Generation Chef by Karen Stabiner

up her stuff and get out. Joe, the student, was suddenly in charge of a station he’d never worked before, which meant that a new chunk of Jonah’s day was devoted to teaching and supervision.
    Jonah was pitting olives when he should have been fielding interview requests, and Jenni was asleep on her feet. He quickly installed a cousin of one of the Maialino prep cooks in the basement prep kitchen, laboring over garlic and onions and carrots and shallots the way he had at Chanterelle. Jenni got her roommate, Alyssa, to agree to work on the nights Joe was in class, in addition to her job as a private chef.
    Dan didn’t have many night shifts available, but Jonah’s next two temporary stand-ins would arrive starting in two weeks, and they had plenty of time on their hands, stuck in a chef’s purgatory between projects that didn’t pan out and new jobs that might not start for months. Chad Shaner had left his job as executive sous chef at Union Square Café to pursue a project in Southern California, but it didn’t turn out to be a long-term position, so he was back trying to figure out his next move. Chris McDade, who would arrive at the end of May, had worked alongside Jonah at Maialino and, like Chad, left town for a job that didn’t pan out. He came back to be the executive sous chef at Marta, but the opening was delayed. They both needed a job between jobs—and while Jonah had to pay Chris more than he paid Jenni, he wanted to have both of them around for what he hoped was an extended packed house.
    They would bail him out if it stayed this busy. If, on the other hand, the crowds subsided—and he had to be realistic, because openings were never the same as the day-to-day—his kitchen habits would keep him out of trouble. Jonah enjoyed the challenge of transforming what another chef might throw out, and showed off his latest effort at the afternoon lineup meeting, what he jokingly called his “garbage pintxo,” made up of the fat trimmed from the jamón and the two-inch-long potato cores left over when they spun out the thin strands for the huevos rotos. He deep-fried the potato until it was slightly crisp on the outside and had absorbed flavor from the fat, and then he wrapped it in a charred ramp. The potato already earned its keep in the rotos; the jamón, on the list of meats. The only food cost was the ramp, for a pintxo that sold for $3. He couldn’t get more economical than that.
    Jonah tried to be reasonable about his expectations, to be prepared for whatever happened after the initial rush, but the problem with making money at the start was that it made losing money seem like failure. He reminded himself that losing money, was the norm at this point, and if it happened it didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing anything wrong.
    He was aware of niggling front-of-house problems—he had to be, much as he preferred to let Nate and Luke handle them—but he told himself that they were primarily a function of being new and inexperienced, nothing of any lasting concern. Nate was already getting resistance from the occasional guest who wanted a cocktail, which was going to be an issue only until they got their upgrade in six months. In the meantime, they had to make the wine and beer lists too tempting to reject. To that end, they had tasted dozens of Spanish wines, until Jonah’s palate went numb, and decided to make their own vermút, which required more sampling and multiple trips to a nearby Indian spice store for inspiration. They looked for beers no one else served, orbeers that were great deals, and offered traditional Spanish combinations like the kalimotxo. Jonah weighed in on all of it—no one was going to consume anything he hadn’t blessed—but that would calm down with time, as they solidified the list.
    Luke faced small, irksome problems that were easy to fix—they found a receptacle for wet umbrellas and would