Generation Chef (24 page)

And they had to generate buzz, which meant opening on Sunday and Monday nights as soon as possible, preferably by the end of January.
Those were the nights that chefs usually had off, which for many of them meant eating at someone else's restaurant and posting photos of the food on Instagram. Huertas needed to be part of that.

Jonah hadn't stopped him yet, so Nate pushed ahead with the one idea he assumed Jonah would resist: Maybe they ought to get rid of the tasting menu altogether, even though it was essential to Jonah's original notion of what Huertas was going to be, even though Pete Wells had made a point of saying what a great deal it was. As far as Nate was concerned, the tasting menu was part of the fundamental problem—the front room and the back room were so different that people didn't know what to expect, or whether to make a reservation, or why they couldn't sit in back and still have some of the cool food that had flown by on trays as they walked to their table. He referred to a list he'd drawn up of successful, enviable restaurants and made his point: None of them had what he considered to be Huertas's competing formats.

Jonah looked at the list. He didn't want to argue; he was prepared to listen to Nate, but they had to consider the benefits of the menu, too. A set menu meant less craziness in the kitchen, which saved money because they could get by with a smaller staff. It meant less waste because they used the same list of ingredients for a week at a time. It was easier for the servers because the story stayed the same night after night. It was part of Jonah's original concept, the place where he got to show people what he could do—and the
Times
loved it. That ought to count for something. What was the hurry?

Nate had a single answer to everything Jonah said: They needed to make their message simpler, to build a brand that would multiply. Going for it, in his mind, meant a more varied menu, more choices no matter where a guest sat, not two separate concepts. The more he talked, the quieter Jonah got, the more Nate talked to fill the silence. Luke had
mentioned a steakhouse whose food costs were an unimaginable 40 percent, but they made $2 million the previous year, which to Nate was proof that they needed to spend money to make money.

Jonah sighed. Steakhouses were different. They charged a lot more.

“Then what do you think?” asked Nate.

“It's not hard to expand the food,” said Jonah, as though he were figuring it out as he spoke. “It does take more energy and more bodies in the kitchen to do more intricate things.”

Nate took that as encouragement and circled back to the hiring issue. “You need to come in later than ten and not worry so much about maintenance,” said Nate. “You need to trust other people in the kitchen, but I know that's not your MO.”

“Maybe I need to change,” said Jonah, “but that's how I lead. I work harder than anyone. I lead by example.”

Nate persisted: Jonah should think more about the menu and less about daily kitchen tasks. He should change the pintxos more often and make them more interesting, and they could keep the tasting menu for now as long as it was “a really bombing menu.” If Jonah needed more time to come up with new dishes, they could change the menu less often. Whatever they did, they ought to pay the publicist for more time and have some serious conversations about how to define and promote the Huertas brand.

Jonah took it all in, but he didn't jump to any conclusions, not yet. He'd delayed thinking about a lot of this, he knew it, but the longer he and Nate worked together, the more he thought it was important not to rush into things. They were a good balance: Jonah worked hard to compartmentalize his life, to spend time with Marina and his friends on his two days off, and not think too much about work, while Nate couldn't stop the conversation inside his head, which meant that it was Nate's
job to push and Jonah's to resist until he was sure. Jonah was the principal owner. He had to distinguish between what was broken and what had to evolve, to fix the former and let the rest work itself out.

Jonah agreed with Nate about opening seven nights a week, though he saw no difference between the last week in January and the first week in February, and refused to consider an earlier opening unless he got the kitchen straightened out. He was happy to stretch the menu a little bit, but not to dismantle it, not yet. As for becoming the next Major Food Group—if it were possible simply to devise a plan to accomplish that goal, more people would be doing it. They would do their best, they would try to innovate, but being big was a cumulative process that seemed to involve timing and luck as well as a bombing menu.

•   •   •

A few nights later,
Jonah sold what he described, with a touch of incredulity, as a ton of fried yellow saffron rice served with scrambled eggs and aioli, shrimp and peas and bacon—paella meets fried rice, was the way he saw it. He watched in bewilderment as serving after serving flew out of the kitchen, at $14 for ingredients that had cost about ninety cents. If Nate thought that worrying less about authenticity was a good idea, Jonah was prepared to try it, but he hadn't anticipated the crazy response to what he considered a “little bit silly dish.” Yes, it was delicious, but it belonged on the menu at Mission Chinese Food, one of the restaurants on Nate's aspirational list, not here. The allure of Mission Chinese depended in great part on its disregard for geography or culinary legacy; the original San Francisco location offered kung pao pastrami and salt cod fried rice, and in New York, brisket qualified as what chef-owner Danny Bowien called “American Oriental food.” People seemed to love his willingness to mix things up—Mission Chinese, a different kind of stutter-step success, had survived a Department of Health
shutdown with its popularity intact, and had reopened in a new space on New York's Lower East Side, soon to be joined by the nearby Mission Cantina, which took on Mexican food with a similar irreverence.

If Jonah had a fledgling brand, it definitely wasn't fusion; Wells had acknowledged that he merged Spanish food with “the seasonal Greenmarket aesthetic,” but it was still Spanish. Jonah had eaten at too many places that he considered “vaguely Spanish,” back when he was doing research for the Huertas menu, and he'd always thought that it was a shame to mess around with the food. Better to do it the way it was supposed to be done. Huevos rotos felt authentic to him because it was still a plate of egg, potato, and chorizo, even though he transformed the basic ingredients into something he never would have found in Madrid. Fried rice? Friends of his had hung out at a Chinese place in an underground parking garage in Madrid, and Jonah joined them a couple of times, but it seemed a waste of time. He had one semester in Spain, so he ought to be eating Spanish food. He felt the same way about the Huertas menu—he much preferred a smart interpretation of an authentic dish to what he considered to be a culinary mash-up.

“My sensibilities are to stay away from novelty,” he said, even as he absorbed the obvious lesson of the fried rice, which he refused to call paella on the menu, because it wasn't. He had to get out of his head and factor in his customers' reactions to the food, because the consensus was clear: They liked to be knocked out a little bit, and they clearly didn't mind a tasty surprise. They were a little numb from all the choice, these days—within two blocks of Huertas a hungry customer could choose Mexican, Spanish, Filipino, Japanese, Italian, vegan, Greek, or Polish food, as well as a place that specialized in schnitzel. Novelty clearly helped to get their attention, as ambivalent as Jonah might be about it.

“People would rather eat exciting than delicious at this point,” he
said. “Not to say it can't be both, but you have to think about what will be exciting, and putting that first is what you have to do.” So he piped trout mousse into little puff pastries and topped it with trout roe, another pintxo he wouldn't have found in Spain. He wrapped leftover New Year's Eve filet mignon around pickled vegetables. He created a lamb dish that felt more French than Spanish to him. He put fried, battered calamari on the dinner menu and tried to drag it toward Spain, for the sake of his own self-respect, with a piquillo pepper vinaigrette and fried olives.

Someone else could have concocted an entertaining narrative about the fried rice, a story that started in a windowless Chinese restaurant in Madrid, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the memory bank of a young food-obsessed New Yorker, and landed on a plate at his first restaurant in the East Village, and the publicist probably could have placed it on one of the food websites. It wasn't as though anyone was going to contact the Chinese place and have them scroll through their credit-card records to see what Jonah Miller had eaten on his single-digit visits during his semester abroad.

He would never do such a thing. Jonah had boundaries, like his food, like David Waltuck and Peter Hoffman. He'd always thought that was an asset; he had a clear sense of what he would and wouldn't do, and his skill and ambition existed inside that frame. His mentors had made their names on the food, not the personality behind it, and Jonah aspired to do the same—a sensible position, he figured, as he was by his own measure too low-key to sell wacky, more interested in creativity on the plate than in promoting an attention-grabbing persona. “Look at me physically, and my background,” he said. “I'm not half-Asian, I don't come from a mixed family. Even the Carbone guys have that Italian American thing going, their names scream it,” referring to two of the three partners in Major Food Group and Carbone, their latest
restaurant. “My name, not so memorable. The Bloomberg website even had me as Jonah Hill for a few moments,” mistaking a tall, half-Jewish kid from Manhattan's Upper West Side for a short, rotund character actor.

“I'm not eccentric enough, and I have a little too much self-respect to pretend,” he said. The publicist always told him to be bubblier on television. Jonah considered himself to be bubbly enough—or as bubbly as he could manage and still feel like himself.

He was clear on what his brand would never be: huge, unpredictable, driven by personality or surprise. To improve his mood—it was a bit demoralizing to see how much people liked something he wasn't sure he wanted to cook—he took refuge where he always did, and thought about the next dish he wanted to develop. He would keep the fried rice on the menu, but he wanted to add a version of cocido madrileño as winter dragged on, a Spanish stew of chickpeas, carrots, chicken, blood sausage, and braising cuts like pork shoulder. The traditional way to serve it was with the broth as a first course, followed by the vegetables and then the meat. Jonah considered serving the vegetables and meat together, but he didn't want to tinker much beyond that. The chickpeas produced the most beautiful liquid. It would be a very nice broth.

In the meantime, an emboldened Nate kept lobbing ideas: guest chefs who invented pintxos in whatever style of cuisine they cooked, house-label vermút bottled by a woman in Brooklyn, an off-the-menu chistorra sausage served like a hot dog to make the customer feel like a cool insider, a whole rabbit, a customized button-down shirt for the pintxo runner. Hearth, a ten-year-old restaurant a couple of blocks up the street, had a thriving daytime business selling take-out cups of homemade bone broth from a kitchen window that opened onto the street, in the hours when the space wasn't in use. Nate eyed the front windows of Huertas and wondered how to monetize them. He urged
Jonah to consider what seemed to be the defining question, because quality clearly wasn't enough to make the difference: “What is the cachet piece of the puzzle?”

•   •   •

Part of it involved
getting people to talk about Huertas, and not just the off-work chefs who might show up on Sunday and Monday. Jonah was in Williamsburg having brunch with Marina when he got a text from Jenni: Chef Bobby Flay, one of the first wave of chefs to become television celebrities, had just walked into Huertas. Jonah paid his check, dashed to the L train shuttle from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and got there in time to saunter over and greet his guest.

•   •   •

Alberto had to take
a half step back when the new line cook started, and he tried to be philosophical about it. Lina had far more experience than he did. She ought to work the fry station and be the one who filled in at roast and sauté, and he would show his willingness to do whatever he was asked to do, on any shift they asked him to work.

His considered calm lasted about a week, until Jonah inadvertently left him off the schedule on a day when he was supposed to work, which sent him to Jenni, his direct boss, to find out if he'd done something wrong. She reassured him that it was a mistake. There was going to be plenty for him to do, even with the new line cook and the sous they hadn't yet found, because Huertas was going to open seven nights a week on February 8. He'd be bouncing around for now, filling in on other cooks' days off, but Jenni wanted him to understand the hidden advantage to having the new line cook: It would be easier to find space on the roster for more training shifts for Alberto. He'd already worked the roast station for the occasional brunch. The next step, once
everyone was settled in, was to train him there for dinner, when the menu was far more extensive. That way, he'd be ready to step in for a dinner shift on a quiet night.

A sous chef continued to elude Jonah. The candidate from Blanca lost interest in the wage debate. One of Peter Hoffman's sous came over for a trail that Jonah pronounced “perfect,” so he offered her a job and told himself that Peter might be relieved to let her go now that he had two sets of cooks and only one restaurant. He never had to have that delicate conversation, because she took a sous chef job at Roberta's. Jonah refused to get too nervous about it, though, despite Nate's urgency about the need to make big changes, because when he caught his breath and thought about more than this week or this month, when he took a longer view, Huertas seemed to be in pretty good shape. They were on track to make even more money in January than they had in December, which might be an indication that they'd survived the worst.