Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  10

  THE CRITIC

  Pete Wells was unhappy. The New York Times restaurant critic arrived at an East Village restaurant he planned to review, only to be told that there was a long wait for a table for four. Maybe two hours. They could take his name, which would not be his real name, and let him know. It wasn’t as though another night would be any better, so the question for Wells, his wife, and two friends was how best to wile away the time. They were already hungry, because he hadn’t factored in a two-hour delay. One of his companions had heard about Huertas, and it was nearby. They could bide their time over drinks and pintxos there, and that way he’d know whether it warranted another look.

  Wells kept a long list of places that might merit a review, although inclusion on the list was no guarantee. He couldn’t possibly get to every one that piqued his interest. It was a best-intention list, one that he pruned on a regular basis, deleting places that languished for too long. Restaurants could sit for more than a year, elbowed out of the way by a more compelling prospect, before they were excised. Huertas was a relatively new entry, and its USHG lineage made it a bit more intriguing than another small, independent restaurant might be, but he hadn’t gotten to it yet. Might as well.

  None of Jonah’s strategies to attract a critic’s attention had made a difference, not the five-course menu del dia or brunch, not the homemade vermút or the homemade almond ice cream or even the slow-poached egg in the rotos. What was about to get Pete Wells in the door was somebody else’s no-reservations policy, which Jonah had rejected for the very reason he now stood to benefit from it—because it left people stranded with nothing to do for hours at a time.

  • • •

  Wells went to great lengths to remain anonymous, as had Times critics who preceded him, and restaurateurs worked just as hard to find out what he looked like. Nate had long since searched the Internet for an image of him and found one of a man of exasperatingly average appearance, although there was no way to tell if or how Wells had changed since it was taken. Nate asked around and came up with not very much: medium brown hair of unreliable but probably medium length, maybe a beard, maybe stubble, maybe clean-shaven. The most recent intelligence came from a friend at Eleven Madison Park who said he’d seen the critic on the Wednesday after Labor Day with a little bit of stubble, which could be predictive unless he had shaved since then. Nate understood how futile it was to speculate on someone’s facial hair, and yet it made him feel better to be doing something, so he redrew the image he carried in his head, adding and subtracting hair but not too much. At least they knew he hadn’t had time to grow a full beard.

  As it turned out, the critic’s wife was not quite as inaccessible. Her name popped up in Wells’s biographical information, and there were plenty of photographs of her; better still, she didn’t seem to change her look. Nate shared photos of her with everyone at Huertas and instructed them to be on the lookout. Wells might come in alone, or with a bunch of people other than his wife, but this greatly improved the odds of spotting him.

  Which Nate did, on the Friday after Labor Day, when he came upstairs from the basement office and saw four people sitting in the first booth, one of whom looked like Wells’s wife, one of whom had to be Wells. Nate considered the hair on the man’s chin and decided that yes, this was how stubble plus two more days would look. He pulled the captain aside for a consultation and she agreed, so they let the staff know as quickly and quietly as they could: The restaurant critic from the New York Times was about to eat at Huertas.

  They still assumed that New York magazine’s Adam Platt had preceded him, way back in June, but by now that was beside the point because he hadn’t written anything. They had Pete Wells, as sure as could be; that was definitely his wife, and the odds were slim that she’d be out with a man who closely resembled descriptions and old photos of her husband, and yet wasn’t.

  Anyone who could find an excuse to stand at the service station did so, to eavesdrop and ferry information to Jonah and Nate. The kitchen knew before the order came in that the party in the first booth was looking for a stopgap before dinner—which frustrated the cooks because it didn’t give them much of a chance to show off. Lots of pintxos, but only one or two of each—except for three croquetas—the tinned mackerel, the small meat plate, an order of olives. Three different vermút—the house preparation, a spritz, two vermút de verano—and then a beer, a glass of Rosado, and a kalimotxo.

  They ordered two raciones—the boquerones plate, which displayed only the kitchen’s ability to turn out paper-thin potato chips and find an excellent supplier of Spanish white anchovies, and the huevos rotos. That was good, because anyone who had seen a plate of the real thing would appreciate Jonah’s version. Word came back from a server that Wells wasn’t eating much of the raciones, but his friends seemed to be enjoying them. Eventually they got the call from their intended dinner destination and headed out the door for the evening’s real meal.

  No one knew what to think. There were bad signs: Wells hadn’t intended to eat at Huertas, he hadn’t been seduced into abandoning his other dinner plans, and even if he was reviewing the other place and had to go there, he didn’t get much of a sampling of what the kitchen could do. There were good signs: He must’ve heard something good about Huertas or he could have picked any of the other places in the neighborhood, he tried a lot of stuff, and the plates came back to the kitchen empty. And Nate had spotted him, so that everyone, from the server who explained the provenance of the cheese and jamón, to the cooks, to the bartender, was that much sharper than they might have been.

  Nate lingered at the pass with Jonah, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “Maybe,” said Nate, “he was checking us out.”

  Jonah searched for the right word.

  “Auspicious,” he said. “It could be an auspicious moment.”

  • • •

  Community Board 3 had an unwritten rule about upgrades to full liquor licenses, and the Huertas lawyer had tried to get Jonah and Nate to listen: “If they give you beer and wine in a new place and you want a change—changing booze to full liquor, outdoor seating, whatever—they think that a year will give them a good indication of who you are and what you’re doing,” said Levey. If they could wait until next April, they’d probably get the upgrade without any opposition. Barely six months in, the board might be difficult.

  After the summer they’d had, they hardly felt patient—and surely their past experience, and the critical reception Huertas had received so far, would be enough to convince the committee that this was a substantial, quality operation. “They wanted to jump a little early,” was how Levey saw it, but he agreed to get them on the committee’s September agenda despite his misgivings. He’d be happy to be proven wrong.

  Two nights after Pete Wells’s visit, Jonah and Nate headed over to the Community Board 3 licensing committee, happy but not too happy, because Wells’s appearance was a fluke and now he had to decide whether to come back, and confident about the odds of a full liquor license but not smug, because this was a notoriously tough board, chaired by a lawyer and composed of local volunteers who saw themselves as the neighborhood’s defense. Before they left Huertas, they told the staff the odds were 90 percent in their favor.

  Nate believed it, and had a cocktail menu ready to go once the State Liquor Authority rubber-stamped tonight’s approval, which could be as soon as two weeks. Jonah tended to focus instead on the 10 percent and to prepare accordingly, mindful of what Levey had told them. “Nate doesn’t realize it, but I think we’re going to get pushback,” he said. “Not from neighbors, but from the board. They’ll say, ‘You’ve been open less than six months. You’ve got balls coming back here.’ They’re going to treat us like arrogant little kids, so we have to go in there with a lot of humility. Definitely going to get pushback.”

  Wilson Tang had e-mailed him with advice: Don’t sound desperate, because you don’t want t
he board to think you need the full license to keep from going out of business. But don’t sound too cocky, either. Jonah walked into the meeting wishing he were more certain of the right spot between those two extremes.

  The meeting room was at the back end of a long hallway papered with announcements, a square, low-ceilinged room with rows of folding chairs facing the wide table where committee members sat in a row, the chairperson at the center of the group. To the left, the board president sat behind a big desk and kept an eye on everything—the applicants, the clock, the wandering child whose parents were there to complain about someone else’s liquor license request.

  The committee reserved its formidable ire for a liquor license upgrade applicant who’d opened on a residential side street ten months earlier, had been denied an upgrade at an August meeting, and was back without having addressed many of the committee’s concerns. The place had all the trappings of a sports bar—five televisions, enough noise to draw complaints—though the owners swore it wasn’t. A woman from the neighborhood block association stated the group’s strong opposition to the full liquor license and, while she was at it, to the bar itself. The committee urged the owners to withdraw the application, regroup, and present a better plan. If they persisted, they faced one of two unpleasant outcomes—either an outright denial, or a set of restrictions designed to minimize the perceived impact on local residents.

  Huertas was up next. The board chair gave a brief summary of the restaurant’s history, including the fact that its beer and wine license had been approved eleven months earlier, in October 2013, with the stipulation that it be “a full-service restaurant,” but that six months had passed before it opened for business.

  She turned to Jonah, Nate, and their lawyer, who had come to the front of the room to stand alongside the committee’s table.

  “You had your door open on Friday, and it was horrifically loud,” she said.

  Did she stalk applicants on the assumption that they would try to deceive her?

  “There was a party in the front room,” said Jonah, quietly. “Unusual circumstances.”

  The lawyer pointed out that of the twenty-two letters of support, fourteen were from neighbors, and of the 242 petition signatures, about 140 were from the area. He rattled off the accolades that the restaurant and Jonah had received.

  “It’s a pure restaurant,” he said, as opposed to a sports bar masquerading as something else. “But we’re hearing people saying, ‘Gee, I’d love a cocktail with that tasting menu.’”

  “When we were before you last year,” said Jonah, “we really would have loved a full license, but we didn’t have a track record.” He felt that he had one now.

  A committee member asked Jonah about his work history and Nate about his position at Blue Smoke, to which they responded with some pride. Their résumés showed how serious they were.

  The first committee member to voice an opinion was impressed. “At first, I was going to say no way,” she said, “but they have background, and they’re responsible, and it’s a real restaurant.” She was inclined to support the application for an upgrade.

  Her comment hung in the air just long enough for Jonah and Nate to think that they were home free—and then, too fast to comprehend, the objections started to fly. The chair complained that five months after opening was too soon to ask for an upgrade. She complained further about “people who come into the neighborhood from outside” with expectations. The words “privilege” and “pedigree” sounded like pejoratives.

  “I don’t want to say you deserve this because you have better training than a guy from Queens who doesn’t get a license,” said another board member.

  Jonah and Nate were speechless. Of all the objections they’d anticipated and planned to address, they’d never imagined getting turned down because they were from the Upper West Side and their families were well off, which was how they interpreted the comment. Jonah had worked since he was fourteen, Nate had worked in college, and besides, this wasn’t supposed to be a competition against some nonexistent person from Queens. Each application was supposed to stand or fall on its own merit—and yet they couldn’t object, couldn’t show their feelings, because they might have to come back to these same people for a second round, relegated to the questionable appeals population that included owners of party hotels and sports bars.

  Even the lawyer was blindsided, although he assumed that the comments referred not to the partners’ family background but to the presumption that all the press coverage and their impressive résumés would make them exempt from the one-year rule, entitled to special treatment.

  “It’d be a shame to put this off,” he said, cautiously, “if you’re going to grant it eventually.”

  The committee took a straw poll to see if there was commanding sentiment in one direction or the other, but it was as close as it could be: Three members were inclined to approve with stipulations, while four wanted to deny the application outright.

  “We take a really hard line,” said one of the four, by way of explanation, not apology.

  Levey tried again—Jonah and Nate were not asking for any other considerations, not for later hours, not for outside seating, nothing but a liquor license.

  “They’re really good guys,” he said.

  At that, one of the committee members complained that he was getting tired and wanted to end the conversation unless one of the four who leaned toward rejecting the application had had a change of heart.

  No one had.

  The committee chair dismissed Jonah and Nate with a meager word of encouragement: Come back and try again when you’ve been open longer.

  It was all they could do to get out the door without saying something they’d regret. Nate was in a rage over the rejection in general, and over the specific references to privilege and pedigree; what did their parents’ tax bracket have to do with whether Huertas ought to have a liquor license? Jonah, whose cocktail-fueled holiday season had just evaporated, got very quiet.

  They had two options left if they wanted to resolve this before April. The faster move was to appear in front of the entire community board, not the liquor license subcommittee, and hope that the full board would see fit to contradict its own members, which was unlikely. The other option was to go straight to the SLA, even though it was slower and more expensive. The SLA met only monthly at its Harlem office, its agenda was backed up with appeals of decisions made at the local level, and it cost more than $4,000 in filing fees, payable in advance, refunded if an application was denied, though that was cold comfort. If the full community board rejected the application, Jonah would have to explain two no votes to the SLA instead of one, so that made no sense. The lawyer figured that the SLA approval process would take six to eight weeks, so there was a slim chance that Jonah would have cocktails for the holidays, if not for people who were planning big holiday parties ahead of time.

  Big, lucrative holiday parties, which had just become a far less likely source of revenue.

  The best strategy was to wait out the subcommittee and come back next April, because a yes vote then meant an automatic approval from the SLA, but neither Jonah nor Nate felt that they had that kind of time.

  It was hard for Jonah not to feel “a little spiteful,” he said. It would be one thing if there were a crowd of noisy sloppy drunks outside Huertas every night at three a.m., but all he wanted to do was pour a drink, particularly a gin and tonic—Spain’s unofficial national drink—if a customer wanted one.

  • • •

  Huertas lost $7,000 less in August than it had in July, but not because more people showed up and spent more money. Sales were flat. Jonah and Nate cut losses by cutting expenses, got to Labor Day on fumes, and waited for the uptick. Instead, the first three days after Labor Day were the worst in Huertas’s short history, and the days leading up to Wells’s visit and the community board meeting, little better.

/>   Privately, Jonah considered a possibility he never would have imagined on opening night: If the big fall surge didn’t hit soon, he might have to close the restaurant. Worse, he didn’t think that he had made any fatal mistakes; he didn’t see the glaring misstep. They had customers, but not enough, and the new dining-room menu had yet to attract bigger crowds. They had plenty of press coverage, none of which seemed to be having an impact. The liquor license would have improved sales figures, but there was no way to tell when they’d show up on the SLA agenda, except that it likely wouldn’t be in time for the holidays. He looked at every angle and came to the same conclusion: They were doing everything they could and it wasn’t enough.

  The slim good news—a big article in the Village Voice and the Pete Wells drop-in, which didn’t qualify as good news unless he came back—was not enough to keep him from some rather apocalyptic second-guessing.

  “It’s so fucking hard in New York City,” he said. “The whole experience has really soured me—now I’m sympathetic to people who say the negatives outweigh the positives. I’m running the business really well, doing a great job on labor and food costs, everything that’s in our control. But I can’t control sales.”

  He kicked himself for not sticking with his original plan to open in Williamsburg, which was “expensive but packed,” because the endless stream of tourists would have more than made up for higher rent. He fulminated on the lack of sidewalk seating, which wouldn’t matter this winter—if they survived the winter—but could put a dent in sales again next summer. People strolled the blocks with sidewalk cafés without knowing where they were going and picked an appealing one. Huertas had to settle for people who’d made up their minds to eat there.

  Jonah was grim about the obvious fix: “What makes money is a bar with five TV screens and sliders,” remembering the community board applicant. He had not spent half his life dreaming about that.