Generation Chef (16 page)

“It's a strange transition,” she said, “that I'm still trying to figure out.”

•   •   •

Rebound lore was
like scary stories told around the campfire, a communal effort to keep fear at bay. Izard's story was hardly unusual. Some of the biggest successes in New York City, names on Jonah and Nate's short list of groups they wanted to emulate, had once been that close to disaster, more than once, only to rise from the ashes to survey the scene from an unassailable height. Their sagas made people brave; the next good idea could make the past evaporate.

David Chang opened Momofuku Noodle Bar on a shoestring in 2004, when he was twenty-seven. It didn't do much business, so he
changed the menu, opened late night to get industry customers, and started to draw crowds: After a disappointing $500,000 in revenues the first year, the restaurant brought in $1 million in the second year and $2 million in the third. He opened Momofuku Ssäm Bar as an Asian burrito place in 2006, this time with $1 million in loans to repay, and faced possible bankruptcy before he salvaged the restaurant with a loan from his father, expanded hours, and another new menu.

“If you look at ten years of Momofuku,” he told
ForbesLife
, “almost everything has come out of a mistake—a terrible fucking mistake.” And yet he had prevailed: The
New York Times
's Jeff Gordinier, who labeled 2004 a “game-changer” in the world of New York City restaurants, named Chang one of a handful of chefs who got the revolution going, “an empire-building star.”

Gordinier included April Bloomfield as well, who failed out of the usual sequence and yet barely broke stride. After The Spotted Pig, she and partner Ken Friedman opened John Dory, a seafood restaurant that went into and out of business in less than a year—but months after that they opened The Breslin in a boutique hotel, and a year later opened what the
New York Times
called a “retooled” version of the closed restaurant, called The John Dory Oyster Bar, as though to blot out any memory of earlier failure.

Those kinds of stories made it possible to dismiss the threat of irreversible bad news. A truly talented chef could survive a misguided menu, staff defections, a miserably slow start, a bad location. There was no reason for Jonah to be discouraged; Chang and Bloomfield had been in far more dire straits, and now they were opening restaurants at an almost incomprehensible clip. Trouble could be a springboard for the next try, and worth the risk. Bad news might be more dramatic than in years past—the lows seemed to hit faster and harder—but recovery could be outsized as well, as long as he didn't give up.

In his 2006 book,
Setting the Table
, Danny Meyer summarized more than twenty years of experience and wrote, “The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”

Almost a decade later, Chang told the
Forbes
reporter that he liked to recall what he considered his dad's best advice: Make mistakes. Just don't make the same mistakes twice.

P
ete Wells was unhappy. The
New York Times
restaurant critic arrived at an East Village restaurant he planned to review, only to be told that there was a long wait for a table for four. Maybe two hours. They could take his name, which would not be his real name, and let him know. It wasn't as though another night would be any better, so the question for Wells, his wife, and two friends was how best to wile away the time. They were already hungry, because he hadn't factored in a two-hour delay. One of his companions had heard about Huertas, and it was nearby. They could bide their time over drinks and pintxos there, and that way he'd know whether it warranted another look.

Wells kept a long list of places that might merit a review, although inclusion on the list was no guarantee. He couldn't possibly get to every one that piqued his interest. It was a best-intention list, one that he pruned on a regular basis, deleting places that languished for too long. Restaurants could sit for more than a year, elbowed out of the way by a more compelling prospect, before they were excised. Huertas was a relatively new entry, and its USHG lineage made it a bit more
intriguing than another small, independent restaurant might be, but he hadn't gotten to it yet. Might as well.

None of Jonah's strategies to attract a critic's attention had made a difference, not the five-course menu del dia or brunch, not the homemade vermút or the homemade almond ice cream or even the slow-poached egg in the rotos. What was about to get Pete Wells in the door was somebody else's no-reservations policy, which Jonah had rejected for the very reason he now stood to benefit from it—because it left people stranded with nothing to do for hours at a time.

•   •   •

Wells went to great lengths
to remain anonymous, as had
Times
critics who preceded him, and restaurateurs worked just as hard to find out what he looked like. Nate had long since searched the Internet for an image of him and found one of a man of exasperatingly average appearance, although there was no way to tell if or how Wells had changed since it was taken. Nate asked around and came up with not very much: medium brown hair of unreliable but probably medium length, maybe a beard, maybe stubble, maybe clean-shaven. The most recent intelligence came from a friend at Eleven Madison Park who said he'd seen the critic on the Wednesday after Labor Day with a little bit of stubble, which could be predictive unless he had shaved since then. Nate understood how futile it was to speculate on someone's facial hair, and yet it made him feel better to be doing something, so he redrew the image he carried in his head, adding and subtracting hair but not too much. At least they knew he hadn't had time to grow a full beard.

As it turned out, the critic's wife was not quite as inaccessible. Her name popped up in Wells's biographical information, and there were plenty of photographs of her; better still, she didn't seem to change her look. Nate shared photos of her with everyone at Huertas and instructed
them to be on the lookout. Wells might come in alone, or with a bunch of people other than his wife, but this greatly improved the odds of spotting him.

Which Nate did, on the Friday after Labor Day, when he came upstairs from the basement office and saw four people sitting in the first booth, one of whom looked like Wells's wife, one of whom had to be Wells. Nate considered the hair on the man's chin and decided that yes, this was how stubble plus two more days would look. He pulled the captain aside for a consultation and she agreed, so they let the staff know as quickly and quietly as they could: The restaurant critic from the
New York Times
was about to eat at Huertas.

They still assumed that
New York
magazine's Adam Platt had preceded him, way back in June, but by now that was beside the point because he hadn't written anything. They had Pete Wells, as sure as could be; that was definitely his wife, and the odds were slim that she'd be out with a man who closely resembled descriptions and old photos of her husband, and yet wasn't.

Anyone who could find an excuse to stand at the service station did so, to eavesdrop and ferry information to Jonah and Nate. The kitchen knew before the order came in that the party in the first booth was looking for a stopgap before dinner—which frustrated the cooks because it didn't give them much of a chance to show off. Lots of pintxos, but only one or two of each—except for three croquetas—the tinned mackerel, the small meat plate, an order of olives. Three different vermút—the house preparation, a spritz, two vermút de verano—and then a beer, a glass of Rosado, and a kalimotxo.

They ordered two raciones—the boquerones plate, which displayed only the kitchen's ability to turn out paper-thin potato chips and find an excellent supplier of Spanish white anchovies, and the huevos rotos. That was good, because anyone who had seen a plate of the real thing
would appreciate Jonah's version. Word came back from a server that Wells wasn't eating much of the raciones, but his friends seemed to be enjoying them. Eventually they got the call from their intended dinner destination and headed out the door for the evening's real meal.

No one knew what to think. There were bad signs: Wells hadn't intended to eat at Huertas, he hadn't been seduced into abandoning his other dinner plans, and even if he was reviewing the other place and had to go there, he didn't get much of a sampling of what the kitchen could do. There were good signs: He must've heard something good about Huertas or he could have picked any of the other places in the neighborhood, he tried a lot of stuff, and the plates came back to the kitchen empty. And Nate had spotted him, so that everyone, from the server who explained the provenance of the cheese and jamón, to the cooks, to the bartender, was that much sharper than they might have been.

Nate lingered at the pass with Jonah, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “Maybe,” said Nate, “he was checking us out.”

Jonah searched for the right word.

“Auspicious,” he said. “It could be an auspicious moment.”

•   •   •

Community Board 3
had an unwritten rule about upgrades to full liquor licenses, and the Huertas lawyer had tried to get Jonah and Nate to listen: “If they give you beer and wine in a new place and you want a change—changing booze to full liquor, outdoor seating, whatever—they think that a year will give them a good indication of who you are and what you're doing,” said Levey. If they could wait until next April, they'd probably get the upgrade without any opposition. Barely six months in, the board might be difficult.

After the summer they'd had, they hardly felt patient—and surely their past experience, and the critical reception Huertas had received so
far, would be enough to convince the committee that this was a substantial, quality operation. “They wanted to jump a little early,” was how Levey saw it, but he agreed to get them on the committee's September agenda despite his misgivings. He'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Two nights after Pete Wells's visit, Jonah and Nate headed over to the Community Board 3 licensing committee, happy but not too happy, because Wells's appearance was a fluke and now he had to decide whether to come back, and confident about the odds of a full liquor license but not smug, because this was a notoriously tough board, chaired by a lawyer and composed of local volunteers who saw themselves as the neighborhood's defense. Before they left Huertas, they told the staff the odds were 90 percent in their favor.

Nate believed it, and had a cocktail menu ready to go once the State Liquor Authority rubber-stamped tonight's approval, which could be as soon as two weeks. Jonah tended to focus instead on the 10 percent and to prepare accordingly, mindful of what Levey had told them. “Nate doesn't realize it, but I think we're going to get pushback,” he said. “Not from neighbors, but from the board. They'll say, ‘You've been open less than six months. You've got balls coming back here.' They're going to treat us like arrogant little kids, so we have to go in there with a lot of humility. Definitely going to get pushback.”

Wilson Tang had e-mailed him with advice: Don't sound desperate, because you don't want the board to think you need the full license to keep from going out of business. But don't sound too cocky, either. Jonah walked into the meeting wishing he were more certain of the right spot between those two extremes.

The meeting room was at the back end of a long hallway papered with announcements, a square, low-ceilinged room with rows of folding chairs facing the wide table where committee members sat in a row, the chairperson at the center of the group. To the left, the board president
sat behind a big desk and kept an eye on everything—the applicants, the clock, the wandering child whose parents were there to complain about someone else's liquor license request.

The committee reserved its formidable ire for a liquor license upgrade applicant who'd opened on a residential side street ten months earlier, had been denied an upgrade at an August meeting, and was back without having addressed many of the committee's concerns. The place had all the trappings of a sports bar—five televisions, enough noise to draw complaints—though the owners swore it wasn't. A woman from the neighborhood block association stated the group's strong opposition to the full liquor license and, while she was at it, to the bar itself. The committee urged the owners to withdraw the application, regroup, and present a better plan. If they persisted, they faced one of two unpleasant outcomes—either an outright denial, or a set of restrictions designed to minimize the perceived impact on local residents.

Huertas was up next. The board chair gave a brief summary of the restaurant's history, including the fact that its beer and wine license had been approved eleven months earlier, in October 2013, with the stipulation that it be “a full-service restaurant,” but that six months had passed before it opened for business.

She turned to Jonah, Nate, and their lawyer, who had come to the front of the room to stand alongside the committee's table.

“You had your door open on Friday, and it was horrifically loud,” she said.

Did she stalk applicants on the assumption that they would try to deceive her?

“There was a party in the front room,” said Jonah, quietly. “Unusual circumstances.”

The lawyer pointed out that of the twenty-two letters of support, fourteen were from neighbors, and of the 242 petition signatures, about
140 were from the area. He rattled off the accolades that the restaurant and Jonah had received.

“It's a pure restaurant,” he said, as opposed to a sports bar masquerading as something else. “But we're hearing people saying, ‘Gee, I'd love a cocktail with that tasting menu.'”

“When we were before you last year,” said Jonah, “we really would have loved a full license, but we didn't have a track record.” He felt that he had one now.

A committee member asked Jonah about his work history and Nate about his position at Blue Smoke, to which they responded with some pride. Their résumés showed how serious they were.

The first committee member to voice an opinion was impressed. “At first, I was going to say no way,” she said, “but they have background, and they're responsible, and it's a real restaurant.” She was inclined to support the application for an upgrade.

Her comment hung in the air just long enough for Jonah and Nate to think that they were home free—and then, too fast to comprehend, the objections started to fly. The chair complained that five months after opening was too soon to ask for an upgrade. She complained further about “people who come into the neighborhood from outside” with expectations. The words “privilege” and “pedigree” sounded like pejoratives.

“I don't want to say you deserve this because you have better training than a guy from Queens who doesn't get a license,” said another board member.

Jonah and Nate were speechless. Of all the objections they'd anticipated and planned to address, they'd never imagined getting turned down because they were from the Upper West Side and their families were well off, which was how they interpreted the comment. Jonah had worked since he was fourteen, Nate had worked in college, and besides, this wasn't supposed to be a competition against some nonexistent
person from Queens. Each application was supposed to stand or fall on its own merit—and yet they couldn't object, couldn't show their feelings, because they might have to come back to these same people for a second round, relegated to the questionable appeals population that included owners of party hotels and sports bars.

Even the lawyer was blindsided, although he assumed that the comments referred not to the partners' family background but to the presumption that all the press coverage and their impressive résumés would make them exempt from the one-year rule, entitled to special treatment.

“It'd be a shame to put this off,” he said, cautiously, “if you're going to grant it eventually.”

The committee took a straw poll to see if there was commanding sentiment in one direction or the other, but it was as close as it could be: Three members were inclined to approve with stipulations, while four wanted to deny the application outright.

“We take a really hard line,” said one of the four, by way of explanation, not apology.

Levey tried again—Jonah and Nate were not asking for any other considerations, not for later hours, not for outside seating, nothing but a liquor license.

“They're really good guys,” he said.

At that, one of the committee members complained that he was getting tired and wanted to end the conversation unless one of the four who leaned toward rejecting the application had had a change of heart.

No one had.

The committee chair dismissed Jonah and Nate with a meager word of encouragement: Come back and try again when you've been open longer.