest in the next hot chef as a way to buy a little chunk of the excitement. Mortgage money was still hanging off of trees, just waiting for a young culinary school graduate who'd already worked her way up from a resort kitchen in Phoenix to a sous chef's job in Chicago. It didn't matter that she'd never run a business; no one seemed to care that she didn't have a business plan.

She got a loan to buy a $750,000 building, came up with a menu, hired a staff, and opened Scylla without so much as a general manager to make sure there was someone other than the chef to confirm reservations. She had an accountant to monitor income and costs—even if she had no idea that one thing an accountant might do was to call with a request for $20,000 to pay taxes, which was more than Stephanie's
income in the first year. She had to be able to pay her employees before she could consider giving herself a raise.

Scylla was simply more popular than Izard could handle, on both a business and an emotional level. She had no life outside the restaurant—and not much of a life in it anymore, having collapsed under the weight of responsibility. She'd already called the realtor who'd found the building for her, a couple of times, to broach the subject of selling, only to pull back at the last minute in the hope that things would somehow get better. She was responsible for twenty employees who'd have to look for work if she closed—as would she. If she gave up, Stephanie would be a chef who went out of business, a failure, not exactly the profile she wanted to present if she ever tried to court investors again.

But there was no time to take a step back, create a functional business model, and hire the right people to bail her out. She called the realtor again and meant it this time: If he could find another restaurant to take over the space, she was ready to give up. The building went back on the market in May 2007, and the three-year-old Scylla closed that summer.

Two weeks before the new owner took over, Stephanie got a call from the producers of
Top Chef
, inviting her to audition for season four, which was going to be filmed in Chicago.

She was about to turn thirty and unemployed. She said yes.

“Everything happens for a reason,” she thought. “Perfect timing.”

Izard's win, that year, bought her another try. The people she hadn't known she needed at Scylla—business partners from the Boka Restaurant Group, who at that point had two chef-driven restaurants and were on their way to partnerships with six chefs in multiple locations—approached her on the strength of the win and offered her a second chance, done right this time. It was two years before Girl & the Goat opened in Chicago's gentrifying West Loop, by the time they found and outfitted a space, but her new partners were in no rush.

“People kept being, like, ‘Where's your restaurant?'” said Izard. “I remember my partners said, ‘Well, we don't want the headline in the paper to be ‘Top Chef?'” as though the chef hadn't lived up to her title.

“I was, ‘Yeah, I don't either,'” she said. “It puts more pressure on.”

Girl & the Goat opened in 2010, and two years later Izard colonized the opposite side of West Randolph Street with Little Goat Diner, an 8,200-square-foot space with 120 seats that served everything from breakfast at seven a.m. to late-night weekend meals at midnight. She won a James Beard Award in 2013 for Best Chef, Great Lakes Region.

The days of passing out on the phone were over; she had partners to help shoulder the load, and she had overhauled her personal life. Izard got married in 2013, and her husband, a beer brewer, suggested that they could take on “three main things a year” as an overarching survival strategy, propped up by a new daily discipline. They woke up at five thirty in the morning on workdays and went to the gym together. She was at the restaurant before nine to make sure that prep got off to a good start and was out by nine at night. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, with quiet nights at home and early-morning exercise to take the place of late-night partying and recovery. Long-term, it was the only answer.

Now that she had the kind of success she could manage, she got to confront the question of what to do next. She thought about getting into the quality fast-food race with a chicken place and considered setting up her own processing plant, but decided in the end that it was too much of a stretch, probably $1 million to set it up right, and hard to control in terms of consistent quality. She fielded requests from hotels, in and outside of Chicago, and wondered if she ought to consider opening a place in New York City, to prove that she could.

The prospect felt a little bit like the chicken project, too difficult to monitor for a chef who tasted every dish every day with her team, even the dishes that were on the menu all the time, to make sure that the
execution was up to her standards. She liked being part of the Chicago chef community—but the issue of expansion nagged at her because it was the expected next step. Chef Paul Kahan, a longtime friend, had figured out how to juggle seven restaurants and a bar, and she saw him as a mentor, “more of an overseer-restaurateur-chef,” while she was still very much the “day-to-day chef.” She talked to him about the options she considered and the offers she received, because she did not want to make another misstep.

She also hoped to start a family; that was one item on the three-item to-do list, and the existing businesses were the second. A cookbook could be considered part of the existing business, but the list was filling up, and a big out-of-town project felt like too much for the third slot. She decided to stick to the neighborhood for now, and embarked on plans for an Asian market-style restaurant a five-minute walk from her other places—a big open space full of stalls, with an early-morning noodle take-out window for employees at Google's new headquarters nearby. It wasn't the long-term answer to what she wanted to do but rather an interim step while she figured out where, exactly, she wanted to end up.