Generation Chef (9 page)

Jenni made a batter out of sugar, egg white, ground almonds, and a little bit of flour, which Jonah spooned into the aerosol canister. He cut a slit in the bottom of the coffee cup to give any accumulated steam a vent, shook the canister, and filled the cup one-third of the way up, a cautious guess. The recipe he'd seen said halfway, but he was a little worried about how much the cake might puff up, as the batter was shot full of air. He placed the cup inside the microwave, turned the oven on, and he and Jenni leaned close to the door to watch.

“It's working,” he said, as the batter poufed to more than twice its original size, a dome of batter rising above the top of the cup. After a couple of minutes he removed the cup and cut it away to expose a slightly gooey cone of almond cake. Next time he'd leave it in the microwave for a few more seconds, to make sure it set, but this was going to work. They had an almond cake that tasted good and resembled a loofah sponge, two or three portions per coffee cup. All that remained was to figure out what to do with it.

“Chocolate and goat cheese,” said Jenni.

“Not goat cheese,” said Jonah. “Maybe almond crumble, almond cream.”

A sous chef was supposed to have opinions. “I don't like almond extract,” said Jenni, a vote against almond cream, which required it.

“Almond puree,” said Jonah, to acknowledge her opinion.

“Almond cream,” said Jenni, backtracking. She did not want to seem obstinate; it was Jonah's menu, after all.

He was stumped. A puree might not have enough flavor or the right consistency, so he gave Jenni a new task to add to her to-do list. Between now and the start of service she had to make a puree and a cream, try them both, and figure out the answer. Almond cake in some form was going on the menu.

The more pressing task was to get someone to dash out and buy a second canister, to make sure they had enough batter ready to go.

Jonah cooked to satisfy himself, in the end, not for the six people in the first booth, not even for the critics whose arrival was the subject of constant speculation—or rather, he figured that by cooking for himself he cooked for all of them. If he cooked instead based on assumptions about what people might want, he'd pull his punches, and the food wouldn't be his anymore.

He was hard to please and felt compelled to move on as soon as he was happy with a dish. Jonah never cooked the same dish twice at home, because that was where he got to try new things, to stretch past the constraints of Spanish food, which already felt to him like a one-off. If he could make great Spanish food, he owed it to himself to master something else next time. And he balked at food truisms, which he considered a creative challenge. Nate said that they shouldn't put chicken on the menu because people didn't go to restaurants to eat chicken, which they made at home or bought to go. Jonah, always with an eye on the bottom line, figured he could make chicken work by pairing it with small amounts of more luxurious ingredients, like morel mushrooms. Nobody was going to tell him what he could or couldn't cook. He was, after all, the cook who got the
New York Times
's attention with cow's stomach.

One of his first responsibilities at Maialino was making braised tripe, a mainstay of classic Roman cooking but not an easy sell. Jonah didn't care. He made the best tripe he could, tripe that met his exacting standards, day in and day out for months, working alongside Chris to turn out two batches every week, about seventy-five pounds of it. First he had to blanch the tripe multiple times, and then simmer it in stock and cook it down in a tomato sauce. When he got lucky, he got the one oversized pot with a spigot, which he opened to release the blanching water into the floor drain. The other big pot was too heavy to carry over to the sink, and there wasn't a strainer big enough to handle a batch, so
when he got stuck with that pot he resorted to siphoning, which worked—except for the day when he sucked in on the hose for a moment too long and ended up with a mouthful of foul-tasting tripe blanching water while Chris, grateful not to be Jonah, lay on the kitchen floor and laughed.

Jonah didn't care, or he didn't care once he read the reference to it in the
Times
's January 2010 review, which he had memorized: “Mr. Anderer's tripe is served in a tomato sauce with pecorino and mint,” wrote then-critic Sam Sifton. “It's light, delicate even, slightly sweet, with a backbeat. You can dance to it.”

Mr. Anderer was Nick, and the recipe was his. The execution was Jonah's, though, at least half of the time. A backbeat you can dance to. He thought about that line, sometimes, when the talk turned to Huertas and reviews.

•   •   •

Nate lived in a state
of constant preoccupation with how to do things better, and if exhaustion overtook him in mid-thought, late at night, he woke up wherever he'd left off. He was never not thinking about Huertas. It occupied him on his bicycle ride in from Brooklyn, on the ride back home, on his day off, when he was out with friends. He was not about to let anything about the business side get by him.

Luke, in contrast, had worked for a restaurant group that defined success in terms of decades, not weeks, which suited his less antic rhythm. He kept a notebook in which he jotted down every idea he had for how to improve service, no matter how small. He talked about getting good over time, in incremental steps.

At a Friday afternoon lineup meeting, heading into what promised to be a busy weekend if the reservations showed up, Nate introduced a new moneymaking special, the “can and conserva,” $12 for a can of beer,
probably one that wasn't on the menu, to make it seem even more special, and a tin of seafood, which had already proved itself a popular item. The cheapest tinned seafood on the menu was $10, so Nate instructed the staff to describe this as a free beer. It was a great deal.

“It should be an easy sell,” said Nate, a note of imperative in his voice.

When it was Luke's turn, he consulted his notebook and recited a list of slang phrases he'd heard the servers use, none of which he wanted to hear in the future:

“No problem.”

“Hey, how you guys doing tonight?”

“What's up?”

He preferred a list that included “You're welcome” and “How are you?” without the “hey.” When he looked up from his notebook at the incredulous expressions on a couple of faces—were speech patterns really the key to Huertas's success?—he did his best to explain.

“It doesn't mean that we're a formal environment,” said Luke. “We want to have a friendly environment—but not be the customer's friend.”

The traffic hierarchy was next on his list. Right of way in the narrow restaurant went, in order of priority, to guests, hot food, and dirty dishes. It didn't matter if a server had a set of hot plates resting on his forearm. A guest always had the right of way.

Posture mattered, too. Luke exhorted the staff to stand up straight, and on this one, Nate backed him up. If someone felt the need to stretch an aching muscle, they should slip out of the customers' line of sight into the stairwell.

“And if someone's headed to the bathroom,” said Luke, “get out of their way. Don't rush, but move quickly. This is like a Broadway stage. Every movement you make gets noticed.”

Nate agreed with this, too, but he was mindful that the first tenet of USHG's philosophy was to make sure that the staff was satisfied. If they
didn't come to work happy, they weren't going to take good care of the customers—and this was starting to feel too much like a grown-up lecturing the kids. He wanted them to think of him and Luke as experts, but accessible ones, who not so long ago had been on the receiving end of all this information.

He decided to confess to his own set of nerves.

“Look, just think about something bad you do and work on it,” he said. “I bite my nails. That's pretty gross. ‘Look, a partner in a restaurant biting his nails.' That's really gross. I'm working on it.” All he wanted was for everyone in the room to work as hard on whatever their equivalent bad behavior was.

“Verbiage, posture, table maintenance,” he said. “That's our focus this week. We'll add more next week.”

•   •   •

On his way into work
on Saturday, Jonah stopped at a little secondhand store in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he lived and couldn't afford to work, to buy a couple of dozen butter knives. It hadn't taken long to realize that people who ordered the menu del dia came in hungry, anticipating a four-course menu. They could get impatient waiting for the pintxo first course, but if Jonah gave them something to nibble on they might order a glass of wine or vermút in addition to the wine pairings with the meal. He'd decided on radishes served with flavored butter, which they'd tried for the first time the night before, precipitating a knife crisis. The dishwasher had to wash batches of them in the middle of service so that the servers could dry them for subsequent courses, which made everybody crazy. Jonah liked vintage dishes and cutlery, which contributed to the we've-been-here-forever vibe, so he bought a bunch of mismatched little knives.

He came to work feeling that he'd made progress this week. He'd
survived the Tuesday service, their worst yet in his estimation, and he thought he'd done a good job of addressing his supposed snappishness without backing down about standards. He had a new, seasonal pintxo with grilled asparagus and ramps, and bunches of broccoli rabe flowers and purple chive flowers to use as garnishes. The weather report wasn't promising—threatened cloudbursts could make people skittish about going out—but there was a benefit to that, too. It'd give everyone a chance to work on the suggestions that he and Nate and Luke had made.

Chad had arrived in town and had a reservation tonight, to check out the food before he started work in the coming week. In the meantime, Alyssa had turned out to be a workhorse, efficient, precise, and fast, just what he needed until the next wave of reinforcements arrived. She had gone through the four-year program at the Culinary Institute of America's main Hyde Park campus on nothing but loans, so she had a pressing need of a paycheck; he could count on her to show up. Between her three days, and Chad, and Chris right after that, the fourth week of Huertas's life promised to be a relief, and possibly a pleasure.

The shift started on a forgiving note, able hands in the kitchen and a steady stream of customers rather than a flood. Jonah had the pintxo runner take over the job of adding garnishes to the pintxos, which made the runner that much prouder of what he was selling and saved the line cook some time. He moved the Spanish ham up to the wood-burning oven station to make more space for the order tickets. The front-room staff got better at the endless loop between the kitchen and the bar, so the food never stopped flowing. The inexperienced server who thought she should stand at the service station across from the kitchen until someone beckoned her over, rather than step up to the pass whenever she saw a plate, was encouraged to find another job.

The first hiccup was an order that sounded as though someone who knew Jonah was playing a joke, making special requests designed to
drive him crazy. The server leaned over the pass and explained the order ticket in a lowered voice, as if sharing a terrible secret:

No asparagus in the migas with asparagus, which reduced it to a bowl of toasted bread crumbs and egg.

No fish or shellfish in a restaurant whose menu was built on them, requiring the kitchen to substitute a dish Jonah would have to make up on the spot.

A hard-boiled egg instead of a slow-poached egg for the huevos rotos, even though the soft egg was supposed to thicken the vinaigrette into a sauce.

One diner at the table had what the server described as “issues” with octopus and would prefer something else.

Jonah had to customize an array of dishes and somehow sync them with the regular orders at the table, and he was in the middle of it when another server appeared with a plate of lamb, minus a single bite. The customer didn't like it.

Five people studied the plate. Jonah was mystified; it looked fine to him.

“Are we telling them anything about the lamb?” he asked. “If the guy had known it was going to be this pink, he might have ordered something else.”

“I told him medium rare,” said the server. “He just wants it a little more done.” Clearly the customer's notion of medium rare was less pink than the chef's.

“Well?”

“No. Just a little more done.”

Jonah grimaced. They would have to figure out a description that better conveyed how the lamb was going to look.

“He's making a big mistake,” he said quietly. “It's perfect medium-rare.” He handed it off to Jenni with a request for a minute more. When
the server came back to retrieve it, Jonah held the plate in his hand for a moment before he relinquished it, as though debating whether to send out something he wouldn't eat.

It was painful to turn out what was essentially the wrong food: If the migas had been a balanced dish without asparagus, if a hard-boiled egg achieved the same texture as a softer one, if overcooked lamb were any good, he would have offered the dishes that way in the first place. There was nothing he could do about taste preferences and allergies, about an aversion to shellfish or fish or octopus, but the interpretive requests grated. He was the chef. The idea was to sit down and enjoy his best efforts, not revamp them and, in doing so, throw a dish out of whack.

And yet hospitality seemed to demand accommodation, except for the few chef-owners who made a no-substitution policy part of their brand from the start, transforming the formal absolutism of the European kitchen into a T-shirted but no less definitive stance about what people should eat. David Chang and April Bloomfield hardly wanted for customers, even though he refused to make substitutions at his Momofuku restaurants, and she insisted that it was Roquefort or no cheese at all on the hamburger at The Spotted Pig in the West Village. That wasn't how Jonah wanted to operate. He'd rather a customer was happy with his meal—or at least he had thought so before this evening. Right now he wasn't so sure.