Free Generation Chef by Karen Stabiner

every decision easily made, and eventually he and Nick became partners in adversity: When the building department threatened to hold up a set of permits the plumber needed, they made a frantic dash to the permit office, and Jonah drove Nick’s car around the block while Nick dartedupstairs to straighten things out. When Nick got a discount price on boxes and boxes of kitchen tiles that weren’t the custom sizes he wanted, he set Jonah up in the basement at a massive tile cutter, showed him how it worked, and left him there, wearing a construction mask, cutting hundreds of tiles into three different sizes and happy to do so, because it kept him occupied and saved thousands of dollars.
    For the time being Jonah had a day job, which he’d never had before and would not have again once Huertas opened, and he didn’t mind the normal hours or even the mindless tasks. He drafted friends to help him stain new wood to look battered and old, for wainscoting in the dining room, and when he found barely used chairs and bar stools at a bargain $20 and $30, respectively, he grabbed two more friends, rented a van, and drove out to get them. Chairs at Maialino had run $600 apiece, “but they know they’re not going to be out of business in a year,” he said, which was as close as he got to entertaining the possibility that he might be.
    Maialino operated in a far more protected universe inside the Gramercy Hotel, which absorbed some of the operating costs, and as part of USHG, which benefited from economy of scale and decades of experience. Jonah had no such buffers, so he settled for what he could afford. The chairs and stools were the wrong color, but all he had to do was rub them down and paint them, and congratulate himself on having saved thousands more. He was able to recycle table bases from the pizza place for the dining room, which freed up money for custom tops, and Nick recut and reupholstered an existing booth so that he needed only two to be built from scratch.
    Kitchen equipment was not as open to compromise. “There’s a huge disparity between good and shitty things,” said Jonah, and he was determined to buy as much of the good stuff as possible, starting with the ovens. He knew exactly what he wanted: a Jade range like the one he’d cooked on at Maialino, in a slightly different configuration—asix-burner model outfitted with two open burners on the right, where a right-handed chef wanted them to be, and a flat-top that took up the remaining two-thirds of the space, heated by one long burner that ran underneath it and took an hour to heat up and another to cool down. It was the kind of range he’d have forever, he said, a vote of confidence in his future. Next to it he’d put a combi oven, which let him cook three ways—convection, steam, and a combination. It was expensive, but nothing else had the range a combi had. He wanted a gas one because it was cheaper to run, but the supplier happened to have a prefabricated electric model that someone had ordered and then canceled, for $8,000 instead of $14,000. It would take three years of constant use before Jonah came close to spending the $6,000 on utility bills, at which point he could upgrade and sell this one to the next newcomer.
    Jonah’s ideal kitchen would be full of All-Clad skillets, which cost about $120 for a twelve-inch and $90 for an eight-inch, five or six times more than the cheap ones from China. He splurged on a couple of them, and then he searched online and found a store outside Pittsburgh that sold All-Clad irregulars, and grabbed eight more for $500. He haunted Fishs Eddy, a store that sold both vintage dishware and sturdy new patterns, and picked white dinner plates with a raised, leaf-patterned edge, $1 apiece for unused Syracuse China originals from the 1950s, before the company merged and moved its production to China, enough new reissues to fill out the order. He bought plates shaped like