Generation Chef (31 page)

And then Chris decided to quit, only weeks into the perfect gig, because he didn't like the way the kitchen ran. Suddenly Jonah's future was right in front of him, complete with an alternate concept for a new place, one that Jonah had to admit he preferred—not a bigger space that emphasized takeout but a cozier, smaller one where he and Chris could serve their versions of whatever New York classics they felt like cooking, anything from the city's culinary past that inspired a reboot. Nate could probably raise money for a forty-seat place without breaking a sweat, and Jonah was ready for a place that was packed all the time. The often empty back room at Huertas did not earn its keep; he wouldn't mind having to turn people away.

Nate loved the idea of having Chris around because he injected new energy into the kitchen and made a second restaurant more of an imperative. He did not love the idea of a smaller second place unless it made his as-yet undisclosed agenda easier to implement. Nate was almost done with a business plan he'd been working on for six months, whenever he had a day off, for a concept that would not necessarily include Jonah. If Jonah and Chris preferred their idea, as Nate expected they would, he would have less trouble striking out on his own. He could hire another chef to work for him, and if Jonah wanted to consult, that might work out fine.

Nate had convinced himself that they'd taken Huertas as far as they
could, and being a minority partner in a small business was not enough for him. He wanted to own a business. He had even started to look for a space, not in the bustling center of Williamsburg but “on the outskirts of the main strip,” where rents might be a bit lower and he'd have a better chance of leasing a space he could build out to his specifications. He looked closer to downtown Brooklyn and near the area that Jonah had dismissed years before, which seemed to have developed more of a street life since then. Nate hoped to raise $1 million, find a warehouse space, and design a combination of retail and restaurant with an emphasis on the former; he figured 400 square feet for take-out and 1,400 square feet for seated service, but no servers, only food runners who delivered orders that customers made at the counter. He hoped to translate the places he loved in Los Angeles—Gjusta in Venice and Sqirl in Silver Lake—into a version that worked in his hometown.

It had to be fast. In a glowing review of High Street on Hudson, a Philadelphia import, Pete Wells had pointed out a shortcoming of the New York restaurant scene: “Restaurants that aim to be useful and interesting all day long are becoming more common in Los Angeles and other cities; New York could use more of them.” That single sentence was the food equivalent of the call to post for the Kentucky Derby, as talk spread on the restaurant circuit about this chef or that front-of-house person who was ready to step into the void. Travis Lett, chef and co-owner of Gjusta and its sister restaurant, Gjelina, had just announced that he was coming to Manhattan to take over a big downtown space with restaurateur Ken Friedman of The Spotted Pig, The Breslin, and John Dory, a plan that had been rumored for months.

“You better hurry,” a colleague warned Nate. “You're going to miss the boat.”

Jonah assumed that Nate was working on the idea they had talked about, the one he called Sunchoke and Nate called Croft, and had
begun to wonder why it was taking him so long to share it. But he didn't push; if Nate had a reason for holding back there was probably nothing Jonah could do about it. Still, he was a money-raising machine, and while Chris and Jonah were capable of finding investors they weren't as good at it as Nate was. It would take longer without him, if that was what was about to happen. Jonah knew that Nate would expect an equal partnership on the next place, so he decided to show his good intentions: He offered Nate some of his own equity in Huertas to confirm that they were in this together.

Nate thought, That's not much money and it could be years down the line. The 2016 budget anticipated $100,000 in profits, less than the 2015 figure and a nod to what they called a “sad truth” in a letter to investors: It was harder for established restaurants to maintain volume. They'd sent out the first distribution checks to investors in the third quarter of 2015, much earlier than anyone anticipated, but then postponed a second distribution until after the first quarter of 2016, in the hope of being able to cut larger checks later in the year. And money wasn't the real issue: Once Nate started to think about running his own place he couldn't stop thinking about it, and while Jonah's offer was very generous it wasn't enough to distract him. Nate was in the same place Jonah had been when he quit Maialino: He was ready to venture out on his own.

Jonah and Nate and Chris circled one another, trying to figure out what would get them farthest, fastest, wondering if the best answer would require a new configuration. Jonah could partner again with Nate and figure out how to involve Chris, but Nate had started to drop hints about what he was working on and it sounded less like a creative partnership and more like a chef-for-hire, which hardly interested Jonah. Nate could try to convince Chris to decamp with him, a long shot given the chefs' friendship but a pitch he was prepared to make if Chris seemed at all interested. Or he could pursue his project without
either Jonah or Chris. He could hire a chef to run the back of house and not have to take on another partner at all.

Jonah could move forward on the smaller place with Chris and Nate, or with Chris and without Nate, which meant that he would have to hire a general manager. Restaurants ran that way, so it wasn't out of the question, and Jonah had resources of his own, Huertas investors who were ready to invest in a new project. For that matter, Chris could take the menu he was working on and find a place—he was looking as well—either with Jonah or on his own.

Chris floated the idea of the three of them working together on a set of overlapping projects: Huertas, Nate's idea, whatever it was, and Jonah's and Chris's idea, all of them tied together in a loose framework that played to everyone's strengths. But that didn't give Nate autonomy or get Jonah out of Huertas, so clearly it was not going to be their first choice.

Nick Thatos, the contractor and designer who built Huertas, said that the answer was simple: Go bigger. He wanted Jonah to consider not 40 seats but 100 or even 120. That's what made money these days.

•   •   •

When Gavin Kaysen was Jonah's age,
he was Daniel Boulud's employee. When Stephanie Izard was Jonah's age, she was passed out on the floor. David Chang was battling to keep his second place, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, afloat, and April Bloomfield had not yet started cooking at The Spotted Pig. Jonah had plenty of options, when he thought about it; maybe too many. For the first time since he quit Maialino and got ready to open Huertas, he took a breath and looked around.

He knew what he didn't want: the big place Nick was talking about or Nate's chef-for-hire notion, whatever the actual business arrangement might be. If Chris wanted to pursue the smaller restaurant project together, Jonah would be happy to do so, because having him around
Huertas only reminded Jonah of how much fun it was to be in the kitchen together—but in truth the notion of a second restaurant overwhelmed him at the moment. He'd done it. Nate and Chris hadn't, yet. The key, for him, was to keep his head and not rush into anything. There was a next chapter for a talented chef, he knew it. To his surprise, given the hell-bent pace of the last few years, he wasn't quite sure what it was.

His first responsibility was to keep Huertas healthy, so he decided to make some changes of the sort that Coraine prescribed. In the summer of 2016 Jonah right-sized the back-of-house staff—eliminated one cook and got ready to cut a second one during slow weeks. The kitchen could handle the current volume with four people, not five, which gave him at least a salary's worth of savings. To make it easier for the remaining cooks, he intended to make another round of what he called “menu edits,” not as sweeping as when he gave up the menu del dia but designed to accommodate both the smaller kitchen staff and Huertas's regular customers.

As the restaurant entered its third year, Jonah took “a hard look at who comes here, and they're not necessarily foodies. They're people who want Spanish food, so maybe we give them what they come to expect rather than put as much of a spin on it.” Customers were not as interested in creative preparations as he or Nate had thought they would be—so he decided to offer charred shishito peppers year-round rather than when they were in season, even if it meant buying Mexican ones when the local supply ran out. He added albondigas because meatballs were popular, and figured that at least his would be far better than average. Diners could still order a meat or cheese plate but not choose the individual components, because a standard assortment was faster for the kitchen to prepare. He put the saffron fried rice on the menu.

“More surefire crowd pleasers,” he said. “Stuff we're still proud of,
but maybe not that exciting for us to cook day in and day out.” He had a business to run, and this, he believed, was the formula for a profitable 2016.

With those adjustments in place he could afford to focus on the smart next move. Nate finally showed him the business plan for Gertie, named for his grandmother and now closer in concept, he said, to the Washington, DC, salad chain sweetgreen than to Gjusta or the idea that he and Jonah had originally discussed. Sweetgreen had raised $18.5 million to expand beyond its twenty-seven East Coast locations, including money from both Danny Meyer and Daniel Boulud, and Nate wanted a concept he could replicate down the line.

It was an easy call for Jonah. He reiterated that he didn't want to be in the kitchen unless he had “pushback” on the menu, which clearly wasn't part of the plan, so he'd be happy to help out or give advice but didn't want to participate more actively than that. He had not worked this hard—and achieved this much—to cook someone else's food. Privately, he wondered how much trouble Nate might have finding the chef he was sure was out there, because to Jonah the menu fell in the tricky space between great, challenging food and no-brainer cuisine.

“It's not the food I want to cook,” he said. “And in a way it's very ambitious, but in another sense it's like Blue Smoke,” referring to the USHG barbecue restaurants. “You're going to have a hard time attracting talented cooks because it's not that interesting food, but it takes a lot of people to keep it moving. It's hard to find that in-between person, because it doesn't sound like fun cooking.” And that was only one of the challenges Nate faced; he confessed that what looked easy often wasn't. One landlord wanted him to bring a committed investor along to prove that someone involved with the project had deep pockets, the Brooklyn neighborhood that at first looked promising was dead when Nate bicycled through at eleven at night, and a sure-thing investor who Nate had
counted on for $50,000 had just bought a new house and had a baby on the way, so maybe next time.

It all sounded very familiar to Jonah, and it raised an immediate logistical question, because he knew how much energy and time it would take to get Gertie off the ground. He could let Nate keep his equity but replace him on the floor, but he didn't, and wouldn't until he saw how this played out. “The hardest thing will be trying to figure out his continued role and salary here, and make sure things aren't falling through the cracks,” said Jonah. “But he wants to do it. It's in his system to pursue it.” If doing so meant that Nate let his Huertas responsibilities slip, Jonah would have to hire a new general manager.

Jonah was unsettled at first by Nate's news, although it wasn't unexpected. It was disorienting. All their talk of what they might do next was about to come unraveled, at least until they saw whether Gertie's got off the ground. The possibility of having to take on a new partner or hire a replacement hardened into a probability, a substantial variable added to the list of unknowns that defined the immediate future. But Jonah was good at turning disappointment into motivation—and after all, his relationship with Nate was not yet three years old. He had wanted to be a chef for far longer than that, and it had never been a conditional dream. He'd never thought, I want to be a chef and own my place but only if I can raise a million dollars, or find a spot in Williamsburg, or hire an already-accomplished team, or have a full liquor license on opening day. He had always intended to be a chef and have a restaurant, no matter what obstacle he had to dodge to do so, and he'd find a way to step around Nate's ambition and move forward. This might turn out to be a good thing in the end if it restored his sense of urgency.

He righted himself quickly and set a personal deadline: He would find something new to do within the next year. Jonah got a half-dozen unsolicited realty listings every week, and while he wasn't actively
looking he always checked them out, just in case one of them “charmed” him in a way that the Huertas location hadn't. He still blamed his space for Huertas's solid but not runaway performance—and while he might not welcome the stress of opening another full-scale restaurant he did wonder what would happen when the address was not a drawback. No reason not to look; he might stumble onto a great place just as Chris got enough investors lined up.

In the meantime, there was the hot dog.
New York
magazine had run an item in its summer 2015 Cheap Eats edition that posed the question, “The East Village pintxos bar's new Basque-hot-dog takeout window might not be the Coney Island boardwalk, but isn't this more or less how Shake Shack got its start?” which fairly guaranteed that readers would take notice. The hot dog window was open again in 2016, even as Jonah started to branch out: He accepted an invitation to have a stall at the Grub Street Beats & Eats event at the weekly Hester Street fair, which promised as many as four thousand hungry guests, and if it went well he'd go back for the regular Saturday fairs through the end of the summer. The organizers of the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival invited him to join a select group of vendors and he said yes to them as well. The hot dog bags had H
UERTAS
B
ASQUE
D
OG
stamped on them, so he was building the brand with every sale.