Generation Chef (21 page)

The format was similar to
Chopped
, with a bit more leeway—rather
than a new basket of secret ingredients for each course, the contestants got one basket, a half hour to figure out what to do with it before they started to cook, and one hour to transform as many ingredients as they wanted to use into as many courses as made sense to them. They could bring a couple of items with them, so Jonah came armed with the dry pasta they served at Maialino, figuring that he could turn almost anything into a pasta dish.

His first-round box contained salsify, maple syrup, and brisket, the meat impossible to cook in so short a time without a pressure cooker. There was nothing to do but get started. Jonah turned out pintxos for the first course, a shishito pepper wrapped in salsify, grilled, and dressed with lemon, sea salt, and maple syrup, and crostini with raw salsify, anchovy, and capers. Next, he made chitarra carbonara with salsify, pasta with a sauce bound together by a salsify puree that had a touch of maple syrup added to it. The only thing he forgot was to adjust for salt, which he forgot at home, too: He was used to making pasta at Maialino, where he had worked with a tank of water, so he added too much salt without realizing it until he tasted the results. He tried to compensate for the mistake by adding less cheese at the end, but he had to admit that the dish was on the salty side, and the judges agreed.

They said that Jonah's brisket was the best dish of the day—except that it was tough.

For dessert, he turned out a salsify flan with sea salt and maple syrup standing in for the caramel.

The two chefs had a moment together while the judges conferred, and Admony told Jonah that she thought he had won, because the judges pronounced one of her dishes the worst of the round. Jonah thought that she had won because his pasta was too salty and his delicious brisket, too tough.

She was also far better known than he was, and one of only two
women in the sixteen-round competition, which might mean something, he thought.

“I really hate losing,” said Jonah. “I just hope they don't cut it in a way that makes me look like an ass.”

He did lose, whatever the reasons, and would have to wait until the show aired to find out how he came off in the process. He rushed to work after a seven-hour shoot consoled by one thing—at least he didn't have to go back for another round.

When he finally got to Huertas, at six, the tickets were rolling and the restaurant was already half full. It felt weird—as though he were a chef who owned several restaurants and had trusted, talented employees who ran the kitchens for him. It felt the way he wanted the future to feel.

•   •   •

Alyssa saw her station
like a chess game—there was what she was doing right now and what she knew she would be doing for each of the eight steps that followed. She saw the sequence of an order in her head, start to finish, and had been known to slap away a line cook's hand if he got too close to one of her plates, even though all he wanted was to be of help.

“Don't touch my stuff” was her work philosophy. She would find a way to get things done, no matter how busy the restaurant was, if people left her alone.

The last Friday of October was a test, though: There were seventy-six covers, a record for Huertas so far, and she simply ran out of room. She turned the two burners up high in the hope that the flames would extend to heat the four pans she'd crowded onto them, filled the flat-top with more, and perched two waiting pans on the piano, the steel rim that ran in front of the burners, which was hot enough to burn her if she didn't watch out but not quite hot enough to cook the contents of those pans. They sat there until a space opened up, so that she didn't have to
waste seconds stepping away to get them: She lifted a finished pan off the heat with her left hand, shoved its replacement into position with her right, and kept moving in a counterclockwise half turn, to plate the contents of the first pan and send the dish on its way.

The shared rice dish for the dining room should have made the kitchen's life a little easier, because more family-style dishes meant less plating, and two of the mini-paella pans would feed four to six people. They were supposed to sit on the flat-top for a half hour, filled to the brim with liquid at the start, ending up with a nice crust at the bottom. It worked as long as nobody touched the pans—but the slightest jostle early in the process sent liquid sloshing onto the flat-top, where it turned into a crusty little moat that got in the way of the sauté pans that were waiting their turn. At the evening's peak Alyssa had fifteen little paella pans burbling away.

Antonio would have cleaned the flat-top when he arrived, but Alyssa was so frustrated by the end of the night that she started scrubbing, just to have someplace productive to put her energy. It didn't help that she'd given notice as soon as the review came out; she was killing herself on her way out the door.

She was back at nine the next morning to work a double shift, brunch through dinner.

“How many tonight?” she asked Jenni.

“Seventy-five,” said Jenni, proudly.

Alyssa felt her eyes well up. She prided herself on her work ethic, but she didn't know where she was going to find the strength to get through another shift like the previous night's.

“I can't do this,” she said, just as Nate walked up.

“What's the problem?” he said.

Alyssa screamed, “We can't do this!” and walked over to her station to start doing prep. She sang Christmas songs to herself to try to calm down.

•   •   •

The story served up
with the late November opening of Gavin Kaysen's Spoon and Stable was irresistible, in a city that had never been on the national short-list of essential dining locations: Local boy makes good, works abroad, wins awards and honors, turns his back on New York City, whose residents consigned the state of Minnesota to the category of flyover, and comes home to cook and raise his family. He had given up the life that many cooks dreamed of, and expected his old neighbors to embrace food the way they did in important food cities, which was a nice compliment. He had rejuvenated an office building built out of a stable, a fast walk from a dying sex strip, to become part of the city's next phase.

A potent mix of Minneapolis pride and plain curiosity got people talking before the opening, and the opening itself clinched things. His guests included Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, one legendary chef from each coast making the trip to Minneapolis to celebrate their spiritual heir and Bocuse d'Or teammate. With Kaysen as team coach, they were training for the competition that would take place in January in Lyon, France—the culmination of seven years' effort to put the United States in serious contention for the first time. That was the level of excellence Kaysen had brought home, and the city was eager to express its gratitude.

It was easy enough to find him, to walk over before or after a meal for a fast hello: Kaysen, a small, trim man in impeccable whites, stood at one end of the open kitchen and expedited, calmly but quickly, to a random chorus of “Oui, Chef” as one cook after another fielded an order. Behind the display kitchen, hidden like the wizard behind the curtain in Oz but far more productive, the prep kitchen staff readied the ingredients that enabled Kaysen and the visible cooks to turn dinner into performance art.

The duck, fed and dry-aged according to Kaysen's specification,
appeared as a laser-edged rectangle, its paper-thin, translucent skin as brittle as torched sugar on a crème brûlée, and in duck meat loaf sliders. There was spinach with cheese curds, a regional treat as channeled by the classically trained chef, and a version of his grandmother's pot roast that involved chanterelle mushrooms and broth poured tableside; he wanted to incorporate home on the menu, but on his culinary terms.

No longer did a food-obsessed local have to find an excuse to drive to Chicago to eat. Soon enough, traffic would run in the opposite direction, and any hope of a reservation would be two months out. People stood in the snow in the hope of snagging a first-come, first-served seat at the bar.

S
uccess seemed definitive, back when it was out of reach: Huertas wasn't yet doing enough business, but as soon as it was, as soon as it reached a tenable plateau, Jonah could do two things that he couldn't do when the restaurant was empty. He could attract more talented cooks, which would ease the time commitment for the existing staff and stave off burnout, and he could think more seriously about what came next.

It was more complicated close up. First off, there was no depot; it wasn't as though Huertas arrived and that was that. The October numbers were great, close to double the bottom of the summer: Revenues were $176,000 in October compared to about $88,000 in both August and September, compared, for that matter, to $120,000 for opening month. The average check was up to $50 from an initial $42.

The sheer volume was startling. “We're selling so many cans of seafood, we just bought every one that our supplier had,” said Jonah. “We sold them out of scallops, clams, mussels. They get a big shipment from Spain and it's a month until they get another, so we said we'll take everything because we're going to blow through them.”

Even a random dip on a midweek night seemed an aberration, corrected before anyone could get too worried about it. Jonah and Nate felt confident enough to cash their paychecks—they were holding on to a half dozen at this point—but they stopped short of cocky.

“If we could flatline here,” said Jonah, “I'd be happy.” He was too competitive for that to be quite true, but the staff understood what he meant. If life would just hold steady, he'd feel secure enough to make plans.

They wouldn't know if they were safe for weeks yet. The consensus among more seasoned restaurateurs was that a
Times
review guaranteed a six-week window of opportunity: six weeks to turn the curious into return customers, that was it, before the easily distracted public moved on and Jonah got a better sense of exactly how successful he was likely to be long-term. The
Times
review had hauled Huertas back from the brink and given it the healthiest possible shove in the right direction. Now all that mattered was what they did with the fresh start.

With Alyssa leaving, Jonah wanted both a sous chef and a line cook, and the first batch of résumés after the review made him hope that the drought might be over. It didn't take long for him to realize that the new applicants were as “underwhelming” as their predecessors; the only difference was that now there were more of them. He got a sous chef applicant who'd only worked in corporate kitchens and big food service operations, never in an actual restaurant. He got a line-cook hopeful who wasn't a cook but a paramedic who wanted to change careers. Jonah was willing to give him a trail because a paramedic ought to be responsible and hardworking, and he could teach the guy what to do as long as he knew the basics. He didn't.

Jonah knew people who could handle either job, but they worked at restaurants where he'd worked, and there was a firm no-poaching rule. If Jonah wanted to hire someone who worked for a chef he'd worked for
in the past, he'd have to ask permission, and he preferred to find a cook who didn't require that kind of favor. He didn't want someone else to swipe one of his cooks someday.

The logical in-house solution was to move Alberto up from the wood oven to the fry station, full-time, and move Max, the fry cook, up to Alyssa's station, because it was easier to find a beginner to work the oven than to find a cook with experience. It wasn't the perfect answer, though, and Jonah was reluctant to make those two promotions if he had doubts going in. Max didn't work clean enough to satisfy Jonah or Jenni, even though he had an honorable explanation—if he faced the choice on a jammed night between getting food on a plate and wiping down the piano that ran along the front of the range, it was food on the plate every time, and Jonah couldn't quite argue with that, even though he thought there was a way to do both.

Alberto made Jonah nervous only because he was a kid three months into his first full-time job, and yet everything he did suggested that he could handle a step up. He watched what Jonah did carefully and had no interest in kitchen drama; he didn't raise his voice or get emotional or give anyone a hard time. Everything about him was precise, from his short dark hair to his disciplined posture to his kitchen uniform, which somehow always looked crisp. He was like Jonah in that way—he kept his head down and got the work done.

•   •   •

If minorities had more of
a numerical presence in restaurant kitchens than women did, over time, it was in part because historically immigrants had filled the lowest-paying entry-level jobs—a downstairs community, literally, in New York's upstairs-downstairs vertical universe, which of necessity separated a kitchen's upper echelons from the prep
cooks who supported them. When Jonah made braised tripe, he did so in the main-floor kitchen, because hot dishes had to walk fast from the pass to the dining room; when he spent summers on prep, it was in a windowless basement, the ingredients to be carried upstairs when he was done. Women might land in the basement, if they worked on the pastry side, but that, too, was a practical decision, if an ironic one; while the job of pastry chef was an upstairs position in terms of the hierarchy, most desserts were made in advance, so pastry could live downstairs and settle for a dedicated assembly space in a corner of the main kitchen.

A young, ambitious cook like Alberto faced a pervasive assumption about his destiny, a ceiling based on generations who lacked the skills—or access to the skills—to run a kitchen. He'd grown up cooking, like Jonah and Jenni, but his single mother couldn't simply decide to send him to culinary school. It was too expensive; it wasn't an option. If not for Richard Grausman, an author and educator who had devoted himself for thirty years to students like Alberto, he would not have become Jonah's presumptive fry cook—or if he had, it would have been years from now, his progress dependent on employers willing to give an eager but untrained kid a chance.

In 1990 Grausman piloted a cooking program in New York City public high schools that led to the formation of C-CAP, the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, designed to provide culinary training to underserved high school students, and college scholarships for those who distinguished themselves in an escalating set of cooking competitions. As a high school senior, Alberto's future hung on a two-course dinner he had two hours to prepare from classic French recipes he'd had to memorize: Sûpreme poulet chasseur avec pommes château, or hunter's chicken with turned, sautéed potatoes, and crêpes sucrées with crème pâtissière and sauce au chocolat, crepes with pastry cream and
chocolate sauce. He won a $7,000 scholarship; recipes from the past would help to pay for opportunities he otherwise might have missed.

In addition to his classwork at Monroe, Alberto became a teaching assistant. He helped the culinary dean open the program's dining lab, a small restaurant that was open to the public and staffed by culinary students, and ran the lab even as he kept going to class. He completed the requirements for a two-year associate degree while he held down a part-time job, including two classes he finished online, and then he saw the ad for a position at Huertas.

Alberto was only three classes shy of his bachelor's degree, but there were days when he didn't see the point, as it made little sense to think about homework when he might profitably invest that energy in his career. His girlfriend and the dean tag-teamed him—he was too close to the end to blow a degree now—and he promised them that he'd get it done, even though he wasn't sure when, or how.

He was more focused on his future. Alberto believed in the one-year-and-out rule, a common philosophy among young cooks: If there wasn't progress or the firm promise of it after a year on a job, it was time to move on. If he ever felt stuck at Huertas—spent too much time at the wood oven or the fry station, or even at Alyssa's roast and sauté station down the line—he'd have to leave. A great job, by definition, had forward motion, because he saw himself doing exactly what Jonah was doing, someday. He wanted his own place, too, but he wanted to learn about other cuisines, particularly Asian food, and he wasn't going to get that here.

Patience and impatience; it was hard to find the balance. Alberto had a lot to learn, so he had to be careful not to get ahead of himself, even as he kept his eye on his long-range goal. Huertas was part of his continuing education. The Monroe classroom kitchens were old-school, and he had been screamed at by his share of instructors. He was intrigued by
somebody who seemed able to manage without too much drama, and he tried to emulate his boss's approach on everything from his mise en place to his calm demeanor in the kitchen.

“Jonah's so attentive to detail,” he said, “and it's not, ‘You have to do it this way,' but, ‘It's better if you do it this way.'”

Alberto already worked the fry station on Max's days off, and he knew that even a seemingly simple task like making potato chips was trickier than it looked. “The hardest part of the fry station is balance,” he said. “Pintxos, and orders with things I have to fry—balancing space and time. I'm going to be as efficient as possible.” If he got the chance to be in the main kitchen all the time, not up at the oven, he would have more opportunity to watch Jonah, to learn how to handle himself once he had his own kitchen to run—and to prove his merit, which with luck would mean another promotion before he hit the next one-year mark.

•   •   •

Once the post-review euphoria subsided,
Jenni found herself in an unexpected and equally outsized funk, at an uncomfortable emotional distance from the rest of the staff. The review, the crowds, and the accompanying crazy hours reminded her that she was, after all, a salaried employee—still a sous chef, not yet the executive sous, and too often the one who stayed late to close the restaurant. She'd been there since the beginning. No one could say that she'd devoted any less energy than the partners had to making Huertas a success—but she didn't have her own money to invest, as they did, so she didn't have the status. It was time for Jonah to more fully express his appreciation to her, and she let both Jonah and Nate know how she felt: She was not being compensated sufficiently, financially or emotionally.

“Everyone says I should be a partner,” she told them, because in fact
that was what some of the staffers said when she complained to them. At the same time, she didn't want to push too hard and precipitate an unnecessary crisis if they weren't ready to promote her or give her equity. “I just deserve to be compensated,” she said, and left it to them to figure out how. They could make her a partner, give her a deserved promotion, or give her a raise with a specific timetable for promotion and equity down the line. They should figure it out and come back to her. Jenni didn't have a plan if they balked, because she wasn't going to quit in a huff and look for another job. She assumed they'd do the right thing.

The easiest answer, to Nate, was to find the second sous chef who had so far eluded all of their efforts, which would enable both Jonah and Jenni to cut their workweek by ten hours. Jonah was more willing to discuss a partnership, because he wanted Jenni to be happy. She'd taken a big gamble on him—and now that it was starting to pay off, he wanted to find an appropriate way to thank her. A partnership meant that she stood in line for payouts with the other partners and the investors, so it wasn't money out of pocket today. Once they were in a position to write disbursement checks, they could include Jenni—and they could use the partnership offer to insist on a five-year commitment. That had advantages when they opened a second place and needed a reliable person to run the Huertas kitchen.

Nate was blunt: He reminded Jonah that Jenni was a sous chef who had never managed a kitchen before, and restaurants weren't in the business of giving equity to sous chefs. If Jonah really wanted to, they could slice off a percentage or two of equity shares, which could mean a few thousand dollars for Jenni after the investors were paid off, but that wasn't a real partnership, and it might not mollify her. Better to give her a big raise immediately, he told Jonah, $5,000 or $6,000 a year
and a monthly stipend so that she could go out to eat. She'd feel better, and they'd buy some time to see how she handled added managerial responsibilities.

Or they could tell her that she would get equity at Huertas's one-year anniversary, which would provide them with the same window of time to reflect on the decision. They could hold off on a promotion until they hired an additional sous chef, because at that point it made sense: They couldn't expect her to have the same title as someone new who reported to her. There were all sorts of appropriate ways to do this, and no reason to rush ahead with wrong moves just because Jonah felt an emotional debt to her.

They settled on a $4,000 raise, to $42,000, and a stipend to communicate how important she was. She needed to spend more time checking out other restaurants so that she could contribute more to the ongoing development of this menu and of whatever menus they developed for future locations.

•   •   •

Jonah had always been proud
of his work ethic, as a teenage kitchen volunteer and as a line cook. If Maialino needed him to oversee the sous vide chicken, he would bag up 120 pounds of chicken, get them into and out of the circulator, and have them ready to be finished on the flat-top. When the circulator balked, he loaded the bags onto a wheeled cart and pushed it a couple of crosstown blocks to Gramercy Tavern to use their machine, and accommodated the Tavern's cooks if their machine broke down, without ever letting himself fall behind. On a day when the cart's wheel caught the curb and dozens of bags of chicken splattered on the ground, he cursed privately at the guy at the nearby halal food cart who didn't step over to lend a hand—weren't they in the same business, after all?—but all that a passerby saw was a tall, skinny kid righting the cart
and reloading the bags. A small tantrum might have been an appropriate response, but Jonah preferred outward calm.