Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  In 2003, when he was sixteen, Jonah made up his mind: He was going to be a chef and open his own restaurant, and he was going to do it by the time he was twenty-three. David Waltuck had opened Chanterelle when he was twenty-four, and Jonah liked to compete, so he set his deadline a year sooner, for the heck of it.

  He convinced Nat to start up a catering company during their junior year of high school, and that spring they shopped their résumés to some bigger restaurants, one of which refused even to consider them for an unpaid apprenticeship, called a stage—from the French stagiaire, or trainee—because clearly Jonah and Nat had faked their résumés. No seventeen-year-old had logged that kind of experience at a restaurant like Chanterelle.

  The chef de cuisine at Gramercy Tavern believed them, though, and suddenly they found themselves in an environment that was a sea change from what the Waltucks referred to as their mom-and-pop restaurant: forty tables in the dining room, fifteen more in the casual bar room, seventeen seats at the bar itself, and crowds, always. Gramercy Tavern opened in 1994, when Jonah was seven, and was one of the most popular restaurants in New York City, alongside its older sibling, Union Square Café, which had opened in 1985. They were the foundation of USHG, which by the time Jonah started at Gramercy Tavern had expanded to include Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, and Blue Smoke, and would soon add The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art as well as the first Shake Shack.

  The kitchen at Gramercy Tavern was “more aggressive, competitive, bigger, full of young, hungry chefs,” to Jonah, and he loved it. Occasionally the chef who hired him let him spend lunch service standing at the pass, where finished plates were checked one last time before they headed into the dining room. Jonah got to wipe an errant drop from the rim of the plate, to consider the composition of each dish, to understand exactly how great food was supposed to look and smell and taste. The following summer he embarked on a new venture, a room-service operation for the residents of the apartment building where his family lived. Every day he posted the next day’s menu in the elevator and took orders from neighbors who preferred Jonah’s food to their own home cooking or takeout, and every day he delivered the evening meal.

  He completed a dual major in food studies and restaurant management at NYU, wedged in a stint as a host and reservationist at Blue Smoke, and took an internship in the restaurant’s office. And he cooked, part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers. Jonah worked the garde-manger and grill stations at Savoy, another downtown pioneer, where since 1990 chef Peter Hoffman, like David Waltuck, had offered a menu based on what he could get at the farmers market and from local suppliers. When Jonah took a semester abroad he headed for Spain—not France, which was no longer an imperative for an aspiring chef, as it had been when Waltuck was coming up, but Spain, whose food had not already been channeled onto American plates for decades.

  By the time Jonah graduated, in 2009, he figured he was two steps away, three, tops, from being ready: He had to find a job as a line cook at a restaurant that would show potential investors how serious he was. He had to work hard and get promoted to sous chef. From that vantage point he could look ahead and decide if he needed to log time as an executive chef or chef de cuisine, to show that he could run a kitchen—or if he could step right into his future, straight from sous chef, in time to meet his deadline.

  He was the first line cook hired at Maialino, USHG’s newest restaurant, brought on six months before it opened in the winter of 2009, but he ended up having to work for two years, just past his twenty-third birthday, before he got his promotion to sous chef. The six gridlocked sous chefs above him weren’t going anywhere because they’d committed to at least one year when they were hired, and he found himself eyeing them to figure out who might leave first, even as he sized up the competition among the other line cooks. One of Jonah’s coworkers got the first open slot, but he assumed that he was in line for the next opening, or at worst, the one after that.

  Nick Anderer, then the executive chef and since 2012 the chef and a partner, remembered Jonah “coming at me hard” for a promotion to sous, and a particular slot at that—the morning sous, who soon started to joke that Jonah and another line cook were trying to hustle him out the door. He wasn’t wrong. As long as he stayed in place, he kept Jonah from moving forward. When he left, Jonah got the morning slot, which he liked because there was only one sous on that shift. From that vantage point he could consider his next step.

  He wrote a business plan for Huertas in between shifts at Maialino and had a friend who was in design school turn his sketches into an early set of drawings and a logo. He took a cold look at the kitchen hierarchy and didn’t see the next advantageous move. He’d already missed the chance to open a place when he was twenty-three, and while working as an executive chef might be the traditional path to having his own place, he wasn’t convinced it was necessary. He could have his name on the menu at a place that someone else owned, or at his own restaurant. Cooks told one another: If you don’t have a restaurant before you’re thirty, you’ll never have one. The only option that made sense, it seemed, was to quit and get on with his life.

  After eleven months as a sous, Jonah told Nick he was thinking about leaving. Nick, who had been an executive sous at Gramercy Tavern before he opened Maialino, had been the beneficiary of what he called “a carrot” that USHG occasionally dangled to keep a talented chef around—he was promised the opportunity to run a new restaurant within the company if he’d hang around and be a little patient. Nick had just promoted two of his sous to share the previously nonexistent post of executive sous, and one of them was clearly on track to open a place for USHG, but there was no point in having that discussion with Jonah because it was clear to Nick that owning his own place mattered to him as much as running a kitchen did. Jonah gave three months’ notice to give Nick enough time to find and train a replacement, and planned a quick research trip to Spain. As soon as he returned, he’d start raising money in earnest and looking for a space. It had taken a little longer than he’d hoped to get here, but now he was going to be in charge of the timetable. He revised his internal calendar and told himself he’d have his own place when he was twenty-five.

  • • •

  A generation earlier, when Waltuck decided to become a chef, the path was either reassuringly clear or exclusionary, depending on who was contemplating the journey. At the high end, the American restaurant kitchen was a respectful reincarnation of the French model, in terms of both how it operated and what it served, a rule-bound universe summarized by one chef who worked his way up as “white, militaristic, and male.” Ambitious Americans studied in France and came home to wear toques and utter “Oui, Chef” with conviction every time an order came to their stations, which were organized according to the French brigade system developed in the late nineteenth century by chef Auguste Escoffier—garde-manger for the salads and cold appetizers, entremetier for soups and vegetable and egg dishes, saucier for sauces and, in a smaller place, for sauté, and the sous chef, plucked from the ranks of the line cooks because he had the potential to run a kitchen some day, to become a chef de cuisine. The few women who pursued a career in the kitchen usually gravitated toward pastry work, which offered more regular hours and, so, the chance to fulfill domestic obligations at dinnertime.

  The early exceptions showed up in communities that preferred their own way of doing things, or among individuals inspired to step off the defined path; in both cases, much of the change started in California, which had institutionalized a certain skepticism about the way things were supposed to be done, and was audacious enough to name a cuisine after itself. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Berkeley considered hierarchy and pedigree to be suspect no matter what the field, and chef Joyce Goldstein remembers wondering why anyone would feel the need to embrace French tradition when homegrown attributes—equal parts passion, a sense of community, and commitment—worked just fine. She credits the city’s “mom-and-pop culture�
�� for a flourishing alternative model that supported the 1971 opening of Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse—and enabled an outlier like Goldstein to succeed, even though she broke every rule in sight: She was a chef, not a pastry chef, and got a late start as chef at the Café at Chez Panisse, later still as the owner of her own place, Square One. Goldstein opened her business in 1984, when she was forty-nine, an age at which many chefs were already casualties of the physical rigors of the job, and in 1993 won the James Beard Award for best chef in California.

  If the Southern California restaurant scene was built on a more traditional model—chef Wolfgang Puck and restaurateur Michael McCarty were both classically trained chefs—the people who worked there often had another agenda in mind. Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton followed the prescribed steps up to a point—she studied abroad and worked her way up from pastry assistant at McCarty’s Michael’s restaurant to run the pastry program at Puck’s Spago—but she and a handful of other women cooks ignored the part of the narrative that involved gender and a limited destiny. If she wanted to open a bakery and a restaurant with her then husband, chef Mark Peel, and years later make the transition to chef, opening three new places with partners Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, she would do so—along the way winning James Beard Awards for both best pastry chef and outstanding chef, the only person to have won both honors.

  There was still a kitchen hierarchy; a room full of hungry customers required something more reliable than anarchy. What started to change was the identity of the people standing at the stations and, with that, their attitude. They responded to orders with “Yes, Chef,” or by calling back the name of the dish that had been ordered, wore little brocade skullcaps instead of toques, and created menus based on bounty rather than on received ideas of fine food. Cooks who were not willing to be left out pried the door open, not fast enough to qualify as a revolution but wide enough to make the insiders take note.

  And then, whether inspired or threatened by the disruption, or both, the men who already had kitchen jobs stepped into the fray: Like the stifled children of authoritative parents, they rebelled. Jonah grew up in the shadow of the swaggering bad-boy cook, the expletive-spewing, drugs-and-alcohol-addled descendants of Anthony Bourdain. The anti-chef positioned himself as far from the austere French model as it was possible to do and still hold down a job; he might be talented, but he often showed up for a shift in an altered state and took pride in the fact that he could turn out great food while operating at a diminished capacity. Some members of the boys’ club did not respond well to newcomers, behaving in ways that dared the faint of heart to walk in the kitchen door.

  Change, however messy, had its benefits on the plate: A chef might be a somber man in a white coat and a tall hat who knew the classic French sauces, or a woman who knew them but was more interested in creating a dish around that week’s bounty of tomatoes. In 1998 Nancy Silverton started grilled cheese night at Campanile, because she liked grilled cheese and could come up with lots of tasty variations, and suddenly that was a perfectly reasonable thing for a high-end restaurant to serve. Cooking was up for grabs, as was the notion of who got to do it—not yet a meritocracy, but not quite the closed society it had been for so long. That was the start; by the time Jonah started to look for a full-time job, chefs had turned their backs on geography and natural science as well. They might mix Asian and French ingredients, as Waltuck did, or go further afield to merge Mexican and Korean, because maps were nothing more than another set of restrictions. A chef could ignore the boundaries of solid, liquid, and gas and turn an olive into a quivering, olive-flavored bubble, because there was no reason not to.

  • • •

  The changes that came next, the ones that defined the landscape Jonah stepped into in 2013, had more to do with life outside the kitchen than inside. In 2003 there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Eater or Grubstreet.com, no Instagram or Foursquare, no iPhone or Android. The debut of Top Chef was still three years away; Mario Batali might be gaining a following on Molto Mario, a dump-and-stir instructional television show, but the era of competitive cooking, with the lure of money, prizes, and national exposure for any talented comer, had not yet begun. The economy was good, so there was little need to rethink the spacious bricks-and-mortar model. The leading edge of the millennials had just hit twenty-one, most of them still too young to drive, not yet the kind of marketing force that defined trends.

  Ten years later, nothing was the same: More people talked about food more often, in more ways, until the ability to make great food achieved celebrity status—which in turn increased the volume and frequency of the conversation. Cooking for a living developed cachet, and held out the double promise of profits and fame. Nick Anderer, who was only nine years older than Jonah, had been embarrassed to tell his professor father that he intended to be a chef, but shame was no longer an issue.

  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of chefs and head cooks in the New York City area more than doubled between 2003 and 2013, from just over three thousand to more than seven thousand, even as an increasing number decamped to escape the city’s competitive job market. Restaurant openings were up, although closures kept pace, and Nick marveled that, as he saw it, “Anyone can have a 40-seat restaurant in the East Village.” From there a chef could catapult to empire, like Momofuku’s David Chang, who had spun the neighborhood’s Momofuku Noodle Bar, opened in 2004, into a global network that continued to grow—five restaurants in New York City, with more in development; locations in Washington, D.C., Toronto, Canada, and Sydney, Australia; the Milk Bar bakery, involved in its own expansionist agenda; a quarterly food publication, Lucky Peach; an online market for products and souvenirs.

  A chef might find herself at the happy intersection of effort and opportunity, a celebrity without seeking it, as April Bloomfield did when the man who would become her business partner, Ken Friedman, auditioned her to become the chef at his gastropub, The Spotted Pig. She was British and knew the food; he was already well into planning and needed a chef who could execute his idea. Suddenly Bloomfield was no longer an anonymous if well-regarded sous chef at London’s River Café, but at twenty-nine the standard-bearer for a new dining concept—new to New Yorkers, at least—and in charge of a kitchen that would be the first of several they opened together.

  Along the way, they upended accepted notions of time and space: Danny Meyer had waited nine years to open his second white-tablecloth restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, an eternity by current standards, and a model that chefs seemed in a hurry to leave behind. Nick Anderer, who worked in kitchens for eleven years before he got his name on a menu, created one at Maialino that was designed to bridge the gap between the dwindling number of orders for a traditional coursed meal—“composed appetizer, composed second course, composed entrée, composed dessert”—and the more fashionable shared plates. He imagined that the next place he’d open for Meyer’s company, a Roman pizzeria called Marta, was the likelier model for the new age—no tablecloths, a big display kitchen, and pizza nudging entrées out of the way.

  The familiar middle ground—a chef and his restaurant, a reservation, a meal—started to feel tentative if not shortsighted, an unreliable foundation for a long career.

  Meyer, referred to as “the greatest restaurateur Manhattan has ever seen” by the New York Times, evaluated the scene as “good and bad,” and he wasn’t equivocating. Too much had changed, too fast, to be able to predict how all of this would resolve itself, whether the antic pace would last or correct itself into more modulated growth. In the meantime, the generation in play—cooks on the cusp of a career—were not likely to hold still long enough to find out, lest they be left behind.

  It seemed impossible to reconcile the impact of everything that had happened in a single decade. Social media was good, surely, because it helped a young chef spread the word about his new place, cheaply and quickly—and bad because it sped up the conversation. Chefs used to have six mo
nths to find their feet before a review, but now critics showed up in the first six weeks, and an opening without online coverage might as well not have happened.

  Competition television was good and bad for the same reason—it promised a backstage look at kitchen life, which got viewers more interested in dining out and in the chef as media personality, but it drew people to the profession who would never survive a season of dicing vegetables in a basement prep kitchen, as Jonah had at Chanterelle. Chef Tom Colicchio, the head judge of Bravo’s Top Chef since its 2006 debut, distinguished that show, which allowed its contestants to “shine,” he said, from shows that shamed contestants with challenges they’d never encounter in real life and loud, extended dressings-down, a difference seemingly lost on viewers who now watched cooks of any age cook under any circumstances. The Food Network alone had more than one hundred million viewers for what Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, called “gladiatorial combat” in a piece for the New York Times. Pollan saw food shows as sports television, and the analogy extended beyond cutthroat competition: Chefs could be rich and famous like celebrities in other fields.

  Unless, of course, they failed, in an equally spectacular fashion. The economy was another element in the whiplash equation, with unexpected consequences no matter what it did. The healthy prerecession economy seemed at the time to be a gold mine—easy mortgages and plenty of places to rent—but it turned out to be a money trap when the recession hit and previously giddy chefs found themselves in over their heads. And the years of tight money rewarded ingenuity: A young chef might have trouble raising money to rent a space, but ambition couldn’t wait, so he looked for an alternative, and the recession elevated the food truck from the ubiquitous ice-cream vendor to a gourmet outpost on wheels. Los Angeles’s classically trained Roy Choi was the first food-truck operator to make the top ten on Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chef list, in 2010, with the Kogi Korean BBQ truck he’d launched two years earlier. Kimchi on a quesadilla made perfect sense, as long as people lined up to buy it.