Generation Chef

by Karen Stabiner

  “This kitchen knows where to get the good stuff,” he declared, after a serving of Iberico ham.

  “From the front door to the table, our service had been proactively friendly and enthusiastic,” this, after Nate had warned the front-of-house staff that Wells rarely singled out service.

  He ordered huevos rotos. “It was gone in 30 seconds.”

  And, “The way this night went was that by the time the other restaurant called, we didn’t want to leave.”

  He was kindly disposed by the time he tried the tasting menu, so much so that he cut Jonah some slack for the garlic shrimp, not as sweet or firm as they should be, but, he was sure, “an anomaly; in general, the cooking at Huertas stands out for its pure, fresh flavors.”

  He pronounced dessert “a dream, a round and closely packed little goat-cheese cheesecake with a topping of candied almonds instead of a bottom crust. More tangy than sugary, the cake took beautifully to a sauce made from ripe nectarines.” If he didn’t get around to Jonah’s crispy Concord grapes, it hardly mattered. Nothing mattered except the pendulum swing from a cranky Eater review to what felt like a rave from the Times.

  The summary toward the end of the article made everyone dizzy with joy: “This night and a later one made it clear that dinner in Huertas’s back room ranks among the best deals in town, up there with the how-do-they-do-it bargains at Contra and Delaware & Hudson. Mr. Miller shapes his menus so skillfully that it’s hard to imagine wanting more.”

  It could not have been any better; that was the quick consensus as the phones began to ring and people shouted out more lines from the review and texted it to everyone they knew. They scoffed at the Eater review, buried now under an avalanche of intelligent praise, as they repeated “among the best deals in town” and “it’s hard to imagine wanting more.”

  Jonah clung to the routine of getting ready for service as though it were an anchor, as one by one people came over to congratulate him, clap him on the back, try for an awkward hug. He’d been holding it together for weeks, for months, and he had to measure out his relief carefully so that it didn’t swamp him. Happiness seeped in, in increments. His mouth relaxed into an almost goofy smile, and his shoulders no longer sat quite so tight, as though protecting him from the possibility of bad news. His usual slump was powered now by delight. He could relax, a little bit.

  Nate was less moderate about celebrating. He put Queen’s “We Are the Champions” on the sound system and cranked the volume way up, as everyone reeled around the room like pinballs, bouncing from one squealing embrace to the next, unable to hold still. They sat down, they stood up, they checked their phones for more congratulations, and then they read the review over again. It was impossible to read it too often.

  Jonah and Nate agreed: It would have been a three-star review if they had linen tablecloths and a slightly more polished air, which made it the best possible review. It read better than any two-star they could recall, and it avoided the raised expectations, and almost certain letdown, of a three-star.

  And then it was almost five thirty. They had to peel themselves off the ceiling and get to work.

  Nate grabbed the short wine tumblers and poured an inch of cava, a sparkling Spanish wine, for everyone at the lineup meeting—which today included not only the front-of-house staff but the cooks and the prep cook and Juan, who rarely got to leave the basement prep kitchen these days, between butchering and prep and maintenance work. It was Jenni’s day off, but Alyssa called and put her on speaker so that she could share in the good news.

  By now Wells had tweeted the review to his seventy-four thousand followers, and Nate gleefully recited the message: “How I fell into @huertasnyc and why I didn’t want to leave,” with a link to the story.

  “I couldn’t be happier with you guys right now,” said Jonah. “It’s a victory for everyone. He didn’t just love the food but the experience. And special thanks to Jenni and Nate.”

  Alyssa held her cell phone up.

  “She can hear you,” she said.

  “Hi, Chef,” Jenni yelled, ignoring his rule about calling him Jonah.

  “Now I’m self-conscious,” he said. He raised his glass. “I’m sure this will taste better with two stars.”

  With that, everyone went back to work.

  One of the hosts consulted the reservation list and smiled.

  “The two parties that canceled tonight are going to regret it,” she said.

  • • •

  The party started before the party started. Nat, the long-ago bar mitzvah boy who had taken Jonah to Chanterelle and worked alongside him there and at Gramercy Tavern, showed up early with a friend who was a wine purveyor. Jonah’s parents arrived—and because it was a quiet Tuesday in the dining room, Jonah and his dad had time to stand at the pass and pick apart the San Francisco Giants baseball game. Nate circulated with an empty wine bottle, had every staffer sign the label, and wrote the date and drew two stars on it as well. The publicist came by with an instant revisionist analysis, all the better for making sense: She was glad the Sutton review had run today, because the Times had overshadowed it.

  “Three weeks from now it would have been of concern,” she said. “Today it evaporates.”

  Stew dismissed the review altogether because Sutton had referred to an almond cake, when in fact it was an apple cake.

  “Sloppy,” he said.

  There were already five cases of beer downstairs, stocked in advance in optimistic anticipation of a celebration party that would begin as soon as they could close up the kitchen, and a growing number of champagne bottles from friends. For once, they wished for an early, sparse crowd in the dining room so that they could get around to having a good time, fast. They had that luxury, now that they knew the slow times were about to end.

  Nate surveyed the busy bar, which was always good on Tuesdays because of the $1 pintxos. Life, he figured, was about to be better than this all the time.

  “I am ready for the burn every single day,” he said. “Enough of this boredom.” He glanced at Jonah, who was concentrating on the plates in front of him, and leaned over the pass.

  “I’m waiting for you to smile, man—jump over the pass,” said Nate, bouncing up and down on his toes. Jonah kept plating the five dishes in front of him. The review was a thrill, but he had his eye on the opportunity it presented, which was to convince a raft of new diners to put Huertas on their short list. Pete Wells had done what he and Nate could not, though not for want of trying: He’d filled up the back room, at least for the foreseeable future: They started the day with only eight reservations for Wednesday night, but by the time they finished with Tuesday’s dinner service they were up to twenty-seven.

  Jenni blew in just before nine thirty, happy to sacrifice her night off for a party, carrying a rectangular two-layer Duncan Hines chocolate cake with Duncan Hines chocolate frosting and crumbled Oreos between the layers and homemade cream cheese frosting on the outside. She threw an apron on over her dress, filled a large pastry bag with more chocolate frosting, and made space for herself at the pass, opposite Jonah.

  She held the bag poised over the cake.

  “I’m going to write ‘Thank You to the Staff,’” she told him. “Anything else?”

  He smiled. “’Four stars in one day?’”

  Jenni piped a star and realized that it was too big to fit four in a row, so she grabbed a spatula to lift it off just as a server bumped into her, damaging the top of the cake. She slathered on more frosting to cover the mess and started over.

  “It has to be perfect,” she said.

  She tried again and got closer, but the final star slid over the edge of the cake like a Dalí clock, so she swiped all of them off again and refrosted the top. On the third try she got it: four stars in a row with “#AllDay” under them.

  Luke arrived carrying a bottle of champagne and wearing a suit, his ne
w uniform as an assistant general manager at Quality Meats, a midtown steakhouse owned by the restaurateur who had created the original TGI Fridays and his son—just as Jonah and Nate decided that nine forty-five was late enough to stay open and closed the front door. Jonah walked up to the bar to pour himself a glass of vermút while everyone else broke down the kitchen in triple time. He looked at his cell phone for the first time in three hours. Twenty-five e-mails and four text messages; not that many, he thought, but then, everyone he cared about was at Huertas.

  The servers set up the dining room for drink service, as Jonah dispatched his final responsibility of the evening, the only unpleasant consequence of the Times review, given his feelings about public speaking. He stood on a chair in the front room as everyone clapped and yelled, and announced, “I’m going to regurgitate my speech from opening night,” which he did. He had wondered who would be there when he opened. He had allowed himself to wonder, too, who would be there when he got this first great review.

  “I’m so glad it’s you,” he said, in a hurry to get down from the chair.

  The cases of beer went, the champagne went, and the party moved next door to Empellón Cocina. Serious drinking—what one server referred to as “frat party drinking”—was one aspect of the previous generation’s kitchen culture that had endured, in great part because bars were the only places that were still open after a long dinner shift. It was difficult to go straight home and to sleep after all those hours of split-second effort, and yet it was important to go to sleep fairly soon because morning was going to arrive too quickly. A drink with other staffers was an efficient way to downshift, even if it got harder to remember to leave after every subsequent drink, and restaurants often adopted a nearby bar as their after-work hangout.

  On a night like this, it could easily get out of hand. There was so much pent-up energy, almost six months of it, enough to blur the usual indicators that it might be time to stop, or at least to slow down.

  Empellón kicked the Huertas crowd out just after one, and they stood on the sidewalk, some of them already well past reason in terms of alcohol consumption, and debated whether to look for a late-night bar where they could continue the festivities. The consensus was that it was time to go home, because they had to be back at work in the morning and had no idea what kind of mob scene they might face. They drifted toward the subway or split a cab, hoping for a couple of hours’ sleep before they faced twenty-seven dinner reservations and who knew how many Times-reading walk-ins.

  Jonah might have lingered. There would be other restaurants and other reviews, but never again a great first review in the Times. Several of his friends from Maialino and its three-week-old sister restaurant, Marta, had shown up to help him celebrate, and the consensus was that the best way to acknowledge a Times review of this caliber was to continue the party. They were right, on some level, and he hesitated, but common sense prevailed, and he and Marina headed home. He had managed only recently to scale his schedule back by two hours, coming in at ten thirty instead of nine thirty and leaving closer to eleven, sometimes even ten thirty, than midnight. That was over, starting today. He was back to nine thirty to midnight five days a week, maybe six, until he saw what the crowds were like.

  • • •

  Jenni was a little apprehensive when she saw the reservation list for Wednesday, the night after the review posted online, the day it appeared in the paper itself. They’d survived sixteen-hour shifts back when Huertas opened, but they were out of practice after a slow summer, and that first run had been a sprint. The coming onslaught was supposed to last, supposed to be normal from here on out. “The prospect of those days again, without stopping, there’s a little fear. But we’ll be fine,” she said, as much to convince herself as anything else. “We’re putting out a lot of food.”

  No one was prepared for how much food, or how fast. The kitchen usually marked time by the appearance of Antonio, the late-night dishwasher, who arrived at nine thirty, a couple of hours after the front room started to fill up. When he didn’t show up on time on Wednesday night, Jenni’s anxiety spiked. It was nine thirty, the back room was packed, and the front room was a zoo. Why wasn’t he there yet?

  Because it was only seven thirty, she realized; it only felt later. Jenni had already put up so much food that she’d assumed she’d been at it for hours longer than she had. The kitchen had to duplicate the madness of the last two hours for two more hours before Antonio showed up, and then for another two hours of service after that.

  Jonah tried to keep track of the parade of people to the dining room, to see if he could distinguish between the potential keepers and the people who ran from review to review. The first rush was older than he’d anticipated, “and not sort of old, but really old. Eighties. Canes.” Later on the crowd got a little younger, if still older than the people in the bar—but the point was, they kept coming. Every table in the back was full for four hours straight, until he left Jenni in charge of closing up the kitchen at ten thirty. People who made reservations for two showed up with three; parties of four became parties of six, and couldn’t Huertas squeeze them in? The path out the front door narrowed, as clots of people lined the bar and the standing counter across from it, and anyone hoping to get in or out had to angle their shoulders to pass.

  Before the review, he’d had Juan prepare 75 gildas for dinner service. Today he had asked for 110 or 115—and as he surveyed the scene, he realized that he would probably need more than that on the weekend.

  “My biggest priority,” he said, with an enormous grin, finally, now that he saw the crowds, “which I haven’t even done, is to put out an ad for a cook.”

  • • •

  Huertas had fifty reservations for its first Saturday brunch after the review, but that was only part of the new order. Jonah received his first unsolicited résumés, which with luck would make his search for another line cook easier. And the purveyors regarded him with a new respect: One of his standard orders arrived on Friday accompanied by free product samples—cornmeal and spices—and a seafood information sheet, in case Jonah wanted to spend more of the money he surely was about to make.

  Wells’s tweet had spawned a set of tweets and retweets, including one from Serious Eats’s Ed Levine. “Pete Wells is right: Huertas is a terrific restaurant. The $55 prix fixe menu is a worthy successor to the original Torrisi concept. Go now,” he tweeted to his 134,000 followers, invoking the name of Major Food Group’s hole-in-the-wall first restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties. It was a magical association. MFG’s two chef partners, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, had been teen cooks like Jonah, but they attended CIA and landed at a run of famous kitchens owned by role models who included Marcus Samuelsson, Mario Batali, Daniel Boulud, and Wiley Dufresne. They opened Torrisi in 2009 and a year later joined Jeff Zalaznick—whose background was in investment banking and food website development—to launch Major Food Group. Its expansion model was based, it seemed, on equal parts skill, fearlessness, and speed—they now had four restaurants and profitable offshoots that included a bar and Yankee Stadium outpost—and not a small amount of audacity, including the decision to close Torrisi after five years and replace it with a new concept.

  The company website referred to MFG as “a new breed of restaurant group with the aim to conceptualize and operate restaurants that are respectful of the past, exciting for the present, and sustainable for the future; restaurants that uphold the highest level of food quality and fine dining service in a fun and inviting atmosphere for the guest.” All that Jonah and Nate knew was that they seemed to do everything faster and better than anyone else—that they had, at least for now, laid claim to high-energy fun. To be mentioned in the same breath with them was a compliment and a challenge, because MFG’s restaurants had managed to become that most elusive, enviable, and profitable thing—they were irresistible. Nate marveled at the fact that even the partners’ last names sounded cool.

 
The Times review seemed to blanket the known universe with goodwill. Peter Hoffman stopped by to congratulate Jonah. David Waltuck called with congratulations as well, and to let Jonah know that the Times review of Élan would run the following week. He only hoped, he said, that his review was as positive as the one Jonah had received.

  Jonah was touched by the call. Waltuck had been more than generous to a couple of kids, a great teacher and mentor. The business about the pending review was sobering, though. For everything Waltuck had accomplished, he was waiting, just as Jonah had. His remarkable past would have no influence on whatever was coming.

  • • •

  Alyssa was on her third coffee before Saturday dinner service even began, with a Gatorade chaser after the second one to make sure she stayed hydrated. To help her get through the night, she had set aside a second Gatorade, some Starburst candies, and leftover family meal cookies from Blue Smoke, the USHG barbecue place whose new chef had worked alongside Jonah at Maialino and had brought over food to congratulate the Huertas staff on the review. She raised her arms heavenward, part stretch, part supplication—she hoped she had stashed away enough caffeine and sugar to keep her going—as Jonah called out the first order of the night.

  An hour later she was red-faced and sweating. Jenni was sweating. Jonah had rolled his pants up to his calves in a failed attempt to cool off, exposing a pair of dark, striped, rumpled socks that lacked the resilience to do anything but puddle at his ankles. The stack of completed order tickets ran halfway up the spindle where Jonah speared them and it wasn’t eight o’clock yet; as they piled up, conversation evaporated into a call-and-response, Jonah chanting nonstop, “Fire six skate, two menu, two menu, four menu, two menu,” and getting confirmation from his harried cooks. Jenni had started the evening using two spoons to make whipped cream quenelles to accompany the apple cake dessert, perfect little footballs of cream that she placed just so. By eight she had abandoned perfection for speed: She turned a single spoon against the side of the plastic container of whipped cream. It wasn’t quite as elegant, but it was pretty enough, and faster.