Free Generation Chef by Karen Stabiner Page A

scallops, and mismatched vintage plates for pintxos and raciones.
    He listened to pitches from local dishwashing companies that leased equipment to restaurants, from basic machines to a computerized model that gave each employee a log-in number and enabled Jonah to evaluate who used the cleaning chemicals most effectively. And he thought, We’ll both be in the kitchen. Can’t I just watch? He chose a cheaper option.
    The big decisions made, he sat down with Nick and Nate and Luke in mid-December to see if they could pick an opening date that would stick, preferably one that would keep him from having to pay a second month’s rent on a dead space. Nick predicted that the plumbing and gas work would be done before Christmas, even with the holiday slow-down. The combi oven could be there whenever Jonah said he was ready for delivery, and the Jade took two weeks to arrive once he notified the supplier. There was more done than there was yet to do. March 1 seemed like a reasonable target.
    Jonah put a publicist on a full-time retainer to help with the launch, an expense that seemed as essential as rent, now that there were so many potential outlets for stories, each with a voracious hunger for copy. A single restaurant that was satisfied to be a singleton could probably assign a staffer and get good-enough coverage, but if Huertas was the first brick in a brand, he needed someone who already had contacts and knew what to send to each of them. The publicist on the pop-up project he’d participated in had generated an impressive amount of coverage, and he could always cut her back to part-time once he was under way. Together they decided to give Eater an exclusive early heads-up, as much to gauge interest as to get coverage.
    On December 18, they contacted an editor at the website to say, “We wanted to let you guys know first” about an anticipated March opening.
    â€œWe’ll see,” came the brief reply. Nothing happened.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Jonah couldn’t hire his friends any more than he could buy $600 chairs; they had as much experience as he did and their own trajectories to map, which did not include taking a cut in pay or position, not even to work alongside a friend. He would have hired any one of a number of guys he knew to be his sous chef—but they were already souschefs at bigger places, so the next step for them was as significant as it was for him. They were looking for projects that gave them a better title or more money or both, or aiming for their own places, just like Jonah, whether as a chef-owner or in the shade of a larger group’s corporate umbrella. He couldn’t compete with that. He was going to have to hire people who weren’t quite ready, hope that he could mentor them into shape, fast, and be grateful for the weeks here and there when he was going to have temporary help.
    He couldn’t hire anyone, for that matter, until he had an opening date that stuck. It turned out to be a good thing that Eater ignored the March announcement because the date evaporated over the holidays. Revised estimates ran from four to eight weeks more, which put him in a hiring bind: He couldn’t ask anyone to give notice on an existing job until he could put them on payroll, but he didn’t want to throw away money putting someone on payroll too many weeks before opening.
    Jonah had stayed in touch with Jenni, a Maialino line cook who started there as part of the extern program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley campus in Northern California. She wasn’t ready to be a sous chef—they both knew it—but she was good, and after three line-cook jobs at three restaurants in three years, she was motivated to take a chance.
    Any step up in a restaurant kitchen was a game of musical chairs, and always had been, because the number of positions declined as a cook moved up the ladder; there were fewer sous than cooks on