Generation Chef (3 page)

They analyzed the particulars and listed the next day's tasks as though to compensate for a rising elation. It would be so easy to relax—and after all, a small moment of celebration was called for, given how long they'd waited for this moment and how hard they'd worked. Jonah, who had been a line cook at four previous openings, was the most experienced member of the trio, in addition to being the majority owner. It seemed appropriate for him to provide a little happy context. This was, he told his partners, the smoothest opening he'd ever worked on, and he wasn't saying that because of any bias.

“I know stuff's going to go wrong, but I know we're going to fix it,” he said. “And I think we're going to make money.”

He and Nate and Luke started to laugh, with relief as much as anything. He regaled them with a story a friend had just told him of a much bigger opening, twelve cooks to Huertas's four, eighty covers to tonight's fifty, where the cooks had lost their synchronized rhythm and never got it back. “They went down in flames,” was how the friend described it.

And Huertas hadn't. For all their inexperience, they'd pulled it off.

It was two in the morning before Jonah had a moment to himself, and more time until the adrenaline subsided and he could even think of sleep. He'd be back in the kitchen the next morning before ten to make his own stocks and prep for dinner. Eater was sending a photographer over at noon to shoot the restaurant's interior.

W
hen Jonah was thirteen, his best friend got a bar mitzvah gift certificate for dinner for two at Chanterelle, one of the first fine-dining restaurants to colonize downtown Manhattan when it opened in 1979, and for years a member of a short and exclusive list of restaurants that had received four-star reviews from the
New York Times
. Ten years later Chanterelle moved to a slightly larger location and lost a star along the way, only to win it back in 1993. It was a required destination for anyone who cared about restaurants, run by chef David Waltuck, who had gone into business when he was only twenty-four, and his wife, Karen, who handled the front of house.

Karen slipped into the kitchen to tell her husband about the two boys in suits and ties who seemed to consider themselves as serious as anyone else. When they were done with dinner, a server offered to escort them to the kitchen, if they'd like to have a tour.

They would.

When they were done, Waltuck asked the boys if they had any questions.

They were too tongue-tied to ask right then, but Jonah quickly wrote a thank-you note that posed the only question that mattered: Could he and his friend work at Chanterelle over the summer? Nobody had to pay them. They just wanted to learn.

Waltuck spent his Bronx adolescence reading French cookbooks and trying out recipes on his family, but had gone to college to major in oceanography before the lure of being a chef finally tugged him away from the life he expected to lead. He traveled to France to experience the food he'd been reading about, enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America when he returned, and ended up taking a restaurant job rather than stick around long enough to graduate. When a friend suggested that he ought to have a place of his own, he and Karen found an unlikely but cheap location, one that would make it easier to take chances.

Chanterelle was its own small-scale revolution: a shrine to French nouvelle cuisine with some Asian flavors added in, housed in what had been a bodega, a restaurant that emphasized local ingredients at a time when the city's first farmers market was three years old and included only a handful of vendors. The Waltucks hired female servers, a radical move when serious French restaurants hired only men. They promoted the then-subversive notion that an American chef could compete in terms of quality without mimicking the previous generation's methods, both in the kitchen and in the dining room, altering the definition of fine dining in ways that seemed radical at the time but were just a glimpse of what was coming.

It was the kind of story that fed the dreams of a kid like Jonah, who was about the same age David had been when he started reading cookbooks in his free time. Jonah had helped his parents cook for as long as anyone could remember, and by the time he ate at Chanterelle he had taken over as head chef at home. He might like to be a chef, assuming
that professional baseball didn't work out—a reasonable assumption, given that he was good but probably not that good—and it was legal for teenagers to work for free as long as they had the proper paperwork, so Jonah and the bar mitzvah boy, Nat, spent what felt like two perfect summers at Chanterelle. The first year, they prepped endless tubs of garlic and onions and shallots. The second year, David showed them how to butcher meat and clean fish. In the afternoons, they played ball.

Along the way, Jonah's home-cooked meals became more ambitious; he created a multicourse feast for his grandma Ruth's birthday, enlisting his younger sister to create an illustrated menu that listed his showpiece dish, “Shellfish paella, saffron rice with onions, garlic, lobster, muscles, squid, shrimp peas,” and a dessert of caramelized fruit skewers with a bourbon-coconut cream sauce.

The following summer, Jonah worked at a French bistro and took a hard look at his options. His pitching arm was not of professional caliber, but his kitchen skills might be, if he kept at it. This was his third summer in a professional kitchen, he didn't mind the hard work, and he loved the result, whether in a restaurant or at home: He liked making people happy at the table. If he were a chef, he could create the dishes they ate, not merely execute someone else's ideas. That could be his life.

In 2003, when he was sixteen, Jonah made up his mind: He was going to be a chef and open his own restaurant, and he was going to do it by the time he was twenty-three. David Waltuck had opened Chanterelle when he was twenty-four, and Jonah liked to compete, so he set his deadline a year sooner, for the heck of it.

He convinced Nat to start up a catering company during their junior year of high school, and that spring they shopped their résumés to some bigger restaurants, one of which refused even to consider them for an unpaid apprenticeship, called a stage—from the French
stagiaire
, or
trainee—because clearly Jonah and Nat had faked their résumés. No seventeen-year-old had logged that kind of experience at a restaurant like Chanterelle.

The chef de cuisine at Gramercy Tavern believed them, though, and suddenly they found themselves in an environment that was a sea change from what the Waltucks referred to as their mom-and-pop restaurant: forty tables in the dining room, fifteen more in the casual bar room, seventeen seats at the bar itself, and crowds, always. Gramercy Tavern opened in 1994, when Jonah was seven, and was one of the most popular restaurants in New York City, alongside its older sibling, Union Square Café, which had opened in 1985. They were the foundation of USHG, which by the time Jonah started at Gramercy Tavern had expanded to include Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, and Blue Smoke, and would soon add The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art as well as the first Shake Shack.

The kitchen at Gramercy Tavern was “more aggressive, competitive, bigger, full of young, hungry chefs,” to Jonah, and he loved it. Occasionally the chef who hired him let him spend lunch service standing at the pass, where finished plates were checked one last time before they headed into the dining room. Jonah got to wipe an errant drop from the rim of the plate, to consider the composition of each dish, to understand exactly how great food was supposed to look and smell and taste. The following summer he embarked on a new venture, a room-service operation for the residents of the apartment building where his family lived. Every day he posted the next day's menu in the elevator and took orders from neighbors who preferred Jonah's food to their own home cooking or takeout, and every day he delivered the evening meal.

He completed a dual major in food studies and restaurant management at NYU, wedged in a stint as a host and reservationist at Blue Smoke, and took an internship in the restaurant's office. And he cooked,
part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers. Jonah worked the garde-manger and grill stations at Savoy, another downtown pioneer, where since 1990 chef Peter Hoffman, like David Waltuck, had offered a menu based on what he could get at the farmers market and from local suppliers. When Jonah took a semester abroad he headed for Spain—not France, which was no longer an imperative for an aspiring chef, as it had been when Waltuck was coming up, but Spain, whose food had not already been channeled onto American plates for decades.

By the time Jonah graduated, in 2009, he figured he was two steps away, three, tops, from being ready: He had to find a job as a line cook at a restaurant that would show potential investors how serious he was. He had to work hard and get promoted to sous chef. From that vantage point he could look ahead and decide if he needed to log time as an executive chef or chef de cuisine, to show that he could run a kitchen—or if he could step right into his future, straight from sous chef, in time to meet his deadline.

He was the first line cook hired at Maialino, USHG's newest restaurant, brought on six months before it opened in the winter of 2009, but he ended up having to work for two years, just past his twenty-third birthday, before he got his promotion to sous chef. The six gridlocked sous chefs above him weren't going anywhere because they'd committed to at least one year when they were hired, and he found himself eyeing them to figure out who might leave first, even as he sized up the competition among the other line cooks. One of Jonah's coworkers got the first open slot, but he assumed that he was in line for the next opening, or at worst, the one after that.

Nick Anderer, then the executive chef and since 2012 the chef and a partner, remembered Jonah “coming at me hard” for a promotion to sous, and a particular slot at that—the morning sous, who soon started to joke that Jonah and another line cook were trying to hustle him out
the door. He wasn't wrong. As long as he stayed in place, he kept Jonah from moving forward. When he left, Jonah got the morning slot, which he liked because there was only one sous on that shift. From that vantage point he could consider his next step.

He wrote a business plan for Huertas in between shifts at Maialino and had a friend who was in design school turn his sketches into an early set of drawings and a logo. He took a cold look at the kitchen hierarchy and didn't see the next advantageous move. He'd already missed the chance to open a place when he was twenty-three, and while working as an executive chef might be the traditional path to having his own place, he wasn't convinced it was necessary. He could have his name on the menu at a place that someone else owned, or at his own restaurant. Cooks told one another: If you don't have a restaurant before you're thirty, you'll never have one. The only option that made sense, it seemed, was to quit and get on with his life.

After eleven months as a sous, Jonah told Nick he was thinking about leaving. Nick, who had been an executive sous at Gramercy Tavern before he opened Maialino, had been the beneficiary of what he called “a carrot” that USHG occasionally dangled to keep a talented chef around—he was promised the opportunity to run a new restaurant within the company if he'd hang around and be a little patient. Nick had just promoted two of his sous to share the previously nonexistent post of executive sous, and one of them was clearly on track to open a place for USHG, but there was no point in having that discussion with Jonah because it was clear to Nick that owning his own place mattered to him as much as running a kitchen did. Jonah gave three months' notice to give Nick enough time to find and train a replacement, and planned a quick research trip to Spain. As soon as he returned, he'd start raising money in earnest and looking for a space. It had taken a little longer than he'd hoped to get here, but now he was going to be in charge of the
timetable. He revised his internal calendar and told himself he'd have his own place when he was twenty-five.

•   •   •

A generation earlier,
when Waltuck decided to become a chef, the path was either reassuringly clear or exclusionary, depending on who was contemplating the journey. At the high end, the American restaurant kitchen was a respectful reincarnation of the French model, in terms of both how it operated and what it served, a rule-bound universe summarized by one chef who worked his way up as “white, militaristic, and male.” Ambitious Americans studied in France and came home to wear toques and utter “Oui, Chef” with conviction every time an order came to their stations, which were organized according to the French brigade system developed in the late nineteenth century by chef Auguste Escoffier—garde-manger for the salads and cold appetizers, entremetier for soups and vegetable and egg dishes, saucier for sauces and, in a smaller place, for sauté, and the sous chef, plucked from the ranks of the line cooks because he had the potential to run a kitchen some day, to become a chef de cuisine. The few women who pursued a career in the kitchen usually gravitated toward pastry work, which offered more regular hours and, so, the chance to fulfill domestic obligations at dinnertime.

The early exceptions showed up in communities that preferred their own way of doing things, or among individuals inspired to step off the defined path; in both cases, much of the change started in California, which had institutionalized a certain skepticism about the way things were supposed to be done, and was audacious enough to name a cuisine after itself. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Berkeley considered hierarchy and pedigree to be suspect no matter what the field, and chef Joyce Goldstein remembers wondering why anyone would feel the need to embrace French tradition when homegrown attributes—equal parts
passion, a sense of community, and commitment—worked just fine. She credits the city's “mom-and-pop culture” for a flourishing alternative model that supported the 1971 opening of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse—and enabled an outlier like Goldstein to succeed, even though she broke every rule in sight: She was a chef, not a pastry chef, and got a late start as chef at the Café at Chez Panisse, later still as the owner of her own place, Square One. Goldstein opened her business in 1984, when she was forty-nine, an age at which many chefs were already casualties of the physical rigors of the job, and in 1993 won the James Beard Award for best chef in California.

If the Southern California restaurant scene was built on a more traditional model—chef Wolfgang Puck and restaurateur Michael McCarty were both classically trained chefs—the people who worked there often had another agenda in mind. Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton followed the prescribed steps up to a point—she studied abroad and worked her way up from pastry assistant at McCarty's Michael's restaurant to run the pastry program at Puck's Spago—but she and a handful of other women cooks ignored the part of the narrative that involved gender and a limited destiny. If she wanted to open a bakery and a restaurant with her then husband, chef Mark Peel, and years later make the transition to chef, opening three new places with partners Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, she would do so—along the way winning James Beard Awards for both best pastry chef and outstanding chef, the only person to have won both honors.

There was still a kitchen hierarchy; a room full of hungry customers required something more reliable than anarchy. What started to change was the identity of the people standing at the stations and, with that, their attitude. They responded to orders with “Yes, Chef,” or by calling back the name of the dish that had been ordered, wore little brocade skullcaps instead of toques, and created menus based on bounty rather
than on received ideas of fine food. Cooks who were not willing to be left out pried the door open, not fast enough to qualify as a revolution but wide enough to make the insiders take note.