Jonah was silent for a moment more. In truth, the menu del dia kept Jonah tied to the kitchen doing the kinds of things a chef ought to delegate to his cooks. It made no sense to teach Max or Alberto how to execute a dish if it was going to disappear when the menu changed a week later—it was faster simply to do it himself than to demonstrate, supervise, and intervene if it didn’t go the way he wanted it to. That was a fundamental problem he hadn’t seen coming: The dining-room menu fairly guaranteed that he couldn’t back off to three days a week, which in turn meant that he’d never have the time to develop the next project.
“First-year anniversary?” he asked.
“Later in the spring,” said Nate, with relief. “And we make it a media event. Blow-out tasting menus, get it while it lasts, blow people’s minds for two months, and launch this after Memorial Day. You win the James Beard, and then . . .”
“Don’t count on that,” Jonah said.
Nate ignored him. Now that Jonah was onboard, they could get the publicist involved. There ought to be a long feature that cast all of this in a positive light.
The decision wore both of them out, and they lingered over their coffee, knowing that in a few minutes they’d have to head over to Huertas to get to work. Jonah wanted to talk instead about a new large-format menu he had in mind, an homage to something Peter Hoffman used to do on grills he set up on the street behind Back Forty—and to the tradition that inspired it. A Spanish calçotada celebrated the seasonal arrival of the Spanish calçot, a larger, milder cousin of the scallion that was charred and served with grilled lamb, along with wine poured directly into the diner’s mouth from a porrón, a large pitcher with a long, tapered spout. Jonah didn’t have a grill, and he still didn’t have a working wood oven, but he could slow-roast the lamb and finish it on the flat-top, and use the salamander to get a good char on spring leeks, which would serve as a stand-in for the calçot. It was authentic Spanish food that required finesse to get it right, a nice thing to contemplate as he prepared to abandon the idea that had propelled him since he’d carried it around in his backpack to show to potential investors.
Nate was more interested in a couple of other new ideas, including take-out lunch service later in the spring, or a cart outside the new Whitney Museum during the block party to celebrate its May opening. It was too late to be a vendor at the party, but they could set up at the periphery.
“Maybe,” said Jonah, who seemed done with decisions for the day. “Sounds like a headache.”
• • •
Jenni’s one-year anniversary with Huertas was at the end of March, and when she pointed it out to Jonah he said it was time to make some moves, sat her down in the dining room, and, without preamble, handed over a box of new business cards for Jenni Cianci, executive sous chef. He announced the promotion at the afternoon lineup, and the response was unanimous: Everyone already thought that Jenni was the executive sous, but sure, congratulations, now that reality had caught up with consensus.
She was gratified, if not quite as happy as she’d anticipated. The fact that he’d had to order the business cards in advance—that he’d already made up his mind—slipped past her, because she was focused on the fact that she’d mentioned her anniversary before he gave her the box. It felt as though she’d had to ask.
The next day Jonah’s forecast came true, and then some: None of the three New York semifinalists made the list of finalists for the 2015 James Beard Rising Star Award. The foundation saw the future in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.; in Brunswick, Maine, and Los Angeles and Los Gatos, California.
• • •
Alberto could feel a busy night coming. The noise in the restaurant seemed to drop away, and all he could hear was “Fire, fire, fire,” fast, one order after another.
It’s coming, he told himself. Go in, do it, don’t talk. Jonah was off, which meant that Jenni was expediting, Max was plating and overseeing the line cooks, and Alberto was on roast and sauté. Alberto had made himself even more nervous, the first few weeks on roast and sauté, by thinking about just how busy it was going to get and how many hours it would last—which bothered Max, who’d see the tight expression on Alberto’s face, and tell him to relax, in front of everyone, which didn’t make it any easier. Still, Max was right. Nerves were contagious. If Jonah thought that Alberto was competent to work the station, Alberto needed to act as though it were true.
It was hard at first, because it had happened so fast, and because he worked for three bosses with different management styles: Jonah, who got quieter when he was concerned; Jenni, who talked her way through a tense service, and Max, whose style Alberto thought of as “just get out of my way.” When Alberto felt Jonah looking at him, he sped up and waited to see if a correction was coming, and took a breath only when Jonah looked away. When Jenni talked at him, he tried to respond without losing his rhythm. When Max bulldozed past, he tried not to take it personally. He expended a lot of energy on accommodation, even as he tried to keep up with the pace. He was determined not to be the one who landed the kitchen in trouble.
On a rough night he did a lot of short sprints from the burners to the shelves to the cooling drawers or the counter, not yet having achieved Alyssa’s economy of motion, his heart racing as he tried to go as fast as he could without making a mistake. By the end of March he slid into a regular schedule, working the station Thursday through Monday from two in the afternoon to close, with his weekend on Tuesday and Wednesday. Not that his heart stopped pounding; it didn’t. But the frantic rhythm at least become somewhat familiar, and the fear of the unexpected yielded to a more manageable fear of falling behind, which was something a cook had to learn to live with—to turn into a positive force—forever.
Saturday nights were the worst, most of the time, but the last Sunday in March promised to be a logistical nightmare: There was a buyout in the back room, thirty-six people arriving at six p.m. for a birthday celebration, and seven tables for the large-format dinner, and Jonah was off. Alberto could sense Jenni’s apprehension, which seemed to him the only reasonable response to this kind of schedule.
Big parties were always a challenge—all that food at once—but the night started off with too many special requests, the sort of adjustments that could rattle a kitchen even when there wasn’t a party of thirty-six. Jenni was calling volume orders—thirty-one duck croquetas—as the custom orders started to come in from individual diners scattered throughout the restaurant:
No fish for one of the women in the back.
No gildas at a table in the front.
No mackerel.
“Fine. Four croquetas and a morcilla tortilla,” said Jenni, refusing to be derailed so close to opening. “Allergies all over the place,” she muttered.
She stopped Max from using the wrong sauce to anchor an order of croquetas to the plate, encouraged the new fry cook to set out his empty plates in advance before the next batch came out of the deep fryer, and spun around to help Max with plating, even as she kept an eye on the ticket printer and wondered why two croquetas were still sitting at the pass, waiting either for a server to notice them or a cook to finish an order. Just as she was about to inquire, ten more appeared, and a server whisked them away.
Nate leaned over the pass to ask why two women at a front table said that they’d been sitting there for a half hour waiting for their food.
“Seriously, what did they order?” said Jenni, instantly on edge. She looked for the ticket in the row in front of her. “A tortilla and what, fifty dollars of food? Give them the food unless you think it’s bad for business.”
Nate spun and headed over to the table, came back to the pass, studied the ticket again, and returned to the table, muttering to himself. It was barely six thirty, the rush hadn’t even hit yet, and the kitchen had taken too long on an order. One of the experienced servers, aware of how easy it was for a kitchen to fall apart on a night like this, gave
Jenni a big smile.
“Look at you,” he said, proudly. “I mean, just look at you. Three chicken dinners and not even a bead of sweat.”
She smiled for the first time since service started and gestured at the row of tickets. “And everyone has an allergy,” she said, wiggling her fingers on either side of her besieged head. “Aaaaahhhh!”
Another server came back with a second bulletin from the dissatisfied two-top. One of the women had announced that they did not want to be interrupted by passed pintxos. They wanted their food to come out in courses, as it was supposed to.
Jenni put a new paper roll in the printer and stared, in horror, as a handful of backed-up order tickets spit at her. She glanced up and saw a man standing in the aisle looking lost and impatient, holding a credit card aloft, and dispatched a server to get him his check. She got the orders under control—food was flying out of the kitchen—and started to feel that she had found her rhythm, but satisfaction didn’t last long. Nate returned with the two-top’s final complaint of the evening: Their churros with chocolate dipping sauce were late.
She watched as one of them walked past the kitchen to the restroom and passed judgment: She did not like the woman’s face, her expression, or her clothes, neither the top nor the pants. While she hated to reward the two women for what she considered to be excessive demands, they hadn’t spent that much, and the easiest solution might be to comp the whole check and send them home happy at least about that. Nate agreed, but only up to a point: He dropped a check that showed no charge for several items, to let the women know that he’d registered and acknowledged their dissatisfaction, and perhaps to send a subtle message: We didn’t comp the whole thing because we know, and you know, that you overdid the complaints. It might make them feel too guilty to badmouth the restaurant.
The birthday party buyout had its own syncopated rhythm, which had nothing to do with a standard meal—there were toasts and more toasts, speeches and random interruptions, requests to hold a course or serve a course or drop the volume of the music or turn it up again. Everyone pitched in to keep the kitchen moving, including one of the bartenders, who between drink orders ferried a few stacks of dishes to the shelves under the pass, so that the dishwasher could stay at his station and catch up. Nate ran plates to waiting tables.
Still, carrots went to a table lukewarm. Fish came out less than done. Eight chicken dinners came out for an order of seven. The kitchen was so crowded with people trying to help that the dishwasher couldn’t get from the back of the kitchen to the front with the next stack of clean dishes. He had to circle outside the kitchen and weave past customers to get to the shelves under the pass.
In the midst of it all, one of the hosts stationed at the front door approached Nate and Jenni: A woman was on the phone wanting to know if she could turn her party of seven into a party of nine. She knew it was late, she knew it was a squeeze, but please?
Nate pulled his hand sideways across his throat.
“No. We can’t do it.”
“What do I say to her?”
“Tell her we can’t do it. No. She’s calling too late to ask for that.”
A server rushed up to interrupt: A customer with a crustacean allergy worried that whatever she had ordered might be cooked in the same oil as the octopus, and she didn’t want to get sick. Jenni was in the midst of decorating a display birthday cake and answered without looking up.
Octopus isn’t a crustacean, she told the server. It’s a cephalopod. It doesn’t matter what oil we cook things in. She won’t get sick.
Then she countermanded Nate and told the host to accommodate the table of seven that had become a table of nine. Jenni was in charge of the kitchen, and if they could handle this much activity, they could handle more. She was not going to turn away business.
Things threatened to get out of hand at every turn. The dishwasher’s arms barely came into focus, he was moving so fast, but clean cutlery wasn’t the last step—before it hit the table it was supposed to be polished to eliminate any water spots. Nate had a box full of clean flatware that he couldn’t polish fast enough to keep up with demand, so he grabbed a passing bartender by the elbow as he walked past and hissed, “We don’t have any silverware” in an urgent whisper. The bartender broke away because he had orders for bottles of wine that in his estimation mattered more than spotless knives and forks. One of the servers stepped over to help Nate, in between running plates of food, and as soon as the bartender dropped off the bottles he joined them at a crowded corner of the pass.
Jenni madly portioned almond cake for the back room and stared at the plates; the cake might be delicious, but it was pretty plain to look at. She tried adding whipped cream around the slices, wasn’t satisfied, added more sugar to the aerosol canister full of already-sweetened cream, and tried again. She spooned a dollop of Max’s homemade bitter orange marmalade onto each plate, which added color and kept the whole thing from being too sweet, and sent out the cake just as the strains of “Happy Birthday” floated up from the dining room, at which point she went back to hacking up whole chickens for the large-format orders.
She reached over to grab the next ticket from the order printer, which she’d ignored while she decorated the cakes, and three tickets came out in one long snake. Jenni recoiled.
“My god,” she said, “I didn’t think it was going to be that long.”
Nate took small revenge on the last-minute table of nine by seating them as a party of five and a party of four and requiring that they order two large-format dinners, not one. The dinners were designed to serve a maximum of six, so even seven was a stretch. Nine people didn’t get to hold down all that real estate to divide a large-format meal into appetizer portions.
They presented Nate with nine credit cards at the end of the meal.
“I’ll take four,” he said, trying to remain polite. “Four. You figure it out.”
• • •
A few days later, Jonah showed up for work with a side part in his hair, which was still not long enough to have a sense of direction but long enough to hold a part. In three weeks Huertas would be a year old. Eater had decided to do a long story on the big changes in store for Huertas’s second year; the one-year minimum wait on a full liquor license was almost up; and Jonah and Nate were about to spend $20,000 of Huertas’s post-review profits not only on new front windows but on new tables to replace the standing counter in front, a smaller counter to replace the table between the windows and the bar, and glass doors for the back wall of the dining room, to bring in more light. It was time to present a more mature profile.
“I figure it was a haircut for a very young kid,” he said, referring to the old $15 brush cut. “And now that I’m older I should have a part.”
16
FUN
There was something sobering about an anniversary. It forced a summary, a fill-in-the-blank finish to the sentence that began, Our first year was ______, and too many of the options tipped toward the negative. Our first year was unresolved, uncertain, unlicensed. Jonah was good at fending off day-to-day problems, but it was hard to evaluate a whole year. Could it have been better? Sure. That much better? Probably not, but that was small consolation. The high points that a more detached observer might have tallied—the Times review, the overall improvement ever since, the upcoming Eater story where he and Nate could control the spin on the menu change—looked too small, from Jonah’s point of view.
He could quantify his success in all kinds of ways—he’d survived a scary first summer, the new menu seemed like a smart hedge against a repeat of that slump in a couple of months, and he had great reviews and lots of coverage for someone who didn’t already have a brand to promote. By any objective measure, Jonah was about to celebrate a first year that had exceeded expectations—but he was having a hard time accessing any sense of accomplishment. All the good news existed on a happy distant plain that he could barely m
ake out from a kitchen that refused to align, no matter how hard he tried.
At ten o’clock in the morning, a week before Huertas’s one-year anniversary, Jonah was alone in the kitchen, chopping carrots and celery for stock, which he had sworn he would not be doing by now but found hard to hand over to anyone else. His mood was in free fall. He was as unhappy as he had been since he started looking for a space—which didn’t mean that he had been unhappy then, because he wasn’t, but rather that none of the disappointments since then had made him as blue as he felt now. He confessed as much to Jenni when she got in and she pushed back, insisting that she’d seen him unhappier at various points along the way. He wouldn’t be argued out of it. This was the low point of his short tenure as a chef-owner, and if she looked at the newly revised schedule for April 22, anniversary night, she’d understand why. Jonah was at the pass, Jenni was working the roast and sauté station, and Max had stepped down to fry because it was Alberto’s night off and the regular fry cook had left unexpectedly, after some vague mutterings about how he needed to leave the country immediately. A year in, and he still didn’t have the kitchen set up the way he wanted it.
Anyone driven enough to want his own restaurant by the time he was twenty-three was probably never going to be satisfied—and Nate was Jonah’s front-of-house equal in terms of the age-success equation, so he walked around with a similar cloud over his head as the anniversary approached. They lost their compensatory rhythm, in which the happier one at any given moment talked his partner out of a darker mood. They agreed only on their shared dissatisfaction. Whatever their specific goals had been on the day Huertas opened, they had redefined success: It was more than they had at any given moment.
The unspoken tension finally bubbled over into an inevitable fight about nothing, in the middle of service, at the pass, where anyone could hear them. Jonah forgot to fire a cauliflower puree, so the entrée went out without it. When he realized that a customer’s dinner was missing its side dish, he yelled at one of the new servers, “Why didn’t you take the cauliflower puree?”
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