Generation Chef (12 page)

“That's not in line with the East Village,” Luke told himself. “We're homey, not glitzy and glam. Sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself, Is this the right thing to do?” It was his job, he figured, to make sure that the partners were selective about the opportunities that would surely come their way.

He wasn't going to be satisfied with one restaurant any more than Jonah and Nate were. A chef couldn't work in the kitchen forever, so he needed a network of places where he could step into an advisory role as he got older. The same was true for him and Nate; it was fine to be closing up at one thirty in the morning when they were in their mid-twenties, but they didn't want to do it forever. They all agreed that Huertas was the first step, not the destination. The issue was how fast to take the next step. Luke was starting to think that it was his responsibility to make sure they didn't get ahead of themselves.

“We're in the culture of the next big thing,” he said, “and worse, all the media are trying to find the next big thing. We're still racing, not pacing, ourselves.”

•   •   •

The next day,
at lineup, Nate apologized to the front-of-house staff for his behavior. He had not led by example, he had let his nerves get the
best of him, and he vowed not to let it happen again—even as he exhorted the staff to be on the lookout for the next Platt visit, and to study the few photos he'd managed to find of Pete Wells, the critic at the
New York Times
.

•   •   •

Huertas got its
needed mid-June publicity when it landed at the top of a
Village Voice
list of the ten best places to watch World Cup soccer, just as Jonah learned of a much bigger pending story: Eater wanted to send over a photographer because the site was running a review by a critic who had managed to visit unnoticed. It appeared on June 28 as the second half of a double review by Robert Sietsema, who led off with Donostia, another Spanish place a few blocks away from Huertas. Not a place to go for a full meal, he wrote, “but as a place to snack and explore the alcoholic beverages of Spain, Donostia is unparalleled.”

Huertas, in his opinion, was both more and less, terrific overall, particularly in the back room, but inconsistent on a couple of dishes he felt compelled to warn the reader to avoid. He disliked “the spongy hake croquette resting in a puddle of indifferent garlic mayo,” and he dismissed the percebes as an overpriced novelty act. He quibbled with the idea of a prix fixe meal in the back, which he found “faddish,” having nothing to do with Spanish tradition, found the third course too small to be an entrée, and the vegetarian option “grease-sodden.”

And yet the migas were “brilliant!” and the rest of the back-room menu, memorable. Huertas got two stars to Donostia's three, which rankled, but not enough to stick, because of the quote that was pulled out of the review and highlighted alongside the text.

“Lucky for us,” wrote Sietsema, “the four-course feed via chef Jonah Miller verges on the superb.”

F
or the first time—or finally, if Jonah was being a realist—Huertas lived up to its new-restaurant budget projections and lost about $5,000 in June. It was a smaller loss than he'd estimated, and no surprise. If anything, the solid numbers for late April and all of May were the shockers. He should have reacted with a shrug and a bit of gratitude that it wasn't worse, but the good opening numbers—no, the ridiculous opening numbers—had spoiled him. Any loss at all seemed a more precipitous drop than it was because, until now, Huertas had been the exception to the start-up rule.

The competitor in him did not want to slip into a lower gear. “I want to make money all the time,” he said, disappointed that he hadn't been able to sustain the numbers.

Jonah lectured himself: He knew the summer was going to be slower, and maybe that was a blessing, a chance to get used to brunch and get ready for the fall, when he planned to open seven days a week and add weekday lunch service and, at some point, a special family-style dinner on Wednesday and Sunday nights. He could see the table in his head—a
big platter in the center, a whole chicken or fish, or a pork roast, with a bunch of side dishes and hard Spanish cider. Summer was for refinement and planning, and the first item on that agenda was brunch.

Spaniards might not eat brunch, but New Yorkers did, religiously, with the under-thirty crowd devoting hours each Sunday to drinks that took the edge off of Saturday night's hangover, a stabilizing plate of food, and conversation to put the previous night into focus. Brunch was an imperative debrief with a menu, and Jonah felt compelled to offer it. The challenge was to figure out a menu he could live with, one that didn't stray too far from what someone might eat midday in Spain—retooled raciones alongside dishes that put a Spanish spin on a more typical American brunch. He wasn't a purist, but there were limits, and he had a shorthand for what he wouldn't do: This was not a mimosas-and-hollandaise menu. He could walk out the door at Huertas, walk five minutes in almost any direction, and be staring at a mimosa and a plate of eggs Benedict, or a mimosa and a three-ingredient diner's choice omelette, or, for the vegetarian, a mimosa and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with fresh fruit.

“It's a good neighborhood for brunch,” he said, taking a swipe at the competition. “Lots of mediocre places open.”

A couple of days before the first brunch service, he laid out samples of his efforts for the front-of-house staff, minus the hake croqueta that Sietsema had described as spongy. Jonah wasn't so vulnerable that he'd kill a menu item because one critic didn't like it, but he wasn't taking any chances. He wasn't arrogant, either; maybe the execution had been off, or maybe it could stand a little improvement. He retired the croqueta until he could figure out which it was.

A jamón and queso sandwich was a standard in Spain, but Huertas customers weren't going to settle for plain ham and cheese, so it became
a pressed sandwich on a roll ordered for that sandwich alone, the warmth to bring up the flavor and the roll to distinguish it from anything else on the menu. Spaniards ate rice pudding, too sweet for a main dish, so Jonah worked instead on a porridge that combined Calaspara Spanish short-grain rice, for a traditional element, with farro and red quinoa, a nod to current tastes, all of it cooked in milk and served with slivered almonds to bring it back to Spain.

Jonah had an instinct about where to stop, in terms of accommodations, and he explained the parameters to the staff. Sure, they would add fresh fruit to the porridge, $6 for a side order. No, that did not include fruit that might be a staple of an American brunch menu but didn't show up in Spain.

“If someone asks, ‘Can I have a banana?' No. We're not a hotel,” he told them. “You say, ‘Every fruit we have this weekend is fresh from the greenmarket.'”

The bocadillo de calamares, battered and deep-fried squid piled on a roll, was as popular as jamón y queso in Spain, but in the East Village it posed a challenge, a double negative for the growing number of people who avoided gluten, between the white-bread roll and the battered squid. Jonah put it on the menu anyhow, because people liked fried calamari, and because anyone willing to eat eggs Benedict was likely to be unrepentant about the bocadillo.

“Tell people it's fried calamari on bread,” Jonah instructed the servers. “It sounds like a po'boy. It'll work.” He planned to put a mound of mixed greens on the plate as well, not that anyone in Spain ate a salad like that. New Yorkers seemed to regard a small side salad as their virtuous due, and it made the plate less beige.

One of his favorite dishes was what he called Spanish French toast, because that was the only way to convey what it was: eggy bread flavored
with orange and cinnamon, deep-fried until it was crunchy on the outside but still custardy on the inside, served with whipped cream and fruit compote.

“We can sell a ton of these,” said one of the runners. Crisp, sweet, topped with whipped cream and fruit; who wouldn't prefer it to hollandaise?

“It's the most kid-friendly dish we have,” said Jonah. He asked only that the servers downplay the availability of maple syrup. Good maple syrup was very expensive, and frankly not part of the dish. They had to have it on hand because people expected it, but they didn't need to be aggressive about selling it.

“Doesn't need it,” said Luke, supportively.

“What if someone wants it not deep-fried?” a server asked.

Jonah deflated for a moment, trying to imagine the diminished nature of the dish without the contrasting textures. It wasn't as though he could turn cream and sugar and eggs and white bread into health food simply by avoiding the fryer, and the trade-off was substantial: no crust, and just as fattening.

“I just wouldn't advertise the fried part of it,” he said.

The important focus, for the servers, was the list of side dishes at the bottom of the menu—bacon that Jonah spiced and smoked in-house, homemade sausages, and slices of jamón. He wanted to change the way people ate brunch as well as what they ordered, to get away from the one-person, one-plate model. The Huertas brunch menu was built on sharing, with a main dish for each person and then, if it worked as he intended, little plates to pass around, so that the person who ordered the porridge could sample a strip of bacon, a chunk of sausage, maybe even a sliver of the tortilla that someone had ordered for the table. It wasn't the old notion of brunch, but it wasn't the current small-plate
model, either, not quite. Too many small dishes could disrupt the experience, as a constant “Want some of this?” replaced conversation.

He anticipated two built-in problems that would be easy to fix as long as the servers stayed sharp. Churros with chocolate sauce came five to an order, so a server had to alert the kitchen if a party of six ordered them; an extra churro for free and everyone at the table would feel special. An expensive item like the homemade bacon or sausage meant a small extra charge, with the emphasis on small. There would always be people who wanted “one egg done this way,” Jonah warned, which he'd be happy to do.

“That's why it's good to have slow brunches at first,” he said, “to get used to the process.”

“We don't anticipate busy,” chimed in Luke. “That was the intention.”

•   •   •

Coffee was an afterthought at dinner
, when most people didn't bother, but essential at brunch, when they ordered it before they even looked at the menu. Huertas had a $4,800 espresso machine, but the cup of drip coffee they'd been pouring at night—sorry, no decaf—was not a high-quality introduction to a meal, not in the midst of a post-Starbucks third wave that saw microbrewers and local roasters popping up all over town. If Jonah cared enough to make his own quince paste and to smoke and spice his own bacon, he had to think about coffee service—or rather, he had to let a couple of front-of-house staffers who had been baristas at Maialino do so, as he was still skeptical that it mattered as much as they said it did. He couldn't argue with their logic, though: The coffee ought to be as good as the food that followed it. He wanted to encourage his staff to suggest ways to improve the restaurant, to feel that they had a personal stake in its success, so he agreed to spend
another $1,000 on a drip coffee setup from the company that sold beans, sold and maintained the equipment, and trained the staff as part of the package.

Espresso drinks were handled only by the two staffers who already knew how to use the espresso machine, but drip coffee was going to be everyone's responsibility, and they had more to learn than they realized. A representative from the coffee roaster set up a Fetco coffeemaker in a nook at the bottom of the stairs, brewed a pot, and gathered the front-of-house staff around him. The standard Bunn coffee brewer was shunted off to the side, as obsolete as a landline.

For a half hour the group sipped and listened. One of the two staffers who knew what she was doing explained that the pervasive approach—“get Italian roast and load it up with milk and sugar”—was as out of fashion as the Bunn coffeemaker. Coffee had distinct flavor notes, like wine, in this case based on where it came from and how it was roasted, and it deserved the same kind of respect. Fine coffee was a beverage, not a wake-up in a cup, certainly not the result of hot water indiscriminately splashed over grounds.

There were rules:

Rinsing out the basket that held the grounds between each pot was key. “If there are grounds left in the basket it's like re-brewing coffee,” said the supplier's rep, “and you wouldn't re-scramble eggs you made yesterday.”

Temperature was just as important, and hot was not the goal. “Coffee tastes better as it cools.”

The recipe for fine coffee was precise, exactly 105 grams of coffee per pot, which one of the experienced staffers would weigh in advance and set out in plastic quart containers.

The grind was everything, which was why the trainer was going to mark the proper setting. If the beans were ground too fine, the coffee
would be weak; too coarse, and it would be strong but could be bitter. The way the ground coffee hit the basket mattered as well. “Give it a little shake to level the coffee, or the water will flow around it and not extract the flavors,” the trainer said, to looks of increasing alarm from servers who had thought that pouring coffee meant just that, and were trying to figure out where, in the midst of a busy shift, they were going to find the time for all this. “And don't jam the basket in, or the coffee will shift to one side.”

“Be quick,” said one food runner, with a baffled grin, “but not too quick.”

They had to add water in two careful stages, a “pre-wet” before the full pour to moisten the grinds, and then the rest of the water, premeasured, to make a pot. They ought to throw out any pot that was more than an hour old because the coffee started to “degrade,” explained the trainer, but he understood the financial imperative. “We'll find the happy medium between what's good and what you can afford to waste.”

And when brunch service ended they had to clean everything—carefully, completely, and using a food-safe cleanser instead of soap, which left a residue.

All that for a cup of coffee, and they hadn't even addressed whether to break down and offer decaf. A slow start to brunch service began to look more and more appealing.

•   •   •

Employees outnumbered diners
for the first brunch shift on July 5, and the first table to be seated belonged to Wilson Tang, a restaurant owner who'd advised Jonah about the community board liquor license hearing, the kind of guy who brought his family to a brunch opening to show his support. Tang had left a job in finance to take over Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Chinatown's oldest dim sum restaurant, from his uncle, who
had gone to work there as a teenager in 1950 and bought the restaurant in 1974. He had been spared the permit hassles, nervous investors, and limitations of a shoestring budget; although he'd had to go through the process on a second place he'd opened just months before Huertas, he operated from a relatively secure position. He did what he could to encourage a young chef like Jonah, who operated without any of the advantages Tang had inherited.

He and his family sat at one of the two round tables at the front windows, which caught some of the dwindling sunlight. The rest of the room was a cool, dark cave, and Jonah began to chafe at two things he could not change and had not considered when he was looking for a space: Huertas faced east, which meant that the sun was overhead and gone before even the earliest brunch crowd was done eating and drinking. If he'd been across the street, facing west, it wouldn't be so dim—and it wouldn't have mattered as much that First Avenue was an unappealing site for a sidewalk café, with trucks barreling north and a lot of ambient noise. Jonah hadn't even bothered to inquire about whether sidewalk seating was merely unpleasant or forbidden, because he wasn't interested. He couldn't compete. The plum locations were on Second Avenue, one block to the west, and Avenue A, one block to the east. When the weather got nice, diners headed for the sun like lizards seeking a warm rock.

It mattered more than what they ate, which was demoralizing. Jonah had hoped, even assumed, that people would defect from the open-air usual-suspect menus once they heard about the great Spanish fried toast with fruit compote, or all the new ways to consume weekend eggs, but the places with outdoor seating were jammed no matter what was on the menu. The definition of a great summer brunch seemed to include fresh air.

Or maybe the day after the Fourth of July was a bad time to start serving brunch, because everyone was away for the holiday weekend, a
theory that required him to ignore the mimosa drinkers a block away. Jonah couldn't figure out exactly what the empty room meant. He thought and waffled; his rhythm was off.