“If we fail I’m going to leave town and never come back,” he said, as though he meant it. “I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
• • •
When Gavin Kaysen was Jonah’s age he drew up a list of life goals, and one of them was to open his own restaurant by the time he was thirty. By then he had appeared on Food & Wine magazine’s annual list of best new chefs and won the James Beard Rising Star Chef Award, but he still didn’t feel ready. He revised the list and decided to open his own place when he was thirty-five.
Kaysen was just a year younger than Nick Anderer, only eight years older than Jonah, but his experience—a classical education at what might now be considered a stately pace—more closely resembled that of his mentor, fifty-nine-year-old chef Daniel Boulud, who had built a global business on the success of two Michelin-starred restaurants, Daniel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and its more casual sibling, Café Boulud. Anderer used “jailhouse” to describe the atmosphere in the kitchens where he had learned to cook, places where advanced degrees were rare and the early Anthony Bourdain—the confessional renegade cook, not the television host—was an object of admiration. Kaysen followed the more formal French training model: After he graduated from the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, he worked at the restaurant at Domaine Chandon, on the grounds of the Northern California winery opened in 1973 by Moët et Chandon, and then made his pilgrimage overseas, first to L’Auberge de Lavaux in Switzerland and then to the venerable L’Escargot in London, an outpost of French cuisine since 1927. He returned to the States to become executive chef at El Bizcocho in San Diego, which landed him on the Food & Wine list; five years after that he moved to New York as chef de cuisine at Café Boulud, where in 2008 he won the Rising Star award.
Kaysen and his contemporaries might have knife skills and personal ambition in common, but his conversation was peppered with words like “legacy,” and, like his older role models, he found freedom in kitchen discipline. His restaurant, if and when he had one, would be built on formal technique and professionalism; he was part of an effort to build a competitive team for the international Bocuse d’Or cooking competition, a biennial contest named for chef Paul Bocuse in which the United States had yet to place higher than sixth, and had created a foundation with Bocuse’s son, Jerome, and Boulud and the chef-owner of The French Laundry, Thomas Keller, to support and train the team. He was at dinner with Boulud and Keller in 2010 when Keller asked Kaysen, who was about to turn thirty-one, about his plans for the future.
“What’s your goal?” he recalled Keller asking him. “Do you want to have a restaurant someday, or what are you thinking? I’m not trying to get you out of Daniel’s world. I’m just trying to understand.”
Despite his list of life goals, Kaysen had begun to wonder if thirty-five was too late—if in fact thirty-one was too late and he’d already missed his chance.
“I feel like I might be past it,” he confessed.
The two older chefs disagreed. Keller pointed out that he was forty when he opened The French Laundry. Boulud was thirty-nine when he opened Daniel. Kaysen knew it but had forgotten; it seemed so late, when he considered the ages of chefs who were opening places now.
“What’s the difference between now and then?” he asked them.
“Nobody wrote about it then,” said Boulud. No one had clocked his progress; there was scrutiny within the profession but not this constant, urgent level of chatter, which made maturity seem suspect even to Kaysen, who knew better. The notion of too late was a new phenomenon.
It was part of his hesitation, though—the stories he anticipated, the attendant hype or worse, the lack of it, the questions about timing that surely would surface in the narrative about him, and not with the collegial affection that informed Keller’s question. And yet two of his mentors said that age was irrelevant. If Kaysen stopped pushing himself to align with some imaginary schedule, if he thought about having his own place without putting a time stamp on it, he could do it when he felt ready, and not before, a realization that allowed him to relax and wonder if he ought to look around a bit, just to see what might be available.
He did, not a concerted effort but an occasional inquiry, and then, in the summer of 2013, he stepped up the effort. Kaysen loved New York City and respected the prevailing notion that a serious chef had to make his mark there. He had a following that he could turn into investment dollars, so it would not be as much of a stretch as it would be for a younger chef—but he also had a reputation, between his work at Café Boulud and the Bocuse d’Or team, and that sense of history. He wasn’t interested in a little space where he could start the next part of his career. He wanted a substantial location where he could build something that would last.
Early in the process, Kaysen found a beautiful space downtown, across the street from Mario Batali’s Otto, a popular, informal place known for its pizza and pasta—but the NYU crowd was too young, too casual, too fleeting, and probably, at least some of them, constrained by an undergraduate’s budget, and Kaysen lived on the Upper East Side. When he imagined his future, he walked to and from work.
It was too soon to compromise.
He devoted more energy to the search, looked at dozens of spaces in Manhattan and even a few in Southern California, and rejected each one. Then one morning, as he walked his dog, a new question came to him. Why was it so important to stay in New York City? He loved the city, but he’d started to wonder if he loved it because it was the best place for his family to be, or because he was supposed to, because success there was supposed to mean more than accomplishments anywhere else.
He had an epiphany, standing on the street with his dog: He didn’t have to open a restaurant in New York. He wouldn’t fall off the face of the culinary map if he did it somewhere else. He could go anywhere; in fact, he could go home and have a restaurant in Minneapolis, where he grew up. If his reputation survived the self-imposed exile, he would have a chance to distinguish himself in a way he couldn’t in New York City. He’d have a higher profile the minute the doors opened, and he’d have a better family life for himself, his wife, and his two small children. Real estate was cheaper, so theoretically he’d get to spend more on food. It felt risky, but it might be a bigger opportunity.
People in the Midwest ate. “If I cook good food and deliver good service,” he told himself, “they’ll find me.”
Kaysen announced his planned departure from Café Boulud in March 2014, a month before Huertas opened, as Jonah sat mired in inspections and delays. The news caught the New York restaurant community by surprise, and Kaysen quickly became a symbol of a threatened culinary diaspora. If he had the confidence to turn his back on the restaurant capital of the entire country, other chefs might consider doing the same. If he thought he could find reliable, enthusiastic diners in a place where the cost of doing business was far lower, where there were fewer openings each week to distract those diners, and so, less competition for media attention—if it was in fact possible to build a business from an outpost like Minneapolis—then a young chef could reasonably ask whether fighting to succeed in New York was worth all the trouble.
• • •
Early April slid too quickly into mid-April, but finally, it was time. Huertas still didn’t have a front door, although it had columns of steel-rimmed horizontal windows on either side of a wooden slab that served as a temporary door, and a round table set to the left and right of the entrance. The host station was to the left as a guest entered, across from a long rough-hewn wooden bar that had been finished with a deep sheen. The mammoth zinc mural, hung behind the bar, with shelves in front of it to hold bottles of wine and, not soon enough, hard liquor. On the opposite wall, a counter for the standing crowd, and behind it, a row of high tables that ended at the service station midway through the front room.
Farther back there were three big booths, wide enough to hold six, easy, maybe eight
in a pinch, the best seats in the house for diners who loved theater, because they faced the open kitchen. People there could check out the eggs being slow-poached in the immersion circulator, or consider a departing tray of pintxos, or watch the team of young cooks at work. The dining room took up the back third of the space, dark wood and gray paint, exposed original concrete floors and dark acoustic ceiling tiles that looked more like the strands of Jonah’s huevos rotos than like the usual cottage cheese. The booths were trimmed in etched glass set into thin welded steel frames. The lights above the bar were custom made.
Huertas was going to open on Tuesday, April 22, after four days of friends-and-family tryouts that turned into five as the date got closer, because there was no such thing as too much rehearsal. Bad news didn’t last any longer than good news did: The correct oven stand arrived, the flipped placement of the flat-top and the burners seemed less significant as time passed, and there was daily evidence of progress, from the delivery of dry goods to the first batch of chef shirts and kitchen towels. There weren’t any big decisions left, of the sort that led to disagreements or large amounts of permit paperwork, and a comforting inevitability descended. The date was official; an e-mail announcement had gone out to investors. Everyone was in completion mode, though it looked like a race to the finish for the electrician, who was setting up the lights over the bar.
When an expensive midtown Spanish place closed its doors with only one day’s notice to the staff, someone else’s failure became Jonah’s good luck, and he inherited a line cook who’d gone to culinary school in Spain as well as Stew Parlo, an experienced, unflappable bartender who would be the perfect person to develop cocktails with Nate and launch the expanded bar menu once Huertas got its upgrade to a full liquor license. Jonah and Jenni worked on the menu and figured out what they needed to order to get started; he intended to ramp up one step at a time during the soft opening, first offering drinks and a couple of pintxos, then the full bar menu, and then, on the last two nights before the official opening, the dining-room menu as well.
Jenni had watched Jonah make the staff meal at Maialino when he was a sous, so she took that on as one of her first managerial tasks, and on April 1 she set out trays of food along the kitchen counter even as Nick’s crew cleaned up construction debris and remnants of their own lunches. She was going to help transform the staff into a family, and giving them a great meal before they started a shift was a smart way to start. This first meal set the tone: Huertas took care of its employees.
They were just finishing up when the Department of Health inspector arrived for a final preopening inspection. Health Department inspections were always a surprise, in terms of the exact time, but this was worse: Jonah drew an inspector who was legendary for her attention to, and criticism of, the smallest detail. On a good day, he did things that attracted an inspector’s heightened scrutiny. The Health Department was nervous about sous vide because it involved cooking vacuum-packed proteins for a long time at lower-than-standard temperatures, and the fact that Jonah was one of the few chefs in town who’d taken a safety course to get certification didn’t do much to offset the concern; prepared incorrectly, sous vide ingredients could harbor botulism or salmonella bacteria. He kept the jamón on display, which increased the risk that its temperature could rise above the acceptable 41 degrees Fahrenheit. As he watched her jot down notes, he wished for that predictable kind of trouble. She wasn’t going to bother him about eggs or ham today, not with so many other infractions staring her in the face.
He stood by, helpless, as she took in the scene: trays of food perched on the kitchen counter, construction dust, and general disarray. She went downstairs and found mouse droppings, because the restaurant still didn’t have a front door or a basement door to close off the delivery ramp that ran to the street.
She tallied the violations and let Jonah know that an inspector would have to come back before the soft opening to confirm that he had resolved what he swore to her were temporary problems. He ought to take this very seriously: She wanted to be sure he understood how much trouble he could have been in.
“If you’d already been open for business,” she told him, “I would have shut you down.”
• • •
One of the things that sustained Jonah was a little movie that had played in his head for years, in which he spoke to the assembled staff of his first restaurant on the first night of service, which for Huertas would be the first night of the soft opening.
He used to wonder who the staff would turn out to be, because until now they had been fantasy stand-ins for people he would meet down the line. He had arrived at down the line: His front-of-house staff, most of whom he had not known three weeks earlier, all of whom played a role in what he hoped would be his success, were folding napkins and checking glasses for water spots, while his cooks ticked off the items in their mise en place. As the chef-owner, he had to say something to them, which he did not like to do.
The place was as hectic as he expected it to be, but right before the doors opened he gathered everyone together and stood on a chair so that they could see him. “Here we are. Long time coming,” he said, with an unexpected catch in his voice that made him speed up a bit to get past it. “Long time coming. Still getting to know some of you, great kitchen staff, and Luke and Nate have put together a solid team. This is my fourth time opening service. We’re going to be busy, we’re going to make mistakes, that’s what this is for. People tonight are family, loved ones, people who want us to succeed. Make a mistake, don’t hang your head—just fix it and we’ll talk after. Anything you need from me, Jenni, Luke, Nate, let us know, and if I’m too busy, I’m sorry, I’ll get to you later.”
They waited to see if there was anything more. “I want you to be happy, to be around for a long time,” he said. “So have a good service. We’ll have a beer and talk it over in a few hours.”
• • •
The next three nights were a parade of people who wouldn’t sit down because they wanted to congratulate Jonah or one of the cooks, or had to take photographs, or saw friends across the room and detoured to say hello. Nat, the long-ago bar mitzvah boy, was there, having taken a job in restaurant development—his business card had a purposefully ragged edge, designed to look as though someone had taken a bite out of it. Other members of the original Maialino sous chef team showed up to wish Jonah well and suggest that he figure out some way to brighten up the flavor of the rotos with a bit more acid, which was what he needed them to tell him. His parents held court and shared memories of Jonah cooking at five, at ten, as a teenager.
On the fourth night they opened the dining room in back for the first of two full-service rehearsals before Tuesday’s opening. For the first time in a year and a half, Jonah was going to feed people not just pintxos but dinner; for the first time, at all, in his own restaurant. He hurtled downstairs, and when he came back up he held a bouquet of skillets in one hand.
He waggled them in Jenni’s direction.
“Tonight we get to cook,” he said, with a weary and hopeful smile. “Pans and everything.”
5
STAMPEDE
Slammed didn’t begin to describe Huertas’s first week of business. “Slammed” was a good word to toss around after a busy night, but not for a ninety-hour week that was a continuous loop of prep and service and cleanup, interrupted by something that barely qualified as a long nap before the cycle began again.
That single week beat Jonah’s projections for the entire first month of business—$34,800 in sales for a week, compared to anticipated first-month sales of $32,200. He and Nate looked at the sales numbers every day, because they believed that vigilance made the difference between a successful restaurant and one that might seem healthy, only to slide off the rails too quickly to save. They had based their projections on losses at the start, possibly straight through the summer, because that was usually how it went; investors commonly had to wa
it as long as five years to see a first return on their money. Friends and family had broken even when it was supposed to lose $8,000, but that was a partisan crowd. Their first reaction to the week’s numbers, to real sales, was to assume that they had made a mistake.
They had anticipated a $5,000 loss over the first two months. The way things were going, they might not lose anything at all. Best of all, they were making “sick money” in the dining room, in Jonah’s giddy estimation. Pintxos were fun, and they got people in the door, but the menu del dia was his brand, his chance to show that he could refine and expand Spanish food without getting fussy about it—and by extension, that he could do the same with whatever cuisine he tried next, not Spanish necessarily, not at a Huertas sequel and so, not a partnership based on necessity. Just Jonah and Nate and Luke building their business.
The trick was to achieve great numbers without sleeping in a booth between shifts, which Jenni had jokingly mentioned as an alternative to her hour’s commute to Queens, where a sous chef could afford to live. There wasn’t a straightforward fix. Restaurant profit margins were notoriously slim, about ten cents on the dollar, and there were frustratingly few ways to improve them. The rent was set. There was little leeway on the other two fixed costs, labor and food, because past a certain point they couldn’t trim their way to profitability. If Jonah looked for profit in even cheaper ingredients or a staff that was leaner than was practical, he ran the risk that the food wouldn’t seem special enough, and the service, cursory. The better way to reduce ninety hours a week to a tolerable sixty or seventy was to make Huertas a place where people craved two more rounds of pintxos or had to try the wine pairings. An increase of a couple of dollars per check, multiplied by checks per year, could subsidize a bigger staff without putting a dent in the profit and loss statement that Nate planned to produce every month.
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