Generation Chef (17 page)

It was all they could do to get out the door without saying something
they'd regret. Nate was in a rage over the rejection in general, and over the specific references to privilege and pedigree; what did their parents' tax bracket have to do with whether Huertas ought to have a liquor license? Jonah, whose cocktail-fueled holiday season had just evaporated, got very quiet.

They had two options left if they wanted to resolve this before April. The faster move was to appear in front of the entire community board, not the liquor license subcommittee, and hope that the full board would see fit to contradict its own members, which was unlikely. The other option was to go straight to the SLA, even though it was slower and more expensive. The SLA met only monthly at its Harlem office, its agenda was backed up with appeals of decisions made at the local level, and it cost more than $4,000 in filing fees, payable in advance, refunded if an application was denied, though that was cold comfort. If the full community board rejected the application, Jonah would have to explain two no votes to the SLA instead of one, so that made no sense. The lawyer figured that the SLA approval process would take six to eight weeks, so there was a slim chance that Jonah would have cocktails for the holidays, if not for people who were planning big holiday parties ahead of time.

Big, lucrative holiday parties, which had just become a far less likely source of revenue.

The best strategy was to wait out the subcommittee and come back next April, because a yes vote then meant an automatic approval from the SLA, but neither Jonah nor Nate felt that they had that kind of time.

It was hard for Jonah not to feel “a little spiteful,” he said. It would be one thing if there were a crowd of noisy sloppy drunks outside Huertas every night at three a.m., but all he wanted to do was pour a drink, particularly a gin and tonic—Spain's unofficial national drink—if a customer wanted one.

•   •   •

Huertas lost $7,000 less
in August than it had in July, but not because more people showed up and spent more money. Sales were flat. Jonah and Nate cut losses by cutting expenses, got to Labor Day on fumes, and waited for the uptick. Instead, the first three days after Labor Day were the worst in Huertas's short history, and the days leading up to Wells's visit and the community board meeting, little better.

Privately, Jonah considered a possibility he never would have imagined on opening night: If the big fall surge didn't hit soon, he might have to close the restaurant. Worse, he didn't think that he had made any fatal mistakes; he didn't see the glaring misstep. They had customers, but not enough, and the new dining-room menu had yet to attract bigger crowds. They had plenty of press coverage, none of which seemed to be having an impact. The liquor license would have improved sales figures, but there was no way to tell when they'd show up on the SLA agenda, except that it likely wouldn't be in time for the holidays. He looked at every angle and came to the same conclusion: They were doing everything they could and it wasn't enough.

The slim good news—a big article in the
Village Voice
and the Pete Wells drop-in, which didn't qualify as good news unless he came back—was not enough to keep him from some rather apocalyptic second-guessing.

“It's so fucking hard in New York City,” he said. “The whole experience has really soured me—now I'm sympathetic to people who say the negatives outweigh the positives. I'm running the business really well, doing a great job on labor and food costs, everything that's in our control. But I can't control sales.”

He kicked himself for not sticking with his original plan to open in Williamsburg, which was “expensive but packed,” because the endless
stream of tourists would have more than made up for higher rent. He fulminated on the lack of sidewalk seating, which wouldn't matter this winter—if they survived the winter—but could put a dent in sales again next summer. People strolled the blocks with sidewalk cafés without knowing where they were going and picked an appealing one. Huertas had to settle for people who'd made up their minds to eat there.

Jonah was grim about the obvious fix: “What makes money is a bar with five TV screens and sliders,” remembering the community board applicant. He had not spent half his life dreaming about that.

He couldn't afford to provide health insurance stipends, which would have drawn a better level of employees. He hadn't raised enough money to insulate himself for five years, the way a big company could. And the money he had came from people he knew well, and liked, which had seemed like an advantage at the start but now grated on his nerves.

“I would caution people not to take money from family and friends,” he said, in a reversal of his initial desire to work with empathic investors. “Not that I had other options—and I felt incredibly competent, but now I feel an incredible weight. It's people I know.”

In August he'd imagined what he might do if a phantom buyer walked in with $2 million and offered to put Jonah out of his misery, to stake him to the kind of smarter second chance that had propelled Chang, Bloomfield, and Izard. By mid-September his imaginary price had come down to what it would take to pay back the investors, his own contribution a wash, though he had no idea if such a bailout were possible at this point.

“I'm not even sure that deal would come to me,” he said.

He wondered if he had passed a fail-safe point without realizing it. “Failure has crept into my mind the way it never has before,” he said. “I never thought I'd fail. But I'm a very rational person. It's within the realm of possibility. Having that even in my mind is a new thing for me.”

•   •   •

Nate watched the reservation list
for anything that might provide a clue to another Pete Wells visit, although some of what got his attention would have seemed unremarkable if he hadn't been on the lookout. A table of four was more interesting than a table of two, because the word was that Wells paid three visits to any place he was going to review, and he needed enough people to order a range of dishes. A very early or very late reservation piqued Nate's interest, because some people said that a critic might eat two dinners in one night. An odd e-mail—a broad category that at this point included anything other than the common first initial and last name—caught his eye.

The guy who'd supplied the stubble intelligence told Nate that recently Wells had opted for more dramatic disguises and a wider range of dining companions to try to stymie vigilant chefs and managers. The same friend said that when Wells's predecessor, Frank Bruni, was spotted at Eleven Madison Park in 2009, the kitchen sent six extra courses to everyone in the dining room, to impress Bruni without it looking as though he had received special treatment.

Six extra courses on the fly. Nate could barely imagine a kitchen that operated like that.

And then odd little things began to happen. Nate approached a woman at table one, at the window in front of the bar, because he thought she was a regular at Abraço, the coffee place around the corner, and he wanted to thank her for signing the liquor license petition. Halfway through the brief conversation, he realized he was wrong. He recognized her from somewhere else.

“You're in the industry,” he said.

She was, in a way: She wrote about food for the
New York Times
, where there was great buzz, she said, about Huertas.

“Yes,” said Nate, thinking like his speedy self and not like Jonah, whose internal brakes would have kept him from saying what Nate was about to say: “We may have had a special guest.”

“I can't confirm or deny,” said the writer, and Nate, who could not think of what to say next, found a quick excuse to go back to work.

The next night the man who'd eaten with Wells showed up at the bar, and Nate moved in for the strategic hover. It turned out to be Jeff Gordinier, the
Times
's Food section writer who had suggested pintxos to Wells as a smart way to fill the time before dinner.

Nate retreated to the service station by the kitchen and watched as Gordinier sent out a raft of texts or photos, surely to Wells, or at least Nate wanted to believe that. When it felt right, not intrusive, not too blasé, he went back for another chat, hoping that the writer might convey a message to Wells: They ought to try the dining room, Nate said. The wine pairings were a great deal.

Pete decides on his own, came the reply.

The night after that, a restless Nate had drinks with a friend who worked at the NoMad, the second restaurant from the team who in 2011 had bought Eleven Madison Park from Danny Meyer. Chef Daniel Humm, who'd won his first Michelin star at twenty-four, and his business partner, Will Guidara, had opened the NoMad restaurant and bar in 2012, in the hotel of the same name, and in only two years had arrived at a point where they'd transcended mere mentions on Eater and Grub Street and were, as Nate saw it, “all about reviews and San Pellegrino ratings,” the annual list of the top fifty restaurants in the world. It was a far different universe from the one where Huertas lived, in terms of food and ambiance and cost, but NoMad had survived Pete Wells's multiple visits, prevailed, in fact, and Nate wondered if his friend had any advice on how to prepare, short of six extra courses for the entire house.

Simple, his friend replied: They changed the entire menu the day after Wells's first visit, reinvented it overnight, so that there was no chance he would have to repeat a single dish.

Nate's head started to spin. He and Jonah wanted Wells to eat in the dining room, of course, to experience the new five-course menu del dia. That way, Jonah was in control of the menu. But what if Wells sat in the front again? They couldn't come up with a completely new set of pintxos and raciones every single night. Jonah decided to look at the itemized check from the first visit, which was tacked up on a bulletin board in, the basement office, to see what Wells and his friends had ordered. At least he could make sure that the server passed new pintxos first.

That night Nate dreamed that Wells came in and he seated Wells at table forty, the best table in the dining room, the one at the back of the room, alongside the glass doors. That was the dream: Wells came in, and Nate seated him. Clearly, table forty was going to be it, if they got their chance.

•   •   •

Jonah and Nate called
a managers' meeting and issued a mandate that hearkened back to Luke's service mantra: For the next six weeks, starting today, they were to treat every one at every table as a potential critic, in case the cryptic enthusiasm of the two
Times
writers was a coded message. Jonah would make sure that servers got to taste everything during the day, not a few of the dishes in a hurry at lineup, so that they could better answer any questions. He and Nate intended to consider all the beverage pairings and make substitutions when it seemed right—though right, given their heated debate on whether cider worked with the huevos rotos, might prove to be a bit elusive. As an experiment, they would put two different bottles of cider on a table with the instruction, “Drink as much as you want,” Nate said, and then they'd see if the sweeter or the
funkier cider prevailed. At that point they could argue some more, since no one was about to let customers dictate what got poured the next time Wells came in.

In the meantime, they debated where to put the critic, since a dream about table forty didn't quite qualify as a strategy. They had no idea how many people would be in his party, or whether he would reserve for the back dining room or visit the front a second time, so they considered every variable. Table six, the two-top right in front of the service station, was the nicest front-room table, but whoever ate there could hear too much of what the servers might have to say about the customers—which would mean that Wells would hear too much about how they intended to care for him. The front tables by the windows were nice, but it could get crowded and noisy. Table forty in the dining room really was the best, but it was a four-top. What if he came in with only one other person? They couldn't seat him at a table for four, because it would look like special treatment, or maybe they could, if the rest of the room was full. They reconsidered the two tables by the front windows, but no, only the one on the south side of the restaurant. Under no circumstances was he to be seated on the north side, which was too close to the bar.

•   •   •

Nate got to work
a little early on September 17 and announced, out of nowhere: If there's a dining-room reservation tonight it's Pete Wells. Nate had been checking the list for days—there weren't many dining-room reservations—and had already announced, more than once, “If it's Pete Wells it's this one,” based on nothing more than hunches, or names that caught his eye, or a combination of those two things and an early booking. Everyone took him seriously, even though his pronouncement was little more than congealed nerves, because that was the newly announced policy, to treat every guest like a critic.

Wells walked in the door at six forty-five, alone, told the host he had a reservation for four people at seven o'clock, and went up to the bar. Stew was busy with other customers, so Nate, who had been near the door and saw Wells get out of a cab, handed the critic a menu, walked behind the bar, and pretended to be busy at the computer until Stew came over to input an order.

“Pete Wells is right over there,” muttered Nate.

Without a word, Stew turned to wait on the critic as though he weren't the most important guest imaginable. Nate, who at that moment idolized his bartender, tried for an air of capable nonchalance as he walked back to the pass to give Jonah a fast heads-up.

“Well,” said Jonah, who'd been reviewing their accounting on his laptop, which was what he did when the restaurant wasn't busy. “I guess I'll go to work.”